The Judge

by Rebecca West

Then Marion had been right. A wave of terror washed over Ellen. What chance had she of playing any part on a stage where there moved this woman of genius, who was so creative that she had made Richard, and so wise that she could see through the brick wall of this girl's brutishness? She stammered, "Well, good-night, I'll away to my bed," and ran upstairs to her room and undressed furiously, letting her clothes fall here and there on the floor. In the first moments after she turned out the lights the darkness was brightly painted with pictures of the moonlit temple; one everywhere she turned her eyes. And once, when she was far gone into drowsiness, she woke herself by sitting up in bed and crying acidly: "And do you think we will have to spend every night searching for your mother, Richard?" But very soon she slept.

She woke suddenly and with her mind at attention, as if someone had whispered into her ear. She sat up and looked through the great window into that not quite full-bodied light of a day that was overcast and advanced past its dawn only by an hour or two. There was no one in the farmyard. Yet it came back to her that she had been called by the sound of men's voices; of Richard's voice, she could be almost sure, for there was a filament of pleasure trailing across her consciousness. There was no reason why he should be out of doors at this hour, before the family had been called to breakfast, unless the search for Marion had been unsuccessful. She jumped out of bed and washed and dressed and ran downstairs, leaving her hair loose about her shoulders because she begrudged the time for pinning it when he needed her comfort. Mabel, the parlour-maid, was coming out of the dining-room with an empty tray in her hand. One corner of her apron-bib flapped loose and there was a smut on her face. Ellen knew that Marion had not been found, for if she had been in the house, alive or dead, the girl would not have dared to look like that. They passed in silence, but exchanged a look of horror.

There was no one in the dining-room but Roger and Poppy. Poppy was sitting in an armchair at the hearth, where she had evidently spent the night. Her uniform was unbuttoned half-way down her square bust; and on the arms of the chair there rested two objects that looked like sections of dried viscera, but which Ellen remembered to have seen labelled as pads in hair-dressers' windows. Roger was kneeling before her, his head on her lap, and weeping bitterly. She was stroking his hair kindly enough, though her eyes were dwelling on the teapot and ham on the breakfast-table. The French window was swinging open, admitting air that had the chill of dawn upon it; and outside on the gravel path stood Richard, listening to a bearded old fisherman in oilskins. She hovered about the threshold and heard the old man saying: "'Tes no question o' you putting yourselves about to look for her now. Mostly you don't hear nothin' of them for three weeks, and then they comes out where they went in. Till the tide brings them back you can't fetch them." Richard said: "Yes, yes," and held out money to him. She saw he wanted to send the fisherman away, that he could not bear to hear these things; but he was held rigid by the obsession, which he and Marion had followed as if it were a law, that one must not betray emotion. His inhibited hand became more and more talonlike, more and more incapable of making the gesture of dismissal. To aid him Ellen showed herself at the open door in her wildness of loose hair and called: "Richard! Richard!"

That made the old man take his money and go away, and Richard stepped back into the room. He evaded her embrace. "This ghastly light!" he muttered, and went to the corner of the room and turned on the electric switch. Then he let her take his old, grief-patterned face between her hands.

"My dear, my dear, what has happened?"

"There's a place ... there's a place ... there's a place on the sea-wall...." He drew his hand across his forehead. "He is finding it difficult," her heart told her sadly, "to explain it to a stranger." "In the train, when you came, you must have seen a brick-kiln ... on the right of the railway ... deserted.... A trolley-line runs from there over a bridge to the sea-wall ... to a jetty. It hasn't been used for years. The planks are half of them rotted away. The high tide runs right up among the piers. We found her lantern down there on the mud."

Her heart sickened. "Oh, poor, poor Marion!" she wept, and asked foolishly, incredulously, as if in hopes of finding a flaw in the story, "But when did you find the lantern?"

"An hour ago. We looked for her last night till two. We went all the way along to Canfleet. They took us in at the signal-box there. Then as soon as it was light we walked back along the sea-wall. And we found the lantern. Look, it's out on the lawn."

They gazed at the dark object on the edge of the grass as if at any moment it might move or speak.

"But, my dearest, she may not be in the water! She may have dropped the light and been feared to go further without it, and gone into one of those wee byres on the marshes till the morning, and not have wakened yet!"