I applied myself to recollection. What, after all, _had_ she said? As
a matter of fact, beyond her linen tabulation I could not recall more
than a dozen words.
"Anyway," I remonstrated, "she makes you feel as if she talked! She
doesn't seem silent."
"No," he admitted thoughtfully, "that's true. But she never talks.
She hardly speaks to the servants--they're all under her, you know--but
they all seem to know what she wants. I've tested lots of them: the
cook, the laundresses, the furnace man, the steward--and when they come
to consider, they can't recall a dozen words a day. But they always
insist, at first, that she gives them detailed orders and criticises
them constantly. It's funny."
"Oh, well," I broke in impatiently, "never mind her! Tell me about Mr.
Vail--how long has he been there?"
"He's been there six months!" Will announced triumphantly, suppressing
a delighted smile at my amazement.
"Six months! And nobody knows?"
"Nobody but the family. Oh, he gets out, now and then: I or one of the
doctors goes with him and he puts in a day at the office. Everybody
thinks he's travelling or taking electric light baths for his liver or
Roentgen rays for his lungs or osteopathy for a cold in the head--Lord
knows what!"
"A day at the office? But how can he, if he's insane?"
"He's not too insane to make money." His smile was deliberately
intended to intrigue me, I thought.
"He's no more insane than I am!" I cried. "Who put him there?"
"The Countess of Barkington--primarily. Abbriglia agreed, but _they'd_
never have done it alone--Irene's too fond of the old fellow."
"Do you mean to say----"
"Oh, don't get excited, aunty--he committed himself. Nobody roped and
gagged him."
"But what doctor----"
"Two besides me."
"Besides you? Why, Will!"
"Oh, I didn't say that I recommended him to an asylum. Not at all. If
he had fought it, I could have found reasons on the other side."
"Like a corporation lawyer!"
"Oh, well...."
He began rolling cigarettes; they were his one weakness.
"The question is," he said slowly, "what is insanity? Medical
insanity's one job, legal insanity's another.... Suppose your butler
was convinced of the fact that he was Napoleon: would you care a
continental, provided he buttlered as per contract? So long as he
didn't shout, '_Tete d'armee!_' as he passed the salad, what would you
care? It's quite possible that he has some such delusion, for all you
know."
"Of course, I see that."
"There was that old nurse of ours--Esther, you know? To the day of her
death she swore that the druggist on the corner of Hartwell Street was
Charley Ross--the child that was abducted long ago. You couldn't argue
her out of it nor laugh her out of it--she said she had a feeling. She
brought us up in it, you know, and for years I believed that he was
Charley Ross and regarded him with veneration. She was a perfectly
good nurse, just the same. But that idiotic fancy was part of her
life--strengthened with every year of her life. It was an _idee fixe_."
"Well?"
"Well. Esther died a poor woman, but if she had left fifty thousand
to--to a home for blind mulattoes, say, the first thing her nephews
would have brought forward was that idea of Charley Ross."
"Brought forward?"
"To break her will. They would have said that it proved her mentally
incapable."
"But it doesn't, Will, does it?"
"That's just as you see it. She wasn't incapable of looking after us
and dressing mother and doing the marketing and keeping the accounts
and making all her own clothes and some of ours. But if you ask me if
she had a perfectly normal mind, I should have to say no."
"I see, Will."
I was extremely interested: I seemed to see, glimmering far off, what
we were getting to, and it was gripping, absorbing. But I had no idea
what we really were getting to--not then.
"Now, we'll take another case," he said, at another cigarette.
"I was at Lourdes last year, as you know, studying the Pilgrimage.
Curious thing. Not an atom of proof, you see, that anybody was ever
cured of a headache there. Not even sense enough to use the immense
suggestive power that's massed there to do real good to neurasthenics
and hysterics--in fact, they try to bar them. They prefer goitre,
which is _not_ cured by dirty baths, unfortunately. The people who go
away from there think they were cured from this, that and the other;
whole business founded on a perfectly authenticated case of _dementia
praecox_--as much a pathological condition as gout or insomnia. I
interviewed a prize case; she appeared before their bluff at a
scientific council and presented affidavits of cure from consumption, a
year previous. I examined her later. It was--as the man
said--interesting if true, but the trouble was, it wasn't true, for she
was nearly gone, then. I gave her three months, and she died, I took
pains to learn, in ten weeks. Well: that was her delusion. Was she
sane?"
"She was misinformed--mistaken."
