"I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all. You will please consider it final""I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all. You will please consider it final"
"I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all. You will please consider it final""I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all. You will please consider it final"
A whirl of what seemed almost rage shook him; with a single stride he reached her and seized both her hands. "Is there—another man?" There was what startled her now in the harsh, hard voice.
She stiffened. "Well," she said, "—and if there is?"
At the chill quiet of her voice all the vicious strength and intolerance of the man blazed out. "You are right!" he said savagely. "It could make no difference to me! I will not take your answer—do you understand? In time you will give me a different one. I have waited for other things and I have had them in the end. I can wait for you!"
He released her hands—so violently that she fell back a step. Then, while she stood regarding him in shocked and indignant amaze, summoning all her forces to meet this fury that had both astonished and repelled her, his face swiftly changed. The flush of anger ebbed, the flash died in his eyes.
Once again his accustomed self, with the steady, confident eyes and swing of shoulder, he drew aside to let her pass and followed her along the box-bordered path to the piazza.
As they entered the blue-parlour, a lady very smart in black-and-white, and a sailor-hat whose girlish brim youthened her mature beauty, rose from her seat with Mrs. Allen and Nancy Langham, Echo's house-guest, a slight, glowing girl of nineteen, with eyes like marigolds in shade.
"Well, Echo," she said, "I thought you neverwouldappear. I just ran in to remind you that you and Nancy promised to come to my dinner to-night at the 'Farm.' I've asked some of the youngsters out for a little dance afterward." She smiled a brilliant recognition to the heavy figure behind her.
"Mr. Craig!" she exclaimed. "So you are in town! How nice it would be of you to come too. Or do you find country-club gaieties too stale and unprofitable?"
He bowed over her hand. "My dear Mrs. Spottiswoode!" he said. "This is my lucky day! I shall be more than delighted!"
The "Farm," as the Country-Club was popularly known to its habitués, was a long, three-storied structure of red brick on the selvedge of the southern suburb, set in a grove of maple trees facing a lake whose still depths were stirred by budding water-lilies, like the breasts of young girls. With its golf-links, and tennis-courts and its ball-room which formed an L at one side, its white, balustraded verandahs, it was the favoured resort of both the frivolous and athletic; its monthly dances were the gayest of the season's informal functions and on Saturday evenings its row of little dining-rooms, that looked out on a gentle slope of shrubbery and gravelled walks pricked out with paper lanterns, were favourite resorts for small dinner-parties.
Mrs. Spottiswoode's dinners were apt to have a pleasurable sprinkling of youth and sobriety and to-night the dozen of the younger set found sufficient foil in the fashionable rector of St. Andrews in clerical dress relieved only by the tiny amethyst cross that swung upon his waistcoat—in Senator Peyton, party-whip at Washington and one of the state's distinguished citizens, with piercing sword-grey eyes under brows as black as midnight—and finally in Cameron Craig.
As Echo Allen had said to her father, the latter was not "one of them." The phrase to her had been an instinctive expression of that subtle sense of caste that had been born in her, springing from long lines of gentle ancestors that linked back beyond the days of the Old Dominion. But the distinction lay deep in the mental formula of the man: it was not to be perceived in externals. To-night, in his faultless evening-dress, with his keen, strong face and assured manner, he had an air even of distinction that well became him, and the instant's painful embarrassment that Echo felt as her hand touched his in their first greeting yielded quickly to an unwilling admiration of his poise and control. If that flare of passion in the garden had left its traces, they had been successfully covered. He was once more the Cameron Craig she had known—till yesterday.
But beneath that unruffled exterior Craig's every pulse was in tumult. At table he found himself opposite Echo. The decorations were red roses and in a ruby gown with a single rose in the coil of her tawny hair, she seemed to him an inherent part of the scheme, a ruby pendent to the rich, shimmering setting. There had been many women to whom he had been passingly attracted—his tastes had been catholic enough in that regard! But he had never seen one whom he had wished to marry. He had spoken truly when he said that the women he had known had really meant nothing to him. His licenses had been but incidents after all. They had not ministered to the mental side of his nature, whereas this passion had taken swift and complete possession. As he saw her now, her cheeks flushing to the glow of the candles and her eyes like softly lighted sapphires, he felt open wide within him an abyss that thronged thick with distempered imaginings. There was another man! She had not denied it. And with the thought there grew in him a slow, cold hatred and determination.
Yet his face, as Echo glanced across the roses, betrayed no sign of disquiet. He was apparently listening amusedly to the small-talk of his partner, Nancy Langham, in a gown of pale gauze that made her look like a small, eager tiger-lily caught in a hampering cloud. In the interstices of conversation Echo could catch whiffs of her laughing nonsense:
"Isn't Dr. Custis quitewickedlyhandsome for a rector! I've been instructednotto ask him if he is related to Martha Washington. The man across from Mrs. Spottiswoode is Richard Brent, he is 'The Herald,' and a power in the community, I believe. Our hostess is wearing the new wave; it costs a lot, but they say it's guaranteed to last six months. And to think," she sighed, "that Melissa, my maid, spends a dollar a week trying to have her wool ironedstraight! The man with the goatee, who looks so Spanishy, is Mr. Horace Leighton, the New York artist who is doing the mural paintings for the new City Hall here."
