An automobile speeding through the starry dark! No hesitant progress through congested traffic, no frequent swerving for daylight wayfarers. The city was far behind now—only the clear, well-nigh deserted road, winding like a tremulous magenta ribbon through the swooping gloom that seemed to shrink and cringe from the metal monster hurtling after its golden halo through the eddying dust.
A practised hand was on the throttle and the yellow-lined face bent over the wheel was shrewd and keen. There had been no supper for Bob that night and no evening at Black Joe's billiard parlour, but the chauffeur knew his master. "Go like the devil till I tell you to stop," the other had said, and without the word from the moveless figure on the rear seat, he would obey till the engine stopped or his hand went numb on the wheel. Hamlets flashed by—huddles of flaring street-lights—then shadow and blankness again. Now and then a hollow rumbling marked a bridge, or a jovial, beckoning doorway betokened a road-house. Ten, twenty, thirty miles. A turn of the wheel and the car swept into a divergent highway. Another mile and again a turn—Bob was shuttling back and forth now, fearful of an impossible distance from home.
The man behind him sat as if graven in stone. At first, while his senses instinctively resisted the intoxication, Harry had been conscious only of blind movement, a frantic flight to escape the unescapable. Yet his whole body was tense, his eyes never wavered, his hand was as steady as his chauffeur's. He was sharply conscious of all about him, every sense recording its message unerringly. He felt the wind-flung dust, heard the chatter of the exhaust, grasped acutely at each detail of sight and sound in the reeling panorama through which they passed with such arrow-like swiftness, under a sky that was a wild, blue field of silver flowers. Yet the governance of the mind, the sole arena in which the intoxicant ravened and rioted, the logical faculty to which sense-impression is but material, was astray. And at length the intoxication had wholly conquered.
And with the acknowledged dominance of the sinister thing that held him, the mental turmoil had swiftly stilled. There had come sudden composure—a strange, appalling peace, in which was no appreciation of place or time or fact, but yet a curious exaltation, a sensation of seeing not through a glass darkly, but with a further mental vision which knew no material bars.
Three hours, four hours—and still no sign. Bob stole a glance behind him. "Wonder what's the matter?" he muttered. "He sure never did want to go hell-bent-for-election like this before. Lucky I filled the tank plumb full this morning. She's good for another forty mile, I reckon."
As he withdrew his eyes he became aware of a red light swinging down into the road—a railway-crossing. He threw himself forward on the gear and with a grinding roar the brakes took hold. Plunging and shuddering, the car stopped dead, its forward lamps jingling against the warning bar.
With the sudden stop Harry lurched forward. And, curiously, with the abrupt cessation of motion and roar, the vast, vague distance through which his mind had been shuttling, closed instantly up. The baleful intoxication had lifted as it had come. He did not wake fully at once, for the breaking of the spell left him in a strange confusion through which he saw but dimly the outlines of the real present. He found himself sitting dazed and shaken in his motor—staring at the broad back of his chauffeur beyond which, an isolated point in the darkness of the night, swung the angry red lantern of the crossing. He put a hand to his forehead—what was he doing there?
It was coming back to him. He remembered the straining trial, the hour in his inner office—with the little wall-cabinet! He saw the crowded courtroom, saw himself standing impotent before the bar, saw the despairing face of the man beside him, the puzzled countenances about him, the dim lamps. He heard verdict and sentence. He saw himself turn to gaze into the face of the girl across the court-room—knew the swift rush of the motor, the blazing arc lights and that final stab of realisation!
His lips tightened to shut back something like a groan, as there rushed upon him a sense of horror, of disgust, of shame. The Harry Sevier he had been—the Harry Sevier of good repute, of disdain for the intemperate, of brilliant accomplishment and regular habit, was gazing with horrified eyes at the Harry Sevier he had unwittingly become, the slave of the spirit he had so long invoked, whose coarse debauch had to-day betrayed his client, and sent an innocent man to the wretched cell of a convict!
He spoke. "Bob, where are we?"
The chauffeur stole a quick glance behind him—there was relief in it. "Penitentiary-Crossing, sir," he said. "There's the Black Maria." He pointed to one side, where the gloomy vehicle, a wheeled ark with a narrow barred window set in its rear, waited with its patient mules.
The train was at the crossing now and the rumble of the brakes swelled to a vibrant screech, the long dotted line of dimly-lighted windows shuddering to a stop right athwart the road. A train-man with a lantern jumped down, followed by a couple of passengers. Harry opened the door of the tonneau and suddenly conscious that he was stiff and aching in every joint, achieved the ground and took a step toward the train.
