Curious thing. Not an atom of proof, you see, that anybody was ever cured of a headache there. Not even sense enough to use the immense suggestive power that"s ma.s.sed there to do real good to neurasthenics and hysterics--in fact, they try to bar them. They prefer goitre, which is _not_ cured by dirty baths, unfortunately. The people who go away from there think they were cured from this, that and the other; whole business founded on a perfectly authenticated case of _dementia praec.o.x_--as much a pathological condition as gout or insomnia. I interviewed a prize case; she appeared before their bluff at a scientific council and presented affidavits of cure from consumption, a year previous. I examined her later. It was--as the man said--interesting if true, but the trouble was, it wasn"t true, for she was nearly gone, then. I gave her three months, and she died, I took pains to learn, in ten weeks. Well: that was her delusion. Was she sane?"
"She was misinformed--mistaken."
"Quite so--but she _knew_ she was cured, remember. She felt it. The rest of us didn"t.
"Now let"s go a step farther, if you don"t mind. Beatrix tells me that the Almighty G.o.d, the creator of the universe, is the father of the son of a young Jewess, and sacrificed his son in order to save the world.
This seems to me fantastic, frankly. But mind you, aunty, though I know that druggist wasn"t Charley Ross, and though I know that the miraculous baths of Lourdes didn"t cure poor Marie Tremplin of her tuberculosis, I can"t say that what Beatrix a.s.sures me she knows about the Deity isn"t so! It appears to me quite incapable of demonstration, but maybe it all happened as she says. Only I don"t believe with her that she _knows_ it. I say she _believes_ it. If it helps her, as she says it does, to be the good and lovely girl she is, all right. It might help Parrott to stand straight to think he was Napoleon. All right."
"That"s pragmatism," I suggested.
"Oh, well," he said, with one of his curious old smiles, "they call it different things different years, I suppose."
He drew himself up, and I could see something was coming.
"Now, aunty, attend to me. I couldn"t put Beatrix in an asylum for what I and many, many others consider _her_ delusion, could I?"
"Why, Will, of course not!"
"No, nor Marie Tremplin."
"Equally of course not. She has a right to her miracle, legally, I suppose, as well as Beatrix."
"Precisely. Well, here comes along Absolom Vail, and says _he"s_ had a miracle, too. He hasn"t millions of people behind him, like Beatrix, nor thousands like Marie, nor even half a dozen, as our old Esther had--she converted all the servants and us children. He has only one--himself. A poor miracle, perhaps, but his own. And Barkington lands him in an asylum. The day of miracles is over."
"Why, Will! Why, Will..." I murmured. I seemed to feel myself on the edge of something very big and cloudy and confusing, but very necessary, somehow, to be understood. The trap he had led me into so neatly had fastened softly, but with almost an actual click, upon me.
"What--what _is_ his miracle?" I inquired, in a subdued voice. I was beginning to feel a little afraid of this boy of ours.
"I had hoped he"d tell you himself. He will, if you ask him.... We ought to go and dress, oughtn"t we?"
There was no more to be got out of him that night: he was pa.s.sionately fond of music and had no mind to lose the prelude to _Tristan_.
But through all that evening the big, shadowy something he had stirred up in my mind grew and grew and troubled me increasingly.
"A poor miracle, but his own..." it haunted me. I went up with him again in two days" time, as he had expected me to, I have no doubt.
In the little room with the gold fish and the Franklin grate everything was the same except that the piled linen on the table was new: it was being listed and stamped. And at the little desk in the corner, his gloves and stick beside him on the floor, sat Absolom Vail, the hardware king, in a pepper-and-salt suit.
"I brought my nephew up with me and thought I"d look in for another little chat, Mr. Vail," I said. The housekeeper lifted her unfathomable eyes to mine for a moment, then dropped them.
"Six dozen snow-drop twenty-eight inch breakfast napkins," she said quietly, but my mind received--I cannot explain how--a totally different impression from what the sound of these words conveyed.
