LISTEN TO ME, ESTABROOK!LISTEN TO ME, ESTABROOK!
The great Scotch hound had been snarling. He had growled, for I remembered it as a fact brought out of the background of my consciousness. And when I tore my eyes away from the Judge’s stare, I saw that the dog was staring, too,—was staring, was drawing back his black lips, exposing his yellow teeth. Every hair on his back was erect, his nostrils were distended as if he were relying upon his sense of smell to determine the nature of what he saw. Could there be any doubt that he, living, and his master, dead, still saw something—something which, because it was behind me, I could not see?
At first I did not dare to look. I felt some dreadful presence behind me—a presence upon which the lifeless man and the cringing, snarling beast had set their eyes, a presence which had wiped the smile from the Judge’s face and tightened every nerve and sinew in the dog’s lean body. I could hear the wind, and, in its lapses, the rumble of the city, I could smell the warm aroma of the Judge’s pipe, I could feel my senses grow keener as I gathered my courage to look over my shoulder.
When at last, after that dragging moment’s reluctance, I did so, I believed that I had looked for no purpose. The room behind me was empty. My nervous eyes searched the rectangular space,swept over the chairs, the tea-table covered with its display of rare china, the blue-and-gold Japanese floor vase, the brasses on the cases of books, the dark walls, the pictures, the gloomy corners filled with the mist of shadows, the rugs, the cornice, the draperies.
Then suddenly I saw!
Outside the long French windows, framed in the uncertain outlines of the old ornate balcony rail and the tossing leaves and branches of the vine, there appeared, as if it had come floating out of the liquid blackness of the night, detached from all else, a face.
No sooner had my glance fallen upon this peering countenance than I thought I saw a startled opening of its lips; it withdrew and was gone. I had merely caught a glance at it, yet of this I am sure—the face was white with the pallor of things that grow in a cellar, it was weak with the terrible drooping, hopeless weakness of endless self-indulgence; it was a brutal face, and yet wore the expression of timid, anxious, pathetic inquiry. It was a face that had come to ask a question. And though, because only the pale skin had reflected the light from within, I had not seen what might have appeared above or below, and though I may have been wrong, I received the impression that it was the countenance of an old woman.
Of course the moment I discovered this apparition, upon which the wild stare of the Judge in life and in death had rested, I ran forward. I thought as I did so that I heard the scrape of clothing on the iron balcony rail and the thud of a heavy object dropping on the grass below. Flinging open the glass doors, through which a torrent of wind poured into the room, and leaning out under the twisted branches of the vine, I tried in vain to penetrate the wall of blackness before me, and force my sight through it and down into the old garden, from which there arose only the rushing sound of the dry wind in the shrubbery. All the universe seemed made of black and hissing chaos. Out of it came blasts that combed through my disheveled hair and drove fine dust into my eyes. But of the messenger of death, who had peered in the window for a moment, and then withdrawn, nothing could be seen.
I turned back, feeling suddenly, for the first time, the emptiness of body which occurs, perhaps in sympathy with the emptiness of death, and as I turned, I found myself in the position of the thing that had looked in at us. The stare of the Judge was still fixed upon that spot, so that for a moment I received the impression that he was gazing at me. The dog still whined softly, cowering close to the floor.
I went to the middle of the room: I stood theregathering my wits. I heard a clock strike somewhere in the kitchen region below, from outside the window came the rattle of some conveyance, louder, louder, softer, softer. A passing boy whistled; I heard Julianna’s step above me; I heard the dog licking his paws unconcernedly; I heard the curtains flap in the wind that filled the room; and finally its ironical little scream as it lifted from the desk the last opinion the Judge ever wrote and scattered the loose sheets all over the room. It brought in the dank smell of the garden.
“I must tell her,” I said aloud, and the old dog, senses dulled by age, wagged his tail. “I must tell her,” I repeated, and toiled up the soft, carpeted stairs.
She was waiting for me in her own room, standing under the soft light from a hanging, well-shaded, electric lamp. I see her there, clearly, with the smile fading from her face as she read my own. Indeed, it was not necessary for me to speak; before I had gathered courage to do so, I saw her bosom swell with a long breath. She inhaled it jerkily, as one who is suddenly shocked with a deluge of icy water. I saw the color fade as the smile had faded before it, and when I had nodded to indicate that she had guessed the truth, stepped forward, fearing that she would sway off her feet.
“No, Jerry,” she said, with her hands held tight at her sides. “I am all right. I had expected this some day soon. It is hard to believe, but has not come without warning. His heart—his great, loving heart—had—worn out. I do not want you to come with me. I am going down—alone.”
I moved my dry tongue in my mouth: a word of the strange circumstance of his death was there. But her courage—her steady body, her squared shoulders, her firm mouth, her eyes which showed her agony, but no sign of weakness, and her soft voice as she said, “Wait for me here”—restrained me. I pressed her fingers to my lips and as I saw her go out, I felt that perhaps never would the opportunity to tell the story I have told to-night come again.
CHAPTER VAT DAWN
I think it must have been nearly a half-hour—though the minutes were themselves hours—before I, waiting in the upper hall beside the window, through which the arc lights from the street threw jumping white patches on the ceiling, heard the sound of the old dog’s claws on the floor below and her little catches of breath as she came up.
At the top she buried her face for a moment on my shoulder.
“I love you more than ever,” she whispered. “I want you to stay.—Call Margaret and do what you can. I will come to you by and by.”
With these words she pressed my forearm in the grip of her strong fingers and, entering her own room, shut the door.
