At the Villa Rose (22 page)

It was then that Helene Vauquier ventured humbly upon a suggestion.

"Since madame has a friend coming here on Tuesday, perhaps that would
be the best day for him to go. Madame would not be likely to take a
long drive that afternoon."

"No, indeed," replied Mme. Dauvray. "We shall all three dine together
early in Aix and return here."

"Then I will tell him he may go to-morrow," said Celia.

For this conversation took place on the Monday, and in the evening Mme.
Dauvray and Celia went as usual to the Villa des Fleurs and dined there.

"I was in a bad mind," said Celia, when asked by the Juge d'Instruction
to explain that attack of nerves in the garden which Ricardo had
witnessed. "I hated more and more the thought of the seance which was
to take place on the morrow. I felt that I was disloyal to Harry. My
nerves were all tingling. I was not nice that night at all," she added
quaintly. "But at dinner I determined that if I met Harry after dinner,
as I was sure to do, I would tell him the whole truth about myself.
However, when I did meet him I was frightened. I knew how stern he
could suddenly look. I dreaded what he would think. I was too afraid
that I should lose him. No, I could not speak; I had not the courage.
That made me still more angry with myself, and so I—I quarrelled at
once with Harry. He was surprised; but it was natural, wasn't it? What
else should one do under such circumstances, except quarrel with the
man one loved? Yes, I really quarrelled with him, and said things which
I thought and hoped would hurt. Then I ran away from him lest I should
break down and cry. I went to the tables and lost at once all the money
I had except one note of five louis. But that did not console me. And I
ran out into the garden, very unhappy. There I behaved like a child,
and Mr. Ricardo saw me. But it was not the little money I had lost
which troubled me; no, it was the thought of what a coward I was.
Afterwards Harry and I made it up, and I thought, like the little fool
I was, that he wanted to ask me to marry him. But I would not let him
that night. Oh! I wanted him to ask me—I was longing for him to ask
me—but not that night. Somehow I felt that the seance and the tricks
must be all over and done with before I could listen or answer."

The quiet and simple confession touched the magistrate who listened to
it with profound pity. He shaded his eyes with his hand. The girl's
sense of her unworthiness, the love she had given so unstintingly to
Harry Wethermill, the deep pride she had felt in the delusion that he
loved her too, had in it an irony too bitter. But he was aroused to
anger against the man.

"Go on, mademoiselle," he said. But in spite of himself his voice
trembled.

"So I arranged with him that we should meet on Wednesday, as Mr.
Ricardo heard."

"You told him that you would 'want him' on Wednesday," said the Judge
quoting Mr. Ricardo's words.

"Yes," replied Celia. "I meant that the last word of all these
deceptions would have been spoken. I should be free to hear what he had
to say to me. You see, monsieur, I was so sure that I knew what it was
he had to say to me—" and her voice broke upon the words. She
recovered herself with an effort. "Then I went home with Mme. Dauvray."

On the morning of Tuesday, however, there came a letter from Adele
Tace, of which no trace was afterwards discovered. The letter invited
Mme. Dauvray and Celia to come out to Annecy and dine with her at an
hotel there. They could then return together to Aix. The proposal
fitted well with Mme. Dauvray's inclinations. She was in a feverish
mood of excitement.

"Yes, it will be better that we dine quietly together in a place where
there is no noise and no crowd, and where no one knows us," she said;
and she looked up the time-table. "There is a train back which reaches
Aix at nine o'clock," she said, "so we need not spoil Servettaz'
holiday."

"His parents will be expecting him," Helene Vauquier added.

Accordingly Servettaz left for Chambery by the 1.50 train from Aix; and
later on in the afternoon Mme. Dauvray and Celia went by train to
Annecy. In the one woman's mind was the queer longing that "she" should
appear and speak to-night; in the girl's there was a wish passionate as
a cry. "This shall be the last time," she said to herself again and
again—"the very last."

Meanwhile, Helene Vauquier, it must be held, burnt carefully Adele
Taces letter. She was left in the Villa Rose with the charwoman to keep
her company. The charwoman bore testimony that Helene Vauquier
certainly did burn a letter in the kitchen-stove, and that after she
had burned it she sat for a long time rocking herself in a chair, with
a smile of great pleasure upon her face, and now and then moistening
her lips with her tongue. But Helene Vauquier kept her mouth sealed.

