"Well, Mr. Estabrook, these pieces were not written several years

apart--at different periods of life, were they?"

"Why, no," said I.

"They are not the work of one person, then," he said, with firm

conviction. "I would stake my reputation on that."

"Then one is an attempt to imitate the other?" I said, stifling a glad

exclamation.

"That's the rub," said he. "And, to be frank, I might spend a month

without being able to say which was the imitated and which the

imitating. I would almost think you had stumbled on two specimens which,

merely by coincidence, bore a wonderful resemblance to each other. It

lies between that and the cleverest, most practiced forgery I have ever

seen."

You may be sure that his decision gave me a sense of triumph; without

speculating as to the truth, it was enough for me to know that Julianna

had not, as I had at first suspected, been a party to this vulgar and

melodramatic flourish. I berated myself for having entertained any doubt

and now felt anew, and with aggravation, my affection for her. This

outcome of my adventure with the Sheik, in fact, restored my spirit,

made me forget my pride, and, as you will see, was enough to put me in

condition to receive that which was about to befall me.

CHAPTER IV

THE FACE

My thoughts as I entered the portico of that building where I had my

apartments were not only of Julianna, but were also in those channels

where I have no doubt your own opinion of my narrative must run. I

freely admit, as I then was forced to admit, that my lovemaking had been

attended with many bizarre and abnormal happenings; yet at the time I

sneered at the questions which rose in my own mind and bravely asserted

to myself that the chances of winning Julianna were not wholly lost.

In the lower hall of the building in which I had quarters there were

stationed until six at night a telephone operator and a doorman. Perhaps

you have noticed that I tell you these matters in considerable detail,

and I will continue to do this, because my natural dread of disclosing

the intimate affairs of my life has kept me heretofore from sharing my

story with any one, and now that I have lifted the cover and drawn the

veil of my experience, I can only find justification, in so narrating

the sequence of extraordinary events, by observing the strictest

adherence to detail and accuracy in the hope that perhaps you, by the

virtue of a fresh and unprejudiced viewpoint, may be able to unravel

some of the tangle in which I am, even now, enmeshed.

As I have said, at six the telephone girl at the switchboard and the

doorman, for some reason which I could never understand, were replaced

by an old negro who served as both, and who was the most garrulous,

indiscreet individual I have ever seen.

As if to affirm these characteristics he spoke to me the moment I had

entered, in a voice which seemed to be adapted to a general address to

the three or four other bachelors who were waiting in the frescoed

vestibule for a conveyance.

"Yaas, sah, Mr. Estabrook, sah. De dohman lef' a message, sah. Der has

been a lady waitin' foh you, sah, mos' all de ahfternoon. She comin'

back, she say--dis evenin'. She sutt'nly act very queer, sah."

"All right," I snapped. "It's one of my clients."

"Um-um," he said, shaking his head. "I spec she ain't, Mr. Estabrook,

sah. She mos' likely has pussonal business, sah!"

The others--Folsom the broker, and Madison, and Ingle the architect--had

evidently dined well, preparing for a musical comedy, and they snickered

without shame.

"Let my man know when she comes," said I, and without smiling hurried

into the elevator.

I had no belief that the woman, whoever she might be, would come back

after dark to call upon me. With my conflicting thoughts about Julianna,

I forgot the incident. It was therefore with some surprise that I heard

Saito, my Jap, arouse me from my sleepy reverie, to which exhaustion had

reduced my mind, to tell me that a lady was waiting in the reception

room downstairs.

You may understand the conservative nature of my life and habits more

thoroughly when I tell you that the mere idea that a woman had dared to

ask for me at my apartment in the evening caused me the greatest

anxiety. As if to prove what dependence we can put upon our intuitions,

I felt, on my way down, most strongly, that an evil event was about to

take place.

Nothing could, I think, better illustrate the nonsense of attaching

importance to these fore-warnings than to tell you that the woman who

waited for me was Julianna herself!

My first instinct, before I had been seen by her, was to hurry her out

of the garish little reception room, where, through the door which

opened into the hallway, she might well have been seen by anybody; it

was only when she greeted me and turned her face toward the tiled floor,

and I saw that her shoulders drooped and that her hands hung down at

her side, and that she stood like a guilty, punished, and remorseful

child, that my wish to protect her was displaced by a mad desire to take

her in my arms and comfort her.

"Julianna!" I cried. "What has happened? Is it the Judge? Tell me! Why

did you come?"

She shook her head and lowered it still more, until the sweeping curve

of her bare neck, from the fine hair behind her ears to the back of the

lace collar of her waist, was visible.

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

her there, softly.

She looked up then without the slightest indication of either surprise

or reproach.

"I liked that," she whispered. "I didn't know how I was going to tell

you, but now I can."

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

"I love you," she said. "I could not let you go. I thought last night

that I could carry it through. I thought my duty was to stay with

father. But it isn't!"

"And you came _here_ to tell me!" I gasped.

"Why not?" she said, with a catch in her voice. "I was afraid I would

never see you again and I love you."

When I think of all the sham there is among women, I treasure the memory

of that simple little explanation. It was delivered as a full answer to

all the conventionalities from here back to the time of the Serpent. It

was spoken in a low but confident voice, with her hands upon her breast

as if to calm the emotions within, and was directed toward me with the

first frank exposure of her eyes which were still wet with tears.

"I have been miserable!" she said. "A woman is meant for some man, after

all. And if she resists, she is resisting God! It all has been shown to

me so clearly. And I knew that you were the one. There's nothing else

that makes any difference, and it sweeps you off your feet, so it must

be nature, because it gave me the courage to telephone you and then try

to find you and come here and wait and come again, and only nature can

make any one go against all her habits and education. And I believe I'll

call you Jerry, if you still--"

"Good God! Love you?" said I. "Forever!"

"Always?"

"Forever."

She gave her burning hands to mine, and oblivious of the old negro,

whose eyes were upon us, we stood there, looking at each other in awe,

very much frightened and very much, for that moment,--and I sometimes

wonder if not in truth,--the centre of the universe.

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

"Yes," said I.

"Then I must go back quickly," she explained, after a moment. "I do not

want father to know yet. I want to prepare the way. I don't want you to

speak with him for a week. I will tell him then. Perhaps you think it is

strange. But Friday, when he knows, you may come."

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

"I want to kiss you, Julianna," I whispered.

She looked up to see whether the driver could observe us. He could not.

And then the mischief-loving quality of womankind appeared in her. She

gave forth a glad little laugh.

"On Friday," she said.

The door slammed, and I thought, as I caught a last glance at her then,

that she was a luminous being of dreams, lighting the dark recess of a

common cab.

This impression recurred so often in those following days that at times

there rose the uncanny suspicion that the woman who had visited me had

not been one of reality, of flesh and blood, and beating heart and

sweet, warm breath. Her smile, her voice, her personality had not seemed

a part of real life, but almost the manifestations of a spirit which,

timidly and with the hope of some reincarnation in life, had come to

claim my vows. I believed that I knew well enough why Julianna, if it

were she, had planned to avoid a sudden disclosure of our betrothal to

the Judge, but, none the less, I fretted at the sluggishness of time,

which, like a country horse, will not go faster for the wishing or the

beating.