I found, when I did mechanically as she had bade me do, that Margaret, with the instinct of an old servant, which is sometimes as keen as that of an animal, had already sensed the presence of some crisis and prowled about in her soft-footed way until she had discovered the truth. She was lying at the bottom of the stairs,her face buried in her hands and her broad back rising and falling with slow and silent tides of grief. Julianna and her father were together the old woman’s life. One half had gone.
“Come, Margaret,” said I softly.
“Very well, sir,” she answered after a minute, and rising, straightened her cap, preparing for duty like a broken-hearted soldier. And so she went on in that next hour or two, telephoning, directing, arranging and doing with me all those necessary things. In spite of her labors she seemed always to be at my elbow, a ceaseless little whimpering in her throat. Her spectacles were befogged with the mist from her old blue eyes, which, like the color of old china, had faded with wetting and drying in years of family use, but she did not again give up to her grief.
Therefore, when at last we looked at each other in the hall in one of those moments when, at the end of a task, a mental inventory is taken to be sure that all is done, I was surprised to see her expression change suddenly, to hear a cry of dismay escape her, and to observe her trundle herself toward the library door in grotesque haste.
When, following her, I went into the room, I found her thick fingers pulling open drawer after drawer of the desk, and turning over the papers they contained.
“It was here, Mr. Estabrook. Oh, my God! Mr. Estabrook, I saw him put it here!” she cried.
“What?” I asked, with a glimmer of memory.
“The papers. They was marked for her, but she mustn’t ever have ’em! I’d rather they should pluck me from my bones, sir! And I saw him put ’em here!”
“He took them out again, ”I cried, touched by her contagious fear. “He died with them on the floor beside him. I know what you mean. The blue seal.”
“Yes, the blue seal!” she cried in recognition, and stumbling across the room she fell upon her knees, reaching under the old easy-chair and the desk, patting over the rug with her hand, turning up its corners, searching with her face bent down, like a devotee of some strange sect, muttering to herself.
“She must never see,” she exclaimed monotonously. “Poor child, she must never see. It is worse than death—a hundred times. Oh, what has he done with that terrible package!”
Suddenly, throwing herself upward and backward, until the upper half of her body was erect, and with a small object held up to my astonished eyes between her forefinger and thumb, she uttered a cry of despair and rage. She had found a piece of the sealing wax with which the packet, once offered to my eyes, had been fastened!
“It’s too late,” she wailed miserably. “Do you see that? The girl has read it. She would not let me in her room. It’s too late!”
There was no keeping back the question.
“What was in it?” I cried. “What was written there?”
I saw her old mouth shut as if she meant to show me that I need expect no disclosure from her.
“I don’t know, Mr. Estabrook,” said she.
In her eyes, perhaps distorted by the strong lenses of her glasses, I saw the challenge of stubbornness. I felt myself growing wild with a desire to break through the unwholesome mystery which had entangled me, and overcome by any means the silence of this woman. She had arisen. She was within my reach. And I believe that I put my hands upon her, catching her two round and fleshy shoulders under my curved palms, shaking her to and fro with the excess of my excitement. In that moment before I spoke to her, she looked up at me, surprise and terror written on her face.
“Tell me!” I roared. “You know this horrible, hidden thing. Confound you, tell me!”
Her expression changed. I saw surprise become craftiness and fear, distrust. I saw in her eyes the beginning of that hate which I believe has never, since that irresponsible moment, diminished.
“You had best leave go of me, Mr. Estabrook,”she said calmly. “You would not act so if the old Judge was alive and here. Nor his daughter, sir!”
The rebuke, you may believe, was enough.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
The old woman, however, wrung her hands and looked toward the room above as if to indicate to me that nothing was important but the fact that Julianna had possession of the Judge’spost-mortemmessage.
“Let her tell you if she will,” she cried. Then covering her face with her fat hands, as if to hide some terrible picture of the imagination, she stumbled forward out of the library.
I have often wondered since, as I wonder to-night, when those spectres have arisen again, what that old servant meant. At the time it never occurred to me that but one thing could happen. I had the utmost confidence in Julianna, and indeed, without thinking much of my own troubles, I passed that long vigil in the library only with regret that I could not wrest away from the true and noble woman who had promised to be my wife, all the terrible grief which, alone in the chamber above, she must have been suffering. For the first time, I think, in all my life, which, by training and inherited instincts, had been devoted, I might say, to the welfare of the Estabrook name and of myself, I felt mymind—and even my body—filled with a strange and passionate desire to be the instrument of good, not for myself, but in the name of others and perhaps in the name of God. My eyes filled with tears, springing not so much from grief as from belief in myself, not so much from weakness as from strength. I called upon an unknown force that I felt to be near me and directing me.
“Save her from misfortune,” I said aloud in that silent room. “Protect her. Comfort her.”
The old dog, as if he now understood, raised his head and licked my hand. I realized then that the wind had died down, and, looking up, I saw that the balcony and garden were lit by the pale rays of the morning moon, that the stars shone clearly again through the still air, and that the odor of flowers, nodding below the window, perfumed the Judge’s study. The pipe, with ashes tumbling out upon the table, by curious chance had not been moved from the place where he had laid it down.
It seemed to me that I had dreamed restlessly, that the old man had not left the room, and then, when this fancy had gone, I almost believed that he had come back as he used to do when he, in his absent-minded way, had left something behind. With my heart full of him, I got up and reaching for the pipe I dropped it into my own pocket.
At last the oil in the lamp had been consumed. The burner flickered, gurgled several times, snapped, and went out; but the failure of this light served to show that morning was near at hand. The rectangular squares of the window panes now appeared luminous with the first gray flow of the east. It seemed to me that the time had come when Julianna should no longer be alone with her own thoughts; with soft steps I climbed the stairs and softly I turned the knob of her closed door. If it had been locked, it was so no longer; it yielded to my gentle, cautious pressure. The crack widened. Then, for a moment, unseen and unheard, I stood on the threshold looking in.
