“I don’t want to see it! What my mother wore at her table in the presence of my father and his guests is not what she would have worn in her garret day after day for a month with her husband away. You should have remembered your blood, Olivia, and my name and position.”
“Judge Colton!” cried Adam, stepping nearer and looking the Judge square in the eyes—all the forces of his soul were up in arms now—“your criticisms and your words are an insult! Your wife is as unconscious as a child of any wrong-doing, and so am I. I found the dress in the trunk and made her put it on. Mrs. Colton has been as safe here with me as if she had been my sister, and she has been my sister every hour of the day, and I love her dearly. I have told her so, and I tell you so!”
The Judge was accustomed to read the souls of men, and he saw that this one was without a stain.
“I believe you, Gregg,” he said, extending his hand. “I have been hasty and have done you a wrong. Forgive me! And you, too, Olivia. I am over-sensitive about these things: perhaps, too, I am a little tired. We will say no more about it.”
That night when the Judge had shut himself up in his study with his work, and Olivia had gone to her room, Adam mounted the stairs and flung himself down on one of the old sofas. The garret was dark, except where the light of the waning moon filtering through the sheet, fell upon the portrait and patterned the floor in squares of silver. Olivia’s eyes still shone out from the easel. In the softened, half-ghostly light there seemed to struggle out from their depths a certain pleading look, as if she needed help and was appealing to him for sympathy. He knew it was only a trick the moonlight was playing with his colors—lowering the reds and graying the flesh tones—that when the morning came all the old joyousness would return; but it depressed him all the same.
The Judge’s words with their cruelty and injustice still rankled in his heart. The quixotic protest, he knew, about his mother’s faded old satin must have had some other basis than the one of immodesty—an absurd position, as any one could see who would examine the picture. Olivia could never be anything but modest. Had it really been the gown that had offended him? or had he seen something in his wife’s portrait which he had missed before in her face—something of the joy which a freer and more untrammelled life had given her, and which had, therefore, aroused his jealousy. He would never forgive him for the outburst, despite the apology, nor would he ever forget Olivia cowering, when she listened, as if from a blow, hugging little Phil to her side. While the Judge’s words had cut deep into his own heart they had scorched Olivia’s like a flame. He had seen it in her tear-dried face seamed and crumpled like a crushed rose, when without a word to her husband or himself, except a simple—“Good-night, all,” she had left the room but an hour before.
Suddenly he raised his head and listened: A step was mounting the stairs. Then came a voice from the open door.
“Adam, are you in there?”
“Yes, Olivia.”