CHAPTER IIITHE TORN SCRAP
When I left Judge Colfax that day, the only questions in my mind concerned Julianna. To her I had said nothing in so many words of my love, and yet I knew that if the Judge had read my growing sentiment surely, she must have seen it even more clearly. I tried to interpret her friendly, playful, girlish acceptance of my affection as an indication that she, too, felt an increasing fondness for me—a fondness which went beyond that given to a trustworthy friend. But I could not forget that her father, when he had so strangely anticipated my request for his consent, had described her as one whose yielding would be sudden and complete—one to whom love would come in sweeping torrent of emotion—one with whom love would thereafter stay eternally. If this were true, she did not love me yet, I reflected. And with a falling of hope, I remembered that the Judge had expressed, for what reason I did not know, his own doubt of my ability to win her.
These were thoughts well adapted to hasten my lovemaking. I made a point of walking tothe Monument the next afternoon. I did not meet her there, or on the way along the edge of the park, and I found myself suddenly haunted by the hitherto unconsidered possibility that, as summer was coming on, I might expect at any day that she would leave the city to visit friends or go with the Judge to some resort.
It rained again the following day, and though the downpour ceased in the late afternoon, great gray banks of clouds hung threateningly above the city. Nevertheless, tormented with the notion that we might at any time be separated for several weeks, I went again to the Monument to seek her.
She was there. Nor did she seem at all surprised that I had come.
“I am full of energy to-day,” she said, smiling a welcome. “Let us take a long walk together.”
“Good!” said I. “I will tell you about your father. As you know, I called on him Thursday afternoon.”
But from the Judge she quickly turned the subject to discussion that was wholly impersonal, and it was the same on the following Monday when I saw her again. Had it not been for the expression in her eyes with which she greeted me, listened when I talked to her and bade me good-bye when I left her, these would have been depressing meetings for me, because I thought thatI could clearly see that she was holding me at arm’s length with that natural art of a good, true woman,—an art which needs no practice.
Imagine, then, my surprise, on this second occasion, when we had reached her door, when she had asked me to have tea and I had been forced to plead a previous engagement, when she stood there before me smiling, rosy, the form itself of health, beauty, and vivacity, and when her glance was raised to meet mine, I suddenly saw her smile fade and I thought her eyes were filling with tears.
She laughed, however,—a little choking laugh,—and looking down so that I could not see her face, she said, “I have liked these walks and chats with you better than any I have ever had.” And so she bade me good-night.
Only when I had gone from her did I recall that she had spoken as if our companionship was not to continue, as if, for some cause unknown to me, there was to be an end of our intimacy. The thought made me stop stock-still upon the pavement.
“And yet,” thought I, “might it not be—that she meant only to show that she is willing to continue our relationship—perhaps forever?”
Loving her as much as I did and wanting her—and no other on the breadth of the green earth—for my wife, this uncertainty was a tormentwhich I could not stand. I remembered she had told me that the Judge walked each evening after his dinner, and I am ashamed to confess that the next evening dark found me waiting on their street corner, like a scullery maid’s beau, until I saw his stoop-shouldered figure come down the steps with the lank, grizzled “Laddie” behind, and heard the beat of his grapevine stick recede down the avenue.
Margaret Murchie let me in. Had I been a wolf she could not have glared at me more; it was evident that her shrewd old eyes, whatever hidden knowledge lay behind them, regarded me as a brigand, as a menace, as some one who had come to take a precious treasure of art from the drawing-room or the household goddess from the front hall. And as I sat in the study once more, on the comfortable easy-chair of the Judge, with the empty feeling in my stomach telling me that my nerves were on edge, as they used to be when I rowed on our crew and sat listening for the gun, I was sure that after announcing me she lingered beyond the curtains, covertly watching me.
Julianna did not keep me waiting long, and as she came through the door into the light, I could not help but notice the poise and grace which comes from inherited refinement and health, and is only imitated badly by self-consciousness and the pose of the actress.
“I’m so sorry you did not come a moment earlier,” she said. “Father would have been in. Now, you and I—”
She seated herself in her place on the old-fashioned mahogany sofa.
“Do you mind?” I asked.
“No, I’m glad!” she said, and wriggled like a pleased child, yet so slightly that no one could have accused her of it.
“Do you like me?” said I, after a moment.
Her eyes opened very wide and looked into mine seriously—half amused, half frightened. At last she nodded in a matter-of-fact way; it was only because I could see her hands pressed against the arm of the couch until they were white and little blue veins had begun to show that I knew she was capable of the stoicism of an Indian, and that her nod was not matter-of-fact, after all.
As I have told you, I am not of an habitually romantic temperament. I was well aware of my unfitness to deal with a girl who, herself, had never known the processes of lovers, but the belief that she was trying to restrain her true feelings toward me ran through my brain like an intoxicating liquor. I would have taken the breadth of her shoulders in the crook of my arm, and pressed my face into the rich mass of her hair, and kissed her upon her white forehead, hadI not suddenly recalled that never had I even phrased to her a sentence explaining my feeling toward her.
“Of course I do,” she said at that moment. I remember how cool the words sounded.
