Anthony Hope - Sophy of Kravonia - A Novel

The occasion was one of the séances where Sophy was to be medium. It was a curious scene. Gaunt Lady Meg, with her eyes strained and eager, superintended the arrangements. "Lord help you!" was plentiful for everybody, even for the prophet Pharos himself when his miracle was behind time. Mantis was there, subterraneously scornful of her unwilling rival; and the rogue Pharos himself, with his oily glibness, his cheap mystery, and his professional jargon. Two or three dowagers and Casimir de Savres – who had to unbuckle his sword and put it outside the door for reasons insufficiently explained – completed the party. In the middle sat Sophy, smiling patiently, but with her white brow wrinkled just a little beneath the arching masses of her dark hair. On her lips the smile persisted all through; the mark was hardly visible. "No more than the slightest pinkness; I didn't notice it till I had looked at her for full five minutes," says Marie Zerkovitch. This was, no doubt, the normal experience of those who met Sophy first in moments of repose or of depression.

Sophy is to "go off." Pharos makes his passes and goes through the rest of his performance.

"I feel nothing at all – not even sleepy," said Sophy. "Only just tired of staring at monsieur!"

Casimir de Savres laughed; old Lady Meg looked furious; Mantis hid a sickly smile. Down go the lights to a dull gloom – at the prophet's request. More gestures, more whisperings, and then sighs of exhaustion from the energetic wizard.

"Get on, Lord help you!" came testily from Lady Meg. Had Pharos been veritably her idol, she would have kicked him into granting her prayer.

"She won't give me her will – she won't be passive," he protests, almost eliciting a perverse sympathy.

He produced a glittering disk, half as large again as a five-franc piece; it gave forth infinite sparkles through the dark of the room. "Look at that! Look hard – and think of nothing else!" he commanded.

Silence fell on the room. Quick breaths came from eager Lady Meg; otherwise all was still.

"It's working!" whispered the wizard. "The power is working."

Silence again. Then a sudden, overpowering peal of laughter from the medium – hearty, rippling, irrepressible and irresistible.

"Oh, Lady Meg, I feel such a fool – oh, such a fool!" she cried – and her laughter mastered her again.

Irresistible! Marie Zerkovitch joined in Casimir's hearty mirth, Mantis's shrill cackle and the sniggers of the dowagers swelled the chorus. Casimir sprang up and turned up the gas, laughing still. The wizard stood scowling savagely; Lady Meg glared malignantly at her ill-chosen medium and disappointing protégée .

"What's the reason for it, Lord help you?" she snarled, with a very nasty look at Pharos.

He saw the danger. His influence was threatened, his patroness's belief in him shaken.

"I don't know," he answered, in apparent humility. "I can't account for it. It happens, so far as I know, only in one case – and Heaven forbid that I should suggest that of mademoiselle."

"What is the case?" snapped Lady Meg, by no means pacified – in fact, still dangerously sceptical.

Pharos made an answer, grave and serious in tone in purpose and effect malignantly nonsensical: "When the person whom it is sought to subject to this particular influence (he touched the pocket where his precious disk now lay) has the Evil Eye."

An appeal to a superstition old as the hills and widespread as the human race – would it ever fail to hit some mark in a company of a dozen? Casimir laughed in hearty contempt, Sophy laughed in mischievous mockery. But two of the dowagers crossed themselves, Lady Meg started and glowered – and little Madame Zerkovitch marked, recorded, and remembered. Her mind was apt soil for seed of that order.

That, in five years' time, five years in jail awaited the ingenious Monsieur Pharos occasions a consoling reflection.

Sophy's enemies were at work – and Sophy was careless. Such is the history of the next twelve months. Mantis was installed medium now – and the revelations came. But they came slow, vague, fitful, tantalizing. Something was wrong, Pharos confessed ruefully – what could it be? For surely Lady Meg by her faith (and, it may be added, her liberality) deserved well of the Unseen Powers? He hinted at that Evil Eve again, but without express accusation. Under "the influence" Mantis would speak of "the malign one"; but Mantis, when awake, thought Mademoiselle de Gruche a charming young lady! It was odd and mysterious. Pharos could make nothing of it; he, too, thought Mademoiselle Sophie – he advanced to that pleasant informality of description – quite ravishing and entirely devoted to Lady Meg, only, unhappily, so irresponsive to the Unseen – a trifle unsympathetic, it might be. But what would you? The young had no need to think of death or the dead. Was it to be expected, then, that Mademoiselle Sophie would be a good subject, or take much interest in the work, great and wonderful though it might be?

The pair of rogues did their work well and quietly – so quietly that nothing of it would be known were it not that they quarrelled later on over the spoils of this and other transactions, and Madame Mantis, in the witness-box at Lille, used her memory and her tongue freely. "The plan now was to get rid of the young lady," she said, plainly. "Pharos feared her power over my lady, and that my lady might leave her all the money. Pharos hated the young lady because she would have nothing to say to him, and told him plainly that she thought him a charlatan. She had courage, yes! But if she would have joined in with him – why, then into the streets with me! I knew that well enough, and Pharos knew I knew it. So I hated her, too, fearing that some day she and he would make up their differences, and I – that for me! Yes, that was how we were, Monsieur le Président." Her lucid exposition elicited a polite compliment from Monsieur le Président – and we also are obliged to her.

But Sophy was heedless. She showed afterwards that she could fight well for what she loved well, and that with her an eager heart made a strong hand. Her heart was not in this fight. The revelation of mad Lady Meg's true motive for taking her up may well have damped a gratitude otherwise becoming in Sophy Grouch transmuted to Sophie de Gruche. Yet the gratitude remained; she fought for Lady Meg – for her sanity and some return of sanity in her proceedings. In so fighting she fought against herself – for Lady Meg was very mad now. For herself she did not fight; her heart and her thoughts were elsewhere. The schemes in the Rue de Grenelle occupied her hardly more than the clash of principles, the efforts of a falling dynasty, the struggles of rising freedom, the stir and seething of the great city and the critical times in which she lived.

For she was young, and the Lord of Youth had come to visit her in his shower of golden promise. The days were marked for her no more by the fawning advances or the spiteful insinuations of Pharos than by the heroics of an uneasy emperor or the ingenious experiments in reconciling contradictions wherein his ministers were engaged. For her the days lived or lived not as she met or failed to meet Casimir de Savres. It was the season of her first love. Yet, with all its joy, the shadow of doubt is over it. It seems not perfect; the delight is in receiving, not in giving; his letters to her, full of reminiscences of their meetings and talks, are shaded with doubt and eloquent of insecurity. She was no more than a girl in years; but in some ways her mind was precociously developed – her ambition was spreading its still growing wings. Casimir's constant tone of deference – almost of adulation – marks in part the man, in part the convention in which he had been bred; but it marks, too, the suppliant: to the last he is the wooer, not the lover, and at the end of his ecstasy lies the risk of despair. For her part she often speaks of him afterwards, and always with the tenderest affection; she never ceased to carry with her wherever she went the bundle of his letters, tied with a scrap of ribbon and inscribed with a date. But there is one reference, worthy of note, to her innermost sentiments towards him, to the true state of her heart as she came to realize it by-and-by. "I loved him, but I hadn't grown into my feelings," she says. Brief and almost accidental as the utterance is, it is full of significance; but its light is thrown back. It is the statement of how she came to know how she had been towards him, not of how in those happy days she seemed to herself to be.