I wished, too, that she had said she would meet me in her afternoon

walks to the Monument and wondered that, if she loved me, she was able

to forbid herself a meeting, even though she had felt that good sense

demanded a period of reflection and a readjustment of view, so that when

we did see each other again, it would be with firmer minds and steadier

hearts. I would have gladly foregone all this value of reserve and

restraint for one look at her face, one touch of her sleeve, one word

from her tender, curving lips.

And yet I was happy in those days--so painfully happy that I heard

voices telling me that such happiness does not last, that ecstasies are

tricks of fate by which man's joy is fattened for slaughter, that from

some ambush a horrible thing was peering.

Strangely enough, these fears were connected in no way with the warnings

which I had had from my eavesdropping or even from the definite threat

which had come out of my grotesque experience with the Sheik of Baalbec.

The piece of writing, which had begun, "You are in danger," I had

dropped into a file of papers, and though I suppose it is somewhere

among them now, I have never yielded to the temptation to look at it

again. I may have thought of it merely to add to the opinion of Jarvis

that the writing was not Julianna's, the apparently indisputable fact

that, at the moment the warning had been written, Julianna was, by the

word of the apartment house doorman, waiting for me in the little

reception room. Furthermore, with my success in winning her, with the

intoxication of it, I began to look upon the strange and unexplained

matters which had so perplexed me as trivial illusions beneath the

consideration of good sense. However much you may be surprised at my

willful blindness, your wonder cannot equal that which I myself feel

to-night.

And now, when I am about to tell you of that memorable Friday, I must

impress upon you that no detail of it is distorted in my memory, that so

clear and vivid were the impressions upon my senses that, were I to live

to the age of pyramids, I could recall every slight sequence with

accuracy. I say this because you are a physician and as such, no

doubt,--and it is no different in the case of us lawyers,--have learned

the absurd fallibility of ordinary human testimony, not excluding that

which proceeds from the highest and most honorable type of our

civilization.

The day, as I was about to tell you, had been saved from the heat of

the season by a breeze which blew from the water and once or twice even

reached the velocity of a storm wind. A hundred times I had looked out

my office window and a hundred times I had seen that not one speck of

cloud showed in the sky. Yet all day long, while I tried to work, only

to find myself all on edge with expectancy, I could hear the flap and

rustle of the American flag on the Custom-House roof, which was

straining at its cords and lashing itself into a frenzy like a wild

creature in chains.

I am not sure that a dry storm of this kind is not freighted with some

nerve-twanging quality. I have often noticed on such days a universal

irritability on the part of mankind, and I have been informed by those

who have traveled much that often a nervous wind of this kind, in

countries where such things happen, precedes some disaster such as

volcanic eruptions, avalanches, earthquakes, and tidal waves.

My own nervousness, however, took the form of impatience. I was absurdly

eager to go at once to Julianna, and the fact that the hour for dinner

had finally arrived, and that the remaining time was short, only served

to increase my impatience the more. I could not assign any cause for

this other than my wish to see Julianna, for now I knew in my mind and

heart, by reason and by instinct, that the Judge had been right, that

once having given her love she had given all, and, with that noble and

perhaps pathetic trait of fine women, would never change.

At last I found myself at her door, at last she herself had opened it,

and was smiling at me--as beautiful, more beautiful, than I had ever

seen her. I remember that, with an innocent and spontaneous outburst of

affection, she caught my hand in hers and tucked it under her soft round

arm in playful symbolism of capture.

"You must not say a word to me," she said. "I have never been so happy!

But he is in there. He wants to see you alone and you must hurry."

"Hurry?" I protested.

"I don't know why," she said, with a nervous little laugh. "I suppose

it's because I want you to talk to him and come to me as quickly as you

can."

Then, with a gentle pressure from behind, she pushed me through the

curtains into the familiar study and I heard her feet scampering up the

soft carpet on the broad, black-walnut stairs.

The Judge was sitting in his easy-chair beside the table. A book was

open on his knees, a long-stemmed pipe was on the chair arm, and the

gray and grizzled old dog lay, with head on paws, at his feet. Above him

a huge wreath of thin smoke hung in the air. Had I been a painter, I

should have wished to lay that picture upon canvas, because seldom

could one see expressed so completely the evening of an honest day and

of an honorable life, the tranquillity of home, the comfort of

meditation, the affection for faithful dog, old volume, and seasoned

pipe.

As he looked up at me, however, it suddenly seemed to me that he had

grown old; behind his smile of warm greeting I fancied I could observe a

haunted look, the ghostly flickering forth of some unwelcome thought

held in the subconsciousness.

"Why, Estabrook!" he cried, when he had seen me. "Bless my soul, I

didn't know you would be so prompt. I have understood that young men

approached these interviews with reluctance."

"You forget, sir," I answered, knowing that he would have a jest at my

expense, "that we made the arrangement in advance."

"We did! We did! That's a fact. But I had no idea that you would be

successful, at least so soon, and if I may say it--so--so--precipitously."

"I plead the spirit of the age," said I.

"It's a spirit common to all ages, I take it," he answered, with a quirk

of his judicial mouth. "Do I understand that you and my daughter have

first become engaged and now wish my permission to see enough of each

other to become acquainted?"

Perhaps he hit a centre ring with this thrust, for I could only stammer

forth an awkward statement about being very sure of my feelings.

"They all are sure!" he said, with a good-natured cynicism. Then he

smiled again and pointed toward the ceiling with a long forefinger.

"Perhaps you may be pleased to know that she is very sure," he

whispered.

I sat down.

"Yes," said he solemnly. "You are to be envied. I believe her love--as I

have seen it grow in these weeks--is the sweetest thing that ever flowed

from a human soul."

"You knew that she at first sent me away in the name of her duty to

you?" said I.

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

the table.

"No," said he, with a break in his voice. "But I shall not quickly

forget that you have been fair enough to her and to me to tell me that."

"May I have her?" I asked.

"Yes," said he. "Of course you may."

I hesitated a moment. Then I laughed. "She told me when you had said

that to go to her."

I rose.

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

I had not been watching his expression, but now, when I looked up at

him, I saw that the gray look which I had fancied I had seen under his

smile had now come out upon his face.

"Estabrook," he said, leaning forward toward me with his lips

compressed, "sometime, perhaps years from now, perhaps never, but, if

you choose, to-night--you may know what a problem I have had to solve,

and what it will cost me to say to you that which I am going to say."

He had lowered his voice as if he wished to be sure that no one could

overhear him, and now, when he stopped, he stood with his head turned as

if listening to be sure that no one was in the hallway. No sounds came,

however, except those of the dog, who whined softly in his dreams, and

the complaint of the dry wind, which, instead of diminishing with night,

had perhaps increased its intensity, and the rattle of the long French

windows through which I could see the gnarled old wistaria vine clinging

desperately to the iron balcony, its leaves tossing about as if in

agony.

"I have sat on the bench for many years, trying with my imperfect

intelligence to adjust the misshapen affairs of men and women," the

Judge went on. "Never have I been forced to deal with so terrible a

question as lies before me now--to-night."

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

"Judge," said I, "how can I help?"

"I am afraid," he said slowly, and apparently avoiding my gaze,--"I am

afraid that I must call upon you in a manner which will severely weigh

upon you. Estabrook," he put his hand upon my shoulder. "I've done my

best. Do you hear? I've done my best."

"I will never doubt it," I assured him. "Nor do you need to doubt me."

He looked at me steadily for a second; then he went to a drawer and,

opening it, took out a packet of folded papers. It was evident that he

had placed it there so that he could reach it easily.

