"By this time his father had made up his mind that there were short intervals in which the young colonel did not know exactly what he was doing--or, rather, that while he did know and act intelligently--from the outlook of the moment--it was a time wholly disconnected from the rest of his life, and when the moment was past he had no farther recollection of it.
"However, Mr. Wetherell was not sure enough of this to risk compromising a probably brilliant future by a premature or unnecessarily public announcement, and he therefore allowed the order to be made, and taken in good faith, and walked back to camp with his son, who immediately went about his duties in the most intelligent and scrupulously careful manner.
"Mr. Wetherell, however, made a call upon the officer in command the moment he could do so without attracting attention; and after a long talk (in which the secret sword order was discovered to be a delusion), it was decided that the recently recovered invalid should retire from the field on the sick leave, which he had previously refused to consider.
"When he was told of this arrangement, he agreed to it without a murmur, and began, for the first time for many days, to have his wounds (which were now past the need of it) dressed with much care. This he continued every morning, but by the time they reached home he had become possessed with the belief that his chief wound was in his side, where there had not been a scratch.
"To humor him, the family physician applied bandages to the imaginary injury every day regularly.
"All this time there was no clearer talker, no more acute reasoner, no more simple, earnest, gentlemanly fellow to be found than Col. George Wetherell, whom his townsmen were honoring and inducing to make public speeches and write clear, firm, inspiring editorials for one of the leading papers. No one except his own family and physician suspected for a moment that he was not mentally as bright as he always had been, and even the younger members of the family were without the least hint of it.
"Indeed, his father and the doctor both thought that his only illusion now was a belief in the wound in his side. Several weeks pa.s.sed, and even this indication was losing its force, for he no longer required medical attention, and was as well and as rational as ever in his life, so far as any one could perceive, when one day a stranger appeared and asked for him. Mr. Wetherell requested the gentleman (who was evidently laboring under great excitement) to be seated, and at the same time made up his own mind to be present during the interview.
"Colonel Wetherell was summoned, and, on entering the room, looked in a startled way at the stranger, smiled vaguely, extended his hand, contracted his eyes into a long, narrow line, turned white, and throwing both arms suddenly above his head, exclaimed: "My G.o.d! my G.o.d! what have I done? Where am I? How long has it been? Is she dead? Is she dead?" and staggered back into his father"s arms.
"His distress was so manifest, that the visitor lost his severity at once, and said quite gently: "No, she is not dead; but she is almost insane with fright, and has been so exhausted with anxiety and tears, that we had lost all hope for her reason, or even for her life, unless I could find you. I have been through the lines, was delayed by the loss of my pa.s.sport, and it is now five weeks since I saw her. She is alive, but--"
"Young Wetherell sprang to his feet, and turned on his father like a madman. "How dared you?" he demanded; "how dared you keep back my letters? You have killed her. You have murdered her, poor, delicate girl, with anxiety and doubt of me." And then with set teeth and white lips he advanced upon his father, his arm uplifted, as if he held a sword, and with a sweep which would have severed chords of steel, if the weapon had really been within his grasp, he brought his arm across his father"s breast and sank upon the floor, senseless and still.
"Afterward, when he revived, he had no recollection of what had occurred, except alone the fact that for many weeks previous he had forgotten utterly the girl who was to be his wife, whose life and love were all his world. While he had remembered everything else, had carefully attended to the smallest details of daily life, the link of memory that held the fact of her existence had been coated with a rust of absolute oblivion. The single link in all the chain of memory that had failed him had been the one the nearest to his heart--the dearest one of all!
"They were married two months later, and he resumed command of his regiment. Through an honorable and eventful life no sign of mental lapse ever returned; but every day he dreaded it, and watched his wife and children as a man might do who saw a creeping monster back of those he loved while he stood paralyzed and dumb. He never seemed to fear that other things might lose their hold upon his consciousness; but the apprehension that his mind would slip the link which held his wife, and leave her sick and faint with anxious fears, which he alone could still, constantly haunted him.
"His wounds never troubled him again. He died not long ago. His career was an exceptionally brilliant one. You would know him if I had given his real name, for it was in the public ear for years.
"There were but six persons who ever knew the history of his case, and they are still unable to explain it--its cause, its direction, its cure.
Or is it cured? Will his children be subject to it? Will it take the same form? Was it caused by the wound? by the fever? Or were hereditary conditions so grouped as to produce this mental effect, even if there had been no wound--no illness? If the latter, will it be transmitted?
