THE JUDGE SITS IN THE LAMPLIGHT
In the silence of the room the Judge stood for a moment with his hand at his lips, as though he tasted blood. The summer night outside was very still. The curtain before one of the windows swayed gently in the air and from the acacia trees on the lawn he could hear the sleepy twitter of an oriole. He turned off the light and went into the hall. There at one side stood the white, panelled door of his wife's room. It was shut. It came to him that it stood for a perfect symbol of that cold immaculateness of hers which had so long denied him the living bread of sympathy. She could forgive anything in her son, but nothing in her husband. For twenty long years they two might have dwelt at opposite ends of the Milky Way, and it seemed to him suddenly monstrous, whatever the cause, whosesoever the fault, that they, being man and wife, should yet be so far apart.
He went slowly down the stair again, his hand, shaking a little, slipping along the polished banister. The dim night-light made the lower hall a place of ghostly shadows. He re-entered the library, moved to the table and turned on the reading-lamp. Then, lifting it to the limit of its silken cord, he threw the electric glow upon the canvas that hung above the mantel, studying it intently.
"Mine!" he muttered, with a sort of fierce satisfaction. "Mine, every inch—mine, not Charlotte's! My blood gave you that curve of brow and those full lips and that deep, dark blue of eye—they are of my side, not of hers! You, at least belong to me!"
He returned the lamp to its place, and turning, cast his glance at the little Italian desk in the corner. His lips trembled. At that desk she had sat—the woman knowledge of whom had sharpened the sword of his wife's never-dying disdain. The woman who had come into his life too late! He thought of their meetings, few enough, indeed. How often he had wondered how life would have turned for him, if at the end she had listened to his desperate pleading, and gone with him along that alluring way that had drawn him like an opal path among Italian asphodels, flinging to the winds social standing, reputation, career, friends, honour, all! If she had said "yes" to that wild letter he had sent her—the one to which she had vouchsafed no reply—which might have been written in his very heart's blood!
He looked again at the painted portrait of Echo, in her splendid youth and clean heritage: the answer was there.
He sat down before the little desk, stretched his arms upon it and bowed his head upon them. "You were right, Eleanor," he sighed. "You were right. But somehow it's been so long!"
He felt a fluttering touch upon his hair and started up. There before him on the desk lay a faded leaf of paper—a page closely written over in twirly, dim writing. He lifted it up and held it to the light, his nostrils catching a scent wraith-frail and delicate, like a dead pansy's ghost—
No—no—no! Why did you write it? Why did you put it into words? For now I must keep it always. I cannot destroy it. You knew I would not—could not—-let you do what you beg me to! Never, never! I am not so mad. Nor are you, really. It is not your best self speaking in this letter. Sometime—
His gaze became fixed. He gave a hoarse cry—a mist was before his eyes. He snatched at the top of the yellowed sheet—it was dated twenty years before, and the hand-writing, how familiar! He laid the leaf flat in the lamp-light and read it through, with every nerve throbbing to a memory that had started afresh, as instinct as though days, not years, had sifted their dust upon it: