The Professor's Mystery Part 25

Somehow, the name was indefinitely familiar, as the face had been. I wasted no time in surmise, but went straight up to the door.

"Was that Doctor Paulus who just came in?" I asked the maid. She looked me over cautiously.

"Who was it wanted to see him, sir?"

"He wouldn't know me," I said, "it's only that I have something which I think he lost in the street."

The trick worked, as I had expected, and a moment later my man stood before me identified, even to the shrill precision of his voice with its tinge of German accent.

"I found this in front of your door, Doctor," said I, "and I thought you had dropped it as you went in." And I handed him my silver pocket-knife.

Deliberately he produced his own, and with deliberate courtesy pointed out my mistake. I thought as the door closed behind me that there had been a glint of recognition in his eyes. But the final step remained to take; and with an aching swarm of suspicions writhing in my brain, I sought out a public telephone.

"Mac," I asked, "who and what is Doctor Immanuel Paulus?" and the answer I had expected set the keystone upon a whole arch of tottering reminiscences.

"Biggest alienist and nerve-shark in town; biggest in the country, I guess. He was the old guy sittin' alone in the corner at that spook-hunt. D'you remember?"

CHAPTER XXII

I LEARN WHAT I HAVE TO DO

I did not sleep very much that night; but it was no longer the frustrate misery of indecision. I was done with all that, with beating myself aimlessly against blind bars and running weary circles in the wheel, with tossing helplessly in a mesh of irresoluble circ.u.mstances. I saw now what I had to do; and the problem was not what the trouble might be, not even what I must accomplish, but only how I should accomplish it.

The Carucci story might be true wholly, or in part, or practically not at all; it did not matter. a.s.suming all of it, if Lady was Miriam, and Reid had married her when he was not free to do so, she was not his wife even in law. Whether his wife was now living or dead made no difference.

Lady was not bound to him in theory and certainly not in reality. She was free to come to me if she chose, and I had only to make her see it.

But I did not for a moment believe that the trouble was so directly her concern. Mrs. Tabor was insane, or was feared to be: that was beyond a doubt, and that beyond a doubt was the root and center of it all; that was what the family had so elaborately striven to conceal, either because of the nature of her illusion, or because of some scandal in the events which had brought it about. That was reason enough, granting their determination to keep it secret, for all that I had seen, from the midnight alarm, which had driven me out of the house, to Mrs. Tabor's terror of the alienist; and her absurd suggestion that he himself was insane clenched the matter. What supported it still more was that if this were so, then all these honest people had from point to point spoken the truth; Mr. Tabor had, as he said, trusted me to the edge of caution; Lady had told the truth in fear, and Reid under pressure; Sheila had told the truth, only inflated and colored by superst.i.tion.

And as I thought over the substance of what she had told me, I wondered whether by some chance her tale had not been truer than I thought, nearer than even the others knew to the heart of reality. I would not take her ghosts too literally; but Mrs. Tabor might have some illusion of her dead daughter's presence, and I remembered the voice called Miriam that had spoken in the circle of spirit-seekers. Was there not surely some connection here?

Yet, however that might be, it all closed round a single need. I cared nothing, after all, what the shadow might be, except as that concerned my taking Lady away from it. It would be like her loyalty to feel the family trouble a bond that she must not selfishly break, and like her girlhood to dream her mother's delusion a taint that must forbid her marrying. But she was wrong in both, and to-morrow I should tell her so and take her away with me. Even if she were right, I should do the same: I had grown to care for the others, and I was not wholly careless of humanity; but in the face of this greater matter, family and race and right itself, if need were, might go to the devil. I was fighting for her and for myself, and for that wherein we two were one desire.

I fell asleep at last thinking of that, and imagining what I should need to say and do; and the next morning I went out to Stamford in a curious mood of deliberation; feeling, on the threshold of crisis, unnaturally calm and sure; as if I were somehow going with the stream, a small embodiment of predetermined force, a mouthpiece of the thing which was to be.

As she had done once before, Sheila opened the door for me. It was very plain that she was glad of my coming.

"Sure it's Mr. Crosby!" she exclaimed softly. "What's the matter, sir?

You look white and tired like. 'Tis all the world seems upset lately."

"I want to see Miss Tabor, Sheila. Will you tell her that I am here?"

"That's the very thing I'm not to tell her, sir. She said most particular that she was not to see any one to-day; but--" Sheila frowned at me forbiddingly, "you sit down an' wait a minute, sir, an' I'll do me best. I'm a servant-girl no longer--ordhers is nothing to me."

"But, Sheila--" I began nervously.