"So there isn't any one here who isn't anybody!" Craig observed.
"Only me," she said. "The reason I'm asked is because I'm frivolous. I'm supposed to offset the feast of reason with bubbles and froth."
"At any rate," remarked the senator, "seriousness is not to fall in arrears. Down at the other end they have actually got to politics."
Echo's glance followed his. Their hostess was holding a glass of wine between her eye and the candle-light, which splashed a bright crimson ray on her pretty face. It was the rector who was speaking:
"As for myself, I'm afraid I'm a friend to all the old, hackneyed arguments. 'If meat maketh my brother to offend,' you know." He pointed to his wine-glass, which, with the arrival of the soup, he had turned upside-down. "You see I am consistent."
"Politics?" queried Echo. "It seems to be only teetotalism."
"Ah," the senator answered, "but it's coming to be the same thing nowadays."
"One understands the individual objection on moral grounds," said Mrs. Spottiswoode. "That's a matter of personal belief and conscience. And the Church must be above criticism—must take the sterner course. But for those of us who don't think it wrong, the other arguments seem so—so local. I suppose drinking does keep the negroes from doing as much work as they might, but it's hard on the rest of us to have to cut our cloth by the farmer's pattern! We here, for example, at this table, are to go without our sauterne because he has trouble in getting in his tobacco."
"Exactly," agreed the churchman. "The greatest good of the greatest number. And isn't that true democracy, after all? But of course the agricultural problem is the least of it—there are the figures of poverty and crime. The two are twin-brothers, of course. And drink is the father of them both. Will, character, determination—a man with these may overcome the habit. But these are just the qualities that men in the mass lack. When a weak man falls our system keeps him down. I once heard Thomas Malcolm—every one here knows of him and his work, I presume—say that for the average drunkard to reform with a saloon on every corner is about as easy as to hoist one's-self out of hell by one's boot-straps. I'm inclined to think he is right. And I never saw a drunkard yet—a real Simon-pure drunkard, I mean; not a mere sophomoric tippler—who wouldn't jump at the chance to reform if he could. But he has no more chance of winning out now than a gambler against loaded dice." He paused, with a little gesture. "But then," he added, "the modern political movement for prohibition has made every one familiar with the basic arguments."
Treadwell, spruce young corporation attorney and cotillon leader, looked up interestedly from the other end of the table; the hostess's fan had begun to flutter—a sign of agitation. For Cameron Craig's affiliations with the great Trust were well-known, though presumably not to the clergyman, who had met him for the first time that evening. Craig, however, seemed quite unconscious of personal implications.
"Do you seriously think, sir," he asked, with the faintest trace of irony, "that the statistics of crime would be materially lowered in your state if it went 'dry' next year?"
"I do," replied the rector with emphasis. "And not only lowered. They would be practically wiped out. There wouldn't be enough left to constitute an item in the appropriation for public printing."
"Naturally, however," Craig observed, "as the state has always been 'wet,' exact data is lacking to assist one's speculations."
"On the contrary," said the other. "Every jail furnishes them. I think," he went on, turning now to Treadwell, "that it is the experience of every criminal lawyer that liquor, in some phase or other, has been back of the larger proportion of cases he is called on to defend."
The young man nodded. "I never had any experience in criminal cases," he said, "but I should think you were not far wrong. What do you say, Brent?"
"I agree with you," the journalist answered, "but my view of course is a superficial one. It is a pity that Harry Sevier isn't here; we should have got a valuable opinion."
"You may be gratified then," said the hostess. "Though Mr. Sevier couldn't come to dinner, he will be here for the dancing."
The senator spoke. "Sevier! I heard him in court yesterday."
"So did I," commented Nancy, aside. "I gave up an auction-bridge for it, and I wish I hadn't. It wasn't exciting at all."
Mrs. Spottiswoode looked relief—at last the talk had shifted to safe ground. "He lost the case, I hear," she said. "I wonder what was the matter. Wasn't he in good form?"
The senator looked thoughtful. "In one way, yes," he replied judicially. "I confess, though, I had rather expected something different, but just what I scarcely know."
Nancy turned her small, piquant face. "Iknow. We all expected Mr. Sevier to do what he has done so often—but didn't to-day. Oh," she exclaimed almost angrily, "while he was talking along, like a machine, I could have shaken him!"
"Thatwouldhave furnished the sensation!" said Treadwell. "And I should think it might have had its effect on the jury, too. Juriescanbe intimidated. I wish you had tried it."
She made a little face at him across the nodding roses, then turned more earnestly to her partner. "I don't know anything about court matters or criminal trials, but from where I sat I could see the man he was defending. He looked so hopeless and—scared! I wanted to stand up and scream across the room: Can't yousee? Look at the poor thing there! Make the juryfeel! You were thinking the same thing too, Echo, I could see it in your face."
Echo lifted her eyes. In the candle-light her cheek held a rising flush. She looked across at the rector. "What do you think, Dr. Custis?" she asked, evenly.
