Some men do not fall in love. I had supposed from the beginning of my interest in such things that I was one of these men. I did not doubt that all of us have an inherent tendency, perhaps based upon our coarser natures, to love this or that woman thrown in our way by a fortunate or unfortunate chance. But the traditions of our family were strong; I had been educated by all those who were near to me in earlier life to look upon marriage, not as a result of natural instinct so much as the result of a careful and diplomatic choice of an alliance. I had been taught—not in so many words, but by the accumulation of impressions received in my home and in my youthful training—that one first scrutinized a woman’s inheritance of character, wealth, and position, and as a second step fell in love with her.
This cannot be called snobbishness. It is prudence. And I followed this course until I was nearly thirty years old. If the test of its success lies in the fact that I had never had more than a temporary affection, sometimes stimulated by the curve of a bare shoulder and sometimes by the angle of a bright mind, then it had successfully kept me from the altar.
And yet you shall see that at last I reversed the order of our traditions; you shall see, too, that it resulted in one of the strangest of courtships and a tangle of mystery of which the rest of the world knows nothing, but which you have adequate proof threatens my happiness and the ghastly end of which may now be skulking within the walls of my house.
The wild weather of this night, with the howl of the wind and the rattle of dead leaves driven against the blinds, is in extraordinary contrast to the day of beautiful spring sunlight when I first set eyes upon her who was Julianna Colfax.
It is not necessary to tell you who her father was, because you have probably many times toasted your feet before the grate in the club with him.
He was a master of human interest, as grizzled as that old Scotch hound which became his constant companion after Mrs. Colfax died, and his contact with all those hosts of men and women, for whom he administered justice so faithfully for more than twenty years, had stamped on his shaven face sad but warm and sympathetic lines. All men liked him and those who knew him best loved him heartily. Under his gruffness there was a lot of sentiment and tenderness. After his reserved moments, when he was silent and cold, he would burst forth into indulgences of fine, dry humor, like an effervescent fluid which gains in sparkling vigor by remaining corked awhile. It was commonly said—and often said by Judge Graver, of the Supreme Court—that old Colfax remained in the comparative obscurity of a probate judgeship simply from an innate modesty and a belief that he had found his work in life in which he might best serve humanity without hope of personal power and glory. Gaunt, tall, stoop-shouldered, gray, walking the same path each day,—home, court-house, club, neighbors, home,—with a grapevine stick as thick as a fence-post in his hand—such was her father.
Exactly seven years ago the first of last June, on a spring day when I believe every bird that dared came into the city to make his song heard, I came up from downtown and dropped off a surface car before the gleaming white pillars of the new probate court building. My pocket was stuffed with a lot of documents in that Welson vs. Welson litigation, which I had just succeeded in closing.
Behind those swinging green doors which flank the big bench is the judge’s retiring-room; pushing the crack there wider, I was able to peek in, and saw at once that the old atmosphere of Judge Colfax’s study had not remained in the old dingy court-house, where the dismantlers’ picks were already breaking up the ancient mortar, but had followed the personality of the man into these new pretentious quarters. The retiring-room already gave forth an alluring odor of law books and document files, the floor already had been forced into use to bear up little piles of transcripts of evidence, tin document boxes and piles of books, open at reference pages, occupying obscure corners. The Judge’s black silk hat was in its familiar place, resting with the opening upward, on the old black walnut desk which its owner had affectionately brought with him, and which made a strange and cynical contrast with the mahogany woodwork and new rug.
“Come in,” he said, and with one of his long-fingered hands he made a gesture toward the opposite side of the room and spoke my name and that of another.
She was there! I had never seen her before. She was there. I had no thought of her ancestry, her wealth, or her position. She was there, and into my throat came something I had never felt before, into my face a suffusion of hot blood, into my lungs a long-held inhalation of breath.