The Golden Slipper (23 page)

“You have someone with you,” he declared, advancing another step, but with none of the uncertainty which usually accompanies the movements of the blind. “Some dear friend,” he went on, with an almost sarcastic emphasis and a forced smile that had little of gaiety in it.

The agitated and distressed blush which answered him could have but one interpretation. He suspected that her hand had been clasped in mine, and she perceived his thought and knew that I perceived it also.

Drawing herself up, she moved towards him, saying in a sweet womanly tone:

“It is no friend, Constant, not even an acquaintance. The person whom I now present to you is a representative from some detective agency. He is here upon a trivial errand which will soon be finished, when I will join you in the office.”

I knew she was but taking a choice between two evils, that she would have saved her husband the knowledge of my calling as well as of my presence in the house, if her self-respect would have allowed it; but neither she nor I anticipated the effect which this introduction of myself in my business capacity would produce upon him.

“A detective,” he repeated, staring with his sightless eyes, as if, in his eagerness to see, he half hoped his lost sense would return. “He can have no trivial errand here; he has been sent by God Himself to—”

“Let me speak for you,” hastily interposed his wife, springing to his side and clasping his arm with a fervour that was equally expressive of appeal and command. Then turning to me, she explained: “Since Mr. Hasbrouck’s unaccountable death, my husband has been labouring under an hallucination which I have only to mention, for you to recognize its perfect absurdity. He thinks—oh! do not look like that, Constant; you know it is an hallucination which must vanish the moment we drag it into broad daylight—that he—he, the best man in all the world, was himself the assailant of Mr. Hasbrouck.”

“Good God!”

“I say nothing of the impossibility of this being so,” she went on in a fever of expostulation. “He is blind, and could not have delivered such a shot even if he had desired to; besides, he had no weapon. But the inconsistency of the thing speaks for itself, and should assure him that his mind is unbalanced and that he is merely suffering from a shock that was greater than we realized. He is a physician and has had many such instances in his own practice. Why, he was very much attached to Mr. Hasbrouck! They were the best of friends, and though he insists that he killed him, he cannot give any reason for the deed.”

At these words the doctor’s face grew stern, and he spoke like an automaton repeating some fearful lesson:

“I killed him. I went to his room and deliberately shot him. I had nothing against him, and my remorse is extreme. Arrest me and let me pay the penalty of my crime. It is the only way in which I can obtain peace.”

Shocked beyond all power of self-control by this repetition of what she evidently considered the unhappy ravings of a madman, she let go his arm and turned upon me in frenzy.

“Convince him!” she cried. “Convince him by your questions that he never could have done this fearful thing.”

I was labouring under great excitement myself, for as a private agent with no official authority such as he evidently attributed to me in the blindness of his passion, I felt the incongruity of my position in the face of a matter of such tragic consequence. Besides, I agreed with her that he was in a distempered state of mind, and I hardly knew how to deal with one so fixed in his hallucination and with so much intelligence to support it. But the emergency was great, for he was holding out his wrists in the evident expectation of my taking him into instant custody; and the sight was killing his wife, who had sunk on the floor between us, in terror and anguish.

“You say you killed Mr. Hasbrouck,” I began. “Where did you get your pistol, and what did you do with it after you left his house?”

“My husband had no pistol; never had any pistol,” put in Mrs. Zabriskie, with vehement assertion. “If I had seen him with such a weapon—”

“I threw it away. When I left the house, I cast it as far from me as possible, for I was frightened at what I had done, horribly frightened.”

“No pistol was ever found,” I answered with a smile, forgetting for the moment that he could not see. “If such an instrument had been found in the street after a murder of such consequence, it certainly would have been brought to the police.”

“You forget that a good pistol is valuable property,” he went on stolidly. “Someone came along before the general alarm was given; and seeing such a treasure lying on the sidewalk, picked it up and carried it off. Not being an honest man, he preferred to keep it to drawing the attention of the police upon himself.”

“Hum, perhaps,” said I; “but where did you get it. Surely you can tell where you procured such a weapon, if, as your wife intimates, you did not own one.”

“I bought it that selfsame night of a friend; a friend whom I will not name, since he resides no longer in this country. I—” He paused; intense passion was in his face; he turned towards his wife, and a low cry escaped him, which made her look up in fear.

“I do not wish to go into any particulars,” said he. “God forsook me and I committed a horrible crime. When I am punished, perhaps peace will return to me and happiness to her. I would not wish her to suffer too long or too bitterly for my sin.”

“Constant!” What love was in the cry! It seemed to move him and turn his thoughts for a moment into a different channel.

“Poor child!” he murmured, stretching out his hands by an irresistible impulse towards her. But the change was but momentary, and he was soon again the stern and determined self-accuser. “Are you going to take me before a magistrate?” he asked. “If so, I have a few duties to perform which you are welcome to witness.”

This was too much; I felt that the time had come for me to disabuse his mind of the impression he had unwittingly formed of me. I therefore said as considerately as I could:

“You mistake my position, Dr. Zabriskie. Though a detective of some experience, I have no connection with the police and no right to intrude myself in a matter of such tragic importance. If, however, you are as anxious as you say to subject yourself to police examination, I will mention the same to the proper authorities, and leave them to take such action as they think best.”

“That will be still more satisfactory to me,” said he; “for though I have many times contemplated giving myself up, I have still much to do before I can leave my home and practice without injury to others. Good-day; when you want me you will find me here.”

He was gone, and the poor young wife was left crouching on the floor alone. Pitying her shame and terror, I ventured to remark that it was not an uncommon thing for a man to confess to a crime he had never committed, and assured her that the matter would be inquired into very carefully before any attempt was made upon his liberty.

She thanked me, and slowly rising, tried to regain her equanimity; but the manner as well as the matter of her husband’s self-condemnation was too overwhelming in its nature for her to recover readily from her emotions.

