In his room at the hotel Cameron Craig took the sheaf of letters. Under the electric-light he drew the folded leaves one by one from their worn envelopes and spread them open before him. A look of chagrin crossed his face. No woman had written them; they had been penned by the Judge himself—he was familiar with the heavy, characteristic hand-writing. Were they, then, only some old letters to his wife, perhaps? He was holding one leaf to the light. Suddenly his eye caught. He made an exclamation. His face lighted with amaze and savage exultation.
What a weapon blind luck, ironic fate, had put into his hands, in the very face of the man for whom he had craved it! For on that leaf, etched in remorseless ink, was what would open an old grave, drag into the daylight the corpse of an ignoble passion, cast scorn upon the writer's name and blight and wither present and future! How little, after all, the tricks of the body changed! Twenty years—and yet,his letter!
What matter when it had been penned, or whether the woman were long dead to whom he had once written that blazing indiscretion? He, the jurist of spotless living and good repute—to be shown forth to the world as a moral fraud, a husband and father who had once stood shamelessly ready to fling home and reputation on the scrap-heap in a disgraceful flight "without benefit of clergy!" The woman presumably had scorned his offer—since she had sent him back his letters—and yet on the page still stood the black intention, in black and white! What incredible folly had led him to preserve it? Twenty years ago—in the dead past—and yet there it was, to be used in the living present, the blunt handwriting, recognisable at a glance, damning and beyond denial!
He laughed aloud. It was Echo's father whom he held in his hand! If he did not come to terms, so much the better, since the blow would strike her too. She thought herself above him, did she? What if this story should be spread abroad in yellow headlines, babbled of in club and boudoir, smirked at on street-corners? Would she hold herself so high then? Well, if he was so far beneath her pride, that should bring her to his level! He felt no prick of shame at the base move he contemplated, no smart of pity for the ruin it should bring. Ambition in which was no tincture of honourable scruple wove, with the desire to humble the woman who would have none of him, to a resolution as unyielding as steel.
He gathered up the letters and put them carefully into his pocket. In another hour he was on the train, speeding to his home in the next state.
The speech of the day before of which Treadwell had spoken so enthusiastically to Cameron Craig, had indeed given to the crowd, which had been wont on past occasions to gather at the old court-house when he spoke, another revelation of Harry Sevier. It had been impromptu—not the outgrowth of deliberate plan. The non-appearance of a much-heralded speaker had thrust the exigency upon him without warning, and he had acquiesced only in a keen desire to save from blank failure a meeting in whose principles and object he was by his very character deeply interested. The tortuous involutions of local politics had never interested him, but he had thrilled to the stirring beneath the surface of the great forces of good and evil and the present agitation for clean government had found him enrolled, without question, on its side.
As he stepped forward to face the great curtain of faces that stretched outward and upward beyond the footlights, he had not known what he should say. Indeed, while he slowly "felt" his audience in his opening sentences, the sub-conscious part of his mind had been full of a matter foreign to the subject at hand. There had come to him a fleeting recollection of the last time he had spoken in public—the day upon which he had betrayed his client and put a man, of whose innocence an instinct deeper-rooted than reason had convinced him, into the striped habiliments of the convict. The sharp, aching compunction of that thought had never left him. Since that day, though he went daily to his sumptuous office, he had taken no new case. He had gone always with that sin clanking against his conscience and the memory of the trial had focused always in that glimpse, across the mass of faces, of a woman's look of puzzle and hurt. During the months since then that face had hung before his fevered vision as a far, cool oasis to the desert wayfarer. These had been black months of fierce, untiring battle with the appetite to which he had surrendered himself, and which he had sworn to conquer. There had been times when the avid thirst had seized him by the throat, when endurance had almost failed: days when he had sat in his inner office, with door locked and blinds down, fighting desperately with the strenuous impulse that seemed to be dragging him bodily, as if with fleshly hands, to the little wall-cabinet whose door had never been unlocked since the day of that sinister court-recess.
During this prolonged, grappling struggle he had never been to Midfields. He had seen Echo but occasionally, walking or driving on the street, or less frequently at functions from which he could not absent himself without remark. There had been no confidences between them. Never had he leaned to her to whisper: "You see! Do I do well?" Never had her lips said, "I know ... I know, and I am watching!" yet his heart had told him that she was alive to the issue, that she felt the forces conflicting for the mastery. She had not been in the audience on this day, but as the faces pulsed and receded till they wove into a grey blur in the misty blaze of the incandescents, Harry's inner vision had a swift memory of her face as it had looked in that old court-house scene.
