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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Brussels Post, 1927-1-5, Page 7-Re1d i_:c•kilxi .A:,esti• 3,14.+5'I. (Copyright) by MARY ROBERTS RINEHART 3ir',.i3".,f.'tdi:'„R tlk)rf.ret: It seems clear that he clad not ex- peeted me at the Lodge; Larkin ap- parently told Gordon, but Gordon neglecters to inform him. Just what he telt, what terror and anger when I greeters him at the house an his ar- rival will never be known, I remem- ber now how he watched me, peering up at me through his disguising spec- tacles, with the beef cubo hi hie band, and waiting. Waiting. But the disguise held. My own very slight acquaintance' with him, my near-sightedness, my total lack of suspicion, all were in his favor. And of theperfection of the dis- guise itself, it is enough to say that Gordon apparently; never suspected it. He did suspect the paralysis. "He moved his arm to -day,” he wrote once, in the diary. "He knows I saw it, and he has tvatehecl rite ever since." "It takes yery little to change an appearance beyond casual recogni- tion," Halliday tells me. "The idea is to take a few important points and substitute their opposites. Take a man with partial paralysis; one side of his face drops, you see. Well. he can't imitate that, but he can put a fig in the other cheek and raise it. Put hair on a bald-headed tan and watch the change. And there are other things; eyebrows now—" Only once did I conte anywhere near the truth, and •.hen it slipped past me, and I dill not c..t:ah it. That was on the night he sant fog nee. after he had struck Gordon clown, He was frightened that' night, we know now. Gordon was suspicious; might even have g me to the po ice. And that night he tested his dis- guise and mo. I have recorded the revolt I telt after his attack on the Christian faith. And that I had the feeling of having heard almost the same thing, ons ago, I had heard the same hing, from Cameron, on the first occasion of my meeting him. • , Much of the explanation of that tragic summer becomes -more sur- mise, naturally. There 'is no sur- mise, however, necessary as regards Cameron's coming to the third se- ance, at my invitation. So fa; as he knew, we still believed that Sinton Bethel was dead. That our circle, so innocent in appearance, so naive, was a clveerly devised trap seems not to have occurred to him. My frankness, the product of my ignor- ance, would probably have reassured a man less driven by necesity than he was. But even had he suspected some- thing„ I believe he would have come. His other attempts, to enter the house and secure the man/tscrzpt, had failed, And any day some bit -of mischance, a mouse behind a- panel, a casual repair, and this cook' of his, with its characteristic phrasing, its reference to his .earlier works, would he in the hands of the police, With what secret eagerness he ae- cepted my invitation we can only guess. Halliday, carefully plotting, had already discounted his accept. once in advance, "I knew he would come, of •course," he says. "He wanted to get in. We offered him not only that, but darknez to cover any prove 'he wanted to make. It had to work out." And .here he explains the necessity of having the criminal caugat flag- rante delicto. It had to be shown, he says, not only that Cameron had written the manuscript, but that it was he who had hidden it where it lay. "The case against him stood or :fell by that," he says.. , . But aside from this, much of the explanation of that tragic summer becomes pure guesswork, Wo have, however, elaborated the following as fulfilling our requirements as to the situation s Letterheads Envelopes Billheads - And all kinds of Buslass Stationery printed at The Post Publishing House. We will do a yob that will do credit to your business. Look over your stock of Dolce Stationery and tf it requires replenishing Bail Us by telephone 81. TN, Post Publishing House c' Wo know for instance that an !old Iiottaee Fet'ter's developing; in- s'Wrest in spiritism, Mrs. Livingstone referrers him to Cameron. But we do not know why that interest dei• vcd'rped, - Is it too melt, I woml?r, to say that the. house itself led hint to it. In this I know I am on dangerous ground, and it becomes still more dangerous if one grants that Mrs. l.ivingstone's gift of a red lamp led hint to experimenting wit's it, We do know, however, that after he had had this lamp for three months or so, he got in touch with Cameron, and it seems probnhle Char such experiments as were, made there at night with this lamp. roused Cameron to fever heat. Mrs. Livingstone believes there was a pact between them,'the: usual one of the first to ,'pass over" to come back if possible, We do rot know