"Aren't you ashamed?" shouted Peter. "Should I change my dress before we go to town, Daddy, or will this do?"
Peter was about to explode, but Jonathan took him by the arm and led him down the hall, seething. "Now, wait," said Jonathan. "Have you ever noticed the child talking like that before—not seeming to answer direct questions no matter how often you ask them?"
The seething subsided. Peter's flashing eyes narrowed, and he breathed heavily. He tried to control himself. Then he said, "Yes, I did. Several times. She's been getting worse lately. But kids are like that. I used to try to get out of punishment or scolding, myself, by avoiding a direct answer. And Elinor— "
"Listen to me," said Jonathan. "And think before you answer. Does Elinor only evade and avoid when she is afraid she's done something wrong and might be punished?"
"But, we never punish her! She hasn't any fear of us, for God's sake! Why should she?" But Jonathan waited and Peter was forced to think. Then he said with reluctance, "Yes, she's gotten that maddening habit recently. I tried to get her out of it, but she only makes an equally senseless remark, avoiding the subject I think she is really a little tease—most children are."
But not this one, thought Jonathan. He glanced down the hall to see Father McNulty talking affectionately to Elinor. Looking at Father McNulty, Jonathan actively hated him. What a hell of a situation that busybody had dragged him into, on a fine summer day!
"All right," said Peter with unfriendly sullenness, "you can talk to Elinor alone."
Jonathan saw a way out. "Now, listen, my friend. I didn't want to come here to your house. I was dragooned here, by Mrs. O'Grady down there, the town helper. He practically kidnaped me. Say the word and I'll go off quietly, and you can call another doctor. I'd prefer that, anyway."
Peter was astute. He looked at Jonathan acutely. "Why?" he asked.
"I'd rather someone else examined your daughter, someone more capable than I."
"My daughter? But it was my wife you came to see! It is my wife who is ill!"
"No," said Jonathan. "It is your child, I'm sorry to say. You need a more competent man. Your wife is suffering
from deadly anxiety and inadequacy, most of which she isn't conscious of, but it's deep in her mind and is torturing her. She knows something is wrong, but what it is she doesn't know. I'm not the kind of doctor you need at all—for your child. So, shall we say good-bye?"
"You haven't even examined Elinor, but you can make a snap judgment like that!" The poor father was beside himself. He clenched his fist and bent toward Jonathan.
"Do you want me to talk to her a little—alone?"
"All right, all right!" shouted Peter, waving a big muscular arm at his distant child. "And you'll come out with a smile on the other side of your face!"
"I hope so," said Jonathan. He went back to the girl's room and took her hand and said to her with the special voice he used for children, "Elinor, will you spare me a few minutes of your time, dear?"
"I'm very thirsty," she said.
"Yes, I know. It will take only a minute or two." He led her into her pretty bedroom and closed the door behind him. The child went at once to a buffet and sat down with her hands neatly folded in her lap and her slender ankles crossed. She looked at Jonathan but without normal curiosity, and he stood and looked down at her blank face and eerie eyes. He stood for several minutes and the eyes did not blink nor did the quiet static expression change on the small face.
"Who hurts you and talks cruelly about you, Elinor?" he asked.
The expression remained the same, and the awful eyes, but the child had heard something that had put her in touch with her own fearful reality. "Everybody," she said. "I don't like to go to school because the Sisters and the other children whisper about me, and point at me, and talk about me. Sometimes I want to hit them." For the first time the eyes did move and blink, and there was a sudden peculiar and lusting glare in them.
"And it makes you afraid?"
"No. I'm not afraid, Doctor. Sometimes I don't think I'm really there—"
"Like a dream?"
"Or everybody's dead."
"Does that make you feel bad?"
"Do you have any little girls, Doctor? Like me?"
"Elinor, I'm asking you about school and your friends."
"I'd like to go back to Detroit and see Grandma."
Jonathan saw that he could not break through that wall of glass, and he had suspected it. He tried again, however. "What do you like to play?" he asked.
