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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Blue Wall, by Richard Washburn Child,
+Illustrated by Harold J. Cue
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Blue Wall
+       A Story of Strangeness and Struggle
+
+
+Author: Richard Washburn Child
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 29, 2008  [eBook #24451]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLUE WALL***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
+      file which includes the original illustrations.
+      See 24451-h.htm or 24451-h.zip:
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+      or
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+
+
+
+
+
+THE BLUE WALL
+
+A Story of Strangeness and Struggle
+
+by
+
+RICHARD WASHBURN CHILD
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: A PICTURE THERE AMONG THE LAW BOOKS]
+
+
+
+New York
+Grosset & Dunlap
+Publishers
+
+Copyright, 1912, by Richard Washburn Child
+All Rights Reserved
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   BOOK I--THE PROBLEM OF MACMECHEM
+
+         I. The House Next Door                                3
+
+        II. A Moving Figure                                   22
+
+   BOOK II--THE AUTOMATIC SHEIK
+
+         I. A Woman at Twenty-two                             39
+
+        II. A Pledge to the Judge                             65
+
+       III. The Torn Scrap                                    80
+
+        IV. The Face                                         101
+
+         V. At Dawn                                          126
+
+        VI. The Moving Figure again                          137
+
+   BOOK III--THE DOCTOR'S LIMOUSINE
+
+         I. A Shadow on the Curtain                          157
+
+        II. Margaret                                         170
+
+   BOOK IV--A PUPIL OF THE GREAT WELSTOKE
+
+         I. Les Trois Folies                                 181
+
+        II. The House on the River                           196
+
+       III. A Visitor at Night                               219
+
+        IV. A Suppression of the Truth                       240
+
+         V. Again the Moving Figure                          261
+
+   BOOK V--THE MAN WITH THE WHITE TEETH
+
+         I. Blades of Grass                                  283
+
+        II. In the Painted Garden                            292
+
+   BOOK VI--A PUPPET OF THE PASSIONS
+
+         I. The Vanished Dream                               301
+
+        II. Mary Vance                                       312
+
+       III. The Ghost                                        323
+
+   BOOK VII--THE PANELED DOOR
+
+         I. The Scratching Sound                             337
+
+   BOOK VIII--FROM THE WOMAN'S HAND
+
+         I. The Voice of the Blood                           351
+
+        II. This New Thing                                   362
+
+   BOOK IX--BEHIND THE WALL
+
+         I. An Answer to MacMechem                           371
+
+        II. "Why Care?"                                      378
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+            A picture there among the law-books     Frontispiece
+
+            "Listen to me, Estabrook"                        120
+
+            "It must be Julianna!"                           238
+
+            She did not speak. She seemed in doubt           372
+
+                       From drawings by Harold J. Cue.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 BOOK I
+
+                        THE PROBLEM OF MACMECHEM
+
+                             THE BLUE WALL
+
+
+                                CHAPTER I
+
+                          THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR
+
+
+What's behind this wall?
+
+As I write, here in my surgeon's study, I ask myself that question.
+What's behind it? My neighbors? Then what do I know--really know--of
+them? After all, this wall which rises beyond my desk, the wall against
+which my glass case of instruments rests, symbolizes the boundary of
+knowledge--seemingly an opaque barrier. I am called a man of science, a
+man with a passion for accuracies. I seek to define a part of the
+limitless and undefined mysteries of the body. But what is behind the
+wall? Are we sensitive to it? You smile. Give your attention then to a
+narrative of facts.
+
+How little we know what influence the other side has upon us or we upon
+the human beings beyond this boundary. We think it is opaque,
+impassable. I am writing of the other wall. _There_ was a puzzle! The
+wall of the Marburys!...
+
+Here I risk my reputation as a scientific observer. But that is all; I
+offer no conclusions. I set down in cold blood the bare facts. They are
+fresh enough in my memory. All seasons are swift when a man slips into
+age and it was only four short years ago that this happened--so
+marvelous, so suggestive of the things that we may do without
+knowing--mark me! the things we may accomplish--_beyond the wall!_
+
+You will see what I mean when I make a record of those strange events.
+They began when poor MacMechem--an able practitioner he was, too--was
+thrown from his saddle horse in the park and died in the ambulance
+before they could get him to the Matthews Hospital. I inherited some of
+his cases, and Marbury was one of those who begged me to come in at the
+emergency. It was meningitis and it is out of my line. Perhaps the
+Marbury wealth influenced me; perhaps it was because the banker--of
+course I am not using the real names--went down on his knees on this
+very rug which is under my feet as I write. There is such a thing as a
+financial face. You see it often enough among those who deal with loans,
+percents, examiners, and the market. It's the face of terror peering
+through a heavy mask of smugness, and it was dreadful to see it looking
+up at me.... I yielded.
+
+The Marburys' house faces the group of trees which shade the very spot
+where MacMechem's horse went insane. It is one of a block where each
+residence represents a different architect--a sort of display of
+individuality and affluence squeezed together like fancy crackers packed
+in a box. My machine used to wait for me by the hour in front of the
+pretentious show of flowers, tub-evergreens, glass and bronze
+vestibules, and the other conventional paraphernalia of our rich city
+successes.
+
+It was their little girl. She was eight, I think, and her beauty was not
+of the ordinary kind. Sometimes there rises out of the coarse,
+undeveloped blood of peasants, or the thin and chilly tissue of families
+going to seed, some extraordinary example like my little friend
+Virginia. The spirit that looks out of eyes of profound depth, the
+length of the black lashes lying upon a cheek of marvelous whiteness,
+the delicate lines of the little body which delight the true artist, the
+curve of the sensitive lips, the patient calm of personality suggesting
+a familiarity with other worlds and with eternity, makes a strong
+impression upon a medical man or surgeon who deals with the thousands of
+human bodies, all wearing somewhere the repulsive distortions of
+civilization. The ordinary personality stripped of the pretense which
+cannot fool the doctor, appears so hysterical, so distorted by the
+heats of self-interest, so monkey-like!
+
+Oh, well,--she was extraordinary! I was impressed from the moment when,
+having reread MacMechem's notes on the case under the lamp, and then
+having crossed the blue-and-gold room to the other wall, I drew aside
+the corners of an ice pack and gazed for the first time upon little
+Virginia.
+
+When I raised my glance I noticed the mother for the first time. I might
+have stopped then to wonder that this child was her daughter, for the
+woman was one of those who with a fairly refined skill endeavor to
+retain the appearance of youth. I knew her history. I knew how her feet
+had moved--it always seems to me so futilely--through miles and miles
+and miles of dance on polished floors and her mouth in millions of false
+smiles. She had been debutante, belle, coquette, old maid. Marbury had
+married her when wrinkles already were at her chin and her hands had
+taken on the dried look which no fight against age can truly conceal;
+then after six years of longing for new hopes in life she had had a
+single child.
+
+Just as she turned to go out, I saw her eyes upon me, dry, unwinking.
+But I know the look that means that death is unthinkable, that a woman
+has concentrated all her love on one being. It is not the appeal of a
+man or woman--that look. Her eyes were not human. I tell you, they were
+the praying eyes of a thoroughbred dog!
+
+I knew I must fight with that case--put strength into it--call upon my
+own vitality....
+
+The bed on which Virginia lay was placed sideways along the wall--as I
+have said--the Marburys' wall. I drew a chair close to it, and before I
+looked again at the child I glanced up at the nurse to be sure of her
+character. Perhaps I should say that I found her to be a thin-lipped
+person not over thirty, with long, square-tipped fingers, eyes as cold
+as metal, and colorless skin of that peculiar texture which always
+denotes to me an unbreakable vitality and endurance, and perhaps a mind
+of hard sense. Her name was Peters.
+
+MacMechem's notes on the case, which I still held in my hand, set forth
+the usual symptoms--headache, inequality of the eye pupils, vertigo,
+convulsions. He had determined that the variety was not the
+cerebro-spinal or epidemic form. He had tapped the spinal canal with
+moderate results. According to his observations and those of the nurse
+there was an intermittent coma. For hours little Virginia would lie
+unconscious, and restless, suffering failing strength and a slow
+retraction of the head and neck, or on other occasions she would rest
+in absolute peace, so that the disease, which depends so much upon
+strength, would later show improvement. The cause of this case, he
+believed, was either an abscess of the ear which had not received
+sufficient treatment--probably owing to the fact that the child, though
+abnormally sensitive, had always masked her sufferings under her quiet
+and patience, or a blow on her head not thought of consequence at the
+time it had happened.
+
+Well, I happened to turn the notes over and, by George!--there was the
+first signal to me. It was scrawled hastily in the characteristic
+nervous hand,--a communication from poor Mac, a question but also a sort
+of command,--like a message from the grave!
+
+These were the words,--"What keeps her alive? What is behind the
+Marburys' wall?"
+
+They startled me. "Behind the wall?" I said to myself. "Behind the wall?
+What wall?"
+
+There were the scientific notes he had made! Then at the end a sane and
+eminent doctor had written shocking gibberish. "What's behind the wall?"
+
+"Come here," I called to that grim machine, the nurse.
+
+She came, looked over my shoulder at my finger pointing at the words,
+and her face filled with a dreadful expression of apprehension, all the
+more uncouth because it sat upon a countenance habitually blank. She did
+not answer. She pointed. I looked up. And then I knew that the wall in
+question was that blank expanse of pale blue, that noncommittal wall
+that rose beside the bed, at one moment flat, hard, and impenetrable, at
+another with the limitless depths and color of a summer sky.
+
+"Turn up that light a little," said I uneasily. "What has this wall to
+do with us?"
+
+"Nothing," said Miss Peters. "Nothing. I refuse to recognize such a
+thing."
+
+"Then, what did Dr. MacMechem see?" I asked.
+
+"He saw nothing," she answered. "It is the child who knows that
+something is beyond that wall. It is her delirium. There is no sense in
+it. She believes some one is there. She has tried to explain. She puts
+her hands upon that surface and smiles, or sometimes her face, as she
+looks, will all screw up in pain. It has a strange effect upon her."
+
+"How?" said I. "You are impressed, too, eh? Well, how does it show?
+MacMechem was no fool. Speak."
+
+The raw-boned woman shivered a little, I thought. "That's what causes me
+to wonder, Doctor," she said. "There _is_ an effect upon her. She can
+foretell the condition of her disease. She seems conscious that her
+life depends on the welfare of something else or the misfortune and
+suffering of something else--beyond--that--wall."
+
+"Poppycock!" I growled at her. "It's a pretty pass when sane medical men
+in their practice begin to fancy--"
+
+"Sh--sh!" she said, interrupting me sharply. "See! Now the child is
+conscious! Watch!"
+
+I drew back a little from the bedside as Virginia stirred, but I could
+see the milk-white lids of her eyes--eyes, as I have said, deep and blue
+and intense like the wall behind her, with their long black lashes. Her
+slender body shook as if she was undergoing the first rippling torsions
+of a convulsion. Her face was drawn into such an expression as one might
+imagine would appear on the face of an angel in agony, and then,
+gradually, as some renewed circulation relaxed the nerve centres, her
+breath was expelled with a long patient sigh. And this I noticed,--she
+did not turn toward us, but with an almost imperceptible twist of her
+body and the reaching of her little hands she sought the wall.
+
+I confess I half believed that she would float off into the infinite
+blue of the plaster and be lost in its depths. I found my own eyes
+following hers. I felt, I think, that I too was conscious of some
+dreadful or marvelous, horrible or inspiring something behind the
+partition; but in light of subsequent discoveries my memory may have
+been distorted. Besides, I have promised none but the cold-blooded facts
+and I need only assert that the little girl looked, moved her lips,
+stretched her arms, and then suddenly, as if she had sensed some agony,
+some fearful turbulence, she cried out softly, her face grew white, her
+upper lip trembled, she fell back, if one may so speak of an inch of
+movement, and lay panting on her pillow. The nurse, I think, seized the
+moment to renew the cold applications. Yet I, who had scoffed, who had
+sneered at poor MacMechem's perplexity, stood looking at that blank blue
+wall, expecting to see it become transparent, to see it open and some
+uncanny thing emerge, holding out to little Virginia a promise of life
+or a sentence of death.
+
+My first instinct would have endeavored to shake off the question of the
+other side of that wall. I would, perhaps, if younger, have rejected the
+whole impression, declared the girl delirious, and would not now be
+reciting a story, the conclusion of which never fails to catch my
+breath. But mine is an empirical science. We deal not so much with
+weights and measures as with illusive inaccuracies. To be exact is to be
+a failure. To reject the unknown is to remain a poor doctor, indeed. The
+issue in this case was defined. Either the congestion of the membranes
+in the spinal cord was producing a persistent hallucination or else
+there was, in fact, something going on behind that wall. Either an
+influence was affecting the child from within or an influence was
+affecting her from without. I was mad to save her. Even a doctor who
+habitually views patients and data cards with the same impersonal regard
+may sometimes feel a call to work for love. And I loved that little
+child. I meant to exhaust the possibilities. As poor MacMechem had asked
+the question, I asked it.
+
+I touched Virginia's hands with the tips of my fingers. Her eyes turned
+toward me, and again I was sure that no madness was in them. You, too,
+would have said that, awakened from the intermittent coma, the little
+thing, though mute and helpless, was none the less still the mistress of
+her thoughts.
+
+"You have not asked her?" I inquired of Miss Peters.
+
+The woman, folding her arms, at the same time shook her head solemnly.
+
+"No," she said as if she disapproved.
+
+But I bent over Virginia. "I am the new doctor," I said. "Do you
+understand?"
+
+She smiled, and, I tell you, no monster could have resisted that
+tenderness.
+
+"What is there?" I whispered, pointing with my free hand.
+
+Her eyes opened as children's eyes will do in the distress of
+innocence; her feeble hand moved in mine as a little weak animal might
+move. Her face refilled with pain.
+
+"Something is there," she whispered.
+
+"What?"
+
+She shook her head weakly.
+
+The nurse touched my elbow. I thanked her for reminding me of the
+chances I was taking with the little girl's quiet. I left instructions;
+then, perhaps not wholly at peace with myself, I crept softly down the
+stairs. I did not wish an interview with Mrs. Marbury. I did not wish to
+see that begging look on her face. I would have been glad to have
+escaped Marbury himself.
+
+He was waiting for me. He waited at the bottom of the steps with that
+smug financial face of his--a mask through which, in that moment, the
+warmth of suffering and love seemed struggling to escape. He was
+plucking, from his thin crop, gray hairs that he could ill afford to
+lose.
+
+I anticipated his questions.
+
+"It is a matter of conservation of strength," I told him; "a question of
+mental state, a question of the nervous system. No man can answer
+now--beforehand."
+
+He drew out his watch and looked at it without knowing what he did or
+why or observing the hour.
+
+"By the way," said I, "who lives next door--in there?"
+
+"Who?" he answered. "Why, the Estabrooks."
+
+"A large family?"
+
+"Two. Jermyn Estabrook and his wife. They were married six years ago and
+have lived there ever since. We know them very little. His father has
+never forgiven my objection to his membership on a certain directorate
+in 1890. The wife was the daughter of Colfax, the probate judge. They
+have no children. But perhaps you know as well as I."
+
+"No," said I, studying his face. "I know nothing of them. Are they
+happy? Is there anything to lead you to believe that some tragedy hangs
+over them?"
+
+For a moment he looked at me as if he believed me insane; then he
+laughed nervously.
+
+"Bless me, no," he said. "Imagine a couple very happy together,
+surrounded by influences the most refined, leading a conservative life
+well intrenched as to money, the husband a partner and heir-apparent to
+an important law practice, the wife an attractive young woman who rides
+well and cares little for excitement. You will have imagined the
+Estabrooks."
+
+"They and their servants are in the house?"
+
+"Yes. Possibly Jermyn is away just now. I think I heard so. But I do
+not know."
+
+His words seemed to clear away the chance of any extraordinary abnormal
+situation beyond the wall.
+
+"What is the mystery?" he asked nervously.
+
+I can hear the querulous tone of his voice now; I can see the tapestry
+that hangs above the table in their hall.
+
+"Thank you," I said, without answering. And so I left him.
+
+Outside, I stopped a moment to look up at that house next door.
+
+It was October tenth. I remember the date well. The good moon was
+shining, for it has the decency to bathe with its light these cities we
+make as well as God's fields. It lit up the front of the residence so
+that I could see that, perhaps of all in the block, the Estabrooks' was
+the plainest, the most modest, with its sobriety of architecture and
+simplicity, and on the whole the most respectable of all. It seemed to
+insure tranquillity, refinement, and peace to its owner. I tell you that
+at that moment, with my chauffeur coughing his hints behind me, I felt
+almost ashamed for the fancies that had led me to find a mystery behind
+its stones and mortar.
+
+And then, as suddenly as I speak, I realized that a window on the second
+floor was being opened gently. I saw two hands rest for a moment on the
+sill, some small object was dropped into the grass below, and my ears
+were shocked by a low cry of suffering with which few of the millions
+which I have heard could be compared!
+
+It is always so, I find. We are ever forced by pure reason away from
+those delicate subconscious whisperings. I had sensed something beyond
+the wall, and as science, after all, is not so much truth as a search
+for truth, I would perhaps have done well to have retained an open mind.
+Instead, I had sneered at the whole idea. And to rebuke me the house, as
+if it were itself a personality, had for a fleeting second disclosed the
+presence of some hidden secret. The window was closed, and then I stood
+upon the deserted thoroughfare, the hum of my fretting limousine behind
+me, staring up at the moonlit front of the Estabrooks' home. You may be
+sure that it was with a mind full of speculations that I left the spot,
+asking myself as MacMechem had asked himself, what was behind the wall,
+what was the thing which was determining the question of the life or
+death of so lovable a child as little Virginia Marbury....
+
+It is already raining. As I write again, the slap of it on the window
+makes one feel the possibilities of loneliness in city life....
+
+It is hard for me to describe what a fascination there is in
+campaigning against death in those special extraordinary cases where the
+doctor becomes something more than a man of science and is also a man of
+affections. It is impossible to describe the irritation of being unable
+to act in cases like Virginia's--cases where the fight is made between
+strength of body and mind, on the one hand, and some deep-seated
+infection, like meningitis, on the other. I was more than anxious for
+the late afternoon hour when I could again go to the child. Her blue
+eyes, as deep and mysterious as the sea, called to me, if I may use that
+word. And there was something else that called to me as well--the blue
+wall--blank blue wall beyond the bed.
+
+I found Miss Peters there, sitting in the patient's room and the
+gathering gloom of dusk, her muscular hands flattened upon her knees in
+the position of a red granite Rameses from the Nile, looking out the
+window at the waving treetops of the park and the clouds of falling
+leaves which were being driven by the dismal October wind across the
+white radiance of the arc lamps. I thought that I detected upon her
+metallic face a faint gleam of pleasure.
+
+"It has been a good day," she said, without rising and with her
+characteristic brusqueness. "Mrs. Marbury is glad that you have not
+suggested a hospital, and desired me to say so." Indicating the bed
+with its inert little human body she added, "Peaceful."
+
+"The wall?" said I.
+
+She smiled insultingly.
+
+"You are interested?" she asked.
+
+I scowled, I think.
+
+"Oh, well," she said, moving her shoulders, "she has been talking to
+it,--whatever is behind there,--and, do you know, I believe it has been
+talking to her!"
+
+With those deliberate movements which characterized, I suppose, the
+movements of her mind itself, she lit the light; under its yellow rays
+lay the girl Virginia, her long lashes fringing her translucent eyelids,
+her delicately turned mouth with lips parted, and an expression of peace
+about the whole of her body.
+
+"At twelve to-day," said the nurse with her finger on the chart, "she
+went through apparent distress. Something seemed to give her the
+greatest anxiety. She even spoke to me twice. She pointed. She said, 'It
+is bad! It is bad!' with great vehemence. It was like that for more than
+an hour. Then suddenly she became peaceful. She went to sleep. I have
+not wakened her since."
+
+Maybe I shuddered. I remember I merely said in answer, "Yes, yes, that's
+all right!" and bent over the sleeping child. In the next moment I was
+lost in wonder at the improvement which had taken place in twenty-four
+hours. The tension and retraction of the neck and head had relaxed,
+respiration had diminished, the lips were pink and moist, the spasmodic
+nerve reaction and muscular twitching had almost ceased. I felt that
+exultation which comes when instinct as much as specific observation
+assures me that the tide has turned, that the arrow of fate has swung
+about, and the odds have changed. Strange as it may seem to many
+persons, these turns are felt by the doctor at times when the patient is
+wholly unconscious of them, and often enough I have wondered if, after
+all, this does not show that the crises of life are not determined
+within ourselves, but by some watching eye and mind and hand outside of
+us. As I bent over the little Virginia some such reflection was in my
+mind.
+
+Then you can imagine, perhaps, how startling, how much an answer to my
+unspoken question, was the sound which at that very moment came from the
+blue wall beyond the bed!
+
+How can we analyze our sense of hearing? Do you know the sound of your
+wife's footsteps? When you were young, could you pick out the approach
+of your father by the sound of his walk? Yes. But can you tell how? Are
+you able to say what it is that distinguishes it from the sounds a
+hundred other men would make going by your closed door? No. And neither
+can I tell you why I recognized this sound.
+
+All that I can say is this,--the wall was opaque, the sound so faint as
+to be hardly heard, and yet I knew, as well as if the partition had been
+of plate glass, that the impact was that of a human body!...
+
+There was something in this sound on the wall which drew an involuntary
+exclamation from me as the jar of forceps draws a tooth. And the sound
+of my voice, sharp and explosive, woke the child.
+
+She stared up at me with that strange look of infinity--I must so
+describe it--infinity; then, as if she too had heard, she turned toward
+the wall.
+
+"What do you see?" I asked near her ear.
+
+She gave me one of her tender smiles and made a little gesture as if to
+say that she felt her inability to express something.
+
+"It is there?" I asked, indicating the blank wall at last.
+
+Her eyes sought that space of mysterious blue. Then she whispered,
+"Yes."
+
+I must say that, though I knew no more than I had at first, I derived
+some satisfaction from the mere fact that for the second time Virginia
+had confirmed the extraordinary belief or fancy which had possessed
+prosaic MacMechem, the unimaginative Miss Peters, and, finally, myself.
+It seemed to justify positive steps in an investigation; after a further
+examination of the little body on the bed which offered still better
+evidence of an improvement in the course of the malady, I left the
+Marburys' door, determined to settle the question once and for all.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+                            A MOVING FIGURE
+
+
+It may strike you as absurd that I did not accept the possibility that
+Virginia was suffering from delirium. I confess that, after I had closed
+the house door behind me, I was for the moment convinced of the
+connection between congestion at the base of the brain and the abnormal
+fancy of the child. I had come to the house on foot, no vehicle was
+waiting for me, and I remember that when I started off I turned in the
+direction leading away from the Estabrooks' door.
+
+The day had promised a much-needed rain; now the coming night threatened
+one of those angry tempests of the autumn. It was already dark and the
+street was deserted as if every one had hurried to find cover. The
+lighted windows suggested warmth and protection; but outside the dust
+and flying, rustling leaves, the dancing shadows on the pavements, the
+wail of the wind, the tossing treetops in the park, the musty odor of
+the death of the year all bore down upon the spirit and awoke that
+superstitious uneasiness which we inherit, I suppose, from ancestors who
+fled the storm to find shelter for their naked bodies in caves and
+hollow trees.
+
+This wild and funereal scene and the proximity to the spot where poor
+MacMechem met his end brought him back into my memory, and again I found
+myself wondering, as he had wondered, and then I remembered the low cry
+I had heard issue from the window.
+
+One feels at times that determination comes from without. You can almost
+imagine, then, that some part of your own self which exists outside your
+body has tapped you on the shoulder, spoken a command, and directed your
+action. Certainly I cannot remember why I turned around, nor can I
+recall why I went back toward the Estabrooks'. I do remember that it
+occurred to me that, if I should see the young lawyer or his wife, all
+that I asked of them about the other side of the blue wall would
+probably incline them to the belief that I was as mad as any hare of
+March. But even that thought did not retard my steps.
+
+If I hesitated at the point where I again reached the Marburys', it was
+for good cause, for what I saw gave me no little uneasiness. Out of the
+shadow of the Estabrooks' entrance, where a high iron grilled fence
+curves toward the steps, there came, as if it were some wild and furtive
+animal startled from its shelter, a moving figure!...
+
+I endeavor to speak with accuracy.... It was dark. Everything seemed to
+sway in the galloping wind--the trees, the shrubs, the magnetic arc
+lights and even the luxurious iron and stone inclosures before the line
+of houses. Furthermore the dust was blinding. In spite of all this, in
+spite of the fact that the vision was fleeting, I received the definite
+impression that this figure sought to escape unseen. It hurried away
+into the darkness, hugged the shadows, and took up a position in a place
+that would have been chosen by one who wished to observe secretly what I
+was about to do.
+
+"Bah!" said I to myself. "Some loiterer. He cannot be connected with the
+Estabrooks' affairs."
+
+Yet, for some reason, feeling that I was watched, I determined to walk
+away again, and as I went I looked along the ground in the manner of one
+who has lost something. The cross-street was near and I turned it. I
+thought after a moment or two of waiting under the wall of the corner
+residence that I heard receding footbeats on the pavement; therefore,
+having allowed a minute or two to pass, I retraced my steps. The figure
+was no longer anywhere in sight. Holding my hat so that the ugly gusts
+of cold wind would not blow it away, I walked up the white steps of the
+Estabrook home and pressed the electric button which projected from a
+bronze disk. This disk, so the sense of touch indicated, had at one time
+been one of those Chinese carved metal mirrors and was now set into the
+stone. I remember how it spoke to me of the extents to which the
+metropolitan architects and decorators will go to appeal to the whims
+and pretensions of the rich, who, after all, are out of the same mould
+as other men so obscure and wretched that the money spent for such a
+capricious ornament would support a family of them for six months.
+Perhaps the irony of it is that, no matter how much wealth may protect
+one from the others, it can never protect one from himself. And then--I
+pressed the button again.
+
+There were silk curtains within the long heavy glass panels on either
+side of the door, but had a light been lit within I could have seen it.
+The whole house, however, was dark, and only by chance did I catch the
+sly movement of one of the curtains and the glint of an eye, peeping out
+at me. Whoever its owner might be, he or she had crept across the tiled
+vestibule silently and was now behind the outer door conducting a covert
+investigation.
+
+"An odd procedure for a house of a respectable, conservative family,"
+said I to myself, and without hesitating I rang again.
+
+A light in the ceiling of the vestibule glowed forth immediately and I
+heard the movement of heavy metal locks and latches; the door swung back
+and I found myself standing before a middle-aged woman dressed in the
+black-and-white garb of well-trained servants.
+
+This woman had a face that one may find sometimes among veteran nuns--a
+strong and kindly face, patient and self-subjugated--the face of the
+convent. But, of course, old family serving-women may have this same
+expression, for they too are nuns in a sense; in household rites they
+renounce the world, and if the spirit does not sour, little by little,
+they take wordless vows and obliterate themselves in service. This woman
+who stood before me, with skirts and apron blown about her substantial
+figure by the chill wind that poured into the vestibule, seemed at first
+to be one of them. It was only when I perceived that her eyes were
+filled with some guilty fear, and that her hands were half raised as if
+to ward off some impending danger, that I began to suspect that hers was
+one of those masks which hypocrisy and deceit grow upon the countenance
+of evil souls.
+
+"I wish to see Mr. Estabrook," said I.
+
+"He is not at home. He is away."
+
+"Mrs. Estabrook."
+
+"She is not well, sir. She cannot see anybody."
+
+These conventional answers seemed to put an end to the interview: if
+she had not spoken again, with that strange look of apprehension and
+terror rising to her eyes, I would have bowed and turned away. But her
+voice trembled as she moved toward me timidly and said, "Will you leave
+a message? Will you call again? Will you say--will you say--"
+
+Her sentence failed like that. As it did, words sprang to my mouth. I
+looked at her accusingly.
+
+"Yes," I snapped. "On the second story of the Marburys' house there is,
+of course, a partition. I called to ask Mrs. Estabrook what was on _her_
+side of that wall."
+
+This information acted like dynamite. You would have said that it had
+blown to pieces some vital organ of the old servant. The color ran out
+of her face as if her head had lost its connection with her body.
+
+"This is terrible," she choked. "Oh, 'tis awful! Who are you? Who can
+you be? Somebody has sent you."
+
+She caught the edge of the door and pushed it toward me.
+
+"I know who you are," she exclaimed. "You are somebody that is sent by
+_him_!"
+
+With a final shove, then, she closed the crack which had remained, the
+locks moved again, the light in the vestibule went out, and I was alone
+on the step.
+
+Such was the success of my first attempt to find an answer to
+MacMechem's question--to solve the riddle of the blue wall. But I
+realized, as I stood there, looking up into the gray sky of night with
+its wind-driven clouds, that the presence of some peculiar form of good
+or evil was no longer in doubt; that little Virginia, with the sensitive
+receptiveness of childhood, of suffering, and of her own endearing,
+unworldly personality, had not been wrong; that MacMechem, like a true
+physician, had not excluded the unknown and now was vindicated, and that
+there are sometimes strange affairs that baffle our feeble diagnosis of
+mankind....
+
+This is merely a recital of the facts. I am not attempting to prove
+anything. I merely state that, as I descended the Estabrook steps and
+struck off into the park, the detective instinct which lies in every one
+of us had wakened in me. It may have been the reason for my turning
+around, after I had crossed the street, between the whirr and lights of
+two automobiles, and stood at the opening of one of the paths of the
+park.
+
+The house I had just left met my scrutiny with a cold, impassive stare
+of its own--its look might have been the stare of the sphinx or of a
+good poker player. It gave no sign. My eyes traveled up to the roof,
+then back again to the ground, and only when my glance dropped did I
+see for the second time the lurking figure of the man.
+
+"He was watching me from first to last," said I to myself. "He probably
+saw my little strategy of waiting around the corner."
+
+Indeed, my first impulse was to walk rapidly over the way, head him off,
+and ask him his business; but I considered it unwise, and plunging into
+the shadows of the wailing trees, I walked briskly toward the distant
+lights that marked my district of the city.
+
+You know, perhaps, the feeling that you are being followed. Without
+recognition of any definite sight or sound, you become more and more
+conscious of some one skulking in the shadows behind. Finally, you hear,
+in one of those moments when the wind catches its breath, the breaking
+of a twig, the disturbance among the dry leaves that have blown in
+drifts over the path, and you know that some one is there.
+
+I admit freely that I felt I had involved myself in such a manner that
+some one wished to do me harm. If, on the other hand, he who followed
+sought to rob me, the situation was as bad. The park was deserted. One
+does not like to call for help unless certain of danger. And therefore,
+though I am no longer moulded for speed, I broke into a run.
+
+I had gone but a few paces before the other discovered that I was in
+flight. I heard the rapid patter of his shoes behind me. In another
+twenty feet I heard his voice. It was not loud and it was cautious, but
+it reached my ears with a suggestion of extraordinary savageness.
+
+"Stop!" it called with an oath. "I've got you. Stop!"
+
+It was not a reassuring message, of course. I tried to run faster. A
+moment of this endeavor only showed me that my pursuer was gaining. I
+therefore stopped short, stepped into the heavy shadow of an evergreen,
+and waited for my new friend. Though it was dark I could see him as he
+came, and I assure you that it surprised me when I noted that the man
+was well-dressed and bore the appearance of respectability.
+
+Just as he reached the spot in front of me, I saw him hesitate as if he
+had discovered that I was no longer running along in front of him. I
+knew that an encounter could not be avoided. Accordingly I sprang
+forward and drove my fist into his neck. Instantly I found myself
+grappling with him. I felt the watch in his waistcoat pocket as I
+pressed my knee into his stomach, and with my face near his I could see
+by the look in his eyes that my blow had staggered him and put him at a
+disadvantage. Some years ago I could deliver a heavy punch and the knack
+had stayed with me. I threw my weight against him once more, bore him
+down onto the leaves and gravel, and found myself on top.
+
+Both of us were panting; we were breathing into each other's faces when
+suddenly I saw his eyes open wide as if he had seen a vision.
+
+"I know you now. You are the doctor!" cried he. "Stop! Tell me, for
+God's sake, what's wrong with my wife!"
+
+"Your wife?" I cried, dumbfounded. "Who are you?"
+
+He struggled to his feet and leered at me. His face twitched with
+emotion.
+
+"I am Jermyn Estabrook," he gasped.
+
+You may imagine my astonishment when, after struggling with a man who
+had pursued me through the dark paths of the park like one who sought my
+life, he whom I had never seen before should now appeal to me as if I
+could lift him from the depths of some profound despair. He had cried
+out that I must tell him what was wrong with his wife. I had never so
+much as set eyes upon her. He had said he was Jermyn Estabrook. And
+though, with my face close to his, I could see that he was covered with
+bits of dead leaves and mud and the sweat of his desperate struggle, I
+felt that he told the truth.
+
+"I have never been to your home but once in my life," I said. "You were
+watching me on that occasion--to-night. That is plain. I did not go
+in."
+
+"I have made a mistake," he gasped. "I'm sorry. I have been through
+torments beyond telling. Something is going on--some ghastly, horrible
+tragedy within my own walls."
+
+The word caught my ear; I gripped his shoulder.
+
+"Listen, Estabrook," I cried. "It is no time for us to mince matters. I
+am attending Marbury's little child. It is an odd form of meningitis. I
+am fighting to save her. Do you understand?"
+
+He shook his head stupidly as if worn dull by mental agony. "What of
+her?" he asked.
+
+"What of her, eh?" I cried. "I'll tell you! I'll tell you! She is
+affected--perhaps her life or death depends upon--something--or
+somebody--that is behind the wall--the blue wall--something in your
+house next door. Come! Let us go back there. Let us force this thing. It
+is your home! Enter it!"
+
+"I can't!" he cried, thrusting his fingers upward.
+
+"Can't!" I roared at him.
+
+"No," he said. "Not yet. I have promised her. She has my word."
+
+"But think, man, what may be going on there!" I said.
+
+"I have sworn not to pass the door," he said obstinately. "Heaven knows
+I am nearly crazy for light upon all this. But I must keep my word!"
+
+As if to lend emphasis to his exclamation, a gust of wind roaring
+through the trees of the park brought the first deluge of rain--a cold,
+stinging downpour of the wild autumn night. Estabrook shivered. I could
+see that he was a man, badly tired, unnerved, and still dizzy from the
+blow I had given him.
+
+"Follow me," said I roughly. "You need warmth--stimulant. And I want
+your story, Estabrook."
+
+He looked at me with an empty stare, but at last nodded his assent, and
+without another word between us, we came to this house and into this
+very room.
+
+He sat there before the fire--burning then as it is now--and as the
+warmth penetrated his trembling body, he seemed to regain his
+self-composure.
+
+I saw then that this young man, well under forty, did not lack
+distinction of appearance. His head was carried upon his strong neck in
+the masterful manner of those who have true poise and strength of
+personality. His hair had turned gray above his ears, and his
+well-shaven face carried those lines that the grim struggles of our
+modern civilization gouge into the fullness of youth and health.
+
+"I must tell somebody," he said, while I was observing his features upon
+which the firelight danced. "I have never dreamed that I would come to
+such a pass. But you shall hear my love story. You may be able to throw
+some light upon it. Contrary to the notion of my friends, who consider
+me incapable of adventure, my experience in the affections is one that
+offers opportunity for speculation--it would appeal to a great
+detective!"
+
+I leaned forward quickly. Such a statement from any man might awaken
+interest, but Estabrook was not any man. He represented the essence of
+conventional society. He belonged to a family of well-preserved
+traditions, a family whose reputation for conservative conduct and
+manners of cold self-restraint was well known in a dozen cities. They
+were that particular family, of a common enough name, which was known as
+the Estabrookses Arbutus. Jermyn had had a dozen grandfathers who, from
+one to another, had handed down the practice of law to him, as if for
+the Estabrooks it was an heirloom.
+
+"Perhaps I had better tell you from the beginning," said he, drawing the
+back of his fine hand across his forehead. "For it is strange--strange!
+And who can say what the ending will be?"
+
+I counseled him to calm himself and asked that he eliminate as much as
+possible all unnecessary details of his story. I shall repeat, then, as
+accurately as possible, the story he told me. I will attempt to write it
+in his own words....
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 BOOK II
+
+                          THE AUTOMATIC SHEIK
+
+
+                                CHAPTER I
+
+                          A WOMAN AT TWENTY-TWO
+
+
+Some men do not fall in love. I had supposed from the beginning of my
+interest in such things that I was one of these men. I did not doubt
+that all of us have an inherent tendency, perhaps based upon our coarser
+natures, to love this or that woman thrown in our way by a fortunate or
+unfortunate chance. But the traditions of our family were strong; I had
+been educated by all those who were near to me in earlier life to look
+upon marriage, not as a result of natural instinct so much as the result
+of a careful and diplomatic choice of an alliance. I had been
+taught--not in so many words, but by the accumulation of impressions
+received in my home and in my youthful training--that one first
+scrutinized a woman's inheritance of character, wealth, and position,
+and as a second step fell in love with her.
+
+This cannot be called snobbishness. It is prudence. And I followed this
+course until I was nearly thirty years old. If the test of its success
+lies in the fact that I had never had more than a temporary affection,
+sometimes stimulated by the curve of a bare shoulder and sometimes by
+the angle of a bright mind, then it had successfully kept me from the
+altar.
+
+And yet you shall see that at last I reversed the order of our
+traditions; you shall see, too, that it resulted in one of the strangest
+of courtships and a tangle of mystery of which the rest of the world
+knows nothing, but which you have adequate proof threatens my happiness
+and the ghastly end of which may now be skulking within the walls of my
+house.
+
+The wild weather of this night, with the howl of the wind and the rattle
+of dead leaves driven against the blinds, is in extraordinary contrast
+to the day of beautiful spring sunlight when I first set eyes upon her
+who was Julianna Colfax.
+
+It is not necessary to tell you who her father was, because you have
+probably many times toasted your feet before the grate in the club with
+him.
+
+He was a master of human interest, as grizzled as that old Scotch hound
+which became his constant companion after Mrs. Colfax died, and his
+contact with all those hosts of men and women, for whom he administered
+justice so faithfully for more than twenty years, had stamped on his
+shaven face sad but warm and sympathetic lines. All men liked him and
+those who knew him best loved him heartily. Under his gruffness there
+was a lot of sentiment and tenderness. After his reserved moments, when
+he was silent and cold, he would burst forth into indulgences of fine,
+dry humor, like an effervescent fluid which gains in sparkling vigor by
+remaining corked awhile. It was commonly said--and often said by Judge
+Graver, of the Supreme Court--that old Colfax remained in the
+comparative obscurity of a probate judgeship simply from an innate
+modesty and a belief that he had found his work in life in which he
+might best serve humanity without hope of personal power and glory.
+Gaunt, tall, stoop-shouldered, gray, walking the same path each
+day,--home, court-house, club, neighbors, home,--with a grapevine stick
+as thick as a fence-post in his hand--such was her father.
+
+Exactly seven years ago the first of last June, on a spring day when I
+believe every bird that dared came into the city to make his song heard,
+I came up from downtown and dropped off a surface car before the
+gleaming white pillars of the new probate court building. My pocket was
+stuffed with a lot of documents in that Welson _vs._ Welson litigation,
+which I had just succeeded in closing.
+
+Behind those swinging green doors which flank the big bench is the
+judge's retiring-room; pushing the crack there wider, I was able to peek
+in, and saw at once that the old atmosphere of Judge Colfax's study had
+not remained in the old dingy court-house, where the dismantlers' picks
+were already breaking up the ancient mortar, but had followed the
+personality of the man into these new pretentious quarters. The
+retiring-room already gave forth an alluring odor of law books and
+document files, the floor already had been forced into use to bear up
+little piles of transcripts of evidence, tin document boxes and piles of
+books, open at reference pages, occupying obscure corners. The Judge's
+black silk hat was in its familiar place, resting with the opening
+upward, on the old black walnut desk which its owner had affectionately
+brought with him, and which made a strange and cynical contrast with the
+mahogany woodwork and new rug.
+
+"Come in," he said, and with one of his long-fingered hands he made a
+gesture toward the opposite side of the room and spoke my name and that
+of another.
+
+She was there! I had never seen her before. She was there. I had no
+thought of her ancestry, her wealth, or her position. She was there, and
+into my throat came something I had never felt before, into my face a
+suffusion of hot blood, into my lungs a long-held inhalation of breath.
+
+Sometime you may see her. She has changed a little. But then she was
+twenty-two, and the simplicity of her attire seemed to be at once the
+propriety of nature and the infinite skill of art. She wore a black
+gown, without ornamentation, and a black hat of graceful form. Not a
+harsh or stiff fol-de-rol was about her anywhere. You will pardon me for
+this detail. But, oh, she was so different from the others. She was a
+picture there among the law books.
+
+The most attractive thing there can be in a woman is that combination of
+youth, innocence, glowing health, modesty. The perfect skin, with its
+grapelike, dusty bloom which shows where the collar droops at the front
+of the neck, the even lashes, from under which the deep eyes gaze out at
+you half timidly, the brave, honest uplifting of a rounded chin, the
+undulations of fine lungs, the almost imperceptible movement of
+restrained vigor in a poised, delicate, graceful figure, the gentleness
+and tenderness of a voice which at the same time suggests refinement and
+decision and strength, the absence of any effort to make an impression,
+either in manner or dress,--these are rare and beautiful attributes in
+an age when female children hatch out as artful women without the
+intervening period of girlhood. After all, the best men of us will not
+choose one of these modern maidens who imitate the boldness of the
+character and dress of the adventuress or the stage and opera favorite.
+It has become a tiresome feature of our modern life with the insidious
+faculty of corrupting the manners even of families who know better. She
+was so different! And in that moment I knew her superiority as a woman.
+I could not speak.
+
+We exchanged no words. Yet as we looked at each other in the manner of
+children, the Judge, I thought, sensed a significance. When my eye
+sought his, I found a cloud upon his stern face, but immediately, as if
+he had tossed a haunting thought aside, he laughed.
+
+"Julianna," said he, "this is the Mr. Estabrook who is as insane as I.
+That is, he devotes no end of time and energy and seriousness to the
+game of chess. We have never yet met each other on the field of battle.
+Some afternoon, here in this room, however--"
+
+She did not allow him to finish; she said hastily that she must witness
+the contest.
+
+"Then at my home," he said, beaming at me. "To-morrow will you come to
+dinner?"
+
+I remember that Julianna had raised her eyes, that they were smiling,
+and that I received the definite, convincing impression that I was
+looking at a girl who never had given her love away. I tell you that one
+feels a truth like that by instinct, and that a woman wears not only her
+spotlessness, but also her purity of thought, like a faint halo. Yet at
+that moment I knew she was glad that I had accepted the invitation:
+there was a blushing eagerness in her eyes, upon her lips, in the
+movement of her graceful hands. For the rest of the morning I was half
+dizzy with the mad sense of triumph, of conquest--that strange onslaught
+of the emotions which gives no quarter to the disordered phalanx of
+reason.
+
+I must admit that when I met Judge Colfax on the court-house steps the
+next afternoon to walk home with him, I had not given a thought to his
+daughter's forebears or security of place in the social structure. In
+fact, the social structure had vanished; an individual had, at least for
+the time, filled its place.
+
+I even jumped when the first sentence the Judge addressed to me began
+with her name.
+
+"My daughter plays an excellent game herself," he said, as if in
+explanation of her interest. "In fact, I may say, with an old man's
+modesty, that there are only two persons in this city who can win from
+me consistently. She is one."
+
+"And the other, sir?" I asked as we turned our faces toward the hot
+stare of the late afternoon sun.
+
+"The other," he said, "is an automaton. I have named it the Sheik of
+Baalbec. But I believe he calls himself the Player of the Rolling Eye."
+
+It is impossible for me to say why the mere mention of the fanciful name
+of an automatic chessplayer should have caused me to feel a peculiar
+uneasiness--the sensation of apprehension. I am not susceptible
+ordinarily to the so-called warnings of voices from within. And yet I
+suppose the Judge saw a look of inquiry on my face, for he drew out his
+large, old-fashioned gold watch, which he carried in his trousers
+pocket, with his keys.
+
+"We will stop there," said he. "There is time. The automaton has a
+corner of the lower hallway in the old Natural History Museum. It's not
+far out of our way, and if you will start with a problem I will give you
+and play with him, it will afford me an opportunity to measure you
+before our game this evening."
+
+Such were the circumstances which brought me into a mystery not yet
+solved, the ending of which I fear to guess. In a modern era, when it is
+commonly supposed that skeletons no longer hang in closets, that day
+after day brings commonplace occurrences or, at the best, trivial
+abnormalities to be explained to-morrow, that romance is dead, it is
+strange that Fate should have picked me, when, by custom and my own
+desire, I am aloof from all things turbulent, morbid, and uncanny, to
+play an unwilling part in so extraordinary a drama, or, possibly, a
+tragedy.
+
+At any rate, that day found me face to face with the half-human
+personality which the Judge had named the Sheik of Baalbec, and whose
+eye has cast an evil cloud upon my life.
+
+Of course I do not know whether you are familiar with the old Natural
+History Society and its musty exhibit. A controversy about a curator in
+1873 had caused the formation of the new American Institution of
+Biology. A few old men continued thereafter to support the ancient
+Society by annual subscription, and when they died, one or two of them,
+acting from stubborn partizanship, left the museum tied up with trusts
+and legacies, preventing the sale of a valuable city property and yet
+not furnishing enough to keep the building in repair or dust the case
+containing "Beavers at Work." Finally the old museum, once the pride of
+the municipality, had come down to the disgraceful necessity of letting
+its lower floor to a ten-cent exhibition of respectable waxworks, the
+principal attraction of which was the automatic chessplayer, which a
+year before my visit had gained suddenly a reputation for playing at
+times with the skill of a fiend. I faced the mechanism that afternoon
+for the first time, little realizing the intimacy, if I may use the
+word, which was to spring up between it and me.
+
+The representation of a squatting Arab, robed in red Oriental swathes
+and with a chessboard fastened to its knees, sat cross-legged on a
+box-like structure. Upon dropping a coin into a slot in the flat top,
+two folding-doors in front of this box would open for a few moments,
+showing a glass-covered interior, which, as far as the back of the box,
+was filled with a tangle of wheels and pulleys, seeming to preclude the
+possibility that a human being could hide therein. As soon as these
+doors closed, a flat space in the chest of the Sheik opened, with a
+faint purr of machinery to expose internal organs of metal levers and
+gears.
+
+The effect of this last exposure was extraordinary, and in all the time
+I knew the Sheik, I never got over it. The moment this cavity in his
+chest opened, he was an impersonal piece of mechanism; the moment it
+closed, however, the soul, the personality of a living being returned,
+and it seemed to me that the brown, wax skin of his nodding head, the
+black hair of his pointed beard, the red of his curved, malicious lips,
+the whites of his eyes, which showed when he moved with a squeak of
+unoiled bearings in his neck, and even the jointed fingers of his hand,
+with which he moved the pawns in short, mechanical jerks about the
+board, all belonged to a human body, containing an individual
+intelligence.
+
+This was my feeling as the Judge arranged the chess problem on the board
+above the gilt-and-red Turkish slippers on the feet of the thing's
+shapeless cotton-stuffed legs, and briefly described the point to be
+gained by the Sheik in the series of moves which he was to begin and the
+success of which I was to combat. The creature made its first move in
+its deliberate manner and then I stepped forward.
+
+I ask you to believe me that, as I did so, the whirring of wheels within
+the contrivance stopped, and at that moment I heard a human throat
+inhale a long breath with a frightened gasp! It was as if the balanced
+glass eyes of the figure had recognized me or seen in my coming an event
+long expected.
+
+For a moment I hesitated, then made my move. The figure hesitated, made
+another. I studied the situation before my second attempt, and then was
+surprised at the absurd mistakes made by the automaton, who, in his next
+moves, was playing in slipshod fashion, as if preoccupied. I now had the
+advantage, and believed that I should win. My triumph was short-lived,
+however; my opponent awakened to his danger, and yet perhaps my first
+warning of the final move came when the Judge laughed heartily, clapped
+me on the shoulder, and pointed toward the board. Another turn made it
+plain to me. I had lost.
+
+And at the same moment the infernal Sheik lifted his head with the
+clicking of gears, stared at me, drew down one papier-mache eyelid in a
+hideous wink and rolled the other glassy eyeball in a complete orbit of
+the socket, and as soon as this evil, mechanical grimace had been
+accomplished, the head fell forward, the door in the being's chest
+opened once more, showing the moving wheels, and again the creature
+seemed to become soulless.
