Margaret was arranging the folds of cloth to make billowing arcs in the ruby red velvet draperies Jonas had just installed over the grand window -- which gave out onto the garden and the fountain with nymphs frolicking and pouring water from buckets held waist high -- when Mrs. Farebrother entered the library, and clapping her hands together exclaimed, Exquisite!
Margaret blushed and curtseyed and in a birdlike voice said, Thank you, ma'am.
And your work wasn't for nothing either, now, was it, Jonas? Mrs. Farebrother continued, prodding the young man who was busying himself with sorting and putting away his tools in order to distract himself from her attention or his own obligation to say anything. But now he must, and looking up at his mistress said, Yes, ma'am, thank you. We do our best.
And it is very good, Mrs. Farebrother answered flirtatiously, extending her right hand, palm down, fingers drooping, with every expectation he would bow and kiss whichever of the diamonds his lips first met in his obeisance.
He stepped forward and stiffly obeyed. It was difficult for him to be so directly humiliated. He did not mind the enforced work very much. But these compelled shows of servility and worship nearly roused a sleeping rage, but not quite. So effectively had he mastered himself, they only made him stiff and awkward.
None of this was lost on Mrs. Farebrother, and she reacted with the arch of an eyebrow and a triumphant grace that became her delight in the power of her station as he stooped to her.
As he stooped to her, he was embarrassed by his workman's clothes, by the high boots over corduroy breeches and the leather apron covering them, and by his loose shirt of coarse oatmeal colored cotton poorly woven, several of the buttons still undone, as he had unfastened them during the heat of labor, so that his smooth and powerful chest must fall open to her gaze now, even perhaps his nipples, as he bowed to kiss her fingers.
It is more than I should have to do, Jonas hissed in suppressed rage.
But do it nevertheless you will, or prove the disgrace and dishonor of me.
It is a bit strange to hear you speak of disgrace and dishonor as you've been bringing them on yourself these many years and have bequeathed them to me now as a dirty legacy.
Simon with a swiftness that his age and years of insobriety might have made unlikely, nevertheless had his whip in hand and Jonas felt the sting of its shock against his thigh before his eye could register his father's gesture.
But with the same swiftness, he lunged at his father, one hand plastered to the smarting thigh, and with the other seized the old man's hand and grabbed the whip from him, and brandishing it in the air above his cowering parent fiercely spat, If I were cut from the same filthy cloth as you, your life would now lie in tattered shreds upon the dirt of this damned cottage floor.
Instead he lifted up the nearly empty whiskey bottle standing on the grimy table beside him and after making a quick threatening gesture at his father, threw it rather at the farther wall, and left the place quickly, the old man cowering and crouching on the ground.
Outside, he flung the whip into the tall grass and continued on up a steep road toward the venerable pile where Mrs. Farebrother exercised her authority.
Mrs. Farebrother was far wealthier than the members of the aristocracy who regularly found a place at her table. They were the progeny of men, or the men themselves, who had not been astute in the conversion of land into money when the one medium of wealth supplanted the other. What had once been a thriving and dependable feudal source of income through rents and yields, labor and services, was transformed for them, by the industrial revolution, Methodism, and Dissent, behind their backs, as it were, into a drain on a meager fortune through taxes and debts.
It was pleasant for Mrs. Farebrother to see a fallen earl like Willoughby or a threadbare marquess like Cumberland paying court to a factory owner like Ebenezer Plymdale or Harrison MacAdam, and even more so when she was the object of such courtesy, devotion, and all the ceremonial flourishes of past gallantry which had little power now to effect anything on Fleet Street or Downing Street or even at Buckingham Palace, and market value only for arrivistes and snobs like Mrs. Farebrother.
They graced her table, played in her drawing room, strolled in her parks, listened to her gossip and braggadocio, and always flattered her, but behind her back lamented that it had come to that, and berated her for lacking, really, anything that might make their praises even halfway deserved -- excepting the great and questionably accumulated fortune her husband had left her by his success at^Åmanufacturing!
