profile. He walked twenty miles a day--he did boxing and fencing and
riding--it was no use--he thought when we--when--he hoped if we were
married--oh, Miss Jessop, she came just the same!"
"For heaven's sake!" I said again. It wasn't very helpful, but I
simply couldn't think of anything else. She was so pretty and sweet,
and he was so plucky, and who would have supposed it would have got on
his nerves so!
Her night gown was solid real lace, and the front of it was sopping wet
where she'd cried, and the top of the sheet, too.
"I gave her to him, and he won't give her back--I can't make him!" she
went on, gasping and sobbing. "I begged him on my knees, but he
wouldn't."
"And don't you see her?" I asked.
"No, no, I can't!" she cried. "I try, but I can't."
"Well, that's something, anyway," I said. "You wait till I go and
speak to him again, and put some cold water on your eyes, why don't
you?"
For it just occurred to me that maybe I could do something with him,
after all. He was leaning against the window at the end of the
corridor, and I never like to see excited people near windows, after my
suicide woman, so I sprinted along till I got to him. But I really
don't believe there was any need for it--he wasn't that kind.
"See here, Mr. Ferrau," I said, "do you really believe that Miss
Elton--I beg your pardon, Mrs. Ferrau--really gave that old Janet ghost
to you?"
"Believe it? _believe it_?" he said, staring at me out of his red eyes.
"No, I don't believe it, Miss Jessop--I know it! I tell you I see the
damned thing, in a brown dress, on the edge of my bed every night!"
"Well, then," I said, "do you think you could give it to anybody else?"
And just at that moment, and not before, I remembered old Margaret!
"Why--why, I never thought of that," he said. "I--I wouldn't put any
one else through such a hell, though----"
"Oh, come, now," I said. "Maybe they wouldn't think it was so bad as
you do, Mr. Ferrau."
"But who would--oh, it's too crazy!" he said, half angry, but all
broken up, so he didn't much care how it sounded.
"Oh, lots of people," I told him. "Why, you might easily find some one
with an incurable disease, you know, that hadn't long to live and
wanted money----"
Of course, this was all nonsense, but anything to humour people in his
condition--it's the only way. And what do you think? He turned around
like a shot and stared at me as if I'd been a ghost, myself.
"That might be possible," he said, very slowly; "it's just possible I
know ... excuse me, I'll go in and speak to my wife a moment!"
He left me there and in a few minutes he came for me again, and I went
into their parlour. She had on a beautiful pale rose negligee all
covered with lace and her braids were wound around her head: she'd
wiped her eyes.
"Would you perhaps play a little bridge with us, Miss Jessop?" says he,
trying to keep calm. "We think we'd better have some one with us."
So there we sat till four in the morning, playing three-handed bridge,
and if anybody knows of a funnier wedding-night, I'd like to hear of it!
I suppose anybody would have thought us all crazy if they could have
seen us, the next night, sitting, all three of us, by the bed of that
queer old man that lived in old Greenwich Village. (My patient let me
off, for I told her it was a case of a young bride and groom, and she
was delighted to oblige the Eltons. She told me she should call on
them after that! She was a climber, if there ever was one, that woman.)
He was an old valet of Mr. Ferrau's father, and Mr. Ferrau was
supporting him till he died in a little cottage there. He had angina
and was likely to go off any minute, and the Lord knows what Master
Louis paid the old monkey--I'll bet it was no thirty cents! He only
talked French, but I could see he thought Mr. Ferrau was crazy--he
looked at me so queerly out of his little wrinkled eyes and nodded his
head as if to say, "What a pity all this is! But we must humour him."
Mrs. Ferrau told me afterward that her husband promised him solemnly to
take Janet back if he couldn't stand her--and he would have, too, and
don't forget it! He was a game one. But the old fellow just kept
saying:
"_Bon, m'sieu, bon, bon!_" and kept reaching for his envelope. He was
only afraid they'd change their mind, you see.
Then Mr. Ferrau lay down on a cot next the old fellow's--he was kept
very clean and neat by the woman that boarded him--and I stayed in the
room while Master Louis gave that darned old Janet away. He insisted
that I should witness it, and to tell you the truth, when I remembered
what black Margaret had said about having a witness, I _did_ feel
rather queer, for a moment. But of course they were all crazy--as
crazy as loons--so far as that one thing went. You see, it was what
Dr. Stanchon calls an _idee fixe_. They had to be humoured.
