The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro

by Harry Stephen Keeler

“per D. C. Fambon,

  “Office Manager.”

  Middleton read the brief letter twice, unbelievingly in each instance. He looked up, turning white and cold at the same time. “Oh — oh, I say — it can’t be. I was in Fortescue’s room — the receipt never left my sight. I saw it given to the messenger. I — ” And then his face suddenly clouded up. “Damn them, they are in this conspiracy after all. The Trust Company people are in it! Damn them — the whole pack of them: Fortescue, Searles, Lockwood — all of them — want me kept here. That’s — that’s the explanation of this lying letter.” He crumpled it up fiercely in his fingers, and threw it on the floor. His eyes blazed. The doctor reached down and rescued the crumpled letter. A dry smile was on the young medical man’s face.

  “Stonecipher was right,” he said slowly. “Stonecipher was right. He foretold almost to a word what you would say.”

  And Jerry Middleton suddenly realised that once more he had lived up to the exact definition of the actions and attitude of a paranoiac — of all paranoiacs.

  CHAPTER XX

  RAVEN LOCKS AND BROWN EYES

  JERRY MIDDLETON stood for a long time that night, staring out into the moonlight-covered quiet grounds that surrounded Birkdale. Only too well he knew now that he was in a trap indeed — and that the plot that had put him in that trap possessed longer tentacles than he had dreamed at first. For he had seen with his own eyes the sealed-up receipt for those ancient spectacles deposited by Fortescue in plain sight on the latter’s desk, and then handed openly to the clerk who had called for them, and that same clerk likewise he had glimpsed in Searles’ office a few days before when he had gone up to the Mid-West Trust Company to render a specific question about his father’s huge estate. Hence it meant simply that the clerk had been bribed to substitute receipts. This being so, it indicated most strongly that Searles was in the plot, and if Searles was in it, then Lockwood too was involved. But why — why?

  Again he was assailed by the fleeting thought that perhaps after all he really was demented — that perhaps he was Jonathan Doe — that the whole affair that had supposedly put him here was but a thing of a disordered imagination — that this conspiracy against which he futilely railed was in reality but a beneficent act to keep him safe from himself. But he shook himself fiercely at this rebel thought. He was Jerome H. Middleton — he was imprisoned unjustly — he was the victim of a conspiracy.

  Startled at a sound at his elbow, he turned and found Hyde standing silently at his shoulder in the moonlight.

  “What is the matter, old boy?” the latter asked tenderly. “You seem downcast! I couldn’t make myself turn in to-night, your face haunted me so. What is the trouble?”

  Middleton made no answer. Then suddenly, he turned to the other. His face was bathed in the moonlight. “Howard, look me in the eye. They claim that I am a paranoiac. Do you believe, too, that I am in here because I am — that?”

  Hyde bit his lips embarrassedly. “I can only say, Jonathan, that many a man has been put in an asylum because of a conspiracy against him — and kept there for years, too.” He continued to regard his friend. “But you are the sanest, most level-headed man I have ever encountered in this place.”

  “Except yourself, Howard,” Middleton replied unhappily. “God knows you don’t belong here. Well, Howard, I am not a Paul Pry — an inquisitive intruder, and so I ask you no direct questions. But I know full well that you are in this place because of some legal subterfuge. You know too much about insanity — why, you know more than the doctors themselves. Is — was it — some crime?”

  Hyde’s face grew bitter. “It was a crime — yes — but I myself was guiltless.”

  “And you had yourself sent here? Was it this — or prison?”

  “This — or worse,” said the other sadly. “God knows this is bad enough — but at least one retains here his hold on that precious thread called life.”

  “Then — it would have been a death sentence had you not taken this alternative?”

  Hyde nodded. He stared out into the moonlight. “I do not talk much about my strange case, Jonathan, but I like you — I have liked you from the beginning — and perhaps one of these days we may be of a mind to confide in each other.”

  “Gladly,” said Middleton. “Howard, can a man get a letter out of this place?”

  “It is pretty nearly impossible,” said the other. “Every letter goes through the doctor’s hands — and there are tons that are destroyed, I understand.” He placed a friendly hand on Middleton’s shoulder. “I must go now, old boy. Sleep tight — and enjoy freedom in your dreams anyway.” And he was gone, almost as though he, too, were a phantasm.