I remember, indeed, every word of that evening, every detail of that room, every play of expression about her mouth, and I cannot go on without speaking of these things. They meant so much to me and have meant so much ever since!
At last, then, I told her.
“Julianna—” said I. “I have never called you by that name before. I have not seen you long. But I must disregard all facts of that kind. They may be important to some men and women. They are not of consequence to me. I have loved you from the first.”
She gave a little cry, but whether it was of joy or surprise I cannot say. I only know that when I leaned forward and took one of her hands in my own, she left it there as if it belonged to me of right, and with my finger tips upon her soft wrist I could feel the beating of her heart.
“I don’t want to love any one else,” I whispered desperately. “I want you. I want you to love me. I want you to let me take you.”
I thought when I had said this and pressed my lips to the back of her hand and looked up at heragain that her face was illuminated with wonder, joy, and supreme gladness, and that her eyes were filled with light reflected from some bright revelation. What, then, was my astonishment to observe that, as I looked, the color seemed to fade from her skin, her parted lips slowly compressed themselves, her eyelids fell like those of one who suffered pain or shuts out some repulsive sight! It may have been my imagination; but I was sure I felt her hand turn cold in mine and draw away as if to escape a menace. Her body stiffened as if preparing for effort or defense and she arose from her seat and stood before me.
So little did I understand the significance of her actions that I neither moved nor spoke.
She came toward me then and placed the tips of her fingers upon my shoulder affectionately, I can say—as she might have touched her father, and as if she meant to cause some unsaid thing to flow through the contact into my body.
“Please do not get up,” she said softly. “Do not follow me.”
There was strength in that command.
She walked toward the long windows at the back of the room, the windows which overlooked the garden, and pulling them open, stepped out onto the balcony. The vine there being in bloom, her figure was framed with the soft purple of the flowers, which, lit by the light from within andpendant against the black background of night, might well have been blossoms embroidered on Japanese black satin. With my head swimming, I watched the movement of her bare shoulders, from which her modest scarf had half fallen, until she turned to enter again.
“I shall not tell you that I am sorry that you have spoken as you have,” she said, spacing her words so evenly that it gave the impression at first that she was repeating memorized sentences. “But I am young and no one else has ever done so. Perhaps I should have interrupted you and told you that my duty is toward my father, and that I am not sure of myself now, and that I am not ready to give myself to any other life. If this is true, it can profit neither of us to talk of love.”
“Neither of us!” Again it seemed to me that she had disclosed herself. I stood before her and in a voice that shook with eagerness, I said, “You love me. At least you love me a little?”
She drew back.
“You do!” I cried under my breath. “I know it! You do!”
She raised her hands as if to keep me from her, and still retreated toward the hearth.
“You love me!” I said. The sound of my own voice was raising a madness within me. “Say it!” I cried. “Say it!”
She turned quickly away from me.
“You love me.”
“No,” she said. “I do not—love—you!”
I think for a second neither of us stirred; for a second, too, I could see that her body had relaxed as mine had relaxed. Then I felt the sting of wrecked pride—the pride from which I suppose I never shall escape. I can remember that I drew a long breath, made a low bow, which, though not so intended, must have been both insulting and absurd, and walked through the curtains into the hall. I looked back once and that fleeting glance showed me only a beautiful girl who stood very stiffly, like a soldier saluting, but who, unlike a soldier, stood with closed eyes and with her long lashes showing against a pale and delicate skin.
How miserable I was in the following hours, I cannot well describe. After I had returned to my own apartments I sat in my study without desire for sleep, staring with burning eyes at the silk curtains fluttering in the June night wind, until they seemed to be ghosts dancing on my window sills, and my straining ears listened to the hourly booming of the clock on the Fidelity Tower, until it sounded like the cruel voice of Time itself. Long after the rosy dawn I got up, drank some water, lit a strong cigar, and prepared to dress myself for the day’s work. I can well remember my determination never again to expose my feelingstoward any living soul and my constantly repeated assertion to myself that I had been hasty and indiscreet, that I did not in truth any longer love Julianna and had been punished for a breach of that reserve and caution which had been a virtuous characteristic of my ancestors.
With my teeth shut together, with a frenzy to accomplish much work, without a breakfast, and with sharp and perhaps ill-tempered commands to my assistants, I spent the morning in the preparation of cases for which trials were pending. By noon the heat of the day had become intense, the sides of the battalions of towering buildings across the narrow street seemed to become radiators for the viciousness of the summer sun, the voices of newsboys, the murmur of the lunch-hour crowd twanged a man’s nerves, and I noticed for the first time the devilish song of the electric fan on my wall. As you have foreseen, I felt suddenly the wilting of my will. Tired, hungry, sleepless, I slipped down into my chair, and there seemed no happiness left in a world which did not include the girl I had left the night before.
I seized my hat and, clapping it on my head, I stopped only to sweep the papers into the desk drawers and hurried toward the elevator.
“There’s somebody on the ’phone for you, Mr.Estabrook,” said the switchboard girl. “They’re very anxious to talk.”
“Tell ’em I’ve gone home for the day,” I called back to her and then went down and out of the building to the sunbaked street.
