After Heath had given Miss O’Brien the necessary instructions we left the house and walked toward First Avenue.
“Good God, Vance!” said Markham huskily. “We’ve got to move quickly. That child’s story opens up new and frightful possibilities.”
“Couldn’t you get a commitment for the old woman to some sanitarium tomorrow, sir?” asked Heath.
“On what grounds? It’s a pathological case, pure and simple. We haven’t a scrap of evidence.”
“I shouldn’t attempt it, in any event,” interposed Vance. “We mustn’t be hasty. There are several conclusions to be drawn from Ada’s story; and if the thing that all of us is thinking should be wrong, we’d only make matters worse by a false move. We might delay the slaughter for the time being; but we’d learn nothing. And our only hope is to find out—some way—what’s at the bottom of this atrocious business.”
“Yeh? And how are we going to do that, Mr. Vance?” Heath spoke with despair.
“I don’t know now. But the Greene household is safe for tonight anyway; and that gives us a little time. I think I’ll have another talk with Von Blon. Doctors—especially the younger ones—are apt to give snap diagnoses.”
Heath had hailed a taxicab, and we were headed downtown along Third Avenue.
“It can certainly do no harm,” agreed Markham. “And it might bring forth something suggestive. When will you tackle him?”
Vance was gazing out of the window.
“Why not at once?” Suddenly his mood had changed. “Here we are in the Forties. And teatime! What could be more opportune?”
He leaned over and gave the chauffeur an order. In a few minutes the taxicab drew up to the curb before Von Blon’s brownstone residence.
The doctor received us apprehensively.
“Nothing wrong, I hope?” he asked, trying to read our faces.
“Oh, no,” Vance answered easily. “We were passing and thought we’d drop in for a dish of tea and a medical chat.”
Von Blon studied him with a slight suspicion.
“Very well. You gentlemen shall have both.” He rang for his man. “But I can do even better. I’ve some old Amontillado sherry—”
“My word!” Vance bowed ceremoniously and turned to Markham. “You see how fortune favors her punctual children?”
The wine was brought and carefully decanted.
Vance took up his glass and sipped it. One would have thought, from his manner, that nothing in the world at that moment was as important as the quality of the wine.
“Ah, my dear doctor,” he remarked, with some ostentation, “the blender on the sunny Andalusian slopes unquestionably had many rare and valuable butts with which to glorify this vintage. There was little need for the addition of vino dulce that year; but then, the Spaniards always sweeten their wine, probably because the English object to the slightest dryness. And it’s the English, you know, who buy all the best sherries. They have always loved their ‘sherris-sack’; and many a British bard has immortalized it in song. Ben Jonson sang its praises, and so did Tom Moore and Byron. But it was Shakespeare—an ardent lover of sherry himself—who penned the greatest and most passionate panegyric to it. You remember Falstaff’s apostrophe?—‘It ascends me into the brain; dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it; makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery and delectable shapes. …’ Sherry, you probably know, doctor, was once regarded as a cure for gout and other malaises of faulty metabolism.”
He paused and put down his glass.
“I wonder that you haven’t prescribed this delicious sherry for Mrs. Greene long ago. I’m sure she would serve you with a writ of confiscation if she knew you had it.”
“The fact is,” Von Blon returned, “I once took her a bottle, and she gave it to Chester. She doesn’t care for wine. I remember my father’s telling me she objected violently to her husband’s well-stocked cellar.”
“Your father died, did he not, before Mrs. Greene became paralyzed?” Vance asked incuriously.
“Yes—about a year.”
“And was yours the only diagnosis made of her case?”
Von Blon looked at him with an air of gentle surprise.
“Yes. I saw no necessity of calling in any of the bigwigs. The symptoms were clear-cut and conformed with the anamnesis. Furthermore, everything since then has confirmed my diagnosis.”
“And yet, doctor”—Vance spoke with great deference—“something has occurred which, from the layman’s point of view, tends to cast doubt on the accuracy of that diagnosis. Therefore, I feel sure you will forgive me when I ask you quite frankly if it would not be possible to place another, and perhaps less serious, interpretation on Mrs. Greene’s invalidism.”
Von Blon appeared greatly puzzled.
“There is,” he said, “not the slightest possibility that Mrs. Greene is suffering from any disease other than an organic paralysis of both legs—a paraplegia, in fact, of the entire lower part of the body.”
“If you were to see Mrs. Greene move her legs, what would be your mental reaction?”
Von Blon stared at him incredulously. Then he forced a laugh.
“My mental reaction? I’d know my liver was out of order, and that I was having hallucinations.”
“And if you knew your liver was functioning perfectly—then what?”
“I’d immediately become a devout believer in miracles.”
Vance smiled pleasantly.
“I sincerely hope it won’t come to that. And yet so-called therapeutic miracles have happened.”
“I’ll admit that medical history is filled with what the uninitiated call miraculous cures. But there is sound pathology beneath all of them. In Mrs. Greene’s case, however, I can see no loophole for error. If she should move her legs, it would contravert all the known laws of physiology.”
“By the by, doctor”—Vance put the question abruptly—“are you familiar with Brügelmann’s Über hysterische Dämmerzustände?”
“No—I can’t say that I am.”
“Or with Schwarzwald’s Über Hystero-Paralyse und