I suppose that the gravity of his bearing, the trembling of his hands,

in which these papers rustled, and the anxious expression with which he

gazed at me, as if I were to decide some question of life or death,

infected me with his unrest. I got up, paced back and forth, and finally

sat down again facing his empty easy-chair, with my back to the long

windows.

The Judge watched every movement I made, his eyes staring out at me from

under the brush of their brows. At last, when I had seated myself, he

came and sat in front of me, laid the papers on his knees and smoothed

them with the palm of his shaking hand.

"My boy," he said, "I wrote these papers, not for you, but for my

Julianna. Never has a man had a task so calculated to break his heart.

She was not to read my message to her unless death came and took me, for

while I lived, I felt that I might spare her. See! Her name is written

across this outside page."

I could find no words to fill the pauses which he seemed obliged to

make, for, as you may well believe, I felt the presence of a crisis in

my affairs--in the affairs of all of us.

"But, my boy," he went on, "what these pages contain is now for you, if

you so decide."

"Decide?" I managed to say. "What must I decide?"

"I will tell you if God gives me the strength to do it," he said. "It is

about Julianna. It is written here. I have sealed it as you see."

"Something about her?" I cried.

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

"You may break the seal if you must. I have fought many battles to bring

myself to tell you that you may read what is there."

I reached for the package.

"Wait," said he. "The contents of this document need never be given to

her if she becomes your wife. Nor is it necessary for you to read what

is there set forth if you only will choose not to do so. These are

strange words between men in these modern times, Estabrook. But I have

guarded my honor carefully all my life. And now, though the temptation

has been almost more than I could stand, as you may believe some

day,--or perhaps know in the next five minutes, which are walking toward

us out of eternity,--yet I have determined that you should know

everything if you chose."

"I do choose," I said firmly.

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

"Think!" he begged. "No good can come of your knowledge. It cannot avert

harm if harm must come. And more--be cool in your judgment, or you may

ruin all of us."

"But, Judge Colfax," I cried out, "your proposal of choice is empty. One

cannot reject or accept the unknown."

"It must be so," said he. "There is an astounding fact about Julianna

which you do not know. About that fact I have written this message, so

that when I had gone she might be prepared in case the worst--in case

the worst--the improbable--the unexpected, the unthinkable--should

come."

I caught the arms of the chair in the grip of my two hands and tried to

think, but I could find no reason for my remaining, perhaps for a

lifetime, in ignorance of some unseen menace to the woman I loved. I

think that I was about to tell him that nothing could change my feelings

for Julianna, or shake my faith in her, that it was right that I should

become her defender, and that I, therefore, must know what hung so

threateningly over her. Words were on my tongue, when suddenly the Judge

bent his great frame forward and was in another second half kneeling on

the floor in front of me, his hands clutching my coat. His face then was

the color of concrete, and the dignity which he had worn so long had

slipped from him as an unloosened garment falls.

"For her sake!" he whispered. "For her sake, don't go further. Let the

thing be unspoken. My boy, don't dig up that which is all but buried

forever. Listen to me, Estabrook. You trust me. And I, tell you that if

I were in your place, knowing what I know--"

"Enough," I said, awed by his pleading. "Do you tell me that it is best

for her and for me to make her my wife in ignorance of this thing?"

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

He seemed to be thinking desperately, as if some voice had told him that

only a moment was left for thought. At last he threw his long arms

outward.

"Yes," said he. "I tell you that it is better for you and for her to

know nothing."

"That is sufficient," I said. "I ask no more."

He shut his eyes as one would receive the relief of an opiate after

long agony of the body and for some moments he remained so, his hands,

from which the packet of papers had fallen, relaxed upon his knees. The

starched white shirt he wore crackled absurdly with each long inhalation

of breath.

In those moments a tumult of thoughts went tumbling through my brain,

and as the seconds passed, I almost felt that it was the wind that

howled outside which was blowing these thoughts over each other, as it

would blow dry autumn leaves.

At last the dog rose, stretched himself, and, as if restless, sought

here and there a new place to lie, and the sound of his claws upon the

polished floor recalled the Judge from his almost unconscious reverie.

He half opened his eyes and once or twice moved his thin lips. At last

he spoke and into those commonplace words he put all the meaning which

hours of ranting would have made less plain.

"I am grateful," he said.

When I looked up at him after lowering my head in acknowledgment of his

thanks, I saw again that wonderful smile of benevolence, which, given to

me once before in his office, I believe could only have been bestowed by

one who had had a lifelong practice in love of humanity. Indeed, he only

directed it at me for a moment, and then turned his face a little aside

toward the back of the room, as if he wished to send that expression

through the walls and spread over the whole world its beaming radiance.

You may, then, well imagine my surprise when, without a word or a motion

of any other part of his body, I saw that smile fade from his face. It

disappeared as if a blast of the night wind, entering the room, had

dried it, crumbled it, and blown it away. In its place I now saw the

terrible, eye-widened, and fixed stare which we recognize as the facial

sign of some abject, unreasoning terror, or of death, after the clutch

of some fatal agony.

"Judge Colfax!" I exclaimed.

I waited. I thought I saw his head move a little as if he had heard me,

but with that motion there came a click, the sound of teeth coming

together.

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

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

"It has come," he said in his throat.

I jumped toward him. He did not stir.

"Judge!" I cried.

He did not answer. I waited, bending over him, not daring to guess what

had befallen him, holding my breath. Then, cautiously, I moved my

fingers before his eyes: they did not wink. I placed my hand over his

heart.... It was as still as a rundown clock. The room itself was still.

The wind had paused a moment as if for this.... The Judge was dead. And

yet because he still sat there, his gray head resting on the cushions,

and because he stared so fixedly before him, I could not grasp the fact

of death. I had never met it face to face before. I could not honor its

credentials.

For a moment I stood in front of the old man, with the single thought

that our extraordinary interview had been too much for him: it never

occurred to me to go for assistance any more than it occurred to me that

death, unlike sleep, was a permanent thing, from which the Judge would

never come back again. I simply stood there, awed by the presence of

death, yet crediting death with none of death's attributes.

And as I stood, my attention became more and more fixed upon the Judge's

stare. It did not seem to be a vacant gaze; on the contrary, it seemed

to contain something. It seemed not only fixed; it seemed fixed on some

object. It looked past me, behind me, and there, with all its terror and

all its intelligence, it rested, motionless. It seemed to refute the

notion that dead men cannot see; it seemed to affirm that dead men's

eyes are not dead. Into that terrible stare I looked, fascinated, awed,

hushed, motionless. Then, suddenly, I heard the dog.

[Illustration: LISTEN TO ME, ESTABROOK!]

The great Scotch hound had been snarling. He had growled, for I

remembered it as a fact brought out of the background of my

consciousness. And when I tore my eyes away from the Judge's stare, I

saw that the dog was staring, too,--was staring, was drawing back his

black lips, exposing his yellow teeth. Every hair on his back was erect,

his nostrils were distended as if he were relying upon his sense of

smell to determine the nature of what he saw. Could there be any doubt

that he, living, and his master, dead, still saw something--something

which, because it was behind me, I could not see?

At first I did not dare to look. I felt some dreadful presence behind

me--a presence upon which the lifeless man and the cringing, snarling

beast had set their eyes, a presence which had wiped the smile from the

Judge's face and tightened every nerve and sinew in the dog's lean body.