Two figures just then emerged from the glare. He saw that they were linked together by a wrist and as the coat of one blew aside, the lights of the motor glinted from a nickel star—the badge of a deputy-sheriff. They had passed him, and the train was moving again to thechug-chugof the engine, when the officer turned back, biting the end from a cigar.
"Could you give me a light?" he asked.
"Certainly." Sevier took a silver match-box from his pocket.
The other struck the match, hauling irritably at his lagging prisoner, and the red light, flaring up, for an instant showed the two faces, the sheriff's grim and tenacious, and the one beside it—a white, dogged face, with red-rimmed eyes and a shock of sand-coloured hair.
Sevier shrank as though at a blow in the face. He drew a sharp breath, for the sight pierced to the excoriate spot that lay like a live coal in his soul. There before him stood his client of that day's trial, on the last lap of his dismal journey, the man whom he, Harry Sevier, had sent there! Back of this man of the law, with his gleaming star and pocket revolver, he saw himself standing, the real mainspring of that blatant enginery.
The flare of the match fell. "Well, good night to you," said the deputy-sheriff.
"Hold on," said Harry. "Can a prisoner use money?"
"They're not supposed to, but I reckon money talks as loud in a concrete cell as anywhere else."
Sevier had taken some crisp yellow-backs from his pocket and now he held them out—to the jailbird. "Here!" he said. "Take this."
The other looked at the bills with a suddenly contorted face, then with a whirl of his unfettered hand dashed them on the ground. "Keep your money!" he snarled. "I'm a thief—that's whatIam now! When I want money I'll steal it!"
The sheriff made an exclamation, and jerked viciously on the tethered wrist. "Don't you mind, sir," he said. "You mean it well, but this is an ugly one. Lord love you, they'll soon take that out of him over there! Come along, you," he added to the other, pulling him toward the Black Maria, "and if you open your face like that I'll give you what for!"
Sevier stood an instant looking dully after them, then mechanically picked up the fallen bills, fumblingly replaced them in his pocket, and climbed into the motor. He felt his face suddenly hot. In those flung words his judicial mind recognised the indictment. From the little wall-cabinet in his inner-office had crept a thing of shame and humiliation to himself. He saw this now suddenly swell and grow—as did the vapour from the fisherman's cruse—to a blighting, tentacled thing, reaching interminably into the future, holding in its coils a human life of pain, of desperate warfare, of social outlawry.
He sat down on the leather cushions like one in a dream.
"Home now, Bob," he said, heavily.
At Midfields that evening the late moonlight poured a flood of radiance on the wide columned porch with its climbing roses where Echo sat on the step, chin in hand, absorbed in her own thought. She was alone. Nancy had slipped off to bed, her mother had retired to her room and her father to the quiet of the library and his reading.
From the kitchens she could hear the muffled clash of table-silver and the strident voice of Aunt Emily the cook, grumbling at Nelson: "Yo'-all hurry erlong wid dem ar fawks, now! Speck ah's gwine wait heah allnight, yo' triflin' trash, yo'? Yo' heah me—yo' ain' blind! What yo' 'spose Marse Bev'lypayyo' fo', anyhow?" From far down the road, beyond the gates, she could hear the faint twang of a guitar and the refrain of strolling, darky voices:
"Reign! Reign! Reign-a mah Lawd!Reign, Marse Jesus, reign!Reign salvation in-a mah soul,Reign, Marse Jesus, reign!"
These died away with the sharp, eager bark of a dog. Then at length distinguishable sounds faded and there was only the deep, somnolent peace of the southern night, with the scent of the roses wreathing the garden with their intense, mystical odour—only the faint stirring of little leaves playing hide-and-seek with their shadows, and the thin, fairy tone-carpet woven by the myriad looms of night insects for near whispers to tread on.
Since that homeward ride she had had no time to ponder upon the event of the day. At dinner the trial had been touched upon but casually. Now that she was alone, however, it had rushed uppermost in her thought. It was not that Harry Sevier had lost the verdict: but his speech had seemed to her, in the tension of the crisis, with a man's honour and liberty at stake, inconsequential and almost flippant. And in the measure of her disappointment she had realised anew the depth of her regard for him. Again and again she pictured the scene in the courtroom but each time her thought returned upon itself, baffled and puzzled.
At length, with a long breath that was almost a sigh, she stirred, and rising, passed into the library where the Judge sat in the arm-chair by his reading lamp. "You're a disgraceful night-owl," she said, "and I refuse to keep you in countenance any longer."
