THAT night Helen slept little. Her talk with Saul Hartz had proved cruelly disturbing to the mind and to the emotions. She was haunted by it. For hours she lay awake thinking of this man who had played so strange a part in her life. Seeing him now as the thing he truly was, her fear of him was unnerving. It troubled her that they should be under one roof. She had an insurgent desire to seek at once the safety of her home. There could be no rest for her until she had returned to that haven and to the man she loved.
Much of the next day, Sunday, was spent in active dread of the Colossus and a desire to avoid him. Helen mixed freely with the other guests. She went to church in the morning, she played bridge in the afternoon and by every means that was open to her she took precaution against being caught unawares. The last thing she desired was another tête-à-tête with Saul Hartz.
In her present emotional state she was met with one harsh fact. For some reason she was now the prey of a secret fear. An unknown force had invaded her life. Suddenly the future had become an abyss. To such an extent was she possessed by a sense of the impending, that it was as if a sword was about to fall.
What this menace could be she was without means of knowing. But it was surely there, a phantom perhaps of an overdriven brain. At least Helen hoped that it might prove no worse than that. Certainly as far as she was aware, it had no ground in reason or logic, and was, therefore, without the stay of fact.
Color, however, was lent to this new fear in a rather odd way. Among her fellow week-end guests was a man named Wygram. The personality of this man excited Helen’s curiosity. She had never met any one like him. A rather exotic, oriental appearance seemed to lend value and emphasis to his views on occultism, mental telepathy, thought transference and kindred subjects which were now so much in the air, and upon which, in an unobtrusive way, he seemed to be a veritable mine of information.
After Helen had spent an entrancing hour in talk with Mr. Wygram, she gleaned from her hostess by dint of judicious inquiry that he was now recognized the world over as an authority upon the Unseen. She learned further that this remarkable man had found a solution to more than one mystery that seemed impenetrable and that the police often had recourse to his services.
This view of Wygram’s unique powers was supported by the attention paid him by Saul Hartz. It was never a habit of the Colossus to flatter the vanity of his fellow men by sitting in public at the feet of Gamaliel. But it was clear to Helen that the orientalist had some potent attraction for him. More than once in the course of that day she saw the two men together in quiet corners. And to judge by the look of concentration on Mr. Hartz’s face the subject of their talk was to him of vital concern.
At dinner, no doubt as a concession to the keen curiosity Helen had shown in regard to Mr. Wygram, she was taken in by him. Further acquaintance did but add to the interest he excited in her. Little passed between them that average people could have laid hold of as definitely enlarging the boundaries of human knowledge, but Helen felt all the same that her approach to certain subjects whose importance and value she could but vaguely surmise would from now on be more practical, more scientific, more expert.
“How far do you think it possible,” she ventured to ask, “for one mind, or for a group of minds, to act subconsciously upon the mind of another person, without coming into direct contact with it, in order to control its actions?”
“An interesting speculation!” Wygram spoke with the simple candor of one very much a master of his subject. “I think myself the science—and as one happens to know, a dark and terrible science it is, which the East has already brought to an uncanny perfection—of imposing one’s will upon the will of another is being developed to a point which threatens some very ugly developments.”
“That is just what one feels oneself,” said Helen.
“Only the other day,” said Wygram, “I was called in by the New York police to help in a terrible case which has made a great impression over there. It was that of a man, otherwise presumably sane, who committed a perfectly senseless and illogical crime because a deadly enemy, an expert practitioner of the new science, had been able to tamper with the mind of that man subconsciously while he slept.”
“How dreadful!”
Wygram agreed that the speculations opened up by a fact so sinister were not pleasant. “The whole world is on the down grade,” he said. “Man has played things up too high. For many years he has been dealing with unclean things—subtle poisons, high explosives, black magic. But to my mind this new science which has come out of the East is the worst of all, because it is by far the most elusive.”
“Can it be used, do you suppose, on a large scale?”
“The fear is that it can be,” said Wygram, “and that it will be. An unlucky signalman the other day at Hellington had a lapse of memory. The London express ran into a goods train that was being shunted out of a siding. Such a thing, in normal circumstances, should never occur. By reason of it, sixteen people were killed and sixty-eight injured. Among the killed were the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Judge of the High Court. Accident, says the world. A rub of the green, say the directors of the railway company. Fate, say the newspapers. Call it what you will, but at the point the perverted mind of man has now reached, who shall say what the real cause was? Perhaps a certain very distinguished Chinese thinker now in this country might be able to throw a new light on a terrible occurrence.” At the look of horror in the eyes of the woman at his side, Wygram paused. “Mind you,” he said, “one does not for a moment accept all the implications that such a theory may open up. Let the possibility be advanced just for what it is worth. And I think”—his voice grew very gentle—“it would have been kinder, and perhaps wiser, not to have advanced such a possibility at all.”
“Your studies have made you pessimistic,” said Helen, hoping this was a straw to which she might cling.
“Yes, I quite think so,” Wygram agreed. “Every mind becomes subdued to that in which it works. But I do feel that human life was never exposed to so many hidden perils as to-day.”
“One feels that, too,” said Helen. “Indeed,”—she shivered slightly—“the truth of that somehow strikes to one’s marrow.”
As she spoke, she was sharply aware that the man at her side was looking at her with a grave curiosity.
“Forgive the question,” he said, in his soft voice, “if it should seem impertinent,—but do you say that as a private member of the community, or as the wife of a man to whom so many eyes now turn in the hope that he may be able to do a great and much needed work for us all?”
Girt by the thought that Saul Hartz was at another table and that no fragment of their talk was likely to reach his ear, Helen confessed that she was now haunted, not so much on her own account as on that of her husband, by a great fear.
Something in her manner seemed to impress Wygram deeply. “Tell me,” he said, in a voice hardly above a whisper, “just what it is that you fear in regard to him in the near future?”
“It is too vague to be put into words,” said Helen, anxiously. But again she shivered, and again Wygram looked at her with his questioning eyes.
He forbore, however, from pressing the point further. So sharp was her distress that he gave the subject an adroit turn, and did not refer to it again. But this talk, all the same, made a profound impression upon Helen.
Next morning she breakfasted early, at the beck of a strong desire to catch the first possible train. London, her home, her husband were calling her. A second night of very little sleep had made Cloudesley and its surroundings almost intolerable. She was oppressed by a sense of being urgently needed elsewhere. Hour by hour, a conviction had gained strength in her mind that something was about to happen to John.
Perhaps “the something” had happened already. Who could say? An obsession seized her that such was the case. At all events, the breaking of his engagement for the week-end, without being able to give a reason, a proceeding altogether unlike him, lent color to this new and harsh belief. Both Hartz and Wygram, men whose every word meant much, had dropped more than one hint that her husband was in the toils of ineluctable fate.
Helen could not hope for peace of mind until she was back in Brompton Square. And soon after half past eight, as she crossed the hall to the car which was to take her to the station, with every thought fixed upon getting away from this hive of unpleasant memories, a simple thing happened which yet seemed to add tenfold to her fears.
Wygram, who was just coming down to breakfast, intercepted her at the foot of the stairs. “Good-by, my dear Mrs. Endor,” he said, in a cordial tone. And then in one much lower, but of vital urgency, “Take care of your husband. The world has need of him. And if in the course of the next few days you feel you must have a friend whom you can really trust, please remember your compatriot, George Hierons, who, I believe, is still in London. It may be, of course, that the need will not arise. Sincerely one hopes it may not. But if it does, consult him. Again, good-by!”
These cryptic words did not lessen Helen’s alarm. More than ever she was convinced that something had happened or was about to happen to the man she loved.