She was no longer dressed as I had seen her, for now she was clad in the soft drapery of some delicate Oriental silk, which, if she had been standing, would have fallen from the points of her shoulders in voluminous folds to the floor. She had unloosened her hair; it had fallen in a torrent of brown and golden light. I could not see her face.
Her back was turned toward me, for she was sitting on the floor facing the hearth in the middle of the frame of old lavender-and-gold tiles which marked the fireplace. Her hands were pressed to her temples as if her head no longer could be relied upon to retain its contents, her fingers moved this way and that through thehair above her ears, and, in strange contrast with the glimmer of early day beyond the white curtains, an uncanny flickering light burned on the hearth, painting the delicate pallor of her shoulders, neck, ears, and hands with an outline of fire. It was a picture to give the impression of a beautiful sorceress crouching to perform some unholy rite.
“Julianna!” I exclaimed softly.
She turned about as one caught red-handed in guilt, and in doing so, moved far enough to one side to expose the last remnants of written sheets of paper, which flames were rapidly consuming. A moment more and these were crisp ashes which whirled about the hearth with a soft rustle before they fell into heaps of sooty fragments. Whatever the Judge had written with infinite pain had now been destroyed. And as I looked into her eyes, I saw, too, that infinite pain had attended their destruction. Her expression had in it horror, shame, apprehension, and excruciating grief: never had I believed that a face, naturally so innocent and so happy, could have been so distorted with mature and terrible emotions as hers had become in the hours that had passed.
“Julie! my Julie!” I cried.
For answer her fingers reached out toward me in mute appeal, her body followed, and, crawling to my feet, she clutched the air as if trying toreach my hands with her own, and then fell forward, flat upon the floor, unconscious. If in that moment she appeared a groveling thing, it was only for a moment. Before I could stoop to raise her, she had regained her senses with two or three sharp inhalations and a fluttering of her eyelids, had thrust my hands from her and struggled to her feet.
“Go!” she whispered, retreating. “It is unthinkable! Go! Never come near me!”
“No—no—no!” I said. “Julianna, tell me! What has happened? It is not you who speaks!”
“No,” she answered. “It is not I.”
“I say it is not you who say these things,” I repeated. “Who, then?”
“My father. It is his voice. It is his message. And what he has been, I am. There is no other way.”
I moved toward her.
“Tell me this terrible menace behind us—this thing that threatens us—that works its evil upon us. I will not believe that any fault of it is yours.”
“It is mine because it is his,” she said, with a return of her wonderful self-control. “But no one shall ever hear of it from me—no—Jerry—not—even you.”
“He offered to show me that message,” I said. “I refused to see.”
Another little cry issued from her compressed lips.
“You were willing not to know?”
“Yes.”
She went into a corner; without taking her eyes away from mine, she wrung her hands, again and again.
“Why did I ever see you?” she whispered. “Why did I ever love you? Oh, go, while I am strong! Go, while I know that you must never ask for me again! Go, before I bargain with my conscience.”
“You cannot send me away,” I said. A thousand hidden horrors would not have daunted me then. “Will you treat my love for you so? Has your own gone so quickly?”
She shuddered then as if cold steel had been run through her body.
“I am lost,” cried she. “I am lost. I cannot do more. Promise by your love of me,—by your love of God,—never to ask me of those things now ashes on the hearth—never to so much as speak of them to me—till eternity.”
“What then?—I promise,” I said.
“Then I will as solemnly swear to be as good and faithful, as true and ever-loving wife as God will let me be,” she said softly; “and may He forgive me for what I do, because I love you.”
She held out her arms to me, begging to betaken into mine, and when I had touched her she fell back, with her limp body in the curve of my elbow, and, looking up at me, offered her parted lips to the first kiss I had ever given her.
CHAPTER VITHE MOVING FIGURE AGAIN
Such was a betrothal, sir, so extraordinary that had my natural repulsion for the unusual permitted me to have told it before, it would have been with belief that others would think me a man deluded by his own fancies. And yet these are facts I have told you—cold and bare and sufficient to have proved to me that the adventure and romance mourned for by some men are not dead, but, were it only known, still flourish, concealed in the hearts and experience of such matter-of-fact persons as myself.
Our marriage, too, was not of the conventional sort. It took place a fortnight later without any of the celebration usual in such cases. The death of the Judge, the fact that Julianna had no other immediate relatives to act as her protectors, and that my own father, whose affection for me has always been of a rather cold and undemonstrative type, approved not only of my choice of a wife, but also of my plan for an immediate marriage, argued against delay. Furthermore, Julianna herself, with a sad but charming little smile, again and again assured herself in my presencethat she knew her own heart and that for her part there was no need to prolong a period of preparation.
Often, in those days, she spoke to me of her father, with the deepest affection, not as if he were dead, but rather as if his spirit still remained in the old house. She had one of those rare minds that reject the disagreeable superstitious affectations concerning death and that overcome hysterical grief. To be sure, for hours at a time she would suffer an extraordinary melancholy, and then, in my agony of curiosity, I believed that the spectre which had first appeared before her, the night of the Judge’s death, was whispering to her again. True, however, to my solemn oath, which I have always kept, I asked her nothing, and she always emerged from these periods of meditation into moods of gayety and affection which were more charming than I can describe.
She would romp, mind and body, in all the freshness of youth, with the most entrancing grace of movement and with her natural brilliant play of thought.