Mrs. Ferrau and I went out, then, and walked up and down for an hour
through the village with the chauffeur behind us, a little way, and I
really thought I'd be dippy myself, before long, if I had to pretend to
be serious about it much longer. It's no wonder to me the doctors in
asylums get touched themselves, after what I went through with those
two.
In just about an hour he came dashing out and pushed us into the car.
We didn't need to ask him--he looked ashamed, but oh, so different!
"Let's get back to town," was all he said, and I never mentioned it to
him again, any of it. Of course, a sensible fellow like him _would_
feel too ridiculous; knowing he had that silly idea in his head, yet
not being able to get over it without such childishness--I felt sorry
for him.
I know that they didn't go back to Lakewood, for her maid packed up
there, and a week after that the old lady wrote me from Long Island
that they'd gone for a honeymoon tour in the car through Southern
France, so I knew that father-in-law's valet hadn't gone back on his
bargain. I never knew what that old monkey made on it, but Mrs. Ferrau
told me he was going to leave it to the Catholic church in Normandy,
where he was born. I hope it did some good.
I went up to Greenwich that summer with a little boy who had
tuberculosis of the spine (the sweetest little fellow, and so clever!)
and on one of my afternoons out with him I stopped at the old cottage
where the valet lived, just to ask after him. The woman there told me
he had passed away about ten days after I was there before.
"In the night?" I asked, more for something to say than any real reason.
"No, in his sleep, in the afternoon," she said. "He didn't sleep much
at night, after his young gentleman came, I noticed. He seemed to have
bad dreams. He'd be praying away and clicking those rosary beads half
the night, sometimes. But he went out easy, at the last. I learned a
little French when I was lady's maid to a party, once, so I could get
along pretty well with him. But I couldn't make out about those
dreams, exactly; they seemed to be about something brown, with its back
to him, on the bed. But he was pretty contented by day, when he was
awake; he kept telling me of all he was leaving to his church."
... When you think about it, it was queer, wasn't it?
THE MIRACLE
"And are they all really insane?"
He looked at me curiously.
"'Insane'?" he repeated, "'really'?"
He was very young, but very clever, and I had known his mother well and
listened to his letters from school many a time; she was intensely
proud of him.
"I tell you what it is, aunty," he began, selecting a cigarette with
the deft manual gesture of a born surgeon (he was only twelve years
younger than I, and his phenomenal record of almost impossible
accomplishment made him seem far older than his years; but we kept to
the habits of his perambulator days, when I had been tremendously
pleased with the title). "I tell you what it is, aunty--I'm hanged if
I know!"
He peered slit-eyed through the clouds of smoke, and I waited eagerly
for what would come; when his eyes took on that look the boy seemed to
me, frankly, inspired. Twenty-three years (he had finished Harvard at
nineteen) appeared so pitifully inadequate to account for him! One was
forced to the belief that he had directly inherited that marvelous
"intuition" of his: that it was actually part of his famous father's
experience--for he was Richard Stanchon's only son.
"Of course, you know," he said quietly, "I see what they mean--most of
'em. I always do, somehow. And the more you do that, the less insane
they get to seem to you. It's only you and I, a little warped, a
little exaggerated. My idea is that fewer and fewer of them will be
sent to places like this, and more and more put out among families--oh,
don't shiver, aunty, there's nothing to shiver at, I assure you.
"Look here--do you see that tall girl in the blue silk shirtwaist?"
I saw her--she was reading _Punch_ before the big library fire (it was
furnished like a wealthy private club, the library), and just because
she was so calm and high bred and Madonna-faced, I flattered myself
that I could jump in the right direction.
"Does she murder babies?" I asked resignedly.
"Not at all," he replied, with a tiny grin for my cleverness, "not a
bit of it. She only insists on taking five baths a day and never
touching any washable thing that's been handled. She wears five
changes a day and cleans the piano keys before she plays--plays very
well, too."
"But--but, is that all?"
"Every bit."
"Then why must she come here?"
"Oh, well, there are practical complications, of course. She thinks
most people are pigs, and says so. Then her family is nervous--I
notice most of them come from very nervous families--and they simply
couldn't rub on. She shampoos her head every day. It's my firm
belief, aunty, that if some steady-going German-American family without
any nerves would give her two rooms and a bath and put up with her for
a few months, she'd be all right. Honestly, as it is, she's fretting
herself crazy. She's no fool, you know."