  Jerry Middleton slept little that night. A thousand schemes passed through his head for obtaining his freedom — but a thousand came to demolition. And when morning came, after a sleepless night, he was as far from a practical solution of his difficulties as he had been before.

  But something happened that morning that was to cast a different light on things — to cause him to change the entire tenor of his thoughts with respect to those thousand useless plans. It was about ten o’clock when Joe Blake, the chief attendant, tapped him on the shoulder. “There’s a lady up the ward, Doe, a visitor, with a special pass, that claims she thinks she can tell us who you are. So you’d better go up and see her.”

  “Do I have to?”

  Blake nodded. “I’m afraid you do. She has a pass and an order signed by the assistant superintendent himself, allowing her to have a talk with you.”

  Without further ado Jerry Middleton turned from his window and, stepping forth from his room, turned his footsteps up the ward. A mission settee, very hard and very formal, stood at the very end of the ward near its front portal, and when an inmate was visited by one of his relatives from the outside world, both inmate and visitor were allowed to sit on this bench, silhouetted against a great glazed window through which the bars on the outside were also silhouetted, and both in full sight all the time of the attendants and other inmates; but no other inmate was allowed, at such times, to come within forty feet of visitor and visitee. And the forty foot rule was rigorously enforced.

  Blake was right at Middleton’s heels, and he was the first to speak.

  “This is Mr, Doe, ma’am,” he said.

  Resentfully, Middleton surveyed the woman who had come there thinking she could reveal to the authorities the supposedly lost identity of Jonathan Doe. It was laughable, the chase for that lost identity of his! But she was no woman, he noted at once. She was merely a girl. Perhaps twenty years of age — no more — she was gracefully slender, hardly five feet in height, with hair as black as a raven’s wing and eyes that were big and round and soulfully brown. Blake was speaking again. “Yes’m, here he is, ma’am. Just sit down on the bench there. He’s quite harmless, but I’ll keep my eye down the ward, ma’am, in case you’re afraid. And nobody will disturb you while you talk to him.” He stood but a moment longer, and then went back in the direction of his office at the other end, stopping twice on the way to order inmates to keep their distance from the visitor’s bench.

  Middleton stood ill at ease for a moment. Then he spoke. With his prison-made clothing on, he felt peculiarly embarrassed in front of this slender girl with her dainty garments of black and her delicate face that looked at him so searchingly.

  “I beg pardon, madam — but am I the one you wanted to see?”

  Her eyes had lit up at sight of him for a brief instant — then a dubious look had come into them. She nodded slowly. “You are — you are Jonathan Doe, I believe?” She sat down gracefully on the bench. “Won’t you sit down, too, please? My name is Anne Holliston.”

  “Oh, thank God,” he managed to articulate, “it is you — you of all persons! Anne Holliston — ”His voice broke.

  “Oh — to think you would come — the girl who watched over me in old Dr. Harrow’s hospital in Sydney. Of course you know, don’t you, dear girl — that I am exactly who I claim to be?
”

  But she shook her head slowly. Her reply was faint and sad. “No, I — I do not. For I called on Mr. Jerome Middleton yesterday afternoon. And he remembered me well — we talked for a couple of hours about Sydney, Australia, and of those days when he lay in the hospital. And he even apologised for something ungentlemanly which he did there. He — ” She stopped.

  Middleton clenched his fists. “Those devils that put me here have all the details of my life. This man — this crooked rascal who claims to be me — did he apologise to you for seizing you in his arms and kissing you on the lips one day in Sydney?”

  She nodded wonderingly.

  He pressed on. “They tell you, of course, that I resemble him — that I picked up all the intimate details of his life while working as a valet for Fortescue and listening to their conversations?”

