AUTHORITY
It was late when the jury returned. The dusty end of day completed
their dusty deliberations. They settled down in their seats mopping
faces, adjusting waistcoats, casting plausible eyes to the ceiling
or doubtful ones to the floor. The foreman, it was evident, felt his
brief authority. He was clearly sorry that the waiting crowd had
perceptibly diminished. He stood, dyed of mustache, mottled of necktie,
his hair brushed in the country barber's idea of integrity and truth.
The rendering of the verdict was given with his laborious elegance of
diction.
And, suddenly, under even his smug sternness, the dimly lighted
building became surcharged with fatal things! The old drama of youth
and society, the old tragedy was as evident here as in any Greek
theatre set in a hillside. Those who waited greedily for the sentence
felt a certain awe as it was given. The Judge's machine-like voice had
a cold inexorability, very impressive. It was like a clock ticking out
the final words evenly:
"Twenty years at hard labor!"
There was a general intake of breath. To some the sentence was
disgracefully light; to others gratifyingly merciful. There was a slow
rumble of satisfied country virtue. They looked at the prisoner at the
bar. Well, did Terry now know what the law was?
Twenty years at hard labor! Something torturing made Sard's heart
careen like a badly ballasted boat. She got her first vision of the
enigma of life. But with Terry's sentence were they not all sentenced?
Twenty years at hard labor! Watts working for human betterment, for
clearer vision in legal things, yet still under the law. Twenty years
at hard labor! Dora, working in the kitchen, always shadowed by her
brother's fate. Twenty years at hard labor! Colter patiently striving
to piece together his lost puzzled life. Twenty years at hard labor!
All the patient workers, thinkers, teachers and trail blazers of
the great world! Was Terry in such poor company? Were they not all
condemned, all held down, suffocated, frustrated, held back by the
blind significance of crystallized laws?
Sard stumbled over to the little group near Terry. Dora, now
passionately crying, caught at her hand.
"Dora," Sard's voice weakened in her throat, "Dora, don't cry like
that. It isn't only you and Terry, don't you see we are all--all under
the law?"
And then the little country court-house became something very terrible
to her; she stumbled blindly out of it.
For Sard, poor child, knew that the chief issue, the chief point of all
the struggle would be missed. How the trial of Terry O'Brien would be
turned by the countryside merely into a compliment for itself! How it
would be said that Watts Shipman, the great continental lawyer, had
been so impressed by the splendid and inexorable quality of the Trout
County Justice, that he had tried one of its most sensational cases
himself! How the little country paper would gloat over the thing and
fairly tumble over its type as it abandoned its usual clipped stories
and boiler press jokes about the mother-in-law, the old maid, the
unwelcome twins and the absent husband to flare into three sticks of
local felicitations! Veritas, Uncle Felix and E Pluribus Unum would
write their usual letters. The Grand Old Man of the town would make a
speech and everything he said would later be corrected and contradicted
by the three Grand Old Women.
The Roman Holiday furnished by Terry's ruined life would obtain, but
there would be no sober effort for the understanding and education of
future Terrys.
On the way home Sard and her father drove in silence.
The country roads were leafy tunnels through which the lights of their
automobile rayed mysteriously. Owls and bats whirred away from them,
mists arose from the flats or filtered through the woods. The Judge
held his portfolio of carefully fitted papers. In the dusk Sard saw him
heavy, immovable, his cigar in the corner of his mouth. Once or twice
he turned to his daughter as if expecting her comment on the day's
events. But there was no talk between them and the Judge's face grew
harder.
As they entered the drive he waved toward the garage. There gleamed
no patch of orange-colored light in the window of the room above; the
girl's heart suddenly stood still. As she took her hands from the wheel
they trembled.
Again the Judge pointed to the garage. "Leave the car here, don't drive
it around; a new man will wash the cars to-morrow. I dismissed Colter
this morning."
The Judge did not get down from the car, but sat there smoking and
turning his cigar. His gray lips closing on it seemed to be the only
thing the girl could look at; she could not look as far as his eyes and
the Judge knew that her face became slowly and suffocatingly a scarlet
consciousness. He gave a short grunt.
"Exactly; you're not to see him again," he said. Then, "I all but
kicked that fellow off the place." As the wild tears rushed to the
young eyes: "It's your own behavior, young lady. I've never limited you
nor held you back," the Judge said grimly. "I thought you were a lady;
I thought you lived under the right laws."
