A 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 that night, 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 another nip 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 at times. 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 deceived the 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 accomplish the 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!”