Chapter 7

"Young Wetherell sprang to his feet, and turned on his father like a madman. 'How dared you?' he demanded; 'how dared you keep back my letters? You have killed her. You have murdered her, poor, delicate girl, with anxiety and doubt of me.' And then with set teeth and white lips he advanced upon his father, his arm uplifted, as if he held a sword, and with a sweep which would have severed chords of steel, if the weapon had really been within his grasp, he brought his arm across his father's breast and sank upon the floor, senseless and still.

"Afterward, when he revived, he had no recollection of what had occurred, except alone the fact that for many weeks previous he had forgotten utterly the girl who was to be his wife, whose life and love were all his world. While he had remembered everything else, had carefully attended to the smallest details of daily life, the link of memory that held the fact of her existence had been coated with a rust of absolute oblivion. The single link in all the chain of memory that had failed him had been the one the nearest to his heart--the dearest one of all!

"They were married two months later, and he resumed command of his regiment. Through an honorable and eventful life no sign of mental lapse ever returned; but every day he dreaded it, and watched his wife and children as a man might do who saw a creeping monster back of those he loved while he stood paralyzed and dumb. He never seemed to fear that other things might lose their hold upon his consciousness; but the apprehension that his mind would slip the link which held his wife, and leave her sick and faint with anxious fears, which he alone could still, constantly haunted him.

"His wounds never troubled him again. He died not long ago. His career was an exceptionally brilliant one. You would know him if I had given his real name, for it was in the public ear for years.

"There were but six persons who ever knew the history of his case, and they are still unable to explain it--its cause, its direction, its cure. Or is it cured? Will his children be subject to it? Will it take the same form? Was it caused by the wound? by the fever? Or were hereditary conditions so grouped as to produce this mental effect, even if there had been no wound--no illness? If the latter, will it be transmitted? These questions come to me with renewed force, to-day, as I hold in my hand this letter, asking me to give the family history of Col. George Wetherell for the use of physicians in a distant city who are now treating his son. This son has reached the precise age at which his father had the strange experience of which I have just told you.

"There is a hint in the letter which, in the light of the father's malady, appears to a physician to be of peculiar importance from a medical outlook.

"We shall see, we shall see."

There was a long pause; then he asked: "Should you, a layman, look to the wound to explain the condition? Or to the Castle of Heredity? Suppose the son's malady is quite similar--as now appears--what then?"

THE BOLER HOUSE MYSTERY.

_"What would you do? what would you say now, if you were in such a position?"_--Thackeray.

_"Thackeray is always protesting that no good is to be done by blinking the truth. Let us have facts out, and mend what is bad if we can"_--Trollope.

Mr. John Boler had been in the hotel business, as he phrased it, ever since he was born. Before he could walk he had been the "feature" of his father's summer hotel, where he was the only baby to be passed around and hugged into semi-unconsciousness by all the women in the house. Because of the scarcity of his kind, too, he was subjected to untold agony by the male guests, most of whom appeared to believe that the chief desire of his infantile heart was to be tossed skyward from hour to hour and caught in upstretched hands as he descended with a sickening sense of insecurity and a wild hysterical laugh. In these later years he often said that he would like to know who those summer fiends were who had made his infancy so full of narrow escapes from sudden and violent death. Finally he thought he had revenge at hand. A benevolent-looking old gentleman came puffing up to the desk of the Boler House, and, after registering, proceeded to question the genial proprietor as to his identity.

"Dear me, dear me," he puffed, "and so you are the son of old John Boler, the best hotel-keeper the sun ever shone upon! Why, I remember tossing you up to the rafters under the porch of your father's house when you were only the size of a baked apple and mighty nigh as measly looking. Well, well, to be sure you had grit for a young one. Never got scared. Always yelled for more. I believe if you had batted your soft little head against the roof you'd have laughed all the louder and kicked until you did it again," and the old man chuckled with the pleasure of age and retrospection.

"Yes, I remember well," said Mr. Boler, casting about in his own mind for the form of revenge he should take on this man now that he was to have the chance for which he had so longed and waited.

His first thought was to put him in the room next to the three sporting men who played poker and told questionable stories of their own exploits after two o'clock every night, but that hardly seemed adequate. The room adjoining the elevator popped into his head. Every time the old gentleman fell asleep _bang_ would go that elevator door or _bzzzz_ would start off the bell so suddenly that it would leave him unnerved and frantic in the morning. But what was that? What John Boler yearned for was to make the punishment fit the crime, and, after all these years of planning and wishing for the chance, here it was, and he felt that he could think of nothing, absolutely nothing, bad enough.