I could hear the wind, and, in its lapses, the rumble of the city, I

could smell the warm aroma of the Judge's pipe, I could feel my senses

grow keener as I gathered my courage to look over my shoulder.

When at last, after that dragging moment's reluctance, I did so, I

believed that I had looked for no purpose. The room behind me was empty.

My nervous eyes searched the rectangular space, swept over the chairs,

the tea-table covered with its display of rare china, the blue-and-gold

Japanese floor vase, the brasses on the cases of books, the dark walls,

the pictures, the gloomy corners filled with the mist of shadows, the

rugs, the cornice, the draperies.

Then suddenly I saw!

Outside the long French windows, framed in the uncertain outlines of the

old ornate balcony rail and the tossing leaves and branches of the vine,

there appeared, as if it had come floating out of the liquid blackness

of the night, detached from all else, a face.

No sooner had my glance fallen upon this peering countenance than I

thought I saw a startled opening of its lips; it withdrew and was gone.

I had merely caught a glance at it, yet of this I am sure--the face was

white with the pallor of things that grow in a cellar, it was weak with

the terrible drooping, hopeless weakness of endless self-indulgence; it

was a brutal face, and yet wore the expression of timid, anxious,

pathetic inquiry. It was a face that had come to ask a question. And

though, because only the pale skin had reflected the light from within,

I had not seen what might have appeared above or below, and though I may

have been wrong, I received the impression that it was the countenance

of an old woman.

Of course the moment I discovered this apparition, upon which the wild

stare of the Judge in life and in death had rested, I ran forward. I

thought as I did so that I heard the scrape of clothing on the iron

balcony rail and the thud of a heavy object dropping on the grass below.

Flinging open the glass doors, through which a torrent of wind poured

into the room, and leaning out under the twisted branches of the vine, I

tried in vain to penetrate the wall of blackness before me, and force my

sight through it and down into the old garden, from which there arose

only the rushing sound of the dry wind in the shrubbery. All the

universe seemed made of black and hissing chaos. Out of it came blasts

that combed through my disheveled hair and drove fine dust into my eyes.

But of the messenger of death, who had peered in the window for a

moment, and then withdrawn, nothing could be seen.

I turned back, feeling suddenly, for the first time, the emptiness of

body which occurs, perhaps in sympathy with the emptiness of death, and

as I turned, I found myself in the position of the thing that had looked

in at us. The stare of the Judge was still fixed upon that spot, so that

for a moment I received the impression that he was gazing at me. The dog

still whined softly, cowering close to the floor.

I went to the middle of the room: I stood there gathering my wits. I

heard a clock strike somewhere in the kitchen region below, from outside

the window came the rattle of some conveyance, louder, louder, softer,

softer. A passing boy whistled; I heard Julianna's step above me; I

heard the dog licking his paws unconcernedly; I heard the curtains flap

in the wind that filled the room; and finally its ironical little scream

as it lifted from the desk the last opinion the Judge ever wrote and

scattered the loose sheets all over the room. It brought in the dank

smell of the garden.

"I must tell her," I said aloud, and the old dog, senses dulled by age,

wagged his tail. "I must tell her," I repeated, and toiled up the soft,

carpeted stairs.

She was waiting for me in her own room, standing under the soft light

from a hanging, well-shaded, electric lamp. I see her there, clearly,

with the smile fading from her face as she read my own. Indeed, it was

not necessary for me to speak; before I had gathered courage to do so, I

saw her bosom swell with a long breath. She inhaled it jerkily, as one

who is suddenly shocked with a deluge of icy water. I saw the color fade

as the smile had faded before it, and when I had nodded to indicate that

she had guessed the truth, stepped forward, fearing that she would sway

off her feet.

"No, Jerry," she said, with her hands held tight at her sides. "I am

all right. I had expected this some day soon. It is hard to believe, but

has not come without warning. His heart--his great, loving

heart--had--worn out. I do not want you to come with me. I am going

down--alone."

I moved my dry tongue in my mouth: a word of the strange circumstance of

his death was there. But her courage--her steady body, her squared

shoulders, her firm mouth, her eyes which showed her agony, but no sign

of weakness, and her soft voice as she said, "Wait for me

here"--restrained me. I pressed her fingers to my lips and as I saw her

go out, I felt that perhaps never would the opportunity to tell the

story I have told to-night come again.

CHAPTER V

AT DAWN

I think it must have been nearly a half-hour--though the minutes were

themselves hours--before I, waiting in the upper hall beside the window,

through which the arc lights from the street threw jumping white patches

on the ceiling, heard the sound of the old dog's claws on the floor

below and her little catches of breath as she came up.

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

"I love you more than ever," she whispered. "I want you to stay.--Call

Margaret and do what you can. I will come to you by and by."

With these words she pressed my forearm in the grip of her strong

fingers and, entering her own room, shut the door.

I found, when I did mechanically as she had bade me do, that Margaret,

with the instinct of an old servant, which is sometimes as keen as that

of an animal, had already sensed the presence of some crisis and prowled

about in her soft-footed way until she had discovered the truth. She was

lying at the bottom of the stairs, her face buried in her hands and her

broad back rising and falling with slow and silent tides of grief.

Julianna and her father were together the old woman's life. One half had

gone.

"Come, Margaret," said I softly.

"Very well, sir," she answered after a minute, and rising, straightened

her cap, preparing for duty like a broken-hearted soldier. And so she

went on in that next hour or two, telephoning, directing, arranging and

doing with me all those necessary things. In spite of her labors she

seemed always to be at my elbow, a ceaseless little whimpering in her

throat. Her spectacles were befogged with the mist from her old blue

eyes, which, like the color of old china, had faded with wetting and

drying in years of family use, but she did not again give up to her

grief.

Therefore, when at last we looked at each other in the hall in one of

those moments when, at the end of a task, a mental inventory is taken to

be sure that all is done, I was surprised to see her expression change

suddenly, to hear a cry of dismay escape her, and to observe her trundle

herself toward the library door in grotesque haste.

When, following her, I went into the room, I found her thick fingers

pulling open drawer after drawer of the desk, and turning over the

papers they contained.

"It was here, Mr. Estabrook. Oh, my God! Mr. Estabrook, I saw him put

it here!" she cried.

"What?" I asked, with a glimmer of memory.

"The papers. They was marked for her, but she mustn't ever have 'em! I'd

rather they should pluck me from my bones, sir! And I saw him put 'em

here!"

"He took them out again," I cried, touched by her contagious fear. "He

died with them on the floor beside him. I know what you mean. The blue

seal."

"Yes, the blue seal!" she cried in recognition, and stumbling across the

room she fell upon her knees, reaching under the old easy-chair and the

desk, patting over the rug with her hand, turning up its corners,

searching with her face bent down, like a devotee of some strange sect,

muttering to herself.

"She must never see," she exclaimed monotonously. "Poor child, she must

never see. It is worse than death--a hundred times. Oh, what has he done

with that terrible package!"

Suddenly, throwing herself upward and backward, until the upper half of

her body was erect, and with a small object held up to my astonished

eyes between her forefinger and thumb, she uttered a cry of despair and

rage. She had found a piece of the sealing wax with which the packet,

once offered to my eyes, had been fastened!

"It's too late," she wailed miserably. "Do you see that? The girl has

read it. She would not let me in her room. It's too late!"

