"Can he not stop that kind of devouring?" Paula exclaimed. "Would there not be hope—if he battled with that—put that vampirism behind?"
Madame Nestor regarded the other steadily, until all distortion of feature had given away to her accustomed mildness. Then she uttered an unforgettable question:
"Can a tiger eat grains?"
Vast ranges of terrible understanding were suggested.
"It is my duty, if I ever had a duty," the caller went on, "to make you know Bellingham as I know him. You must have no pity."
"Is there really no fact by which his age can be determined?"
"None that I know. Twenty-five years ago, when he left me hideously wise and pitifully drained, he looked as he does now."
"But why, oh why, do you always think of me with Bellingham?" Paula asked hopelessly.
"I watched his face when he regarded you last night. I knew the look."
"What is to prevent me from never seeing him? He cannot force himself upon me here—in the flesh. … Certainly you would not tell him where I am, where I go—if I begged you not to!"
Madame Nestor shuddered. "No, Paula. It is because you are frightened and tormented that such a thought comes. It is I who am showing you the real Bellingham. He menaces my race. None but big-souled women are useful to him now. He is drawn to them, as one hungry, as one always hungry. It is he first who is drawn. Then they begin to feel and respond to his occult attraction. The time might have come when you would worship him—had I not warned you. I did. I was quite his—until I learned. A woman knows no laws in the midst of an attraction like this. No other man suffices——"
"But why—why do you prepare me? Do you think I cannot resist?" Paula asked furiously. She felt the bonds about her already. The blood rose hot and rebellious at the thought of being bound. It was the old hideous fear of a locked room—the shut-in horror which meant suffocation.
"If I thought you could not resist, Paula," Madame Nestor said, "I should advise you to flee to the remotest country—this moment. I should implore you never to allow from your side your best and strongest friend. But I have studied your brain, your strength, your heart. I love you for the thought that has come to me—that it is you, Paula Linster, who is destined to free the race from this destroyer."
Often in the last half-hour had come a great inward revolt against the trend of her caller's words. It passed through Paula again, yet she inquired how she could thus be the means.
"By resisting him. Bellingham once told me—trust him, this was after I was fully his—that if I had matched his force with a psychic resistance equally as strong—it would mortally have weakened him. So if he seeks to subvert your will and fails, this great one-pointed power of his, developed who knows how long—will turn and rend itself. This is an occult law."
Paula could understand this—the wild beast of physical desire rending itself at the last—but not the conception of hopelessness—Bellingham cut off from immortality. The woman divined her thoughts.
"Again I beg of you," she said in excitement, "not to let a thought of pity for him insinuate itself in your brain—not the finest point of it! Think of yourself, of the Great Good which must sustain you, of the benefit to your race—think of the women less strong! Fail in this, and Bellingham will absorb your splendid forces, and let you fall back into the common as I did—to rise again, ah, so bitterly, so wearily! … But I cannot imagine you failing, you strong young queen, and the women like me, the legion of emptied shells he has left behind—we shall canonize you, Paula, if you shatter the vampire's power."
Thoughts came too fast for speech now. They burned Paula's mind—a destructive activity, because ineffectual. She wanted to speak of the shameful experience of the morning, but she could not bring the words to confession.
"I had almost forgotten," she said lightly at length, "that it is well for one to eat and drink. Stay, won't you please, and share a bite of supper with me, Madame Nestor? We'll talk of other things. I am deadly tired of Bellingham."
A hungry man would have known no repletion from the entire offering which sufficed for these two, forgotten of appetite. Wafers of dark bread, a poached egg, pickles, a heart of lettuce and a divided melon, cake and tea—yet how fully they fared! … They were talking about children and fairy tales over the teacups, when Paula encountered again that sinister mental seizure—the occultist's influence creeping back from her reason to that part of the brain man holds in common with animals. … The lights of the room dimmed; her companion became invisible. Bellingham was calling: "Come to me—won't you come and help me in my excellent labors? Come to me, Paula. We can lift the world together—you and I. Wonderful are the things for me to show you—you who are already so wise and so very beautiful. Paula Linster—come to me!"
Again and again the words were laid upon her intelligence, until she heard them only. All the rest was an anterior murmuring, as of wind and rivers. The words were pressed down upon the surfaces of her brain, like leaf after leaf of gold-beaters' film—and hammered and hammered there. … He was in a great gray room, sitting at a desk, but staring at her, as if there were no walls or streets between—just a little bit of blackness. … She seemed to know just where to go. She felt the place for her was there in the great gray room—a wonderful need for her there. … But a door opened into the room where he sat—a door she had not seen, for she had not taken her eyes from his face. A woman came in, a pale woman, a shell of beauty. The huge tousled head at the desk turned from her to the woman who entered. Paula saw his profile alter hideously. …
Her own bright room filled her eyes again, and the ashen horror on the countenance of Madame Nestor, who seemed vaguely to see it all.
"I think I should have gone to him," Paula murmured, in the slow, flat tone of one not yet quite normally conscious.
"There is but one way, you poor distressed child—to build about you a fortress of purity—which he cannot penetrate——"
"I think I should have known the car to take—the place to enter," Paula went on, unheeding, "the elevator entrance—the door of the room——"
Madame Nestor continued to implore her to pray. Paula shivered finally, and stared at the other for a few seconds, as if recalling the words the visitor had spoken, and the past she had lived with Bellingham. Her terrible rage toward herself spread and covered Madame Nestor. Did not the latter still dip here, there, and everywhere in the occult and weird? Might she not have something to do with the projectiles of Desire?
"I think I'd better be alone now," she said hoarsely. "One does not feel like invoking the Pure Presence—when one is chosen for such defilement."
THIRD CHAPTER
CERTAIN DEVELOPING INCIDENTS ARE CAUGHT INTO THE CURRENT OF NARRATIVE—ALSO A SUPPER WITH REIFFERSCHEID
In the week that followed, Paula's review of Quentin Charter's new book appeared. As a bit of luxury reading, she again went over "A Damsel Came to Peter." It stood up true and strong under the second reading—the test of a real book. The Western writer became a big figure in her mind. She thought of him as a Soul; with a certain