"Thou shalt not do evil that good may come!"—it was curious how the banal, forgotten texts started up, like Jack-in-boxes, from some boyhood covert of his brain! Not matter? Ah, how much it mattered! Escape by that road was impossible for him. And there was but one other road by which he could evade the issue.
He unlocked a desk-drawer and pushed aside its litter of papers. A small silver-mounted revolver lay there—pointing the one way out. He picked it up, his fingers shrinking at the chill of the cool metal, then laid it on the desk. He took a sheet of paper from its place and began to write: "Dear Echo—"
He started; no, that would not do. He began again: "Dear Charlotte and—"
He paused an instant and listened—his hearing had caught some sound above-stairs. It was not repeated and he bent his head again over the writing. But his fingers would not frame the words. He laid aside the pen. Better, after all, to go all silently, leaving behind him empty speculation, which if painful at first, would become in time but a softened memory!
It was the opening of the door of Echo's room which he had heard. For hours she had lain sleepless, her brain throbbing, strange painful pictures flitting under her closed eyelids. Her home world, which had always seemed simple and uncomplex, even in its darker aspects, had suddenly become fateful and mysterious, a thing of secret depths and shaming, piteous revelations. Her own father's past had held a secret that would not bear the light! That he had loved another woman than her mother—afterward—that, though the thought was repellent, perhaps he could not have helped. But that he had ever, ever as a passing phase, yielded to an infatuation which had taken no thought of consequence or of convention smote her with a kind of terror. Now, through his own reckless act, he had become the prey of a shameless woman—of a blackmailer.
For that was what it seemed to her. It did not occur to her that his letter might have fallen into other hands. In her imagination, back of the situation stood the woman who had tempted him, almost to his complete undoing, in his youth, now—a very wanton!—holding out the badge of his indiscretion, for a price! The photograph had come to him with its blunt threat typed at the top: "For Possible Release May 3rd." Echo had seen the like many a time written upon her father's printer's-proofs. It meant released for publication. His letter was to be spread broadcast—unless he met the demand! The hideous vulgarity of his predicament sent pulsing waves of shame and humiliation over her. It seemed suddenly that their conventional, well-ordered existence had dropped all at once into an unnatural and hateful environment, the murky, unredeemable atmosphere of the yellow-backed novel and the tawdry film-play. Thoughts such as these had fought with the acute sympathy that had all her life made her and her father in feeling wellnigh inseparable, stabbing her love with the reflection that his deepest heart had, after all, been locked from her.
Gradually, however, the sharper corrosive ache had dulled away, leaving an overmastering sense of his trouble. Since Nelson had helped him to his room after his fainting in the library, she had not seen him, for though he had with curious stubbornness, it had seemed to her, refused to have the doctor come, he had not appeared at dinner. She wondered whether he was now asleep, or lying wide-eyed, nursing thoughts like hers. Finally there had stolen over her an odd uneasiness, a thriving anxiety. That tenuous telegraphy whose laws evade analysis though its operations are familiar and which, ever since her childhood, had called from her a subconscious and involuntary response to his moods that had sometimes startled them both by its eerie suggestion, now flooded her mind with a sense of warning. She slipped out of bed to peer through the blind. She could see a window of the library: light was sifting from between its heavy curtains—her father was not in his room, then; he was there. She thrust her feet into worsted slippers, threw a kimono over her nightgown and ran quickly down the stair.
The light footfall, the whispering rustle, did not reach the Judge. He was unaware of the girl who had paused uncertainly on the threshold. His mind was arguing the final phase of his problem.
What he purposed would cut the Gordian knot, make plain-sailing for others, if not for himself. He would have rendered no decision on the crucial case. With his escape the problem would solve itself. Craig would have nothing to gain then in publishing the letter. "Why not?" he muttered. "It is justifiable—it is neither gross nor cowardly—to issue one's-self a ticket into the hereafter in order to avert shame from the innocent and secure peace to those one loves!" His wife was provided for. His elimination from her equation of life, he reflected with a tinge of bitterness, would not deeply disturb her even, centred existence. Echo, he thought likely, would marry Sevier. And Chilly—of what earthly use was his life to Chilly? "I will do it," he said to himself. He stretched out his hand—toward the silver-mounted revolver.
But he drew it back. A further clearer conception had come to him in that last instant to give him pause. What, after all, was he about to do? Himself aside, all that was dearest to him aside, was not the act he contemplated at bottom the murder of a principle, the betrayal of a trust that he held for the State? He was a public officer, who had taken oath in the presence of his associates worthily to execute the functions of his high office, to do justice and fear not. For him the sin of omission could be no less than the sin of commission. Would such a shifty suppression of his decision be one whit less a treason than the rendering of a mendacious one? Either equally besmirched his honour! Something deeper in him than dread of death, deeper even than his present fear of life, stirred and throbbed. No, whatever the outcome, no matter what it held for him and his, he must go through with it to the bitter end! He buried his face in his hands.