There was no keeping back the question.

"What was in it?" I cried. "What was written there?"

I saw her old mouth shut as if she meant to show me that I need expect

no disclosure from her.

"I don't know, Mr. Estabrook," said she.

In her eyes, perhaps distorted by the strong lenses of her glasses, I

saw the challenge of stubbornness. I felt myself growing wild with a

desire to break through the unwholesome mystery which had entangled me,

and overcome by any means the silence of this woman. She had arisen. She

was within my reach. And I believe that I put my hands upon her,

catching her two round and fleshy shoulders under my curved palms,

shaking her to and fro with the excess of my excitement. In that moment

before I spoke to her, she looked up at me, surprise and terror written

on her face.

"Tell me!" I roared. "You know this horrible, hidden thing. Confound

you, tell me!"

Her expression changed. I saw surprise become craftiness and fear,

distrust. I saw in her eyes the beginning of that hate which I believe

has never, since that irresponsible moment, diminished.

"You had best leave go of me, Mr. Estabrook," she said calmly. "You

would not act so if the old Judge was alive and here. Nor his daughter,

sir!"

The rebuke, you may believe, was enough.

"I'm sorry," I said.

The old woman, however, wrung her hands and looked toward the room above

as if to indicate to me that nothing was important but the fact that

Julianna had possession of the Judge's _post-mortem_ message.

"Let her tell you if she will," she cried. Then covering her face with

her fat hands, as if to hide some terrible picture of the imagination,

she stumbled forward out of the library.

I have often wondered since, as I wonder to-night, when those spectres

have arisen again, what that old servant meant. At the time it never

occurred to me that but one thing could happen. I had the utmost

confidence in Julianna, and indeed, without thinking much of my own

troubles, I passed that long vigil in the library only with regret that

I could not wrest away from the true and noble woman who had promised to

be my wife, all the terrible grief which, alone in the chamber above,

she must have been suffering. For the first time, I think, in all my

life, which, by training and inherited instincts, had been devoted, I

might say, to the welfare of the Estabrook name and of myself, I felt my

mind--and even my body--filled with a strange and passionate desire to

be the instrument of good, not for myself, but in the name of others and

perhaps in the name of God. My eyes filled with tears, springing not so

much from grief as from belief in myself, not so much from weakness as

from strength. I called upon an unknown force that I felt to be near me

and directing me.

"Save her from misfortune," I said aloud in that silent room. "Protect

her. Comfort her."

The old dog, as if he now understood, raised his head and licked my

hand. I realized then that the wind had died down, and, looking up, I

saw that the balcony and garden were lit by the pale rays of the morning

moon, that the stars shone clearly again through the still air, and that

the odor of flowers, nodding below the window, perfumed the Judge's

study. The pipe, with ashes tumbling out upon the table, by curious

chance had not been moved from the place where he had laid it down.

It seemed to me that I had dreamed restlessly, that the old man had not

left the room, and then, when this fancy had gone, I almost believed

that he had come back as he used to do when he, in his absent-minded

way, had left something behind. With my heart full of him, I got up and

reaching for the pipe I dropped it into my own pocket.

At last the oil in the lamp had been consumed. The burner flickered,

gurgled several times, snapped, and went out; but the failure of this

light served to show that morning was near at hand. The rectangular

squares of the window panes now appeared luminous with the first gray

flow of the east. It seemed to me that the time had come when Julianna

should no longer be alone with her own thoughts; with soft steps I

climbed the stairs and softly I turned the knob of her closed door. If

it had been locked, it was so no longer; it yielded to my gentle,

cautious pressure. The crack widened. Then, for a moment, unseen and

unheard, I stood on the threshold looking in.

She was no longer dressed as I had seen her, for now she was clad in the

soft drapery of some delicate Oriental silk, which, if she had been

standing, would have fallen from the points of her shoulders in

voluminous folds to the floor. She had unloosened her hair; it had

fallen in a torrent of brown and golden light. I could not see her face.

Her back was turned toward me, for she was sitting on the floor facing

the hearth in the middle of the frame of old lavender-and-gold tiles

which marked the fireplace. Her hands were pressed to her temples as if

her head no longer could be relied upon to retain its contents, her

fingers moved this way and that through the hair above her ears, and,

in strange contrast with the glimmer of early day beyond the white

curtains, an uncanny flickering light burned on the hearth, painting the

delicate pallor of her shoulders, neck, ears, and hands with an outline

of fire. It was a picture to give the impression of a beautiful

sorceress crouching to perform some unholy rite.

"Julianna!" I exclaimed softly.

She turned about as one caught red-handed in guilt, and in doing so,

moved far enough to one side to expose the last remnants of written

sheets of paper, which flames were rapidly consuming. A moment more and

these were crisp ashes which whirled about the hearth with a soft rustle

before they fell into heaps of sooty fragments. Whatever the Judge had

written with infinite pain had now been destroyed. And as I looked into

her eyes, I saw, too, that infinite pain had attended their destruction.

Her expression had in it horror, shame, apprehension, and excruciating

grief: never had I believed that a face, naturally so innocent and so

happy, could have been so distorted with mature and terrible emotions as

hers had become in the hours that had passed.

"Julie! my Julie!" I cried.

For answer her fingers reached out toward me in mute appeal, her body

followed, and, crawling to my feet, she clutched the air as if trying to

reach my hands with her own, and then fell forward, flat upon the

floor, unconscious. If in that moment she appeared a groveling thing, it

was only for a moment. Before I could stoop to raise her, she had

regained her senses with two or three sharp inhalations and a fluttering

of her eyelids, had thrust my hands from her and struggled to her feet.

"Go!" she whispered, retreating. "It is unthinkable! Go! Never come near

me!"

"No--no--no!" I said. "Julianna, tell me! What has happened? It is not

you who speaks!"

"No," she answered. "It is not I."

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

"My father. It is his voice. It is his message. And what he has been, I

am. There is no other way."

I moved toward her.

"Tell me this terrible menace behind us--this thing that threatens

us--that works its evil upon us. I will not believe that any fault of it

is yours."

"It is mine because it is his," she said, with a return of her

wonderful self-control. "But no one shall ever hear of it from

me--no--Jerry--not--even you."

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

Another little cry issued from her compressed lips.

"You were willing not to know?"

"Yes."

She went into a corner; without taking her eyes away from mine, she

wrung her hands, again and again.

"Why did I ever see you?" she whispered. "Why did I ever love you? Oh,

go, while I am strong! Go, while I know that you must never ask for me

again! Go, before I bargain with my conscience."

"You cannot send me away," I said. A thousand hidden horrors would not

have daunted me then. "Will you treat my love for you so? Has your own

gone so quickly?"

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

"I am lost," cried she. "I am lost. I cannot do more. Promise by your

love of me,--by your love of God,--never to ask me of those things now

ashes on the hearth--never to so much as speak of them to me--till

eternity."

"What then?--I promise," I said.

"Then I will as solemnly swear to be as good and faithful, as true and

ever-loving wife as God will let me be," she said softly; "and may He

forgive me for what I do, because I love you."

She held out her arms to me, begging to be taken into mine, and when I

had touched her she fell back, with her limp body in the curve of my

elbow, and, looking up at me, offered her parted lips to the first kiss

I had ever given her.