"Quite so--but she _knew_ she was cured, remember. She felt it. The
rest of us didn't.
"Now let's go a step farther, if you don't mind. Beatrix tells me that
the Almighty God, the creator of the universe, is the father of the son
of a young Jewess, and sacrificed his son in order to save the world.
This seems to me fantastic, frankly. But mind you, aunty, though I
know that druggist wasn't Charley Ross, and though I know that the
miraculous baths of Lourdes didn't cure poor Marie Tremplin of her
tuberculosis, I can't say that what Beatrix assures me she knows about
the Deity isn't so! It appears to me quite incapable of demonstration,
but maybe it all happened as she says. Only I don't believe with her
that she _knows_ it. I say she _believes_ it. If it helps her, as she
says it does, to be the good and lovely girl she is, all right. It
might help Parrott to stand straight to think he was Napoleon. All
right."
"That's pragmatism," I suggested.
"Oh, well," he said, with one of his curious old smiles, "they call it
different things different years, I suppose."
He drew himself up, and I could see something was coming.
"Now, aunty, attend to me. I couldn't put Beatrix in an asylum for
what I and many, many others consider _her_ delusion, could I?"
"Why, Will, of course not!"
"No, nor Marie Tremplin."
"Equally of course not. She has a right to her miracle, legally, I
suppose, as well as Beatrix."
"Precisely. Well, here comes along Absolom Vail, and says _he's_ had a
miracle, too. He hasn't millions of people behind him, like Beatrix,
nor thousands like Marie, nor even half a dozen, as our old Esther
had--she converted all the servants and us children. He has only
one--himself. A poor miracle, perhaps, but his own. And Barkington
lands him in an asylum. The day of miracles is over."
"Why, Will! Why, Will..." I murmured. I seemed to feel myself on the
edge of something very big and cloudy and confusing, but very
necessary, somehow, to be understood. The trap he had led me into so
neatly had fastened softly, but with almost an actual click, upon me.
"What--what _is_ his miracle?" I inquired, in a subdued voice. I was
beginning to feel a little afraid of this boy of ours.
"I had hoped he'd tell you himself. He will, if you ask him.... We
ought to go and dress, oughtn't we?"
There was no more to be got out of him that night: he was passionately
fond of music and had no mind to lose the prelude to _Tristan_.
But through all that evening the big, shadowy something he had stirred
up in my mind grew and grew and troubled me increasingly.
"A poor miracle, but his own..." it haunted me. I went up with him
again in two days' time, as he had expected me to, I have no doubt.
In the little room with the gold fish and the Franklin grate everything
was the same except that the piled linen on the table was new: it was
being listed and stamped. And at the little desk in the corner, his
gloves and stick beside him on the floor, sat Absolom Vail, the
hardware king, in a pepper-and-salt suit.
"I brought my nephew up with me and thought I'd look in for another
little chat, Mr. Vail," I said. The housekeeper lifted her
unfathomable eyes to mine for a moment, then dropped them.
"Six dozen snow-drop twenty-eight inch breakfast napkins," she said
quietly, but my mind received--I cannot explain how--a totally
different impression from what the sound of these words conveyed.
Afterward, I realized that I thought suddenly of the sea, great clouds,
unheard of, enormous fish, and myself driving like the wind across
high, tumbling waves ... it was extraordinary. I had been literally
lost in her eyes.
"Always glad to see the doctor's friends," he chirped, and soon, as
Will had said, he was talking.
It was all very simple--simple and pathetic and typical enough. The
hall bedroom, the rising clerk, the new branch in Kansas City, the
young, fresh wife, the little story-and-a-half frame house, the bigger
one on a better street, the partnership, the two daughters, the private
school, the invention of the new time-lock, the great factory, the
Trust, the vice-presidency, the clear head in the panic, the board of
directors, the mass of capital, the amazing power.
"And of course we brought the girls up very different from what we'd
had."
"Of course."
The old epic of America; the wonderful, cruel destiny of its sons and
daughters ... I seemed to see them, climbing, climbing, their dainty
feet on the bent, grey heads of the human stairway love had built and
thrift had mortared and habit had hardened there!
"It was all right while mother was with us," he went on. "I used to
get home late after one of those big dinners, and she'd be sitting up
and warm me a little soup or something on the alcohol lamp (she'd never
touch electricity, mother wouldn't) and I'd get my coat off and sit
awhile; she'd send the servants to bed. Minnie never liked that, but
while mother lived, Minnie didn't have so much say. Not but that
Minnie wasn't a good girl and a good daughter, for a minute, mind you!