+
+"He always rolls his eye at you when he wins," explained Judge Colfax as
+we went out into the sunlit street again, and he patted me on the
+shoulder in gentle banter.
+
+"I believe I do not like your Sheik machine," said I, laughing
+nervously. "I felt all the time as if a hidden pair of human eyes were
+on me--as if there was a personality behind it all."
+
+The Judge chuckled.
+
+"But you forget," said he. "Of course there is a person--some man--or
+woman. I have often wished to have a look at that person, Estabrook."
+
+As you will see, I have had cause to feel as he did on that memorable
+night--memorable because I first sat at table with Julianna--with
+Julianna, whose magnificence was not boldness, whose spirit was not
+immodesty, and whose gentleness did not rob her of either her beauty or
+vivacity.
+
+Though it seems to me that to-night, in the depths of anxiety, I find
+myself in love with a new and deeper feeling, there can be no doubt
+that, as I looked at her across the table, I thrilled with the thought
+that she might one day be my wife, and felt that delicious and painful
+ecstasy when her deep eyes met mine and her lips smiled back at me the
+encouragement of a modest woman who does not guard too closely her own
+first interest in an exchange of ardent glances. I had then forgotten
+most fully the theories of my training.
+
+I remember now that she wore a gown of soft and ample drapery and of a
+dark green, suggestive of the colors in the shady recesses of a forest.
+I was charmed by the shape and subtle motions of her white hands, the
+quality of the affectionate attitude she maintained toward her father,
+the refinement of her voice when she answered my comments or addressed
+the old serving-maid.
+
+About this serving-maid I must speak. On that occasion her ample form
+moved about in the shifting shadows outside the brilliant glow of the
+flickering candles, like a noiseless ghost, hovering about a feast of
+the living. But I liked her, because, when she looked toward Julianna,
+she wore that expression of loyal affection which perhaps one never sees
+except upon the faces of mothers or old servants. She had been in the
+Judge's family even at the time of the death of his wife years before,
+and she had looked as old then as she does when I see her in my own home
+now. The old woman's name is Margaret Murchie. You will see that she,
+too, is involved in this affair.
+
+How I noticed her at all that evening, or how I kept up an intelligent
+conversation with Judge Colfax, I cannot explain. I only know that I
+finally found myself sitting with my knees under the table with the long
+thin legs of the Judge, and a set of chessmen, carved exquisitely from
+amber and ivory, on the board before me, and that when the old man was
+called to the telephone and announced on his return that he must go out
+to the bedside of a friend, I was overjoyed that I might have some rare
+moments in conversation with Julianna.
+
+I observed, however, that this prospect did not please Judge Colfax as
+much as it did me; there was an awkward moment in which he looked from
+one to the other of us with the same expression as he had worn when he
+had observed my interest in his daughter in our first meeting. Then, as
+on the former occasion, his optimistic good-nature seemed to rise again
+above whatever apprehensions he may have had. He smiled until all the
+multitude of wrinkles about his eyes were showing.
+
+"Estabrook," said he, "we have bad luck, eh? But I can offer a worthy
+substitute. Unless you find that you must go, you may discover my
+daughter to be as worthy an opponent as the Sheik of Baalbec."
+
+Of course I recognized the significance of the words, "unless you find
+that you must go," and my first instinct was to offer some lame excuse
+and take my departure. Immediately I turned toward Julianna, but she,
+instead of coming forward in the manner of one ready to say good-night,
+idly turned the pages of a book on the old table, and then, walking
+across the room, stood near the chessboard with the pink glow of the
+droplight upon her face, and looked up at me, saying as plainly as
+words, "Stay."
+
+From the ordinary woman this would not have affected my intentions; it
+would have been nothing. From her it was a piece of daring. From her it
+seemed a sacrifice of dignity for my sake. I met her glance, and then
+turned politely toward the Judge, who stood in the wide door, his tall
+hat resting under his arm and his searching eyes looking out from under
+the bushy brows.
+
+"Thank you for the suggestion," I said.
+
+"I will be out late," he answered, his deep rumbling voice directed at
+me. "Good-night."
+
+"Good-night, sir," I said cheerfully.
+
+Then for the first time I was alone with Julianna, and she was directing
+at me, as I stood before her, one of those perplexed little
+smiles--those rare perplexed smiles which indicate, perhaps, that for
+the first time in a woman's life she does not understand her inner self,
+and yet is sure that some joyful thing hangs where she can reach it if
+she will. It is the last smile drawn from childhood.
+
+"Shall we play?" she said.
+
+"No," said I.
+
+"I am glad."
+
+"Then you do not like the game?"
+
+"Yes, when I play it with father, because it interests him. And he
+prefers to play with me because he says that I am youth."
+
+"His youth, too," I suggested.
+
+She nodded seriously. "Yes, I think so," she said. "We see so many old
+people, and balls attract me very little. Our companionship is very
+close even for father and daughter. I surprise myself by talking so to
+you, but that is it--and we have established a little kingdom of our
+own--a walled kingdom which no one else can enter or destroy."
+
+Upon hearing these words, pronounced with that soft ring of
+determination which gave her the one touch of imperiousness she
+possessed, my heart fell. It was as if she had warned me that she had
+dedicated herself to him.
+
+And then suddenly the fact that she had so spoken to me, who had known
+her so short a time and said nothing but commonplaces to her, seemed to
+take on new significance. I thought it plain that she was erecting a
+defense against her own self and was admitting, by her denial, that her
+fortresses were for the first time in danger. She had had her choice in
+conversation and she had chosen to speak not of general matters, but of
+herself. She had done so with charming awkwardness, and I felt as if the
+world of all my happiness were resting on the bare chessboard between
+the round and healthy forearms that leaned there, and between her
+graceful hands, whose intrinsic beauty was not marred by any ring.
+
+"One might well envy the Judge," said I.
+
+She looked up at me quickly.
+
+"Will you close those long windows for me?" she asked, after a moment,
+pointing toward the back of the room. "At the front of the house we are
+level with the street; at the rear, however, the old walled garden is
+almost another story below us. It is damp, I think, even after a spring
+day as tender and sunny as this has been."
+
+I hastened to do her bidding.
+
+"There is a tangle of old-fashioned flowers in our little city
+inclosure," she called after me. "The Judge likes it that way--as mother
+used to like it. There is a balcony with an old wistaria vine just
+outside the window."
+
+"And the moon," said I under my breath.
+
+The pranks that fate plays--or whatever one chooses to call the strange
+domination of our chance happenings--are wonderful and at times seem
+malicious. I am certain that it brought me onto the iron-railed balcony
+just beyond the French windows at the beat of that second.
+
+The old garden, though small and flanked by the ugly backs of city
+houses, seemed to hold within its brick inclosure a world full of white
+liquid moonlight. Shrubs, however, which had grown in disorder under the
+walls, threw dark and steady shadows across the patches of lesser
+vegetation. The tops of early blossoms and nodding grasses showed beyond
+these spaces of blackness. Suddenly, as I looked down, I heard a click
+like that of a gate-latch, and a second later I saw, projecting from one
+of the fantastic patterns of shade, a round disk of shining surface.
+
+There are moments when the sight is puzzled to determine the character
+of such an object. I could not make out the nature of this bobbing,
+moving circle that followed along the irregular line of wall shrubbery.
+Then, when it was nearer, I saw in a flash that it was the top of a silk
+hat. I could see, too, the stooping shoulders of the man who wore it, I
+could see that he was proceeding cautiously as if he feared to attract
+attention, and at last, when he paused beneath the balcony, I could see
+a face with an anxious expression that turned upward toward me. I drew
+back behind the thick-leaved vine; for the man was Judge Colfax.
+
+Of all persons he was the last to act as if he sought concealment in
+what he did, the last to be guilty or wear the appearance of guilt. Had
+he been a stranger, I might have assumed that he had come to make a call
+below stairs, but the fact that it was my host, a judge of probate, with
+a reputation for lifelong honor and refinement, filled me with the
+keenest curiosity. I gripped the old iron railing with my hands and
+leaned over.
+
+The Judge waited for a moment before a door opened slowly somewhere
+beneath the balcony and a stream of artificial light escaped through the
+crack and for a brief second lay like a piece of yellow ribbon across
+the grass. Then he was joined by some one whose voice I recognized as
+that of Margaret Murchie.
+
+"I came back," I heard him whisper, "because I saw that you had
+something to say to me. Julie is observant. I couldn't speak to you in
+the hall, Margaret. What is the matter? What did you indicate by the
+signs?"
+
+"It's him, sir," she answered. "This thing we have feared has come."
+
+"You cannot mean it!" he exclaimed.
+
+"How could we expect different, sir? The heart of her is like that of
+other healthy young girls. I could tell by the look on her face, sir.
+The like of it has never been there before. 'T is given to some one to
+have his way with her, Judge. I think it's him."
+
+They were talking of me!
+
+"He would have to be told," said the old man. I could see the top of the
+silk hat shaking. "And she would have to be told!"
+
+"It is awful, sir!" she answered, wringing her hands. "But I'd never
+spoil it that way for anything."
+
+"You forget the other!" he said sternly.
+
+"Lost," she argued. "The time has gone by. It was not a human, sir. I
+could never mention her name--beautiful thing she is!--with that other."
+
+"I know--I know," whispered the old man distractedly.
+
+"Well, then, let things run their course. God will not let harm come of
+it."
+
+"Blood," said he.
+
+For a moment there was no sound. The one word seemed to have decided all
+questions and to have called for silence.
+
+"In case of my death--" the Judge began after a while.
+
+Margaret Murchie uttered a little cry.
+
+"I have left a paper where she will find it," he finished. "I can do
+nothing more now. Perhaps--perhaps it will not be a crisis, after all.
+I think if I had the chance again, I would send him to his doom."
+
+With these words he raised his clenched fist and walked rapidly across
+the grass to the arched exit leading to the alley. The click of the
+latch told me that he had gone.
+
+You may imagine my state of mind. As I endeavored in those seconds to
+wrest some meaning from the tangle of words I had overheard, my thoughts
+were tumbling over each other so fast that I had forgotten the doubtful
+part I had played as an eavesdropper. I had heard a reference made to me
+as one who had brought some new complication into the affairs of that
+household which heretofore I had regarded as the most spotless and quiet
+in the city, but which now I found had some dark and mysterious menace
+hanging over its peace. Was I the one, after all, to whom they had
+referred? They had spoken of some one else and whispered strange
+phrases. It was all a blank puzzle to me.
+
+Perhaps under different circumstances my caution and dislike of all that
+is unusual or doubtful would have led me away from the house, planning
+never to return. But there is in me a certain loyalty. I do not quickly
+cast my lot or my reputation with that of another; when, however, I have
+done so, I do not quickly withdraw. Extraordinary as it may seem, I
+felt myself already bound to Julianna. Perhaps I already loved her
+desperately.
+
+Whatever may have been the case, when I turned back into the room I
+looked into her gaze with an expression of solemnity which my emotions
+intended as an outward sign of my continued devotion.
+
+I must have presented then a ridiculous, sentimental appearance. She
+laughed the moment she saw me.
+
+"You like our balcony," she said. And then, as if she had discovered the
+cause of my seriousness, she added, "also our spring moonlight."
+
+I nodded.
+
+"It is an unusual spot for the middle of a metropolis," she went on. "It
+is filled with a tangle from which years ago I used to imagine fairies
+and gnomes and Arabian marauders might step at any moment."
+
+"Tell me more," said I.
+
+"There was a little basin and fountain there when I was a child. But
+when it did not flow, yellow slime collected at the bottom, and when the
+water was turned on and trickled from one basin to another, it gave
+forth a mournful sound that made one think of deserted villages, and
+moss growing on gravestones, and courtyards where there were moonlight
+murders."
+
+"You have a keen imagination."
+
+"The keenest!" she exclaimed. "Why not? It has grown up with me. And the
+only trouble is that it causes me the greatest restlessness. My fate is
+like all others. I am exactly what I would not be. Sometimes I long to
+enjoy all the wildest of respectable adventures."
+
+"I should think you would keep that a secret from the Judge. He, above
+all, is a man of settled habits. His greatest genius has been to make
+romance out of the commonplace sequences of life."
+
+She sprang up and walked to the mantel.
+
+"That is true," she said. "I never show that side of me to him. He would
+not know what strange spirit moved me. I inherited none of it from him
+or my mother. I never show that side to anybody."
+
+"Except to me," I said mischievously.
+
+"Except to you," she affirmed without a smile. "But sometimes I feel
+like a wolf in lamb skin."
+
+"At those times I take a brisk walk," I said.
+
+"I do, too. I walk around the Monument nearly every afternoon at five,
+with father's dog. Usually at that hour he is at the club."
+
+"Shall I recognize you then by a shaggy, Scotch hound?" I asked.
+
+"By all means," she said, laughing wholesomely. "I suppose in the novels
+they would call that a secret meeting."
+
+In spite of the light manner in which she had spoken, she had lowered
+her voice a little when she heard a step in the hall. Margaret entered,
+as I have seen her so many, many times since, to collect the little
+coffee-cups.
+
+The old servant, I felt without seeing, did not take her eyes away from
+me while she was in the room; so conscious was I of being the subject of
+her observation that I could find but few words to carry on the
+conversation. The very effect--that of an intimate dialogue
+interrupted--was produced in spite of my desire to avoid it, and when
+she left, Julianna had changed her mood. Finding, perhaps, that I was
+content to listen, she employed a delicate piece of strategy to place me
+in her father's lounging-chair where I could watch her as she leaned
+back among the pillows, and in a voice, more soothing than any I had
+ever heard, described to me in quaint phrases the character of six
+imaginary persons who might among themselves make up a world, with all
+the traits of personality which we find in our own. From this piquant
+attempt, she emerged to plunge into a light discussion of heredity.
+
+"I can see a trace of the Judge in your belief," said I.
+
+She admitted that he had been her teacher, that they often discussed
+such things. It needed no denial from Julianna, however, to know that
+her convictions about the power of inherited tendencies had come from
+her own thought. Her mind, unlike her manner, had little submissiveness,
+and, furthermore, she recited several cases from her own shrewd
+observation.
+
+Can I attribute my entranced interest on that occasion to her
+brilliance? To this day I do not know. I would have been content to sit
+there without my pipe, without a cigarette, listening merely to the
+brook-like flow of her voice and looking at the play of expression upon
+her beautiful, sensitive face.
+
+I could feel, I thought, the warmth of her hand still lingering in my
+own after I had gone down the steps, and I turned my face into the night
+breeze on the avenue, glad to be alive, conscious of my health, my
+strength, my youth and my courage, oblivious to the traditions of the
+Estabrooks and intoxicated with a longing for her personality the moment
+I had left it.
+
+Not before the next morning did the haunting thought of something queer
+and strange lurking behind the Colfax home rise to cause me doubt.
+
+"It is nonsense," I thought. "Chance events, chance words, and my own
+suspicious mind have united to produce an unreality. The Judge,
+naturally enough, is jealous of such a daughter. Who would not be under
+the same circumstances? An old man would be beastly lonely in that
+comfortable but ancient house, even if they had removed the garden
+fountain with its mournful trickle. The world has no such picturesque
+and abnormal situations as those which have come into my mind. And
+Julianna has all that any one could ask. Above all the vital fact is
+that she is no other than she!"
+
+Perhaps for the sake of good taste I waited two days in painful
+restraint before I left my office to walk around the Monument at five;
+certainly my delay was not because I could pretend to foresee that a
+ghastly mystery was waiting to seize me and drag me in with its unseen
+tentacles.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+                         A PLEDGE TO THE JUDGE
+
+
+There is a peculiar honesty about true affection for woman. It is for
+the flirtations, the light and frivolous intimacies that a man smooths
+his hair, picks out his scarf, and purchases a new stick. Somehow it
+seems to me that a gentleman of natural high honor will always present
+his average self to the one woman. That he should be attentive is
+natural, that he should be affected is repellent to my notions. Perhaps
+it was for this reason that without preparation I closed my desk and
+walked up to meet Julianna, as I would have walked home to my own
+bachelor quarters.
+
+She was waiting for me!
+
+"I have been expecting you," said she, with her hand upon the dog's
+grizzled head, and in that frank and simple statement there was more
+charm than in all the false feminine reserve in the universe.
+
+"I did not come before," I told her, "because I felt that you might
+believe me presuming too much."
+
+"Why?" said she in the manner of a child.
+
+I could not answer. I merely gazed at her. She was half leaning, half
+sitting on the retaining wall of the park, and her skin, which was
+flecked with the shadows of new maple leaves above her, was lighted not
+only by the yellow rays of the afternoon sun, but also with the bright
+colors which her brisk walk had brought to the soft surface. I assure
+you, she made a pretty picture.
+
+"I would have been glad to see you yesterday," she said slowly, marking
+with the toe of one shoe upon the gravel. "You have been one of my
+father's younger friends a long time."
+
+"There is nothing the matter!" I cried.
+
+"I can't tell," she said. "He is old, you know, and I can explain it in
+no other way."
+
+"He is not ill?"
+
+"No. But if, for instance, his physician had told him he had not long to
+live, and he felt something give way within him--that might cause it."
+
+I suppressed the anxious note in my voice as I said, "Cause what? You
+have not said, Miss Colfax."
+
+She laughed. "That is true. I haven't, have I?" Serious again, she went
+on. "He seems worried. Something seems to follow him about--some
+thought, some apprehension, some worry."
+
+"It is a new difficulty somewhere that has come up in the trial of a
+case."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Let us walk," she said. "No, it is not that--nothing ordinary. A word
+from me and he would explain. But this time when I ask, he merely smiles
+and says, 'Nothing, Julie, nothing.'"
+
+"Can it be that I am the cause?" I said before I could stop myself. "Has
+he found out that we--"
+
+"I told him," she said, "that we--"
+
+She stopped there, too, and looked at me.
+
+"No," she went on. "It is something else. He went out for a stroll night
+before last. Usually he is gone a half-hour at least. But this time he
+had hardly had time to go down the steps before I heard his key in the
+door again and the feet of 'Laddie' on the hall floor. I ran out to ask
+if he had forgotten anything, and it was a dreadful shock to me."
+
+"Tell me," said I, touching her fingers with my own.
+
+"In the first place, the dog was acting as I have never seen him act
+before. I noticed that, the first thing. He was cowering and slinking
+along as if he feared the most terrible punishment. But that was
+nothing. It was father who made me draw back. Even in the dim light I
+could see that he was white--oh, so white! I thought he had been taken
+ill suddenly and was weak. And yet one hand was clutching his big cane
+and the muscles and veins stood out on the back as if he were raising
+the stick to defend himself."
+
+"He was ill!" I cried.
+
+"Yes, I think that must have been it. He was ill. And since then he has
+brooded so--particularly when he does not know I am watching him.
+Margaret has noticed it, too. She has spoken to him as I did and he has
+laughed her fear away, I suppose."
+
+"Perhaps, after all, it is nothing--just as he says," I suggested,
+turning toward her as we walked.
+
+"Perhaps not," she said. "I am sure you are a good and cheerful friend
+to say so. Nevertheless, I have been worried and restless and this
+afternoon I long for amusement. Can't we do something queer and
+extraordinary--go somewhere--do something?"
+
+I thought her requirement a difficult one to fill at five o'clock in the
+afternoon, walking through the old, dull, and worn-out part of the city,
+where we found we had arrived without purpose in our journey. More than
+that, I am naturally of conservative tastes; the bizarre, the bohemian,
+and the unconventional forms of amusement have never beckoned to me. I
+am not an adventurer by choice.
+
+"We have less than an hour before us," I said to her. "And I am at a
+loss to suggest--"
+
+There I hesitated. A thought had come to me. I saw her eyes dance with
+expectancy--with that expression of eagerness that lights the faces of
+those to whom the world, with all its goodness and badness, beauty and
+ugliness, tranquillity and turbulence, is still unexplored.
+
+"The Sheik of Baalbec!" I exclaimed.
+
+"The Sheik of Baalbec!" she repeated. "I have heard so much of him, but
+have never seen him. That is just the thing!"
+
+"You shall try your skill with him," I said. "You shall meet him face to
+face, look into his evil glassy eyes, watch his brown fingers move on
+mechanical levers, see his lungs and heart of geared wheels and little
+pulleys and--"
+
+"And what?" she cried.
+
+"Battle with him--wit against wit--skill against skill--and win!"
+
+"You seem to bear the Sheik a grudge," she said, and as we went up the
+steps of the old Natural History Building, where romping children of the
+tenements scattered banana peels and papers, she repeated the remark.
+
+"I've taken a dislike to the automaton," I said. "It is an uncanny
+creature. It gives me the impression of an evil soul attached to a lot
+of metallic gears. Personally I should be glad to have the opportunity
+of tearing it to pieces and seeing it scattered on the ground--a heap of
+red cotton rags, hair stuffing, and broken levers."
+
+My earnestness, however, only caused her to tilt her rounded chin in
+air and laugh as only she can laugh. Having persuaded the girl at the
+ticket office that the dog with us would do no harm, we had already
+entered and were passing through the exhibit of figures.
+
+"Possibly you feel the same way toward this waxy Bismarck who looks so
+much more like a brewer than a general," said she, "or toward this
+Catherine of Russia who, I understand, was not a very refined queen, and
+who here shows it by wearing a ruff that should have gone to the laundry
+a year ago or more."
+
+"No," I replied. "If they let me alone, it matters not to me when they
+are melted down for candles. My enemy is the fellow in the corner there
+with the group of country persons around him. Perhaps we shall not have
+a chance to play a game with him this afternoon."
+
+Fortunately, however, just as we came up toward the gloomy corner, there
+was a shout of bantering laughter from those whom, offhand, I should
+have called Aunt Lou, Cousin Becky, Brother Bob, and Milly Snagg, and we
+saw that the automaton had just dispatched his opponent--the fifth
+member of the party, a well-bronzed countryman, with a shaved neck and
+prominent ears. The mechanical eye had drawn down its brown lid in a
+hideous wink, much to the discomfiture of the champion of some rural
+village.
+
+For the second time I deposited the coin in the slot, whereupon
+Julianna, with great delight, watched the opening of the front of the
+box, the exposure of the internals of the figure, and the jerky motions
+of the Sheik as he extended his mechanical arm over his lifeless legs to
+make the first move.
+
+"I like him," she said, and stepped forward toward the chessboard.
+
+Thereupon a strange thing happened. Some part of the contrivance gave
+forth a sound as if a wheel had been torn from its socket; a whirring
+sound continued for a moment, then finally the air was filled with a
+ghastly shriek.
+
+I defy any man to say whether that shriek came from the rasp of an
+unoiled metal bearing or from a human throat. That it proceeded from the
+automaton there was no question.
+
+It was followed by a stillness not only of the automaton itself, but
+also of ourselves.
+
+"Look at his head!" roared the countryman, who had, with his party,
+lingered to see more of the marvelous creature. He pointed to the
+figure, and when my eyes followed his gesture, I saw that the Sheik's
+head had fallen backward like a thing with its throat cut. As I stared,
+there came a slight noise from the box and out of the slot my coin flew
+back as if it bore the message that there was no more playing that
+afternoon.
+
+"Well," said I to Julianna, "apparently the show is over."
+
+She did not answer. I put the coin in my pocket.
+
+"It is too bad," I said. "The Sheik has broken something important in
+his cosmos."
+
+Again she failed to reply, and I looked up. She was staring, I thought,
+at the floor.
+
+"What is the matter?" I asked.
+
+"Look at the dog!" she whispered.
+
+He was cringing, cowering, with closed eyes, flattened to the ground,
+and sniffing softly, in an agony of terror!
+
+It was dreadful to see so noble a beast in such a state, and probably
+more shocking to Julianna who had affection for him than to me.
+
+"I cannot understand Laddie's acting that way," she said in a vexed
+tone. "He has done it twice now in the last two days. What can have
+happened to him?"
+
+"He is very old, isn't he?" I inquired.
+
+"Yes," she said, and a little coquettish smile flitted across her face.
+"He is older than I am. Come, Laddie. Come here, sir. What's the matter,
+old pal?"
+
+"Age," said I. "There has never been a dog grow old in our family that
+he didn't sooner or later develop a kind of second puppyhood. I have
+seen them do all manner of inexplicable things, and one old, toothless,
+wire-haired terrier used to snap at his shadow on the wall."
+
+"I should hate to have him die," said Julianna when we were on the
+street again. She put her arm about his shaggy neck and I wished that I
+were he.
+
+At her door I took off my glove. It was done unconsciously, but she saw
+it--she took off one of hers. Then she laughed and put her hand in mine.
+
+After that walk I became the victim of all the mental follies which
+descend upon a man so thoroughly in love. My work suffered. I found
+myself at one moment reading down a page of digests of cases prepared
+for me by my assistants; in the next, I would be sitting again in Judge
+Colfax's easy-chair, and before me I could see Julianna's smiling lips,
+reflecting the lamplight upon their moist surfaces. In her name I would
+drive myself to my task again, and then, without knowing when the
+transition occurred, I would be standing on a gravel path dappled with
+sunlight and the dancing shadows of maple leaves, and she would be
+standing before me again with the breeze moving brown-and-gold strands
+of hair at the edge of her firm white neck.
+
+It is doubtful whether I thought of Judge Colfax, or chess, or the
+strange meeting in the garden, or the Sheik at all. I wondered about
+nothing save the question of how soon I could say to Julianna what lay
+in my heart to say to her. Therefore it was necessary for me to review
+in my mind many things when, upon waking a morning or two afterward, I
+found, among the letters which my man had brought to the chair beside my
+bed, a note from the girl herself.
+
+I did not know at first that it was from her: I had never seen her
+writing before. I remember that I said, "Who can this be?" and that I
+studied the outside for several moments before I opened the envelope.
+
+"My father," it said, "has not been very well, I think. I wish that you
+could make a point of calling on him at the court-house some afternoon
+this week. I want to know if the change in him rests partly in my own
+imagination. You could determine this at once. I would be so grateful.
+J. COLFAX.--P.S. Why not induce him to ask you to dinner. His indiscreet
+daughter would be delighted. J. C."
+
+This was the sort of note that she would write: it was not hysterical,
+and yet it conveyed to me the urgency of her request; it was not
+frivolous, and yet in its postscript it was boldly mischievous. It
+accomplished the result she wished. She had wanted me to make up my mind
+that I would see the Judge before night and to see her as soon as
+possible. I determined to do both.
+
+All day long it rained, drawing a wet shroud of gloom over the
+pavements, the granite walls of the buildings, and the adamant
+perspective of the streets. Standing in my office window, I could see
+the flow of black umbrellas moving up and down town, like two torpid
+snakes. But though I am ordinarily sensitive to the effect of a long
+drizzle, it failed on that day to depress me. Life had freshened. There
+was romance in it, possibilities, dreams. Instead of complaining to
+myself that the sky had lowered until its opaque rotunda seemed to touch
+the tops of the higher buildings, I rejoiced as I went uptown and looked
+out the cab window at each open square, that the cold spring downpour
+had freshened all the vegetation and brightened these city fresh-air
+spaces as if by magic. When I found myself in the Judge's study, my mood
+could not have been more cheerful.
+
+I had expected to find him in the despondency which Julianna had
+described to me; instead, when I had a chance to study his expression
+before he knew I was there, I came to the conclusion that his thoughts,
+whatever they might be, were pleasant thoughts and not the anxious
+thoughts of one who is harassed by secret apprehensions.
+
+He was a fine picture of a man, sitting there above his old desk, his
+long hands spread out upon an open book, the lines in his shaven face
+expressing a life of faithful service, gentleness, humor, and
+self-control, his blue eyes as bright as those of a youth, looking out
+at some picture which his imagination was painting on the opposite wall
+of the room. I stood watching him a moment before I stirred.
+
+"Ha!" he exclaimed as soon as I had made my presence known. "Estabrook,
+you are the very man I wanted to see!"
+
+"I had imagined it," I answered. "What more?"
+
+He blinked his eyes. "Wait a moment, you rascal," he said, brushing the
+sleeves of his black coat. "Take a cigar, sit down a moment. Let me
+collect my thoughts. I must say I hesitate to launch too quickly a
+subject with which I have not dealt for a good many years and one, if I
+remember rightly, I treated with considerable awkwardness on the former
+occasion."
+
+"When was that, sir?" I asked.
+
+"When I courted my wife," he said solemnly, looking for a moment at the
+floor.
+
+"Perhaps, if I am not mistaken, you would have come to me, by and by,"
+he went on with the wrinkles gathering at the corners of his eyes.
+"Perhaps it is better for me to speak with you now anyhow. I am well
+along in years. My physician tells me that my cardiac valve--or whatever
+the blame thing is--is weak."
+
+"He told you recently!" I exclaimed.
+
+"Bless you, no. More than two years ago. I haven't been near him since,
+except to taste of some old madeira he keeps on his sideboard. No. I
+can't quite explain why I am anxious to speak of this matter so soon, so
+hastily. I only want to ask one or two impertinent questions which you
+will forgive in a man who has grown, as to certain matters, as fussy as
+an old maid--or a mother."
+
+"Why, I will answer gladly enough," I said awkwardly. I thought I knew
+what was on his mind; my tongue grew large in my mouth.
+
+He was pacing up and down the room then, but finally he stopped and
+laughed and grew solemn again.
+
+"Darn it, my boy," he said. "I know you. I like you. I just wanted to
+know if you had ever been engaged--in the broad sense--engaged to a
+woman--with promises to fulfill. I just wanted to ask."
+
+"No," said I.
+
+"There!" said he. "I knew it all the time."
+
+"Was there another question?" I asked.
+
+"Why, yes," he said. "Why, yes. I believe I did have another. Now, what
+was it? I had another question. It was awkward, too, if I remember. I
+had another."
+
+We both laughed then.
+
+"Yet it seems so strange for me to ask these questions now, doesn't
+it?" he went on, fingering the pages of a book on the desk. "It is so
+early and a good deal more natural for you to speak to me than for me to
+speak to you. But, good God! there is a reason if you only knew--a
+reason. Let us say, for instance, that I might not be here then."
+
+"Ask it, sir," I said.
+
+"Why, I was only going to say that, in case you should succeed,--I doubt
+if you do succeed,--but in case you should succeed in causing her to
+love you, there would be no withdrawal on your part. Little Julie--my
+little daughter! Neither of you has known what it means yet. And,
+Estabrook, when she does, it must not go wrong. I know her well. She
+will never love but one man. He must not withdraw when he has won her!"
+
+I started to speak angrily.
+
+"Wait!" he cried, with his hands clenched. "He must not be shaken from
+her by anything--anything for which she is not to blame herself--no
+matter how strange or terrible--anything. Nothing will come. I know it.
+But that must be promised me--to stand by her, no matter what misfortune
+might descend upon her."
+
+"What could?" I asked in a trembling voice.
+
+"Nothing," the Judge said. "It is not in God's character to allow such
+a thing. When you love her, Estabrook, my boy, you will not ask me that
+question in answer to mine."
+
+"No," I said at once. "There need be no doubts between us, sir. It is
+not necessary for either of us to answer."
+
+His whole countenance lit up as if my words had fed his soul. I should
+be sorry to have wiped from my memory the impression of that old man's
+look, as, without taking his eyes from my face, he reached for his hat.
+
+Yet, to-night, when I, for perhaps the last time, realize again the
+presence of some infernal, undefined evil, I wonder that I should have
+been so great a fool and so willingly have neglected even the prudence
+of a lover. I wonder that I made so blind a bargain. I wonder that I did
+not ask him, before it was too late, what his conversation with Margaret
+Murchie in the garden had meant and what secret it was that lurked like
+a clawed creature of the night, ready to eat away, bit by bit, the
+happiness of an innocent man.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+
+                             THE TORN SCRAP
+
+
+When I left Judge Colfax that day, the only questions in my mind
+concerned Julianna. To her I had said nothing in so many words of my
+love, and yet I knew that if the Judge had read my growing sentiment
+surely, she must have seen it even more clearly. I tried to interpret
+her friendly, playful, girlish acceptance of my affection as an
+indication that she, too, felt an increasing fondness for me--a fondness
+which went beyond that given to a trustworthy friend. But I could not
+forget that her father, when he had so strangely anticipated my request
+for his consent, had described her as one whose yielding would be sudden
+and complete--one to whom love would come in sweeping torrent of
+emotion--one with whom love would thereafter stay eternally. If this
+were true, she did not love me yet, I reflected. And with a falling of
+hope, I remembered that the Judge had expressed, for what reason I did
+not know, his own doubt of my ability to win her.
+
+These were thoughts well adapted to hasten my lovemaking. I made a
+point of walking to the Monument the next afternoon. I did not meet her
+there, or on the way along the edge of the park, and I found myself
+suddenly haunted by the hitherto unconsidered possibility that, as
+summer was coming on, I might expect at any day that she would leave the
+city to visit friends or go with the Judge to some resort.
+
+It rained again the following day, and though the downpour ceased in the
+late afternoon, great gray banks of clouds hung threateningly above the
+city. Nevertheless, tormented with the notion that we might at any time
+be separated for several weeks, I went again to the Monument to seek
+her.
+
+She was there. Nor did she seem at all surprised that I had come.
+
+"I am full of energy to-day," she said, smiling a welcome. "Let us take
+a long walk together."
+
+"Good!" said I. "I will tell you about your father. As you know, I
+called on him Thursday afternoon."
+
+But from the Judge she quickly turned the subject to discussion that was
+wholly impersonal, and it was the same on the following Monday when I
+saw her again. Had it not been for the expression in her eyes with which
+she greeted me, listened when I talked to her and bade me good-bye when I
+left her, these would have been depressing meetings for me, because I
+thought that I could clearly see that she was holding me at arm's
+length with that natural art of a good, true woman,--an art which needs
+no practice.
+
+Imagine, then, my surprise, on this second occasion, when we had reached
+her door, when she had asked me to have tea and I had been forced to
+plead a previous engagement, when she stood there before me smiling,
+rosy, the form itself of health, beauty, and vivacity, and when her
+glance was raised to meet mine, I suddenly saw her smile fade and I
+thought her eyes were filling with tears.
+
+She laughed, however,--a little choking laugh,--and looking down so that
+I could not see her face, she said, "I have liked these walks and chats
+with you better than any I have ever had." And so she bade me
+good-night.
+
+Only when I had gone from her did I recall that she had spoken as if our
+companionship was not to continue, as if, for some cause unknown to me,
+there was to be an end of our intimacy. The thought made me stop
+stock-still upon the pavement.
+
+"And yet," thought I, "might it not be--that she meant only to show that
+she is willing to continue our relationship--perhaps forever?"
+
+Loving her as much as I did and wanting her--and no other on the breadth
+of the green earth--for my wife, this uncertainty was a torment which I
+could not stand. I remembered she had told me that the Judge walked each
+evening after his dinner, and I am ashamed to confess that the next
+evening dark found me waiting on their street corner, like a scullery
+maid's beau, until I saw his stoop-shouldered figure come down the steps
+with the lank, grizzled "Laddie" behind, and heard the beat of his
+grapevine stick recede down the avenue.
+
+Margaret Murchie let me in. Had I been a wolf she could not have glared
+at me more; it was evident that her shrewd old eyes, whatever hidden
+knowledge lay behind them, regarded me as a brigand, as a menace, as
+some one who had come to take a precious treasure of art from the
+drawing-room or the household goddess from the front hall. And as I sat
+in the study once more, on the comfortable easy-chair of the Judge, with
+the empty feeling in my stomach telling me that my nerves were on edge,
+as they used to be when I rowed on our crew and sat listening for the
+gun, I was sure that after announcing me she lingered beyond the
+curtains, covertly watching me.
+
+Julianna did not keep me waiting long, and as she came through the door
+into the light, I could not help but notice the poise and grace which
+comes from inherited refinement and health, and is only imitated badly
+by self-consciousness and the pose of the actress.
+
+"I'm so sorry you did not come a moment earlier," she said. "Father
+would have been in. Now, you and I--"
+
+She seated herself in her place on the old-fashioned mahogany sofa.
+
+"Do you mind?" I asked.
+
+"No, I'm glad!" she said, and wriggled like a pleased child, yet so
+slightly that no one could have accused her of it.
+
+"Do you like me?" said I, after a moment.
+
+Her eyes opened very wide and looked into mine seriously--half amused,
+half frightened. At last she nodded in a matter-of-fact way; it was only
+because I could see her hands pressed against the arm of the couch until
+they were white and little blue veins had begun to show that I knew she
+was capable of the stoicism of an Indian, and that her nod was not
+matter-of-fact, after all.
+
+As I have told you, I am not of an habitually romantic temperament. I
+was well aware of my unfitness to deal with a girl who, herself, had
+never known the processes of lovers, but the belief that she was trying
+to restrain her true feelings toward me ran through my brain like an
+intoxicating liquor. I would have taken the breadth of her shoulders in
+the crook of my arm, and pressed my face into the rich mass of her hair,
+and kissed her upon her white forehead, had I not suddenly recalled
+that never had I even phrased to her a sentence explaining my feeling
+toward her.
+
+"Of course I do," she said at that moment. I remember how cool the words
+sounded.
+
+I remember, indeed, every word of that evening, every detail of that
+room, every play of expression about her mouth, and I cannot go on
+without speaking of these things. They meant so much to me and have
+meant so much ever since!
+
+At last, then, I told her.
+
+"Julianna--" said I. "I have never called you by that name before. I
+have not seen you long. But I must disregard all facts of that kind.
+They may be important to some men and women. They are not of consequence
+to me. I have loved you from the first."
+
+She gave a little cry, but whether it was of joy or surprise I cannot
+say. I only know that when I leaned forward and took one of her hands in
+my own, she left it there as if it belonged to me of right, and with my
+finger tips upon her soft wrist I could feel the beating of her heart.
+
+"I don't want to love any one else," I whispered desperately. "I want
+you. I want you to love me. I want you to let me take you."
+
+I thought when I had said this and pressed my lips to the back of her
+hand and looked up at her again that her face was illuminated with
+wonder, joy, and supreme gladness, and that her eyes were filled with
+light reflected from some bright revelation. What, then, was my
+astonishment to observe that, as I looked, the color seemed to fade from
+her skin, her parted lips slowly compressed themselves, her eyelids fell
+like those of one who suffered pain or shuts out some repulsive sight!
+It may have been my imagination; but I was sure I felt her hand turn
+cold in mine and draw away as if to escape a menace. Her body stiffened
+as if preparing for effort or defense and she arose from her seat and
+stood before me.
+
+So little did I understand the significance of her actions that I
+neither moved nor spoke.
+
+She came toward me then and placed the tips of her fingers upon my
+shoulder affectionately, I can say--as she might have touched her
+father, and as if she meant to cause some unsaid thing to flow through
+the contact into my body.
+
+"Please do not get up," she said softly. "Do not follow me."
+
+There was strength in that command.
+
+She walked toward the long windows at the back of the room, the windows
+which overlooked the garden, and pulling them open, stepped out onto the
+balcony. The vine there being in bloom, her figure was framed with the
+soft purple of the flowers, which, lit by the light from within and
+pendant against the black background of night, might well have been
+blossoms embroidered on Japanese black satin. With my head swimming, I
+watched the movement of her bare shoulders, from which her modest scarf
+had half fallen, until she turned to enter again.
+
+"I shall not tell you that I am sorry that you have spoken as you have,"
+she said, spacing her words so evenly that it gave the impression at
+first that she was repeating memorized sentences. "But I am young and no
+one else has ever done so. Perhaps I should have interrupted you and
+told you that my duty is toward my father, and that I am not sure of
+myself now, and that I am not ready to give myself to any other life. If
+this is true, it can profit neither of us to talk of love."
+
+"Neither of us!" Again it seemed to me that she had disclosed herself. I
+stood before her and in a voice that shook with eagerness, I said, "You
+love me. At least you love me a little?"
+
+She drew back.
+
+"You do!" I cried under my breath. "I know it! You do!"
+
+She raised her hands as if to keep me from her, and still retreated
+toward the hearth.
+
+"You love me!" I said. The sound of my own voice was raising a madness
+within me. "Say it!" I cried. "Say it!"
+
+She turned quickly away from me.
+
+"You love me."
+
+"No," she said. "I do not--love--you!"
+
+I think for a second neither of us stirred; for a second, too, I could
+see that her body had relaxed as mine had relaxed. Then I felt the sting
+of wrecked pride--the pride from which I suppose I never shall escape. I
+can remember that I drew a long breath, made a low bow, which, though
+not so intended, must have been both insulting and absurd, and walked
+through the curtains into the hall. I looked back once and that fleeting
+glance showed me only a beautiful girl who stood very stiffly, like a
+soldier saluting, but who, unlike a soldier, stood with closed eyes and
+with her long lashes showing against a pale and delicate skin.
+
+How miserable I was in the following hours, I cannot well describe.
+After I had returned to my own apartments I sat in my study without
+desire for sleep, staring with burning eyes at the silk curtains
+fluttering in the June night wind, until they seemed to be ghosts
+dancing on my window sills, and my straining ears listened to the hourly
+booming of the clock on the Fidelity Tower, until it sounded like the
+cruel voice of Time itself. Long after the rosy dawn I got up, drank
+some water, lit a strong cigar, and prepared to dress myself for the
+day's work. I can well remember my determination never again to expose
+my feelings toward any living soul and my constantly repeated assertion
+to myself that I had been hasty and indiscreet, that I did not in truth
+any longer love Julianna and had been punished for a breach of that
+reserve and caution which had been a virtuous characteristic of my
+ancestors.
+
+With my teeth shut together, with a frenzy to accomplish much work,
+without a breakfast, and with sharp and perhaps ill-tempered commands to
+my assistants, I spent the morning in the preparation of cases for which
+trials were pending. By noon the heat of the day had become intense, the
+sides of the battalions of towering buildings across the narrow street
+seemed to become radiators for the viciousness of the summer sun, the
+voices of newsboys, the murmur of the lunch-hour crowd twanged a man's
+nerves, and I noticed for the first time the devilish song of the
+electric fan on my wall. As you have foreseen, I felt suddenly the
+wilting of my will. Tired, hungry, sleepless, I slipped down into my
+chair, and there seemed no happiness left in a world which did not
+include the girl I had left the night before.
+
+I seized my hat and, clapping it on my head, I stopped only to sweep the
+papers into the desk drawers and hurried toward the elevator.
+
+"There's somebody on the 'phone for you, Mr. Estabrook," said the
+switchboard girl. "They're very anxious to talk."
+
+"Tell 'em I've gone home for the day," I called back to her and then
+went down and out of the building to the sunbaked street.
+
+I knew that I should put food in my stomach, so I ate a lunch somewhere.
+I knew I should rest, but the thought of returning to my bachelor rooms
+suggested only a violent mental review of the events through which I had
+been. I was tempted to go to the Monument, but flung the idea aside as a
+piece of sentimental madness. Accordingly I walked toward the river
+front with its uninteresting and sordid warehouses, saloons and boxes,
+bales and crates of the wholesale produce commissioners. On that long,
+cobblestoned thoroughfare, with its drays and commercial riffraff, its
+lounging stevedores, its refuse barrels, its gutter children and its
+heat, I went forward mile after mile, without much thought of where I
+went or why I chose such surroundings for my way, unless it was that the
+breeze from the water was welcome to me.
+
+The late afternoon found me on an uptown pier, watching the return of an
+excursion steamer, proud with flags and alive with children, girls with
+sunburned faces and young men with handkerchiefs tucked around their
+collars and carrying souvenir canes. They disembarked down a narrow
+gangplank, like ants crawling along a straw. I reflected that all were,
+like myself, with their individual comedies and tragedies, the
+representatives of the countless, forgotten, and ever reproducing
+millions of human gnats that through unthinkable periods of time come
+and go. I had seen none of them before. I would see none of them again.
+Instead of being a depressing notion, I found this a cheerful idea; I
+welcomed the evidence of my own insignificance. I laughed. I even
+determined to amuse myself. If nothing better offered, I made up my mind
+I would visit the Sheik of Baalbec, and, by pitting my skill against
+his, prove that I could exclude, when I wished, the haunting thoughts to
+which my mind had been a prey.
+
+"The Sheik, then," said I, after a block or two. "It was he who ushered
+me into this affair. It shall be he who may say an end to it."
+
+In the light of what followed, this sentence, murmured half aloud as I
+walked, has many times caused me to wonder at the prophetic voice with
+which we sometimes carelessly address ourselves.
+
+I found the museum, except for the red-nosed attendant and the pale pink
+girl in the ticket window, deserted. The accursed automaton, I feared,
+would be closed for business, and therefore it was with satisfaction
+that I noticed that the coin slot was open, and that, having dropped in
+my tribute to genius, chess, and machinery, I heard the squeak of the
+moving mechanism and the brown, jointed fingers of the figure scraping
+across the board.
+
+I cannot believe that the Sheik was playing his best game. At the end of
+a half-hour, when the machinery stopped to notify me that another coin
+was due, I had a decided advantage in position. Before another fifteen
+minutes, during which we both played rapidly, had gone, the issue was no
+longer in doubt and I stopped.
+
+"Ha!" said I, aloud. "You will not wink at me this time. Is there any
+other game you can play better than you play this?"
+
+The automaton was silent.
+
+I cannot say what impelled me to suggest it, but I drew a piece of paper
+and a pencil out of my pocket and said, "Can you write?"
+
+The door in the chest of the Sheik flew open then for a moment as if to
+expose his heart to me. Though I had put no coin into the machine, I saw
+the levers and gears start to move again, the door of that pulmonary
+cavity was closed and the brown fingers jerked their way forward.
+
+"Not only can write, but is anxious to do so," I remarked, as I extended
+the pencil and laid the paper on the chessboard.
+
+For a second or two I waited, as the hand of the mechanical creature
+wrote a few words: I remember that during those seconds I heard a clock
+somewhere striking six. I did not make any attempt to see beforehand
+what he had chosen to inscribe, for I assumed that it would be some
+empty answer to my bantering remarks. At last the pencil dropped upon
+the board and rolled under one of the cross-legged creature's red
+Turkish slippers, the whirr of the mechanism stopped abruptly, and I
+picked up the writing.
+
+Having read the scrawl once I believed myself out of my wits. I could
+not credit my eyes. I could not gather my reason. I was breathless,
+transfixed!
+
+I looked up at the face of the Sheik and found that, in place of the
+malicious wink with which he proclaimed himself a victor in a game of
+draughts, his glass eyes, with their whites in sharp contrast to his
+swarthy wax skin, were both wide open and set in a glare of such
+ferocity and malign hatred that they seemed to flash the fire of life
+and lighten the gloom of the corner with rays of evil.
+
+I laughed. I forced myself to laugh, but it was with no mirth, and then,
+hesitating for a moment and seized by the temptation to tear the
+automaton to shreds, to discover what was within its exterior, I turned,
+crunched the paper in my closed fist, and almost ran out through the
+lines of wax figures--the Garibaldis, the Jenny Linds, the Louis
+Napoleons, and the Von Moltkes--into the sunlight.
+
+No man can blame me for my excitement or even my terror, for the Sheik
+had written, "You are in danger! Withdraw before it is too late, and
+never see the old man or child of his again!"
+
+Had the time been the Middle Ages, or the place a strange quarter of the
+Orient, I might not have been so shocked at the knowledge which a tawdry
+machine, or the mountebank behind it, seemed to have of the affairs of
+persons against whom no charge of contact with the lower strata of life
+could be brought. But in our civilization, where nothing but the
+commonplace is to be expected, I was wholly unnerved.
+
+"Come," said I to myself, having walked to the far side of the open
+square, "sit on this bench, unfold the paper, and use your intelligence
+to overcome the hysteria which last night's experience and this odd
+affair of the Sheik have aroused. Be sensible. This message is a matter
+to be explained, just as all things are to be explained by any one who
+is not the victim of superstitious fear."
+
+This determination immediately cleared my reason. After all, there was
+nothing to solve.
+
+"Whoever controls the mechanism has seen me with the Judge," said I,
+"and doubtless has heard him mention his daughter, and perhaps has
+observed the effect of her name on me. Furthermore, he, or, as the Judge
+said, the man or woman behind the Sheik, has even seen me with Julianna
+and might well have drawn conclusions. The message was written in ill
+temper or as a piece of malicious mischief. And there's an end to it!"
+
+Whereupon I tore the scrap across the middle and, dropping it in the
+grass, I started toward my home.
