THE FACE
My thoughts as I entered the portico of that building where I had my apartments were not only of Julianna, but were also in those channels where I have no doubt your own opinion of my narrative must run. I freely admit, as I then was forced to admit, that my lovemaking had been attended with many bizarre and abnormal happenings; yet at the time I sneered at the questions which rose in my own mind and bravely asserted to myself that the chances of winning Julianna were not wholly lost.
In the lower hall of the building in which I had quarters there were stationed until six at night a telephone operator and a doorman. Perhaps you have noticed that I tell you these matters in considerable detail, and I will continue to do this, because my natural dread of disclosing the intimate affairs of my life has kept me heretofore from sharing my story with any one, and now that I have lifted the cover and drawn the veil of my experience, I can only find justification, in so narrating the sequence of extraordinary events, by observing the strictest adherence to detail and accuracy in the hope that perhaps you, by the virtue of a fresh and unprejudiced viewpoint, may be able to unravel some of the tangle in which I am, even now, enmeshed.
As I have said, at six the telephone girl at the switchboard and the doorman, for some reason which I could never understand, were replaced by an old negro who served as both, and who was the most garrulous, indiscreet individual I have ever seen.
As if to affirm these characteristics he spoke to me the moment I had entered, in a voice which seemed to be adapted to a general address to the three or four other bachelors who were waiting in the frescoed vestibule for a conveyance.
“Yaas, sah, Mr. Estabrook, sah. De dohman lef’ a message, sah. Der has been a lady waitin’ foh you, sah, mos’ all de ahfternoon. She comin’ back, she say—dis evenin’. She sutt’nly act very queer, sah.”
“All right,” I snapped. “It’s one of my clients.”
“Um-um,” he said, shaking his head. “I spec she ain’t, Mr. Estabrook, sah. She mos’ likely has pussonal business, sah!”
The others—Folsom the broker, and Madison, and Ingle the architect—had evidently dined well, preparing for a musical comedy, and they snickered without shame.
“Let my man know when she comes,” said I, and without smiling hurried into the elevator.
I had no belief that the woman, whoever she might be, would come back after dark to call upon me. With my conflicting thoughts about Julianna, I forgot the incident. It was therefore with some surprise that I heard Saito, my Jap, arouse me from my sleepy reverie, to which exhaustion had reduced my mind, to tell me that a lady was waiting in the reception room downstairs.
You may understand the conservative nature of my life and habits more thoroughly when I tell you that the mere idea that a woman had dared to ask for me at my apartment in the evening caused me the greatest anxiety. As if to prove what dependence we can put upon our intuitions, I felt, on my way down, most strongly, that an evil event was about to take place.
Nothing could, I think, better illustrate the nonsense of attaching importance to these fore-warnings than to tell you that the woman who waited for me was Julianna herself!
My first instinct, before I had been seen by her, was to hurry her out of the garish little reception room, where, through the door which opened into the hallway, she might well have been seen by anybody; it was only when she greeted me and turned her face toward the tiled floor, and I saw that her shoulders drooped and that her hands hung down at her side, and that she stood like a guilty, punished, and remorseful child, that my wish to protect her was displaced by a mad desire to take her in my arms and comfort her.
“Julianna!” I cried. “What has happened? Is it the Judge? Tell me! Why did you come?”
She shook her head and lowered it still more, until the sweeping curve of her bare neck, from the fine hair behind her ears to the back of the lace collar of her waist, was visible.
I cannot say what gave me the courage, but I bent over her and kissed her there, softly.
She looked up then without the slightest indication of either surprise or reproach.
“I liked that,” she whispered. “I didn’t know how I was going to tell you, but now I can.”
“Tell me what?” said I, in a choking voice.
“I love you,” she said. “I could not let you go. I thought last night that I could carry it through. I thought my duty was to stay with father. But it isn’t!”
“And you came here to tell me!” I gasped.
“Why not?” she said, with a catch in her voice. “I was afraid I would never see you again and I love you.”
When I think of all the sham there is among women, I treasure the memory of that simple little explanation. It was delivered as a full answer to all the conventionalities from here back to the time of the Serpent. It was spoken in a low but confident voice, with her hands upon her breast as if to calm the emotions within, and was directed toward me with the first frank exposure of her eyes which were still wet with tears.