“I belong to you!” she would exclaim, retreating before my advance. “Come—take me!”
Then, after I had captured her and she had looked up at me, wrinkling her nose playfully, she would suddenly grow serious, and from her smiling eyes tears of happiness would start, andthen, for an hour afterward, she would go singing snatches of song through the house. So that more than once I saw Margaret Murchie stop her household task to listen, shut her old eyes and say, “Thank God for his care of her.”
It need not surprise you that I tell you of her, for, as you may understand when I have told you all, I am now facing circumstances which, for some reason, have caused me to fall in love with her with a strange, new, and even deeper desire, and which raise the necessity for me to save her from some unrevealed menace and win her a second time.
The extraordinary fact in the light of this new situation is that our married life has been, until a year ago, as peaceful as could be. Whatever I might have suffered at first from the fact that I had been forbidden to know or ask of the past, these stings soon lost their power to disturb me. I was glad to forget them because I so hated all things which might tend to disturb the well-ordered life with which well-bred families retain their respectable position.
We found our tastes adapted to a common enjoyment of outdoor and intellectual pleasures, and we spent many hours each week, when alone, in reading the books which pleased us and in playing duets, in which I, being an indifferent player of the piano, contrasted my cold techniquewith the warmth and expression of her performances upon the ’cello. Indeed, we showed ourselves in these duets as in our companionship, for though I loved her, I believe I may have fallen short in those attentions, those little demonstrations and caresses, upon which some women seem to be nourished. As for her, she remained unchanged by marriage or time. By her humor, her tender sympathy, her refreshing, unaffected ways, she won a large and devoted circle of acquaintance, composed of both women and men. If any of the former, however, desired intimacy, they always found a gentle resistance; if the latter, they were made to see that a fortress had been erected on the borderland.
Until a year ago we were very happy, I think. To be sure, as time passed without the coming of any child, Julianna suffered that peculiar grief which, whatever may be its severity, is like no other. The desire for children was not only in her heart and mind: it was also a keen, instinctive yearning. Quietly, and without inflicting upon me any of her distress over unfulfilled hopes of the past, she persisted in the belief that the gift she most desired would not be withheld from her forever. Other than this no cloud seemed to be creeping up our sky, and, indeed, it was only little by little that I realized that some peculiar change had taken place.
I may say to you, I think, that this strange influence came even more than a year ago. I have tried in my own mind to establish a connection between its beginning and an accident which happened at that time.
We had gone for a week-end visit to the Tencorts’ farm in the Sweetbriar Hills, and much against my wishes, expressed, however, sleepily, Julianna had gone out at sunrise, chosen a rangy mare, saddled the creature herself, for the grooms were not up, and had ridden off across the wet fields, alone. Breakfast had already been announced when we heard the hoofs of the animal and caught glimpses of the horse’s yellow neck and Julianna’s plaid jacket, bobbing toward us under the arching trees.
“Your lady is hardly what one might call a gentle rider,” said Jack Tencort. “As for me, I’m glad to see the mare in a foam for once, but I would not be pleased to have my own wife—Hello, she is using her right hand.”
I, too, could see that Julianna’s left arm was hanging by her side, and as she pulled up the panting mare below the porch, I noticed that her lips were white.
“I’m sorry to have forced your animal,” she said, “but I was in a hurry to get back. Jerry! Please hurry. Help me off.”
“What’s the matter?” cried our host behind me.
“To tell the truth,” she said. “I have had my arm broken.”
“Thrown?” cried Tencort, looking for signs of mud or dust on her costume.
Julianna smiled gamely.
“That is a matter wholly between myself and the mare,” she answered.
You know, of course, that in spite of her unconcerned answers the thing was serious. The great trouble, I have always thought, was that no good surgeon was within reaching distance; the country doctor who set the bones failed to discover the presence of some splinters at the elbow, which the injury had thrust up into and displaced some of the nerves and sinew there.
When we had come back home and Nederlinck, the surgeon, had discovered how the healing process had gone on, he told me that for many weeks my wife would have to suffer great pain from the readjustment of the irritated nerves. For two months he did what little he could and then left the rest to time.
Julianna suffered silently. She complained little, but I could see a marked change in her. She became restless. I have seen her pace up and down a room for hours, like a captured animal longing for the jungle, and remain at the dinner-table, after the time had come to go to our library for coffee, with her great round eyes staring beforeher until some one spoke to her. Her vigor disappeared. The moods which had followed the reading of thepost-mortemmessage from the Judge returned; her little exhibits of affection and, I think, even her innocence of personality disappeared. The spectre, whatever it was, seemed present once more. At times I believed I saw in her beautiful face a look of guilt, of fear—the look of a soul in a panic. She became suspicious of her friends and withdrew from them more and more, at times with such awkward haste that it seemed as if she believed they were about to observe some fact which she must, at any cost, hide. Little by little, too, I believed that I detected signs that she was drawing away from me.
For some reason I have always dated the beginning of this change to that morning when Julianna went off to ride alone. Yet, if I wanted to be sure of bringing back to her face an old trace of her mischievous smile, it was only necessary for me to question her about the cause of her accident.
“I have promised the horse never to tell,” she would say, putting her finger to her red lips. And I have never been able to decide whether she was concealing, playfully, some little folly or awkwardness of her own, or, behind her light manner, some more serious experience.
In any case, it was plain that some accursed thing had come between us. I found after some months that I must face this as a fact. We said little to each other from morning till night. When evening had come I did not go home, as I always had, with a little thrill of the old expectation which had never seemed to wear out. Instead I had a subconscious reluctance to enter a relation in which each day sympathy and understanding grew less and less. I began to suffer from a desire to demand from her a complete disclosure of all that had been hidden from me, and this temptation to break my solemn promise grew when, asking her on several occasions as to where she had been at this or that hour, I found that she was evading my questions.
