The Man With White Nails

BY CAPTAIN W. E. P. FRENCH, U.S.A.

MY wife brought me the case and the client, and, strict candor compels me to say, I was not particularly grateful for either. The case was a curiously involved combination of an over-indulgent, invalid mother; a shrewd, selfish and unscrupulous son; a trained nurse, rather worse than she should have been; a cleverly drawn but very unjust will; an exceedingly large estate mostly in investment securities; a husband-deserted daughter with two small children and “an annual income of nothing to keep ’em on”; a witness who would undoubtedly be “agin the government,” and one other person whose testimony might, or might not, be favorable to the prosecution, but who had apparently vanished bodily from the face of the earth. The client was a pretty, gentle little creature, crushed under a load of trouble much too big for her, quite pathetic in her helplessness, and shrinking and rather indifferent about her own claims, but with an almost fierce mother-instinct over the rights of her babies.

How the partner of my joys and sorrows discovered these wronged mites of humanity is immaterial—she has a keen scent for injustice or oppression of any kind—but she rounded them up, brought them to my office, and said I was to take the case. I never appeal from the decision of my supreme court, so I said, “Certainly.”

First she took me aside and gave me an ex parte and rather highly colored statement of the facts in the affair, explaining that her protégée was diffident and reticent, unless stirred up about the children, and perorating with the remark, “You will find, John, that my meek-looking lamb is quite a ferocious animal when roused.” Then she went over to the other woman, kissed her, gave the boy a pile of my cherished law-books to use as building-blocks, took the tiny girl on her lap, hitched her chair a bit closer to the mother and said, “Now, my dear, you tell John everything, just as you told it to me, and he will fix it all up for you.”

A tolerable portion of my fairly large practice has consisted, and, I fancy, will continue to consist, of charity cases brought to me by my wife. They have, of course, seldom or never been profitable; they have cost time, work, worry and money, have occasionally been paid in the base coin of ingratitude, and without them we should have had a much larger bank account. But the warmest-hearted and most generous woman I have ever known likes me to help those she thinks are wronged, and it is little enough for me to do for her dear sake.

My small, scared client attracted me from the first, and my dusty legal heart ached over her sad story. Her mother had never cared much for her and had lavished love and money on her brother. She had married unfortunately, while scarcely more than a child. The estrangement with her mother had increased, and her brother had craftily widened the breach. This last fact I had much trouble to elicit, and wormed it out of her piecemeal.

After three years of neglect and ill-treatment, her husband had deserted her and run away with another woman—incidentally, her best friend—leaving her almost destitute. When she recovered from an attack of brain fever she found a letter from her brother awaiting her, in which he announced the death of their mother, his marriage to the trained nurse who had taken care of the mother in her last illness, and their exodus to Europe. He inclosed a copy of the will, which left everything unreservedly to him, and said that his attorney would communicate with her. The man-of-the-law came in person, and stated that he was empowered to pay her a hundred dollars a month, so long as she did not attempt litigation.

The will was witnessed by the doctor and the trained nurse, and the doctor was, to all intents, beyond discovery.

It was, on its face, a probable case of undue influence and, perhaps, mental aberration. But how prove either, without the doubly expert testimony of the missing physician, who, it appeared, was the only person, except the son and the nurse, that had seen the invalid during the last year of her life?

It was a significant fact that the daughter’s name was not mentioned in the instrument; and I suspected collusion on the part of the medical gentleman with the beneficiary and the woman who would share the profits of the criminal enterprise. My poor little client had seen the doctor once only when she was vainly endeavoring to gain access to her mother, and described him as a very fine-looking man on the sunny slope of forty, with wavy blond hair and pointed beard, a suave and kindly manner, a charming voice and singularly handsome hands.

