A 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 if the 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 a beautiful 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 are you doing 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 in that 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 an eyelash. 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 are you doing 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 and was 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 when it 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 were still 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 see him again.”
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 has always 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 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.