Wasn't she?"
He turned to his old housekeeper.
"Miss Vail had a very fine mind," she said quietly, "a great deal of
faculty."
"That's it--faculty," he repeated contentedly. "But Irene was easier
to get along with. A good deal easier. You said you'd never met
Irene?"
"I never had that pleasure."
"She was married over in Italy. The Queen of Italy asked for it to be
that way, and with mother gone, I didn't see it mattered much, though
Minnie didn't like it. But the Queen was Hannibal's godmother. She
was at the wedding. We didn't think, when Irene used to lie in her
little crib in the front bedroom in Kansas City, sucking on that rubber
doll, that a queen would be at her wedding, did we?"
I looked out of the window for a minute, frowning a little in the
effort to adjust my ideas to the surprise of the Vails' having had a
housekeeper in those early days. When I turned my face to the room
again, Mrs. Leeth was gone.
"Minnie got me to give up the business, and after a while I did. So
long as I was working for mother and the girls, I'd never have stopped,
but with them gone, and the rest I had to take, after the pneumonia, I
sort of let things slide. What's the use? There's Vint, now--he kept
at it till he died. No one to do for, really--his girl had all her
mother's money, too, and she gives it all to foreign missions, anyhow.
"She's here, you know. Thinks she's--well, I guess I couldn't tell a
lady just what she thinks she is, poor thing!"
"I see why she's here, Mr. Vail; but tell me, why do you stay here?" I
cried suddenly; the quiet, sensible little man forced it out of me,
fairly.
He looked whimsically up at me--I sat higher in my chair than he.
"Didn't the doctor tell you?" he asked quietly.
"No, he said you would, perhaps."
"Well, I don't mind. It happened when she died."
"Mrs. Vail?"
"No, Mrs. Leeth."
I jumped--I couldn't help it.
"Wh--what?" I gasped. What a horrible thing--like a bomb thrown into
the quiet room!
"Yes," he said placidly, "sounds queer to you, doesn't it? Well, it is
queer, I guess."
It was with the greatest difficulty that I held myself to my chair. My
throat went perfectly dry, suddenly, and if I did not scream, it was
merely because I have a fairly strong will and a horror of making a
scene. The little room had turned dreadful to me, all at
once--dreadful and unnatural; Absolom Vail, in his pepper-and-salt, a
nightmare.
He seemed to read my thoughts and put his hand out reassuringly.
"Oh, I don't think she's dead, _now_!" he explained, "I'm not so crazy
as all that comes to! Goodness, no!"
"Oh...," I faltered, soothed in spite of myself by his kindly smile.
"No, no. It was this way."
He leaned forward slightly and tapped the arms of his chair
rhythmically.
"After mother left me, there wasn't much to keep going for, you see.
Then Irene, she went off, and though she was mighty kind about it, and
there'd always be a room for me, and all that, and I liked Hannibal
well enough, still, I'd never be happy in Italy. Hannibal saw it
himself. In a good many ways Hannibal used to see what I meant, now
and again--funny, wasn't it, with him so foreign? You'd have thought
Barkington, now ... but that's neither here nor there.
"Well, we stayed in the house together, Mrs. Leeth and me, and we got
on very well. She knew all mother's ways, and we used to talk about
her, evenings, and she as good as gave me her promise she'd never leave
me while I wanted her.
"Then I had pneumonia. We had three trained nurses, but I guess
there's no doubt she pulled me through. She was up all the nights.
"Irene and Hannibal came right over--it seems they cabled. Irene was
expecting to have her baby, too, and it was in March, the worst time to
cross the water. But she came. And Hannibal listened to the doctors
and the nurses and then he turned to Mrs. Leeth--'How do you find Mr.
Vail to-day?' he said.
"'He'll live, sir,' she said, and he said, 'All right,' and that was
all there was to it. There was always something about Hannibal ...
"Then _she_ came down. Pleurisy. I'd been South and got back, and I
was well enough, you understand, but when they told me that they
couldn't save her, something turned right over inside me, and I knew I
couldn't bear it. It was too much--everything just slipping away from
me, one by one, and me all alone--no, I wasn't good for it, that's all.
I suppose it sounds dreadfully weak to you, but there it is: I wasn't
good for it.
"I was sitting by her bed, looking at her, thinking of all the old days
she could remember with me, and the girls she'd seen grow up, and
mother, and all, and all of a sudden she opened her eyes and she knew
me. She was sinking fast, but she knew me for the first time in days.
