“I’m sure he will if he can,” the girl answered with emphasis. “But be very careful with Lady Mae, won’t you?”
There was a pleading, protective note in her voice, and Vance regarded her curiously.
“Tell us something of Mrs. Drukker—or Lady Mae—before we visit her. Why should we be so careful?”
“She’s had such a tragic life,” the girl explained. “She was once a great singer—oh, not just a second-rate artist, but a prima donna with a marvelous career before her.[10] She married a leading critic of Vienna—Otto Drucker[11]—and four years later Adolph was born. Then one day in the Wiener Prater, when the baby was two years old, she let him fall; and from that moment on her entire life was changed. Adolph’s spine was injured, and he became a cripple. Lady Mae was heartbroken. She held herself to blame for his injury, and gave up her career to devote herself to his care. When her husband died a year later she brought Adolph to America, where she had spent some of her girlhood, and bought the house where she now lives. Her whole life has been centred on Adolph, who grew up a hunchback. She has sacrificed everything for him, and cares for him as though he were a baby. . . .” A shadow crossed her face. “Sometimes I think—we all think—that she still imagines he’s only a child. She has become—well, morbid about it. But it’s the sweet, terrible morbidity of a tremendous motherlove—a sort of insanity of tenderness, uncle calls it. During the past few months she has grown very strange—and peculiar. I’ve often found her crooning old German lullabies and kindergarten songs, with her arms crossed on her breast, as if—oh, it seems so sacred and so terrible!—as if she were holding a baby. . . . And she has become frightfully jealous of Adolph. She’s resentful of all other men. Only last week I took Mr. Sperling to see her—we often drop in to call on her: she seems so lonely and unhappy—and she looked at him almost fiercely, and said: ‘Why weren’t you a cripple, too?’ . . .”
The girl paused and searched our faces.
“Now don’t you understand why I asked you to be careful? . . . Lady Mae may think we have come to harm Adolph.”
“We sha’n’t add unnecessarily to her suffering,” Vance assured her sympathetically. Then, as we moved toward the hall, he asked her a question which recalled to my mind his brief intent scrutiny of the Drukker house earlier that afternoon. “Where is Mrs. Drukker’s room situated?”
The girl shot him a startled look, but answered promptly:
“On the west side of the house—its bay window overlooks the archery range.”
“Ah!” Vance took out his cigarette-case, and carefully selected a Régie. “Does she sit much at this window?”