"But nothin', Mr. Crosby. You sit down an' wait," and she was gone before I could say another word. I sat in the great room, as if at the portals of judgment day, every fiber of me keenly alive, and yet my mind knowing no particular focus of thought. The future gaped before me like eternity, something too vaguely large for definition or comprehension. I remember that I kept whispering dryly to myself that man was master of his fate, and feeling infinitesimally comforted by the sophistry.

The curtains at the door parted, and Lady stood looking into my eyes. I saw before she spoke that she knew why I had come.

"I was sure that it was you," she said at last. "Sheila told me that a young man was down-stairs, and that she could not get him to go away."

"She told me," I said, "that you did not wish to see me. Was that true?"

Lady sank wearily into a chair. "Sheila should not have let you in," she said. "I was afraid that you might come here; and you know that it was wrong of you to come. You know that as well as I do."

She spoke monotonously, with pauses between the words, leaning back along the deep chair. The last few days must have been hard ones for her. She was very pale, the little blue veins in her temples distinct and clearly lined. It tore me to see her so; and for a moment I wondered if I had done well to come, and felt a wave of that uncomfortable reaction which meets one on the threshold of a test; for a moment only, then I knew that even though I tired her the more, it was a price that we must pay for her sake as well as mine. No good ever comes of half understandings.

"No, I don't know that," I said slowly. "You don't believe that I'm altogether selfish, or that I would come now, when I know that many things have distressed you, to give you any further reason for distress."

She leaned forward, one white hand raised. "Please," she said, "I am not sure--not really sure--why you have come. But I am certain of this, that you have made a mistake in coming. There's nothing on earth that you can do to help us just now--there's nothing anybody can do--there's nothing anybody can do."

"Oh, things aren't so bad as that." I knew that I was only temporizing, and raged inwardly at myself.

Lady's eyes dropped, and one hand played nervously with a loop of the chain that hung about her neck.

"I don't believe you can understand just how bad they are. The worst of it is that I can't tell you--oh, it wasn't fair of you to come to-day"--her voice broke ever so little, and her eyes brimmed with unshed tears--"I'm tired and disheartened, and I want advice and comfort--no, don't come near me--I can't tell you anything--there's nothing I can tell to anybody in the world."

I was standing before her. "No, I can't comfort you now," I said. "I'm here to ask you things, and perhaps to hurt you very much. But you mustn't think I've come carelessly. I came because I had to--because there are things I have to understand to go on living."

Her eyes were frightened, but she settled herself back as if to meet whatever blow my questioning might give. "I don't think that you are very generous to-day," she said; and her voice grew harder than I had ever heard it. "Neither shall I answer anything that I may not. But--but perhaps you are right--perhaps there are some things that you should know. Please say what you have to say and have it done."

"You told me once," I began gently, "that your name was Margaret. Was that true?"

"True?" she wrinkled her brow. "Of course it was true." It was evidently not a question that she had expected.

"Then who is Miriam?"

"Oh, I told you the truth then. Do you doubt it? Why should you ask these things again?"

I paused. Certainly she was not to hear that ugly story if it were not true and I could in any way prevent it.

"It may seem very strange to you," said I, "but some day I will tell you all about it. I have to know this now: Do you mean that it is true you have a sister, that her name is Miriam, and that she is--that she was Doctor Reid's wife?" The question was out at last, and my heart stopped for the answer.

"Why, yes," she answered, in the same disinterested tone, as if she were telling dry facts in distant history--"Miriam married Walter when he came back from studying abroad. She only lived about a year. They had a little girl, you know, that lived not more than about an hour. I think if she had lived, Miriam would have lived too. But it was too much for her to bear. She died three days after her baby died."

The unshed tears were falling now, falling quietly in the mere physical relief of tender sorrow. Every rigid line of tragedy and pain had disappeared, and her trouble came upon her naturally, like sleep, a relaxation and a rest after hot-eyed days. I did not even feel any sorrow for her, so full was I of the new certainty that we were free.

Very reverently I came closer to her, and like a child she turned to me and hid her face against my shoulder. So we rested for a s.p.a.ce. I do not think that either of us had any definite thought--only that peace wrapped us like a garment and that the tension of the past few weeks had somehow vanished away. At last Lady drew herself quietly from me, half smiling as she brushed away her tears.

"I have been very silly," she whispered, "but it's all over now. It was good of you to let me cry," and she reached her hand toward me with a gesture so intimately grateful that my love fairly broke its bounds, and I caught it almost fiercely in my own.

"Lady, Lady dearest," I cried, "can't you see what it all means? Oh, my dear, you must see. I love you. That is all I know in the world, and nothing else matters or can matter."

"No, no--you must not--" she drew back from me frightened. "You must not tell me that. You have no right--and you are spoiling it all."

"Don't you love me?" I persisted.

Lady raised her eyes sadly. "There can be no such thing for you and me.