“I have been miserable!” she said. “A woman is meant for some man, after all. And if she resists, she is resisting God! It all has been shown to me so clearly. And I knew that you were the one. There’s nothing else that makes any difference, and it sweeps you off your feet, so it must be nature, because it gave me the courage to telephone you and then try to find you and come here and wait and come again, and only nature can make any one go against all her habits and education. And I believe I’ll call you Jerry, if you still—”
“Good God! Love you?” said I. “Forever!”
“Always?”
“Forever.”
She gave her burning hands to mine, and oblivious of the old negro, whose eyes were upon us, we stood there, looking at each other in awe, very much frightened and very much, for that moment,—and I sometimes wonder if not in truth,—the centre of the universe.
“You belong to me, Jerry?” she said tearfully. “Now?”
“Then I must go back quickly,” she explained, after a moment. “I do not want father to know yet. I want to prepare the way. I don’t want you to speak with him for a week. I will tell him then. Perhaps you think it is strange. But Friday, when he knows, you may come.”
She had a carriage waiting for her, and I walked with her to its door.
“I want to kiss you, Julianna,” I whispered.
She looked up to see whether the driver could observe us. He could not. And then the mischief-loving quality of womankind appeared in her. She gave forth a glad little laugh.
“On Friday,” she said.
The door slammed, and I thought, as I caught a last glance at her then, that she was a luminous being of dreams, lighting the dark recess of a common cab.
This impression recurred so often in those following days that at times there rose the uncanny suspicion that the woman who had visited me had not been one of reality, of flesh and blood, and beating heart and sweet, warm breath. Her smile, her voice, her personality had not seemed a part of real life, but almost the manifestations of a spirit which, timidly and with the hope of some reincarnation in life, had come to claim my vows. I believed that I knew well enough why Julianna, if it were she, had planned to avoid a sudden disclosure of our betrothal to the Judge, but, none the less, I fretted at the sluggishness of time, which, like a country horse, will not go faster for the wishing or the beating.
I wished, too, that she had said she would meet me in her afternoon walks to the Monument and wondered that, if she loved me, she was able to forbid herself a meeting, even though she had felt that good sense demanded a period of reflection and a readjustment of view, so that when we did see each other again, it would be with firmer minds and steadier hearts. I would have gladly foregone all this value of reserve and restraint for one look at her face, one touch of her sleeve, one word from her tender, curving lips.
And yet I was happy in those days—so painfully happy that I heard voices telling me that such happiness does not last, that ecstasies are tricks of fate by which man’s joy is fattened for slaughter, that from some ambush a horrible thing was peering.
Strangely enough, these fears were connected in no way with the warnings which I had had from my eavesdropping or even from the definite threat which had come out of my grotesque experience with the Sheik of Baalbec. The piece of writing, which had begun, “You are in danger,” I had dropped into a file of papers, and though I suppose it is somewhere among them now, I have never yielded to the temptation to look at it again. I may have thought of it merely to add to the opinion of Jarvis that the writing was not Julianna’s, the apparently indisputable fact that, at the moment the warning had been written, Julianna was, by the word of the apartment house doorman, waiting for me in the little reception room. Furthermore, with my success in winning her, with the intoxication of it, I began to look upon the strange and unexplained matters which had so perplexed me as trivial illusions beneath the consideration of good sense. However much you may be surprised at my willful blindness, your wonder cannot equal that which I myself feel to-night.
And now, when I am about to tell you of that memorable Friday, I must impress upon you that no detail of it is distorted in my memory, that so clear and vivid were the impressions upon my senses that, were I to live to the age of pyramids, I could recall every slight sequence with accuracy. I say this because you are a physician and as such, no doubt,—and it is no different in the case of us lawyers,—have learned the absurd fallibility of ordinary human testimony, not excluding that which proceeds from the highest and most honorable type of our civilization.
The day, as I was about to tell you, had been saved from the heat of the season by a breeze which blew from the water and once or twice even reached the velocity of a storm wind. A hundred times I had looked out my office window and a hundred times I had seen that not one speck of cloud showed in the sky. Yet all day long, while I tried to work, only to find myself all on edge with expectancy, I could hear the flap and rustle of the American flag on the Custom-House roof, which was straining at its cords and lashing itself into a frenzy like a wild creature in chains.