“I have long dreaded this,” she acknowledged. “For months I have foreseen that he would make some rash communication or insane avowal. If I had dared, I would have consulted some physician about this hallucination of his; but he was so sane on other points that I hesitated to give my dreadful secret to the world. I kept hoping that time and his daily pursuits would have their effect and restore him to himself. But his illusion grows, and now I fear that nothing will ever convince him that he did not commit the deed of which he accuses himself. If he were not blind I would have more hope, but the blind have so much time for brooding.”

“I think he had better be indulged in his fancies for the present,” I ventured. “If he is labouring under an illusion it might be dangerous to cross him.”

“If?” she echoed in an indescribable tone of amazement and dread. “Can you for a moment harbour the idea that he has spoken the truth?”

“Madam,” I returned, with something of the cynicism of my calling, “what caused you to give such an unearthly scream just before this murder was made known to the neighbourhood?”

She stared, paled, and finally began to tremble, not, as I now believe, at the insinuation latent in my words, but at the doubts which my question aroused in her own breast.

“Did I?” she asked; then with a burst of candour which seemed inseparable from her nature, she continued: “Why do I try to mislead you or deceive myself? I did give a shriek just before the alarm was raised next door; but it was not from any knowledge I had of a crime having been committed, but because I unexpectedly saw before me my husband whom I supposed to be on his way to Poughkeepsie. He was looking very pale and strange, and for a moment I thought I stood face to face with his ghost. But he soon explained his appearance by saying that he had fallen from the train and had only been saved by a miracle from being dismembered; and I was just bemoaning his mishap and trying to calm him and myself, when that terrible shout was heard next door of ‘Murder! murder!’ Coming so soon after the shock he had himself experienced, it quite unnerved him, and I think we can date his mental disturbance from that moment. For he began immediately to take a morbid interest in the affair next door, though it was weeks, if not months, before he let a word fall of the nature of those you have just heard. Indeed it was not till I repeated to him some of the expressions he was continually letting fall in his sleep, that he commenced to accuse himself of crime and talk of retribution.”

“You say that your husband frightened you on that night by appearing suddenly at the door when you thought him on his way to Poughkeepsie. Is Dr. Zabriskie in the habit of thus going and coming alone at an hour so late as this must have been?”

“You forget that to the blind, night is less full of perils than the day. Often and often has my husband found his way to his patients’ houses alone after midnight; but on this especial evening he had Leonard with him. Leonard was his chauffeur, and always accompanied him when he went any distance.”

“Well, then,” said I, “all we have to do is to summon Leonard and hear what he has to say concerning this affair. He will surely know whether or not his master went into the house next door.”

“Leonard has left us,” she said. “Dr. Zabriskie has another chauffeur now. Besides (I have nothing to conceal from you), Leonard was not with him when he returned to the house that evening or the doctor would not have been without his portmanteau till the next day. Something—I have never known what—caused them to separate, and that is why I have no answer to give the doctor when he accuses himself of committing a deed that night so wholly out of keeping with every other act of his life.”

“And have you never asked Leonard why they separated and why he allowed his master to come home alone after the shock he had received at the station?”

“I did not know there was any reason for my doing so till long after he had left us.”

“And when did he leave?”

“That I do not remember. A few weeks or possibly a few days after that dreadful night.”

“And where is he now?”

“Ah, that I have not the least means of knowing. But,” she objected, in sudden distrust, “what do you want of Leonard? If he did not follow Dr. Zabriskie to his own door, he could tell us nothing that would convince my husband that he is labouring under an illusion.”

“But he might tell us something which would convince us that Dr. Zabriskie was not himself after the accident; that he—”

“Hush!” came from her lips in imperious tones. “I will not believe that he shot Mr. Hasbrouck even if you prove him to have been insane at the time. How could he? My husband is blind. It would take a man of very keen sight to force himself into a house closed for the night, and kill a man in the dark at one shot.”

“On the contrary, it is only a blind man who could do this,” cried a voice from the doorway. “Those who trust to eyesight must be able to catch a glimpse of the mark they aim at, and this room, as I have been told, was without a glimmer of light. But the blind trust to sound, and as Mr. Hasbrouck spoke—”

“Oh!” burst from the horrified wife, “is there no one to stop him when he speaks like that?”

As you will see, this matter, so recklessly entered into, had proved to be of too serious a nature for me to pursue it farther without the cognizance of the police. Having a friend on the force in whose discretion I could rely, I took him into my confidence and asked for his advice. He pooh-poohed the doctor’s statements, but said that he would bring the matter to the attention of the superintendent and let me know the result. I agreed to this, and we parted with the mutual understanding that mum was the word till some official decision had been arrived at. I had not long to wait. At an early day he came in with the information that there had been, as might be expected, a division of opinion among his superiors as to the importance of Dr. Zabriskie’s so-called confession, but in one point they had been unanimous and that was the desirability of his appearing before them at Headquarters for a personal examination. As, however, in the mind of two out of three of them his condition was attributed entirely to acute mania, it had been thought best to employ as their emissary one in whom he had already confided and submitted his case to,—in other words, myself. The time was set for the next afternoon at the close of his usual office hours.

He went without reluctance, his wife accompanying him. In the short time which elapsed between their leaving home and entering Headquarters, I embraced the opportunity of observing them, and I found the study equally exciting and interesting. His face was calm but hopeless, and his eye, dark and unfathomable, but neither frenzied nor uncertain. He spoke but once and listened to nothing, though now and then his wife moved as if to attract his attention, and once even stole her hand towards his, in the tender hope that he would feel its approach and accept her sympathy. But he was deaf as well as blind; and sat wrapped up in thoughts which she, I know, would have given worlds to penetrate.