And with it, as though it had been a key to the disused mental machinery, strangely and wonderfully there had come back to him, in a sudden flashing illumination like summer lightning, a surging return of the old power, the vivid rush of lambent images in his brain and the burning, insistent phrase to his tongue—the power that he had thought gone forever with that shuddering failure of a year before.
As he felt again the old native ability rising in him, strong and undismayed, and once more his own, without hostage given to the bottle, a stinging delight had swept through him. It was the fruit of victory, and fiercely sweet in proportion to the bitterness of the struggle. Yet in his new sensitiveness the realisation had held a flicker of self-shame. Never in those old days had he employed that talent for the greater good: only for individual ambition, often for the blunt defeating of the clear ends of justice! It was another Harry Sevier who spoke now, one to whom conscience now stood as mentor, to whom principle was become a guiding star. The leashed power and restraint had been bred of that long struggle, and from the fresh mastery of self which he had so hardly gained, flowed forth a subtle magnetic quality that held his listeners mute. In the hush that wrapped the great assemblage the speaker of the day, late by an hour, had entered the back of the stage, to wave back the nonplussed chairman and to seat himself in the rear, enthralled by the white magic that swayed all alike. The speech had held no rodomontade, none of the pyrotechnics that, had lent a flavour of sensation to past court trials. It had been on a higher plane than appeal to superficial feeling or ingrained prejudice. It had brought no accusation, pointed no finger, save backward to old ideals of community respect, and forward to the wave of independent thought that was sweeping over sister states to break in thundering force upon the crags of misrule.
It had closed in a note of hope and of promise, and ended with the hall hushed in that greatest tribute to true oratory—absolute silence.
Next day, wherever men congregated in the little capital, Harry Sevier's name was on every lip. It was flung wide, too, in newspaper headlines until the ripple stirred far borders. Of this he himself could not be unaware. He knew that never in the old days had he spoken as he had spoken then. He was conscious also that in the trial of himself his faculties had been reorganised and renewed, had emerged sounder and truer from the strenuous testing, and that the fire through which he had passed had burned away the rubble and left metal that was more worthy. Nor could he fail to realise that at a single step he had attained to a new and unfamiliar status in the community. He felt this not so much in the multiple congratulations of the many, as in a certain new deference that he distinguished in more reserved greetings.
Beneath all, however, but one opinion profoundly concerned him—Echo's. As he swung along the street this afternoon, the thought of her excluded all others.
Rounding the corner, a voice came to him—a ribald, good-humoured voice, inviting some one to "come and have a drink." He turned abruptly. Chisholm Allen stood a little way from him, before a swing-door through which sifted the clink of glasses and boisterous conversation.
Chilly was decidedly the worse for wear. Much water had run under the bridges since he had tussled with old Nelson, the butler, over the decanter of sherry. His face was pallid and the marks of incorrigible weakness and self-indulgence showed clearly through its habitual good-nature. Chilly's feet were set in the paths of dalliance and he had ceased to care if anybody knew it. He greeted the newcomer, however, with a trace of embarrassment which he dissipated with a laugh, as he said:
"The invitation's for you, if you like, Harry. We'll have one to the silver-tongued orator! What do you say?"
For answer Harry linked an arm in his and turned him down the street—away from the swing-door. "Come up to my rooms, Chilly, it's cool there and we haven't had a talk for a blue moon. No, we'll consider the drink afterward."
Just at the moment a carriage and pair bowled by them. It was drawn by the Allens' bays and Echo was on the rear seat. She had seen the action, had caught its import, and Harry had a flashing glance from her dark eyes that sent the blood coursing to his fingers. Chilly too, however, had seen the swift exchange. He frowned, then laughed again.
"You should join the Salvation Army," he said, satirically. "They've a rescue corps, I believe. I know a pretty ensign, and she shall come and pin a nice little medal on your manly chest!"
Harry smiled without resentment. "The Army might not be so bad; it's an outdoor life at any rate. You'd be better for more of that."
"I believe you," said Chilly lugubriously. "It's getting impossible indoors. Nothing doing but moral lectures nowadays. If it weren't for the Duchess I'd cut it."
"For 'somewhere east of Suez, where a man can raise a thirst'?" quoted the other mildly. "Travel is expensive, Chilly."
"Yes, confound it," was the reply. "So is the thirst. The old man only allows me fifty dollars a month and I've stuck up every bar in town to the limit."