I am not sure that a dry storm of this kind is not freighted with some nerve-twanging quality. I have often noticed on such days a universal irritability on the part of mankind, and I have been informed by those who have traveled much that often a nervous wind of this kind, in countries where such things happen, precedes some disaster such as volcanic eruptions, avalanches, earthquakes, and tidal waves.
My own nervousness, however, took the form of impatience. I was absurdly eager to go at once to Julianna, and the fact that the hour for dinner had finally arrived, and that the remaining time was short, only served to increase my impatience the more. I could not assign any cause for this other than my wish to see Julianna, for now I knew in my mind and heart, by reason and by instinct, that the Judge had been right, that once having given her love she had given all, and, with that noble and perhaps pathetic trait of fine women, would never change.
At last I found myself at her door, at last she herself had opened it, and was smiling at me—as beautiful, more beautiful, than I had ever seen her. I remember that, with an innocent and spontaneous outburst of affection, she caught my hand in hers and tucked it under her soft round arm in playful symbolism of capture.
“You must not say a word to me,” she said. “I have never been so happy! But he is in there. He wants to see you alone and you must hurry.”
“Hurry?” I protested.
“I don’t know why,” she said, with a nervous little laugh. “I suppose it’s because I want you to talk to him and come to me as quickly as you can.”
Then, with a gentle pressure from behind, she pushed me through the curtains into the familiar study and I heard her feet scampering up the soft carpet on the broad, black-walnut stairs.
The Judge was sitting in his easy-chair beside the table. A book was open on his knees, a long-stemmed pipe was on the chair arm, and the gray and grizzled old dog lay, with head on paws, at his feet. Above him a huge wreath of thin smoke hung in the air. Had I been a painter, I should have wished to lay that picture upon canvas, because seldom could one see expressed so completely the evening of an honest day and of an honorable life, the tranquillity of home, the comfort of meditation, the affection for faithful dog, old volume, and seasoned pipe.
As he looked up at me, however, it suddenly seemed to me that he had grown old; behind his smile of warm greeting I fancied I could observe a haunted look, the ghostly flickering forth of some unwelcome thought held in the subconsciousness.
“Why, Estabrook!” he cried, when he had seen me. “Bless my soul, I didn’t know you would be so prompt. I have understood that young men approached these interviews with reluctance.”
“You forget, sir,” I answered, knowing that he would have a jest at my expense, “that we made the arrangement in advance.”
“We did! We did! That’s a fact. But I had no idea that you would be successful, at least so soon, and if I may say it—so—so—precipitously.”
“I plead the spirit of the age,” said I.
“It’s a spirit common to all ages, I take it,” he answered, with a quirk of his judicial mouth. “Do I understand that you and my daughter have first become engaged and now wish my permission to see enough of each other to become acquainted?”
Perhaps he hit a centre ring with this thrust, for I could only stammer forth an awkward statement about being very sure of my feelings.
“They all are sure!” he said, with a good-natured cynicism. Then he smiled again and pointed toward the ceiling with a long forefinger. “Perhaps you may be pleased to know that she is very sure,” he whispered.
I sat down.
“Yes,” said he solemnly. “You are to be envied. I believe her love—as I have seen it grow in these weeks—is the sweetest thing that ever flowed from a human soul.”
“You knew that she at first sent me away in the name of her duty to you?” said I.
He looked up at me, shut his book, patted the dog, and laid the pipe on the table.
“No,” said he, with a break in his voice. “But I shall not quickly forget that you have been fair enough to her and to me to tell me that.”
“May I have her?” I asked.
“Yes,” said he. “Of course you may.”
I hesitated a moment. Then I laughed. “She told me when you had said that to go to her.”
I rose.
“Wait,” said he. “That is not all. Before God, I wish it were.”
I had not been watching his expression, but now, when I looked up at him, I saw that the gray look which I had fancied I had seen under his smile had now come out upon his face.
“Estabrook,” he said, leaning forward toward me with his lips compressed, “sometime, perhaps years from now, perhaps never, but, if you choose, to-night—you may know what a problem I have had to solve, and what it will cost me to say to you that which I am going to say.”
