CHAPTER IIIA VISITOR AT NIGHT
A nice breeze was blowing in from the meadows, cooling the hot night, and finally, when I was laughing at my nervousness, I went to the window and leaned on the sill. It was a very peaceful scene, I can tell you, with that long stretch of grass and daisies and the water, and the light, carried through the factory yard up the river, bobbing along as the watchman passed one window after another. All but the apple trees! They seemed as horrible as ever, and a dozen times I thought I saw men without heads, or with long arms like apes, creeping and skulking from one shadow to another. At last I felt my eyes sore with staring at them, and I turned away.
Just then I heard the knocking at the back door. It was soft and careful at first and then a little louder.
“Some one from up the street to ask me questions,” said I, feeling my way down the stairs, but then I caught the sound of something that I thought was the mewing of a cat. If I had had any sense I would have called to the Judge before I slid the bolt and opened the door.
The thing I saw was a little bundle of white clothing. At first it looked so white it seemed to give off a light and I thought it was hanging in the air. Then I saw two hands were holding it, and that it was a child.
“I want to see the Judge,” said a thick, evil voice. “I’ve got a joke for him—the best joke he ever had played on him.”
“And who are you?” I asked.
“Oh, he’ll see me all well enough,” said the man, with a heave of his shoulders. “I’m John Chalmers!”
I could not speak. I stepped back and he came in. He must have heard the voices in the study. But I can hardly say what happened. I only know that I found myself standing behind him and that I saw him put the baby into a chair and heard him cough.
The two men—the Judge and Mr. Roddy—looked up, and I never saw two such faces.
“Stare!” said the terrible creature. “Well you may! Go ahead and stare, for all the good it will do you. I know you both. Both of you wanted me hung, didn’t you? You’re clever men—you two. But I’m cleverer than you. The joke is on you.”
“You came in?” asked the Judge in a whisper, as if he didn’t believe his eyes.
“Yes, and I’d have come in the front door ifthe people, with their butterplate eyes, weren’t watching me wherever I go. Oh, don’t think I’m crazy with drink. No! I’m clever.”
The Judge and Mr. Roddy had stood up and the Judge could not seem to find a word to say, but Mr. Roddy clenched his freckled fists.
“What yer want?” he said.
“I came to tell you,” said Chalmers, “that the joke is on you. I didn’t expect the pleasure of seeing you, Roddy, my fine penny-a-liner. But you’re in this, too. The joke is on you. I’ve been acquitted.”
“What of it?” the Judge said.
“I can’t be tried twice for the same crime, can I? Didn’t my lawyer tell me? I guess I know my rights. Ho, ho, the joke is on you, Judge. I saw your eyes looking at me for a week. I knew you would like to see me hung and Roddy there,—he nearly got me. But I’m safe now—safe as you are.”
The reporter laughed a little—a strange laugh.
“You killed her, after all?” he asked.
“Yes,” answered the other in a husky and cheerful voice. “I did. That’s where the joke is on you. I did the trick! Me! And what have you two got to say? Who takes the bacon—me or you?”
“You don’t know what you say,” the Judge cried.
“Yes, I do,” roared the man. “I tell you I did the trick and got tried once, and I’m free forever. There isn’t anybody can touch me. I tell you the joke is on you, because I did it.”
I could see Mr. Roddy’s green eyes grow narrow then. He turned to the Judge.
“Is that so?” he asked. “He can’t be arrested again?”
The Judge shook his head. I can see this minute how his face looked.
“Well,” said Mr. Roddy, with a long sigh, “I’m beat! I’ve seen a lot of criminals in my day. Some were very clever. The joke is on me, Chalmers, for I’m obliged to say that you are the cleverest, slickest person I’ve ever seen, and you beat me! I’ve a lot of respect for you, Chalmers. Here’s my fist—shake!”
The other walked to meet him and they clasped hands in the middle of the room. It was only for a second; for as quick as a flash, Mr. Roddy seemed to stiffen every muscle in his body. He pulled the other man toward him with one arm and shot out his other fist. It made a dull sound like a blow struck on a pan of dough. And the wretched murderer slumped down onto the floor like a sack of bran, rolled over on his back, and was still.
“There!” said Mr. Roddy, with his cheerful smile.
The Judge had jumped forward, too, with a shout.
“Just a minute, Judge,” said the reporter. “Let me explain. You remember that I found out that two years ago our clever friend was at Bridgeport. That summer a girl was found in the park there—murdered. I was on the case. They never found out who did it. Have we or have we not just heard the confession of the man who killed her?”
“You mean to testify that this brute confessed to that other murder?” asked the Judge, choking out the words. “You mean to hang this man for a crime he never committed?”
“Why not?” asked Mr. Roddy. “It’s between us and it can be done. It’s justice, isn’t it?”
“My God!” said the Judge. He began to bite his knuckles as if he was tempted sorely enough.
What made me step over to look at the unconscious man’s face? I do not know, unless it was the design of Fate. White it was—white and terrible and stamped with evil and dissipation and fearful dreams. But there was a smile on it as if the blow had been a caress, and that smile was still the smile of a child who sees before it all the endless pleasures of self-indulgence.