"'Mrs. Leeth,' I said, 'it's no use. If you go, I'll go too. I can't
stick it out alone! Must you?' I said. 'Must you? Isn't there any
way?'
"'Wait!' she sort of whispered to me, 'wait! There'll be a way, Mr.
Vail--a way'll be found!'
"And then her eyes closed.
"I just sat there, staring ahead. I was too miserable to notice
anything different about her, though I knew she was very still.
"By and by one of the nurses came in very soft and lifted up one of her
hands--I had mine over the other. She was a nice girl, that nurse--we
both liked her real well. Dr. Stanchon--the old doctor, not the boy,
here--brought her, and he said to me, 'Now, Mr. Vail, here's the best
nurse in New York: trust her.' And we did. She looked sharp at me,
Miss Jessop did, and listened over her heart, then she put her cheek
down to the lips.
"'Why, she's gone!' she said. 'Mr. Vail, when did it happen?'
"And then she called the doctor and he said yes, she was gone.
_That's_ why I say Mrs. Leeth died."
He looked calmly at me and I found to my surprise that during this
story I had grown as calm as he and had quite forgotten, in my sympathy
for the little man, just why he had begun to tell it. It was most
perplexing. The room had taken on its homely comfort again: the horror
had disappeared.
"So I sat there. The doctor said to let me stay, if I felt so. And I
just saw my whole life pass right by me like pictures in a book--if you
see what I mean. I saw Min when she graduated and Irene playing tunes
to her mamma and me on the piano, and the day the new gold furniture
came in, and Mrs. Leeth leading me by the hand out of mother's room
after I'd sat all day and all night by her....
"And I looked at the face lying so quiet there, and while I looked, it
sort of shook--more like when you throw a little pebble into a
pond--and the eyes opened. And I knew mother was looking at me.
That's all."
Poor, lonely little man! How could I have felt afraid of him? It was
not difficult to see how it had been.
"Then she--Mrs. Leeth--had not really died at all, had she?" I said
hastily, only to bite my lips at my tactlessness.
But he smiled tolerantly.
"That's what they said," he answered quietly. "It was very
interesting, they said. The doctor was pretty hard on Miss Jessop, I
thought. But I guess they always lay it off on them.
"They were all so excited about it, they didn't seem to notice what had
happened. And by and by I saw they never would notice it, anyway. I
just spoke a little about it to Irene and it frightened her, so I kept
quiet. She said she saw Mrs. Leeth was different, somehow, but it was
the sickness, she thought. They had to go right back. He wanted the
baby to be born in Italy. That was all right, of course."
"And Mrs. Leeth--what did _she_ say?"
"Oh, she was never one to talk, Mrs. Leeth. She talks less than ever,
now. I don't know as I put it very clear to you: it's a pretty hard
thing _to_ put clear."
He looked appealingly at me.
"Of course, of course," I said soothingly. "Those things are not to be
set down in black and white."
"That's just it. When I say that mother looks out at me from her eyes,
it seems to be more what I mean. I seem to have 'em both by me, if you
can see.... And when I look in her eyes, I understand it all--and I
can wait," he added simply. "You've noticed her eyes?"
I nodded.
"Does she ever speak...?"
"I couldn't make you see what I mean very well, about that," he said
contentedly. "She just looks at me. It's all plain, then. Maybe
that's how we'll all do, in the next life. Don't you think so?"
I found my way to Will's office through a mist of tears.
"Well, what about it?" he asked abruptly.
"I think it's one of the most touching things I ever heard."
"Believe it?"
"Why, Will!"
"Oh! Then you don't blame me any more for committing him?"
"Certainly not. What else could you do?"
"Um-m-m. That's what Minnie, Countess of Barkington, said. She put it
stronger than that. When a man of that age spends half of his time in
the housekeeper's room, sorting linen, she suggested, there's something
wrong. We shall certainly question the will--if he alters it."
"Alters it?"
"In favor of Mrs. Leeth, of course. The fair Minnie hasn't lived among
the English aristocracy for nothing."
"Why, Will, how ludicrous--you mean that she suspects----"
"Certainly she does. And very hard-headed of her, too. Stranger
things have been."
"But one has only to look at them!"
"That's what Irene thought. But not Barkington. He suggested an
asylum. The doctor called me in. (The doctor, by the way, swears the
woman died, aunty. 'Only, of course, she couldn't have,' he always
adds.) To everybody's surprise Absolom agrees quietly, immediately.
