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The Blue Wall

A PICTURE THERE AMONG THE LAW BOOKS

COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY RICHARD WASHBURN CHILD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Contents

Illustrations

From drawings by Harold J. Cue.

The Blue Wall

CHAPTER I

THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR

What’s behind this wall?

As I write, here in my surgeon’s study, I ask myself that question. What’s behind it? My neighbors? Then what do I know—really know—of them? After all, this wall which rises beyond my desk, the wall against which my glass case of instruments rests, symbolizes the boundary of knowledge—seemingly an opaque barrier. I am called a man of science, a man with a passion for accuracies. I seek to define a part of the limitless and undefined mysteries of the body. But what is behind the wall? Are we sensitive to it? You smile. Give your attention then to a narrative of facts.

How little we know what influence the other side has upon us or we upon the human beings beyond this boundary. We think it is opaque, impassable. I am writing of the other wall. There was a puzzle! The wall of the Marburys!...

Here I risk my reputation as a scientific observer. But that is all; I offer no conclusions. I set down in cold blood the bare facts. They are fresh enough in my memory. All seasons are swift when a man slips into age and it was only four short years ago that this happened—so marvelous, so suggestive of the things that we may do without knowing—mark me! the things we may accomplish—beyond the wall!

You will see what I mean when I make a record of those strange events. They began when poor MacMechem—an able practitioner he was, too—was thrown from his saddle horse in the park and died in the ambulance before they could get him to the Matthews Hospital. I inherited some of his cases, and Marbury was one of those who begged me to come in at the emergency. It was meningitis and it is out of my line. Perhaps the Marbury wealth influenced me; perhaps it was because the banker—of course I am not using the real names—went down on his knees on this very rug which is under my feet as I write. There is such a thing as a financial face. You see it often enough among those who deal with loans, percents, examiners, and the market. It’s the face of terror peering through a heavy mask of smugness, and it was dreadful to see it looking up at me.... I yielded.

The Marburys’ house faces the group of trees which shade the very spot where MacMechem’s horse went insane. It is one of a block where each residence represents a different architect—a sort of display of individuality and affluence squeezed together like fancy crackers packed in a box. My machine used to wait for me by the hour in front of the pretentious show of flowers, tub-evergreens, glass and bronze vestibules, and the other conventional paraphernalia of our rich city successes.

It was their little girl. She was eight, I think, and her beauty was not of the ordinary kind. Sometimes there rises out of the coarse, undeveloped blood of peasants, or the thin and chilly tissue of families going to seed, some extraordinary example like my little friend Virginia. The spirit that looks out of eyes of profound depth, the length of the black lashes lying upon a cheek of marvelous whiteness, the delicate lines of the little body which delight the true artist, the curve of the sensitive lips, the patient calm of personality suggesting a familiarity with other worlds and with eternity, makes a strong impression upon a medical man or surgeon who deals with the thousands of human bodies, all wearing somewhere the repulsive distortions of civilization. The ordinary personality stripped of the pretense which cannot fool the doctor, appears so hysterical, so distorted by the heats of self-interest, so monkey-like!

Oh, well,—she was extraordinary! I was impressed from the moment when, having reread MacMechem’s notes on the case under the lamp, and then having crossed the blue-and-gold room to the other wall, I drew aside the corners of an ice pack and gazed for the first time upon little Virginia.

When I raised my glance I noticed the mother for the first time. I might have stopped then to wonder that this child was her daughter, for the woman was one of those who with a fairly refined skill endeavor to retain the appearance of youth. I knew her history. I knew how her feet had moved—it always seems to me so futilely—through miles and miles and miles of dance on polished floors and her mouth in millions of false smiles. She had been débutante, belle, coquette, old maid. Marbury had married her when wrinkles already were at her chin and her hands had taken on the dried look which no fight against age can truly conceal; then after six years of longing for new hopes in life she had had a single child.

Just as she turned to go out, I saw her eyes upon me, dry, unwinking. But I know the look that means that death is unthinkable, that a woman has concentrated all her love on one being. It is not the appeal of a man or woman—that look. Her eyes were not human. I tell you, they were the praying eyes of a thoroughbred dog!

I knew I must fight with that case—put strength into it—call upon my own vitality....

The bed on which Virginia lay was placed sideways along the wall—as I have said—the Marburys’ wall. I drew a chair close to it, and before I looked again at the child I glanced up at the nurse to be sure of her character. Perhaps I should say that I found her to be a thin-lipped person not over thirty, with long, square-tipped fingers, eyes as cold as metal, and colorless skin of that peculiar texture which always denotes to me an unbreakable vitality and endurance, and perhaps a mind of hard sense. Her name was Peters.

MacMechem’s notes on the case, which I still held in my hand, set forth the usual symptoms—headache, inequality of the eye pupils, vertigo, convulsions. He had determined that the variety was not the cerebro-spinal or epidemic form. He had tapped the spinal canal with moderate results. According to his observations and those of the nurse there was an intermittent coma. For hours little Virginia would lie unconscious, and restless, suffering failing strength and a slow retraction of the head and neck, or on other occasions she would rest in absolute peace, so that the disease, which depends so much upon strength, would later show improvement. The cause of this case, he believed, was either an abscess of the ear which had not received sufficient treatment—probably owing to the fact that the child, though abnormally sensitive, had always masked her sufferings under her quiet and patience, or a blow on her head not thought of consequence at the time it had happened.

Well, I happened to turn the notes over and, by George!—there was the first signal to me. It was scrawled hastily in the characteristic nervous hand,—a communication from poor Mac, a question but also a sort of command,—like a message from the grave!

These were the words,—“What keeps her alive? What is behind the Marburys’ wall?”

They startled me. “Behind the wall?” I said to myself. “Behind the wall? What wall?”

There were the scientific notes he had made! Then at the end a sane and eminent doctor had written shocking gibberish. “What’s behind the wall?”

“Come here,” I called to that grim machine, the nurse.

She came, looked over my shoulder at my finger pointing at the words, and her face filled with a dreadful expression of apprehension, all the more uncouth because it sat upon a countenance habitually blank. She did not answer. She pointed. I looked up. And then I knew that the wall in question was that blank expanse of pale blue, that noncommittal wall that rose beside the bed, at one moment flat, hard, and impenetrable, at another with the limitless depths and color of a summer sky.

“Turn up that light a little,” said I uneasily. “What has this wall to do with us?”

“Nothing,” said Miss Peters. “Nothing. I refuse to recognize such a thing.”

“Then, what did Dr. MacMechem see?” I asked.

“He saw nothing,” she answered. “It is the child who knows that something is beyond that wall. It is her delirium. There is no sense in it. She believes some one is there. She has tried to explain. She puts her hands upon that surface and smiles, or sometimes her face, as she looks, will all screw up in pain. It has a strange effect upon her.”

“How?” said I. “You are impressed, too, eh? Well, how does it show? MacMechem was no fool. Speak.”

The raw-boned woman shivered a little, I thought. “That’s what causes me to wonder, Doctor,” she said. “There is an effect upon her. She can foretell the condition of her disease. She seems conscious that her life depends on the welfare of something else or the misfortune and suffering of something else—beyond—that—wall.”

“Poppycock!” I growled at her. “It’s a pretty pass when sane medical men in their practice begin to fancy—”

“Sh—sh!” she said, interrupting me sharply. “See! Now the child is conscious! Watch!”

I drew back a little from the bedside as Virginia stirred, but I could see the milk-white lids of her eyes—eyes, as I have said, deep and blue and intense like the wall behind her, with their long black lashes. Her slender body shook as if she was undergoing the first rippling torsions of a convulsion. Her face was drawn into such an expression as one might imagine would appear on the face of an angel in agony, and then, gradually, as some renewed circulation relaxed the nerve centres, her breath was expelled with a long patient sigh. And this I noticed,—she did not turn toward us, but with an almost imperceptible twist of her body and the reaching of her little hands she sought the wall.

I confess I half believed that she would float off into the infinite blue of the plaster and be lost in its depths. I found my own eyes following hers. I felt, I think, that I too was conscious of some dreadful or marvelous, horrible or inspiring something behind the partition; but in light of subsequent discoveries my memory may have been distorted. Besides, I have promised none but the cold-blooded facts and I need only assert that the little girl looked, moved her lips, stretched her arms, and then suddenly, as if she had sensed some agony, some fearful turbulence, she cried out softly, her face grew white, her upper lip trembled, she fell back, if one may so speak of an inch of movement, and lay panting on her pillow. The nurse, I think, seized the moment to renew the cold applications. Yet I, who had scoffed, who had sneered at poor MacMechem’s perplexity, stood looking at that blank blue wall, expecting to see it become transparent, to see it open and some uncanny thing emerge, holding out to little Virginia a promise of life or a sentence of death.

My first instinct would have endeavored to shake off the question of the other side of that wall. I would, perhaps, if younger, have rejected the whole impression, declared the girl delirious, and would not now be reciting a story, the conclusion of which never fails to catch my breath. But mine is an empirical science. We deal not so much with weights and measures as with illusive inaccuracies. To be exact is to be a failure. To reject the unknown is to remain a poor doctor, indeed. The issue in this case was defined. Either the congestion of the membranes in the spinal cord was producing a persistent hallucination or else there was, in fact, something going on behind that wall. Either an influence was affecting the child from within or an influence was affecting her from without. I was mad to save her. Even a doctor who habitually views patients and data cards with the same impersonal regard may sometimes feel a call to work for love. And I loved that little child. I meant to exhaust the possibilities. As poor MacMechem had asked the question, I asked it.

I touched Virginia’s hands with the tips of my fingers. Her eyes turned toward me, and again I was sure that no madness was in them. You, too, would have said that, awakened from the intermittent coma, the little thing, though mute and helpless, was none the less still the mistress of her thoughts.

“You have not asked her?” I inquired of Miss Peters.

The woman, folding her arms, at the same time shook her head solemnly.

“No,” she said as if she disapproved.

But I bent over Virginia. “I am the new doctor,” I said. “Do you understand?”

She smiled, and, I tell you, no monster could have resisted that tenderness.

“What is there?” I whispered, pointing with my free hand.

Her eyes opened as children’s eyes will do in the distress of innocence; her feeble hand moved in mine as a little weak animal might move. Her face refilled with pain.

“Something is there,” she whispered.

“What?”

She shook her head weakly.

The nurse touched my elbow. I thanked her for reminding me of the chances I was taking with the little girl’s quiet. I left instructions; then, perhaps not wholly at peace with myself, I crept softly down the stairs. I did not wish an interview with Mrs. Marbury. I did not wish to see that begging look on her face. I would have been glad to have escaped Marbury himself.

He was waiting for me. He waited at the bottom of the steps with that smug financial face of his—a mask through which, in that moment, the warmth of suffering and love seemed struggling to escape. He was plucking, from his thin crop, gray hairs that he could ill afford to lose.

I anticipated his questions.

“It is a matter of conservation of strength,” I told him; “a question of mental state, a question of the nervous system. No man can answer now—beforehand.”

He drew out his watch and looked at it without knowing what he did or why or observing the hour.

“By the way,” said I, “who lives next door—in there?”

“Who?” he answered. “Why, the Estabrooks.”

“A large family?”

“Two. Jermyn Estabrook and his wife. They were married six years ago and have lived there ever since. We know them very little. His father has never forgiven my objection to his membership on a certain directorate in 1890. The wife was the daughter of Colfax, the probate judge. They have no children. But perhaps you know as well as I.”

“No,” said I, studying his face. “I know nothing of them. Are they happy? Is there anything to lead you to believe that some tragedy hangs over them?”

For a moment he looked at me as if he believed me insane; then he laughed nervously.

“Bless me, no,” he said. “Imagine a couple very happy together, surrounded by influences the most refined, leading a conservative life well intrenched as to money, the husband a partner and heir-apparent to an important law practice, the wife an attractive young woman who rides well and cares little for excitement. You will have imagined the Estabrooks.”

“They and their servants are in the house?”

“Yes. Possibly Jermyn is away just now. I think I heard so. But I do not know.”

His words seemed to clear away the chance of any extraordinary abnormal situation beyond the wall.

“What is the mystery?” he asked nervously.

I can hear the querulous tone of his voice now; I can see the tapestry that hangs above the table in their hall.

“Thank you,” I said, without answering. And so I left him.

Outside, I stopped a moment to look up at that house next door.

It was October tenth. I remember the date well. The good moon was shining, for it has the decency to bathe with its light these cities we make as well as God’s fields. It lit up the front of the residence so that I could see that, perhaps of all in the block, the Estabrooks’ was the plainest, the most modest, with its sobriety of architecture and simplicity, and on the whole the most respectable of all. It seemed to insure tranquillity, refinement, and peace to its owner. I tell you that at that moment, with my chauffeur coughing his hints behind me, I felt almost ashamed for the fancies that had led me to find a mystery behind its stones and mortar.

And then, as suddenly as I speak, I realized that a window on the second floor was being opened gently. I saw two hands rest for a moment on the sill, some small object was dropped into the grass below, and my ears were shocked by a low cry of suffering with which few of the millions which I have heard could be compared!

It is always so, I find. We are ever forced by pure reason away from those delicate subconscious whisperings. I had sensed something beyond the wall, and as science, after all, is not so much truth as a search for truth, I would perhaps have done well to have retained an open mind. Instead, I had sneered at the whole idea. And to rebuke me the house, as if it were itself a personality, had for a fleeting second disclosed the presence of some hidden secret. The window was closed, and then I stood upon the deserted thoroughfare, the hum of my fretting limousine behind me, staring up at the moonlit front of the Estabrooks’ home. You may be sure that it was with a mind full of speculations that I left the spot, asking myself as MacMechem had asked himself, what was behind the wall, what was the thing which was determining the question of the life or death of so lovable a child as little Virginia Marbury....

It is already raining. As I write again, the slap of it on the window makes one feel the possibilities of loneliness in city life....

It is hard for me to describe what a fascination there is in campaigning against death in those special extraordinary cases where the doctor becomes something more than a man of science and is also a man of affections. It is impossible to describe the irritation of being unable to act in cases like Virginia’s—cases where the fight is made between strength of body and mind, on the one hand, and some deep-seated infection, like meningitis, on the other. I was more than anxious for the late afternoon hour when I could again go to the child. Her blue eyes, as deep and mysterious as the sea, called to me, if I may use that word. And there was something else that called to me as well—the blue wall—blank blue wall beyond the bed.

I found Miss Peters there, sitting in the patient’s room and the gathering gloom of dusk, her muscular hands flattened upon her knees in the position of a red granite Rameses from the Nile, looking out the window at the waving treetops of the park and the clouds of falling leaves which were being driven by the dismal October wind across the white radiance of the arc lamps. I thought that I detected upon her metallic face a faint gleam of pleasure.

“It has been a good day,” she said, without rising and with her characteristic brusqueness. “Mrs. Marbury is glad that you have not suggested a hospital, and desired me to say so.” Indicating the bed with its inert little human body she added, “Peaceful.”

“The wall?” said I.

She smiled insultingly.

“You are interested?” she asked.

I scowled, I think.

“Oh, well,” she said, moving her shoulders, “she has been talking to it,—whatever is behind there,—and, do you know, I believe it has been talking to her!”

With those deliberate movements which characterized, I suppose, the movements of her mind itself, she lit the light; under its yellow rays lay the girl Virginia, her long lashes fringing her translucent eyelids, her delicately turned mouth with lips parted, and an expression of peace about the whole of her body.

“At twelve to-day,” said the nurse with her finger on the chart, “she went through apparent distress. Something seemed to give her the greatest anxiety. She even spoke to me twice. She pointed. She said, ‘It is bad! It is bad!’ with great vehemence. It was like that for more than an hour. Then suddenly she became peaceful. She went to sleep. I have not wakened her since.”

Maybe I shuddered. I remember I merely said in answer, “Yes, yes, that’s all right!” and bent over the sleeping child. In the next moment I was lost in wonder at the improvement which had taken place in twenty-four hours. The tension and retraction of the neck and head had relaxed, respiration had diminished, the lips were pink and moist, the spasmodic nerve reaction and muscular twitching had almost ceased. I felt that exultation which comes when instinct as much as specific observation assures me that the tide has turned, that the arrow of fate has swung about, and the odds have changed. Strange as it may seem to many persons, these turns are felt by the doctor at times when the patient is wholly unconscious of them, and often enough I have wondered if, after all, this does not show that the crises of life are not determined within ourselves, but by some watching eye and mind and hand outside of us. As I bent over the little Virginia some such reflection was in my mind.

Then you can imagine, perhaps, how startling, how much an answer to my unspoken question, was the sound which at that very moment came from the blue wall beyond the bed!

How can we analyze our sense of hearing? Do you know the sound of your wife’s footsteps? When you were young, could you pick out the approach of your father by the sound of his walk? Yes. But can you tell how? Are you able to say what it is that distinguishes it from the sounds a hundred other men would make going by your closed door? No. And neither can I tell you why I recognized this sound.

All that I can say is this,—the wall was opaque, the sound so faint as to be hardly heard, and yet I knew, as well as if the partition had been of plate glass, that the impact was that of a human body!...

There was something in this sound on the wall which drew an involuntary exclamation from me as the jar of forceps draws a tooth. And the sound of my voice, sharp and explosive, woke the child.

She stared up at me with that strange look of infinity—I must so describe it—infinity; then, as if she too had heard, she turned toward the wall.

“What do you see?” I asked near her ear.

She gave me one of her tender smiles and made a little gesture as if to say that she felt her inability to express something.

“It is there?” I asked, indicating the blank wall at last.

Her eyes sought that space of mysterious blue. Then she whispered, “Yes.”

I must say that, though I knew no more than I had at first, I derived some satisfaction from the mere fact that for the second time Virginia had confirmed the extraordinary belief or fancy which had possessed prosaic MacMechem, the unimaginative Miss Peters, and, finally, myself. It seemed to justify positive steps in an investigation; after a further examination of the little body on the bed which offered still better evidence of an improvement in the course of the malady, I left the Marburys’ door, determined to settle the question once and for all.

CHAPTER II

A MOVING FIGURE

It may strike you as absurd that I did not accept the possibility that Virginia was suffering from delirium. I confess that, after I had closed the house door behind me, I was for the moment convinced of the connection between congestion at the base of the brain and the abnormal fancy of the child. I had come to the house on foot, no vehicle was waiting for me, and I remember that when I started off I turned in the direction leading away from the Estabrooks’ door.

The day had promised a much-needed rain; now the coming night threatened one of those angry tempests of the autumn. It was already dark and the street was deserted as if every one had hurried to find cover. The lighted windows suggested warmth and protection; but outside the dust and flying, rustling leaves, the dancing shadows on the pavements, the wail of the wind, the tossing treetops in the park, the musty odor of the death of the year all bore down upon the spirit and awoke that superstitious uneasiness which we inherit, I suppose, from ancestors who fled the storm to find shelter for their naked bodies in caves and hollow trees.

This wild and funereal scene and the proximity to the spot where poor MacMechem met his end brought him back into my memory, and again I found myself wondering, as he had wondered, and then I remembered the low cry I had heard issue from the window.

One feels at times that determination comes from without. You can almost imagine, then, that some part of your own self which exists outside your body has tapped you on the shoulder, spoken a command, and directed your action. Certainly I cannot remember why I turned around, nor can I recall why I went back toward the Estabrooks’. I do remember that it occurred to me that, if I should see the young lawyer or his wife, all that I asked of them about the other side of the blue wall would probably incline them to the belief that I was as mad as any hare of March. But even that thought did not retard my steps.

If I hesitated at the point where I again reached the Marburys’, it was for good cause, for what I saw gave me no little uneasiness. Out of the shadow of the Estabrooks’ entrance, where a high iron grilled fence curves toward the steps, there came, as if it were some wild and furtive animal startled from its shelter, a moving figure!...

I endeavor to speak with accuracy.... It was dark. Everything seemed to sway in the galloping wind—the trees, the shrubs, the magnetic arc lights and even the luxurious iron and stone inclosures before the line of houses. Furthermore the dust was blinding. In spite of all this, in spite of the fact that the vision was fleeting, I received the definite impression that this figure sought to escape unseen. It hurried away into the darkness, hugged the shadows, and took up a position in a place that would have been chosen by one who wished to observe secretly what I was about to do.

“Bah!” said I to myself. “Some loiterer. He cannot be connected with the Estabrooks’ affairs.”

Yet, for some reason, feeling that I was watched, I determined to walk away again, and as I went I looked along the ground in the manner of one who has lost something. The cross-street was near and I turned it. I thought after a moment or two of waiting under the wall of the corner residence that I heard receding footbeats on the pavement; therefore, having allowed a minute or two to pass, I retraced my steps. The figure was no longer anywhere in sight. Holding my hat so that the ugly gusts of cold wind would not blow it away, I walked up the white steps of the Estabrook home and pressed the electric button which projected from a bronze disk. This disk, so the sense of touch indicated, had at one time been one of those Chinese carved metal mirrors and was now set into the stone. I remember how it spoke to me of the extents to which the metropolitan architects and decorators will go to appeal to the whims and pretensions of the rich, who, after all, are out of the same mould as other men so obscure and wretched that the money spent for such a capricious ornament would support a family of them for six months. Perhaps the irony of it is that, no matter how much wealth may protect one from the others, it can never protect one from himself. And then—I pressed the button again.

There were silk curtains within the long heavy glass panels on either side of the door, but had a light been lit within I could have seen it. The whole house, however, was dark, and only by chance did I catch the sly movement of one of the curtains and the glint of an eye, peeping out at me. Whoever its owner might be, he or she had crept across the tiled vestibule silently and was now behind the outer door conducting a covert investigation.

“An odd procedure for a house of a respectable, conservative family,” said I to myself, and without hesitating I rang again.

A light in the ceiling of the vestibule glowed forth immediately and I heard the movement of heavy metal locks and latches; the door swung back and I found myself standing before a middle-aged woman dressed in the black-and-white garb of well-trained servants.

This woman had a face that one may find sometimes among veteran nuns—a strong and kindly face, patient and self-subjugated—the face of the convent. But, of course, old family serving-women may have this same expression, for they too are nuns in a sense; in household rites they renounce the world, and if the spirit does not sour, little by little, they take wordless vows and obliterate themselves in service. This woman who stood before me, with skirts and apron blown about her substantial figure by the chill wind that poured into the vestibule, seemed at first to be one of them. It was only when I perceived that her eyes were filled with some guilty fear, and that her hands were half raised as if to ward off some impending danger, that I began to suspect that hers was one of those masks which hypocrisy and deceit grow upon the countenance of evil souls.