A frown was on Harry's brow. A year ago this youth had confined his daily potations to the club, and his drinking-bouts to that sequestered resort, "The Springs." Now he drank openly in corner saloons—he, the son of a southern gentleman, a member of the Supreme Bench, whose forebears had been courtly and clean-living from the days of the Colony! They had turned into the apartment-building now, and a moment later were in Harry's sitting-room, whose windows opened upon a square musical with lisping leaves and the cool splash of a fountain.
It was an apartment that bespoke a keen though sober artistic taste: grey walls with violet silk curtains at the deep windows and two or three old paintings—among these, set on an easel, a Greuze that he had unearthed in a cobwebbed curio-shop in Italy—a plain desk with a strip of dull-coloured damask whose quaint Russian needle-work set off a few books in tooled leather—a square piano of Circassian walnut spread with an old brocade, against which a bowl of peonies splashed their fleshy crimson—and deep, comfortable chairs. Into one of these Chilly threw himself.
"Well," he said, "here we are, as per schedule. So trot out your drink."
"It was that I wanted to talk to you about. I think you know I'm your friend, Chilly, and what I say I say as a friend. Whisky is getting the better of you."
"Pshaw!" scoffed Chilly, easily. "You weren't always so mighty particular. When did you climb onto the water-wagon, I'd like to know?"
"When I found I was better off there. I haven't touched liquor for a year. Take my advice, Chilly—it's sound!—and try to cut the drink out. It's doing you harm."
Chilly laughed. "That seems to be the signal all along the line!" he said humorously. "But what's the good? I could knock off any time I chose, just as well as you. But I don't intend to do it yet awhile. I like it."
There was a tentative knock at the door. It opened and a girl's piquant face peered in. "Chisholm Allen!" said Nancy Langham's indignant voice. "Have you forgotten you have an engagement to take me to the kennels this afternoon?"
Chilly sprang forward and seized her small gloved hands. "Come in," he said. "There's nobody here but Harry and me. Please do, Nancy."
"Oh, I mustn't!" She turned to the latter. "You see I needed Chilly sotremendously, and Echo told me she saw him with you. I expected to meet him on the way. Then I thought I'd just ring and ask for him, only the hall door was open. Chilly, you're outrageously undependable. You know I wanted to get that dog to-day, because I'm going to leave for home to-morrow, and you do know more about dogs than any one else."
Chilly looked a little shame-faced. "I forgot all about it, Nancy. Honestly, I did."
She sighed. "That's the fact, no doubt, but it's not one bit complimentary. You're so dreadfully truthful, Chilly! Come along now, or we'll be too late."
"All right," he answered, drawing her inside the door. "Just a minute. Harry's going to give me a drink. Weren't you, Harry, eh?"
For answer the other pressed a button and a trim silk-robed Japanese came noiselessly from the next room. "Fetch a bottle of Evien, Suzuki," he said, "and some glasses. Have it cold, please."
Chilly stared. "Mineral water!" he exclaimed with sulky discomfiture. "My word! This is no signal for the H2O. I'mdry!"
Harry shook his head. "I'm sorry, but it's a rule of my house."
Chilly shrugged. For an instant a little sneer drew down his lips, irritation fighting with his seldom-failing good-humour. He turned to the square piano, sat down on its stool, and ran his fingers up and down the ivory keys.
"I'll return good for evil," he said. "Before we go I'll give you a little ballad I've just composed. It's bound to make a great hit when it strikes the Barbary Coast. He struck a resounding chord, and with a wink at Harry, began to sing:
"The rounder swore at his barroom score'Ere he called for a last, long bottle,And proceeded to tint, without any stint,His nose with a mellow mottle.Then he climbed on a chair and hiccoughed longAnd loudly he sang this funny old song:
"'Money is dross,Loving is loss,There's never a crown that is worth its cross!Life is a toss,Dying is moss,But booze—Oh, bully old booze, is boss!'"
There was something of whimsical fun, yet of bitter recklessness in the spectacle. Without technical training, Chilly had music in his finger-tips and a fair baritone voice. The fingers wavered now and then and the voice was shaken a little, but it was full of magnetism, as, swaying lightly on the stool, he rolled out the slangy doggerel with all the unction of a music-hall artist:
"Then the mixer laughed till the cat went daftAnd the roof clanged all its gutters,While the loungers yelled with mirth unquelledTill they shook the very shutters;And a sweet-faced devil peeped over the steinsAnd merrily carolled the lilting lines:
"'Money is dross,Loving is loss,There's never a crown that is worth its cross.Life is a toss,Dying is moss,But booze—Oh, bully old booze, is boss!"
