"You see before you the Veiled Lady," said the bearded Professor,
advancing to the verge of the platform. "By the agency of which I have
just spoken, she is at this moment in communion with the spiritual
world. That silvery veil is, in one sense, an enchantment, having been
dipped, as it were, and essentially imbued, through the potency of my
art, with the fluid medium of spirits. Slight and ethereal as it
seems, the limitations of time and space have no existence within its
folds. This hall--these hundreds of faces, encompassing her within so
narrow an amphitheatre--are of thinner substance, in her view, than the
airiest vapor that the clouds are made of. She beholds the Absolute!"
As preliminary to other and far more wonderful psychological
experiments, the exhibitor suggested that some of his auditors should
endeavor to make the Veiled Lady sensible of their presence by such
methods--provided only no touch were laid upon her person--as they
might deem best adapted to that end. Accordingly, several deep-lunged
country fellows, who looked as if they might have blown the apparition
away with a breath, ascended the platform. Mutually encouraging one
another, they shouted so close to her ear that the veil stirred like a
wreath of vanishing mist; they smote upon the floor with bludgeons;
they perpetrated so hideous a clamor, that methought it might have
reached, at least, a little way into the eternal sphere. Finally, with
the assent of the Professor, they laid hold of the great chair, and
were startled, apparently, to find it soar upward, as if lighter than
the air through which it rose. But the Veiled Lady remained seated and
motionless, with a composure that was hardly less than awful, because
implying so immeasurable a distance betwixt her and these rude
persecutors.
"These efforts are wholly without avail," observed the Professor, who
had been looking on with an aspect of serene indifference. "The roar
of a battery of cannon would be inaudible to the Veiled Lady. And yet,
were I to will it, sitting in this very hall, she could hear the desert
wind sweeping over the sands as far off as Arabia; the icebergs
grinding one against the other in the polar seas; the rustle of a leaf
in an East Indian forest; the lowest whispered breath of the
bashfullest maiden in the world, uttering the first confession of her
love. Nor does there exist the moral inducement, apart from my own
behest, that could persuade her to lift the silvery veil, or arise out
of that chair."
Greatly to the Professor's discomposure, however, just as he spoke
these words, the Veiled Lady arose. There was a mysterious tremor that
shook the magic veil. The spectators, it may be, imagined that she was
about to take flight into that invisible sphere, and to the society of
those purely spiritual beings with whom they reckoned her so near akin.
Hollingsworth, a moment ago, had mounted the platform, and now stood
gazing at the figure, with a sad intentness that brought the whole
power of his great, stern, yet tender soul into his glance.