Part 51

“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 them 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 out-stretched 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.

And truly I never beheld a finer manifestation of practical insight in cases of a more or less baffling nature. He is certainly a most wonderful physician, and I feel bound to record that his mind is as clear for business as if no shadow had fallen upon it.

Dr. Zabriskie loves his wife, but in a way torturing to himself and to her. If she is gone from the house he is wretched, and yet when she returns he often forbears to speak to her, or if he does speak it is with a constraint that hurts her more than his silence. I was present when she came in today. Her step, which had been eager on the stairway, flagged as she approached the room, and he naturally noted the change and gave his own interpretation to it. His face, which had been very pale, flushed suddenly, and a nervous trembling seized him which he sought in vain to hide. But by the time her tall and beautiful figure stood in the doorway, he was his usual self again in all but the expression of his eyes, which stared straight before him in an agony of longing only to be observed in those who have once seen.

“Where have you been, Zulma?” he asked, as contrary to his wont, he moved to meet her.

“To my mother’s, to Arnold & Constable’s, and to the hospital, as you requested,” was her quick answer, made without faltering or embarrassment.

He stepped still nearer and took her hand, and as he did so my eye fell on his and I noted that his finger lay over her pulse in seeming unconsciousness.

“Nowhere else?” he queried.

She smiled the saddest kind of smile and shook her head; then, remembering that he could not see this movement, she cried in a wistful tone:

“Nowhere else, Constant; I was too anxious to get back.”

I expected him to drop her hand at this, but he did not; and his finger still rested on her pulse.

“And whom did you see while you were gone?” he continued.