Afterward, I realized that I thought suddenly of the sea, great clouds, unheard of, enormous fish, and myself driving like the wind across high, tumbling waves ... it was extraordinary. I had been literally lost in her eyes.
"Always glad to see the doctor"s friends," he chirped, and soon, as Will had said, he was talking.
It was all very simple--simple and pathetic and typical enough. The hall bedroom, the rising clerk, the new branch in Kansas City, the young, fresh wife, the little story-and-a-half frame house, the bigger one on a better street, the partnership, the two daughters, the private school, the invention of the new time-lock, the great factory, the Trust, the vice-presidency, the clear head in the panic, the board of directors, the ma.s.s of capital, the amazing power.
"And of course we brought the girls up very different from what we"d had."
"Of course."
The old epic of America; the wonderful, cruel destiny of its sons and daughters ... I seemed to see them, climbing, climbing, their dainty feet on the bent, grey heads of the human stairway love had built and thrift had mortared and habit had hardened there!
"It was all right while mother was with us," he went on. "I used to get home late after one of those big dinners, and she"d be sitting up and warm me a little soup or something on the alcohol lamp (she"d never touch electricity, mother wouldn"t) and I"d get my coat off and sit awhile; she"d send the servants to bed. Minnie never liked that, but while mother lived, Minnie didn"t have so much say. Not but that Minnie wasn"t a good girl and a good daughter, for a minute, mind you!
Wasn"t she?"
He turned to his old housekeeper.
"Miss Vail had a very fine mind," she said quietly, "a great deal of faculty."
"That"s it--faculty," he repeated contentedly. "But Irene was easier to get along with. A good deal easier. You said you"d never met Irene?"
"I never had that pleasure."
"She was married over in Italy. The Queen of Italy asked for it to be that way, and with mother gone, I didn"t see it mattered much, though Minnie didn"t like it. But the Queen was Hannibal"s G.o.dmother. She was at the wedding. We didn"t think, when Irene used to lie in her little crib in the front bedroom in Kansas City, sucking on that rubber doll, that a queen would be at her wedding, did we?"
I looked out of the window for a minute, frowning a little in the effort to adjust my ideas to the surprise of the Vails" having had a housekeeper in those early days. When I turned my face to the room again, Mrs. Leeth was gone.
"Minnie got me to give up the business, and after a while I did. So long as I was working for mother and the girls, I"d never have stopped, but with them gone, and the rest I had to take, after the pneumonia, I sort of let things slide. What"s the use? There"s Vint, now--he kept at it till he died. No one to do for, really--his girl had all her mother"s money, too, and she gives it all to foreign missions, anyhow.
"She"s here, you know. Thinks she"s--well, I guess I couldn"t tell a lady just what she thinks she is, poor thing!"
"I see why she"s here, Mr. Vail; but tell me, why do you stay here?" I cried suddenly; the quiet, sensible little man forced it out of me, fairly.
He looked whimsically up at me--I sat higher in my chair than he.
"Didn"t the doctor tell you?" he asked quietly.
"No, he said you would, perhaps."
"Well, I don"t mind. It happened when she died."
"Mrs. Vail?"
"No, Mrs. Leeth."
I jumped--I couldn"t help it.
"Wh--what?" I gasped. What a horrible thing--like a bomb thrown into the quiet room!
"Yes," he said placidly, "sounds queer to you, doesn"t it? Well, it is queer, I guess."
It was with the greatest difficulty that I held myself to my chair. My throat went perfectly dry, suddenly, and if I did not scream, it was merely because I have a fairly strong will and a horror of making a scene. The little room had turned dreadful to me, all at once--dreadful and unnatural; Absolom Vail, in his pepper-and-salt, a nightmare.
He seemed to read my thoughts and put his hand out rea.s.suringly.
"Oh, I don"t think she"s dead, _now_!" he explained, "I"m not so crazy as all that comes to! Goodness, no!"
"Oh...," I faltered, soothed in spite of myself by his kindly smile.