I found both pieces at last, placed them side by side and compared them with the note in my hand. I have already told you that Julianna wrote a hand distinguished from others by subtle peculiarities. The message from the Sheik was written as she would write!
To believe, as I found I must believe, that she, with or without the knowledge of the Judge, would so far forget the obligations of her place in society as to operate a vulgar puppet in public, no matter how much it might interest or amuse her, was another shock to me. I am free to confess that, in spite of all my former assertions to myself that I had not loved her as much as I had supposed, this new development was the first that began to make me believe I had been blinded by mere infatuation.
“You have been moving in the dark,” I told myself. “You have stifled your senses from a whole set of facts which tend to show that some unwholesome thing is sleeping on the threshold of the Colfax home. Perhaps, after all, Julianna and the Sheik of Baalbec are right. It has come out for the best.”
And yet, hardly had I so thought than a strange sense of loneliness came over me, the dingy buildings about the square seemed like so many squatting personalities, depressed and brooding, and out of that gloomy picture came the image of Julianna, so fresh, so smiling, and so fair that for a moment I almost forgot that it was a creation of my fancy. It brought back to me my love for her. I remembered my promise to the Judge. I recalled her tenderness and purity, which I had felt so strongly that I had expected to see it about her like an effulgence. I cursed myself for doubting her. I looked upon the evidence of the scrap of paper in my hand as a piece of testimony brought against an innocent person. Not only with the instinct of a lover, but that of a lawyer as well, I determined to defend her from my own accusations.
I had not been without the necessity, once or twice in my practice, of calling upon experts in handwriting; now I remembered that one of them, a clever fellow named Jarvis, lived in an apartment not far from mine. It was the dinner hour. I believed I should find him and I was right.
“I have come on a peculiar errand,” I explained to him as he appeared in his library, napkin in hand, “and if you are not through dinner, I will wait.”
“No, no,” said he, with easy falsehood. “I had just finished. How can I help you, Mr. Estabrook?”
“I wish your opinion on two pieces of handwriting,” I answered. “It is unnecessary for me to tell you where I got them, you understand. The question at issue is, did one person write both, and if not, is one of them an imitation of the other?”
He flourished a powerful reading-glass in the professional manner those fellows use and gave the two specimens a cursory examination.
“The problem should not be difficult,” he said, “since both were written hastily. In the case of the pencil, it is clear from the manner in which the fine fibres of the paper are brushed forward like grass leaning in the wind. In the case of the ink, the wet pen has gone back to cross a t or complete an imperfectly formed letter before the earlier strokes had time to dry.”