CHAPTER VI

THE MOVING FIGURE AGAIN

Such was a betrothal, sir, so extraordinary that had my natural

repulsion for the unusual permitted me to have told it before, it would

have been with belief that others would think me a man deluded by his

own fancies. And yet these are facts I have told you--cold and bare and

sufficient to have proved to me that the adventure and romance mourned

for by some men are not dead, but, were it only known, still flourish,

concealed in the hearts and experience of such matter-of-fact persons as

myself.

Our marriage, too, was not of the conventional sort. It took place a

fortnight later without any of the celebration usual in such cases. The

death of the Judge, the fact that Julianna had no other immediate

relatives to act as her protectors, and that my own father, whose

affection for me has always been of a rather cold and undemonstrative

type, approved not only of my choice of a wife, but also of my plan for

an immediate marriage, argued against delay. Furthermore, Julianna

herself, with a sad but charming little smile, again and again assured

herself in my presence that she knew her own heart and that for her

part there was no need to prolong a period of preparation.

Often, in those days, she spoke to me of her father, with the deepest

affection, not as if he were dead, but rather as if his spirit still

remained in the old house. She had one of those rare minds that reject

the disagreeable superstitious affectations concerning death and that

overcome hysterical grief. To be sure, for hours at a time she would

suffer an extraordinary melancholy, and then, in my agony of curiosity,

I believed that the spectre which had first appeared before her, the

night of the Judge's death, was whispering to her again. True, however,

to my solemn oath, which I have always kept, I asked her nothing, and

she always emerged from these periods of meditation into moods of gayety

and affection which were more charming than I can describe.

She would romp, mind and body, in all the freshness of youth, with the

most entrancing grace of movement and with her natural brilliant play of

thought.

"I belong to you!" she would exclaim, retreating before my advance.

"Come--take me!"

Then, after I had captured her and she had looked up at me, wrinkling

her nose playfully, she would suddenly grow serious, and from her

smiling eyes tears of happiness would start, and then, for an hour

afterward, she would go singing snatches of song through the house. So

that more than once I saw Margaret Murchie stop her household task to

listen, shut her old eyes and say, "Thank God for his care of her."

It need not surprise you that I tell you of her, for, as you may

understand when I have told you all, I am now facing circumstances

which, for some reason, have caused me to fall in love with her with a

strange, new, and even deeper desire, and which raise the necessity for

me to save her from some unrevealed menace and win her a second time.

The extraordinary fact in the light of this new situation is that our

married life has been, until a year ago, as peaceful as could be.

Whatever I might have suffered at first from the fact that I had been

forbidden to know or ask of the past, these stings soon lost their power

to disturb me. I was glad to forget them because I so hated all things

which might tend to disturb the well-ordered life with which well-bred

families retain their respectable position.

We found our tastes adapted to a common enjoyment of outdoor and

intellectual pleasures, and we spent many hours each week, when alone,

in reading the books which pleased us and in playing duets, in which I,

being an indifferent player of the piano, contrasted my cold technique

with the warmth and expression of her performances upon the 'cello.

Indeed, we showed ourselves in these duets as in our companionship, for

though I loved her, I believe I may have fallen short in those

attentions, those little demonstrations and caresses, upon which some

women seem to be nourished. As for her, she remained unchanged by

marriage or time. By her humor, her tender sympathy, her refreshing,

unaffected ways, she won a large and devoted circle of acquaintance,

composed of both women and men. If any of the former, however, desired

intimacy, they always found a gentle resistance; if the latter, they

were made to see that a fortress had been erected on the borderland.

Until a year ago we were very happy, I think. To be sure, as time passed

without the coming of any child, Julianna suffered that peculiar grief

which, whatever may be its severity, is like no other. The desire for

children was not only in her heart and mind: it was also a keen,

instinctive yearning. Quietly, and without inflicting upon me any of her

distress over unfulfilled hopes of the past, she persisted in the belief

that the gift she most desired would not be withheld from her forever.

Other than this no cloud seemed to be creeping up our sky, and, indeed,

it was only little by little that I realized that some peculiar change

had taken place.

I may say to you, I think, that this strange influence came even more

than a year ago. I have tried in my own mind to establish a connection

between its beginning and an accident which happened at that time.

We had gone for a week-end visit to the Tencorts' farm in the Sweetbriar

Hills, and much against my wishes, expressed, however, sleepily,

Julianna had gone out at sunrise, chosen a rangy mare, saddled the

creature herself, for the grooms were not up, and had ridden off across

the wet fields, alone. Breakfast had already been announced when we

heard the hoofs of the animal and caught glimpses of the horse's yellow

neck and Julianna's plaid jacket, bobbing toward us under the arching

trees.

"Your lady is hardly what one might call a gentle rider," said Jack

Tencort. "As for me, I'm glad to see the mare in a foam for once, but I

would not be pleased to have my own wife--Hello, she is using her right

hand."

I, too, could see that Julianna's left arm was hanging by her side, and

as she pulled up the panting mare below the porch, I noticed that her

lips were white.

"I'm sorry to have forced your animal," she said, "but I was in a hurry

to get back. Jerry! Please hurry. Help me off."

"What's the matter?" cried our host behind me.

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

"Thrown?" cried Tencort, looking for signs of mud or dust on her

costume.

Julianna smiled gamely.

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

You know, of course, that in spite of her unconcerned answers the thing

was serious. The great trouble, I have always thought, was that no good

surgeon was within reaching distance; the country doctor who set the

bones failed to discover the presence of some splinters at the elbow,

which the injury had thrust up into and displaced some of the nerves and

sinew there.

When we had come back home and Nederlinck, the surgeon, had discovered

how the healing process had gone on, he told me that for many weeks my

wife would have to suffer great pain from the readjustment of the

irritated nerves. For two months he did what little he could and then

left the rest to time.

Julianna suffered silently. She complained little, but I could see a

marked change in her. She became restless. I have seen her pace up and

down a room for hours, like a captured animal longing for the jungle,

and remain at the dinner-table, after the time had come to go to our

library for coffee, with her great round eyes staring before her until

some one spoke to her. Her vigor disappeared. The moods which had

followed the reading of the _post-mortem_ message from the Judge

returned; her little exhibits of affection and, I think, even her

innocence of personality disappeared. The spectre, whatever it was,

seemed present once more. At times I believed I saw in her beautiful

face a look of guilt, of fear--the look of a soul in a panic. She became

suspicious of her friends and withdrew from them more and more, at times

with such awkward haste that it seemed as if she believed they were

about to observe some fact which she must, at any cost, hide. Little by

little, too, I believed that I detected signs that she was drawing away

from me.

For some reason I have always dated the beginning of this change to that

morning when Julianna went off to ride alone. Yet, if I wanted to be

sure of bringing back to her face an old trace of her mischievous smile,

it was only necessary for me to question her about the cause of her

accident.

"I have promised the horse never to tell," she would say, putting her

finger to her red lips. And I have never been able to decide whether she

was concealing, playfully, some little folly or awkwardness of her own,

or, behind her light manner, some more serious experience.

In any case, it was plain that some accursed thing had come between us.

I found after some months that I must face this as a fact. We said

little to each other from morning till night. When evening had come I

did not go home, as I always had, with a little thrill of the old

expectation which had never seemed to wear out. Instead I had a

subconscious reluctance to enter a relation in which each day sympathy

and understanding grew less and less. I began to suffer from a desire to

demand from her a complete disclosure of all that had been hidden from

me, and this temptation to break my solemn promise grew when, asking her

on several occasions as to where she had been at this or that hour, I

found that she was evading my questions.