I knew that I should put food in my stomach, so I ate a lunch somewhere. I knew I should rest, but the thought of returning to my bachelor rooms suggested only a violent mental review of the events through which I had been. I was tempted to go to the Monument, but flung the idea aside as a piece of sentimental madness. Accordingly I walked toward the river front with its uninteresting and sordid warehouses, saloons and boxes, bales and crates of the wholesale produce commissioners. On that long, cobblestoned thoroughfare, with its drays and commercial riffraff, its lounging stevedores, its refuse barrels, its gutter children and its heat, I went forward mile after mile, without much thought of where I went or why I chose such surroundings for my way, unless it was that the breeze from the water was welcome to me.
The late afternoon found me on an uptown pier, watching the return of an excursion steamer, proud with flags and alive with children, girls with sunburned faces and young men with handkerchiefs tucked around their collars and carrying souvenir canes. They disembarked down anarrow gangplank, like ants crawling along a straw. I reflected that all were, like myself, with their individual comedies and tragedies, the representatives of the countless, forgotten, and ever reproducing millions of human gnats that through unthinkable periods of time come and go. I had seen none of them before. I would see none of them again. Instead of being a depressing notion, I found this a cheerful idea; I welcomed the evidence of my own insignificance. I laughed. I even determined to amuse myself. If nothing better offered, I made up my mind I would visit the Sheik of Baalbec, and, by pitting my skill against his, prove that I could exclude, when I wished, the haunting thoughts to which my mind had been a prey.
“The Sheik, then,” said I, after a block or two. “It was he who ushered me into this affair. It shall be he who may say an end to it.”
In the light of what followed, this sentence, murmured half aloud as I walked, has many times caused me to wonder at the prophetic voice with which we sometimes carelessly address ourselves.
I found the museum, except for the red-nosed attendant and the pale pink girl in the ticket window, deserted. The accursed automaton, I feared, would be closed for business, and therefore it was with satisfaction that I noticed thatthe coin slot was open, and that, having dropped in my tribute to genius, chess, and machinery, I heard the squeak of the moving mechanism and the brown, jointed fingers of the figure scraping across the board.
I cannot believe that the Sheik was playing his best game. At the end of a half-hour, when the machinery stopped to notify me that another coin was due, I had a decided advantage in position. Before another fifteen minutes, during which we both played rapidly, had gone, the issue was no longer in doubt and I stopped.
“Ha!” said I, aloud. “You will not wink at me this time. Is there any other game you can play better than you play this?”
The automaton was silent.
I cannot say what impelled me to suggest it, but I drew a piece of paper and a pencil out of my pocket and said, “Can you write?”
The door in the chest of the Sheik flew open then for a moment as if to expose his heart to me. Though I had put no coin into the machine, I saw the levers and gears start to move again, the door of that pulmonary cavity was closed and the brown fingers jerked their way forward.
“Not only can write, but is anxious to do so,” I remarked, as I extended the pencil and laid the paper on the chessboard.
For a second or two I waited, as the hand of themechanical creature wrote a few words: I remember that during those seconds I heard a clock somewhere striking six. I did not make any attempt to see beforehand what he had chosen to inscribe, for I assumed that it would be some empty answer to my bantering remarks. At last the pencil dropped upon the board and rolled under one of the cross-legged creature’s red Turkish slippers, the whirr of the mechanism stopped abruptly, and I picked up the writing.
Having read the scrawl once I believed myself out of my wits. I could not credit my eyes. I could not gather my reason. I was breathless, transfixed!
I looked up at the face of the Sheik and found that, in place of the malicious wink with which he proclaimed himself a victor in a game of draughts, his glass eyes, with their whites in sharp contrast to his swarthy wax skin, were both wide open and set in a glare of such ferocity and malign hatred that they seemed to flash the fire of life and lighten the gloom of the corner with rays of evil.
I laughed. I forced myself to laugh, but it was with no mirth, and then, hesitating for a moment and seized by the temptation to tear the automaton to shreds, to discover what was within its exterior, I turned, crunched the paper in my closed fist, and almost ran out through the linesof wax figures—the Garibaldis, the Jenny Linds, the Louis Napoleons, and the Von Moltkes—into the sunlight.
No man can blame me for my excitement or even my terror, for the Sheik had written, “You are in danger! Withdraw before it is too late, and never see the old man or child of his again!”
Had the time been the Middle Ages, or the place a strange quarter of the Orient, I might not have been so shocked at the knowledge which a tawdry machine, or the mountebank behind it, seemed to have of the affairs of persons against whom no charge of contact with the lower strata of life could be brought. But in our civilization, where nothing but the commonplace is to be expected, I was wholly unnerved.
“Come,” said I to myself, having walked to the far side of the open square, “sit on this bench, unfold the paper, and use your intelligence to overcome the hysteria which last night’s experience and this odd affair of the Sheik have aroused. Be sensible. This message is a matter to be explained, just as all things are to be explained by any one who is not the victim of superstitious fear.”
This determination immediately cleared my reason. After all, there was nothing to solve.