+
+The picture of that writing, however, was too clearly photographed upon
+my vision; it continually wrote itself on the walls of buildings, upon
+the pavement or across the sky. And as it did, little by little, it
+began to dawn upon me that the handwriting with which it had been
+executed I had seen before.
+
+When at last, from the back of my mind, I recalled the occasion, I
+astonished those persons who were walking near me by stopping in the
+middle of the sidewalk as if stricken and uttering a sharp exclamation.
+My hand sought the contents of my inside coat pocket; among the papers
+there I found the note which Julianna, wishing me to see her father, had
+written me, and with trembling fingers I spread the sheet before me.
+
+One look was all that was necessary, for it sent me hurrying back the
+way I had come; it was enough to cause me to kneel down on the grass in
+the gathering gloom that was filling the old square. Where I had sat a
+half-hour before, I now searched frantically for bits of torn paper.
+
+I found both pieces at last, placed them side by side and compared them
+with the note in my hand. I have already told you that Julianna wrote a
+hand distinguished from others by subtle peculiarities. The message from
+the Sheik was written as she would write!
+
+To believe, as I found I must believe, that she, with or without the
+knowledge of the Judge, would so far forget the obligations of her place
+in society as to operate a vulgar puppet in public, no matter how much
+it might interest or amuse her, was another shock to me. I am free to
+confess that, in spite of all my former assertions to myself that I had
+not loved her as much as I had supposed, this new development was the
+first that began to make me believe I had been blinded by mere
+infatuation.
+
+"You have been moving in the dark," I told myself. "You have stifled
+your senses from a whole set of facts which tend to show that some
+unwholesome thing is sleeping on the threshold of the Colfax home.
+Perhaps, after all, Julianna and the Sheik of Baalbec are right. It has
+come out for the best."
+
+And yet, hardly had I so thought than a strange sense of loneliness
+came over me, the dingy buildings about the square seemed like so many
+squatting personalities, depressed and brooding, and out of that gloomy
+picture came the image of Julianna, so fresh, so smiling, and so fair
+that for a moment I almost forgot that it was a creation of my fancy. It
+brought back to me my love for her. I remembered my promise to the
+Judge. I recalled her tenderness and purity, which I had felt so
+strongly that I had expected to see it about her like an effulgence. I
+cursed myself for doubting her. I looked upon the evidence of the scrap
+of paper in my hand as a piece of testimony brought against an innocent
+person. Not only with the instinct of a lover, but that of a lawyer as
+well, I determined to defend her from my own accusations.
+
+I had not been without the necessity, once or twice in my practice, of
+calling upon experts in handwriting; now I remembered that one of them,
+a clever fellow named Jarvis, lived in an apartment not far from mine.
+It was the dinner hour. I believed I should find him and I was right.
+
+"I have come on a peculiar errand," I explained to him as he appeared in
+his library, napkin in hand, "and if you are not through dinner, I will
+wait."
+
+"No, no," said he, with easy falsehood. "I had just finished. How can I
+help you, Mr. Estabrook?"
+
+"I wish your opinion on two pieces of handwriting," I answered. "It is
+unnecessary for me to tell you where I got them, you understand. The
+question at issue is, did one person write both, and if not, is one of
+them an imitation of the other?"
+
+He flourished a powerful reading-glass in the professional manner those
+fellows use and gave the two specimens a cursory examination.
+
+"The problem should not be difficult," he said, "since both were written
+hastily. In the case of the pencil, it is clear from the manner in which
+the fine fibres of the paper are brushed forward like grass leaning in
+the wind. In the case of the ink, the wet pen has gone back to cross a t
+or complete an imperfectly formed letter before the earlier strokes had
+time to dry."
+
+"That would preclude imitation?" I asked.
+
+"Why, yes. Offhand, I should say so--unless the one who made the attempt
+had practiced for years, or has the skill of imitation developed beyond
+that of any professional forger. But give me a moment, please."
+
+I waited, tapping with my fingers on the chair arm.
+
+He straightened up at last, with a sigh, then looked at me with his
+eyebrows drawn and a look of perplexity on his thin, cadaverous face.
+
+"It's very odd," said he.
+
+"What's very odd?"
+
+"Well, Mr. Estabrook, these pieces were not written several years
+apart--at different periods of life, were they?"
+
+"Why, no," said I.
+
+"They are not the work of one person, then," he said, with firm
+conviction. "I would stake my reputation on that."
+
+"Then one is an attempt to imitate the other?" I said, stifling a glad
+exclamation.
+
+"That's the rub," said he. "And, to be frank, I might spend a month
+without being able to say which was the imitated and which the
+imitating. I would almost think you had stumbled on two specimens which,
+merely by coincidence, bore a wonderful resemblance to each other. It
+lies between that and the cleverest, most practiced forgery I have ever
+seen."
+
+You may be sure that his decision gave me a sense of triumph; without
+speculating as to the truth, it was enough for me to know that Julianna
+had not, as I had at first suspected, been a party to this vulgar and
+melodramatic flourish. I berated myself for having entertained any doubt
+and now felt anew, and with aggravation, my affection for her. This
+outcome of my adventure with the Sheik, in fact, restored my spirit,
+made me forget my pride, and, as you will see, was enough to put me in
+condition to receive that which was about to befall me.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IV
+
+                                THE FACE
+
+
+My thoughts as I entered the portico of that building where I had my
+apartments were not only of Julianna, but were also in those channels
+where I have no doubt your own opinion of my narrative must run. I
+freely admit, as I then was forced to admit, that my lovemaking had been
+attended with many bizarre and abnormal happenings; yet at the time I
+sneered at the questions which rose in my own mind and bravely asserted
+to myself that the chances of winning Julianna were not wholly lost.
+
+In the lower hall of the building in which I had quarters there were
+stationed until six at night a telephone operator and a doorman. Perhaps
+you have noticed that I tell you these matters in considerable detail,
+and I will continue to do this, because my natural dread of disclosing
+the intimate affairs of my life has kept me heretofore from sharing my
+story with any one, and now that I have lifted the cover and drawn the
+veil of my experience, I can only find justification, in so narrating
+the sequence of extraordinary events, by observing the strictest
+adherence to detail and accuracy in the hope that perhaps you, by the
+virtue of a fresh and unprejudiced viewpoint, may be able to unravel
+some of the tangle in which I am, even now, enmeshed.
+
+As I have said, at six the telephone girl at the switchboard and the
+doorman, for some reason which I could never understand, were replaced
+by an old negro who served as both, and who was the most garrulous,
+indiscreet individual I have ever seen.
+
+As if to affirm these characteristics he spoke to me the moment I had
+entered, in a voice which seemed to be adapted to a general address to
+the three or four other bachelors who were waiting in the frescoed
+vestibule for a conveyance.
+
+"Yaas, sah, Mr. Estabrook, sah. De dohman lef' a message, sah. Der has
+been a lady waitin' foh you, sah, mos' all de ahfternoon. She comin'
+back, she say--dis evenin'. She sutt'nly act very queer, sah."
+
+"All right," I snapped. "It's one of my clients."
+
+"Um-um," he said, shaking his head. "I spec she ain't, Mr. Estabrook,
+sah. She mos' likely has pussonal business, sah!"
+
+The others--Folsom the broker, and Madison, and Ingle the architect--had
+evidently dined well, preparing for a musical comedy, and they snickered
+without shame.
+
+"Let my man know when she comes," said I, and without smiling hurried
+into the elevator.
+
+I had no belief that the woman, whoever she might be, would come back
+after dark to call upon me. With my conflicting thoughts about Julianna,
+I forgot the incident. It was therefore with some surprise that I heard
+Saito, my Jap, arouse me from my sleepy reverie, to which exhaustion had
+reduced my mind, to tell me that a lady was waiting in the reception
+room downstairs.
+
+You may understand the conservative nature of my life and habits more
+thoroughly when I tell you that the mere idea that a woman had dared to
+ask for me at my apartment in the evening caused me the greatest
+anxiety. As if to prove what dependence we can put upon our intuitions,
+I felt, on my way down, most strongly, that an evil event was about to
+take place.
+
+Nothing could, I think, better illustrate the nonsense of attaching
+importance to these fore-warnings than to tell you that the woman who
+waited for me was Julianna herself!
+
+My first instinct, before I had been seen by her, was to hurry her out
+of the garish little reception room, where, through the door which
+opened into the hallway, she might well have been seen by anybody; it
+was only when she greeted me and turned her face toward the tiled floor,
+and I saw that her shoulders drooped and that her hands hung down at
+her side, and that she stood like a guilty, punished, and remorseful
+child, that my wish to protect her was displaced by a mad desire to take
+her in my arms and comfort her.
+
+"Julianna!" I cried. "What has happened? Is it the Judge? Tell me! Why
+did you come?"
+
+She shook her head and lowered it still more, until the sweeping curve
+of her bare neck, from the fine hair behind her ears to the back of the
+lace collar of her waist, was visible.
+
+I cannot say what gave me the courage, but I bent over her and kissed
+her there, softly.
+
+She looked up then without the slightest indication of either surprise
+or reproach.
+
+"I liked that," she whispered. "I didn't know how I was going to tell
+you, but now I can."
+
+"Tell me what?" said I, in a choking voice.
+
+"I love you," she said. "I could not let you go. I thought last night
+that I could carry it through. I thought my duty was to stay with
+father. But it isn't!"
+
+"And you came _here_ to tell me!" I gasped.
+
+"Why not?" she said, with a catch in her voice. "I was afraid I would
+never see you again and I love you."
+
+When I think of all the sham there is among women, I treasure the memory
+of that simple little explanation. It was delivered as a full answer to
+all the conventionalities from here back to the time of the Serpent. It
+was spoken in a low but confident voice, with her hands upon her breast
+as if to calm the emotions within, and was directed toward me with the
+first frank exposure of her eyes which were still wet with tears.
+
+"I have been miserable!" she said. "A woman is meant for some man, after
+all. And if she resists, she is resisting God! It all has been shown to
+me so clearly. And I knew that you were the one. There's nothing else
+that makes any difference, and it sweeps you off your feet, so it must
+be nature, because it gave me the courage to telephone you and then try
+to find you and come here and wait and come again, and only nature can
+make any one go against all her habits and education. And I believe I'll
+call you Jerry, if you still--"
+
+"Good God! Love you?" said I. "Forever!"
+
+"Always?"
+
+"Forever."
+
+She gave her burning hands to mine, and oblivious of the old negro,
+whose eyes were upon us, we stood there, looking at each other in awe,
+very much frightened and very much, for that moment,--and I sometimes
+wonder if not in truth,--the centre of the universe.
+
+"You belong to me, Jerry?" she said tearfully. "Now?"
+
+"Yes," said I.
+
+"Then I must go back quickly," she explained, after a moment. "I do not
+want father to know yet. I want to prepare the way. I don't want you to
+speak with him for a week. I will tell him then. Perhaps you think it is
+strange. But Friday, when he knows, you may come."
+
+She had a carriage waiting for her, and I walked with her to its door.
+
+"I want to kiss you, Julianna," I whispered.
+
+She looked up to see whether the driver could observe us. He could not.
+And then the mischief-loving quality of womankind appeared in her. She
+gave forth a glad little laugh.
+
+"On Friday," she said.
+
+The door slammed, and I thought, as I caught a last glance at her then,
+that she was a luminous being of dreams, lighting the dark recess of a
+common cab.
+
+This impression recurred so often in those following days that at times
+there rose the uncanny suspicion that the woman who had visited me had
+not been one of reality, of flesh and blood, and beating heart and
+sweet, warm breath. Her smile, her voice, her personality had not seemed
+a part of real life, but almost the manifestations of a spirit which,
+timidly and with the hope of some reincarnation in life, had come to
+claim my vows. I believed that I knew well enough why Julianna, if it
+were she, had planned to avoid a sudden disclosure of our betrothal to
+the Judge, but, none the less, I fretted at the sluggishness of time,
+which, like a country horse, will not go faster for the wishing or the
+beating.
+
+I wished, too, that she had said she would meet me in her afternoon
+walks to the Monument and wondered that, if she loved me, she was able
+to forbid herself a meeting, even though she had felt that good sense
+demanded a period of reflection and a readjustment of view, so that when
+we did see each other again, it would be with firmer minds and steadier
+hearts. I would have gladly foregone all this value of reserve and
+restraint for one look at her face, one touch of her sleeve, one word
+from her tender, curving lips.
+
+And yet I was happy in those days--so painfully happy that I heard
+voices telling me that such happiness does not last, that ecstasies are
+tricks of fate by which man's joy is fattened for slaughter, that from
+some ambush a horrible thing was peering.
+
+Strangely enough, these fears were connected in no way with the warnings
+which I had had from my eavesdropping or even from the definite threat
+which had come out of my grotesque experience with the Sheik of Baalbec.
+The piece of writing, which had begun, "You are in danger," I had
+dropped into a file of papers, and though I suppose it is somewhere
+among them now, I have never yielded to the temptation to look at it
+again. I may have thought of it merely to add to the opinion of Jarvis
+that the writing was not Julianna's, the apparently indisputable fact
+that, at the moment the warning had been written, Julianna was, by the
+word of the apartment house doorman, waiting for me in the little
+reception room. Furthermore, with my success in winning her, with the
+intoxication of it, I began to look upon the strange and unexplained
+matters which had so perplexed me as trivial illusions beneath the
+consideration of good sense. However much you may be surprised at my
+willful blindness, your wonder cannot equal that which I myself feel
+to-night.
+
+And now, when I am about to tell you of that memorable Friday, I must
+impress upon you that no detail of it is distorted in my memory, that so
+clear and vivid were the impressions upon my senses that, were I to live
+to the age of pyramids, I could recall every slight sequence with
+accuracy. I say this because you are a physician and as such, no
+doubt,--and it is no different in the case of us lawyers,--have learned
+the absurd fallibility of ordinary human testimony, not excluding that
+which proceeds from the highest and most honorable type of our
+civilization.
+
+The day, as I was about to tell you, had been saved from the heat of
+the season by a breeze which blew from the water and once or twice even
+reached the velocity of a storm wind. A hundred times I had looked out
+my office window and a hundred times I had seen that not one speck of
+cloud showed in the sky. Yet all day long, while I tried to work, only
+to find myself all on edge with expectancy, I could hear the flap and
+rustle of the American flag on the Custom-House roof, which was
+straining at its cords and lashing itself into a frenzy like a wild
+creature in chains.
+
+I am not sure that a dry storm of this kind is not freighted with some
+nerve-twanging quality. I have often noticed on such days a universal
+irritability on the part of mankind, and I have been informed by those
+who have traveled much that often a nervous wind of this kind, in
+countries where such things happen, precedes some disaster such as
+volcanic eruptions, avalanches, earthquakes, and tidal waves.
+
+My own nervousness, however, took the form of impatience. I was absurdly
+eager to go at once to Julianna, and the fact that the hour for dinner
+had finally arrived, and that the remaining time was short, only served
+to increase my impatience the more. I could not assign any cause for
+this other than my wish to see Julianna, for now I knew in my mind and
+heart, by reason and by instinct, that the Judge had been right, that
+once having given her love she had given all, and, with that noble and
+perhaps pathetic trait of fine women, would never change.
+
+At last I found myself at her door, at last she herself had opened it,
+and was smiling at me--as beautiful, more beautiful, than I had ever
+seen her. I remember that, with an innocent and spontaneous outburst of
+affection, she caught my hand in hers and tucked it under her soft round
+arm in playful symbolism of capture.
+
+"You must not say a word to me," she said. "I have never been so happy!
+But he is in there. He wants to see you alone and you must hurry."
+
+"Hurry?" I protested.
+
+"I don't know why," she said, with a nervous little laugh. "I suppose
+it's because I want you to talk to him and come to me as quickly as you
+can."
+
+Then, with a gentle pressure from behind, she pushed me through the
+curtains into the familiar study and I heard her feet scampering up the
+soft carpet on the broad, black-walnut stairs.
+
+The Judge was sitting in his easy-chair beside the table. A book was
+open on his knees, a long-stemmed pipe was on the chair arm, and the
+gray and grizzled old dog lay, with head on paws, at his feet. Above him
+a huge wreath of thin smoke hung in the air. Had I been a painter, I
+should have wished to lay that picture upon canvas, because seldom
+could one see expressed so completely the evening of an honest day and
+of an honorable life, the tranquillity of home, the comfort of
+meditation, the affection for faithful dog, old volume, and seasoned
+pipe.
+
+As he looked up at me, however, it suddenly seemed to me that he had
+grown old; behind his smile of warm greeting I fancied I could observe a
+haunted look, the ghostly flickering forth of some unwelcome thought
+held in the subconsciousness.
+
+"Why, Estabrook!" he cried, when he had seen me. "Bless my soul, I
+didn't know you would be so prompt. I have understood that young men
+approached these interviews with reluctance."
+
+"You forget, sir," I answered, knowing that he would have a jest at my
+expense, "that we made the arrangement in advance."
+
+"We did! We did! That's a fact. But I had no idea that you would be
+successful, at least so soon, and if I may say it--so--so--precipitously."
+
+"I plead the spirit of the age," said I.
+
+"It's a spirit common to all ages, I take it," he answered, with a quirk
+of his judicial mouth. "Do I understand that you and my daughter have
+first become engaged and now wish my permission to see enough of each
+other to become acquainted?"
+
+Perhaps he hit a centre ring with this thrust, for I could only stammer
+forth an awkward statement about being very sure of my feelings.
+
+"They all are sure!" he said, with a good-natured cynicism. Then he
+smiled again and pointed toward the ceiling with a long forefinger.
+"Perhaps you may be pleased to know that she is very sure," he
+whispered.
+
+I sat down.
+
+"Yes," said he solemnly. "You are to be envied. I believe her love--as I
+have seen it grow in these weeks--is the sweetest thing that ever flowed
+from a human soul."
+
+"You knew that she at first sent me away in the name of her duty to
+you?" said I.
+
+He looked up at me, shut his book, patted the dog, and laid the pipe on
+the table.
+
+"No," said he, with a break in his voice. "But I shall not quickly
+forget that you have been fair enough to her and to me to tell me that."
+
+"May I have her?" I asked.
+
+"Yes," said he. "Of course you may."
+
+I hesitated a moment. Then I laughed. "She told me when you had said
+that to go to her."
+
+I rose.
+
+"Wait," said he. "That is not all. Before God, I wish it were."
+
+I had not been watching his expression, but now, when I looked up at
+him, I saw that the gray look which I had fancied I had seen under his
+smile had now come out upon his face.
+
+"Estabrook," he said, leaning forward toward me with his lips
+compressed, "sometime, perhaps years from now, perhaps never, but, if
+you choose, to-night--you may know what a problem I have had to solve,
+and what it will cost me to say to you that which I am going to say."
+
+He had lowered his voice as if he wished to be sure that no one could
+overhear him, and now, when he stopped, he stood with his head turned as
+if listening to be sure that no one was in the hallway. No sounds came,
+however, except those of the dog, who whined softly in his dreams, and
+the complaint of the dry wind, which, instead of diminishing with night,
+had perhaps increased its intensity, and the rattle of the long French
+windows through which I could see the gnarled old wistaria vine clinging
+desperately to the iron balcony, its leaves tossing about as if in
+agony.
+
+"I have sat on the bench for many years, trying with my imperfect
+intelligence to adjust the misshapen affairs of men and women," the
+Judge went on. "Never have I been forced to deal with so terrible a
+question as lies before me now--to-night."
+
+For a long time, then, he was silent. Finally I spoke.
+
+"Judge," said I, "how can I help?"
+
+"I am afraid," he said slowly, and apparently avoiding my gaze,--"I am
+afraid that I must call upon you in a manner which will severely weigh
+upon you. Estabrook," he put his hand upon my shoulder. "I've done my
+best. Do you hear? I've done my best."
+
+"I will never doubt it," I assured him. "Nor do you need to doubt me."
+
+He looked at me steadily for a second; then he went to a drawer and,
+opening it, took out a packet of folded papers. It was evident that he
+had placed it there so that he could reach it easily.
+
+I suppose that the gravity of his bearing, the trembling of his hands,
+in which these papers rustled, and the anxious expression with which he
+gazed at me, as if I were to decide some question of life or death,
+infected me with his unrest. I got up, paced back and forth, and finally
+sat down again facing his empty easy-chair, with my back to the long
+windows.
+
+The Judge watched every movement I made, his eyes staring out at me from
+under the brush of their brows. At last, when I had seated myself, he
+came and sat in front of me, laid the papers on his knees and smoothed
+them with the palm of his shaking hand.
+
+"My boy," he said, "I wrote these papers, not for you, but for my
+Julianna. Never has a man had a task so calculated to break his heart.
+She was not to read my message to her unless death came and took me, for
+while I lived, I felt that I might spare her. See! Her name is written
+across this outside page."
+
+I could find no words to fill the pauses which he seemed obliged to
+make, for, as you may well believe, I felt the presence of a crisis in
+my affairs--in the affairs of all of us.
+
+"But, my boy," he went on, "what these pages contain is now for you, if
+you so decide."
+
+"Decide?" I managed to say. "What must I decide?"
+
+"I will tell you if God gives me the strength to do it," he said. "It is
+about Julianna. It is written here. I have sealed it as you see."
+
+"Something about her?" I cried.
+
+He bent his head as if I had struck him from above.
+
+"You may break the seal if you must. I have fought many battles to bring
+myself to tell you that you may read what is there."
+
+I reached for the package.
+
+"Wait," said he. "The contents of this document need never be given to
+her if she becomes your wife. Nor is it necessary for you to read what
+is there set forth if you only will choose not to do so. These are
+strange words between men in these modern times, Estabrook. But I have
+guarded my honor carefully all my life. And now, though the temptation
+has been almost more than I could stand, as you may believe some
+day,--or perhaps know in the next five minutes, which are walking toward
+us out of eternity,--yet I have determined that you should know
+everything if you chose."
+
+"I do choose," I said firmly.
+
+He shrunk back as if I had struck at him again.
+
+"Think!" he begged. "No good can come of your knowledge. It cannot avert
+harm if harm must come. And more--be cool in your judgment, or you may
+ruin all of us."
+
+"But, Judge Colfax," I cried out, "your proposal of choice is empty. One
+cannot reject or accept the unknown."
+
+"It must be so," said he. "There is an astounding fact about Julianna
+which you do not know. About that fact I have written this message, so
+that when I had gone she might be prepared in case the worst--in case
+the worst--the improbable--the unexpected, the unthinkable--should
+come."
+
+I caught the arms of the chair in the grip of my two hands and tried to
+think, but I could find no reason for my remaining, perhaps for a
+lifetime, in ignorance of some unseen menace to the woman I loved. I
+think that I was about to tell him that nothing could change my feelings
+for Julianna, or shake my faith in her, that it was right that I should
+become her defender, and that I, therefore, must know what hung so
+threateningly over her. Words were on my tongue, when suddenly the Judge
+bent his great frame forward and was in another second half kneeling on
+the floor in front of me, his hands clutching my coat. His face then was
+the color of concrete, and the dignity which he had worn so long had
+slipped from him as an unloosened garment falls.
+
+"For her sake!" he whispered. "For her sake, don't go further. Let the
+thing be unspoken. My boy, don't dig up that which is all but buried
+forever. Listen to me, Estabrook. You trust me. And I, tell you that if
+I were in your place, knowing what I know--"
+
+"Enough," I said, awed by his pleading. "Do you tell me that it is best
+for her and for me to make her my wife in ignorance of this thing?"
+
+"God help me," he said, falling back into his chair.
+
+He seemed to be thinking desperately, as if some voice had told him that
+only a moment was left for thought. At last he threw his long arms
+outward.
+
+"Yes," said he. "I tell you that it is better for you and for her to
+know nothing."
+
+"That is sufficient," I said. "I ask no more."
+
+He shut his eyes as one would receive the relief of an opiate after
+long agony of the body and for some moments he remained so, his hands,
+from which the packet of papers had fallen, relaxed upon his knees. The
+starched white shirt he wore crackled absurdly with each long inhalation
+of breath.
+
+In those moments a tumult of thoughts went tumbling through my brain,
+and as the seconds passed, I almost felt that it was the wind that
+howled outside which was blowing these thoughts over each other, as it
+would blow dry autumn leaves.
+
+At last the dog rose, stretched himself, and, as if restless, sought
+here and there a new place to lie, and the sound of his claws upon the
+polished floor recalled the Judge from his almost unconscious reverie.
+He half opened his eyes and once or twice moved his thin lips. At last
+he spoke and into those commonplace words he put all the meaning which
+hours of ranting would have made less plain.
+
+"I am grateful," he said.
+
+When I looked up at him after lowering my head in acknowledgment of his
+thanks, I saw again that wonderful smile of benevolence, which, given to
+me once before in his office, I believe could only have been bestowed by
+one who had had a lifelong practice in love of humanity. Indeed, he only
+directed it at me for a moment, and then turned his face a little aside
+toward the back of the room, as if he wished to send that expression
+through the walls and spread over the whole world its beaming radiance.
+
+You may, then, well imagine my surprise when, without a word or a motion
+of any other part of his body, I saw that smile fade from his face. It
+disappeared as if a blast of the night wind, entering the room, had
+dried it, crumbled it, and blown it away. In its place I now saw the
+terrible, eye-widened, and fixed stare which we recognize as the facial
+sign of some abject, unreasoning terror, or of death, after the clutch
+of some fatal agony.
+
+"Judge Colfax!" I exclaimed.
+
+I waited. I thought I saw his head move a little as if he had heard me,
+but with that motion there came a click, the sound of teeth coming
+together.
+
+"You are ill," I said, half rising from my chair.
+
+His lips moved, but the stare in his eyes remained the same.
+
+"It has come," he said in his throat.
+
+I jumped toward him. He did not stir.
+
+"Judge!" I cried.
+
+He did not answer. I waited, bending over him, not daring to guess what
+had befallen him, holding my breath. Then, cautiously, I moved my
+fingers before his eyes: they did not wink. I placed my hand over his
+heart.... It was as still as a rundown clock. The room itself was still.
+The wind had paused a moment as if for this.... The Judge was dead. And
+yet because he still sat there, his gray head resting on the cushions,
+and because he stared so fixedly before him, I could not grasp the fact
+of death. I had never met it face to face before. I could not honor its
+credentials.
+
+For a moment I stood in front of the old man, with the single thought
+that our extraordinary interview had been too much for him: it never
+occurred to me to go for assistance any more than it occurred to me that
+death, unlike sleep, was a permanent thing, from which the Judge would
+never come back again. I simply stood there, awed by the presence of
+death, yet crediting death with none of death's attributes.
+
+And as I stood, my attention became more and more fixed upon the Judge's
+stare. It did not seem to be a vacant gaze; on the contrary, it seemed
+to contain something. It seemed not only fixed; it seemed fixed on some
+object. It looked past me, behind me, and there, with all its terror and
+all its intelligence, it rested, motionless. It seemed to refute the
+notion that dead men cannot see; it seemed to affirm that dead men's
+eyes are not dead. Into that terrible stare I looked, fascinated, awed,
+hushed, motionless. Then, suddenly, I heard the dog.
+
+[Illustration: LISTEN TO ME, ESTABROOK!]
+
+The great Scotch hound had been snarling. He had growled, for I
+remembered it as a fact brought out of the background of my
+consciousness. And when I tore my eyes away from the Judge's stare, I
+saw that the dog was staring, too,--was staring, was drawing back his
+black lips, exposing his yellow teeth. Every hair on his back was erect,
+his nostrils were distended as if he were relying upon his sense of
+smell to determine the nature of what he saw. Could there be any doubt
+that he, living, and his master, dead, still saw something--something
+which, because it was behind me, I could not see?
+
+At first I did not dare to look. I felt some dreadful presence behind
+me--a presence upon which the lifeless man and the cringing, snarling
+beast had set their eyes, a presence which had wiped the smile from the
+Judge's face and tightened every nerve and sinew in the dog's lean body.
+I could hear the wind, and, in its lapses, the rumble of the city, I
+could smell the warm aroma of the Judge's pipe, I could feel my senses
+grow keener as I gathered my courage to look over my shoulder.
+
+When at last, after that dragging moment's reluctance, I did so, I
+believed that I had looked for no purpose. The room behind me was empty.
+My nervous eyes searched the rectangular space, swept over the chairs,
+the tea-table covered with its display of rare china, the blue-and-gold
+Japanese floor vase, the brasses on the cases of books, the dark walls,
+the pictures, the gloomy corners filled with the mist of shadows, the
+rugs, the cornice, the draperies.
+
+Then suddenly I saw!
+
+Outside the long French windows, framed in the uncertain outlines of the
+old ornate balcony rail and the tossing leaves and branches of the vine,
+there appeared, as if it had come floating out of the liquid blackness
+of the night, detached from all else, a face.
+
+No sooner had my glance fallen upon this peering countenance than I
+thought I saw a startled opening of its lips; it withdrew and was gone.
+I had merely caught a glance at it, yet of this I am sure--the face was
+white with the pallor of things that grow in a cellar, it was weak with
+the terrible drooping, hopeless weakness of endless self-indulgence; it
+was a brutal face, and yet wore the expression of timid, anxious,
+pathetic inquiry. It was a face that had come to ask a question. And
+though, because only the pale skin had reflected the light from within,
+I had not seen what might have appeared above or below, and though I may
+have been wrong, I received the impression that it was the countenance
+of an old woman.
+
+Of course the moment I discovered this apparition, upon which the wild
+stare of the Judge in life and in death had rested, I ran forward. I
+thought as I did so that I heard the scrape of clothing on the iron
+balcony rail and the thud of a heavy object dropping on the grass below.
+Flinging open the glass doors, through which a torrent of wind poured
+into the room, and leaning out under the twisted branches of the vine, I
+tried in vain to penetrate the wall of blackness before me, and force my
+sight through it and down into the old garden, from which there arose
+only the rushing sound of the dry wind in the shrubbery. All the
+universe seemed made of black and hissing chaos. Out of it came blasts
+that combed through my disheveled hair and drove fine dust into my eyes.
+But of the messenger of death, who had peered in the window for a
+moment, and then withdrawn, nothing could be seen.
+
+I turned back, feeling suddenly, for the first time, the emptiness of
+body which occurs, perhaps in sympathy with the emptiness of death, and
+as I turned, I found myself in the position of the thing that had looked
+in at us. The stare of the Judge was still fixed upon that spot, so that
+for a moment I received the impression that he was gazing at me. The dog
+still whined softly, cowering close to the floor.
+
+I went to the middle of the room: I stood there gathering my wits. I
+heard a clock strike somewhere in the kitchen region below, from outside
+the window came the rattle of some conveyance, louder, louder, softer,
+softer. A passing boy whistled; I heard Julianna's step above me; I
+heard the dog licking his paws unconcernedly; I heard the curtains flap
+in the wind that filled the room; and finally its ironical little scream
+as it lifted from the desk the last opinion the Judge ever wrote and
+scattered the loose sheets all over the room. It brought in the dank
+smell of the garden.
+
+"I must tell her," I said aloud, and the old dog, senses dulled by age,
+wagged his tail. "I must tell her," I repeated, and toiled up the soft,
+carpeted stairs.
+
+She was waiting for me in her own room, standing under the soft light
+from a hanging, well-shaded, electric lamp. I see her there, clearly,
+with the smile fading from her face as she read my own. Indeed, it was
+not necessary for me to speak; before I had gathered courage to do so, I
+saw her bosom swell with a long breath. She inhaled it jerkily, as one
+who is suddenly shocked with a deluge of icy water. I saw the color fade
+as the smile had faded before it, and when I had nodded to indicate that
+she had guessed the truth, stepped forward, fearing that she would sway
+off her feet.
+
+"No, Jerry," she said, with her hands held tight at her sides. "I am
+all right. I had expected this some day soon. It is hard to believe, but
+has not come without warning. His heart--his great, loving
+heart--had--worn out. I do not want you to come with me. I am going
+down--alone."
+
+I moved my dry tongue in my mouth: a word of the strange circumstance of
+his death was there. But her courage--her steady body, her squared
+shoulders, her firm mouth, her eyes which showed her agony, but no sign
+of weakness, and her soft voice as she said, "Wait for me
+here"--restrained me. I pressed her fingers to my lips and as I saw her
+go out, I felt that perhaps never would the opportunity to tell the
+story I have told to-night come again.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+
+                                AT DAWN
+
+
+I think it must have been nearly a half-hour--though the minutes were
+themselves hours--before I, waiting in the upper hall beside the window,
+through which the arc lights from the street threw jumping white patches
+on the ceiling, heard the sound of the old dog's claws on the floor
+below and her little catches of breath as she came up.
+
+At the top she buried her face for a moment on my shoulder.
+
+"I love you more than ever," she whispered. "I want you to stay.--Call
+Margaret and do what you can. I will come to you by and by."
+
+With these words she pressed my forearm in the grip of her strong
+fingers and, entering her own room, shut the door.
+
+I found, when I did mechanically as she had bade me do, that Margaret,
+with the instinct of an old servant, which is sometimes as keen as that
+of an animal, had already sensed the presence of some crisis and prowled
+about in her soft-footed way until she had discovered the truth. She was
+lying at the bottom of the stairs, her face buried in her hands and her
+broad back rising and falling with slow and silent tides of grief.
+Julianna and her father were together the old woman's life. One half had
+gone.
+
+"Come, Margaret," said I softly.
+
+"Very well, sir," she answered after a minute, and rising, straightened
+her cap, preparing for duty like a broken-hearted soldier. And so she
+went on in that next hour or two, telephoning, directing, arranging and
+doing with me all those necessary things. In spite of her labors she
+seemed always to be at my elbow, a ceaseless little whimpering in her
+throat. Her spectacles were befogged with the mist from her old blue
+eyes, which, like the color of old china, had faded with wetting and
+drying in years of family use, but she did not again give up to her
+grief.
+
+Therefore, when at last we looked at each other in the hall in one of
+those moments when, at the end of a task, a mental inventory is taken to
+be sure that all is done, I was surprised to see her expression change
+suddenly, to hear a cry of dismay escape her, and to observe her trundle
+herself toward the library door in grotesque haste.
+
+When, following her, I went into the room, I found her thick fingers
+pulling open drawer after drawer of the desk, and turning over the
+papers they contained.
+
+"It was here, Mr. Estabrook. Oh, my God! Mr. Estabrook, I saw him put
+it here!" she cried.
+
+"What?" I asked, with a glimmer of memory.
+
+"The papers. They was marked for her, but she mustn't ever have 'em! I'd
+rather they should pluck me from my bones, sir! And I saw him put 'em
+here!"
+
+"He took them out again," I cried, touched by her contagious fear. "He
+died with them on the floor beside him. I know what you mean. The blue
+seal."
+
+"Yes, the blue seal!" she cried in recognition, and stumbling across the
+room she fell upon her knees, reaching under the old easy-chair and the
+desk, patting over the rug with her hand, turning up its corners,
+searching with her face bent down, like a devotee of some strange sect,
+muttering to herself.
+
+"She must never see," she exclaimed monotonously. "Poor child, she must
+never see. It is worse than death--a hundred times. Oh, what has he done
+with that terrible package!"
+
+Suddenly, throwing herself upward and backward, until the upper half of
+her body was erect, and with a small object held up to my astonished
+eyes between her forefinger and thumb, she uttered a cry of despair and
+rage. She had found a piece of the sealing wax with which the packet,
+once offered to my eyes, had been fastened!
+
+"It's too late," she wailed miserably. "Do you see that? The girl has
+read it. She would not let me in her room. It's too late!"
+
+There was no keeping back the question.
+
+"What was in it?" I cried. "What was written there?"
+
+I saw her old mouth shut as if she meant to show me that I need expect
+no disclosure from her.
+
+"I don't know, Mr. Estabrook," said she.
+
+In her eyes, perhaps distorted by the strong lenses of her glasses, I
+saw the challenge of stubbornness. I felt myself growing wild with a
+desire to break through the unwholesome mystery which had entangled me,
+and overcome by any means the silence of this woman. She had arisen. She
+was within my reach. And I believe that I put my hands upon her,
+catching her two round and fleshy shoulders under my curved palms,
+shaking her to and fro with the excess of my excitement. In that moment
+before I spoke to her, she looked up at me, surprise and terror written
+on her face.
+
+"Tell me!" I roared. "You know this horrible, hidden thing. Confound
+you, tell me!"
+
+Her expression changed. I saw surprise become craftiness and fear,
+distrust. I saw in her eyes the beginning of that hate which I believe
+has never, since that irresponsible moment, diminished.
+
+"You had best leave go of me, Mr. Estabrook," she said calmly. "You
+would not act so if the old Judge was alive and here. Nor his daughter,
+sir!"
+
+The rebuke, you may believe, was enough.
+
+"I'm sorry," I said.
+
+The old woman, however, wrung her hands and looked toward the room above
+as if to indicate to me that nothing was important but the fact that
+Julianna had possession of the Judge's _post-mortem_ message.
+
+"Let her tell you if she will," she cried. Then covering her face with
+her fat hands, as if to hide some terrible picture of the imagination,
+she stumbled forward out of the library.
+
+I have often wondered since, as I wonder to-night, when those spectres
+have arisen again, what that old servant meant. At the time it never
+occurred to me that but one thing could happen. I had the utmost
+confidence in Julianna, and indeed, without thinking much of my own
+troubles, I passed that long vigil in the library only with regret that
+I could not wrest away from the true and noble woman who had promised to
+be my wife, all the terrible grief which, alone in the chamber above,
+she must have been suffering. For the first time, I think, in all my
+life, which, by training and inherited instincts, had been devoted, I
+might say, to the welfare of the Estabrook name and of myself, I felt my
+mind--and even my body--filled with a strange and passionate desire to
+be the instrument of good, not for myself, but in the name of others and
+perhaps in the name of God. My eyes filled with tears, springing not so
+much from grief as from belief in myself, not so much from weakness as
+from strength. I called upon an unknown force that I felt to be near me
+and directing me.
+
+"Save her from misfortune," I said aloud in that silent room. "Protect
+her. Comfort her."
+
+The old dog, as if he now understood, raised his head and licked my
+hand. I realized then that the wind had died down, and, looking up, I
+saw that the balcony and garden were lit by the pale rays of the morning
+moon, that the stars shone clearly again through the still air, and that
+the odor of flowers, nodding below the window, perfumed the Judge's
+study. The pipe, with ashes tumbling out upon the table, by curious
+chance had not been moved from the place where he had laid it down.
+
+It seemed to me that I had dreamed restlessly, that the old man had not
+left the room, and then, when this fancy had gone, I almost believed
+that he had come back as he used to do when he, in his absent-minded
+way, had left something behind. With my heart full of him, I got up and
+reaching for the pipe I dropped it into my own pocket.
+
+At last the oil in the lamp had been consumed. The burner flickered,
+gurgled several times, snapped, and went out; but the failure of this
+light served to show that morning was near at hand. The rectangular
+squares of the window panes now appeared luminous with the first gray
+flow of the east. It seemed to me that the time had come when Julianna
+should no longer be alone with her own thoughts; with soft steps I
+climbed the stairs and softly I turned the knob of her closed door. If
+it had been locked, it was so no longer; it yielded to my gentle,
+cautious pressure. The crack widened. Then, for a moment, unseen and
+unheard, I stood on the threshold looking in.
+
+She was no longer dressed as I had seen her, for now she was clad in the
+soft drapery of some delicate Oriental silk, which, if she had been
+standing, would have fallen from the points of her shoulders in
+voluminous folds to the floor. She had unloosened her hair; it had
+fallen in a torrent of brown and golden light. I could not see her face.
+
+Her back was turned toward me, for she was sitting on the floor facing
+the hearth in the middle of the frame of old lavender-and-gold tiles
+which marked the fireplace. Her hands were pressed to her temples as if
+her head no longer could be relied upon to retain its contents, her
+fingers moved this way and that through the hair above her ears, and,
+in strange contrast with the glimmer of early day beyond the white
+curtains, an uncanny flickering light burned on the hearth, painting the
+delicate pallor of her shoulders, neck, ears, and hands with an outline
+of fire. It was a picture to give the impression of a beautiful
+sorceress crouching to perform some unholy rite.
+
+"Julianna!" I exclaimed softly.
+
+She turned about as one caught red-handed in guilt, and in doing so,
+moved far enough to one side to expose the last remnants of written
+sheets of paper, which flames were rapidly consuming. A moment more and
+these were crisp ashes which whirled about the hearth with a soft rustle
+before they fell into heaps of sooty fragments. Whatever the Judge had
+written with infinite pain had now been destroyed. And as I looked into
+her eyes, I saw, too, that infinite pain had attended their destruction.
+Her expression had in it horror, shame, apprehension, and excruciating
+grief: never had I believed that a face, naturally so innocent and so
+happy, could have been so distorted with mature and terrible emotions as
+hers had become in the hours that had passed.
+
+"Julie! my Julie!" I cried.
+
+For answer her fingers reached out toward me in mute appeal, her body
+followed, and, crawling to my feet, she clutched the air as if trying to
+reach my hands with her own, and then fell forward, flat upon the
+floor, unconscious. If in that moment she appeared a groveling thing, it
+was only for a moment. Before I could stoop to raise her, she had
+regained her senses with two or three sharp inhalations and a fluttering
+of her eyelids, had thrust my hands from her and struggled to her feet.
+
+"Go!" she whispered, retreating. "It is unthinkable! Go! Never come near
+me!"
+
+"No--no--no!" I said. "Julianna, tell me! What has happened? It is not
+you who speaks!"
+
+"No," she answered. "It is not I."
+
+"I say it is not you who say these things," I repeated. "Who, then?"
+
+"My father. It is his voice. It is his message. And what he has been, I
+am. There is no other way."
+
+I moved toward her.
+
+"Tell me this terrible menace behind us--this thing that threatens
+us--that works its evil upon us. I will not believe that any fault of it
+is yours."
+
+"It is mine because it is his," she said, with a return of her
+wonderful self-control. "But no one shall ever hear of it from
+me--no--Jerry--not--even you."
+
+"He offered to show me that message," I said. "I refused to see."
+
+Another little cry issued from her compressed lips.
+
+"You were willing not to know?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She went into a corner; without taking her eyes away from mine, she
+wrung her hands, again and again.
+
+"Why did I ever see you?" she whispered. "Why did I ever love you? Oh,
+go, while I am strong! Go, while I know that you must never ask for me
+again! Go, before I bargain with my conscience."
+
+"You cannot send me away," I said. A thousand hidden horrors would not
+have daunted me then. "Will you treat my love for you so? Has your own
+gone so quickly?"
+
+She shuddered then as if cold steel had been run through her body.
+
+"I am lost," cried she. "I am lost. I cannot do more. Promise by your
+love of me,--by your love of God,--never to ask me of those things now
+ashes on the hearth--never to so much as speak of them to me--till
+eternity."
+
+"What then?--I promise," I said.
+
+"Then I will as solemnly swear to be as good and faithful, as true and
+ever-loving wife as God will let me be," she said softly; "and may He
+forgive me for what I do, because I love you."
+
+She held out her arms to me, begging to be taken into mine, and when I
+had touched her she fell back, with her limp body in the curve of my
+elbow, and, looking up at me, offered her parted lips to the first kiss
+I had ever given her.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER VI
+
+                        THE MOVING FIGURE AGAIN
+
+
+Such was a betrothal, sir, so extraordinary that had my natural
+repulsion for the unusual permitted me to have told it before, it would
+have been with belief that others would think me a man deluded by his
+own fancies. And yet these are facts I have told you--cold and bare and
+sufficient to have proved to me that the adventure and romance mourned
+for by some men are not dead, but, were it only known, still flourish,
+concealed in the hearts and experience of such matter-of-fact persons as
+myself.
+
+Our marriage, too, was not of the conventional sort. It took place a
+fortnight later without any of the celebration usual in such cases. The
+death of the Judge, the fact that Julianna had no other immediate
+relatives to act as her protectors, and that my own father, whose
+affection for me has always been of a rather cold and undemonstrative
+type, approved not only of my choice of a wife, but also of my plan for
+an immediate marriage, argued against delay. Furthermore, Julianna
+herself, with a sad but charming little smile, again and again assured
+herself in my presence that she knew her own heart and that for her
+part there was no need to prolong a period of preparation.
+
+Often, in those days, she spoke to me of her father, with the deepest
+affection, not as if he were dead, but rather as if his spirit still
+remained in the old house. She had one of those rare minds that reject
+the disagreeable superstitious affectations concerning death and that
+overcome hysterical grief. To be sure, for hours at a time she would
+suffer an extraordinary melancholy, and then, in my agony of curiosity,
+I believed that the spectre which had first appeared before her, the
+night of the Judge's death, was whispering to her again. True, however,
+to my solemn oath, which I have always kept, I asked her nothing, and
+she always emerged from these periods of meditation into moods of gayety
+and affection which were more charming than I can describe.
+
+She would romp, mind and body, in all the freshness of youth, with the
+most entrancing grace of movement and with her natural brilliant play of
+thought.
+
+"I belong to you!" she would exclaim, retreating before my advance.
+"Come--take me!"
+
+Then, after I had captured her and she had looked up at me, wrinkling
+her nose playfully, she would suddenly grow serious, and from her
+smiling eyes tears of happiness would start, and then, for an hour
+afterward, she would go singing snatches of song through the house. So
+that more than once I saw Margaret Murchie stop her household task to
+listen, shut her old eyes and say, "Thank God for his care of her."
+
+It need not surprise you that I tell you of her, for, as you may
+understand when I have told you all, I am now facing circumstances
+which, for some reason, have caused me to fall in love with her with a
+strange, new, and even deeper desire, and which raise the necessity for
+me to save her from some unrevealed menace and win her a second time.
+
+The extraordinary fact in the light of this new situation is that our
+married life has been, until a year ago, as peaceful as could be.
+Whatever I might have suffered at first from the fact that I had been
+forbidden to know or ask of the past, these stings soon lost their power
+to disturb me. I was glad to forget them because I so hated all things
+which might tend to disturb the well-ordered life with which well-bred
+families retain their respectable position.
+
+We found our tastes adapted to a common enjoyment of outdoor and
+intellectual pleasures, and we spent many hours each week, when alone,
+in reading the books which pleased us and in playing duets, in which I,
+being an indifferent player of the piano, contrasted my cold technique
+with the warmth and expression of her performances upon the 'cello.
+Indeed, we showed ourselves in these duets as in our companionship, for
+though I loved her, I believe I may have fallen short in those
+attentions, those little demonstrations and caresses, upon which some
+women seem to be nourished. As for her, she remained unchanged by
+marriage or time. By her humor, her tender sympathy, her refreshing,
+unaffected ways, she won a large and devoted circle of acquaintance,
+composed of both women and men. If any of the former, however, desired
+intimacy, they always found a gentle resistance; if the latter, they
+were made to see that a fortress had been erected on the borderland.
+
+Until a year ago we were very happy, I think. To be sure, as time passed
+without the coming of any child, Julianna suffered that peculiar grief
+which, whatever may be its severity, is like no other. The desire for
+children was not only in her heart and mind: it was also a keen,
+instinctive yearning. Quietly, and without inflicting upon me any of her
+distress over unfulfilled hopes of the past, she persisted in the belief
+that the gift she most desired would not be withheld from her forever.
+Other than this no cloud seemed to be creeping up our sky, and, indeed,
+it was only little by little that I realized that some peculiar change
+had taken place.
+
+I may say to you, I think, that this strange influence came even more
+than a year ago. I have tried in my own mind to establish a connection
+between its beginning and an accident which happened at that time.
+
+We had gone for a week-end visit to the Tencorts' farm in the Sweetbriar
+Hills, and much against my wishes, expressed, however, sleepily,
+Julianna had gone out at sunrise, chosen a rangy mare, saddled the
+creature herself, for the grooms were not up, and had ridden off across
+the wet fields, alone. Breakfast had already been announced when we
+heard the hoofs of the animal and caught glimpses of the horse's yellow
+neck and Julianna's plaid jacket, bobbing toward us under the arching
+trees.
+
+"Your lady is hardly what one might call a gentle rider," said Jack
+Tencort. "As for me, I'm glad to see the mare in a foam for once, but I
+would not be pleased to have my own wife--Hello, she is using her right
+hand."
+
+I, too, could see that Julianna's left arm was hanging by her side, and
+as she pulled up the panting mare below the porch, I noticed that her
+lips were white.
+
+"I'm sorry to have forced your animal," she said, "but I was in a hurry
+to get back. Jerry! Please hurry. Help me off."
+
+"What's the matter?" cried our host behind me.
+
+"To tell the truth," she said. "I have had my arm broken."