At last it became evident enough that I had not been deceived in my

increasing suspicions that something was wrong. One evening she burst

into tears as she stood before my chair, and then falling on her knees,

caught up my hands in her own and pressed them to her neck, cheeks, and

forehead.

"Whatever happens, you will love me?" she cried out desperately. "Say

you will! Say you will!"

"You know that," I said.

Perhaps I had answered as badly as I could, for it seemed to cause her

the greatest pain.

"I wish you had not said so," she exclaimed, with a wild look in her

eyes. "It is your goodness that hurts. Don't you see what comfort it

must be to a woman to have her husband cruel to her--beat her--abuse

her!"

I drew back from my wife, astounded.

"Stop!" I said, with the first show of stern authority I had ever made

since I had known her. "It's time for you who dare to speak like

that--to tell--"

"No! No!" she cried. "For God's sake, don't forget your promise. If you

do we are lost--I am lost."

She sprang up and away from me, and with her bare arms crossed over her

face and her hands over her ears to shut out all sounds, she ran from

the room.

This, sir, was seven weeks ago, and for many days following she would

sit and look at me constantly, until, feeling her eyes, I would raise my

own to find her face drawn as by a weary period of sleeplessness. At

these moments it seemed to me that she was trying to make me understand,

just as a faithful dog tries at times to communicate his thoughts by the

expectancy, the love, or the pleading shining from his eyes. How much

would I now give had I been able to do it!

Within the space of a week she brought to me the suggestion and the

plan, which I, being driven to desperation by the impending wreck of

our happiness, was mad enough to accept without foreseeing the

punishment I would have to suffer through giving for the second time a

solemn word of honor.

I think on that morning Julianna was more like her old self than she had

been for weeks. Her apartments, though separate from my own, are entered

from mine by a narrow door. I had prepared for breakfast,--which we do

not have served in our rooms according to the degenerate modern

custom,--and then had gone to find her, with the thought in my mind

that, whatever she suffered or feared, it was my duty to help her as

best I might. I had promised myself to be cheerful, yielding, and as

entertaining as possible.

She was sitting on the side of her bed when I came in. The whiteness of

the linen and the pale blue of her morning gown served to bring out the

delicate color of her skin. I was so delighted with this indication of

renewed health that I opened my mouth to express my admiration.

She was quicker than I.

"You find me attractive this morning," she said with a sad little smile.

"I am glad. I wish that I might be attractive to you forever and

ever.--I mean my shoulders, my arms, my hands--free from wrinkles or fat

or dryness."

"I'd love you now if you were to assume the shape of a Chinese dragon,"

I said seriously, "--or the Sheik of Baalbec."

The truth was that I had almost forgotten this latter creature, the

automaton. Apparently she had, too, for at first a puzzled look came to

her eyes, then she smiled up at me with a bit of her own individual

coquetry.

"You are making love this morning?" she said in a gay voice. Yet it

seemed to me that in it was a trace of eagerness, shrewdly directed

toward a concealed purpose.

"I am going to ask you to go away, Jerry," she went on timidly, but

still smiling.

"Go away? When? For what purpose?" I exclaimed.

"Just go away for me--for my sake," she answered, straightening her

body, raising her head, and looking squarely at me with some of her old

strength. "You can go to live in a hotel. You can explain that you are

forced to do so for some business reason. You can say that I have gone

away."

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

"Don't!" she pleaded. "I know very well how unreasonable I may seem. But

if I have earned any gratitude or respect or love from you, just give me

what I ask now and give it to me blindly--without question."

Her eyes held my own as she said these words and I knew she had cast

her spell over me.

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

"I shall stay in this house," she answered, spacing her words. "Margaret

will stay, too. The rest of the servants I shall send away. But of this

I want to be sure--you must not come to find me for three weeks. God

only knows what would happen if you did."

"You are insane!" I cried out, with my hand gripping her round wrist.

"It's that which has hung over us."

She shook her head.

"Worse," said she.

Then, as if to assure me that she had not lost her reason, she recalled

the months which had just gone and described, as I could not, the change

in our home, our life, ourselves.

"It is for you!" she broke out finally, as if she were no longer able to

be calm. "For you and for our future I am begging you to do what I ask."

"Tell me this," said I, stirred by seeing her tremble so violently. "Has

something come to you out of the past?"

"Yes," she said, reaching behind her for the wall. "Ask nothing more. It

has come out of the old, old past. For the love of all that is good,

promise to do as I say."

"And then?" said I.

"Come back to me. I shall be here--then."

I bowed my head.

"On your word of honor," she commanded.

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

I had scarcely done so, however, before I felt her arms about me, the

impact and the clinging of her body. Close to me, plucking at my

fingers, my sleeves, my wrist, her body shaking with her sobs, she

covered me with caresses like those given at some parting for eternity.

"You--are not--in danger of death!" I exclaimed, holding her away from

me at arm's length.

"No, I cannot believe that," she said quietly. "Such as I am, I shall be

when you come back."

With these words she pushed me gently from the room; I found myself

looking into the broad white panel of a closed door. I stood there a

moment, dazed, then going to my chamber, I, with my own hands, packed a

large kit bag, preparing to do as she had asked. It was only after I had

reflected on my promise that I went again to speak with her. I knocked.

There was no answer. I tried the latch. The door was locked.

Without eating my breakfast and with a strange conflict between my trust

in my wife and the memory of my experiences since I had known her, I

left the house and have not passed its threshold, though it is two weeks

to-morrow morning since I left it.

Do you wonder, sir, that I have suffered all the torments which anxiety

can devise or imagination, with its swift picture-film, may unroll

before one's eyes? I have stifled as best I could these uncertain

terrors. By day, when I have plunged into my work at the office, at

times I have been able to shut my mind to the everlasting rehearsal

around and around, over and over again, of the facts which I have told

you to-night; but when night has come, I am the prey of my own thoughts.

For six days, in spite of my exaggerated fear of scandal, I have prowled

like a ghost before my own house, lurking behind trees, watching my own

door like a ten-dollar-a-day detective. Dodging the policeman who would

know me, I have kept my eyes for hours on the dim light that sometimes

burns in my wife's room, and when I have seen the shadow of some one

passing and repassing behind the drawn shade, I have felt my heart in my

throat, and have scarcely been able to restrain myself from calling out

into the night air, "Julianna! Julianna!"

Finally, I must tell you one thing more. I had believed that perhaps the

crisis which had come to her had done so independently of any

personality but mine or hers. I was wrong. To-night, unable to remain

inactive any longer, and by the accumulation of restraint made

desperate, I rung up my house on the telephone. No answer was returned.

The feeling that my wife, in danger, was calling upon me, swept over me

until, had I been open to such beliefs, I would have felt sure that

across the affection and sympathy between us, as across wires, the

message came.

I walked hastily from the hotel into the park, taking the path which I

had used in the pleasant June days when I had met her at the Monument.