I felt the years slide back, I saw the mask of evil and folly torn away. I was sitting again in abeautiful gown in the Trois Folies in Venice, the wind was blowing the flowers on my table, the water in the canal sounded through the lattice, a man was tearing tablecloths from their places, dishes crashed, and then I saw the fellow’s smile fly and his face turn sober, and I heard his voice say, “What areyoudoing here?” as if he had known me for centuries. Because I knew then, in one look, that John Chalmers and Monty Cranch were one. I had met him for the second time—a wreck of a man—a murderer. But the mystery of a woman’s heart—!
“Well,” I heard Mr. Roddy say, “are we going to hang him?”
“No,” I cried, like a wild thing. “No, Judge. No! No! No!”
“And why not?” he asked, glaring at me.
“It’s against your oath, sir,” I said, like one inspired. “And it’s against honor to hang a creature with lies.”
The Judge thought a long time, struggling with himself, until his face was all drawn, but at last he touched the red-haired reporter on the elbow.
“She is right,” said he. “The incident is closed.”
Something in his low voice was so ringing that for a moment none of us spoke, and I could hear the drawn curtains at the window going flap-flap-flap in the breeze.
At last the reporter looked at his watch.“Well, Judge,” he said, with his freckled smile, “I’m sorry you can’t see it my way.”
“You want to catch your train,” the master replied quietly. “It’s all right. I have a revolver here in the drawer.”
“Probably I’m the one he’ll want to see, anyway,” Mr. Roddy said in his cool, joking way. “Quite a little drama? Good-night, sir.”
“Good-night,” said the Judge, without taking his eyes from the man on the floor. “Good-night, Mr. Roddy.”
I can remember how the door closed and how we heard the reporter’s footsteps go down the walk. Then came the click of the gate and after a minute the toot of the train coming from far away and then the silence of the night. Then out of the silence came the sound of Monty Cranch’s breathing, and then the curtains flapped again. But still the Judge stood over the other man, thinking and thinking.
Finally I could not stand it any longer; I had to say something. Anything would do. I pointed to the baby, sound asleep as a little kitten in the chair.
“Have you seen her?” I asked.
“What!” he answered. “How did she come there? You brought her down?”
“That isn’t Julianna,” said I. “It’s his!”
“His baby!” the Judge cried. “That man’s baby!”
I nodded without speaking, for then, just as if Monty had heard his name spoken, he rolled over onto his elbow and sat up. First he looked at the Judge and then I saw that his eyes were turning toward me. I felt my spine alive with a thousand needle pricks.
“Will he know me?” thought I.
He looked at me with the same surprised look—the same old look I thought, but he only rubbed his neck with one hand and crept up and sat in the big chair, and tried to look up into the Judge’s face. He tried to meet the eyes of the master. They were fixed on him. He could not seem to meet the gaze. And there were the two men—one a wreck and a murderer, the other made out of the finest steel. One bowed his head with its mat of hair, the other looked down on him, pouring something on him out of his soul.
“Well, I’m sober now,” said Cranch, after a long time. “I know what you’re thinking. I know it all. I know it all.”
“You are not human,” whispered the Judge.
Can you say that certain words call up magic? I do not know. But those words worked a miracle. In a second, like something bursting out of its shell, the Monty Cranch I had treasured in my heart tossed off the murderer, the drunkard, the worthless wretch who had been throttling him and holding him locked up somewhere inthat worn and tired body, and came up to the surface like a drowning man struggling for life.
“Human?” he said in a clearing voice. “Human? Am I human? My God! that is the curse of all of us—we’re human. To be human is to be a man. To be human is to be born. To be human is to have the blood and bone and brain that you didn’t make or choose. To be human is to be the son of another without choice. To be human is to be the yesterday of your blood and marked with a hundred yesterdays of others’ evil.”
He jumped up. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot.
“Am I responsible for what I am?” he roared. “Are any of us?”
The Judge looked frightened, I thought.
“Blood is blood,” cried Monty, with the veins standing out on his forehead. “That’s why I brought the baby here. I wanted to kill her. Blood is blood. There’s mine in that chair—and it is me, and I am my father and he was his father, and there’s no escape, do you hear? I wanted to kill her because I loved her, loved her, loved her!”
He fell back in the chair and covered his face with his hand and wept like a child.
I looked at the Judge and I could have believed he was a bronze statue. He never moved aneyelash. I could not see him breathe. He seemed a metal figure and he frightened me and the child frightened me, because it slept through it all so calm, so innocent—a little quiet thing.
“Well, Chalmers,” said the Judge at last, “what do you mean to do? You’re going away. Are you going to leave your daughter here?”
Monty’s head was bowed over so his face did not show, but I saw him shiver just as if the Judge’s words had blown across him with a draft as cold as ice.
“I’m going to Idaho,” he said. “I’m going away to-night. I’ve got to leave the baby. You know that. Put it in an institution and don’t let the people know who its father was. Some day my blood will speak to it, Judge, but half my trouble was knowing what I was.”
“By inheritance,” said the Judge.
“By inheritance,” said Monty.
“You love this little daughter?” the Judge whispered.
Monty just shivered again and bowed his head. It was hard to believe he was a murderer. Everything seemed like a dream, with Monty’s chest heaving and falling like the pulse of a body’s own heart.
“You never want her to know of you—anything about you?” asked the Judge.
“No,” choked Monty. “Never!”