+
+"Thrown?" cried Tencort, looking for signs of mud or dust on her
+costume.
+
+Julianna smiled gamely.
+
+"That is a matter wholly between myself and the mare," she answered.
+
+You know, of course, that in spite of her unconcerned answers the thing
+was serious. The great trouble, I have always thought, was that no good
+surgeon was within reaching distance; the country doctor who set the
+bones failed to discover the presence of some splinters at the elbow,
+which the injury had thrust up into and displaced some of the nerves and
+sinew there.
+
+When we had come back home and Nederlinck, the surgeon, had discovered
+how the healing process had gone on, he told me that for many weeks my
+wife would have to suffer great pain from the readjustment of the
+irritated nerves. For two months he did what little he could and then
+left the rest to time.
+
+Julianna suffered silently. She complained little, but I could see a
+marked change in her. She became restless. I have seen her pace up and
+down a room for hours, like a captured animal longing for the jungle,
+and remain at the dinner-table, after the time had come to go to our
+library for coffee, with her great round eyes staring before her until
+some one spoke to her. Her vigor disappeared. The moods which had
+followed the reading of the _post-mortem_ message from the Judge
+returned; her little exhibits of affection and, I think, even her
+innocence of personality disappeared. The spectre, whatever it was,
+seemed present once more. At times I believed I saw in her beautiful
+face a look of guilt, of fear--the look of a soul in a panic. She became
+suspicious of her friends and withdrew from them more and more, at times
+with such awkward haste that it seemed as if she believed they were
+about to observe some fact which she must, at any cost, hide. Little by
+little, too, I believed that I detected signs that she was drawing away
+from me.
+
+For some reason I have always dated the beginning of this change to that
+morning when Julianna went off to ride alone. Yet, if I wanted to be
+sure of bringing back to her face an old trace of her mischievous smile,
+it was only necessary for me to question her about the cause of her
+accident.
+
+"I have promised the horse never to tell," she would say, putting her
+finger to her red lips. And I have never been able to decide whether she
+was concealing, playfully, some little folly or awkwardness of her own,
+or, behind her light manner, some more serious experience.
+
+In any case, it was plain that some accursed thing had come between us.
+I found after some months that I must face this as a fact. We said
+little to each other from morning till night. When evening had come I
+did not go home, as I always had, with a little thrill of the old
+expectation which had never seemed to wear out. Instead I had a
+subconscious reluctance to enter a relation in which each day sympathy
+and understanding grew less and less. I began to suffer from a desire to
+demand from her a complete disclosure of all that had been hidden from
+me, and this temptation to break my solemn promise grew when, asking her
+on several occasions as to where she had been at this or that hour, I
+found that she was evading my questions.
+
+At last it became evident enough that I had not been deceived in my
+increasing suspicions that something was wrong. One evening she burst
+into tears as she stood before my chair, and then falling on her knees,
+caught up my hands in her own and pressed them to her neck, cheeks, and
+forehead.
+
+"Whatever happens, you will love me?" she cried out desperately. "Say
+you will! Say you will!"
+
+"You know that," I said.
+
+Perhaps I had answered as badly as I could, for it seemed to cause her
+the greatest pain.
+
+"I wish you had not said so," she exclaimed, with a wild look in her
+eyes. "It is your goodness that hurts. Don't you see what comfort it
+must be to a woman to have her husband cruel to her--beat her--abuse
+her!"
+
+I drew back from my wife, astounded.
+
+"Stop!" I said, with the first show of stern authority I had ever made
+since I had known her. "It's time for you who dare to speak like
+that--to tell--"
+
+"No! No!" she cried. "For God's sake, don't forget your promise. If you
+do we are lost--I am lost."
+
+She sprang up and away from me, and with her bare arms crossed over her
+face and her hands over her ears to shut out all sounds, she ran from
+the room.
+
+This, sir, was seven weeks ago, and for many days following she would
+sit and look at me constantly, until, feeling her eyes, I would raise my
+own to find her face drawn as by a weary period of sleeplessness. At
+these moments it seemed to me that she was trying to make me understand,
+just as a faithful dog tries at times to communicate his thoughts by the
+expectancy, the love, or the pleading shining from his eyes. How much
+would I now give had I been able to do it!
+
+Within the space of a week she brought to me the suggestion and the
+plan, which I, being driven to desperation by the impending wreck of
+our happiness, was mad enough to accept without foreseeing the
+punishment I would have to suffer through giving for the second time a
+solemn word of honor.
+
+I think on that morning Julianna was more like her old self than she had
+been for weeks. Her apartments, though separate from my own, are entered
+from mine by a narrow door. I had prepared for breakfast,--which we do
+not have served in our rooms according to the degenerate modern
+custom,--and then had gone to find her, with the thought in my mind
+that, whatever she suffered or feared, it was my duty to help her as
+best I might. I had promised myself to be cheerful, yielding, and as
+entertaining as possible.
+
+She was sitting on the side of her bed when I came in. The whiteness of
+the linen and the pale blue of her morning gown served to bring out the
+delicate color of her skin. I was so delighted with this indication of
+renewed health that I opened my mouth to express my admiration.
+
+She was quicker than I.
+
+"You find me attractive this morning," she said with a sad little smile.
+"I am glad. I wish that I might be attractive to you forever and
+ever.--I mean my shoulders, my arms, my hands--free from wrinkles or fat
+or dryness."
+
+"I'd love you now if you were to assume the shape of a Chinese dragon,"
+I said seriously, "--or the Sheik of Baalbec."
+
+The truth was that I had almost forgotten this latter creature, the
+automaton. Apparently she had, too, for at first a puzzled look came to
+her eyes, then she smiled up at me with a bit of her own individual
+coquetry.
+
+"You are making love this morning?" she said in a gay voice. Yet it
+seemed to me that in it was a trace of eagerness, shrewdly directed
+toward a concealed purpose.
+
+"I am going to ask you to go away, Jerry," she went on timidly, but
+still smiling.
+
+"Go away? When? For what purpose?" I exclaimed.
+
+"Just go away for me--for my sake," she answered, straightening her
+body, raising her head, and looking squarely at me with some of her old
+strength. "You can go to live in a hotel. You can explain that you are
+forced to do so for some business reason. You can say that I have gone
+away."
+
+She must have seen the flush of my anger, for she raised her hand.
+
+"Don't!" she pleaded. "I know very well how unreasonable I may seem. But
+if I have earned any gratitude or respect or love from you, just give me
+what I ask now and give it to me blindly--without question."
+
+Her eyes held my own as she said these words and I knew she had cast
+her spell over me.
+
+"What do you propose to do for these three weeks?" I asked roughly.
+
+"I shall stay in this house," she answered, spacing her words. "Margaret
+will stay, too. The rest of the servants I shall send away. But of this
+I want to be sure--you must not come to find me for three weeks. God
+only knows what would happen if you did."
+
+"You are insane!" I cried out, with my hand gripping her round wrist.
+"It's that which has hung over us."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Worse," said she.
+
+Then, as if to assure me that she had not lost her reason, she recalled
+the months which had just gone and described, as I could not, the change
+in our home, our life, ourselves.
+
+"It is for you!" she broke out finally, as if she were no longer able to
+be calm. "For you and for our future I am begging you to do what I ask."
+
+"Tell me this," said I, stirred by seeing her tremble so violently. "Has
+something come to you out of the past?"
+
+"Yes," she said, reaching behind her for the wall. "Ask nothing more. It
+has come out of the old, old past. For the love of all that is good,
+promise to do as I say."
+
+"And then?" said I.
+
+"Come back to me. I shall be here--then."
+
+I bowed my head.
+
+"On your word of honor," she commanded.
+
+"On my word of honor," said I, and turned away.
+
+I had scarcely done so, however, before I felt her arms about me, the
+impact and the clinging of her body. Close to me, plucking at my
+fingers, my sleeves, my wrist, her body shaking with her sobs, she
+covered me with caresses like those given at some parting for eternity.
+
+"You--are not--in danger of death!" I exclaimed, holding her away from
+me at arm's length.
+
+"No, I cannot believe that," she said quietly. "Such as I am, I shall be
+when you come back."
+
+With these words she pushed me gently from the room; I found myself
+looking into the broad white panel of a closed door. I stood there a
+moment, dazed, then going to my chamber, I, with my own hands, packed a
+large kit bag, preparing to do as she had asked. It was only after I had
+reflected on my promise that I went again to speak with her. I knocked.
+There was no answer. I tried the latch. The door was locked.
+
+Without eating my breakfast and with a strange conflict between my trust
+in my wife and the memory of my experiences since I had known her, I
+left the house and have not passed its threshold, though it is two weeks
+to-morrow morning since I left it.
+
+Do you wonder, sir, that I have suffered all the torments which anxiety
+can devise or imagination, with its swift picture-film, may unroll
+before one's eyes? I have stifled as best I could these uncertain
+terrors. By day, when I have plunged into my work at the office, at
+times I have been able to shut my mind to the everlasting rehearsal
+around and around, over and over again, of the facts which I have told
+you to-night; but when night has come, I am the prey of my own thoughts.
+For six days, in spite of my exaggerated fear of scandal, I have prowled
+like a ghost before my own house, lurking behind trees, watching my own
+door like a ten-dollar-a-day detective. Dodging the policeman who would
+know me, I have kept my eyes for hours on the dim light that sometimes
+burns in my wife's room, and when I have seen the shadow of some one
+passing and repassing behind the drawn shade, I have felt my heart in my
+throat, and have scarcely been able to restrain myself from calling out
+into the night air, "Julianna! Julianna!"
+
+Finally, I must tell you one thing more. I had believed that perhaps the
+crisis which had come to her had done so independently of any
+personality but mine or hers. I was wrong. To-night, unable to remain
+inactive any longer, and by the accumulation of restraint made
+desperate, I rung up my house on the telephone. No answer was returned.
+The feeling that my wife, in danger, was calling upon me, swept over me
+until, had I been open to such beliefs, I would have felt sure that
+across the affection and sympathy between us, as across wires, the
+message came.
+
+I walked hastily from the hotel into the park, taking the path which I
+had used in the pleasant June days when I had met her at the Monument.
+You know the kind of night it has been. Therefore when I reached the
+border of trees opposite my house, I hardly thought it necessary to seek
+the screen of the shrubbery; the arc lights were throwing the dancing
+shadows of tree limbs across the pavement, the rush of the wind drowned
+the noise of footsteps, and the street was deserted, I thought, except
+for the clouds of whirling dust that passed downtown like so many huge
+and ghostly pedestrians. I saw that a dim light shone through her blinds
+and that the house was the picture of peace, suggesting that the walls
+contained comfort, happiness, and the quiet of a peaceful family. So the
+fronts of houses lie to us!
+
+At the very moment that this thought came, I saw from my position under
+the shadow of a spreading oak, which has not yet dropped its leaves,
+that I was not the only person who was observing the light behind the
+blinds. A figure was standing not more than a hundred feet away from me,
+peering out from beyond one of the light poles. It wore a vizored cap, I
+thought, and its head rolled this way and that on top of its spare,
+bent, and agile body. Now and then, however, it ceased this grotesque
+movement to gaze up at the window. One would have said that this
+creature was less a man than an ape.
+
+I am not a coward. "Here," thought I, "is a tangible factor. My word of
+honor to Julianna is not broken if I seize this customer, whatever he
+may be, and make him explain the part he is acting." I stepped forward
+immediately, but he saw me before I had made two steps. From my bearing
+and the place where I had concealed myself, he knew at once, I suppose,
+that I had been watching him, for, turning with a swift motion, he
+plunged into the shrubs and evergreens behind him. That the thing was as
+frightened as a rabbit, there can be no doubt; the single little cry it
+gave forth was not a scream. You would have called it a squeal! In a
+jiffy I was after him, tearing through the branches among which, with a
+sinuous twisting of his body, he had just slid; a moment later I reached
+the open lawn again. The man had vanished.
+
+I knew well enough that he was hiding, probably flattened on the
+ground, among the evergreens. At another time, on a quiet evening,
+listening for his movements or even his breathing, might have told me
+where he lay, but now the wind and the rattle of dead leaves made it
+necessary for me to use my eyes in my search. Therefore I went back
+through the bushes, kicking at dark shadows with my foot, my heart
+thumping with the excitement of the hunt.
+
+As I reached the street again, I looked up toward my house, and there,
+at the front door, I saw a crack widen and a black figure of a man come
+out and down the steps. It crossed the street, and when it had gone into
+the park, I followed it. You know what happened; this second man was
+you.
+
+And now I ask you, Doctor, man to man--For God's sake, tell me what you
+know!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                BOOK III
+
+                         THE DOCTOR'S LIMOUSINE
+
+
+                                CHAPTER I
+
+                         A SHADOW ON THE CURTAIN
+
+
+Such was Jermyn Estabrook's story. I have tried, in repeating it, not
+only to include all the details given by this desperate young man, but
+to suggest also the coldness and accuracy of his speech. Why? Because
+the very manner of narration is indicative of the man's character. He
+belongs to the dry, dessicated, and abominably respectable class of our
+society. Pah! I have no patience with them. They live apart, believing
+themselves rarities; the world is content to let them do it, because
+theirs is a segregation of stupidity. And Estabrook, though he had fine
+qualities, belonged to them.
+
+Nothing could have indicated this more clearly than the emphasis he put
+on his fear of scandal, the smug way he spoke of his word of honor, and
+the self-conscious blush that came into his handsome face when he
+mentioned the name of Estabrook. Why, even the menace to his beautiful
+Julianna was not quite sufficient to cause this egotist to forget his
+duties toward himself! So if he had not acted with such nobility of
+spirit during the remainder of our adventures begun that night, I could
+not sit here now and write that I learned to be very fond of him.
+
+At any rate, Estabrook asked me what I knew and I told him all that I
+have written--about Virginia, that she seemed to feel the existence of
+something the other side of her bedroom wall, about MacMechem's notes on
+the case, the game of life and death I was playing, my conversation with
+the old servant, and for full measure, I told him where I had learned to
+place a blow behind a gentleman's ear. It is necessary to deal with men
+as excited as Estabrook without showing the nervousness that one may
+feel one's self.
+
+When I had finished, he jumped up from his chair, and, clasping his
+hands behind his back, in the manner of lawyers, he walked twice across
+the room.
+
+"Why, don't you see?" he cried. "All that you have told me simply adds
+mystery to mystery, apprehension to apprehension, fear to fear. And it
+strikes me that, though my own experience has been bizarre enough, your
+observations and that of this other doctor who is dead are even more
+fantastic. What do you hope to accomplish by telling me this gruesome,
+unnatural state of affairs?"
+
+"I hope to make you act," I said, putting a chair in his path. "We are
+sensible men. There are, no doubt, explanations for all occurrences.
+Our limited mental equipment may not find them at once. But the first
+thing to recognize is the one important fact; neither of us doubts that
+your wife is in some grave danger. Personally I believe that if you are
+not mentally deranged, she is! In any case, it's your duty to go to your
+house. Force an entrance if necessary. It cannot be done too soon!"
+
+Estabrook clenched his hands as he heard me, but after a moment he began
+to shake his head doggedly.
+
+"Can't you see that it would mean publicity?" he asked.
+
+"Better than losing her," I argued, feeling certain that he would yield.
+
+He did, in fact, cry aloud, but nevertheless he shook his head.
+
+"Impossible," he groaned. "I've given her my solemn promise!"
+
+I suppose I've a reputation for being short of speech, often frank, and
+sometimes profane. I then allowed myself in my rage to be all three. It
+was to no purpose. Estabrook would not consent to tearing the cover from
+his affairs in any way which would cost him the breach of his confounded
+words of honor.
+
+"You are a madman!" I exclaimed in my vexation. "The death of your wife
+may be entered against you. What folly!"
+
+"Doctor," he answered quietly, "I want your help and not abuse. Your
+storming will not accomplish anything. You are the only living soul to
+whom I have confessed the presence of a skeleton in my married life, and
+I want you to help me. I have been told repeatedly that you are a man of
+courage, steadiness of nerve, scientific eminence, and high ability."
+
+I could not disagree with him.
+
+"The next thing, then, is Margaret Murchie, the servant," I said.
+
+"What of her?"
+
+"She knows something," said I. "You have heard how she talked to me, how
+she tried to conceal her excitement, how she treated me as a spy, how
+guilty she seemed, and you have indicated that you, as well as I,
+believe that she knows what is at the bottom of this."
+
+"Yes, yes," cried Estabrook. "I am sure that she knows. But what
+then--what then? What can we do?"
+
+"My dear fellow," I said, "why 'we'?"
+
+He threw up his hands and sprang out of his chair again.
+
+"I beg your pardon," he answered with a look of chagrin. "I've been
+under a strain, I suppose, and I forgot that you have nothing at stake."
+
+"Not so fast, Estabrook," I said. "Take another nip of the brandy. I
+prescribe it for you. And not so fast. I have a good deal at stake."
+
+"What?"
+
+"My case," I said.
+
+He looked at me with admiration.
+
+"Furthermore," I went on, "I feel a certain brotherhood with you, young
+man. You are the first person with whom I've rolled on the sod for many
+years. I have punched you in the neck. You are now my patient and my
+guest. You have confided in me. You have made an unconscious appeal to
+me for help. Above all, I am one of those old fogies you have mentioned,
+who secretly mourn the dying-out of romance. Here!--a glass!--to
+adventure!"
+
+Estabrook smiled sourly, but he drank.
+
+"Thank you," he said. "I appreciate your spirit and, permit me to say,
+also your attempt to make me treat this terrible affair in a spirit of
+sport. But old Margaret is the superlative of stubbornness. We cannot
+expect to go to her to obtain information. I have lived in the house
+with her for more than six years. Can I say whether she is a saint or a
+crafty villainess? No. I know no more now than when I shook her in my
+anger on the evening the Judge died. She has never addressed me of her
+own will since. She will give up nothing to me. You have tried her
+already."
+
+"I am less conservative in my ideas," I answered. "Since we are in this
+field of turbulence and mystery, let us be turbulent and mysterious. All
+that you say is true. Therefore, we must force the truth from Margaret
+Murchie."
+
+"You mean to induce her--" he began.
+
+"Stuff!" said I. "The thing I mean is assault and battery. The thing I
+mean is kidnapping. You may believe in clapping your hand over her mouth
+and struggling with her, while we take her out. Personally I prefer a
+cone containing the fumes of a liquid called cataleptol, fortunately
+well known in my profession, while still a stranger to criminals."
+
+But the careful Estabrook shook his head.
+
+"You are not serious?" said he doubtfully. "Do you plan for me to take
+part in this?"
+
+"There must be two," I said. "And once we have the lady in this room, I
+will be willing to guarantee that she will tell all she knows. I cannot
+ask my chauffeur to go with me, for I trust him about as implicitly as I
+trust a rattlesnake. Which makes me think--can you run a car?"
+
+Estabrook was weakening. He nodded. I looked at my watch and found that
+it was after eleven. I drew the curtain and saw that sheets of rain were
+still being blown slantwise across the foggy radiance of the arc lights.
+There is a trace of the criminal in me. Perhaps all men feel it at
+times. Just then, observing the wildness of the storm, I felt the joy
+of a midnight misdoing, even more than my desire to find the answer to
+MacMechem's question.
+
+"I shall be glad to know how you propose to gain a second admittance,"
+said Estabrook, when, after tripping over the wet cobblestones and
+bending our shoulders to the drive of the cold rain, we had groped
+through the black alley to the dimly lit garage. "I'll also be glad to
+know why you suppose you can draw a statement from the old woman."
+
+"My dear fellow," said I, "there is the cause of many of your troubles!
+You are always wanting to see your way to the end. And the way there
+often must be cut through a trackless waste of events that haven't
+happened."
+
+"In light of my experience it seems to me that your statement is
+unreasonable," he muttered peevishly; "but since you are satisfied, I
+will be, too. If I understand your plan, however, while you sit dry and
+comfortable within this machine, I am to ride outside, wet to the
+marrow."
+
+At this remark the sleepy garage attendant rubbed his eyes, filling them
+with the sting of gasoline, swore, and forgot to submit my new chauffeur
+to the inspection of his first surprise. He drew back the door and we
+trundled out into the water-swept thoroughfare.
+
+The rain, which had begun with a thin drive, had now settled into one
+of those sod-soaking, autumn downpours, commonly called an equinoctial
+storm. Estabrook was showing the effect of his nervous strain
+by driving the machine through it with a recklessness of which
+I disapproved, not only because we had twice skidded like a
+curling-stone from one side of the asphalt to the other, but also
+because I did not wish undue attention attracted to our course. The
+windows in front of me and to the right and left were covered with
+streaks of water and fogged with the smoke of my cigarettes which, in
+my pleasurable excitement, I smoked one after the other; therefore
+everything outside--the spots of light which lengthened into streaks,
+the shadows, the other vehicles, the glaring fronts of theatres in
+Federal Circle--formed a ribbon of smutched panorama, the running of
+which obliterated vertical lines and made all the world horizontal. At
+each crossing we jumped, landing again to scoot forward to the next,
+where, through the opening of side streets, came the faint sound of
+whistles in the harbor; and still, Estabrook,--confound him!--to my
+cautions bellowed through the speaking-tube, paid no attention.
+
+With shocking suddenness it occurred to me, for the first time,
+seriously, that I had no assurance that this man who drove me was not a
+maniac!
+
+I reviewed the meeting with him, the tale he had unfolded, his
+distraught actions. I am fairly familiar with psychopathic symptoms and
+my summary of all that I had observed in him indicated clearly enough
+that he was as sane as any one of us. But for the first time in my life
+I realized the feeling of uncertainty about a physician's diagnosis
+which a patient must endure. A doctor delivers his opinion as a matter
+of self-assertion; the layman receives it as a matter of
+self-preservation. Riding in that flying car, I found myself in both
+positions. As a physician I was wholly satisfied with my conclusion; as
+a man I found myself still in doubt and picturing to myself a wild
+ten-minute ride, which I had no power to prevent, ending in a chaos of
+broken glass, twisted metal, clothing, blood, and flaming gasoline.
+
+"MacMechem met violent death the moment he became curious as to the
+other side of the blue wall," I thought, with a twinge of the
+superstitious fear which touches prowlers as well as presidents,
+professors as well as paupers.
+
+We were whirling around a corner then, and through the glass and over
+Estabrook's broad shoulders, I believed I saw again the treetops of the
+park.
+
+"At least he knows where he lives," said I to myself as we drew up to
+the curb.
+
+"Good!" I whispered to him, when I had stepped out into the swash of
+the rain. "Frankly, I hardly enjoyed it. You drive like a demonstrator."
+
+"I'm a ruin of nerves," he answered, shivering. "I'm afraid I'm a poor
+assistant for you, anyway. What do you want me to do?"
+
+"Just climb inside there where it is warmer," I said, clapping him on
+the shoulder. "I'll be back in a minute."
+
+"Back in a minute?" he repeated as if dazed.
+
+"From the Marburys', if you don't mind," I explained.
+
+He leaned back against the cushions, disregarding the fact that with
+every nervous movement water ran from him as from a squeezed sponge.
+"Oh, I forgot your patient," said he, with a twitching mouth. "But, for
+God's sake, don't keep me waiting long!"
+
+I shook my head in answer; then ran, rather than walked, up the
+Marburys' steps; indeed, that night taught me how active a corpulent old
+codger can be if the need comes.
+
+Miss Peters evidently had been at the window in her night vigil,
+watching the storm; she opened the door.
+
+"Well?" said I.
+
+"The tide has turned."
+
+Under the hall light I looked up at her stony, expressionless face. The
+Sphinx itself was never more noncommittal.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I supposed you knew," she whispered. "I supposed that was why you came
+back to-night so late."
+
+I exclaimed in a hoarse and savage whisper. I was furious. This time I
+had fought with disease not only, as in a common struggle, with
+carnivorous Death, but as a hardened sinner whose heart has suddenly
+opened to a child.
+
+"Virginia is dead!" I said, glaring at her.
+
+She never changed the coldness of her tone.
+
+"No," she said. "She is going to get well."
+
+"Confound it!" I growled, under my breath. "How do you know?"
+
+"The blue wall," she answered with a sneer.
+
+"Bah!" said I, starting up the stairs. "We shall see."
+
+As I pushed open the door, I observed that the nurse had procured a red
+silk shade to screen the single electric lamp on the table. The yellow
+rays were changed to a pink, reflected on the wall, sending their rosy
+lights into the depths of that bottomless blue; the breaking of a clear
+day after a spring rain has no softer mingling of colors. For a moment I
+looked at the chart, then with new hope turned toward Virginia herself.
+
+Either the new tints diffused by the lamp deceived the eye, or the
+little girl's pale skin had in fact been warmed by a new response from
+the springs of life. She was sleeping quietly, her innocent face turned
+a little toward me and in the faint, illusive smile at her mouth, and in
+the relaxation of her beautiful hands, I read the confirmation of Miss
+Peters's prophecy. I, too, believed just then that Virginia would not
+die, and that, as so rarely happens in this disease, her recovery would
+be complete.
+
+"It is a wild night," said the bony nurse when I had tiptoed out of the
+room.
+
+She seemed to be wishing to draw from me an opinion on the extraordinary
+rally the child had made. That was her way; she always invited
+discussion of a subject by comments about something wholly irrelevant.
+
+"We shall see," I answered again. "A relapse might be fatal.
+To-morrow--we shall see."
+
+"It is raining hard," she said as she turned the latch for me.
+
+"Yes," said I, "and the treatment till then must be the same. Who
+knows--"
+
+"Who knows?" she repeated.
+
+A blast of wind and water and the closing of the door seemed to deny an
+answer. I found myself on the steps again, looking into the staring eyes
+of my car, and, with a sharp jump of my thoughts, wondering how we were
+to accomplish the work we had come to do. I descended, however, and
+when I had reached the door of my limousine, I saw Estabrook's drawn
+face pressed close to the glass. It was the sight of him that gave me an
+idea; it was his first words that, for a moment, drove it from my mind.
+
+"Look! Look!" he said to me. "Look at her window!"
+
+I had merely noticed that a new, bright light shone there; now, in a
+quick glance over my shoulder, I saw a shadow on the curtain--the shadow
+of a figure standing with its arms extended above a head, thrown back as
+if in agony.
+
+"Is it your wife?" I asked in a hoarse whisper.
+
+He took my wrist in the grip of his cold hand. "My God, Doctor, I don't
+know," he said. "It looks--its motions, its attitudes, its posture!--it
+looks like the thing I saw outside the Judge's window!"
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+                                MARGARET
+
+
+Well, now,--his words made me shudder! I confess it with some
+reluctance. Of course a doctor comes in contact with enough real
+horrors. They become ordinary. It is those undefined, doubtful things
+which run fear through the veins like a drug. Nevertheless I caught
+myself in time to conceal my nervousness.
+
+"Here, here, Estabrook!" I said in a sharp, businesslike tone. "We
+didn't come to watch drawn curtains. The question is, did you bring your
+keys?"
+
+Without asking me questions, he handed them over.
+
+"Now, understand me," I said, for I could see that in truth he was in no
+condition to offer much assistance. "My advice is for you to take these
+keys and walk into your own house."
+
+"I can't do that," he said irritably. "I've told you I can't do it--and
+why I can't."
+
+"Then understand me further," I said when a shriek of wind had gone off
+down the avenue. "I have debated this question and decided that we must
+not disturb your wife. She has warned against that, and perhaps it is
+better to assume she is not insane and take her warning."
+
+"Yes, yes," he cried. "That is right."
+
+"I shall not parley with Margaret Murchie," I went on. "Move a little! I
+have something I want to reach under the seat. There!--I shall not ask
+her to come. She will have no choice. It will all be over before she has
+time to cry out. And you must be ready to help me carry her into this
+car."
+
+"The law--" he began.
+
+"Oh, I know that," said I. "But it is a choice of doing this, or
+nothing. Any other course either makes you break your confounded,
+nonsensical word of honor, or else raises a noise that will bring the
+reporters around like so many vultures. It is your affair, after all.
+Shall I stop here?"
+
+Again, as I spoke, I felt the pleasurable thrill of adventure which I
+had supposed had gone with my youth.
+
+"You want me to wait here till you signal?" he asked.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"As you say!" he agreed. "The old servant knows. She must tell. I can't
+stand it any longer. She must be made to tell."
+
+I nodded. He indicated the proper key with a touch of his forefinger.
+Whereupon, crossing the sidewalk again and ascending the Estabrooks'
+steps with as much unconcern as if they had been my own, I fitted the
+key softly and turned the lock.
+
+The very instant that I tried to open the heavy door, however, I knew
+that a watcher who had been observing our movements through the silk
+curtains was behind it. I felt a resisting pressure. I heard a stifled
+scream. It was no moment for indecision. With an unbelievable rapidity
+of thought, I estimated the chances of the unseen person being armed,
+the hazard of his giving vent to an uproar which would bring the
+neighborhood about our ears. Then I threw my body against the door with
+all the force I could muster. It yielded suddenly; with a crash it flew
+back against the tiled wall. I was precipitated forward and a second
+later found myself in the ridiculous performance of rolling around on
+the floor with what felt to me like a fat wash, consigned to a laundry.
+It was, however, a bundle from which choking imprecations and grunts
+exploded, and which for a turn or two was enlivened with upheavals of
+some strength. Well enough to laugh now, but at that moment, you may be
+sure, I was searching with my free hand for the person's mouth.
+
+I had meant to be gentle: if I clapped my hand over the source of the
+little cries and protests, when I had found it, with something more than
+decision, you must blame the circumstances. I had expected to surprise
+old Margaret from behind and give her such a whiff of cataleptol that
+she would have suffered no inconvenience. Unfortunately I had not at
+first known that it was she whom I had encountered, and now there were
+obvious difficulties in the way of my applying my saturated gauze to her
+nose.
+
+"Be still!" I commanded, trying to uncork my vial, with a single hand.
+"Be still. No harm will come to you."
+
+Her reply was a well-placed thrust of her two old knees which nearly
+sent me through the glass. It placed me in a position, however, where I
+could, with a push of my foot, close the door and shut us into the
+vestibule, so that her clamor, which had broken forth again, might be
+muffled.
+
+Furthermore, I now had my chance to unloose my anaesthetic. I can hear
+the squeak of that fat cork now; I can recall the pleasure of smelling
+those dizzy fumes as I thrust the gauze into her face. Time after time
+she succeeded in thrusting it aside with her clawing hands; time after
+time I succeeded in jamming it back again against her nose. The scene is
+not one I recall with pride, but my brief excuse must be that I do not
+like to have my undertakings fail. The delicacies of the best of us,
+moreover, depart at critical junctures.
+
+However that may be, the important point is that finally I felt her
+struggles subside. Her hands no longer acted with intelligence; they
+moved about wildly in front of her face, as if to push away a tangle of
+cobwebs. Her head rolled to and fro; the gurglings, sputters,
+half-uttered cries of rage, ceased.
+
+"Breathe again!" said I, with the habitual phrase of the surgeon
+administering an anaesthetic. "Breathe away--breathe away--Ah,
+now!--breathe--breathe--breathe!"
+
+And at last she was still. I threw the gauze into the corner. I got up
+panting, for I am not built for exercise, and, panting still, I peeped
+out through the silk curtains to be sure that in our little adventure we
+had attracted no attention.
+
+The wind-driven rain still swept down the streets under the iridescent
+glows of the arc lights, my car still stood like a forlorn, forgotten
+thing in the gutter. In one direction the wet perspective of the avenue
+appeared as empty as a street scene on a drop curtain. But when I turned
+my eyes the other way my heart gave quick response. Just beyond the iron
+fence stood a patrolman.
+
+He had stopped and seemed to be looking directly at the door behind
+which I stood. I could see his two bare hands on the iron railing. They
+were very conspicuous against the rubber coat--wet, black, and
+shiny--which covered his burly figure, and he used them to sway himself
+softly backward and forward. It seemed to me that he was debating how to
+act, and I believe that I learned then, peeping through the glass, to
+what extent guilt and the desire for secrecy will sharpen the
+imagination.
+
+I say this, because, almost at the moment that I felt sure he had taken
+a step forward toward me, I saw that not his face but his back was
+turned toward me, that his hands were behind him and that he had leaned
+for a moment on the rail, perhaps to look at the physician's green cross
+on my lights. A second later he ducked his helmet into the driving rain
+and, walking on, turned into the shadows of the cross-street.
+
+I knew then I had no time to lose. I had been delayed; Margaret Murchie
+might regain her senses. And yet, when I had signaled to Estabrook, when
+he, without a word, had come, and when I felt the excitement most
+keenly, I found myself impressed not with the necessities of the moment,
+but rather with the extraordinary grotesqueness of the situation.
+
+"Take her about the knees," said I, and then touched his elbow.
+"Estabrook," I added, "this--mind you--happens in a twentieth-century
+metropolis."
+
+He did not answer, because the old servant, dashed in her upturned face
+by a stream of water running from the coping, moved her arms feebly and
+uttered a groan.
+
+"Quick!" said I. "Drop her and crank up the car. I'll do the rest."
+
+He obeyed.
+
+I dragged the burdensome weight of my victim, if you will so call her,
+and thrust it into the interior of the vehicle. Estabrook was already on
+the chauffeur's seat; as quickly as I tell it, the car had begun to pick
+up speed over the wet and slippery street. We flashed by a light or two
+and I saw that Margaret Murchie's eyes had lost their stare of
+unconsciousness.
+
+"Margaret," said I, "you are all right. Be sensible. There is Mr.
+Estabrook in front."
+
+She shook herself convulsively as if to throw off the remnants of the
+anaesthetic. Then she caught my sleeve.
+
+"Oh, it's terrible," she cried. "Ye have taken me away from Julie! Bring
+me back to her, do you hear? You and Mr. Estabrook--What do ye want of
+me?"
+
+"Quiet!" I said. "We want you to tell all you know."
+
+"You want me to tell it? After all these years? And it's no fault of
+mine or hers!"
+
+Suddenly she became excited again.
+
+"Take me back!" she screamed. "You don't know what you do! Take me back
+to my Julie! She may need me sore enough!"
+
+"Have sense," I said close to her ear. "We are going to the bottom of
+this. You must tell everything--everything from beginning to end."
+
+She was silent for several seconds while we sped out toward the North
+Side.
+
+"It's awful," she said finally. "And it has gone far enough. It's been
+more than I can bear. It's time for me to tell! If you, whoever you are,
+and Mr. Estabrook will hear, you shall have it all--the living truth of
+it--the bottom of what I know."
+
+"Good!" said I. "And now we'll go to my house."
+
+"No, no," she exclaimed. "There is no need for that. I would not be from
+the girl while these awful minutes is going by. Who can say what would
+happen? Oh, no, sir. Take your cab back to our door, and then--sitting
+on this seat--with my eye on that terrible house--and less need of any
+of us to worry--I can tell ye all from the first to the last."
+
+In her voice was that sincerity of emotion which invites confidence.
+
+"Very well," I said. "That is agreed."
+
+And then, picking up the speaking-tube, I told the wretched man at the
+wheel. He swung us around; we turned back, and in five minutes more
+drew up again, according to my direction, not by the Estabrooks' door,
+but under the spreading limbs of the oak across from the Marburys'
+ornate residence.
+
+"Take some of this, my boy," I said as he crawled, wet and trembling,
+into the interior. "It will be good for you, and for you, Margaret,
+too!"
+
+"Oh, Mr. Estabrook!" she exclaimed when she had swallowed the stimulant,
+"I lied to you. I once lied to you very sore, as you shall see."
+
+"Enough--enough!" he cried. "What of her--my wife? She is still alive?"
+
+"Have no fear," replied the old woman. "It's not death that's with us,
+I'm believing."
+
+The poor fellow wrung his hands.
+
+"But, by the Saints, what I'll tell you now is true," she said, putting
+her hands first on his knees and then on mine. "Look! The light is
+shining on my face and you can read it if you like. Sure, I'm praying
+that you may use the knowledge to save us all."
+
+"Go on," said the young man hoarsely.
+
+And thereupon, in an awkward, jerking manner, which I can only hope to
+suggest in the repetition, she told a tale of strange mingling of good
+and evil. This was her story....
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 BOOK IV
+
+                      A PUPIL OF THE GREAT WELSTOKE
+
+
+                                CHAPTER I
+
+                             LES TROIS FOLIES
+
+
+I was born on the Isle of Wight. My father was a seafaring man. He owned
+his own vessel--a brigantine as sailed from the Thames to British South
+Africa and sometimes around the Hope to Madagascar.
+
+Where he met my mother I never knew. He was Scotch and she was an Irish
+beauty, I can tell you. Looking back on it now, I believe she was of
+rich and proud people and that they had cast her off for her folly in
+marrying a man that was rough of cheek and speech, for all his ready
+good heart. She was as delicate and high-strung and timid, as he was
+brown, big, and fearless as to anything, be it man or typhoon. And yet
+it was she who could stick to one purpose as if the character of a
+bulldog was behind the slender, girlish face of her, while he was always
+making for this and that end, charging at life with head down, like a
+bull.
+
+I can see the two of them now, walking together arm in arm, when he'd
+come back out of the sea; I can see them strolling off down along the
+old hedges of the garden, or sitting beneath the thatched roof of our
+cottage which had stood the wind sweeping off the Channel for more time
+than any one at Bolanbywick could remember. She looked like a child
+beside him, for his shoulders would measure three of the width of hers.
+It was from him I have my frame that once called to the eyes of men to
+see the figure that it held, though I say it myself. But from her I got
+many a trait that fitted me badly, because craftiness and stubbornness
+and a weakness for sentiment and the like of that, had best be in a body
+small enough to tame them.
+
+The two of them loved each other completely, each in their way, but it
+was well that they had no other children. It was well, perhaps, that
+when I was seventeen I had grown strong and quick as a hound. My mother
+went with him then for her first voyage since her honeymoon, and it was
+the last ever seen of her or him, or the only property we owned, which
+was the vessel and a cargo of cotton ducks and sheetings for
+speculation, bound to the Gold Coast. Sometimes the sea opens its mouth
+like that, and the jaws close again.
+
+There was no more education for me! My father's sister was a
+boarding-house keeper in London. I was staying with her then, and when
+the lawyer found there was no insurance, life, ship, or cargo, she was
+for setting me to work the next morning. Poor woman, she had slaved her
+life against dust in halls and cockroaches and couples who wanted rooms
+without references and the heart had gone from her, and when she died
+she left the best of two thousand pound to a clairvoyant and
+card-reader, who had robbed her week after week for ten years and more.
+
+I took a place as companion to an old lady, going to Odymi in Hungary.
+It was there one of the doctors, who had seen my two bare forearms,
+spoke of my strength and told me that I could make good money as a
+rubber in the baths, and I was glad of the change from the old woman. I
+was proud and short of tongue and patience with her, and we were always
+snarling at each other. But time wears those edges off people, I can
+tell you!
+
+It was there, at the baths, I fell in with the woman who called herself
+Madame Welstoke. She was an evil woman, and of the worst of such,
+because she was one who never seemed bad at first, and then, little by
+little, as she showed herself, you could get used to her deviltry and
+for each step you could find an apology or excuse, until at last the
+thing she had done yesterday seemed all right to-day and you were ready
+for some new invention of hers to-morrow.
+
+Mainly she treated diseases by the laying on of hands, and the best that
+could be said of her as to that was she preyed on the rich and would
+take no patients she thought were short of at least fifty pounds to
+spend for her mumbo-jumbo and gimcracks. She would talk in a very smooth
+voice to those she got in her web--about the flow of vital energy and
+the power of positive and negative currents over the valves of the heart
+and circulation of the blood. She would roll up her eyes and complain of
+how the treatments, which consisted of laying her fingers on a person's
+temples and wrists, exhausted her, and at first I thought she really
+meant it, and when her good, old motherly face was turned away, many was
+the time I laughed. And finally, when I began to see that most of her
+patients improved and some were cured, I stopped laughing, for there was
+the evidence before my eyes and no denying it.
+
+Whether or no she had power to heal, I would have stayed with her. Her
+influence was like slow rot and the germ of it was deep-seated before
+you could even see that it was time to resist it. I was acting as her
+maid in private at first, and before other people, wherever we
+went,--Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Monte Carlo, and lots of places I have
+forgotten,--I was supposed to be her daughter who had joined her from
+New York. And it was all one to me, for I was drawing a fine pay and
+living very rich and I could see that the name and game of Mrs.
+Welstoke spelled prosperity.
+
+All this, of course, was before I even saw the Judge, but I was getting
+my training, and learning how easy money could be made to come through a
+little fol-de-rol here and a bit of blackmail there, and introducing one
+class of society to another in the next place. It was easy to salve my
+conscience, because the old adventuress was curing many a poor sleepless
+or rheumatic creature who could spend money like dirt to get the result,
+and besides, she took an interest in me enough to make me wonder why,
+and she was always keeping her eyes open like a pilot to see that I
+didn't meet any man who might be after me. To tell the truth, she talked
+so much of the villainy of males and the horrors of marriage that
+finally I believed what she said and turned my young face away from all
+men, just as if good, timid, and bad were run out of the same mould.
+
+We were in Paris when she showed her hand, and, strange enough, she
+chose to do it one afternoon when we were driving in the Bois with a
+thousand fine gowns and faces to distract the attention.
+
+"The trouble, Margaret," says she, "is that our reputation runs on ahead
+of us. Here in Paris it is the same as at Vienna and Rome--we have much
+more than we can attend to. I can't put my hands on two fools at once,
+and I am always pained because I am American by birth, as I never yet
+told you before, and I hate to see five dollars slip by, as we say over
+there."
+
+"It's too bad," I answers, "for there is no way to help it."
+
+"Indeed!" she says. "I'm not so sure. I haven't made you my daughter for
+nothing. And I'm thinking of having you treat those who I can't."
+
+"Me!" I cries, very surprised. "You know well enough that I have no
+power."
+
+At this she leaned back on the cushions and nearly put her broadness on
+Midget, her toy lap-dog, sitting beside her. But she threw her head back
+and laughed her own natural laugh, as coarse as a fishmonger's and
+different from the ripples she could give when anybody was around.
+
+"Power?" says she. "Child alive! I have no power, you simple girl. When
+I put my fingers on their silly heads, my hands might as well be resting
+on a sawdust pincushion in the Sahara Desert."
+
+"But the cures?" says I, looking to see if the _cocher_ could overhear
+us.
+
+That question brought the laugh away from her, and for a minute she
+looked serious.
+
+"Many a time, when I go to sleep of nights, I think of that myself," she
+says, patting my hand.
+
+"I actually know no more of the reason for those cures than you.
+Nevertheless I know surely enough it's not me that cures them. No. I
+think it's their own wills. A bit of claptrap fools them into exerting
+their own minds on their bodies, and by the same token the fear of
+weakness will make the weakness itself. So the world rolls around, my
+dear."
+
+It was those words of hers I have never forgotten. I've never forgotten,
+for one reason, because, when I began to play for patients and worked
+over them with the talk and flap-dash and monkey-shine, and got them to
+pay their money freely, then half the time they would improve and say
+they felt the flow of vitality, and some of them went away well and
+sound as biscuits, when, before they had come to us, they had had
+doctors and drugs and baths and changes of climate for nothing. I even
+knew some who would swear that Welstoke's daughter had more power of
+healing than the great Welstoke herself, and among them, too, was rich
+and terribly cultured people, who would come with veils in closed
+carriages and would be afraid their husbands would find out, and then,
+if they didn't pay the bill rendered, all that was necessary was to
+threaten suit to have them go into a panic and rush the money to us in a
+hurry. It is wonderful how easy a person drops into new views of what is
+fair and right when their surroundings change, and something else is
+wonderful--the fact that I, who sit here with the two of you now, a
+broken old housemaid, once had gowns as fashionable as any on the
+Continent, and that without a penny of inheritance or a single love
+affair.
+
+"All is well with us," Welstoke used to say, "and all will be well if
+you have the sense to keep out of a match with some lying-tongued
+creature who, on his side, will believe nothing you say, and will cast
+sheeps' eyes at every plump blonde from Benares to Buffalo. Besides
+which, my dear, there never was one of them that didn't snore. Remember
+that and you are safe."
+
+Indeed, I thought I was safe, as she called it. I believed that the
+affectionate natures of my father and of my mother had offset each other
+in me, for three years went by and never a thought did I give to love of
+man. And when it came, there was a flit of it like the shadow of a
+flying bird that comes and goes on the wall and is none the less hard to
+forget. It is so with all, I'm thinking, high and low, rich and poor; we
+see these shadows of what might be, and whist! they are gone again, as
+if to say we'd live again in another world and there is plenty of time
+in other lives than ours--time for the right head to lean on the
+shoulder that was meant for it and this hand to touch that!
+
+Be that as it may, the thing happened the winter we were at Venice.
+Madame Welstoke was in her heyday then, with plenty of money to give
+dinners for the little crowd that was made up out of dark-brown
+society--the old men who'd tell of nearly reaching greatness and the
+like of that, with champagne running from the corners of their eyes and
+their voices cracking with all the bad-spent years. And there were fat,
+jeweled women, too, hanging on alimony or adventure, and middle-aged men
+from this country, who had left New York or Philadelphia for one reason
+or another of their own, and talked about rates of interest and whistled
+tunes that were popular in the United States in the seventies, and had a
+word or two for my shoulders.
+
+"Be careful how you talk too much," old Welstoke would say. "It's a very
+fair presentment you make with a bit of rouge, and a hairdresser, and
+keeping your big hands under the table as much as possible. Whatever you
+do, listen, and be on your guard, if the conversation runs to letters or
+music. One way to be educated is to be silent!"
+
+Perhaps she laid it on so heavy about my lack of "finish," as she called
+it, that when my one moment came to speak and say in my plain way a word
+or two, it gagged me in my throat and would not slide out.
+
+In those days a French Jew, named Vorpin, had a place just off the
+Grand Canal, called "Trois Folies," and by waiting till mid-evening for
+dinner, we could find the cafe well-nigh empty. The truth was I went
+there often alone when a fit of depression was on me, and it was no
+wonder these fits came. A week of idleness, taken by a person who comes
+from my class, and should be working eight and ten hours a day, is a
+misfortune often longed for and seldom recognized when it has come.
+
+Little did I think that evening, of which you will hear, that what
+happened there was to have its hold on Julianna Colfax, who had not then
+been thought of as coming into the terrible clutches of that which has
+followed us like a skulk o' night.
+
+The cafe was long, and longer yet with its gilt mirrors on the white
+walls and its row of empty gilded chairs, and I found a table in the
+corner. Perhaps a man and woman or two was there, either too late or too
+early for the gayeties that went on. I have forgotten. I only know that
+the sound of lapping water came in through the lattice beside my table
+and a breeze, too, that cooled my bare neck and would not cool my head,
+which was full of thoughts of my days in the old garden in the Isle of
+Wight and my mother's song and the colored crayon of my father, looking
+very stern, and hanging over the green old china vases on the mantel.
+
+I believe the first thing that made me look up was a crash of glass, of
+crockery, the exclamation of the waiters, and running feet.
+
+"So here is where they boast of excitement?" roared a thick voice. "And
+yet a man must make it himself."
+
+The waiters had surrounded him, whoever he was, and I could not see him
+then.
+
+"Bah!" he cried, beginning to laugh like a stevedore. "I'm an American.
+Monte Carlo and all that! I'll pay, you frog-catchers! Take that! Ask
+the proprietor if that will cover the damage!"
+
+A great explosion of squeaky French followed, a word or two of Italian.
+The waiters parted and this American stepped out. I had expected to see
+him taller, but his power was in the weight of his shoulders, the easy
+swing of his drunken progress down the aisle. The devil-may-care was in
+him--in his handsome, laughing, wild eyes--the look of a child mad with
+the promise of a world of pleasures.
+
+"Pay?" he roared again. "I pay as I go! Live? I live as I like! Out of
+the way, dishes! You are here to-day; on the ashheap to-morrow! So with
+all of us."
+
+With that he pulled off another tablecloth, sending the glassware
+rolling into splinters.
+
+"Come! Collect!" he said, holding a fistful of notes in the air. "How
+much? How much? Quickly! I see mirrors down beyond! You lie, you
+mirrors! I'm walking straight! You lie!"
+
+There was no stopping him. With a heavy crooked cane in his strong hand
+and the perspiration running from his handsome face, he staggered toward
+the spot where I was sitting. And yet, though he had raised his stick to
+strike the chandelier above the next table and had let out a yelp of
+childish delight before he saw me, I had felt no fear of him.