But more than they spoke of her, both men and women whispered together, or dreamed in solitary, about that servant of hers with the dark brown curls and the swooning and smoky brown eyes whom we have already observed in several of his incarnations, Jonas.
Nor less alluring to their errant tongues were the roots and terms of his indenture, the story of the fallen father, overseeing comptroller once of all his Manchester factories to the late Mr. William Farebrother. Simon Smallcap had been caught after a great embezzlement, and only through his pledge of his son's lifetime labor till his forty-ninth year, in service to his employer had he escaped the gallows outside Newgate.
Jonas knew nothing but the fate bequeathed him since his fourth year and bowed to it, for his father's blood upon his head would have been a curse more weighted than the daily burden of indenture that he bore. Bowed he was, but not under the weight of his own guilt as he would have been were he rebellious to his fate.
One evening, the company was graced by a mesmerist and table thumper just returned from Moscow and St. Petersburg. He had been the cause of much commotion because of the tales that preceded him everywhere of his spirit conjurations at the Princess Drubetskoy's gatherings, which it was rumored, had even been attended by the reclusive and bilious novelist, Ivan Goncharov.
He arrived in the afternoon by coach with a large trunk, which Jonas was summoned to carry to his rooms on the third floor, following behind Margaret, who showed the way after a curtsey and informed him that the mistress expected him for tea, after he had changed^Åin an hour, please.
Dr. Orocknea, for that was the name the mesmerist went by, was a tall and lean but powerfully built man who cultivated a walk which suggested the ease and stealth of a cat. He did, indeed, have, as would seem requisite for his profession, keen and piercing, altogether intimidating, black eyes set at some distance apart over an imposing nose and a large mouth with wide Cupid's bow lips and perfect teeth. His eyebrows were thick and straight, and he wore his thick hair long, in the manner made popular on the continent by Franz Liszt. He was not conventionally handsome, but he was nevertheless compelling, and his numerous sexual conquests, not restricted to either one or the other of the sexes, attested to it, and were a matter of public bruit.
You will stay a few minutes, said he as Jonas set the trunk down at the foot of his bed, and help me with some things I cannot do alone.
As was expected of him, Jonas bowed his head and said, Yes, sir, and waited for instructions.
Good, the mesmerist said, separating from the rest a brass key on the end ring of the gold chain hanging from the pockets of his waistcoat in a graceful crescent, and handed it to Jonas.
Open, if you will, the lock there.
Jonas stooped before the trunk and turned the key in the latch; a spring gave, and he lifted the lid revealing a sienna colored damask cloth covering whatever was within.
Very good, Dr. Orocknea, said. Now, if you will, he indicated with a sweep of his arm for Jonas to rise and back away, I want to show you something I think you will find quite fascinating.
From under the cloth -- executing an easy plié rather than bending forward -- he extracted a small wheel on the end of a silver chain. This, the mesmerist -- effortlessly resuming his full height -- held up before the poor boy's eyes and started swinging it slowly back and forth through the action of his thumb against his index finger.
Look how the light glints at the center of the wheel, how it seems to be spinning, spinning, spinning. Now follow the arc of the wheel as it swings in front of you and feel how heavy your eyes are becoming and how light your body is becoming. So light, your body is becoming lighter and lighter until it disappears.
Jonas was seized by a strange and alien pressure that suddenly bound him to the spot and just as suddenly dissolved, and the confusion his changed condition had momentarily wrought in him dissolved, also.
There! All sensation of your body is completely gone, and you, my boy are in a deep sleep. You can hear my voice and you will obey my commands. Only I can return you to your body. I am your master. Do you understand?
Yes, master.
Good. Now when I count to three you will wake and recall that you have helped me open my trunk, but you will remember nothing else. Only, whenever I say, Open My Trunk, you will return to this state of deep hypnosis. Is that clear?
Yes, master.
Very good, Jonas. One, two, three.