Harry's nerves were on edge. It was not the cheap vulgarity of the jingle nor the patent swagger of the performer, but the under-suggestion of the picture. The edge of this qualm had touched him on the street, with the odour of Chilly's breath and the moist tang of hops that had floated through the swinging-door. Now he felt a sudden anger that the coarse picturing and the tinkling keys had power to call up, even for an instant, the old slinking, craving ache in his throat.
Chilly swung round and got up laughing. "Pretty good, eh, what?" he said. "Come along, Nancy; we'll go and pick out that dog! So long, Harry."
Harry opened the door for them. He did not trust himself to speak. As Nancy's hand lay an instant in his on the threshold, a wave of sudden pity engulfed him. Her cheeks were mist-pale and her girlish lips were trembling.
An hour later Harry sat in the same pleasant room, looking out where curdled clouds set their silver sails in the pale shimmer of sky. A light breeze fluttered the figured-silk curtains, a blue-bottle buzzed tentatively to and fro outside, and birds were fluting in the trees of the small park and splashing joyously in the fountain.
The encounter with Chilly had broken into his mood, which had been occupied with more inviting things. Now, alone, the thought of what this day held for him absorbed him. "One year!" he had said to himself on the day of that old court-house trial. "That is the test I will give myself. It is enough. If I can beat the brandy for a year, I can beat it forever!" To-day was an anniversary; this afternoon the year was up. The period had called up all his courage, had searched out with prying fingers every crevice of weakness, explored insistently each avenue of uncontrol. But he had won the long battle, and the resurgence of the old power that had come to him in his yesterday's speech had crowned the victory with confidence. Yesterday he would have died sooner than to have wrung from his lips what he should say to her—to Echo—to-day!
When the tall old clock in the corner next chimed he rose and called, "Suzuki!"
The Japanese servant of spotless raiment entered with noiseless footsteps.
"Tell Aunt Judy I sha'n't want dinner to-night," said Sevier; "I'll dine at the club. You can take the night off, if you like; I'll let myself in."
"Hai-e!" Suzuki sucked in his breath and his oval eyes allowed themselves a gleam of satisfaction. As he brought his master's hat and stick Harry looked at him meditatively, wondering, as he had wondered a thousand times, what lay behind that secret-keeping, brown face with its perpetual, half-smiling gravity. He had picked him up a half-dozen years before in his travels, a shabby and abject adventurer with an English dialect that was fearfully and wonderfully made; and the youthful flotsam had speedily and without apparent tuition blossomed forth into that inestimable jewel, a perfect valet. With Aunt Judy the cook, who had been a servant of his father's, Bob the chauffeur who was her son, and Suzuki, Harry's bachelorménagein the city stood a model of its kind, and the despair of his associates.
Harry walked slowly along the street clanging with cars, on pavements busy and sunny at first and giving place gradually to wedges of lawn and stretches of deserted foliaged flagging as he approached the suburbs. At the big gate of Midfields he lifted his eyes. Mrs. Allen was just stepping from her electric at the curb, cool and statuesque and smiling.
"A penny for your thoughts!" she said. "I really believe you were counting the flag-stones. I hope you were coming in—you've been shamefully oblivious of our pleasure this season!"
"I've been oblivious of my own," he countered, opening the gate for her. "But I'm going to make amends in future."
They walked leisurely up the drive under the acacias, chatting. She had often wondered, in the old days, whether there were not some understanding between him and Echo, and his long absence had puzzled her. But he had apparently gone nowhere else, and she welcomed his return. He was a distinctly eligibleparti, and Echo had reached a point where the future was a pertinent thing. There had never been between the mother and daughter that closerapportwhich existed between daughter and father; Mrs. Allen had never felt that she understood Echo. She had never known for her, even as a child, the fierce and excluding yearning which she had lavished on Chisholm, and which had grown even stronger with the latter's increasing years and delinquencies. But she had Echo's interests thoroughly at heart, and Harry Sevier—particularly since his speech at the Opera House—had attained to importance in her worldly estimation.
"I haven't congratulated you," she said presently. "Your speech! It was a masterly thing."
"You were there? I'm glad I didn't know it. It would have deepened the blueness of my funk."