The bill of items would have fitted tolerably a dozen men of my acquaintance, and I said as much, asking her, as an afterthought, how she came to notice his hands. Someone has said that the gist of a woman’s letter is in the postscript, and the large majority of women that have employed me as counsel have invariably reserved the leading and important facts of their cases until the last. This client was no exception to the rule; but when the dramatic little body had finished personating the missing man, I would have known him as far as I could see him among ten thousand, unless he were asleep or quite still; for she had cleverly imitated a man whose restless hands were ever in motion as he talked, and who glanced at them with covert satisfaction every few seconds. This singular trick, the descriptive factors in his personal equation, and the name he had signed—which, she assured me, was undoubtedly his own—as witness to the signature of the testatrix were about all the additional information I could extract from her, except that she had refused her brother’s proposition and was ready to fight to the bitter end for her children’s rights, though she had to beg or steal the money to pay court and counsel.

I waived retainer and took the case on contingent fee, which, after the little grass widow had left, I told my wife, in gentle irony, I would divide with her; but that she must not squander it on yachts and four-in-hands, because these big paying cases are pretty rare—fortunately.

That good woman received my ironic suggestion with her usual placidity, and said: “Very well, my dear; I shall certainly hold you to your promise of division, and I have a premonition that we shall win the suit. Mark my words! I don’t want a yacht, but I shall buy that lovely Goldsborough place and spend my declining years looking at the river-view from that glorious, wide piazza.”

I had not the slightest hope of success, for even if the witness could be found, I had no doubt that he was a scamp and in the brother’s pay.

A letter to a friend and fellow-attorney in the city where the mother had died brought this reply: The man I wanted to find had been a general practitioner there for some years; he had had a very large practice and the liking and respect of the community; but both had fallen away from him from two very odd causes; one, that he had suddenly become exceedingly untrustworthy and unreliable, in fact, a phenomenal and outrageous liar; and the other, that he had unaccountably taken to the habitual wearing on every possible or impossible occasion, professional or social, of white kid gloves or long white gauntlets, bringing these ghostly hands to the bedside of patients, or hovering with them over the operating-table. It began to be noised abroad that Dr. Bently, which was his name, was unsound in his mind, was suffering from some dreadful, contagious disease which had broken out in his hands, and that the truth was not in him. My informant added that shortly after the death of Mrs. Johnstone, my small client’s mother, the doctor had taken himself, his gauntlets and his marvelous mendacity to New York, but that his present whereabouts were unknown to the writer.

The detective agency in New York, of which I next inquired, sent me word that there was no such name as Bernard Brice Bently in the directory or in any way on record as a physician or surgeon in that city. All this took time, and, meanwhile, I had advertised vainly in prominent papers all over the country and had had an agent interview many of the doctor’s old acquaintances. The man had disappeared, and within a very narrow limit of time the will would be admitted to probate.

Just at this time another legal matter required my presence in New York, and, when I reached there, the engrossing nature of my business drove most other matters out of my head. After several days of close and confining work, I finished taking the depositions I needed, and purposed to return home that evening. It occurred to me that a pleasant way of spending my remaining hours in town would be to take a stroll through Central Park, which I had not seen in years—not, in fact, since I had been a student in Columbia Law School.

I walked from the Fifty-ninth Street entrance as far as the Museum, which is about opposite Eighty-second Street, and had sat down to rest near the obelisk. It was a magnificent late spring day, and I was lazily enjoying the beauty of the place and watching the passing show, when a man on the next bench attracted my attention by springing to his feet and gazing eagerly and fiercely beyond me and up the drive. If ever ferocious desire and intent to kill were written on a human face it was on his.

Instinctively I glanced in the direction he was looking and saw a steam runabout, with one man in it, approaching smoothly and not very rapidly. I turned back instantly and sprang at the would-be assassin, whose pistol was out and pointed, but I was too late. There was a flash and a report, and I could see the hammer of the self-cocker rising for a second shot, when I struck him a left-hander. I do not often have occasion to hit a man, but when I do he usually falls. As he went down the weapon spoke again, but I knew that that bullet went wide. The fellow was game, though, and determined, for his back had scarcely touched the ground before he rolled on his side and fired twice at the man in the locomobile. The fifth chamber of the revolver he let me have, as I flung myself down on him, and the subsequent proceedings were blank, the ball having grazed my temple and stunned me.

