Book: The Necromancers

R >> Robert Hugh Benson >> The Necromancers




His moods alternated with the rapidity of flying clouds. At one
instant he was furious with pain, at the next broken and lax from the
same cause. At one moment he cursed God and desired to die, defiant
and raging; at the next he sank down into himself as weak as a
tortured child, while tears ran down his cheeks and little moans as of
an animal murmured in his throat. God was a hated adversary, a
merciless Judge ... a Blind Fate ... there was no God ... He was a
Fiend.... there was nothing anywhere in the whole universe but Pain
and Vanity....

Yet, through it all, like a throbbing pedal note, ran his need of this
girl. He would do anything, suffer anything, make any sacrifice,
momentary or lifelong, if he could but see her again, hold her hand
for one instant, look into her eyes mysterious with the secret of
death. He had but three or four words to say to her, just to secure
himself that she lived and was still his, and then ... then he would
say good-bye to her, content and happy to wait till death should
reunite them. Ah! he asked so little, and God would not give it him.

All, then, was a mockery. It was only this past summer that he had
begun to fancy himself in love with Maggie Deronnais. It had been an
emotion of very quiet growth, developing gently, week by week, feeding
on her wholesomeness, her serenity, her quiet power, her cool, capable
hands, and the look in her direct eyes; it resembled respect rather
than passion, and need rather than desire; it was a hunger rather than
a thirst. Then had risen up this other, blinding and bewildering; and,
he told himself, he now knew the difference. His lips curled into
bitter and resentful lines as he contemplated the contrast. And all
was gone, shattered and vanished; and even Maggie was now impossible.

Again he writhed over, sick with pain and longing; and so lay.

* * * * *

It was ten minutes before he moved again, and then he only roused
himself as he heard a foot on the stairs. Perhaps it was his mother.
He slipped off the couch and stood up, his face lined and creased with
the pressure with which he had lain just now, and smoothed his tumbled
clothes. Yes, he must go down.

He stepped to the door and opened it.

"I am coming immediately," he said to the servant.

* * * * *

He bore himself at lunch with a respectable self-control, though he
said little or nothing. His mother's attitude he found hard to bear,
as he caught her eyes once or twice looking at him with sympathy; and
he allowed himself internally to turn to Maggie with relief in spite
of his meditations just now. She at least respected his sorrow, he
told himself. She bore herself very naturally, though with long
silences, and never once met his eyes with her own. He made his
excuses as soon as he could and slipped across to the stable yard. At
least he would be alone this afternoon. Only, as he rode away half an
hour later, he caught a sight of the slender little figure of his
mother waiting to have one word with him if she could, beyond the
hall-door. But he set his lips and would not see her.

It was one of those perfect September days that fall sometimes as a
gift from heaven after the bargain of summer has been more or less
concluded. As he rode all that afternoon through lanes and across
uplands, his view barred always to the north by the great downs above
Royston, grey-blue against the radiant sky, there was scarcely a hint
in earth or heaven of any emotion except prevailing peace. Yet the
very serenity tortured him the more by its mockery. The birds babbled
in the deep woods, the cheerful noise of children reached him now and
again from a cottage garden, the mellow light smiled unending
benediction, and yet his subconsciousness let go for never an instant
of the long elm box six feet below ground, and of its contents lying
there in the stifling dark, in the long-grassed churchyard on the hill
above his home.

He wondered now and again as to the fate of the spirit that had
informed the body and made it what it was; but his imagination refused
to work. After all, he asked himself, what were all the teachings
of theology but words gabbled to break the appalling silence?
Heaven ... Purgatory ... Hell. What was known of these things? The very
soul itself--what was that? What was the inconceivable environment,
after all, for so inconceivable a thing...?

He did not need these things, he said--certainly not now--nor those
labels and signposts to a doubtful, unimaginable land. He needed Amy
herself, or, at least, some hint or sound or glimpse to show him that
she indeed was as she had always been; whether in earth or heaven, he
did not care; that there was somewhere something that was herself,
some definite personal being of a continuous consciousness with that
which he had known, characterized still by those graces which he
thought he had recognized and certainly loved. Ah! he did not ask
much. It would be so easy to God! Here out in this lonely lane where
he rode beneath the branches, his reins loose on his horse's neck, his
eyes, unseeing, roving over copse and meadow across to the eternal
hills--a face, seen for an instant, smiling and gone again; a whisper
in his ear, with that dear stammer of shyness; a touch on his knee of
those rippling fingers that he had watched in the moonlight playing
gently on the sluice-gate above the moonlit stream.... He would tell
no one if God wished it to be a secret; he would keep it wholly to
himself. He did not ask now to possess her; only to be certain that
she lived, and that death was not what it seemed to be.

