“I am afraid,” he said slowly, and apparently avoiding my gaze,—“I am afraid that I must call upon you in a manner which will severely weigh upon you. Estabrook,” he put his hand upon my shoulder. “I’ve done my best. Do you hear? I’ve done my best.”
“I will never doubt it,” I assured him. “Nor do you need to doubt me.”
He looked at me steadily for a second; then he went to a drawer and, opening it, took out a packet of folded papers. It was evident that he had placed it there so that he could reach it easily.
I suppose that the gravity of his bearing, the trembling of his hands, in which these papers rustled, and the anxious expression with which he gazed at me, as if I were to decide some question of life or death, infected me with his unrest. I got up, paced back and forth, and finally sat down again facing his empty easy-chair, with my back to the long windows.
The Judge watched every movement I made, his eyes staring out at me from under the brush of their brows. At last, when I had seated myself, he came and sat in front of me, laid the papers on his knees and smoothed them with the palm of his shaking hand.
“My boy,” he said, “I wrote these papers, not for you, but for my Julianna. Never has a man had a task so calculated to break his heart. She was not to read my message to her unless death came and took me, for while I lived, I felt that I might spare her. See! Her name is written across this outside page.”
I could find no words to fill the pauses which he seemed obliged to make, for, as you may well believe, I felt the presence of a crisis in my affairs—in the affairs of all of us.
“But, my boy,” he went on, “what these pages contain is now for you, if you so decide.”
“Decide?” I managed to say. “What must I decide?”
“I will tell you if God gives me the strength to do it,” he said. “It is about Julianna. It is written here. I have sealed it as you see.”