When I came to I was lying on a leather couch in a very handsomely appointed doctor’s office. My head was bound up, and I was a bit sick and dizzy. I suppose I had half swooned again, when I was roused by a soft touch on my wrist, and looking down I saw the most beautiful and the whitest man’s hand I have ever seen. But, white as it was, the fine, filbert-shaped nails were whiter still. They were absolutely milky, and the half-moons had the ghostly whiteness and lustre of pearls. I was both startled and fascinated. Surely no living flesh was ever that color, and no human being with blood in him ever had such nails. Was it the hand of a corpse? No, it was warm, and, as I looked, the fingers bent and sought my pulse. A deep, musical voice broke the silence:

“Ah, we are all right now, thank God! How do you feel, friend? Drink this.” The speaker, holding a tumbler, came in front of me, and I saw a handsome man with clean-shaven face, black, wavy hair and beautiful but rather wild-looking eyes.

“Thank you,” I said as I took the glass and obediently drained it; “I feel somewhat as though I had been trifling with a steam-hammer. But I shall be all right presently.”

“Of course you will,” he assured me heartily. “You were struck a glancing blow on the head by the bullet of that poor, half-crazed Pole, who, the police say, thought I was a Russian duke. The only ill consequence of your noble act will be an honorable scar, to remind you how gallantly you risked your life to save a total stranger’s. My dear friend—if you will allow a friendless man to call you so”—here the charming voice grew as sweet and vibrant as an organ note—“it was the bravest and most generous act I ever knew. I cannot thank you adequately, but I hope it may be given me to serve you some time, and should you ever need a friend’s purse, his hand or his life, mine are yours.”

I endeavored to deprecate the value of my interference and to moderate his expressions of gratitude; but he would have none of it, and, leaping to his feet, began to pace to and fro, expatiating upon what he extravagantly termed my bravery and unselfishness, and insisting upon his tremendous obligation to me. He was manifestly in earnest; but all at once habit asserted itself, the ruling passion came to the fore, and a trifle “light as air” made “confirmation strong as proof of Holy Writ.” When he first began to move a memory flashed over me, but, as those beautiful, restless white hands added their evidence, assurance became doubly sure. I could see my demure, pretty little client impersonating this man, and I knew, despite the dyed hair and the shaven beard, that I had found the missing witness. But I had found something else. I had found a man suffering from a chronic dementia. Whether his derangement was general or merely monomania, I was at a loss to determine. If the former, he was not competent as a witness for either side. If the latter, the special form and degree of alienation might or might not militate against his testimony.

I was impelled to take him unawares, and so I said suddenly: “Dr. Bently, do you remember Mrs. Abbott, the daughter of your former patient, Mrs. Johnstone, of Laneville?”

If he started or showed surprise or annoyance, it was imperceptible; but he glanced with smiling complaisance at his nails as he came over to me, and, touching my forehead, remarked, with most irritating suavity: “My dear fellow, I fear you are feverish. My name is Charles Chester Chickering. I never was in Laneville, I never had a patient named Johnstone, and I have no recollection whatever of anyone by the name of Abbott.”

He looked straight at me as he uttered these falsehoods, and his tone was like velvet. There was the flicker of an amused smile on his mouth, but his eyes were hard and cold as blued steel, the contracted pupils shining like black pinheads. I stared back at him, and presently he shifted his gaze from my face to his own right hand, which he was holding out in front of him, and again that abominable, self-satisfied smirk appeared. I was filled with boundless contempt for this man I had almost begun to pity, and as I rose from the couch and began to speak I could fairly taste the bitterness of the words I flung at him:

“Dr. or Mr. Bernard Brice Bently, Charles Chester Chickering—or whatever your infernal, alliterative alias may be—I deeply regret that I should have saved you from the death I have no doubt you richly deserved, and I earnestly hope that you may be punished for your crime of helping to ruin a poor little woman and two innocent children. And, by the living God! I will do all in my power to bring you to——”

He interrupted me eagerly, wonderingly, protestingly. “What is that you say? Mrs. Abbott and her children living? Why, that scoundrel Johnstone and that she-devil of a nurse swore to Mrs. Johnstone and me that all three of them were dead and buried!”