* * * * *

"Is Father Mahon at home?" he asked, as he halted a mile from his own
house in the village, where stood the little tin church, not a hundred
yards from its elder alienated sister, to which he and Maggie went on
Sundays.

The housekeeper turned from her vegetable-gathering beyond the
fence, and told him yes. He dismounted, hitched the reins round the
gatepost, and went in.

Ah! what an antipathetic little room this was in which he waited while
the priest was being fetched from upstairs!

Over the mantelpiece hung a large oleograph of Leo XIII, in cope and
tiara, blessing with upraised hand and that eternal, wide-lipped
smile; a couple of jars stood beneath filled with dyed grasses; a
briar pipe, redolent and foul, lay between them. The rest of the room
was in the same key: a bright Brussels carpet, pale and worn by the
door, covered the floor; cheap lace curtains were pinned across the
windows; and over the littered table a painted deal bookshelf held a
dozen volumes, devotional, moral, and dogmatic theology; and by the
side of that an illuminated address framed in gilt, and so on.

Laurie looked at it all in dumb dismay. He had seen it before, again
and again, but had never realized its horror as he realized it now
from the depths of his own misery. Was it really true that his
religion could emit such results?

There was a step on the stairs--a very heavy one--and Father Mahon
came in, a large, crimson-faced man, who seemed to fill the room with
a completely unethereal presence, and held out his hand with a certain
gravity. Laurie took it and dropped it.

"Sit down, my dear boy," said the priest, and he impelled him gently
to a horsehair-covered arm-chair.

Laurie stiffened.

"Thank you, father; but I mustn't stay."

He fumbled in his pocket, and fetched out a little paper-covered
packet.

"Will you say Mass for my intention, please?" And he laid the packet
on the mantelshelf.

The priest took up the coins and slipped them into his waistcoat
pocket.

"Certainly," he said. "I think I know--"

Laurie turned away with a little jerk.

"I must be going," he said. "I only looked in--"

"Mr. Baxter," said the other, "I hope you will allow me to say how
much--"

Laurie drew his breath swiftly, with a hiss as of pain, and glanced at
the priest.

"You understand, then, what my intention is?"

"Why, surely. It is for her soul, is it not?"

"I suppose so," said the boy, and went out.




_Chapter II_


I

"I have told him," said Mrs. Baxter, as the two women walked beneath
the yews that morning after breakfast. "He said he didn't mind."

Maggie did not speak. She had come out just as she was, hatless, but
had caught up a spud that stood in the hall, and at that instant had
stopped to destroy a youthful plantain that had established himself
with infinite pains on the slope of the path. She attacked for a few
seconds, extricated what was possible of the root with her strong
fingers, tossed the corpse among the ivy, and then moved on.

"I don't know whether to say anything to Mrs. Stapleton or not,"
pursued the old lady.

"I think I shouldn't, auntie," said the girl slowly.

They spoke of it for a minute or two as they passed up and down, but
Maggie only attended with one superficies of her mind.

She had gone up as usual to Mass that morning, and had been astonished
to find Laurie already in church; they had walked back together, and,
to her surprise, he had told her that the Mass had been for his own
intention.

She had answered as well as she could; but a sentence or two of his as
they came near home had vaguely troubled her.

It was not that he had said anything he ought not, as a Catholic, to
have said; yet her instinct told her that something was wrong. It was
his manner, his air, that troubled her. What strange people these
converts were! There was so much ardor at one time, so much chilliness
at another; there was so little of that steady workaday acceptance of
religious facts that marked the born Catholic.

"Mrs. Stapleton is a New Thought kind of person," she said presently.

"So I understand," said the old lady, with a touch of peevishness. "A
vegetarian last year. And I believe she was a sort of Buddhist five or
six years ago. And then she nearly became a Christian Scientist a
little while ago."

Maggie smiled.

"I wonder what she'll talk about," she said.

"I hope she won't be very advanced," went on the old lady. "And you
think I'd better not tell her about Laurie?"

"I'm sure it's best not," said the girl, "or she'll tell him about
Deep Breathing, or saying Om, or something. No; I should let Laurie
alone."