Under the laws----!
Her father did not move from beside her in the seat and Sard dared not
press by him out of the driver's seat. She sat, her straight figure
dilating, her hands clenched, the red stain on her face seeming to burn
down into her body and to make another sort of woman of her--What sort?
She could see what sort her father thought she was. The piteous eyes
were dense with shame.
At first she thought she could not, must not speak, then a man's kind
eyes, understanding, compassionate, rallying, looked again into hers.
"Courage!" came Watts' voice. He must have known. The lawyer with his
priest's habit of the confessional of reading storm and stress back of
faces must have read the new strange agony back of hers.
To do honor to Shipman's belief in her, she must meet this thing calmly
and without disrespect or passion. The girl swallowed once; with lifted
face, turned on her father a look that might, had he noted it, made him
wonder. For the uplifted features were swept clean of resentment. Sard
was recognizing the parent's claim on her, trying reasonably to meet
it, but the Judge saw only one thing; his hard, old eyes told him he
had made his decision just in time and that he must act quickly.
"You--you're letting yourself care for this man." The tones, though not
loud, lashed on her; the Judge was deliberately making her ashamed. "I
should have thought as my daughter, even if not for yourself, you would
have had more pride."
Sard, slowly turning the watch on her wrist round and round, listened.
There was only one thing to do, to try to meet the eyes, to meet the
accusation with respect. But--but where was the respect due her, to her
motives and actions? Had not this man, her own father, been willing to
degrade her in her own estimation without hearing her, taking counsel
with her?
"Dad," she gave a little helpless shiver, "I don't think you know; you
don't understand, or you couldn't say such a thing--as--as that!"
But Bogart, taking out the cigar, smiled at it with a shrewd squint.
Well, of course, he did know, and she, this untutored young thing,
didn't, that was all!
Sard's father knew what would be the plans of a ne'er-do-well who could
make an ardent, indulged young person fall in love with him. "Pah!" The
Judge's gorge rose at it, also at what he called Sard's "deceit," it
being the means of having him employ this man, rose up and condemned
her.
He saw her bowed head in the dusk, the girl's cheek white on her blue
scarf, and cleared his throat. "It isn't pleasant," he admitted; then
with a rasp, "I never expected to speak to you like this any more than
I should expect to thrash Dunstan, but," went on the Judge grimly,
"under some circumstances I should take pleasure in doing that very
thing. Now stop all this nonsense," he assumed that Sard was crying.
"I've had a hard morning," the Judge always saw himself as unnerved by
his court-room experiences, "but I'm going to be obeyed."
His hand went out; it clenched on the girl's arm; it was not hurtful,
only hard, arresting and cold. "You're to have self-control," said the
Judge sharply, "and you're to obey me! Understand?"
But she turned a set and stern face on him. That soft echo of Shipman's
"Courage!" had sent the flame of all her ancestors in her. "You are
not fair," she stammered. "I am ready to--to"--Sard quivered over the
hard word, "obey, but I can't be cut off, dried up, stopped in all
that I really care about." She stiffened suddenly, flaring on him with
hot mouth. "Oh, you can't be my father, not in spirit, or you wouldn't
stand off and judge me, condemn me, like this; you'd help me, you'd
be," the tortured girl caught her breath, "a friend; you wouldn't be
willing to----"
For answer the Judge rose. He cast an eye to the sky and took out his
watch. "You have an aunt," he said sententiously, "a woman, and a lady,
to talk things over with." He saw the curling lip of rebellion, adding,
"Of course, if you have no use for the society of ladies and social
equals, if you care only for gutter snipes and wharf rats, that's your
own loss. My business," said the Judge, getting heavily down from the
car, "my business is to see that you remember you're my daughter, even
if I have to use pretty severe means to make you.... My daughter,
flirting with a tramp, making herself the comment of the town and the
clubs, is a thing I will not allow!" said the magistrate. "That is a
little too low!"
The cheap word "flirting," its hopeless connotation, the inhuman
density and commonplace acceptance of the whole matter, seemed to goad
Sard into a frenzy.
"Ah, I'm not your daughter," burst out the girl wildly. "I'm not the
daughter of coarse, narrow, cruel, smug things."
With the familiar eyes slowly turning on her, with their awful
arraignment of her as something vulgar, unworthy, she quivered like
a frightened animal. "I don't feel like you--I _couldn't!_ Such
disgusting thoughts couldn't stay in my mind--I couldn't be so--so
common as you."
