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 circumstances. 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. Assuming 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 superstition. 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.