The Judge

by Rebecca West

Mr. Mactavish James seemed to have withdrawn his mind from the discussion, for he had taken out his appointment diary, which could surely have nothing to do with the case. But when Mr. Philip had turned towards the door, the old man said, amiably enough, "Ay, I'll speak to Nelly. I'll speak to her on Monday afternoon. The morning I must be up at the Court of Session. But in the afternoon I'll give the girl a word."

It was on the tip of Mr. Philip's tongue to cry, "Thank you, father, thank you!" but he remembered that this was merely a matter of office discipline that was being settled, and no personal concern of his. So he said, "I think it would be wise, father," and went out of the room. He ran upstairs whistling. It would be a great come-down for her that had always been such a pet of his father's to be spoken to about her conduct....

II

The door had swung ajar, so Mr. Mactavish James in his seat at his desk was able to look into the further room and keep an eye on Ellen, who was sitting with her back to him, supporting her bright head on her hand and staring fixedly down at something on the table. Her appearance entertained him, as it always did. He chuckled over the shapeless blue overall, just like a bairn's, that she wore on her neat wee figure, and the wild shining hair which resembled nothing so much as a tamarisk hedge in a high wind, though she would have barked like a terrier at anyone who suggested that it was not as neatly a done head as any in Edinburgh. But he was very anxious about her. For some moments now she had not moved, and this immobility was so unnatural in her that he knew she must be somehow deeply hurt, as one who sees a bird quite still knows that it is dead or dying. "Tuts, tuts," he sighed. "This must be looked to. She is the bonniest lassie that I've ever seen. Excepting Isabella Kingan." His right hand, which had been lying listlessly on the desk before him, palm upwards, turned over when he thought of Isabella Kingan. The fingers crooked, and it became an instrument of will, like the hand of a young man.

But he was really quite old, nearly seventy, and well on the way to lose the human obsession of the importance of humanity; so his attention began to note, as if they were not less significant than Ellen's agony, the motes that were dancing in the bar of pale autumn sunshine that lay athwart the room. "It is a queer thing," his mind droned on, "that when I came here when I was young I saw there was a peck of dust in every room, and I blamed old Mr. Logan for keeping on yon dirty old wife of a caretaker. I said to myself that when I was the master I would have it like a new pin and put a decent buddy in the basement. And now Mr. Logan is long dead, and the old wife is long dead, and I have had things my own way these many years, but the place is still foul as a lum, and I keep on yon slut of a Mrs. Powell. Ah well! Ah well!" He pondered, with a Scotch sort of enjoyment, on the frustration of youth's hopes and the progress of mortality in himself, until a movement of Ellen's bright head, such a jerk as might have been caused by a silent sob, brought his thoughts back to beauty and his small personal traffic with it.

"I do not know why she should mind me of Isabella Kingan. She is not like her. Isabella was black as a wee crow. It is just that they're both very bonny. I wonder what has happened to Isabella. She must be sixty-five. I saw her once in Glasgow, in Sauchiehall Street, after she was married, but she would not speak. Yet what else could I have done? I had my way to make, and it was known up and down the length of Edinburgh that her mother kept a sweetie shop in Leith Walk, and she had a cousin who was a policeman in the town. No, no, it would not have been a suitable marriage."

He moved restlessly in his chair, vexed by a sense of guilt, which although he immediately mitigated it into a suspicion that he might have behaved more wisely, made his memory maliciously busy opening doors which he had believed he had locked. But he was so expert in the gymnastic art of standing well with himself and the world that he could turn each recollected incident to a cause of self-approbation before he had begun to flush. For a few moments, using the idioms of Burns' love-lyrics, which were the only dignified and unobscene references to passion he had ever encountered, he thought of that night when he had persuaded little Isabella to linger in the fosse of shadow under the high wall in Canaan Lane and give up her mouth to his kisses, her tiny warm dove's body to his arms. Never in all the forty-five intervening years had he seen such a wall on such a night, its base in velvety darkness and its topmost half shining ghostly as plaster does in moonlight, without his hands remembering the queer pleasure it had been to crush crisp muslin, without his heart remembering the joy it had been to coax from primness its first consent to kisses. Before he could reproach himself for having turned that perfect hour into a shame to her who gave it by his later treachery, he began to reflect what a steady young fellow he had been to have known no other amorous incident in all his unmarried days than this innocent fondling on a summer's night.

But there pressed in on him the recollection of how she had dwined away when she realised that, though he had kissed her, he did not mean to marry her. He saw again the pale face she ever after wore; he remembered how, when he met her in the street, she used at first to droop her head and blush, until her will lifted her chin like a bearing-rein and she forced herself to a proud blank stare, while her small stature worked to make her crinoline an indignant spreading majesty behind her. Yet, after all, she was not the only person to be inconvenienced, for he had fashed himself a great deal over the business and had slept very badly for a time. He exhorted her reproachful ghost not to be selfish. Besides, she had somehow brought it on herself by looking what she did; for her dark eyes, very bright, yet with a kind of bloom on them, and her full though tiny underlip had always looked as if it would be very easy to make her cry, and she had had a preference for wearing grey and brown and such modest colours that made it plain she feared to be noticed. To display a capacity for pain so visibly was just to invite people to test it. If she had been a girl who could look after herself, doubtless she would have got him. He paid her the high compliment of wishing that she had, although he had done very well out of the marriages he had made, for his first wife, Annie Logan, had brought him his partnership in the firm, and his second, Christian Lawrie, had brought him a deal of money. But Isabella had been such a bonny wee thing.

His skin became alive again, and remembered the few responding kisses that he had wheedled from her, contacts so shy that they might have been the poisings of a moth. He shuddered, and said, "Ech! Somebody's walking over my grave!" though, indeed, what had happened was that his youth had risen from its grave. He decided to be generous to Isabella and not bear her a grudge for causing him this revisiting heartache. With the softest pity that the lot of beauty in this world should be so hard, though quite without self-condemnation, he thought how very sure the poor girl must have been that he meant to marry her before she abandoned that proud physical reserve that was the protecting integument of her sensitive soul. That sensitiveness seemed fair ridiculous when things were going well with him; but once or twice in his life, when he had been ill, it had appeared so dreadful that he had desired either to be young again and give a different twist to things, or to die utterly and know no after-life.

No, dealing unkindly with the lasses was an ill thing to do. It made one depressed afterwards even if it paid, just as cheating the widow and orphan did. His eyes went back to Ellen, who had moved again. "I must settle this business of Nelly's," he thought. "Of course, Philip is quite right. It would not be suitable. Besides, he is getting on nicely with Bob McLennan's girl, and that would be a capital match even for us. But I must put things straight for my Nelly, my poor wee Nelly." He rose, first feeling for his crutch, for he was fair dying on his legs with the gout, and padded slowly towards the open door.