+
+I can tell you, the effect of the meeting of our eyes was astonishing.
+I'm thinking there wasn't a muscle in his body that did not pull at him
+to straighten him up, to take off his hat, to bend him a little
+backward, as if he had thrust his face among thistles.
+
+As I sat there, looking at those brown eyes of his and listening to his
+frightened, heavy breathing, I knew well enough I had come to a place
+where my road of life split and ran in two directions. There are things
+we know, not by thought or reason or culture, but by the instincts, I'm
+thinking, that Heaven has put into us along with the rest of the
+animals. And he knew it, too, perhaps, for he saw me leaning forward on
+my elbows and a little white and scared of something that can't be put
+into words at all, and it sobered him, I can tell you.
+
+"What are _you_ doing here?" he said, as though he had known me these
+six thousand years.
+
+Silly fool that I was, the color came rushing up into my face and I
+feared to speak. Believe it or not as you like, I could see Welstoke's
+thin lips saying, "Though your nose and your eyes is very refined, it's
+your manner of speech as discloses you, my poor dear," and I was silent
+as a stone, for I thought him a fine gentleman.
+
+"Do _you_ disapprove of me?" says he.
+
+I smiled, I suppose, but my lips only moved. And a look of pain came
+into his face.
+
+"Somewhere else--some other time," he rather whispered. "God knows how.
+But you will remember Monty Cranch. It's not soon you'll be forgetting
+him, girl."
+
+With that he turned and walked out of the place as straight as an arrow,
+and his words were true--as true as death. And though it was all many
+years ago, I can tell you, it seems to me now that I can hear the water
+lapping in the canal outside the lattice and see the wind nodding the
+flowers on the table that were mocking me--a nosegay one minute, and the
+next a bouquet for a tomb of something gone and buried. Nor from then to
+now have I opened these lips to tell living soul of that meeting.
+
+Life kept on as it had been going, with many things sliding in and out,
+but they have nothing to do with what is hanging over us now. Welstoke
+and I finally came to America, however, and then luck began to turn.
+There is a great joke behind the scenes of the little dramas of each of
+us, and the old lady, who had laid her hand on many a twisted wrist or
+swollen elbow, began with a joint in her thumb and in six months' time
+was a hundred shapes with the rheumatism. She was all out of scandals
+and blackmail then, and lay in bed with her own self coming out, in evil
+curses for pain and her losses on 'Change, and slow horses, and she who
+had claptrapped thousands was caught herself by a slick brown man who
+called himself a Hindoo Yogi and treated her by burning cheap incense in
+a brass bowl, and a book of prayer that he called the "Word of
+Harmonious Equilibrium."
+
+"You are all I have now," she would say to me after the cupboard was
+bare. "Whatever you do, don't get married, my child. These men are all
+alike. Some of them begin to get knock-kneed as soon as you marry them,
+and others have great fat middles. You have your choice in these
+offenses to good taste."
+
+The old fox was wasting breath, though, for I had less notions for men
+than ever before. I had only to shut my eyes to see one, and though time
+had slid by fast enough, I could only see him as he was, standing half
+frightened before me in the Trois Folies. He never seemed to change. I
+thought he'd always be the same.
+
+Besides, I was loyal to old Welstoke, if I do say it. I tried hard at
+first to keep our patients coming, but it would not go when the Madame
+herself was out of the business. I never understood how to hold the
+confidence of people, and then the only thing left to us was a
+complexion mask that the old lady had invented. It was a failure, at
+first, but after I had walked my feet off introducing it, we got a bare
+living from it, and I thought it would stand between me and starvation
+when Welstoke had gone.
+
+Finally that day came, too, with the undertaker creeping around in his
+black, sneaking way, and I found when it was all over that she had
+secretly incorporated a face-bleach company and sold all she owned to
+it, complexion mask and all, and lost the whole of what she got on that
+year's Derby. I've understood from the boarding-house keeper that the
+last words she said, was, "Now I'm really plucked!" And that was the end
+of her.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+                         THE HOUSE ON THE RIVER
+
+
+There are times like that, when one's spirit is sick, sore, and lame, as
+if it was a body, and it goes looking for a place to lie down where
+nobody will disturb it, and it can feel its dizzy self going into a long
+sleep. I'll never forget how sick my soul was then--sick of all the
+false ways and selfishness and all the old scenes, and all big cities
+and the flow of faces on the streets and the memory of our elegant
+apartments in Paris, with their pale brocades at the windows and on the
+furniture, and sick of the sordid surroundings in the cheap New York
+boarding-house where the rheumatism had finally reached Welstoke's
+heart, and the paper was peeling off the walls. I had always swallowed
+the airs and graces of society people very hard, and many was the time
+I'd wish to drop back among people like my father's family, who didn't
+mind the smell of cooking and could get a night's sleep by laying a head
+on a pillow and weren't bothered by frills. So, though it was plain
+enough that nothing was left for me but to come down in the world, I was
+not sorry, after all. I could see in the mirror that the easy life I
+had led at first, and the worry and labor of foot that had come suddenly
+on top of it, had made me fat of body and yet drawn and old of face. My
+youth had gone, along with Madame Welstoke, and I had little regret for
+it or for her.
+
+Business was dreadfully poor then, and for the life of me I could not
+get a hold on anything in the way of hotel housekeeper, or millinery, or
+doctor's office-maid. For every position that offered, which was few,
+there was a mob of women with their smirks and smiles and references in
+white envelopes that they were trying to keep clean as the days went by.
+Of course, I had no references at all, and small good would it do for me
+to tell of my past experience. Besides, as I've often thought since, the
+way I wore my hair and colored my cheeks, from the habits Welstoke had
+taught me, was overdone, as all women get to overdoing the thing sooner
+or later, and more particularly when they think their good looks is
+threatened by the bleaching and yellowing and drying-up of the wrong
+side of thirty-five. It's not a thing to help much in applying for work.
+Anyway, the short of it was that after six weeks I had no job, for all
+my walks in the heat to save carfare.
+
+You have never felt the panic that comes when it seems as if Fate was
+chewing away the strands of the rope that holds you to self-preservation;
+it is a terrible thing and soon takes out of you all fancy notions. It
+grabbed me by the neck and bent my pride and sent me off praying to
+find a place through an employment agency. Cooking, washing and
+ironing was good enough for me the minute I found my last dollar
+staring up at me from the palm of this right hand. The fall had begun
+to come on, and, believe it or not, as you like, I dreamed and dreamed
+and dreamed of walking the streets at night, through the driving snow
+of winter and down to the wharves and the river, with its cakes of ice
+and its welcome. And when the first day I had gone to sit in the
+intelligence room and a lady--she seemed like a blurred picture to me
+and her questions were far away like the rumble of a train at
+night--had hired me, I took my alligator bag that was left out of
+the wreck of old elegance, and I stood up and tried to follow her
+like a dog till she stopped me.
+
+It was only when I'd met her later and was on the train bound for a
+little town up the state, that I turned my eyes, kind of cautious, to
+see who it was had hired me. You could not call her pretty, by any
+means. She was tall and thin, and there was a prominent bone sticking
+out at the back of her neck. Her shoulders sloped, too, and looked as if
+they had been bent forward on purpose to squeeze her lungs together. Her
+skin was a bit too yellow and her teeth too large and her lips too
+shapeless. But the steel of people has nothing to do with the scabbard,
+I'm thinking. Bodies are many a time disguises, and there was only one
+place where that woman's self peeped through like a flower through the
+dead coals on an ashheap. It was her eyes.
+
+I never have seen the beat of her eyes for loveliness. No, I never have
+seen two of them--gray they were--that could toss a God's blessing to
+you so easy. They gave the lie to her cold lips and made you forget the
+looks of her, because you knew she'd been made to wear ugliness to test
+the sweetness of her soul.
+
+I saw 'em when, from all the falseness and worry, all the paint and
+powder and the mockery of big cities and the jest of money and all the
+worry and bitterness of the end of my adventures, I felt the relief of
+being nobody again and going in a home, whose ever it might be, and
+being where there was trees and hard work and fewer human faces
+streaming along and looking into yours, only to forget you forever. For
+the first time since the day I believed I'd never meet Monty Cranch
+again, my sight was all fogged with tears.
+
+Probably she saw me. And if you'd know the kind of woman she was, I'll
+tell you that the first I knew, her thin fingers was on my big hands,
+and I looked up and there were those two eyes. The train was thumping
+along through the meadows, but I heard her say, "There, there," very
+soft and she never asked me one word about my past either then or ever
+after. That was her kind of charity, and may God rest her soul!
+
+Oh, when I look back on that day, I wonder how evil thoughts ever came
+into my mind and how I could ever wish harm to the white house under the
+big elms in the centre of the town, where among the business blocks it
+stood very stubborn, and I wonder how I ever plotted wrong for her or
+him that was her husband and met us that day at the iron gate.
+
+We saw him reading a paper on the wide porch--a young man then, with a
+big frame and a habit of looking out very solemn from under his eyebrows
+and over big tortoise-shell glasses. But he had boyish, joking ways of
+speech, as you know. He came down the walk between the plats of grass
+that looked like two peaceful, green rugs spread in the midst of all the
+noise and bustle of the town, and his long hands pulled up the latch and
+he smiled at the woman as if he loved her. And she said to me in a very
+proud and dignified way, "Judge Colfax, my husband."
+
+That was the first time I ever set eyes on him, and in a quarter of a
+century, beginning as he was then, a judge of county court, and ending,
+as well you know, I never could see a change in his way of looking at
+life. Civilization moves here and there and along with it ways and
+means and customs and fashions and the looks of the buildings and the
+furniture, but there is a saying of the Judge that comes back to me now.
+"The way of vice, virtue, passions, and instincts of men is universal
+and everlasting," he'd say, and as for himself, his eyes were watching
+it all from too high a place for him to be jumping this way and that,
+like one of the sheep running with the flock.
+
+It showed on the inside of the house then, as it did the day he died in
+this city. The look of it was the same then, with most everything that
+was in it used for comfort and not for show, though in those first days
+there was no end of ornaments, that was kept for memory's sake--a piece
+of coral as big as your head brought back by Mrs. Colfax's father, who
+had been a minister or something to Brazil, and spears from the South
+Sea Islands, and two big blue biscuitware jars from China that had been
+a wedding present to the Judge's mother from an importer of tea, who had
+courted her and been rejected, and documents in frames which I can't
+remember, except a commission in the army signed by a man named James
+Madison, and a college degree, and a letter written by Jonathan Edwards
+to a man dying of consumption. They were hard to keep clean, but I liked
+those things because they reminded a body of the fact that days had gone
+by when other people was living with their ambitions and loves, and
+snoring at night, and pain in their wisdom teeth, and all forgotten now!
+
+Anyway, you'd never know they had wealth, they lived so simply, and Mrs.
+Colfax had even done much of her own housework. I was hired because a
+baby was coming, and you can believe it was a happy house in those days,
+with its peace and the sprinklers spraying water on the lawn in the last
+hot days of the autumn, and the leaves rustling outside the kitchen
+window, and the wife singing in her room upstairs, and the Judge looking
+at her as she sat across the table at breakfast, with his eyes wide
+open, because, whatever anybody else might think, he believed her the
+most beautiful looking woman in the world.
+
+I was happy, too, speaking generally. The only trouble was the training
+that Madame Welstoke had given me. After a body has learned a little of
+being shrewd like a snake, a cat, or a weasel, and looking on anybody as
+fair game for blackmail or threats or health cures, it is very hard to
+shut the cover down on them and never employ those methods any more. I
+liked the Judge and I might say I loved his wife, but there was still
+something in me that kept me watching for secrets or skeletons in the
+closet, and little did I know then how my chance would come.
+
+The baby was born in January,--a daughter--and as beautiful a little
+creature as you would want to see, with red-brown hair and a pink mouth
+hard to beat. Of course I've seen parents fond enough of children, but
+never any so fond of one that their mouths were hushed as they looked at
+her. The truth was that, as for Mrs. Colfax, she was so bound up in the
+child that she suffered.
+
+"Margaret," she said to me many a time, "a mother's heart has strange
+instincts and, I fear, true ones. There is something that tells me that
+little Julianna will never live."
+
+"Hush, the nonsense!" I answered her, laughing at her white, frightened
+face. "Trouble enough you'll have with her teething without borrowing
+more from such things as Death! Look out the window, ma'am, at the snow
+that covers everything, and be thankful that we are not having a green
+winter."
+
+"Something will happen," she said. And I believe it was her worry and
+nervousness that kept her from getting her strength back and wore her
+thinner and thinner. She would sit in her window that looked down the
+slope to the river, with Julianna in her lap, and gaze out at the
+melting snow, or, later, at the first peep of green in the meadows
+between the two factories up and down the valley, and at those times I
+would notice how tired and patient her face looked, though it would all
+spring up into smiles when she heard the voice of the Judge, who had
+come in the front door.
+
+Then finally there came a night I remember well. It was about the full
+moon in the early days of April, but a wind had come up with a lot of
+clouds blowing across the sky. Maybe it was at ten o'clock--just after I
+had gone to bed, anyway, and had got to sleep--when I heard the
+screams--terrible, terrible screams. And I thought they were the screams
+of a woman.
+
+I jumped up, threw open my window, and tried to look through the night
+toward the river. I could hear something splash once or twice in the
+water, and then all was still--still as the grave.
+
+You know how a body feels waked out of a sleep like that. Though it was
+a warm breeze that blew and though I've never been timid, I was shaking
+like a sheet of paper. It was a minute or two before I could get it out
+of my mind that some one had been cut from ear to ear. Then I remembered
+that they had told me that rowdy parties were often boating on the water
+above the first dam, as the weather grew warmer, and when I listened and
+heard no sound of any one else in the house stirring, I began to think
+that my half-sleepy ears had exaggerated the sounds. And then, just as I
+was about to close the window, a cloud rolled off the moon, and for a
+second or two there was a great bath of light on the slope, and back of
+the stable, among the old gnarled apple trees. There were a lot of queer
+looking shadows among these trees, too, but none so queer as one.
+
+This one shadow was different, for it was not still like the others, but
+went stopping and starting and scuttling like a crab over the
+grass--sometimes upright like a man and sometimes on all fours like a
+beast. At last it stood up and ran from tree to tree in a swaying,
+moving zigzag. I could see then that it was a man, but for the life of
+me I could not remember where I'd seen his like. Then another cloud slid
+over the moon and the night was as dark as velvet again.
+
+You may be sure I passed a restless night. Perhaps the Judge saw it, for
+when he came in from his regular early morning walk the next day,
+looking very grave and solemn and troubled, he stared at me a minute
+before he spoke.
+
+"Margaret," said he, "you look overworked."
+
+"Oh, no, sir," I said, half ashamed to tell of my fright.
+
+"I'm glad to hear you say so," he answered. "I was about to ask you
+whether you could add to your duties by taking full charge of Julianna."
+
+"The baby!" said I. "Has anything happened to Mrs. Colfax?"
+
+"No," he said, a bit excited, "but I'm going to send her away to-day. I
+trust it will be soon enough. The doctor has been advising it this long
+time. Mrs. Colfax is on the edge of nervous prostration, and the baby
+should be taken from her now and put in your care while she is gone."
+
+I think I must have shrunk back from him. I remembered the screams. I
+could hear them again in my ears--terrible, terrible screams--at the
+river.
+
+"While she is gone!" I whispered.
+
+"Yes," said he. "What ails you? You have heard the plan before."
+
+"But the haste, sir," I said. "What is this dreadful hurry about?"
+
+"Not so loud," said he. "You will hear the news soon enough. I may as
+well tell you. But it must be kept from her at any cost until she is
+away. A dreadful thing has happened--happened in the night,--not two
+hundred yards from this house. A woman has been murdered."
+
+"A woman!" I said. "Who?"
+
+"Her name was Mary Chalmers," he said. "She was an actress. She and her
+husband and their baby had come up from New York. She was found this
+daybreak at the dam by one of the factory watchmen. There was an
+overturned boat. The baby had been left asleep in the boarding-house
+where they were staying, and the husband had been heard to say that he
+would take her rowing on the river. He had been drinking. He was caught
+trying to catch the early morning train, and was still so befuddled that
+he could only say over and over again that he had no memory of where he
+had been. He says he is not guilty and has sent for a lawyer. The
+coroner has gone to the dam. That is the story and my wife must be
+prevented from suspecting any of it. The man will probably be held. It
+looks badly for him, and the case, if tried, will come before me. My
+wife must be kept away until it is all over; she must not suffer the
+morbid worry."
+
+"Did any one hear screams on the river last night?" I asked, biting my
+finger.
+
+"Several heard them," he said, nodding.
+
+I felt a great relief from that answer, for I had a dread of being
+called as a witness and then and there I made up my mind that, come what
+might, I would tell nothing. "What one sees to-morrow, and what one
+didn't see yesterday, makes the road easy," Madame Welstoke had been
+used to say, and I recalled her words and thought highly of their
+wisdom. And yet I have many the time, wondered whether, if I had told of
+the creature I had seen, scuttling like a crab over the grass in the
+orchard, I might not have prevented the grisly prank that Fate has
+played.
+
+That afternoon my mistress, in spite of her gentle protests, was taken
+to the train by the Judge and Doctor Turpin, who I've always remembered
+as an old fool, trying to wipe the prickly heat off his forehead with a
+red-bordered silk handkerchief. One of the neighbors, clinking with jet
+beads till she sounded like a pitcher of ice water coming down the hall,
+went on the journey to the mountain sanitarium with Mrs. Colfax, as a
+sort of companion, and when all the fuss of the departure and the slam
+of the old cab doors and the neighing of the livery-stable hearse horses
+was over, I was left alone with the baby Julianna and the Judge.
+
+The child was laying on its fat little naked back, kicking its feet at
+me, when the father came upstairs.
+
+"Please, sir," said I, "what is the news?"
+
+"The inquest says drowning or blows on the head administered by a party
+or parties unknown," he answered gravely. "John Chalmers, the husband,
+acts like a heeled snake--violent and sinuous by turns. His lawyer has
+waived all preliminary proceedings and, as luck will have it, we have a
+clear docket to go to trial with a jury."
+
+By afternoon the town was filled with reporters who had come up on the
+midday train. From the back windows you could see them walking along the
+banks of the river and talking with a man in a red shirt. And later I
+learned he was the one who had gone out in a rowboat and found the poor
+woman's silly hat, that, with its wet yellow roses and lavender veil,
+had floated around amongst a clump of rushes. With night the city papers
+came, full of accounts of the actress and how she had played in
+melodramas, until finally she had played her farewell in a tragedy of
+real life. One said her husband was going to prove an _alibi_; another
+said he had no memory whatever of where he had been or what he had done
+that evening; and still another paper said the woman had been seen to
+quarrel with him and join a mysterious stranger, who was described as
+being a hunchback of terrible ugliness. All three of those I saw said
+the mystery might never be solved, but that new developments were
+expected every minute by both the state police and the chief of the
+local department.
+
+"Margaret," said the Judge that evening at supper, as I was waiting on
+him, "you must not be talking of this murder with any one. Remember that
+you are employed in my home. Furthermore, I have old-fashioned notions,
+and so, from now on, I have stopped the 'Morning Chronicle' from coming
+to the house and I don't want any newspapers brought in until the trial
+is over."
+
+"And when will that be?" I asked.
+
+"Soon, I hope," he answered. "The district attorney, I understand, has
+conferred with the police again this afternoon, and believes he has
+enough evidence to hang Chalmers and that no more can be gathered. For
+some reason the defense is equally satisfied. Do you understand now?"
+
+"Yes, sir," I said. "There won't be much delay."
+
+"Not much delay," he repeated over after me, and his voice shook as I
+never heard it shake before that minute.
+
+"The beast!" I said.
+
+"Hush," said he. "He must be found guilty first. But if he is--"
+
+He stopped there, but I saw the light in his eyes and his long,
+tight-clenched fingers turning white under the pressure, and I knew, if
+he passed sentence on John Chalmers, what it would be.
+
+That was the last word I ever heard from him before the trial was over,
+and I had to be running over to the neighbors for all the news I got. A
+reporter came to ask me one day if I had seen a strange man loafing in
+the meadows the evening the thing happened. He was a red-haired,
+freckled young man who kept pushing his hat, first to one side of his
+head and then the other, and talking first to one side and then the
+other of a pencil held in his teeth, so I could hardly hear a word he
+said. But he told me that, following the case from the beginning, he
+had been the one who had discovered that two weeks before the murder the
+man had insured his wife's life in his own favor and that before he had
+met and married her he had had a different name,--Mortimer Cross,--and
+been a runner for a hotel in Bermuda, and lost the place because, in a
+fit of anger, he had tried to knife a porter.
+
+"The police haven't half covered this case," he said, with his green
+eyes snapping. "I've got more evidence for my paper than they can get
+for the State's case. I haven't slept four hours in forty-eight."
+
+"Young man," said I, "how much do you get a week?"
+
+He grinned.
+
+"Twenty dollars," he said.
+
+"You work like that for twenty dollars?" I asked.
+
+"For twenty dollars!" said he. "What's the twenty dollars?"
+
+"Well, then--" said I.
+
+"It's the game!" he said. "But you don't understand."
+
+"Don't I, though!" said I. And for days the old desire for adventure,
+for all the crooked ways, came back to me and made me as restless as a
+volcanic island, as Madame Welstoke used to say.
+
+It was then I used to begin to hate the baby at times. I could have
+loved one of my own, and the feeling that this one belonged to some one
+else, and that I probably never would have the touch of hands that
+belonged to me, haunted me like a gray worm crawling through my head.
+Many a time as I would be dipping little Julianna into her bath, these
+thoughts would come to my wicked mind, and, drying her, I'd dust the
+powder over the pink body till the room looked like a flour-mill. I
+wished the trial would hurry to come and go, so Mrs. Colfax, who was
+writing such pathetic, patient letters about her baby, could return, and
+I laid many a curse on the fat doctor for making so much fuss about her
+nervous condition and for sending her away.
+
+I could not go to the court and I had to pick up what I could of the
+trial, as it went on, from gossip and reading of papers in my own room
+after I had gone to bed. Sometimes I'd wheel Julianna down the street to
+the court-house, and then I'd see men with fingers raised as if they
+were all barristers, or imitating barristers, standing on the
+court-house steps and whispering and talking and laughing, and the
+sheriff, with a blue coat and mixed trousers and gray side whiskers,
+sitting on a campstool under the big elm tree, like a man at an old
+soldiers' home, and factory-girl witnesses, giggling as they went up and
+disappeared into the dark corridors, and the drone of voices coming out
+of the open windows, and perhaps the jury walking in pairs and acting
+very important, with a deputy sheriff taking them over to the Lenox Cafe
+for their lunch. The murder mystery had brought up a lot of curious
+people from the city, and I remember one--a woman with folds of skin
+under her chin and plenty of diamond rings--who wiped her eyes,
+pretending there were tears in them.
+
+"Where is the court-house?" she said to me, just as if she could not see
+it. "_I_ was the woman's most _intimate_ friend _once_."
+
+That was the way with most everybody. They did not like the thought of
+the poor dead woman or the horror of it, but only the thought of being
+important and knowing something about it that the next one did not know.
+One girl in the town--a daughter of the biggest grocer and quite a
+belle--could imitate the screams she had heard and did it over and over,
+because she was begged by her girl friends, and so she was something of
+a heroine and thought for still another reason to be a good person to
+know.
+
+The Judge was made of different stuff, I can tell you. We did not have
+many criminal trials in our family, so to speak, and I think it must
+have eaten well into his heart, for he was very silent and grave at
+meals and never laughed, except when he came up to play with the baby
+and ride the little thing, with its lolling head and big eyes, on his
+knee.
+
+It took over a week to finish the trial after they had begun it. They
+had wanted to trace John Chalmers's history, but he would tell nothing
+of it himself, and his past was a mystery, and there was a feeling among
+those who discussed the case that this would be against him. In fact,
+every one said he was surely guilty. He had misused his wife's life; he
+was a drunkard and subject to fits of violence; he had asked his wife to
+go rowing on the river at a season when it was still cold; she had
+screamed; he was a good swimmer; there were signs of blows on her head;
+he had rescued himself, but not her, and he had tried to run away from
+the town without reporting her death. To be sure, he had been able to
+show that he had been drinking, and evidence was brought to prove that
+he had lost consciousness after getting out of the water, and that when
+he had awakened he had asked a sleepy milkman where the police station
+was and had been directed to the depot by mistake. According to his own
+story, the boat had tipped over when the moon was behind a cloud and he
+had lost all trace of his wife after her first struggle in the water.
+But people laughed at this story, and as for myself, I wondered who was
+the creature I had seen in the orchard, mixed up with the queer shadows
+and running from tree to tree like a frightened ape. Little knowing what
+was to happen, I wondered whether I should ever see John Chalmers, the
+accused man, before the law had made way with him.
+
+I never doubted that the law would hesitate, till the day the Judge came
+home to dinner at six in the evening and told me that the case had been
+in the jury's hands for three hours already. How well I remember the
+long rays of the sun slanting over the slope, the songs of the wild
+birds that had sneaked into the trees along the green back yards of our
+dusty street, and how it came to me then that the world was too
+beautiful to be befouled by the hates of little men, whose appetites
+were no more important than the appetites of the caterpillars eating the
+green foliage. But I could see the hates of men reflected in the Judge's
+face.
+
+"Surely they would not let him go, sir?" said I.
+
+He only shook his head, and later he went out without once asking for
+the baby, and I knew when I heard the gate slam that things had not gone
+well at the court-house.
+
+At eight o'clock that night I was on the porch when a man came tearing
+up to the fence, almost fell off a bicycle, vaulted the rail, and came
+running over the grass.
+
+"Got a telephone?" he said.
+
+"Yes," said I, with the answer frightened out of me.
+
+"Gimme a match," said he. "I've gotter have a cigarette. Hold on, I got
+one."
+
+He lit it. In the flare I saw it was the red-haired, freckled reporter
+and his green eyes was all alive again.
+
+Before I could stop him, he had pushed his way ahead of me into the
+Judge's study and was at the instrument.
+
+"A line!" he gasped. "I want New York."
+
+He was snapping at his cigarette like a wild thing, and, along with his
+perspiration, ashes and sparks were dropping on the rug.
+
+"Excuse me," he said. "I lost my prey!"
+
+"What!" said I.
+
+"Acquittal," said he. "The Judge was too damned conscientious in his
+charge to the jury.--Come on, there, New York! Confound you, come on!
+I've got to relay a message through to my paper."
+
+"Acquittal?" I asked, trembling like a horse.
+
+"Acquittal," he roared into the instrument. "This is Roddy. Five hours
+out. Interview with Dugan, juryman, local plumber. Says strict charge of
+judge did it. Prisoner gone down to River Flats with counsel. Drinking
+with Fred Magurk in kitchen barroom. Refuses to talk. Rest of story
+already gone by telegraph."
+
+He turned around then and grinned as if it hurt him--as if he was
+trying to hide some pain. I had lit the lamp and you cannot begin to
+know how funny his white face looked under his bright red hair.
+
+"Can I get a drink of water?" he said, choking, and then over he went
+face foremost into the morris chair.
+
+I ran into the kitchen and what with the water splashing in the sink, I
+did not hear the Judge come in, and the first I knew about his being
+there was when I went back into the library. There he stood, with his
+tortoise-shell glasses in his long fingers, looking down at Mr. Roddy,
+sitting weak and blinking in his chair.
+
+"Sorry, Judge, to faint away like a queen dowager in your library," said
+the reporter, with his everlasting American good nature. "But I came in
+to use the first telephone I could find. I was a little tired. My name's
+Roddy."
+
+"Mr. Roddy," said Judge Colfax, holding out his hand, "I know of you
+very well and of your work on this case."
+
+"Too bad!" said Roddy,--"the outcome?"
+
+"I express no opinion," the Judge answered in a weary voice.
+
+"The prisoner lost no time in finding liquor again," said the other. "He
+went to a bar before he went to his baby."
+
+This reached the Judge. His eyes snapped. There was a low growling in
+his throat.
+
+"Margaret," said he to me, "bring this gentleman some brandy. You will
+rest here a while, Mr. Roddy. I suppose you will not leave until the
+eleven-thirty train."
+
+"Thank you. I'm played out," said the reporter. "I thank you."
+
+And so it was that, with many a queer thought in my head, I sat in the
+kitchen rocker, listening to the mumble of their voices and waiting up
+to see if they should want me for anything. And so it was, too, that at
+last I found myself nodding with sleep, and started to go upstairs to
+bed.
+
+Call me superstitious if you like, but I know well enough that some of
+us humans can feel the whisper of evil and terror before it reaches us.
+It spoke to me on those dark back stairs with the moonlight shining on
+the wall at the top, and I was brought up sharp and wide awake, when the
+air rang with it as if it was a bell.
+
+"You're half asleep, you old fool," I said, feeling the sweat start out
+on my forehead, and I repeated it to myself when I was in my room and
+turning down the bedclothes.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+
+                           A VISITOR AT NIGHT
+
+
+A nice breeze was blowing in from the meadows, cooling the hot night,
+and finally, when I was laughing at my nervousness, I went to the window
+and leaned on the sill. It was a very peaceful scene, I can tell you,
+with that long stretch of grass and daisies and the water, and the
+light, carried through the factory yard up the river, bobbing along as
+the watchman passed one window after another. All but the apple trees!
+They seemed as horrible as ever, and a dozen times I thought I saw men
+without heads, or with long arms like apes, creeping and skulking from
+one shadow to another. At last I felt my eyes sore with staring at them,
+and I turned away.
+
+Just then I heard the knocking at the back door. It was soft and careful
+at first and then a little louder.
+
+"Some one from up the street to ask me questions," said I, feeling my
+way down the stairs, but then I caught the sound of something that I
+thought was the mewing of a cat. If I had had any sense I would have
+called to the Judge before I slid the bolt and opened the door.
+
+The thing I saw was a little bundle of white clothing. At first it
+looked so white it seemed to give off a light and I thought it was
+hanging in the air. Then I saw two hands were holding it, and that it
+was a child.
+
+"I want to see the Judge," said a thick, evil voice. "I've got a joke
+for him--the best joke he ever had played on him."
+
+"And who are you?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, he'll see me all well enough," said the man, with a heave of his
+shoulders. "I'm John Chalmers!"
+
+I could not speak. I stepped back and he came in. He must have heard the
+voices in the study. But I can hardly say what happened. I only know
+that I found myself standing behind him and that I saw him put the baby
+into a chair and heard him cough.
+
+The two men--the Judge and Mr. Roddy--looked up, and I never saw two
+such faces.
+
+"Stare!" said the terrible creature. "Well you may! Go ahead and stare,
+for all the good it will do you. I know you both. Both of you wanted me
+hung, didn't you? You're clever men--you two. But I'm cleverer than you.
+The joke is on you."
+
+"You came in?" asked the Judge in a whisper, as if he didn't believe his
+eyes.
+
+"Yes, and I'd have come in the front door if the people, with their
+butterplate eyes, weren't watching me wherever I go. Oh, don't think I'm
+crazy with drink. No! I'm clever."
+
+The Judge and Mr. Roddy had stood up and the Judge could not seem to
+find a word to say, but Mr. Roddy clenched his freckled fists.
+
+"What yer want?" he said.
+
+"I came to tell you," said Chalmers, "that the joke is on you. I didn't
+expect the pleasure of seeing you, Roddy, my fine penny-a-liner. But
+you're in this, too. The joke is on you. I've been acquitted."
+
+"What of it?" the Judge said.
+
+"I can't be tried twice for the same crime, can I? Didn't my lawyer tell
+me? I guess I know my rights. Ho, ho, the joke is on you, Judge. I saw
+your eyes looking at me for a week. I knew you would like to see me hung
+and Roddy there,--he nearly got me. But I'm safe now--safe as you are."
+
+The reporter laughed a little--a strange laugh.
+
+"You killed her, after all?" he asked.
+
+"Yes," answered the other in a husky and cheerful voice. "I did. That's
+where the joke is on you. I did the trick! Me! And what have you two got
+to say? Who takes the bacon--me or you?"
+
+"You don't know what you say," the Judge cried.
+
+"Yes, I do," roared the man. "I tell you I did the trick and got tried
+once, and I'm free forever. There isn't anybody can touch me. I tell you
+the joke is on you, because I did it."
+
+I could see Mr. Roddy's green eyes grow narrow then. He turned to the
+Judge.
+
+"Is that so?" he asked. "He can't be arrested again?"
+
+The Judge shook his head. I can see this minute how his face looked.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Roddy, with a long sigh, "I'm beat! I've seen a lot of
+criminals in my day. Some were very clever. The joke is on me, Chalmers,
+for I'm obliged to say that you are the cleverest, slickest person I've
+ever seen, and you beat me! I've a lot of respect for you, Chalmers.
+Here's my fist--shake!"
+
+The other walked to meet him and they clasped hands in the middle of the
+room. It was only for a second; for as quick as a flash, Mr. Roddy
+seemed to stiffen every muscle in his body. He pulled the other man
+toward him with one arm and shot out his other fist. It made a dull
+sound like a blow struck on a pan of dough. And the wretched murderer
+slumped down onto the floor like a sack of bran, rolled over on his
+back, and was still.
+
+"There!" said Mr. Roddy, with his cheerful smile.
+
+The Judge had jumped forward, too, with a shout.
+
+"Just a minute, Judge," said the reporter. "Let me explain. You remember
+that I found out that two years ago our clever friend was at Bridgeport.
+That summer a girl was found in the park there--murdered. I was on the
+case. They never found out who did it. Have we or have we not just heard
+the confession of the man who killed her?"
+
+"You mean to testify that this brute confessed to that other murder?"
+asked the Judge, choking out the words. "You mean to hang this man for a
+crime he never committed?"
+
+"Why not?" asked Mr. Roddy. "It's between us and it can be done. It's
+justice, isn't it?"
+
+"My God!" said the Judge. He began to bite his knuckles as if he was
+tempted sorely enough.
+
+What made me step over to look at the unconscious man's face? I do not
+know, unless it was the design of Fate. White it was--white and terrible
+and stamped with evil and dissipation and fearful dreams. But there was
+a smile on it as if the blow had been a caress, and that smile was still
+the smile of a child who sees before it all the endless pleasures of
+self-indulgence.
+
+I felt the years slide back, I saw the mask of evil and folly torn away.
+I was sitting again in a beautiful gown in the Trois Folies in Venice,
+the wind was blowing the flowers on my table, the water in the canal
+sounded through the lattice, a man was tearing tablecloths from their
+places, dishes crashed, and then I saw the fellow's smile fly and his
+face turn sober, and I heard his voice say, "What are _you_ doing here?"
+as if he had known me for centuries. Because I knew then, in one look,
+that John Chalmers and Monty Cranch were one. I had met him for the
+second time--a wreck of a man--a murderer. But the mystery of a woman's
+heart--!
+
+"Well," I heard Mr. Roddy say, "are we going to hang him?"
+
+"No," I cried, like a wild thing. "No, Judge. No! No! No!"
+
+"And why not?" he asked, glaring at me.
+
+"It's against your oath, sir," I said, like one inspired. "And it's
+against honor to hang a creature with lies."
+
+The Judge thought a long time, struggling with himself, until his face
+was all drawn, but at last he touched the red-haired reporter on the
+elbow.
+
+"She is right," said he. "The incident is closed."
+
+Something in his low voice was so ringing that for a moment none of us
+spoke, and I could hear the drawn curtains at the window going
+flap-flap-flap in the breeze.
+
+At last the reporter looked at his watch. "Well, Judge," he said, with
+his freckled smile, "I'm sorry you can't see it my way."
+
+"You want to catch your train," the master replied quietly. "It's all
+right. I have a revolver here in the drawer."
+
+"Probably I'm the one he'll want to see, anyway," Mr. Roddy said in his
+cool, joking way. "Quite a little drama? Good-night, sir."
+
+"Good-night," said the Judge, without taking his eyes from the man on
+the floor. "Good-night, Mr. Roddy."
+
+I can remember how the door closed and how we heard the reporter's
+footsteps go down the walk. Then came the click of the gate and after a
+minute the toot of the train coming from far away and then the silence
+of the night. Then out of the silence came the sound of Monty Cranch's
+breathing, and then the curtains flapped again. But still the Judge
+stood over the other man, thinking and thinking.
+
+Finally I could not stand it any longer; I had to say something.
+Anything would do. I pointed to the baby, sound asleep as a little
+kitten in the chair.
+
+"Have you seen her?" I asked.
+
+"What!" he answered. "How did she come there? You brought her down?"
+
+"That isn't Julianna," said I. "It's his!"
+
+"His baby!" the Judge cried. "That man's baby!"
+
+I nodded without speaking, for then, just as if Monty had heard his
+name spoken, he rolled over onto his elbow and sat up. First he looked
+at the Judge and then I saw that his eyes were turning toward me. I felt
+my spine alive with a thousand needle pricks.
+
+"Will he know me?" thought I.
+
+He looked at me with the same surprised look--the same old look I
+thought, but he only rubbed his neck with one hand and crept up and sat
+in the big chair, and tried to look up into the Judge's face. He tried
+to meet the eyes of the master. They were fixed on him. He could not
+seem to meet the gaze. And there were the two men--one a wreck and a
+murderer, the other made out of the finest steel. One bowed his head
+with its mat of hair, the other looked down on him, pouring something on
+him out of his soul.
+
+"Well, I'm sober now," said Cranch, after a long time. "I know what
+you're thinking. I know it all. I know it all."
+
+"You are not human," whispered the Judge.
+
+Can you say that certain words call up magic? I do not know. But those
+words worked a miracle. In a second, like something bursting out of its
+shell, the Monty Cranch I had treasured in my heart tossed off the
+murderer, the drunkard, the worthless wretch who had been throttling him
+and holding him locked up somewhere in that worn and tired body, and
+came up to the surface like a drowning man struggling for life.
+
+"Human?" he said in a clearing voice. "Human? Am I human? My God! that
+is the curse of all of us--we're human. To be human is to be a man. To
+be human is to be born. To be human is to have the blood and bone and
+brain that you didn't make or choose. To be human is to be the son of
+another without choice. To be human is to be the yesterday of your blood
+and marked with a hundred yesterdays of others' evil."
+
+He jumped up. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot.
+
+"Am I responsible for what I am?" he roared. "Are any of us?"
+
+The Judge looked frightened, I thought.
+
+"Blood is blood," cried Monty, with the veins standing out on his
+forehead. "That's why I brought the baby here. I wanted to kill her.
+Blood is blood. There's mine in that chair--and it is me, and I am my
+father and he was his father, and there's no escape, do you hear? I
+wanted to kill her because I loved her, loved her, loved her!"
+
+He fell back in the chair and covered his face with his hand and wept
+like a child.
+
+I looked at the Judge and I could have believed he was a bronze statue.
+He never moved an eyelash. I could not see him breathe. He seemed a
+metal figure and he frightened me and the child frightened me, because
+it slept through it all so calm, so innocent--a little quiet thing.
+
+"Well, Chalmers," said the Judge at last, "what do you mean to do?
+You're going away. Are you going to leave your daughter here?"
+
+Monty's head was bowed over so his face did not show, but I saw him
+shiver just as if the Judge's words had blown across him with a draft as
+cold as ice.
+
+"I'm going to Idaho," he said. "I'm going away to-night. I've got to
+leave the baby. You know that. Put it in an institution and don't let
+the people know who its father was. Some day my blood will speak to it,
+Judge, but half my trouble was knowing what I was."
+
+"By inheritance," said the Judge.
+
+"By inheritance," said Monty.
+
+"You love this little daughter?" the Judge whispered.
+
+Monty just shivered again and bowed his head. It was hard to believe he
+was a murderer. Everything seemed like a dream, with Monty's chest
+heaving and falling like the pulse of a body's own heart.
+
+"You never want her to know of you--anything about you?" asked the
+Judge.
+
+"No," choked Monty. "Never!"
+
+"Every man has good in him," said the Judge slowly. "You had better
+go--now!"
+
+Without a word, then, Monty got up and went. He did not rush off like
+the reporter. He stopped and touched the baby's dirty little dress with
+the tips of his fingers. And then he went, and the front door closed
+slowly and creaked, and the screen door closed slowly and creaked, and
+his shoes came down slowly on the walk and creaked, and the iron
+gate-latch creaked. I went to the window and looked out one side of the
+flapping curtain, and I saw Monty Cranch move along the fence and raise
+his arms and stop and move again. In the moonlight, with its queer
+shadows, he still looked like half man and half ape, scuttling away to
+some place where everything is lost in nothing.
+
+"We can't do anything more to-night," said the Judge, touching my
+shoulder. "Take the child upstairs."
+
+"Yes, sir," said I.
+
+"Stop!" he said huskily. "Let me look at her. What is in that body? What
+is in that soul? What is it marked with? What a mystery!"
+
+"It is, indeed," I answered.
+
+"They look so much alike when they come into the world," he said,
+talking to himself. "So much alike! I thought it was Julianna."
+
+"And yet--" I said.
+
+He wiped his tortoise-shell glasses as he looked at me and nodded.
+
+"I shall not go to bed now," said he. "I shall stay down here. Give the
+child clean clothing. And then to-morrow--"
+
+I felt the warmth of the little body in the curve of my arm and whether
+for its own sake or its father's, I do not know, but my heart was big
+for it. In spite of my feeling and the water in my eyes, I shut my
+teeth.
+
+"To-morrow," I said.
+
+How little we knew.
+
+How little I knew, for after I had washed the child, laid it in the big
+vacant bed, and blown out the candle, I remember I stood there in the
+dark beside little Julianna's crib with my thoughts not on the child at
+all. It was the ghost of Monty Cranch that walked this way and that in
+front of me, sometimes looking into my eyes and saying, "What are _you_
+doing here?" and other times running up through the meadow away from his
+crime and again standing before a great shining Person and saying, "What
+I am, I was born; what I am, I must be."
+
+I went downstairs once that night and peeked in through the curtains.
+The Judge was at his desk with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes
+looking out from under his heavy eyebrows, as if he had the puzzle of
+the world in front of him and was almost afraid. I thought of how tired
+he must be and of what a day it had been for all of us.
+
+At last a board squeaked on the stairs, reminding me of the late hour
+and my aching body and burning eyes. So I went up to bed and tossed
+about until I fell asleep.
+
+I know I could not have slept very soundly. Little matters stick in the
+memory if they are connected with such affairs. And so I remember half
+waking to hear the slam of a blind and the howl of a wind that had
+sprung up. Things were rattling everywhere with every gust of it--the
+curtains, the papers on my bureau, the leaves on the trees outside, and
+I pulled the sheet over my head and thought of how my father and mother
+had gone down at sea, and fell into dreams of oceans of melted lead
+hissing and steaming and red.
+
+I think it was the shout of some man that woke me, but that is neither
+here nor there. The house was afire! Yellow, dancing light and smoke
+poured under the door like something turned out of a pail. With every
+puff of the wind the trees in the orchard were all lit up and the flames
+yelled as if they were a thousand men far away and shouting together.
+Between the gusts you could hear the gentle snap and crackle and the
+splitting of sap in wood and a body's own coughing when it tried to
+breathe in the solid mass of smoke. There were shouts of people outside,
+too, and the squeaking and scampering of rats through the walls. Out of
+my window I could see one great cloud of red sparks. They had burst out
+after a heat explosion and I heard the rattle and tinkle of a broken
+window above the roar of the fire.
+
+Of this terrible element I always had an unreasoning terror. Many a
+sleepless night I spent when I was with Madame Welstoke, and all because
+our rooms might happen to be high up in the hotel where we had put up.
+You can believe that I forgot all and everything when I opened my door
+and found that the little flames were already licking the wall on the
+front stairs and smoke was rolling in great biscuit-shaped clouds
+through the leaping pink light. I could not have told where I was,
+whether in our house or city or another. And I only knew that I could
+hear the voice of my old mistress saying, "Remember, if we do have
+trouble, to cover your face with a wet towel and keep close to the
+floor." It was senseless advice, because the fire, that must have
+started in the Judge's study, kept blowing out into the hall through the
+doorway, and then disappearing again like a waving silk flag. I opened
+my mouth and screamed until my lungs were as flat as empty sacks.
+
+I might have known that the Judge, if he were still in the library, was
+not alive, and I might have noticed, as I went through his sleeping-room
+to climb out on the roof of the front porch, that he had not been to bed
+at all. But it was all a blank to me. I did not remember that there was
+a Judge. Fire and its licking tongue was after me and I threw myself off
+the hot tin roof and landed among the hydrangea bushes below. In a
+second more I felt the cool grass of the lawn under my running feet, and
+the first time that I felt my reasoning power come to me I found myself
+wondering how I had stopped to button a skirt and throw a shawl around
+my shoulders.
+
+There were half a dozen men. Where they had come from I do not know.
+They were rushing here and there across the lawn and vaulting the fence.
+They did not seem to notice me at all. I heard one of them shout, "The
+fire alarm won't work! You can't save the house!" Everything seemed
+confused. Other people were coming down the street, running and
+shouting, sparks burst out somewhere and whirled around and around in a
+cloud, as if they were going up into the black sky on a spiral
+staircase. The walls of the grocery and the Fidelity Building and the
+Danforths' residence across the street were all lit up with the red
+light, and a dash of flames, coming out our library window, shriveled up
+a shrub that grew there as if it was made of dry tissue paper.
+
+"How did it start?" yelled a man, shaking me.
+
+I only opened my mouth and looked at him. He was the grocer. I had
+ordered things from him every morning.
+
+"Well, who was in the house?" he said.
+
+"The Judge," I said.
+
+"The Judge is in the house!" he began to roar. "The Judge is in the
+house!"
+
+It sounded exactly like the telephone when it says, "The line is busy,
+please ring off," and it seemed to make the people run together in
+little clusters and point and move across the lawn to where the sparks
+were showering down, and then back, like a dog that wants to get a
+chop-bone out of a hot grate.
+
+Suddenly every one seemed to turn toward me, and in a minute all those
+faces, pink and shiny, were around me.
+
+"She got out!" they screamed and shouted. "Where's the Judge? Any one
+else?"
+
+"The Judge and the baby!" I cried and sat down on the grass.
+
+"No!" shouted the depot master. "The Judge is all right. I just met him
+walking over the bridge after the freight had gone through. It wasn't
+twenty minutes ago. But you can't save a thing--not a stick of
+furniture. The whole thing is gone from front to back on the ground
+floor already!"
+
+"Here's the Judge now! That's him running with the straw hat in his
+hand," a woman shrieked, and ran out toward him with her hair flying
+behind. I could see his tall figure, with its long legs, come hurdling
+across the street. I could see his white face with the jaw square and
+the lips pressed tight together.
+
+"You!" he said, bending down. "Yes! Where's Julianna? Where's my baby?"
+
+My head seemed to twist around like the clouds of pink smoke and the
+whirl of hot air that tossed the hanging boughs of the trees. The
+crackle and roar of the fire seemed to be going on in my skull. But I
+managed to throw my head back and my hands out to show they were empty.
+
+"God!" he cried.
+
+The world went all black for me then, but I heard voices.
+
+"Stop, Judge! Don't go! You'd never get out."
+
+"Let go of me!"
+
+"He's going into a furnace! Somebody stop him!"
+
+"Look! Look! You'll never see _him_ again."
+
+I opened my eyes. Judge Colfax's long lean body, with its sloping
+shoulders, was in the doorway, as black as a tree against a sunset. I
+saw him duck his head down as if he meant to plough a path through the
+fire, and then a fat roll of smoke shut off all view of him.
+
+"They're both gone--him and the baby!" roared the depot master. "Lost!
+Both lost!"
+
+The woman with the flying hair heard this and ran off again, screaming.
+I listened to the piercing voice of her and the roar and the clanging of
+bells. Horses came running up behind me, with heavy thuds of hoofs, and
+voices in chorus went up with every leap of the fire. It was like a
+delirium with the fever; and the grass, under my hands where I sat, felt
+moist and cool.
+
+Then all of a sudden the shouting and noise all seemed to stop at once,
+so there was nothing but the snapping and crackle and hiss of the
+flames, and a voice of a little boy cried out:--
+
+"The Judge is climbing down the porch! He's got something in his arms!"
+
+"It's the baby!" yelled the depot master, throwing his hat on the
+ground. "He's saved the baby!"
+
+I began to cry again, and wondered why the people did not cheer. There
+was only a sort of mumble of little shouts and cries and oaths, and the
+people fell to one side and the other, as the Judge came toward me.
+
+"Come, Margaret," he said.