He had lowered his voice as if he wished to be sure that no one could overhear him, and now, when he stopped, he stood with his head turned as if listening to be sure that no one was in the hallway. No sounds came, however, except those of the dog, who whined softly in his dreams, and the complaint of the dry wind, which, instead of diminishing with night, had perhaps increased its intensity, and the rattle of the long French windows through which I could see the gnarled old wistaria vine clinging desperately to the iron balcony, its leaves tossing about as if in agony.
“I have sat on the bench for many years, trying with my imperfect intelligence to adjust the misshapen affairs of men and women,” the Judge went on. “ Never have I been forced to deal with so terrible a question as lies before me now—to-night.”
For a long time, then, he was silent. Finally I spoke.
“Judge,” said I, “how can I help?”
“I am afraid,” he said slowly, and apparently avoiding my gaze,—“I am afraid that I must call upon you in a manner which will severely weigh upon you. Estabrook,” he put his hand upon my shoulder. “I’ve done my best. Do you hear? I’ve done my best.”
“I will never doubt it,” I assured him. “Nor do you need to doubt me.”
He looked at me steadily for a second; then he went to a drawer and, opening it, took out a packet of folded papers. It was evident that he had placed it there so that he could reach it easily.
I suppose that the gravity of his bearing, the trembling of his hands, in which these papers rustled, and the anxious expression with which he gazed at me, as if I were to decide some question of life or death, infected me with his unrest. I got up, paced back and forth, and finally sat down again facing his empty easy-chair, with my back to the long windows.
The Judge watched every movement I made, his eyes staring out at me from under the brush of their brows. At last, when I had seated myself, he came and sat in front of me, laid the papers on his knees and smoothed them with the palm of his shaking hand.
“My boy,” he said, “I wrote these papers, not for you, but for my Julianna. Never has a man had a task so calculated to break his heart. She was not to read my message to her unless death came and took me, for while I lived, I felt that I might spare her. See! Her name is written across this outside page.”
I could find no words to fill the pauses which he seemed obliged to make, for, as you may well believe, I felt the presence of a crisis in my affairs—in the affairs of all of us.
“But, my boy,” he went on, “what these pages contain is now for you, if you so decide.”
“Decide?” I managed to say. “What must I decide?”
“I will tell you if God gives me the strength to do it,” he said. “It is about Julianna. It is written here. I have sealed it as you see.”
“Something about her?” I cried.
He bent his head as if I had struck him from above.
“You may break the seal if you must. I have fought many battles to bring myself to tell you that you may read what is there.”
I reached for the package.
“Wait,” said he. “The contents of this document need never be given to her if she becomes your wife. Nor is it necessary for you to read what is there set forth if you only will choose not to do so. These are strange words between men in these modern times, Estabrook. But I have guarded my honor carefully all my life. And now, though the temptation has been almost more than I could stand, as you may believe some day,—or perhaps know in the next five minutes, which are walking toward us out of eternity,—yet I have determined that you should know everything if you chose.”
“I do choose,” I said firmly.
He shrunk back as if I had struck at him again.
“Think!” he begged. “No good can come of your knowledge. It cannot avert harm if harm must come. And more—be cool in your judgment, or you may ruin all of us.”
“But, Judge Colfax,” I cried out, “your proposal of choice is empty. One cannot reject or accept the unknown.”
“It must be so,” said he. “There is an astounding fact about Julianna which you do not know. About that fact I have written this message, so that when I had gone she might be prepared in case the worst—in case the worst—the improbable—the unexpected, the unthinkable—should come.”
I caught the arms of the chair in the grip of my two hands and tried to think, but I could find no reason for my remaining, perhaps for a lifetime, in ignorance of some unseen menace to the woman I loved. I think that I was about to tell him that nothing could change my feelings for Julianna, or shake my faith in her, that it was right that I should become her defender, and that I, therefore, must know what hung so threateningly over her. Words were on my tongue, when suddenly the Judge bent his great frame forward and was in another second half kneeling on the floor in front of me, his hands clutching my coat. His face then was the color of concrete, and the dignity which he had worn so long had slipped from him as an unloosened garment falls.
“For her sake!” he whispered. “For her sake, don’t go further. Let the thing be unspoken. My boy, don’t dig up that which is all but buried forever. Listen to me, Estabrook. You trust me. And I, tell you that if I were in your place, knowing what I know—”
“Enough,” I said, awed by his pleading. “Do you tell me that it is best for her and for me to make her my wife in ignorance of this thing?”