“Whoever controls the mechanism has seen me with the Judge,” said I, “and doubtless hasheard him mention his daughter, and perhaps has observed the effect of her name on me. Furthermore, he, or, as the Judge said, the man or woman behind the Sheik, has even seen me with Julianna and might well have drawn conclusions. The message was written in ill temper or as a piece of malicious mischief. And there’s an end to it!”
Whereupon I tore the scrap across the middle and, dropping it in the grass, I started toward my home.
The picture of that writing, however, was too clearly photographed upon my vision; it continually wrote itself on the walls of buildings, upon the pavement or across the sky. And as it did, little by little, it began to dawn upon me that the handwriting with which it had been executed I had seen before.
When at last, from the back of my mind, I recalled the occasion, I astonished those persons who were walking near me by stopping in the middle of the sidewalk as if stricken and uttering a sharp exclamation. My hand sought the contents of my inside coat pocket; among the papers there I found the note which Julianna, wishing me to see her father, had written me, and with trembling fingers I spread the sheet before me.
One look was all that was necessary, for it sent me hurrying back the way I had come; it wasenough to cause me to kneel down on the grass in the gathering gloom that was filling the old square. Where I had sat a half-hour before, I now searched frantically for bits of torn paper.
I found both pieces at last, placed them side by side and compared them with the note in my hand. I have already told you that Julianna wrote a hand distinguished from others by subtle peculiarities. The message from the Sheik was written as she would write!
To believe, as I found I must believe, that she, with or without the knowledge of the Judge, would so far forget the obligations of her place in society as to operate a vulgar puppet in public, no matter how much it might interest or amuse her, was another shock to me. I am free to confess that, in spite of all my former assertions to myself that I had not loved her as much as I had supposed, this new development was the first that began to make me believe I had been blinded by mere infatuation.
“You have been moving in the dark,” I told myself. “You have stifled your senses from a whole set of facts which tend to show that some unwholesome thing is sleeping on the threshold of the Colfax home. Perhaps, after all, Julianna and the Sheik of Baalbec are right. It has come out for the best.”
And yet, hardly had I so thought than astrange sense of loneliness came over me, the dingy buildings about the square seemed like so many squatting personalities, depressed and brooding, and out of that gloomy picture came the image of Julianna, so fresh, so smiling, and so fair that for a moment I almost forgot that it was a creation of my fancy. It brought back to me my love for her. I remembered my promise to the Judge. I recalled her tenderness and purity, which I had felt so strongly that I had expected to see it about her like an effulgence. I cursed myself for doubting her. I looked upon the evidence of the scrap of paper in my hand as a piece of testimony brought against an innocent person. Not only with the instinct of a lover, but that of a lawyer as well, I determined to defend her from my own accusations.
I had not been without the necessity, once or twice in my practice, of calling upon experts in handwriting; now I remembered that one of them, a clever fellow named Jarvis, lived in an apartment not far from mine. It was the dinner hour. I believed I should find him and I was right.
“I have come on a peculiar errand,” I explained to him as he appeared in his library, napkin in hand, “and if you are not through dinner, I will wait.”
“No, no,” said he, with easy falsehood. “I hadjust finished. How can I help you, Mr. Estabrook?”
“I wish your opinion on two pieces of handwriting,” I answered. “It is unnecessary for me to tell you where I got them, you understand. The question at issue is, did one person write both, and if not, is one of them an imitation of the other?”
He flourished a powerful reading-glass in the professional manner those fellows use and gave the two specimens a cursory examination.
“The problem should not be difficult,” he said, “since both were written hastily. In the case of the pencil, it is clear from the manner in which the fine fibres of the paper are brushed forward like grass leaning in the wind. In the case of the ink, the wet pen has gone back to cross a t or complete an imperfectly formed letter before the earlier strokes had time to dry.”
“That would preclude imitation?” I asked.
“Why, yes. Offhand, I should say so—unless the one who made the attempt had practiced for years, or has the skill of imitation developed beyond that of any professional forger. But give me a moment, please.”
I waited, tapping with my fingers on the chair arm.
He straightened up at last, with a sigh, thenlooked at me with his eyebrows drawn and a look of perplexity on his thin, cadaverous face.
“It’s very odd,” said he.
“What’s very odd?”
“Well, Mr. Estabrook, these pieces were not written several years apart—at different periods of life, were they?”
“Why, no,” said I.
“They are not the work of one person, then,” he said, with firm conviction. “I would stake my reputation on that.”
“Then one is an attempt to imitate the other?” I said, stifling a glad exclamation.
“That’s the rub,” said he. “And, to be frank, I might spend a month without being able to say which was the imitated and which the imitating. I would almost think you had stumbled on two specimens which, merely by coincidence, bore a wonderful resemblance to each other. It lies between that and the cleverest, most practiced forgery I have ever seen.”
You may be sure that his decision gave me a sense of triumph; without speculating as to the truth, it was enough for me to know that Julianna had not, as I had at first suspected, been a party to this vulgar and melodramatic flourish. I berated myself for having entertained any doubt and now felt anew, and with aggravation, my affection for her. This outcome of my adventurewith the Sheik, in fact, restored my spirit, made me forget my pride, and, as you will see, was enough to put me in condition to receive that which was about to befall me.