"Flatterer!" She tapped him on the arm with her parasol. "But I'm not wholly pleased, I assure you. The headlines are prophetic, I'm afraid. Presently the politicians will seize upon you, and the first we know you will be in Congress—or the Senate—and the town will have lost you. That's the way it goes!"
"Ah," he said, shaking his head, "who is the flatterer now?"
They had reached the big porch and she drew him into the hall and to the blue parlour, where the Judge sat with Echo, leisurely munching toast. "I've brought Mr. Sevier," she announced, "with his laurels thick upon him, just in time for tea. For my part, I am a wreck from the sun and I shall take mine in my room. But you'll come soon again, won't you?"
She passed out, faintly smiling and leaving a perfume of heliotrope behind her, without waiting Harry's answer, which seemed indeed to be given to Echo, since his hand held hers at the moment and his eyes were on her face. The sight for him had blotted everything else. The restful room with its cool shadows, the Judge—all seemed to retire into an inextinguishable and meaningless background, leaving only them two, together. In the year past he had never been so near her; now he marked that while her hair had the same familiar whorl and golden under-lights, her face seemed more serious than of old, her eyes deeper and more wistful.
Since that far-away evening at the Country Club, Echo had passed through a confusion of experiences, the more trying as they had been locked in her own breast. It had been more than Harry Sevier: it was her love for him that had been fought over during that long year. When he had left her that night with his kiss burning on her hand, she had known instinctively that he had gone to do battle. What she had said had stung him deeply, yet she could not have recalled a word. It had been the cry of wounded pride, of stricken ideals, of reproach, of protest against the dominancy of the thing she hated over the man she loved. As the long months of autumn and winter wore away she had seemed, with a singular clarity of vision, to see his temptation and to enter spiritually into his struggle. They had met only a few times and then in public places and more than once her eye had distinguished the traces of the conflict. Something deep in her had told her that when he came to her again that conflict would be ended. So, at sight of him on the threshold, Echo's heart had leaped into turbulent beating. Here, at last, they were face to face—it was the closure of the past, the burgeoning of the new!
There was a desultory conversation over the tea, and then the Judge went back to his chair in the library, and they two strayed out through the open French-window to the wide porch. There, on the top step, she sat down, leaning back against one of the big columns, up which a crimson rambler climbed. He sat lower, at her feet. The smile had faded from both their faces, and a rose that was on her breast, from the tumult of her heart, showered its petals on the stone. He could see the old sun-dial gleaming from its tangle of ivy. He knew its quaint motto:
Hours fly, flowers die.New men, new ways,Pass by;Love stays.
After a silence he lifted his gaze.
"You didn't think," he said in a low voice, "that I stayed away because I—because that same thing had ever happened since the day of the trial?"
"No," she answered, gently, "I knew it hadn't."
A uniformed imp on a bicycle—a postal messenger—careened wildly up the drive with a special delivery letter. They saw him deliver it to old Nelson at the side portico and pedal whistling down a by-path.
"Then," he said quickly, "you know now that it never can again? It has been a year, a round year to-day. I made up my mind that I would not come to you till the last day was out."
"I felt that, too," she said. "I knew what you were thinking. I—I even guessed the year. Was it—so hard?"
"Yes," he answered. "But it would have been harder if I hadn't found it out when I did. The sting of all these months," he went on, "has been your thought of me! Every day, every hour, I have seen you as you looked that night at the 'Farm.' I shall never deserve that look again—Echo!"
She turned toward him at that, as if with a sudden impulse, her eyes like sapphire stars, her lips parted, but she did not speak. The failing sunlight spattered down through the moving foliage in green-gilt flashes that tinged her face and touched her hair with the soft burnish of Venetian gold, like that of a figure he remembered in St. Mark's. Behind her reared the seamed and grey old column—a faded background of age for a figure of immortal youth—and he knew suddenly that the picture of her, as he saw her at that moment, had covered forever the painful memory. There was only the ardent, unconditional now: only Echo and the dear old porch and the dimming daylight—and a bluebird singing from the heart of a tree—ever henceforward to be symbols to him of woman's love and—home!
He leaned toward her, his hand groping for hers, outstretched on the cool stone beside her, and said in a voice shaken, in spite of himself:
"Echo—itisjust as it was a year ago, isn't it?"
She caught her hand—the one he groped for—to her cheek. She rose, and for an instant it seemed as if she had not heard. Then her glance wavered and fell and a bright, rich colour stained her cheeks like a sudden flush of rosy sun-set. But she had slightly turned away and he did not see it.