“I wish to see Mr. Estabrook,” said I.

“He is not at home. He is away.”

“Mrs. Estabrook.”

“She is not well, sir. She cannot see anybody.”

These conventional answers seemed to put an end to the interview: if she had not spoken again, with that strange look of apprehension and terror rising to her eyes, I would have bowed and turned away. But her voice trembled as she moved toward me timidly and said, “Will you leave a message? Will you call again? Will you say—will you say—”

Her sentence failed like that. As it did, words sprang to my mouth. I looked at her accusingly.

“Yes,” I snapped. “On the second story of the Marburys’ house there is, of course, a partition. I called to ask Mrs. Estabrook what was on her side of that wall.”

This information acted like dynamite. You would have said that it had blown to pieces some vital organ of the old servant. The color ran out of her face as if her head had lost its connection with her body.

“This is terrible,” she choked. “Oh, ’tis awful! Who are you? Who can you be? Somebody has sent you.”

She caught the edge of the door and pushed it toward me.

“I know who you are,” she exclaimed. “You are somebody that is sent by him!”

With a final shove, then, she closed the crack which had remained, the locks moved again, the light in the vestibule went out, and I was alone on the step.

Such was the success of my first attempt to find an answer to MacMechem’s question—to solve the riddle of the blue wall. But I realized, as I stood there, looking up into the gray sky of night with its wind-driven clouds, that the presence of some peculiar form of good or evil was no longer in doubt; that little Virginia, with the sensitive receptiveness of childhood, of suffering, and of her own endearing, unworldly personality, had not been wrong; that MacMechem, like a true physician, had not excluded the unknown and now was vindicated, and that there are sometimes strange affairs that baffle our feeble diagnosis of mankind....

This is merely a recital of the facts. I am not attempting to prove anything. I merely state that, as I descended the Estabrook steps and struck off into the park, the detective instinct which lies in every one of us had wakened in me. It may have been the reason for my turning around, after I had crossed the street, between the whirr and lights of two automobiles, and stood at the opening of one of the paths of the park.

The house I had just left met my scrutiny with a cold, impassive stare of its own—its look might have been the stare of the sphinx or of a good poker player. It gave no sign. My eyes traveled up to the roof, then back again to the ground, and only when my glance dropped did I see for the second time the lurking figure of the man.

“He was watching me from first to last,” said I to myself. “He probably saw my little strategy of waiting around the corner.”

Indeed, my first impulse was to walk rapidly over the way, head him off, and ask him his business; but I considered it unwise, and plunging into the shadows of the wailing trees, I walked briskly toward the distant lights that marked my district of the city.

You know, perhaps, the feeling that you are being followed. Without recognition of any definite sight or sound, you become more and more conscious of some one skulking in the shadows behind. Finally, you hear, in one of those moments when the wind catches its breath, the breaking of a twig, the disturbance among the dry leaves that have blown in drifts over the path, and you know that some one is there.

I admit freely that I felt I had involved myself in such a manner that some one wished to do me harm. If, on the other hand, he who followed sought to rob me, the situation was as bad. The park was deserted. One does not like to call for help unless certain of danger. And therefore, though I am no longer moulded for speed, I broke into a run.

I had gone but a few paces before the other discovered that I was in flight. I heard the rapid patter of his shoes behind me. In another twenty feet I heard his voice. It was not loud and it was cautious, but it reached my ears with a suggestion of extraordinary savageness.

“Stop!” it called with an oath. “I’ve got you. Stop!”

It was not a reassuring message, of course. I tried to run faster. A moment of this endeavor only showed me that my pursuer was gaining. I therefore stopped short, stepped into the heavy shadow of an evergreen, and waited for my new friend. Though it was dark I could see him as he came, and I assure you that it surprised me when I noted that the man was well-dressed and bore the appearance of respectability.

Just as he reached the spot in front of me, I saw him hesitate as if he had discovered that I was no longer running along in front of him. I knew that an encounter could not be avoided. Accordingly I sprang forward and drove my fist into his neck. Instantly I found myself grappling with him. I felt the watch in his waistcoat pocket as I pressed my knee into his stomach, and with my face near his I could see by the look in his eyes that my blow had staggered him and put him at a disadvantage. Some years ago I could deliver a heavy punch and the knack had stayed with me. I threw my weight against him once more, bore him down onto the leaves and gravel, and found myself on top.

Both of us were panting; we were breathing into each other’s faces when suddenly I saw his eyes open wide as if he had seen a vision.

“I know you now. You are the doctor!” cried he. “Stop! Tell me, for God’s sake, what’s wrong with my wife!”

“Your wife?” I cried, dumbfounded. “Who are you?”

He struggled to his feet and leered at me. His face twitched with emotion.

“I am Jermyn Estabrook,” he gasped.

You may imagine my astonishment when, after struggling with a man who had pursued me through the dark paths of the park like one who sought my life, he whom I had never seen before should now appeal to me as if I could lift him from the depths of some profound despair. He had cried out that I must tell him what was wrong with his wife. I had never so much as set eyes upon her. He had said he was Jermyn Estabrook. And though, with my face close to his, I could see that he was covered with bits of dead leaves and mud and the sweat of his desperate struggle, I felt that he told the truth.

“I have never been to your home but once in my life,” I said. “You were watching me on that occasion—to-night. That is plain. I did not go in.”

“I have made a mistake,” he gasped. “I’m sorry. I have been through torments beyond telling. Something is going on—some ghastly, horrible tragedy within my own walls.”

The word caught my ear; I gripped his shoulder.

“Listen, Estabrook,” I cried. “It is no time for us to mince matters. I am attending Marbury’s little child. It is an odd form of meningitis. I am fighting to save her. Do you understand?”

He shook his head stupidly as if worn dull by mental agony. “What of her?” he asked.

“What of her, eh?” I cried. “I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you! She is affected—perhaps her life or death depends upon—something—or somebody—that is behind the wall—the blue wall—something in your house next door. Come! Let us go back there. Let us force this thing. It is your home! Enter it!”

“I can’t!” he cried, thrusting his fingers upward.

“Can’t!” I roared at him.

“No,” he said. “Not yet. I have promised her. She has my word.”

“But think, man, what may be going on there!” I said.

“I have sworn not to pass the door,” he said obstinately. “Heaven knows I am nearly crazy for light upon all this. But I must keep my word!”

As if to lend emphasis to his exclamation, a gust of wind roaring through the trees of the park brought the first deluge of rain—a cold, stinging downpour of the wild autumn night. Estabrook shivered. I could see that he was a man, badly tired, unnerved, and still dizzy from the blow I had given him.

“Follow me,” said I roughly. “You need warmth—stimulant. And I want your story, Estabrook.”

He looked at me with an empty stare, but at last nodded his assent, and without another word between us, we came to this house and into this very room.

He sat there before the fire—burning then as it is now—and as the warmth penetrated his trembling body, he seemed to regain his self-composure.

I saw then that this young man, well under forty, did not lack distinction of appearance. His head was carried upon his strong neck in the masterful manner of those who have true poise and strength of personality. His hair had turned gray above his ears, and his well-shaven face carried those lines that the grim struggles of our modern civilization gouge into the fullness of youth and health.

“I must tell somebody,” he said, while I was observing his features upon which the firelight danced. “I have never dreamed that I would come to such a pass. But you shall hear my love story. You may be able to throw some light upon it. Contrary to the notion of my friends, who consider me incapable of adventure, my experience in the affections is one that offers opportunity for speculation—it would appeal to a great detective!”

I leaned forward quickly. Such a statement from any man might awaken interest, but Estabrook was not any man. He represented the essence of conventional society. He belonged to a family of well-preserved traditions, a family whose reputation for conservative conduct and manners of cold self-restraint was well known in a dozen cities. They were that particular family, of a common enough name, which was known as the Estabrookses Arbutus. Jermyn had had a dozen grandfathers who, from one to another, had handed down the practice of law to him, as if for the Estabrooks it was an heirloom.

“Perhaps I had better tell you from the beginning,” said he, drawing the back of his fine hand across his forehead. “For it is strange—strange! And who can say what the ending will be?”

I counseled him to calm himself and asked that he eliminate as much as possible all unnecessary details of his story. I shall repeat, then, as accurately as possible, the story he told me. I will attempt to write it in his own words....

CHAPTER I

A WOMAN AT TWENTY-TWO

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.

Sometime you may see her. She has changed a little. But then she was twenty-two, and the simplicity of her attire seemed to be at once the propriety of nature and the infinite skill of art. She wore a black gown, without ornamentation, and a black hat of graceful form. Not a harsh or stiff fol-de-rol was about her anywhere. You will pardon me for this detail. But, oh, she was so different from the others. She was a picture there among the law books.

The most attractive thing there can be in a woman is that combination of youth, innocence, glowing health, modesty. The perfect skin, with its grapelike, dusty bloom which shows where the collar droops at the front of the neck, the even lashes, from under which the deep eyes gaze out at you half timidly, the brave, honest uplifting of a rounded chin, the undulations of fine lungs, the almost imperceptible movement of restrained vigor in a poised, delicate, graceful figure, the gentleness and tenderness of a voice which at the same time suggests refinement and decision and strength, the absence of any effort to make an impression, either in manner or dress,—these are rare and beautiful attributes in an age when female children hatch out as artful women without the intervening period of girlhood. After all, the best men of us will not choose one of these modern maidens who imitate the boldness of the character and dress of the adventuress or the stage and opera favorite. It has become a tiresome feature of our modern life with the insidious faculty of corrupting the manners even of families who know better. She was so different! And in that moment I knew her superiority as a woman. I could not speak.

We exchanged no words. Yet as we looked at each other in the manner of children, the Judge, I thought, sensed a significance. When my eye sought his, I found a cloud upon his stern face, but immediately, as if he had tossed a haunting thought aside, he laughed.

“Julianna,” said he, “this is the Mr. Estabrook who is as insane as I. That is, he devotes no end of time and energy and seriousness to the game of chess. We have never yet met each other on the field of battle. Some afternoon, here in this room, however—”

She did not allow him to finish; she said hastily that she must witness the contest.

“Then at my home,” he said, beaming at me. “To-morrow will you come to dinner?”

I remember that Julianna had raised her eyes, that they were smiling, and that I received the definite, convincing impression that I was looking at a girl who never had given her love away. I tell you that one feels a truth like that by instinct, and that a woman wears not only her spotlessness, but also her purity of thought, like a faint halo. Yet at that moment I knew she was glad that I had accepted the invitation: there was a blushing eagerness in her eyes, upon her lips, in the movement of her graceful hands. For the rest of the morning I was half dizzy with the mad sense of triumph, of conquest—that strange onslaught of the emotions which gives no quarter to the disordered phalanx of reason.

I must admit that when I met Judge Colfax on the court-house steps the next afternoon to walk home with him, I had not given a thought to his daughter’s forebears or security of place in the social structure. In fact, the social structure had vanished; an individual had, at least for the time, filled its place.

I even jumped when the first sentence the Judge addressed to me began with her name.

“My daughter plays an excellent game herself,” he said, as if in explanation of her interest. “In fact, I may say, with an old man’s modesty, that there are only two persons in this city who can win from me consistently. She is one.”

“And the other, sir?” I asked as we turned our faces toward the hot stare of the late afternoon sun.

“The other,” he said, “is an automaton. I have named it the Sheik of Baalbec. But I believe he calls himself the Player of the Rolling Eye.”

It is impossible for me to say why the mere mention of the fanciful name of an automatic chessplayer should have caused me to feel a peculiar uneasiness—the sensation of apprehension. I am not susceptible ordinarily to the so-called warnings of voices from within. And yet I suppose the Judge saw a look of inquiry on my face, for he drew out his large, old-fashioned gold watch, which he carried in his trousers pocket, with his keys.

“We will stop there,” said he. “There is time. The automaton has a corner of the lower hallway in the old Natural History Museum. It’s not far out of our way, and if you will start with a problem I will give you and play with him, it will afford me an opportunity to measure you before our game this evening.”

Such were the circumstances which brought me into a mystery not yet solved, the ending of which I fear to guess. In a modern era, when it is commonly supposed that skeletons no longer hang in closets, that day after day brings commonplace occurrences or, at the best, trivial abnormalities to be explained to-morrow, that romance is dead, it is strange that Fate should have picked me, when, by custom and my own desire, I am aloof from all things turbulent, morbid, and uncanny, to play an unwilling part in so extraordinary a drama, or, possibly, a tragedy.

At any rate, that day found me face to face with the half-human personality which the Judge had named the Sheik of Baalbec, and whose eye has cast an evil cloud upon my life.

Of course I do not know whether you are familiar with the old Natural History Society and its musty exhibit. A controversy about a curator in 1873 had caused the formation of the new American Institution of Biology. A few old men continued thereafter to support the ancient Society by annual subscription, and when they died, one or two of them, acting from stubborn partizanship, left the museum tied up with trusts and legacies, preventing the sale of a valuable city property and yet not furnishing enough to keep the building in repair or dust the case containing “Beavers at Work.” Finally the old museum, once the pride of the municipality, had come down to the disgraceful necessity of letting its lower floor to a ten-cent exhibition of respectable waxworks, the principal attraction of which was the automatic chessplayer, which a year before my visit had gained suddenly a reputation for playing at times with the skill of a fiend. I faced the mechanism that afternoon for the first time, little realizing the intimacy, if I may use the word, which was to spring up between it and me.

The representation of a squatting Arab, robed in red Oriental swathes and with a chessboard fastened to its knees, sat cross-legged on a box-like structure. Upon dropping a coin into a slot in the flat top, two folding-doors in front of this box would open for a few moments, showing a glass-covered interior, which, as far as the back of the box, was filled with a tangle of wheels and pulleys, seeming to preclude the possibility that a human being could hide therein. As soon as these doors closed, a flat space in the chest of the Sheik opened, with a faint purr of machinery to expose internal organs of metal levers and gears.

The effect of this last exposure was extraordinary, and in all the time I knew the Sheik, I never got over it. The moment this cavity in his chest opened, he was an impersonal piece of mechanism; the moment it closed, however, the soul, the personality of a living being returned, and it seemed to me that the brown, wax skin of his nodding head, the black hair of his pointed beard, the red of his curved, malicious lips, the whites of his eyes, which showed when he moved with a squeak of unoiled bearings in his neck, and even the jointed fingers of his hand, with which he moved the pawns in short, mechanical jerks about the board, all belonged to a human body, containing an individual intelligence.

This was my feeling as the Judge arranged the chess problem on the board above the gilt-and-red Turkish slippers on the feet of the thing’s shapeless cotton-stuffed legs, and briefly described the point to be gained by the Sheik in the series of moves which he was to begin and the success of which I was to combat. The creature made its first move in its deliberate manner and then I stepped forward.

I ask you to believe me that, as I did so, the whirring of wheels within the contrivance stopped, and at that moment I heard a human throat inhale a long breath with a frightened gasp! It was as if the balanced glass eyes of the figure had recognized me or seen in my coming an event long expected.

For a moment I hesitated, then made my move. The figure hesitated, made another. I studied the situation before my second attempt, and then was surprised at the absurd mistakes made by the automaton, who, in his next moves, was playing in slipshod fashion, as if preoccupied. I now had the advantage, and believed that I should win. My triumph was short-lived, however; my opponent awakened to his danger, and yet perhaps my first warning of the final move came when the Judge laughed heartily, clapped me on the shoulder, and pointed toward the board. Another turn made it plain to me. I had lost.

And at the same moment the infernal Sheik lifted his head with the clicking of gears, stared at me, drew down one papier-maché eyelid in a hideous wink and rolled the other glassy eyeball in a complete orbit of the socket, and as soon as this evil, mechanical grimace had been accomplished, the head fell forward, the door in the being’s chest opened once more, showing the moving wheels, and again the creature seemed to become soulless.

“He always rolls his eye at you when he wins,” explained Judge Colfax as we went out into the sunlit street again, and he patted me on the shoulder in gentle banter.

“I believe I do not like your Sheik machine,” said I, laughing nervously. “I felt all the time as if a hidden pair of human eyes were on me—as if there was a personality behind it all.”

The Judge chuckled.

“But you forget,” said he. “Of course there is a person—some man—or woman. I have often wished to have a look at that person, Estabrook.”

As you will see, I have had cause to feel as he did on that memorable night—memorable because I first sat at table with Julianna—with Julianna, whose magnificence was not boldness, whose spirit was not immodesty, and whose gentleness did not rob her of either her beauty or vivacity.

Though it seems to me that to-night, in the depths of anxiety, I find myself in love with a new and deeper feeling, there can be no doubt that, as I looked at her across the table, I thrilled with the thought that she might one day be my wife, and felt that delicious and painful ecstasy when her deep eyes met mine and her lips smiled back at me the encouragement of a modest woman who does not guard too closely her own first interest in an exchange of ardent glances. I had then forgotten most fully the theories of my training.

I remember now that she wore a gown of soft and ample drapery and of a dark green, suggestive of the colors in the shady recesses of a forest. I was charmed by the shape and subtle motions of her white hands, the quality of the affectionate attitude she maintained toward her father, the refinement of her voice when she answered my comments or addressed the old serving-maid.

About this serving-maid I must speak. On that occasion her ample form moved about in the shifting shadows outside the brilliant glow of the flickering candles, like a noiseless ghost, hovering about a feast of the living. But I liked her, because, when she looked toward Julianna, she wore that expression of loyal affection which perhaps one never sees except upon the faces of mothers or old servants. She had been in the Judge’s family even at the time of the death of his wife years before, and she had looked as old then as she does when I see her in my own home now. The old woman’s name is Margaret Murchie. You will see that she, too, is involved in this affair.

How I noticed her at all that evening, or how I kept up an intelligent conversation with Judge Colfax, I cannot explain. I only know that I finally found myself sitting with my knees under the table with the long thin legs of the Judge, and a set of chessmen, carved exquisitely from amber and ivory, on the board before me, and that when the old man was called to the telephone and announced on his return that he must go out to the bedside of a friend, I was overjoyed that I might have some rare moments in conversation with Julianna.

I observed, however, that this prospect did not please Judge Colfax as much as it did me; there was an awkward moment in which he looked from one to the other of us with the same expression as he had worn when he had observed my interest in his daughter in our first meeting. Then, as on the former occasion, his optimistic good-nature seemed to rise again above whatever apprehensions he may have had. He smiled until all the multitude of wrinkles about his eyes were showing.

“Estabrook,” said he, “we have bad luck, eh? But I can offer a worthy substitute. Unless you find that you must go, you may discover my daughter to be as worthy an opponent as the Sheik of Baalbec.”

Of course I recognized the significance of the words, “unless you find that you must go,” and my first instinct was to offer some lame excuse and take my departure. Immediately I turned toward Julianna, but she, instead of coming forward in the manner of one ready to say good-night, idly turned the pages of a book on the old table, and then, walking across the room, stood near the chessboard with the pink glow of the droplight upon her face, and looked up at me, saying as plainly as words, “Stay.”

From the ordinary woman this would not have affected my intentions; it would have been nothing. From her it was a piece of daring. From her it seemed a sacrifice of dignity for my sake. I met her glance, and then turned politely toward the Judge, who stood in the wide door, his tall hat resting under his arm and his searching eyes looking out from under the bushy brows.

“Thank you for the suggestion,” I said.

“I will be out late,” he answered, his deep rumbling voice directed at me. “ Good-night.”

“Good-night, sir,” I said cheerfully.

Then for the first time I was alone with Julianna, and she was directing at me, as I stood before her, one of those perplexed little smiles—those rare perplexed smiles which indicate, perhaps, that for the first time in a woman’s life she does not understand her inner self, and yet is sure that some joyful thing hangs where she can reach it if she will. It is the last smile drawn from childhood.

“Shall we play?” she said.

“No,” said I.

“I am glad.”

“Then you do not like the game?”

“Yes, when I play it with father, because it interests him. And he prefers to play with me because he says that I am youth.”

“His youth, too,” I suggested.

She nodded seriously. “Yes, I think so,” she said. “We see so many old people, and balls attract me very little. Our companionship is very close even for father and daughter. I surprise myself by talking so to you, but that is it—and we have established a little kingdom of our own—a walled kingdom which no one else can enter or destroy.”

Upon hearing these words, pronounced with that soft ring of determination which gave her the one touch of imperiousness she possessed, my heart fell. It was as if she had warned me that she had dedicated herself to him.

And then suddenly the fact that she had so spoken to me, who had known her so short a time and said nothing but commonplaces to her, seemed to take on new significance. I thought it plain that she was erecting a defense against her own self and was admitting, by her denial, that her fortresses were for the first time in danger. She had had her choice in conversation and she had chosen to speak not of general matters, but of herself. She had done so with charming awkwardness, and I felt as if the world of all my happiness were resting on the bare chessboard between the round and healthy forearms that leaned there, and between her graceful hands, whose intrinsic beauty was not marred by any ring.

“One might well envy the Judge,” said I.

She looked up at me quickly.

“Will you close those long windows for me?” she asked, after a moment, pointing toward the back of the room. “At the front of the house we are level with the street; at the rear, however, the old walled garden is almost another story below us. It is damp, I think, even after a spring day as tender and sunny as this has been.”

I hastened to do her bidding.

“There is a tangle of old-fashioned flowers in our little city inclosure,” she called after me. “The Judge likes it that way—as mother used to like it. There is a balcony with an old wistaria vine just outside the window.”

“And the moon,” said I under my breath.

The pranks that fate plays—or whatever one chooses to call the strange domination of our chance happenings—are wonderful and at times seem malicious. I am certain that it brought me onto the iron-railed balcony just beyond the French windows at the beat of that second.

The old garden, though small and flanked by the ugly backs of city houses, seemed to hold within its brick inclosure a world full of white liquid moonlight. Shrubs, however, which had grown in disorder under the walls, threw dark and steady shadows across the patches of lesser vegetation. The tops of early blossoms and nodding grasses showed beyond these spaces of blackness. Suddenly, as I looked down, I heard a click like that of a gate-latch, and a second later I saw, projecting from one of the fantastic patterns of shade, a round disk of shining surface.

There are moments when the sight is puzzled to determine the character of such an object. I could not make out the nature of this bobbing, moving circle that followed along the irregular line of wall shrubbery. Then, when it was nearer, I saw in a flash that it was the top of a silk hat. I could see, too, the stooping shoulders of the man who wore it, I could see that he was proceeding cautiously as if he feared to attract attention, and at last, when he paused beneath the balcony, I could see a face with an anxious expression that turned upward toward me. I drew back behind the thick-leaved vine; for the man was Judge Colfax.

