The psychologist impatiently stopped the excited man with a gesture. “You still see Iris?”
“Yes,” the answer came, after a considerable pause.
“She has not left the library? Tell us what she is doing.”
“She turns toward the clock, which is striking three. The door bell rings. Both the maids are out, so Iris lays down her book and goes to the door. At the door is a tall, dark man, all alone. He is a Spaniard from the mountains in Honduras, and his name is Canonigo Penol.”
An indrawing of his breath, sharp almost as a whistle, brought the gaze of all upon Penol; but the eyes of the Spaniard, starting in superstitious terror from his livid face, saw only the girl.
“Penol is not known to Iris, but he has come to see her. She is surprised. She leads him to the library. His manner makes her uneasy,” the voice, now uninterrupted by Trant’s questions, went on with great rapidity. “He asks her if she remembers that she lived among Indians. Iris remembers that. He asks if she remembers that before that she lived with white men—an American and some Spaniards—who were near and dear to her. Iris cannot remember. He asks if she remembers him—Penol. His speech frightens her. He says: ‘Once an American went to Central America with an expedition, and got lost from his companions. He crossed rivers; he was in woods, jungles, mountains; he was near dying. A Spaniard found him. The Spaniard was poor—poor. He had a daughter.
“‘The American, whose name was James Clarke, loved the daughter and married her. He did not want ever to go back to the United States; he was mad—mad with love, and mad about the ancient carved statues of Central America, the temples and inscriptions. He would sit all day in front of an inscription making marks on a paper, and afterwards he would tear the paper up. They had a daughter. Canonigo repeats many times that they were very poor. They had only one white servant and a hundred Indians. Sickness in the mountains killed the old Spaniard. In another year sickness killed the wife also. Now the American was all alone with his baby daughter and one white servant and the Indians. Then sickness also took hold of him. He was troubled about his daughter; he trusted no one; he would drag himself in the night in spite of his sickness to see that no one had done harm to her.
“‘The American was dying. He proposed to the young Spaniard many things; finally he proposed that he marry the little girl. There was no priest, and the American was mad; mad about ancient times and dead, vanished peoples, and more mad because he was dying; and he married them after the old custom of the Aztecs, with the chachihuitl stone and a bird feather, while they sat on a woven mat with the corners of their garments tied together—the young Spaniard and the little girl, who was four years old. Afterwards her father died, and that night the Spaniard all alone buried him: and when toward morning he came back he found only a few Indians too old to travel. The others, frightened of the mad dead man, had gone, taking the little girl with them.’”
“What does Iris do when she hears that?” asked Trant.
“It begins to revive memories in Iris,” the voice answered quickly; “but she says bravely, ‘What is that to me? Why do you tell me about it?’ ‘Because,’ says Canonigo Penol, ‘I have the chalchihuitl stone which bears witness to this marriage!’ And as he holds it to her and it flashes in the sun, just as it did when they held it before her when her clothes were tied to his on the mat, she remembers and knows that it is so; and that she is married to this man! By the flash of the chalchihuitl stone in the sun she remembers and she knows that the rest is true!”
“And then?” Trant pressed.
“She is filled with horror. She shrinks from Canonigo. She puts her hands to her face, because she loved Dr. Pierce with her whole heart—”
“O God!” cried Pierce.
“She cries out that it is not so, though she knows it is the truth. She dashes the stone from his hand and pushes Canonigo from her. He is unable to find the stone; and seeing the sculptured gods and the inscriptions about the room, he thinks it is these by which Dr. Pierce is able to hold her against him. So now he says that he will destroy these pictures and he will have her. Iris screams. She runs from Canonigo to the study. She shuts the door upon him, as he follows. She sets a chair against it. Canonigo is pushing to get in. But she gets the key to the cabinet from the desk and opens the cabinet.