Again, she touched her reality. Her Spanish eyes glowed at once. "They don't know I'm a princess!" she said. "A real princess. I'm adopted. They stole me from my parents, and I hate them, I hate them, I hate them!" She struck the buffet on which she sat with a passion direful in one so young.
Jonathan knew that children liked to make up fancies to amuse them, but this child was not fancifying. She believed what she said. He bent down and kissed that small and dreadfully distorted face and patted the thin shoulder. "Just stay here quietly, dear," he said. But she had lapsed again into her eerie staring and did not see him go.
He rejoined the two men. Peter looked at him with hatred and umbrage, but Father McNulty was alarmed by Jonathan's expression and took his arm. "Let's go downstairs and sit down," said Jonathan, and left them and went down the stairs and they followed. He found what looked like a sitting room and stood there, and again hated the fact that he was a doctor. How do you tell a loving father that his adored only child is probably hopelessly psychotic?
The others came in, and Father McNulty sat down, but Peter stood in the middle of the room, blackly derisive. "What did you find wrong with Elinor, Doctor? I heard, in town, even before I knew you, that you have a way of finding mysterious things wrong with people, and you tell them so, and they die of fright. Did you tell Elinor something like that? If you did," and he knotted his big fists.
"Shut up," said Jonathan. "I will tell you brutally and frankly. Your wife isn't sick. But her heart is under unbearable stress, and it will probably give way in a year or so, and she will die or be an invalid the rest of her short life. The stress comes from your child. She told me that even when Elinor was only two, she felt the child was 'strange.' Did she never tell you that, too?"
Peter had turned a ghastly yellowish color. "Matilda? Something wrong with Matilda's heart?"
"Didn't you hear me at all?"
The man breathed noisily and he blinked. He finally said, "Yes, I heard you. Yes, Matilda told me that Elinor was 'strange,' even when she was a baby. I laughed at her. The kid is bright beyond her years, but she has a lot of reserve and maturity and imagination—"
"Such as telling you wild stories of who she really is, or something?"
Peter's face relaxed in a fond smile. "Well, you know kids. I told my own parents I was Davy Crockett one time, and was going West."
"But you didn't really believe it?"
"Of course not. But it was an exciting story."
"The trouble is," said Jonathan, "that your child really believes her stories. And there is the difference between—"
Peter seemed to swell with both horror and rage. "Are you trying to tell me that my little girl is—is—crazy?"
Father McNulty stood up and went to stand beside Peter and he gazed with dread and grief at Jonathan.
"The term," said Jonathan, "is dementia praecox, paranoid type. They've coined a new word for it out in Vienna. Schizophrenia. Split personality."
Peter was numb with his increasing rage and shock, and his eyes bulged as he looked at Jonathan.
"Your wife will die," said Jonathan, "unless she is relieved of this burden, though she doesn't know it is a burden, and unconsciously blames herself for not being able to reach her child with normal love and attention. That is the guilt feelings we have been talking about. Whenever I see a man or a woman with no physical complaints but under such terrible stress—normal nice people, good people—then I stop looking at them. I look for the actual person who
is creating that disturbance, and unlike Freud, I don't blame every damned thing on a mother or on an 'afflicted childhood.'
"You can't reach a person suffering from schizophrenia in the regular way. In fact, a normal person can't reach him at all. But your wife is trying, God, how she is trying! And it's no use at all. The child needs specialized attention. I know a private sanitarium in Philadelphia—"
"Why, you're insane," Peter whispered, with horror now of Jonathan himself. "You're out of your mind. A child! Psychotic!"
"Your child is already deteriorating mentally," said Jonathan with a detached cold air. "Her mother mentioned it. Do you want her to have no chance at all of a cure? A very small chance but still a chance?"
"You're out of your mind," said Peter, still in that whisper. Then he shouted madly, "Get out of my house at once!"
Jonathan stood up. He put on his riding gloves. He said, "I told you I am no alienist. I may be wrong entirely, though
I'm afraid I'm not. But I've seen a number of these cases, in mental hospitals, in sanitariums, and I could recognize it, though other forms of—insanity—would escape me entirely."
