I. An Answer to MacMechem 371
II. "Why Care?" 378
ILLUSTRATIONS
A picture there among the law-books Frontispiece
"Listen to me, Estabrook" 120
"It must be Julianna!" 238
She did not speak. She seemed in doubt 372
From drawings by Harold J. Cue.
BOOK I
THE PROBLEM OF MACMECHEM
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....
BOOK II
THE AUTOMATIC SHEIK
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?"