He smiled at her. "That's right, Sorrel-Top! It's time for beauty-sleep if you and Nancy are off to ride in the morning. Just give me my eye-shade, will you, before you go?"
She brought the green crescent and snapped it on his forehead. "There! You haven't told me how you like my dress to-night. It's a new one."
He looked. "It's beautiful."
She turned about before him. "I do choose well sometimes, don't I?"
"You do everything well, my dear." In his tone now was a quaint and curious humility which always touched her when she discerned it—something of utter fondness and dependance—and she smoothed his iron-grey hair, one of her characteristic endearments, as she kissed him good night.
Upstairs Echo opened the door of her room softly. It was hung in blue—that shade which one sees in a Gainsborough ribbon, a Romney sash or a Reynolds sky—and its furniture was of simple white, with large pink dahlias trailing over the chintz window-curtains and chair-cushions. In the dim night-light the triple mirror of the dresser reflected the carven four-post bed, in one of whose pillows Nancy's dark head was already buried.
"Is that you, Echo?"
"Yes, it's I. Were you asleep already?"
"Almost," yawned Nancy. "Ishallbe in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Has Chilly come home yet?"
"No, not yet."
"Do you think he's really at the club, Echo?"
"Of course I do."
"Men are so queer!" sighed Nancy, drowsily. "We had such a lovely evening—all except Chilly's not being there."
Echo slipped off her gown and drew out the pins from her hair, letting it fall in a shimmering cloud to her waist. Then in the moon-light she drew a deep chair before the open window and began to brush out that wonderful mass of stirring gold that curled and waved about her bare, round shoulders. Below her the garden lay, a mass of olive shadows, wound in cloudy golds and misty greens, sprinkled with moon-dust and drenched with the dizzying scent of roses and honeysuckle. All was lapped in the utter quiet of the night—only the swift wing of a night-bird shook the darker clump of ivy that marked the sun-dial. A long time she sat there, the brush parting and smoothing the bronze mesh with long sweeping movements, gazing into the whisper-haunted gloom and listening to the measured breathing of the girl behind her that seemed to form a rhythmical current for her own thoughts.
All at once in the hush there came the clashing of the gate at the foot of the drive and jovial "good-byes," mingled with a hilarious voice asseverating that its owner had had "the time of his young life."
She bit her lip. "It's Chilly!" she whispered, with a frowning look over her shoulder.
She listened intently. There was the crunch of an uncertain step on the gravel, the sound of a stumble from the porch—then the slamming of the front door.
The dulled sound reverberated through the old house. It roused Nancy and she sat upright in the drift of silken coverlets, her eyes heavy with sleep. "Is it Chilly?"
"Yes. He has just come in."
"Is he—?"
"I'm afraid so, dear."
The younger girl caught her breath. "Oh, I hope your father has gone to bed. He's so hard on him!"
Echo turned. "How can he be otherwise?" she said, sadly. "It's so often and often it happens, nowadays. Won't you try and influence him? He cares for you, darling!"
Nancy's hands were clasped tight about her knees. She stirred uneasily. "How can I, Echo? A boy has to have a little bit of a good time once in awhile. I wouldn't want him to be a molly-coddle! He won't be any the worse for it when he gets older and settled down."
"The worse for it!" The words fell sadly. "Don't you think he is the worse for it already? He's making no progress with his law-study and he's been two years out of college, now. There's nothing to blame but his drinking—and the company he keeps. What will be the end of it? Oh, Nancy, you have a responsibility. Every woman has with some one man. If women only wouldn't countenance it as they do!"
"But, Echo—you talk as if Chilly was—as if you thought he was doing something disgraceful. Why, he's a gentleman; hecouldn'tbe anything but that, no matter what he did!"
Echo came to the bed and sat down beside the other. In her filmy night-gown, wound in the mist of her loosened gold shadowed hair she looked like some ethereal thing in the moonlight.
"Ah, that's just what so many say! That a gentleman is a gentleman whether he is drunk or sober! It's not so with other things. Is a gentleman a gentleman whether he lies, or cheats at cards, or not? Isn't there to be any standard, really? Don't you see that there never will be any penalty—as far as drinking is concerned—until womenmakeit? Listen, Nancy. The year I came out, I went to a dance—my first big one. There was a boy there who followed me about all over the floor. He wanted me to dance with him, and he was—he could hardly walk. At first I was frightened, but at last I grew angry. I asked a lady why he was not asked to leave the floor. She seemed quite astonished and indignant. 'But,' she said, 'don't you know who heis? That's the son of General Moultrie!' It was Cale Moultrie. You know what became of him, don't you?"