“Every man has good in him,” said the Judge slowly. “You had better go—now!”
Without a word, then, Monty got up and went. He did not rush off like the reporter. He stopped and touched the baby’s dirty little dress with the tips of his fingers. And then he went, and the front door closed slowly and creaked, and the screen door closed slowly and creaked, and his shoes came down slowly on the walk and creaked, and the iron gate-latch creaked. I went to the window and looked out one side of the flapping curtain, and I saw Monty Cranch move along the fence and raise his arms and stop and move again. In the moonlight, with its queer shadows, he still looked like half man and half ape, scuttling away to some place where everything is lost in nothing.
“We can’t do anything more to-night,” said the Judge, touching my shoulder. “Take the child upstairs.”
“Yes, sir,” said I.
“Stop!” he said huskily. “Let me look at her. What is in that body? What is in that soul? What is it marked with? What a mystery!”
“It is, indeed,” I answered.
“They look so much alike when they come into the world,” he said, talking to himself. “So much alike! I thought it was Julianna.”
“And yet—” I said.
He wiped his tortoise-shell glasses as he looked at me and nodded.
“I shall not go to bed now,” said he. “I shall stay down here. Give the child clean clothing. And then to-morrow—”
I felt the warmth of the little body in the curve of my arm and whether for its own sake or its father’s, I do not know, but my heart was big for it. In spite of my feeling and the water in my eyes, I shut my teeth.
“To-morrow,” I said.
How little we knew.
How little I knew, for after I had washed the child, laid it in the big vacant bed, and blown out the candle, I remember I stood there in the dark beside little Julianna’s crib with my thoughts not on the child at all. It was the ghost of Monty Cranch that walked this way and that in front of me, sometimes looking into my eyes and saying, “What areyoudoing here?” and other times running up through the meadow away from his crime and again standing before a great shining Person and saying, “What I am, I was born; what I am, I must be.”
I went downstairs once that night and peeked in through the curtains. The Judge was at his desk with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes looking out from under his heavy eyebrows, as if he had the puzzle of the world in front of him andwas almost afraid. I thought of how tired he must be and of what a day it had been for all of us.
At last a board squeaked on the stairs, reminding me of the late hour and my aching body and burning eyes. So I went up to bed and tossed about until I fell asleep.
I know I could not have slept very soundly. Little matters stick in the memory if they are connected with such affairs. And so I remember half waking to hear the slam of a blind and the howl of a wind that had sprung up. Things were rattling everywhere with every gust of it—the curtains, the papers on my bureau, the leaves on the trees outside, and I pulled the sheet over my head and thought of how my father and mother had gone down at sea, and fell into dreams of oceans of melted lead hissing and steaming and red.
I think it was the shout of some man that woke me, but that is neither here nor there. The house was afire! Yellow, dancing light and smoke poured under the door like something turned out of a pail. With every puff of the wind the trees in the orchard were all lit up and the flames yelled as if they were a thousand men far away and shouting together. Between the gusts you could hear the gentle snap and crackle and the splitting of sap in wood and a body’s own coughing whenit tried to breathe in the solid mass of smoke. There were shouts of people outside, too, and the squeaking and scampering of rats through the walls. Out of my window I could see one great cloud of red sparks. They had burst out after a heat explosion and I heard the rattle and tinkle of a broken window above the roar of the fire.
Of this terrible element I always had an unreasoning terror. Many a sleepless night I spent when I was with Madame Welstoke, and all because our rooms might happen to be high up in the hotel where we had put up. You can believe that I forgot all and everything when I opened my door and found that the little flames were already licking the wall on the front stairs and smoke was rolling in great biscuit-shaped clouds through the leaping pink light. I could not have told where I was, whether in our house or city or another. And I only knew that I could hear the voice of my old mistress saying, “Remember, if we do have trouble, to cover your face with a wet towel and keep close to the floor.” It was senseless advice, because the fire, that must have started in the Judge’s study, kept blowing out into the hall through the doorway, and then disappearing again like a waving silk flag. I opened my mouth and screamed until my lungs were as flat as empty sacks.
I might have known that the Judge, if he werestill in the library, was not alive, and I might have noticed, as I went through his sleeping-room to climb out on the roof of the front porch, that he had not been to bed at all. But it was all a blank to me. I did not remember that there was a Judge. Fire and its licking tongue was after me and I threw myself off the hot tin roof and landed among the hydrangea bushes below. In a second more I felt the cool grass of the lawn under my running feet, and the first time that I felt my reasoning power come to me I found myself wondering how I had stopped to button a skirt and throw a shawl around my shoulders.
There were half a dozen men. Where they had come from I do not know. They were rushing here and there across the lawn and vaulting the fence. They did not seem to notice me at all. I heard one of them shout, “The fire alarm won’t work! You can’t save the house!” Everything seemed confused. Other people were coming down the street, running and shouting, sparks burst out somewhere and whirled around and around in a cloud, as if they were going up into the black sky on a spiral staircase. The walls of the grocery and the Fidelity Building and the Danforths’ residence across the street were all lit up with the red light, and a dash of flames, coming out our library window, shriveled up a shrub that grew there as if it was made of dry tissue paper.
“How did it start?” yelled a man, shaking me.
I only opened my mouth and looked at him. He was the grocer. I had ordered things from him every morning.
