The Golden Slipper (24 page)

Her countenance was not without its mystery also. She showed in every lineament passionate concern and misery, and a deep tenderness from which the element of fear was not absent. But she, as well as he, betrayed that some misunderstanding deeper than any I had previously suspected drew its intangible veil between them and made the near proximity in which they sat at once a heart-piercing delight and an unspeakable pain. What was the misunderstanding; and what was the character of the fear that modified her every look of love in his direction? Her perfect indifference to my presence proved that it was not connected with the position in which he had placed himself towards the police by his voluntary confession of crime, nor could I thus interpret the expression, of frantic question which now and then contracted her features, as she raised her eyes towards his sightless orbs, and strove to read in his firm set lips the meaning of those assertions she could only ascribe to loss of reason.

The stopping of the carriage seemed to awaken both from thoughts that separated rather than united them. He turned his face in her direction, and she stretching forth her hand, prepared to lead him from the carriage, without any of that display of timidity which had previously been evident in her manner.

As his guide she seemed to fear nothing; as his lover, everything.

“There is another and a deeper tragedy underlying the outward and obvious one,” was my inward conclusion, as I followed them into the presence of the gentlemen awaiting them.

Dr. Zabriskie’s quiet appearance was in itself a shock to those who had anticipated the feverish unrest of a madman; so was his speech, which was calm, straightforward, and quietly determined.

“I shot Mr. Hasbrouck,” was his steady affirmation, given without any show of frenzy or desperation. “If you ask me why I did it, I cannot answer; if you ask me how, I am ready to state all that I know concerning the matter.”

“But, Dr. Zabriskie,” interposed one of the inspectors, “the why is the most important thing for us to consider just now. If you really desire to convince us that you committed this dreadful crime of killing a totally inoffensive man, you should give us some reason for an act so opposed to all your instincts and general conduct.”

But the doctor continued unmoved:

“I had no reason for murdering Mr. Hasbrouck. A hundred questions can elicit no other reply; you had better keep to the how.”

A deep-drawn breath from the wife answered the looks of the three gentlemen to whom this suggestion was offered. “You see,” that breath seemed to protest, “that he is not in his right mind.”

I began to waver in my own opinion, and yet the intuition which has served me in cases seemingly as impenetrable as this bade me beware of following the general judgment.

“Ask him to inform you how he got into the house,” I whispered to Inspector D——, who sat nearest me.

Immediately the inspector put the question which I had suggested:

“By what means did you enter Mr. Hasbrouck’s house at so late an hour as this murder occurred?”

The blind doctor’s head fell forward on his breast, and he hesitated for the first and only time.

“You will not believe me,” said he; “but the door was ajar when I came to it. Such things make crime easy; it is the only excuse I have to offer for this dreadful deed.”

The front door of a respectable citizen’s house ajar at half-past eleven at night! It was a statement that fixed in all minds the conviction of the speaker’s irresponsibility. Mrs. Zabriskie’s brow cleared, and her beauty became for a moment dazzling as she held out her hands in irrepressible relief towards those who were interrogating her husband. I alone kept my impassibility. A possible explanation of this crime had flashed like lightning across my mind; an explanation from which I inwardly recoiled, even while I felt forced to consider it.

“Dr. Zabriskie,” remarked the inspector formerly mentioned as friendly to him, “such old servants as those kept by Mr. Hasbrouck do not leave the front door ajar at twelve o’clock at night.”

“Yet ajar it was,” repeated the blind doctor, with quiet emphasis; “and finding it so, I went in. When I came out again, I closed it. Do you wish me to swear to what I say? If so, I am ready.”

What reply could they give? To see this splendid-looking man, hallowed by an affliction so great that in itself it called forth the compassion of the most indifferent, accusing himself of a cold-blooded crime, in tones which sounded dispassionate because of the will forcing their utterance, was too painful in itself for any one to indulge in unnecessary words. Compassion took the place of curiosity, and each and all of us turned involuntary looks of pity upon the young wife pressing so eagerly to his side.

