A 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 left to 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 behind the 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.
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 of soul 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 was looking 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 was always 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’t you 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 to the 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 she called “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 then slides 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 striding toward 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 want the 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 could put 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, stooping for 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!”