"Heavens, Will! Why, I can perfectly understand----"
"Of course you can. Not mother, though. Mother won't hear about
her--and the joke of it is, you know, aunty, mother takes her three
tubs a day all summer and never shakes hands in warm weather!"
I gasped.
"But, Will, this is awful! Why, we're all on the verge, if you look at
it that way!"
He shrugged and put out his hand to a heavy-faced, ordinary woman of
the well-groomed New York type.
"Good afternoon, Miss Vint--let me present you to my aunt, Mrs. Ba--oh,
come, now, aunty's a woman of the world and she's married, too.
There's no reason on earth why you shouldn't."
"But, doctor, you know what I am----"
"I know," he said kindly, and the real sympathy in his boy's eyes
struck moisture into my own, "I know. But you're living it down--no
woman could do more."
"Really?" she begged, her features working, "really, doctor? Heaven
knows I try!"
"And you never slip back. _You never slip back!_" he said slowly and
emphatically. "Just think what that: means, Miss Vint!"
We nodded at each other and she hurried off, almost smiling.
"She looks no more insane than I do," I suggested, and again he
shrugged.
"There's where it is," he answered quietly; "she's just a little over
the line, that's all. She's Levi B. Vint's daughter, you know."
"Really!"
"I'd hate to think what she pays a week. What she's really worrying
about, I believe, is the old man's money. She insists he was all
right, you know, and all this exposure business, though it couldn't
shake her trust in the old scoundrel, got on her nerves and she got
worrying over herself. Everybody argued with her--the whole Vint gang
are a set of bronze mules, you know--and finally she arrived at a
definite _idee fixe_: I'm sure it could have been prevented. Anyway,
she thinks she's--she's all sorts of a bad lot, you know. She won't
speak to the girls here--not even to the maids. She says she might
corrupt them."
"How absurd--I mean how sad! But she's so healthy; she'll soon
recover?"
"I don't know," he said briefly, and something scared me in his voice.
"She's a very hard case. A bad age."
We walked in silence through a long glass-walled hall, a sort of
conservatory, with palms and caged canaries chirping and trilling.
"I hate those birds!" I cried nervously; he stopped and looked
thoughtfully into me--it was no less than that.
"That's interesting," he said abruptly, "I don't like 'em, either. And
you're one of the best-balanced women I know. Mother, too--she doesn't
care for them. No--nor Beatrix."
Beatrix was the hardy young woman who contemplated marrying him--a
tremendous venture, it seemed to me!
"But they seem to like 'em here. The crazier they are (there's nobody
bad here, you know) the more they like 'em, ... Did you know mediums
and spiritualists and all that sort can't live without 'em? I never
heard anybody mention it, but it's so. When I went over to Lourdes,
last year, I made a point of looking up the families of the people that
had the visions, and they all kept larks in cages----"
I saw he was following some train of thought and kept silence. At
length he shrugged his shoulders.
"But that isn't what I asked you out for," he began. "I thought you'd
be interested in seeing--Oh, Mrs. Leeth, how are you?"
"Very well, thank you, doctor."
A busy, quiet, elderly woman, plainly dressed, cut across our path
through the long conservatory.
"Everything all right to-day?"
"Everything, I think, thank you, doctor."
There was nothing to remark about her until she lifted her eyes, and
then the curious, intense depth of them (like a dog who could speak, I
thought), held me almost breathless with sympathy. She looked,
somehow, as if she had gone through more than would be right for her to
tell.
"Poor creature," I said as she disappeared through a baize door. "Tell
me about her. What is her trouble?"
"She has none that I know of," he replied quietly. "She's the
housekeeper."
"Good Heavens, Will! I think I should go mad myself, if I lived here!
How does one tell them apart?"
"I don't think one does, always," he remarked placidly. "I sometimes
think that accounts for a good deal! There's a man, now--see that
fussy little fellow getting out of his motor coat? That's Jarvyse."
"_The_ Jarvyse? The great specialist?"
"That's it," he grunted with a disrespectful grin. "From my point of
view, you know, aunty, he might about as well stay in, now he's here.
I wouldn't go too near him, if I were you--he'll say you're a
paranoiac, if you mention your prejudice against free silver or thick
soup at dinner or steam heat. Everything's been paranoia with him
since 1902. It's just as much an _idee fixe_ as anybody's here. If
you object to anything he says, he diagnoses you immediately. You
couldn't build asylums fast enough to hold all Jarvyse's paranoiacs!
