A JUDICIAL DECISION
The judge refused to take a nap, though when he sat down on the veranda
he did take one, lying back in his chair with one of the many sections
of the Sunday paper spread over his face. It was from this somewhat
undignified posture that he was aroused by a step; he started up
hastily.
"I beg your pardon," said the young man, who stood on the steps twirling
his straw hat round and round in his hands. The young man went on with
an anxious smile:
"This is Judge Blair, I presume? My name is Marley--Glenn Marley."
If Marley had known that there were men then in the Ohio penitentiary
serving terms that were longer by years than they would have been had
Judge Blair digested his breakfast, or been allowed to finish his
afternoon nap, he would have chosen another hour to press his suit. But
he had youth's sublime confidence, and its abiding faith in the abstract
quality of justice. He had dreaded this moment, but it had forced itself
upon his keen conscience as a duty, and when he heard that morning that
Judge Blair had returned he resolved to have it out at once.
"May I have a word with you?" he asked, advancing a little.
The judge nodded, but slightly, as if it were necessary for him, as a
fattening man advanced in middle life, to conserve his energies. His nod
seemed to include not only an assent, however reluctant, but a
permission as well, to take the other chair that stood, all ready to
rock comfortably, on the veranda. Marley took the chair but he did not
rock, nor did he yield himself to it, but sat somewhat tensely on its
very edge.
"It's warm this afternoon, isn't it?" he said, trying to keep up his
smile. He felt hopeless about it, but the thought, darting through his
mind, that Lavinia was near, braced his purpose. The judge sat hunched
in his chair, with his short white hair tumbled rather picturesquely,
and his chin low in his collar. His lips were set firmly, his brows
contracted. He breathed heavily, and on his strong aquiline nose, Marley
could see tiny drops of perspiration.
"I have come," said Marley, "to speak to you, Judge Blair, on a matter
of, that is, importance. That is, I have come to ask you if I
might--ah--pay my addresses to your daughter."
Marley thought this form of putting it rather fine, and he was glad that
that much of it, at least, was over. And yet, much as he liked this
old-fashioned formula about paying his addresses, he instantly felt its
inadequacy, and so nerved himself to do it all over.
"I mean Lavinia," he said hurriedly, as if to correct any error of
identification he might have led the judge into. "I want to marry her."
The judge, still breathing heavily, looked at Marley out of his narrowed
eyes.
"You know," Marley said, in an explanatory way, "I love her."
He waited then, but the judge was motionless, even to the hand that hung
at his side over the arm of his chair, still holding his paper. Now and
then, at what seemed to be long, unequal intervals, his eyelids fell
slowly in heavy winks.
"How long have you and Lavinia known each other?" he asked finally.
"I met her several weeks ago, out at Captain Carter's. But I did not see
her again, that is to speak to her, until about a week ago. In one way I
have known her, you might say, but a week; yet I feel that I have known
her a long time, always, in fact. I--I--well, I loved her at first
sight." Marley dropped his face at this speech, for it seemed that he
had made it too sentimental; he had a feeling that the judge so regarded
it. He sat and picked at the braids of straw in his hat.
"And have you spoken to her?" asked the judge.
"Oh yes!" said Marley, looking up quickly.
"And she--?"
"She loves me."
The judge closed his eyes as if in pain. Then he stirred, the paper
dropped from his fingers, and he drew himself up in his chair, as if to
deal with the matter.
"How old are you, Mr. Marley?" he inquired.
"I am twenty-two," said Marley, confidently, as if this maturity must
incline the judge in his favor. "I cast my first vote for McKinley." He
thought this, too, would help matters, and possibly it did.
"You have completed your education?"
"I graduated this summer from the Ohio Wesleyan."
"And what are you doing now, or proposing to do?"
"Just now, I am studying law," he announced. "I'm going to make the law
my profession."
Marley looked up with a high faith in this final appeal, but even that
did not impress the judge as Marley felt a tribute thus delicately
implied should affect him.
"You are reading with a preceptor, I take it?"
"Yes, sir, in Mr. Powell's office."
Judge Blair looked at Marley as if he were deciding what to do with him.
After he had looked a while he gazed off across the street, drumming
with his finger-tips on the arm of his chair. Presently, without
turning, and still gazing abstractedly into the distance--and in that
instant Marley remembered that he had seen the judge stare at the
ceiling of the court room in exactly the same way while sentencing a
culprit--he began to speak.
"Lavinia is yet very young, Mr. Marley," he said, "with no knowledge of
the world, and, perhaps, little of the state of her own mind. You too,
are young, very young, and as yet without an occupation. You are, it is
true, studying law, but it will be three years before you can be
admitted, and many years after that before you can command a practice
that would warrant you in marrying. In this day, the outlook for the
young lawyer is not encouraging. I do not think I would wish a son of
mine to choose that profession; the great changes that have transpired,
and are transpiring in our industrial development, have greatly reduced
the chances of the young lawyer's success. The practice in the smaller
county-seats, like our own, for instance, has almost entirely vanished.
The settlement of titles to real estate, so lucrative a branch of the
law in the early days of my own practice, has deprived the later
practitioners of that source of revenue; the field of criminal law has
become narrowed, unremunerative and almost disreputable. The corporation
work can be handled by one or two firms in each town, and all that seems
to be left is the prosecution of personal injury suits, and that is a
work that hardly appeals to the man of dignity and self-respect. The
large cities have a wider, I might say, the only field, but there the
young lawyer must spend years of the hardest, most unremitting toil
before he can come to anything like success."
The judge paused. He had not intended to speak at such length, but the
habit of the courts was on him, and once started, he found his own
didacticism so pleasing to himself, that it was with reluctance that he
paused at all. He might not have stopped when he did, but gone on almost
indefinitely, as he did when he delivered what were always spoken of as
his beautiful charges to juries, had he not recalled, with something
like a pang of resentment, that the happiness of his own, instead of
another's child, lay at the bottom of all this. He turned then to face
Marley. The young man was sitting there, his eyes wide, and his face
long. The color that flamed in it when he first appeared, was now quite
gone. It was gray and cold instead.
"You will see, Mr. Marley," the judge resumed, "that you are hardly in a
position to ask for my daughter's hand. Of course," the judge allowed a
smile to soften somewhat the fixity of his lips, "I appreciate your
manliness in coming to me, and I do not want to be understood as making
any reflections upon, or in the least questioning, your character, your
worth, or the honor of your intentions. But in view of your youth and of
Lavinia's, and in view of your own, as yet, unsettled position in life,
you must see how impossible it is that anything like an engagement
should subsist between you. I say this because I wish only for Lavinia's
happiness. I may say that I am not unmindful of your happiness, too, and
I esteem it my duty to reach the conclusions I have just presented to
you."
"And I--I can not even see her?" stammered Marley, in his despair.
"I have not said that," the judge said. "I shall always be pleased to
extend to you the hospitality of my house, of course; but I would not
consider it necessary for you to see her regularly, or intimately, and I
certainly would not want you to monopolize her society to the exclusion
of other young men with whom she has been in the habit of associating."
Marley sat there, after this long harangue, with his head downcast. He
sat and turned his hat round and round. At last he did look up with an
appeal in his eyes, but when he saw that the judge was sitting there, as
he had at first, sunk in his chair, breathing heavily and looking at him
out of those sluggish eyes, he arose. He stood a moment, and looked off
across the street somewhere, anywhere. Then he smote one hand lightly
into the other, turned, and said:
"Well--good afternoon, Judge Blair."
"Good afternoon, Mr. Marley," the judge replied. He watched Marley go
down the walk and out of the gate.