  She nodded slowly again. “I read of this strange case in the Denver newspapers, where the story had considerable space. Because of the fact, Mr. Doe, that you are the individual who caused that story to come into existence, I will be quite fair to you and tell you exactly what the printed details were. The story was to the effect that an insane man, a tramp, claiming to be the bride’s ex-fiancé interrupted and caused a commotion at a big society wedding here in Chicago; that he was arrested and found to be suffering from the delusion that he was a certain young Chicagoan who has recently been prominent in both Chicago papers and the papers of all the other big cities over the United States. A still later story printed in the Denver papers, but smaller this time, stated that this man was committed to a State institution because of his delusion and because of the fact that his true identity could not be learned.”

  She paused only a bare second, as though marshalling her thoughts, and then went hurriedly on. “I had known Mr. Middleton, the young man whose name had been assumed by this tramp, in Australia, and I wondered — I wondered exceedingly — how another man could be so similar to him as all that, for he was far from being a common type. I determined to see you in person. I made an application to the clerk of the county court in Chicago for permission to see and talk with you, by stating that I was in a position possibly to be able to reveal your lost identity to the authorities. And here I am.”

  “But look at me!” he cried vehemently. “Look at me, Anne. Don’t I look more like that lad you nursed than does this other fellow?”

  “The man I nursed,” she said calmly, “I never saw — that is, I saw only the lower part and the very highest part of his face. His eyes, the top and bridge of his nose, his brows and lower forehead were always swathed in bandages.”

  “And — and he?” stammered Jerry Middleton. “Does — does he resemble me — here?” He pointed in turn to his eyes, his nose, his brow.

  “Yes, he does,” she returned quietly. “He is at present paying a certain debt of honour of his father’s, and for this reason he is wearing a pair of old antique spectacles that do not grace his face very much. But if you were wearing those same glasses I am sure the resemblance would be startling.”

  He whipped from the side pocket of his coat the pair of leaden spectacles which had never left his possession. “Now look at me,” he cried. “Am I still he?”

  “You are so much like him,” she said in unconcealed wonderment, “that — that — that I would hardly know which to pick if you both wore the same clothing. Your attitudes — your personalities — are not exactly alike, but this conveys nothing to me, for — remember — I have not seen Jerome Middleton for several years now. And then I saw him with bandages on his face.”

  He whipped the spectacles off his eyes. “Oh, Anne — Anne — is there any way by which I can identify myself? Ask me a question — any question. I’ll answer it, and I’ll answer it correctly. Why, Anne, I was offered money — thousands of dollars — to do those things which directly contributed toward putting me here, and believing that I was really going to receive it, I intended to spend it all to find you — to find the little girl whose lips pressed against mine once and only once in my life — who lay in my arms for one minute one day — and then disappeared out of my life altogether.”

  She remained strangely silent, as though lost in bewilderment. Then she spoke. “They said — that you would talk like that; that I should expect to hear strange fantastic stories from your lips.”

  His eyes grew hopeless. “I seem to be a perfect case.”

  “Have you absolutely no recollection whatever,” she asked suddenly, “of your true self before you attained the personality of Mr. Jerome Middleton? Or — or perhaps I should not ask that.” She appeared frightened at her boldness.

  “Recollection of myself?” he asked dumbfoundedly. He was crushed. “I have none — because I am Jerome Middleton. How can I have? These so-called spurious recollections which I have, and which the doctors claim are garnered from books and letters and talk, are genuine ones. It is my double who sports the spurious ones. No wonder he talked to you so concisely of those days in Sydney — I dilated on them fully one night at Fortescue’s.”

  “Mr. Fortescue seems to be a very upright sort of a man,” she said quietly. “He — he impresses me very much. He regrets very much this whole sad affair and is really sorry for you.”

  He fell into a silence. He knew now exactly why genuine paranoiacs were caged up — if they had homicidal sentiments even one-half as active as the ones that surged and tore through his own being.

  “Ask me a question,” he said fiercely. “Ask me something. I will prove that I am Jerry Middleton.”

  She shook her head helplessly. “There is nothing I can ask,” she said. “I had a hazy idea at first that perhaps this thing was a practical joke of some sort, and to make sure that it was not I asked Mr. Jerome Middleton everything I could think of. But, you see, he has already answered all my questions perfectly.”

  “And you left nothing for me?” he said bitterly.

  She shook her head, but she seemed puzzled. “If only you weren’t so much alike — so much like two peas taken from the same pod; and if only you both weren’t so cognisant of the past life of Jerome H. Middleton! That is the astounding thing.”