Of all persons he was the last to act as if he sought concealment in what he did, the last to be guilty or wear the appearance of guilt. Had he been a stranger, I might have assumed that he had come to make a call below stairs, but the fact that it was my host, a judge of probate, with a reputation for lifelong honor and refinement, filled me with the keenest curiosity. I gripped the old iron railing with my hands and leaned over.

The Judge waited for a moment before a door opened slowly somewhere beneath the balcony and a stream of artificial light escaped through the crack and for a brief second lay like a piece of yellow ribbon across the grass. Then he was joined by some one whose voice I recognized as that of Margaret Murchie.

“I came back,” I heard him whisper, “because I saw that you had something to say to me. Julie is observant. I couldn’t speak to you in the hall, Margaret. What is the matter? What did you indicate by the signs?”

“It’s him, sir,” she answered. “This thing we have feared has come.”

“You cannot mean it!” he exclaimed.

“How could we expect different, sir? The heart of her is like that of other healthy young girls. I could tell by the look on her face, sir. The like of it has never been there before. ’T is given to some one to have his way with her, Judge. I think it’s him.”

They were talking of me!

“He would have to be told,” said the old man. I could see the top of the silk hat shaking. “And she would have to be told!”

“It is awful, sir!” she answered, wringing her hands. “But I’d never spoil it that way for anything.”

“You forget the other!” he said sternly.

“Lost,” she argued. “The time has gone by. It was not a human, sir. I could never mention her name—beautiful thing she is!—with that other.”

“I know—I know,” whispered the old man distractedly.

“Well, then, let things run their course. God will not let harm come of it.”

“Blood,” said he.

For a moment there was no sound. The one word seemed to have decided all questions and to have called for silence.

“In case of my death—” the Judge began after a while.

Margaret Murchie uttered a little cry.

“I have left a paper where she will find it,” he finished. “I can do nothing more now. Perhaps—perhaps it will not be a crisis, after all. I think if I had the chance again, I would send him to his doom.”

With these words he raised his clenched fist and walked rapidly across the grass to the arched exit leading to the alley. The click of the latch told me that he had gone.

You may imagine my state of mind. As I endeavored in those seconds to wrest some meaning from the tangle of words I had overheard, my thoughts were tumbling over each other so fast that I had forgotten the doubtful part I had played as an eavesdropper. I had heard a reference made to me as one who had brought some new complication into the affairs of that household which heretofore I had regarded as the most spotless and quiet in the city, but which now I found had some dark and mysterious menace hanging over its peace. Was I the one, after all, to whom they had referred? They had spoken of some one else and whispered strange phrases. It was all a blank puzzle to me.

Perhaps under different circumstances my caution and dislike of all that is unusual or doubtful would have led me away from the house, planning never to return. But there is in me a certain loyalty. I do not quickly cast my lot or my reputation with that of another; when, however, I have done so, I do not quickly withdraw. Extraordinary as it may seem, I felt myself already bound to Julianna. Perhaps I already loved her desperately.

Whatever may have been the case, when I turned back into the room I looked into her gaze with an expression of solemnity which my emotions intended as an outward sign of my continued devotion.

I must have presented then a ridiculous, sentimental appearance. She laughed the moment she saw me.

“You like our balcony,” she said. And then, as if she had discovered the cause of my seriousness, she added, “also our spring moonlight.”

I nodded.

“It is an unusual spot for the middle of a metropolis,” she went on. “It is filled with a tangle from which years ago I used to imagine fairies and gnomes and Arabian marauders might step at any moment.”

“Tell me more,” said I.

“There was a little basin and fountain there when I was a child. But when it did not flow, yellow slime collected at the bottom, and when the water was turned on and trickled from one basin to another, it gave forth a mournful sound that made one think of deserted villages, and moss growing on gravestones, and courtyards where there were moonlight murders.”

“You have a keen imagination.”

“The keenest!” she exclaimed. “Why not? It has grown up with me. And the only trouble is that it causes me the greatest restlessness. My fate is like all others. I am exactly what I would not be. Sometimes I long to enjoy all the wildest of respectable adventures.”

“I should think you would keep that a secret from the Judge. He, above all, is a man of settled habits. His greatest genius has been to make romance out of the commonplace sequences of life.”

She sprang up and walked to the mantel.

“That is true,” she said. “I never show that side of me to him. He would not know what strange spirit moved me. I inherited none of it from him or my mother. I never show that side to anybody.”

“Except to me,” I said mischievously.

“Except to you,” she affirmed without a smile. “But sometimes I feel like a wolf in lamb skin.”

“At those times I take a brisk walk,” I said.

“I do, too. I walk around the Monument nearly every afternoon at five, with father’s dog. Usually at that hour he is at the club.”

“Shall I recognize you then by a shaggy, Scotch hound?” I asked.

“By all means,” she said, laughing wholesomely. “I suppose in the novels they would call that a secret meeting.”

In spite of the light manner in which she had spoken, she had lowered her voice a little when she heard a step in the hall. Margaret entered, as I have seen her so many, many times since, to collect the little coffee-cups.

The old servant, I felt without seeing, did not take her eyes away from me while she was in the room; so conscious was I of being the subject of her observation that I could find but few words to carry on the conversation. The very effect—that of an intimate dialogue interrupted—was produced in spite of my desire to avoid it, and when she left, Julianna had changed her mood. Finding, perhaps, that I was content to listen, she employed a delicate piece of strategy to place me in her father’s lounging-chair where I could watch her as she leaned back among the pillows, and in a voice, more soothing than any I had ever heard, described to me in quaint phrases the character of six imaginary persons who might among themselves make up a world, with all the traits of personality which we find in our own. From this piquant attempt, she emerged to plunge into a light discussion of heredity.

“I can see a trace of the Judge in your belief,” said I.

She admitted that he had been her teacher, that they often discussed such things. It needed no denial from Julianna, however, to know that her convictions about the power of inherited tendencies had come from her own thought. Her mind, unlike her manner, had little submissiveness, and, furthermore, she recited several cases from her own shrewd observation.

Can I attribute my entranced interest on that occasion to her brilliance? To this day I do not know. I would have been content to sit there without my pipe, without a cigarette, listening merely to the brook-like flow of her voice and looking at the play of expression upon her beautiful, sensitive face.

I could feel, I thought, the warmth of her hand still lingering in my own after I had gone down the steps, and I turned my face into the night breeze on the avenue, glad to be alive, conscious of my health, my strength, my youth and my courage, oblivious to the traditions of the Estabrooks and intoxicated with a longing for her personality the moment I had left it.

Not before the next morning did the haunting thought of something queer and strange lurking behind the Colfax home rise to cause me doubt.

“It is nonsense,” I thought. “Chance events, chance words, and my own suspicious mind have united to produce an unreality. The Judge, naturally enough, is jealous of such a daughter. Who would not be under the same circumstances? An old man would be beastly lonely in that comfortable but ancient house, even if they had removed the garden fountain with its mournful trickle. The world has no such picturesque and abnormal situations as those which have come into my mind. And Julianna has all that any one could ask. Above all the vital fact is that she is no other than she!”

Perhaps for the sake of good taste I waited two days in painful restraint before I left my office to walk around the Monument at five; certainly my delay was not because I could pretend to foresee that a ghastly mystery was waiting to seize me and drag me in with its unseen tentacles.

CHAPTER II

A PLEDGE TO THE JUDGE

There is a peculiar honesty about true affection for woman. It is for the flirtations, the light and frivolous intimacies that a man smooths his hair, picks out his scarf, and purchases a new stick. Somehow it seems to me that a gentleman of natural high honor will always present his average self to the one woman. That he should be attentive is natural, that he should be affected is repellent to my notions. Perhaps it was for this reason that without preparation I closed my desk and walked up to meet Julianna, as I would have walked home to my own bachelor quarters.

She was waiting for me!

“I have been expecting you,” said she, with her hand upon the dog’s grizzled head, and in that frank and simple statement there was more charm than in all the false feminine reserve in the universe.

“I did not come before,” I told her, “because I felt that you might believe me presuming too much.”

“Why?” said she in the manner of a child.

I could not answer. I merely gazed at her. She was half leaning, half sitting on the retaining wall of the park, and her skin, which was flecked with the shadows of new maple leaves above her, was lighted not only by the yellow rays of the afternoon sun, but also with the bright colors which her brisk walk had brought to the soft surface. I assure you, she made a pretty picture.

“I would have been glad to see you yesterday,” she said slowly, marking with the toe of one shoe upon the gravel. “You have been one of my father’s younger friends a long time.”

“There is nothing the matter!” I cried.

“I can’t tell,” she said. “He is old, you know, and I can explain it in no other way.”

“He is not ill?”

“No. But if, for instance, his physician had told him he had not long to live, and he felt something give way within him—that might cause it.”

I suppressed the anxious note in my voice as I said, “Cause what? You have not said, Miss Colfax.”

She laughed. “That is true. I haven’t, have I?” Serious again, she went on. “He seems worried. Something seems to follow him about—some thought, some apprehension, some worry.”

“It is a new difficulty somewhere that has come up in the trial of a case.”

She shook her head.

“Let us walk,” she said. “No, it is not that—nothing ordinary. A word from me and he would explain. But this time when I ask, he merely smiles and says, ‘Nothing, Julie, nothing.’”

“Can it be that I am the cause?” I said before I could stop myself. “Has he found out that we—”

“I told him,” she said, “that we—”

She stopped there, too, and looked at me.

“No,” she went on. “It is something else. He went out for a stroll night before last. Usually he is gone a half-hour at least. But this time he had hardly had time to go down the steps before I heard his key in the door again and the feet of ‘Laddie’ on the hall floor. I ran out to ask if he had forgotten anything, and it was a dreadful shock to me.”

“Tell me,” said I, touching her fingers with my own.

“In the first place, the dog was acting as I have never seen him act before. I noticed that, the first thing. He was cowering and slinking along as if he feared the most terrible punishment. But that was nothing. It was father who made me draw back. Even in the dim light I could see that he was white—oh, so white! I thought he had been taken ill suddenly and was weak. And yet one hand was clutching his big cane and the muscles and veins stood out on the back as if he were raising the stick to defend himself.”

“He was ill!” I cried.

“Yes, I think that must have been it. He was ill. And since then he has brooded so—particularly when he does not know I am watching him. Margaret has noticed it, too. She has spoken to him as I did and he has laughed her fear away, I suppose.”

“Perhaps, after all, it is nothing—just as he says,” I suggested, turning toward her as we walked.

“Perhaps not,” she said. “I am sure you are a good and cheerful friend to say so. Nevertheless, I have been worried and restless and this afternoon I long for amusement. Can’t we do something queer and extraordinary—go somewhere—do something?”

I thought her requirement a difficult one to fill at five o’clock in the afternoon, walking through the old, dull, and worn-out part of the city, where we found we had arrived without purpose in our journey. More than that, I am naturally of conservative tastes; the bizarre, the bohemian, and the unconventional forms of amusement have never beckoned to me. I am not an adventurer by choice.

“We have less than an hour before us,” I said to her. “And I am at a loss to suggest—”

There I hesitated. A thought had come to me. I saw her eyes dance with expectancy—with that expression of eagerness that lights the faces of those to whom the world, with all its goodness and badness, beauty and ugliness, tranquillity and turbulence, is still unexplored.

“The Sheik of Baalbec!” I exclaimed.

“The Sheik of Baalbec!” she repeated. “I have heard so much of him, but have never seen him. That is just the thing!”

“You shall try your skill with him,” I said. “You shall meet him face to face, look into his evil glassy eyes, watch his brown fingers move on mechanical levers, see his lungs and heart of geared wheels and little pulleys and—”

“And what?” she cried.

“Battle with him—wit against wit—skill against skill—and win!”

“You seem to bear the Sheik a grudge,” she said, and as we went up the steps of the old Natural History Building, where romping children of the tenements scattered banana peels and papers, she repeated the remark.

“I’ve taken a dislike to the automaton,” I said. “It is an uncanny creature. It gives me the impression of an evil soul attached to a lot of metallic gears. Personally I should be glad to have the opportunity of tearing it to pieces and seeing it scattered on the ground—a heap of red cotton rags, hair stuffing, and broken levers.”

My earnestness, however, only caused her to tilt her rounded chin in air and laugh as only she can laugh. Having persuaded the girl at the ticket office that the dog with us would do no harm, we had already entered and were passing through the exhibit of figures.

“Possibly you feel the same way toward this waxy Bismarck who looks so much more like a brewer than a general,” said she, “or toward this Catherine of Russia who, I understand, was not a very refined queen, and who here shows it by wearing a ruff that should have gone to the laundry a year ago or more.”

“No,” I replied. “If they let me alone, it matters not to me when they are melted down for candles. My enemy is the fellow in the corner there with the group of country persons around him. Perhaps we shall not have a chance to play a game with him this afternoon.”

Fortunately, however, just as we came up toward the gloomy corner, there was a shout of bantering laughter from those whom, offhand, I should have called Aunt Lou, Cousin Becky, Brother Bob, and Milly Snagg, and we saw that the automaton had just dispatched his opponent—the fifth member of the party, a well-bronzed countryman, with a shaved neck and prominent ears. The mechanical eye had drawn down its brown lid in a hideous wink, much to the discomfiture of the champion of some rural village.

For the second time I deposited the coin in the slot, whereupon Julianna, with great delight, watched the opening of the front of the box, the exposure of the internals of the figure, and the jerky motions of the Sheik as he extended his mechanical arm over his lifeless legs to make the first move.

“I like him,” she said, and stepped forward toward the chessboard.

Thereupon a strange thing happened. Some part of the contrivance gave forth a sound as if a wheel had been torn from its socket; a whirring sound continued for a moment, then finally the air was filled with a ghastly shriek.

I defy any man to say whether that shriek came from the rasp of an unoiled metal bearing or from a human throat. That it proceeded from the automaton there was no question.

It was followed by a stillness not only of the automaton itself, but also of ourselves.

“Look at his head!” roared the countryman, who had, with his party, lingered to see more of the marvelous creature. He pointed to the figure, and when my eyes followed his gesture, I saw that the Sheik’s head had fallen backward like a thing with its throat cut. As I stared, there came a slight noise from the box and out of the slot my coin flew back as if it bore the message that there was no more playing that afternoon.

“Well,” said I to Julianna, “apparently the show is over.”

She did not answer. I put the coin in my pocket.

“It is too bad,” I said. “The Sheik has broken something important in his cosmos.”

Again she failed to reply, and I looked up. She was staring, I thought, at the floor.

“What is the matter?” I asked.

“Look at the dog!” she whispered.

He was cringing, cowering, with closed eyes, flattened to the ground, and sniffing softly, in an agony of terror!

It was dreadful to see so noble a beast in such a state, and probably more shocking to Julianna who had affection for him than to me.

“I cannot understand Laddie’s acting that way,” she said in a vexed tone. “He has done it twice now in the last two days. What can have happened to him?”

“He is very old, isn’t he?” I inquired.

“Yes,” she said, and a little coquettish smile flitted across her face. “He is older than I am. Come, Laddie. Come here, sir. What’s the matter, old pal?”

“Age,” said I. “There has never been a dog grow old in our family that he didn’t sooner or later develop a kind of second puppyhood. I have seen them do all manner of inexplicable things, and one old, toothless, wire-haired terrier used to snap at his shadow on the wall.”

“I should hate to have him die,” said Julianna when we were on the street again. She put her arm about his shaggy neck and I wished that I were he.

At her door I took off my glove. It was done unconsciously, but she saw it—she took off one of hers. Then she laughed and put her hand in mine.

After that walk I became the victim of all the mental follies which descend upon a man so thoroughly in love. My work suffered. I found myself at one moment reading down a page of digests of cases prepared for me by my assistants; in the next, I would be sitting again in Judge Colfax’s easy-chair, and before me I could see Julianna’s smiling lips, reflecting the lamplight upon their moist surfaces. In her name I would drive myself to my task again, and then, without knowing when the transition occurred, I would be standing on a gravel path dappled with sunlight and the dancing shadows of maple leaves, and she would be standing before me again with the breeze moving brown-and-gold strands of hair at the edge of her firm white neck.

It is doubtful whether I thought of Judge Colfax, or chess, or the strange meeting in the garden, or the Sheik at all. I wondered about nothing save the question of how soon I could say to Julianna what lay in my heart to say to her. Therefore it was necessary for me to review in my mind many things when, upon waking a morning or two afterward, I found, among the letters which my man had brought to the chair beside my bed, a note from the girl herself.

I did not know at first that it was from her: I had never seen her writing before. I remember that I said, “Who can this be?” and that I studied the outside for several moments before I opened the envelope.

“My father,” it said, “has not been very well, I think. I wish that you could make a point of calling on him at the court-house some afternoon this week. I want to know if the change in him rests partly in my own imagination. You could determine this at once. I would be so grateful. J. Colfax.—P.S. Why not induce him to ask you to dinner. His indiscreet daughter would be delighted. J. C.”

This was the sort of note that she would write: it was not hysterical, and yet it conveyed to me the urgency of her request; it was not frivolous, and yet in its postscript it was boldly mischievous. It accomplished the result she wished. She had wanted me to make up my mind that I would see the Judge before night and to see her as soon as possible. I determined to do both.

All day long it rained, drawing a wet shroud of gloom over the pavements, the granite walls of the buildings, and the adamant perspective of the streets. Standing in my office window, I could see the flow of black umbrellas moving up and down town, like two torpid snakes. But though I am ordinarily sensitive to the effect of a long drizzle, it failed on that day to depress me. Life had freshened. There was romance in it, possibilities, dreams. Instead of complaining to myself that the sky had lowered until its opaque rotunda seemed to touch the tops of the higher buildings, I rejoiced as I went uptown and looked out the cab window at each open square, that the cold spring downpour had freshened all the vegetation and brightened these city fresh-air spaces as if by magic. When I found myself in the Judge’s study, my mood could not have been more cheerful.

I had expected to find him in the despondency which Julianna had described to me; instead, when I had a chance to study his expression before he knew I was there, I came to the conclusion that his thoughts, whatever they might be, were pleasant thoughts and not the anxious thoughts of one who is harassed by secret apprehensions.

He was a fine picture of a man, sitting there above his old desk, his long hands spread out upon an open book, the lines in his shaven face expressing a life of faithful service, gentleness, humor, and self-control, his blue eyes as bright as those of a youth, looking out at some picture which his imagination was painting on the opposite wall of the room. I stood watching him a moment before I stirred.

“Ha!” he exclaimed as soon as I had made my presence known. “Estabrook, you are the very man I wanted to see!”

“I had imagined it,” I answered. “What more?”

He blinked his eyes. “Wait a moment, you rascal,” he said, brushing the sleeves of his black coat. “Take a cigar, sit down a moment. Let me collect my thoughts. I must say I hesitate to launch too quickly a subject with which I have not dealt for a good many years and one, if I remember rightly, I treated with considerable awkwardness on the former occasion.”

“When was that, sir?” I asked.

“When I courted my wife,” he said solemnly, looking for a moment at the floor.

“Perhaps, if I am not mistaken, you would have come to me, by and by,” he went on with the wrinkles gathering at the corners of his eyes. “Perhaps it is better for me to speak with you now anyhow. I am well along in years. My physician tells me that my cardiac valve—or whatever the blame thing is—is weak.”

“He told you recently!” I exclaimed.

“Bless you, no. More than two years ago. I haven’t been near him since, except to taste of some old madeira he keeps on his sideboard. No. I can’t quite explain why I am anxious to speak of this matter so soon, so hastily. I only want to ask one or two impertinent questions which you will forgive in a man who has grown, as to certain matters, as fussy as an old maid—or a mother.”

“Why, I will answer gladly enough,” I said awkwardly. I thought I knew what was on his mind; my tongue grew large in my mouth.

He was pacing up and down the room then, but finally he stopped and laughed and grew solemn again.

“Darn it, my boy,” he said. “I know you. I like you. I just wanted to know if you had ever been engaged—in the broad sense—engaged to a woman—with promises to fulfill. I just wanted to ask.”

“No,” said I.

“There!” said he. “I knew it all the time.”

“Was there another question?” I asked.

“Why, yes,” he said. “Why, yes. I believe I did have another. Now, what was it? I had another question. It was awkward, too, if I remember. I had another.”

We both laughed then.

“Yet it seems so strange for me to ask these questions now, doesn’t it?” he went on, fingering the pages of a book on the desk. “It is so early and a good deal more natural for you to speak to me than for me to speak to you. But, good God! there is a reason if you only knew—a reason. Let us say, for instance, that I might not be here then.”

“Ask it, sir,” I said.

“Why, I was only going to say that, in case you should succeed,—I doubt if you do succeed,—but in case you should succeed in causing her to love you, there would be no withdrawal on your part. Little Julie—my little daughter! Neither of you has known what it means yet. And, Estabrook, when she does, it must not go wrong. I know her well. She will never love but one man. He must not withdraw when he has won her!”

I started to speak angrily.

“Wait!” he cried, with his hands clenched. “He must not be shaken from her by anything—anything for which she is not to blame herself—no matter how strange or terrible—anything. Nothing will come. I know it. But that must be promised me—to stand by her, no matter what misfortune might descend upon her.”

“What could?” I asked in a trembling voice.

“Nothing,” the Judge said. “It is not in God’s character to allow such a thing. When you love her, Estabrook, my boy, you will not ask me that question in answer to mine.”

“No,” I said at once. “There need be no doubts between us, sir. It is not necessary for either of us to answer.”

His whole countenance lit up as if my words had fed his soul. I should be sorry to have wiped from my memory the impression of that old man’s look, as, without taking his eyes from my face, he reached for his hat.

Yet, to-night, when I, for perhaps the last time, realize again the presence of some infernal, undefined evil, I wonder that I should have been so great a fool and so willingly have neglected even the prudence of a lover. I wonder that I made so blind a bargain. I wonder that I did not ask him, before it was too late, what his conversation with Margaret Murchie in the garden had meant and what secret it was that lurked like a clawed creature of the night, ready to eat away, bit by bit, the happiness of an innocent man.

CHAPTER III

THE TORN SCRAP

When I left Judge Colfax that day, the only questions in my mind concerned Julianna. To her I had said nothing in so many words of my love, and yet I knew that if the Judge had read my growing sentiment surely, she must have seen it even more clearly. I tried to interpret her friendly, playful, girlish acceptance of my affection as an indication that she, too, felt an increasing fondness for me—a fondness which went beyond that given to a trustworthy friend. But I could not forget that her father, when he had so strangely anticipated my request for his consent, had described her as one whose yielding would be sudden and complete—one to whom love would come in sweeping torrent of emotion—one with whom love would thereafter stay eternally. If this were true, she did not love me yet, I reflected. And with a falling of hope, I remembered that the Judge had expressed, for what reason I did not know, his own doubt of my ability to win her.

