Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1924 page)

The next number (being Number Fifteen) was called by the elderly servant, and the first incident occurred in the strange series of events destined to happen in the Doctor’s house that night.

One after another the three men who had been waiting rose, examined their cards under the light of the lamp, and sat down again surprised and disappointed.

The servant advanced to investigate the matter. The numbers possessed by the three visitors, instead of being Fifteen, Sixteen and Seventeen, proved to be Sixteen, Seventeen and Eighteen. Turning to the stranger who had arrived the last, the servant said:

“Have I made a mistake, sir? Have I given you Number Fifteen instead of Number Eighteen?”

The gentleman produced his numbered card.

A mistake had certainly been made, but not the mistake that the servant supposed. The card held by the latest visitor turned out to be the card previously held by the dissatisfied stranger who had just left the room — Number Fourteen! As to the card numbered Fifteen, it was only discovered the next morning lying in a corner, dropped on the floor!

Acting on his first impulse, the servant hurried out, calling to the original holder of Fourteen to come back and bear his testimony to that fact. The street-door had been opened for him by the landlady of the house. She was a pretty woman — and the gentleman had fortunately lingered to talk to her. He was induced, at the intercession of the landlady, to ascend the stairs again.

On returning to the waiting-room, he addressed a characteristic question to the assembled visitors. “
More
humbug?” asked the gentleman who liked to talk to a pretty woman.

The servant — completely puzzled by his own stupidity — attempted to make his apologies.

“Pray forgive me, gentlemen,” he said. “I am afraid I have confused the cards I distribute with the cards returned to me. I think I had better consult my master.”

Left by themselves, the visitors began to speak jestingly of the strange situation in which they were placed. The original holder of Number Fourteen described his experience of the Doctor in his own pithy way. “I applied to the fellow to tell my fortune. He first went to sleep over it, and then he said he could tell me nothing. I asked why. ‘I don’t know,’ says he. ‘
I
do,’ says I — ’humbug!’ I’ll bet you the long odds, gentlemen, that
you
find it humbug, too.”

Before the wager could be accepted or declined, the door of the inner room was opened again. The tall, spare, black figure of a new personage appeared on the threshold, relieved darkly against the light in the room behind him. He addressed the visitors in these words:

“Gentlemen, I must beg your indulgence. The accident — as we now suppose it to be — which has given to the last comer the number already held by a gentleman who has unsuccessfully consulted me, may have a meaning which we can none of us at present see. If the three visitors who have been so good as to wait will allow the present holder of Number Fourteen to consult me out of his turn — and if the earlier visitor who left me dissatisfied with his consultation will consent to stay here a little longer — something may happen which will justify a trifling sacrifice of your own convenience. Is ten minutes’ patience too much to ask of you?”

The three visitors who had waited longest consulted among themselves, and (having nothing better to do with their time) decided on accepting the Doctor’s proposal. The visitor who believed it all to be “humbug” coolly took a gold coin out of his pocket, tossed it into the air, caught it in his closed hand, and walked up to the shaded lamp on the bracket.

“Heads, stay,” he said, “Tails, go.” He opened his hand, and looked at the coin. “Heads! Very good. Go on with your hocus-pocus, Doctor — I’ll wait.”

“You believe in chance,” said the Doctor, quietly observing him. “That is not my experience of life.”

He paused to let the stranger who now held Number Fourteen pass him into the inner room — then followed, closing the door behind him.

C
HAPTER III.

T
HE CONSULTATION.

THE consulting-room was better lighted than the waiting-room, and that was the only difference between the two. In the one, as in the other, no attempt was made to impress the imagination. Everywhere, the commonplace furniture of a London lodging-house was left without the slightest effort to alter or improve it by changes of any kind.

Seen under the clearer light, Doctor Lagarde appeared to be the last person living who would consent to degrade himself by an attempt at imposture of any kind. His eyes were the dreamy eyes of a visionary; his look was the prematurely-aged look of a student, accustomed to give the hours to his book which ought to have been given to his bed. To state it briefly, he was a man who might easily be deceived by others, but who was incapable of consciously practicing deception himself.

Signing to his visitor to be seated, he took a chair on the opposite side of the small table that stood between them — waited a moment with his face hidden in his hands, as if to collect himself — and then spoke.

“Do you come to consult me on a case of illness?” he inquired, “or do you ask me to look to the darkness which hides your future life?”

The answer to these questions was frankly and briefly expressed. “I have no need to consult you about my health. I come to hear what you can tell me of my future life.”

“I can try,” pursued the Doctor; “but I cannot promise to succeed.”

“I accept your conditions,” the stranger rejoined. “I never believe nor disbelieve. If you will excuse my speaking frankly, I mean to observe you closely, and to decide for myself.”

Doctor Lagarde smiled sadly.

