“What does it mean?” she pleaded, “oh! what does it mean?”
“It doesn't mean anything,” said Vargas, roughly.
“How can that be,” she moaned. “It must mean something. It does mean something. I feel it does.”
“That is just the point,” he said, “that is what I feared before, and warned you of. Here are some chance words. They mean nothing, except that you or I or both of us have been intensely strung up with emotion. But if you cannot see that or be made to see that, you are lost. If you feel that they mean something, then they do mean that something to you, that that is your danger. Do not yield to it.”
“Do you mean to tell me, to try to convince me that those words, twice written, in the same handwriting, in my husband's hand of all hands, formed upon those slates while I held them myself, came there by accident?”
“Not by accident,” he argued. “By some operation of unguessed forces set in motion by your excitement or mine or both; but blind forces, meaningless as the voices in dreams.”
“Am I to believe meaningless,” she demanded, “the voices in my dreams that sent me to that advertisement and to you and told me expect an answer from the slates, a true answer?”
“Madame,” he reasoned, “the series of coincidences is startling, but it is nothing but a series of coincidences. Try to rise superior to it.”
“And you won't help me,” she wailed. “You won't tell me what this message means — ”
“I have told you my belief as to how it originated,” he said, “I have told you that I do not attach any other significance to it.”
“Oh,” she groaned, “I must go home.”
“Your carriage is at the door,” he said.
“My carriage!” she exclaimed. “How did it get there?”
“Not your own carriage,” he explained, “but one for you. I telephoned for it.”
“You have not left me an instant,” she asserted incredulously.
“When I brought you a glass of water I told the maid to telephone for a carriage and tell it to wait. It will be there.”
“I thank you,” she said, “and now, what do I owe you? What is your fee?” Vargas flushed all over his face and neck, a deep brownish-red.
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” he said with great dignity, “I take pay from my dupes for my fripperies of deception. But no money, not all the money on earth could pay me to do what I have done for you to-day, no sum could induce me to go through it again for anyone else. For you I would do anything. But what I have done was not done for payment, nor will anything I may do be done except for you, for whom I would do any service in my power.”
“I ask your pardon,” she said. “Where is the carriage? I shall faint if I stay here.”
Some weeks later, in the same room, the clairvoyant and the lady again faced each other.
“I had hoped never to see you again,” he said.
“Did you imagine that I could escape from the compulsion of all that series of manifestations?” she asked.
“I tried to believe that you might,” he answered.
“Have you been able to shake off its hold on you?” she demanded.
“Not entirely,” he confessed. “But dazing as the coincidences were, the effect on my emotions will wear off, like the smart of a burn; and, as one forgets the fury of past sufferings, I shall forget the turmoil of my feelings. There was no clear intelligibility, no definite significance in it at all.”
“Not in that message!” she exclaimed.
“Certainly not,” he asseverated.
“Yes there was,” she contradicted.
“Madame,” he said earnestly, “if you fancy you perceive any genuine coherence in those fortuitous words you have put the meaning there yourself, your imagination is riveting upon your soul fetters of your own forging.”
“My imagination and my soul have nothing to do with my insight into the spirit of that message,” she said calmly. “My heart cries out for help and my intellect has pondered at leisure upon what you call a fortuitous series of coincidences, a chance string of meaningless words. I see no incoherence, rather convincing coherence, in the sequence of your reading of horoscopes, my dreaming of dreams, leading up to the imperative behest given me from your slate.”
“Madame,” he cried, “this is heart-rending. I told you I dreaded the effect upon you of any sort of mummery. You forced me to it. I should have had strength to refuse you. I yielded. Now my cowardice will ruin you.”
“Was not your trance genuine?” she queried. “Entirely genuine, entirely too genuine.”
“Did not the writing appear upon the slate independent of your will or of mine?” she demanded.
“It did,” he admitted. “Can you explain how it came there?” she wound up. “Alas, no,” he confessed, shaking his head.
“You can scarcely reproach me for accepting it as a message,” she concluded triumphantly.
“I do not reproach you,” he said, “I reproach myself as culpable.”
“I rather thank you for what you have done for me,” she almost smiled at him. “It gives me hope. I have meditated carefully upon the message and I am convinced that I comprehend its meaning.”
“That is the worst possible state of mind you could get into,” he groaned. “Can I not make you realize the truth? It is not as you think you see it.”
“I do not think,” she said. “I know. I am convinced, and I mean to act on my convictions.”
“This is terrible,” he muttered. Then he controlled himself, shifted his position in his chair and asked: “And what are your convictions? What do you mean to do?”
“My conviction,” she said, “is that David's love for Marian is in some way bound up with whatever he had buried in that coffin. I mean to have the coffin disinterred.”
“Madame,” he said, “this thing gets worse the more you tell me of it. You are in danger of coming under the domination of a fixed idea, even if you are not already under its sway. Fight against it. Shake it off.”
“There is no use in your talking that way to me,” she said. “I mean to do it. I shall do it.”
“Has your husband consented?” Vargas asked.
“He has,” she replied.
“Do you mean to tell me that he has agreed to your opening his wife's grave?”
“He has agreed,” she asserted.
“But did he make no demur?” the clairvoyant inquired.
“He said he did not care what I did, I could do anything I pleased.”
“Was that all he said?” Vargas persisted.
“Not all,” she admitted. “He asked me if I had not told him that what I wanted in this life was to spend as much as possible of my time on earth with him, for us two to be together as much as circumstances would allow, and as long as death would permit. I told him of course I had said it, not once but over and over. He asked me if I still felt that way. I told him I did. He said it made no difference to him he was past any feelings, but if that was what I really wanted he advised me to let that grave alone.”
“Take his advice, by all means,” Vargas exclaimed. “It is good advice. You let that grave alone.”
“I am determined,” she told him. “Madame,” he said, “will you listen to me?”
“Certainly,” she replied. “If you have anything to say to the purpose. But not to fault-findings or to scoldings.”
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” Vargas began, “what happened during your former visit to me has demolished the entire structure of my spiritual existence. I had the sincerest disbelief in astrology, in prophecy, in ghosts, in apparitions, in superstitions, each and all, in supernaturalism in general, in religions, individually and collectively, in the idea of future life. Upon the most materialistic convictions my intellectual life was placid and unruffled, and my soul-life, if I had any, undisturbed by anything save occasional and very evanescent twinges of conscience over the contemptible duplicity of my way of livelihood. Intermittently only I despised myself. Mostly I only despised my dupes and generally not even that. Rather I merely smiled tolerantly at the childishness of their profitable credulity. Never did I have the remotest approach to any shadow of belief that there could be anything occult beneath or behind any such jugglery as I continually made use of. The matter of your horoscope and mine I took as mere coincidence. It might affect my feelings, never my reason; my heart, never my head. My head is involved now, my reason at fault. In the writing on that slate I am face to face with something, if not supernatural, at least preternatural. The thing is beyond our ordinary experience of the ordinary operation of those forces which make the world go. It depends upon something not yet understood, not necessarily inexplicable, but unexplained. It is uncanny. I don't like it. Yet I do not yield to its influence. I am not swept away. If I dwell upon it, I know it will unsettle my reason. I do not mean to dwell upon it, I mean to get away from it, to ignore it, to forget it, and I counsel you to do likewise.”