So with a fine satire which was wholly lost upon his victim, Mr. Boler ordered him taken to the very best room in the house, and made up his mind that after disarming all suspicion in that way he would set about his revenge, which should take some exquisitely torturous form.

All this had run through his mind with great rapidity while the old gentleman talked. Then Mr. Boler turned the register around, wrote "98" opposite the name. Said he should be delighted to show his own mettle to one of his father's old guests, called out "Front," and transferred his attention to a sweet-faced girl who stood waiting her turn to register.

"A small room, please," she said in a voice scarcely above a whisper. Mr. Boler knew just what it meant in an instant. He knew that she was not used to hotels--that she was uncertain what to do, and that she wanted her living to cost her as little as possible. She was evidently a lady, and quite as evidently from some small town.

"Front," he called again. "Show this lady to 96. Step lively." Front grinned. Ninety-six was a mere closet with no window except one facing a dark shaft. Indeed, it had once been the dressing-room and clothes press for the adjoining suite, and so far as Front could remember had never been used as a sleeping apartment by any one except the valet of a certain French gentleman who once occupied 98.

"Took my revenge on the wrong person that time," mused Mr. Boler as he saw the lady enter the elevator. "Now I wonder why I did that?" But Mr. John Boler had his little superstition, as most of us have, and whenever he was moved by a perfectly blind impulse to do a thing, he always believed that "something would come of it sure," as he expressed it. "Never knew it to fail. Of course I don't believe in such things; but--" and then he would laugh and go on believing in it as implicitly as ever.

All day he brooded over what he should do to old Winkle, as he called the man in 98, and as surely as his mind grew exhausted and his various plans fell through, his thoughts would catch a glimpse of the timid girl in the next room, and he would smilingly wink to himself and say, "Something will come of it, something will come of it sure. Never put a guest in that beastly room before, and I had nothing against _her. Must_ have been him It was after." He always called his blind impulses "It" when he was utilizing them for superstitious purposes or to quiet his reason.

"I'll bet that girl being in that closet will be the means of getting me even with old Winkle yet, and she is not used to city hotels. She'll think that it is all right and she will most likely be out all day. It's not so bad to sleep in after all. Quietest room in the house."

The next morning Mr. Winkle strolled into the office and harassed Mr. Boler about his infancy, reminding him that he had possessed a very weak stomach. "And who wouldn't," thought that gentleman indignantly, "if he was pitched about like a bale of hay from morning till night by every fool that got hold of him?" but he smiled pleasantly and said no doubt he had been very much like other infants, judging from the way he grew up. He looked upon a baby as the embryonic man, and as he was about an average adult male biped now, he had most likely been very close to an average male infant. "I might have been more," he hinted darkly, "but for certain idiotic people," and then he laughed. For it was not in Mr. John Boler's nature to be openly unpleasant to any one. This was the secret of his success as an innkeeper.

"By the way, Johnnie," said old Mr. Winkle late the next afternoon, "I thought I heard some one sobbing in the room next to mine last night. This morning I concluded I was mistaken, but now I'm sure I heard it. Anybody sick in there? I tried the door that leads into my room but it was locked. It sounds like a woman's voice. It always did tear the very heart out of me to hear a woman cry--" He went on talking but Mr. John Boler heard no more. His heart gave a wild bound of delight. "It" had given him his revenge. He would let the young woman stay in the hotel free of charge as long as old Winkle was in the house if only she would weep and sob pretty steadily. "'Johnnie,' by gad," thought he, resenting this new indignity to his name. "By George, what luck!" And then he went about his duties with a new spring in his always elastic step. At the lunch hour the following day he glanced into the dining-room, and sure enough, there sat the occupant of 96, and her eyes were swollen and red. At almost any other time this would have disturbed John Boler, but now it was a deep delight to him.

"Had a spat with her lover, no doubt," speculated he, "and, by Jove! it came at a lucky time for me. I'd pay her lover to keep up the row for three weeks if I could get at him. 'Weak stomach,' 'Johnnie,' indeed!" And he went back to the office rubbing his hands in a satisfied way, thinking that old Winkle would be afraid to go to his room that night, and that his sleep would be broken by visions of a weeping woman next door, even if she did not keep him awake half the time sobbing because Ralph had called her a mean thing or a proud stuck-up flirt, and hinted darkly that she was in love with his rival.

Matters had gone on in this way for nearly a week and Mr. Winkle had fretted and fumed and asked for another room two or three times, but Mr. Boler told him that the house was full and that there wasn't another room fit to offer him anyhow. He said that he would change the young lady's room as soon as he could, but he expected her to leave every day. She went out a good deal and wrote a large number of letters, and he felt sure she was going to remain only a day or two longer. He apologized and explained and planned, and then he would chuckle to himself the moment "old Winkle's" back was turned to think how "_It_" had succeeded in getting him even with the old reprobate without the least overt act on his part.

