The Necromancers

"Oh! I think Laurie took it all right."

"It was most unfortunate, all that about death and the rest.... Why, here comes Laurie; I thought he would be gone out by now!"

The boy strolled towards them round the corner of the house, tossing away the fragment of his cigarette. He was still in his dark suit, bareheaded, with no signs of riding about him.

"So you've not gone out yet, dear boy?" remarked his mother.

"Not yet," he said, and hesitated as they went on.

Mrs. Baxter noticed it.

"I'll go and get ready," she said. "The carriage will be round at three, Maggie."

When she was gone the two moved out together on to the lawn.

"What did you think of that woman?" demanded Laurie with a detached air.

Maggie glanced at him. His tone was a little too much detached.

"I thought her quite dreadful," she said frankly. "Didn't you?" she added.

"Oh yes, I suppose so," said Laurie. He drew out a cigarette and lighted it. "You know a lot of people think there's something in it," he said.

"In what?"

"Spiritualism."

"I daresay," said Maggie.

She perceived out of the corner of her eye that Laurie looked at her suddenly and sharply. For herself, she loathed what little she knew of the subject, so cordially and completely, that she could hardly have put it into words. Nine-tenths of it she believed to be fraud--a matter of wigs and Indian muslin and cross-lights--and the other tenth, by the most generous estimate, an affair of the dingiest and foulest of all the backstairs of life. The prophetic outpourings of Mrs. Stapleton had not altered her opinion.

"Oh! if you feel like that--" went on Laurie.

She turned on him.

"Laurie," she said, "I think it perfectly detestable. I acknowledge I don't know much about it; but what little I do know is enough, thank you."

Laurie smiled in a faintly patronizing way.

"Well," he said indulgently, "if you think that, it's not much use discussing it."

"Indeed it's not," said Maggie, with her nose in the air.

There was not much more to be said; and the sounds of stamping and whoaing in the stable-yard presently sent the girl indoors in a hurry.

Mrs. Baxter was still mildly querulous during the drive. It appeared to her, Maggie perceived, a kind of veiled insult that things should be talked about in her house which did not seem to fit in with her own scheme of the universe. Mrs. Baxter knew perfectly well that every soul when it left this world went either to what she called Paradise, or in extremely exceptional cases, to a place she did not name; and that these places, each in its own way, entirely absorbed the attention of its inhabitants. Further, it was established in her view that all the members of the spiritual world, apart from the unhappy ones, were a kind of Anglicans, with their minds no doubt enlarged considerably, but on the original lines.