Victor Ollnee's Discipline Part 30

So it fell out that Victor (penniless youth, hedged about with invisible walls, pikes, and pitfalls) was soon galloping about a tennis court in the glories of a new pair of flannel trousers and a lovely blue-striped outing shirt, trying hard not to win every game from a very good partner, who was pouting with dismay while admiring his skill.

"It isn't right for any one to 'serve' as weird a ball as you do," she protested. "It's like playing with loaded dice. I begin to understand why you were not renowned as a scholar."

"Oh, I wasn't so bad! I stood above medium."

"How could you? It must have taken all your time to learn to play tennis in the diabolical way you do--it's conjury, that's what it is!"

They were in the shade, and the fresh sweet wind, heavy with the scent of growing corn and wheat, swept steadily over the court, relieving it from heat, and Victor clean forgot his worriments. This girlish figure filled his eyes with pictures of unforgetable grace and charm. The swing of her skirts as she leaped for the ball, the free sweep of her arm (she had been well instructed), and the lithe bending of her waist brought the lover's sweet unease. When they came to the net now and again, he studied her fine figure with frank admiration. "You are a corker!" was his boyish word of praise. "I don't go up against many men who play the game as well as you do. Your 'form' is a whole lot better than mine. I am a bit lucky, I admit. You see, I studied baseball pitching, and I know the action of a whirling sphere. I curve the ball--make it 'break,'

as the English say. I can make it do all kinds of 'stunts.'"

"I see you can, and I'll thank you not to try any new ones," she protested. "Can you ride a horse?"

His face fell a bit. "There I am a 'mutt,'" he confessed. "I never was on a horse except the wooden one in the Gym."

"I'm glad I can beat you at something," she said, with exultant cruelty.

"I know you can row."

"Shall we try another set?" he asked.

"Not to-day, thank you. My self-respect will not stand another such drubbing. I'm going in for a cold plunge. After that you may read to me on the porch."

"I'll be there with the largest tome in the library," he replied.

Mrs. Joyce stopped him as he was going up-stairs to his room. "Victor, don't worry about me. While it looks as though I have lost a good deal of money through Pettus, I am by no means bankrupt. I am just about where I was when I met your mother. She has not enriched me--I mean The Voices have not--neither have they impoverished me. It's just the same with Leo. She's almost exactly where she was when she came East. It would seem as if they had been playing with us just to show us how unsubstantial earthly possessions are."

There was a certain comfort in this explanation, and yet the fact that her losses had not eaten in upon her original capital did not remove the essential charge of dishonesty which the man Aiken had brought against the ghostly advisers. Florence and Thomas Aiken could not afford to be so lenient. They were disinherited, cheated of their rightful legacy, by the lying spirits.

He was anxious, also, to know just how deeply Leo was involved in the People's Bank; and when she came down to the porch he led her to a distant chair beside a hammock on the eastern side of the house, and there, with a book in his hand, opened his interrogations.

He began quite formally, and with a well-laid-out line of questions, but she was not the kind of witness to permit that. She broke out of his boundaries on the third query, and laughingly refused to discuss her losses. "I am holding no one but myself responsible," she said. "I was greedy--I couldn't let well enough alone, that's all."

"No, that is not all," he insisted. "My mother is charged with advising people to put money into the hands of a swindler--"

"I don't believe that. I think she was honest in believing that Pettus would enrich us all. She was deceived like the rest of us."

"But what becomes of the infallible Voices?"

She laughed. "They are fallible, that's all. They made a gross blunder in Pettus."

"Mr. Bartol suggests that my mother may have been hypnotized by Pettus and made to work his will, and I think he's right. He thinks the whole thing comes down to illusion--to hypnotic control and telepathy."

She looked thoughtful. "I had a stage of believing that; but it doesn't explain all, it only explains a small part. Does it explain Altair to you?"

His glance fell. "Nothing explains Altair--nor that moaning wind--nor the writing on the slates."

"And the letter--have you forgotten that?"

"Half an hour ago, as we were playing tennis, I _had_ forgotten it. I was cut loose from the whole blessed mess--now it all comes back upon me like a cloud."

"Oh, don't look at it that way. That's foolish. I think it's glorious fun, this investigating."

He acknowledged her rebuke, but added, "It would be more fun if the person under the grill were not one's own mother."

"That's true," she admitted; "and yet, I think you can study her without giving offense. I began in a very offensive way--I can see that now--but she met my test, and still meets every test you bring. The faith she represents isn't going to have its heart plucked out in a hurry, I can tell you that."

"The immediate thing is to defend her against this man Aiken. Mr. Bartol said he would order up a lot of books, and I'm to cram for the trial. If you have any book to suggest, I wish you'd write its t.i.tle down for me."

"What's the use of going to books? The judges will want the facts, and you'll have to convince them that she is what she claims to be."

"How can we do that? We can't exhibit her in a trance?"

"You might. Perhaps her guides will give her the power." She glowed with antic.i.p.atory triumph. "Imagine her confounding the jury! Wouldn't that be dramatic! It would be like the old-time test of fire."

He was radiant, too, for a moment, over the thought. Then his face grew stern. "Nothing like that is going to happen. She would fail, and that would leave us in worse case than before. Our only hope is to convince the jury that she is not responsible for what her Voices say. We've got to show she's auto-hypnotic."

"I hope the trial will come soon."

"So do I, for here I am eating somebody else's food, with no prospect of earning a cent or finding out my place in the world. I don't know just what my mother's idea was in educating me in cla.s.sical English instead of some technical course, but I'm perfectly certain that I'm the most helpless mollusk that was ever kicked out of a school."

Real bitterness was in his voice, and she hastened to add a word of comfort. "All you need is a chance to show your powers."

"What powers?"

"Latent powers," she smiled. "We are all supposed to have latent powers.

I am seeking a career, too."

He forgot himself in a return of his admiration of her. "Oh, you don't have to seek. A girl like you has her career all cut out for her."

She caught his meaning. "That's what I resent. Why should a woman's career mean only marriage?"

"I don't know--I guess because it's the most important thing for her to do."

"To be some man's household drudge or pet?"

"No, to be some man's inspiration."

"Fudge! A woman is never anybody's inspiration--after she's married."

"How cynical you are! What caused it?"

"Observing my married friends."

"Oh, I am relieved! I was afraid it was through some personal experience--"

This seemed funny to them both, and they laughed together. "There's nothing of 'the maiden with reluctant feet' about me," she went on. "I simply refuse to go near the brink. I find men stupid, smelly, and coa.r.s.e."

"I hate girls in the abstract--they giggle and whisper behind their hands and make mouths; but there is one girl who is different." He tried to be very significant at the moment.

She ignored his clumsy beginning of a compliment. "All the girls who giggle should marry the men who 'crack jokes'--that's my advice."