"Ah!" he said, looking up at her. "I may say it now—may I not?—what you must have known all along. I love you, I love you! Only you and your love, dear—that is all I ask of God!... Echo—"
There was a sudden sound behind them, a hoarse cry from the room they had left. Both turned sharply toward the French-window. Then she was down the long porch like a flying shadow.
He followed, to find her bending over the form of her father, slipped sideways on the leathern sofa, his face bluish-white and a paper crumpled in his rigid hand. At the same moment Nelson thrust his woolly head through the rear door.
"Quick!" she cried, kneeling beside the couch. "He has fainted. Call mother." He went, his aged features twitching with fright.
"I will send Doctor Southall," said Harry quickly. He touched her hand, and with a single backward look at her, hurried out. She heard his step speeding down the gravel drive.
Echo laid a tremulous hand upon her father's, and at the touch the tense fingers relaxed and a crumpled brown paper dropped from them. She snatched it up—was that what had made him faint? She spread it out: it was a photographic print, unmounted, of the last page of a letter, in his own handwriting. Across the top was printed, in the purple, noncommittal lettering of a typewriter, "For possible release May 3rd."
Then as she gazed, over the agitation of her face grew a shocked bewilderment that rushed headlong to realisation. She started to her feet, and a vivid scarlet flooded her pale face from chin to brow, then slowly ebbed, leaving behind it a frozen anguish. The print fell from her hand. At the same moment the Judge stirred and opened his eyes. He saw her standing before him; knowledge slipped back.
"Echo—"
She turned swiftly. He had struggled to a sitting posture—his gaze fastened on the crumpled paper on the rug. A little spasm crossed his face. "Reach me that," he said.
She picked it up and laid it in his hand, and he put it into his pocket with shaking fingers. He passed his hand across his forehead. "Where's Sevier?" he asked dully.
"He went to send the doctor. We were on the porch and heard you cry out."
"Ah, yes, I—remember. I tried to call you. I lost track of things for a minute or two, I reckon, But it's nothing. I've had little spells like this before. I don't need Southall—send Nelson to tell him not to come. I'm all right."
Unheeding her protests, he rose and went to his chair, as Mrs. Allen, with unaccustomed agitation on her face, swept into the room.
Late that night the Judge sat alone at his desk in the library. There was a faint pungent odour in the room and at his elbow sat an ash-tray on which was a little huddle of brown ashes—all that remained of the photograph whose arrival that afternoon had so disconcerted him. He sat like a stone image, staring out into the moon-lighted garden, but really seeing nothing beyond the range of the poisonous ashes at his side, save a green-and-yellow blur that might have been blent of leaves and moonshine.
He was looking at the Handwriting on the Wall.
All of his early life had been impeccable, all save that single lapse—that "brain-storm" which had convulsed the deep and quiet waters of his nature. It had come and gone with fateful swiftness, and out of the bitterness of the tragic awakening had grown gradually—as a spotless lily springs from the silt—a flower of recompense, which, its roots in the turbid memory, had shed a subtle perfume on his later life. His steady-going career had been laurelled with place and honours, and in Echo he had found compensation for the empty and the missed. And now, after all the years, Fate grinned at him like a gargoyle from the cloud, holding the thunderbolt to destroy him! Unless he paid the penalty—with his professional integrity!
The Judge knew all at once that in the Great Economy no act of life was lost. His had not been. It had only been covered. Somewhere that old leaf of scribbled paper had lain, inert but potential, waiting the turn of the wheel to bring it to light. By some satanic twist of circumstance it had come to the hands of his enemy—Craig was his enemy now—and in his hands it spelled his own ruin. What weapon was there to fight with? None. However dastard the act that spread it to the world, he would stand in the eyes of his fellow-men discredited, undermined, morally disestablished, stripped and naked of all those things which were the breath of his life. He thought of his wife—of Echo. For them humiliation, looks askance. His decision on the Welles-Scott case was ready, locked in his drawer—lacking only his signature writ at the bottom—the most vital and far-reaching decision of any he had rendered. On the first of May it was to be handed down. He remembered the typewritten line on the photograph: "May 3rd!" On that day he would be placarded in the public prints!
A hackneyed text flashed through his mind: "Be sure thy sin will find thee out." He had not sinned, as the world counted it, no. But chasing the first, a second text etched itself as swiftly: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."
The coils had woven inextricably, there was no gap in the meshes. Suppose he did this thing that Craig demanded, rewrote the decision, perjured himself. Right, by another judgment, would have its way in the end. The act would save him from shame—would save others as well. What did it matter? Would not such a solution be best for all concerned?
