Victor Ollnee's Discipline Part 34

"Who are you?"

"_Don't you know me? I am Altair. Do not forget me._"

"I will not forget you," he answered. "I can't forget you. Why do you look so sad?"

"_It is cold and empty where I dwell. I come to you for happiness and warmth. You had forgotten me. You would not listen to my voice._" Her reproach moved him almost to tears.

"I could not see you. I was not sure."

"_I do not accuse you. It is natural for you to love. When the day comes you will seek another. One whose flesh is warm. Mine is cold. She is of the day. I am of the night. But do not refuse to speak to me._"

Her bust had grown fuller, more complete as she spoke, and yet from the waist downward she seemed but a trailing garment of convoluting, phosph.o.r.escent gauze. Her left hand still hung at her side, vague, diaphanous, but her right lay upon her breast, as beautiful, as real as firelit ivory, and her face seemed to glow as though with some inward radiance.

Victor could follow the exquisite line of her brow, and her eyes were glorious pools of color, deep and dark with mystery and pa.s.sion. Slowly she sank as if kneeling, her stately head lowered, bent above him, and he felt the touch of soft lips upon his own--a kiss so warm, so human that it filled his heart with wors.h.i.+p. Gently he lifted his hand, seeking to draw her to him, and for an instant he felt her pliant body in the circle of his arms--then she dissolved, vanished--like some condensation of the atmosphere, and he was left alone, aching with longing and despair.

For a long time he waited, hoping she would return. He saw the moonlight fade from the carpet. He heard the night wind amid the maple leaves, and he knew he had not been dreaming, for that strange Oriental perfume lingered in the air, and on the coverlet where her exquisite hand had rested a white bloom lay, mystic and wonderful. He lifted it, and its breath, sweeter than that of any other flower he had ever held, filled him with instant languor and happy release of care.

His next perception was that of sunlight. It was morning, and the kine and fowls were astir.

He looked for the mysterious flower, but it was gone. He sprang from his bed and searched the room for it. "It did not exist," he sadly concluded. "It has returned to the mysterious world from whence it came."

For a long time afterward he suffered with a sense of loss, while the sunlight deepened in his room and the sounds of the barn-yard brought back to him the realization that he was in effect a fugitive in the house of a stranger. Slowly the normal action of his mind and body resumed its sway, and he dressed, quite sure that something abnormal had brought this vision to him. He wondered if he, too, were getting mediumistic. "Am I to be a son of my mother? Am I to hear voices and see visions?" he asked himself, with a note of alarm. He began to fear the disintegrating effects of these experiences. His personality; his body hitherto so solid, so stable, seemed about to develop disturbing capabilities.

He was profoundly pleased and rea.s.sured to find on his dressing-room table a large white rose, a rose precisely like that which had been laid upon his coverlet by the hand of the dream-woman. It's odor was the same, and its petals were as fresh as if it had just been cut. It rea.s.sured him by convincing him that his vision was real--that it had a basis of physical change; but it also started a perplexing chain of thought. "How came the rose here? Who brought it?" was his question. "It certainly was not there when I went to bed."

With the flower in his hand, he still stood looking down at the place where the hand of Altair had rested--still marveling at this mingling of the real and the fantastic, the dream and the rose, when something s.h.i.+ning revealed itself half concealed by the pillow; and putting out his hand he took up a little brooch of turquoise set with diamonds, which he recognized instantly as one that Leo had worn at her throat when she said good-night.

Sinking into a chair, he stared now at the jewel, now at the rose, while a thrill of pride, of mastery, of joy stole through him. His blood warmed. His heart quickened its beat. Could it be that Leo had been his visitor? Was it possible that she, burning with hidden love of him, had stolen to his room, and there at his bedside, masking herself as Altair, had bent to his drowsy eyes, and laid upon his lips that fervid kiss?

The thought confused him, overpowered him, exalted him.

His was a chivalrous nature, therefore this act, at the moment, seemed neither unmaidenly nor wrong--indeed, it appeared very beautiful in his eyes. It humbled him, made him wonder if he were worth the risk she had run? He was not abnormally self-appreciative, but he had not been left unaware of his appeal to women. His previous love-affairs had been those of the undergraduate, proceeding under the jocular supervision of his watchful fellows. His present case was in wholly different spirit. He was a man now--in fact, his quarrel with Leo from the first had been over her evident determination to treat him as a lad.

The memory of her serene self-possession made her self-surrender of the night all the more amazing to him. "It is cold and empty where I dwell,"

she had said. This meant that she loved him--longed for him--it could mean nothing else. Her love had begun during their ride on the lagoon, in their delicious drowse on the gra.s.s. It had been deepened by their afternoon of sweet companions.h.i.+p at tennis and over their books; then came the walk in the moonlight and her acceptance of his caress in the dusky place in the path--all were preparatory to this final wondrous visit and confession.