At last it became evident enough that I had not been deceived in my increasing suspicions that something was wrong. One evening she burst into tears as she stood before my chair, and then falling on her knees, caught up my hands in her own and pressed them to her neck, cheeks, and forehead.
“Whatever happens, you will love me?” she cried out desperately. “Say you will! Say you will!”
“You know that,” I said.
Perhaps I had answered as badly as I could, for it seemed to cause her the greatest pain.
“I wish you had not said so,” she exclaimed, with a wild look in her eyes. “It is your goodness that hurts. Don’t you see what comfort it must be to a woman to have her husband cruel to her—beat her—abuse her!”
I drew back from my wife, astounded.
“Stop!” I said, with the first show of stern authority I had ever made since I had known her. “It’s time for you who dare to speak like that—to tell—”
“No! No!”she cried. “For God’s sake, don’t forget your promise. If you do we are lost—I am lost.”
She sprang up and away from me, and with her bare arms crossed over her face and her hands over her ears to shut out all sounds, she ran from the room.
This, sir, was seven weeks ago, and for many days following she would sit and look at me constantly, until, feeling her eyes, I would raise my own to find her face drawn as by a weary period of sleeplessness. At these moments it seemed to me that she was trying to make me understand, just as a faithful dog tries at times to communicate his thoughts by the expectancy, the love, or the pleading shining from his eyes. How much would I now give had I been able to do it!
Within the space of a week she brought to me the suggestion and the plan, which I, being drivento desperation by the impending wreck of our happiness, was mad enough to accept without foreseeing the punishment I would have to suffer through giving for the second time a solemn word of honor.
I think on that morning Julianna was more like her old self than she had been for weeks. Her apartments, though separate from my own, are entered from mine by a narrow door. I had prepared for breakfast,—which we do not have served in our rooms according to the degenerate modern custom,—and then had gone to find her, with the thought in my mind that, whatever she suffered or feared, it was my duty to help her as best I might. I had promised myself to be cheerful, yielding, and as entertaining as possible.
She was sitting on the side of her bed when I came in. The whiteness of the linen and the pale blue of her morning gown served to bring out the delicate color of her skin. I was so delighted with this indication of renewed health that I opened my mouth to express my admiration.
She was quicker than I.
“You find me attractive this morning,” she said with a sad little smile. “I am glad. I wish that I might be attractive to you forever and ever.—I mean my shoulders, my arms, my hands—free from wrinkles or fat or dryness.”
“I’d love you now if you were to assumethe shape of a Chinese dragon,” I said seriously, “—or the Sheik of Baalbec.”
The truth was that I had almost forgotten this latter creature, the automaton. Apparently she had, too, for at first a puzzled look came to her eyes, then she smiled up at me with a bit of her own individual coquetry.
“You are making love this morning?” she said in a gay voice. Yet it seemed to me that in it was a trace of eagerness, shrewdly directed toward a concealed purpose.
“I am going to ask you to go away, Jerry,” she went on timidly, but still smiling.
“Go away? When? For what purpose?” I exclaimed.
“Just go away for me—for my sake,” she answered, straightening her body, raising her head, and looking squarely at me with some of her old strength. “You can go to live in a hotel. You can explain that you are forced to do so for some business reason. You can say that I have gone away.”
She must have seen the flush of my anger, for she raised her hand.
“Don’t!” she pleaded. “I know very well how unreasonable I may seem. But if I have earned any gratitude or respect or love from you, just give me what I ask now and give it to me blindly—without question.”
Her eyes held my own as she said these words and I knew she had cast her spell over me.
“What do you propose to do for these three weeks?” I asked roughly.
“I shall stay in this house,” she answered, spacing her words. “Margaret will stay, too. The rest of the servants I shall send away. But of this I want to be sure—you must not come to find me for three weeks. God only knows what would happen if you did.”
“You are insane!” I cried out, with my hand gripping her round wrist. “It’s that which has hung over us.”
She shook her head.
“Worse,” said she.
Then, as if to assure me that she had not lost her reason, she recalled the months which had just gone and described, as I could not, the change in our home, our life, ourselves.
“It is for you!” she broke out finally, as if she were no longer able to be calm. “For you and for our future I am begging you to do what I ask.”
“Tell me this,” said I, stirred by seeing her tremble so violently. “Has something come to you out of the past?”
“Yes,” she said, reaching behind her for the wall. “Ask nothing more. It has come out of the old, old past. For the love of all that is good, promise to do as I say.”
“And then?” said I.
“Come back to me. I shall be here—then.”
I bowed my head.
“On your word of honor,” she commanded.
“On my word of honor,” said I, and turned away.
I had scarcely done so, however, before I felt her arms about me, the impact and the clinging of her body. Close to me, plucking at my fingers, my sleeves, my wrist, her body shaking with her sobs, she covered me with caresses like those given at some parting for eternity.
“You—are not—in danger of death!” I exclaimed, holding her away from me at arm’s length.
“No, I cannot believe that,” she said quietly. “Such as I am, I shall be when you come back.”
With these words she pushed me gently from the room; I found myself looking into the broad white panel of a closed door. I stood there a moment, dazed, then going to my chamber, I, with my own hands, packed a large kit bag, preparing to do as she had asked. It was only after I had reflected on my promise that I went again to speak with her. I knocked. There was no answer. I tried the latch. The door was locked.