These questions come to me with renewed force, to-day, as I hold in my hand this letter, asking me to give the family history of Col. George Wetherell for the use of physicians in a distant city who are now treating his son. This son has reached the precise age at which his father had the strange experience of which I have just told you.
"There is a hint in the letter which, in the light of the father"s malady, appears to a physician to be of peculiar importance from a medical outlook.
"We shall see, we shall see."
There was a long pause; then he asked: "Should you, a layman, look to the wound to explain the condition? Or to the Castle of Heredity?
Suppose the son"s malady is quite similar--as now appears--what then?"
THE BOLER HOUSE MYSTERY.
_"What would you do? what would you say now, if you were in such a position?"_--Thackeray.
_"Thackeray is always protesting that no good is to be done by blinking the truth. Let us have facts out, and mend what is bad if we can"_--Trollope.
Mr. John Boler had been in the hotel business, as he phrased it, ever since he was born. Before he could walk he had been the "feature" of his father"s summer hotel, where he was the only baby to be pa.s.sed around and hugged into semi-unconsciousness by all the women in the house.
Because of the scarcity of his kind, too, he was subjected to untold agony by the male guests, most of whom appeared to believe that the chief desire of his infantile heart was to be tossed skyward from hour to hour and caught in upstretched hands as he descended with a sickening sense of insecurity and a wild hysterical laugh. In these later years he often said that he would like to know who those summer fiends were who had made his infancy so full of narrow escapes from sudden and violent death. Finally he thought he had revenge at hand. A benevolent-looking old gentleman came puffing up to the desk of the Boler House, and, after registering, proceeded to question the genial proprietor as to his ident.i.ty.
"Dear me, dear me," he puffed, "and so you are the son of old John Boler, the best hotel-keeper the sun ever shone upon! Why, I remember tossing you up to the rafters under the porch of your father"s house when you were only the size of a baked apple and mighty nigh as measly looking. Well, well, to be sure you had grit for a young one. Never got scared. Always yelled for more. I believe if you had batted your soft little head against the roof you"d have laughed all the louder and kicked until you did it again," and the old man chuckled with the pleasure of age and retrospection.
"Yes, I remember well," said Mr. Boler, casting about in his own mind for the form of revenge he should take on this man now that he was to have the chance for which he had so longed and waited.
His first thought was to put him in the room next to the three sporting men who played poker and told questionable stories of their own exploits after two o"clock every night, but that hardly seemed adequate. The room adjoining the elevator popped into his head. Every time the old gentleman fell asleep _bang_ would go that elevator door or _bzzzz_ would start off the bell so suddenly that it would leave him unnerved and frantic in the morning. But what was that? What John Boler yearned for was to make the punishment fit the crime, and, after all these years of planning and wishing for the chance, here it was, and he felt that he could think of nothing, absolutely nothing, bad enough.
So with a fine satire which was wholly lost upon his victim, Mr. Boler ordered him taken to the very best room in the house, and made up his mind that after disarming all suspicion in that way he would set about his revenge, which should take some exquisitely torturous form.
All this had run through his mind with great rapidity while the old gentleman talked. Then Mr. Boler turned the register around, wrote "98"
opposite the name. Said he should be delighted to show his own mettle to one of his father"s old guests, called out "Front," and transferred his attention to a sweet-faced girl who stood waiting her turn to register.
"A small room, please," she said in a voice scarcely above a whisper.
Mr. Boler knew just what it meant in an instant. He knew that she was not used to hotels--that she was uncertain what to do, and that she wanted her living to cost her as little as possible. She was evidently a lady, and quite as evidently from some small town.
"Front," he called again. "Show this lady to 96. Step lively." Front grinned. Ninety-six was a mere closet with no window except one facing a dark shaft. Indeed, it had once been the dressing-room and clothes press for the adjoining suite, and so far as Front could remember had never been used as a sleeping apartment by any one except the valet of a certain French gentleman who once occupied 98.
"Took my revenge on the wrong person that time," mused Mr. Boler as he saw the lady enter the elevator. "Now I wonder why I did that?" But Mr.
John Boler had his little superst.i.tion, as most of us have, and whenever he was moved by a perfectly blind impulse to do a thing, he always believed that "something would come of it sure," as he expressed it.
"Never knew it to fail. Of course I don"t believe in such things; but--"
and then he would laugh and go on believing in it as implicitly as ever.
