CHAPTER XI
CRAIG FINDS HIS WEAPON
From his chair in the library at Midfields that night, just beyond the circle of radiance cast by the big reading-lamp, Cameron Craig looked steadily at the Judge from under his bushy eyebrows, as the latter said:
"Yes, it is true that I was for years affiliated with the interests you represent. I was their attorney. The connection ceased when I, myself, severed it, eleven years ago."
Craig's lips, that had been set in a hard line, parted in a satiric smile. He was leading doggedly up to what he purposed to say. "To its profound loss," he said from the shadow. "You had cogent reasons, no doubt."
The other mused a moment, his pallid, scholarly face averted. "I'll tell you, if you like," he said at length. "But you will understand that I challenge no one else's convictions. I assume to sit in judgment only upon my own."
Craig nodded. "Of course."
"I made the connection we are speaking of," continued the Judge, "when I was a young man, just beginning practice. The liquor problem was young then too. Communities did not take it too seriously—particularly in the south where drinking was a matter of course with gentlemen. The white-ribbon movement was in its infancy and John B. Gough had hardly been heard of. To me—to the men I knew—the 'temperance' agitation seemed a mere recurring fad, fostered by pious and well-meaning persons, which cropped up—a kind of moral seven-year locust—at periodic intervals. People lived more or less as their grandfathers had lived before them on their plantations. And their fathers had been fox-hunting, hard-living 'three-bottle men' right down to the war. I had all the habits and prejudices of my class. Liquor seemed to me like many another thing that was made to minister to individual weakness, but was not in itself obnoxious. And the decanter was never empty on my side-board. Yet even then the new element in politics and in every-day life—the sentiment against liquor—was growing. Times were slowly changing, men's outlook was changing, and I knew—long before I admitted it to myself—that I was a part of an industry which the best thought of the community no longer approved, and that men who championed it were swimming against a deepening and strengthening social current. I was stubborn, but at last there came a day when I—changed too."
His voice had softened, had suddenly become surcharged with feeling. He leaned over the table and caught up a small oval photograph, set in a black-leathern frame. It was a picture of his son Chisholm, as a boy of perhaps fourteen. He held it out in a hand that slightly trembled:
"That is why I changed, Craig. One night Chilly came home—drunk. I had never seen him intoxicated, had never guessed that he could so far forget himself. He was a mere boy, at school! In that moment the sharp truth came to me. Shame stared at me from my own door-step. I saw the text of the sermon that had been preached into my deaf ears—in my own son!"
He broke off abruptly and set the picture back on the table. When he spoke again his voice was more even:
"That hour, as I sat here in this same room, I—saw. Could anything else have opened my eyes? Perhaps not. But that did. I saw all at once what I had been bolstering. It was no longer a theoretical question of the harm of the club-bar and the corner saloon to the community. They were making a drunkard of Chilly! The Trust furnished their stock-in-trade. And I had been the Trust's paid tool—a part of its brain in this state—had guarded it from error, shown how far it could go with impunity under the law, had even made possible its organisation as it exists to-day! I, Chilly's father! That night I wrote out my resignation as counsel. I mailed it before I slept."
There was a slight pause. Craig's lowering look had been watching the other curiously. The emotion in the older man's voice had touched no chord of response in him. Rather it roused contempt—not for the son, whom he considered a brainless weakling, but for what seemed to him an arrant attempt to evade the issue that stood so sharply and insistently in his own mind. To him no man's motives were pure. The man before him had been not the Trust's servant, but its creature. Had not the Corporation, behind all, set him on his high seat? Was he fool enough to think that he—Craig—was not aware of that? It had expected him to pay in kind, when the need arose, as now it had. And did the other think to throw dust in his eyes with such mawkish sentimentalism—to evade this old tacit obligation by a flimsy pretence of moral scruple? Craig spoke:
"And—the Corporation. What did it say? Eh?"
"The president of the board came to see me. He was good enough to ask me to reconsider. But I had made my choice."
Craig leaned forward, his arm on the little inlaid desk beside him. "Let me finish," he said with deliberate meaning. "The board, accepting that decision with the keenest regret, desired to make your retirement the occasion for showing in a tangible way its appreciation of your long and faithful service. A seat on the Supreme Bench being vacant, the Directorate proposed, unless your taste pointed otherwise, to use such influence as it might possess, to gain for your name the consideration in that connection which it deserved."
A look of surprise had crossed the Judge's face as he began. A sensitive flush swept it as he ended. "If you imply that my seat was offered me, Mr. Craig, even tentatively, at that time, or in that connection, you are in error!"
Craig's sneer was open now. There was no more pretence. "If not in so many words, in effect! Pshaw! Do you mean to pretend you would have had that appointment if the Trust hadn't backed you for it? It owned the state bag and baggage then, as it does now—and as it will continue to do! It put you on the Bench and it has kept you there, and you know it!"