Without eating my breakfast and with a strange conflict between my trust in my wife and the memory of my experiences since I hadknown her, I left the house and have not passed its threshold, though it is two weeks to-morrow morning since I left it.
Do you wonder, sir, that I have suffered all the torments which anxiety can devise or imagination, with its swift picture-film, may unroll before one’s eyes? I have stifled as best I could these uncertain terrors. By day, when I have plunged into my work at the office, at times I have been able to shut my mind to the everlasting rehearsal around and around, over and over again, of the facts which I have told you to-night; but when night has come, I am the prey of my own thoughts. For six days, in spite of my exaggerated fear of scandal, I have prowled like a ghost before my own house, lurking behind trees, watching my own door like a ten-dollar-a-day detective. Dodging the policeman who would know me, I have kept my eyes for hours on the dim light that sometimes burns in my wife’s room, and when I have seen the shadow of some one passing and repassing behind the drawn shade, I have felt my heart in my throat, and have scarcely been able to restrain myself from calling out into the night air, “Julianna! Julianna!”
Finally, I must tell you one thing more. I had believed that perhaps the crisis which had come to her had done so independently of any personality but mine or hers. I was wrong. To-night,unable to remain inactive any longer, and by the accumulation of restraint made desperate, I rung up my house on the telephone. No answer was returned. The feeling that my wife, in danger, was calling upon me, swept over me until, had I been open to such beliefs, I would have felt sure that across the affection and sympathy between us, as across wires, the message came.
I walked hastily from the hotel into the park, taking the path which I had used in the pleasant June days when I had met her at the Monument. You know the kind of night it has been. Therefore when I reached the border of trees opposite my house, I hardly thought it necessary to seek the screen of the shrubbery; the arc lights were throwing the dancing shadows of tree limbs across the pavement, the rush of the wind drowned the noise of footsteps, and the street was deserted, I thought, except for the clouds of whirling dust that passed downtown like so many huge and ghostly pedestrians. I saw that a dim light shone through her blinds and that the house was the picture of peace, suggesting that the walls contained comfort, happiness, and the quiet of a peaceful family. So the fronts of houses lie to us!
At the very moment that this thought came, I saw from my position under the shadow of a spreading oak, which has not yet dropped itsleaves, that I was not the only person who was observing the light behind the blinds. A figure was standing not more than a hundred feet away from me, peering out from beyond one of the light poles. It wore a vizored cap, I thought, and its head rolled this way and that on top of its spare, bent, and agile body. Now and then, however, it ceased this grotesque movement to gaze up at the window. One would have said that this creature was less a man than an ape.
I am not a coward. “Here,” thought I, “is a tangible factor. My word of honor to Julianna is not broken if I seize this customer, whatever he may be, and make him explain the part he is acting.” I stepped forward immediately, but he saw me before I had made two steps. From my bearing and the place where I had concealed myself, he knew at once, I suppose, that I had been watching him, for, turning with a swift motion, he plunged into the shrubs and evergreens behind him. That the thing was as frightened as a rabbit, there can be no doubt; the single little cry it gave forth was not a scream. You would have called it a squeal! In a jiffy I was after him, tearing through the branches among which, with a sinuous twisting of his body, he had just slid; a moment later I reached the open lawn again. The man had vanished.
I knew well enough that he was hiding, probablyflattened on the ground, among the evergreens. At another time, on a quiet evening, listening for his movements or even his breathing, might have told me where he lay, but now the wind and the rattle of dead leaves made it necessary for me to use my eyes in my search. Therefore I went back through the bushes, kicking at dark shadows with my foot, my heart thumping with the excitement of the hunt.
As I reached the street again, I looked up toward my house, and there, at the front door, I saw a crack widen and a black figure of a man come out and down the steps. It crossed the street, and when it had gone into the park, I followed it. You know what happened; this second man was you.
And now I ask you, Doctor, man to man—For God’s sake, tell me what you know!
BOOK III
THE DOCTOR’S LIMOUSINE
CHAPTER IA SHADOW ON THE CURTAIN
Such was Jermyn Estabrook’s story. I have tried, in repeating it, not only to include all the details given by this desperate young man, but to suggest also the coldness and accuracy of his speech. Why? Because the very manner of narration is indicative of the man’s character. He belongs to the dry, dessicated, and abominably respectable class of our society. Pah! I have no patience with them. They live apart, believing themselves rarities; the world is content to let them do it, because theirs is a segregation of stupidity. And Estabrook, though he had fine qualities, belonged to them.
Nothing could have indicated this more clearly than the emphasis he put on his fear of scandal, the smug way he spoke of his word of honor, and the self-conscious blush that came into his handsome face when he mentioned the name of Estabrook. Why, even the menace to his beautiful Julianna was not quite sufficient to cause this egotist to forget his duties toward himself! So if he had not acted with such nobility of spirit during the remainder of our adventures begun thatnight, I could not sit here now and write that I learned to be very fond of him.
At any rate, Estabrook asked me what I knew and I told him all that I have written—about Virginia, that she seemed to feel the existence of something the other side of her bedroom wall, about MacMechem’s notes on the case, the game of life and death I was playing, my conversation with the old servant, and for full measure, I told him where I had learned to place a blow behind a gentleman’s ear. It is necessary to deal with men as excited as Estabrook without showing the nervousness that one may feel one’s self.
When I had finished, he jumped up from his chair, and, clasping his hands behind his back, in the manner of lawyers, he walked twice across the room.
“Why, don’t you see?” he cried. “All that you have told me simply adds mystery to mystery, apprehension to apprehension, fear to fear. And it strikes me that, though my own experience has been bizarre enough, your observations and that of this other doctor who is dead are even more fantastic. What do you hope to accomplish by telling me this gruesome, unnatural state of affairs?”
