The latter had regained self-control. He stood erect and tall, his leonine head thrown back, his eyes shining, and in his face a look the other had never seen in it before. "You have presumed," he said, "to say to me what I would not have believed any representative of your corporation would dare to say. And you have taken advantage of my hospitality to say it in my own house. I choose now to believe this message an individual one, springing from a personal and base initiative rather than from the responsible Directorate which I once served. 'Once,' I say. For I serve it no longer. I am now a member of the Judiciary of this commonwealth. Because the corporation furthered my candidacy, you assume that it 'made' me. Perhaps it did. But it never owned my conscience or my integrity! Nor does it now, thank God!"
As he spoke he had stepped to the wall and pushed a bell. "Nelson," he said, to the entering butler, "show this gentleman to the door."
Craig had risen to his feet. He looked at the other an instant with livid face. Then he went rapidly to the hall and snatched up his hat and stick. The outer door closed heavily behind him.
In his room at the hotel Cameron Craig took the sheaf of letters. Under the electric-light he drew the folded leaves one by one from their worn envelopes and spread them open before him. A look of chagrin crossed his face. No woman had written them; they had been penned by the Judge himself—he was familiar with the heavy, characteristic hand-writing. Were they, then, only some old letters to his wife, perhaps? He was holding one leaf to the light. Suddenly his eye caught. He made an exclamation. His face lighted with amaze and savage exultation.
What a weapon blind luck, ironic fate, had put into his hands, in the very face of the man for whom he had craved it! For on that leaf, etched in remorseless ink, was what would open an old grave, drag into the daylight the corpse of an ignoble passion, cast scorn upon the writer's name and blight and wither present and future! How little, after all, the tricks of the body changed! Twenty years—and yet, his letter!
What matter when it had been penned, or whether the woman were long dead to whom he had once written that blazing indiscretion? He, the jurist of spotless living and good repute—to be shown forth to the world as a moral fraud, a husband and father who had once stood shamelessly ready to fling home and reputation on the scrap-heap in a disgraceful flight "without benefit of clergy!" The woman presumably had scorned his offer—since she had sent him back his letters—and yet on the page still stood the black intention, in black and white! What incredible folly had led him to preserve it? Twenty years ago—in the dead past—and yet there it was, to be used in the living present, the blunt handwriting, recognisable at a glance, damning and beyond denial!
He laughed aloud. It was Echo's father whom he held in his hand! If he did not come to terms, so much the better, since the blow would strike her too. She thought herself above him, did she? What if this story should be spread abroad in yellow headlines, babbled of in club and boudoir, smirked at on street-corners? Would she hold herself so high then? Well, if he was so far beneath her pride, that should bring her to his level! He felt no prick of shame at the base move he contemplated, no smart of pity for the ruin it should bring. Ambition in which was no tincture of honourable scruple wove, with the desire to humble the woman who would have none of him, to a resolution as unyielding as steel.
He gathered up the letters and put them carefully into his pocket. In another hour he was on the train, speeding to his home in the next state.