It was out now, her condemnation of him. They were pitted against each
other, and Sard with a feminine prophetic pang knew to what extent. The
only way to influence the Judge would have been her mother's way, the
little helpless scented timid lady's way, and the girl knew miserably
that hers could never be that way. Yet here she was fighting, not only
for her integrity as a dignified woman, but for--for someone who until
now, but for her, had been helpless, dazed, a fine sensitive being
shut out of all human contacts by his ignorance of what contacts were
normally his.
The man turned and faced his daughter; something remorseless came into
his eyes. His mouth gripped the cigar. "Either," said the Judge slowly,
"either you are my daughter and do as I say, or you don't do as I
say--and go----" he muttered doggedly, adding, "I don't care where!"
Then, his eyes professionally piercing, he remarked coolly, over his
cigar, "There, that'll do, you've worked yourself up enough, you don't
need to be theatrical! Your duty," said the Judge pompously, "is
to drop all this poppy-cock about unfortunates, the under-dogs and
gutter snipes, whom you affect. Be natural, be normal," said the Judge
largely. "Go around with your kind and your own age, though, as far as
I can see, they're as addle-pated as yourself. Drop all this nonsense,
I say, and _don't see Colter again_--do you hear?" For the girl, now
that he was out of the car, could turn her face from him.
The Judge slowly fulminated, gradually bulged with authority. He seemed
solemn even to himself as he laid down his final command. He took the
cigar from his mouth. "Don't see Colter again!" His eyes, reading his
daughter's, he was looking mercilessly on her young agony, making it
naked and flaying it, saw the writhings of her as she took the lash.
Sard made a slow desperate gesture; she had winced, half shrunk from
him, but she seemed resolved now to meet the thing in its entirety.
"I'm sorry," said the girl in a low voice, "I can't promise that. Last
week, perhaps, but"--with a strange little sigh of inevitability,
"not now, Dad. I'm sorry," Sard looked sadly into his face, "I can't
promise."
The Judge was stupefied. "Can't promise?" he queried. "Can't promise?
But I gave you my orders! Do you realize what you're saying?"
"Courage!" Shipman's low voice, pleading for human understanding,
came to her. And another voice, the calm, thoughtful voice of Colter.
She saw and recognized instantly her kinship with this soul that had
come to her so strangely; she knew that she read it right and that no
matter what its oblivion and dismay, it had come to her, belonged to
her. Yet with all youth's insecurity and doubt she realized, too, that
she could hardly trust herself. Her eyes widened, deepened; with a
sudden strange, wild gesture she threw herself forward. Her arms went
half-way about her father's neck. "Oh, help me," she begged, "help me!
Don't you see that I can't promise? Oh, Father," wept Sard, "why should
we two be like this?"
It was perhaps the truest sign, had the girl but known it, of the depth
of feeling that had been born in her. When a woman truly loves, her
heart goes out to all those with whom she has a relationship under the
great new trouble; for her there must be no small meanness, no stabbing
dislikes, no impatience. When a woman truly loves, she is tender to the
world.
"I can't promise that," the girl wept desperately; "won't you help me,
Dad?"
But she might as well have asked help from the automobile. With a
strange gesture of disgust and spurning the Judge held her coldly off.
What he said was reiterated with majesty. He slowly raised the cigar in
his hand and looked at it. Suddenly, with a bitter ejaculation, a short
wry shake of the whole body, he flung it away. He passed the slender
figure that had thrown itself miserably on the turf at his side and
walked rapidly toward the house.
No one saw the Judge that long summer evening; his study was vacant.
The talking-machine was silent, his goldfish pool, where he often sat
feeding the fishes, was deserted; and yet the whole place, forbidding
and shadowed, seemed full of his personality.
So Sard could not go to the house, she could not see Miss Aurelia,
discuss the trial, conjecture as to Minga's and Dunstan's whereabouts.
The girl, her body aching, her eyes half blind with surging thoughts,
wandered to the little fruit orchard. It seemed to her that the gray
ancient trees, like good little crones, welcomed her, and that the long
grass and the rifts of leaves and patches of starred sky spoke to her.
"You are part of us, Sard; we have struggled and fought, too; we have
followed instincts and been smitten and wounded. You are like us, Sard,
you have come into our laws."