that, but it seems plausible. Neither Halliday nor I believe, how- ever, as she does, that Cameron kill- ed the olden' span, in a fit of rage over the rejection of his proposal to carry their investigations to the -crim- inal point. What seems more probable is that Cameron had very early recognized the advantages of the house for the psychic and scientific experiments he had in mind, and that he final'y sub- mitted the idea to old Horace. With what growing horror and indigna- tion they wore received we knew from his letter. They turned a possible ally into an angry and dangerous enemy; the veji'ction of the proposition, with the threat which accompanied it, left Cameron stripped before the world ns 5e enemy to society. He went home and brooded over it. "But he couldn't let it rest at that," Halliday says. "He went back. And the old man was at tis desk. There was danger in Cameron that night, and the poor, old chap was frightened. We'll say he crumpled his letter up in his hand, and Cam- eron didn't see it. Maybe there was an argument and Cameron knocked him down. But he got up again, and he managed to drop the letter into an open drawer; after that, his heart failed, and he fell for good." We acquit hint of that. Of the others—? We are, with regard to the under- lying motive, the so-called experi- ments, again obliged to resort to sur-., mise. We know, for, instance, of Cameron's early experiments in weighing the body before and im- mediately after death. He has him- self recorded them. But in the manu- script of his book he distinctly states his belief that the, vital princi- ple, whatever that may be, is weak- ened by long illness, and his belief that those who pass over suddenly out of full health, are more able to manifest themselves. He quotes numerous instances of murdered men who tradition believes to have returned for motives of ven- geance. But he himself believes this ability to return is due to the strength of the unweakened vital principle, The whole spirit, he ealle it. And although his manuscript in itself does not Ileal with any discov- eries he may have made during the summer, -there . are accompanying, it certain pages of figures which seem to prove that he made more than one experiment along those lines dueing his occupancy of the house. What waifs and strays he pickets up on those night journeys of his we do not know; poor wanderers, probably, with no plaee in the, world from which, they could be ria"secs. At the same time, Halliday feels that the experiments were not nec- essarily to be with life and death; he suggests that they were to lie, rather, in deejr narcosis, pushed to the danger point and that it was un- der this narcosis that Maggie Morri- son, for one, succumbed. Among Cameron's papers, later 'on, we founts a curious document entitled, "The reality of the • Soul through a study of the effects of Chloroforms and Ccrari on the Anis male ]conomy," with this note in Cameron's hand: "The soul and the body are sep- arated by the agency of anaesthesia. The soul is not a breath, but an en- tity." Of the nature of the further tests matte we have no idea. Halliday be- lieves that, shown the space behind the wall by Horace Porter, he later utilized it to conceal such apparatus as he used ill his experiments.. "It seemed to be full of stuff," he, says, "the night I found it." But later on; as the chase harrow - ad, he got rid of Whit by bit at night, ssrohabler throwing it into the. THE BRUSSELS POST WEDNESDAY, JAN. 5, 1917. by RAFAEL SABATINI THE GREATEST LOVE STORY ER TQ LD Will commence in THE POST on January 12th. Blood is a romance of the Spanish Main. Start Chapter next week. Captain the first bay. This is borne out!by the fact that, late that following autumn, go- ing back to Twin Hollows to look over the property with a real estate dealer, I found washed up on the beach the battered fragments of a camera. Only a portion of the lens remain- ed in the frame, but this lens had been of quartz. As nearly ae I can discover, the theory of quartz used in such a manner is to photograph the ultra -violet. In other words, I daresay, to make visible that strange world which may lie beyond the spectrum and our normal vision. Died he obtain anything? We shall never know. But sometimes I wonder. Suppose a man to have done what he has done to prove the immortality of the soul; to have taken lives and to have risked his own, to give to the world the survival after death it so pathe- tically, craves. And he fails; there is nothing, His own conviction has not weakened, but his proofs are not there, Then, in the twinkling of an eye, he himself breaks through the veil. With that idea dominant he passes over to the other side, perhaps to the long sleep, perhaps