He responded promptly. "Perhaps the explanation isn't so far afield. I presume the man had confessed to him and Sevier knew he was guilty."
Echo was conscious of a wave of relief at an explanation so simple and credible. It had never occurred to her to question the accuracy of other verdicts Harry had won in the past. Each had seemed to her the triumph of a just cause over a baleful combination of circumstance, the brilliant freeing of truth and innocence from entangling error and maleficent scheming. But if this man was guilty and Harry had known it beyond question, what other outcome had been possible? At the moment she saw in that even, cold presentation of the court-room only the conscientious determination of the lawyer, who, as the law prescribed, stood by his client to demand that justice, if she must exact her penalty, prove conclusively every jot and tittle of her ground.
Craig's eyes had been regarding her steadily. With the spreading of that flush upon her cheeks a covert, laughing allusion that had come to his ear on the court-house steps on the day of the trial darted to his mind. A cool, keen certainty rushed through him. Sevier! Fool that he was not to have thought of him before! This youngflâneur—and drunkard!—this petty trifler with his profession! Was that white indignation of the garden, this vivid flush, forhim? He leaned forward, his heavy voice, intense and well modulated, addressed the clergyman:
"An interesting hypothesis, but the implication seems hardly safe. A lawyer's responsibility to his client is a very grave one. He owes none toward the commonwealth—the state's attorney takes care of that. Any less conventional view should appeal to a lawyer, I think, as dangerous and uncalled-for."
"What do you fancy was responsible for Sevier's method of defence in this case?" asked the rector.
There was an instant of blank silence. The conversation had absorbed the lesser talk and other voices were hushed. Craig's look was set upon the long oval damask with its glistening silver and baskets of brilliant fruit, its leaf thin glasses with languid beads rising in their liquid amber, its knots of fern and bonbons. His big fingers were twisting the stem of a goblet. When he spoke it was as though he had not heard the question.
"I attended a trial once," he said, "at a frontier town in the far southwest, a border community where procedure is very primitive. The man was charged with murder. He was a school-master, I believe, and in a quarrel with some local bully or other, had killed him. I was in the place on some land-business and went to the trial for mere amusement. The whole neighbourhood was there. Both men, it appeared, had been in their cups, and self-defence seemed an adequate plea. Acquittal was regarded as fairly certain—the more so as the District Attorney was the bosom-friend of the accused man, and everybody knew it. There was almost no attempt at evidence, which didn't seem surprising under the circumstances, and the state made the baldest farce of its cross-examination. The real interest came after a rather long recess that preceded the final speeches. The prisoner's counsel was a young man with a rough, direct address that caught the people. He had them pretty well with him, too, and when he sat down there seemed very little reason why the jury should even leave the box. The speech had been a fairly long one and as it had grown dark, candles had been brought in and set about—two on the judge's desk and some on the tables."
Echo repressed a start. It had come to her suddenly that there was a significance in what he was saying—a suggestion that a quick clairvoyant sense told her was principally for her. In the few words he had, with apparent unintention, sketched the actual scene in the court-room of the day before, and while reversing its elements, was picturing, in unfamiliar guise, its identical situation. She felt her face slowly harden, and turned her profile toward him, her hand playing with a spray of fern beside her plate.
"During the whole speech the District Attorney had sat in his chair, with his chin in his collar and his eyes closed, never moving. When his turn came he didn't rise; in fact, it was clear that he had been asleep. A laugh went round and the sheriff put a hand on his shoulder and shook him. He got up, looking confused, and while he blinked at the candles, some one in the audience called out, 'Never mind, old man. If you can't make a speech, recite a poem.' It was curious, but the remark seemed to give him a clue, and he began to recite Hood'sEugene Aram."
Craig paused a moment and sipped from his wine-glass. All at the table were leaning forward intently. Treadwell was frowning at his plate. No one spoke; only a fork, dropped from Nancy Langham's fingers, rattled against the cloth.
"It was a strange sight," went on Craig, "and one I have always remembered. You must picture the crowded court-room, the gloom, the flaring candles, and the whole uncanny episode, to realise the effect that was produced. The man was by nature a marvellous actor—he would have made his fortune on any stage. At first it seemed as if he didn't know quite where he was, but then the ballad itself gripped him and he rendered it, acting each line, as I never heard it before or since. I had never realised what was in that poem. Very few there, I suppose, had ever heard it in their lives, and they listened in a fascinated silence while he rolled it out to the last line.
"'Two hard-faced men set out from Lynn,Through the rain and heavy mist,And Eugene Aram walked betweenWith gyves upon his wrist.'"
He paused again. "Oh, finish!" gasped Nancy Langham. "I don't like that story. What then?"
"When he ended he walked out of the court-room without waiting for the verdict."
Echo's head turned toward him. "They found him guilty!" exclaimed Mrs. Spottiswode.
"Yes."
"And you say the District Attorney was his best friend?" asked the artist.
"So I was told."
"And yet wanted to convict him?"
Craig shook his head. "No, I didn't say that."
"Then what," inquired the rector, "do you take it, inspired him to such an extraordinary action?"