CHAPTER IVTHE FACE
My thoughts as I entered the portico of that building where I had my apartments were not only of Julianna, but were also in those channels where I have no doubt your own opinion of my narrative must run. I freely admit, as I then was forced to admit, that my lovemaking had been attended with many bizarre and abnormal happenings; yet at the time I sneered at the questions which rose in my own mind and bravely asserted to myself that the chances of winning Julianna were not wholly lost.
In the lower hall of the building in which I had quarters there were stationed until six at night a telephone operator and a doorman. Perhaps you have noticed that I tell you these matters in considerable detail, and I will continue to do this, because my natural dread of disclosing the intimate affairs of my life has kept me heretofore from sharing my story with any one, and now that I have lifted the cover and drawn the veil of my experience, I can only find justification, in so narrating the sequence of extraordinary events, by observing the strictest adherence to detail andaccuracy in the hope that perhaps you, by the virtue of a fresh and unprejudiced viewpoint, may be able to unravel some of the tangle in which I am, even now, enmeshed.
As I have said, at six the telephone girl at the switchboard and the doorman, for some reason which I could never understand, were replaced by an old negro who served as both, and who was the most garrulous, indiscreet individual I have ever seen.
As if to affirm these characteristics he spoke to me the moment I had entered, in a voice which seemed to be adapted to a general address to the three or four other bachelors who were waiting in the frescoed vestibule for a conveyance.
“Yaas, sah, Mr. Estabrook, sah. De dohman lef’ a message, sah. Der has been a lady waitin’ foh you, sah, mos’ all de ahfternoon. She comin’ back, she say—dis evenin’. She sutt’nly act very queer, sah.”
“All right,” I snapped. “It’s one of my clients.”
“Um-um,” he said, shaking his head. “I spec she ain’t, Mr. Estabrook, sah. She mos’ likely has pussonal business, sah!”
The others—Folsom the broker, and Madison, and Ingle the architect—had evidently dined well, preparing for a musical comedy, and they snickered without shame.
“Let my man know when she comes,” said I, and without smiling hurried into the elevator.
I had no belief that the woman, whoever she might be, would come back after dark to call upon me. With my conflicting thoughts about Julianna, I forgot the incident. It was therefore with some surprise that I heard Saito, my Jap, arouse me from my sleepy reverie, to which exhaustion had reduced my mind, to tell me that a lady was waiting in the reception room downstairs.
You may understand the conservative nature of my life and habits more thoroughly when I tell you that the mere idea that a woman had dared to ask for me at my apartment in the evening caused me the greatest anxiety. As if to prove what dependence we can put upon our intuitions, I felt, on my way down, most strongly, that an evil event was about to take place.
Nothing could, I think, better illustrate the nonsense of attaching importance to these fore-warnings than to tell you that the woman who waited for me was Julianna herself!
My first instinct, before I had been seen by her, was to hurry her out of the garish little reception room, where, through the door which opened into the hallway, she might well have been seen by anybody; it was only when she greeted me and turned her face toward the tiled floor, and I sawthat her shoulders drooped and that her hands hung down at her side, and that she stood like a guilty, punished, and remorseful child, that my wish to protect her was displaced by a mad desire to take her in my arms and comfort her.
“Julianna!” I cried. “What has happened? Is it the Judge? Tell me! Why did you come?”
She shook her head and lowered it still more, until the sweeping curve of her bare neck, from the fine hair behind her ears to the back of the lace collar of her waist, was visible.
I cannot say what gave me the courage, but I bent over her and kissed her there, softly.
She looked up then without the slightest indication of either surprise or reproach.
“I liked that,” she whispered. “I didn’t know how I was going to tell you, but now I can.”
“Tell me what?” said I, in a choking voice.
“I love you,” she said. “I could not let you go. I thought last night that I could carry it through. I thought my duty was to stay with father. But it isn’t!”
“And you camehereto tell me!” I gasped.
“Why not?” she said, with a catch in her voice. “I was afraid I would never see you again and I love you.”
When I think of all the sham there is among women, I treasure the memory of that simple little explanation. It was delivered as a full answerto all the conventionalities from here back to the time of the Serpent. It was spoken in a low but confident voice, with her hands upon her breast as if to calm the emotions within, and was directed toward me with the first frank exposure of her eyes which were still wet with tears.
“I have been miserable!” she said. “A woman is meant for some man, after all. And if she resists, she is resisting God! It all has been shown to me so clearly. And I knew that you were the one. There’s nothing else that makes any difference, and it sweeps you off your feet, so it must be nature, because it gave me the courage to telephone you and then try to find you and come here and wait and come again, and only nature can make any one go against all her habits and education. And I believe I’ll call you Jerry, if you still—”
“Good God! Love you?” said I. “Forever!”
“Always?”
“Forever.”
She gave her burning hands to mine, and oblivious of the old negro, whose eyes were upon us, we stood there, looking at each other in awe, very much frightened and very much, for that moment,—and I sometimes wonder if not in truth,—the centre of the universe.
“You belong to me, Jerry?” she said tearfully. “Now?”
“Yes,” said I.