“Well, who was in the house?” he said.
“The Judge,” I said.
“The Judge is in the house!” he began to roar. “The Judge is in the house!”
It sounded exactly like the telephone when it says, “The line is busy, please ring off,” and it seemed to make the people run together in little clusters and point and move across the lawn to where the sparks were showering down, and then back, like a dog that wants to get a chop-bone out of a hot grate.
Suddenly every one seemed to turn toward me, and in a minute all those faces, pink and shiny, were around me.
“She got out!” they screamed and shouted. “Where’s the Judge? Any one else?”
“The Judge and the baby!” I cried and sat down on the grass.
“No!” shouted the depot master. “The Judge is all right. I just met him walking over the bridge after the freight had gone through. It wasn’t twenty minutes ago. But you can’t save a thing—not a stick of furniture. The whole thing is gone from front to back on the ground floor already!”
“Here’s the Judge now! That’s him running with the straw hat in his hand,” a woman shrieked, and ran out toward him with her hair flying behind. I could see his tall figure, with its long legs, come hurdling across the street. I could see his white face with the jaw square and the lips pressed tight together.
“You!” he said, bending down. “Yes! Where’s Julianna? Where’s my baby?”
My head seemed to twist around like the clouds of pink smoke and the whirl of hot air that tossed the hanging boughs of the trees. The crackle and roar of the fire seemed to be going on in my skull. But I managed to throw my head back and my hands out to show they were empty.
“God!” he cried.
The world went all black for me then, but I heard voices.
“Stop, Judge! Don’t go! You’d never get out.”
“Let go of me!”
“He’s going into a furnace! Somebody stop him!”
“Look! Look! You’ll never seehimagain.”
I opened my eyes. Judge Colfax’s long lean body, with its sloping shoulders, was in the doorway, as black as a tree against a sunset. I saw him duck his head down as if he meant to plough a path through the fire, and then a fat roll of smoke shut off all view of him.
“They’re both gone—him and the baby!” roared the depot master. “Lost! Both lost!”
The woman with the flying hair heard this and ran off again, screaming. I listened to the piercing voice of her and the roar and the clanging of bells. Horses came running up behind me, with heavy thuds of hoofs, and voices in chorus went up with every leap of the fire. It was like a delirium with the fever; and the grass, under my hands where I sat, felt moist and cool.
Then all of a sudden the shouting and noise all seemed to stop at once, so there was nothing but the snapping and crackle and hiss of the flames, and a voice of a little boy cried out:—
“The Judge is climbing down the porch! He’s got something in his arms!”
“It’s the baby!” yelled the depot master, throwing his hat on the ground. “He’s saved the baby!”
I began to cry again, and wondered why the people did not cheer. There was only a sort of mumble of little shouts and cries and oaths, and the people fell to one side and the other, as the Judge came toward me.
“Come, Margaret,” he said.
I looked up and saw he was all blackened with smoke and soot, except where the sweat had run down in white streaks. His face was close to mine.
“Come! Do you hear?” he said. “I don’t believe she’s hurt, but we must see. We’ll go across to the Danforths’. There is nothing to do here. I’ve got Julianna!”
Just as if the fire was answering him, there came a great ripping and roaring, as if something had given away and collapsed. A tower of flames shot up out of the roof—a sort of bud of flame that opened into a great flower with petals. It was horrible to see the shingles curl and fall in a blazing stream down onto the ground, as if they were drops of hot metal.
It stupefied me, perhaps; I cannot remember how we went to the neighbor’s house or who welcomed us or how we got into the room on the second floor, with a candle burning on the bureau. I noticed how small and ridiculous the flame was and laughed. Indeed, I think when I laughed, I woke up—really woke from my sleep for the first time.
“I went for a walk,” the Judge was saying. “I had a headache. I couldn’t sleep. I moved the lamp onto the card table. The curtain must have blown into it. We must thank God. We were lucky, very lucky!”
He was pacing up and down there like a caged animal.
“I’m thankful Eleanor, my wife, wasn’t at home,” he went on, talking very fast. “She hasalways been so delicate—had so much sorrow—so much trouble. A shock would kill her—a shock like that. My God, we were lucky!”
I got up and pushed the tangled hair back from my face.
“It’s all right,” he went on with a thick tongue. “Julianna is all right—the little rascal is smoky, but all right. Blow the candle out. It is getting light outside. It’s dawn.”
The child on the bed kicked its pink feet out from under its long dresses and gave one of those gurgles to show it was awake. The sound made me scream. I had just awakened from my stupidity.
“The other child!” I cried.
“The other!” he said. “What other?”
“The one he left,” I whispered. “I had forgotten her.”
“My God! so had I. I had only one thought,” he cried out. “Only one thought! And now Chalmers’s wish has been granted. His—has—gone.”
He sat down in a wicker rocking-chair and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
“I never thought,” he said again. “I didn’t see it anywhere. I didn’t look for it. I found Julianna in the middle of the bed.”
“Bed!”
IT MUST BE JULIANNAIT MUST BE JULIANNA
That was the only word I had. The light of sunrise had come. The shouts in the street were far away.
“Why, yes,” the Judge said. “I—did—I found—”
He stopped, he walked over to the infant and swept it into his arms. He took it to the window and held it up to the light as a person looks at a piece of dressgoods.