“God help me,” he said, falling back into his chair.
He seemed to be thinking desperately, as if some voice had told him that only a moment was left for thought. At last he threw his long arms outward.
“Yes,” said he. “ I tell you that it is better for you and for her to know nothing.”
“That is sufficient,” I said. “I ask no more.”
He shut his eyes as one would receive the relief of an opiate after long agony of the body and for some moments he remained so, his hands, from which the packet of papers had fallen, relaxed upon his knees. The starched white shirt he wore crackled absurdly with each long inhalation of breath.
In those moments a tumult of thoughts went tumbling through my brain, and as the seconds passed, I almost felt that it was the wind that howled outside which was blowing these thoughts over each other, as it would blow dry autumn leaves.
At last the dog rose, stretched himself, and, as if restless, sought here and there a new place to lie, and the sound of his claws upon the polished floor recalled the Judge from his almost unconscious reverie. He half opened his eyes and once or twice moved his thin lips. At last he spoke and into those commonplace words he put all the meaning which hours of ranting would have made less plain.
“I am grateful,” he said.
When I looked up at him after lowering my head in acknowledgment of his thanks, I saw again that wonderful smile of benevolence, which, given to me once before in his office, I believe could only have been bestowed by one who had had a lifelong practice in love of humanity. Indeed, he only directed it at me for a moment, and then turned his face a little aside toward the back of the room, as if he wished to send that expression through the walls and spread over the whole world its beaming radiance.
You may, then, well imagine my surprise when, without a word or a motion of any other part of his body, I saw that smile fade from his face. It disappeared as if a blast of the night wind, entering the room, had dried it, crumbled it, and blown it away. In its place I now saw the terrible, eye-widened, and fixed stare which we recognize as the facial sign of some abject, unreasoning terror, or of death, after the clutch of some fatal agony.
“Judge Colfax!” I exclaimed.
I waited. I thought I saw his head move a little as if he had heard me, but with that motion there came a click, the sound of teeth coming together.
“You are ill,” I said, half rising from my chair.
His lips moved, but the stare in his eyes remained the same.
“It has come,” he said in his throat.
I jumped toward him. He did not stir.
“Judge!” I cried.
He did not answer. I waited, bending over him, not daring to guess what had befallen him, holding my breath. Then, cautiously, I moved my fingers before his eyes: they did not wink. I placed my hand over his heart.... It was as still as a rundown clock. The room itself was still. The wind had paused a moment as if for this.... The Judge was dead. And yet because he still sat there, his gray head resting on the cushions, and because he stared so fixedly before him, I could not grasp the fact of death. I had never met it face to face before. I could not honor its credentials.
For a moment I stood in front of the old man, with the single thought that our extraordinary interview had been too much for him: it never occurred to me to go for assistance any more than it occurred to me that death, unlike sleep, was a permanent thing, from which the Judge would never come back again. I simply stood there, awed by the presence of death, yet crediting death with none of death’s attributes.
And as I stood, my attention became more and more fixed upon the Judge’s stare. It did not seem to be a vacant gaze; on the contrary, it seemed to contain something. It seemed not only fixed; it seemed fixed on some object. It looked past me, behind me, and there, with all its terror and all its intelligence, it rested, motionless. It seemed to refute the notion that dead men cannot see; it seemed to affirm that dead men’s eyes are not dead. Into that terrible stare I looked, fascinated, awed, hushed, motionless. Then, suddenly, I heard the dog.
LISTEN TO ME, ESTABROOK!
The great Scotch hound had been snarling. He had growled, for I remembered it as a fact brought out of the background of my consciousness. And when I tore my eyes away from the Judge’s stare, I saw that the dog was staring, too,—was staring, was drawing back his black lips, exposing his yellow teeth. Every hair on his back was erect, his nostrils were distended as if he were relying upon his sense of smell to determine the nature of what he saw. Could there be any doubt that he, living, and his master, dead, still saw something—something which, because it was behind me, I could not see?