“She takes out the papers, but there is no place to hide them before he enters. So she opens the drawer, but it is full of worthless papers. She takes out enough of the old papers to make room for the others, which she puts in the bottom of the drawer underneath the rest. The old papers she puts into the cabinet above, closing the cabinet; but she had no time to lock it. Canonigo has pushed the door open. He has found the stone and tries to show it to her again; but again she dashes it from his hand. He rushes straight to the cabinet, for he has seen from the tree where the papers are kept. The cabinet is unlocked, but he tries to pull the door to him. He pulls off the knob. Then he smashes the glass with his foot; he begins burning the worthless papers. So Iris has done all she can and runs from him to her room. She is exhausted, fainting. She falls upon the bed—”
The voice stopped suddenly. Pierce had sprung to her with a cry, and putting his arms about her for support, spoke to her again and again. But she neither moved nor spoke to his entreaties, and seemed entirely insensible when he touched her. He leaped up, facing Trant in hostile demand, but still kept one arm about her.
“What is this you have done to her now?” he cried. “And what is this you have made her say?”
But the psychologist now was not watching either the girl or his client. His eyes were fixed upon the face of Canonigo Penol, shot with red veins and livid spots of overpowering terror.
“So, Don Canonigo Penol,” Trant addressed him, “that was the way of it? But, man, you could scarcely have been enough in love with a girl four years old to take this long and expensive trip for her nineteen years later. Was there property then, which belonged to her that you wanted to get?”
Canonigo Penol heard the question, though he did not look at his questioner. His eyes, starting from his head, could still see only the stony face of the girl who, thus unconsciously, under the guidance of the psychologist, had accused him in a manner which filled him with superstitious terror. Palpitating, convulsed with fright, with loose lips shaking and knees which would not bear his weight, he slipped from his chair and crawled and groveled on the floor before her.
“Oh, speak not—speak not again!” he shrieked. “I will tell all! I lied; the old Spaniard was not poor—he was rich! But she can have all! I abandon all claim! Only let me go from here—let me leave her!”
“First we will see exactly what damage you have done,” Trant answered. “Dr. Pierce,” he turned collectedly to his client, “you have just heard the true account of last Wednesday afternoon.”
“You want me to believe that she let him in—she was here and did that?” Pierce cried. “You think that was all real and—true!”
“Look in the drawer she indicated, and see if she was able, indeed, to save the papers as she said.”
Mechanically and many times looking back at Trant’s compelling face, Pierce went to the cabinet, stooped and, pulling out the drawer, tossed aside a mass of scattering papers on the top and rose with a bundle of manuscripts held together with wire clips. He stared at them almost stupidly, then, coming to himself, sorted them through rapidly and with amazement.
“They are all here!” he cried, astounded. “They are intact. But what—what trick is this, Mr. Trant?”
“Wait!” Trant motioned him sharply to be silent. “She is about to awake! Inspector, she must not find you here, or this other,” and seizing Penol by one arm, while the inspector seized the other, he pushed him from the room, and closed the study door upon them both. Then he turned to the girl, whose more regular breathing and lessening rigidity had warned him that she was coming to herself.
Gen
tly, peacefully, as those of a child wakening from sleep, her eyes opened; and with no knowledge of all that in the last half hour had so shaken those who listened in the little study, with no realization even that an interval of time had passed, she replied to the first remark that Trant had made to her when she entered the room:
“Yes, indeed, Mr. Trant, the afternoon sun is beautiful; but I like these rooms better in the morning.”
“You will not mind, Miss Pierce,” Trant answered gently, without heeding Pierce’s gasp of surprise, and hiding him from the girl’s sight with his body, as he saw Dr. Pierce could not restrain his emotion, “if I ask you to leave us for a little while. I have something to talk over with your guardian.”
She rose, and with a bright smile left them.
“Trant! Trant!” cried Pierce.
“You will understand better, Dr. Pierce,” said the psychologist, “if I explain this to you from its beginning with the fact of the ‘devil’s claw,’ which was where I myself began this investigation.
