The blue wall

by Richard Washburn Child

What could I say? How could I avoid going? There was no way. But the Judge had not found the locket. Nor had I.

But the Judge had other worries, I’m telling you. He feared the news of the fire would reach his wife in some wrong way and he telegraphed her. She answered by saying she was leaving for home. Brave woman that she was! The telegram said, “It is worth the fire to feel the leap of the heart when I know that you all were saved for me.”

“Will she ever know?” he whispered, staring down at the laughing baby, with its little pink, curved mouth. “Will she ever know? I did this for her. God, tell me if I was right!”

“Be easy, sir,” I said to him. “Have no fear. There is no one in the world but you and me can tell the story of last night. After these weeks and weeks your wife has been away, there is nobody but me or you who can say this child is not—”

“Julianna,” he choked.

“Yes, sir,” said I.

I was right. What it cost the Judge’s soul I do not know. But that the lie he acted in the name of love was not discovered by the thin woman and wife, whose only beauty was in the light of her eyes, I know very well. The years that she lived—it was after we all came to this city, when the Judge took his new office—were happy enough years for her. Rare enough is the brand of devotion he gave to her; rare enough was the beauty and sweetness of the girl that grew up calling her “Mother.”

In all that time never a word did he say to me of what only he and I knew, and I have often thought of what faith he must have had in human goodness—what full, unchanging, constant, noble faith—to trust a servant the way he seemed to trust me by his silence. I have believed ever since that no man or animal can long be mean of soul under the terrible presence of kindness and confidence. For all the trickery that the inherited character of my mother and that Madame Welstoke had poured into my nature was driven bit by bit out of my heart by the trust the Judge put in me, and his looking upon me as a good and honest woman. Long before my love for Julianna had grown strong, I knew that I never could bring myself to use my knowledge of the Judge’s secret to wring money from him, or in fact for any other purpose than to feel sorrow for what his fear of the future must have made him suffer.

I knew well enough how the blood of the daughter preyed upon his mind. There is no child that, sooner or later and more than once, does not come to a time of badness and stubbornness and mischief, and when those times came to Julianna, the Judge would watch her as if he expected to see her turn into a snake like magic in a fairy story. More than that, for days he would be odd and silent, and when he thought no one was looking at him, he would sit with his face in his hands, thinking and brooding and afraid.

I found out, too, that he had tried to trace the father, John Chalmers, back to the days when he wore his own name, and it may have been that then he would have strived to go back to Monty’s father and grandfather, and so on, as far as he could go. I knew about it because one day I was looking through his desk drawers—prying has always been a failing with me!—and I found a letter from Mr. Roddy, the newspaper reporter, who I had almost forgotten. Mr. Roddy said that he never had been able to find anything of the murderer’s history before the time he was employed in Bermuda, and I know my heart jumped with pleasure, for I could not see what good it would do for the Judge to know; and I felt, for some reason, that the name of Cranch was one that both he and I would not have smudged with the owner’s misdeeds and folly. You may say that it was strange that pictures of love—the love which came and went like the shadow of a flying bird, flitting across a wall—should have still been locked up in an old woman’s heart. But they were there to be called back, as they are now, with all their colors as clear and bright as the pictures of Julianna’s future that the Judge used to see pass before the eyes of his fear.