Judge Owen did know him by the description, but too well! That short good-looking young man with the curly hair, the moustache and the light-gray clothes, was as certainly the man he had forbidden his house and the company of his daughter, as his own name was Owen and his dignity a judicial one!
Here was an outrage!—witness it ye fathers whose daughters do not always obey your high behests. Here was a call for the exercise of the highest qualities of authority!—bear witness to that, all you good people who have at one time or another dragged your wives out of churches because you did not like the ritual, or who have dragged them into churches because suitors armed with money-bags or aristocratic names or political influence, stood within and beckoned! Here was a necessity for proving what Judge Owen had only a day or two before so loudly asserted—his ascendency in his own household. Here was an opportunity to show to the public that Judge Owen, arbiter of the legal destinies of his fellow-men when they did not range beyond a certain insignificant number of dollars, was at once a Solon and a Draco in his own domestic relations. Great men will develope themselves at some period or other in their lives, however they may previously have been kept back by adverse circumstances; and Judge Owen had never yet enjoyed the opportunity of showing half his mighty energies. Armed with the double power of a parent and the law, he felt that he could combat anything—even a young and delicate woman: gifted with a rigid sense of right which rose above all personal considerations, he felt that to that right he could sacrifice anything—even the privacy and sanctity of his domestic relations.
The great men of old had done something in that way: Brutus had laid his son, without a tear or a groan, on the altar of his country; Virginius had slain his daughter when her perilled honor demanded that violent deed; and only half a century before his own time, Napoleon had given up a beloved Empress and married a royal nobody, for the sake of preserving the dynasty that his people so demanded. It only remained for William Owen, Judge, to emulate those great examples and drag his daughter out of the theatre!
It may have been that Judge Owen did not think of quite all those great examples, as he walked broadly and pompously down the aisle, disturbing the audience just when the curtain was rising on the second piece; but he certainly bore himself as if he remembered all of them and a few hundreds more. Anxious spectators looked at him as he came down, speculating painfully whether he was likely to take his seat in front of them, and calculating what would be their chances of seeing in that event. But the Judge was not going to sit down—no! At the gate he encountered a momentary obstruction, in the shape of the usher who looked after the orchestra tickets; but he swept him away as a spring freshet might carry away a bundle of obstructing sedge, by a majestic wave of the hand and the information that he was merely going down there for a moment on business.
Then he strode on down the aisle, unobserved as yet by the lovers, who sat in the seat next the front and within three or four places of the end of the row, enjoying the dramatic entertainment and each others' company about equally. Perhaps they sat a very little closer together than they might have done had there been no parental objection in the way; and under the folds of Emily's dark mantilla, which lay upon her lap, there may have been two hands clasped together. Let the young and the loving, whose province it is to make such follies half the material of their lives, decide whether affairs were likely to be exactly in the shape suggested,—as also, whether at any time during the evening, when it had become necessary for Frank Wallace to make a remark to his companion, he had or had not leaned down his lips so close to her ear as almost to kiss its pink pendant.
The first intimation had by the absorbed lovers that the paternal bomb was bursting in the neighborhood, was conveyed by the Judge halting at the end of their row, leaning over the two or three people between, without any apology, stretching out his arm, and saying in his loud, coarse voice:
"Miss Emily Owen, you are wanted at home."
The blood flew to the face of the young girl in an instant, though it was the blood of anxiety and not of shame, and she asked:
"Is any one ill—hurt?—My mother—"
"Your mother is well, and there is no one sick at home," said the Judge, determined that his lesson to his daughter should not be balked by any one of the audience thinking him less a brute than he was. "But I find you here in improper company and against my orders; and I command you to leave that man and come home with me instantly."