The part of the orchard where the girl threw herself down was dense
and deep and its dimness cooled her heart and mind. Concealed from the
murmurings of the house and garden, she lay pondering. The kind little
old trees mothered her; she opened young eyes and stared pitifully at
them, now clenching her hands and softly crying, now softly opening
them and shuddering.
"_As if I had done something wrong! As if I had done something wrong!_"
Her own sentence beat and hammered into Sard's brain until it seemed as
if she had done something wrong. So, sometimes, suspicion and influence
can put guilt on a clean creature! Under the strange half-awakeness,
the half-conscious struggles of a full-grown woman coming to life,
before her there suddenly rose the Gorgon face of Society, of the thing
called actual life. It turned her young heart and body to stone. The
looks and words of Sard's father had been unmistakable; they had made
her warm-hearted interest in the Man on the Place, the slow sense of
delighted companionship, the mysterious attraction and trust, something
shameful!
"_As if I had done something wrong! As if I had done something wrong!_"
Sard turned miserably, staring up at the sky. With the fairness, the
willingness to face things peculiar to her, she could in a measure
understand her father's anger and sense of outrage. The girl hardly
rebelled against this, unjust as it was, but her helplessness with her
own problem, the impossibility of proceeding on this strange and rare
path without shame and mud-flinging, for the very path itself became
evident to her.
She remembered Miss Aurelia's twittering and misgivings when once
or twice she had gone to read with Colter on a bench under the
horse-chestnut tree. She remembered Tawny Troop's cheap scorn; she had
been "made ashamed."
Even Watts Shipman, it seemed, had had misgivings. He, too, had
endeavored to "make her think," and now it was out. There was no hiding
it, no possible explanation; she cared for Colter, cared for him with
the marvelous gleaming tide, the dewy garden-like rapture, the vivid,
etched, romantic stir and storm of a girl's first feeling. It was out;
known, discussed, condemned and made shameful. The scarlet flame that
had stained Sard's face brought a blazing fire of pride into her heart.
Boldly she cast imagination and self-will on this fire of pride.
"I _care_," she breathed. "I care. It is my life, not theirs! I will go
before them all with Colter and say--'I care'!"
The gray twilight grew darker in its language and breathed down to
sleep. Roses emptied tiny jars of scent on the night. Lilies burned
tall pastilles. Leaves pressed their little hands together in some
prayer of darkness. Now and then some small thing like a clock stirred
in the long grass near Sard and tried to remind her of time and
obligations, but the woe of the whole youthful frame meant nothing to
them. They went on in their little ticking way, busy and inevitable.
These things did, however, mean unutterable emotions to the man who
came suddenly upon them, who viewed them pitifully in the long grass
where long ago the fire-flies had begun to rise and glimmer. To the
startled, half-rising girl's face, Colter half groaned. Quickly he
tempered his voice and manner. He, it seemed, was in no passion of
resentment, and he sought to quell hers.
"I thought I saw you go in here--I waited a long time for you to come
out." Colter hesitated. "I wanted to say 'good-bye' before I went. Do
you know how late it is?"
For answer she gave a long sigh of relief. "I thought you had gone!"
she said. "Is it late?"
The man looked at the girl lying there in the long grass. It was a
different Sard Bogart from any he had seen and known since the early
spring, since that March day when she had rescued him. He could not
look at her thus. Something instinctive and delicate made Colter turn
his head away and remain standing. Under the trees he stood immovable,
like a statue, thinking with utmost concern upon this prostrate,
abandoned grief of youth. He stood, his back to her, looking out toward
the slow gathering stars.
His quiet, the absolute calm of him, made Sard wonder. Suddenly she sat
up; her hands went to her hair. She was glad he could not see her eyes
and wondered if he could have heard her sobbing. Again, inquiringly,
she looked at the tall thin form with its broad shoulders and the head,
nobly poised, set to a listening attitude.
"If we are very quiet," said Colter at last, "we can hear the wind
freshening down the river." Somehow, she knew it was the way he took to
quiet her. She was hushed like a storming child.
After a few seconds: "I did not hear you come." She tried to say it
naturally, but her relief, the long shuddering sigh, struck into him.
The man, his face still turned away, murmured something.
"I did not hear you." Sard rose and went toward him in the dark.
"Perhaps I should not have come," he said. He carefully kept the senses
of mistress and employed between them. "But I was very anxious. Shall I
go?"