These were thoughts well adapted to hasten my lovemaking. I made a point of walking to the Monument the next afternoon. I did not meet her there, or on the way along the edge of the park, and I found myself suddenly haunted by the hitherto unconsidered possibility that, as summer was coming on, I might expect at any day that she would leave the city to visit friends or go with the Judge to some resort.

It rained again the following day, and though the downpour ceased in the late afternoon, great gray banks of clouds hung threateningly above the city. Nevertheless, tormented with the notion that we might at any time be separated for several weeks, I went again to the Monument to seek her.

She was there. Nor did she seem at all surprised that I had come.

“I am full of energy to-day,” she said, smiling a welcome. “Let us take a long walk together.”

“Good!” said I. “I will tell you about your father. As you know, I called on him Thursday afternoon.”

But from the Judge she quickly turned the subject to discussion that was wholly impersonal, and it was the same on the following Monday when I saw her again. Had it not been for the expression in her eyes with which she greeted me, listened when I talked to her and bade me good-bye when I left her, these would have been depressing meetings for me, because I thought that I could clearly see that she was holding me at arm’s length with that natural art of a good, true woman,—an art which needs no practice.

Imagine, then, my surprise, on this second occasion, when we had reached her door, when she had asked me to have tea and I had been forced to plead a previous engagement, when she stood there before me smiling, rosy, the form itself of health, beauty, and vivacity, and when her glance was raised to meet mine, I suddenly saw her smile fade and I thought her eyes were filling with tears.

She laughed, however,—a little choking laugh,—and looking down so that I could not see her face, she said, “I have liked these walks and chats with you better than any I have ever had.” And so she bade me good-night.

Only when I had gone from her did I recall that she had spoken as if our companionship was not to continue, as if, for some cause unknown to me, there was to be an end of our intimacy. The thought made me stop stock-still upon the pavement.

“And yet,” thought I, “might it not be—that she meant only to show that she is willing to continue our relationship—perhaps forever?”

Loving her as much as I did and wanting her—and no other on the breadth of the green earth—for my wife, this uncertainty was a torment which I could not stand. I remembered she had told me that the Judge walked each evening after his dinner, and I am ashamed to confess that the next evening dark found me waiting on their street corner, like a scullery maid’s beau, until I saw his stoop-shouldered figure come down the steps with the lank, grizzled “Laddie” behind, and heard the beat of his grapevine stick recede down the avenue.

Margaret Murchie let me in. Had I been a wolf she could not have glared at me more; it was evident that her shrewd old eyes, whatever hidden knowledge lay behind them, regarded me as a brigand, as a menace, as some one who had come to take a precious treasure of art from the drawing-room or the household goddess from the front hall. And as I sat in the study once more, on the comfortable easy-chair of the Judge, with the empty feeling in my stomach telling me that my nerves were on edge, as they used to be when I rowed on our crew and sat listening for the gun, I was sure that after announcing me she lingered beyond the curtains, covertly watching me.

Julianna did not keep me waiting long, and as she came through the door into the light, I could not help but notice the poise and grace which comes from inherited refinement and health, and is only imitated badly by self-consciousness and the pose of the actress.

“I’m so sorry you did not come a moment earlier,” she said. “Father would have been in. Now, you and I—”

She seated herself in her place on the old-fashioned mahogany sofa.

“Do you mind?” I asked.

“No, I’m glad!” she said, and wriggled like a pleased child, yet so slightly that no one could have accused her of it.

“Do you like me?” said I, after a moment.

Her eyes opened very wide and looked into mine seriously—half amused, half frightened. At last she nodded in a matter-of-fact way; it was only because I could see her hands pressed against the arm of the couch until they were white and little blue veins had begun to show that I knew she was capable of the stoicism of an Indian, and that her nod was not matter-of-fact, after all.

As I have told you, I am not of an habitually romantic temperament. I was well aware of my unfitness to deal with a girl who, herself, had never known the processes of lovers, but the belief that she was trying to restrain her true feelings toward me ran through my brain like an intoxicating liquor. I would have taken the breadth of her shoulders in the crook of my arm, and pressed my face into the rich mass of her hair, and kissed her upon her white forehead, had I not suddenly recalled that never had I even phrased to her a sentence explaining my feeling toward her.

“Of course I do,” she said at that moment. I remember how cool the words sounded.

I remember, indeed, every word of that evening, every detail of that room, every play of expression about her mouth, and I cannot go on without speaking of these things. They meant so much to me and have meant so much ever since!

At last, then, I told her.

“Julianna—” said I. “I have never called you by that name before. I have not seen you long. But I must disregard all facts of that kind. They may be important to some men and women. They are not of consequence to me. I have loved you from the first.”

She gave a little cry, but whether it was of joy or surprise I cannot say. I only know that when I leaned forward and took one of her hands in my own, she left it there as if it belonged to me of right, and with my finger tips upon her soft wrist I could feel the beating of her heart.

“I don’t want to love any one else,” I whispered desperately. “I want you. I want you to love me. I want you to let me take you.”

I thought when I had said this and pressed my lips to the back of her hand and looked up at her again that her face was illuminated with wonder, joy, and supreme gladness, and that her eyes were filled with light reflected from some bright revelation. What, then, was my astonishment to observe that, as I looked, the color seemed to fade from her skin, her parted lips slowly compressed themselves, her eyelids fell like those of one who suffered pain or shuts out some repulsive sight! It may have been my imagination; but I was sure I felt her hand turn cold in mine and draw away as if to escape a menace. Her body stiffened as if preparing for effort or defense and she arose from her seat and stood before me.

So little did I understand the significance of her actions that I neither moved nor spoke.

She came toward me then and placed the tips of her fingers upon my shoulder affectionately, I can say—as she might have touched her father, and as if she meant to cause some unsaid thing to flow through the contact into my body.

“Please do not get up,” she said softly. “Do not follow me.”

There was strength in that command.

She walked toward the long windows at the back of the room, the windows which overlooked the garden, and pulling them open, stepped out onto the balcony. The vine there being in bloom, her figure was framed with the soft purple of the flowers, which, lit by the light from within and pendant against the black background of night, might well have been blossoms embroidered on Japanese black satin. With my head swimming, I watched the movement of her bare shoulders, from which her modest scarf had half fallen, until she turned to enter again.

“I shall not tell you that I am sorry that you have spoken as you have,” she said, spacing her words so evenly that it gave the impression at first that she was repeating memorized sentences. “But I am young and no one else has ever done so. Perhaps I should have interrupted you and told you that my duty is toward my father, and that I am not sure of myself now, and that I am not ready to give myself to any other life. If this is true, it can profit neither of us to talk of love.”

“Neither of us!” Again it seemed to me that she had disclosed herself. I stood before her and in a voice that shook with eagerness, I said, “You love me. At least you love me a little?”

She drew back.

“You do!” I cried under my breath. “I know it! You do!”

She raised her hands as if to keep me from her, and still retreated toward the hearth.

“You love me!” I said. The sound of my own voice was raising a madness within me. “Say it!” I cried. “Say it!”

She turned quickly away from me.

“You love me.”

“No,” she said. “I do not—love—you!”

I think for a second neither of us stirred; for a second, too, I could see that her body had relaxed as mine had relaxed. Then I felt the sting of wrecked pride—the pride from which I suppose I never shall escape. I can remember that I drew a long breath, made a low bow, which, though not so intended, must have been both insulting and absurd, and walked through the curtains into the hall. I looked back once and that fleeting glance showed me only a beautiful girl who stood very stiffly, like a soldier saluting, but who, unlike a soldier, stood with closed eyes and with her long lashes showing against a pale and delicate skin.

How miserable I was in the following hours, I cannot well describe. After I had returned to my own apartments I sat in my study without desire for sleep, staring with burning eyes at the silk curtains fluttering in the June night wind, until they seemed to be ghosts dancing on my window sills, and my straining ears listened to the hourly booming of the clock on the Fidelity Tower, until it sounded like the cruel voice of Time itself. Long after the rosy dawn I got up, drank some water, lit a strong cigar, and prepared to dress myself for the day’s work. I can well remember my determination never again to expose my feelings toward any living soul and my constantly repeated assertion to myself that I had been hasty and indiscreet, that I did not in truth any longer love Julianna and had been punished for a breach of that reserve and caution which had been a virtuous characteristic of my ancestors.

With my teeth shut together, with a frenzy to accomplish much work, without a breakfast, and with sharp and perhaps ill-tempered commands to my assistants, I spent the morning in the preparation of cases for which trials were pending. By noon the heat of the day had become intense, the sides of the battalions of towering buildings across the narrow street seemed to become radiators for the viciousness of the summer sun, the voices of newsboys, the murmur of the lunch-hour crowd twanged a man’s nerves, and I noticed for the first time the devilish song of the electric fan on my wall. As you have foreseen, I felt suddenly the wilting of my will. Tired, hungry, sleepless, I slipped down into my chair, and there seemed no happiness left in a world which did not include the girl I had left the night before.

I seized my hat and, clapping it on my head, I stopped only to sweep the papers into the desk drawers and hurried toward the elevator.

“There’s somebody on the ’phone for you, Mr. Estabrook,” said the switchboard girl. “They’re very anxious to talk.”

“Tell ’em I’ve gone home for the day,” I called back to her and then went down and out of the building to the sunbaked street.

I knew that I should put food in my stomach, so I ate a lunch somewhere. I knew I should rest, but the thought of returning to my bachelor rooms suggested only a violent mental review of the events through which I had been. I was tempted to go to the Monument, but flung the idea aside as a piece of sentimental madness. Accordingly I walked toward the river front with its uninteresting and sordid warehouses, saloons and boxes, bales and crates of the wholesale produce commissioners. On that long, cobblestoned thoroughfare, with its drays and commercial riffraff, its lounging stevedores, its refuse barrels, its gutter children and its heat, I went forward mile after mile, without much thought of where I went or why I chose such surroundings for my way, unless it was that the breeze from the water was welcome to me.

The late afternoon found me on an uptown pier, watching the return of an excursion steamer, proud with flags and alive with children, girls with sunburned faces and young men with handkerchiefs tucked around their collars and carrying souvenir canes. They disembarked down a narrow gangplank, like ants crawling along a straw. I reflected that all were, like myself, with their individual comedies and tragedies, the representatives of the countless, forgotten, and ever reproducing millions of human gnats that through unthinkable periods of time come and go. I had seen none of them before. I would see none of them again. Instead of being a depressing notion, I found this a cheerful idea; I welcomed the evidence of my own insignificance. I laughed. I even determined to amuse myself. If nothing better offered, I made up my mind I would visit the Sheik of Baalbec, and, by pitting my skill against his, prove that I could exclude, when I wished, the haunting thoughts to which my mind had been a prey.

“The Sheik, then,” said I, after a block or two. “It was he who ushered me into this affair. It shall be he who may say an end to it.”

In the light of what followed, this sentence, murmured half aloud as I walked, has many times caused me to wonder at the prophetic voice with which we sometimes carelessly address ourselves.

I found the museum, except for the red-nosed attendant and the pale pink girl in the ticket window, deserted. The accursed automaton, I feared, would be closed for business, and therefore it was with satisfaction that I noticed that the coin slot was open, and that, having dropped in my tribute to genius, chess, and machinery, I heard the squeak of the moving mechanism and the brown, jointed fingers of the figure scraping across the board.

I cannot believe that the Sheik was playing his best game. At the end of a half-hour, when the machinery stopped to notify me that another coin was due, I had a decided advantage in position. Before another fifteen minutes, during which we both played rapidly, had gone, the issue was no longer in doubt and I stopped.

“Ha!” said I, aloud. “You will not wink at me this time. Is there any other game you can play better than you play this?”

The automaton was silent.

I cannot say what impelled me to suggest it, but I drew a piece of paper and a pencil out of my pocket and said, “Can you write?”

The door in the chest of the Sheik flew open then for a moment as if to expose his heart to me. Though I had put no coin into the machine, I saw the levers and gears start to move again, the door of that pulmonary cavity was closed and the brown fingers jerked their way forward.

“Not only can write, but is anxious to do so,” I remarked, as I extended the pencil and laid the paper on the chessboard.

For a second or two I waited, as the hand of the mechanical creature wrote a few words: I remember that during those seconds I heard a clock somewhere striking six. I did not make any attempt to see beforehand what he had chosen to inscribe, for I assumed that it would be some empty answer to my bantering remarks. At last the pencil dropped upon the board and rolled under one of the cross-legged creature’s red Turkish slippers, the whirr of the mechanism stopped abruptly, and I picked up the writing.

Having read the scrawl once I believed myself out of my wits. I could not credit my eyes. I could not gather my reason. I was breathless, transfixed!

I looked up at the face of the Sheik and found that, in place of the malicious wink with which he proclaimed himself a victor in a game of draughts, his glass eyes, with their whites in sharp contrast to his swarthy wax skin, were both wide open and set in a glare of such ferocity and malign hatred that they seemed to flash the fire of life and lighten the gloom of the corner with rays of evil.

I laughed. I forced myself to laugh, but it was with no mirth, and then, hesitating for a moment and seized by the temptation to tear the automaton to shreds, to discover what was within its exterior, I turned, crunched the paper in my closed fist, and almost ran out through the lines of wax figures—the Garibaldis, the Jenny Linds, the Louis Napoleons, and the Von Moltkes—into the sunlight.

No man can blame me for my excitement or even my terror, for the Sheik had written, “You are in danger! Withdraw before it is too late, and never see the old man or child of his again!”

Had the time been the Middle Ages, or the place a strange quarter of the Orient, I might not have been so shocked at the knowledge which a tawdry machine, or the mountebank behind it, seemed to have of the affairs of persons against whom no charge of contact with the lower strata of life could be brought. But in our civilization, where nothing but the commonplace is to be expected, I was wholly unnerved.

“Come,” said I to myself, having walked to the far side of the open square, “sit on this bench, unfold the paper, and use your intelligence to overcome the hysteria which last night’s experience and this odd affair of the Sheik have aroused. Be sensible. This message is a matter to be explained, just as all things are to be explained by any one who is not the victim of superstitious fear.”

This determination immediately cleared my reason. After all, there was nothing to solve.

“Whoever controls the mechanism has seen me with the Judge,” said I, “and doubtless has heard him mention his daughter, and perhaps has observed the effect of her name on me. Furthermore, he, or, as the Judge said, the man or woman behind the Sheik, has even seen me with Julianna and might well have drawn conclusions. The message was written in ill temper or as a piece of malicious mischief. And there’s an end to it!”

Whereupon I tore the scrap across the middle and, dropping it in the grass, I started toward my home.

The picture of that writing, however, was too clearly photographed upon my vision; it continually wrote itself on the walls of buildings, upon the pavement or across the sky. And as it did, little by little, it began to dawn upon me that the handwriting with which it had been executed I had seen before.

When at last, from the back of my mind, I recalled the occasion, I astonished those persons who were walking near me by stopping in the middle of the sidewalk as if stricken and uttering a sharp exclamation. My hand sought the contents of my inside coat pocket; among the papers there I found the note which Julianna, wishing me to see her father, had written me, and with trembling fingers I spread the sheet before me.

One look was all that was necessary, for it sent me hurrying back the way I had come; it was enough to cause me to kneel down on the grass in the gathering gloom that was filling the old square. Where I had sat a half-hour before, I now searched frantically for bits of torn paper.

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.”

“That would preclude imitation?” I asked.

“Why, yes. Offhand, I should say so—unless the one who made the attempt had practiced for years, or has the skill of imitation developed beyond that of any professional forger. But give me a moment, please.”

I waited, tapping with my fingers on the chair arm.

He straightened up at last, with a sigh, then looked at me with his eyebrows drawn and a look of perplexity on his thin, cadaverous face.

“It’s very odd,” said he.

“What’s very odd?”

“Well, Mr. Estabrook, these pieces were not written several years apart—at different periods of life, were they?”

“Why, no,” said I.

“They are not the work of one person, then,” he said, with firm conviction. “I would stake my reputation on that.”

“Then one is an attempt to imitate the other?” I said, stifling a glad exclamation.

“That’s the rub,” said he. “And, to be frank, I might spend a month without being able to say which was the imitated and which the imitating. I would almost think you had stumbled on two specimens which, merely by coincidence, bore a wonderful resemblance to each other. It lies between that and the cleverest, most practiced forgery I have ever seen.”

You may be sure that his decision gave me a sense of triumph; without speculating as to the truth, it was enough for me to know that Julianna had not, as I had at first suspected, been a party to this vulgar and melodramatic flourish. I berated myself for having entertained any doubt and now felt anew, and with aggravation, my affection for her. This outcome of my adventure with the Sheik, in fact, restored my spirit, made me forget my pride, and, as you will see, was enough to put me in condition to receive that which was about to befall me.

CHAPTER IV

THE FACE

My thoughts as I entered the portico of that building where I had my apartments were not only of Julianna, but were also in those channels where I have no doubt your own opinion of my narrative must run. I freely admit, as I then was forced to admit, that my lovemaking had been attended with many bizarre and abnormal happenings; yet at the time I sneered at the questions which rose in my own mind and bravely asserted to myself that the chances of winning Julianna were not wholly lost.

In the lower hall of the building in which I had quarters there were stationed until six at night a telephone operator and a doorman. Perhaps you have noticed that I tell you these matters in considerable detail, and I will continue to do this, because my natural dread of disclosing the intimate affairs of my life has kept me heretofore from sharing my story with any one, and now that I have lifted the cover and drawn the veil of my experience, I can only find justification, in so narrating the sequence of extraordinary events, by observing the strictest adherence to detail and accuracy in the hope that perhaps you, by the virtue of a fresh and unprejudiced viewpoint, may be able to unravel some of the tangle in which I am, even now, enmeshed.

As I have said, at six the telephone girl at the switchboard and the doorman, for some reason which I could never understand, were replaced by an old negro who served as both, and who was the most garrulous, indiscreet individual I have ever seen.

As if to affirm these characteristics he spoke to me the moment I had entered, in a voice which seemed to be adapted to a general address to the three or four other bachelors who were waiting in the frescoed vestibule for a conveyance.

“Yaas, sah, Mr. Estabrook, sah. De dohman lef’ a message, sah. Der has been a lady waitin’ foh you, sah, mos’ all de ahfternoon. She comin’ back, she say—dis evenin’. She sutt’nly act very queer, sah.”

“All right,” I snapped. “It’s one of my clients.”

“Um-um,” he said, shaking his head. “I spec she ain’t, Mr. Estabrook, sah. She mos’ likely has pussonal business, sah!”

The others—Folsom the broker, and Madison, and Ingle the architect—had evidently dined well, preparing for a musical comedy, and they snickered without shame.

“Let my man know when she comes,” said I, and without smiling hurried into the elevator.

I had no belief that the woman, whoever she might be, would come back after dark to call upon me. With my conflicting thoughts about Julianna, I forgot the incident. It was therefore with some surprise that I heard Saito, my Jap, arouse me from my sleepy reverie, to which exhaustion had reduced my mind, to tell me that a lady was waiting in the reception room downstairs.

You may understand the conservative nature of my life and habits more thoroughly when I tell you that the mere idea that a woman had dared to ask for me at my apartment in the evening caused me the greatest anxiety. As if to prove what dependence we can put upon our intuitions, I felt, on my way down, most strongly, that an evil event was about to take place.

Nothing could, I think, better illustrate the nonsense of attaching importance to these fore-warnings than to tell you that the woman who waited for me was Julianna herself!

My first instinct, before I had been seen by her, was to hurry her out of the garish little reception room, where, through the door which opened into the hallway, she might well have been seen by anybody; it was only when she greeted me and turned her face toward the tiled floor, and I saw that her shoulders drooped and that her hands hung down at her side, and that she stood like a guilty, punished, and remorseful child, that my wish to protect her was displaced by a mad desire to take her in my arms and comfort her.

“Julianna!” I cried. “What has happened? Is it the Judge? Tell me! Why did you come?”

She shook her head and lowered it still more, until the sweeping curve of her bare neck, from the fine hair behind her ears to the back of the lace collar of her waist, was visible.

I cannot say what gave me the courage, but I bent over her and kissed her there, softly.

She looked up then without the slightest indication of either surprise or reproach.

“I liked that,” she whispered. “I didn’t know how I was going to tell you, but now I can.”

“Tell me what?” said I, in a choking voice.

“I love you,” she said. “I could not let you go. I thought last night that I could carry it through. I thought my duty was to stay with father. But it isn’t!”

“And you came here to tell me!” I gasped.

“Why not?” she said, with a catch in her voice. “I was afraid I would never see you again and I love you.”

When I think of all the sham there is among women, I treasure the memory of that simple little explanation. It was delivered as a full answer to all the conventionalities from here back to the time of the Serpent. It was spoken in a low but confident voice, with her hands upon her breast as if to calm the emotions within, and was directed toward me with the first frank exposure of her eyes which were still wet with tears.

“I have been miserable!” she said. “A woman is meant for some man, after all. And if she resists, she is resisting God! It all has been shown to me so clearly. And I knew that you were the one. There’s nothing else that makes any difference, and it sweeps you off your feet, so it must be nature, because it gave me the courage to telephone you and then try to find you and come here and wait and come again, and only nature can make any one go against all her habits and education. And I believe I’ll call you Jerry, if you still—”

“Good God! Love you?” said I. “Forever!”

“Always?”

“Forever.”

She gave her burning hands to mine, and oblivious of the old negro, whose eyes were upon us, we stood there, looking at each other in awe, very much frightened and very much, for that moment,—and I sometimes wonder if not in truth,—the centre of the universe.

“You belong to me, Jerry?” she said tearfully. “Now?”

“Yes,” said I.

“Then I must go back quickly,” she explained, after a moment. “I do not want father to know yet. I want to prepare the way. I don’t want you to speak with him for a week. I will tell him then. Perhaps you think it is strange. But Friday, when he knows, you may come.”

She had a carriage waiting for her, and I walked with her to its door.

“I want to kiss you, Julianna,” I whispered.

She looked up to see whether the driver could observe us. He could not. And then the mischief-loving quality of womankind appeared in her. She gave forth a glad little laugh.

“On Friday,” she said.