That's why I'm here, by the way; the case I want you to see is really
father's. But he loses his temper so, when he meets Jarvyse, that he
sends me up, instead. The old boy doesn't bother me--'Morning, doctor."
We stepped into a noiseless lift and he ran it to the fourth floor. At
the end of the corridor an open door showed a pleasant little interior;
a window full of red geraniums, goldfish in a globe, an immense grey
cat by a little Franklin stove with brass balls atop, and in the centre
a round old-fashioned mahogany table piled high with various household
linen. We walked directly into this little home-like picture--a great
relief after the lavish publicity of the immense halls--and as I
greeted the housekeeper, who stood by the heaped table (with an actual
note of apology in my voice for having mistaken her!) I noticed a
little elderly man, a vague pepper-and-salt effect, sitting by a
business-like desk in the corner, his hat and stick on the chair beside
him, a book and pencil on his knee.
"Good morning, Mr. Vail, I rather hoped you might be here; let me
present you to my aunt, Mrs.----"
"Good heavens!" I almost said it aloud, for the vague pepper-and-salt
took on familiar lines suddenly, and the matter-of-fact little features
scattered so indistinguishably, as it were, though the boyishly round
face became obviously one with the much-photographed trader-prince; it
was Absolom Vail, the multimillionaire! When had he...
"Mrs. Leeth used to be Mr. Vail's housekeeper for many years," my young
doctor's voice sounded reprovingly (had my jaw dropped?) "and he often
looks in on her like this."
"Oh!" I recalled the hat and stick and breathed again. Not that I had
any interest in the old gentleman, but he seemed a sort of public
character, he and his "old stocking savings-bank," his "millions for
deposit, but not a cent for speculation," his "every penny earned in
honest trade," and all the rest of it.
"Never forgot an old friend yet," he chirruped, and the housekeeper
smiled gravely. It was very decent and kindly and quite what one would
have expected; I remembered that every employee always received a
personally selected gift at Christmas and that he had stood godfather
for seventeen (or was it twenty-seven?) children of labourers, born on
the great eight thousand acre estate on the Hudson.
My boy listened a moment to a call from the house-telephone, turned on
his heel and swung hurriedly down the corridor. I appeared to have
been abandoned.
The housekeeper's lips moved silently as she fingered the napkins on
the further corner of the table; it was unnecessary, evidently, to
include her in the social situation, though she would be perfectly
capable of the inclusion if it should be thought best.
"I had the pleasure of meeting your daughter in London last spring, Mr.
Vail," I said.
"Minnie?" he inquired, his shrewd little eyes on me.
"I think so--the Countess of Barkington."
"Yes, that's Minnie. Well, Minnie's a good girl, I guess. I haven't
seen her much lately. Not for some years, but once or twice. Ever see
Irene?"
"I don't think so. She married----"
"She took an Italian. She's a countess, too--contessa they call it
over there. The Contessa di Abbriglia. Hannibal, her husband's name
is--always seemed like a Newfoundland dog's name, to me. He hasn't any
such amount of land as Barkington, but the family's older, I believe.
Hannibal's old enough, anyhow. How old was the count, Mrs. Leeth, when
Irene married him?"
"Miss Irene was twenty-one, Mr. Vail, and Count Hannibal was forty."
"You knew them both?" I asked her, caught by a sudden curiosity to see
those deep, secret brown eyes once more. The famous Absolom was just
what I had supposed he would be, neither more nor less; the most
interesting thing I could see in him was this simple, friendly kindness
to an old retainer.
"I dressed both the young ladies for their weddings," she replied
quietly.
"It must be very pleasant to you--these talks of old times," I hazarded.
"It is," she answered.
I thought of a number of remarks suitable to one or both of my old
companions, but they all, somehow, seemed banal and excessive as I
marshalled them to my lips. A quaint, almost hypnotic quiet rose like
the tide around us: all seemed said and agreed to. A tiny fire
flickered on the Franklin hearth; the iridescent fan-tailed fish bent
and flattened and glided in the translucent globe; an old clock ticked
restfully somewhere. The two elderly friends there--for they were
friends; one felt it. And why not? They were from the same class,
undoubtedly, the hardware king and the housekeeper, the solid
bourgeoisie that is essentially alike in all countries and
centuries--these two friends exhaled an atmosphere of contented trust
in each other and what life had left for them that spread like a
visible cloud, a sort of sunset autumn haze, quite through the little,
homely room, and took me under it, with them. No wonder he liked to
come there: it did not require much imaginative faculty to infer that
neither Barkington nor di Abbriglia had been able to offer such an
asylum to their father-in-law....
