The Stuff of Dreams: The Weird Stories of Edward Lucas White (Dover Horror Classics)

by Edward Lucas White

  A neat maid opened the door. Yes, Mr Vargas was in; would she walk into the waiting room? The untenanted waiting room was a dignified parlor, furnished in the costliest way, but with a restraint as far as possible from ostentation. The rug was Persian, each piece of furniture different in design from any other, yet all harmonizing, while the ten pictures were paintings by well-known artists. Before Mrs Llewellyn had time for more than one comprehensive and surprised glance about, when she had barely seated herself, the retreating maid struck two sharp notes on a silvery gong. Almost immediately the door leading to the rear room was opened. In it appeared a man under five feet tall, not dwarfish, but deformed. His patent-leather shoes were boyish, his trousers hung limp about legs shriveled to mere skeletal stems, and his left knee was bent and fixed at an unchanging angle, so that his step was a painful hobble. Above the waist he was well made; a deep chest; broad, square shoulders; a huge head with a vast shock of black, curly hair. He had the look of a musician or artist; with a wide forehead; delicately curved eyebrows; nose hooked, sharp and assertive; eyes, wide apart, large, dark brown with sparkles of red and green; and a mouth whose curled upper lip was almost too short. The mouth and eyes held Mrs Llewellyn at first glance, and the instant change in them startled her. He had appeared with a suave mechanical smile, with a look of easy expectancy. As his gaze met hers his lips set and their redness dulled; his eyes were full of so poignant a dismay that she would not have been surprised had he abruptly retreated and slammed the door between them. Without a word he clung to the knob, staring at her. Then he drew the door to after him and leaned against it, still holding to the knob with one hand behind his back. When he spoke it was in a dry whisper.

  ‘You here, of all women!’

  ‘You know me!’ she exclaimed; ‘I have never seen you.’

  ‘You are seen of many thousands you never note,’ he replied. ‘Everyone knows Mrs David Llewellyn. Everyone knew Constance Palgrave.’

  ‘You flatter me,’ she said coldly, with the air of one resenting an unwelcome familiarity.

  ‘Flattery is part of my trade,’ he replied. ‘But I do not flatter you. So little that I have forgotten my manners. I should have asked you to step into my consulting room. Pray, enter it.’

  She passed him as he held the door open for her. The inner room was not less seemly than the outer.

  Except for three doors and one broad window looking out on an area, it was walled with bookcases some eight feet high, broken only where there were set into them two small cabinets with drawers below. The glass doors of the bookcases were of small panes, and the books within were in exquisite bindings. Topping the cases were several splendid bronze busts. The furniture was completed by a round mahogany center-table, several small chairs and three tapestried armchairs. When Mrs Llewellyn had seated herself in one the clairvoyant took another. His agitation was so extreme that had she been capable of fear it would almost have frightened her; her curiosity it greatly piqued. He was as pale as a swarthy man can be, his lips bloodless and twitching, dry and moistening themselves one against the other as he mechanically swallowed in his nervousness. She herself was perturbed in soul, but an eye less practised than his would have discerned no signs of emotion beneath her easy exterior. They faced each other in silence for some breaths; then he spoke:

  ‘For what purpose have you come here?’

  ‘To consult you,’ she answered. ‘Is it astonishing? Do not all sorts of persons come to consult you?’

  ‘All sorts’ he replied. ‘But none such as you. Never any such as you.’

  ‘I have come, it seems,’ she said simply, ‘and to consult you.’

  ‘In what way do you mean to consult me?’ he queried. ‘People consult me in various ways.’

  ‘I had in mind,’ she said, ‘the answers you give by writing on the inside of a shut slate.’

  ‘You have come to the wrong man,’ he said harshly, with an obvious effort that made his voice unnatural. ‘Go elsewhere,’ and he rose.

  She gazed at him in astonishment without moving.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ she demanded.

  He opened each of the three doors, looked outside and then made sure that each was latched. He looked out of the window, glancing at each of the other windows visible from it. He hobbled once or twice up and down the room, mopping his forehead and face with his handkerchief; then he seated himself again.

  ‘Mrs Llewellyn,’ he said, ‘I must request your promise of entire and permanent secrecy for what I am about to tell you.’

  ‘Anyone would suppose,’ she said, ‘that you were the client and I the clairvoyant.’

  ‘Acknowledging that,’ he replied. ‘Let it pass, I beg of you. I have told you that you have come to the wrong man. I bade you go elsewhere. You ask for an explanation. I have fortified myself to give it to you. But I must have your pledge of silence if you desire an explanation.’

  ‘I do desire it and you have my promise.’

  He looked around the room with the movement of a rat in a cage. His eyes met hers, but shifted uneasily, and his shamefaced gaze fell to the floor. His hands clutched each other upon his lame knee.

  ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘I tell you to go elsewhere because I am a charlatan, an impostor. My trances are mere pretense, the method of my replies a farcical mummery, the answers transparent concoctions from the hints I extract from my dupes.’

  ‘You say this to try me,’ she cried; ‘you are subjecting me to some sort of test.’

  ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘look at me. Am I like a man playing a part? Do I not look in earnest?’

  She regarded him, convinced.

  ‘But,’ she wondered. ‘Why do you thrust this confession upon me?’

  ‘I fear,’ he hesitated, ‘that a truthful answer to that question would displease you.’

  ‘Your behavior,’ she said, ‘and your utterances are so unexpected and amazing to me, coming here as I have, that I must request an explanation.’

  Vargas straightened himself in his chair and looked her in the eyes, not aggressively, but timidly. He spoke in a low voice.

  ‘Madame,’ he said solemnly, ‘I have told you the truth about myself because you are the one human being whom I am unwilling to harm, wrong or cheat.’

  ‘You mean—’ she broke off, bridling.

  ‘Ah, Madame,’ he cried, ‘I mean nothing that has in it any tinge of anything that might offend you. What does the north star know or care how many frail, storm-tossed barks struggle to steer by it? Is it any the less radiant, pure, high because so many to whom it is and shall remain forever unattainable strive to win from its rays guidance towards havens of safety? A woman such as you cannot guess, much less know, to how many she is the one abiding heavenly beacon. How could you, who need no such help from without, realize what the mere sight of you afar off must mean to natures not blest with such a heritage of goodness? How many have been strengthened at sight of your face, wherein they could not but see the visible outward expression of that inward peace and serenity that comes from right instincts unswervingly adhering to noble ideals? You have been to me the incarnate token of the existence of that righteousness to which I might not attain.’

  Mrs Llewellyn had borne his torrent of verbiage with a look of intolerant toleration, of haughty displeasure curbed by astonishment. When he paused for breath she said, in a voice half angry, half repressed:

  ‘I quite understand you, I have heard enough, I have heard altogether too much of this; we will change the subject, if you please.’

  ‘I spoke at your command,’ Vargas apologized, abashed, ‘and only to convince you of my sincerity in telling you that I am not worthy of being consulted by you.’

  ‘But,’ she protested, carried away by her surprise, ‘you are called the greatest clairvoyant on earth.’

  ‘And I have schemed, advertised lavishly, spent money like water, bribed reporters, bought editors, cajoled managers, hoodwinked owners and won over their wives and daughters throu
gh laborious years to produce that impression. It is no growth of accident, no spontaneous recognition of self-evident merit.’

  ‘But,’ she argued, ‘are you a fiend doing all this for the delight of deceiving for deception’s sake? Are you a man wealthy by inheritance and choosing this form of activity for the pleasure it gives you?’

  ‘By no means Madame,’ he denied, ‘I live by my wits.’

  ‘Your surroundings tell me that you live well,’ she suggested.

  ‘Better than my surroundings reveal,’ he rejoined.

  ‘Then your wits are good wits,’ she ventured.

  ‘None better of their kind on earth,’ he naively admitted, wholly off his guard.

  ‘And they are not overtaxed?’ she asked.

  ‘Deception is not hard,’ he told her, ‘the world is full of fools and even the sensible are easy to deceive.’

  ‘From what I have read,’ she continued, ‘you do not deceive. Your advice is good. Your precepts guide your clients right. Your suggestions lead to success. Your predictions come to pass, your conjectures are verified.’

  ‘All that is true enough,’ he allowed.

  ‘Then how can you call your clients dupes, your methods mummeries, your answers lies?’ She wound up triumphantly.

  ‘I did not call my answers lies,’ he disclaimed. ‘Mummeries I deal in and to dupes. Dupes they are all. They pour gold into my lap to tell them what they already knew if they but reasoned it out calmly with themselves. They babble to me all they need to know and pay me insensately for it when I fling back to them a patchwork of the fragments I have extracted from their stories of expectations, apprehensions and memories.’

  ‘But if you do all that you must be a real judge of human nature, a genuine reader of hearts, a keen-brained counsellor.’

  ‘I am all that and more,’ he bragged. He had lost every trace of agitation and bore himself with a dashing self-confidence of manner, extremely engaging. ‘I cannot minister to a mind diseased; but I am called on to prescribe for all sorts of delusions, follies, blunders, miseries and griefs. I could count by thousands the men and women I have saved, the lives I have made happy, the difficulties I have annihilated, the aspirations I have guided aright.’

  ‘Then you must have an immense experience of human frailties and human needs.’

  ‘Vast, enormous, incalculable,’ he declared.

  ‘Your advice then should be valuable.’

  ‘It is valuable,’ he boasted.

  ‘Then advise me, I am in extreme distress. I have felt that no one could help me. The belief that you might has given me a ray of hope. You have expressed a regard for me altogether extraordinary. Will it not lead you to help me?’