"Yes." Nancy's voice was muffled. "But Chilly—"
"Oh, my dear, there was a time when Cale drank no more than the others, and everybody liked him—as they do Chilly. It's coming to be the same with him, I'm afraid. There's no penalty for him yet because he's Chisholm Allen—because he's father's son!"
She stopped, caught by the sound of a sob. In another moment her arms were around the frail little body and the flower-like face was pressed hard against her breast.
"I don't care if heisd-d-dissipated," said Nancy passionately. "I'd rather have him come to me d-d-drunk than any other man sober! He's just Ch-Ch-Chilly, all the same!"
On the ground floor of the old house all was silent save in the dining-room, where a single electric bulb threw into garish relief the dismantled table with a bowl of fern glowing like a fountain of emeralds against the dark wood. It lighted the Chippendale sideboard, before which Chisholm Allen confronted old Nelson, the butler. A cut-glass decanter of sherry was in one hand; the other was alternately fumbling uncertainly with the stopper and pushing back the persuasive fingers of the aged negro. His straw hat was tipped awry, his face was flushed and his eyes unnaturally bright. He was laughing immoderately.
"You old black stick-in-the-mud!" he said. "What's the matter with you? Thinkyouown that decanter, eh? Well, you don't, not by a long shot.Ido—Chris'mas present from the Duchess. Hope to die if it wasn't. Leggo, you virtuous old chicken-thief, and give me a tumbler!"
"Now, Marse Chilly!" The low voice was deprecating and appealing, and there was love in it too—the deep, changeless affection of the old-time negro for his white master. "Yo'knowsyo' don' want no mo' dat ar. Yo' done had er plenty at dat ole club down town. Ef yo' tuck away any mo' now, yo' gwine have er haid lak er rainbar'l on yo' shouldahs in dee mawnin'! Yo'knowsyo' is!"
Chilly's hand dragged at the black detaining fingers. "What doyouknow about heads? Take your fool hands away, I tell you! I'm only going to take a couple of swallows."
"Ahknows dem ar swallers," pleaded the old man. "Yo' go erlong tuh baid. Hit's long pas' midnight. Marse Bev-ly's in dee lib'ry."
"Oh bother!" said Chilly irreverently. "He's gone to bye-bye long ago. Shut your face or you'll wake him up."
"Fo' deeLawd, Marse Chilly!" stuttered the old man. "Ah heahs him comin'now! Ah sho' does!"
"You can't bamboozle me!" laughed Chilly. "Old Huckleberry's been snoozing this hour! If he does come, you and I'll drink his health. Eh? Wonder what he'd say!"
He was not to be left in doubt, for at the moment the hall-door opened. His father stood on the threshold. He was dressed and the green eyeshade was on his forehead.
"We will dispense," he said in a tone of quiet hardness, "with a ceremony which, however filial, is somewhat ill-timed. Nelson, I think you needn't wait up any longer."
"Yas, Marse Bev'ly. Yas, suh." The old man went to the door, hesitated and came back. "Is yo' sho' yo' don' want nothin' else, Marse Bev'ly?"
"Nothing further, Nelson."
"Yas, suh. Good night, Marse Bev'ly. Good night, Marse Chilly." This time he went out, closing the door behind him with exaggerated caution.
"Come now, Judge," said his son, still mirthfully. "There's no masonic funeral going on in the bungalow, is there? Can't one have a harmless night-cap without being excommunicated?"
His father looked at him from under the green shade with gloomy disapproval. The address did not tend to mend matters; his son was wont to reserve the judicial title for moods of especial mellowness such as to-night's. He noted the flushed face and sparkling eyes, the general air of goodnatured recklessness that so clearly spoke the nature of the other's evening's pleasure.
"We'll discuss that to-morrow." He crossed to the wall and laid his hand on the electric switch. "Good night."
Chisholm still smiled without apparent resentment. "I guess you weren't ever as young as I am, Judge, anyway. You seem to think I'm a rotten bad lot just because I like to take a glass now and then and go out with the boys. You drinkyourmint-julep all right enough. And I'll bet whoever you had to dinner to-night took as much as I've had under my vest. The only difference isIhaven't had any dinner. It does make a difference, I assure you."
His father's hand was still extended to the wall. "I said good night, Chisholm."
Chilly shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, what's the use?" he said listlessly, and went unsteadily out by the rear door.
