THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL
Late that night the Judge sat alone at his desk in the library. There
was a faint pungent odour in the room and at his elbow sat an ash-tray
on which was a little huddle of brown ashes--all that remained of the
photograph whose arrival that afternoon had so disconcerted him. He
sat like a stone image, staring out into the moon-lighted garden, but
really seeing nothing beyond the range of the poisonous ashes at his
side, save a green-and-yellow blur that might have been blent of leaves
and moonshine.
He was looking at the Handwriting on the Wall.
All of his early life had been impeccable, all save that single
lapse--that "brain-storm" which had convulsed the deep and quiet waters
of his nature. It had come and gone with fateful swiftness, and out of
the bitterness of the tragic awakening had grown gradually--as a
spotless lily springs from the silt--a flower of recompense, which, its
roots in the turbid memory, had shed a subtle perfume on his later
life. His steady-going career had been laurelled with place and
honours, and in Echo he had found compensation for the empty and the
missed. And now, after all the years, Fate grinned at him like a
gargoyle from the cloud, holding the thunderbolt to destroy him!
Unless he paid the penalty--with his professional integrity!
The Judge knew all at once that in the Great Economy no act of life was
lost. His had not been. It had only been covered. Somewhere that old
leaf of scribbled paper had lain, inert but potential, waiting the turn
of the wheel to bring it to light. By some satanic twist of
circumstance it had come to the hands of his enemy--Craig was his enemy
now--and in his hands it spelled his own ruin. What weapon was there
to fight with? None. However dastard the act that spread it to the
world, he would stand in the eyes of his fellow-men discredited,
undermined, morally disestablished, stripped and naked of all those
things which were the breath of his life. He thought of his wife--of
Echo. For them humiliation, looks askance. His decision on the
Welles-Scott case was ready, locked in his drawer--lacking only his
signature writ at the bottom--the most vital and far-reaching decision
of any he had rendered. On the first of May it was to be handed down.
He remembered the typewritten line on the photograph: "May 3rd!" On
that day he would be placarded in the public prints!
A hackneyed text flashed through his mind: "Be sure thy sin will find
thee out." He had not sinned, as the world counted it, no. But
chasing the first, a second text etched itself as swiftly: "As a man
thinketh in his heart, so is he."
The coils had woven inextricably, there was no gap in the meshes.
Suppose he did this thing that Craig demanded, rewrote the decision,
perjured himself. Right, by another judgment, would have its way in
the end. The act would save him from shame--would save others as well.
What did it matter? Would not such a solution be best for all
concerned?
"Thou shalt not do evil that good may come!"--it was curious how the
banal, forgotten texts started up, like Jack-in-boxes, from some
boyhood covert of his brain! Not matter? Ah, how much it mattered!
Escape by that road was impossible for him. And there was but one
other road by which he could evade the issue.
He unlocked a desk-drawer and pushed aside its litter of papers. A
small silver-mounted revolver lay there--pointing the one way out. He
picked it up, his fingers shrinking at the chill of the cool metal,
then laid it on the desk. He took a sheet of paper from its place and
began to write: "Dear Echo--"
He started; no, that would not do. He began again: "Dear Charlotte
and--"
He paused an instant and listened--his hearing had caught some sound
above-stairs. It was not repeated and he bent his head again over the
writing. But his fingers would not frame the words. He laid aside the
pen. Better, after all, to go all silently, leaving behind him empty
speculation, which if painful at first, would become in time but a
softened memory!
It was the opening of the door of Echo's room which he had heard. For
hours she had lain sleepless, her brain throbbing, strange painful
pictures flitting under her closed eyelids. Her home world, which had
always seemed simple and uncomplex, even in its darker aspects, had
suddenly become fateful and mysterious, a thing of secret depths and
shaming, piteous revelations. Her own father's past had held a secret
that would not bear the light! That he had loved another woman than
her mother--afterward--that, though the thought was repellent, perhaps
he could not have helped. But that he had ever, ever as a passing
phase, yielded to an infatuation which had taken no thought of
consequence or of convention smote her with a kind of terror. Now,
through his own reckless act, he had become the prey of a shameless
woman--of a blackmailer.
For that was what it seemed to her. It did not occur to her that his
letter might have fallen into other hands. In her imagination, back of
the situation stood the woman who had tempted him, almost to his
complete undoing, in his youth, now--a very wanton!--holding out the
badge of his indiscretion, for a price! The photograph had come to him
with its blunt threat typed at the top: "For Possible Release May 3rd."
Echo had seen the like many a time written upon her father's
printer's-proofs. It meant released for publication. His letter was
to be spread broadcast--unless he met the demand! The hideous
vulgarity of his predicament sent pulsing waves of shame and
humiliation over her. It seemed suddenly that their conventional,
well-ordered existence had dropped all at once into an unnatural and
hateful environment, the murky, unredeemable atmosphere of the
yellow-backed novel and the tawdry film-play. Thoughts such as these
had fought with the acute sympathy that had all her life made her and
her father in feeling wellnigh inseparable, stabbing her love with the
reflection that his deepest heart had, after all, been locked from her.
Gradually, however, the sharper corrosive ache had dulled away, leaving
an overmastering sense of his trouble. Since Nelson had helped him to
his room after his fainting in the library, she had not seen him, for
though he had with curious stubbornness, it had seemed to her, refused
to have the doctor come, he had not appeared at dinner. She wondered
whether he was now asleep, or lying wide-eyed, nursing thoughts like
hers. Finally there had stolen over her an odd uneasiness, a thriving
anxiety. That tenuous telegraphy whose laws evade analysis though its
operations are familiar and which, ever since her childhood, had called
from her a subconscious and involuntary response to his moods that had
sometimes startled them both by its eerie suggestion, now flooded her
mind with a sense of warning. She slipped out of bed to peer through
the blind. She could see a window of the library: light was sifting
from between its heavy curtains--her father was not in his room, then;
he was there. She thrust her feet into worsted slippers, threw a
kimono over her nightgown and ran quickly down the stair.