All day he brooded over what he should do to old Winkle, as he called the man in 98, and as surely as his mind grew exhausted and his various plans fell through, his thoughts would catch a glimpse of the timid girl in the next room, and he would smilingly wink to himself and say, "Something will come of it, something will come of it sure. Never put a guest in that beastly room before, and I had nothing against _her. Must_ have been him It was after." He always called his blind impulses "It"
when he was utilizing them for superst.i.tious purposes or to quiet his reason.
"I"ll bet that girl being in that closet will be the means of getting me even with old Winkle yet, and she is not used to city hotels. She"ll think that it is all right and she will most likely be out all day. It"s not so bad to sleep in after all. Quietest room in the house."
The next morning Mr. Winkle strolled into the office and hara.s.sed Mr.
Boler about his infancy, reminding him that he had possessed a very weak stomach. "And who wouldn"t," thought that gentleman indignantly, "if he was pitched about like a bale of hay from morning till night by every fool that got hold of him?" but he smiled pleasantly and said no doubt he had been very much like other infants, judging from the way he grew up. He looked upon a baby as the embryonic man, and as he was about an average adult male biped now, he had most likely been very close to an average male infant. "I might have been more," he hinted darkly, "but for certain idiotic people," and then he laughed. For it was not in Mr.
John Boler"s nature to be openly unpleasant to any one. This was the secret of his success as an innkeeper.
"By the way, Johnnie," said old Mr. Winkle late the next afternoon, "I thought I heard some one sobbing in the room next to mine last night.
This morning I concluded I was mistaken, but now I"m sure I heard it.
Anybody sick in there? I tried the door that leads into my room but it was locked. It sounds like a woman"s voice. It always did tear the very heart out of me to hear a woman cry--" He went on talking but Mr. John Boler heard no more. His heart gave a wild bound of delight. "It" had given him his revenge. He would let the young woman stay in the hotel free of charge as long as old Winkle was in the house if only she would weep and sob pretty steadily. ""Johnnie," by gad," thought he, resenting this new indignity to his name. "By George, what luck!" And then he went about his duties with a new spring in his always elastic step. At the lunch hour the following day he glanced into the dining-room, and sure enough, there sat the occupant of 96, and her eyes were swollen and red.
At almost any other time this would have disturbed John Boler, but now it was a deep delight to him.
"Had a spat with her lover, no doubt," speculated he, "and, by Jove! it came at a lucky time for me. I"d pay her lover to keep up the row for three weeks if I could get at him. "Weak stomach," "Johnnie," indeed!"
And he went back to the office rubbing his hands in a satisfied way, thinking that old Winkle would be afraid to go to his room that night, and that his sleep would be broken by visions of a weeping woman next door, even if she did not keep him awake half the time sobbing because Ralph had called her a mean thing or a proud stuck-up flirt, and hinted darkly that she was in love with his rival.
Matters had gone on in this way for nearly a week and Mr. Winkle had fretted and fumed and asked for another room two or three times, but Mr. Boler told him that the house was full and that there wasn"t another room fit to offer him anyhow. He said that he would change the young lady"s room as soon as he could, but he expected her to leave every day.
She went out a good deal and wrote a large number of letters, and he felt sure she was going to remain only a day or two longer. He apologized and explained and planned, and then he would chuckle to himself the moment "old Winkle"s" back was turned to think how "_It_"
had succeeded in getting him even with the old reprobate without the least overt act on his part.
But the eighth morning Mr. Winkle rebelled outright. He said that he would wring the girl"s worthless neck if he could get at her, but he could not and would not bear her sobs any longer. The night before they had been worse than ever and he had not slept a wink all night long. At last Mr. Boler promised that he would transfer the girl to another room that very afternoon if she did not leave, and the old man softened at once and said if she could not afford to pay for any other room he would pay the difference and she need never know it.
John Boler was not mercenary, but this offer gave him keen delight.
For "old Winkle" would have to buy his relief after all. He thought how willingly a certain infant of his memory would have paid for rest and quiet too when it was helpless clay in the hands of certain old imbeciles he knew of.
At 2 p.m. he told Front to go up to 96 and tell the young lady that he now had a better room for her that would cost her no more than the one she now occupied, and to change her and her belongings to 342 forthwith.
In five minutes Front came back as white as a cloth and said that the young lady"s door was unlocked, that there were a number of letters on the table and that she was dead.