The Judge snapped off the switch, and putting out the light in the library, ascended the stair. The hard look had deepened on his face. As he gazed at that nonchalant epitome of ribaldry he had thought of other men who had so often been grouped about the table in that room—men of tempered habit, of standing and achievement. His own son had contempt for such company. It bored him. He preferred to "go out with the boys" and to come home in the small hours—as he had to-night. So he was thinking as he entered the room above. There he stopped in surprise, for across the threshold stood his wife. She was in her night-gown, over which she had thrown a robe of pale crêpe with lace at the neck and wrists. Her face showed a heightened colour and her lips were trembling. He drew forward a chair.
"I thought you were asleep long ago," he said.
She declined the seat with a gesture. "I heard your voices. What did you say to Chilly?"
"I said 'Good night,'" he answered heavily. "That was about all."
Her lip curled. The glance she gave him was critically cold. When she married Beverly Allen she had loved him—in so far as she had been capable of loving. To her marriage had meant the assumption of woman's predestined place in the social fabric, the inevitable change of habit which time brings to all, with its widened orbit and opportunities. She had been drawn to him by every instinct of selection which took count of name, standing, worldly endowment and mental equipment; but there had been behind it no throb of maidenly impulse, no thrill of the great current that feeds the romance of the world. The one point at which life for her caught and focused had been the son, whose misconduct stood so sharply out against the spotless Allen name. He was her one weakness, her love for him an unreasoning passion that had swayed her from his birth. To her his transgressions showed as venial, his delinquencies as but the forgivable errors of youth. The few instances in which he had been openly called to task by his father had been sharpened in the latter's memory by her resentment. But on none of these occasions had her husband seen her so moved as now. He did not know that for many minutes she had stood on the dark landing listening to the murmurous voices, and that now she resented what seemed to her a deliberate evasion. She spoke with slow, even point:
"As a monologist Chilly is a distinct surprise. Was he saying 'good night' also?"
Under the unaccustomed anger of her voice the Judge's pale face flushed. He took off the eyeshade and set it on the table, as he replied evenly:
"Chilly is not himself to-night, Charlotte. Does it matter particularly what he said?"
Beneath his voice now there was a kind of subterranean compassion, a note almost of entreaty, as though in this trouble that touched them both he could have wished to comfort her, if, indeed, she had made that possible.
She made an involuntary movement—not a sign that a chord had been touched, but rather a mark of agitation. Chilly was the one subject upon which she could not bring to bear the tempered reason which otherwise marshalled her even life. It seemed to her now that she was being thrust aside, in the interest of some new plan of discipline and coertion. She turned swiftly on her husband.
"I suppose you think it should make no difference to me!" Her eyes blazed. "You are so sure you understand Chilly! You—his father—have you ever really known him all his life? Does he ever come to you when he is in trouble or needs advice?"
Her voice held a bitter sarcasm and again the flush swept up the Judge's pale face. But his voice was emotionless as he said, "Chilly never felt the need of advice from any one. He goes his own sweet way."
"That is just it!" she said. "You set yourself so far above him. You have such a contempt for his pleasures and so thoroughly despise the company he keeps. Suppose he has a taste for liquor. He is still a gentleman, I believe. But you, with your solemn rectitude and your touch-me-not self-righteousness—you would drive him to the very people and places he ought to keep away from!"
He stared at her. "I have never regarded my repugnance to his habits as inducing him to further excesses," he said slowly. "Nor have I set myself up as preacher. Perhaps I have never understood him as—you do. I only know that his ways are not my ways. He has had every advantage that education and environment can confer. He is older than I was when I began practice. But what is he making of his life? He thinks of nothing but playing fast and loose at country-houses and loafing at the club and acting the fop and the fool generally!"
Her shaking hand was plucking at the lace at her throat. His every word had been a live coal laid to her resentment. "Is that the worst you can say of him?" she asked. "Can't you call him sot or black-leg?"
"Not yet." He was feeling now a dull anger at her scorn, at her persistent disapproval. The throb of sympathy he had first felt had been frozen by her icy reproach. "There are other things I wish to be able to say of my son. I want him to be more than a decorative philanderer. I want him to be a man—one to whom men may look for manliness, and women for honour!"
She had grown pale to the lips. "'And women for honour!'" she repeated. "AsIlooked to—you!"