Hope came to life again in my heart. It was a mistake, after all, and this man could and would rectify it. He had been deceived and had witnessed the document in good faith. I had commenced an apology when he uttered a violent exclamation, and, holding the backs of his hands in front of his face, scrutinized his nails with rapt intensity.

His very lips grew livid, the eyes he turned on me were those of a madman, and, snarling like a wolf, he screamed: “See what you have done! Look at my nails!” and thrust his pallid fingers forward for my inspection.

On the polished, snowy surface of every nail was a bright pink fleck or spot of about the bigness and shape of a ladybug; but I was barely conscious of these rosy marks on the intense whiteness of the uncanny things, for I suppose the smart rap of that pistol bullet and this man’s extraordinary sayings and doings had upset my fairly choleric temper, and I was literally beside myself with uncontrollable rage and indignation.

“Damn you and your dead nails!” I shouted back at him. “You cowardly liar and thief, you are Johnstone’s accomplice, and I will tear the truth out of you if I have to kill you to do it.”

We were glaring at each other like wild beasts, and, before the words were fairly out of my mouth, we sprang forward, our hands clutching hungrily at each other’s throats in the fierce desire to strangle which comes to men and the other brutes that slay when anger and hate have reached the last and deadly stage. An undercut would have driven him back, but I wanted his windpipe and he wanted mine, and each of us was sick to have the other at close quarters, so a blow would not have been fair play. We were well matched. I was sure of that as we grappled. We swayed and strained, and I could feel the blood running down my face when my wound reopened; but the end came quickly, and, as we crashed to the floor, he was underneath, and my hands flew up eagerly and clenched under his chin. Ah! the savage joy of it!

But why did he not struggle? What trick was this? Good God, had the fall killed him? How white he was! And he had been crimson a second ago. The revulsion of feeling turned me sick. Was I a murderer? I let go my hold, leaped to my feet and threw a pitcher of ice water on his head and face. He gasped, opened his eyes and regarded me calmly and quietly. Was it only a moment ago that those calm, sad eyes had been narrow rims of blue around intensely black, distended pupils that had in them the dull red glare of blood-lust? Now they were soft and human, and the light of sanity was in them.

“My friend,” he said gently—what a superb voice he had, and how the deep, rich, mellow tones brushed away anger, hatred and fear—“my friend, I owe you my life twice. First, you saved it; now, you spare it. And I owe you more than life. I owe you my restoration to reason, to perfect sanity. For I have been bitten by a mania so wild, so strange, so improbable that no man save you who have seen it would believe in its existence. ‘Like cures like.’ It came through a fall and a shock. It has been cured through a fall and a shock. You were right. I was a liar. The greatest on earth, I believe, and I gloried in it, and hated to tell a truth lest it should bring a pink spot on my nails. No, don’t lift me up.”

I had attempted to raise him and had blurted out a word or two of shame, sympathy and pity.

“I prefer to lie here while I tell you the story,” he went on. “You have no cause to be ashamed; it was simple self-defense on your part, for I should probably have killed you in my paroxysm. Besides, you do not realize what you have done for me. But I thank you for your kindly sympathy; it is not wasted, believe me. Now, if you will do me a favor, watch my nails, and, if they become normal, tell me. But, first, put one of those wet compresses on your wound and slip the bandage over it. You will forgive me by and bye for fighting with a guest to whom I owed so much. I was not responsible.”