“You remember that I overheard Ulame, the negro nurse, speak of this characteristic of Miss Pierce. You, like most educated people to-day, regarded it simply as an anaesthetic spot—curious, but without extraordinary significance. I, as a psychologist, recognized it at once as an evidence, first pointed out by the French scientist, Charcot, of a somewhat unusual and peculiar nervous disposition in your ward, Miss Iris.
“The anaesthetic spot is among the most important of several physical evidences of mental peculiarity which, in popular opinion, marked out its possessors through all ages as ‘different’ from other people. In some ages and countries they have been executed as witches; in others, they have been deified as saints; they have been regarded as prophets, pythonesses, sibyls, ‘clairvoyants.’ For in some respects their mental life is more acute than that of the mass of mankind, in others it is sometimes duller; and they are known to scientists as ‘hystericals.’
“Now, when you gave me your account, Dr. Pierce, of what had happened here last Wednesday, it was evident to me at once that, if any of the persons in the house had admitted the visitor who rang the bell—and this seemed highly probable because the bell rang only once, and would have been rung again if the visitor had not been admitted—the door could only have been opened by Miss Iris. For we have evidence that neither the cook nor Ulame answered the bell; and moreover, all of those in the house, except Miss Iris, had stood together at the top of the stairs and listened to the screams from below.
“Following you into the study, then, I found plain evidence, as I pointed out to you at the time, that two persons had been there, one a man; one perfectly familiar with the premises, the other wholly unfamiliar with them. I had also evidence, from the smoke in the museum, that the study door had been open after the papers were lighted, and I saw that whoever came out of the study could have gone up the anteroom stairs to the second floor of the south wing, but could not have passed out through the main hall without being seen by those listening at the top of the stairway. All these physical facts, therefore, if uncontradicted by stronger evidence, made it an almost inevitable conclusion that Miss Iris had been in the study.”
“Yes, yes!” Pierce agreed, impatiently, “if you arrange them in that order!”
“In contradiction of this conclusion,” Trant went on rapidly, “I had three important pieces of evidence. First, the statement of your mother that the voice she heard was that of a strange woman; second, the fact that Miss Iris had gone to her room to take a nap and had been found asleep there on the bed by Ulame; third, that your ward herself denied with evident honesty and perfect frankness that she had been present, or knew anything at all of what had gone on in the study. I admit that without the evidence of the anaesthetic spot—or even with it, if it had not been for the chalchihuitl stone—I should have considered this contradictory evidence far stronger than the other.
“But the immense and obvious influence on Miss Iris of the chalchihuitl stone, when you found it together—an influence which she could not account for, but which nevertheless was sufficient to make her refuse to marry you—kept me on the right track. For it made me certain that the stone must have been connected with some intense emotional experience undergone by your ward, the details of which she no longer remembered.”
“No longer remembered!” exclaimed Pierce, incredulously.
“When it had happened only the day before!”
“Ah!” Trant checked him quickly. “You are doing just what I told you a moment ago the anaesthetic spot had warned me against; you are judging Miss Iris as though she were like everybody else! I, as a psychologist, knew that having the mental disposition that the anaesthetic spot indicated, any such intense emotion, any such tragedy in her life as the one I imagined, was connected with the chalchihuitl stone, might be at once forgotten; as you see it was, for when Ulame aroused her only a few moments later she no longer remembered any part of it.
“You look incredulous, Dr. Pierce! I am not telling you anything that is not well authenticated, and a familiar fact to men of science. If you want corroboration, I can only advise you to trace my statement through the works on psychology in any well-furnished library, where you will find it confirmed by hundreds of specific instances. With a mental disposition like Miss Iris’s, an emotion so intense as that she suffered divides itself off from the rest of her consciousness. It is so overpowering that it cannot connect itself with her daily life; ordinary sights and sounds cannot call it back to memory. It can be awakened only by some extraordinary means such as those I used when, as far as I was able, I reproduced for her benefit just now here in your study all the sights and sounds of last Wednesday afternoon that preceded and attended her interview with Canonigo Penol.”