+
+I looked up and saw he was all blackened with smoke and soot, except
+where the sweat had run down in white streaks. His face was close to
+mine.
+
+"Come! Do you hear?" he said. "I don't believe she's hurt, but we must
+see. We'll go across to the Danforths'. There is nothing to do here.
+I've got Julianna!"
+
+Just as if the fire was answering him, there came a great ripping and
+roaring, as if something had given away and collapsed. A tower of flames
+shot up out of the roof--a sort of bud of flame that opened into a great
+flower with petals. It was horrible to see the shingles curl and fall in
+a blazing stream down onto the ground, as if they were drops of hot
+metal.
+
+It stupefied me, perhaps; I cannot remember how we went to the
+neighbor's house or who welcomed us or how we got into the room on the
+second floor, with a candle burning on the bureau. I noticed how small
+and ridiculous the flame was and laughed. Indeed, I think when I
+laughed, I woke up--really woke from my sleep for the first time.
+
+"I went for a walk," the Judge was saying. "I had a headache. I couldn't
+sleep. I moved the lamp onto the card table. The curtain must have blown
+into it. We must thank God. We were lucky, very lucky!"
+
+He was pacing up and down there like a caged animal.
+
+"I'm thankful Eleanor, my wife, wasn't at home," he went on, talking
+very fast. "She has always been so delicate--had so much sorrow--so
+much trouble. A shock would kill her--a shock like that. My God, we were
+lucky!"
+
+I got up and pushed the tangled hair back from my face.
+
+"It's all right," he went on with a thick tongue. "Julianna is all
+right--the little rascal is smoky, but all right. Blow the candle out.
+It is getting light outside. It's dawn."
+
+The child on the bed kicked its pink feet out from under its long
+dresses and gave one of those gurgles to show it was awake. The sound
+made me scream. I had just awakened from my stupidity.
+
+"The other child!" I cried.
+
+"The other!" he said. "What other?"
+
+"The one he left," I whispered. "I had forgotten her."
+
+"My God! so had I. I had only one thought," he cried out. "Only one
+thought! And now Chalmers's wish has been granted. His--has--gone."
+
+He sat down in a wicker rocking-chair and wiped his forehead with the
+back of his hand.
+
+"I never thought," he said again. "I didn't see it anywhere. I didn't
+look for it. I found Julianna in the middle of the bed."
+
+"Bed!"
+
+[Illustration: IT MUST BE JULIANNA]
+
+That was the only word I had. The light of sunrise had come. The
+shouts in the street were far away.
+
+"Why, yes," the Judge said. "I--did--I found--"
+
+He stopped, he walked over to the infant and swept it into his arms. He
+took it to the window and held it up to the light as a person looks at a
+piece of dressgoods.
+
+"Why, it must be Julianna," he whispered.
+
+Then I heard noises in the back of his throat; he could not catch his
+breath at first, and when he did, he gave a low groan that seemed to
+have no end. The baby stared up at him and laughed. It was Monty
+Cranch's child.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER IV
+
+                       A SUPPRESSION OF THE TRUTH
+
+
+It was I who took it out of his arms and I who watched him go to the bed
+and fall across it face downwards, and hide his eyes like a man who
+cannot stand to see the light of day. If Fate ever played a fiendish
+trick and punished a square and upright man, it had done it then! I did
+not dare to speak to him. I did not dare to move. I laid the happy,
+gurgling baby in my lap and sat there till I felt that every joint in my
+body had grown tight in its socket.
+
+Once they rapped on the door. The Judge did not move, so I opened it a
+crack and motioned them away, and sat down again, watching the light
+turn from pink to the glare of full day, and then a path of warm summer
+sunlight stretch out across the rug and climb down the wall till it fell
+onto a basin of water sitting on the floor, and the reflection jumped up
+to dance its jigs on the ceiling.
+
+I heard the Judge move often enough, but I did not know he was on his
+feet until I looked up at last, and there he was standing in front of
+me, with his wild eyes staring down at the child.
+
+He pointed at the little thing with his long forefinger.
+
+"Julianna," said he.
+
+"You are mad, sir," I cried.
+
+"No," said he. "My wife! It must be done to save her happiness. Yes! To
+save her life."
+
+"To save her?" I repeated after him.
+
+"Yes, a lie," he whispered bitterly. "She has not seen the baby for
+weeks and weeks."
+
+"She could never know," I cried, understanding what he meant. "That is
+true, sir. No one could ever tell. The two of them were not different
+anyway. But you--! You could never forget."
+
+"I know," said he. "Yet it is my happiness against hers, and I have made
+up my mind. No living soul can ever learn of this. I am safe there.
+Chalmers will never come back. Nor could he ever know if he did. And
+so--"
+
+"But the blood," I said, trembling with the thought. "What of that?"
+
+"God help us!" he answered, beating his knuckles on his jaws. "How can I
+say? But, come what may, I have decided! That child is now Julianna!
+Give her to me!"
+
+He took the infant in his arms again, pressing it close to him, as if it
+were a nettle which must be grasped with full courage to avoid the
+pricks of its thousand barbs.
+
+"What are you?" he whispered to the new Julianna. "What will you be?
+What is your birthright?"
+
+Well I remember his words, spoken in that half-broken voice; they asked
+questions which have not been answered yet, I tell you! And yet little
+attention I paid to them at the moment, for the mischief Welstoke had
+taught me crept around me again. I could not look at the Judge with his
+youth dropped off him, his voice and face ten years older and his eyes
+grown more tender by the grief and love and sacrifice of an hour,
+without turning away from him. Why? Because a voice from the grave was
+whispering to me as cool as wet lettuce, to prove that the good or bad
+of a soul does not end with death.
+
+"Didn't I tell you that skeletons hang in all closets?" it said. "Now,
+after this night, the Judge, to use a good old phrase, is quite in your
+power. Bide your time, my dear. We women will come into our own again."
+
+"Excuse me, sir," I said, aloud. "There was a locket on the child's
+neck. Wouldn't it be well to remove it? It is marked with a name that
+must be forgotten."
+
+He looked at me gratefully as he fumbled at the trinket with his long,
+smoke-blackened fingers, while I trembled with my desire to have it safe
+in my own hands. It was the one thing left to prove the truth. I
+believe my arms were stretched out for it, when there came a knock on
+the door.
+
+"You want some breakfast," said a voice. "You poor tired people!"
+
+The Judge, jumping up, placed the little chain and locket on the window
+sill. I saw it slide down the incline; the screen was up far enough to
+let it through. It was gone! He gave an exclamation, but the next moment
+the door had opened and the Danforth family were crowding in.
+
+"Well, Colfax," said the old lawyer, "you're a lucky man. Everybody safe
+and sound and a very ugly old colonial house burned flat to the ground,
+with plenty of insurance. Now that you have the new appointment and are
+going to leave town, it makes a very convenient sale for you."
+
+"Hush!" said his daughter. "The hot coffee is more important. You had
+better bring the baby down with you. We have sent for milk and
+nursing-bottles. There, John, that is the baby. You've never seen it.
+Wasn't I right? Isn't it pretty?"
+
+"My God!" cried the Judge.
+
+"What!" said they.
+
+"I must be tired," he answered. "It has been a strain. It was nothing."
+
+We went out onto the porch for a moment when we were below, and stood
+out of sight behind the vines. The street was still crowded with
+curious people, and there was a great black hole with the elm trees,
+scorched brown, drooping over it--a hole filled with the ashes that were
+all that was left of the home. Men were playing a hose into it and every
+time they moved the stream, here or there, a great hiss and cloud of
+vapor came up. Some one had hung the Judge's straw hat on a lilac bush
+and there it advertised itself. But the Judge drew himself up and
+stiffened his body and set his teeth, as he looked at that scene, and I
+knew then he would not break down again, but would play the game he had
+begun to the end.
+
+Indeed, I felt his fingers at my sleeve.
+
+"I shall slip away to get the locket," he whispered. "Do you understand?
+Just a moment. Tell them I will be right back."
+
+He went around the house and I into the hall.
+
+"Judge Colfax will return in a minute," I explained.
+
+"Of course!" said Miss Danforth. "We will wait for him."
+
+The minutes passed. He did not come back.
+
+"Where did you say he went?" asked the old barrister--or lawyer, as you
+call them.
+
+I shook my head and turned the baby onto my other arm. In a second more
+I heard his voice on the porch.
+
+"Margaret!" he called.
+
+I went out to him.
+
+His face showed his nervousness again. His fingers trembled as he took
+the baby from me.
+
+"Go! Look!" he whispered. "I cannot find it!"
+
+This was my chance! I went. The grass below the window had grown long
+and was matted down; people on the street were watching me and I did not
+dare to drop on my knees for fear some well-meaning and unwelcome
+assistance might come for the search. Nevertheless I pushed my toes, I
+thought, over every inch of the ground below the window. I doubled and
+redoubled the space. At last the Danforths' cook raised the screen.
+
+"What are ye doing?" said she. "Come in. The baby's food is here
+already."
+
+What could I say? How could I avoid going? There was no way. But the
+Judge had not found the locket. Nor had I.
+
+But the Judge had other worries, I'm telling you. He feared the news of
+the fire would reach his wife in some wrong way and he telegraphed her.
+She answered by saying she was leaving for home. Brave woman that she
+was! The telegram said, "It is worth the fire to feel the leap of the
+heart when I know that you all were saved for me."
+
+"Will she ever know?" he whispered, staring down at the laughing baby,
+with its little pink, curved mouth. "Will she ever know? I did this for
+her. God, tell me if I was right!"
+
+"Be easy, sir," I said to him. "Have no fear. There is no one in the
+world but you and me can tell the story of last night. After these weeks
+and weeks your wife has been away, there is nobody but me or you who can
+say this child is not--"
+
+"Julianna," he choked.
+
+"Yes, sir," said I.
+
+I was right. What it cost the Judge's soul I do not know. But that the
+lie he acted in the name of love was not discovered by the thin woman
+and wife, whose only beauty was in the light of her eyes, I know very
+well. The years that she lived--it was after we all came to this city,
+when the Judge took his new office--were happy enough years for her.
+Rare enough is the brand of devotion he gave to her; rare enough was the
+beauty and sweetness of the girl that grew up calling her "Mother."
+
+In all that time never a word did he say to me of what only he and I
+knew, and I have often thought of what faith he must have had in human
+goodness--what full, unchanging, constant, noble faith--to trust a
+servant the way he seemed to trust me by his silence. I have believed
+ever since that no man or animal can long be mean of soul under the
+terrible presence of kindness and confidence. For all the trickery that
+the inherited character of my mother and that Madame Welstoke had poured
+into my nature was driven bit by bit out of my heart by the trust the
+Judge put in me, and his looking upon me as a good and honest woman.
+Long before my love for Julianna had grown strong, I knew that I never
+could bring myself to use my knowledge of the Judge's secret to wring
+money from him, or in fact for any other purpose than to feel sorrow for
+what his fear of the future must have made him suffer.
+
+I knew well enough how the blood of the daughter preyed upon his mind.
+There is no child that, sooner or later and more than once, does not
+come to a time of badness and stubbornness and mischief, and when those
+times came to Julianna, the Judge would watch her as if he expected to
+see her turn into a snake like magic in a fairy story. More than that,
+for days he would be odd and silent, and when he thought no one was
+looking at him, he would sit with his face in his hands, thinking and
+brooding and afraid.
+
+I found out, too, that he had tried to trace the father, John Chalmers,
+back to the days when he wore his own name, and it may have been that
+then he would have strived to go back to Monty's father and grandfather,
+and so on, as far as he could go. I knew about it because one day I was
+looking through his desk drawers--prying has always been a failing with
+me!--and I found a letter from Mr. Roddy, the newspaper reporter, who I
+had almost forgotten. Mr. Roddy said that he never had been able to find
+anything of the murderer's history before the time he was employed in
+Bermuda, and I know my heart jumped with pleasure, for I could not see
+what good it would do for the Judge to know; and I felt, for some
+reason, that the name of Cranch was one that both he and I would not
+have smudged with the owner's misdeeds and folly. You may say that it
+was strange that pictures of love--the love which came and went like the
+shadow of a flying bird, flitting across a wall--should have still been
+locked up in an old woman's heart. But they were there to be called
+back, as they are now, with all their colors as clear and bright as the
+pictures of Julianna's future that the Judge used to see pass before the
+eyes of his fear.
+
+At first I used to think that the master was principally in terror
+because of the chance that some strange trick of fate would show his
+wife the truth. The older and more beautiful and the more lovable and
+affectionate the little daughter grew, and the weaker and whiter the
+poor deceived woman, the worse the calamity would have been. Perhaps I
+thought this was the Judge's fear, because of its being my own. I was
+always feeling that the blow was about to fall, and I prayed that Mrs.
+Colfax would no longer be living when it came.
+
+But at last she was gone. She died when Julianna was eleven, and had
+long braids of hair that would have been the envy of the mermaids, and
+eyes that had begun to grow deep like pools of cool water, and a figure
+that had begun to be something better than the stalkiness of a child.
+Mrs. Colfax died with a little flickering smile one day, and the Judge
+put his arms around her and then fell on his knees. She looked thin and
+worn, but very happy.
+
+"Sleep," he whispered to her.
+
+And then he opened the door and called Julianna.
+
+"You must not be afraid, dear," he said to her. "Death is here, but
+Death is not terrible. See! She has smiled. We can tell that she knew
+that we would see her again in a little while, can't we?"
+
+"Why, yes," said Julianna. "For she never thought first of herself, but
+of us."
+
+Then the Judge put out his arms and held the girl close to him, so that
+I knew a fresh love for her had come into his heart. Perhaps on account
+of it he had more fear than ever. One day he brought home a book in a
+green cover; I read the words on the back--"Some Aspects of Heredity."
+Nor was that book the last of its kind he bought or sat reading till
+late at night, with his pipe held in the crook of his long fingers and
+his forehead drawn down into a scowl. I could tell he was wondering
+about the mystery of that which goes creeping down from mother or father
+to son and daughter, and on and on, like a starving mongrel dog that
+slinks along after a person, dropping in the grass when a person speaks
+cross to it, running away when a person turns and chases it, and then,
+when it has been forgotten, a person looks around and there it is again,
+skulking close behind. "And then," as Madame Welstoke used to say,
+folding her hands, "if you call it 'Heredity,' it knows its name and
+wags its tail!"
+
+One would have said that the Judge always expected that some creature
+like that would crawl up behind the girl. I used to imagine, when
+Julianna came into the room, that he looked over her shoulder or behind
+her, as if he expected to see it there with its grinning face. And,
+moreover, I've seen him look at the soft, fine skin of her round
+forearms, or the little curls of hair at the back of her neck, or the
+lids of her eyes, when they were moist in summer, or the half moons on
+the nails of her fingers, as if he might be able to see there some sign
+of her birth or the first bruises made by this thing called "Heredity,"
+that would say, if it could talk, "Come. Don't you feel the thrill of
+my touch? You belong not to yourself, my dear, but to me."
+
+I knew. And as the girl came into womanhood, and he saw, perhaps, that I
+was watching her, too, I think he longed for sympathy and wanted the
+relief of speech. Finally he spoke. It was late one night and he had his
+hand on the stair rail, when he heard me locking the window in the hall.
+He turned quickly.
+
+"Margaret," he whispered.
+
+"Yes, sir," I answered.
+
+"Thank God, she is a woman and not a man," he said, out of a clear sky;
+"for a woman is better protected against herself."
+
+For a moment he seemed to be thinking; then he looked at the floor.
+
+"Does Julianna ever take a glass of sherry or claret when I am not at
+dinner?" he asked. "I thought it had gone quickly."
+
+"Why, no!" I replied.
+
+He nodded the way he did when he was satisfied--the way a toyshop
+animal's head nods--less and less until it stops.
+
+"I'm sorry I asked," he said. "Good-night."
+
+What he had said was enough to show me that his imagination had been
+sharpened and sharpened and sharpened. Perhaps you know how it is when
+some one does not come back until late at night, and how, when you are
+waiting, listening to the ticking of the clock, or the sounds of
+footsteps or cab horses in the street, coming nearer and nearer and then
+going farther and farther away, you can imagine all kinds of things like
+highway robbery and accidents and hospitals, and the telephone seems
+ready to jump at you with a piece of bad, bad news. So it was with him,
+except that he did not see pictures of what had happened, but pictures
+of what might come. I knew that he feared the character that might crop
+out of the good and beautiful girl, and I thought sometimes, too, that
+he still had fits of believing, though the past was buried under the
+years, that sometime the ugly ghost of the truth would come rapping on
+the window pane in the dead o' night.
+
+Perhaps I can say, in spite of the fact that we never knew of a
+certainty, that it did. We had cause to know that, barring the Judge and
+me and Monty Cranch, wherever he might have been, a new and strange and
+evil thing showed itself as the fourth possessor of our secret.
+
+Julianna, in that year, had begun going to a new school--fashionable,
+you might call it, and many is the time I have smiled, remembering how
+it came about. The woman with the old-fashioned cameo brooch, who kept
+it, did everything to invite the Judge to send his daughter there,
+except to ask him outright, and afterward I heard she had rejoiced to
+have the one she called "the best-born girl in all the city" at her
+school, which she boasted, in the presence of her servants, was not made
+like the others, with representatives of ten Eastern good families as
+social bait for a hundred daughters, of Western quick millionaires.
+
+I mention this because it was the beginning of times when Julianna was
+being asked to other girls' houses and for nice harmless larks at fine
+people's country-places, when vacations came. On one of these times when
+she was away, a voice came whispering to us out of the past!
+
+It was the Christmas season, bitter cold, and before I went to bed I
+could hear the wind snapping the icicles off the edge of the library
+balcony and sending them, like bits of broken goblets onto bricks and
+crusted snow below. I could see the flash of them, too, as they went by
+the light from the frosted windows in the kitchen basement, but nothing
+else showed outside in the old walled garden, for it was as black as a
+pocket.
+
+Not later than ten I crawled up the stairs and stood for a minute in the
+dining-room. I heard the scratch of the Judge's pen and knew he was hard
+at work, and I remember, when I looked through the curtains, how I
+thought of how old the Judge looked, with his hair already turning from
+gray to white, and of how the youth of all of us hangs for a moment on
+the edge and then slides away without any warning or place where a body
+can put a finger and say, "It went at that moment." Perhaps I would have
+stood there longer, but the Judge looked up and smiled, dry enough.
+
+"You may think I am working," he said. "But I'm mostly engaged just now,
+Margaret, exerting will power to overcome a foolish fancy."
+
+"What is that, sir?" I asked.
+
+"That somebody is watching me," he said. "I've turned around a dozen
+times and left this seat twice already. It's an uncomfortable feeling,
+but I've made up my mind not to look again."
+
+"Not to look?" I cried.
+
+"No. There's nothing there."
+
+"Where?" I said.
+
+"Below--in the garden or on the balcony," he answered; "somewhere
+outside the window."
+
+"Bless us, I'll look," I whispered, walking toward the back of the room.
+
+It might have been my fancy or my own reflection, but whatever it was, I
+thought I saw a dark and muffled thing move outside. It forced a scream
+from me, and that one little cry was enough to bring the Judge up out of
+his chair, knowing well enough without words that I had seen something.
+
+"That's enough!" he said, his long legs striding toward the French
+windows. "Stand back, Margaret. We'll look into this."
+
+He tore the glass doors open, the bitter cold wind flickered the lamp,
+and by some sensible instinct I pulled the cord of the oil burner. I
+knew that as he stood on the balcony, looking, he could see nothing with
+a light behind him. Furthermore, I did not move, because I knew that he
+was listening, too. Both of us heard the scrape of something on the icy
+garden walk, the moment the lights went out. Immediately after it the
+Judge called to me.
+
+"Look!" he said. "Isn't something moving there along the shrubs?"
+
+"Yes," I whispered. "It's near the ground. It crawls."
+
+"What do you want?" called the Judge to the moving thing. Then, although
+he had no revolver at hand, he said, "Answer, or I'll shoot."
+
+The only reply to this was the sound of breathing and one little cough
+that sounded human. The Judge reached behind him with one long arm,
+feeling around the little table by the window for some object. At last
+his fingers closed on it and I knew he had the little bronze elephant
+that now stands on the mantel, where Mrs. Estabrook turns it so it will
+not show that it has lost its tail.
+
+"We are a pair of old fools," said the Judge, as if he was not sure. "It
+probably is a cat."
+
+With these words he poised the bronze that was solid and must have
+weighed two pounds, and hurled it into the garden. There was a sound of
+striking flesh that a body can tell from all others. I heard it! And
+then, quicker than I tell it, the sharp clear air was filled with a cry
+which died away, as if it had flown up to the milky, starry sky and left
+us listening to strange, inhuman groans coming up from the garden.
+
+"My God!" cried the Judge. "I did not mean to hit it! It wasn't a cat!
+It is something else."
+
+"The kitchen!" I cried, and without stopping to close the doors against
+the nipping cold, I led the way down the back stairs.
+
+"No time for caution," he said. "Unbolt this door. See, it is writhing
+there on the snow! It is a child!"
+
+I believed at first that he was right. As we ran forward it seemed to be
+a naked, half-starved child of six or seven years, wallowing in the snow
+in some terrible agony. My heart jumped against my ribs as I saw it. I
+stopped in my tracks and let the Judge go on alone.
+
+In a second his voice rose in a tone that braced me like a glass of
+brandy.
+
+"See!" he cried. "Thank Heaven! It is only a poor, cringing dog--a
+shaggy hound. Here, you poor beast. Did I hurt you? Come, Laddie, come,
+boy!"
+
+"Laddie" he had called him, and it was the same "Laddie" that lived
+with us so long.
+
+"Margaret!" cried the Judge, as he pulled the dirty creature into the
+kitchen. "A light! The thing is half-starved. Bring some food upstairs
+to the library."
+
+The hound was licking his hand and cowering as if accustomed to abuse,
+and from that night it was nearly six months before the old fellow got
+his flesh and healthy coat of hair and his spirit back again. That
+night, having eaten, it looked about the room, found the Judge, went to
+him, and, laying his head in his lap, looked up at him out of his two
+sorrowful eyes. I knew then, by the smile of the Judge's mouth and the
+way he put on his tortoise-shell glasses, that "Laddie" would never be
+sent away. Just then, though, the master, after he had looked at the dog
+a minute, sprang up suddenly and stood staring at me with his mouth
+twitching.
+
+"What is it, sir?" I asked.
+
+"The dog!" he said.
+
+"Yes, sir," I said. "The dog--"
+
+"The gate swings shut with a spring!" he said. "Some human being must
+have opened the gate."
+
+It was true! We looked at each other, and then the Judge laughed.
+
+"Oh, well," said he carelessly, "if they want the dog they must come
+and claim him with proceedings at law. Make a bed for him in the back
+hall."
+
+On my part, however, I was not satisfied so easily and many more
+peaceful moments I would have had if I had never pried further as I did.
+After all, I only asked one question and that early the next morning. In
+the house next to ours a brick ell was built way out to the alleyway
+along half the yard. The kitchen windows looked out on the passage.
+There was a maid in that house,--a second girl, as they call them in
+this country,--and I knew she was a great person for staying up late,
+telling her own fortune with cards or reading a dream-book. She was
+hanging clothes in the early sun, with her red hair bobbing up and down
+above the sheets and napkins, when I stood on a chair and looked over
+the wall.
+
+"Busy early?" I said. "But I saw your light late last night. Did you by
+any chance see anybody come in through our gate?"
+
+"Only you," the stupid thing said. "At first I thought it was some other
+woman, because, begging your pardon, you looked thin. But it was after
+nine and I knew you'd not be having callers that late."
+
+My tongue grew so dry it was hard to move it from the roof of my mouth,
+and before I could put in a word she threw a handful of clothespins
+into the basket and looked up again.
+
+"When did you get a dog?" she asked. "I saw you had one with you."
+
+"Dog!" I cried. "Oh, yes, the dog. That's the Judge's new dog."
+
+I jumped down off the chair and looked up at the windows to be sure the
+Judge was not looking at me.
+
+"A woman!" I whispered.
+
+With a hundred thoughts I went across the garden, looking in the snow
+for a person's tracks. It had grown warmer, however. Water was dripping
+from the roof, and if there had been any story in the snow, it had
+thawed away. I walked along with my head down, thinking and wondering
+whether I would tell the Judge. Mrs. Welstoke used to say, "Silence, my
+dear, is the result of thinking. You might not suppose so, perhaps, but
+why tell anything without a reason? People find out the good or bad news
+soon enough without your help. If it's good, their appetite is the
+sharper for it, and if it's bad, they have had just so much longer in
+peace." I thought of these words and wondered, too, what use it would be
+to worry the master. If evil was to come, it would come. And then, at
+that moment, my eye lit on something that shone in a hollow of the snow.
+
+"A piece of jewelry!" I said to myself, stooping for it. My fingers
+never reached it in that attempt; instinct made them draw back as if the
+object had been of red-hot metal. But it was not of red-hot metal. It
+was of gold. It was a locket. It was the very locket and chain that had
+been taken from the neck of Monty Cranch's baby!
+
+"So!" I cried, starting back as if it had been a tarantula; "so it is
+you! Found at last!"
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER V
+
+                        AGAIN THE MOVING FIGURE
+
+
+When it was in my fingers, I looked all about in a guilty way to see if
+any one had seen me pick it up, and then, with the metal icy cold in my
+hand, my head swam. I knew the meaning of my find. The thing had not
+come out of its hiding to spring upon us of its own accord. Human hands
+had preserved it, and human feet had brought it into the garden in the
+dead of a winter night, and human fright had been the cause of leaving
+it behind.
+
+I had searched once for this trinket, with a plan to use it as a weapon
+of evil, and now it was mine. It was mine, and yet all my love for the
+Judge and Julianna, for whom I would have given my life, made me look
+upon it as if it were a snake. My first thought was its destruction. I
+wanted to throw it in the furnace. I longed to have an anvil and hammer,
+so that I could beat it into a pulp of gold. I wished a crack in the
+earth might open miles deep so I could drop it in.
+
+I went into the kitchen where the cook was busy with her pastry, and up
+to my own room. It was there I began to think sensibly. I believed that
+whoever might want to come now and say, "I know. That is a murderer's
+child," no longer would have the proof. I believed that Julianna was
+safe again. So long as I had the locket and Monty Cranch was lost in the
+depths of time and perhaps dead, no real harm, I thought, could come to
+her. Often enough I had remembered the moment when Mr. Roddy had begged
+the Judge to condemn Monty to death by an accusation of a crime he never
+committed, and how I had said, perhaps, the words that prevented the
+master from agreeing to the devilish plot. I had often wondered if I had
+not been the cause of all the Judge's troubles by my speaking then. This
+thought, for the moment, prevented me from hurrying downstairs in time
+to catch the Judge before he went out. I could hear him hunting around
+the corners for his grapevine stick, humming a tune.
+
+"What good, after all, to tell?" said I to myself. "Just as he kept a
+secret for the happiness of his wife, I will keep one for the sake of
+his peace of mind."
+
+I heard the front door close and knew that he had gone.
+
+"If I took the locket to him," I thought, "what would he believe? Only
+that I had had it in my possession all these years. After all, I am only
+a servant. He would be suspicious. He would believe I had invented the
+story of finding it in the yard. It would spoil all his trust in me and
+that would break my heart."
+
+So my thoughts went around and a week passed, in which there was not a
+night that I did not sit in my bedroom window, looking out at the cold
+garden and the black alley, expecting to see some one lurking there. A
+hundred times I took the locket out of its hiding-place and wondered
+what to do, and at last it came to me that the first question the Judge
+would ask was why I had not told him at once. That was enough to clinch
+the matter; until to-night the secret has been my own and you can blame
+me or not, as you see fit.
+
+It was painful enough for me--a lonely old maid--with nothing but
+memories of a wasted girlhood and no one to help me see the right of
+things. Many is the night I have wet my pillow with tears, being afraid
+that I had always played the wrong part and would finally be the cause
+of the ruin of those I had grown to love.
+
+Of all those bad moments, none was more bitter than that when the Judge
+told me that the day would come when Julianna must know the truth. To
+this day I remember the study as it was then. Workmen had been
+redecorating the walls, and all the furniture was moved into the centre
+of the room, strips of paper were gathered into a tangled pile on the
+floor, and in the middle of the confusion, the Judge was sitting in his
+easy-chair, with his eyes looking a thousand miles away, and his lips
+moving just enough to keep his old pipe alight. He looked up as I drew
+the curtains.
+
+"Don't light the lamp yet," he said. "You are a woman and I want to talk
+to you."
+
+"It's about Julianna," said I.
+
+"Yes," said he, "about her. She is eighteen. Her birthday is scarcely a
+week away. I suppose she will fall in love sometime?"
+
+"Of course," I answered. "Women are not cast in her mould to be old
+maids."
+
+"Isn't it funny?" he said. "I just began to think of it yesterday. I
+never realized. I thought we had at least ten years more before there
+would be any chance. They are women before one can turn around! It is
+surprising."
+
+"It's terrible," I added.
+
+"Yes," said he, "it's terrible! Because if any man won her, then I would
+have to tell--"
+
+He stopped there and shut his two fists.
+
+"Tell the truth!" I exclaimed.
+
+"Yes," said he. "I'd have to tell him. Could I let him be cheated?"
+
+"Cheated!" I cried. "No man is good enough for her, that's what I
+think!"
+
+"I said cheated!" he answered roughly, as if he was trying to harden his
+own feelings. "He would be putting dependence upon her inherited
+characteristics, wouldn't he? And then, if anything ever cropped out in
+her, if he didn't know, how could he understand her or forgive her or
+help her?"
+
+"Judge," said I, "you spoke of my being a woman. Well, sir, I am an
+ignorant woman, but I know well enough that there are some things that
+you and I had best leave alone--some things that God will take care of
+by Himself."
+
+At that his face screwed up in pain.
+
+"Honor is honor!" he said, jumping up. "Truth is truth! And heredity is
+heredity!"
+
+He seized his hat and went into the hall and down the front steps and
+off along the pavement with his long strides, like a man followed by a
+fiend.
+
+It was the last word he ever spoke on the subject until Mr. Estabrook
+came into our life. Then I saw from the first how things were going.
+When I caught the look on the girl's face as she watched the first man
+in whom she had taken that special interest, and when I saw him--begging
+your pardon--staring at her as if she were not real, I knew, with a sick
+feeling in my heart and throat, that the day would come when he would
+take her away from us.
+
+It was like a panic to me. I could not stand it and I called the Judge.
+I wanted to speak with him. I nodded and beckoned to him and tried to
+show him what was going on, for though a mother has the eyes of a hawk,
+a father is often blind. And I thought that night he was going out
+without my having a chance to say a word. I went down to the kitchen and
+then to the dark laundry, out of sight of the cook. I threw my apron
+over my head and cried like an old fool from fright. It was in the midst
+of it that I heard the gate-latch.
+
+"The woman again!" I said to myself. "The strange woman! She feels
+there's something wrong, too. She's come back!"
+
+I could hear my own heart thumping as I stared out into the dark, wiping
+my eyes to get the fog out of them. Minutes went by before I saw that it
+was the Judge. He had come back to hear what I had to say, and I think
+when I told him that he was as upset as I had been. Well I remember how
+his voice trembled as he told me how he had written the paper telling
+the whole secret, except for my knowing about it, to Julianna, in case
+he should die, and how, then and there, I made up my mind that if God
+would let me I would keep the girl from ever reading it. And to this day
+she does not know that I loved her that much. What made me fail to do
+this is something you are aware of already, just as you know all the
+story of the marriage and a time of happiness before this new and
+dreadful, dreadful thing, whatever it is, came to us.
+
+Well enough for you, Mr. Estabrook, to notice the change in your wife.
+It is well enough for you to wonder what has come to her and why she has
+driven you out of your own house. But do not forget that I held her as a
+baby in my arms and saw her grow into a woman, as free from guilt or
+blame as any that ever lived. It may all be a mystery to you, sir. I
+tell you it is all a hundred times more a mystery to me who know no more
+of it than you, though in these terrible days I have been alone with
+her, locked into a deserted house, with every other servant sent away
+and the quiet of the grave over everything.
+
+"Is it some of Monty Cranch's wild blood?" I have asked, and with that
+question no end of others.
+
+I asked them when her arm had been hurt, and was getting well in those
+days when she seemed to be in a dream, with her silent thoughts and her
+frightened face. For hours she would sit in the window at night, looking
+out into the park, as you know, and daytimes, when you were away, many
+is the time I have found her on her bed, shaking with her misery and
+tears.
+
+I asked those questions, too, when one night--a month ago--she came into
+my bedroom, walking like a ghost in her bare feet.
+
+"Margaret," she whispered, trembling, "I can't wake Mr. Estabrook. I
+haven't the courage to. I want you to come to the front windows."
+
+"Yes," said I. "What is the matter?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know!" she cried. "Come. Come. He is there again!"
+
+I had crept through the cold hall with her, and we kneeled down together
+under the ledge. Moonlight was on the street. The shadows of the trees
+moved back and forth slowly.
+
+"Look! Now! Behind that post over the way!" she said, pinching my arm.
+"Do you see him?"
+
+"See who?" I gasped. "What is it? I see nothing."
+
+"He stretched his hands out!" she cried. "He isn't real! You see
+nothing?"
+
+"Nothing," said I.
+
+"I was afraid so!" she cried, and broke away from me and shut the door
+of her own room in my face. Nor have I ever since been able to get a
+word from her concerning that night.
+
+It was about the same time I discovered that, though she almost never
+left the house, she was telephoning for messenger boys when she thought
+I was out of hearing. It set my curiosity on edge, I tell you. I began
+to watch. And then I discovered she was sending out little envelopes and
+getting little envelopes in return. All my old training with Mrs.
+Welstoke came back to me; I made up my mind to be as sly as a weasel.
+Finally my chance came.
+
+I had been out to do some shopping and walked home across the park. Just
+as I came within sight of the house, I saw a messenger boy come down our
+steps. I ran as fast as my old limbs would carry me, until I caught up
+with him.
+
+"Little boy!" I said.
+
+He looked around, half frightened and half impudent.
+
+"There's been a mistake!" I told him. "Where did the lady tell you to
+take the message."
+
+"Why, to the man with the gold teeth," said he.
+
+"There's a mistake in it," said I. "Give me the envelope."
+
+He looked at me suspiciously.
+
+"Not on yer life," he said. "You'll get me in trouble. I won't open it
+for anybody."
+
+"But there's money in it," I said.
+
+"No, there ain't," he answered, feeling of the envelope. "I guess I can
+tell!"
+
+"Hold it up to the light, then," said I, for the sun was shining very
+bright. "We'll see who is right."
+
+He did this, and the writing was as plain as if written on the outside.
+It was her own hand, too, though it was not signed.
+
+"She must have some more," it said.
+
+"Where does the man with the gold teeth live?" I asked, trying to smile
+and look careless.
+
+"I shan't say!" said the boy. "There is some funny business here. Let go
+of me!"
+
+He twisted himself away and ran off, looking over his shoulder to see if
+I was following him.
+
+I went back to the house then, and it was when I was in my room that I
+heard the telephone bell and Mrs. Estabrook's soft voice talking very
+low. I crept out and hung over the stair rail trying to listen. Any one
+could tell in a second that the poor girl was in fright.
+
+"Who was it?" she asked. "Did they learn anything from the boy? How long
+ago?"
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"Can't you see how terrible it would be if any one knew about her?" she
+said. "Do you believe she is being watched? You do! Detectives! I can't
+talk any more--good-bye!"
+
+That was what she said and for a week afterward she was walking through
+the house, up and down each room, like a creature in a cage, listening
+for every sound and nursing her head with her hands as if she were
+afraid it would burst. She would sit down in a chair and then jump up
+again, as if the place she had chosen to rest was red-hot. Every moment
+she was with her husband she seemed to be holding herself in check, as
+if he might read some terrible thing in her eyes. Then, all of a sudden,
+she would get some message from outside and she would be peaceful again
+and sigh and fold her beautiful hands.
+
+You can see well enough that I was ready for something queer. But when
+it came, it was so unaccountable that I could scarcely believe I wasn't
+living in a dream. It was late one afternoon when I came down from my
+room and found her talking through the crack of the front door to
+somebody outside in the vestibule. I could hear the whisper of voices
+and I thought the other person was a man. I can be sly when I want to,
+so I did not go forward at all, but crept back and along the upper hall
+to the window. After a minute or two I heard the door close and somebody
+going down the steps. I had raised the screen already so that I could
+lean out to see who it was.
+
+For some reason I felt I should know the person. I had a horrid feeling
+that it was somebody I had seen before. The name of Monty Cranch was
+almost ready on my lips in spite of my old idea, which had never left
+me, that I had seen him--at least in this world--for the last time.
+Therefore it was almost a surprise to me to find that the man was as far
+different from her father as butter from barley. Whoever the man might
+be, he was tall and thin and had a white, disagreeable skin and a
+nervous way of looking to right and left, holding his chin in his hands.
+I never got a good look at his face. But once he turned up his head,
+perhaps to look at the house. He had gold teeth--a whole front row of
+them! This, perhaps, was the man the messenger boy had described--the
+man to whom Mrs. Estabrook was addressing secret communications.
+Certainly it was no one I had ever seen, and certainly, too, there was
+something in that fleeting glance at the lower part of his face which
+made me have no wish to see his ugly countenance again.
+
+His visit, at any rate, set me to thinking more than ever, and that
+night as I walked about the dining-room, serving the courses in place of
+the maid who was away, I think I felt for the first time a doubt about
+my mistress. She had always seemed to me like a creature of heaven, and
+as I stood back of her chair, looking down upon those beautiful
+shoulders and white arms and head of soft and shining hair, it was hard
+to believe she was in some conspiracy of which she had kept her husband
+in ignorance with the slyness of a snake. I felt sorry for him. So at
+the moment of my first doubt of her, I found that pity--begging your
+pardon!--had at last made me ready to forget that I had never liked him
+or his cold ways, and ready to forgive the once he laid violent hands on
+me. My mistress had not chosen to tell me anything and had acted toward
+me as suspicious as if she had believed me capable of meaning evil to
+her. She had turned my questions aside and reminded me of my place. I
+suppose it was only human nature for me to lose sympathy with her and
+begin to have it with the man who sat across the table from her, all in
+the dark about the curious and perhaps terrible affairs that were
+hanging over his home and always kind and patient and, I may
+say,--begging your pardon!--innocent, too! It was during that meal that
+I made up my mind to tell him all I knew. It seemed to me the best and
+safest course; I would have taken it if he had stayed another day in the
+house.
+
+His going was a mystery to me. I only knew that Mrs. Estabrook said that
+she had asked him to go and that he had gone. The front door had hardly
+closed behind him that morning before she unlocked her room and called
+to me to come to her. I shall never lose the picture of her face as I
+saw it then. She was sitting in that big wing-chair which is covered
+with the figured cretonne and her face was as white as a newly ironed
+napkin. It was so white that it did not seem real, but more like the
+face of some vision that comes and sits for a minute and fades away
+before a little draft of air. Her hands were on the chair arms just
+like the hands of those Egyptian kings, carved out of alabaster, that
+you see in museums. She might have been one of those queens of great
+empires in the old times. She might have heard the roar of battle and
+seen the retreat of her army from the windows of the palace and had
+plunged a thin little dagger into her breast so that she would not be
+captured alive. It cut me to the heart to see how beautiful she was--and
+how terrible!
+
+"Margaret," she said to me, spacing off her words. "Margaret."
+
+"Little girl!" I cried out, forgetting the passage of all the years. And
+I fell on my knees beside her.
+
+"Sh! Sh!" she said. "I need your help. It is a desperate matter. You
+must be calm."
+
+"And what shall I do?" I asked.
+
+"This--as I tell you," she answered, her eyes fixed on mine. "Send every
+one else out of the house--only before they go, I want everything taken
+out of this room of mine--all the furniture, all the rugs, all the
+pictures. I want the blinds drawn everywhere, the doors bolted. For
+three weeks I want no person to come across the threshold. I want you to
+stay that long indoors--in this house. Mr. Estabrook will not come back
+during that time, and to all others I want you to say that he is away
+and that I am away, too,--or ill,--or anything that will seem best to
+you. I never want you to come near my locked door unless I call for
+you."
+
+"But, Mrs. Estabrook!" I cried, my lips all of a tremble.
+
+"Wait," she said. There was a look in her eyes that seemed to go into me
+like a knife. "Come to my door every morning. Bring a glass of milk.
+Knock. If I do not answer, have the door broken down! That is all; do
+you hear?"
+
+"Mercy on us!" I cried. "Tell me what this means. Are you mad?"
+
+She put her soft hand on my cheek for a second.
+
+"No," said she, with a voice growing as hard as the rattling of wire
+nails. "Do as I say. Do it for the sake of the lives of all of us!"
+
+I believed then that she was sane. There was something in her eyes, as I
+have said, that would have tamed a tiger. I got up. I did everything she
+had asked. The furnishings were all moved out of her room until it
+looked as bare as a place to rent in December. There was nothing on the
+floor but a mattress and a chair, which were left by her directions. I
+sent the servants away with instructions to come back after three weeks'
+time. At last, when all was done and I was alone, walking through the
+house like a sour-faced ghost, I climbed the stairs to her door. It was
+locked! I have not caught sight of her face since!
+
+I cannot tell any one what I have been through in these days of waiting.
+I only know it has been like a terrible dream--like those dreams that
+make the perspiration come out on the forehead with the struggle to wake
+or cry out or toss the smothering thing from off a body's lungs and
+heart. And till now, in spite of all, I have been faithful enough to my
+trust.
+
+I have turned away all the visitors that came. I have gone each morning
+to my mistress's door for orders that were spoken through the panels. I
+have walked up and down the silent rooms below, day after day, or sat in
+the library trying to read and listening to the tread of some one in
+that awful room above, with every hour dragging as if the hands of the
+clock on the mantel were slipping back almost as fast as they moved
+forward. Then the steps would stop and the clock would go on with its
+everlasting ticking. And if I listened hard, I could hear the big clock
+in the hall take up the tune like a duet. Then the one in the front room
+above would join in, then the one in the kitchen, until there was such a
+clamor of ticking that it would drive a body to distraction with a sound
+like a hundred typewriters all going at once.
+
+I have heard voices, too. Voices seemed to be whispering in the hall as
+if some one were welcoming people at a funeral, voices seemed to be
+chatting in the basement, and again there would be a murmur like a
+rabble of voices all talking together in a room far away. Often it was
+more than a fancy, I can tell you. I heard real voices in the room of my
+mistress.
+
+I began to have the idea that it was not my mistress's voice alone.
+There seemed to be another in argument with her. There seemed to be a
+strange voice speaking in an undertone--a voice I thought I never had
+heard before. I crept up along the hall and listened. Everything was
+still. But in spite of all, I began to feel that there was more than one
+person on the other side of those thick white panels. I knew it was
+folly to suppose such a thing, but I began to have the idea that
+another--a woman or a talkative child--was with her behind the locked
+door.
+
+Once this impossible idea took hold of me, I did all I could to get a
+peep within the room. I had been bringing the meals, that were not
+enough to keep a kitten alive, to the crack she would open to take them
+in. Believe me, that the very first time I tried to poke my head around
+where I could see, that practice stopped, and my mistress, in a dull and
+heavy voice, told me to leave everything on the floor and go away. It
+seemed that she had grown suspicious. It seemed that she had something
+to conceal. I brooded over the strangeness of it all until I began to
+wonder how this other person, whatever or whoever it might be, had ever
+entered the house. I even began to wonder whether creatures could be
+drawn from the air and put into the form of flesh and blood.
+
+Finally came my chance to look. Three days ago, at about eleven o'clock
+in the morning, I heard the lock of her door slide over and a moment
+later she called to me. It was long after I had done her errand and had
+gone away that I began to be haunted by the thought that there had been
+no sound of the lock turning again. I heard the voices. I thought of the
+possibility that I might now softly open the door.
+
+"A look! A look!" I heard my own tongue saying, as I tiptoed up the
+stairs and as I twisted the door knob by little turns, each one no more
+than the width of a hair.
+
+I had been right about the lock. I discovered it at last when the door
+yielded. I looked in through a narrow crack. On the far side of the
+bare, dim room was my mistress on her knees, her clasped hands resting
+on the floor in front of her. She had not heard me and she seemed to be
+writhing as if in pain. Her skin was as pale as death. The whole picture
+gave a body the feeling that she had been thrown forward by some strong
+hand. I felt sure at that moment that I had not been mistaken--that
+some other person was there. I almost believed I saw its shadow falling
+across the floor. But after I had looked from one end to the other of
+the chamber, I knew at last that no one else was there.
+
+If I had dared to speak I would have done so, but I felt that a word
+would be like dynamite, and would tear the silent house into a pile of
+smoking bricks and plaster. I felt sure it would act like an earthquake,
+toppling the house over into the street. I felt that a word would be
+like the roaring voice of some strange god that would send everything
+off in thin vapor. I felt I must shut the door, and I went away
+remembering the words of my Julianna, "If I do not answer some morning
+when you knock, have the door broken in!" and my heart jumped again with
+new fear. It was the fear of some other person who seemed to be in the
+house, unseen and hidden from my eyes. For in spite of my peep into the
+room, I felt that it was still there.
+
+And now you have heard all! I have told everything--all that I
+know--things that many a time I have sworn to myself to take through my
+lonesome life unspoken to the grave.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 BOOK V
+
+                      THE MAN WITH THE WHITE TEETH
+
+
+                                CHAPTER I
+
+                             BLADES OF GRASS
+
+
+When Margaret Murchie, sitting in the interior of the limousine, with
+the arc light playing through the thousand raindrops on the window pane
+spotting a face lined with the strength of a stolid old maid, had
+finished her narrative, there was no sound but that of the storm
+mourning down the avenue. Estabrook sat with his forehead in his hands.
+I had had enough experience in my practice with those who are struggling
+to overcome a great shock, not to speak until some word from him had
+disclosed the effect that Margaret's story had produced. His face was
+hidden, but his fingers moved on his temples as if he were grinding some
+substance there into powder. When at last he raised his head, his
+expression astounded me. It had, I thought, softened rather than
+hardened. A little patient smile almost concealed the fear that looked
+out of his eyes.
+
+"The daughter of a murderer?" he asked, touching my knee.
+
+What could I say?
+
+"She must be in some distress, Doctor?" he whispered.
+
+I nodded.
+
+It was then that the true Estabrook went tearing up through the crust of
+custom, manners, traditions, egotism, smugness, and self-love. From the
+depths of his personality, the man for whom I have since that moment had
+a deep regard, then called his soul and it came. He leaned forward and
+looked through the misty glass in the door, across the wind-swept
+street, at the dripping front of his home, at the dim light that burned
+there.
+
+"God, sir!" he said, turning on me with his teeth set like those of a
+fighting animal. "What's all this to me? I love her! She's mine! She's
+the most beautiful--the best woman in all the world!"
+
+Margaret Murchie shivered.
+
+After a moment Estabrook's hands were both clutching my sleeve.
+
+"You'll stand by now?" he said, looking up into my face. "I can't ask
+any one else. You can see that. You'll help? What shall we do?"
+
+"Depend on me," I answered him. "We must be careful. Wait! Just let me
+review these facts. The first move must be for us to send Margaret back
+into the house. Do you suppose your wife knows she is out of it?"
+
+"I don't believe so," said he. "I watched the window all the time we
+were taking Margaret into this limousine. The curtains never moved."
+
+"Good!" I cried. "Now, Miss Murchie, listen to what I say. How often
+does your mistress call you during the day?"
+
+"Every three or four hours, I think, sir."
+
+"Very well. Take this umbrella and go back. Use Mr. Estabrook's key.
+Enter as quietly as possible. Say nothing to any one. If your mistress
+should allow more than five hours to go by without calling you, go to
+her door and knock. If there is no answer, telephone my office. You
+mustn't allow a second of delay. It will mean danger."
+
+Estabrook listened to these instructions with staring eyes.
+
+"You know something!" he cried. "Tell me!"
+
+I shook my head, opened the door, and the old servant, getting out, went
+waddling off across the street, her dress flapping in the wet wind.
+
+"Come, Mr. Chauffeur!" I said to him. "You are to spend the night with
+me. To-morrow--"
+
+"To-morrow?"
+
+"Exactly," said I brusquely.
+
+"And what then?"
+
+"To-morrow I shall search for truth lying hidden among blades of grass!"
+said I. "In the mean time all the sleep I can pile into you may count
+more than you know!"
