"Thank God!"
And then the tension broke. Arthur found himself sobbing, with the arm of Vickars round his neck.
"Take me to my father at once," he said. "I wish to go home with him."
"Very well," said Bundy. "Wait here till I find him."
The crowd rapidly thinned, till, in a few moments, where a roaring torrent of life had run, but an insignificant ripple flowed and eddied. The tragic bubble, so long watched by thousands of eager eyes, had burst; it was a thing of the past, to be speedily forgotten. The carriage moved unimpeded now to the doors of the court. A few stragglers still hung around, in the hope of seeing once more the protagonists in the finished drama.
A long black van with a grated door at the back drew up against the curb. Two policemen came out of the court-house, looked warily up and down the street, and disappeared again. The man who drove the van nodded to them, and went on reading his evening paper.
The policemen reappeared, with a man walking between them. The man's head was bowed, his coat-collar turned up, his hat drawn down over his eyes.
Arthur had a brief glimpse of a face yellow as wax, a pair of shifty, bloodshot eyes, and he shuddered. It was Scales. The door of the van closed, and, through the barred window, that yellow, awful face looked out, in a last glimpse at liberty. A long, terrible look, gathering up and flashing to the memory things that would be seen no more, unforgetable things that would become the torture of sleep and dreams, little things, such as sunlight flashing on a pool of water, sparrows in the gutter, a broken flower lying in the road, a girl's languorous face turned toward her lover, a beggar gazing into the window of a cook-shop—and then the lids fell upon the bloodshot eyes, and the van rolled away.
"And that might have been my father," thought Arthur. And with the thought came a pang of pity for the man in the black van. Not a good man, not even a lovable man; without grace, without charm, inherently mean-natured—yet, were he a thousandfold worse than he was, to be pitied as a creature going to the torture. And, after all, who should judge even a Scales with justice, who declare how far he was a victim of the evil system which had inflamed his avarice—the victim, too, perhaps of some potency of evil in his own blood, some ghostly hand stretched out of the illimitable past, from whose predestined clutch he could not escape? Ah, God! who should judge?
And now at last he saw him—his father. Archibold Masterman stood in the doorway of the court-house. He came down the steps with a firm tread, looking up and down the street with a calm, defiant glance, his lips compressed in scornful challenge. Yet scorn could not conceal the ravage wrought in him by his misfortunes. The face had lost its colour, it was drawn and haggard, and the hair was nearly white. He was talking with Bundy, and he smiled as he talked. He drew near the waiting carriage, opened the door, and stepped in.