Part 14 (1/2)
When fifteen minutes later the perplexed Mullinix halted a taxi at the Deansworth Studio Building she was at the curbing, her left arm in a sling and her eyes ablaze with barely controlled emotions. Before he could move to get out and help her in she was already in.
”Bellevue Hospital, psychopathic ward,” he told the driver as she climbed nimbly inside.
As the taxi started she turned to Mullinix, demanding: ”Now tell it to me all over again. When you are through, then I'll explain to you why I am so interested.”
”Well,” he said, ”there isn't so very much to tell. The address you gave me turned out to be a boarding house just as you suspected it might--a second-rate place but apparently highly respectable, kept by a Mrs.
Sheehan. It's been under the same management at the same place for a good many years. It wasn't very much trouble for me to find out what you wanted to know, because the whole place was in turmoil after what had happened just an hour or so before I got there. And when it developed that I had come to inquire about the cause of all the excitement every old-lady boarder in the house wanted to tell me about it all at the same time.
”It seems that three days ago this Mrs. Vinsolving applied at the place for room and board. Mrs. Sheehan vaguely remembered her as having been her guest for a short time ten or twelve years ago. At that time she was with her husband, Colonel Vinsolving, who it appears has since died, and a daughter about ten years or twelve years of age--a little girl with red hair, as Mrs. Sheehan recalls. This time, though, she came alone, carrying only hand baggage. Except that she seemed to be nervous and rather hara.s.sed and unhappy looking, there was nothing noticeably unusual about her. Mrs. Sheehan took her in willingly enough.
”She went straight to her room on the third floor and stayed there, having her meals brought up to her. But this morning early she went to the landlady and begged for protection, saying she was in fear of her life. Mrs. Sheehan very naturally inquired to know what was up--and then Mrs. Vinsolving told her this story:
”She said she had discovered a conspiracy to murder her, headed by--guess who? The late Kaiser, no less! She said that the Kaiser in disguise had escaped from Holland, leaving behind him in his recent place of exile over there a double made up to look like him, and was now in hiding in this country for the sole purpose of having Mrs. Vinsolving a.s.sa.s.sinated in revenge, because her late husband, while an officer in the Army, had perfected a poison gas deadlier than any other known, which, being kept a secret by this Government and used against the German army in the war, had brought about the victory for our side and led to the overthrow of the Kaiser's outfit.
”She went on to say she had run away from some suburban town or other to hide in New York and that was why she had taken refuge at Mrs.
Sheehan's, thinking she would be in safety. But now she knew the plotters had tracked her, because she had just detected that the maid who had been bringing up her meals to her was really a German agent, and acting under orders from the Kaiser had put poison into her food. All of which naturally surprised Mrs. Sheehan considerably, especially as the accused servant happened to be a perfectly reliable Finnish girl who has been working for Mrs. Sheehan for five years and who had two brothers in the Seventy-seventh Division overseas.
”It didn't take Mrs. Sheehan two minutes--she being a pretty level-headed person evidently--to see what ailed her new boarder. She managed to get Mrs. Vinsolving quieted down and get her back again into her room, and then she called in the policeman on the post and inside of an hour the woman had been smuggled out of the house and was on her way to Bellevue in an ambulance with a doctor and a policeman guarding her. But by that time, of course, the news had leaked out among the other boarders and the whole place was beginning to stew with excitement. It was still stewing when I got there.
”Well, as soon as you told me over the telephone that you were bent and determined on going to Bellevue, though I do not see why you should be in such a hurry about it and taking chances on setting up an inflammation in your injured arm, because even though you do know the poor crazed creature you can't be of any help--”
”I don't know her. I never saw her in my life.”
”Then why--”
”That part can wait. I'll explain later. You were saying that as soon as you talked with me over the telephone you did something. What was it?”
”Oh, yes, I called up Doctor Steele, chief surgeon in the psychopathic ward, who happens to be a friend of mine and one of us besides”--he tapped the badge he wore under his coat lapel--”and told him I was bringing you down to see this woman, and he volunteered some information of the case in advance of your coming. I've forgotten just what he called the form of insanity which has seized her--it's a jaw-breaking Latin name--but anyhow, he said his preliminary diagnosis convinced him that it must have been coming on her for some time; that it was marked by delusions of persecution and by an exaggerated ego, causing its victims to imagine themselves the objects of plots engineered by the most distinguished personages, such as rulers and high dignitaries; and that while in this state a man or a woman suffering from this particular brand of lunacy was apt to s.h.i.+ft his or her suspicion from one person to another--first perhaps accusing some perfectly harmless and well-meaning individual, who might be a relative or a near friend, and then nearly always progressing to the point in his or her madness where the charge was directed against some famous character.”
”Did you hear anywhere any mention made of a daughter--the red-haired child of twelve years ago?” inquired Miss Smith.
”To be sure I did, but I'd forgotten about her,” said Mullinix. ”Mrs.
Sheehan told me that somewhere in her excited narrative Mrs. Vinsolving did say something about the daughter. As nearly as I can recall, she told Mrs. Sheehan that five or six weeks ago, or some such matter, her daughter had tried to kill her and that she thought then the daughter had gone mad, but that now she knew the girl had joined the Kaiser's gang for pay. I made a mental note of this part of the rigmarole at the time Mrs. Sheehan was repeating it to me, and then it slipped my mind.
But now putting that yarn alongside of what Doctor Steele tells me about the symptoms of the disease, I see the connection--first the daughter, then the strange servant girl and finally the Kaiser. But say, I wonder why the daughter hasn't been keeping some sort of a guard over the poor demented creature? What can she have been thinking about herself to let her mother go running foot-loose round the country, nursing these changing delusions?”
”She couldn't very well help herself,” put in Miss Smith. ”The daughter is in an asylum--put there five weeks ago on the mother's complaint.”
”But heavens alive, how could that have happened?”
”Very easily--under the laws of this state,” she answered grimly. Then speaking more quickly: ”I've changed my mind about going to Bellevue with you. Please tell the driver to take me to the Grand Central Station. I don't know what train I'm going to catch, except that it's the next one leaving on the Hudson River Division for up state. You go on then, please, to the hospital and find out all you can about this case and call me on the long-distance to-night--no, that won't do either. I don't know where I'll be. I may be in Peekskill or in Albany--I can't say which. I tell you--I'll call you at eight o'clock; that will be better.
”No, no!” she went on impetuously, reading on his face the protest he meant to utter. ”My wrist is well bandaged and giving me no pain. I'm thinking now of what a poor brave girl had on both her wrists when last I saw her and of what she must have been enduring since then. I'll explain the biggest chapter of the story to you on the way over before you drop me at the station.”
At the Grand Central she left behind a thoroughly astonished gentleman.
He was clear on some points which had been puzzling him from time to time during this exceedingly busy morning, but still much mystified to make out the meaning of Miss Smith's farewell remark as he put her aboard her train.