The door slammed, and I thought, as I caught a last glance at her then, that she was a luminous being of dreams, lighting the dark recess of a common cab.

This impression recurred so often in those following days that at times there rose the uncanny suspicion that the woman who had visited me had not been one of reality, of flesh and blood, and beating heart and sweet, warm breath. Her smile, her voice, her personality had not seemed a part of real life, but almost the manifestations of a spirit which, timidly and with the hope of some reincarnation in life, had come to claim my vows. I believed that I knew well enough why Julianna, if it were she, had planned to avoid a sudden disclosure of our betrothal to the Judge, but, none the less, I fretted at the sluggishness of time, which, like a country horse, will not go faster for the wishing or the beating.

I wished, too, that she had said she would meet me in her afternoon walks to the Monument and wondered that, if she loved me, she was able to forbid herself a meeting, even though she had felt that good sense demanded a period of reflection and a readjustment of view, so that when we did see each other again, it would be with firmer minds and steadier hearts. I would have gladly foregone all this value of reserve and restraint for one look at her face, one touch of her sleeve, one word from her tender, curving lips.

And yet I was happy in those days—so painfully happy that I heard voices telling me that such happiness does not last, that ecstasies are tricks of fate by which man’s joy is fattened for slaughter, that from some ambush a horrible thing was peering.

Strangely enough, these fears were connected in no way with the warnings which I had had from my eavesdropping or even from the definite threat which had come out of my grotesque experience with the Sheik of Baalbec. The piece of writing, which had begun, “You are in danger,” I had dropped into a file of papers, and though I suppose it is somewhere among them now, I have never yielded to the temptation to look at it again. I may have thought of it merely to add to the opinion of Jarvis that the writing was not Julianna’s, the apparently indisputable fact that, at the moment the warning had been written, Julianna was, by the word of the apartment house doorman, waiting for me in the little reception room. Furthermore, with my success in winning her, with the intoxication of it, I began to look upon the strange and unexplained matters which had so perplexed me as trivial illusions beneath the consideration of good sense. However much you may be surprised at my willful blindness, your wonder cannot equal that which I myself feel to-night.

And now, when I am about to tell you of that memorable Friday, I must impress upon you that no detail of it is distorted in my memory, that so clear and vivid were the impressions upon my senses that, were I to live to the age of pyramids, I could recall every slight sequence with accuracy. I say this because you are a physician and as such, no doubt,—and it is no different in the case of us lawyers,—have learned the absurd fallibility of ordinary human testimony, not excluding that which proceeds from the highest and most honorable type of our civilization.

The day, as I was about to tell you, had been saved from the heat of the season by a breeze which blew from the water and once or twice even reached the velocity of a storm wind. A hundred times I had looked out my office window and a hundred times I had seen that not one speck of cloud showed in the sky. Yet all day long, while I tried to work, only to find myself all on edge with expectancy, I could hear the flap and rustle of the American flag on the Custom-House roof, which was straining at its cords and lashing itself into a frenzy like a wild creature in chains.

I am not sure that a dry storm of this kind is not freighted with some nerve-twanging quality. I have often noticed on such days a universal irritability on the part of mankind, and I have been informed by those who have traveled much that often a nervous wind of this kind, in countries where such things happen, precedes some disaster such as volcanic eruptions, avalanches, earthquakes, and tidal waves.

My own nervousness, however, took the form of impatience. I was absurdly eager to go at once to Julianna, and the fact that the hour for dinner had finally arrived, and that the remaining time was short, only served to increase my impatience the more. I could not assign any cause for this other than my wish to see Julianna, for now I knew in my mind and heart, by reason and by instinct, that the Judge had been right, that once having given her love she had given all, and, with that noble and perhaps pathetic trait of fine women, would never change.

At last I found myself at her door, at last she herself had opened it, and was smiling at me—as beautiful, more beautiful, than I had ever seen her. I remember that, with an innocent and spontaneous outburst of affection, she caught my hand in hers and tucked it under her soft round arm in playful symbolism of capture.

“You must not say a word to me,” she said. “I have never been so happy! But he is in there. He wants to see you alone and you must hurry.”

“Hurry?” I protested.

“I don’t know why,” she said, with a nervous little laugh. “I suppose it’s because I want you to talk to him and come to me as quickly as you can.”

Then, with a gentle pressure from behind, she pushed me through the curtains into the familiar study and I heard her feet scampering up the soft carpet on the broad, black-walnut stairs.

The Judge was sitting in his easy-chair beside the table. A book was open on his knees, a long-stemmed pipe was on the chair arm, and the gray and grizzled old dog lay, with head on paws, at his feet. Above him a huge wreath of thin smoke hung in the air. Had I been a painter, I should have wished to lay that picture upon canvas, because seldom could one see expressed so completely the evening of an honest day and of an honorable life, the tranquillity of home, the comfort of meditation, the affection for faithful dog, old volume, and seasoned pipe.

As he looked up at me, however, it suddenly seemed to me that he had grown old; behind his smile of warm greeting I fancied I could observe a haunted look, the ghostly flickering forth of some unwelcome thought held in the subconsciousness.

“Why, Estabrook!” he cried, when he had seen me. “Bless my soul, I didn’t know you would be so prompt. I have understood that young men approached these interviews with reluctance.”

“You forget, sir,” I answered, knowing that he would have a jest at my expense, “that we made the arrangement in advance.”

“We did! We did! That’s a fact. But I had no idea that you would be successful, at least so soon, and if I may say it—so—so—precipitously.”

“I plead the spirit of the age,” said I.

“It’s a spirit common to all ages, I take it,” he answered, with a quirk of his judicial mouth. “Do I understand that you and my daughter have first become engaged and now wish my permission to see enough of each other to become acquainted?”

Perhaps he hit a centre ring with this thrust, for I could only stammer forth an awkward statement about being very sure of my feelings.

“They all are sure!” he said, with a good-natured cynicism. Then he smiled again and pointed toward the ceiling with a long forefinger. “Perhaps you may be pleased to know that she is very sure,” he whispered.

I sat down.

“Yes,” said he solemnly. “You are to be envied. I believe her love—as I have seen it grow in these weeks—is the sweetest thing that ever flowed from a human soul.”

“You knew that she at first sent me away in the name of her duty to you?” said I.

He looked up at me, shut his book, patted the dog, and laid the pipe on the table.

“No,” said he, with a break in his voice. “But I shall not quickly forget that you have been fair enough to her and to me to tell me that.”

“May I have her?” I asked.

“Yes,” said he. “Of course you may.”

I hesitated a moment. Then I laughed. “She told me when you had said that to go to her.”

I rose.

“Wait,” said he. “That is not all. Before God, I wish it were.”

I had not been watching his expression, but now, when I looked up at him, I saw that the gray look which I had fancied I had seen under his smile had now come out upon his face.

“Estabrook,” he said, leaning forward toward me with his lips compressed, “sometime, perhaps years from now, perhaps never, but, if you choose, to-night—you may know what a problem I have had to solve, and what it will cost me to say to you that which I am going to say.”

He had lowered his voice as if he wished to be sure that no one could overhear him, and now, when he stopped, he stood with his head turned as if listening to be sure that no one was in the hallway. No sounds came, however, except those of the dog, who whined softly in his dreams, and the complaint of the dry wind, which, instead of diminishing with night, had perhaps increased its intensity, and the rattle of the long French windows through which I could see the gnarled old wistaria vine clinging desperately to the iron balcony, its leaves tossing about as if in agony.

“I have sat on the bench for many years, trying with my imperfect intelligence to adjust the misshapen affairs of men and women,” the Judge went on. “ Never have I been forced to deal with so terrible a question as lies before me now—to-night.”

For a long time, then, he was silent. Finally I spoke.

“Judge,” said I, “how can I help?”

“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.”

“Something about her?” I cried.

He bent his head as if I had struck him from above.

“You may break the seal if you must. I have fought many battles to bring myself to tell you that you may read what is there.”

I reached for the package.

“Wait,” said he. “The contents of this document need never be given to her if she becomes your wife. Nor is it necessary for you to read what is there set forth if you only will choose not to do so. These are strange words between men in these modern times, Estabrook. But I have guarded my honor carefully all my life. And now, though the temptation has been almost more than I could stand, as you may believe some day,—or perhaps know in the next five minutes, which are walking toward us out of eternity,—yet I have determined that you should know everything if you chose.”

“I do choose,” I said firmly.

He shrunk back as if I had struck at him again.

“Think!” he begged. “No good can come of your knowledge. It cannot avert harm if harm must come. And more—be cool in your judgment, or you may ruin all of us.”

“But, Judge Colfax,” I cried out, “your proposal of choice is empty. One cannot reject or accept the unknown.”

“It must be so,” said he. “There is an astounding fact about Julianna which you do not know. About that fact I have written this message, so that when I had gone she might be prepared in case the worst—in case the worst—the improbable—the unexpected, the unthinkable—should come.”

I caught the arms of the chair in the grip of my two hands and tried to think, but I could find no reason for my remaining, perhaps for a lifetime, in ignorance of some unseen menace to the woman I loved. I think that I was about to tell him that nothing could change my feelings for Julianna, or shake my faith in her, that it was right that I should become her defender, and that I, therefore, must know what hung so threateningly over her. Words were on my tongue, when suddenly the Judge bent his great frame forward and was in another second half kneeling on the floor in front of me, his hands clutching my coat. His face then was the color of concrete, and the dignity which he had worn so long had slipped from him as an unloosened garment falls.

“For her sake!” he whispered. “For her sake, don’t go further. Let the thing be unspoken. My boy, don’t dig up that which is all but buried forever. Listen to me, Estabrook. You trust me. And I, tell you that if I were in your place, knowing what I know—”

“Enough,” I said, awed by his pleading. “Do you tell me that it is best for her and for me to make her my wife in ignorance of this thing?”

“God help me,” he said, falling back into his chair.

He seemed to be thinking desperately, as if some voice had told him that only a moment was left for thought. At last he threw his long arms outward.

“Yes,” said he. “ I tell you that it is better for you and for her to know nothing.”

“That is sufficient,” I said. “I ask no more.”

He shut his eyes as one would receive the relief of an opiate after long agony of the body and for some moments he remained so, his hands, from which the packet of papers had fallen, relaxed upon his knees. The starched white shirt he wore crackled absurdly with each long inhalation of breath.

In those moments a tumult of thoughts went tumbling through my brain, and as the seconds passed, I almost felt that it was the wind that howled outside which was blowing these thoughts over each other, as it would blow dry autumn leaves.

At last the dog rose, stretched himself, and, as if restless, sought here and there a new place to lie, and the sound of his claws upon the polished floor recalled the Judge from his almost unconscious reverie. He half opened his eyes and once or twice moved his thin lips. At last he spoke and into those commonplace words he put all the meaning which hours of ranting would have made less plain.

“I am grateful,” he said.

When I looked up at him after lowering my head in acknowledgment of his thanks, I saw again that wonderful smile of benevolence, which, given to me once before in his office, I believe could only have been bestowed by one who had had a lifelong practice in love of humanity. Indeed, he only directed it at me for a moment, and then turned his face a little aside toward the back of the room, as if he wished to send that expression through the walls and spread over the whole world its beaming radiance.

You may, then, well imagine my surprise when, without a word or a motion of any other part of his body, I saw that smile fade from his face. It disappeared as if a blast of the night wind, entering the room, had dried it, crumbled it, and blown it away. In its place I now saw the terrible, eye-widened, and fixed stare which we recognize as the facial sign of some abject, unreasoning terror, or of death, after the clutch of some fatal agony.

“Judge Colfax!” I exclaimed.

I waited. I thought I saw his head move a little as if he had heard me, but with that motion there came a click, the sound of teeth coming together.

“You are ill,” I said, half rising from my chair.

His lips moved, but the stare in his eyes remained the same.

“It has come,” he said in his throat.

I jumped toward him. He did not stir.

“Judge!” I cried.

He did not answer. I waited, bending over him, not daring to guess what had befallen him, holding my breath. Then, cautiously, I moved my fingers before his eyes: they did not wink. I placed my hand over his heart.... It was as still as a rundown clock. The room itself was still. The wind had paused a moment as if for this.... The Judge was dead. And yet because he still sat there, his gray head resting on the cushions, and because he stared so fixedly before him, I could not grasp the fact of death. I had never met it face to face before. I could not honor its credentials.

For a moment I stood in front of the old man, with the single thought that our extraordinary interview had been too much for him: it never occurred to me to go for assistance any more than it occurred to me that death, unlike sleep, was a permanent thing, from which the Judge would never come back again. I simply stood there, awed by the presence of death, yet crediting death with none of death’s attributes.

And as I stood, my attention became more and more fixed upon the Judge’s stare. It did not seem to be a vacant gaze; on the contrary, it seemed to contain something. It seemed not only fixed; it seemed fixed on some object. It looked past me, behind me, and there, with all its terror and all its intelligence, it rested, motionless. It seemed to refute the notion that dead men cannot see; it seemed to affirm that dead men’s eyes are not dead. Into that terrible stare I looked, fascinated, awed, hushed, motionless. Then, suddenly, I heard the dog.

LISTEN TO ME, ESTABROOK!

The great Scotch hound had been snarling. He had growled, for I remembered it as a fact brought out of the background of my consciousness. And when I tore my eyes away from the Judge’s stare, I saw that the dog was staring, too,—was staring, was drawing back his black lips, exposing his yellow teeth. Every hair on his back was erect, his nostrils were distended as if he were relying upon his sense of smell to determine the nature of what he saw. Could there be any doubt that he, living, and his master, dead, still saw something—something which, because it was behind me, I could not see?

At first I did not dare to look. I felt some dreadful presence behind me—a presence upon which the lifeless man and the cringing, snarling beast had set their eyes, a presence which had wiped the smile from the Judge’s face and tightened every nerve and sinew in the dog’s lean body. I could hear the wind, and, in its lapses, the rumble of the city, I could smell the warm aroma of the Judge’s pipe, I could feel my senses grow keener as I gathered my courage to look over my shoulder.

When at last, after that dragging moment’s reluctance, I did so, I believed that I had looked for no purpose. The room behind me was empty. My nervous eyes searched the rectangular space, swept over the chairs, the tea-table covered with its display of rare china, the blue-and-gold Japanese floor vase, the brasses on the cases of books, the dark walls, the pictures, the gloomy corners filled with the mist of shadows, the rugs, the cornice, the draperies.

Then suddenly I saw!

Outside the long French windows, framed in the uncertain outlines of the old ornate balcony rail and the tossing leaves and branches of the vine, there appeared, as if it had come floating out of the liquid blackness of the night, detached from all else, a face.

No sooner had my glance fallen upon this peering countenance than I thought I saw a startled opening of its lips; it withdrew and was gone. I had merely caught a glance at it, yet of this I am sure—the face was white with the pallor of things that grow in a cellar, it was weak with the terrible drooping, hopeless weakness of endless self-indulgence; it was a brutal face, and yet wore the expression of timid, anxious, pathetic inquiry. It was a face that had come to ask a question. And though, because only the pale skin had reflected the light from within, I had not seen what might have appeared above or below, and though I may have been wrong, I received the impression that it was the countenance of an old woman.

Of course the moment I discovered this apparition, upon which the wild stare of the Judge in life and in death had rested, I ran forward. I thought as I did so that I heard the scrape of clothing on the iron balcony rail and the thud of a heavy object dropping on the grass below. Flinging open the glass doors, through which a torrent of wind poured into the room, and leaning out under the twisted branches of the vine, I tried in vain to penetrate the wall of blackness before me, and force my sight through it and down into the old garden, from which there arose only the rushing sound of the dry wind in the shrubbery. All the universe seemed made of black and hissing chaos. Out of it came blasts that combed through my disheveled hair and drove fine dust into my eyes. But of the messenger of death, who had peered in the window for a moment, and then withdrawn, nothing could be seen.

I turned back, feeling suddenly, for the first time, the emptiness of body which occurs, perhaps in sympathy with the emptiness of death, and as I turned, I found myself in the position of the thing that had looked in at us. The stare of the Judge was still fixed upon that spot, so that for a moment I received the impression that he was gazing at me. The dog still whined softly, cowering close to the floor.

I went to the middle of the room: I stood there gathering my wits. I heard a clock strike somewhere in the kitchen region below, from outside the window came the rattle of some conveyance, louder, louder, softer, softer. A passing boy whistled; I heard Julianna’s step above me; I heard the dog licking his paws unconcernedly; I heard the curtains flap in the wind that filled the room; and finally its ironical little scream as it lifted from the desk the last opinion the Judge ever wrote and scattered the loose sheets all over the room. It brought in the dank smell of the garden.

“I must tell her,” I said aloud, and the old dog, senses dulled by age, wagged his tail. “I must tell her,” I repeated, and toiled up the soft, carpeted stairs.

She was waiting for me in her own room, standing under the soft light from a hanging, well-shaded, electric lamp. I see her there, clearly, with the smile fading from her face as she read my own. Indeed, it was not necessary for me to speak; before I had gathered courage to do so, I saw her bosom swell with a long breath. She inhaled it jerkily, as one who is suddenly shocked with a deluge of icy water. I saw the color fade as the smile had faded before it, and when I had nodded to indicate that she had guessed the truth, stepped forward, fearing that she would sway off her feet.

“No, Jerry,” she said, with her hands held tight at her sides. “I am all right. I had expected this some day soon. It is hard to believe, but has not come without warning. His heart—his great, loving heart—had—worn out. I do not want you to come with me. I am going down—alone.”

I moved my dry tongue in my mouth: a word of the strange circumstance of his death was there. But her courage—her steady body, her squared shoulders, her firm mouth, her eyes which showed her agony, but no sign of weakness, and her soft voice as she said, “Wait for me here”—restrained me. I pressed her fingers to my lips and as I saw her go out, I felt that perhaps never would the opportunity to tell the story I have told to-night come again.

CHAPTER V

AT DAWN

I think it must have been nearly a half-hour—though the minutes were themselves hours—before I, waiting in the upper hall beside the window, through which the arc lights from the street threw jumping white patches on the ceiling, heard the sound of the old dog’s claws on the floor below and her little catches of breath as she came up.

At the top she buried her face for a moment on my shoulder.

“I love you more than ever,” she whispered. “I want you to stay.—Call Margaret and do what you can. I will come to you by and by.”

With these words she pressed my forearm in the grip of her strong fingers and, entering her own room, shut the door.

I found, when I did mechanically as she had bade me do, that Margaret, with the instinct of an old servant, which is sometimes as keen as that of an animal, had already sensed the presence of some crisis and prowled about in her soft-footed way until she had discovered the truth. She was lying at the bottom of the stairs, her face buried in her hands and her broad back rising and falling with slow and silent tides of grief. Julianna and her father were together the old woman’s life. One half had gone.

“Come, Margaret,” said I softly.

“Very well, sir,” she answered after a minute, and rising, straightened her cap, preparing for duty like a broken-hearted soldier. And so she went on in that next hour or two, telephoning, directing, arranging and doing with me all those necessary things. In spite of her labors she seemed always to be at my elbow, a ceaseless little whimpering in her throat. Her spectacles were befogged with the mist from her old blue eyes, which, like the color of old china, had faded with wetting and drying in years of family use, but she did not again give up to her grief.

Therefore, when at last we looked at each other in the hall in one of those moments when, at the end of a task, a mental inventory is taken to be sure that all is done, I was surprised to see her expression change suddenly, to hear a cry of dismay escape her, and to observe her trundle herself toward the library door in grotesque haste.

When, following her, I went into the room, I found her thick fingers pulling open drawer after drawer of the desk, and turning over the papers they contained.

“It was here, Mr. Estabrook. Oh, my God! Mr. Estabrook, I saw him put it here!” she cried.

“What?” I asked, with a glimmer of memory.

“The papers. They was marked for her, but she mustn’t ever have ’em! I’d rather they should pluck me from my bones, sir! And I saw him put ’em here!”

“He took them out again, ”I cried, touched by her contagious fear. “He died with them on the floor beside him. I know what you mean. The blue seal.”

“Yes, the blue seal!” she cried in recognition, and stumbling across the room she fell upon her knees, reaching under the old easy-chair and the desk, patting over the rug with her hand, turning up its corners, searching with her face bent down, like a devotee of some strange sect, muttering to herself.

“She must never see,” she exclaimed monotonously. “Poor child, she must never see. It is worse than death—a hundred times. Oh, what has he done with that terrible package!”

Suddenly, throwing herself upward and backward, until the upper half of her body was erect, and with a small object held up to my astonished eyes between her forefinger and thumb, she uttered a cry of despair and rage. She had found a piece of the sealing wax with which the packet, once offered to my eyes, had been fastened!

“It’s too late,” she wailed miserably. “Do you see that? The girl has read it. She would not let me in her room. It’s too late!”

There was no keeping back the question.

“What was in it?” I cried. “What was written there?”

I saw her old mouth shut as if she meant to show me that I need expect no disclosure from her.

“I don’t know, Mr. Estabrook,” said she.

In her eyes, perhaps distorted by the strong lenses of her glasses, I saw the challenge of stubbornness. I felt myself growing wild with a desire to break through the unwholesome mystery which had entangled me, and overcome by any means the silence of this woman. She had arisen. She was within my reach. And I believe that I put my hands upon her, catching her two round and fleshy shoulders under my curved palms, shaking her to and fro with the excess of my excitement. In that moment before I spoke to her, she looked up at me, surprise and terror written on her face.

“Tell me!” I roared. “You know this horrible, hidden thing. Confound you, tell me!”

Her expression changed. I saw surprise become craftiness and fear, distrust. I saw in her eyes the beginning of that hate which I believe has never, since that irresponsible moment, diminished.

“You had best leave go of me, Mr. Estabrook,” she said calmly. “You would not act so if the old Judge was alive and here. Nor his daughter, sir!”

The rebuke, you may believe, was enough.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

The old woman, however, wrung her hands and looked toward the room above as if to indicate to me that nothing was important but the fact that Julianna had possession of the Judge’s post-mortem message.

“Let her tell you if she will,” she cried. Then covering her face with her fat hands, as if to hide some terrible picture of the imagination, she stumbled forward out of the library.

I have often wondered since, as I wonder to-night, when those spectres have arisen again, what that old servant meant. At the time it never occurred to me that but one thing could happen. I had the utmost confidence in Julianna, and indeed, without thinking much of my own troubles, I passed that long vigil in the library only with regret that I could not wrest away from the true and noble woman who had promised to be my wife, all the terrible grief which, alone in the chamber above, she must have been suffering. For the first time, I think, in all my life, which, by training and inherited instincts, had been devoted, I might say, to the welfare of the Estabrook name and of myself, I felt my mind—and even my body—filled with a strange and passionate desire to be the instrument of good, not for myself, but in the name of others and perhaps in the name of God. My eyes filled with tears, springing not so much from grief as from belief in myself, not so much from weakness as from strength. I called upon an unknown force that I felt to be near me and directing me.