“For a blind man,” ventured one, “the assault was both deft and certain. Are you accustomed to Mr. Hasbrouck’s house, that you found your way with so little difficulty to his bedroom?”

“I am accustomed—” he began.

But here his wife broke in with irrepressible passion:

“He is not accustomed to that house. He has never been beyond the first floor. Why, why do you question him? Do you not see—”

His hand was on her lips.

“Hush!” he commanded. “You know my skill in moving about a house; how I sometimes deceive those who do not know me into believing that I can see, by the readiness with which I avoid obstacles and find my way even in strange and untried scenes. Do not try to make them think I am not in my right mind, or you will drive me into the very condition you attribute to me.”

His face, rigid, cold, and set, looked like that of a mask. Hers, drawn with horror and filled with question that was fast taking the form of doubt, bespoke an awful tragedy from which more than one of us recoiled.

“Can you shoot a man dead without seeing him?” asked the Superintendent, with painful effort.

“Give me a pistol and I will show you,” was the quick reply.

A low cry came from the wife. In a drawer near to every one of us there lay a pistol, but no one moved to take it out. There was a look in the doctor’s eye which made us fear to trust him with a pistol just then.

“We will accept your assurance that you possess a skill beyond that of most men,” returned the Superintendent. And beckoning me forward, he whispered: “This is a case for the doctors and not for the police. Remove him quietly, and notify Dr. Southyard of what I say.”

But Dr. Zabriskie, who seemed to have an almost supernatural acuteness of hearing, gave a violent start at this, and spoke up for the first time with real passion in his voice:

“No, no, I pray you. I can bear anything but that. Remember, gentlemen, that I am blind; that I cannot see who is about me; that my life would be a torture if I felt myself surrounded by spies watching to catch some evidence of madness in me. Rather conviction at once, death, dishonour, and obloquy. These I have incurred. These I have brought upon myself by crime, but not this worse fate—oh! not this worse fate.”

His passion was so intense and yet so confined within the bounds of decorum, that we felt strangely impressed by it. Only the wife stood transfixed, with the dread growing in her heart, till her white, waxen visage seemed even more terrible to contemplate than his passion-distorted one.

“It is not strange that my wife thinks me demented,” the doctor continued, as if afraid of the silence that answered him. “But it is your business to discriminate, and you should know a sane man when you see him.”

Inspector D—— no longer hesitated.

“Very well,” said he, “give me the least proof that your assertions are true, and we will lay your case before the prosecuting attorney.”

“Proof? Is not a man’s word—”

“No man’s confession is worth much without some evidence to support it. In your case there is none. You cannot even produce the pistol with which you assert yourself to have committed the deed.”

“True, true. I was frightened by what I had done, and the instinct of self-preservation led me to rid myself of the weapon in any way I could. But someone found this pistol; someone picked it up from the sidewalk of Lafayette Place on that fatal night. Advertise for it. Offer a reward. I will give you the money.” Suddenly he appeared to realize how all this sounded. “Alas!” cried he, “I know the story seems improbable; but it is not the probable things that happen in this life, as, you should know, who every day dig deep into the heart of human affairs.”

Were these the ravings of insanity? I began to understand the wife’s terror.

“I bought the pistol,” he went on, “of—alas! I cannot tell you his name. Everything is against me. I cannot adduce one proof; yet even she is beginning to fear that my story is true. I know it by her silence, a silence that yawns between us like a deep and unfathomable gulf.”

But at these words her voice rang out with passionate vehemence.

“No, no, it is false! I will never believe that your hands have been plunged in blood. You are my own pure-hearted Constant, cold, perhaps, and stern, but with no guilt upon your conscience save in your own wild imagination.”

“Zulma, you are no friend to me,” he declared, pushing her gently aside. “Believe me innocent, but say nothing to lead these others to doubt my word.”

And she said no more, but her looks spoke volumes.