“Then I must go back quickly,” she explained, after a moment. “I do not want father to know yet. I want to prepare the way. I don’t want you to speak with him for a week. I will tell him then. Perhaps you think it is strange. But Friday, when he knows, you may come.”
She had a carriage waiting for her, and I walked with her to its door.
“I want to kiss you, Julianna,” I whispered.
She looked up to see whether the driver could observe us. He could not. And then the mischief-loving quality of womankind appeared in her. She gave forth a glad little laugh.
“On Friday,” she said.
The door slammed, and I thought, as I caught a last glance at her then, that she was a luminous being of dreams, lighting the dark recess of a common cab.
This impression recurred so often in those following days that at times there rose the uncanny suspicion that the woman who had visited me had not been one of reality, of flesh and blood, and beating heart and sweet, warm breath. Her smile, her voice, her personality had not seemed a part of real life, but almost the manifestations of a spirit which, timidly and with the hope of some reincarnation in life, had come to claim my vows. I believed that I knew well enough whyJulianna, if it were she, had planned to avoid a sudden disclosure of our betrothal to the Judge, but, none the less, I fretted at the sluggishness of time, which, like a country horse, will not go faster for the wishing or the beating.
I wished, too, that she had said she would meet me in her afternoon walks to the Monument and wondered that, if she loved me, she was able to forbid herself a meeting, even though she had felt that good sense demanded a period of reflection and a readjustment of view, so that when we did see each other again, it would be with firmer minds and steadier hearts. I would have gladly foregone all this value of reserve and restraint for one look at her face, one touch of her sleeve, one word from her tender, curving lips.
And yet I was happy in those days—so painfully happy that I heard voices telling me that such happiness does not last, that ecstasies are tricks of fate by which man’s joy is fattened for slaughter, that from some ambush a horrible thing was peering.
Strangely enough, these fears were connected in no way with the warnings which I had had from my eavesdropping or even from the definite threat which had come out of my grotesque experience with the Sheik of Baalbec. The piece of writing, which had begun, “You are in danger,” I had dropped into a file of papers, and thoughI suppose it is somewhere among them now, I have never yielded to the temptation to look at it again. I may have thought of it merely to add to the opinion of Jarvis that the writing was not Julianna’s, the apparently indisputable fact that, at the moment the warning had been written, Julianna was, by the word of the apartment house doorman, waiting for me in the little reception room. Furthermore, with my success in winning her, with the intoxication of it, I began to look upon the strange and unexplained matters which had so perplexed me as trivial illusions beneath the consideration of good sense. However much you may be surprised at my willful blindness, your wonder cannot equal that which I myself feel to-night.
And now, when I am about to tell you of that memorable Friday, I must impress upon you that no detail of it is distorted in my memory, that so clear and vivid were the impressions upon my senses that, were I to live to the age of pyramids, I could recall every slight sequence with accuracy. I say this because you are a physician and as such, no doubt,—and it is no different in the case of us lawyers,—have learned the absurd fallibility of ordinary human testimony, not excluding that which proceeds from the highest and most honorable type of our civilization.
The day, as I was about to tell you, had beensaved from the heat of the season by a breeze which blew from the water and once or twice even reached the velocity of a storm wind. A hundred times I had looked out my office window and a hundred times I had seen that not one speck of cloud showed in the sky. Yet all day long, while I tried to work, only to find myself all on edge with expectancy, I could hear the flap and rustle of the American flag on the Custom-House roof, which was straining at its cords and lashing itself into a frenzy like a wild creature in chains.
I am not sure that a dry storm of this kind is not freighted with some nerve-twanging quality. I have often noticed on such days a universal irritability on the part of mankind, and I have been informed by those who have traveled much that often a nervous wind of this kind, in countries where such things happen, precedes some disaster such as volcanic eruptions, avalanches, earthquakes, and tidal waves.
My own nervousness, however, took the form of impatience. I was absurdly eager to go at once to Julianna, and the fact that the hour for dinner had finally arrived, and that the remaining time was short, only served to increase my impatience the more. I could not assign any cause for this other than my wish to see Julianna, for now I knew in my mind and heart, by reason and by instinct, that the Judge had been right,that once having given her love she had given all, and, with that noble and perhaps pathetic trait of fine women, would never change.
At last I found myself at her door, at last she herself had opened it, and was smiling at me—as beautiful, more beautiful, than I had ever seen her. I remember that, with an innocent and spontaneous outburst of affection, she caught my hand in hers and tucked it under her soft round arm in playful symbolism of capture.
“You must not say a word to me,” she said. “I have never been so happy! But he is in there. He wants to see you alone and you must hurry.”
“Hurry?” I protested.
“I don’t know why,” she said, with a nervous little laugh. “I suppose it’s because I want you to talk to him and come to me as quickly as you can.”
Then, with a gentle pressure from behind, she pushed me through the curtains into the familiar study and I heard her feet scampering up the soft carpet on the broad, black-walnut stairs.
The Judge was sitting in his easy-chair beside the table. A book was open on his knees, a long-stemmed pipe was on the chair arm, and the gray and grizzled old dog lay, with head on paws, at his feet. Above him a huge wreath of thin smoke hung in the air. Had I been a painter, I should have wished to lay that picture upon canvas,because seldom could one see expressed so completely the evening of an honest day and of an honorable life, the tranquillity of home, the comfort of meditation, the affection for faithful dog, old volume, and seasoned pipe.
