He knew his chiefs, men of the highest ideals, but also of the sternest justice, and he knew that rebellion need expect no mercy. First would come an order to attend Lodge and offer an explanation ; should that prove unsatisfactory, he would be commanded to return to the archives all insignia, symbols and manuscripts, and he would be solemnly warned, in a formula thousands of years old, that for the future he would exercise occult powers at his peril ; and then he would be bidden to go forth and associate no more with his brethren.
Should he, however, persist in his evil ways, should he, especially, pervert to his own ends the powers he had acquired, then something that was not of this plane of existence dealt with him. No man raised a finger against him, the law was not invoked, his name was not mentioned for evil, but, all the same, something happened to him, and after that which was to fall had fallen, he was incapable of either good or evil for the short span of existence which usually remained to him.
Lucas knew all this quite well, and, hands deep in trouser pockets, he slowly paced the room, calculating his chances of escape should he decide on the course of defiance.
Six years ago, with a promising journalistic career before him, he had suddenly abandoned Fleet Street, and to the surprise and disgust of his colleagues, become secretary to a society for the study of comparative folk-lore. Why he did it, they could not make out, and Lucas did not enlighten them ; but, if the truth were known, he was controlling the mundane pied-à-terre that even the most esoteric of occult fraternities must have, and to this fraternity he dedicated his existence. As had been truly said that evening, he had raised the Fraternity to a very different position to that which it had occupied when first he took its affairs in hand. He had found it engaged in study for study's sake, and he had shown it the practical application of its knowledge. Hitherto it had contented itself in dealing with the individual, his development or regeneration. Lucas showed it that its methods were equally applicable to international affairs, and he had interfered with such notable success in certain coups d’état that the great majority of his Fraternity looked upon him as the coming leader. It was only a minority that viewed his doings askance, but, as he had seen that evening, the seniors of the Fraternity were in that minority to a man, and it was they alone who could bind or loose. It was useless to have the support of numbers if those who held the keys of power closed the door upon him, and it had been borne in upon Lucas recently that these doors were closed, had, in fact, been closed for some time. He had realized that no amount of hard work, no amount of devotion, would take a man up the Fraternity if that man's heart were not right. Lip service would not avail, either ; the trained clairvoyants who had charge of these matters judged a man neither by what he said nor what he did, but by the colours of his aura, and that tell-tale emanation revealed the truth. No amount of ostentatious church-going on Sundays and wearing of crosses on watch-chains could conceal the dull red glow that Saturday night's diversions left behind, or counterfeit the bright clear electric blue that had to show before a man was judged fit for the higher degrees.
Lucas knew that although his aura showed the occult green, that green was not right, and he could not get it right except by changing his whole nature, by casting out the inordinate ambition and love of power that consumed him and bringing in compassion for his fellow men, and neither of these things could Lucas see his way to achieve ; he despised his fellow man too much to feel anything beyond a contemptuous pity for him ; and as for foregoing the fruits of power, what else was there to live and strive for ? He was quite willing to show kindness to all and sundry, or any other manifestation in fact that might be demanded of him as a qualification, but laboriously to acquire power and then to refrain from using it for one's own benefit even when driven into a corner, this was beyond his comprehension. He was prepared to pay any price required for his apprenticeship, he had worked as Jacob worked for Rachel, but for two years his progress had been held up, and men with half his capacities had preceded him into the higher degrees. His theoretical studies completed, he realized that the chiefs had no intention of entrusting him with the practical applications thereof. The secret science of the hidden forces of man and nature he knew, but not the Names of Power by which these forces were controlled, and without them all his studies were useless—he had the lock, but not the key.
And so he paced up and down, pondering his problem. The chiefs had openly declared their dissatisfaction ; a complete revision of the Fraternity's policy might follow, and with it a drastic clipping of his own wings ; he might even be removed from the post of secretary. For this contingency he had endeavoured to provide. Next door lived an aged general, gasping his life out in repeated attacks of bronchitis, any one of which might prove fatal ; Lucas had judiciously cultivated his acquaintance, and the first use he had made of his Delta Degree initiation was to use the powers it conferred to cause the old man to make a will in his favour, so Lucas hoped before long to find himself among the landed gentry and the possessor of private means, in which situation he thought it might be easier for him to come up to the moral standard of the Fraternity and obtain the coveted higher degrees. His only danger was that the will might be contested and the transaction thus brought to the ears of his chiefs, and what they would have to say on the subject would not be pleasant hearing, for he knew full well the white occultist's horror of black magic, and his drastic methods of dealing with it, and he supposed they would consider his transactions very black indeed, though he had no intention whatever of doing harm with the money, which would, he thought, be used to much better advantage if it were in his hands than distributed among the general's nephews and nieces of the third and fourth generation.