And yet her eyes had never been other than those of a friend. Seemingly she had laughed at herself for the momentary weakness of yielding to his arm. Her daylight expression had always been that of the humorous, self-reliant, rather intellectual girl, who acknowledges no fear of man and no sudden rush of pa.s.sion, and yet--How reconcile the facts!

He smiled to think how he had been deceived by her imperious air, by her expressed contempt for his interest. "And all the while she was really waiting for me to break through her reserve," he said; and this delicious explanation satisfied him for a few moments, till he went deeper into his memory of what she had said and done.

He was forced to rea.s.sure himself again by the jewel and the rose that she had really come to him, so dream-like did the whole ethereal episode now seem. The more he dwelt upon the vision the deeper it moved him.

It's growing significance set his blood aflame. In fiction and poesy women often sacrifice their reserve, moved by uncontrollable longing, like the heroine of mad Ophelia's song, because commanded by something stronger than their sweet selves. It was hard to think of Leo as one carried out of herself by love--and yet here lay the jewel of her bosom in his hand! How to meet her puzzled and excited him.

Up to this minute he had admired her and had paid court to her as a young man naturally addresses a handsome girl, but he was not violently in love with her; indeed, she had interested him rather less than a girl in Winona, daughter of Professor Boyden; but now, as he was about to meet her in the breakfast-room, she possessed more power, more significance, than any woman in the world. He recalled how fine and helpful she had been during the few days of their acquaintance--her serenity, her good sense, her pungent comment began to seem very wonderful.

He looked at himself in the gla.s.s, finding there a very good-looking, stalwart youth, but could not discover anything to account for the sudden blaze of Leonora's self-sacrificing pa.s.sion. He was neither a fool nor a peac.o.c.k, and he tried to account for her love on the ground of her regard for his mother. Then, like a flash of light, came the thought, "She was sleep-walking!"

He had read of the marvels of hypnotism and somnambulism. Perhaps in some strange way his mother's desire to have Leo love her son had sent the girl straight to his bedside. There was something uncanny in her speech and in her gestures--only in her kiss had she been solidly, warmly human.

And yet all this seemed so difficult to believe--and besides, if the girl came in her sleep, did it not prove her love quite as conclusively?

It might be unconscious, but it was there.

With heart pounding mightily, and face set and stern, he left his room and began descending the stairway, uncertain still of the way in which he should meet her.

Happily he found no one in the dining-room but the maid, who said to him, "Mr. Bartol would like to see Mr. Ollnee in his study as soon as Mr. Ollnee has had his breakfast."

"Very well," he replied; "I will make short work of breakfast this morning."

As he sat thus awaiting Leo, his mind filled with the wonder of her self-surrender, he considered carefully in what way he should greet her.

"She must not know that I know," he decided. "I will greet her as if I had not found the brooch, and I will leave it where she will happen upon it accidentally."

XIII

VICTOR TESTS HIS THEORY

He was still at breakfast, deeply engaged with his alluring vision, when Mrs. Joyce and his mother entered the room. As he rose to greet them Mrs. Joyce asked, "Have you seen Mr. Bartol?"

"Not yet--but he is up. I am to see him soon. Where is Leo?"

"She is not feeling very brisk this morning, and is taking her coffee in bed."

He said no more, but resumed his seat, richer by this added proof of the deep perturbation through which the girl had pa.s.sed. He was disappointed, and eager to see her, but the conviction that she had been sleepless from love of him put him among the clouds. He would have forgotten his appointment with Bartol had not the maid reminded him of it. Even then he tried to avoid it. "You're sure he wanted me? Didn't he mean my mother?"

"I'm quite sure he said Mister Ollnee."

"Mother, what do you suppose he wants of me?"

"I don't know, Victor. Perhaps he wants to talk over the trial."

"Come back and tell us as soon as you can," commanded Mrs. Joyce. "I'm crazy to know what he did last night, and what he really thinks of us?"

Victor promised to report, and went away to his interview with a vague alarm disturbing the blissful self-satisfaction of the early morning.

He found Bartol seated at a big table with a writing-pad before him and four or five open volumes disposed about as if for reference. He, too, looked old and worn and rather grim, but he greeted his guest politely.

"Good-morning. Have you seen your mother this morning?"

"Yes, I have just left her at breakfast."

"How is she?"

"She seems quite herself--a little pale, perhaps."

"Be seated, please. I want to go over our case with you. First of all, I want you to tell me once more, and in full detail, all you know of your mother's life. Begin at the beginning and leave nothing out. Don't theorize or try to explain--give me the facts as you have observed them."

This was not the kind of business to which a love-exalted youth would set himself, but Victor squared himself before the brooding face and deep-set eyes of his host, and entered once more upon the story of the "ghost-room," which had been the one dark spot in his childhood, and which became again in a moment the overshadowing torment of his young manhood.