+
+I had spoken with a note of authority because each moment I feared that
+he would become stubborn. I feared that, taking offense at my theories,
+he would reject my services and plunge into some folly at the moment
+when a most delicate balance between good and evil, life and death,
+safety and danger, might be overthrown on the side of terrible calamity.
+I was thankful when he once more showed himself tractable by climbing on
+the driver's seat and turning our course homeward. It was the small
+hours of morning that found me under the lamp in my study, giving the
+distracted young man a narcotic. When his head was nodding, he struggled
+once to open his eyes.
+
+"I don't understand--anything--blades of grass--or anything," he
+asserted sleepily, as I closed his door.
+
+Exhaustion had brought its childlike petulance, but I knew that
+drowsiness would do its work, and that he was now safely stowed away for
+at least ten hours. He would not interfere with my plans before noon.
+
+For a few moments that night I sat on the edge of my own bed.
+
+"What if I am right?" I whispered to myself. "What a drama! What a peep
+into the unexplored corners of our souls!"
+
+I went to the window. An early milk cart clattered along the
+thoroughfare with a figure nodding on its seat. When the mud-spattered
+white horse had reached a circle of light shed from the lamp on the
+street corner, the figure arose and, looking up at the stars in the
+rifts of the sky, pulled off and folded a rubber coat. The storm had
+blown away.
+
+"He does a simple little act," I said to myself as I watched the figure
+seat itself again. "His thoughts may be as simple. But the consequences
+of either! Who can say? Life itself is all on one side of a blue wall!"
+
+                 *       *       *       *       *
+
+Physicians, however, make good detectives. I mention this not to point
+out my own case particularly, but merely to call your attention to the
+fact that a good surgeon or practitioner has a training in those
+qualities of mind which produce a great solver of mysteries. A good
+physician must develop the powers of observation. In any physical
+disorder, knowing the cause, he must forecast the effect, or with the
+evidences of some effect before him, he must deduce the cause. Above all
+he must keep his mind from jumping at false conclusions, even though
+these conclusions are in line with all his former experiences.
+Physicians learn these principles by their mistakes in following clues.
+A good diagnostician has in him the material for an immortal police
+inspector. I speak modestly, and yet I must say that the next morning
+proved that I was not mistaken in these theories.
+
+Before nine o'clock I had arrived at the Marburys'. The banker himself
+opened the door.
+
+"Doctor!" he cried, his face drawn out of its mask of eternal shrewdness
+and suspicion by a beaming smile, "what can I say? How can we ever show
+our gratitude?"
+
+"Not so fast!" I reproved him. "There is danger in too much optimism.
+The disease is treacherous."
+
+"But Miss Peters, the nurse--she sees it, too! There can be no doubt.
+Our little Virginia is saved! You have done it!"
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"Not I."
+
+"Not you? Who, then?"
+
+"Marbury," said I, "I am just beginning to learn that there are other
+contagions than those of the body. Can we be sure, my good sir, that
+fear is not a disease? Do we know that love is not an infection? Can the
+criminal's gloves, saturated with his personality, be safe for the hands
+of an honest man? Don't we weaken by rubbing elbows with the weak? Are
+there not contagious germs of thought?"
+
+He raised his eyebrows. Finance he knew well. Otherwise he was a stupid
+man.
+
+"I do not believe I follow you," he said nervously. "I was speaking of
+Virginia. She is so much better!"
+
+I bowed to him politely, and, instead of entering the open door,
+descended the steps.
+
+"You're not coming in?" he exclaimed.
+
+"Not yet," said I. "To tell you the truth, I am looking in that grass
+plot next door for something dropped there. I see that no one has
+disturbed the grass. It has not even been cut. Hello! What's this?"
+
+I had reached down, picked up a metal cylinder and showed it to him.
+
+"It looks like a rifle cartridge--one of those murderous steel-nosed
+bullet affairs," said he.
+
+"Something even more dangerous!" said I, thrusting it into my pocket.
+"Much more dangerous! Possibly you will believe that I am
+ungracious--rather odd as it were--not to mention its name."
+
+He shook his head. The mask of the polite student of percents had
+returned; he became formally polite.
+
+"Not at all," he answered, adjusting his black tie. "I had rather hoped
+you would stay to see my daughter."
+
+"Another crisis prevents," I said, bowing at the door of my car. But the
+banker had turned his back.
+
+"Where now, sir?" asked my chauffeur.
+
+"The old Museum of Natural History."
+
+"All cobblestones in those streets, sir," he said as we leaped forward
+again.
+
+This was true. We fairly jounced our way to the old brownstone
+structure, which sat with such pathetic dignity on the square of
+discouraged grass, frowning at the surrounding tenements. The sign
+advertising the waxworks and "Collection of Criminology" still hung at
+the door of the lower floor.
+
+"Tell me," said I to the freckled girl who sold admissions, "is the Man
+with the Rolling Eye still here?"
+
+She put down her embroidery and removed a long end of red silk thread
+which she had been carrying on the tip of her tongue.
+
+"I should certainly say not!" she answered. "He's all wore out. They
+couldn't repair him any more."
+
+"The machine or the man?"
+
+"Both," said she. "But they weren't much of an attraction. Of course
+there wasn't supposed to be any man--only the machine--the automaticon
+they called it. But it didn't make enough money the last year or two to
+pay the repairs. The old man that run it was a swell chessplayer. The
+old man got sick and the machine got broken. Both were about at the end
+of the rope. So he went away three weeks ago and the machine is stored
+in the cellar now."
+
+"Where did you say the old man lived?" I asked.
+
+"I didn't say. But I'll write it down for you. It's a scene-painting
+loft over by the river."
+
+She scribbled on a slip of paper, "J. Lecompte, 5 East India Place."
+
+"Thank you," I said.
+
+"Um-m. You can't fool me," said she. "You're in the show business!"
+
+This was a thrust of her curiosity, but I merely bowed and left her.
+
+"Go home as quickly as you can," I whispered to the chauffeur. "Give Mr.
+Estabrook, my guest, this slip of paper. Tell him to lose no time. Tell
+him to bring the revolver he will find in the top drawer of my desk!
+Don't wait for me. I'll walk."
+
+The man gazed at me stupidly a moment before he started the machine.
+
+"He believes I am crazy," I said to myself as I saw him turn the corner.
+"Whether or not he is right, the interview will be at least
+interesting."
+
+You will agree with me that these words forecasted accurately.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+                         IN THE PAINTED GARDEN
+
+
+East India Place is not a well-known thoroughfare. In fact, it is a
+court, hidden between truck stables and concealed also by the boxes and
+bales of commission merchants. Even on a sunshiny day the dank bottom of
+this court is dark and smells as if it were under rather than on the
+earth. A warehouse occupies one side, the other presents several
+doorways, which might once have been the entrances to sailors' lodgings,
+but which now are plastered with the rude signs of junk dealers. The
+numbers on these houses were all even--2-4-8-10--which left me the
+conclusion that Number 5 must be the warehouse and that the
+scene-painting loft must be on the top floor of the grimy building.
+Indeed, I could see that a skylight had been superimposed on the roof
+and my eye caught the sign at the entrance, "The Mohave Scenic Studios."
+I began the ascent of boxed wooden stairways, musty with the odors of
+ships' cargoes. At the top a sign confronted me, "No Admittance Except
+on Business. This means You"; but beneath it in red, white, and blue
+paint, was the message, "Used for Storage. New Studio at 43 Barkiston
+Avenue."
+
+I knocked. There was no answer. I tried the stump of a knob; the door
+yielded. I found myself in a large room with rolls and rolls of canvas
+in piles and huge scenic back drops pendant from the high ceiling. A
+skylight above, with rotting curtains drawn across the square panes,
+threw a strange green glare over everything. A peculiar aromatic odor,
+such as is sometimes wafted over the footlights into the audience, gave
+the deserted place a theatrical flavor which was heightened by the
+presence of gilded papier-mache statuettes and a huge representation of
+the god Buddha leaning against the bare brick wall. A spider had spun a
+web above one of this god's bare shoulders; it glinted in a chance ray
+of direct sunlight which had entered through a tear in the curtain
+overhead. Above me a staging held a kitchen chair, some fire pails, and
+several pots whose sides were smirched with the colors they contained.
+The only sign of human life was the faint warm odor of pipe smoke.
+Knowing, then, that some one beside myself was in the loft, I proceeded
+gingerly between two vast canvases which hung side by side, preparing
+myself on my soft-footed way down this aisle to see the man I sought as I
+emerged from the other end. I imagined I heard a nervous, suppressed
+cough, indicating that the other already knew of my invasion of his
+strange abode.
+
+This was not the fact. For a moment, looking from the opening, I had
+ample opportunity, without being seen, to observe all that spread itself
+before me. A painted drop hung against the wall, upon which, in delicate
+colors of Italian blue and rich green, was stretched a vast, imposing,
+and beautiful view of the Gardens of Versailles, with a wealth of
+flowers in full bloom extending along the velvet greensward into the
+depth of the landscape, where, white and regal, walls and pillars rose
+toward the clear sky of spring. A modern grotesque had invaded this
+regal scene and forbidden ground, and had placed his cot, disordered
+with newspapers and ragged red blankets, so boldly in the foreground
+that at first sight the impropriety of his presence was shocking. I
+could see that the man sat upon his cot cross-legged; his back,
+pitifully thin under a spare white shirt, was turned toward me. With one
+sinewy, aged hand he fondled the wisps of faded hair upon his head; with
+the other he moved small objects over a flat board. He was a lonely
+monarch upon a throne of squalor; he was playing a solitary game of
+chess!
+
+"The Sheik of Baalbec!" I whispered to myself.
+
+The creature stopped, looked up at the skylight and its green curtains
+and drew a miserable sigh from the depths of his lungs. It was such a
+sigh that I could not restrain a shudder.
+
+"Julianna," said I.
+
+He drew his head down between his shoulders like a frightened turtle and
+held himself stiffly as one who has been doused with a pail of ice
+water. For several moments he did not move; when at last he turned
+around, his expression was patient rather than vicious, sad rather than
+terror-stricken.
+
+"What do you want?" he said, and held his mouth open so that he, too,
+seemed like an automaton, the springs of which had failed.
+
+The pause gave me the opportunity to observe that he was not the man
+with the gold fillings. Indeed, the only part of him which seemed well
+preserved--which, as it were, he had saved from the wreck--was a row of
+white, even teeth!
+
+"What do you want?" he repeated. "I have never seen you before. I know
+no reason for your speaking a word to me."
+
+"Your daughter--" I began.
+
+"I have no daughter," he cried, his eyes blazing with sudden passion.
+"Who are you? I tell you that you are talking nonsense. I have no
+daughter!"
+
+"Fine words," I said threateningly; "fine words. But this is no time for
+them. She is in vital danger--"
+
+"Danger!" he screamed, clawing at the red blankets. "My God! Has it
+come? What form? Quick, I say! What form?"
+
+"It is because you can shed light upon it that I have come," said I. "We
+know little. She has sent her husband away--"
+
+"Damn him!" he choked.
+
+"She has locked herself in her room. She has been so for three weeks.
+The maid--"
+
+"Margaret Murchie," he whispered. "She believes that I am dead?"
+
+I nodded.
+
+"I know nothing," he said. "The girl is not of me or mine."
+
+"Come, come," said I. "It is time for disclosure."
+
+He arose, searched under the corner of the mattress a moment, and then,
+with a quick, panther-like movement, sprang upon the bed again, holding
+a revolver in his two claws.
+
+"I have no idea of what you mean," he cried. "I will not be questioned.
+If I shoot, it is self-defense. You understand that. Nor will any one be
+the wiser. She is not my daughter. I know nothing of her."
+
+"You know everything," I cried, as anger made me reckless. "It will not
+pay you to flourish that weapon. Listen!"
+
+"Some one else coming!" he whispered.
+
+"Yes," I shouted. "You have seen him before. It is young Estabrook."
+
+The wizened creature immediately hid the revolver under the folds of the
+blanket and began to play nervously with the chessmen. Both of us
+waited, listening to the approach of the footsteps which came so
+cautiously behind the pendant canvas.
+
+To see at last that I was right, that the newcomer was Estabrook, was a
+relief.
+
+"Well," said the young man, appearing suddenly around the corner. "I
+came. I thought I heard your voice, Doctor. You were talking?"
+
+I pointed.
+
+The worn, colorless face of the other man gazed up at us pathetically;
+his body had relaxed into the hollows of his disordered cot. Against the
+scene of regal gardens which was luminous as if the painted sky itself
+bathed all in the soft light of a spring evening, the man and his face
+were ridiculous and incongruous. His presence in that half-real setting
+seemed a satire upon the beauties achieved by man and God.
+
+"Who?" asked Estabrook involuntarily.
+
+"The Sheik of Baalbec," I said.
+
+The man looked up at me again.
+
+"Mortimer Cranch," said I.
+
+He fell forward on his face. It was several moments before any of us
+moved. Cranch spoke first. He had arisen, and now stood with his sad
+eyes fixed upon Estabrook, and I noticed for the first time that his
+mouth and lips showed suffering and, perhaps, strength.
+
+"It is this, above all things, I hoped would never come," said he. "You
+have resurrected me from the dead. I was buried. You have dug me up.
+Whatever good you may get from this strange meeting, make the most of
+it. If it will help to guard against the danger spoken of by this man
+you address as Doctor, I will be satisfied."
+
+"You dog!" cried Estabrook, hot with emotions of violence. "It is you
+who were responsible for the death of Judge Colfax."
+
+The other held out his knotted hands toward me.
+
+"The whole story!" he cried. "Not a part. You must know the whole
+story."
+
+"Briefly," I commanded.
+
+He nodded, and began to pace the foreground of the Gardens of
+Versailles, back and forth like a tethered beast in a park. His voice
+was dispassionate. The narrative proceeded in a monotone. But if fiends
+could conceive a tale more dark, they would whisper it among themselves.
+
+For this, told in the somewhat quaint narrative of a former generation,
+was his story.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                BOOK VI
+
+                        A PUPPET OF THE PASSIONS
+
+
+                                CHAPTER I
+
+                            THE VANISHED DREAM
+
+
+There is only one person now in this world who could have told you my
+name. I have been sure that she has long believed me to be dead. That
+person is Margaret Murchie, and it is only too plain that she has told
+you all that she knows of me. Parts of my life she does not know. My
+testimony as to these is now given against my prayers, for I have prayed
+that I never would have to uncover my heart to any living man.
+
+My first two recollections are of my birthplace and of my mother. A
+lifetime has passed, yet I remember both as plainly as if they were
+before me now. I was heir to a fine old colonial estate which, because
+of diminishing fortunes and increasing troubles extending over two
+generations, had been allowed to run down. My great-great-grandfather,
+whose portrait hung in the old parlor between two mirrors that extended
+solemnly from floor to ceiling, had been a sea-captain and shipowner,
+and, it is said, a privateer as well. Whatever strange doings he had
+seen, one thing is certain; he returned after one mysterious voyage with
+great wealth, a sword-wound through his middle, ruined health, and a
+desire for respectability, social position, and a reputation for piety.
+It had been he who had built the immense house which, in my childhood,
+was shaded by huge gnarled trees, under which crops of beautiful but
+poisonous toadstools were almost eternally sprouting.
+
+If the great house was like a tomb, my mother was like a flower in it. I
+recall the sweetness of her timid personality, the half-frightened eyes
+which looked at me sometimes from the peculiar solitude of her mind, and
+the faint perfume of her dress when, as a child, I would rest my head in
+her lap and beg her to tell me of my father's brave and good life.
+
+If I grew up somewhat headstrong and self-confident, it was in part due
+to a faith in my inheritance. The delicate and refined lips of my
+mother, upon which prayers were followed by lies and lies by prayers,
+taught me an almost indescribable belief in my own strength. The fruit
+forbidden by moral law to the ordinary man seemed to belong of right to
+me. No sensation, no indulgence, no excess seemed to threaten me. I knew
+my mother's philosophy of pleasure was different from mine, and,
+reaching an early maturity, I concealed from her the experiments I made
+in tasting daintily and rather proudly of life's pleasures. Before my
+boyhood had gone, my natural cleverness and my selection of friends had
+introduced me to many follies, each of which I regarded as a taste of
+life which in no way meant a weakness. Weakness I was sure was not the
+legacy of character which I possessed, and I failed to notice that I no
+longer sipped of the various poisons which the world may offer, but
+feverishly drank long drafts.
+
+The awakening came in extraordinary form. I had not had my eighteenth
+birthday when, upon a beautiful moonlit night in spring, a man and a
+woman, more sober and much older than I, drove me out to my gate, begged
+me to say less of the nobility of the horse which they had whipped into
+a froth of perspiration, and left me to make my way alone along the long
+path of huge flagstones to the house.
+
+A light burned in the hall. I stood there looking for a long time in the
+mirror of the old mahogany hatrack, with a growing conviction that my
+reflected image looked extraordinarily like some one I had seen before.
+I finally recognized myself as being an exact counterpart of my
+great-great-grandfather's portrait. This did not shock me, though the
+idea was a new one. I remember I laughed and brushed some white powder
+from my sleeve. The powder did not come off readily; it was with some
+thought of finding a brush that I gave my serious attention to the
+handles of one of the little drawers. My awkward movement resulted in
+pulling it completely out. Chance brought to light at that moment an
+object long hidden behind the drawer itself. The thing fell to the
+floor; I stooped dizzily to pick it up. It was an old glove!
+
+It was an old glove, musty with age and yet still filled with the
+individuality of the man who had worn it and still creased in the
+distinctive lines of his hand. As I held it, I imagined that it was
+still warm from the contact of living flesh, that it still carried faint
+whiffs of its owner's personality as if he had a moment before drawn it
+from his fingers. What maudlin folly seized me, I cannot say. I remember
+that I exclaimed to myself affectionately, as one might who, like
+Narcissus, worshiped his own image in a pool. I pressed the glove to my
+face, delighting in its imagined likeness to myself. I gave it, in my
+intoxicated fancy, the attributes of a living being. To me it seemed
+alive with vital warmth. It had long lain a corpse. My touch had
+thrilled it as its contact now thrilled me.
+
+With it, pressing it against my cheek, I turned toward the portiere of
+the library, and as chance would have it, making a misstep when my head
+was swimming, I went plunging forward into the folds of this curtain.
+Because of this I found myself sitting flat upon the hardwood floor,
+gibbering like an idiot at the dim light which showed the bookcases
+which extended around the room from floor to ceiling.
+
+At last, out of the haze of my befuddled mind, I saw my mother. She did
+not speak; she did not cry. She had come down the stairs, and now her
+face shone out of the clouds of other objects, quiet, set, as immovable
+and as white as a death mask. She came near me and, taking the glove
+from my hand, examined it in the manner of a prospective purchaser.
+
+The next morning, in the midst of a horror of brilliant sunlight, she
+told me the truth about my father. He had not been brave. He had not
+been good.
+
+"The glove was his," she said in her dead, cold voice. "Are you not
+afraid?"
+
+"Of what?" I asked.
+
+"Of yourself," she whispered.
+
+"Yes," said I. "Mortally!"
+
+I had believed in my strength. Now a few hours had taught me the terrors
+of self-fear. The ghastly story of inheritance of wild passions from
+grandfather to grandfather, from father to son, pressed on my brain like
+a leaden disk thrust into my skull. I had first learned the joy of
+experiment with my strength; I was now to learn the pains of the ghosts
+which always seemed to be mocking the assertions of my will. A line of
+them, fathers and sons, pointed fingers at me and laughed. "You are
+doomed," said they in matter-of-fact voices. I spent my days between
+determination to indulge myself, for the very purpose of testing my
+power in self-control, and the sickening relaxation of moral force that
+occurs from the mere deprivation of all hope of victory in the battle.
+The excuses of intemperance were never so clever as those I devised for
+my own satisfaction; the bald truth, that I had taught my body
+enjoyments which would never be shaken off before old age or infirmity
+had placed them out of my reach, was never better known than to me.
+
+Fortunately my mother died before the outbreak of my barbarous nature
+had broken down the pride which caused me to conceal my true self from
+the daylit world. I sold the home and cursed its dank old trees and
+toadstools and silent, gloomy chambers the day I signed the deed. I went
+to city after city, leaving each as it threatened me with ennui or with
+retribution. Money went scattering hither and thither, spent madly,
+given, stolen, borrowed, with no regret but that the piper might some
+day, when the pay was no longer forthcoming, refuse to play.
+
+Perhaps all would have been different had I not been pursued by a
+fiendish fortune at games of chance. As if Fate meant that my ruin
+should be complete, she saw to it that I was provided with funds for
+the journey. I have seen my last penny hang on the turn of a card, and
+come screaming back to me with a small fortune in its wake. Everywhere,
+misconstruing the results, men whispered of my luck. It was only once
+that the truth was told: at Monte Carlo a pair of red-painted,
+consumptive lips pouted at me with terrible coquetry over the table.
+"Pah!" said they. "The Devil takes us all on application. It is only
+very few he _chooses_! Monsieur has won again!"
+
+She was right, but there is an end to all things and the end of all my
+ruinous luck came at Venice. It came with Margaret Murchie; it came, I
+believe, at the very instant that I saw her sitting in a cafe there--saw
+her sitting alone, golden from head to foot, golden of hair, golden of
+skin, golden rays shining from her eyes, showers of gold in the motions
+of her body--a living creature of gold, shining as a great mass of it,
+warm and bright and untarnished as a coin fresh from the pressure of the
+dies. I took her with me to Tuscany--stole her from an old vixen of a
+fortune-teller. Ah, I see she did not tell you all!--Never mind. There
+was no disgrace for her--she might well have told everything! She needed
+no blush for the story. It was the only pretty thing in my life.
+
+The trees of that country grow at the edges of green meadows, tall and
+stately as the trees of Lorrain's brush. Sheep, with soft-sounding
+bells, feed along the rich rolls of the land. Birds sing in the thicket
+at daybreak. The hills are alive with springs of matchless clearness.
+Butterflies hover over hedges and dart into half-concealed gardens.
+
+For a month we played there like children. Her ignorance was charming.
+Her mind was like a fresh canvas; I could paint whatever I chose upon
+it, and loving her, I painted none but beautiful pictures, pictures of
+the divine things that were still left in the violated mortal sanctuary
+of the soul of Mortimer Cranch.
+
+What did I accomplish by spreading all the fruits of my education and my
+familiarity with refinement before her? What did I accomplish by my
+mastery of mind? I accomplished my undoing! You need not ask how. I will
+tell you. I made this healthy, glowing Irish lass believe in the beauty
+of character which I insisted she possessed. I made her believe that she
+was a noble creature and that she was capable of fine womanly
+unselfishness. It was like the influence of the hypnotist. My own
+fanciful conception of her, at first described merely to awake in her
+the pleasures of admiration, became, when repeated, convincing to
+myself. I began to feel sure that she had the rare qualities which I had
+ascribed to her. I found myself desperately in love with her--not only
+intoxicated by the beauty of her body and the sound of her laugh, but by
+real or imagined beauty of character as well. This acted upon her
+powerfully. She, too, began to believe. Her capacity for goodness
+expanded. A sadness came over her.
+
+"Why are you so thoughtful?" I said to her one midday as we sat together
+on a ledge overlooking the peaceful valley.
+
+"Don't ask," she said bitterly, looking at the ground.
+
+Curiosity then drove me mad. For two days I persecuted her with cruel
+questions. I believed that some regret for a secret in her past was
+troubling her. At last she told me. I believe she told me truly. She
+said that she knew that a girl without education and refinement could
+have no hope of being taken through life by me. She spoke simply of the
+unhappiness it would bring me if I were tied to her.
+
+"Tell me that you love me!" I cried.
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I am not your equal," she said. "You have been the one who has made me
+good, if I am good at all. Didn't you say that I would be capable of any
+sacrifice for love?"
+
+"Why, yes," I said.
+
+"Hush," she whispered and laid her hand on mine.
+
+The next day she had disappeared. No one knew when or how or where she
+had gone. She had vanished. She left no word. Her room was empty. And
+there on the tiled floor, in the sunlight, was the rosette from a
+woman's slipper. It spoke of haste, of farewell; it was enough to
+convince me that Margaret was not a creature of my imagination. But the
+little tawdry decoration, and the faint aroma of her individual
+fragrance which still clung to it, was all that was left of her and my
+selfish dreams.
+
+I traveled all the capitals in search of her or of Mrs. Welstoke, to no
+purpose. My resources dwindled. The wheel and the cards mocked my
+attempts to repair my state. Fortune had dangled salvation in front of
+me, had snatched it away, and now laughed at my attempts to put myself
+in funds. I was shut off from a search for my happiness. When I had
+played to gain money for my damnation, as if with the assistance of the
+Evil One, I had won; now that I sought regeneration, a malicious fiend
+conducted the game and ruined me.
+
+I remember of thinking how I had begun life with full assurance of my
+power over all the world and, above all, over myself. I was sitting on a
+chair on the pavement in front of a miserable little cafe at Brest,
+looking down at my worn-out shoes.
+
+"Well," said I, aloud, "some absinthe--a day of forgetfulness--and
+then--I will begin life anew."
+
+It was the same old tricky promise--the present lying to the future and
+making everything seem right.
+
+I clapped my hands. A slovenly girl served me, standing with her fat red
+hands pressed on her hips as I gazed down into the glass.
+
+"Drink," said she. She was a cockney, after all.
+
+"Must I?" I asked.
+
+She nodded solemnly. And so I drank.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+                               MARY VANCE
+
+
+Eight days later I was taken on board a sailing-vessel, and when we were
+out at sea and my nerves had steadied, I was forced by a villainous
+captain to the work of a common sailor. From that experience as a
+laborer I never recovered. My mind learned the comfort of association
+with other minds which conceived only the most elementary thoughts. The
+savage vulgarity of stevedores, strike-breakers, ships' waiters, circus
+crews, and soldiers had a charm to me of which I had never before
+dreamed. I entered the brotherhood of those at life's bottom and found
+that again I was looked upon as a man superior to my associates and
+perhaps more fortunate. Even though I exhibited a brutality equal to
+any, I was regarded as a person of undoubted cleverness. If the great or
+showy classes of mankind would no longer flatter my vanity, the vicious
+and uncivilized classes would still perform that office. Fate threw me
+among them, so that nothing should be left undone to cajole me toward
+the last point of degradation.
+
+I kept no track of those years, nor understood why Mary Vance ever
+married me, nor why she was willing to be so patient, so loyal, so
+tender, and so kind. I had come from above and was going down. She had
+come from the dregs; she was going up. We met on the way. I married her,
+not because I loved her, but because she loved me and I could not
+understand it. She was a lonely, tired little gutter-snipe, who had gone
+on the stage, had had no success whatever, and whose pale red hair was
+always stringing down around her neck and eyes; but even then I could
+not see why she picked me out for her devotion. She was like a dog in
+her faithfulness. I can see her now as she was one night, snarling and
+showing her teeth, keeping the police from taking me to a patrol box. I
+can see her cooking steak over a gas jet. She thought my name was John
+Chalmers. I learned to love her at last. I learned to love her, and
+because of it I learned to hate myself. She deserved so much and had so
+little from me beside my temper, my wildness, and abuse.
+
+When we were at our wits' end for pennies to buy food, the little girl
+came. The only thing we had not pawned was a gold locket that had never
+been off her neck because it was wished on by her mother and had always
+kept her from harm, as she said. She took it off and put it on the
+baby's neck and tears came to my eyes--the first in thirty-five years.
+
+"We will call her Mary," I said, choking with happiness.
+
+Four hours later I was on a wharf, crawling around on my hands and knees
+in the madness of alcohol, with a New York policeman and a gang of
+longshoremen roaring with laughter at my predicament. It was on that
+occasion that, as my brain cleared, I saw what I had done. I had sworn a
+thousand times never to do it. And now it had come about. I had become
+responsible for another living human thing with the blood of my veins
+coursing in its own! I had committed the crime of all crimes!
+
+To describe the horror of this thought is impossible. It never left me.
+I began to devise a means to undo this dreadful work of mine. I prayed
+for days--savagely and breaking out into curses--that the little
+laughing, mocking thing should die.
+
+"She has your eyes," said Mary, looking up at me with a smile on her
+gaunt, starved face.
+
+I rushed from the dirty lodgings like a man with a fiend in pursuit; the
+words followed me. I roared out in my pain.
+
+"I will do it!" I said over and over again. "I will kill the child. I
+will kill it."
+
+I believed I was right. I believed the best of me and not the worst of
+me had spoken. I believed I must atone for my crime by another. I
+believed I should begin to prepare the way.
+
+"Suppose she should die," I said to my wife.
+
+"Then grief would kill me, too," she said.
+
+I could not stand the look on her face.
+
+"This is the only happiness I ever had," she said, pressing the little
+body close to her.
+
+I believed then that I could never do what I had planned. I knew I could
+never take Mary's happiness away. I felt myself caught like a rat in a
+trap. The blood of my fathers was going on in a new house of flesh and
+bone! I had done the great crime! And there was no help for it!
+
+We move, however, like puppets of the show. Just see!
+
+Within a month the doctor at the clinic had said that my wife was
+incurable with consumption.
+
+"The worst trouble with it all," said he, "is that she will suffer
+without hope and for no purpose."
+
+"Death would be good luck?" said I.
+
+"The kindest thing of all," he answered, killing a fly on the window
+ledge, as if to demonstrate it.
+
+I was trembling all over with wild nerves, a wild brain-madness. I shut
+my eyes craftily as I went down the steps.
+
+"She may go first," I whispered to myself. "I will kill her in the name
+of God. And then the other and the Devil is cheated!"
+
+Was I a madman? I cannot say! I had sense enough to prepare myself by
+days of drinking, during which I deliberately and cruelly beat whatever
+tenderness remained in me into insensibility. I suffered no doubts,
+however, for I was sure that I had planned a crime which, unlike all my
+others, was founded on unselfishness. I believed I had dedicated myself
+at last to a supreme test of goodness and love.
+
+The question of what would become of me after I had done this terrible
+thing never entered my mind. My desire was to place Mary where she need
+suffer no more, where she would be free from hardships and labors, from
+lingering disease and slow death, and from my ungoverned brutalities.
+Above all, however, I wanted to accomplish the second murder--made
+possible to me by the first. A monomania possessed me. I wanted to put
+an end forever to my strain of blood before it was too late--before it
+had escaped me through the body of my little daughter.
+
+My zeal, I suppose, was like that of a religious fanatic; but it did not
+blind me to the horror of my undertaking. I cried out aloud at the
+picture of the sad, reproachful eyes of my poor wife, fixed upon me as
+they might be when the film of death passed over them. I knew that I
+must do the thing in a way which would prevent her sensing my purpose,
+even in the last flicker of time in which her understanding remained.
+
+I can't go on!... Wait!...
+
+Well, it was over. I fled. Dripping, I rushed from the river bank. I had
+planned to go back after the baby. I forgot it entirely. The meadows
+became alive with shapes and faces. I swear to you that I believed a
+terrible green glow hung over the hole in the black water behind me. I
+thought this water had opened to receive her. I had not seen it close
+again. There was a hole there! She lay in the bottom of it, screaming
+terrible screams. The grass of the slope was filled with creatures who
+had seen all. The moon rose up the sky with astounding rapidity. Its
+rays dropped like showers of arrows. Every sparkling drop of dew became
+an eye that watched me as I fled. I sought dark shadows; the moon
+snatched them away from me. I ran over the soft carpet of new
+vegetation; it seemed to echo with the sounds of a man in wooden shoes,
+fleeing over a tiled floor. I fell over in a faint. I regained
+consciousness with indescribable agonies.
+
+Then and then only did I remember the flask in my pocket. I drank. The
+stimulant, contrary to my expectation, flew into my brain like fire. I
+was crazy for more of this relief. I had believed it would sharpen my
+wits for further action; I found it made me disregard the existence of a
+world. And instead of suffering fear or regret, I was mad with joy. I
+drained the flask, hummed a tune, grew foolish in my mutterings to my
+own ears, and at last, glad of the warmth of the spring night, welcomed
+sleep as a luxury never before enjoyed by mortal man in all of history.
+
+It is unnecessary to tell you of my awakening. Though no one was about,
+the air seemed to ring with the news of a floating body. I had slept,
+but that wonderful sleep had robbed me of all possibility of defending
+myself. Believing this, I tried to escape the town. The sun was worse
+than the moon. It poked fun at me. From the moment I awoke to look into
+the face of this mocking sun, I knew that my capture could not be
+prevented. The very fact that I myself believed so thoroughly that I
+could not escape, determined the outcome. To feel the hand of the law on
+my shoulder was a blessed relief. It seemed to save me so much useless
+thought and unavailing effort. It was as welcome as death must be to a
+pain-racked incurable. This touch of the hand of the law is a blessed
+thing; it is as comforting as the touch of a mother's hand. So lovely
+did it seem that it put me into a mind when, for a little kindly
+encouragement, I would have said, "You have opened your doors to welcome
+me in. God bless you for your insight. I am the man!"
+
+I do not know why I shook my head at my accusers with stupid
+complacency. My denial of guilt seemed to me a trivial lie. I had become
+a man of wood. I went through my trial like a carven image. I seemed to
+myself to be a puppet, a jointed figure, a manikin. In a dull, insensate
+way I had learned to hate the Judge as a superior being who showed
+loathing for me on his face. The jury foreman and all the rest there in
+the court-room day after day were as little to me as a lot of
+mountebanks on a stage. Yet it was the foreman, with his red, bursting
+face and thin, yellow hair and fat hand stuck in his trousers' pocket,
+who awakened me from this strange and comfortable coma of the trial.
+"Because of reasonable doubt," he said, with his unconscious humor, "we
+find the prisoner"--here he paused and shifted his feet like a schoolboy
+who has forgotten his piece--"we find him not guilty."
+
+Not guilty! I was free! It crashed in upon my senses. Suddenly there
+came back to me the existence of my little daughter--the existence of my
+blood--the fact that I had pledged myself to another crime in the name
+of humanity--that its execution awaited me. Damn them! They had gone
+wrong. They had thrown me back on the world. They had denied me the
+comfort of the law--that thing which had touched me on the throat with
+its firm hands and had promised me oblivion. They had left me staring at
+the terrible mind-picture of a little child asleep in its crib with the
+thing that was me lurking in its heart, in its lungs, in the cells of
+its brain.
+
+"I did it," I whispered to my lawyer.
+
+"You spoke too late," he said, gathering up his papers. "You have been
+tried. And for that crime you can never be tried again! Come with me. I
+have a carriage outside. Where are you going?"
+
+"For alcohol!" I said, gritting my teeth.
+
+"That is a matter of indifference to me," he replied, sniffing with a
+miserable form of contempt. "Our relationship is over anyhow!"
+
+His eyes were upon me with the same expression as the others. They
+looked at me everywhere. Youthful eyes ran along beside the carriage; a
+hundred pairs watched me after I had alighted and the vehicle had gone.
+The darkness came on as a kind thing which threw a merciful blanket over
+me. I thanked the night. I was grateful for the world's vicious classes,
+so used to violence that they did not stare at me. I thanked the good
+old rough crowd, the fist-pounding, the hard-talking, hoarse-voiced
+loafers whose leers showed envy of my notoriety. And all the time I
+thought of my child, of the blood of my fathers which, against all my
+vows, had escaped again, and with the stimulant whirling in my head, I
+determined to go back to the other end of town, to the house where I
+knew this menace to the world lay smiling in its crib.
+
+Yet when I had carried out all but the last chapter of my plans, when
+I, like a thief, had slipped off into the night with my little daughter
+in my arms, I found that I held her tight against my aching heart. At
+last I knew fear--no longer the fear that I would not carry out my aim,
+but fear that I would.
+
+Again, out of the grass and down from the apple trees, drops of dew
+glinted through the darkness like a thousand human eyes. Then suddenly
+they all vanished, and as I walked along in the shadows I believed that
+some one trod behind. I heard soft footsteps in the grass. I thought I
+felt human breath upon my neck. Some one came behind me and yet I did
+not dare to look, for I knew if I turned I would see the pale, thin face
+of Mary, with her wistful eyes.
+
+She was there--
+
+I say, visible or not, she was there. I knew then, as if I had heard her
+command, that I must go up the slope to the Judge's house and knock upon
+the door. As I walked, she walked with me, watching me as I held the
+sleeping baby in my arms, fearing perhaps that in my drunken course I
+would fall.
+
+And then--after I had been knocked senseless by the reporter's fist and
+at last regained consciousness--then, after all the years, at that
+terrible moment, a self-confessed murderer, a half-witted, half-sodden,
+disheveled, driven, half-wild creature, what prank did Fate play? Who
+stood there, gazing at me with full recognition in her eyes and begging
+for my life? You know the story already. It was Margaret, the woman of a
+thousand dreams,--the woman I had lost.
+
+
+
+
+                              CHAPTER III
+
+                               THE GHOST
+
+
+You know, too, of that night. But this you do not know--that a mile out
+of the village I sat on a boulder in a hillside pasture and watched the
+flames of a terrible fire, without any knowledge of what house was
+burning, and that it was not until a man came along the road long after
+daybreak, with a shovel over his shoulder, that I had the energy to
+stir.
+
+He saw me as I got up; he waved his hand.
+
+"Bad fire," he shouted, not recognizing me.
+
+"Whose house?" I asked.
+
+"Judge Colfax."
+
+My heart came gurgling up into my throat.
+
+"Anybody lost in it?" I asked, trembling.
+
+"No," said he. "Everybody got out. The servant got out and the Judge
+saved his baby and there wasn't anybody else in it. Those three. That
+was all."
+
+His words stunned me at first. I said them over and over after he had
+gone, because I could not seem to believe their meaning. Those three!
+That was all! What I could not do by my will, another Will had done. The
+Great Hand had swept away my fears! Above my grief I felt the presence
+of one marvelous fact. The inheritance I had allowed to escape me had
+been ended again! Once more my body was the only body in all the world
+containing the terrible ingredients of my strain of blood. I raised my
+face toward the blue of heaven and gave vent to a long cry of
+triumphant, hysterical, passionate exultation.
+
+I became possessed of the desire to make sure, to ask again, to hear
+once more the phrase, "Those three. That was all," and then turn my back
+on the town forever. With this idea I walked swiftly into the village,
+choosing a back street until I had reached a point opposite the smoking
+ruins of the Judge's house. The crowd was still buzzing back and forth
+along the fence and gathered about the old-fashioned fire engine that
+was still spitting sparks and pumping water. I slipped into the back
+yard of the house just across the street, half afraid to show myself,
+half mad to ask some one the question I had asked the man with the
+shovel.
+
+Then, suddenly, as I stood hesitating, I heard Margaret Murchie's voice
+in the window above me--I recognized it instantly.
+
+"There is some one at the door, Judge. The secret is safe with me," she
+whispered.
+
+At the same moment something fell at my feet. It was the tiny locket my
+child had worn on its little neck from the day the mother had fastened
+it there. What secret had Margaret meant? The locket was the answer! I
+had been a plaything of some unknown, malicious fiend again. The rescued
+baby was not the Judge's baby. That was the secret! The child I heard
+crying there was mine!
+
+I felt like a creature in a haunted place, pursued by devils, mocked by
+strange voices in the air, deceived by the senses, tricked by
+unrealities, persecuted by memories, the victim of fear, falsities, and
+impotent rage. I rushed away from the spot, walked many miles, and at
+last, coming to the railroad again, I took a train and for weeks,
+without money, rode westward on freight trains. I dropped out of sight.
+I lost my name. I even lost much of my flesh. I was as thoroughly dead
+as a living man could be. The world had buried me.
+
+Almost immediately the body and its organs, which had borne up with such
+infernal endurance for the express purpose of making the ruin of my soul
+complete, gave way. Suddenly my stomach, as if possessing a malicious
+intelligence of its own, refused the stimulant with which I had helped
+to accomplish my slide to the bottom of life and with which I had
+expected to be able to dull the mental and physical pains of my final
+accounting. My mind now found itself picturing with feverish desire all
+the old pleasures. At the same moment my flesh and bones forbade me to
+enjoy them. My body had caught my mind like a rat in a trap!
+
+Day followed day, week, week, and year, year. It was a weary monotony of
+manual labor, poverty, restless travel, on foot, and hopeless attempts
+to recover my birthright--the privileges of excess--which had gone from
+me forever. Cities and their bright lights laughed at me.
+
+I suffered the tortures of insomnia, the pains of violent rheumatism,
+the dreadful imprisonment of a partial paralysis. I was in and out of
+hospitals. I spent months on my back, entertained only by my lurid
+memories. My mind became starved for new material on which to work. It
+was at that period that I first learned to obscure the awful presence of
+my own personality by flinging my thoughts into the problems of chess.
+
+I recalled often enough the fact that somewhere I had a daughter. No
+night passed that I did not go to sleep wondering where she might be. I
+realized that she was growing up somewhere. I realized, too, that a
+child of fancy was growing up in my mind. I could see her in her crib, a
+laughing baby uttering meaningless sounds, clasping a flower in her fat
+little fist. I could see her in short skirts, trying to walk upstairs,
+clinging to the banister. I could hear her first words. I saw her
+learning to read. Little by little her hair grew. It reached a length
+which made a braid necessary. At times I saw her laugh,--this child of
+the imagination,--and once, left alone at dusk, she had wept over some
+cross word that had been spoken to her. I could see her tears glisten on
+her cheeks in the fading light.
+
+"Little girl!" I cried aloud. "Come to me! It's I! Little girl!"
+
+The sound of my own voice startled me. I found myself sitting in the
+Denver railroad station with my hands clasped around my thin knees.
+
+No man's own blood ever haunted him more than mine. I had not seen the
+child, yet I loved her. She had no knowledge of my existence, yet she
+seemed to call to me. I suffered a dreadful thought--the fear that I
+should die before I saw her and feasted my eyes upon my own. I struggled
+to keep myself from going to seek her. I felt as one who, being dead,
+impotently desires to return to the world and touch the hands of the
+living. Year after year the desire grew strong to rise from my grave and
+call out that she was mine.
+
+At last I yielded to my temptation--fool that I was! I came eastward. I
+made cautious inquiry. I arrived in this city where I had heard the
+Judge had gone. The mere fact of proximity to her made me tremble as I
+alighted from the train. I had expected difficulties in finding her. But
+when I telephoned to the name I had found in the book and heard a voice
+say that the Judge had just gone out with his daughter, I felt that I
+was in a dream. A strange faintness came over me. The glass door of the
+booth reflected my image--the face of a frightened old man. It was
+remarkable that I did not fall forward sprawling, unconscious.
+
+Before seeking a lodging I sat for hours in a park. Young girls passed,
+fresh, beautiful, laughing, going home from school.
+
+"Can that be she?" I asked a dozen times, looking after one of those
+chosen from among the others. "What can she be like? What would she say
+to me?"
+
+Suddenly I realized again that I did not exist, that she could not know
+that I had ever existed, that whatever pain it might cost me, she must
+never know. If I saw her, it must be as a ghost peeping through a
+crevice in the wall. These were my thoughts as I sat on the park bench
+hour after hour until a little outcast pup--a thin, bony creature,
+kicked and beaten, came slinking out of the gathering dusk and licked my
+hand. It was the first love I had felt in years. My whole being screamed
+for it. I caught up the pariah and warmed its shivering body in my
+arms. This was the dog that, two years later, I lost along with the
+locket in the Judge's old garden where I had gone indiscreetly, praying
+that I might get a peep in the window and see my own girl--so wonderful,
+so beautiful, so good--reading by the lamp.
+
+You need not think I had not seen her before. If I spent my working
+hours manipulating the automaton at the old museum, all my leisure I
+spent in seeking a glimpse of my own daughter. The very sight of her was
+nourishment to my starving heart. Many is the time I have hobbled along
+far behind her as she walked on the city pavements. Months on end I
+strolled by the house at night to throw an unseen caress up at a lighted
+window. I have seen a doctor's carriage at that door with my heart in my
+mouth. I have seen admiration, given by a glance from a girl friend,
+with a father's pride so great and real that it took strength of mind to
+restrain myself from stopping the nearest passer-by and saying, "Look!
+She is mine!"
+
+Again the malicious fortune into which I was born was making game of me;
+it had made my daughter more than a mere girl, whom I was forbidden to
+claim. It had made her the loveliest creature in the world! I cried out
+against it all. I knew that if I would, I could claim her. She was mine.
+I had the right of a father. She was still a child. I loved her. I
+wanted to have the world know that whatever else I had done and whatever
+doubts I had once felt about the blood that was in my veins and hers,
+now I was sure that I could claim a great achievement and hold aloft the
+gift to mankind of this blooming flower.
+
+I remembered then, however, what I had been. I saw in the bit of mirror
+in my squalid lodgings a countenance stained with the indelible ink of
+vice and moulded beyond repair by excesses and the sufferings of shame.
+Could I present this horror to my daughter? Could I destroy her by
+claiming her? Could I blight her life by thrusting my love for her
+beyond the secret recesses of my own heart?
+
+"No!" I whispered. And I prayed for strength.
+
+Above all, I knew that except for regaining, by reading books, the
+refinement of my youth, I was not changed. I knew I was not, and never
+should be free from the old vicious fiends within myself. I could not,
+had I come to her with health, prosperity, and a good name, have offered
+her safety from my brutal nature. I had even abused the dog which had
+been my only companion and the one living thing that had love for me in
+its heart. I can see its eyes upon me now, with their reproach, and, I
+imagine, with their distrust. I had cowed its spirit with my passions of
+rage, my kicks and my curses, for each of which I had felt a torment of
+regret and with each of which came a hundred vain vows to myself never
+to let my nature get the best of me again. I had grown old, but I could
+not trust myself more than before. I even feared that some day I might
+reveal voluntarily my existence to my daughter, so that a final and
+terrible, unspeakable culminating evil deed should mark the end of my
+career. I feared this even more than another narrow escape from
+accidental disclosure, such as I had had in my first attempt to enter
+the old garden on that winter night I remember so well.
+
+At these times I have kept away for weeks and weeks, mad for want of the
+sight of her. I had been forbidden liquor by wrecked organs, but now the
+sound of her voice at a distance, the sight of her perfect skin was like
+a draft of wine to me. Crazed with the lack of it, I always at last gave
+up my struggle, and with my heart filled with the tormented affections
+of a father, I went back to my watching and waiting, to my interest in
+her school, her clothes, her young friends, her health, her afternoon
+walks. I watched Margaret Murchie, too, with strange memories that
+caught me by the throat. And ever and ever I watched the Judge. Unseen,
+unknown, careful never to show myself often in the neighborhood for fear
+of attracting attention, as sly as a fox, suffering like a thing in an
+inferno, and no more than a lonesome ghost, I tried to determine if the
+Judge were acting my part as he should--he who had taken what was mine
+by the gift of God.
+
+Chance, as you now know, threw him into a place where he was no longer a
+stranger to me. He became a visitor to the "Man with the Rolling Eye,"
+though I believe he used to call my automaton "The Sheik of Baalbec." It
+was my delight to beat him in a battle of skill and at the same time,
+from my peephole, scan his face to read his character.
+
+At last one day he brought this young man, Estabrook.
+
+What awakened all my sense of danger then, I cannot explain. I only know
+that as this young man walked toward the machine, I realized a truth
+that had never so presented itself before. My daughter was no longer a
+girl! She was now a woman! Some man would come for her. And I believe I
+would have been filled with hatred and fear, no matter what man he had
+been.
+
+That night I tossed upon my bed, feverish with new thoughts. I realized
+that soon there would be a turn in the road of my own child's destiny. I
+realized with agony which I cannot describe that I could use no guiding
+hand. I hungered for the responsibility of a father. I cried out aloud
+that now, in this choosing of men, I should have a word. I writhed as I
+had often writhed, because, loving her too much, I was forbidden to
+perform the offices of my affection. The tears that had come before now
+came again, and I wept for hours, as I had wept on other occasions.
+
+I began a new and indiscreet observation. I found that this young man
+was a real menace. I followed him as he walked with her, liking him no
+better when I saw a look in my daughter's eyes that never had been there
+before. I would have interfered with his lovemaking, had I been able.
+
+"God," I whispered, "I am only a ghost!"
+
+Then chance gave me, I thought, an opportunity to strike at his courage.
+He is here. He can tell you of the message the automaton scrawled for
+him on a bit of paper. But he cannot tell the anxious hours, the frantic
+hours, a tormented outcast spent before that message was written,
+lurking in front of the Judge's house, watching with eyes red with
+sleeplessness for every little sign of what was going on. Nor can he
+tell you of the terror that came into a lonely creature's soul the night
+the Judge came down his front steps and met a shadow of the past, face
+to face. It is only I who may describe the horror of that meeting. The
+recognition of my identity by a dog who whined and cowered, and then by
+a man, whose breath gurgled in his throat and whose skin turned white,
+are things that no man knows but me.