“Save her from misfortune,” I said aloud in that silent room. “Protect her. Comfort her.”

The old dog, as if he now understood, raised his head and licked my hand. I realized then that the wind had died down, and, looking up, I saw that the balcony and garden were lit by the pale rays of the morning moon, that the stars shone clearly again through the still air, and that the odor of flowers, nodding below the window, perfumed the Judge’s study. The pipe, with ashes tumbling out upon the table, by curious chance had not been moved from the place where he had laid it down.

It seemed to me that I had dreamed restlessly, that the old man had not left the room, and then, when this fancy had gone, I almost believed that he had come back as he used to do when he, in his absent-minded way, had left something behind. With my heart full of him, I got up and reaching for the pipe I dropped it into my own pocket.

At last the oil in the lamp had been consumed. The burner flickered, gurgled several times, snapped, and went out; but the failure of this light served to show that morning was near at hand. The rectangular squares of the window panes now appeared luminous with the first gray flow of the east. It seemed to me that the time had come when Julianna should no longer be alone with her own thoughts; with soft steps I climbed the stairs and softly I turned the knob of her closed door. If it had been locked, it was so no longer; it yielded to my gentle, cautious pressure. The crack widened. Then, for a moment, unseen and unheard, I stood on the threshold looking in.

She was no longer dressed as I had seen her, for now she was clad in the soft drapery of some delicate Oriental silk, which, if she had been standing, would have fallen from the points of her shoulders in voluminous folds to the floor. She had unloosened her hair; it had fallen in a torrent of brown and golden light. I could not see her face.

Her back was turned toward me, for she was sitting on the floor facing the hearth in the middle of the frame of old lavender-and-gold tiles which marked the fireplace. Her hands were pressed to her temples as if her head no longer could be relied upon to retain its contents, her fingers moved this way and that through the hair above her ears, and, in strange contrast with the glimmer of early day beyond the white curtains, an uncanny flickering light burned on the hearth, painting the delicate pallor of her shoulders, neck, ears, and hands with an outline of fire. It was a picture to give the impression of a beautiful sorceress crouching to perform some unholy rite.

“Julianna!” I exclaimed softly.

She turned about as one caught red-handed in guilt, and in doing so, moved far enough to one side to expose the last remnants of written sheets of paper, which flames were rapidly consuming. A moment more and these were crisp ashes which whirled about the hearth with a soft rustle before they fell into heaps of sooty fragments. Whatever the Judge had written with infinite pain had now been destroyed. And as I looked into her eyes, I saw, too, that infinite pain had attended their destruction. Her expression had in it horror, shame, apprehension, and excruciating grief: never had I believed that a face, naturally so innocent and so happy, could have been so distorted with mature and terrible emotions as hers had become in the hours that had passed.

“Julie! my Julie!” I cried.

For answer her fingers reached out toward me in mute appeal, her body followed, and, crawling to my feet, she clutched the air as if trying to reach my hands with her own, and then fell forward, flat upon the floor, unconscious. If in that moment she appeared a groveling thing, it was only for a moment. Before I could stoop to raise her, she had regained her senses with two or three sharp inhalations and a fluttering of her eyelids, had thrust my hands from her and struggled to her feet.

“Go!” she whispered, retreating. “It is unthinkable! Go! Never come near me!”

“No—no—no!” I said. “Julianna, tell me! What has happened? It is not you who speaks!”

“No,” she answered. “It is not I.”

“I say it is not you who say these things,” I repeated. “Who, then?”

“My father. It is his voice. It is his message. And what he has been, I am. There is no other way.”

I moved toward her.

“Tell me this terrible menace behind us—this thing that threatens us—that works its evil upon us. I will not believe that any fault of it is yours.”

“It is mine because it is his,” she said, with a return of her wonderful self-control. “But no one shall ever hear of it from me—no—Jerry—not—even you.”

“He offered to show me that message,” I said. “I refused to see.”

Another little cry issued from her compressed lips.

“You were willing not to know?”

“Yes.”

She went into a corner; without taking her eyes away from mine, she wrung her hands, again and again.

“Why did I ever see you?” she whispered. “Why did I ever love you? Oh, go, while I am strong! Go, while I know that you must never ask for me again! Go, before I bargain with my conscience.”

“You cannot send me away,” I said. A thousand hidden horrors would not have daunted me then. “Will you treat my love for you so? Has your own gone so quickly?”

She shuddered then as if cold steel had been run through her body.

“I am lost,” cried she. “I am lost. I cannot do more. Promise by your love of me,—by your love of God,—never to ask me of those things now ashes on the hearth—never to so much as speak of them to me—till eternity.”

“What then?—I promise,” I said.

“Then I will as solemnly swear to be as good and faithful, as true and ever-loving wife as God will let me be,” she said softly; “and may He forgive me for what I do, because I love you.”

She held out her arms to me, begging to be taken into mine, and when I had touched her she fell back, with her limp body in the curve of my elbow, and, looking up at me, offered her parted lips to the first kiss I had ever given her.

CHAPTER VI

THE MOVING FIGURE AGAIN

Such was a betrothal, sir, so extraordinary that had my natural repulsion for the unusual permitted me to have told it before, it would have been with belief that others would think me a man deluded by his own fancies. And yet these are facts I have told you—cold and bare and sufficient to have proved to me that the adventure and romance mourned for by some men are not dead, but, were it only known, still flourish, concealed in the hearts and experience of such matter-of-fact persons as myself.

Our marriage, too, was not of the conventional sort. It took place a fortnight later without any of the celebration usual in such cases. The death of the Judge, the fact that Julianna had no other immediate relatives to act as her protectors, and that my own father, whose affection for me has always been of a rather cold and undemonstrative type, approved not only of my choice of a wife, but also of my plan for an immediate marriage, argued against delay. Furthermore, Julianna herself, with a sad but charming little smile, again and again assured herself in my presence that she knew her own heart and that for her part there was no need to prolong a period of preparation.

Often, in those days, she spoke to me of her father, with the deepest affection, not as if he were dead, but rather as if his spirit still remained in the old house. She had one of those rare minds that reject the disagreeable superstitious affectations concerning death and that overcome hysterical grief. To be sure, for hours at a time she would suffer an extraordinary melancholy, and then, in my agony of curiosity, I believed that the spectre which had first appeared before her, the night of the Judge’s death, was whispering to her again. True, however, to my solemn oath, which I have always kept, I asked her nothing, and she always emerged from these periods of meditation into moods of gayety and affection which were more charming than I can describe.

She would romp, mind and body, in all the freshness of youth, with the most entrancing grace of movement and with her natural brilliant play of thought.

“I belong to you!” she would exclaim, retreating before my advance. “Come—take me!”

Then, after I had captured her and she had looked up at me, wrinkling her nose playfully, she would suddenly grow serious, and from her smiling eyes tears of happiness would start, and then, for an hour afterward, she would go singing snatches of song through the house. So that more than once I saw Margaret Murchie stop her household task to listen, shut her old eyes and say, “Thank God for his care of her.”

It need not surprise you that I tell you of her, for, as you may understand when I have told you all, I am now facing circumstances which, for some reason, have caused me to fall in love with her with a strange, new, and even deeper desire, and which raise the necessity for me to save her from some unrevealed menace and win her a second time.

The extraordinary fact in the light of this new situation is that our married life has been, until a year ago, as peaceful as could be. Whatever I might have suffered at first from the fact that I had been forbidden to know or ask of the past, these stings soon lost their power to disturb me. I was glad to forget them because I so hated all things which might tend to disturb the well-ordered life with which well-bred families retain their respectable position.

We found our tastes adapted to a common enjoyment of outdoor and intellectual pleasures, and we spent many hours each week, when alone, in reading the books which pleased us and in playing duets, in which I, being an indifferent player of the piano, contrasted my cold technique with the warmth and expression of her performances upon the ’cello. Indeed, we showed ourselves in these duets as in our companionship, for though I loved her, I believe I may have fallen short in those attentions, those little demonstrations and caresses, upon which some women seem to be nourished. As for her, she remained unchanged by marriage or time. By her humor, her tender sympathy, her refreshing, unaffected ways, she won a large and devoted circle of acquaintance, composed of both women and men. If any of the former, however, desired intimacy, they always found a gentle resistance; if the latter, they were made to see that a fortress had been erected on the borderland.

Until a year ago we were very happy, I think. To be sure, as time passed without the coming of any child, Julianna suffered that peculiar grief which, whatever may be its severity, is like no other. The desire for children was not only in her heart and mind: it was also a keen, instinctive yearning. Quietly, and without inflicting upon me any of her distress over unfulfilled hopes of the past, she persisted in the belief that the gift she most desired would not be withheld from her forever. Other than this no cloud seemed to be creeping up our sky, and, indeed, it was only little by little that I realized that some peculiar change had taken place.

I may say to you, I think, that this strange influence came even more than a year ago. I have tried in my own mind to establish a connection between its beginning and an accident which happened at that time.

We had gone for a week-end visit to the Tencorts’ farm in the Sweetbriar Hills, and much against my wishes, expressed, however, sleepily, Julianna had gone out at sunrise, chosen a rangy mare, saddled the creature herself, for the grooms were not up, and had ridden off across the wet fields, alone. Breakfast had already been announced when we heard the hoofs of the animal and caught glimpses of the horse’s yellow neck and Julianna’s plaid jacket, bobbing toward us under the arching trees.

“Your lady is hardly what one might call a gentle rider,” said Jack Tencort. “As for me, I’m glad to see the mare in a foam for once, but I would not be pleased to have my own wife—Hello, she is using her right hand.”

I, too, could see that Julianna’s left arm was hanging by her side, and as she pulled up the panting mare below the porch, I noticed that her lips were white.

“I’m sorry to have forced your animal,” she said, “but I was in a hurry to get back. Jerry! Please hurry. Help me off.”

“What’s the matter?” cried our host behind me.

“To tell the truth,” she said. “I have had my arm broken.”

“Thrown?” cried Tencort, looking for signs of mud or dust on her costume.

Julianna smiled gamely.

“That is a matter wholly between myself and the mare,” she answered.

You know, of course, that in spite of her unconcerned answers the thing was serious. The great trouble, I have always thought, was that no good surgeon was within reaching distance; the country doctor who set the bones failed to discover the presence of some splinters at the elbow, which the injury had thrust up into and displaced some of the nerves and sinew there.

When we had come back home and Nederlinck, the surgeon, had discovered how the healing process had gone on, he told me that for many weeks my wife would have to suffer great pain from the readjustment of the irritated nerves. For two months he did what little he could and then left the rest to time.

Julianna suffered silently. She complained little, but I could see a marked change in her. She became restless. I have seen her pace up and down a room for hours, like a captured animal longing for the jungle, and remain at the dinner-table, after the time had come to go to our library for coffee, with her great round eyes staring before her until some one spoke to her. Her vigor disappeared. The moods which had followed the reading of the post-mortem message from the Judge returned; her little exhibits of affection and, I think, even her innocence of personality disappeared. The spectre, whatever it was, seemed present once more. At times I believed I saw in her beautiful face a look of guilt, of fear—the look of a soul in a panic. She became suspicious of her friends and withdrew from them more and more, at times with such awkward haste that it seemed as if she believed they were about to observe some fact which she must, at any cost, hide. Little by little, too, I believed that I detected signs that she was drawing away from me.

For some reason I have always dated the beginning of this change to that morning when Julianna went off to ride alone. Yet, if I wanted to be sure of bringing back to her face an old trace of her mischievous smile, it was only necessary for me to question her about the cause of her accident.

“I have promised the horse never to tell,” she would say, putting her finger to her red lips. And I have never been able to decide whether she was concealing, playfully, some little folly or awkwardness of her own, or, behind her light manner, some more serious experience.

In any case, it was plain that some accursed thing had come between us. I found after some months that I must face this as a fact. We said little to each other from morning till night. When evening had come I did not go home, as I always had, with a little thrill of the old expectation which had never seemed to wear out. Instead I had a subconscious reluctance to enter a relation in which each day sympathy and understanding grew less and less. I began to suffer from a desire to demand from her a complete disclosure of all that had been hidden from me, and this temptation to break my solemn promise grew when, asking her on several occasions as to where she had been at this or that hour, I found that she was evading my questions.

At last it became evident enough that I had not been deceived in my increasing suspicions that something was wrong. One evening she burst into tears as she stood before my chair, and then falling on her knees, caught up my hands in her own and pressed them to her neck, cheeks, and forehead.

“Whatever happens, you will love me?” she cried out desperately. “Say you will! Say you will!”

“You know that,” I said.

Perhaps I had answered as badly as I could, for it seemed to cause her the greatest pain.

“I wish you had not said so,” she exclaimed, with a wild look in her eyes. “It is your goodness that hurts. Don’t you see what comfort it must be to a woman to have her husband cruel to her—beat her—abuse her!”

I drew back from my wife, astounded.

“Stop!” I said, with the first show of stern authority I had ever made since I had known her. “It’s time for you who dare to speak like that—to tell—”

“No! No!”she cried. “For God’s sake, don’t forget your promise. If you do we are lost—I am lost.”

She sprang up and away from me, and with her bare arms crossed over her face and her hands over her ears to shut out all sounds, she ran from the room.

This, sir, was seven weeks ago, and for many days following she would sit and look at me constantly, until, feeling her eyes, I would raise my own to find her face drawn as by a weary period of sleeplessness. At these moments it seemed to me that she was trying to make me understand, just as a faithful dog tries at times to communicate his thoughts by the expectancy, the love, or the pleading shining from his eyes. How much would I now give had I been able to do it!

Within the space of a week she brought to me the suggestion and the plan, which I, being driven to desperation by the impending wreck of our happiness, was mad enough to accept without foreseeing the punishment I would have to suffer through giving for the second time a solemn word of honor.

I think on that morning Julianna was more like her old self than she had been for weeks. Her apartments, though separate from my own, are entered from mine by a narrow door. I had prepared for breakfast,—which we do not have served in our rooms according to the degenerate modern custom,—and then had gone to find her, with the thought in my mind that, whatever she suffered or feared, it was my duty to help her as best I might. I had promised myself to be cheerful, yielding, and as entertaining as possible.

She was sitting on the side of her bed when I came in. The whiteness of the linen and the pale blue of her morning gown served to bring out the delicate color of her skin. I was so delighted with this indication of renewed health that I opened my mouth to express my admiration.

She was quicker than I.

“You find me attractive this morning,” she said with a sad little smile. “I am glad. I wish that I might be attractive to you forever and ever.—I mean my shoulders, my arms, my hands—free from wrinkles or fat or dryness.”

“I’d love you now if you were to assume the shape of a Chinese dragon,” I said seriously, “—or the Sheik of Baalbec.”

The truth was that I had almost forgotten this latter creature, the automaton. Apparently she had, too, for at first a puzzled look came to her eyes, then she smiled up at me with a bit of her own individual coquetry.

“You are making love this morning?” she said in a gay voice. Yet it seemed to me that in it was a trace of eagerness, shrewdly directed toward a concealed purpose.

“I am going to ask you to go away, Jerry,” she went on timidly, but still smiling.

“Go away? When? For what purpose?” I exclaimed.

“Just go away for me—for my sake,” she answered, straightening her body, raising her head, and looking squarely at me with some of her old strength. “You can go to live in a hotel. You can explain that you are forced to do so for some business reason. You can say that I have gone away.”

She must have seen the flush of my anger, for she raised her hand.

“Don’t!” she pleaded. “I know very well how unreasonable I may seem. But if I have earned any gratitude or respect or love from you, just give me what I ask now and give it to me blindly—without question.”

Her eyes held my own as she said these words and I knew she had cast her spell over me.

“What do you propose to do for these three weeks?” I asked roughly.

“I shall stay in this house,” she answered, spacing her words. “Margaret will stay, too. The rest of the servants I shall send away. But of this I want to be sure—you must not come to find me for three weeks. God only knows what would happen if you did.”

“You are insane!” I cried out, with my hand gripping her round wrist. “It’s that which has hung over us.”

She shook her head.

“Worse,” said she.

Then, as if to assure me that she had not lost her reason, she recalled the months which had just gone and described, as I could not, the change in our home, our life, ourselves.

“It is for you!” she broke out finally, as if she were no longer able to be calm. “For you and for our future I am begging you to do what I ask.”

“Tell me this,” said I, stirred by seeing her tremble so violently. “Has something come to you out of the past?”

“Yes,” she said, reaching behind her for the wall. “Ask nothing more. It has come out of the old, old past. For the love of all that is good, promise to do as I say.”

“And then?” said I.

“Come back to me. I shall be here—then.”

I bowed my head.

“On your word of honor,” she commanded.

“On my word of honor,” said I, and turned away.

I had scarcely done so, however, before I felt her arms about me, the impact and the clinging of her body. Close to me, plucking at my fingers, my sleeves, my wrist, her body shaking with her sobs, she covered me with caresses like those given at some parting for eternity.

“You—are not—in danger of death!” I exclaimed, holding her away from me at arm’s length.

“No, I cannot believe that,” she said quietly. “Such as I am, I shall be when you come back.”

With these words she pushed me gently from the room; I found myself looking into the broad white panel of a closed door. I stood there a moment, dazed, then going to my chamber, I, with my own hands, packed a large kit bag, preparing to do as she had asked. It was only after I had reflected on my promise that I went again to speak with her. I knocked. There was no answer. I tried the latch. The door was locked.

Without eating my breakfast and with a strange conflict between my trust in my wife and the memory of my experiences since I had known her, I left the house and have not passed its threshold, though it is two weeks to-morrow morning since I left it.

Do you wonder, sir, that I have suffered all the torments which anxiety can devise or imagination, with its swift picture-film, may unroll before one’s eyes? I have stifled as best I could these uncertain terrors. By day, when I have plunged into my work at the office, at times I have been able to shut my mind to the everlasting rehearsal around and around, over and over again, of the facts which I have told you to-night; but when night has come, I am the prey of my own thoughts. For six days, in spite of my exaggerated fear of scandal, I have prowled like a ghost before my own house, lurking behind trees, watching my own door like a ten-dollar-a-day detective. Dodging the policeman who would know me, I have kept my eyes for hours on the dim light that sometimes burns in my wife’s room, and when I have seen the shadow of some one passing and repassing behind the drawn shade, I have felt my heart in my throat, and have scarcely been able to restrain myself from calling out into the night air, “Julianna! Julianna!”

Finally, I must tell you one thing more. I had believed that perhaps the crisis which had come to her had done so independently of any personality but mine or hers. I was wrong. To-night, unable to remain inactive any longer, and by the accumulation of restraint made desperate, I rung up my house on the telephone. No answer was returned. The feeling that my wife, in danger, was calling upon me, swept over me until, had I been open to such beliefs, I would have felt sure that across the affection and sympathy between us, as across wires, the message came.

I walked hastily from the hotel into the park, taking the path which I had used in the pleasant June days when I had met her at the Monument. You know the kind of night it has been. Therefore when I reached the border of trees opposite my house, I hardly thought it necessary to seek the screen of the shrubbery; the arc lights were throwing the dancing shadows of tree limbs across the pavement, the rush of the wind drowned the noise of footsteps, and the street was deserted, I thought, except for the clouds of whirling dust that passed downtown like so many huge and ghostly pedestrians. I saw that a dim light shone through her blinds and that the house was the picture of peace, suggesting that the walls contained comfort, happiness, and the quiet of a peaceful family. So the fronts of houses lie to us!

At the very moment that this thought came, I saw from my position under the shadow of a spreading oak, which has not yet dropped its leaves, that I was not the only person who was observing the light behind the blinds. A figure was standing not more than a hundred feet away from me, peering out from beyond one of the light poles. It wore a vizored cap, I thought, and its head rolled this way and that on top of its spare, bent, and agile body. Now and then, however, it ceased this grotesque movement to gaze up at the window. One would have said that this creature was less a man than an ape.

I am not a coward. “Here,” thought I, “is a tangible factor. My word of honor to Julianna is not broken if I seize this customer, whatever he may be, and make him explain the part he is acting.” I stepped forward immediately, but he saw me before I had made two steps. From my bearing and the place where I had concealed myself, he knew at once, I suppose, that I had been watching him, for, turning with a swift motion, he plunged into the shrubs and evergreens behind him. That the thing was as frightened as a rabbit, there can be no doubt; the single little cry it gave forth was not a scream. You would have called it a squeal! In a jiffy I was after him, tearing through the branches among which, with a sinuous twisting of his body, he had just slid; a moment later I reached the open lawn again. The man had vanished.

I knew well enough that he was hiding, probably flattened on the ground, among the evergreens. At another time, on a quiet evening, listening for his movements or even his breathing, might have told me where he lay, but now the wind and the rattle of dead leaves made it necessary for me to use my eyes in my search. Therefore I went back through the bushes, kicking at dark shadows with my foot, my heart thumping with the excitement of the hunt.

As I reached the street again, I looked up toward my house, and there, at the front door, I saw a crack widen and a black figure of a man come out and down the steps. It crossed the street, and when it had gone into the park, I followed it. You know what happened; this second man was you.

And now I ask you, Doctor, man to man—For God’s sake, tell me what you know!

CHAPTER I

A SHADOW ON THE CURTAIN

Such was Jermyn Estabrook’s story. I have tried, in repeating it, not only to include all the details given by this desperate young man, but to suggest also the coldness and accuracy of his speech. Why? Because the very manner of narration is indicative of the man’s character. He belongs to the dry, dessicated, and abominably respectable class of our society. Pah! I have no patience with them. They live apart, believing themselves rarities; the world is content to let them do it, because theirs is a segregation of stupidity. And Estabrook, though he had fine qualities, belonged to them.

Nothing could have indicated this more clearly than the emphasis he put on his fear of scandal, the smug way he spoke of his word of honor, and the self-conscious blush that came into his handsome face when he mentioned the name of Estabrook. Why, even the menace to his beautiful Julianna was not quite sufficient to cause this egotist to forget his duties toward himself! So if he had not acted with such nobility of spirit during the remainder of our adventures begun that night, I could not sit here now and write that I learned to be very fond of him.

