Why?"
"Because I"m insane," he said placidly.
I don"t pretend to any unusual share of equanimity, and it was not till we were back in the shelter of my own home, with the comfort of my own tea-tray before me and my own little applewood fire snapping on the hearth, that I brought myself to discuss the matter with Emily"s boy.
He had come back with me and we were going to the opera together later.
"I suppose that was what you wanted me to see?" I said abruptly.
He nodded.
"Just that. I wanted your idea. It"s one of the most interesting cases--with all its complications--I ever knew. Father"s turned it over to me, practically. He knows all about it."
"But, Will, the man"s as sane as I am!"
"How much did you talk with him?"
"Quite as much as with hundreds of other people!"
He smiled thoughtfully.
"Talk much with Mrs. Leeth?"
"Oh, yes--she seems much more ordinary than her eyes, doesn"t she?"
"What did she say?"
"Oh, just commonplaces--I don"t recall anything special...."
"Well, try, won"t you? What _were_ the commonplaces?"
I applied myself to recollection. What, after all, _had_ she said? As a matter of fact, beyond her linen tabulation I could not recall more than a dozen words.
"Anyway," I remonstrated, "she makes you feel as if she talked! She doesn"t seem silent."
"No," he admitted thoughtfully, "that"s true. But she never talks.
She hardly speaks to the servants--they"re all under her, you know--but they all seem to know what she wants. I"ve tested lots of them: the cook, the laundresses, the furnace man, the steward--and when they come to consider, they can"t recall a dozen words a day. But they always insist, at first, that she gives them detailed orders and criticises them constantly. It"s funny."
"Oh, well," I broke in impatiently, "never mind her! Tell me about Mr.
Vail--how long has he been there?"
"He"s been there six months!" Will announced triumphantly, suppressing a delighted smile at my amazement.
"Six months! And n.o.body knows?"
"n.o.body but the family. Oh, he gets out, now and then: I or one of the doctors goes with him and he puts in a day at the office. Everybody thinks he"s travelling or taking electric light baths for his liver or Roentgen rays for his lungs or osteopathy for a cold in the head--Lord knows what!"
"A day at the office? But how can he, if he"s insane?"
"He"s not too insane to make money." His smile was deliberately intended to intrigue me, I thought.
"He"s no more insane than I am!" I cried. "Who put him there?"
"The Countess of Barkington--primarily. Abbriglia agreed, but _they"d_ never have done it alone--Irene"s too fond of the old fellow."
"Do you mean to say----"
"Oh, don"t get excited, aunty--he committed himself. n.o.body roped and gagged him."
"But what doctor----"
"Two besides me."
"Besides you? Why, Will!"
"Oh, I didn"t say that I recommended him to an asylum. Not at all. If he had fought it, I could have found reasons on the other side."
"Like a corporation lawyer!"
"Oh, well...."
He began rolling cigarettes; they were his one weakness.
"The question is," he said slowly, "what is insanity? Medical insanity"s one job, legal insanity"s another.... Suppose your butler was convinced of the fact that he was Napoleon: would you care a continental, provided he b.u.t.tlered as per contract? So long as he didn"t shout, "_Tete d"armee!_" as he pa.s.sed the salad, what would you care? It"s quite possible that he has some such delusion, for all you know."
"Of course, I see that."
"There was that old nurse of ours--Esther, you know? To the day of her death she swore that the druggist on the corner of Hartwell Street was Charley Ross--the child that was abducted long ago. You couldn"t argue her out of it nor laugh her out of it--she said she had a feeling. She brought us up in it, you know, and for years I believed that he was Charley Ross and regarded him with veneration. She was a perfectly good nurse, just the same. But that idiotic fancy was part of her life--strengthened with every year of her life. It was an _idee fixe_."
"Well?"
"Well. Esther died a poor woman, but if she had left fifty thousand to--to a home for blind mulattoes, say, the first thing her nephews would have brought forward was that idea of Charley Ross."
"Brought forward?"
"To break her will. They would have said that it proved her mentally incapable."
"But it doesn"t, Will, does it?"
"That"s just as you see it. She wasn"t incapable of looking after us and dressing mother and doing the marketing and keeping the accounts and making all her own clothes and some of ours. But if you ask me if she had a perfectly normal mind, I should have to say no."
"I see, Will."
I was extremely interested: I seemed to see, glimmering far off, what we were getting to, and it was gripping, absorbing. But I had no idea what we really were getting to--not then.
"Now, we"ll take another case," he said, at another cigarette.
"I was at Lourdes last year, as you know, studying the Pilgrimage.