"Thou shalt not do evil that good may come!"—it was curious how the banal, forgotten texts started up, like Jack-in-boxes, from some boyhood covert of his brain! Not matter? Ah, how much it mattered! Escape by that road was impossible for him. And there was but one other road by which he could evade the issue.
He unlocked a desk-drawer and pushed aside its litter of papers. A small silver-mounted revolver lay there—pointing the one way out. He picked it up, his fingers shrinking at the chill of the cool metal, then laid it on the desk. He took a sheet of paper from its place and began to write: "Dear Echo—"
He started; no, that would not do. He began again: "Dear Charlotte and—"
He paused an instant and listened—his hearing had caught some sound above-stairs. It was not repeated and he bent his head again over the writing. But his fingers would not frame the words. He laid aside the pen. Better, after all, to go all silently, leaving behind him empty speculation, which if painful at first, would become in time but a softened memory!
It was the opening of the door of Echo's room which he had heard. For hours she had lain sleepless, her brain throbbing, strange painful pictures flitting under her closed eyelids. Her home world, which had always seemed simple and uncomplex, even in its darker aspects, had suddenly become fateful and mysterious, a thing of secret depths and shaming, piteous revelations. Her own father's past had held a secret that would not bear the light! That he had loved another woman than her mother—afterward—that, though the thought was repellent, perhaps he could not have helped. But that he had ever, ever as a passing phase, yielded to an infatuation which had taken no thought of consequence or of convention smote her with a kind of terror. Now, through his own reckless act, he had become the prey of a shameless woman—of a blackmailer.
For that was what it seemed to her. It did not occur to her that his letter might have fallen into other hands. In her imagination, back of the situation stood the woman who had tempted him, almost to his complete undoing, in his youth, now—a very wanton!—holding out the badge of his indiscretion, for a price! The photograph had come to him with its blunt threat typed at the top: "For Possible Release May 3rd." Echo had seen the like many a time written upon her father's printer's-proofs. It meant released for publication. His letter was to be spread broadcast—unless he met the demand! The hideous vulgarity of his predicament sent pulsing waves of shame and humiliation over her. It seemed suddenly that their conventional, well-ordered existence had dropped all at once into an unnatural and hateful environment, the murky, unredeemable atmosphere of the yellow-backed novel and the tawdry film-play. Thoughts such as these had fought with the acute sympathy that had all her life made her and her father in feeling wellnigh inseparable, stabbing her love with the reflection that his deepest heart had, after all, been locked from her.
Gradually, however, the sharper corrosive ache had dulled away, leaving an overmastering sense of his trouble. Since Nelson had helped him to his room after his fainting in the library, she had not seen him, for though he had with curious stubbornness, it had seemed to her, refused to have the doctor come, he had not appeared at dinner. She wondered whether he was now asleep, or lying wide-eyed, nursing thoughts like hers. Finally there had stolen over her an odd uneasiness, a thriving anxiety. That tenuous telegraphy whose laws evade analysis though its operations are familiar and which, ever since her childhood, had called from her a subconscious and involuntary response to his moods that had sometimes startled them both by its eerie suggestion, now flooded her mind with a sense of warning. She slipped out of bed to peer through the blind. She could see a window of the library: light was sifting from between its heavy curtains—her father was not in his room, then; he was there. She thrust her feet into worsted slippers, threw a kimono over her nightgown and ran quickly down the stair.
The light footfall, the whispering rustle, did not reach the Judge. He was unaware of the girl who had paused uncertainly on the threshold. His mind was arguing the final phase of his problem.
What he purposed would cut the Gordian knot, make plain-sailing for others, if not for himself. He would have rendered no decision on the crucial case. With his escape the problem would solve itself. Craig would have nothing to gain then in publishing the letter. "Why not?" he muttered. "It is justifiable—it is neither gross nor cowardly—to issue one's-self a ticket into the hereafter in order to avert shame from the innocent and secure peace to those one loves!" His wife was provided for. His elimination from her equation of life, he reflected with a tinge of bitterness, would not deeply disturb her even, centred existence. Echo, he thought likely, would marry Sevier. And Chilly—of what earthly use was his life to Chilly? "I will do it," he said to himself. He stretched out his hand—toward the silver-mounted revolver.