not. But in that instant before waking and sleeping, to prove his point! To make good his contention! To justify his course! I wonder. And I wonder too, if at that mom- ent of realisation the supreme irony of the situation could have occurred to him? That the wounded hand, the one injury poor Gordon sad manag- ed to inflict on hist, was the factor that had shot him, head -foremost, in- to eternity . . . Was Cameron our sheep -killer? We believe so, with certain reserva- tions. We know he was at Bass Cove, under an assumed name at the time, looking over the ground. At the same time it seems unlikely that he killed the first lot of Nylie's ' :sheep; that we believe was an act of revenge on the part of a man Nylie had recently discharged. But that the idea seized on his Im- agination seems probable. He was planning that read campaign of his, and it fell in well with weat was to • come. It prepared the neighborhood , in a sense, but it set them looking for a maniac with a religious mania. And it was an effective alibi for him, occurring before his arrival at the , house. Jane has always believed that he added the symbol in chalk deliber- ately to incriminate me. I do not. ! He added it, after Helena Lear had I told him of it, as he added the stone altar, a madman's conception of a madman's act. Carr'oway's murder was incidental to that preparations of his, but in view of all we know, we can reeon- ,truct it fairly well Thus we have the boy, tiring of carrying his rifle, putting it away in the darkness and possible dozing. We have the appearance of the kill- er, and Carroway unable to locate his rifle quickly, following -*him to the waterfront and reaching it too late. ° Underneath our float the killer should have found Isis knife, but ee we know, Halliday had taken it away. They were too unarmed peen who met that night on the quiet sur- face of the hay. And one of theme, although nobody know it, was pot sane. Unarmed only in one sense, how- ever, :for Cameron had ms one. And used it. When it was over, he apparently rowed back quietly to the crook 'be- yond Robinson's- Point, left his boat there, and walked to Bass Cove. The proprietor of the email hotel shore seems never to .have known 'that he wasiout at night. + "He was 41 very quiet gentleman," Ile says, "and always went to bed earl." One thing which had puzzled us in the Morrison case, was that the girl had stopped her truck, at a time when the nerves of the country -side were on edge. It seems probable. therefore„ that on some nights, at Least it was not the square and mus- cular Cameron who went forth, but an old and crippled man. Shown to her by the Iightning flashes that night, age and infirmity by the roadside and a storm going, what wonder that she stopped? The only marvel is that, this bait having proven successful, it does not appear to have been used again. . . , And now, postpone it as I may, I have come to that portion of our summer to which I have early refer- red as the X in our equation. We have solved our problem. We may say quite properly, Quod 'mat dent- onstrandum, But there remains still the unsolved factor. Much that impressed tie strongly at the time has lost its impression now. It is a curious fact that a man may see a ghost—and many believe that they have done so without any lasting belief in so-called survival af- ter death. And so it is with me. On editing my Journal, however, I find myself confronting the same i questions which confronted use dur- ing that terrible summer. Have I a body, or is niy body all there is of ate? In other words, ant I an intelligence served by certain physical organs, Or am I certain physical organs, actuated by en in- telligence as temporary as they. Frankly, I do not know. But any careful analysis of the extra -normal phenomena of the sum- mer seems to show, every so often, some other -world intelligence, strug- gling to get through to us. As though— We have never had, as I have said, any explanation of the corning of the book during the second seance, nor of the sounds from the library, While much of the physical phenom- ena of the first two seances was de- liberately engineered by Mrs. Liv- ingstone, in pursuance of Halliday's plan to get Cameron into the house, these two things remain without ex- planation. The same thing is true of my find- ing of the setter, of the light -house apparition, of the sitting at Evanston and of Jane's clairvoyans visions. None of which, by the way, she has had since, And yet all of wlsich had their part, large or small, in our solv- ing olveing and understanding of the mimes. Peter Geiss, and the figure in the fore -rigging of the sloop, nsy own vision of Cameron at the' foot of the stairs, when he lay dead behind the