Asylum! How unconsciously I had fitted the original sense of the
kindly old word to its technical uses! Asylum: that was what it was, a
refuge, a shelter, a little back-water in the great whirlpool of
overstrained, nervous modern life. And Absolom Vail had found one
here, it seemed. For he was unmistakably at home here; this was not
the first nor the second visit, that was plain. Such atmospheres do
not grow from casual encounters.
We exchanged comfortable, old commonplaces from time to time, while
Mrs. Leeth sorted, and the hardware lord actually jotted down her notes
as to necessary darning and replacing, in a worn red account book--it
was almost too quaint for belief! He chuckled at it a little, but not
much; it was, after all, such a practical, sane sort of interlude in
all the horrid, morbid confusion that the place, with all its
conservatories and old mahogany and spacious vistas, necessarily
included. They were more than common normal, this simple, middle-class
pair, on their friendly little housekeeping island, with this
treacherous sea of pain and revolt forever lapping at the edges.
I don't remember how he got to telling me of his early life, but I
believe it is a habit of all that sort, and Absolom was no exception to
his class and stratum. I was particularly impressed by one little
incident, the foundation, really, of his fortune--if any event can be
selected in those lives which seem destined to exhibit the farthest
possibilities of accumulation.
"I had just exactly one hundred dollars," he said (he had the
characteristic superstitious reverence for set sums, even decimal
multiples of the national symbol) "that I'd saved up as carpenter's
assistant in Greenwich, Connecticut. I took it out of the savings-bank
and I came to New York with a clean shirt and a tooth brush and my old
mother's Bible, packed in a little basket with some boiled ham and
bread. I looked out a verse just as I stepped onto the train--what do
you think it was?"
"I have no idea, Mr. Vail."
"No. You wouldn't have. Well, it was this: _Blessed shall be thy
basket and thy store. D'you see--basket_! And I always intended to
keep a store."
He fixed me triumphantly with his twinkling Santa Claus eyes.
"It's in Deuteronomy," he said.
"The coincidence must have seemed very comforting to you," I suggested
gravely.
"It did. It did," he answered, "and from that moment on, I never had a
doubt. Barkington didn't care much for that story, though--he says
that the old fellows that translated the Bible away back in some king's
time--King----"
"King James," said the housekeeper quietly.
"Yes, King James. Well, he says that they didn't mean that kind of a
store. Maybe not. But it did the job for me, that verse, just the
same."
The whole incident seemed very characteristic, very national, somehow,
and I reflected gently upon it as we sat in silence, broken only by
Mrs. Leeth's practical, dry voice as she announced:
"Greek Key, Irish weave, spring, 1908, six dozen, fair order.
"Thistle pattern, fall, 1906, four dozen, eight darned, ten badly worn."
It seemed that I had been there a long time....
At length I heard Will's quick, nervous step, and as it neared the door
I rose, really reluctantly, and met him.
"I am quite in the doctor's hands," I said, "and I see that he thinks
it time for me to leave. Good-bye, Mr. Vail"--he put his hand out for
his gloves and cane--"if you are going, too, perhaps, can I take you
back in town with me? I motored out."
"I'm afraid you can't," he replied, with his twinkling smile, "because
I'm one of the ones that don't get out!"
I stared at him blankly.
"'That don't get out'!" I repeated stupidly. "_That don't get out_?
Why?"
"Because I'm insane," he said placidly.
* * * * *
I don't pretend to any unusual share of equanimity, and it was not till
we were back in the shelter of my own home, with the comfort of my own
tea-tray before me and my own little applewood fire snapping on the
hearth, that I brought myself to discuss the matter with Emily's boy.
He had come back with me and we were going to the opera together later.
"I suppose that was what you wanted me to see?" I said abruptly.
He nodded.
"Just that. I wanted your idea. It's one of the most interesting
cases--with all its complications--I ever knew. Father's turned it
over to me, practically. He knows all about it."
"But, Will, the man's as sane as I am!"
"How much did you talk with him?"
"Quite as much as with hundreds of other people!"
He smiled thoughtfully.
"Talk much with Mrs. Leeth?"
"Oh, yes--she seems much more ordinary than her eyes, doesn't she?"
"What did she say?"
"Oh, just commonplaces--I don't recall anything special...."