At any rate, Estabrook asked me what I knew and I told him all that I have written—about Virginia, that she seemed to feel the existence of something the other side of her bedroom wall, about MacMechem’s notes on the case, the game of life and death I was playing, my conversation with the old servant, and for full measure, I told him where I had learned to place a blow behind a gentleman’s ear. It is necessary to deal with men as excited as Estabrook without showing the nervousness that one may feel one’s self.

When I had finished, he jumped up from his chair, and, clasping his hands behind his back, in the manner of lawyers, he walked twice across the room.

“Why, don’t you see?” he cried. “All that you have told me simply adds mystery to mystery, apprehension to apprehension, fear to fear. And it strikes me that, though my own experience has been bizarre enough, your observations and that of this other doctor who is dead are even more fantastic. What do you hope to accomplish by telling me this gruesome, unnatural state of affairs?”

“I hope to make you act,” I said, putting a chair in his path. “We are sensible men. There are, no doubt, explanations for all occurrences. Our limited mental equipment may not find them at once. But the first thing to recognize is the one important fact; neither of us doubts that your wife is in some grave danger. Personally I believe that if you are not mentally deranged, she is! In any case, it’s your duty to go to your house. Force an entrance if necessary. It cannot be done too soon!”

Estabrook clenched his hands as he heard me, but after a moment he began to shake his head doggedly.

“Can’t you see that it would mean publicity?” he asked.

“Better than losing her,” I argued, feeling certain that he would yield.

He did, in fact, cry aloud, but nevertheless he shook his head.

“Impossible,” he groaned. “I’ve given her my solemn promise!”

I suppose I’ve a reputation for being short of speech, often frank, and sometimes profane. I then allowed myself in my rage to be all three. It was to no purpose. Estabrook would not consent to tearing the cover from his affairs in any way which would cost him the breach of his confounded words of honor.

“You are a madman!” I exclaimed in my vexation. “The death of your wife may be entered against you. What folly!”

“Doctor,” he answered quietly, “I want your help and not abuse. Your storming will not accomplish anything. You are the only living soul to whom I have confessed the presence of a skeleton in my married life, and I want you to help me. I have been told repeatedly that you are a man of courage, steadiness of nerve, scientific eminence, and high ability.”

I could not disagree with him.

“The next thing, then, is Margaret Murchie, the servant,” I said.

“What of her?”

“She knows something,” said I. “You have heard how she talked to me, how she tried to conceal her excitement, how she treated me as a spy, how guilty she seemed, and you have indicated that you, as well as I, believe that she knows what is at the bottom of this.”

“Yes, yes,” cried Estabrook. “I am sure that she knows. But what then—what then? What can we do?”

“My dear fellow,” I said, “why ‘we’?”

He threw up his hands and sprang out of his chair again.

“I beg your pardon,” he answered with a look of chagrin. “I’ve been under a strain, I suppose, and I forgot that you have nothing at stake.”

“Not so fast, Estabrook,” I said. “Take another nip of the brandy. I prescribe it for you. And not so fast. I have a good deal at stake.”

“What?”

“My case,” I said.

He looked at me with admiration.

“Furthermore,” I went on, “I feel a certain brotherhood with you, young man. You are the first person with whom I’ve rolled on the sod for many years. I have punched you in the neck. You are now my patient and my guest. You have confided in me. You have made an unconscious appeal to me for help. Above all, I am one of those old fogies you have mentioned, who secretly mourn the dying-out of romance. Here!—a glass!—to adventure!”

Estabrook smiled sourly, but he drank.

“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate your spirit and, permit me to say, also your attempt to make me treat this terrible affair in a spirit of sport. But old Margaret is the superlative of stubbornness. We cannot expect to go to her to obtain information. I have lived in the house with her for more than six years. Can I say whether she is a saint or a crafty villainess? No. I know no more now than when I shook her in my anger on the evening the Judge died. She has never addressed me of her own will since. She will give up nothing to me. You have tried her already.”

“I am less conservative in my ideas,” I answered. “Since we are in this field of turbulence and mystery, let us be turbulent and mysterious. All that you say is true. Therefore, we must force the truth from Margaret Murchie.”

“You mean to induce her—” he began.

“Stuff!” said I. “The thing I mean is assault and battery. The thing I mean is kidnaping. You may believe in clapping your hand over her mouth and struggling with her, while we take her out. Personally I prefer a cone containing the fumes of a liquid called cataleptol, fortunately well known in my profession, while still a stranger to criminals.”

But the careful Estabrook shook his head.

“You are not serious?” said he doubtfully. “Do you plan for me to take part in this?”

“There must be two,” I said. “And once we have the lady in this room, I will be willing to guarantee that she will tell all she knows. I cannot ask my chauffeur to go with me, for I trust him about as implicitly as I trust a rattlesnake. Which makes me think—can you run a car?”

Estabrook was weakening. He nodded. I looked at my watch and found that it was after eleven. I drew the curtain and saw that sheets of rain were still being blown slantwise across the foggy radiance of the arc lights. There is a trace of the criminal in me. Perhaps all men feel it at times. Just then, observing the wildness of the storm, I felt the joy of a midnight misdoing, even more than my desire to find the answer to MacMechem’s question.

“I shall be glad to know how you propose to gain a second admittance,” said Estabrook, when, after tripping over the wet cobblestones and bending our shoulders to the drive of the cold rain, we had groped through the black alley to the dimly lit garage. “I’ll also be glad to know why you suppose you can draw a statement from the old woman.”

“My dear fellow,” said I, “there is the cause of many of your troubles! You are always wanting to see your way to the end. And the way there often must be cut through a trackless waste of events that haven’t happened.”

“In light of my experience it seems to me that your statement is unreasonable,” he muttered peevishly; “but since you are satisfied, I will be, too. If I understand your plan, however, while you sit dry and comfortable within this machine, I am to ride outside, wet to the marrow.”

At this remark the sleepy garage attendant rubbed his eyes, filling them with the sting of gasoline, swore, and forgot to submit my new chauffeur to the inspection of his first surprise. He drew back the door and we trundled out into the water-swept thoroughfare.

The rain, which had begun with a thin drive, had now settled into one of those sod-soaking, autumn downpours, commonly called an equinoctial storm. Estabrook was showing the effect of his nervous strain by driving the machine through it with a recklessness of which I disapproved, not only because we had twice skidded like a curling-stone from one side of the asphalt to the other, but also because I did not wish undue attention attracted to our course. The windows in front of me and to the right and left were covered with streaks of water and fogged with the smoke of my cigarettes which, in my pleasurable excitement, I smoked one after the other; therefore everything outside—the spots of light which lengthened into streaks, the shadows, the other vehicles, the glaring fronts of theatres in Federal Circle—formed a ribbon of smutched panorama, the running of which obliterated vertical lines and made all the world horizontal. At each crossing we jumped, landing again to scoot forward to the next, where, through the opening of side streets, came the faint sound of whistles in the harbor; and still, Estabrook,—confound him!—to my cautions bellowed through the speaking-tube, paid no attention.

With shocking suddenness it occurred to me, for the first time, seriously, that I had no assurance that this man who drove me was not a maniac!

I reviewed the meeting with him, the tale he had unfolded, his distraught actions. I am fairly familiar with psychopathic symptoms and my summary of all that I had observed in him indicated clearly enough that he was as sane as any one of us. But for the first time in my life I realized the feeling of uncertainty about a physician’s diagnosis which a patient must endure. A doctor delivers his opinion as a matter of self-assertion; the layman receives it as a matter of self-preservation. Riding in that flying car, I found myself in both positions. As a physician I was wholly satisfied with my conclusion; as a man I found myself still in doubt and picturing to myself a wild ten-minute ride, which I had no power to prevent, ending in a chaos of broken glass, twisted metal, clothing, blood, and flaming gasoline.

“MacMechem met violent death the moment he became curious as to the other side of the blue wall,” I thought, with a twinge of the superstitious fear which touches prowlers as well as presidents, professors as well as paupers.

We were whirling around a corner then, and through the glass and over Estabrook’s broad shoulders, I believed I saw again the treetops of the park.

“At least he knows where he lives,” said I to myself as we drew up to the curb.

“Good!” I whispered to him, when I had stepped out into the swash of the rain. “Frankly, I hardly enjoyed it. You drive like a demonstrator.”

“I’m a ruin of nerves,” he answered, shivering. “I’m afraid I’m a poor assistant for you, anyway. What do you want me to do?”

“Just climb inside there where it is warmer,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Back in a minute?” he repeated as if dazed.

“From the Marburys’, if you don’t mind,” I explained.

He leaned back against the cushions, disregarding the fact that with every nervous movement water ran from him as from a squeezed sponge. “Oh, I forgot your patient,” said he, with a twitching mouth. “But, for God’s sake, don’t keep me waiting long!”

I shook my head in answer; then ran, rather than walked, up the Marburys’ steps; indeed, that night taught me how active a corpulent old codger can be if the need comes.

Miss Peters evidently had been at the window in her night vigil, watching the storm; she opened the door.

“Well?” said I.

“The tide has turned.”

Under the hall light I looked up at her stony, expressionless face. The Sphinx itself was never more noncommittal.

“What do you mean?”

“I supposed you knew,” she whispered. “I supposed that was why you came back to-night so late.”

I exclaimed in a hoarse and savage whisper. I was furious. This time I had fought with disease not only, as in a common struggle, with carnivorous Death, but as a hardened sinner whose heart has suddenly opened to a child.

“Virginia is dead!” I said, glaring at her.

She never changed the coldness of her tone.

“No,” she said. “She is going to get well.”

“Confound it!” I growled, under my breath. “How do you know?”

“The blue wall,” she answered with a sneer.

“Bah!” said I, starting up the stairs. “We shall see.”

As I pushed open the door, I observed that the nurse had procured a red silk shade to screen the single electric lamp on the table. The yellow rays were changed to a pink, reflected on the wall, sending their rosy lights into the depths of that bottomless blue; the breaking of a clear day after a spring rain has no softer mingling of colors. For a moment I looked at the chart, then with new hope turned toward Virginia herself.

Either the new tints diffused by the lamp deceived the eye, or the little girl’s pale skin had in fact been warmed by a new response from the springs of life. She was sleeping quietly, her innocent face turned a little toward me and in the faint, illusive smile at her mouth, and in the relaxation of her beautiful hands, I read the confirmation of Miss Peters’s prophecy. I, too, believed just then that Virginia would not die, and that, as so rarely happens in this disease, her recovery would be complete.

“It is a wild night,” said the bony nurse when I had tiptoed out of the room.

She seemed to be wishing to draw from me an opinion on the extraordinary rally the child had made. That was her way; she always invited discussion of a subject by comments about something wholly irrelevant.

“We shall see,” I answered again. “A relapse might be fatal. To-morrow—we shall see.”

“It is raining hard,” she said as she turned the latch for me.

“Yes,” said I, “and the treatment till then must be the same. Who knows—”

“Who knows?” she repeated.

A blast of wind and water and the closing of the door seemed to deny an answer. I found myself on the steps again, looking into the staring eyes of my car, and, with a sharp jump of my thoughts, wondering how we were to accomplish the work we had come to do. I descended, however, and when I had reached the door of my limousine, I saw Estabrook’s drawn face pressed close to the glass. It was the sight of him that gave me an idea; it was his first words that, for a moment, drove it from my mind.

“Look! Look!” he said to me. “Look at her window!”

I had merely noticed that a new, bright light shone there; now, in a quick glance over my shoulder, I saw a shadow on the curtain—the shadow of a figure standing with its arms extended above a head, thrown back as if in agony.

“Is it your wife?” I asked in a hoarse whisper.

He took my wrist in the grip of his cold hand. “My God, Doctor, I don’t know,” he said. “It looks—its motions, its attitudes, its posture!—it looks like the thing I saw outside the Judge’s window!”

CHAPTER II

MARGARET

Well, now,—his words made me shudder! I confess it with some reluctance. Of course a doctor comes in contact with enough real horrors. They become ordinary. It is those undefined, doubtful things which run fear through the veins like a drug. Nevertheless I caught myself in time to conceal my nervousness.

“Here, here, Estabrook!” I said in a sharp, businesslike tone. “We didn’t come to watch drawn curtains. The question is, did you bring your keys?”

Without asking me questions, he handed them over.

“Now, understand me,” I said, for I could see that in truth he was in no condition to offer much assistance. “My advice is for you to take these keys and walk into your own house.”

“I can’t do that,” he said irritably. “I’ve told you I can’t do it—and why I can’t.”

“Then understand me further,” I said when a shriek of wind had gone off down the avenue. “I have debated this question and decided that we must not disturb your wife. She has warned against that, and perhaps it is better to assume she is not insane and take her warning.”

“Yes, yes,” he cried. “That is right.”

“I shall not parley with Margaret Murchie,” I went on. “Move a little! I have something I want to reach under the seat. There!—I shall not ask her to come. She will have no choice. It will all be over before she has time to cry out. And you must be ready to help me carry her into this car.”

“The law—” he began.

“Oh, I know that,” said I. “But it is a choice of doing this, or nothing. Any other course either makes you break your confounded, nonsensical word of honor, or else raises a noise that will bring the reporters around like so many vultures. It is your affair, after all. Shall I stop here?”

Again, as I spoke, I felt the pleasurable thrill of adventure which I had supposed had gone with my youth.

“You want me to wait here till you signal?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“As you say!” he agreed. “The old servant knows. She must tell. I can’t stand it any longer. She must be made to tell.”

I nodded. He indicated the proper key with a touch of his forefinger. Whereupon, crossing the sidewalk again and ascending the Estabrooks’ steps with as much unconcern as if they had been my own, I fitted the key softly and turned the lock.

The very instant that I tried to open the heavy door, however, I knew that a watcher who had been observing our movements through the silk curtains was behind it. I felt a resisting pressure. I heard a stifled scream. It was no moment for indecision. With an unbelievable rapidity of thought, I estimated the chances of the unseen person being armed, the hazard of his giving vent to an uproar which would bring the neighborhood about our ears. Then I threw my body against the door with all the force I could muster. It yielded suddenly; with a crash it flew back against the tiled wall. I was precipitated forward and a second later found myself in the ridiculous performance of rolling around on the floor with what felt to me like a fat wash, consigned to a laundry. It was, however, a bundle from which choking imprecations and grunts exploded, and which for a turn or two was enlivened with upheavals of some strength. Well enough to laugh now, but at that moment, you may be sure, I was searching with my free hand for the person’s mouth.

I had meant to be gentle: if I clapped my hand over the source of the little cries and protests, when I had found it, with something more than decision, you must blame the circumstances. I had expected to surprise old Margaret from behind and give her such a whiff of cataleptol that she would have suffered no inconvenience. Unfortunately I had not at first known that it was she whom I had encountered, and now there were obvious difficulties in the way of my applying my saturated gauze to her nose.

“Be still!” I commanded, trying to uncork my vial, with a single hand. “Be still. No harm will come to you.”

Her reply was a well-placed thrust of her two old knees which nearly sent me through the glass. It placed me in a position, however, where I could, with a push of my foot, close the door and shut us into the vestibule, so that her clamor, which had broken forth again, might be muffled.

Furthermore, I now had my chance to unloose my anæsthetic. I can hear the squeak of that fat cork now; I can recall the pleasure of smelling those dizzy fumes as I thrust the gauze into her face. Time after time she succeeded in thrusting it aside with her clawing hands; time after time I succeeded in jamming it back again against her nose. The scene is not one I recall with pride, but my brief excuse must be that I do not like to have my undertakings fail. The delicacies of the best of us, moreover, depart at critical junctures.

However that may be, the important point is that finally I felt her struggles subside. Her hands no longer acted with intelligence; they moved about wildly in front of her face, as if to push away a tangle of cobwebs. Her head rolled to and fro; the gurglings, sputters, half-uttered cries of rage, ceased.

“Breathe again!” said I, with the habitual phrase of the surgeon administering an anæsthetic. “Breathe away—breathe away—Ah, now!—breathe—breathe—breathe!”

And at last she was still. I threw the gauze into the corner. I got up panting, for I am not built for exercise, and, panting still, I peeped out through the silk curtains to be sure that in our little adventure we had attracted no attention.

The wind-driven rain still swept down the streets under the iridescent glows of the arc lights, my car still stood like a forlorn, forgotten thing in the gutter. In one direction the wet perspective of the avenue appeared as empty as a street scene on a drop curtain. But when I turned my eyes the other way my heart gave quick response. Just beyond the iron fence stood a patrolman.

He had stopped and seemed to be looking directly at the door behind which I stood. I could see his two bare hands on the iron railing. They were very conspicuous against the rubber coat—wet, black, and shiny—which covered his burly figure, and he used them to sway himself softly backward and forward. It seemed to me that he was debating how to act, and I believe that I learned then, peeping through the glass, to what extent guilt and the desire for secrecy will sharpen the imagination.

I say this, because, almost at the moment that I felt sure he had taken a step forward toward me, I saw that not his face but his back was turned toward me, that his hands were behind him and that he had leaned for a moment on the rail, perhaps to look at the physician’s green cross on my lights. A second later he ducked his helmet into the driving rain and, walking on, turned into the shadows of the cross-street.

I knew then I had no time to lose. I had been delayed; Margaret Murchie might regain her senses. And yet, when I had signaled to Estabrook, when he, without a word, had come, and when I felt the excitement most keenly, I found myself impressed not with the necessities of the moment, but rather with the extraordinary grotesqueness of the situation.

“Take her about the knees,” said I, and then touched his elbow. “Estabrook,” I added, “this—mind you—happens in a twentieth-century metropolis.”

He did not answer, because the old servant, dashed in her upturned face by a stream of water running from the coping, moved her arms feebly and uttered a groan.

“Quick!” said I. “Drop her and crank up the car. I’ll do the rest.”

He obeyed.

I dragged the burdensome weight of my victim, if you will so call her, and thrust it into the interior of the vehicle. Estabrook was already on the chauffeur’s seat; as quickly as I tell it, the car had begun to pick up speed over the wet and slippery street. We flashed by a light or two and I saw that Margaret Murchie’s eyes had lost their stare of unconsciousness.

“Margaret,” said I, “you are all right. Be sensible. There is Mr. Estabrook in front.”

She shook herself convulsively as if to throw off the remnants of the anæsthetic. Then she caught my sleeve.

“Oh, it’s terrible,” she cried. “Ye have taken me away from Julie! Bring me back to her, do you hear? You and Mr. Estabrook—What do ye want of me?”

“Quiet!” I said. “We want you to tell all you know.”

“You want me to tell it? After all these years? And it’s no fault of mine or hers!”

Suddenly she became excited again.

“Take me back!” she screamed. “You don’t know what you do! Take me back to my Julie! She may need me sore enough!”

“Have sense,” I said close to her ear. “We are going to the bottom of this. You must tell everything—everything from beginning to end.”

She was silent for several seconds while we sped out toward the North Side.

“It’s awful,” she said finally. “And it has gone far enough. It’s been more than I can bear. It’s time for me to tell! If you, whoever you are, and Mr. Estabrook will hear, you shall have it all—the living truth of it—the bottom of what I know.”

“Good!” said I. “And now we’ll go to my house.”

“No, no,” she exclaimed. “There is no need for that. I would not be from the girl while these awful minutes is going by. Who can say what would happen? Oh, no, sir. Take your cab back to our door, and then—sitting on this seat—with my eye on that terrible house—and less need of any of us to worry—I can tell ye all from the first to the last.”

In her voice was that sincerity of emotion which invites confidence.

“Very well,” I said. “That is agreed.”

And then, picking up the speaking-tube, I told the wretched man at the wheel. He swung us around; we turned back, and in five minutes more drew up again, according to my direction, not by the Estabrooks’ door, but under the spreading limbs of the oak across from the Marburys’ ornate residence.

“Take some of this, my boy,” I said as he crawled, wet and trembling, into the interior. “It will be good for you, and for you, Margaret, too!”

“Oh, Mr. Estabrook!” she exclaimed when she had swallowed the stimulant, “I lied to you. I once lied to you very sore, as you shall see.”

“Enough—enough!” he cried. “What of her—my wife? She is still alive?”

“Have no fear,” replied the old woman. “It’s not death that’s with us, I’m believing.”

The poor fellow wrung his hands.

“But, by the Saints, what I’ll tell you now is true,” she said, putting her hands first on his knees and then on mine. “Look! The light is shining on my face and you can read it if you like. Sure, I’m praying that you may use the knowledge to save us all.”

“Go on,” said the young man hoarsely.

And thereupon, in an awkward, jerking manner, which I can only hope to suggest in the repetition, she told a tale of strange mingling of good and evil. This was her story....

CHAPTER I

LES TROIS FOLIES

I was born on the Isle of Wight. My father was a seafaring man. He owned his own vessel—a brigantine as sailed from the Thames to British South Africa and sometimes around the Hope to Madagascar.

Where he met my mother I never knew. He was Scotch and she was an Irish beauty, I can tell you. Looking back on it now, I believe she was of rich and proud people and that they had cast her off for her folly in marrying a man that was rough of cheek and speech, for all his ready good heart. She was as delicate and high-strung and timid, as he was brown, big, and fearless as to anything, be it man or typhoon. And yet it was she who could stick to one purpose as if the character of a bulldog was behind the slender, girlish face of her, while he was always making for this and that end, charging at life with head down, like a bull.

I can see the two of them now, walking together arm in arm, when he’d come back out of the sea; I can see them strolling off down along the old hedges of the garden, or sitting beneath the thatched roof of our cottage which had stood the wind sweeping off the Channel for more time than any one at Bolanbywick could remember. She looked like a child beside him, for his shoulders would measure three of the width of hers. It was from him I have my frame that once called to the eyes of men to see the figure that it held, though I say it myself. But from her I got many a trait that fitted me badly, because craftiness and stubbornness and a weakness for sentiment and the like of that, had best be in a body small enough to tame them.

The two of them loved each other completely, each in their way, but it was well that they had no other children. It was well, perhaps, that when I was seventeen I had grown strong and quick as a hound. My mother went with him then for her first voyage since her honeymoon, and it was the last ever seen of her or him, or the only property we owned, which was the vessel and a cargo of cotton ducks and sheetings for speculation, bound to the Gold Coast. Sometimes the sea opens its mouth like that, and the jaws close again.

There was no more education for me! My father’s sister was a boarding-house keeper in London. I was staying with her then, and when the lawyer found there was no insurance, life, ship, or cargo, she was for setting me to work the next morning. Poor woman, she had slaved her life against dust in halls and cockroaches and couples who wanted rooms without references and the heart had gone from her, and when she died she left the best of two thousand pound to a clairvoyant and card-reader, who had robbed her week after week for ten years and more.