“I hope to make you act,” I said, putting a chair in his path. “We are sensible men. There are, no doubt, explanations for all occurrences.Our limited mental equipment may not find them at once. But the first thing to recognize is the one important fact; neither of us doubts that your wife is in some grave danger. Personally I believe that if you are not mentally deranged, she is! In any case, it’s your duty to go to your house. Force an entrance if necessary. It cannot be done too soon!”
Estabrook clenched his hands as he heard me, but after a moment he began to shake his head doggedly.
“Can’t you see that it would mean publicity?” he asked.
“Better than losing her,” I argued, feeling certain that he would yield.
He did, in fact, cry aloud, but nevertheless he shook his head.
“Impossible,” he groaned. “I’ve given her my solemn promise!”
I suppose I’ve a reputation for being short of speech, often frank, and sometimes profane. I then allowed myself in my rage to be all three. It was to no purpose. Estabrook would not consent to tearing the cover from his affairs in any way which would cost him the breach of his confounded words of honor.
“You are a madman!” I exclaimed in my vexation. “The death of your wife may be entered against you. What folly!”
“Doctor,” he answered quietly, “I want your help and not abuse. Your storming will not accomplish anything. You are the only living soul to whom I have confessed the presence of a skeleton in my married life, and I want you to help me. I have been told repeatedly that you are a man of courage, steadiness of nerve, scientific eminence, and high ability.”
I could not disagree with him.
“The next thing, then, is Margaret Murchie, the servant,” I said.
“What of her?”
“She knows something,” said I. “You have heard how she talked to me, how she tried to conceal her excitement, how she treated me as a spy, how guilty she seemed, and you have indicated that you, as well as I, believe that she knows what is at the bottom of this.”
“Yes, yes,” cried Estabrook. “I am sure that she knows. But what then—what then? What can we do?”
“My dear fellow,” I said, “why ‘we’?”
He threw up his hands and sprang out of his chair again.
“I beg your pardon,” he answered with a look of chagrin. “I’ve been under a strain, I suppose, and I forgot that you have nothing at stake.”
“Not so fast, Estabrook,” I said. “Take anothernip of the brandy. I prescribe it for you. And not so fast. I have a good deal at stake.”
“What?”
“My case,” I said.
He looked at me with admiration.
“Furthermore,” I went on, “I feel a certain brotherhood with you, young man. You are the first person with whom I’ve rolled on the sod for many years. I have punched you in the neck. You are now my patient and my guest. You have confided in me. You have made an unconscious appeal to me for help. Above all, I am one of those old fogies you have mentioned, who secretly mourn the dying-out of romance. Here!—a glass!—to adventure!”
Estabrook smiled sourly, but he drank.
“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate your spirit and, permit me to say, also your attempt to make me treat this terrible affair in a spirit of sport. But old Margaret is the superlative of stubbornness. We cannot expect to go to her to obtain information. I have lived in the house with her for more than six years. Can I say whether she is a saint or a crafty villainess? No. I know no more now than when I shook her in my anger on the evening the Judge died. She has never addressed me of her own will since. She will give up nothing to me. You have tried her already.”
“I am less conservative in my ideas,” I answered. “Since we are in this field of turbulence and mystery, let us be turbulent and mysterious. All that you say is true. Therefore, we must force the truth from Margaret Murchie.”
“You mean to induce her—” he began.
“Stuff!” said I. “The thing I mean is assault and battery. The thing I mean is kidnaping. You may believe in clapping your hand over her mouth and struggling with her, while we take her out. Personally I prefer a cone containing the fumes of a liquid called cataleptol, fortunately well known in my profession, while still a stranger to criminals.”
But the careful Estabrook shook his head.
“You are not serious?” said he doubtfully. “Do you plan for me to take part in this?”
“There must be two,” I said. “And once we have the lady in this room, I will be willing to guarantee that she will tell all she knows. I cannot ask my chauffeur to go with me, for I trust him about as implicitly as I trust a rattlesnake. Which makes me think—can you run a car?”
Estabrook was weakening. He nodded. I looked at my watch and found that it was after eleven. I drew the curtain and saw that sheets of rain were still being blown slantwise across the foggy radiance of the arc lights. There is a trace of the criminal in me. Perhaps all men feel it attimes. Just then, observing the wildness of the storm, I felt the joy of a midnight misdoing, even more than my desire to find the answer to MacMechem’s question.
“I shall be glad to know how you propose to gain a second admittance,” said Estabrook, when, after tripping over the wet cobblestones and bending our shoulders to the drive of the cold rain, we had groped through the black alley to the dimly lit garage. “I’ll also be glad to know why you suppose you can draw a statement from the old woman.”
“My dear fellow,” said I, “there is the cause of many of your troubles! You are always wanting to see your way to the end. And the way there often must be cut through a trackless waste of events that haven’t happened.”
“In light of my experience it seems to me that your statement is unreasonable,” he muttered peevishly; “but since you are satisfied, I will be, too. If I understand your plan, however, while you sit dry and comfortable within this machine, I am to ride outside, wet to the marrow.”
At this remark the sleepy garage attendant rubbed his eyes, filling them with the sting of gasoline, swore, and forgot to submit my new chauffeur to the inspection of his first surprise. He drew back the door and we trundled out into the water-swept thoroughfare.