At first I did not dare to look. I felt some dreadful presence behind me—a presence upon which the lifeless man and the cringing, snarling beast had set their eyes, a presence which had wiped the smile from the Judge’s face and tightened every nerve and sinew in the dog’s lean body. I could hear the wind, and, in its lapses, the rumble of the city, I could smell the warm aroma of the Judge’s pipe, I could feel my senses grow keener as I gathered my courage to look over my shoulder.
When at last, after that dragging moment’s reluctance, I did so, I believed that I had looked for no purpose. The room behind me was empty. My nervous eyes searched the rectangular space, swept over the chairs, the tea-table covered with its display of rare china, the blue-and-gold Japanese floor vase, the brasses on the cases of books, the dark walls, the pictures, the gloomy corners filled with the mist of shadows, the rugs, the cornice, the draperies.
Then suddenly I saw!
Outside the long French windows, framed in the uncertain outlines of the old ornate balcony rail and the tossing leaves and branches of the vine, there appeared, as if it had come floating out of the liquid blackness of the night, detached from all else, a face.
No sooner had my glance fallen upon this peering countenance than I thought I saw a startled opening of its lips; it withdrew and was gone. I had merely caught a glance at it, yet of this I am sure—the face was white with the pallor of things that grow in a cellar, it was weak with the terrible drooping, hopeless weakness of endless self-indulgence; it was a brutal face, and yet wore the expression of timid, anxious, pathetic inquiry. It was a face that had come to ask a question. And though, because only the pale skin had reflected the light from within, I had not seen what might have appeared above or below, and though I may have been wrong, I received the impression that it was the countenance of an old woman.
Of course the moment I discovered this apparition, upon which the wild stare of the Judge in life and in death had rested, I ran forward. I thought as I did so that I heard the scrape of clothing on the iron balcony rail and the thud of a heavy object dropping on the grass below. Flinging open the glass doors, through which a torrent of wind poured into the room, and leaning out under the twisted branches of the vine, I tried in vain to penetrate the wall of blackness before me, and force my sight through it and down into the old garden, from which there arose only the rushing sound of the dry wind in the shrubbery. All the universe seemed made of black and hissing chaos. Out of it came blasts that combed through my disheveled hair and drove fine dust into my eyes. But of the messenger of death, who had peered in the window for a moment, and then withdrawn, nothing could be seen.
I turned back, feeling suddenly, for the first time, the emptiness of body which occurs, perhaps in sympathy with the emptiness of death, and as I turned, I found myself in the position of the thing that had looked in at us. The stare of the Judge was still fixed upon that spot, so that for a moment I received the impression that he was gazing at me. The dog still whined softly, cowering close to the floor.
I went to the middle of the room: I stood there gathering my wits. I heard a clock strike somewhere in the kitchen region below, from outside the window came the rattle of some conveyance, louder, louder, softer, softer. A passing boy whistled; I heard Julianna’s step above me; I heard the dog licking his paws unconcernedly; I heard the curtains flap in the wind that filled the room; and finally its ironical little scream as it lifted from the desk the last opinion the Judge ever wrote and scattered the loose sheets all over the room. It brought in the dank smell of the garden.
“I must tell her,” I said aloud, and the old dog, senses dulled by age, wagged his tail. “I must tell her,” I repeated, and toiled up the soft, carpeted stairs.
She was waiting for me in her own room, standing under the soft light from a hanging, well-shaded, electric lamp. I see her there, clearly, with the smile fading from her face as she read my own. Indeed, it was not necessary for me to speak; before I had gathered courage to do so, I saw her bosom swell with a long breath. She inhaled it jerkily, as one who is suddenly shocked with a deluge of icy water. I saw the color fade as the smile had faded before it, and when I had nodded to indicate that she had guessed the truth, stepped forward, fearing that she would sway off her feet.
“No, Jerry,” she said, with her hands held tight at her sides. “I am all right. I had expected this some day soon. It is hard to believe, but has not come without warning. His heart—his great, loving heart—had—worn out. I do not want you to come with me. I am going down—alone.”
I moved my dry tongue in my mouth: a word of the strange circumstance of his death was there. But her courage—her steady body, her squared shoulders, her firm mouth, her eyes which showed her agony, but no sign of weakness, and her soft voice as she said, “Wait for me here”—restrained me. I pressed her fingers to my lips and as I saw her go out, I felt that perhaps never would the opportunity to tell the story I have told to-night come again.