“Why, it must be Julianna,” he whispered.
Then I heard noises in the back of his throat; he could not catch his breath at first, and when he did, he gave a low groan that seemed to have no end. The baby stared up at him and laughed. It was Monty Cranch’s child.
CHAPTER IVA SUPPRESSION OF THE TRUTH
It was I who took it out of his arms and I who watched him go to the bed and fall across it face downwards, and hide his eyes like a man who cannot stand to see the light of day. If Fate ever played a fiendish trick and punished a square and upright man, it had done it then! I did not dare to speak to him. I did not dare to move. I laid the happy, gurgling baby in my lap and sat there till I felt that every joint in my body had grown tight in its socket.
Once they rapped on the door. The Judge did not move, so I opened it a crack and motioned them away, and sat down again, watching the light turn from pink to the glare of full day, and then a path of warm summer sunlight stretch out across the rug and climb down the wall till it fell onto a basin of water sitting on the floor, and the reflection jumped up to dance its jigs on the ceiling.
I heard the Judge move often enough, but I did not know he was on his feet until I looked up at last, and there he was standing in front of me, with his wild eyes staring down at the child.
He pointed at the little thing with his long forefinger.
“Julianna,” said he.
“You are mad, sir,” I cried.
“No,” said he. “My wife! It must be done to save her happiness. Yes! To save her life.”
“To save her?” I repeated after him.
“Yes, a lie,” he whispered bitterly. “She has not seen the baby for weeks and weeks.”
“She could never know,” I cried, understanding what he meant. “That is true, sir. No one could ever tell. The two of them were not different anyway. But you—! You could never forget.”
“I know,” said he. “Yet it is my happiness against hers, and I have made up my mind. No living soul can ever learn of this. I am safe there. Chalmers will never come back. Nor could he ever know if he did. And so—”
“But the blood,” I said, trembling with the thought. “What of that?”
“God help us!” he answered, beating his knuckles on his jaws. “How can I say? But, come what may, I have decided! That child is now Julianna! Give her to me!”
He took the infant in his arms again, pressing it close to him, as if it were a nettle which must be grasped with full courage to avoid the pricks of its thousand barbs.
“What are you?” he whispered to the new Julianna. “What will you be? What is your birthright?”
Well I remember his words, spoken in that half-broken voice; they asked questions which have not been answered yet, I tell you! And yet little attention I paid to them at the moment, for the mischief Welstoke had taught me crept around me again. I could not look at the Judge with his youth dropped off him, his voice and face ten years older and his eyes grown more tender by the grief and love and sacrifice of an hour, without turning away from him. Why? Because a voice from the grave was whispering to me as cool as wet lettuce, to prove that the good or bad of a soul does not end with death.
“Didn’t I tell you that skeletons hang in all closets?” it said. “Now, after this night, the Judge, to use a good old phrase, is quite in your power. Bide your time, my dear. We women will come into our own again.”
“Excuse me, sir,” I said, aloud. “There was a locket on the child’s neck. Wouldn’t it be well to remove it? It is marked with a name that must be forgotten.”
He looked at me gratefully as he fumbled at the trinket with his long, smoke-blackened fingers, while I trembled with my desire to have it safe in my own hands. It was the one thing leftto prove the truth. I believe my arms were stretched out for it, when there came a knock on the door.
“You want some breakfast,” said a voice. “You poor tired people!”
The Judge, jumping up, placed the little chain and locket on the window sill. I saw it slide down the incline; the screen was up far enough to let it through. It was gone! He gave an exclamation, but the next moment the door had opened and the Danforth family were crowding in.
“Well, Colfax,” said the old lawyer, “you’re a lucky man. Everybody safe and sound and a very ugly old colonial house burned flat to the ground, with plenty of insurance. Now that you have the new appointment and are going to leave town, it makes a very convenient sale for you.”
“Hush!” said his daughter. “The hot coffee is more important. You had better bring the baby down with you. We have sent for milk and nursing-bottles. There, John, that is the baby. You’ve never seen it. Wasn’t I right? Isn’t it pretty?”
“My God!” cried the Judge.
“What!” said they.
“I must be tired,” he answered. “It has been a strain. It was nothing.”
We went out onto the porch for a moment when we were below, and stood out of sight behindthe vines. The street was still crowded with curious people, and there was a great black hole with the elm trees, scorched brown, drooping over it—a hole filled with the ashes that were all that was left of the home. Men were playing a hose into it and every time they moved the stream, here or there, a great hiss and cloud of vapor came up. Some one had hung the Judge’s straw hat on a lilac bush and there it advertised itself. But the Judge drew himself up and stiffened his body and set his teeth, as he looked at that scene, and I knew then he would not break down again, but would play the game he had begun to the end.
Indeed, I felt his fingers at my sleeve.
“I shall slip away to get the locket,” he whispered. “Do you understand? Just a moment. Tell them I will be right back.”
He went around the house and I into the hall.
“Judge Colfax will return in a minute,” I explained.
“Of course!” said Miss Danforth. “We will wait for him.”
The minutes passed. He did not come back.
“Where did you say he went?” asked the old barrister—or lawyer, as you call them.
I shook my head and turned the baby onto my other arm. In a second more I heard his voice on the porch.
“Margaret!” he called.