Jonas looked at the open trunk and at the new guest.
Will there be anything else, sir.
No, Jonas, thank you. I will call you again should I need to open my trunk.
Immediately the servant was, just as the mesmerist knew he would be, in a deep trance again.
Good, Jonas, now, one, two, three.
Thank you, sir. If there's nothing else, then.
No, Jonas, thank you.
There was a fire in the library, and the green gray sky, congested with billowing cumulous clouds, pressed against the windows and threatened any minute to break into a storm. The more unwelcoming the weather outside, however, the cozier it had become within as Mrs. Farebrother herself handed round the strong tea in cranberry and gold Limoges teacups which stood in their fine porcelain saucers on four tiny feet.
I don't think so, no, you know, I don't think so, Mr. Haverland, the local curate was saying, addressing Dr. Orocknea. Free will is fundamental. Without it, chaos is come again, and, thanks to a divine providence, that can not be. We were made, you know, as Milton said, sufficient to stand. We do have reason, yes, just for that purpose, to support, to support that sufficiency.
My good Mr. Haverland, while I have no desire to contradict you, the mesmerist gently responded, it seems you are leaving off the other half of what your great English poet said. We are made, if I recall, sufficient to stand but free to fall. Free to fall! No!
The curate did have to concede that, and to fortify himself for the concession took a little swallow of tea.
There is about us something, the mesmerist continued, that disposes us to surrender our reason to a force perhaps more attractive, sweeter than reason, which allows us to be guided by a voice directing us from outside ourselves, something, if you will, that overmasters us, rather than to be always bound by some carping -- crippling, actually, -- inner voice of conscience and constraint.
You make it sound like there is something wrong with conscience or with a conscientious view of our duties and responsibilities to ourselves and to our neighbors.
Do you think so? You clergymen are always so awfully prone to look at things in a moral -- or, shall I term it? moralistic -- light. But I was speaking only of phenomena, from observation, without making judgment.
But perhaps it is essential that we do make judgments. Making judgments is, after all, what makes us human, Mr. Haverland said, rather than bestial.
He defended his ground with a certain thrust of the voice, introducing just a tinge of the stained-glass tone with which his voice was colored when he delivered a sermon.
Well, well, the mesmerist responded, nicely put, but there may be other considerations. Perhaps it is our natural sympathy with another, the ability to be in harmonious accord with another will, which makes us human. Perhaps the greatest mark of our humanity is that we are governable, that we recognize the majesty of authority and bend our knee in submission to it. Where would Her Majesty's government be without that aspect of our humanity?
Indeed, Philip, Mrs. Farebrother intervened, he seems to have you checked there. You would not want to speak in the cause of anarchy now would you? All that Godwinian cant that ruins Shelley's otherwise sublime verse!
While not an irreligious woman, Mrs. Farebrother was seduced by Dr. Orocknea's argument because she imagined herself on the receiving end of the homage due to majesty, not among those who bent the knee, but among those to whom knees were bent.
Well, well; hesitating, Mr. Haverland, who enjoyed riding with the hounds or standing in a good fishing stream more than dialectics, retreated good naturedly.
At which point in the conversation Margaret came in bearing a silver tray of watercress sandwiches, and Splash, the spaniel, raised her head from under the crimson settee where she had been curled and yawned.
Let me see if I understand you, Mr. Haverland picked up the earlier conversation despite himself, as they were leaving the billiard room later that evening and going in to dinner.
You are saying that you can put someone to sleep, as it were, and redirect his mental processes so that later on, when he is awake, he will behave as you have determined he will behave.
Precisely.
Oh, said, Mrs. Farebrother, turning to the Earl of Willoughby and the widowed Lady Hyde, as the company was sitting themselves at the table, they have been arguing like two schoolboys all afternoon. It is a fascinating topic, something, you know, pitting determinism and free will against each other. Perhaps you will be so kind as to offer a demonstration of this mesmeric art you speak of later on this evening dear Dr. Orocknea.