panel, what ant I to say of these? • Am I to accept them as I do Jane's "vision without eyes" as no more extraordinary than the feats of . somnambulists, who go through their curious nightly progress with closed eyelids. Asn I to accept them, refute thein, or evade them? , There are., however, certain inci- dents which, puzzling as they wero at the time, send themselves to very simple explanation. Among :those are the cough I heard more than once, and HadIy,Fs story of tlse ma- terialization in the Oakville cone - tory. Throughout Gordon's diary, here and there, were the letters S. and 0. T. There was also a sentence which traeslatedr became "The G. I'. stuff weer, great last night." I elliday believes that Gorse's wail what we know AS a medium, and that it was in that capacity prlsnaril,V that, Cameron took hint to country. The S. he therefore translates es "sit- ting" and the G. T, i►s "genninsa , trance." After the G. T. there al- most invariably follows the rather pathetic entry: ,'Feel rotten to -day" or "all in." Hadly's ghost, then, in all probab- ility was the secretary, securinr, data for the "sittings" which he so care- fully differentiates front the nights when he went into genuine trance. Being honest with himself, poor boy, and honest nowhere else. And the same was no doubt true as to the dry cough which he practised on me, the night I was in the garage, almost to my undoing. It was during those "sittings" too, almost certainly, that under pretend- ed control from beyond he began to ferret out, with the cunning of his kind, the story underneath; to bring back Horace Porter, and watch the reaction; to inention the boat he had discovered, and see the man across 1 from him, 05 the dim red light, twitch and tremble. To play him, to fool him, and at last to threaten and blackmail him. And, in the end, to die. But there remains these things I cannot explain. One of the moat curious is the herbal odor; that this was not a purely subjective Impres- sion is shown by the fart tha: both Hayward and Edith noticed it dur- ing the second seance. The aunt of flowers is, I believe, not unu.ual dur- ing certain psychic experimce:t;; Warren speaks of the impress on o1' tube rosee being waved is fere him in the dirk by some ghostly hand. Of this, as el' the other inexplic- able phe•nomenL I can only .say that at they time 1 rfid not doubt than; li irx them again, as I ,r, ,rs.', 'P1 manuscript, I accept them once more. But I do nut explain them. "You wish," said Cicero, "to have the explanation of the'.,, things? Very wall . . 1 might tell you that the magnet is a body will+ at- tracts iron and attaches itse f to it; hut bemuse'. I could not give you the eeelanation of it, would you deny it?" . . In closing this record I cannot do better than copy the following ex- tract from my Journal, made the following June. June let, 1.9'2'3. Our little Edith was marrsee to- day. Heigh-ho. And again, heigh- ho. I have done the proper thing; led her up the aisle to Halliday (and would as lief have knocked him down as not) stepped back out of the picture and her life, and feeling for my handkerchief, like the besot- ted old fool I am, pulled out a wash- cloth instead. Fortunate, perhaps, I wee on the verge of loud and broken :obs! How we begrudge the happiness ' of others when it is at our expense! How I hated Halliday when, once in the house he put his arms around her rind held her close. How I resented that calm air of possession with which he took his place in the; line beside her, and shook hands smiling- ly milinbly with the hysterical crowd that kissed and blessed then, on 1h:• way to the dining room and food. And yet—how happy they are, and how safe she is. "My wife," he said. "Foreve_ and ever, Amen." O1ci glass and new glass; china, silver and linen; the Leers' candle- sticks; every corner of the house filled with guests and gifts --and Jock. And for the two of them nothing and nobody; just a space filled with shadows which smiled and Passed; themselves the only reality. And perhaps they are, Love at least is real; the one reality perhaps "Love, thou art absolute; sole Lord of life and death." . , . • So they have gone, and to -night Jane and I are alone. Safe and qui- et --and slam., ,alas, br,hinl the drain pipe. Il oigln-ho 1 THE END. LOWNESS ,?iiIDS C. C. RAMAGE, D.D.S., L.D.S. BRUSSELS, ONT. Graduate Royal College of Dental Surgeons and Honor Graduate Uni- versity of Toronto. Dentistry in all its branches. Office Over Standard Bank, Phone 200 gz,1s ego , ka,m@XT AGENT FOR fire, Automobile and Wind Ins. COMPANIES For Brussels and vicinity Phone 647 JA1d7ES M'FADZEAN Agent Hawick Mutual fire Insurance Company Ala. 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