  ‘Any advice and help, any service in my power you may be sure shall be yours,’ he said earnestly. ‘But let me ask you first, how was it that you did not seek the advice of some businessman, lawyer or clergyman? You are not at all of the light-headed type of those frivolous women who flock to me and to others like me. You have common sense, unalterable principles, rational instincts and personal fastidiousness, why did you not go to one of the recognized, established, honored advisers of humanity? Tell me that if you please?’

  ‘It was because of the dream,’ she faltered.

  ‘The dream!’ he exclaimed. ‘A dream sent you to me? What sort of a dream?’

  ‘I had come to feel that there could be no hope for me,’ she said. ‘But about a month ago I had a dream in which I was told ‘The seventh advertisement in the seventh column of the seventh newspaper in the seventh drawer of the linen room will point for you the way to escape from your miseries and win what you desire.’ There should have been no papers in my linen-room and it made me feel foolish to want to go and look. Also the servants knew I never went there, so I had to watch until the housekeeper was out and, no maids were on that floor. Sure enough I found seven old newspapers in the seventh drawer, and on the seventh page of the lowermost paper, on the seventh column, the seventh advertisement was yours.’

  ‘And you came to me because of that dream?’

  ‘Yes; and—’ she hesitated.

  ‘Well,’ he interrupted, ‘the reasons why you came are not so important. What I want to be sure of is this. Even if you were led to come by a mere coincidence acting on your feelings, are you now, from cool, deliberate reflection, determined to consult me? Would it not be better to take my advice at this point and go to one of the world’s regular, accredited dispensers of wisdom?’

  ‘I have made up my mind to consult you,’ she said. ‘It is not a passing whim, but a settled resolve.’

  ‘Then madame,’ he said, his manner wholly changing ‘you must tell me all your troubles without any reservation of any kind. If I am to help you I must know your case as completely as a physician would have to know your symptoms in an illness. Tell me plainly what your trouble is.’

  She began to pluck at her veil with her gloved hands.

  ‘Oh,’ she gasped, ‘let me moisten my lips. Just a swallow of water.’

  For all his lameness he was surprisingly agile, as he wrenched himself up, tore open the rear door and almost instantly hobbled back with a glass and silver pitcher on a small silver tray.

  She took off her veil and one glove. Several swallows were required to compose her. When she was calm again he sat looking at her with a face full of inquiry, but without uttering any questions.

  ‘You do not know,’ she said, ‘how hard it is to begin.’

  ‘For the third time, Madame,’ he said, ‘I advise you not to consult me, to go elsewhere.’

  ‘Are you not willing to help me?’ she asked, softly.

  ‘Utterly willing,’ he said. ‘but timid, timid as a doctor would be about prescribing for his own child. Yours is the first case ever brought to me in which I feared the effect of personal bias dimming my insight or deflecting my judgment. I have a second confession to make to you. Before you married, a man desperately in love with you came to me for help. Among other things he gave me the day, hour and minute of your birth and of his and asked me to cast both horoscopes and infer his chances of success. I had and have no faith in astrology, yet I had cast my own horoscope long before from mere curiosity. When I cast yours I was amazed at the clear indications of a connection between your fate and mine. I did not believe anything of the Babylonian absurdities, yet the coincidence struck me. Perhaps I am influenced by it yet. Under such an influence, even more than under that of my feeling for yourself, my acumen is likely to be impaired. I again advise you to go elsewhere.’

  ‘I am all the more determined to consult you and you only.’

  He bowed without any word and waited in silence for her to go on.

  She stared at him with big melting eyes, her face very pale.

  ‘My husband does not love me,’ she said.

  ‘Not love you?’ Vargas exclaimed, startled. ‘Do you mean seriously to tell me that, you who have been loved by hundreds, been adored, worshipped, courted by so many, for despair of gaining whom men have gone mad, who have had your choice of so many lovers, are not prized by the man who succeeded in winning you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she barely breathed. ‘He does not prize me, nor love me at all.’

  ‘Does he love any one else?’

  Out of her total paleness she flushed rose pink from throat to hair.

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted.

  ‘Who is she?’ Vargas demanded.

  ‘His first wife.’

  Vargas staggered to his feet. ‘I did not so much as know that your husband had been married before,’ he gasped, ‘let alone that he was divorced.’

  ‘He was not divorced,’ she stated.

  ‘Not divorced,’ he quavered.

  ‘No, he was a widower when I married him.’

  Vargas collapsed back into his chair.

  ‘I do not understand,’ he told her. ‘Does he love a dead woman?’

  ‘Just that,’ she asseverated.

  ‘This will not do,’
the clairvoyant told her, ‘I cannot come nearer to helping you at this rate. Try to give me the information you think necessary, not by splinters and fragments, but as a whole. Make a connected exposition of the circumstances. Begin at the beginning!’

  ‘That is harder,’ she mused, ‘I always want to begin anything at the last chapter.’