"Oh," said Craig, and as he spoke, for the first time he looked full at Echo. "It all came out afterward. He didn't realise what he was doing. He was drunk."
For an instant Echo's breath stopped. In the unexpected dénouement she had guessed, as at a lightning-flash, Craig's real purpose. Sharply, baldly introduced, the tale stood forth intrusive and malicious, an implied slur upon a man who was not present to refute it. Her whole being flooded with fierce resentment, mingled with an angry amaze that of all there no one else seemed to have caught the insinuation. To the rest it had been at most agaucherie, a parallel which, if perhaps not felicitous, had been without significance and would be readily forgotten. Therein lay the added sting, that Craig had so accurately judged the outcome. He had guessed how it stood with her and Harry Sevier, and counting on her keener sensitiveness where the latter was concerned, had barbed his shaft for her alone!
The next instant, however, the tension broke with every one talking at once. From this babble the senator emerged with a negro story about a trial with "exterminatin' circumstances," which brought a ripple of laughter, and presently the hostess gave the rising signal.
The room opened upon the ball-room from whose further end already came the squeak of tuned catgut, and beyond this spread the invitingly cool verandas, now beginning to fill with filmy gowns that showed pallidly against the evening dusk, where the bouquet of masculine segars mingled with the dewed scent of shrubbery. Here in the increasing numbers, unobserved as she thought, Echo stepped down onto the cool dark turf and following one of the little meandering bush-bordered paths, came to a rustic bench over which a paper lantern threw flickering rose-coloured shadows. On this she sat down, struggling to regain her lost composure and grateful for the sense of quiet and the cool inspiration of the water, over whose margin the moonbeams danced in elfish ecstasy.
In another moment, however, the silence was broken. A step sounded on the path, and she looked up to see Craig standing before her.
Echo came to her feet, all her blood on fire. In her resentment it had seemed to her that by very silence she had made herself party to that slur upon the man she loved, and she had been aching fiercely to repel it.
Craig tossed his segar away. He made no apologies for having followed her from the piazza. "May I sit here and talk to you?" he asked.
She remained standing. "Mr. Craig," she said with quiet emphasis, "I am glad you have come to me here. I have something to ask you which I could not have asked you—there."
He bowed and stood waiting.
"I fancied," she went on, "in certain of your remarks at the table a lurking innuendo. It is difficult to reply to such a thing. You would make it possible if you would put it in a more direct form."
"Your own observation does not appear to err in directness," he answered, after a pause. "I am afraid I must ask you to descend to plain English."
"In the course of the dinner you told a story."
"Henceforth I shall congratulate myself on my skill as araconteur." His tone was mildly ironic.
"It seemed to me—and I think I am of average intelligence and not more fanciful than most—that by that story you intended to convey, an insinuation against the reputation of a gentleman whom I do not care to hear maligned."
He looked at her with smouldering eyes. He was feeling admiration for her quick, hot southern blood and resentful spirit. It was part of that splendid type of womanhood that he had determined to make his own. And that it was now displayed in defence of the man whose weakness he despised and whose personality he hated filled him with a dull, glooming fury. His lips twisted. "Maligned?" he repeated, in an accent that was a question.
"That was my word," she said steadily.
"You appear to attach an extraordinary importance to my tale," he retorted, with grim sarcasm.
"Do you deny that therewasinnuendo?"
He smiled. "I can endure even that suspicion, since it is such a compliment to my own subtlety. May I ask, in my turn, in whose interest you so valorously take up the cudgels?"
"Your story directly followed a reference to Mr. Henry Sevier's handling of a case in court here. The unexpected outcome of the trial in your tale was due to the fact that its chief character, though no one realised it, was under the influence of liquor. The implication seemed obvious—that Mr. Sevier was not himself when he conducted his defence."
He shrugged his shoulders. "You are the only one who has drawn such a conclusion?"
Her pale face blazed. "Oh, I understand! You intended the inference for me alone!"
"Well?" he asked, with aggravating calmness.
"Did you insinuate that, or did you not?" Her pent-up anger was tearing now at her self-control.
He laughed, a short, jarring laugh. He felt an insane desire to seize that slender, unyielding body in his great arms, to rain kisses on that vivid, scornful mouth with its short upper lip, and bend or break her like a sapling to his savage will. "Suppose I did," he said stonily. "What then?"
"That was a contemptible act!" The young voice cut like a whip-lash and involuntarily Craig's big fists clenched. "And if I were Mr. Sevier, I would horsewhip you!"
A sound from behind them fell across the surcharged quiet. Both turned astonished faces—Echo's quivering with feeling, Craig's set and stormy—upon the man whose name had just been spoken. Neither had heard his step as he came quickly along the grassy path, nor had Sevier guessed the situation till those pregnant sentences sent the blood from his heart. He had thought the secret of his failure unsuspected. The realisation now that one, at least, had guessed the truth had been instantly swallowed up in the bitter knowledge that it had fallen to her—the one woman in the world—to defend him, who was undeserving!
Craig regarded him with a veiled smile that was half a sneer. The apparition had come at a fateful moment. Then his glance passed to Echo. "May I ask," he said, "whether you have yet cross-examined Mr. Sevier?"