  He gave vent to a groan. “It is his similarity to me that made them all pick him as the one to take my place. But what — what do they want? That is the question. What in God’s name do they want?” He paused. Then he added vehemently, “But I am not going to let you get out of here, my lady, believing that I am Jonathan Doe, a lunatic. I — ”

  She half rose. “I — I — must call the attendant.”

  “Please be seated,” he said coldly. “I wouldn’t lay a finger on you. I would be put in a far worse place than this, if I did. And if I am crazy, I at least have the logic of the lunatic. Anne — ” He leaned over. He put his hand pleadingly on hers. She withdrew it gently but firmly. He flushed, but made no further motion of that sort. “Anne, won’t you please gamble on me? Please? Won’t you gamble on me?”

  “What would you have me do?” she asked.

  “Help me — some way — to get out of this place and establish the existence of this monstrous conspiracy against a sane man.”

  She was silent for such a long time, studying him from beneath her picture hat, that he thought she was never going to speak again. But at last her answer came.

  “Well, I will tell you what I am willing to do. And I have made up my mind only in the last twenty minutes since I have seen you in person. Mr. Doe, if you were Jerome Middleton — you, of course, already consider that you are he — you would have an income of nine hundred dollars per year left you by your father’s will. You believe that, at least?”

  “I know it,” he returned. “I know it — but you don’t. But please proceed.”

  “I am a poor girl,” she said with downcast face. “Poorer than you dream. I have no parents — no aunts — no uncles. Every garment I am wearing here has been made by my own hands. And I have a sister who is sick — a sister who has been sick for a long time. She needs treatment that only m
oney can buy — sun, food, a trip, rest of mind from worry and care. And the cost of a year of such treatment is — well — nine hundred dollars, I compute, at the least. If I deliberately help a ward of the State to escape, I have committed a serious crime. And whether you are Jerome Middleton or some unknown patient, I cannot tell. But this I will do. I will throw in my fortunes with you — I will gamble — to take, if I am right; to lose all if I guess wrong. And guessing only will it be at the best.”

  “And what — what shall I do?” he asked tensely.

  “I will ask you to sign a promissory note in my favour for nine hundred dollars with which I could attach the next twelve seventy-five dollars monthly payments made from the estate of Digby Middleton to Jerome H. Middleton — providing, of course, that you are Jerome Middleton.”

  “And you?” he said. “What — what will you do for me?”

  “Yes, what will I do for you? In the first place your note is not worth the paper it is written on unless you are cleared of this charge of lunacy in the courts of law. That means that I must provide a method for your escape — and a plan for hiding you afterward. And that, then, is what I will do for you. I will bring a week from to-day a tool — or tools — you shall determine what they shall be and how I shall get them. I will, on whatever night we agree upon, following that visit, be waiting at midnight with a small rented Ford car at some point on the outside of this institution; and the location of that point I — who am on the outside, and not you, who are on the inside — must work out. And, as I say, I will be waiting for you — I will whisk you across Illinois into Indiana, which is the outside State nearest this particular point — across the vital strategical tape known as a State line.” She paused. “Do you follow me?”

  “Yes, yes, Anne,” he burst out eagerly. “Go on, please.”

  “There will be a most terrific hue and cry raised,” she continued. “Jerome Middleton, Mr. Fortescue, attorneys, Trust Company officials — everybody connected with the Middleton estate — will post rewards for your recapture. And I imagine they will be big rewards — tempting rewards. There is, as I frankly see it, but one way in which you can remain free of suspicion that you are the escaped paranoiac whom four States are talking about; and that is to be married to me, living with me, in a room with some private family in some quiet little town. It is in Indiana, so I understand, where the necessity for legal residence on the part of the contracting parties to a marriage is waived most frequently; and so, on the night we flee, we must be married by some country parson across the Indiana line — a pair of elopers, if you like it — so that we may later live as husband and wife in the haven of refuge which I shall have rented. And then, God help me if I lose the legal fight that follows. If I lose, then I have married a lunatic, and have violated an Illinois law in aiding him to escape. And if I win, your note is good and I am free to go my way.”