He looked with bitterness at Father McNulty. "You'd better stay a while and talk to these parents—if you can. And the next time you think God has answered your prayers, kindly ask Him to suggest somebody else. Is that clear?"
"Jonathan," said the priest.
But Jonathan turned and left the house, and he was feeling very sick and shaken, and wild with anger against the priest and against his own foolishness in being decoyed by him. He got on his horse and looked for the last time on the stricken house. Yes, it was stricken. A ghastly darkness lived there, and it was seeping into the spirits of two normal good people, and they would not believe it existed. Well, it was a damned awful thing to accept. But it had to be accepted. If not, tragedy and disaster would result, and they'd find it out soon enough, God knew.
Houses, he reflected, as he rode away, are mysterious sounding boards and reflectors. If evil lived in them, it revealed itself in the very postures of furniture, in the very drape of curtains, in the very air of the rooms, but if good lived there the rooms appeared lighted, the furniture inviting, the draperies beautiful and bright, no matter how humble it all was in reality. The house had been "good" to him until he had stepped into Elinor's room. It was the child's presence which had given the house its look of isolation from the beginning.
He could not relieve himself of his feeling of despondency and dread. He had always harbored a whimsical thought which was partly acknowledged superstition and partly fancy: That the mad are in some manner evil, no matter their pathos. It was stupid, he acknowledged, himself, but he had seen madness and evil hand in hand many times, and rarely one without the other. Exorcism, he thought, was perhaps a badly misunderstood thing, and he laughed aloud at himself. But perhaps the alienists were really exorcisers themselves, even if they did not consciously know it!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Robert Morgan and Jenny Heger were only a quarter of a mile behind Jonathan. Robert had met the girl at the little dock on the mainland side, though he had wanted to go to the island and row her to the shore. However, when he arrived in his smart new buggy, he found her waiting for him, diffidently smiling and silent. He knew nothing of women's clothing, but somehow he immediately guessed that her apparel was new, and he was delighted that she had gone to this trouble for him and cared enough to do so. She wore a frail white shirtwaist all tinily tucked from chin to waist, with frills here and there of white lace, and her skirt" was of expensive white silk with a black patent-leather belt and a glittering buckle. She wore white stockings and slippers, and her ankles were occasionally visible as the wide skirt flared with her movements. Her head was covered with a new hat of Leghorn, a very pale gold, and heaped with snowy roses of silk, and there were actually white gloves on her hands.
Her beautiful face was sunburned, a disgusting defect in ladies, but she carried no parasol as a "proper" young lady would have done. The extra color in her cheeks and on her lips made her appear more vivid than usual. She was "rosy" or "dewy," as his mother called sweating—a euphemism that made Robert laugh—and her upper lip was beaded artlessly with water, and her forehead, too. She smelled of lavender soap and sachet. When she strode to Robert's buggy, still not speaking, she walked like an elegant young man, sure and free, not mincing as other girls minced, setting her feet down • firmly yet not hard. She climbed in before he could help her. He thought that she wished to avoid his touch but saw at once that she was acting in full simplicity. He climbed in after her, picked up the reins, then smiled down into the profound and shining blue of her eyes and noticed again the total candor of her heroic face and the dimple in the white chin.
"I brought a really nice lunch," said Robert. "The hotel put it up for me. We aren't quite settled yet, my mother and I, in our new house, so we're still at the hotel. We expect to move into our house on Monday. Well, it's a nice lunch, I think. Cold chicken and salad and buttered new bread and strawberry shortcake and cheese, and a good bottle of white wine, with goblets. I hope you enjoy it."
"Yes," said Jenny. She had naturally accepted the fact of the lunch, unaware that ladies usually prepare the picnic collations. It was the first time she had spoken, but at least she was smiling faintly and shyly at him, and studying him with the frankness of an honest child. Yet, for the first time, he wondered uneasily why she had really accepted his invitation. It was not quite in character for Jenny Heger, the young and frightened recluse about whom such appalling stories were told in the town.
They drove off along the River Road. "A wonderful day," said Robert. "I'm so glad you consented to go with me, Miss Jenny."