He bowed and went quickly up the path toward the lighted piazzas.
There ensued a silence in which two minds travelled far. Echo had sat down upon the bench, her face averted. Her anger had faded out and her heart was hammering at the thought that Harry had heard, in her defence of him, what was in truth a confession. Across the aching interval broke the wanton bubble of a whip-poor-will.
"Echo—" he said in a muffled voice.
She looked up at him in the feathery light. "You heard—I wish you hadn't. Yet I couldn't help it! That ridiculous slur! But you can't possibly imagine that—that any one who knows you—"
He stopped her with an abrupt gesture. "Wait. I want to—I must tell you something."
"No, no!" she protested. "You shall not! I need no assurance. Do you think that I—"
He shook his head. But for that last sneering look of Craig's, that satiric challenge, he might have maintained a silence that would have seemed to her only a proper pride in himself and a deserved contempt for the whisper of malice. But the look and sneer had flicked him on the raw, had called to some element of naked honesty deep within him. In that second he had known, shame-stricken, that whatever the outcome there could be no evasion between them. There must be the truth. He was no longer what he had thought himself, but he would be no malingerer.
"Thank you," he said, "for that! Yet what Craig wished you to believe—was quite true."
She stared at him unbelievingly. "True!" Her lips formed rather than spoke the word.
"Yes. Iwasunder the influence of liquor. But for that I should have won the case, I believe."
"But," she faltered, "I don't—understand. Why, I never saw you in—that condition in my life! I was there. I—I heard you speak."
"It is not the first time," he said steadily. "Nor the second, nor the third. Liquor helped me to win my cases. I thought I had made it my slave when it had made itself my master. This time it failed me. And I—I failed my client," he added bitterly.
She did not catch the note of pain, of deep contrition in his voice. Her own hurt was too keen. She only heard the high-built structures of her own ideals crumbling down about her feet. "So Craig was right!" she said under her breath.
"Don't think it is easy for me to tell you this," he went on. "It is because I must. All my life I have cared very little what others thought. But—you—I care what you think. I never knew how much till now, when I have thrown your good opinion of me in the dust!" He bent and took her hands. "Echo, is it the death of your ideal of me?"
Her lingers trembled in his grasp. Pictures were flashing before her mind—frost-stung October days when they had galloped with the baying hounds, over the blown, tinted leaves and russet fields—winter skating-parties on the frozen river, summer dances like that of to-night, for which the music was now swinging a hundred yards away—always it had been she and Harry Sevier. He had been so superior to the blandishments of the smaller vices. Others had failed and fallen; only he had remained on his pedestal, a type of brilliant accomplishment. She saw now his success as unenduring, fictitious, his talents besmirched with the vice that was most hateful to her. "Not the first time, nor the second, nor the third!" In their own circle she had seen the dreadful cycle more than once repeated—the slow, baleful fastening of habit, the struggle, the piteous, ignoble yielding and the final slipping down to degraded depths from which there could be no resurrection. There was Chilly, her own twin-brother, with his feet set on the same primrose path. And now was it to be Harry Sevier? She shuddered and drew her hand from his clasp.
"I—see," he said, in a slow, even voice. "You can't trust me." It was not the Sevier that had kissed her hand who spoke now, but one whom that gesture seemed to have flung an infinite distance from her.
"Can you trust yourself?" she asked.
Harry's tongue touched his lips—as it had done in his inner office on the day of the trial, when he stood looking at her picture on his desk. Since that day he had known no breath of the periodic craving. But now, curiously, he felt his mouth growing all at once arid and dry with the old slinking thirst.Couldhe trust himself? The question seemed to thrust itself at him with a malevolent significance. How much of his will had he indeed, surrendered? Did he know?
There rose up suddenly in him a savage resolution. Not another drop upon his lips—never, never! Not for the sake of success, not for his very life, never so long as he lived!
He took her hands in both his own, leaned down and kissed them. Then, without a word he went rapidly from her.
Lawrence Treadwell, the attorney, sat in his office negligently smoking a segar and staring down through the open window upon the busy thoroughfare beneath. Outside was the spring sunshine and the smell of growing trees. Just across from the building stood the city's new Opera House, over whose ambitious entrance was still stretched a canvas sign advertising a mass-meeting held the evening before under the auspices of the Civic Club.
He read the lettering reflectively as he blew out clouds of the fragrant, opalescent incense: "Protest Against Machine-Rule." He smiled. The old revolt of the Quixotic handful against the entrenched forces that had governed the city for a generation—one more of the popular ebullitions which punctuate modern progress, the familiar periodic dust-storms from whose turmoil the Old Guard emerged, moveless as ever in the saddle, to a new campaign dictated by the mighty Over-Lord, the great Public Services Corporation which, through its multiple ramifications, assumed to control the state's franchises, to dictate its significant legislation—even to influence its judiciary. As he read the words on the canvas bellying in the breeze, his smile was cynical.