* * * * *

It was a little before one o'clock that the motor arrived, and that
there descended from it at the iron gate a tall, slender woman, hooded
and veiled, who walked up the little path, observed by Maggie from her
bedroom, with a kind of whisking step. The motor moved on, wheeled in
through the gates at the left, and sank into silence in the
stable-yard.

"It's too charming of you, dear Mrs. Baxter," Maggie heard as she came
into the drawing-room a minute or two later, "to let me come over like
this. I've heard so much about this house. Lady Laura was telling me
how very psychical it all was."

"My adopted daughter, Miss Deronnais," observed the old lady.

Maggie saw a rather pretty, passe face, triangular in shape, with
small red lips, looking at her, as she made her greetings.

"Ah! how perfect all this is," went on the guest presently, looking
about her, "how suggestive, how full of meaning!"

She threw back her cloak presently, and Maggie observed that she was
busy with various very beautiful little emblems--a scarab, a snake
swallowing its tail, and so forth--all exquisitely made, and hung upon
a slender chain of some green enamel-like material. Certainly she was
true to type. As the full light fell upon her it became plain that
this other-worldly soul did not disdain to use certain toilet
requisites upon her face; and a curious Eastern odor exhaled from her
dress.

Fortunately, Maggie had a very deep sense of humor, and she hardly
resented all this at all, nor even the tactful hints dropped from time
to time, after the conventional part of the conversation was over, to
the effect that Christianity was, of course, played out, and that a
Higher Light had dawned. Mrs. Stapleton did not quite say this
outright, but it amounted to as much. Even before Laurie came
downstairs it appeared that the lady did not go to church, yet that,
such was her broad-mindedness, she did not at all object to do so. It
was all one, it seemed, in the Deeper Unity. Nothing particular was
true; but all was very suggestive and significant and symbolical of
something else to which Mrs. Stapleton and a few friends had the key.

Mrs. Baxter made more than one attempt to get back to more mundane
subjects, but it was useless. When even the weather serves as a
symbol, the plain man is done for.

Then Laurie came in.

He looked very self-contained and rather pinched this morning, and
shook hands with the lady without a word. Then they moved across
presently to the green-hung dining-room across the hall, and the
exquisite symbol of Luncheon made its appearance.

Lady Laura, it appeared, was one of those who had felt the charm of
Stantons; only for her it was psychical rather than physical, and all
this was passed on by her friend. It seemed that the psychical
atmosphere of most modern houses was of a yellow tint, but that this
one emanated a brown-gold radiance which was very peculiar and
exceptional. Indeed, it was this singularity that had caused Mrs.
Stapleton to apply for an invitation to the house. More than once
during lunch, in a pause of the conversation, Maggie saw her throw
back her head slightly as if to appreciate some odor or color not
experienced by coarser-nerved persons. Once, indeed, she actually put
this into words.

"Dear Laura was quite right," cried the lady; "there is something very
unique about this place. How fortunate you are, dear Mrs. Baxter!"

"My dear husband's grandfather bought the place," observed the
mistress plaintively. "We have always found it very soothing and
pleasant."

"How right you are! And--and have you had any experiences here?"
Mrs. Baxter eyed her in alarm. Maggie had an irrepressible burst of
internal laughter, which, however, gave no hint of its presence in her
steady features. She glanced at Laurie, who was eating mutton with a
depressed air.

"I was talking to Mr. Vincent, the great spiritualist," went on the
other vivaciously, "only last week. You have heard of him, Mrs.
Baxter? I was suggesting to him that any place where great emotions
have been felt is colored and stained by them as objectively as old
walls are weather-beaten. I had such an interesting conversation, too,
with Cardinal Newman on the subject"--she smiled brilliantly at
Maggie, as if to reassure her of her own orthodoxy--"scarcely six
weeks ago."

There was a pregnant silence. Mrs. Baxter's fork sank to her plate.

"I don't understand," she said faintly. "Cardinal Newman--surely--"

"Why yes," said the other gently. "I know it sounds very startling to
orthodox ears; but to us of the Higher Thought all these things are
quite familiar. Of course, I need hardly say that Cardinal Newman is
no longer--but perhaps I had better not go on."

She glanced archly at Maggie.

"Oh, please go on," said Maggie genially. "You were saying that
Cardinal Newman--"

"Dear Miss Deronnais, are you sure you will not be offended?"

"I am always glad to receive new light," said Maggie solemnly.

The other looked at her doubtfully; but there was no hint of irony in
the girl's face.