As he looked up at me, however, it suddenly seemed to me that he had grown old; behind his smile of warm greeting I fancied I could observe a haunted look, the ghostly flickering forth of some unwelcome thought held in the subconsciousness.
“Why, Estabrook!” he cried, when he had seen me. “Bless my soul, I didn’t know you would be so prompt. I have understood that young men approached these interviews with reluctance.”
“You forget, sir,” I answered, knowing that he would have a jest at my expense, “that we made the arrangement in advance.”
“We did! We did! That’s a fact. But I had no idea that you would be successful, at least so soon, and if I may say it—so—so—precipitously.”
“I plead the spirit of the age,” said I.
“It’s a spirit common to all ages, I take it,” he answered, with a quirk of his judicial mouth. “Do I understand that you and my daughter have first become engaged and now wish my permission to see enough of each other to become acquainted?”
Perhaps he hit a centre ring with this thrust, for I could only stammer forth an awkward statement about being very sure of my feelings.
“They all are sure!” he said, with a good-natured cynicism. Then he smiled again and pointed toward the ceiling with a long forefinger. “Perhaps you may be pleased to know that she is very sure,” he whispered.
I sat down.
“Yes,” said he solemnly. “You are to be envied. I believe her love—as I have seen it grow in these weeks—is the sweetest thing that ever flowed from a human soul.”
“You knew that she at first sent me away in the name of her duty to you?” said I.
He looked up at me, shut his book, patted the dog, and laid the pipe on the table.
“No,” said he, with a break in his voice. “But I shall not quickly forget that you have been fair enough to her and to me to tell me that.”
“May I have her?” I asked.
“Yes,” said he. “Of course you may.”
I hesitated a moment. Then I laughed. “She told me when you had said that to go to her.”
I rose.
“Wait,” said he. “That is not all. Before God, I wish it were.”
I had not been watching his expression, but now, when I looked up at him, I saw that thegray look which I had fancied I had seen under his smile had now come out upon his face.
“Estabrook,” he said, leaning forward toward me with his lips compressed, “sometime, perhaps years from now, perhaps never, but, if you choose, to-night—you may know what a problem I have had to solve, and what it will cost me to say to you that which I am going to say.”
He had lowered his voice as if he wished to be sure that no one could overhear him, and now, when he stopped, he stood with his head turned as if listening to be sure that no one was in the hallway. No sounds came, however, except those of the dog, who whined softly in his dreams, and the complaint of the dry wind, which, instead of diminishing with night, had perhaps increased its intensity, and the rattle of the long French windows through which I could see the gnarled old wistaria vine clinging desperately to the iron balcony, its leaves tossing about as if in agony.
“I have sat on the bench for many years, trying with my imperfect intelligence to adjust the misshapen affairs of men and women,” the Judge went on. “ Never have I been forced to deal with so terrible a question as lies before me now—to-night.”
For a long time, then, he was silent. Finally I spoke.
“Judge,” said I, “how can I help?”
“I am afraid,” he said slowly, and apparently avoiding my gaze,—“I am afraid that I must call upon you in a manner which will severely weigh upon you. Estabrook,” he put his hand upon my shoulder. “I’ve done my best. Do you hear? I’ve done my best.”
“I will never doubt it,” I assured him. “Nor do you need to doubt me.”
He looked at me steadily for a second; then he went to a drawer and, opening it, took out a packet of folded papers. It was evident that he had placed it there so that he could reach it easily.
I suppose that the gravity of his bearing, the trembling of his hands, in which these papers rustled, and the anxious expression with which he gazed at me, as if I were to decide some question of life or death, infected me with his unrest. I got up, paced back and forth, and finally sat down again facing his empty easy-chair, with my back to the long windows.
The Judge watched every movement I made, his eyes staring out at me from under the brush of their brows. At last, when I had seated myself, he came and sat in front of me, laid the papers on his knees and smoothed them with the palm of his shaking hand.
“My boy,” he said, “I wrote these papers, not for you, but for my Julianna. Never has a manhad a task so calculated to break his heart. She was not to read my message to her unless death came and took me, for while I lived, I felt that I might spare her. See! Her name is written across this outside page.”
I could find no words to fill the pauses which he seemed obliged to make, for, as you may well believe, I felt the presence of a crisis in my affairs—in the affairs of all of us.
“But, my boy,” he went on, “what these pages contain is now for you, if you so decide.”
“Decide?” I managed to say. “What must I decide?”
“I will tell you if God gives me the strength to do it,” he said. “It is about Julianna. It is written here. I have sealed it as you see.”
“Something about her?” I cried.
He bent his head as if I had struck him from above.
“You may break the seal if you must. I have fought many battles to bring myself to tell you that you may read what is there.”
I reached for the package.
“Wait,” said he. “The contents of this document need never be given to her if she becomes your wife. Nor is it necessary for you to read what is there set forth if you only will choose not to do so. These are strange words between men in these modern times, Estabrook. But I haveguarded my honor carefully all my life. And now, though the temptation has been almost more than I could stand, as you may believe some day,—or perhaps know in the next five minutes, which are walking toward us out of eternity,—yet I have determined that you should know everything if you chose.”