Yet the smile had a touch of wistfulness too. The movement had grown out of the general unrest, the keener public conscience, that had accompanied the political renaissance that in the past year had been sweeping over a dozen commonwealths. In the old southern city, wherein principles were not yet become mere hypocrisies and folk still preserved old-fashioned political ideals, it had attained to the prestige of well-known names and engaging personalities. Their forefathers had been men to whom honour and cleanliness in public life had meant all things and who had governed as naturally as they had breathed. And there were many among these to whom the new era, with its open sneer at public trust and its subservience to great aggregations of wealth selfishly employed, had become an increasing reproach. The man who gazed down from the office window had long ago made his choice. He had no illusions. He knew to what allegiance he owed his present position. It had been the reward of long and faithful service! Yet sometimes still the bonds chafed—sometimes still the new spirit that was stirring abroad struck through his ingrained habit, calling to him to do the impossibly fanatical thing!
There was a knock at the door and a man entered. It was Cameron Craig. He responded briefly to the lawyer's greeting and coming to the window, stood a moment beside him, looking down at the hurrying wheeled traffic, the loitering pavement pedestrians—and the flapping canvas sign. He laughed a little, but without mirth.
"You were there, I suppose," he said.
Treadwell nodded. "Yes. It's tilting at the windmills, of course."
"They began too late," said Craig grimly. "The ticket is safe enough this year. But next year—the Gubernatorial campaign—if they only had fire enough to keep the blaze going till then, they might give us trouble."
The other did not answer. His eyes had rested briefly on Craig's face, then again had sought the window. He was thinking that his visitor had not changed for the better during the past two months. The fact, indeed, would have been apparent to a casual eye. The virulent force and will were no less noticeable, but there was now a kind of glaze over his face—a certain fierce and sullen quality that seemed a reflection of inner bitterness.
The judicial eye clove to the fact. Since that far-away night at the "Farm," Craig's passion had never loosened its grip. It was characteristic of the man that he had on that occasion played the only card in his hand, not blindly, but by instinct and without hesitation. But while he had apparently gained his point, it had been borne to him gradually that his very method of play had lost him infinitely more than he had gained. In the mind of the woman he desired he had transgressed the rules of the game, and the realisation maddened him. Never since then had he heard her name coupled with Harry Sevier's. Never had he seen them together. This had given him satisfaction. But if he had shattered her regard for the man whom he now hated more tenaciously than he had ever hated anything in his whole life, the fact had seemed to hold no advantage for himself. On several visits to the city, he had invented reasons to call at the Allen house, but he had soon learned that he was not to meet Echo there. He had, however, seen her elsewhere more than once—when her gaze had gone by him as if he had been empty air. Though his veins burned with the fever of the famished, he had not ventured to challenge that cold aloofness. But it had rankled and stung him almost beyond endurance, till he had come to thirst avidly for some kind of test between them—for action, whatever the result might mean. And the fierce desire that raged within him, feeding on itself, had left its sinister traces on his face.
Abruptly Craig withdrew his gaze. "I see young Sevier held forth last night. The last time I heard him was in court, just a year ago. The young fop! He'd do better to stick to his lawbooks—though I hear he has no cases anymore."
"It's his own choice," the attorney answered coldly. He liked Harry Sevier and he resented the other's tone, no less than the words. "He could have a new client every day if he wanted. As a matter of fact he hasn't taken a case since the one you speak of. He fought for six months trying to get through an appeal on that. It was the first criminal case he had ever lost and it cut him up some, I fancy. Of course it's ridiculous to take it so to heart, but I swear I can't help liking him for it! He's not merely a fop, either. In my opinion he comes mighty near being just what that crowd at the Civic Club have been looking for."
Craig's eyes had not left Treadwell's. "In what way?" he asked.
"As a spokesman. They know what they believe and what they want to fight for. But they've been inarticulate. Most of them are blue-blooded old fogies, with their souls full of fine ideals, but with no leader. In him (and in that speech of his last night he threw in his lot with them absolutely) they have a finely trained legal mind—for with all his old fire-works Sevier always had that—and a natural orator besides. You should have heard him last night! For two hours he held that great audience in a perfect spell. 'The finest exhibition of southern oratory since the war' the papers called it this morning, and I tell you, Craig, they weren't far wrong!"
He stopped, somewhat embarrassed by his own enthusiasm, and wondering at the dark look on the other's face. Perhaps to hide this, Craig turned away. His fingers were twitching and for an instant he was not wholly master of himself. When he spoke, however, he had regained his governance.
"After all, it wasn't the future of this anti-machine campaign that I came to talk about. There's something nearer home that is worrying me."
"What's the trouble?"
"The Welles-Scott case decision. It is to be handed down on the first of May. It must be in our favour."
The other looked surprised. "But surely it will be."
"It's not on the cards. I thought I knew the Judge, but there are signs that I'm afraid of."
The attorney sniffed incredulously. "Judge Allen!" he exclaimed. "Why, the trust made him. And it keeps him made, I should think, too."
