Sylvia & Michael: The later adventures of Sylvia Scarlett. Compton Mackenzie
different planes since his death. Hush! What's that?"
She stared into the darkest corner of the dining-room.
"Is that you, Gontran?"
"I think it was one of the birds," Sylvia said.
Mère Gontran waved her hand for silence.
"Gontran! Is that you? Where have you been all day? This is a friend of mine who's staying here. You'll like her very much when you know her. Gontran! I want to talk to you after dinner. Now mind, don't forget. I'm glad you've got back. I want you to make some inquiries in England to-morrow."
Sylvia was distinctly aware of a deep-seated amusement all the time at Mère Gontran's matter-of-fact way of dealing with her husband's spirit, and she could never make up her mind how with her sense of amusement could exist simultaneously a credulity that led her to hear at the conclusion of Mère Gontran's last speech three loud raps upon the air of the room.
"He's got over last night," said Mère Gontran in a satisfied voice. "But there again, he always had a kind nature at bottom. Three nice cheerful raps like that always mean he's going to give up his evening to me."
Sylvia's first instinct was to find in what way Mère Gontran had tricked her into hearing those three raps; something in the seer's true gaze forbade the notion of trickery, and a shiver roused by the inexplicable, the shiver that makes a dog run away from an open umbrella blown across a lawn, slipped through her being.
Although Mère Gontran was puffing at her soup as if nothing had happened, the house had changed, or rather it had not changed so much as revealed itself in a brief instant. All that there was of queerness in this tumble-down pension became endowed with deliberate meaning, and it was no longer possible to ascribe the atmosphere to the effect of weakened nerves upon a weakened body. Sylvia began to wonder if the form her delirium had taken had not been directly due to this atmosphere; more than ever she was inclined to attach a profound significance to her delirium and perceive in it the diabolic revelation with which it had originally been fraught.
When after dinner Mère Gontran took a pack of cards and began to tell her fortune, Sylvia had a new impulse to dread; but she shook it off almost irritably and listened to the tale.
"A long journey by land. A long journey by sea. A dark man. A fair woman. A fair man. A dark woman. A letter."
The familiar rigmarole of a hundred such tellings droned its course, accompanied by the flip-flap, flip-flap of the cards. The information was general enough for any human being on earth to have extracted from it something applicable to himself; yet, against her will, and as it were bewitched by the teller's solemnity, Sylvia began to endow the cards with the personalities that might affect her life. The King of Hearts lost his rubicund complacency and took on the lineaments of Arthur: the King of Clubs parted with his fierceness and assumed the graceful severity of Michael Fane: with a kind of impassioned egotism Sylvia watched the journeyings of the Queen of Hearts, noting the contacts and biting her lips when she found her prototype associated with unfavorable cards.
"Come, I don't think the outlook's so bad," said Mère Gontran at the end of the final disposition. "If your bed's a bit doubtful, your street and your house are both very good, and your road lies south. But there again, this blessed war upsets everything, and even the cards must be read with half an eye on the war."
When the cards had been put away, Mère Gontran produced the planchette and set it upon a small table covered in red baize round the binding of which hung numerous little woolen pompons.
"Now we shall find out something about your friends in England," she announced, cheerfully.
Sylvia had not the heart to disappoint Mère Gontran, and she placed her hands upon the heart-shaped board, which trembled so much under Mère Gontran's eager touch that the pencil affixed made small squiggles upon the paper beneath. The planchette went on fidgeting more and more under their four hands like a restless animal trying to escape, and from time to time it would skate right across the paper, leaving a long penciled trail in its path, which Mère Gontran would examine with great intentness.
"It looks a little bit like a Y," she would say.
"A very little bit," Sylvia would think.
"Or it may be an A. Never mind. It always begins rather doubtfully. I won't lose my temper with it to-night."
The planchette might have been a tenderly loved child learning to write for the first time, by the way Mère Gontran encouraged it and tried to award a shape and purpose to its most amorphous tracks. When it had covered the sheet of paper with an impossibly complicated river-system, Mère Gontran fetched a clean sheet and told Sylvia severely that she must try not to urge the planchette. Any attempt at urging had a very bad effect on its willingness.
"I didn't think I was urging it," said Sylvia, humbly.
"Try and sit more still, dear. If you like, I'll put my feet on your toes and then you won't be so tempted to jig. We may have to sit all night, if we aren't careful."
Sylvia strained every nerve to sit as still as possible in order to avoid having her toes imprisoned all night by Mère Gontran's feet, which were particularly large, even for so tall a woman. She concentrated upon preventing her hands from leading planchette to trace the course of any more rivers toward the sea of baize, and after sitting for twenty minutes like this she felt that all the rest of her body had gone into her hands. She had never thought that her hands were small, but she had certainly never realized that they were as large and as ugly as they were; as for Mère Gontran's, they had for some time lost any likeness to hands and lay upon the planchette like two uncooked chops. At last when Sylvia had reached the state of feeling like a large pincushion that was being rapidly pricked by thousands of pins, Mère Gontran murmured:
"It's going to start."
Immediately afterward the planchette careered across the paper and wrote a sentence.
"Dick's picked a daisy," Mère Gontran read out. "Drat the thing! Never mind, we'll have one more try."
Again a sentence was written, and again it repeated that Dick had picked a daisy.
Suddenly Samuel the collie made an odd noise.
"He's going to speak through Samuel," Mère Gontran declared. "What is it, dear? Tell me what it is?"
The dog, who had probably been stung by a gnat, got up and, putting his head upon his mistress's knee, gazed forth ineffable sorrows.
"You heard him trying to talk?" she asked.
"He certainly made a noise," Sylvia admitted.
There was a loud rap on the air—an unmistakable rap, for the five cats which had remained in the room all twitched their ears toward the sound.
"Gone for the night," said Mère Gontran. "And he's very angry about something. I suppose this daisy that Dick picked means something important to him, though we can't understand. Perhaps he'll come back later on when I've gone to bed and tell me more about it."
"Mère Gontran," said Sylvia, earnestly, "do you really believe in spirits? Do you really think we can talk with the dead?"
"Of course I do. Listen! They're all round us. If you want to feel the dead, walk up the garden with me now. You'll feel the spirits whizzing round you like moths."
"Oh, I wonder, I wonder if it's true," Sylvia cried. "I can't believe it, and yet. … "
"Listen to me," said Mère Gontran, solemnly. "Thirty-five years ago I left England to come to Petersburg. I was twenty years old and very beautiful. You can imagine how I was run after by men. You've seen something of the way men run after women here. Well, one summer I went with my family to Finland, and I foolishly arranged to meet Prince Paul in the forest after supper. He was a fine, handsome young man, as bold and as wicked as the devil himself. But there again, I haven't got to give details. Anyway, he said to me: 'What are you afraid of? Your parents?' I can hear his laugh now after all these