The result was that he was not detained, though he prayed for instant commitment. He seemed to dread his own home, and the surveillance to which he instinctively knew he would henceforth be subjected. To see him shrink from his wife’s hand as she strove to lead him from the room was sufficiently painful; but the feeling thus aroused was nothing to that with which we observed the keen and agonized expectancy of his look as he turned and listened for the steps of the officer who followed him.

“From this time on I shall never know whether or not I am alone,” was his final observation as he left the building.

Here is where the matter rests and here, Miss Strange, is where you come in. The police were for sending an expert alienist into the house; but agreeing with me, and, in fact, with the doctor himself, that if he were not already out of his mind, this would certainly make him so, they, at my earnest intercession, have left the next move to me.

That move as you must by this time understand involves you. You have advantages for making Mrs. Zabriskie’s acquaintance of which I beg you to avail yourself. As friend or patient, you must win your way into that home. You must sound to its depths one or both of these two wretched hearts. Not so much now for any possible reward which may follow the elucidation of this mystery which has come so near being shelved, but for pity’s sake and the possible settlement of a question which is fast driving a lovely member of your sex distracted.

May I rely on you? If so—

Various instructions followed, over which Violet mused with a deprecatory shaking of her head till the little clock struck two. Why should she, already in a state of secret despondency, intrude herself into an affair at once so painful and so hopeless?

But by morning her mood changed. The pathos of the situation had seized upon her in her dreams, and before the day was over, she was to be seen, as a prospective patient, in Dr. Zabriskie’s office. She had a slight complaint as her excuse, and she made the most of it. That is, at first, but as the personality of this extraordinary man began to make its usual impression, she found herself forgetting her own condition in the intensity of interest she felt in his. Indeed, she had to pull herself together more than once lest he should suspect the double nature of her errand, and she actually caught herself at times rejoicing in his affliction since it left her with only her voice to think of, in her hated but necessary task of deception.

That she succeeded in this effort, even with one of his nice ear, was evident from the interested way in which he dilated upon her malady, and the minute instructions he was careful to give her—the physician being always uppermost in his strange dual nature, when he was in his office or at the bedside of the sick;—and had she not been a deep reader of the human soul she would have left his presence in simple wonder at his skill and entire absorption in an exacting profession.

But as it was, she carried with her an image of subdued suffering, which drove her, from that moment on, to ask herself what she could do to aid him in his fight against his own illusion; for to associate such a man with a senseless and cruel murder was preposterous.

What this wish, helped by no common determination, led her into, it was not in her mind to conceive. She was making her one great mistake, but as yet she was in happy ignorance of it, and pursued the course laid out for her without a doubt of the ultimate result.

Having seen and made up her mind about the husband, she next sought to see and gauge the wife. That she succeeded in doing this by means of one of her sly little tricks is not to the point; but what followed in natural consequence is very much so. A mutual interest sprang up between them which led very speedily to actual friendship. Mrs. Zabriskie’s hungry heart opened to the sympathetic little being who clung to her in such evident admiration; while Violet, brought face to face with a real woman, succumbed to feelings which made it no imposition on her part to spend much of her leisure in Zulma Zabriskie’s company.

The result were the following naive reports which drifted into her employer’s office from day to day, as this intimacy deepened.

The doctor is settling into a deep melancholy, from which he tries to rise at times, but with only indifferent success. Yesterday he rode around to all his patients for the purpose of withdrawing his services on the plea of illness. But he still keeps his office open, and today I had the opportunity of witnessing his reception and treatment of the many sufferers who came to him for aid. I think he was conscious of my presence, though an attempt had been made to conceal it. For the listening look never left his face from the moment he entered the room, and once he rose and passed quickly from wall to wall, groping with outstretched hands into every nook and corner, and barely escaping contact with the curtain behind which I was hidden. But if he suspected my presence, he showed no displeasure at it, wishing perhaps for a witness to his skill in the treatment of disease.