I hastened to reassure him, and he resumed:

“Before I begin my own weird tale, let me relieve your mind about that poor, wronged, sensitive child, Mrs. Abbott. I will go back with you to Laneville, and we will break that will wide open. There will be no trouble about it. Johnstone is a whelp, his wife is a criminal, and I can put them both behind the bars. That little woman shall be righted, if it takes my entire fortune to do it. Now, listen. A trifle over a year ago, getting out of my phaeton, I fell, struck my head and was out of my mind for some weeks. When I regained health and strength I found that my injury had left me with the most unthinkable hallucination that ever crept into a human brain. Subconsciously, I knew it was a vicious delusion, but I took the same delight in it that a patient partly in the control of delirium sometimes takes in the absurdities he utters.

“You know the little white marks on the nails which, as children, we used to say came from telling lies? Well, my mania was that if I told nothing but lies, lied constantly and consistently, I could turn mine entirely white. I tried and I succeeded. The will, obeying a diseased mind, plays queer pranks. I was partly proud of the result of my experiment, partly ashamed of it. So I took to wearing gloves and gauntlets most of the time. I began to get a reputation as a phenomenal liar. Once I overheard a man say, ‘Dr. Bently says it is so? Then that settles it; it’s a lie that would turn Beelzebub green with envy. Why, I wouldn’t believe the doctor if he swore to anything on seventeen cubic miles of Bibles in the original Hebrew.’

“I could have hugged him with grateful delight. But friends and practice dropped away. People began to look at me askance, and before Mrs. Johnstone died she was about the only patient of our class I had left. The street urchins used to yell at me, ‘Hallo, Ananias! where’s Sapphira?’ and ‘Berny Bently; or, The Hidden Hand.’ So I came here and hid myself in this great city, where no one cares for anything but money and would make much of a rich man if he had claws, hoofs, horns and a tail all white as snow or black as ink.”

While he spoke I had watched his nails closely and curiously, and the pink spots had spread and spread, slowly but surely, until the normal, healthy color had come back to them. I told him, but he never looked at them. Instead, he got up, came over to me, took my two hands in his and said slowly and reverently: “Thank God and you, dear friend, I am cured!” His splendid eyes were filled with tears, and his exquisite voice was solemn and broken with emotion. My own eyes were rather misty, but then they were never much good; and, for a lawyer, I was quite moved. I gave him my friendship then and there, and I have never regretted it.

Two weeks later, starting from my own home, where Mrs. Abbott and Bently had been our most welcome guests, we all went to Laneville, where we met Mr. and Mrs. Johnstone, whom we had summoned back by cable. They made us but little trouble, being cowards as well as scoundrels. Mrs. Abbott, however—good, kindly, generous little soul—was so unfeignedly sorry for her unworthy brother that she wished to let him have the lion’s share of the big property; but we overruled the soft-hearted child-woman and made her take her full share. I had the pleasure, subsequently, of expressing to Mr. Johnstone exactly what I thought of him, and I had considerable difficulty in restraining the doctor from giving him a beating.

Not long after I began divorce proceedings for Mrs. Abbott, but her rascally husband saved her and me the annoyance of going into court by opportunely and thoughtfully dying.

My fee was the largest I have ever received from an individual client, and, in some extenuation for accepting such a small fortune, I would like to say that it was fairly forced on me by the grateful little creature I love as though she were my own child.

My wife promptly demanded, and got, her little commission of one-half, and said she was the best drummer of practice and big-paying clients that any lawyer ever had. She is, God bless her! And, by the way, we live in the Goldsborough house, and my dear lady spends a good part of her time on the piazza she bought with her half of my fee.

Oh, yes! I forgot to mention that Mrs. Abbott’s name is now Bently. They call her husband “the good physician” in our town, and his word is as good as any man’s bond. The doctor has lost interest in his hands, but his sweet and devoted little wife admires them extravagantly. They are still very handsome, but brown as berries, and his nails are as pink as yours or mine.