I took a place as companion to an old lady, going to Odymi in Hungary. It was there one of the doctors, who had seen my two bare forearms, spoke of my strength and told me that I could make good money as a rubber in the baths, and I was glad of the change from the old woman. I was proud and short of tongue and patience with her, and we were always snarling at each other. But time wears those edges off people, I can tell you!

It was there, at the baths, I fell in with the woman who called herself Madame Welstoke. She was an evil woman, and of the worst of such, because she was one who never seemed bad at first, and then, little by little, as she showed herself, you could get used to her deviltry and for each step you could find an apology or excuse, until at last the thing she had done yesterday seemed all right to-day and you were ready for some new invention of hers to-morrow.

Mainly she treated diseases by the laying on of hands, and the best that could be said of her as to that was she preyed on the rich and would take no patients she thought were short of at least fifty pounds to spend for her mumbo-jumbo and gimcracks. She would talk in a very smooth voice to those she got in her web—about the flow of vital energy and the power of positive and negative currents over the valves of the heart and circulation of the blood. She would roll up her eyes and complain of how the treatments, which consisted of laying her fingers on a person’s temples and wrists, exhausted her, and at first I thought she really meant it, and when her good, old motherly face was turned away, many was the time I laughed. And finally, when I began to see that most of her patients improved and some were cured, I stopped laughing, for there was the evidence before my eyes and no denying it.

Whether or no she had power to heal, I would have stayed with her. Her influence was like slow rot and the germ of it was deep-seated before you could even see that it was time to resist it. I was acting as her maid in private at first, and before other people, wherever we went,—Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Monte Carlo, and lots of places I have forgotten,—I was supposed to be her daughter who had joined her from New York. And it was all one to me, for I was drawing a fine pay and living very rich and I could see that the name and game of Mrs. Welstoke spelled prosperity.

All this, of course, was before I even saw the Judge, but I was getting my training, and learning how easy money could be made to come through a little fol-de-rol here and a bit of blackmail there, and introducing one class of society to another in the next place. It was easy to salve my conscience, because the old adventuress was curing many a poor sleepless or rheumatic creature who could spend money like dirt to get the result, and besides, she took an interest in me enough to make me wonder why, and she was always keeping her eyes open like a pilot to see that I didn’t meet any man who might be after me. To tell the truth, she talked so much of the villainy of males and the horrors of marriage that finally I believed what she said and turned my young face away from all men, just as if good, timid, and bad were run out of the same mould.

We were in Paris when she showed her hand, and, strange enough, she chose to do it one afternoon when we were driving in the Bois with a thousand fine gowns and faces to distract the attention.

“The trouble, Margaret,” says she, “is that our reputation runs on ahead of us. Here in Paris it is the same as at Vienna and Rome—we have much more than we can attend to. I can’t put my hands on two fools at once, and I am always pained because I am American by birth, as I never yet told you before, and I hate to see five dollars slip by, as we say over there.”

“It’s too bad,” I answers, “for there is no way to help it.”

“Indeed!” she says. “I’m not so sure. I haven’t made you my daughter for nothing. And I’m thinking of having you treat those who I can’t.”

“Me!” I cries, very surprised. “You know well enough that I have no power.”

At this she leaned back on the cushions and nearly put her broadness on Midget, her toy lap-dog, sitting beside her. But she threw her head back and laughed her own natural laugh, as coarse as a fishmonger’s and different from the ripples she could give when anybody was around.

“Power?” says she. “Child alive! I have no power, you simple girl. When I put my fingers on their silly heads, my hands might as well be resting on a sawdust pincushion in the Sahara Desert.”

“But the cures?” says I, looking to see if the cocher could overhear us.

That question brought the laugh away from her, and for a minute she looked serious.

“Many a time, when I go to sleep of nights, I think of that myself,” she says, patting my hand.

“I actually know no more of the reason for those cures than you. Nevertheless I know surely enough it’s not me that cures them. No. I think it’s their own wills. A bit of claptrap fools them into exerting their own minds on their bodies, and by the same token the fear of weakness will make the weakness itself. So the world rolls around, my dear.”

It was those words of hers I have never forgotten. I’ve never forgotten, for one reason, because, when I began to play for patients and worked over them with the talk and flap-dash and monkey-shine, and got them to pay their money freely, then half the time they would improve and say they felt the flow of vitality, and some of them went away well and sound as biscuits, when, before they had come to us, they had had doctors and drugs and baths and changes of climate for nothing. I even knew some who would swear that Welstoke’s daughter had more power of healing than the great Welstoke herself, and among them, too, was rich and terribly cultured people, who would come with veils in closed carriages and would be afraid their husbands would find out, and then, if they didn’t pay the bill rendered, all that was necessary was to threaten suit to have them go into a panic and rush the money to us in a hurry. It is wonderful how easy a person drops into new views of what is fair and right when their surroundings change, and something else is wonderful—the fact that I, who sit here with the two of you now, a broken old housemaid, once had gowns as fashionable as any on the Continent, and that without a penny of inheritance or a single love affair.

“All is well with us,” Welstoke used to say, “and all will be well if you have the sense to keep out of a match with some lying-tongued creature who, on his side, will believe nothing you say, and will cast sheeps’ eyes at every plump blonde from Benares to Buffalo. Besides which, my dear, there never was one of them that didn’t snore. Remember that and you are safe.”

Indeed, I thought I was safe, as she called it. I believed that the affectionate natures of my father and of my mother had offset each other in me, for three years went by and never a thought did I give to love of man. And when it came, there was a flit of it like the shadow of a flying bird that comes and goes on the wall and is none the less hard to forget. It is so with all, I’m thinking, high and low, rich and poor; we see these shadows of what might be, and whist! they are gone again, as if to say we’d live again in another world and there is plenty of time in other lives than ours—time for the right head to lean on the shoulder that was meant for it and this hand to touch that!

Be that as it may, the thing happened the winter we were at Venice. Madame Welstoke was in her heyday then, with plenty of money to give dinners for the little crowd that was made up out of dark-brown society—the old men who’d tell of nearly reaching greatness and the like of that, with champagne running from the corners of their eyes and their voices cracking with all the bad-spent years. And there were fat, jeweled women, too, hanging on alimony or adventure, and middle-aged men from this country, who had left New York or Philadelphia for one reason or another of their own, and talked about rates of interest and whistled tunes that were popular in the United States in the seventies, and had a word or two for my shoulders.

“Be careful how you talk too much,” old Welstoke would say. “It’s a very fair presentment you make with a bit of rouge, and a hairdresser, and keeping your big hands under the table as much as possible. Whatever you do, listen, and be on your guard, if the conversation runs to letters or music. One way to be educated is to be silent!”

Perhaps she laid it on so heavy about my lack of “finish,” as she called it, that when my one moment came to speak and say in my plain way a word or two, it gagged me in my throat and would not slide out.

In those days a French Jew, named Vorpin, had a place just off the Grand Canal, called “Trois Folies,” and by waiting till mid-evening for dinner, we could find the café well-nigh empty. The truth was I went there often alone when a fit of depression was on me, and it was no wonder these fits came. A week of idleness, taken by a person who comes from my class, and should be working eight and ten hours a day, is a misfortune often longed for and seldom recognized when it has come.

Little did I think that evening, of which you will hear, that what happened there was to have its hold on Julianna Colfax, who had not then been thought of as coming into the terrible clutches of that which has followed us like a skulk o’ night.

The café was long, and longer yet with its gilt mirrors on the white walls and its row of empty gilded chairs, and I found a table in the corner. Perhaps a man and woman or two was there, either too late or too early for the gayeties that went on. I have forgotten. I only know that the sound of lapping water came in through the lattice beside my table and a breeze, too, that cooled my bare neck and would not cool my head, which was full of thoughts of my days in the old garden in the Isle of Wight and my mother’s song and the colored crayon of my father, looking very stern, and hanging over the green old china vases on the mantel.

I believe the first thing that made me look up was a crash of glass, of crockery, the exclamation of the waiters, and running feet.

“So here is where they boast of excitement?” roared a thick voice. “And yet a man must make it himself.”

The waiters had surrounded him, whoever he was, and I could not see him then.

“Bah!” he cried, beginning to laugh like a stevedore. “I’m an American. Monte Carlo and all that! I’ll pay, you frog-catchers! Take that! Ask the proprietor if that will cover the damage!”

A great explosion of squeaky French followed, a word or two of Italian. The waiters parted and this American stepped out. I had expected to see him taller, but his power was in the weight of his shoulders, the easy swing of his drunken progress down the aisle. The devil-may-care was in him—in his handsome, laughing, wild eyes—the look of a child mad with the promise of a world of pleasures.

“Pay?” he roared again. “I pay as I go! Live? I live as I like! Out of the way, dishes! You are here to-day; on the ashheap to-morrow! So with all of us.”

With that he pulled off another tablecloth, sending the glassware rolling into splinters.

“Come! Collect!” he said, holding a fistful of notes in the air. “How much? How much? Quickly! I see mirrors down beyond! You lie, you mirrors! I’m walking straight! You lie!”

There was no stopping him. With a heavy crooked cane in his strong hand and the perspiration running from his handsome face, he staggered toward the spot where I was sitting. And yet, though he had raised his stick to strike the chandelier above the next table and had let out a yelp of childish delight before he saw me, I had felt no fear of him.

I can tell you, the effect of the meeting of our eyes was astonishing. I’m thinking there wasn’t a muscle in his body that did not pull at him to straighten him up, to take off his hat, to bend him a little backward, as if he had thrust his face among thistles.

As I sat there, looking at those brown eyes of his and listening to his frightened, heavy breathing, I knew well enough I had come to a place where my road of life split and ran in two directions. There are things we know, not by thought or reason or culture, but by the instincts, I’m thinking, that Heaven has put into us along with the rest of the animals. And he knew it, too, perhaps, for he saw me leaning forward on my elbows and a little white and scared of something that can’t be put into words at all, and it sobered him, I can tell you.

“What are you doing here?” he said, as though he had known me these six thousand years.

Silly fool that I was, the color came rushing up into my face and I feared to speak. Believe it or not as you like, I could see Welstoke’s thin lips saying, “Though your nose and your eyes is very refined, it’s your manner of speech as discloses you, my poor dear,” and I was silent as a stone, for I thought him a fine gentleman.

“Do you disapprove of me?” says he.

I smiled, I suppose, but my lips only moved. And a look of pain came into his face.

“Somewhere else—some other time,” he rather whispered. “God knows how. But you will remember Monty Cranch. It’s not soon you’ll be forgetting him, girl.”

With that he turned and walked out of the place as straight as an arrow, and his words were true—as true as death. And though it was all many years ago, I can tell you, it seems to me now that I can hear the water lapping in the canal outside the lattice and see the wind nodding the flowers on the table that were mocking me—a nosegay one minute, and the next a bouquet for a tomb of something gone and buried. Nor from then to now have I opened these lips to tell living soul of that meeting.

Life kept on as it had been going, with many things sliding in and out, but they have nothing to do with what is hanging over us now. Welstoke and I finally came to America, however, and then luck began to turn. There is a great joke behind the scenes of the little dramas of each of us, and the old lady, who had laid her hand on many a twisted wrist or swollen elbow, began with a joint in her thumb and in six months’ time was a hundred shapes with the rheumatism. She was all out of scandals and blackmail then, and lay in bed with her own self coming out, in evil curses for pain and her losses on ’Change, and slow horses, and she who had claptrapped thousands was caught herself by a slick brown man who called himself a Hindoo Yogi and treated her by burning cheap incense in a brass bowl, and a book of prayer that he called the “Word of Harmonious Equilibrium.”

“You are all I have now,” she would say to me after the cupboard was bare. “ Whatever you do, don’t get married, my child. These men are all alike. Some of them begin to get knock-kneed as soon as you marry them, and others have great fat middles. You have your choice in these offenses to good taste.”

The old fox was wasting breath, though, for I had less notions for men than ever before. I had only to shut my eyes to see one, and though time had slid by fast enough, I could only see him as he was, standing half frightened before me in the Trois Folies. He never seemed to change. I thought he’d always be the same.

Besides, I was loyal to old Welstoke, if I do say it. I tried hard at first to keep our patients coming, but it would not go when the Madame herself was out of the business. I never understood how to hold the confidence of people, and then the only thing left to us was a complexion mask that the old lady had invented. It was a failure, at first, but after I had walked my feet off introducing it, we got a bare living from it, and I thought it would stand between me and starvation when Welstoke had gone.

Finally that day came, too, with the undertaker creeping around in his black, sneaking way, and I found when it was all over that she had secretly incorporated a face-bleach company and sold all she owned to it, complexion mask and all, and lost the whole of what she got on that year’s Derby. I’ve understood from the boarding-house keeper that the last words she said, was, “Now I’m really plucked!” And that was the end of her.

CHAPTER II

THE HOUSE ON THE RIVER

There are times like that, when one’s spirit is sick, sore, and lame, as if it was a body, and it goes looking for a place to lie down where nobody will disturb it, and it can feel its dizzy self going into a long sleep. I’ll never forget how sick my soul was then—sick of all the false ways and selfishness and all the old scenes, and all big cities and the flow of faces on the streets and the memory of our elegant apartments in Paris, with their pale brocades at the windows and on the furniture, and sick of the sordid surroundings in the cheap New York boarding-house where the rheumatism had finally reached Welstoke’s heart, and the paper was peeling off the walls. I had always swallowed the airs and graces of society people very hard, and many was the time I’d wish to drop back among people like my father’s family, who didn’t mind the smell of cooking and could get a night’s sleep by laying a head on a pillow and weren’t bothered by frills. So, though it was plain enough that nothing was left for me but to come down in the world, I was not sorry, after all. I could see in the mirror that the easy life I had led at first, and the worry and labor of foot that had come suddenly on top of it, had made me fat of body and yet drawn and old of face. My youth had gone, along with Madame Welstoke, and I had little regret for it or for her.

Business was dreadfully poor then, and for the life of me I could not get a hold on anything in the way of hotel housekeeper, or millinery, or doctor’s office-maid. For every position that offered, which was few, there was a mob of women with their smirks and smiles and references in white envelopes that they were trying to keep clean as the days went by. Of course, I had no references at all, and small good would it do for me to tell of my past experience. Besides, as I’ve often thought since, the way I wore my hair and colored my cheeks, from the habits Welstoke had taught me, was overdone, as all women get to overdoing the thing sooner or later, and more particularly when they think their good looks is threatened by the bleaching and yellowing and drying-up of the wrong side of thirty-five. It’s not a thing to help much in applying for work. Anyway, the short of it was that after six weeks I had no job, for all my walks in the heat to save carfare.

You have never felt the panic that comes when it seems as if Fate was chewing away the strands of the rope that holds you to self-preservation; it is a terrible thing and soon takes out of you all fancy notions. It grabbed me by the neck and bent my pride and sent me off praying to find a place through an employment agency. Cooking, washing and ironing was good enough for me the minute I found my last dollar staring up at me from the palm of this right hand. The fall had begun to come on, and, believe it or not, as you like, I dreamed and dreamed and dreamed of walking the streets at night, through the driving snow of winter and down to the wharves and the river, with its cakes of ice and its welcome. And when the first day I had gone to sit in the intelligence room and a lady—she seemed like a blurred picture to me and her questions were far away like the rumble of a train at night—had hired me, I took my alligator bag that was left out of the wreck of old elegance, and I stood up and tried to follow her like a dog till she stopped me.

It was only when I’d met her later and was on the train bound for a little town up the state, that I turned my eyes, kind of cautious, to see who it was had hired me. You could not call her pretty, by any means. She was tall and thin, and there was a prominent bone sticking out at the back of her neck. Her shoulders sloped, too, and looked as if they had been bent forward on purpose to squeeze her lungs together. Her skin was a bit too yellow and her teeth too large and her lips too shapeless. But the steel of people has nothing to do with the scabbard, I’m thinking. Bodies are many a time disguises, and there was only one place where that woman’s self peeped through like a flower through the dead coals on an ashheap. It was her eyes.

I never have seen the beat of her eyes for loveliness. No, I never have seen two of them—gray they were—that could toss a God’s blessing to you so easy. They gave the lie to her cold lips and made you forget the looks of her, because you knew she’d been made to wear ugliness to test the sweetness of her soul.

I saw ’em when, from all the falseness and worry, all the paint and powder and the mockery of big cities and the jest of money and all the worry and bitterness of the end of my adventures, I felt the relief of being nobody again and going in a home, whose ever it might be, and being where there was trees and hard work and fewer human faces streaming along and looking into yours, only to forget you forever. For the first time since the day I believed I’d never meet Monty Cranch again, my sight was all fogged with tears.

Probably she saw me. And if you’d know the kind of woman she was, I’ll tell you that the first I knew, her thin fingers was on my big hands, and I looked up and there were those two eyes. The train was thumping along through the meadows, but I heard her say, “There, there,” very soft and she never asked me one word about my past either then or ever after. That was her kind of charity, and may God rest her soul!

Oh, when I look back on that day, I wonder how evil thoughts ever came into my mind and how I could ever wish harm to the white house under the big elms in the centre of the town, where among the business blocks it stood very stubborn, and I wonder how I ever plotted wrong for her or him that was her husband and met us that day at the iron gate.

We saw him reading a paper on the wide porch—a young man then, with a big frame and a habit of looking out very solemn from under his eyebrows and over big tortoise-shell glasses. But he had boyish, joking ways of speech, as you know. He came down the walk between the plats of grass that looked like two peaceful, green rugs spread in the midst of all the noise and bustle of the town, and his long hands pulled up the latch and he smiled at the woman as if he loved her. And she said to me in a very proud and dignified way, “Judge Colfax, my husband.”

That was the first time I ever set eyes on him, and in a quarter of a century, beginning as he was then, a judge of county court, and ending, as well you know, I never could see a change in his way of looking at life. Civilization moves here and there and along with it ways and means and customs and fashions and the looks of the buildings and the furniture, but there is a saying of the Judge that comes back to me now. “The way of vice, virtue, passions, and instincts of men is universal and everlasting,” he’d say, and as for himself, his eyes were watching it all from too high a place for him to be jumping this way and that, like one of the sheep running with the flock.

It showed on the inside of the house then, as it did the day he died in this city. The look of it was the same then, with most everything that was in it used for comfort and not for show, though in those first days there was no end of ornaments, that was kept for memory’s sake—a piece of coral as big as your head brought back by Mrs. Colfax’s father, who had been a minister or something to Brazil, and spears from the South Sea Islands, and two big blue biscuitware jars from China that had been a wedding present to the Judge’s mother from an importer of tea, who had courted her and been rejected, and documents in frames which I can’t remember, except a commission in the army signed by a man named James Madison, and a college degree, and a letter written by Jonathan Edwards to a man dying of consumption. They were hard to keep clean, but I liked those things because they reminded a body of the fact that days had gone by when other people was living with their ambitions and loves, and snoring at night, and pain in their wisdom teeth, and all forgotten now!

Anyway, you’d never know they had wealth, they lived so simply, and Mrs. Colfax had even done much of her own housework. I was hired because a baby was coming, and you can believe it was a happy house in those days, with its peace and the sprinklers spraying water on the lawn in the last hot days of the autumn, and the leaves rustling outside the kitchen window, and the wife singing in her room upstairs, and the Judge looking at her as she sat across the table at breakfast, with his eyes wide open, because, whatever anybody else might think, he believed her the most beautiful looking woman in the world.

I was happy, too, speaking generally. The only trouble was the training that Madame Welstoke had given me. After a body has learned a little of being shrewd like a snake, a cat, or a weasel, and looking on anybody as fair game for blackmail or threats or health cures, it is very hard to shut the cover down on them and never employ those methods any more. I liked the Judge and I might say I loved his wife, but there was still something in me that kept me watching for secrets or skeletons in the closet, and little did I know then how my chance would come.

The baby was born in January,—a daughter—and as beautiful a little creature as you would want to see, with red-brown hair and a pink mouth hard to beat. Of course I’ve seen parents fond enough of children, but never any so fond of one that their mouths were hushed as they looked at her. The truth was that, as for Mrs. Colfax, she was so bound up in the child that she suffered.

“Margaret,” she said to me many a time, “a mother’s heart has strange instincts and, I fear, true ones. There is something that tells me that little Julianna will never live.”

“Hush, the nonsense!” I answered her, laughing at her white, frightened face. “Trouble enough you’ll have with her teething without borrowing more from such things as Death! Look out the window, ma’am, at the snow that covers everything, and be thankful that we are not having a green winter.”

“Something will happen,” she said. And I believe it was her worry and nervousness that kept her from getting her strength back and wore her thinner and thinner. She would sit in her window that looked down the slope to the river, with Julianna in her lap, and gaze out at the melting snow, or, later, at the first peep of green in the meadows between the two factories up and down the valley, and at those times I would notice how tired and patient her face looked, though it would all spring up into smiles when she heard the voice of the Judge, who had come in the front door.

Then finally there came a night I remember well. It was about the full moon in the early days of April, but a wind had come up with a lot of clouds blowing across the sky. Maybe it was at ten o’clock—just after I had gone to bed, anyway, and had got to sleep—when I heard the screams—terrible, terrible screams. And I thought they were the screams of a woman.

I jumped up, threw open my window, and tried to look through the night toward the river. I could hear something splash once or twice in the water, and then all was still—still as the grave.

You know how a body feels waked out of a sleep like that. Though it was a warm breeze that blew and though I’ve never been timid, I was shaking like a sheet of paper. It was a minute or two before I could get it out of my mind that some one had been cut from ear to ear. Then I remembered that they had told me that rowdy parties were often boating on the water above the first dam, as the weather grew warmer, and when I listened and heard no sound of any one else in the house stirring, I began to think that my half-sleepy ears had exaggerated the sounds. And then, just as I was about to close the window, a cloud rolled off the moon, and for a second or two there was a great bath of light on the slope, and back of the stable, among the old gnarled apple trees. There were a lot of queer looking shadows among these trees, too, but none so queer as one.

This one shadow was different, for it was not still like the others, but went stopping and starting and scuttling like a crab over the grass—sometimes upright like a man and sometimes on all fours like a beast. At last it stood up and ran from tree to tree in a swaying, moving zigzag. I could see then that it was a man, but for the life of me I could not remember where I’d seen his like. Then another cloud slid over the moon and the night was as dark as velvet again.

You may be sure I passed a restless night. Perhaps the Judge saw it, for when he came in from his regular early morning walk the next day, looking very grave and solemn and troubled, he stared at me a minute before he spoke.