"Well," she began, "of course on the Other Side they see things very
differently. I don't mean at all that any religion is exactly untrue.
Oh no; they tell us that if we cannot welcome the New Light, then the
old lights will do very well for the present. Indeed, when there are
Catholics present Cardinal Newman does not scruple to give them a
Latin blessing--"

"Is it true that he speaks with an American accent?" asked Maggie
gravely. The other laughed with a somewhat shrill geniality.

"That is too bad, Miss Deronnais. Well, of course, the personality of
the medium affects the vehicle through which the communications come.
That is no difficulty at all when once you understand the principle--"

Mrs. Baxter interrupted. She could bear it no longer.

"Mrs. Stapleton. Do you mean that Cardinal Newman really speaks to
you?"

"Why yes," said the other, with a patient indulgence. "That is a very
usual experience, but Mr. Vincent does much more than that. It is
quite a common experience not only to hear him, but to see him. I have
shaken hands with him more than once ... and I have seen a Catholic
kiss his ring."

Mrs. Baxter looked helplessly at the girl; and Maggie came to the
rescue once more. "This sounds rather advanced to us," she said.
"Won't you explain the principles first?"

Mrs. Stapleton laid her knife and fork down, leaned back, and began to
discourse. When a little later her plate was removed, she refused
sweets with a gesture, and continued.

Altogether she spoke for about ten minutes, uninterrupted, enjoying
herself enormously. The others ate food or refused it in attentive
silence. Then at last she ended.

"... I know all this must sound quite mad and fanatical to those who
have not experienced it; and yet to us who have been disciples it is
as natural to meet our friends who have crossed over as to meet those
who have not.... Dear Mrs. Baxter, think how all this enlarges life.
There is no longer any death to those who understand. All those
limitations are removed; it is no more than going into another
room. All are together in the Hands of the All-Father"--Maggie
recognized the jetsam of Christian Science. "'O death!' as Paul says,
'where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?'"

Mrs. Stapleton flashed a radiant look of helpfulness round the faces,
lingering for an instant on Laurie's, and leaned back.

There followed a silence.

"Shall we go into the drawing-room?" suggested Mrs. Baxter, feebly
rising. The guest rose too, again with a brilliant patient smile, and
swept out. Maggie crossed herself and looked at Laurie. The boy had an
expression, half of disgust, half of interest, and his eyelids sank a
little and rose again. Then Maggie went out after the others.


II

"A dreadful woman," observed Mrs. Baxter half an hour later, as the
two strolled back up the garden path, after seeing Mrs. Stapleton wave
a delicately gloved hand encouragingly to them over the back of the
throbbing motor.

"I suppose she thinks she believes it all," said Maggie.

"My dear, that woman would believe anything. I hope poor Laurie was
not too much distressed."

"Oh! I think Laurie took it all right."

"It was most unfortunate, all that about death and the rest.... Why,
here comes Laurie; I thought he would be gone out by now!"

The boy strolled towards them round the corner of the house, tossing
away the fragment of his cigarette. He was still in his dark suit,
bareheaded, with no signs of riding about him.

"So you've not gone out yet, dear boy?" remarked his mother.

"Not yet," he said, and hesitated as they went on.

Mrs. Baxter noticed it.

"I'll go and get ready," she said. "The carriage will be round at
three, Maggie."

When she was gone the two moved out together on to the lawn.

"What did you think of that woman?" demanded Laurie with a detached
air.

Maggie glanced at him. His tone was a little too much detached.

"I thought her quite dreadful," she said frankly. "Didn't you?" she
added.

"Oh yes, I suppose so," said Laurie. He drew out a cigarette and
lighted it. "You know a lot of people think there's something in it,"
he said.

"In what?"

"Spiritualism."

"I daresay," said Maggie.

She perceived out of the corner of her eye that Laurie looked at her
suddenly and sharply. For herself, she loathed what little she knew of
the subject, so cordially and completely, that she could hardly have
put it into words. Nine-tenths of it she believed to be fraud--a
matter of wigs and Indian muslin and cross-lights--and the other
tenth, by the most generous estimate, an affair of the dingiest and
foulest of all the backstairs of life. The prophetic outpourings of
Mrs. Stapleton had not altered her opinion.

"Oh! if you feel like that--" went on Laurie.

She turned on him.

"Laurie," she said, "I think it perfectly detestable. I acknowledge I
don't know much about it; but what little I do know is enough, thank
you."

Laurie smiled in a faintly patronizing way.