Craig shook his head. "He's been talking lately. We've had warnings from some who are very close to him. This decisionmustbe what we want it to be. Voters are thinking more than they used to. If these Civic Club people keep up the agitation—particularly if they link on to the prohibition movement, as they are likely to do—the distillery may become a live issue in the next state campaign. That's the great danger. And this Welles-Scott case strikes at the heart of the matter. If the Trust loses this decision it will be the signal for a crop of bills in the next legislature that will cost us a cool million to fight. And they may lead anywhere. I tell you wehaveto have it!"
The other mused a moment. "The Judge, of course, can't be reached in—in ordinary ways."
"Of course not. He's not venal. We've been able to depend on him so long because he has grown up with the Trust—he was its counsel for many years—and its interests were his. He thought with it. His mind ran in the same groove. But Beverly Allen, the Trust's counsel, and Judge Allen of the Supreme Court are different propositions. I always thought this test case was a mistake! But I was overruled. Well, we've got to have the decision. If one way won't bring it about, another shall. Something will have to—persuade him. He must have a weak spot. We must find it, that's all."
"His life's been an open book, if that's what you mean," said the attorney, slowly.
"Few men's life are open books," returned Craig, with cynical shortness. "There's apt to be a page pasted down somewhere. That part of it is your business. If there's any such page in his case, you find it! I don't care how small a page it is, or how long ago it was pasted down. If it's there I want it!"
"His record was combed with a fine-tooth comb when he went on the bench," said Treadwell. "The Trust wanted a man that the opposition couldn't get anything on. That was before your time, of course. I went over the report myself. There wasn't anything there—nothing but the vaguest suspicion of an old love affair that was polished off twenty years ago."
Craig turned sharply. "A love affair! After his marriage?"
"Why yes, I think so. But there weren't any details. And the woman died abroad long ago."
"What was her name?"
Treadwell looked at him curiously. A faint flush had crept over his face. "See here, Craig," he said, "after all, there's a limit to decency. At the most it was nothing but a passing infatuation—an innocent one. There was not the faintest breath of scandal. And as I told you, the woman is dead."
Craig's eyes were boring into him. "Treadwell," he said in a hard voice, "you don't seem to understand. This is a big game, and there is no limit! None! And I intend to win it!What was her name?"
The other leaned to knock the ash from his segar. There was a tense pause before he replied. "I have forgotten."
"Where are the old reports?"
"They were destroyed."
Craig looked at him an instant, his eyes like sparkling points of steel. He opened his lips to speak, but he did not. Instead, with a shrug of incredulous contempt, he caught up his hat, turned to the door, opened it and went out.
Treadwell listened to the heavy footsteps descending the stair. Then he went and shut the door.
"The hound!" he said under his breath.
From his chair in the library at Midfields that night, just beyond the circle of radiance cast by the big reading-lamp, Cameron Craig looked steadily at the Judge from under his bushy eyebrows, as the latter said:
"Yes, it is true that I was for years affiliated with the interests you represent. I was their attorney. The connection ceased when I, myself, severed it, eleven years ago."
Craig's lips, that had been set in a hard line, parted in a satiric smile. He was leading doggedly up to what he purposed to say. "To its profound loss," he said from the shadow. "You had cogent reasons, no doubt."
The other mused a moment, his pallid, scholarly face averted. "I'll tell you, if you like," he said at length. "But you will understand that I challenge no one else's convictions. I assume to sit in judgment only upon my own."
Craig nodded. "Of course."
"I made the connection we are speaking of," continued the Judge, "when I was a young man, just beginning practice. The liquor problem was young then too. Communities did not take it too seriously—particularly in the south where drinking was a matter of course with gentlemen. The white-ribbon movement was in its infancy and John B. Gough had hardly been heard of. To me—to the men I knew—the 'temperance' agitation seemed a mere recurring fad, fostered by pious and well-meaning persons, which cropped up—a kind of moral seven-year locust—at periodic intervals. People lived more or less as their grandfathers had lived before them on their plantations. And their fathers had been fox-hunting, hard-living 'three-bottle men' right down to the war. I had all the habits and prejudices of my class. Liquor seemed to me like many another thing that was made to minister to individual weakness, but was not in itself obnoxious. And the decanter was never empty on my side-board. Yet even then the new element in politics and in every-day life—the sentiment against liquor—was growing. Times were slowly changing, men's outlook was changing, and I knew—long before I admitted it to myself—that I was a part of an industry which the best thought of the community no longer approved, and that men who championed it were swimming against a deepening and strengthening social current. I was stubborn, but at last there came a day when I—changed too."
His voice had softened, had suddenly become surcharged with feeling. He leaned over the table and caught up a small oval photograph, set in a black-leathern frame. It was a picture of his son Chisholm, as a boy of perhaps fourteen. He held it out in a hand that slightly trembled:
"That is why I changed, Craig. One night Chilly came home—drunk. I had never seen him intoxicated, had never guessed that he could so far forget himself. He was a mere boy, at school! In that moment the sharp truth came to me. Shame stared at me from my own door-step. I saw the text of the sermon that had been preached into my deaf ears—in my own son!"