“It seems impossible, Mr. Trant,” Pierce pressed his hands to his eyes dazedly. “But I have seen it with my own eyes!”
“The sudden sleep into which she had fallen before Ulame aroused her, and the fact that the voice your mother heard seemed to her a strange one,” Trant continued, “added strength to my conclusion, for both were only additional evidences of the effect of an intense emotion on a disposition such as Miss Iris’s. Now, what was this emotional experience so closely connected with the chalchihuitl stone that the sight of the stone was able to recall it, with a dulling feeling of fear and apathy to her emotions, without being in itself able to bring recollection to her conscious mind, I could only conjecture.
“But after learning from you that while a child she had lived among Central American Indians, and discovering that the chalchihuitl stone was a ceremonial stone of savage religious rites—particularly the marriage rite—I could not help but note the remarkable coincidence that the man who brought the chalchihuitl stone appeared precisely at the time he would have come if he had learned from newspapers in Central America of the girl’s intended marriage. As the most probable reason for his coming, considering the other circumstances, was to prevent the wedding, I thought the easiest way to lay hands upon him and establish his identity was to publish at once the notice that the wedding had been postponed, which, if he saw it, would make him confident he had accomplished his object and draw him here again. Draw him it did, last night, into the arms of Walker and myself, with a Lake Forest officer along to make the arrest legal.”
“I see! I see! Go on!” Pierce urged intently.
“But though I caught him,” Trant continued, “I could not gain the really important facts from him by questioning, as I was totally unaware of the particulars which concerned Miss Iris’s—or rather Isabella Clarke’s—parentage and self-exiled father. But I knew that, by throwing her into the true ‘trance’ which you have just witnessed—a hysterical condition known as monoideic somnambulism to psychologists—she would be forced to recall and tell us in detail of the experiences which she had passed through in that condition, precisely as the persons possessed of the ‘devil’s claw’ who were burned and tortu
red as witches in the Middle Ages had the ability sometimes to go into trances where they knew and told of things which they were not conscious of in their ordinary state; precisely as certain clairvoyants to-day are often able to tell correctly certain things of which they could seem to have no natural knowledge.
“As for Miss Iris, there is now no reason for apprehension. Ordinarily, in case conditions might arise which would remind her so strongly of the events that took place here last Wednesday, she would be thrown automatically into the condition she was in this afternoon when she gave us her narrative. She would then repeat all the particulars rapidly aloud, as you have heard her give them; or she would act them out dramatically, going through all the motions of her flight from Penol, and her attempt to save your papers. And each reminder being made more easy by the one before, these ‘trances’ as you call them, would become more and more frequent.
“But knowing now, as you do, all the particulars of what happened, you have only to recount them to her, repeating them time after time if necessary, until she normally remembers them and you have drawn the two parts of her consciousness back again into one. She will then, except to the psychologist, be the same as other people, and will show no more peculiarity in the rest of her life than she had already shown in that part of it she has passed in your household. My work here, I think, is done,” the psychologist rose abruptly, and after grasping the hand which Pierce eagerly and thankfully stretched out to him, he preceded him through the doorway.
In the high-ceilinged museum, which blazed red with the light of the setting sun, they came upon Iris, standing again in absorbed contemplation of the sacrificial stone. She turned and smiled pleasantly at them, with no sign of curiosity; but Pierce, as he passed, bent gently and kissed her lips.
VII
THE EMPTY CARTRIDGES
Stephen Sheppard, big game shot and all-around sportsman, lay tensely on his side in bed, watching for the sun to rise out of Lake Michigan. When the first crest of that yellow rim would push clear of the grim, gray horizon stretching its great, empty half circle about the Chicago shore, he was going to make a decision—a decision for the life or for the death of a young man; and as he personally had always cared for that man more than for any other man so much younger, and as his niece, who was the chief person left in the world that Sheppard loved, also cared for the man so much that she would surely marry him if he were left alive, Sheppard was not at all anxious for that day to begin.
The Mystery & Suspense Novella Page 35