I went out to him.
His face showed his nervousness again. His fingers trembled as he took the baby from me.
“Go! Look!” he whispered. “I cannot find it!”
This was my chance! I went. The grass below the window had grown long and was matted down; people on the street were watching me and I did not dare to drop on my knees for fear some well-meaning and unwelcome assistance might come for the search. Nevertheless I pushed my toes, I thought, over every inch of the ground below the window. I doubled and redoubled the space. At last the Danforths’ cook raised the screen.
“What are ye doing?” said she. “Come in. The baby’s food is here already.”
What could I say? How could I avoid going? There was no way. But the Judge had not found the locket. Nor had I.
But the Judge had other worries, I’m telling you. He feared the news of the fire would reach his wife in some wrong way and he telegraphed her. She answered by saying she was leaving for home. Brave woman that she was! The telegram said, “It is worth the fire to feel the leap of the heart when I know that you all were saved for me.”
“Will she ever know?” he whispered, staring down at the laughing baby, with its little pink, curved mouth. “Will she ever know? I did this for her. God, tell me if I was right!”
“Be easy, sir,” I said to him. “Have no fear. There is no one in the world but you and me can tell the story of last night. After these weeks and weeks your wife has been away, there is nobody but me or you who can say this child is not—”
“Julianna,” he choked.
“Yes, sir,” said I.
I was right. What it cost the Judge’s soul I do not know. But that the lie he acted in the name of love was not discovered by the thin woman and wife, whose only beauty was in the light of her eyes, I know very well. The years that she lived—it was after we all came to this city, when the Judge took his new office—were happy enough years for her. Rare enough is the brand of devotion he gave to her; rare enough was the beauty and sweetness of the girl that grew up calling her “Mother.”
In all that time never a word did he say to me of what only he and I knew, and I have often thought of what faith he must have had in human goodness—what full, unchanging, constant, noble faith—to trust a servant the way he seemed to trust me by his silence. I have believed ever since that no man or animal can long be mean ofsoul under the terrible presence of kindness and confidence. For all the trickery that the inherited character of my mother and that Madame Welstoke had poured into my nature was driven bit by bit out of my heart by the trust the Judge put in me, and his looking upon me as a good and honest woman. Long before my love for Julianna had grown strong, I knew that I never could bring myself to use my knowledge of the Judge’s secret to wring money from him, or in fact for any other purpose than to feel sorrow for what his fear of the future must have made him suffer.
I knew well enough how the blood of the daughter preyed upon his mind. There is no child that, sooner or later and more than once, does not come to a time of badness and stubbornness and mischief, and when those times came to Julianna, the Judge would watch her as if he expected to see her turn into a snake like magic in a fairy story. More than that, for days he would be odd and silent, and when he thought no one was looking at him, he would sit with his face in his hands, thinking and brooding and afraid.
I found out, too, that he had tried to trace the father, John Chalmers, back to the days when he wore his own name, and it may have been that then he would have strived to go back to Monty’s father and grandfather, and so on, as far as he could go. I knew about it because one day I waslooking through his desk drawers—prying has always been a failing with me!—and I found a letter from Mr. Roddy, the newspaper reporter, who I had almost forgotten. Mr. Roddy said that he never had been able to find anything of the murderer’s history before the time he was employed in Bermuda, and I know my heart jumped with pleasure, for I could not see what good it would do for the Judge to know; and I felt, for some reason, that the name of Cranch was one that both he and I would not have smudged with the owner’s misdeeds and folly. You may say that it was strange that pictures of love—the love which came and went like the shadow of a flying bird, flitting across a wall—should have still been locked up in an old woman’s heart. But they were there to be called back, as they are now, with all their colors as clear and bright as the pictures of Julianna’s future that the Judge used to see pass before the eyes of his fear.
At first I used to think that the master was principally in terror because of the chance that some strange trick of fate would show his wife the truth. The older and more beautiful and the more lovable and affectionate the little daughter grew, and the weaker and whiter the poor deceived woman, the worse the calamity would have been. Perhaps I thought this was the Judge’s fear, because of its being my own. I wasalways feeling that the blow was about to fall, and I prayed that Mrs. Colfax would no longer be living when it came.
But at last she was gone. She died when Julianna was eleven, and had long braids of hair that would have been the envy of the mermaids, and eyes that had begun to grow deep like pools of cool water, and a figure that had begun to be something better than the stalkiness of a child. Mrs. Colfax died with a little flickering smile one day, and the Judge put his arms around her and then fell on his knees. She looked thin and worn, but very happy.
“Sleep,” he whispered to her.
And then he opened the door and called Julianna.
“You must not be afraid, dear,” he said to her. “Death is here, but Death is not terrible. See! She has smiled. We can tell that she knew that we would see her again in a little while, can’t we?”
“Why, yes,” said Julianna. “For she never thought first of herself, but of us.”
Then the Judge put out his arms and held the girl close to him, so that I knew a fresh love for her had come into his heart. Perhaps on account of it he had more fear than ever. One day he brought home a book in a green cover; I read the words on the back—“Some Aspects of Heredity.”Nor was that book the last of its kind he bought or sat reading till late at night, with his pipe held in the crook of his long fingers and his forehead drawn down into a scowl. I could tell he was wondering about the mystery of that which goes creeping down from mother or father to son and daughter, and on and on, like a starving mongrel dog that slinks along after a person, dropping in the grass when a person speaks cross to it, running away when a person turns and chases it, and then, when it has been forgotten, a person looks around and there it is again, skulking close behind. “And then,” as Madame Welstoke used to say, folding her hands, “if you call it ‘Heredity,’ it knows its name and wags its tail!”