“I do choose,” I said firmly.
He shrunk back as if I had struck at him again.
“Think!” he begged. “No good can come of your knowledge. It cannot avert harm if harm must come. And more—be cool in your judgment, or you may ruin all of us.”
“But, Judge Colfax,” I cried out, “your proposal of choice is empty. One cannot reject or accept the unknown.”
“It must be so,” said he. “There is an astounding fact about Julianna which you do not know. About that fact I have written this message, so that when I had gone she might be prepared in case the worst—in case the worst—the improbable—the unexpected, the unthinkable—should come.”
I caught the arms of the chair in the grip of my two hands and tried to think, but I could find no reason for my remaining, perhaps for a lifetime, in ignorance of some unseen menace to the woman I loved. I think that I was about to tell him that nothing could change my feelings for Julianna,or shake my faith in her, that it was right that I should become her defender, and that I, therefore, must know what hung so threateningly over her. Words were on my tongue, when suddenly the Judge bent his great frame forward and was in another second half kneeling on the floor in front of me, his hands clutching my coat. His face then was the color of concrete, and the dignity which he had worn so long had slipped from him as an unloosened garment falls.
“For her sake!” he whispered. “For her sake, don’t go further. Let the thing be unspoken. My boy, don’t dig up that which is all but buried forever. Listen to me, Estabrook. You trust me. And I, tell you that if I were in your place, knowing what I know—”
“Enough,” I said, awed by his pleading. “Do you tell me that it is best for her and for me to make her my wife in ignorance of this thing?”
“God help me,” he said, falling back into his chair.
He seemed to be thinking desperately, as if some voice had told him that only a moment was left for thought. At last he threw his long arms outward.
“Yes,” said he. “ I tell you that it is better for you and for her to know nothing.”
“That is sufficient,” I said. “I ask no more.”
He shut his eyes as one would receive the reliefof an opiate after long agony of the body and for some moments he remained so, his hands, from which the packet of papers had fallen, relaxed upon his knees. The starched white shirt he wore crackled absurdly with each long inhalation of breath.
In those moments a tumult of thoughts went tumbling through my brain, and as the seconds passed, I almost felt that it was the wind that howled outside which was blowing these thoughts over each other, as it would blow dry autumn leaves.
At last the dog rose, stretched himself, and, as if restless, sought here and there a new place to lie, and the sound of his claws upon the polished floor recalled the Judge from his almost unconscious reverie. He half opened his eyes and once or twice moved his thin lips. At last he spoke and into those commonplace words he put all the meaning which hours of ranting would have made less plain.
“I am grateful,” he said.
When I looked up at him after lowering my head in acknowledgment of his thanks, I saw again that wonderful smile of benevolence, which, given to me once before in his office, I believe could only have been bestowed by one who had had a lifelong practice in love of humanity. Indeed, he only directed it at me for a moment,and then turned his face a little aside toward the back of the room, as if he wished to send that expression through the walls and spread over the whole world its beaming radiance.
You may, then, well imagine my surprise when, without a word or a motion of any other part of his body, I saw that smile fade from his face. It disappeared as if a blast of the night wind, entering the room, had dried it, crumbled it, and blown it away. In its place I now saw the terrible, eye-widened, and fixed stare which we recognize as the facial sign of some abject, unreasoning terror, or of death, after the clutch of some fatal agony.
“Judge Colfax!” I exclaimed.
I waited. I thought I saw his head move a little as if he had heard me, but with that motion there came a click, the sound of teeth coming together.
“You are ill,” I said, half rising from my chair.
His lips moved, but the stare in his eyes remained the same.
“It has come,” he said in his throat.
I jumped toward him. He did not stir.
“Judge!” I cried.
He did not answer. I waited, bending over him, not daring to guess what had befallen him, holding my breath. Then, cautiously, I movedmy fingers before his eyes: they did not wink. I placed my hand over his heart.... It was as still as a rundown clock. The room itself was still. The wind had paused a moment as if for this.... The Judge was dead. And yet because he still sat there, his gray head resting on the cushions, and because he stared so fixedly before him, I could not grasp the fact of death. I had never met it face to face before. I could not honor its credentials.
For a moment I stood in front of the old man, with the single thought that our extraordinary interview had been too much for him: it never occurred to me to go for assistance any more than it occurred to me that death, unlike sleep, was a permanent thing, from which the Judge would never come back again. I simply stood there, awed by the presence of death, yet crediting death with none of death’s attributes.
And as I stood, my attention became more and more fixed upon the Judge’s stare. It did not seem to be a vacant gaze; on the contrary, it seemed to contain something. It seemed not only fixed; it seemed fixed on some object. It looked past me, behind me, and there, with all its terror and all its intelligence, it rested, motionless. It seemed to refute the notion that dead men cannot see; it seemed to affirm that dead men’s eyes are not dead. Into that terrible stare I looked, fascinated, awed, hushed, motionless. Then, suddenly, I heard the dog.