+
+I can see the Judge's face now. It looked upon me with the same accusing
+expression that I knew so well, and I slunk away believing that the
+worst had at last come. He had seen behind the mask of my years, my
+physical decline and my suffering. In one glance, before he turned
+dizzily back toward the house, he had taken my secret away from me. He
+knew me!
+
+The madness of desperation came over me then. It was that which caused
+me to write the message through the hand of my automaton; it was that
+which led me to conceive the folly that, being known by the Judge to be
+living, I might, in the name of my love for my daughter, tell him out of
+my own mouth that I would never molest them.
+
+I had stood all that man could bear. For the second time in my
+desperation, I entered the garden. I climbed the balcony. The Judge was
+there. Estabrook was there. They both saw me. I fled with their staring
+eyes pursuing me.
+
+What more can I tell?
+
+You have heard.
+
+I am a miserable man.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                BOOK VII
+
+                            THE PANELED DOOR
+
+
+                                CHAPTER I
+
+                           THE SCRATCHING SOUND
+
+
+Estabrook listened to the story of Mortimer Cranch, sometimes staring
+into the wizened face of the speaker, sometimes gazing into the depths
+of the painted Gardens of Versailles. When at last, in a hollow voice
+which reverberated through the scene loft, Cranch had ended, the younger
+man jumped forward with his eyes blazing, his hands clenched, his
+nostrils distended.
+
+"What is wrong with my wife now?" he roared. "You know. Tell me or I'll
+tear you to pieces!"
+
+There was a moment in which the place was as still as a tomb. I myself
+drew no breath, but watched the half-bald head of the criminal shake
+sadly.
+
+Then suddenly he looked up. With one claw-like finger, he pointed at
+Estabrook. Hate and distrust were in his eyes.
+
+"You know!" he piped in a thin but terrible voice. There was no doubting
+the sincerity of his accusation.
+
+"I know?" cried Estabrook, falling back. "I know?"
+
+"It began when you left the house!" cried Cranch. "I've always watched
+on and off since you married her. I'm her father. I've loved her as no
+one knows. It was my right to watch. I've been nearly mad with worry.
+What have you done to her? You have dug me out of the grave, I tell you.
+Now we're face to face. What have you done with my girl?"
+
+The lonely, ruined man had thrown his arms forward. He wore dignity. For
+a passing second he became a figure to inspire awe; for a moment he
+seemed the incarnation of a great self-sacrifice. And in that pause he
+saw that Estabrook's expression had suddenly filled with sympathy, as if
+in a flash a warmer circulation of blood stirred in his veins; as if,
+suddenly, his sight had been cleared so that he could picture all the
+suffering which Cranch had been forced to keep locked up within himself,
+through dragging years. He reached for the extended, bare, and bony
+wrist of the older man and grasped its cords in his strong fingers.
+
+"Come," said he softly, "there is no time for us who have loved her so
+much, each in his own way, to misunderstand."
+
+Cranch did not answer. He did not move a muscle. But his eyes filled
+with the thin tears of aged persons.
+
+"And now, Doctor," said Estabrook, wheeling toward me, "we must find
+out if Margaret has sent us word."
+
+He plucked my sleeve; he started toward the stairs. He turned his back
+on the Gardens of Versailles and the vagrant who kneeled beside the cot
+in the foreground, with his face buried in the red blankets.
+
+It was the hoarse call of this ghost of a man that stopped us.
+
+"Estabrook!" he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"We may never meet again."
+
+The younger man went back and without speaking, clasped the other's
+hand.
+
+"You will tell one person--just one--about me?" asked Cranch.
+
+"Julianna!" Estabrook exclaimed with horror.
+
+The other shook his head patiently from side to side.
+
+"I meant Margaret Murchie," he whispered.
+
+Then, feeling the wistful gaze of his worn and watery eyes upon our
+backs, we left the Mohave Scenic Studio forever. A run across town in my
+car brought us again to my door. My scrawny busybody of a maid opened it
+before I had opportunity to even draw forth my key.
+
+"Four or five telephone calls," she said with her impudent importance,
+"but only one is pressing."
+
+"One?" cried I, "who from?"
+
+"Somebody I don't know, Doctor. Margaret Somebody. She left a message.
+She wouldn't say no more than just one word."
+
+"What was that word?" cried Estabrook at my shoulder.
+
+"Danger."
+
+I suppose that both of us felt the shock and then the tingle of
+excitement in the meaning of that phrase, interpreted in the light of
+our understanding.
+
+"Doctor!" the young man shouted.
+
+"Yes, Estabrook," said I; "keep your nerve. I think I have the key to
+this problem in my possession. I have not yet explained. I did not want
+to do so unless it was necessary. But if I am right you must not weaken.
+You must be ready to throw your whole strength into loyalty and
+affection for your wife and courage to protect her at any cost!"
+
+"I'm ready!" he cried. "I feel that I must win her all over again. She
+is as fresh and new and beautiful to me as the day I first saw her. And
+I love her now as never before!"
+
+"Jump into the car, then!" I commanded, and turning to my chauffeur,
+whispered, "To the Marburys'. Where we were this morning. And
+what--we--want--is--speed!"
+
+He nodded, but I have no doubt that Estabrook and I both cursed him for
+his caution as he slowed down at the crossings, and finally, when, to
+conform to the traffic regulation, he circled in front of the banker's
+house.
+
+This time neither of us looked up at either residence, but ran forward
+toward the Estabrooks' door. I pressed the bell centred in the Chinese
+bronze.
+
+Suddenly, however, the unfortunate husband grasped the arm of my coat.
+
+"My promise!" he exclaimed.
+
+"You mean to keep it at any cost?"
+
+"Yes," said he. "I trusted her judgment and her loyalty, and gave her my
+word."
+
+"Pah!" I exploded angrily. His literal sense of honor, his narrow
+conscience which led him into inexpediency, seemed to me a part of a
+feminine rather than of a masculine nature, and more ridiculous than
+high-minded.
+
+"Well, wait here, then," I snapped back at him as Margaret Murchie
+opened the door. "If necessary I will call you."
+
+The old servant said nothing until we were in the hall, but her face was
+white with fear. I read on it the word she had transmitted to us by
+telephone. And whether or not it was my imagination, I felt the presence
+of a crisis and a forewarning that the inexplicable events which I had
+observed were now to come to some explosive end.
+
+Margaret's first words, said to me with her two large hands raised as
+if to ward off a menace, were not reassuring.
+
+"The scratching noise!" she cried. "The soft scratching noise!"
+
+I turned her toward me by grasping her shoulder.
+
+"No hysteria," I said firmly. "Every second may count. Tell me quickly
+what has happened."
+
+"Yes, sir," she said, bracing herself. "I've done as you told me--very
+faithful. I went this morning to get my orders from her. I don't say the
+voice that answered me weren't hers."
+
+"Well, would you say it was?" I asked savagely.
+
+"I think I would, sir," she replied. "It was strange and changed and
+soft. I could hardly hear it. She said she didn't require anything. So I
+came away."
+
+"And then--?"
+
+"And then I did as you told me. I went to her door often enough and
+listened. You told me not to call to her unless there wasn't any sound.
+But there was a sound--a dreadful sound after a body had listened to it
+a bit."
+
+"A sound?"
+
+"Yes, a scratching sound. Sometimes it would stop and then it would go
+on again. And all the time it seemed to me more than ever that she
+wasn't alone in that room."
+
+"Wasn't alone! What made you think so?" I exclaimed.
+
+"I couldn't just say," answered Margaret. "I've never been able to say.
+It's just a feeling--a strange and terrible feeling, sir, that somebody
+else is there. But the scratching sound I heard with my two ears. And
+you never heard so worrying a sound before!"
+
+"It has stopped?" I said.
+
+"Yes, it has stopped. It stopped just before I telephoned. I thought I
+heard something touch the door and I went up and listened. I couldn't
+hear anything. I knocked. I got no answer. I remembered your orders. I
+wasn't sure whether I could hear breathing or not inside, but I didn't
+dare to wait. I called your office, sir. And I thank God you're here!"
+
+"And you didn't break open the door? You didn't even try the knob?"
+
+She looked at me dumbly. Her mouth twitched with her terror.
+
+"I didn't dare. I've had courage for everything in this world, sir," she
+said. "But I didn't dare to open that door! I'm glad somebody else has
+come into this dreadful house!"
+
+"Which is the room?" I asked.
+
+"Come with me," she replied, beginning her climb of the broad stairs.
+
+Her feet made no noise on the soft carpeting; nor did mine. The whole
+house, indeed, seemed stuffy with motionless air, as if not even sound
+vibrations had disturbed the deathlike fixity of that interior. As we
+turned at the top toward the paneled white door, which I knew as by
+instinct was the one we sought, for the first time I became conscious of
+the faint ticking of a clock somewhere on the floor above us.
+
+"I've forgot to wind the rest," whispered the old servant, as if she had
+divined my thought. "They were driving me mad."
+
+I nodded to show her that now I, too, was beginning to feel the effect
+of the strange state of affairs which I had first sensed from the other
+side of the blue wall.
+
+"Leave me here," I said to her softly. "Go down to Mr. Estabrook. He is
+in the vestibule. He has a message for you from long ago."
+
+I may have spoken significantly; she may have been at that moment
+peculiarly sharp to read the meanings behind plain sentences. Whatever
+the case, her face lit up with joy--the characteristic, joyful
+expression that never comes to the faces of men and few times to the
+face of a woman. For a moment youth seemed to return to her. The last
+traces of the limber strength of body, gone with her girlhood, came
+back. She wore no longer, at that second, the mien of a nun of household
+service. She was transfigured.
+
+"It's Monty Cranch!" she cried under her breath. "He isn't dead! I knew
+he wasn't. I knew it always."
+
+"Go now," I said. "Mr. Estabrook has something of a story to tell you."
+
+She left me then, standing alone before that white expanse of door. I
+was literally and figuratively on the threshold of poor MacMechem's
+mystery, knowing well that the solution of it would explain the strange
+influence that had registered its effects upon my patient, little
+Virginia Marbury.
+
+I listened with my ear pressed softly against the door. No other sign of
+life came to me than that of soft breathing. Indeed, even then I had to
+admit to myself that I might have imagined the sound. I stood back, as
+one does in such circumstances, half afraid to act--half afraid that to
+touch the knob or assault the closed and silent room would be to bring
+the sky crashing down to earth, turn loose a pestilence, set a demon
+free, or expose some sight grisly enough to turn the observer to stone.
+I found myself sensing the presence of a person or persons behind the
+opaque panels; my eyes were trying, as eyes will, to look through the
+painted wooden barrier.
+
+My glance wandered to the top of the door, back again to the middle,
+downward toward the bottom. The house was so still, now that Margaret
+had stepped out of it into the vestibule, that the ears imagined that
+they heard the beating of great velvety black wings. The gloom of the
+drawn blinds produced strange shadows, in which the eyes endeavored to
+find lurking, unseen things that watched the conduct and the destinies
+of men. But my eyes and ears returned again each time to their vain
+attention to the entrance of that room, as if the stillness and the
+gloom bade me listen and look, while I stood there hesitant.
+
+At last the reason for my hesitancy, the reason for my reluctance, the
+reason for my staring, suddenly appeared as if some fate had directed my
+observation. A corner of an envelope was protruding from beneath the
+door!
+
+I felt as I pulled the envelope through that the next moment might bring
+a piteous outcry from within, as if I had drawn upon the vital nerves of
+an organism. Yet none came; I found myself erect once more with the
+envelope in my hand, reading the writing on its face. It was scrawled in
+a trembling hand.
+
+"Margaret," it said, "send for my husband. Give him this envelope
+without opening it yourself. Give it to him before he comes to this
+door."
+
+"Poor woman!" I said with a sudden awakening of sympathy. "Poor, poor
+woman!"
+
+With my whispered words repeating themselves in my mind, I retraced my
+way along the hall, down the stairs.
+
+I opened the front door quietly. My first glance showed me the
+countenance of the old servant; it was lighted by the words which the
+young man was saying to her.
+
+"Estabrook," said I.
+
+He jumped like a wounded man.
+
+"She is not dead?" he groaned.
+
+"No," said I; "not dead. Come in. She has sent for you."
+
+"Sent for me!" he cried, trying to dash by me.
+
+"Wait," I commanded. "Before you go, come into this reception room. This
+message is for you."
+
+He took the envelope, almost crunching it in his nervous fingers.
+
+"Remember what I told you," I cautioned him.
+
+"Told me?"
+
+"Yes. To be strong," said I. "To be loyal."
+
+He nodded, then ran his finger under the flap. There were several sheets
+of thin paper folded within.
+
+"Her writing!" he exclaimed. "But so strange--so steady--so much like
+her writing when I first knew her. Why, Doctor, it is her old
+self--it's Julianna."
+
+"Sit down," I suggested.
+
+He spread the papers on his knee.
+
+As he read on, I saw the color leave his skin, I saw his hands draw the
+sheets so taut that there was danger of their parting under the strain.
+I heard the catch in each breath he took. As he read, I looked away,
+observing the refined elegance of the room in which we were sitting and
+even noting the bronze elephant on the mantel which I remembered was the
+very one which Judge Colfax had thrown at the dog "Laddie." It was not
+until he had reached forward and touched my sleeve that I knew he had
+finished.
+
+I looked up then. He had buried his head in the curve of his arm. His
+body seemed to stiffen and relax alternately as if unable to contain
+some great grief or some great joy which accumulated and burst forth,
+only to accumulate again.
+
+I heard him whisper, "Julianna."
+
+I saw his hand extending the paper toward me with the evident meaning
+that I should read it.
+
+I took it from him.
+
+I have that very paper now. It reads as follows.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                               BOOK VIII
+
+                         FROM THE WOMAN'S HAND
+
+
+                               CHAPTER I
+
+                         THE VOICE OF THE BLOOD
+
+
+I am a miserable woman.
+
+Before I ask you to return to me, I am determined that you shall know
+the truth. I beg you to read this and consider well what I am and what I
+have done before you undertake life with me or again bring your love
+into my keeping. This I ask for your sake and for my own; for yours,
+because I grant that you have been deceived and owe me nothing; for my
+own, because I believe that I have borne all that I can, and to have you
+come back to me without knowing all, and without still loving me as you
+used to love me, would break my heart.
+
+I must not write you with emotion; I must stifle my desire to cry out
+for your sympathy. I shall write without even the tenderness of a woman.
+
+I am the daughter of a murderer.
+
+In my veins is an inheritance of unspeakable, viciousness.
+
+Before the death of him who I had believed all my life was my own
+father, I was wholly in ignorance of my own nature. I believed that I
+took from two noble parents the full assurance that I would be exempt
+from weakness, that I, with brain cells formed like theirs, would
+possess forever their tenderness, their geniality, and their strength of
+will.
+
+You know well how strong a faith I had in the power of inherited
+character. To it I attributed all that was good in me. I realize now how
+cruel is this doctrine of heredity; I have spent my strength and given
+my soul in a battle to prove that I was wrong, that it is not a true
+doctrine and that God and the human will can laugh in its face.
+
+Without knowing my experience, however, you cannot know to what extent I
+have been successful. I must tell the story of the tempests which have
+swayed my mind, of the contests between good and evil, of the narrow
+gate where my will has made its last defense against the onslaught of
+terror and destruction.
+
+To my task!
+
+You remember the paper that I burned at dawn which my foster father had
+dropped from his fingers, stiffening in death. It was his last message
+to me, written in infinite pain and in an agony of doubt, intended to
+warn me of the truth that I was not by inheritance strong, but weak, not
+good, but bad. It told me that I was not the daughter of my mother,
+whose gentle goodness seemed to fill the old home like a lingering
+aroma, nor of him who was so strong and so respected of all men, but the
+daughter of a pitiable woman of the tenements who had passed her days in
+singing and dancing for pennies thrown at her, and of a man who, having
+descended from a long line of exquisite savagery, self-indulgence, and
+weakness, had been driven by his inheritance through all excesses and
+finally to the murder of his wife and the wish to strangle me in my
+crib.
+
+Can you conceive the effect of this truth upon my mind?
+
+At first I was merely frozen with terror. I did not fully grasp the
+significance of these lines of writing in which he who loved me so well
+had endeavored to soften for me his warning against the latent horrors
+that had been locked up within me. At first I did not realize that the
+same night which marked his death had marked also the death of my old
+self.
+
+Indeed, my first thought was of you. The message had said plainly that I
+might consider myself the sole possessor of my secret. I was certain
+that you did not know. I felt the desire to prevent you from ever
+knowing; I felt the wildness of a tigress at the thought that any one
+might take my secret from me. Between your hearing the truth about me
+and my giving you up forever, I had no hesitancy of choice. You must
+never know, I told myself. Though you were all that was left in my
+life, I might send you away, but to tell you the truth about myself
+would be, I believed, to end your love for me which was all that was
+left to the comfort of my heart. And at that idea I screamed aloud in
+agony.
+
+I still possessed my conscience; I promised myself over and over again
+in those hours that I would not deceive you. I did not think for a
+moment then of asking you to take me with the understanding that you
+knew there was some terrible thing about me which you were forbidden to
+know. If in those moments, then, when you came to my room at dawn, I
+made that bargain with you, so that I might feel your arms about me, and
+know that I was not to lose you, it was the act of a woman who had just
+lost her girlhood and whose life had been torn to shreds.
+
+I made a terrible mistake. I know it now. The fact that you have
+refrained so honorably from asking me the forbidden question and also
+the fact of your keeping your promise to stay away during these last
+days, though you were in ignorance of my motives in asking it, has shown
+me that I might well have disclosed all to you. Without meaning to do
+so, I have tested not only your honor but something more. I have proved
+to myself that, behind your undemonstrative exterior which I have
+sometimes felt was cold, you have that love and tenderness of spirit
+which is capable of faith and loyalty and the warmth of which endures
+the better because covered. I should have told you because the secret
+has mocked me and because nothing can last between man and woman without
+truth.
+
+I should have told you, moreover, because you might have prevented the
+terrible result of my knowledge of what I am in bone, blood, fibre, and
+brain.
+
+That knowledge began its corrupting influence at once; it accumulated
+force as time went on. The irresistible pull of that knowledge has
+brought me to the point where I know not whether it is heredity, or the
+knowledge of it, which presses upon me--which has driven me like a
+slave. At times I feel certain that the last message of Judge Colfax,
+rather than the danger of which it intended to warn me, has been my
+menace.
+
+At first I recalled the fact of my birth and inheritance with resentment
+and courage.
+
+"I am myself," I have exclaimed. "I alone am responsible for my life, my
+thoughts, my actions. They shall be according to my will to make them."
+
+Then the haunting doubt would oppose itself to my claim. It spoke to me
+like a person.
+
+"No," it said. "You are not yourself. You are the victim of fixed laws.
+The zebra is striped rather than spotted because its forebears wore
+stripes. So with you. You are half murderess and half gutter-snipe. You
+are woven according to the pattern. You are moulded according to the
+mould. You are a prisoner of heredity. Deceive yourself if you will for
+a time, but sooner or later you, like those from whom you came and of
+whom you are a part, will be the plaything of self-indulgence and
+weakness and passion. Fate has made your image that you see in the
+mirror, refined and comely so that you may see the better the work of
+heredity when it asserts itself."
+
+This voice was ever at my ear. It became a personal voice. I thought at
+first that it was the voice of some other being. At last I came by slow
+changes to the belief that it was not a voice outside of me. It was my
+Self that spoke. It was the heritage of evil within me. The thing that
+whispered to me with its condemning voice, frightening away my courage
+and sapping my strength of will, was my own blood!
+
+I began to watch for the outcropping of evil in my conduct--for the
+moment when the force of heredity within me would make itself known to
+you and to the world. No morning dawned that I did not ask myself if
+night would fall without some opening of the gates of my character
+behind which so much that was evil, I believed, was clamoring to escape.
+I lived in two lives. In one I was your wife and the girl you had
+known, who now existed like an automaton, going senselessly through the
+acts of day to day existence. In the other I was a condemned victim,
+waiting in apprehension for the call of terrible and evil authority.
+
+It was an accident which, at last, made real my fancies.
+
+You remember that I was thrown from a horse. You remember that for days
+a torn nerve in my elbow gave me excruciating pain. You remember that,
+having regained my senses after the setting of the bone, I would not
+allow the doctor to give me any narcotic. You remember my protests
+against that form of relief.
+
+I was afraid. I trembled not only with pain. I trembled with terror.
+
+I believed I was on the threshold of danger. I felt the impending of
+ruin. Though I had never experienced the sensation of an opiate I even
+found my body already crying for its comfort. I found myself struggling
+hour after hour with a desire to try myself. I alternated between a
+belief that I was strong enough for the test and the instinct that told
+me the blood in my veins was waiting like a wild animal to pounce upon a
+first form of self-indulgence.
+
+At last I yielded.
+
+"There is no harm in the proper use of this," said the doctor, seeing
+my expression,--"by a woman of your type."
+
+I laughed in his face.
+
+I hardly recognized the sound of this laugh; it was not my own. It was
+the laugh of a new personality. It was care-free and desperate at one
+time.
+
+"There is no need of your suffering so terribly after each adjustment I
+make of these cords," said the doctor a few days later, sympathetically.
+
+"But I suffer so at night," said I.
+
+"I will leave you something," said he. "Do not use it oftener than
+necessary."
+
+Why should I tell you the imperceptible steps by which, partly because I
+believed myself destined to become a victim, I fell an abject slave to
+this drug? I need only say that while my arm was still suffering from
+its injury I gave myself false promises from time to time. "When the
+pain is gone," I said a thousand times, "there will be no need of this
+comforter."
+
+When I was obliged to admit that I suffered no more, it was a shock to
+find myself secretly procuring the opiate in order to continue its use
+undiscovered.
+
+"This will be the last time," I often said.
+
+Then something laughed within me.
+
+It was my blood laughing. It was my blood mocking me.
+
+I began to experience a cycle of terrible emotions which consumed my
+days. They began with shame, with injured pride, and terrible grief.
+They then passed first to vain resolves, then to fear of myself,
+followed by the feeling that what must be is inevitable and that
+struggle to escape from the weakness given me by birth was hopeless.
+This belief led me over and over again to surrender, but with surrender
+came the fear of exposure of my new secret.
+
+As long as I dared I used a prescription which the doctor had given me.
+I made guilty trips to the drug store where I had been from the first. I
+began to feel that strangers who had followed me into the store by
+chance were there by design to spy upon me. My own furtive glances were
+enough to excite suspicion. My more frequent purchases were enough to
+confirm them. At last one day I read in the eyes of the clerk who waited
+on me the question which must have been in his mind. I seized my package
+and rushed out onto the street, knowing that I would never dare return.
+
+I went then from one place to another in shrinking fear of detection. In
+each one my experience was repeated until I believe I began to wear the
+air of a hunted creature.
+
+So suspicious were my actions that at last a drug clerk shook my little
+worn-out slip of paper against the glass perfume case and scowled at
+me.
+
+"The last half of the doctor's name is torn off," he said insolently.
+"Where did you get this?"
+
+I could not speak.
+
+"I'm sorry," he snarled. "We don't sell that under these circumstances.
+Where do you live, madam?"
+
+I hurried out into the street.
+
+There I noticed that a tall young man, who had been staring at me, with
+a row of gold teeth accenting a diabolical smile, had followed me from
+the store. After I had walked half a block to find my carriage, he spoke
+to me.
+
+"I can sell you something just as good," he whispered by my side. "I do
+a little quiet business in it. It's not for yourself, is it?"
+
+"No," I said, trembling from head to foot. "It is for an unfortunate
+woman, whose name must not be disclosed."
+
+"Call her She," he suggested with a leer. "Here is an address. Send a
+messenger boy whenever you like. Every one thinks I am a perfume
+manufacturer."
+
+This was the opening of greater comfort to me; my terror of detection
+was lessened. As time passed I found that my moral sense was being
+dulled, little by little. I was fulfilling my destiny. I was living
+according to my arrangement of brain cells. In spite of his warning--or
+perhaps solely because of it--the fears of my foster father were
+realized. I was I!
+
+Four weeks ago came a new thing. It burst like dynamite. It gripped my
+heart. It felt along the chords of my womanhood. I could not escape its
+presence. It cried to me in the darkness. It walked beside me in the
+sunlight.
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+                             THIS NEW THING
+
+
+It has been hard for me to tell coldly of my first weakness; it will be
+harder still for me to write of what has followed, without letting
+escape on this page the emotions which are in my heart. This new thing
+awakened me with a start from my slumber of indifference and my
+philosophy of defeat.
+
+With a sudden return of my old self I began to have my first doubts
+about the powers of heredity. I began to wonder if fear of myself,
+inspired by knowledge of whence I came, rather than any true inherited
+traits, had not been my undoing. I found that I had not changed so much,
+after all. The goodness in me had not gone. I saw in my mirror the
+Julianna you had known and loved. I felt new faith.
+
+I felt new faith in the goodness of the plan under which men and women
+live and strive. I had always believed in a Divine Spirit if for no
+other reason than that I and all living things through all time had
+sensed somewhere beyond their full understanding the existence of a
+dynamic of creation and order. I believed, if you wish me to phrase it
+so, in God. It seemed to me in my new awakening that no human creature
+could be made by such a Spirit the plaything of so cruel a thing as
+all-powerful heredity.
+
+"He must give us all a chance," I cried with tears on my cheeks. "It
+must be true that I can save myself by fight. It cannot be that I will
+be deprived of the opportunity of putting an end to this evil descent.
+My father sought to strangle me because he believed he would appear in
+my blood. Now it is I, who, finding him there, must strangle him!" And
+I, in my agony, fell upon my knees and prayed.
+
+You were asleep when, in my bare feet, forgetful of the cold, I stood
+hour after hour at the window of my room, listening to your breathing.
+In those hours, little by little I realized that it was not escape from
+a single weakness or indulgence which I must seek, but that I must
+reestablish mastery over myself. I knew that no help from without would
+accomplish this mastery. I made up my mind to fight single-handed, and
+to stake myself and if necessary, my life, in a battle to place again my
+will upon its throne.
+
+Accordingly I took, as I supposed, my last dose of opiate and under its
+influence, which gave me strength, I pleaded with you to leave me alone
+in this house for three weeks. You yielded. I then ordered all
+furnishings out of my chamber, and all the servants except Margaret out
+of the house, to the end that no sight or sound should draw my attention
+or my thoughts from my purpose.
+
+I had a plentiful supply of my drug. You will doubtless want to know
+what I did with it. I took it with me into my retreat.
+
+My first day I suffered the deprivation but little; it was on the second
+that I moved my mattress where I could concentrate all my attention on a
+single wall of the four. On the third day I began to lose track of time.
+I had feared much, but not the degree of suffering which the pains of
+denial now piled upon me in an accumulating load.
+
+Often I fell forward prostrate on the floor, squirming in my agony of
+body and mind, while within me a battle went raging on between the
+spirit and the flesh. My eyes would search for the packet of drugs lying
+on the floor within my reach and rest upon the sight of it, staring as
+mad persons must stare. It was my will that held my hand.
+
+Can you imagine the eternal vacillation of such a contest? Then you will
+know that desire fighting against reason now drove my will back step by
+step until it was tottering on the brink of chaos, and again, in a
+triumph of resistance, my determination swept everything before it until
+I longed to rise, to throw my arms upward, fingers extended, and cry
+aloud my victory.
+
+On the other hand, a thousand moments came when, ready to yield to my
+temptation, I have dropped on my knees on the boards and, with my eyes
+fixed upon that wall, have prayed like mad, hour after hour, my lips
+parched and blood running from my bare knees.
+
+Voices whispered to me that I was a fanatic, pinning my faith to
+superstition and the practices of savagery. I whispered back to them
+that they should see me victorious at last.
+
+"How long will you fight?" said they mockingly.
+
+"Till desire is gone and the will has nothing to fight for," I answered
+them.
+
+"You are insane," they said, speaking like so many devils.
+
+"We shall know better at the end," I replied softly.
+
+These dialogues, the torture of which no one can know, went on
+eternally. They were arguments, I knew, between my ingenious mind and
+the will which was trying to reclaim its mastery of my thought.
+
+Night and day became all one to me. I lost count of the hours, then of
+the days. I became filled with the fear that three weeks would go by,
+that you would return too soon, that interruption would come before my
+fight had been determined one way or the other. This terror was enough
+to weaken me. I felt it many times and on each occasion drew so near the
+bare wall that I could throw my weight against it and lose all external
+thoughts by staring at the blank surface, with all but one purpose
+banished from my mind.
+
+I have eaten merely to live, slept only to repair my strength. Each
+morsel of food has added to my bodily anguish, each falling asleep has
+meant a horrible awakening to new, exquisite torture of the body. My
+hands have become black by resting on the bare boards, my nails torn by
+scratching over the covering of my mattress. My hair is matted. My
+throat, dry with prayers, is almost voiceless, my lips are cracked like
+old leather.
+
+I do not tell you these things to gain your sympathy, but so that, if
+you should want to come back to me, you will not be shocked to find me
+horrible.
+
+I must go on.
+
+Five days ago my craving began to yield. The blessedness of the relief
+is beyond description. Little by little the resistance to my will
+weakened. Little by little my will gained mastery. It seemed a youthful
+giant, learning its power. It seemed to fill the room, to seek to reach
+beyond and find new labors for its strength. I felt the moment approach
+when I, no longer a slave of myself, could indeed rise from thanks to
+God and feel my triumph sure.
+
+I dared three days ago to touch my drugs, to take them in my hand, to
+mock them.
+
+Yesterday I got up. I began to write this message.
+
+I could hear martial music as I wrote and the tramp of a million feet.
+It was the army of men and women who have fought against evil and
+won,--they who have been masters of themselves. As they passed, they
+cheered me, each one; they waved their hats and hands!
+
+And afterward there came a little child and smiled and stretched his
+arms out to me. He was glad.
+
+For he is to be my own.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                                 BOOK IX
+
+                             BEHIND THE WALL
+
+
+                                CHAPTER I
+
+                          AN ANSWER TO MACMECHEM
+
+
+Such was the message Julianna had sent her husband. I read it and,
+without speaking, I arose and touched Estabrook on his shoulder.
+
+"Doctor," said he pathetically.
+
+"Come," said I.
+
+We went up to her door. It was not locked; it opened. She was there.
+
+She was there with a smile of greeting--a beautiful woman, pale with her
+suffering, pale as the flower of a night-blooming cactus, but warm with
+the vitality given to women who love. The pink light of dusk was on her
+calm face.
+
+She was leaning back against the wall. Her great eyes fixed themselves
+upon Estabrook without seeing me at all. She did not speak. She seemed
+in doubt.
+
+Estabrook hesitated a moment with his hand reaching behind him for my
+sleeve. He pulled at it twice, without turning.
+
+"Is she safe?" he whispered hoarsely.
+
+"Yes, in every way. The Lord wouldn't allow the contrary to happen,"
+said I. "If she should need me later, call me. I shall be downstairs."
+
+I stepped back then as softly as a cat. I shut the door after me with
+the greatest pains. In the reception room below I looked about for the
+letter I had laid on my chair. It was gone!
+
+I called Margaret softly. I searched cautiously through the halls,
+whispering her name. She was nowhere. At last I brushed against a
+hanging which, being withdrawn, disclosed the message itself on the
+floor. Its sheets were crumpled together, so that it was evident that
+some one else had read it. I suppose that the old servant had done so.
+If her curiosity was pardonable, so was my theft. I folded the paper and
+thrust it in my pocket as I sat down to wait.
+
+The minutes went by and many of them had gone before I heard some one in
+the back part of the house, descending the stairs. The breath of this
+person was labored like the breath of one who carries a heavy handbag. A
+little later I heard a door creak and a latch click below. Then all was
+still.
+
+The house was terribly still. The stillness beat as before, like a thing
+with feathery wings. The distant clock tick came and went between these
+flurries of silence. I looked at my watch. An hour had gone. It was
+growing dark. My patient chauffeur had lit his lights. Passers-by came
+and went, in and out of their white glare. I had smoked two cigars.
+
+[Illustration: SHE DID NOT SPEAK. SHE SEEMED IN DOUBT]
+
+Finally a pair of feet ran up the front steps. The bell rang. There
+was no movement in the house. It rang again. The feet on the steps
+stamped impatiently. Again the bell buzzed. The sound came from some
+unexplored region of the house, but the little thing made a shocking
+hubbub in that desert of silence.
+
+After this last vehement assault by the newcomer I heard a door open
+above. A man, burning one match after another to light his way, came
+down the stairs. When he had reached the bottom, I saw that it was
+Estabrook. His face was illuminated by the little flame, but a
+hundredfold more by an expression of happiness, the equal of which I
+have never seen.
+
+"Great Scott, Doctor," he cried in sincere surprise. "I forgot you were
+here!"
+
+"Come! Come!" said I. "Some one is wearing his thumb off on that bell."
+
+As he swung the door back, obeying me like a man in a dream, a voice
+outside mumbled indistinctly.
+
+"Yes," said Estabrook, "I am he."
+
+Then closing the door he came into the room, fumbling along the wall for
+the electric switch. The flood of light disclosed him trying to tear
+open an envelope.
+
+As he read the contents, his face grew black as if with rage, then it
+brightened again. He uttered an exclamation of pleasure.
+
+"Thank God!" he cried. "Here! Read this. It's from Margaret Murchie."
+
+I took the paper.
+
+"You will never see me again," it said. "I have gone to Monty Cranch.
+You won't ever see either of us again. He is going with me. We plan to
+finish life, what is left of it, together. We will never turn up again.
+You better not worry.
+
+"I have caused enough trouble already," it went on in its rough scrawl.
+"I have been wicked enough and had to pay dear for my lies. Julianna is
+not the daughter of Monty Cranch. That is the truth. She is the daughter
+of the Judge, so help me. Mrs. Welstoke is to blame for that first lie.
+I stole the locket from the Cranch baby's neck and after the fire I saw
+a chance to get the Judge in my power. I snapped the locket on and I
+fooled him otherwise. God knows I suffered enough for it afterward when
+I got to love him and Julianna. I never attempted any blackmail. But I
+did not dare to tell the truth. It was the only home I had and I was
+afraid. I have done the best I could. You will never see me again. Monty
+knows now she is not his. I have money saved. We won't come back."
+
+"Well," said Estabrook, when I had tossed it on the table, "I am dumb. I
+am the happiest man alive. The Estabrooks, when you come right down to
+it quickly, would have been sorry if--"
+
+"Pardon me, sir," I said. "I will call later. You do not need me now and
+I will step into the Marburys'."
+
+"But, Doctor!" cried the young man.
+
+I shook my head.
+
+"My dear fellow," said I solemnly, "I cannot bear to hear you talk about
+the respectable Estabrooks!"
+
+Our hands met, however, and, I believe, with a warmth that meant more
+than many words.
+
+As I went up the Marburys' steps a minute later, I looked up. A light
+was burning in Mrs. Estabrook's room. I saw the shadows of a man and a
+woman pass the curtain together.
+
+This pretty picture was in my mind as I entered little Virginia's room,
+where Miss Peters met me with a smile--the first human smile I had ever
+seen on her metallic face.
+
+For many minutes I sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at the child
+that I had grown to love, as a foolish old doctor sometimes will. Then I
+bent and kissed her cool, white forehead.
+
+"She is out of danger," said I softly.
+
+"Oh, yes," said Miss Peters. "She will get well. You have saved her."
+
+She moved her angular shoulders as she adjusted her belt, she strode
+noiselessly across the room and moved the shade on the lamp. The light
+now shone so that the blue wall, with its ethereal depths, had turned
+rosy as with the light of dawn.
+
+"Suppose, Miss Peters--" said I, after staring at it a moment, "suppose
+that you were called upon for one guess about this wall and its effect
+upon this child."
+
+She wheeled about and stared at me.
+
+"I've thought of that," she said.
+
+"What's behind that wall?" she mused as if to herself. "As between
+something and somebody, it is not a thing, but a person. A person has
+been there--perhaps some one overcoming evil or winning some victory
+over disease."
+
+"Well," said I, seeing that she was hesitating, "go on."
+
+"I can't exactly go on," she said. "I don't want you to take me for a
+fool. Only, don't you suppose that you and I, ourselves, must throw out
+some influence that is not seen with the eyes or heard with the ears?
+Don't we affect every one near us with our good and evil? Don't we
+affect the people who live above and below in apartments, or to the
+right and left in houses? Doesn't strength or weakness come through wood
+and iron and stone? Didn't it come through this wall, Doctor?"
+
+"My dear Miss Peters," said I, shrugging my shoulders, "how can I say?
+I can only tell you that you have just finished the longest, the most
+human, and, on the whole, in the best sense, the most scientific
+observation I have ever known you to make."
+
+
+
+
+                               CHAPTER II
+
+                              "WHY CARE?"
+
+
+There is the tale, all told. Many may want to ask me my theories. I have
+none. My story, except as to form, is like the data I keep in every case
+which comes before my notice--it is a somewhat incomplete and
+matter-of-fact section out of human life. Like poor MacMechem I try to
+keep my mind open. I simply offer a narrative of the sequence of events.
+
+One thing only troubles me. Did Margaret Murchie lie when she said Mrs.
+Estabrook was the daughter of Cranch? or when she said that she was the
+daughter of Judge Colfax? And to this question many will say, "Why
+care?" Others will decide--each for himself.
+
+                                THE END
+
+
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+
+TITLES SELECTED FROM
+GROSSET & DUNLAP'S LIST
+
+  May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list
+
+THE SIEGE OF THE SEVEN SUITORS. By Meredith Nicholson. Illustrated by
+C. Coles Phillips and Reginald Birch.
+
+  Seven suitors vie with each other for the love of a beautiful girl,
+  and she subjects them to a test that is full of mystery, magic and
+  sheer amusement.
+
+THE MAGNET. By Henry C. Rowland. Illustrated by Clarence F. Underwood.
+
+  The story of a remarkable courtship involving three pretty girls on
+  a yacht, a poet-lover in pursuit, and a mix-up in the names of the
+  girls.
+
+THE TURN OF THE ROAD. By Eugenia Brooks Frothingham.
+
+  A beautiful young opera singer chooses professional success instead
+  of love, but comes to a place in life where the call of the heart is
+  stronger than worldly success.
+
+SCOTTIE AND HIS LADY. By Margaret Morse. Illustrated by Harold M.
+Brett.
+
+  A young girl whose affections have been blighted is presented with a
+  Scotch Collie to divert her mind, and the roving adventures of her
+  pet lead the young mistress into another romance.
+
+SHEILA VEDDER. By Amelia E. Barr. Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher.
+
+  A very beautiful romance of the Shetland Islands, with a handsome,
+  strong-willed hero and a lovely girl of Gaelic blood as heroine. A
+  sequel to "Jan Vedder's Wife."
+
+JOHN WARD, PREACHER. By Margaret Deland.
+
+  The first big success of this much loved American novelist. It is a
+  powerful portrayal of a young clergyman's attempt to win his
+  beautiful wife to his own narrow creed.
+
+THE TRAIL OF NINETY-EIGHT. By Robert W. Service. Illustrated by
+Maynard Dixon.
+
+  One of the best stories of "Vagabondia" ever written, and one of the
+  most accurate and picturesque of the stampede of gold seekers to the
+  Yukon. The love story embedded in the narrative is strikingly
+  original.
+
+   Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+             Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+THE NOVELS OF CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM
+
+ May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list.
+
+JEWEL: A Chapter in Her Life. Illustrated by Maude and Genevieve
+Cowles.
+
+  A sweet, dainty story, breathing the doctrine of love and patience
+  and sweet nature and cheerfulness.
+
+JEWEL'S STORY BOOK. Illustrated by Albert Schmitt.
+
+  A sequel to "Jewel" and equally enjoyable.
+
+CLEVER BETSY. Illustrated by Rose O'Neill.
+
+  The "Clever Betsy" was a boat--named for the unyielding spinster
+  whom the captain hoped to marry. Through the two Betsys a clever
+  group of people are introduced to the reader.
+
+SWEET CLOVER: A Romance of the White City.
+
+  A story of Chicago at the time of the World's Fair. A sweet human
+  story that touches the heart.
+
+THE OPENED SHUTTERS. Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher.
+
+  A summer haunt on an island in Casco Bay is the background for this
+  romance. A beautiful woman, at discord with life, is brought to
+  realize, by her new friends, that she may open the shutters of her
+  soul to the blessed sunlight of joy by casting aside vanity and self
+  love. A delicately humorous work with a lofty motive underlying it
+  all.
+
+THE RIGHT PRINCESS.
+
+  An amusing story, opening at a fashionable Long Island resort, where
+  a stately Englishwoman employs a forcible New England housekeeper to
+  serve in her interesting home. How types so widely apart react on
+  each other's lives, all to ultimate good, makes a story both
+  humorous and rich in sentiment.
+
+THE LEAVEN OF LOVE. Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher.
+
+  At a Southern California resort a world-weary woman, young and
+  beautiful but disillusioned, meets a girl who has learned the art of
+  living--of tasting life in all its richness, opulence and joy. The
+  story hinges upon the change wrought in the soul of the blase woman
+  by this glimpse into a cheery life.
+
+   Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+             Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN'S STORIES OF PURE DELIGHT
+
+          Full of originality and humor, kindliness and cheer
+
+THE OLD PEABODY PEW. Large Octavo. Decorative text pages, printed in two
+colors. Illustrations by Alice Barber Stephens.
+
+  One of the prettiest romances that has ever come from this author's
+  pen is made to bloom on Christmas Eve in the sweet freshness of an
+  old New England meeting house.
+
+PENELOPE'S PROGRESS. Attractive cover design in colors.
+
+  Scotland is the background for the merry doings of three very clever
+  and original American girls. Their adventures in adjusting
+  themselves to the Scot and his land are full of humor.
+
+PENELOPE'S IRISH EXPERIENCES. Uniform in style with "Penelope's
+Progress."
+
+  The trio of clever girls who rambled over Scotland cross the border
+  to the Emerald Isle, and again they sharpen their wits against new
+  conditions, and revel in the land of laughter and wit.
+
+REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM.
+
+  One of the most beautiful studies of childhood--Rebecca's artistic,
+  unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand put midst a circle of
+  austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a phenomenal
+  dramatic record.
+
+NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA. With illustrations by F. C. Yohn.
+
+  Some more quaintly amusing chronicles that carry Rebecca through
+  various stages to her eighteenth birthday.
+
+ROSE O' THE RIVER. With illustrations by George Wright.
+
+  The simple story of Rose, a country girl and Stephen a sturdy young
+  farmer. The girl's fancy for a city man interrupts their love and
+  merges the story into an emotional strain where the reader follows
+  the events with rapt attention.
+
+             Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+STORIES OF WESTERN LIFE
+
+   May be had wherever books an sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list
+
+RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, By Zane Grey. Illustrated by Douglas Duer.
+
+  In this picturesque romance of Utah of some forty years ago, we are
+  permitted to see the unscrupulous methods employed by the invisible
+  hand of the Mormon Church to break the will of those refusing to
+  conform to its rule.
+
+FRIAR TUCK, By Robert Alexander Wason. Illustrated by Stanley L. Wood.
+
+  Happy Hawkins tells us, in his humorous way, how Friar Tuck lived
+  among the Cowboys, how he adjusted their quarrels and love affairs
+  and how he fought with them and for them when occasion required.
+
+THE SKY PILOT, By Ralph Connor. Illustrated by Louis Rhead.
+
+  There is no novel, dealing with the rough existence of cowboys, so
+  charming in the telling, abounding as it does with the freshest and
+  the truest pathos.
+
+THE EMIGRANT TRAIL, By Geraldine Bonner. Colored frontispiece by John
+Rae.
+
+  The book relates the adventures of a party on its overland
+  pilgrimage, and the birth and growth of the absorbing love of two
+  strong men for a charming heroine.
+
+THE BOSS OF WIND RIVER, By A. M. Chisholm. Illustrated by Frank Tenney
+Johnson.
+
+  This is a strong, virile novel with the lumber industry for its
+  central theme and a love story full of interest as a sort of
+  subplot.
+
+A PRAIRIE COURTSHIP, By Harold Bindloss.
+
+  A story of Canadian prairies in which the hero is stirred, through
+  the influence of his love for a woman, to settle down to the heroic
+  business of pioneer farming.
+
+JOYCE OF THE NORTH WOODS, By Harriet T. Comstock. Illustrated by John
+Cassel.
+
+  A story of the deep woods that shows the power of love at work among
+  its primitive dwellers. It is a tensely moving study of the human
+  heart and its aspirations that unfolds itself through thrilling
+  situations and dramatic developments.
+
+  Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+             Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+JOHN FOX, JR'S.
+
+STORIES OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS
+
+ May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list.
+
+THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE. Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
+
+  The "lonesome pine" from which the story takes its name was a tall
+  tree that stood in solitary splendor on a mountain top. The fame of
+  the pine lured a young engineer through Kentucky to catch the trail,
+  and when he finally climbed to its shelter he found not only the
+  pine but the _foot-prints of a girl_. And the girl proved to be
+  lovely, piquant, and the trail of these girlish foot-prints led the
+  young engineer a madder chase than "the trail of the lonesome pine."
+
+THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
+
+  This is a story of Kentucky, in a settlement known as "Kingdom
+  Come." It is a life rude, semi-barbarous; but natural and honest,
+  from which often springs the flower of civilization.
+
+  "Chad," the "little shepherd" did not know who he was nor whence he
+  came--he had just wandered from door to door since early childhood,
+  seeking shelter with kindly mountaineers who gladly fathered and
+  mothered this waif about whom there was such a mystery--a charming
+  waif, by the way, who could play the banjo better that anyone else
+  in the mountains.
+
+A KNIGHT OF THE CUMBERLAND. Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.
+
+  The scenes are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of
+  moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the
+  heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two
+  impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's"
+  charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in
+  the love making of the mountaineers.
+
+  Included in this volume is "Hell fer-Sartain" and other stories,
+  some of Mr. Fox's most entertaining Cumberland valley narratives.
+
+   Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+             Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+      *      *      *      *      *      *
+
+GROSSET & DUNLAP'S DRAMATIZED NOVELS
+
+THE KIND THAT ARE MAKING THEATRICAL HISTORY
+
+  May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list
+
+WITHIN THE LAW. By Bayard Veiller & Marvin Dana. Illustrated by Wm.
+Charles Cooke.
+
+  This is a novelization of the immensely successful play which ran
+  for two years in New York and Chicago.
+
+  The plot of this powerful novel is of a young woman's revenge
+  directed against her employer who allowed her to be sent to prison
+  for three years on a charge of theft, of which she was innocent.
+
+WHAT HAPPENED TO MARY. By Robert Carlton Brown. Illustrated with scenes
+from the play.
+
+  This is a narrative of a young and innocent country girl who is
+  suddenly thrown into the very heart of New York, "the land of her
+  dreams," where she is exposed to all sorts of temptations and
+  dangers.
+
+  The story of Mary is being told in moving pictures and played in
+  theatres all over the world.
+
+THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM. By David Belasco. Illustrated by John Rae.
+
+  This is a novelization of the popular play in which David Warfield,
+  as Old Peter Grimm, scored such a remarkable success.
+
+  The story is spectacular and extremely pathetic but withal,
+  powerful, both as a book and as a play.
+
+THE GARDEN OF ALLAH. By Robert Hichens.
+
+  This novel is an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit,
+  barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of vastness and loneliness.
+
+  It is a book of rapturous beauty, vivid in word painting. The play
+  has been staged with magnificent cast and gorgeous properties.
+
+BEN HUR. A Tale of the Christ. By General Lew Wallace.
+
+  The whole world has placed this famous Religious-Historical Romance
+  on a height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time has
+  reached. The clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, the
+  perfect reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce
+  atmosphere of the arena have kept their deep fascination. A
+  tremendous dramatic success.
+
+BOUGHT AND PAID FOR. By George Broadhurst and Arthur Hornblow.
+Illustrated with scenes from the play.
+
+  A stupendous arraignment of modern marriage which has created an
+  interest on the stage that is almost unparalleled. The scenes are
+  laid in New York, and deal with conditions among both the rich and
+  poor.
+
+  The interest of the story turns on the day-by-day developments which
+  show the young wife the price she has paid.
+
+   Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction
+
+             Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLUE WALL***
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