"No." The girl's voice, under his steady leadership, grew clearer. Sard
began to get herself together. Here was someone who understood, who
needed few words and who, she was convinced, cared. Sard only thought
that word "cared." She dared not think the word "love," with its
overwhelming waves.
She stood there twisting a piece of grass in nervous fingers. "Father
told me!" She said it with a kind of helpless shame. "I am so sorry
that you are going, Colter. You seemed so happy lately--and I--I
believed that we could help you, take you back to yourself, give you
life again."
For answer the man turned and gave her one swift look.
In the summer night Sard saw with wonder that there was a curious
competency, a serene purpose in those eyes. In some dumb moment of wild
joy she realized that her instinct had taught her true. This was no
perplexed "hired man" with no friends nor employment. This was--this
was--
"You have helped me more than you know." His voice was grave and
restoring. "I have come back further to my own than I dare think of
now, and I came by a beautiful path, your sympathy and pure faith. So
you must not sorrow like this. You must not distress yourself like
this. Things will be clearer."
In the night his clear voice of authority moved the girl strangely.
It was an authority and assurance of high character that in her
desperately clouded spirit she reached out for. Instinctively, like a
wilting plant, the young form straightened and freshened until the man
stopped looking at the stars.
He turned toward her and looked long upon the face that had become his
star. Colter made a little sorrowful gesture. "I have brought you such
pain, and--I can't help!" His hands clenched for a second, the low
voice for a second caressed her. "But I will come back if you wish me
to. I can promise you to come back."
Her eyes darkened. "Promise!" she bade him fiercely. "Promise----!"
But he was silent. It seemed that he was determined to get Sard out of
this mood, to hold her to her best self, the steady clear-sighted self
he had seen.
"I do want you to," breathed Sard without shame. "I have grown used to
you----" stammering. There was no immediate answer.
She peered at the tall form standing in the summer night almost
curiously. They had seemed to change places, Colter and she. Once she
had protected, reassured, stimulated and encouraged a weak and sickly
man. Now, what was it that encircled, that from his gentle but firmly
disciplined presence, dominated her?
"I think you must have grown better, stronger," faltered the girl. She
had a kind of childish awe. "You seem different!"
The dark figure moved toward her. "I am different!" He breathed a
little more rapidly. "I found a letter--an old letter stuck into a
small Greek book I had, and there were names, places that I remembered.
It brought back things--people."
The man's voice suddenly sank into a bottomless pit of thronging
memories. He stirred, and took a step toward her, holding out his hand.
She put hers quickly into it. The ardent, generous action seemed again
to make him a man of inflexible control, for he held the hand only a
moment, raised it to his lips, kissed it and then gently put it down.
"You have always trusted me? You have always known me?" he asked in a
sort of wonder.
"I have always known what you were inside your soul better than you
knew yourself," she returned vividly. And as the sensitive long face
turned on her, "I knew that you were _you_."
"If there were time," he answered, "I could tell you what that letter
has brought back,--names, events, associations, a college, but which
college I don't know, and outside, some sorrowful things, some shadow
that brought my Night. What that shadow is I don't know, and until I am
sure it is no shadow on my own life I must not come to you, my dear. I
mustn't come to you----"
She was silent.
Colter, an indescribable strength on his face, added, "But outside of
that, your father thinks, naturally, that I am unworthy, but I am sure
I am worthy of you, as worthy as any man may be! Oh, things keep coming
back, coming back!"
From the man's voice one could see that these things that came back
were a veritable tide of joy and anguish, but that in any case they
were life and sanity.
Suddenly, with uncontrolled tenderness, he moved to her side. "Sard,
child, you belong to me," he said gently. She could hear this man's
breath, his heart plunging in his chest. She almost waited to be swept
to him, to be lost in him, but that did not come. Under his voice and
look lay judgment, a guidance that calmed all their passion.
Colter took both her hands; he looked into her quivering face. "I
was hungry and ye took me in," he said brokenly, "a stranger and ye
ministered unto me."
There was a long silence. The crickets clicked their little time
devices; the stars were long ropes of flowers; the trees, in great
shapes of withheld tenderness, shadowed and shut them in; and in the
little gray fruit orchard a girl's spirit felt its wings brush against
another spirit. A girl's courage and fineness leaned with a great
gratitude against a firmness and fineness greater than its own.