But the eighth morning Mr. Winkle rebelled outright. He said that he would wring the girl's worthless neck if he could get at her, but he could not and would not bear her sobs any longer. The night before they had been worse than ever and he had not slept a wink all night long. At last Mr. Boler promised that he would transfer the girl to another room that very afternoon if she did not leave, and the old man softened at once and said if she could not afford to pay for any other room he would pay the difference and she need never know it.

John Boler was not mercenary, but this offer gave him keen delight. For "old Winkle" would have to buy his relief after all. He thought how willingly a certain infant of his memory would have paid for rest and quiet too when it was helpless clay in the hands of certain old imbeciles he knew of.

At 2 p.m. he told Front to go up to 96 and tell the young lady that he now had a better room for her that would cost her no more than the one she now occupied, and to change her and her belongings to 342 forthwith. In five minutes Front came back as white as a cloth and said that the young lady's door was unlocked, that there were a number of letters on the table and that she was dead.

Mr. John Boler dashed from behind the desk across the street and was back in an incredibly short space of time, dragging behind him the dignified and wealthy physician whose office faced the hotel.

At this stage of the proceedings he cautioned the employees not to say a word about the matter on pain of instant dismissal. They one and all promised, and then proceeded to tell the first reporter who dropped in that a young lady had committed suicide upstairs and that she had cried out loud for a week. They gave a full description of her and her effects, all of which appeared in the 5 o'clock edition of the paper, duly headlined with her name and certain gratuitous speculations in regard to her motive for self-destruction. In these it was darkly hinted that she was no better than she should be, but now that she was dead "we" (the immaculate young gentlemen of the press) felt disposed to draw a veil of charity over her past and say with the law that her suicide proved her insanity, and that her mental condition might also account for her past frailties.

While these generous young gentlemen were penning their reports the doctor and Mr. John Boler worked over the poor helpless body of the unconscious girl in the dark little room upstairs. Between times they read the letters on the table and learned the old, old story--not of crime, but of misfortune. No work had offered, and she must work or starve--or sell the only value she possessed in the sight of men. One or two of the answers to her advertisement had boldly hinted at this, and when her little stock of money had run out and the little stock of misfortune had swelled into a mountain, and the little pile of insults had increased until she felt that she could endure life no longer, she had concluded to brave another world where she was taught to believe a loving Father awaited her because she had been good and true and pure to the last in spite of storms and disappointments and temptations. So she made the wild leap in the dark, confident that the hereafter could hold nothing worse, and believing sincerely that it must hold something better for Her and her kind, even if that better were only forgetfulness.

Up to this point her story was that of thousands of helpless girls who face the unknown dangers of a great city with the confidence of youth, and that ill training and ignorance of the world which is supposed to be a part of the charm of young womanhood. She had not registered her real name, it is true; but this was because she intended to advertise for work and have the replies sent to the hotel, and somehow she thought that it would be easier for her to do that over a name less sacred to her than her mother's, which was also her own. So instead of registering as Fannie Ellis Worth of Atlanta, she had written "Miss Kate Jarvis" and had given no address whatever. This latter fact told strongly against her with the reporters. They located her in a certain house on Thirty-first Street and "interviewed" the madam, who gave them a picture of a girl who had once been there, and a cut of this picture appeared in two of the morning papers with the fuller account of the suicide. A beautiful moral was appended to this history of the girl's life "which had now come to its appropriate ending." But when one of these enterprising young gentlemen of the press called to get the details of the funeral for his paper, he was shocked to learn that the young lady was not dead after all, and that she was now in a fair way to recover. He was still further disgusted when neither Mr. Boler nor the attending physician would submit to an interview and declined to allow him to send his card to the girl's room.

Then and there he made up his mind that if he had to rewrite that two-column report to fit the new developments in the case, he would, as he expressed it, make John Boler and pompous Dr. Ralston wish that they had never been bom. Incident to this undertaking, he would darkly hint at a number of things in regard to the girl herself and their relations with her. This was not at all to make her wish that she had never been born; but if it should serve that purpose, the young gentleman did not feel that he would be in the least to blame--if, indeed, he gave the matter a thought at all, which he very likely did not.