“You have heard of me as a charlatan who contrives to amuse a few idle people,” he said. “I don’t complain of that; my present position leads necessarily to misinterpretation of myself and my motives. Still, I may at least say that I am the victim of a sincere avowal of my belief in a great science. Yes! I repeat it, a great science! New, I dare say, to the generation we live in, though it was known and practiced in the days when pyramids were built. The age is advancing; and the truths which it is my misfortune to advocate, before the time is ripe for them, are steadily forcing their way to recognition. I am resigned to wait. My sincerity in this matter has cost me the income that I derived from my medical practice. Patients distrust me; doctors refuse to consult with me. I could starve if I had no one to think of but myself. But I have another person to consider, who is very dear to me; and I am driven, literally driven, either to turn beggar in the streets, or do what I am doing now.”

He paused, and looked round toward the corner of the room behind him. “Mother,” he said gently, “are you ready?”

An elderly lady, dressed in deep mourning, rose from her seat in the corner. She had been, thus far, hidden from notice by the high back of the easy-chair in which her son sat. Excepting some f olds of fine black lace, laid over her white hair so as to form a head-dress at once simple and picturesque, there was nothing remarkable in her attire. The visitor rose and bowed. She gravely returned his salute, and moved so as to place herself opposite to her son.

“May I ask what this lady is going to do?” said the stranger.

“To be of any use to you,” answered Doctor Lagarde, “I must be thrown into the magnetic trance. The person who has the strongest influence over me is the person who will do it to-night.”

He turned to his mother. “When you like,” he said.

Bending over him, she took both the Doctor’s hands, and looked steadily into his eyes. No words passed between them; nothing more took place. In a minute or two, his head was resting against the back of the chair, and his eyelids had closed.

“Are you sleeping?” asked Madame Lagarde.

“I am sleeping,” he answered.

She laid his hands gently on the arms of the chair, and turned to address the visitor.

“Let the sleep gain on him for a minute or two more,” she said. “Then take one of his hands, and put to him what questions you please.”

“Does he hear us now, madam?”

“You might fire off a pistol, sir, close to his ear, and he would not hear it. The vibration might disturb him; that is all. Until you or I touch him, and so establish the nervous sympathy, he is as lost to all sense of our presence here, as if he were dead.”

“Are you speaking of the thing called Animal Magnetism, madam?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you believe in it, of course?”

“My son’s belief, sir, is my belief in this thing as in other things. I have heard what he has been saying to you. It is for me that he sacrifices himself by holding these exhibitions; it is in my poor interests that his hardly-earned money is made. I am in infirm health; and, remonstrate as I may, my son persists in providing for me, not the bare comforts only, but even the luxuries of life. Whatever I may suffer, I have my compensation; I can still thank God for giving me the greatest happiness that a woman can enjoy, the possession of a good son.”

She smiled fondly as she looked at the sleeping man. “Draw your chair nearer to him,” she resumed, “and take his hand. You may speak freely in making your inquiries. Nothing that happens in this room goes out of it.”

With those words she returned to her place, in the corner behind her son’s chair.

The visitor took Doctor Lagarde’s hand. As they touched each other, he was conscious of a faintly-titillating sensation in his own hand — a sensation which oddly reminded him of bygone experiments with an electrical machine, in the days when he was a boy at school!

“I wish to question you about my future life,” he began. “How ought I to begin?”

The Doctor spoke his first words in the monotonous tones of a man talking in his sleep.

“Own your true motive before you begin,” he said. “Your interest in your future life is centreed in a woman. You wish to know if her heart will be yours in the time that is to come — and there your interest in your future life ends.”

This startling proof of the sleeper’s capacity to look, by sympathy, into his mind, and to see there his most secret thoughts, instead of convincing the stranger, excited his suspicions. “You have means of getting information,” he said, “that I don’t understand.”

The Doctor smiled, as if the idea amused him.

Madame Lagarde rose from her seat and interposed.

“Hundreds of strangers come here to consult my son,” she said quietly. “If you believe that we know who those strangers are, and that we have the means of inquiring into their private lives before they enter this room, you believe in something much more incredible than the magnetic sleep!”

This was too manifestly true to be disputed. The visitor made his apologies.

“I should like to have
some
explanation,” he added. “The thing is so very extraordinary. How can I prevail upon Doctor Lagarde to enlighten me?”

“He can only tell you what he sees,” Madame Lagarde answered; “ask him that, and you will get a direct reply. Say to him: ‘Do you see the lady?’“

The stranger repeated the question. The reply followed at once, in these words:

“I see two figures standing side by side. One of them is your figure. The other is the figure of a lady. She only appears dimly. I can discover nothing but that she is taller than women generally are, and that she is dressed in pale blue.”

The man to whom he was speaking started at those last words. “Her favorite colour!” he thought to himself — forgetting that, while he held the Doctor’s hand, the Doctor could think with
his
mind.

“Yes,” added the sleeper quietly, “her favorite colour, as you know. She fades and fades as I look at her,” he went on. “She is gone. I only see
you
, under a new aspect. You have a pistol in your hand. Opposite to you, there stands the figure of another man. He, too, has a pistol in his hand. Are you enemies? Are you meeting to fight a duel? Is the lady the cause? I try, but I fail to see her.”