Mme. Dauvray and Celia found Adele Rossignol, to give Adele Tace the
name which she assumed, waiting for them impatiently in the garden of
an hotel at Annecy, on the Promenade du Paquier. She was a tall, lithe
woman, and she was dressed, by the purse and wish of Helene Vauquier,
in a robe and a long coat of sapphire velvet, which toned down the
coarseness of her good looks and lent something of elegance to her
figure.

"So it is mademoiselle," Adele began, with a smile of raillery, "who is
so remarkably clever."

"Clever?" answered Celia, looking straight at Adele, as though through
her she saw mysteries beyond. She took up her part at once. Since for
the last time it had got to be played, there must be no fault in the
playing. For her own sake, for the sake of Mme. Dauvray's happiness,
she must carry it off to-night with success. The suspicions of Adele
Rossignol must obtain no verification. She spoke in a quiet and most
serious voice. "Under spirit-control no one is clever. One does the
bidding of the spirit which controls."

"Perfectly," said Adele in a malicious tone. "I only hope you will see
to it, mademoiselle, that some amusing spirits control you this evening
and appear before us."

"I am only the living gate by which the spirit forms pass from the
realm of mind into the world of matter," Celia replied.

"Quite so," said Adele comfortably. "Now let us be sensible and dine.
We can amuse ourselves with mademoiselle's rigmaroles afterwards."

Mme. Dauvray was indignant. Celia, for her part, felt humiliated and
small. They sat down to their dinner in the garden, but the rain began
to fall and drove them indoors. There were a few people dining at the
same hour, but none near enough to overhear them. Alike in the garden
and the dining-room, Adele Tace kept up the same note of ridicule and
disbelief. She had been carefully tutored for her work. She was able to
cite the stock cases of exposure—"les freres Davenport," as she called
them, Eusapia Palladino and Dr. Slade. She knew the precautions which
had been taken to prevent trickery and where those precautions had
failed. Her whole conversation was carefully planned to one end, and to
one end alone. She wished to produce in the minds of her companions so
complete an impression of her scepticism that it would seem the most
natural thing in the world to both of them that she should insist upon
subjecting Celia to the severest tests. The rain ceased, and they took
their coffee on the terrace of the hotel. Mme. Dauvray had been really
pained by the conversation of Adele Tace. She had all the missionary
zeal of a fanatic.

"I do hope, Adele, that we shall make you believe. But we shall. Oh, I
am confident we shall." And her voice was feverish.

Adele dropped for the moment her tone of raillery.

"I am not unwilling to believe," she said, "but I cannot. I am
interested—yes. You see how much I have studied the subject. But I
cannot believe. I have heard stories of how these manifestations are
produced—stories which make me laugh. I cannot help it. The tricks are
so easy. A young girl wearing a black frock which does not rustle—it
is always a black frock, is it not, because a black frock cannot be
seen in the dark?—carrying a scarf or veil, with which she can make
any sort of headdress if only she is a little clever, and shod in a
pair of felt-soled slippers, is shut up in a cabinet or placed behind a
screen, and the lights are turned down or out—" Adele broke off with a
comic shrug of the shoulders. "Bah! It ought not to deceive a child."

Celia sat with a face which WOULD grow red. She did not look, but none
the less she was aware that Mme. Dauvray was gazing at her with a
perplexed frown and some return of her suspicion showing in her eyes.
Adele Tace was not content to leave the subject there.

"Perhaps," she said, with a smile, "Mlle. Celie dresses in that way for
a seance?"

"Madame shall see tonight," Celia stammered, and Camille Dauvray rather
sternly repeated her words.

"Yes, Adele shall see tonight. I myself will decide what you shall
wear, Celie."

Adele Tace casually suggested the kind of dress which she would prefer.

"Something light in colour with a train, something which will hiss and
whisper if mademoiselle moves about the room—yes, and I think one of
mademoiselle's big hats," she said. "We will have mademoiselle as
modern as possible, so that, when the great ladies of the past appear
in the coiffure of their day, we may be sure it is not Mlle. Celie who
represents them."

