While Will Deverill’s operetta was still in rehearsal at the Duke of Edinburgh’s, a little episode occurred at Rue’s house in Hans Place, which was not without a certain weird influence of its own on the after-life of herself and her companions.
Rue gave an At Home one night early in March, to which Florian and Will Deverill were invited. Will brought his sister with him?—?the sister who was married to an East End curate, and who had called upon Rue at her brother’s bidding.
“Well, what do you think of her to-night, Maud?” Will asked a little anxiously as they stood alone for a minute or two in the middle of the evening.
Mrs Sartoris curled her lip. “Oh, she’s pretty enough,” she answered; “pretty enough, after her fashion. I could see that the first time; and she’s got nice manners. She lights up well, too; women of her age always do light up well. They look better by night, even in the searching glare of these electric lamps, than in full broad sunshine. But, of course, she hasn’t got quite the tone of our set; you couldn’t expect it. A faded air of drapery clings about her to the end. That’s the way with these people; they may be ever so rich, they may be ever so fascinating?—?but a discriminating nose still scents trade in them somewhere.”
Will smiled a quiet smile of suppressed amusement. He didn’t care to answer her. Rue’s father, he knew, had been an episcopal clergyman in New York, and she herself, though she married a dry-goodsman, had been every bit as well brought up as Will and his sister. But ’tis a sisterly way to say these disparaging things about women whom one’s brother might be suspected of marrying. Will didn’t mean to marry Rue, it is true; but Maud thought he might; and that idea alone was more than enough to give a caustic tone to her critical comments.
The feature of the evening, it seemed, was to be a peculiar séance of a new American phenomenon, who had come over to Europe with a wonderful reputation for thought-reading, hypnotism, and what he was pleased to style “magnetic influences.” Like most of her countrymen and countrywomen, Rue had a sneaking regard, in the background of her soul, for mesmerism, spiritualism, psychic force, electro-biology, and the occult and mysterious in human nature generally. She was one of those impressionable women, in short, who fall a ready prey to plausible impostors with voluble talk about ethereal vibrations, telepathic energy, the odic fluid, and the rest of such rubbish, unless strong-minded male friends intervene to prevent them. The medium on this occasion, it appeared, was one Joaquin Holmes, otherwise known as the Colorado Seer, who professed to read the inmost thoughts of man or woman by direct brainwaves, without contact of any sort. The guests that night had been specially invited to meet Mr Holmes on this his first appearance at a séance in London; so about ten o’clock, all the world trooped down to the dining-room, which Florian had cunningly arranged as a temporary lecture-hall, with seats in long rows, and an elevated platform at one end for the medium.
“What an odd-looking man!” Mrs Sartoris exclaimed, as the Colorado Seer, in full evening dress, bowed a graceful bow from his place on the platform. “He’s handsome, though, isn’t he? Such wonderful eyes! Just look! And such a Spanish complexion!”
“A Hidalgo, every inch!” Florian assented gravely, nodding his head, and looking at him as he would have looked at a Velasquez. “That olive-brown skin points back straight to Andalusia. It doesn’t want his name to tell one at a glance that if his father was an American of English descent, his mother’s folk must have emigrated from Cordova or Granada. I see a Moslem tinge in cheek and eye; those dusky thin fingers are the Moor all over!”
“For Moor, read blackamoor,” Colonel Quackenboss, the military attaché to the American Legation, murmured half under his breath to his next-door neighbour.
And they were each of them right, in his own way and fashion. The Colorado Seer was a very handsome man, somewhat swarthier than is usual with pure-blooded Europeans. His eyes were large and dark and brilliant; his abundant black hair fell loose over his brow with a graceful southern curl; a heavy moustache fringed his upper lip; he looked to the unsophisticated European eye like a pleasing cross between Buffalo Bill and a Castilian poet. But his Christian name of Joaquin and his southern skin had descended to him, not from Andalusian Hidalgos, but from a mother who was partly Spanish and partly negress, with a delicate under-current of Red Indian ancestry. As he stood there on the platform, however, in his becoming evening dress, and flooded them with the light of his lustrous dark eyes?—?’twas a trick of the trade he had learned in Colorado?—?every woman in the room felt instinctively to herself he was a superb creature, while every man admitted with a grudging smile that the fellow had at least the outward air of a gentleman.