But he drew it back. A further clearer conception had come to him in that last instant to give him pause. What, after all, was he about to do? Himself aside, all that was dearest to him aside, was not the act he contemplated at bottom the murder of a principle, the betrayal of a trust that he held for the State? He was a public officer, who had taken oath in the presence of his associates worthily to execute the functions of his high office, to do justice and fear not. For him the sin of omission could be no less than the sin of commission. Would such a shifty suppression of his decision be one whit less a treason than the rendering of a mendacious one? Either equally besmirched his honour! Something deeper in him than dread of death, deeper even than his present fear of life, stirred and throbbed. No, whatever the outcome, no matter what it held for him and his, he must go through with it to the bitter end! He buried his face in his hands.
As he sat thus stirless, the sense came to him of another presence in the room. Another's breath seemed to enwrap the place with feeling. He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway. "Echo!" he cried and rose to his feet.
He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway. "Echo!" he cried, and rose to his feetHe turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway."Echo!" he cried, and rose to his feet
He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway. "Echo!" he cried, and rose to his feetHe turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway."Echo!" he cried, and rose to his feet
She came to him quickly, a little diffidently. "I couldn't help it, dear! I felt you—worrying, and I had to come." Suddenly her eyes fell on the revolver on the desk. She sprang and snatched at it in panic. "That! Oh, not that! Not that!"
"I—it was in my drawer," he said. "Surely you—"
"Ah," she cried. "I know! You—you received a letter this afternoon. It made you faint. You haven't been yourself since you read it. And now you—"
He drew a shaking hand across his eyes. "No, dear," he said more steadily. "It would not have been—what you think. There was a moment when—but it has gone, and forever." He took the revolver from her hand, returned it to the drawer and locked it. "There," he said, "I give you the key. It will not happen now." There was in his wailing speech a kind of hopeless acquiescence and finality.
Her heart was beating hard with a painful embarrassment. "Can you—can't you tell me what the letter was?"
He looked at her palely, his features working. She would have to know soon enough, yet he shrank with a fastidious pain from telling her. What would she think of him? "Twenty years ago," he said, "when I was a young man, I wrote an—an unwise letter. It—it had to do with some one who died the year it was written, but whose memory I—I treasure. The threat is made now to publish it, and this would—would shame and harm that memory and me."
"Some one who is dead?" she repeated bewildered. The picture her fancy had painted was fading out. "Then how—"
"The old letter has fallen into unfriendly hands."
"And it must come back to hurt you—to spoil your life now! Something written before I was born! It sha'n't! It sha'n't!" She spoke with passionate abandon, her words struck out like fire from flint, from the horror of the knowledge that had sprung to her at sight of the gleaming thing at which she had snatched. "But you can pay the price, no matter how much it is! Take my pearls—my rings—my gowns."
He shook his head. "It's not money: what I am asked to pay is my honour. I am required to alter my judicial decision on the Welles-Scott case ... to hand down a legal lie."
She looked at him with parted lips. "The Welles-Scott case!"
"Yes. Much hangs on this decision. The great corporate interests—but you would not understand."
She threw herself beside his chair and knelt close to him. A great compassion was welling up in her, mingling itself with deep anger at the cowardly attack upon him. She had known of such conscienceless warfare in political life—acts of "character assassins" which knew neither pity nor honourable scruple. "Who has the letter?" she asked.
"Cameron Craig. It came with his card."
She started violently. Cameron Craig! He who had once asked her to marry him, who had asserted his love for her—he, now bent on her father's ruin! She had a darting memory of that heavy, ruthless jaw, those lowering, determined eyes. Cameron Craig? She lifted a stricken face.
"You see!" he said. "I remember you once said to me that he was not 'one of us.' He isn't. That is why I know that he will stop at nothing. He will do what he threatens. There is no way out."
She rose to her feet. Her heart was beating so that her breath came with difficulty and a mist was before her eyes. "You will hand down the decision." It was a statement, not a question.
"God help me—I must!"
"When?"
"A week from to-day, as I have announced."
She leaned and put her arm about his neck, the key of the drawer still clenched in her cold hand, and kissed him on the forehead. Even in that numb moment she felt a certain pride that he, who had known a passing weakness, was yet, in this crucial moment, so strong.
"You must go back to bed now," he said, heavily. "You are going to your aunt's to-morrow, aren't you?"
She nodded, her cheek still against his. "I shall take the early train, before you are up. But I shall be back next day."
She withdrew her arms. "Good night," she half-whispered, then looked at the locked drawer. "You will not—you will not—"
"I promise," he said.
"Whatever happens?"
"Whatever happens."
An instant later she was gone.