One would have said that the Judge always expected that some creature like that would crawl up behind the girl. I used to imagine, when Julianna came into the room, that he looked over her shoulder or behind her, as if he expected to see it there with its grinning face. And, moreover, I’ve seen him look at the soft, fine skin of her round forearms, or the little curls of hair at the back of her neck, or the lids of her eyes, when they were moist in summer, or the half moons on the nails of her fingers, as if he might be able to see there some sign of her birth or the first bruises made by this thing called “Heredity,” that would say, if it could talk, “Come. Don’tyou feel the thrill of my touch? You belong not to yourself, my dear, but to me.”
I knew. And as the girl came into womanhood, and he saw, perhaps, that I was watching her, too, I think he longed for sympathy and wanted the relief of speech. Finally he spoke. It was late one night and he had his hand on the stair rail, when he heard me locking the window in the hall. He turned quickly.
“Margaret,” he whispered.
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
“Thank God, she is a woman and not a man,” he said, out of a clear sky; “for a woman is better protected against herself.”
For a moment he seemed to be thinking; then he looked at the floor.
“Does Julianna ever take a glass of sherry or claret when I am not at dinner?” he asked. “I thought it had gone quickly.”
“Why, no!” I replied.
He nodded the way he did when he was satisfied—the way a toyshop animal’s head nods—less and less until it stops.
“I’m sorry I asked,” he said. “Good-night.”
What he had said was enough to show me that his imagination had been sharpened and sharpened and sharpened. Perhaps you know how it is when some one does not come back until late at night, and how, when you are waiting, listening tothe ticking of the clock, or the sounds of footsteps or cab horses in the street, coming nearer and nearer and then going farther and farther away, you can imagine all kinds of things like highway robbery and accidents and hospitals, and the telephone seems ready to jump at you with a piece of bad, bad news. So it was with him, except that he did not see pictures of what had happened, but pictures of what might come. I knew that he feared the character that might crop out of the good and beautiful girl, and I thought sometimes, too, that he still had fits of believing, though the past was buried under the years, that sometime the ugly ghost of the truth would come rapping on the window pane in the dead o’ night.
Perhaps I can say, in spite of the fact that we never knew of a certainty, that it did. We had cause to know that, barring the Judge and me and Monty Cranch, wherever he might have been, a new and strange and evil thing showed itself as the fourth possessor of our secret.
Julianna, in that year, had begun going to a new school—fashionable, you might call it, and many is the time I have smiled, remembering how it came about. The woman with the old-fashioned cameo brooch, who kept it, did everything to invite the Judge to send his daughter there, except to ask him outright, and afterward I heard she had rejoiced to have the one shecalled “the best-born girl in all the city” at her school, which she boasted, in the presence of her servants, was not made like the others, with representatives of ten Eastern good families as social bait for a hundred daughters, of Western quick millionaires.
I mention this because it was the beginning of times when Julianna was being asked to other girls’ houses and for nice harmless larks at fine people’s country-places, when vacations came. On one of these times when she was away, a voice came whispering to us out of the past!
It was the Christmas season, bitter cold, and before I went to bed I could hear the wind snapping the icicles off the edge of the library balcony and sending them, like bits of broken goblets onto bricks and crusted snow below. I could see the flash of them, too, as they went by the light from the frosted windows in the kitchen basement, but nothing else showed outside in the old walled garden, for it was as black as a pocket.
Not later than ten I crawled up the stairs and stood for a minute in the dining-room. I heard the scratch of the Judge’s pen and knew he was hard at work, and I remember, when I looked through the curtains, how I thought of how old the Judge looked, with his hair already turning from gray to white, and of how the youth of all of us hangs for a moment on the edge and thenslides away without any warning or place where a body can put a finger and say, “It went at that moment.” Perhaps I would have stood there longer, but the Judge looked up and smiled, dry enough.
“You may think I am working,” he said. “But I’m mostly engaged just now, Margaret, exerting will power to overcome a foolish fancy.”
“What is that, sir?” I asked.
“That somebody is watching me,” he said. “I’ve turned around a dozen times and left this seat twice already. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, but I’ve made up my mind not to look again.”
“Not to look?” I cried.
“No. There’s nothing there.”
“Where?” I said.
“Below—in the garden or on the balcony,” he answered; “somewhere outside the window.”
“Bless us, I’ll look,” I whispered, walking toward the back of the room.
It might have been my fancy or my own reflection, but whatever it was, I thought I saw a dark and muffled thing move outside. It forced a scream from me, and that one little cry was enough to bring the Judge up out of his chair, knowing well enough without words that I had seen something.
“That’s enough!” he said, his long legs stridingtoward the French windows. “Stand back, Margaret. We’ll look into this.”
He tore the glass doors open, the bitter cold wind flickered the lamp, and by some sensible instinct I pulled the cord of the oil burner. I knew that as he stood on the balcony, looking, he could see nothing with a light behind him. Furthermore, I did not move, because I knew that he was listening, too. Both of us heard the scrape of something on the icy garden walk, the moment the lights went out. Immediately after it the Judge called to me.