"I will speak to Helene," said Mme. Dauvray, and Adele Tace was content.

There was a particular new dress of which she knew, and it was very
desirable that Mlle. Celie should wear it tonight. For one thing, if
Celia wore it, it would help the theory that she had put it on because
she expected that night a lover; for another, with that dress there
went a pair of satin slippers which had just come home from a shoemaker
at Aix, and which would leave upon soft mould precisely the same
imprints as the grey suede shoes which the girl was wearing now.

Celia was not greatly disconcerted by Mme. Rossignol's precautions. She
would have to be a little more careful, and Mme. de Montespan would be
a little longer in responding to the call of Mme. Dauvray than most of
the other dead ladies of the past had been. But that was all. She was,
however, really troubled in another way. All through dinner, at every
word of the conversation, she had felt her reluctance towards this
seance swelling into a positive disgust. More than once she had felt
driven by some uncontrollable power to rise up at the table and cry out
to Adele:

"You are right! It IS trickery. There is no truth in it."

But she had mastered herself. For opposite to her sat her patroness,
her good friend, the woman who had saved her. The flush upon Mme.
Dauvray's cheeks and the agitation of her manner warned Celia how much
hung upon the success of this last seance. How much for both of them!

And in the fullness of that knowledge a great fear assailed her. She
began to be afraid, so strong was her reluctance, that she would not
bring her heart into the task. "Suppose I failed tonight because I
could not force myself to wish not to fail!" she thought, and she
steeled herself against the thought. Tonight she must not fail. For
apart altogether from Mme. Dauvray's happiness, her own, it seemed, was
at stake too.

"It must be from my lips that Harry learns what I have been," she said
to herself, and with the resolve she strengthened herself.

"I will wear what you please," she said, with a smile. "I only wish
Mme. Rossignol to be satisfied."

"And I shall be," said Adele, "if—" She leaned forward in anxiety. She
had come to the real necessity of Helene Vauquier's plan. "If we
abandon as quite laughable the cupboard door and the string across it;
if, in a word, mademoiselle consents that we tie her hand and foot and
fasten her securely in a chair. Such restraints are usual in the
experiments of which I have read. Was there not a medium called Mlle.
Cook who was secured in this way, and then remarkable things, which I
could not believe, were supposed to have happened?"

"Certainly I permit it," said Celia, with indifference; and Mme.
Dauvray cried enthusiastically:

"Ah, you shall believe tonight in those wonderful things!"

Adele Tace leaned back. She drew a breath. It was a breath of relief.

"Then we will buy the cord in Aix," she said.

"We have some, no doubt, in the house," said Mme. Dauvray.

Adele shook her head and smiled.

"My dear madame, you are dealing with a sceptic. I should not be
content."

Celia shrugged her shoulders.

"Let us satisfy Mme. Rossignol," she said.

Celia, indeed, was not alarmed by this last precaution. For her it was
a test less difficult than the light-coloured rustling robe. She had
appeared upon so many platforms, had experienced too often the bungling
efforts of spectators called up from the audience, to be in any fear.
There were very few knots from which her small hands and supple fingers
had not learnt long since to extricate themselves. She was aware how
much in all these matters the personal equation counted. Men who might,
perhaps, have been able to tie knots from which she could not get free
were always too uncomfortable and self-conscious, or too afraid of
hurting her white arms and wrists, to do it. Women, on the other hand,
who had no compunctions of that kind, did not know how.

It was now nearly eight o'clock; the rain still held off.

"We must go," said Mme. Dauvray, who for the last half-hour had been
continually looking at her watch.

They drove to the station and took the train. Once more the rain came
down, but it had stopped again before the train steamed into Aix at
nine o'clock.

"We will take a cab," said Mme. Dauvray: "it will save time."

"It will do us good to walk, madame," pleaded Adele. The train was
full. Adele passed quickly out from the lights of the station in the
throng of passengers and waited in the dark square for the others to
join her. "It is barely nine. A friend has promised to call at the
Villa Rose for me after eleven and drive me back in a motor-car to
Geneva, so we have plenty of time."