The light footfall, the whispering rustle, did not reach the Judge. He
was unaware of the girl who had paused uncertainly on the threshold.
His mind was arguing the final phase of his problem.
What he purposed would cut the Gordian knot, make plain-sailing for
others, if not for himself. He would have rendered no decision on the
crucial case. With his escape the problem would solve itself. Craig
would have nothing to gain then in publishing the letter. "Why not?"
he muttered. "It is justifiable--it is neither gross nor cowardly--to
issue one's-self a ticket into the hereafter in order to avert shame
from the innocent and secure peace to those one loves!" His wife was
provided for. His elimination from her equation of life, he reflected
with a tinge of bitterness, would not deeply disturb her even, centred
existence. Echo, he thought likely, would marry Sevier. And
Chilly--of what earthly use was his life to Chilly? "I will do it," he
said to himself. He stretched out his hand--toward the silver-mounted
revolver.
But he drew it back. A further clearer conception had come to him in
that last instant to give him pause. What, after all, was he about to
do? Himself aside, all that was dearest to him aside, was not the act
he contemplated at bottom the murder of a principle, the betrayal of a
trust that he held for the State? He was a public officer, who had
taken oath in the presence of his associates worthily to execute the
functions of his high office, to do justice and fear not. For him the
sin of omission could be no less than the sin of commission. Would
such a shifty suppression of his decision be one whit less a treason
than the rendering of a mendacious one? Either equally besmirched his
honour! Something deeper in him than dread of death, deeper even than
his present fear of life, stirred and throbbed. No, whatever the
outcome, no matter what it held for him and his, he must go through
with it to the bitter end! He buried his face in his hands.
As he sat thus stirless, the sense came to him of another presence in
the room. Another's breath seemed to enwrap the place with feeling.
He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway. "Echo!" he cried
and rose to his feet.
[Illustration: He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway.
"Echo!" he cried, and rose to his feet]
She came to him quickly, a little diffidently. "I couldn't help it,
dear! I felt you--worrying, and I had to come." Suddenly her eyes
fell on the revolver on the desk. She sprang and snatched at it in
panic. "That! Oh, not that! Not that!"
"I--it was in my drawer," he said. "Surely you--"
"Ah," she cried. "I know! You--you received a letter this afternoon.
It made you faint. You haven't been yourself since you read it. And
now you--"
He drew a shaking hand across his eyes. "No, dear," he said more
steadily. "It would not have been--what you think. There was a moment
when--but it has gone, and forever." He took the revolver from her
hand, returned it to the drawer and locked it. "There," he said, "I
give you the key. It will not happen now." There was in his wailing
speech a kind of hopeless acquiescence and finality.
Her heart was beating hard with a painful embarrassment. "Can
you--can't you tell me what the letter was?"
He looked at her palely, his features working. She would have to know
soon enough, yet he shrank with a fastidious pain from telling her.
What would she think of him? "Twenty years ago," he said, "when I was
a young man, I wrote an--an unwise letter. It--it had to do with some
one who died the year it was written, but whose memory I--I treasure.
The threat is made now to publish it, and this would--would shame and
harm that memory and me."
"Some one who is dead?" she repeated bewildered. The picture her fancy
had painted was fading out. "Then how--"
"The old letter has fallen into unfriendly hands."
"And it must come back to hurt you--to spoil your life now! Something
written before I was born! It sha'n't! It sha'n't!" She spoke with
passionate abandon, her words struck out like fire from flint, from the
horror of the knowledge that had sprung to her at sight of the gleaming
thing at which she had snatched. "But you can pay the price, no matter
how much it is! Take my pearls--my rings--my gowns."
He shook his head. "It's not money: what I am asked to pay is my
honour. I am required to alter my judicial decision on the
Welles-Scott case ... to hand down a legal lie."
She looked at him with parted lips. "The Welles-Scott case!"
"Yes. Much hangs on this decision. The great corporate interests--but
you would not understand."
She threw herself beside his chair and knelt close to him. A great
compassion was welling up in her, mingling itself with deep anger at
the cowardly attack upon him. She had known of such conscienceless
warfare in political life--acts of "character assassins" which knew
neither pity nor honourable scruple. "Who has the letter?" she asked.
"Cameron Craig. It came with his card."
She started violently. Cameron Craig! He who had once asked her to
marry him, who had asserted his love for her--he, now bent on her
father's ruin! She had a darting memory of that heavy, ruthless jaw,
those lowering, determined eyes. Cameron Craig? She lifted a stricken
face.
"You see!" he said. "I remember you once said to me that he was not
'one of us.' He isn't. That is why I know that he will stop at
nothing. He will do what he threatens. There is no way out."
She rose to her feet. Her heart was beating so that her breath came
with difficulty and a mist was before her eyes. "You will hand down
the decision." It was a statement, not a question.
"God help me--I must!"
"When?"
"A week from to-day, as I have announced."
She leaned and put her arm about his neck, the key of the drawer still
clenched in her cold hand, and kissed him on the forehead. Even in
that numb moment she felt a certain pride that he, who had known a
passing weakness, was yet, in this crucial moment, so strong.
"You must go back to bed now," he said, heavily. "You are going to
your aunt's to-morrow, aren't you?"
She nodded, her cheek still against his. "I shall take the early
train, before you are up. But I shall be back next day."
She withdrew her arms. "Good night," she half-whispered, then looked
at the locked drawer. "You will not--you will not--"
"I promise," he said.
"Whatever happens?"
"Whatever happens."
An instant later she was gone.