“Look!” he said. “Isn’t something moving there along the shrubs?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “It’s near the ground. It crawls.”
“What do you want?” called the Judge to the moving thing. Then, although he had no revolver at hand, he said, “Answer, or I’ll shoot.”
The only reply to this was the sound of breathing and one little cough that sounded human. The Judge reached behind him with one long arm, feeling around the little table by the window for some object. At last his fingers closed on it and I knew he had the little bronze elephant that now stands on the mantel, where Mrs. Estabrook turns it so it will not show that it has lost its tail.
“We are a pair of old fools,” said the Judge, as if he was not sure. “It probably is a cat.”
With these words he poised the bronze that was solid and must have weighed two pounds, and hurled it into the garden. There was a sound of striking flesh that a body can tell from all others. I heard it! And then, quicker than I tell it, the sharp clear air was filled with a cry which died away, as if it had flown up to the milky, starry sky and left us listening to strange, inhuman groans coming up from the garden.
“My God!” cried the Judge. “ I did not mean to hit it! It wasn’t a cat! It is something else.”
“The kitchen!” I cried, and without stopping to close the doors against the nipping cold, I led the way down the back stairs.
“No time for caution,” he said. “Unbolt this door. See, it is writhing there on the snow! It is a child!”
I believed at first that he was right. As we ran forward it seemed to be a naked, half-starved child of six or seven years, wallowing in the snow in some terrible agony. My heart jumped against my ribs as I saw it. I stopped in my tracks and let the Judge go on alone.
In a second his voice rose in a tone that braced me like a glass of brandy.
“See!” he cried. “Thank Heaven! It is only a poor, cringing dog—a shaggy hound. Here, you poor beast. Did I hurt you? Come, Laddie, come, boy!”
“Laddie” he had called him, and it was the same “Laddie” that lived with us so long.
“Margaret!” cried the Judge, as he pulled the dirty creature into the kitchen. “A light! The thing is half-starved. Bring some food upstairs to the library.”
The hound was licking his hand and cowering as if accustomed to abuse, and from that night it was nearly six months before the old fellow got his flesh and healthy coat of hair and his spirit back again. That night, having eaten, it looked about the room, found the Judge, went to him, and, laying his head in his lap, looked up at him out of his two sorrowful eyes. I knew then, by the smile of the Judge’s mouth and the way he put on his tortoise-shell glasses, that “Laddie” would never be sent away. Just then, though, the master, after he had looked at the dog a minute, sprang up suddenly and stood staring at me with his mouth twitching.
“What is it, sir?” I asked.
“The dog!” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “The dog—”
“The gate swings shut with a spring!” he said. “Some human being must have opened the gate.”
It was true! We looked at each other, and then the Judge laughed.
“Oh, well,” said he carelessly, “if they wantthe dog they must come and claim him with proceedings at law. Make a bed for him in the back hall.”
On my part, however, I was not satisfied so easily and many more peaceful moments I would have had if I had never pried further as I did. After all, I only asked one question and that early the next morning. In the house next to ours a brick ell was built way out to the alleyway along half the yard. The kitchen windows looked out on the passage. There was a maid in that house,—a second girl, as they call them in this country,—and I knew she was a great person for staying up late, telling her own fortune with cards or reading a dream-book. She was hanging clothes in the early sun, with her red hair bobbing up and down above the sheets and napkins, when I stood on a chair and looked over the wall.
“Busy early?” I said. “But I saw your light late last night. Did you by any chance see anybody come in through our gate?”
“Only you,” the stupid thing said. “At first I thought it was some other woman, because, begging your pardon, you looked thin. But it was after nine and I knew you’d not be having callers that late.”
My tongue grew so dry it was hard to move it from the roof of my mouth, and before I couldput in a word she threw a handful of clothespins into the basket and looked up again.
“When did you get a dog?” she asked. “I saw you had one with you.”
“Dog!” I cried. “Oh, yes, the dog. That’s the Judge’s new dog.”
I jumped down off the chair and looked up at the windows to be sure the Judge was not looking at me.
“A woman!” I whispered.
With a hundred thoughts I went across the garden, looking in the snow for a person’s tracks. It had grown warmer, however. Water was dripping from the roof, and if there had been any story in the snow, it had thawed away. I walked along with my head down, thinking and wondering whether I would tell the Judge. Mrs. Welstoke used to say, “Silence, my dear, is the result of thinking. You might not suppose so, perhaps, but why tell anything without a reason? People find out the good or bad news soon enough without your help. If it’s good, their appetite is the sharper for it, and if it’s bad, they have had just so much longer in peace.” I thought of these words and wondered, too, what use it would be to worry the master. If evil was to come, it would come. And then, at that moment, my eye lit on something that shone in a hollow of the snow.
“A piece of jewelry!” I said to myself, stoopingfor it. My fingers never reached it in that attempt; instinct made them draw back as if the object had been of red-hot metal. But it was not of red-hot metal. It was of gold. It was a locket. It was the very locket and chain that had been taken from the neck of Monty Cranch’s baby!
“So!” I cried, starting back as if it had been a tarantula; “so it is you! Found at last!”