All the same, Lucas had a very wholesome fear of the dark force which almost invariably got the man, sooner or later, who deviated from the right hand path. Some, indeed, but not many, had had immunity ; but they were men who had climbed so high before they turned to the left that they were senior to those who had to deal with them and often, in fact, returned the occult onslaughts in kind ; but these favoured individuals were rare ; few men maintained themselves long when the fraternity moved against them.
So Lucas calculated his prospects, and they did not look to him very promising unless he could get hold of those Words of Power that should enable him to fight at least on a level footing. That evening had shown him clearly that the Fraternity would not give them to him ; how, in the name of Heaven, earth, and the waters under the earth could those carefully guarded secrets be obtained ? Lucas's stride lengthened and quickened as his perplexity increased. Gazing before him with unseeing eyes, he swung like a pendulum up and down the room.
Suddenly his progress was arrested. His blind march had gradually edged him across the floor till he ran into the low couch upon which the man who had served as the receiver of the occult telephone had lain. He stood staring down at it as if the sleeper still lay there, and through those entranced lips might come the solution of his problem. And come it did. With a sudden start Lucas realized that anyone who could go into a sufficiently deep trance could ‘listen in’ at the occult ceremonies and learn the Words of Power—provided he cared to take the risk ! Lucas had nerves of steel as an occultist needs to have, but even he did not care about that risk.
Still he stood looking down at that couch, seeking further inspiration from a source that had already proved so fruitful. Supposing he could‘ get at ’ Spencer, and get him to join him in this raid upon the secrets of the Fraternity ? But he dismissed the idea ; the brethren were all picked men, hard to corrupt by either threats or promises ; besides, Spencer wouldn't like the risk any more than he did, but the idea in itself was good. Supposing he could find a trance medium who did not know enough to be scared, he could have his own occult telephone and ‘ listen in’ with impunity. The powers might ‘strafe’ the medium, but they would find it exceedingly difficult to locate the man who was operating the medium.
Lucas thoughtfully gathered up the papers, put the l
ights out, and went to bed.
CHAPTER THREE
WHEN A SCHOOL BREAKS UP FOR THE SUMMER holidays it is usual for the pupils to go their various ways to the country or seaside. All are not so happily placed, however, and the pupil who stepped out of the dark entry of the business training college into the blazing sunshine was engaged upon the urgent quest of fresh work now that her secretarial course was finished. Only the most rigorous self-denial had enabled her to get through her training ; the third term had been one of semi-starvation, and this, added to the strain of the final examinations, had reduced her to an abnormal state in which she floated rather than walked, and saw grey ghosts about her instead of men and women.
In her hand she grasped an envelope bearing an address in a neighbouring square, and containing an account of her attainments and credentials, and in her heart was a gnawing anxiety as to what she should do if she failed to obtain the prospective post. Three other girls joined her on the sunlit pavement, also bearing envelopes, and demanded of her her destination, which proved to be the same as her own, and her heart sank still further when she realized that there was going to be competition for the coveted work, and into her mind there flashed a vision of her own face as she had seen it in the dressing-room glass while pinning on her hat—white and exhausted, with deep lines under the eyes and dark circles round them, and it seemed to her that, were she herself engaging a secretary, Veronica Mainwaring would not be her choice.
The others chattered gaily on their way to the square, they did not care much whether they got the post or not, they were only looking at it in case it were so well worth taking as to counterbalance the loss of a summer holiday, and they made it quite plain to Veronica that it had to be very good to be accepted by them at that time of year. She, for her part, had determined to accept anyone who would have her, rather than be disengaged in the blank emptiness of a London summer.
They were admitted through large double doors by an impassive butler, and ushered into a room which was obviously a waiting-room rather than one that was lived in. Veronica, in her abnormal, almost dream state, felt as if the spirit of the place was audible to her inner consciousness ; the butler did not seem to her to be an ordinary butler, but rather a lay brother of some sort of fraternity ; she wondered whether the immaculate shirt-front concealed a great cross that hung from his neck by a chain, or was it the symbol of some strange pagan worship he wore ? She felt certain that the carefully pomaded strands of hair disposed at regular intervals across the top of his bald head rested upon a store of knowledge such as is not usually confined under a butler's skull. The atmosphere of the room, while full of strange, almost electrical vibrations, was brooded over by a great peace, wonderfully soothing to the girl's overwrought nerves. A longing to remain in the stillness overwhelmed her, but she feared greatly less the coveted post were not for her, for half the secretarial agencies of London appeared to have sent candidates of all shapes, sizes and descriptions, from a bemuslined flapper in a picture hat, to a ferocious female of fifty in a reefer jacket, and the more Veronica watched them, the less she thought of her prospects.