He had flung out his arm with a characteristic gesture, but at her last words it suddenly stiffened and remained, as if it had been frozen in the air. Slowly it dropped at his side as he stared at her with ashen face—a look of shocked and disconcerted inquiry. For the exclamation, as at the swift slash of a blade, had torn away a veil, woven of time and habit, that covered an old wound. For twenty years by tacit consent this hidden thing of the past had never been acknowledged by any word or deed between them. Now a single sentence had laid it bare, quick and quivering and mutually confessed. They had been married twenty-two years, and if in that early period he had discerned any lack in her, he had given her no reproaches. On her part, she had fulfilled what she esteemed her whole duty, and in her own mind stood blameless. And he had had his profession. But in the end starved nature had reasserted itself. There had come to him a passion, swift and terrible while it lasted, to which he had surrendered wholly—till death swept it from him. The gall and wormwood had been sweetened then by the birth, in merciful coincidence with that loss, of his twin children. He had thought the episode buried forever from sight and hearing, but a later chance had discovered it to his wife, and in her own immaculateness she had been able neither to forget nor to forgive. It had made no difference in her life before their world. Cold and perfect and correct, she had held her way, but from the day when she had faced him with his secret in her hand, their hearts had been strangers to one another. He had climbed high and she had risen with him. And in twenty years no word had fallen from her lips to open that old tomb—till to-night when the heavy doors swung ajar at the echo of that one exclamation.
"AsIlooked to—you!" There it was—the old ghost, called up to haunt his present as it had waylaid his past. His hand fumbled for the discarded eye-shade and adjusted it as he slowly said:
"I have never counted myself a pattern, Charlotte—least of all for my own son."
She caught the note of pain and weariness now in his voice, and something new and unaccustomed stirred for one brief moment in her heart. She had struck harder than she had intended. But she had lost control at a critical moment and old bitterness, that had never been tinctured with the sweetness of charity and forgiveness, had sharpened her tongue. Now his shocked white face smote her with a sense of self-reproach whose very strangeness threw her momentarily off her poise. For a fleeting second words trembled on her tongue that might have dissolved the icy barrier between them. But the golden second passed.
"That is generous," she said with a distant laugh.
"No doubt Chilly will profit by experience, if not by precept. Shall you be at court to-morrow?"
"Yes," he answered. "I have a hearing."
"You will prefer the horses, then," she said, turning to the door. "I will take the electric for my shopping. Good night."
He opened the door for her. "Good night," he said.
In the silence of the room the Judge stood for a moment with his hand at his lips, as though he tasted blood. The summer night outside was very still. The curtain before one of the windows swayed gently in the air and from the acacia trees on the lawn he could hear the sleepy twitter of an oriole. He turned off the light and went into the hall. There at one side stood the white, panelled door of his wife's room. It was shut. It came to him that it stood for a perfect symbol of that cold immaculateness of hers which had so long denied him the living bread of sympathy. She could forgive anything in her son, but nothing in her husband. For twenty long years they two might have dwelt at opposite ends of the Milky Way, and it seemed to him suddenly monstrous, whatever the cause, whosesoever the fault, that they, being man and wife, should yet be so far apart.
He went slowly down the stair again, his hand, shaking a little, slipping along the polished banister. The dim night-light made the lower hall a place of ghostly shadows. He re-entered the library, moved to the table and turned on the reading-lamp. Then, lifting it to the limit of its silken cord, he threw the electric glow upon the canvas that hung above the mantel, studying it intently.
"Mine!" he muttered, with a sort of fierce satisfaction. "Mine, every inch—mine, not Charlotte's! My blood gave you that curve of brow and those full lips and that deep, dark blue of eye—they are of my side, not of hers! You, at least belong to me!"
He returned the lamp to its place, and turning, cast his glance at the little Italian desk in the corner. His lips trembled. At that desk she had sat—the woman knowledge of whom had sharpened the sword of his wife's never-dying disdain. The woman who had come into his life too late! He thought of their meetings, few enough, indeed. How often he had wondered how life would have turned for him, if at the end she had listened to his desperate pleading, and gone with him along that alluring way that had drawn him like an opal path among Italian asphodels, flinging to the winds social standing, reputation, career, friends, honour, all! If she had said "yes" to that wild letter he had sent her—the one to which she had vouchsafed no reply—which might have been written in his very heart's blood!
He looked again at the painted portrait of Echo, in her splendid youth and clean heritage: the answer was there.
He sat down before the little desk, stretched his arms upon it and bowed his head upon them. "You were right, Eleanor," he sighed. "You were right. But somehow it's been so long!"