The Seer, stepping forward with a genial smile, entertained them at first with some common little tricks of so-called thought-reading, familiar enough to all those who have ever attempted to watch the ways of that simple exhibition. He found pins concealed in ladies’ skirts, and guessed the numbers of bank-notes in financiers’ pockets. Florian’s mouth curled incredulity; why, these were just the same futile old games as ever, the well-known and innocent little conjuring dodges of the Bishops and the Stuart Cumberlands! But after awhile, Mr Joaquin Holmes, waking up all at once, proceeded to try something newer and more original. A pack of cards was produced. To avoid all suspicion of collusion or trickery, ’twas a brand-new pack?—?observe, there’s no deception?—?bought by Rue herself that afternoon in Bond Street. With much air of serious mystery, the Colorado Seer pulled off the stamped cover before their very eyes, gave the cards themselves to Will to shuffle, and then proceeded to offer them to every member of the company one by one in order. Each drew a card, looked at it, and replaced it in the pack. Instantly, the Seer in a very loud voice, without one moment’s hesitation, announced it correctly as ten of spades, ace of clubs, five of hearts, or queen of diamonds. It was an excellent trick, and the performer could do it equally well with open eyes or blindfolded; he could offer the cards behind his back, after the pack had been shuffled and handed him unseen; he could even succeed in the dark, he said, if the lights were lowered, and each person in the company took his own card out to inspect it in the passage.
“That looks like genuine thought-reading,” Will was compelled to admit, thinking it over in his own mind; “but perhaps he forces his cards. One knows conjurers can do such wonderful things in the way of forcing.”
Instantly the Seer turned upon him with an air of injured innocence. “If you think there’s any conjuring about this performance,” he exclaimed, with much dignity, drawing himself up to his full height of six feet two, “you can offer them yourself, and allow each lady and gentleman in the room to pick as they choose for themselves among them. I’ll take each card, blindfold, as fast as they pick, hold it up behind my back, with my hands tied, without seeing it myself, and read off for you what it is by direct thought-transference.”
Will accepted the test?—?a fairly severe one; and, sure enough, the Seer was right. Carefully blindfolded with one of those moulded wraps, invented for the purpose, which prevent all possibility of looking down through the chinks, he yet took each card behind his back in one hand, held it up before their eyes without moving his head, and gave out its name distinctly and instantly. The audience was impressed. There was a touch of magic in it. But the Seer smiled blandly.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” he murmured aloud, with a deprecating little laugh; “a mere matter of choosing between fifty-two alternatives?—?which, after all, is easy. With Mrs Palmer’s consent,” and he turned in a gracefully deferential attitude to Rue, “I can show you something a great deal more remarkable. Here are pencils and papers. Each lady or gentleman will please take a sheet as I hand them round. Write anything you like, in English, French, German or Spanish, on the piece of paper. Then fold it up, so, and put it into one of these envelopes gummed down and fastened. After that, as this experiment requires very great concentration of thought”?—?he knitted his brows, and assumed an expression of the intensest internal effort?—?“with Mrs Palmer’s kind leave, we will turn out the electric light, which confuses and distracts one by revealing to the eye so many surrounding visible objects. And then, without breaking the envelopes in which you have enclosed the pieces of paper, I will read out to you, in the dark, what each of you has written.”
He spoke deliberately, with slow western American distinctness, though with a pleasing accent. That accent, superimposed on his native negro dialect, had cost him no small effort. The guests, half-incredulous, took the sheets of paper he distributed to them one by one, and wrote down a sentence or two, according to taste, after a little interval of whispered consultation. Then, by the Seer’s direction, they folded the slips in two and placed them in their envelopes, each bearing outside the name of the person who wrote it. Florian collected the papers, all carefully gummed down, and handed them to the Seer, who stood ready to receive them at his place on the platform. Without one moment’s delay, the lights were turned out. It was the instantaneousness, indeed, and the utter absence of the usual hocus-pocus, that distinguished Mr Joaquin Holmes’s unique performance from the ordinary style of spiritualist conjuring. In a second, the Seer’s voice rang out clear from his place: “First envelope, Mrs Palmer, containing inscription in French?—?very prettily written:
‘La vie est brève:
Un peu d’amour,
Un peu de rêve,
Et puis?—?bonjour.
La vie est vaine:
Un peu d’espoir,
Un peu de haine,
Et puis?—?bonsoir.’
“Extremely graceful verses; I don’t know the author. However, no matter! . . . Second envelope, Colonel Marchmont, containing inscription in English, ‘The general immediately ordered an advance, and the gallant 21st, regardless of danger, charged for the battery in magnificent style, sabring the enemy’s gunners in a wild outburst of military enthusiasm.’ Very characteristic! A most soldierly choice. And boldly written. . . . Third envelope, Mrs Sartoris,?—?stop, please! the lady’s thoughts are wandering; kindly fix your attention for a moment, Madam, on the words you have given me. Ah, so; that’s better.?—?‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day; The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea; The ploughman homeward wends’?—?wends? wends? it should have been ‘plods’; but ‘wends’ is what you thought?—?‘The ploughman homeward wends his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.’ Very appropriate; it’s dark enough here! ............