The Judge was on his feet now, his flush faded to pallor. He deigned no answer to the flung assertion. "What is your object in coming to me to say this?" His voice was deep and resonant.
"Just this!" Craig lifted his arm, his big fist clenched, his eyes narrowed. "You were the Trust's counsel and confident for twenty years—till it put you where you are now! Do you think it did that for nothing? It made you, Beverly Allen! And now it has reason to believe that you intend to knife it in the back—to drag the ermine it put on your shoulders into an incendiary hue-and-cry started by demagogues who aim to destroy a great industry!"
"What do you mean, sir?" The Judge's tone was icy.
"I mean the Welles-Scott decision!" Craig said in a low, deadly voice. "That"—his clenched hand smote the light desk at his elbow with a savage blow—"must be ours!"
For an instant there was blank silence. The Judge stood aghast, his very speech frozen with indignation. To him his judicial calling had an element that was almost sacred. This man—to whom he had given the hand of friendship, who had the entrée into the exclusive circles of southern gentility—this man assumed to lay coarse fingers upon his vestment of office, to question his integrity as a Judge! He dared to believe him, Beverly Allen, cheaply venal—a puppet, whose legal rulings were at the beck and call of corporate influence! The room seemed suddenly stifling hot. He turned to the window, flung the curtains wide and drew a gulping breath of the fresh air.
He had not seen Craig's sudden start. For at the smashing blow of his fist on the fragile Italian desk, a curious thing had happened. Its catch loosened by the jar, a tiny carven panel had fallen with a little click, and a thin sheaf of yellowed letters had dropped and spread fan-wise beside his hand. The backs of the envelopes were uppermost, and across the top one was written in a dim, twirly hand and faded ink, the initials B.A.
A thought darted like cold lightning through Craig's brain. "B.A."—Beverly Allen! Whose were those old letters? The initials were in a woman's hand. What if they held a clue to the old story Treadwell, his attorney, had spoken of? A quick instinct inspired him. His hand closed over them quickly—went to his breast—as the Judge turned from the window.
The latter had regained self-control. He stood erect and tall, his leonine head thrown back, his eyes shining, and in his face a look the other had never seen in it before. "You have presumed," he said, "to say to me what I would not have believed any representative of your corporation would dare to say. And you have taken advantage of my hospitality to say it in my own house. I choose now to believe this message an individual one, springing from a personal and base initiative rather than from the responsible Directorate which I once served. 'Once,' I say. For I serve it no longer. I am now a member of the Judiciary of this commonwealth. Because the corporation furthered my candidacy, you assume that it 'made' me. Perhaps it did. But it never owned my conscience or my integrity! Nor does it now, thank God!"
As he spoke he had stepped to the wall and pushed a bell. "Nelson," he said, to the entering butler, "show this gentleman to the door."
Craig had risen to his feet. He looked at the other an instant with livid face. Then he went rapidly to the hall and snatched up his hat and stick. The outer door closed heavily behind him.
In his room at the hotel Cameron Craig took the sheaf of letters. Under the electric-light he drew the folded leaves one by one from their worn envelopes and spread them open before him. A look of chagrin crossed his face. No woman had written them; they had been penned by the Judge himself—he was familiar with the heavy, characteristic hand-writing. Were they, then, only some old letters to his wife, perhaps? He was holding one leaf to the light. Suddenly his eye caught. He made an exclamation. His face lighted with amaze and savage exultation.
What a weapon blind luck, ironic fate, had put into his hands, in the very face of the man for whom he had craved it! For on that leaf, etched in remorseless ink, was what would open an old grave, drag into the daylight the corpse of an ignoble passion, cast scorn upon the writer's name and blight and wither present and future! How little, after all, the tricks of the body changed! Twenty years—and yet, his letter!
What matter when it had been penned, or whether the woman were long dead to whom he had once written that blazing indiscretion? He, the jurist of spotless living and good repute—to be shown forth to the world as a moral fraud, a husband and father who had once stood shamelessly ready to fling home and reputation on the scrap-heap in a disgraceful flight "without benefit of clergy!" The woman presumably had scorned his offer—since she had sent him back his letters—and yet on the page still stood the black intention, in black and white! What incredible folly had led him to preserve it? Twenty years ago—in the dead past—and yet there it was, to be used in the living present, the blunt handwriting, recognisable at a glance, damning and beyond denial!
He laughed aloud. It was Echo's father whom he held in his hand! If he did not come to terms, so much the better, since the blow would strike her too. She thought herself above him, did she? What if this story should be spread abroad in yellow headlines, babbled of in club and boudoir, smirked at on street-corners? Would she hold herself so high then? Well, if he was so far beneath her pride, that should bring her to his level! He felt no prick of shame at the base move he contemplated, no smart of pity for the ruin it should bring. Ambition in which was no tincture of honourable scruple wove, with the desire to humble the woman who would have none of him, to a resolution as unyielding as steel.
He gathered up the letters and put them carefully into his pocket. In another hour he was on the train, speeding to his home in the next state.