Then chance gave me, I thought, an opportunity to strike at his courage. He is here. He can tell you of the message the automaton scrawled for him on a bit of paper. But he cannot tell the anxious hours, the frantic hours, a tormented outcast spent before that message was written, lurking in front of the Judge’s house, watching with eyes red with sleeplessness for every little sign of what was going on. Nor can he tell you of the terror that came into a lonely creature’s soul the night the Judge came down his front steps and met a shadow of the past, face to face. It is only I who may describe the horror of that meeting. The recognition of my identity by a dog who whined and cowered, and then by a man, whose breath gurgled in his throat and whose skin turned white, are things that no man knows but me.
I can see the Judge’s face now. It looked upon me with the same accusing expression that I knew so well, and I slunk away believing that the worst had at last come. He had seen behind the mask of my years, my physical decline and my suffering. In one glance, before he turned dizzily back toward the house, he had taken my secret away from me. He knew me!
The madness of desperation came over me then. It was that which caused me to write the message through the hand of my automaton; it was that which led me to conceive the folly that, being known by the Judge to be living, I might, in the name of my love for my daughter, tell him out of my own mouth that I would never molest them.
I had stood all that man could bear. For the second time in my desperation, I entered the garden. I climbed the balcony. The Judge was there. Estabrook was there. They both saw me. I fled with their staring eyes pursuing me.
What more can I tell?
You have heard.
I am a miserable man.
| BOOK VII THE PANELED DOOR |