The blue wall

by Richard Washburn Child

When it was in my fingers, I looked all about in a guilty way to see if any one had seen me pick it up, and then, with the metal icy cold in my hand, my head swam. I knew the meaning of my find. The thing had not come out of its hiding to spring upon us of its own accord. Human hands had preserved it, and human feet had brought it into the garden in the dead of a winter night, and human fright had been the cause of leaving it behind.

I had searched once for this trinket, with a plan to use it as a weapon of evil, and now it was mine. It was mine, and yet all my love for the Judge and Julianna, for whom I would have given my life, made me look upon it as if it were a snake. My first thought was its destruction. I wanted to throw it in the furnace. I longed to have an anvil and hammer, so that I could beat it into a pulp of gold. I wished a crack in the earth might open miles deep so I could drop it in.

I went into the kitchen where the cook was busy with her pastry, and up to my own room. It was there I began to think sensibly. I believed that whoever might want to come now and say, “I know. That is a murderer’s child,” no longer would have the proof. I believed that Julianna was safe again. So long as I had the locket and Monty Cranch was lost in the depths of time and perhaps dead, no real harm, I thought, could come to her. Often enough I had remembered the moment when Mr. Roddy had begged the Judge to condemn Monty to death by an accusation of a crime he never committed, and how I had said, perhaps, the words that prevented the master from agreeing to the devilish plot. I had often wondered if I had not been the cause of all the Judge’s troubles by my speaking then. This thought, for the moment, prevented me from hurrying downstairs in time to catch the Judge before he went out. I could hear him hunting around the corners for his grapevine stick, humming a tune.

“What good, after all, to tell?” said I to myself. “Just as he kept a secret for the happiness of his wife, I will keep one for the sake of his peace of mind.”

I heard the front door close and knew that he had gone.

“If I took the locket to him,” I thought, “what would he believe? Only that I had had it in my possession all these years. After all, I am only a servant. He would be suspicious. He would believe I had invented the story of finding it in the yard. It would spoil all his trust in me and that would break my heart.”

So my thoughts went around and a week passed, in which there was not a night that I did not sit in my bedroom window, looking out at the cold garden and the black alley, expecting to see some one lurking there. A hundred times I took the locket out of its hiding-place and wondered what to do, and at last it came to me that the first question the Judge would ask was why I had not told him at once. That was enough to clinch the matter; until to-night the secret has been my own and you can blame me or not, as you see fit.

It was painful enough for me—a lonely old maid—with nothing but memories of a wasted girlhood and no one to help me see the right of things. Many is the night I have wet my pillow with tears, being afraid that I had always played the wrong part and would finally be the cause of the ruin of those I had grown to love.

Of all those bad moments, none was more bitter than that when the Judge told me that the day would come when Julianna must know the truth. To this day I remember the study as it was then. Workmen had been redecorating the walls, and all the furniture was moved into the centre of the room, strips of paper were gathered into a tangled pile on the floor, and in the middle of the confusion, the Judge was sitting in his easy-chair, with his eyes looking a thousand miles away, and his lips moving just enough to keep his old pipe alight. He looked up as I drew the curtains.

“Don’t light the lamp yet,” he said. “You are a woman and I want to talk to you.”