The article he wrote was certainly very "wide awake" and surprised even himself in its ingenuity of conjecture as to the motive which could prompt two such men as John Boler, proprietor of the Boler House, and Dr. Ralston, "whose reputation had heretofore been above suspicion, to place themselves in so unenviable, not to say dangerous, a position." He suggested that although the young woman had taken her case out of the jurisdiction of the coroner by not actually dying, this fact did not relieve the affair of certain features which demanded the prompt attention of the police court. The matter was perfectly clear. Here was a young woman who had attempted to relieve herself, by rapid means, of the life which all the social and financial conditions which surrounded her had combined to take by a slower and more painful process. If she had succeeded, the law held that she was of unsound mind--that she was, in short, a lunatic--and treated her case accordingly; but, on the other hand, if she failed, or if, as in this instance, her effort to place herself beyond want and pain was thwarted by others, then the law was equally sure that she was _not_ a lunatic at all, but that she was a criminal, and that it was the plain duty of the police judge to see that she was put with those of her class--the enemies and outcasts of society.

It was also quite clear that any one who aided, abetted, or shielded a criminal was _particeps criminis,_ and that unless Mr. John Boler and Dr. Ralston turned the young offender over to the police at once, there was a virtuous young reporter on the _Daily Screamer_ who intended to know the reason why.

It was this article in the _Screamer_ which first made Mr. Winkle aware of the condition of affairs in the room adjoining his own. He had been absent from the hotel for some hours, and had, therefore, known nothing of the sad happenings so near him. He dashed down into the office with the paper in his hand and asked for Mr. Boler; but that gentleman was not visible. It was said that he was in consultation with Dr. Ralston at the office of the latter, whereupon Mr. Winkle re-read the entire article aloud to the imperturbable clerk and expressed himself as under the impression that something was the matter with the law, or else that a certain reporter for the _Screamer_ was the most dangerous lunatic at present outside of the legislature. The clerk smiled. A young man leaning against the desk made a note on a tablet, and then asked Mr. Winkle what he knew of the case and to state his objections to the law, first saying _which_ law he so vigorously disapproved. The clerk winked at Mr. Winkle, but Mr. Winkle either did not see, or else did not regard the purport of the demonstration, and proceeded to express himself with a good deal of emphasis in regard to a condition of affairs which made it possible to elect as lawmakers men capable of framing such idiotic measures and employing on newspapers others who upheld the enactment. But before he had gone far in these strictures on public affairs as now administered he espied John Boler and followed him hastily upstairs.

That afternoon Mr. Winkle almost fell from his chair when he saw the evening edition of the _Screamer_ with a three-column "interview" with himself. It was headed, "_Rank Socialism at the Boler House. A Close Friend of the Offending Landlord Lets the Cat out of the Bag. A Dangerous Nest of Law Breakers. John Boler and Dr. Ralston still Defiant. Backed by a Man Who Ought to Know Better. Shameless Confession of one of the Arch Conspirators. The Mask torn from Old Silas Winkle Who Roomed Next to the Would-be Suicide. Will the Police Act Now?_"

When Mr. Winkle read the article appended to these startling headlines, he descended hastily to the office floor and proceeded to make some remarks which it would be safe to assert would not be repeated by any Sunday-school superintendent--in the presence of his class--in the confines of the State of New York. John Boler was present at the time and whispered aside to Mr. Winkle that a reporter for the _Screamer_ and five others from as many different papers were within hearing, whereupon Mr. Winkle became more and more excited, and talked with great volubility to each and every one of the young men as they gathered about him. "_Adds Blasphemy to His Other Crimes_," wrote one of them as his headline, and then John Boler interfered.

"Look here, boys," said he pleasantly, but with a ring of determination in his voice, "you just let Mr. Winkle alone. This sort of thing is all new to him, and he had no more to do with that girl than if his room had been in Texas." (The reporters winked at each other and one of them wrote, _Connived at by the Proprietor_.) "I put her in the room next to his. _I_ helped the doctor to resuscitate her. _I_ positively refuse to give you her real name and present address, although I know both, and Mr. Winkle does not, and if the police court has any use for me it knows where to find me. Have a cigar?" Each reporter took a weed, and three of them went to the office of Dr. Ralston to complete their records as soon as possible.

"I'm sorry all this has happened to you in my house, Mr. Winkle," said John Boler, as they stood alone for a moment. "It is partly my fault, too," he added, in a sudden burst of contrition. "It" had carried his revenge further than he had intended. He knew how the old man's sudden outbreak of righteous indignation would go against him in the newspaper reports that would follow, and John Boler was kind-hearted as well as fearless.

"Good Lord, don't you worry about me, Johnnie!" said the old man, craning his neck to watch the retreating forms from the window. "But those young devils have gone over to the doctor's office and they'll bully him into telling where the girl is, and then they'll bully the police into dragging her into court yet. Dear me, dear me!"