CHAPTER XIV
THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL
Late that night the Judge sat alone at his desk in the library. There was a faint pungent odour in the room and at his elbow sat an ash-tray on which was a little huddle of brown ashes—all that remained of the photograph whose arrival that afternoon had so disconcerted him. He sat like a stone image, staring out into the moon-lighted garden, but really seeing nothing beyond the range of the poisonous ashes at his side, save a green-and-yellow blur that might have been blent of leaves and moonshine.
He was looking at the Handwriting on the Wall.
All of his early life had been impeccable, all save that single lapse—that "brain-storm" which had convulsed the deep and quiet waters of his nature. It had come and gone with fateful swiftness, and out of the bitterness of the tragic awakening had grown gradually—as a spotless lily springs from the silt—a flower of recompense, which, its roots in the turbid memory, had shed a subtle perfume on his later life. His steady-going career had been laurelled with place and honours, and in Echo he had found compensation for the empty and the missed. And now, after all the years, Fate grinned at him like a gargoyle from the cloud, holding the thunderbolt to destroy him! Unless he paid the penalty—with his professional integrity!
The Judge knew all at once that in the Great Economy no act of life was lost. His had not been. It had only been covered. Somewhere that old leaf of scribbled paper had lain, inert but potential, waiting the turn of the wheel to bring it to light. By some satanic twist of circumstance it had come to the hands of his enemy—Craig was his enemy now—and in his hands it spelled his own ruin. What weapon was there to fight with? None. However dastard the act that spread it to the world, he would stand in the eyes of his fellow-men discredited, undermined, morally disestablished, stripped and naked of all those things which were the breath of his life. He thought of his wife—of Echo. For them humiliation, looks askance. His decision on the Welles-Scott case was ready, locked in his drawer—lacking only his signature writ at the bottom—the most vital and far-reaching decision of any he had rendered. On the first of May it was to be handed down. He remembered the typewritten line on the photograph: "May 3rd!" On that day he would be placarded in the public prints!
A hackneyed text flashed through his mind: "Be sure thy sin will find thee out." He had not sinned, as the world counted it, no. But chasing the first, a second text etched itself as swiftly: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."
The coils had woven inextricably, there was no gap in the meshes. Suppose he did this thing that Craig demanded, rewrote the decision, perjured himself. Right, by another judgment, would have its way in the end. The act would save him from shame—would save others as well. What did it matter? Would not such a solution be best for all concerned?
"Thou shalt not do evil that good may come!"—it was curious how the banal, forgotten texts started up, like Jack-in-boxes, from some boyhood covert of his brain! Not matter? Ah, how much it mattered! Escape by that road was impossible for him. And there was but one other road by which he could evade the issue.
He unlocked a desk-drawer and pushed aside its litter of papers. A small silver-mounted revolver lay there—pointing the one way out. He picked it up, his fingers shrinking at the chill of the cool metal, then laid it on the desk. He took a sheet of paper from its place and began to write: "Dear Echo—"
He started; no, that would not do. He began again: "Dear Charlotte and—"
He paused an instant and listened—his hearing had caught some sound above-stairs. It was not repeated and he bent his head again over the writing. But his fingers would not frame the words. He laid aside the pen. Better, after all, to go all silently, leaving behind him empty speculation, which if painful at first, would become in time but a softened memory!
It was the opening of the door of Echo's room which he had heard. For hours she had lain sleepless, her brain throbbing, strange painful pictures flitting under her closed eyelids. Her home world, which had always seemed simple and uncomplex, even in its darker aspects, had suddenly become fateful and mysterious, a thing of secret depths and shaming, piteous revelations. Her own father's past had held a secret that would not bear the light! That he had loved another woman than her mother—afterward—that, though the thought was repellent, perhaps he could not have helped. But that he had ever, ever as a passing phase, yielded to an infatuation which had taken no thought of consequence or of convention smote her with a kind of terror. Now, through his own reckless act, he had become the prey of a shameless woman—of a blackmailer.
For that was what it seemed to her. It did not occur to her that his letter might have fallen into other hands. In her imagination, back of the situation stood the woman who had tempted him, almost to his complete undoing, in his youth, now—a very wanton!—holding out the badge of his indiscretion, for a price! The photograph had come to him with its blunt threat typed at the top: "For Possible Release May 3rd." Echo had seen the like many a time written upon her father's printer's-proofs. It meant released for publication. His letter was to be spread broadcast—unless he met the demand! The hideous vulgarity of his predicament sent pulsing waves of shame and humiliation over her. It seemed suddenly that their conventional, well-ordered existence had dropped all at once into an unnatural and hateful environment, the murky, unredeemable atmosphere of the yellow-backed novel and the tawdry film-play. Thoughts such as these had fought with the acute sympathy that had all her life made her and her father in feeling wellnigh inseparable, stabbing her love with the reflection that his deepest heart had, after all, been locked from her.
Gradually, however, the sharper corrosive ache had dulled away, leaving an overmastering sense of his trouble. Since Nelson had helped him to his room after his fainting in the library, she had not seen him, for though he had with curious stubbornness, it had seemed to her, refused to have the doctor come, he had not appeared at dinner. She wondered whether he was now asleep, or lying wide-eyed, nursing thoughts like hers. Finally there had stolen over her an odd uneasiness, a thriving anxiety. That tenuous telegraphy whose laws evade analysis though its operations are familiar and which, ever since her childhood, had called from her a subconscious and involuntary response to his moods that had sometimes startled them both by its eerie suggestion, now flooded her mind with a sense of warning. She slipped out of bed to peer through the blind. She could see a window of the library: light was sifting from between its heavy curtains—her father was not in his room, then; he was there. She thrust her feet into worsted slippers, threw a kimono over her nightgown and ran quickly down the stair.