"'I wouldn't have Irene worried, as she is now, for anything,' he said.
'I never meant to leave Mrs. Leeth a penny more than the thousand a
year mother and I always planned, but if Minnie can't believe me, all
right.'
"Now, here's an odd thing, aunty. No one of that family ever heard of
this place, including Absolom himself. Precious few people know about
it, anyhow, you see. It pays every one not to. Well. Mrs. Leeth is
dismissed, arrangements made, I take him in a motor out here. We walk
through the hall, and the first person we meet here--Mrs. Leeth. New
housekeeper. It seems the old one died of heart failure overnight.
Dr. Jarvyse finds this one, by great good luck just out of a job.
Highly recommended by Mr. Absolom Vail. Never occupied just this post,
apparently, but Jarvyse feels perfectly certain she's just the woman
for it. I don't know how he knew it, but she certainly is. Best woman
we ever had."
"How perfectly extraordinary! Was Mr. Vail surprised?"
"Not at all. He just smiled politely, and neither of 'em has ever
discussed it."
"What did the Countess have to say?"
"Oh, she was furious, till I pointed out that we couldn't have the
woman in a safer place, because every employee signs a bond on
entering, never to receive by bequest or otherwise a penny from any
patient. We all sign."
"What does the Italian Count think of it all?"
"Hannibal? He's all right, Hannibal. He and I and Barkington had a
little session in this very room about a fortnight ago. I was saying
something about the question of Mr. Vail's insanity.
"'Question?' says Barkington. 'Question? Why there is no question!
As a man of science, Count Hannibal, you know as well as I do----'
"'But I am not a man of science, my dear fellow--I'm a Roman,' says
Hannibal, grinning away (those Italians speak wonderful English, you
know). 'Very odd things happen in Rome, now and then, my good
Barkington!'"
I looked at him steadily. He sat surrounded by his mysterious electric
machines under shining glass domes, among costly leather-bound volumes
whose very titles questioned the foundation of reason; telephones and
telegrams ready to hand upon his orderly desk. And it seemed to me
that he smiled mockingly at me behind his baffling eye-glasses.
"I don't understand you, Will," I said slowly, "you seem to be leading
me to ... do you mean me to understand that you believe that Mrs.
Vail's--spirit--entered--came back ... do you mean you think Mr. Vail
is right, all the time?"
"Not at all," he returned promptly. "I acknowledge no such conditions.
I know nothing of spirits nor what they do. I do not know that there
are any. I study the human brain: when it ceases to respond to nervous
stimuli, I cease to study it, that's all."
"Then why do you--why do you look at me..."
He struck his fist on the table.
"I look at you," he cried, "because you amaze me so, you people who
assume that you know all about the human brain, where I leave off!
Granted your premises, yours and Trix's and the Barkingtons', why
_don't_ you believe him? I should. Look at that woman's eyes! Try to
talk to her! Do you suppose we haven't tried? Ask Jarvyse what he's
got out of her! Get something out of her, yourself! Then ask
yourself: _if what Absolom says is so, how would she act differently
from the way she does act?_
"God! I wish I _could_ believe him!"
He struck the desk again, and it seemed to me that behind his glasses
he scorned me for the nondescript I was.
I went quickly out of the office into the corridor. I would find Mrs.
Leeth and have it out with her. I would--she stood directly in front
of me.
"Oh--how do you do!" I stammered. Her hands were full of cut flowers.
"How--how do you feel about Mr. Vail?" I demanded brusquely.
The ordinary, stocky, black-dressed figure raised its head slowly; the
eyes met mine.
And suddenly I knew that the flowers in her hands were hyacinths,
hyacinths and damp fern and mignonette. It grew and grew and
surrounded me with a penetrating cloud of rich perfume, perfume and
old, sweet memories that cut and soothed at once. I thought of the
lily-of-the-valley bed under my mother's window, and her brown, brown
eyes held mine and she--my mother, back again and smiling--filled my
heart so full that I stood drowned in the old days and listened for the
school-bell and the other children's voices!
It seemed that it had all been a mistake, a long mistake, and she had
been there all the time.... I cannot tell you how sweet and certain it
all was.
And then I knew the odour for what it was--hyacinth. Hyacinths in a
round, spaded bed, with a robin singing near, and myself picking a
stalk, and the man stepping up behind me that had blotted out all the
other men, who were mistakes and slipped away ... and yet we would not
begin again, my dearest! No, no, there is plenty of time!