She was silent. She was looking at the river as if she were all alone, and at the island. Robert drew the thin buggy cover over her clothing to protect her from the dust and she was not even aware of it.
"I found an admirable spot when I was visiting patients the other day," Robert went on. "Very beautiful, very secluded. Very cool, even in this weather. With a view of the river, too."
"That's nice," said Jenny in her strong clear voice, and then she looked at him with that lovely but uncertain smile. "It was good of you to invite me, Doctor."
He hesitated. His kind eyes smiled down at her. His red-gold mustache was very bright in the sun. "It was my pleasure, Miss Jenny. But I hope it isn't exclusively my pleasure."
She was unaccustomed to gallantries, he saw at once, for she pondered his hint with amusing seriousness. Then she said, "I like it, too. The only picnics I've ever gone to were those given by Aunt Marjorie. Mrs. Ferrier, you know."
"A charming lady," said Robert.
"Yes," said Jenny.
All at once the conversation died, to Robert's disappointment. But it was enough for him that Jenny was beside him, her elbow sometimes touching his sleeve as the buggy rolled over uneven places in the road. She exhaled freshness and youth and innocence. Then Robert knew that he had loved this girl from the very beginning, and he was deeply moved. Because of the dangerous and sudden intensity of his emotions he looked for easiness. He wondered what she liked, this mysterious girl, and what amused her. He had heard she had had a good schooling, and then when she was fifteen, her mother had hired a tutor for her for two years to complete that schooling. (There were tales about that also, in Hambledon.) Yet, she had gone nowhere. She had seen nothing of the world. The only point of reference between him, Robert Morgan, and Jenny Heger, was Jonathan Ferrier. But he did not wish to talk about Jonathan, above everything else.
It was Jenny who indirectly approached the subject. He saw that it was awkward, even painful, for her to initiate a subject, so he was not surprised when she stammered, "Do you like Hambledon, Doctor?"
"Yes. Very much. I could have remained in Philadelphia, and I was offered staff positions in New York and Boston, but I wanted a small town. I don't know why, Miss Jenny. But now I know, I think."
He waited for her
to ask for further elucidation, but she did not. She said, "New York. Boston. Paris. London. Vienna. St. Petersburg. I—I think of them often. I'd like to go. I think."
"Perhaps you will someday." He thought with what joy he would take Jenny to those far-off places, and what he would show her. They would explore, for the first time, together.
"Yes," said Jenny, but there was no conviction in her voice. She waited a moment and then with that painful difficulty she said, "So you will remain here."
"Yes." (Damn that monosyllable!)
"And Jon—Dr. Ferrier—will truly go away?"
"Yes." (He was falling into a helpless game.)
"Soon?"
"Yes." (At least she was talking!)
"Where to?" asked Jenny. He was surprised that she was interested in a man she so obviously loathed. However, perhaps she was eager for him to get out of her sight.
"I don't know," said Robert. (Why weren't they talking about himself, and, best of all, their own future?) "I don't think, though, that he'll ever come back to Hambledon. Never again. I have a feeling his mother will go with him, too, for it's doubtful hell ever remarry. The town treated him abominably, as you know." Now he was curious to know her own reaction to the murder trial. She said nothing. So, he went on, "How anyone can believe that Jonathan Ferrier killed his wife and—er—his child is beyond credibility."
Jenny turned and looked at him gravely, and shook her head. "Jon never did that, Doctor. Never. He—he couldn't have—he was away at the time. Of course, I once read that anyone is capable of anything. But Jon didn't do that, he didn't do that."
He was surprised at her mixture of sophistication and ingenuousness. "I'm glad to hear you say that, Miss Jenny. But you and I make up a minority in this town, you know."
"Yes." She paused. "I didn't think Jon was such a coward."
"Coward?"
"Running away. He should stay—and fight."
"I think so, too. But how can you fight cobwebs, even if they are poisonous?"
"I do," said Jenny. Now her face was exceptionally pale under all that sunburn, and he could see the sudden whiteness around her mouth.