He broke off abruptly and set the picture back on the table. When he spoke again his voice was more even:
"That hour, as I sat here in this same room, I—saw. Could anything else have opened my eyes? Perhaps not. But that did. I saw all at once what I had been bolstering. It was no longer a theoretical question of the harm of the club-bar and the corner saloon to the community. They were making a drunkard ofChilly! The Trust furnished their stock-in-trade. And I had been the Trust's paid tool—a part of its brain in this state—had guarded it from error, shown how far it could go with impunity under the law, had even made possible its organisation as it exists to-day! I, Chilly's father! That night I wrote out my resignation as counsel. I mailed it before I slept."
There was a slight pause. Craig's lowering look had been watching the other curiously. The emotion in the older man's voice had touched no chord of response in him. Rather it roused contempt—not for the son, whom he considered a brainless weakling, but for what seemed to him an arrant attempt to evade the issue that stood so sharply and insistently in his own mind. To him no man's motives were pure. The man before him had been not the Trust's servant, but its creature. Had not the Corporation, behind all, set him on his high seat? Was he fool enough to think that he—Craig—was not aware of that? It had expected him to pay in kind, when the need arose, as now it had. And did the other think to throw dust in his eyes with such mawkish sentimentalism—to evade this old tacit obligation by a flimsy pretence of moral scruple? Craig spoke:
"And—the Corporation. What did it say? Eh?"
"The president of the board came to see me. He was good enough to ask me to reconsider. But I had made my choice."
Craig leaned forward, his arm on the little inlaid desk beside him. "Let me finish," he said with deliberate meaning. "The board, accepting that decision with the keenest regret, desired to make your retirement the occasion for showing in a tangible way its appreciation of your long and faithful service. A seat on the Supreme Bench being vacant, the Directorate proposed, unless your taste pointed otherwise, to use such influence as it might possess, to gain for your name the consideration in that connection which it deserved."
A look of surprise had crossed the Judge's face as he began. A sensitive flush swept it as he ended. "If you imply that my seat was offered me, Mr. Craig, even tentatively, at that time, or in that connection, you are in error!"
Craig's sneer was open now. There was no more pretence. "If not in so many words, in effect! Pshaw! Do you mean to pretend you would have had that appointment if the Trust hadn't backed you for it? It owned the state bag and baggage then, as it does now—and as it will continue to do! It put you on the Bench and it has kept you there, and you know it!"
The Judge was on his feet now, his flush faded to pallor. He deigned no answer to the flung assertion. "What is your object in coming to me to say this?" His voice was deep and resonant.
"Just this!" Craig lifted his arm, his big fist clenched, his eyes narrowed. "You were the Trust's counsel and confident for twenty years—till it put you where you are now! Do you think it did that for nothing? Itmadeyou, Beverly Allen! And now it has reason to believe that you intend to knife it in the back—to drag the ermine it put on your shoulders into an incendiary hue-and-cry started by demagogues who aim to destroy a great industry!"
"What do you mean, sir?" The Judge's tone was icy.
"I mean the Welles-Scott decision!" Craig said in a low, deadly voice. "That"—his clenched hand smote the light desk at his elbow with a savage blow—"must beours!"
For an instant there was blank silence. The Judge stood aghast, his very speech frozen with indignation. To him his judicial calling had an element that was almost sacred. This man—to whom he had given the hand of friendship, who had theentréeinto the exclusive circles of southern gentility—this man assumed to lay coarse fingers upon his vestment of office, to question his integrity as a Judge! He dared to believe him, Beverly Allen, cheaply venal—a puppet, whose legal rulings were at the beck and call of corporate influence! The room seemed suddenly stifling hot. He turned to the window, flung the curtains wide and drew a gulping breath of the fresh air.
He had not seen Craig's sudden start. For at the smashing blow of his fist on the fragile Italian desk, a curious thing had happened. Its catch loosened by the jar, a tiny carven panel had fallen with a little click, and a thin sheaf of yellowed letters had dropped and spread fan-wise beside his hand. The backs of the envelopes were uppermost, and across the top one was written in a dim, twirly hand and faded ink, the initialsB.A.
A thought darted like cold lightning through Craig's brain. "B.A."—Beverly Allen! Whose were those old letters? The initials were in a woman's hand. What if they held a clue to the old story Treadwell, his attorney, had spoken of? A quick instinct inspired him. His hand closed over them quickly—went to his breast—as the Judge turned from the window.
The latter had regained self-control. He stood erect and tall, his leonine head thrown back, his eyes shining, and in his face a look the other had never seen in it before. "You have presumed," he said, "to say to me what I would not have believed any representative of your corporation would dare to say. And you have taken advantage of my hospitality to say it in my own house. I choose now to believe this message an individual one, springing from a personal and base initiative rather than from the responsible Directorate which I once served. 'Once,' I say. For I serve it no longer. I am now a member of the Judiciary of this commonwealth. Because the corporation furthered my candidacy, you assume that it 'made' me. Perhaps it did. But it never owned my conscience or my integrity! Nor does it now, thank God!"
As he spoke he had stepped to the wall and pushed a bell. "Nelson," he said, to the entering butler, "show this gentleman to the door."
Craig had risen to his feet. He looked at the other an instant with livid face. Then he went rapidly to the hall and snatched up his hat and stick. The outer door closed heavily behind him.