"Well," he said indulgently, "if you think that, it's not much use
discussing it."

"Indeed it's not," said Maggie, with her nose in the air.

There was not much more to be said; and the sounds of stamping and
whoaing in the stable-yard presently sent the girl indoors in a hurry.

Mrs. Baxter was still mildly querulous during the drive. It appeared
to her, Maggie perceived, a kind of veiled insult that things should
be talked about in her house which did not seem to fit in with her own
scheme of the universe. Mrs. Baxter knew perfectly well that every
soul when it left this world went either to what she called Paradise,
or in extremely exceptional cases, to a place she did not name; and
that these places, each in its own way, entirely absorbed the
attention of its inhabitants. Further, it was established in her view
that all the members of the spiritual world, apart from the unhappy
ones, were a kind of Anglicans, with their minds no doubt enlarged
considerably, but on the original lines.

Tales like this of Cardinal Newman therefore were extremely tiresome
and upsetting.

And Maggie had her theology also; to her also it appeared quite
impossible that Cardinal Newman should frequent the drawing-room of
Mr. Vincent in order to exchange impressions with Mrs. Stapleton; but
she was more elementary in her answer. For her the thing was simply
untrue; and that was the end of it. She found it difficult therefore
to follow her companion's train of thought.

"What was it she said?" demanded Mrs. Baxter presently. "I didn't
understand her ideas about materialism."

"I think she called it materialization," explained Maggie patiently.
"She said that when things were very favorable, and the medium a very
good one, the soul that wanted to communicate could make a kind of
body for itself out of what she called the astral matter of the medium
or the sitters."

"But surely our bodies aren't like that?"

"No; I can't say that I think they are. But that's what she said."

"My dear, please explain. I want to understand the woman."

Maggie frowned a little.

"Well, the first thing she said was that those souls want to
communicate; and that they begin generally by things like
table-rapping, or making blue lights. Then when you know they're
there, they can go further. Sometimes they gain control of the medium
who is in a trance, and speak through him, or write with his hand.
Then, if things are favorable, they begin to draw out this matter, and
make it into a kind of body for themselves, very thin and ethereal, so
that you can pass your hand through it. Then, as things get better and
better, they go further still, and can make this body so solid that
you can touch it; only this is sometimes rather dangerous, as it is
still, in a sort of way, connected with the medium. I think that's the
idea."

"But what's the good of it all?"

"Well, you see, Mrs. Stapleton thinks that they really are souls from
the other world, and that they can tell us all kinds of things about
it all, and what's true, and so on."

"But you don't believe that?"

Maggie turned her large eyes on the old lady; and a spark of humor
rose and glimmered in them.

"Of course I don't," she said.

"Then how do you explain it?"

"I think it's probably all a fraud. But I really don't know. It
doesn't seem to me to matter much--"

"But if it should be true?"

Maggie raised her eyebrows, smiling.

"Dear auntie, do put it out of your head. How can it possibly be
true?"

Mrs. Baxter set her lips in as much severity as she could.

"I shall ask the Vicar," she said. "We might stop at the Vicarage on
the way back."

Mrs. Baxter did not often stop at the Vicarage; as she did not
altogether approve of the Vicar's wife. There was a good deal of pride
in the old lady, and it seemed to her occasionally as if Mrs. Rymer
did not understand the difference between the Hall and the Parsonage.
She envied sometimes, secretly, the Romanist idea of celibacy: it was
so much easier to get on with your spiritual adviser if you did not
have to consider his wife. But here, was a matter which a clergyman
must settle for her once and for all; so she put on a slight air of
dignity which became her very well, and a little after four o'clock
the Victoria turned up the steep little drive that led to the
Vicarage.


III

Thee dusk was already fallen before Laurie, strolling vaguely in the
garden, heard the carriage wheels draw up at the gate outside.

He had ridden again alone, and his mind had run, to a certain extent,
as might be expected, upon the recent guest and her very startling
conversation. He was an intelligent young man, and he had not been in
the least taken in by her pseudo-mystical remarks. Yet there had been
something in her extreme assurance that had affected him, as a man may
smile sourly at a good story in bad taste. His attitude, in fact, was
that of most Christians under the circumstances. He did not, for an
instant, believe that such things really and literally happened, and
yet it was difficult to advance any absolutely conclusive argument
against them. Merely, they had not come his way; they appeared to
conflict with experience, and they usually found as their advocates
such persons as Mrs. Stapleton.

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.