He felt a fluttering touch upon his hair and started up. There before him on the desk lay a faded leaf of paper—a page closely written over in twirly, dim writing. He lifted it up and held it to the light, his nostrils catching a scent wraith-frail and delicate, like a dead pansy's ghost—
No—no—no! Why did you write it? Why did you put it into words? For now I must keep it always. I cannot destroy it. YouknewI would not—couldnot—-let you do what you beg me to! Never, never! I am not so mad. Nor are you, really. It is not your best self speaking in this letter. Sometime—
His gaze became fixed. He gave a hoarse cry—a mist was before his eyes. He snatched at the top of the yellowed sheet—it was dated twenty years before, and the hand-writing, how familiar! He laid the leaf flat in the lamp-light and read it through, with every nerve throbbing to a memory that had started afresh, as instinct as though days, not years, had sifted their dust upon it:
Sometime you will thank me—will think of this only as a ghastly indiscretion from which you were caught away in time. We do not make the world we live in, and it is a thousand times stronger than we are. No, if we play the game we must stick to the rules. To think of overstepping that boundary, in such a desperate fashion, gives my fastidious sense a strange recoil—something like that curious shame and confusion that associates itself with a dream in which one finds one's-self scantily clad in the midst of wondering strangers! No—no! I do not think I shall send this letter—but perhaps I may at the end. For I am going away. I sail to-morrow. Shall I see you again—ever—ever? What will you think—
That was all. It broke off abruptly as though the writer had laid it aside, never to be finished.
In the silent library the Judge looked at that mute witness as at one risen from the dead. Twenty years of absence and silence—twenty years out of his ken, save to the thriving memory! For how long the hand that had penned those lines had been dust, yet the poor symbols of ink and paper persisted to confront him now! How had the sheet come to be on that desk that she had bequeathed him? It had not lain there a moment before.
He brought the lamp and examined the desk attentively, pulling out every tiny drawer, sounding each carved partition, twisting and tugging at every projecting portion of the ornamentation. With a thin, metal paper-knife he explored each warp and crevice. But his search was fruitless. If the leaf had slipped from some crack—loosened, perhaps, by the fall of the brass bowl upon it that day—the old desk kept its secret.
A strange feeling stole over him, the feeling of mystery that comes to one with some sudden apposition of incident that thrills with a sense of an overpowering meaning in a circumstance in itself banal and trivial. Something of her proud and passionate spirit she had etched into those lines. Might it be that spirit, somewhere in the great void, reached out to him through this silent witness—to say that love does not wholly die?
He gently spoke her name. "Eleanor! You forgave me for writing—that. If you hadn't you wouldn't have left me this desk when you—died, away over there in Florence! So I've got your letter at last."
He sighed again and groping for his big chair, sat down, with the sheet of paper spread out upon his knee.
On the upper floor Mrs. Allen tapped lightly on Chilly's door and when there was no answer, opened it softly and entered. At the whisper of his name he started up in bed.
"Duchess!" he exclaimed.
The pet name, as always, touched her. It was a perennial tribute to that stateliness and dignity which she had made her own. She came and sat down on the edge of the bed and he caught her hand and held it to his lips. "You shouldn't have come," he chided. "You'll take cold."
"I heard your father talking to you," she whispered. "You—you know what he dislikes so. Why can you not be—discreet?"
Chilly moved uneasily: "Oh, I know," he said. "But I can't always be giving an imitation of a quaker meeting! I'm not a child."
"You must not anger him," she said. "I—for my sake, I wish you would be more careful."
He patted her hand. "All right, Duchess! I'll mind my p's and q's. But you must go back to bed now. Don't you worry about me."
She bent down and kissed him on the forehead before she glided from the room.
"Here is the new rose," said Echo. "Its name is the Laurant Carle."
Cameron Craig looked—at her, not at the blossom. She was in simple white and as she stood there in the perfumed garden, vivid, elemental, tuned to the wonder and passion of living, her slim figure outlined against the dark green shrubbery and her face and gold-bronze hair touched with the slanting sunlight, she seemed herself some great, rare, golden flower in a silver sheath. Lines he had somewhere read sprang into his mind:
"Bring me my bow of burning gold,Bring me my arrows of desire,"
and, contained man that he was, he caught his breath at the sudden leap in him of the thing that had been covered and hidden there so long, something fine and keen as flame, that set his habitually cool blood beating under his eyelids.
"It was not the rose," he said. "I had another reason in asking you to come here."
"Yes?" Her voice was evenly inquiring.
"It was to ask you if you will marry me."
She took a quick step backward; a look of amaze had sprung to her face. "I?" she exclaimed. "You want me to—marryyou?"