Suddenly the door opened and a man stood on the threshold surveying the assembly. Of medium height and lightly built, he moved with a springy alertness that put Veronica in mind of a stag, as if he could be off and away at full speed in the flash of a second. Deliberately and entirely impersonally, he inspected the waiting women one by one. Finally Veronica's turn came for a scrutiny. The man's eyes met hers with a normal, observant, not unsympathetic glance, and then, all of a sudden, changed to an expression of ferocious intensity, and yet he did not appear to see her at all, but, on the contrary, to be looking straight through her. A second later he resumed his normal expression, and for the first time since entering the room, he spoke.
“If you will come to my office,” he said, “I should like to have a talk with you.”
Veronica followed him out of the room into the one immediately behind it. It was a large, pleasant room, furnished not as an office, but as a sitting room, and surrounded by book-cases. A faint, sweet smell, as if incense were habitually burnt there, hung in the air,. The door of a strong room, and a desk in the window, were the sole indications that it was used for business purposes.
The man seated himself at the desk and motioned her to a chair opposite.
“My name is Lucas,” he said, “What is yours ?”
She told him, and with shaking fingers handed him her training certificate, which he accepted, but neglected to remove from its envelope.
“How old are you ?” was the next question.
“Twenty-three,” said Veronica.
“What did you do previous to your training ?”
She told him how she had cared for *her widowed mother till the latter's death terminated the little pension upon which they had both subsisted, and then how the minute savings had just served to launch her upon the world.
“Have you good health ?” he enquired. “In the ordinary way, that is, when you are not overworked ? Have you had any serious illnesses ?”
She was able to give satisfactory answers to both these questions.
“I think you will do,” said the man. “What salary do you want ?”
Veronica had had so little hope of obtaining the post that she had not thought about the salary, and almost at random, stated the sum that one of her companions had remarked would be necessary to secure her own services, and then her heart stood still lest she had demanded too much and would be rejected, but the man in the revolving chair did not seem disconcerted, he nodded his head.
“We will see how it works,” he said. “Now when can you start ?”
Veronica said that she was disengaged and could start forthwith.
“That will suit me very well,” he said. “There is no occasion for delay ; if we are going to begin, we may as well begin at once. You will have a couple of rooms upstairs placed at your disposal ; I live in the house myself, but that need not trouble you, you will never see me except during business hours. Various other men come and go. I don't know whether you will consider the butler's wife an adequate chaperone, but she is the best we can offer you. Get a taxi and bring your things round right away.”
Veronica accepted. The offer was beyond her hopes. She asked no questions, she did not even permit her mind to question, she literally flung herself into this haven of refuge and thanked whatever gods might be. Lucas himself let her out of the front door and watched her for a moment as she walked down the road, a little smile curling his lips. He was evidently well pleased with his bargain.
Veronica returned to the hostel that had been her home during the long months she had worked at the training school. There was little enough in her cubicle to pack, and, having put her meagre belongings together, she went to the office to pay her bill.
“Where shall we send your letters ?” asked the superintendent.
Veronica gave the address.
“So you have got a resident post. What work are you going to do ?”
Not until the question was put to her did Veronica realize that she had never inquired the nature of the work on which she was about to be engaged, any more than Lucas had inquired as to her capacities or references. Reluctantly she admitted her ignorance.
“But, Miss Mainwaring, you do not mean to say that you have accepted a post, and a resident post too, without inquiring who you were working for ? Perhaps you don't even know whether it is a man or a woman ?”
“It is a man,” said Veronica, “and his name is Lucas,” and she realized that that was absolutely all she knew. She did not even know what would be her hours or duties, what demands he would make on her, or what qualifications she would require, and she suddenly remembered that he was paying her as a resident secretary the salary she had demanded believing she would have to support herself. Surely exceptional requirements must condition the payment of such a salary.
“I do not feel at all happy about you,” said the superintendent.
“But at any rate you are near here, so you must come round and let us know how you get on.”
Veronica wished her good-bye and transported her few belongings in a taxi round to the house in the square. The impassive butler again admitted her, and again Veronica experienced the sensation that she was in a church. The strange, indescribable feeling of remoteness and stillness enveloped her. A pleasant-faced woman appeared from the nether regions and conducted her to two rooms upon an upper floor. They looked straight into the heart of a great plane tree that stood in the garden of the next house, for the whole of the back premises of the house she was in were occupied by a large, one-storey annexe.
The rooms led one out of the other, pleasant, old-fashioned rooms with deep window-seats to the bow windows, such as Bloomsbury abounds in, for the rich City merchants who inhabited that district during its hey-day knew what comfort meant. Big sash windows let in the light, and heavy wooden shutters, folding back into the walls, were equally capable of shutting out both light and air. A capacious grate bore witness to the good old days of plenty, and, glimpsed through the open door of the adjoining room, a high feather bed with a curtained canopy declared that the tradition was not forgotten, and that the present owners of the house also knew what comfort, if not what hygiene, meant.
Her reverie was interrupted by the butler's voice. “We will send up your dinner at seven, Miss. All your meals will be served up here.”
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