The light footfall, the whispering rustle, did not reach the Judge. He was unaware of the girl who had paused uncertainly on the threshold. His mind was arguing the final phase of his problem.
What he purposed would cut the Gordian knot, make plain-sailing for others, if not for himself. He would have rendered no decision on the crucial case. With his escape the problem would solve itself. Craig would have nothing to gain then in publishing the letter. "Why not?" he muttered. "It is justifiable—it is neither gross nor cowardly—to issue one's-self a ticket into the hereafter in order to avert shame from the innocent and secure peace to those one loves!" His wife was provided for. His elimination from her equation of life, he reflected with a tinge of bitterness, would not deeply disturb her even, centred existence. Echo, he thought likely, would marry Sevier. And Chilly—of what earthly use was his life to Chilly? "I will do it," he said to himself. He stretched out his hand—toward the silver-mounted revolver.
But he drew it back. A further clearer conception had come to him in that last instant to give him pause. What, after all, was he about to do? Himself aside, all that was dearest to him aside, was not the act he contemplated at bottom the murder of a principle, the betrayal of a trust that he held for the State? He was a public officer, who had taken oath in the presence of his associates worthily to execute the functions of his high office, to do justice and fear not. For him the sin of omission could be no less than the sin of commission. Would such a shifty suppression of his decision be one whit less a treason than the rendering of a mendacious one? Either equally besmirched his honour! Something deeper in him than dread of death, deeper even than his present fear of life, stirred and throbbed. No, whatever the outcome, no matter what it held for him and his, he must go through with it to the bitter end! He buried his face in his hands.
As he sat thus stirless, the sense came to him of another presence in the room. Another's breath seemed to enwrap the place with feeling. He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway. "Echo!" he cried and rose to his feet.
He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway.
"Echo!" he cried, and rose to his feet
She came to him quickly, a little diffidently. "I couldn't help it, dear! I felt you—worrying, and I had to come." Suddenly her eyes fell on the revolver on the desk. She sprang and snatched at it in panic. "That! Oh, not that! Not that!"
"I—it was in my drawer," he said. "Surely you—"
"Ah," she cried. "I know! You—you received a letter this afternoon. It made you faint. You haven't been yourself since you read it. And now you—"
He drew a shaking hand across his eyes. "No, dear," he said more steadily. "It would not have been—what you think. There was a moment when—but it has gone, and forever." He took the revolver from her hand, returned it to the drawer and locked it. "There," he said, "I give you the key. It will not happen now." There was in his wailing speech a kind of hopeless acquiescence and finality.
Her heart was beating hard with a painful embarrassment. "Can you—can't you tell me what the letter was?"
He looked at her palely, his features working. She would have to know soon enough, yet he shrank with a fastidious pain from telling her. What would she think of him? "Twenty years ago," he said, "when I was a young man, I wrote an—an unwise letter. It—it had to do with some one who died the year it was written, but whose memory I—I treasure. The threat is made now to publish it, and this would—would shame and harm that memory and me."
"Some one who is dead?" she repeated bewildered. The picture her fancy had painted was fading out. "Then how—"
"The old letter has fallen into unfriendly hands."
"And it must come back to hurt you—to spoil your life now! Something written before I was born! It sha'n't! It sha'n't!" She spoke with passionate abandon, her words struck out like fire from flint, from the horror of the knowledge that had sprung to her at sight of the gleaming thing at which she had snatched. "But you can pay the price, no matter how much it is! Take my pearls—my rings—my gowns."
He shook his head. "It's not money: what I am asked to pay is my honour. I am required to alter my judicial decision on the Welles-Scott case ... to hand down a legal lie."
She looked at him with parted lips. "The Welles-Scott case!"
"Yes. Much hangs on this decision. The great corporate interests—but you would not understand."
She threw herself beside his chair and knelt close to him. A great compassion was welling up in her, mingling itself with deep anger at the cowardly attack upon him. She had known of such conscienceless warfare in political life—acts of "character assassins" which knew neither pity nor honourable scruple. "Who has the letter?" she asked.
"Cameron Craig. It came with his card."
She started violently. Cameron Craig! He who had once asked her to marry him, who had asserted his love for her—he, now bent on her father's ruin! She had a darting memory of that heavy, ruthless jaw, those lowering, determined eyes. Cameron Craig? She lifted a stricken face.
"You see!" he said. "I remember you once said to me that he was not 'one of us.' He isn't. That is why I know that he will stop at nothing. He will do what he threatens. There is no way out."
She rose to her feet. Her heart was beating so that her breath came with difficulty and a mist was before her eyes. "You will hand down the decision." It was a statement, not a question.
"God help me—I must!"
"When?"
"A week from to-day, as I have announced."
She leaned and put her arm about his neck, the key of the drawer still clenched in her cold hand, and kissed him on the forehead. Even in that numb moment she felt a certain pride that he, who had known a passing weakness, was yet, in this crucial moment, so strong.
"You must go back to bed now," he said, heavily. "You are going to your aunt's to-morrow, aren't you?"
She nodded, her cheek still against his. "I shall take the early train, before you are up. But I shall be back next day."
She withdrew her arms. "Good night," she half-whispered, then looked at the locked drawer. "You will not—you will not—"
"I promise," he said.
"Whatever happens?"
"Whatever happens."
An instant later she was gone.