"Yes. Is there anything strange in that?"
She looked away. In all her thoughts of the man before her there had not lurked this possibility. She had been bred among youth who, whatever their other vices, maintained a chivalric ideal of womankind which excluded fast-and-loose conduct; and the whispers that clung about Cameron Craig—set, as they were, over against his force and undeniably brilliant attainments—had lent her opinion of him a certain cold contempt. And now here he was—he of all men!—saying this to her! And it was no hasty impulse: she read that in the steady, confident eyes, the hard, heavy jaw, the steadfast, deep-lined face.
She felt his waiting gaze. "No," she answered, slowly. "Perhaps it is not strange. It is only that the unexpected seems so." She looked at him curiously. "Why did you ask me—to-day?"
"The opportunity came," he said. "It must have, sooner or later."
"So you have intended for some time to say this to me?"
"Since I first met you, a year ago," he answered. "You have two things that I want—as I have their complements."
She considered this a moment. "Forgive me," she said then, "but I am a very curious person—as well, it seems, as a very blind one. Would you mind telling me what are those two qualities that you imagine I possess, which you value so highly?"
"Breeding, first," he replied, "and all that it implies. You represent a stock."
She nodded gravely. "And the other desideratum?"
"Beauty. You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen."
"And—the complements of these things, that you possess?"
"Money," he answered. "And the power it gives—the accessories which a woman like you must have if she would really live. I think you don't doubt that my wife shall have these things."
She shook her head. "Not in the least. Indeed, I am sure she will. But you see, Mr. Craig, I happen to be not at all the sort of person you think I am—the kind you wish to marry."
"I'll risk that!" he flung her.
"The proof is that you ask me—as you have. The things you have to offer seem overwhelmingly attractive to you, no doubt, but I'm afraid they mean much less to me." He could not see the look that was in her face now, for her head was turned away. "I have no longing for money. I could be contented in a mountain lean-to, with morning-glories instead of an orchid conservatory. I could cook my own meals on a gas-stove and live in one room over a hardware store—with the man I loved. I don't care particularly for what you call 'place' either. I could be happy enough on a prairie—with the man I loved. But love must be there, Mr. Craig."
"Do you doubt my love for you?" he asked.
"You had not cited it," she rejoined, calmly. "You spoke of money first—"
"Because I have lived long enough to know that it is the paramount requisite in most women's eyes."
"Your estimate of me by the mass was flattering," she said with gentle satire. "Have you been so busy making this wonderful money of yours that you think it can take the place of everything?"
He made an abrupt, almost angered, gesture. "Surely you know money means—has meant—nothing to me!" he exclaimed. "I am rich, yes. I dare say I could buy and sell almost any one you know. But it was never the main thing. It waswinningthat counted. It was the game, and money was only the counters. I played to win and I have won. And wealth was a stepping-stone to other things."
His voice had subtly altered and he drew closer to her where she stood, moveless and straight against the dark foliage, her gaze averted. "Then—I met you! I have known many women, but they have been nothing, less than nothing, to me! Business has been the only thing that really counted. But since I met you, the whole world has been changing for me. Even my work isn't the main thing to me any more. The main thing isyou!"
She lifted her eyes, wide with the swift sense of the unexpected—touched now with an odd, disquieting prescience. His voice was no longer the cold, even voice of the Cameron Craig she had known. There was passion in it. She saw his big hand tremble.
"There has never been a day or hour since then when I have not wanted you! You have entered into my blood and my brain, and the want of you has coloured all I have thought and done! If this is love, then I love you—Echo, Echo!"
She shrank perceptibly at the name on his lips. "Stop!" she said. "The love you talk of must be mutual. I do not—care for you in that way. I never could!"
"That makes no difference to me!" he protested. "I know what I want—I always have. And I want you."
"No," she said. "It is not the realmethat you want, but we can pass that by. The important fact is that you have offered your last price and the bid is declined."
He looked at her with a sudden flash in his eyes. "Do I deserve that?" He had grown pale to the lips.
"Yes, you do. I have told you that I should never love you. Yet that means less than nothing to you. You have apparently not considered my possible love as a requisite in the case. It is 'breeding' you want, and beauty—and for that you make your offer. You propose purchase, not exchange, Mr. Craig. Well, I am not for sale!"
He flushed to his hair a dark, heavy red. He appeared to be controlling himself by a fierce effort. "Don't answer me now," he said. "Let me speak to you again later."
"I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all. You will please consider it final."