With pleasure, Mrs. Farebrother. If there will be anyone good enough to volunteer to trust himself to the power of my art, he said with an inviting smile directed at Mr. Haverland, who shrunk, however, from it.
Perhaps we may use one of the servants, the Marquess of Cumberland suggested.
Oh, said Mrs. Farebrother with delight. Jonas, why not Jonas?
The young man who helped me to my rooms this afternoon, no? the mesmerist asked in an off-hand manner.
Exactly!
An excellent idea, the mesmerist concurred, and Mrs. Farebrother felt a current run through her -- as did several others of the guests at the idea of seeing that young man enthralled -- which she attributed to the recognition of her own cleverness.
The god of sleep shunned Mrs. Farebrother that night, perhaps jealous that she preferred someone else's embrace to his, feeling in his eternal bones that the place reserved usually for him in her canopied and curtained bed was already occupied by the phantom of the servant Jonas as he had appeared, blank-eyed and submissive to the mesmerist's commands earlier that evening in her drawing room.
More tormented would her waking hours have been had she known as she lay divorced by Morpheus and with her mind churned by waking dreams of a disturbing erotic force that the original of her phantom was just then plunged once again into his dream state and not embraced in metaphor by a mythological god but actually by the compelling mesmerist whose lips were pressing his and meeting rather than resistance a soft and yielding counter pressure.
The hypnotist's eyes were fastened on Jonas' and had drawn him deep within his sphere and now himself was undulating deep within the handsome servant's sphere, calling him slave and beloved slave and my own beloved slave and hearing his evocations met with reciprocal cries of master, beloved master, my beloved master until the rapture of their union exploded in an endless bursting of fireworks over the Thames orchestrated by kettledrums and trumpets.
Dawn's rosy fingers did not reach outside the coverlet of night, but morning broke with a stormy frenzy of rain that looked more like the grizzled beard of an angry Zeus already storming against Hera's imagined reproaches as he staggered to his mountain home after a long night of debauch and dissipation.
Mrs. Farebrother was haggard, too, and setting her porcelain floral Wedgwood cup of chocolate lightly on its saucer and both down upon the marble top of her dressing table, summoned Charity, her maid, to make the best of her, for it would not do to appear before her guests, the entourage she supposed in awe of her, in, as it appeared reflected back to her from her glass, such a frenzied and dilapidated condition.
Believe me, now, Margaret said to Mrs. Sandridge the cook as they were preparing the breakfast, it was all of the most spooky thing I ever saw or felt, too, besides. The mistress calls me in to fetch Jonas to the drawing room instanter, and here I go to get him and when he enters, first thing, that strange man the doctor someone with the funny name says, Ah, is not this the young man who helped me open my trunk today? or something like that, and before my very eyes, a shudder went through Jonas' body and it was like he was not awake or asleep anymore but somewhere in-between.
And then the stranger says to him, It's hot in here Jonas. Would you not be more comfortable with your shirt off? And there we are in Madam's drawing room -- well, I was by the doorway anyway but the rest were all there, the gentry, and sipping tea or holding port in crystal, and here he was, the lad, without a shred of modesty, taking off his shirt and standing naked but for his breeches before them all. And I was afeared he'd soon be quit of them, too, if that strange doctor with his feline air could have his way.
Mrs. Sandridge was stopped with a kettle in her hand about to pour its content into a pot but caught frozen in the middle of the action as if she too were a victim of mesmerism, when she came to and cautioned Margaret, Hush, lass, here's the boy himself, now.
Good morning Jonas.
Good morning, Mrs. Sandridge, Margaret.
Jonas greeted them each brightly.
And you look plucky this morning, Mrs. Sandridge said. Sleep well?
Sound as a bairn all night long, he answered, stretching himself like a healthy cat. Turned in early.
Not disturbed by noise from the drawing room?
Not a bit.
Indeed, Mrs. Sandridge said, glancing knowingly at Margaret.