The rain, which had begun with a thin drive, had now settled into one of those sod-soaking, autumn downpours, commonly called an equinoctial storm. Estabrook was showing the effect of his nervous strain by driving the machine through it with a recklessness of which I disapproved, not only because we had twice skidded like a curling-stone from one side of the asphalt to the other, but also because I did not wish undue attention attracted to our course. The windows in front of me and to the right and left were covered with streaks of water and fogged with the smoke of my cigarettes which, in my pleasurable excitement, I smoked one after the other; therefore everything outside—the spots of light which lengthened into streaks, the shadows, the other vehicles, the glaring fronts of theatres in Federal Circle—formed a ribbon of smutched panorama, the running of which obliterated vertical lines and made all the world horizontal. At each crossing we jumped, landing again to scoot forward to the next, where, through the opening of side streets, came the faint sound of whistles in the harbor; and still, Estabrook,—confound him!—to my cautions bellowed through the speaking-tube, paid no attention.
With shocking suddenness it occurred to me, for the first time, seriously, that I had no assurance that this man who drove me was not a maniac!
I reviewed the meeting with him, the tale he had unfolded, his distraught actions. I am fairly familiar with psychopathic symptoms and my summary of all that I had observed in him indicated clearly enough that he was as sane as any one of us. But for the first time in my life I realized the feeling of uncertainty about a physician’s diagnosis which a patient must endure. A doctor delivers his opinion as a matter of self-assertion; the layman receives it as a matter of self-preservation. Riding in that flying car, I found myself in both positions. As a physician I was wholly satisfied with my conclusion; as a man I found myself still in doubt and picturing to myself a wild ten-minute ride, which I had no power to prevent, ending in a chaos of broken glass, twisted metal, clothing, blood, and flaming gasoline.
“MacMechem met violent death the moment he became curious as to the other side of the blue wall,” I thought, with a twinge of the superstitious fear which touches prowlers as well as presidents, professors as well as paupers.
We were whirling around a corner then, and through the glass and over Estabrook’s broad shoulders, I believed I saw again the treetops of the park.
“At least he knows where he lives,” said I to myself as we drew up to the curb.
“Good!” I whispered to him, when I had stepped out into the swash of the rain. “Frankly, I hardly enjoyed it. You drive like a demonstrator.”
“I’m a ruin of nerves,” he answered, shivering. “I’m afraid I’m a poor assistant for you, anyway. What do you want me to do?”
“Just climb inside there where it is warmer,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Back in a minute?” he repeated as if dazed.
“From the Marburys’, if you don’t mind,” I explained.
He leaned back against the cushions, disregarding the fact that with every nervous movement water ran from him as from a squeezed sponge. “Oh, I forgot your patient,” said he, with a twitching mouth. “But, for God’s sake, don’t keep me waiting long!”
I shook my head in answer; then ran, rather than walked, up the Marburys’ steps; indeed, that night taught me how active a corpulent old codger can be if the need comes.
Miss Peters evidently had been at the window in her night vigil, watching the storm; she opened the door.
“Well?” said I.
“The tide has turned.”
Under the hall light I looked up at her stony,expressionless face. The Sphinx itself was never more noncommittal.
“What do you mean?”
“I supposed you knew,” she whispered. “I supposed that was why you came back to-night so late.”
I exclaimed in a hoarse and savage whisper. I was furious. This time I had fought with disease not only, as in a common struggle, with carnivorous Death, but as a hardened sinner whose heart has suddenly opened to a child.
“Virginia is dead!” I said, glaring at her.
She never changed the coldness of her tone.
“No,” she said. “She is going to get well.”
“Confound it!” I growled, under my breath. “How do you know?”
“The blue wall,” she answered with a sneer.
“Bah!” said I, starting up the stairs. “We shall see.”
As I pushed open the door, I observed that the nurse had procured a red silk shade to screen the single electric lamp on the table. The yellow rays were changed to a pink, reflected on the wall, sending their rosy lights into the depths of that bottomless blue; the breaking of a clear day after a spring rain has no softer mingling of colors. For a moment I looked at the chart, then with new hope turned toward Virginia herself.
Either the new tints diffused by the lamp deceivedthe eye, or the little girl’s pale skin had in fact been warmed by a new response from the springs of life. She was sleeping quietly, her innocent face turned a little toward me and in the faint, illusive smile at her mouth, and in the relaxation of her beautiful hands, I read the confirmation of Miss Peters’s prophecy. I, too, believed just then that Virginia would not die, and that, as so rarely happens in this disease, her recovery would be complete.
“It is a wild night,” said the bony nurse when I had tiptoed out of the room.
She seemed to be wishing to draw from me an opinion on the extraordinary rally the child had made. That was her way; she always invited discussion of a subject by comments about something wholly irrelevant.
“We shall see,” I answered again. “A relapse might be fatal. To-morrow—we shall see.”
“It is raining hard,” she said as she turned the latch for me.
“Yes,” said I, “and the treatment till then must be the same. Who knows—”
“Who knows?” she repeated.
A blast of wind and water and the closing of the door seemed to deny an answer. I found myself on the steps again, looking into the staring eyes of my car, and, with a sharp jump of my thoughts, wondering how we were to accomplishthe work we had come to do. I descended, however, and when I had reached the door of my limousine, I saw Estabrook’s drawn face pressed close to the glass. It was the sight of him that gave me an idea; it was his first words that, for a moment, drove it from my mind.
“Look! Look!” he said to me. “Look at her window!”
I had merely noticed that a new, bright light shone there; now, in a quick glance over my shoulder, I saw a shadow on the curtain—the shadow of a figure standing with its arms extended above a head, thrown back as if in agony.
“Is it your wife?” I asked in a hoarse whisper.
He took my wrist in the grip of his cold hand. “My God, Doctor, I don’t know,” he said. “It looks—its motions, its attitudes, its posture!—it looks like the thing I saw outside the Judge’s window!”