Well, there is nothing for it now, said Margaret. Breakfast is expected. Afterwards there are some loose stones on the path to the stable mistress said need replacing, Jonas.
Indeed, it does concern me, my good lady, Dr. Orocknea responded to Mrs. Farebrother's rebuff when he observed she looked not quite herself this morning.
It is nothing, she reiterated, nothing of any consequence, and yet^Å
It was not possible for her to maintain her reserve in the face of his continuing solicitation, and it was gratifying to yield to attention which she felt was rightly owed her.
And yet? he prodded her.
And yet, she admitted, as if she were seeking within for just the right phrasing to describe the delicacy of her condition, and yet, I do feel, as it were, a bit peaked.
Peaked, Mrs. Farebrother?
Yes, peaked, without the robustness of my usual genial spirits, you know. Drawn.
Ah, perhaps you will allow me to offer^Å
Oh, I am not sure that^Å
Why, Mrs. Farebrother, there is nothing about which to be apprehensive. You will feel as if you have enjoyed a refreshing nap, and once you are awake, I think I can assure you that your genial spirits, as you so aptly describe your usual condition, will be quite happily restored. Now if you'll only look at this fascinating jewel I picked up at a bazaar when I was traveling through Tashkent, I think you'll find it most intriguing. It is a sort of diamond with a most intriguing power.
He swung the chain as he spoke, and simultaneously guided his hostess to a walnut Queen Anne armchair, and sat her down.
Easy now. You hear my voice and nothing else. You will be guided by what I say and even now begin to feel your genial spirits return. When I count to three you will awake and feel refreshed and quite renewed, delighted at my skill, but whenever I say Carnations and Chrysanthemums you will fall right back into this delightful sleep. You will awake now and remember only that you have momentarily slipped into an invigorating, revitalizing sleep. Now one, two, three.
Mrs. Farebrother opened her eyes and looked up at the mesmerist.
Why, my good Dr. Orocknea, that was a treat. I feel, I must say, expansive, as if a great weight has been lifted. How can I thank you?
Oh it is nothing, dear Mrs. Farebrother. Being in such a lovely house presided over by such a brilliant hostess as yourself is reward enough. Why even just to be able to look at such an admirable piece of furniture as that Queen Anne chair upon which you are seated with its brocade of woven carnations and chrysanthemums^Å
Perfect. Can you hear me Mrs. Farebrother?
Yes.
Excellent. Every time, remember when I say carnations and chrysanthemums you will return to this delightful state, but now one, two, three.
No, but I must do something to express my thanks, resumed Mrs. Farebrother. Perhaps you will allow me to give you a trifle, perhaps this ring in token of a friendship I am sure must grow between us.
Only because it is you offering it do I accept, he said, bowing as she took a sapphire from off her finger, and as she extended it to him, he kissed the hand that gave it.
The intermittent storm that gathered in the afternoon of the previous day and broke sporadically without entirely loosing its fury and therefore spending itself and giving way to sunny skies unleashed itself again and Jonas returned wet and muddy from his road repairing and taken with a bitter chill.
After putting him to bed in his attic room, Margaret announced to her mistress that he had been taken ill, and Mrs. Farebrother, looking at Dr. Orocknea, wondered if there might not be something he might do.
He looked in upon the boy, but as he was already sleeping, there was hardly room to exercise his skill, and it was Margaret's ministrations throughout the night and during the succeeding days with tea and lemons, mustard plasters and compresses that took Jonas through his illness.
When the lad was recovered, Dr. Orocknea revealed he had been invited to a chateau in Brittany where he was needed, although he said that professional considerations did not permit him to say for what.
He promised that he would, his gracious hostess permitting, return to her estate when he returned to England, and she said, by all means, of course, and she would feel slighted if he did not.
Then he bowed and kissed her hand, and said perhaps he might take Jonas with him because this time of year the carnations and chrysanthemums were beautiful in Brittany and it would do the lad a world of good to see them.
Mrs. Farebrother, of course, offered no objection.
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