You know the kind of night it has been. Therefore when I reached the

border of trees opposite my house, I hardly thought it necessary to seek

the screen of the shrubbery; the arc lights were throwing the dancing

shadows of tree limbs across the pavement, the rush of the wind drowned

the noise of footsteps, and the street was deserted, I thought, except

for the clouds of whirling dust that passed downtown like so many huge

and ghostly pedestrians. I saw that a dim light shone through her blinds

and that the house was the picture of peace, suggesting that the walls

contained comfort, happiness, and the quiet of a peaceful family. So the

fronts of houses lie to us!

At the very moment that this thought came, I saw from my position under

the shadow of a spreading oak, which has not yet dropped its leaves,

that I was not the only person who was observing the light behind the

blinds. A figure was standing not more than a hundred feet away from me,

peering out from beyond one of the light poles. It wore a vizored cap, I

thought, and its head rolled this way and that on top of its spare,

bent, and agile body. Now and then, however, it ceased this grotesque

movement to gaze up at the window. One would have said that this

creature was less a man than an ape.

I am not a coward. "Here," thought I, "is a tangible factor. My word of

honor to Julianna is not broken if I seize this customer, whatever he

may be, and make him explain the part he is acting." I stepped forward

immediately, but he saw me before I had made two steps. From my bearing

and the place where I had concealed myself, he knew at once, I suppose,

that I had been watching him, for, turning with a swift motion, he

plunged into the shrubs and evergreens behind him. That the thing was as

frightened as a rabbit, there can be no doubt; the single little cry it

gave forth was not a scream. You would have called it a squeal! In a

jiffy I was after him, tearing through the branches among which, with a

sinuous twisting of his body, he had just slid; a moment later I reached

the open lawn again. The man had vanished.

I knew well enough that he was hiding, probably flattened on the

ground, among the evergreens. At another time, on a quiet evening,

listening for his movements or even his breathing, might have told me

where he lay, but now the wind and the rattle of dead leaves made it

necessary for me to use my eyes in my search. Therefore I went back

through the bushes, kicking at dark shadows with my foot, my heart

thumping with the excitement of the hunt.

As I reached the street again, I looked up toward my house, and there,

at the front door, I saw a crack widen and a black figure of a man come

out and down the steps. It crossed the street, and when it had gone into

the park, I followed it. You know what happened; this second man was

you.

And now I ask you, Doctor, man to man--For God's sake, tell me what you

know!

BOOK III

THE DOCTOR'S LIMOUSINE

CHAPTER I

A SHADOW ON THE CURTAIN

Such was Jermyn Estabrook's story. I have tried, in repeating it, not

only to include all the details given by this desperate young man, but

to suggest also the coldness and accuracy of his speech. Why? Because

the very manner of narration is indicative of the man's character. He

belongs to the dry, dessicated, and abominably respectable class of our

society. Pah! I have no patience with them. They live apart, believing

themselves rarities; the world is content to let them do it, because

theirs is a segregation of stupidity. And Estabrook, though he had fine

qualities, belonged to them.

Nothing could have indicated this more clearly than the emphasis he put

on his fear of scandal, the smug way he spoke of his word of honor, and

the self-conscious blush that came into his handsome face when he

mentioned the name of Estabrook. Why, even the menace to his beautiful

Julianna was not quite sufficient to cause this egotist to forget his

duties toward himself! So if he had not acted with such nobility of

spirit during the remainder of our adventures begun that night, I could

not sit here now and write that I learned to be very fond of him.

At any rate, Estabrook asked me what I knew and I told him all that I

have written--about Virginia, that she seemed to feel the existence of

something the other side of her bedroom wall, about MacMechem's notes on

the case, the game of life and death I was playing, my conversation with

the old servant, and for full measure, I told him where I had learned to

place a blow behind a gentleman's ear. It is necessary to deal with men

as excited as Estabrook without showing the nervousness that one may

feel one's self.

When I had finished, he jumped up from his chair, and, clasping his

hands behind his back, in the manner of lawyers, he walked twice across

the room.

"Why, don't you see?" he cried. "All that you have told me simply adds

mystery to mystery, apprehension to apprehension, fear to fear. And it

strikes me that, though my own experience has been bizarre enough, your

observations and that of this other doctor who is dead are even more

fantastic. What do you hope to accomplish by telling me this gruesome,

unnatural state of affairs?"

"I hope to make you act," I said, putting a chair in his path. "We are

sensible men. There are, no doubt, explanations for all occurrences.

Our limited mental equipment may not find them at once. But the first

thing to recognize is the one important fact; neither of us doubts that

your wife is in some grave danger. Personally I believe that if you are

not mentally deranged, she is! In any case, it's your duty to go to your

house. Force an entrance if necessary. It cannot be done too soon!"

Estabrook clenched his hands as he heard me, but after a moment he began

to shake his head doggedly.

"Can't you see that it would mean publicity?" he asked.

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

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

"Impossible," he groaned. "I've given her my solemn promise!"

I suppose I've a reputation for being short of speech, often frank, and

sometimes profane. I then allowed myself in my rage to be all three. It

was to no purpose. Estabrook would not consent to tearing the cover from

his affairs in any way which would cost him the breach of his confounded

words of honor.

"You are a madman!" I exclaimed in my vexation. "The death of your wife

may be entered against you. What folly!"

"Doctor," he answered quietly, "I want your help and not abuse. Your

storming will not accomplish anything. You are the only living soul to

whom I have confessed the presence of a skeleton in my married life, and

I want you to help me. I have been told repeatedly that you are a man of

courage, steadiness of nerve, scientific eminence, and high ability."

I could not disagree with him.

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

"What of her?"

"She knows something," said I. "You have heard how she talked to me, how

she tried to conceal her excitement, how she treated me as a spy, how

guilty she seemed, and you have indicated that you, as well as I,

believe that she knows what is at the bottom of this."

"Yes, yes," cried Estabrook. "I am sure that she knows. But what

then--what then? What can we do?"

"My dear fellow," I said, "why 'we'?"

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

"I beg your pardon," he answered with a look of chagrin. "I've been

under a strain, I suppose, and I forgot that you have nothing at stake."

"Not so fast, Estabrook," I said. "Take another nip of the brandy. I

prescribe it for you. And not so fast. I have a good deal at stake."

"What?"

"My case," I said.

He looked at me with admiration.

"Furthermore," I went on, "I feel a certain brotherhood with you, young

man. You are the first person with whom I've rolled on the sod for many

years. I have punched you in the neck. You are now my patient and my

guest. You have confided in me. You have made an unconscious appeal to

me for help. Above all, I am one of those old fogies you have mentioned,

who secretly mourn the dying-out of romance. Here!--a glass!--to

adventure!"

Estabrook smiled sourly, but he drank.

"Thank you," he said. "I appreciate your spirit and, permit me to say,

also your attempt to make me treat this terrible affair in a spirit of

sport. But old Margaret is the superlative of stubbornness. We cannot

expect to go to her to obtain information. I have lived in the house

with her for more than six years. Can I say whether she is a saint or a

crafty villainess? No. I know no more now than when I shook her in my

anger on the evening the Judge died. She has never addressed me of her

own will since. She will give up nothing to me. You have tried her

already."

"I am less conservative in my ideas," I answered. "Since we are in this

field of turbulence and mystery, let us be turbulent and mysterious. All

that you say is true. Therefore, we must force the truth from Margaret

Murchie."

"You mean to induce her--" he began.

"Stuff!" said I. "The thing I mean is assault and battery. The thing I

mean is kidnapping. You may believe in clapping your hand over her mouth

and struggling with her, while we take her out. Personally I prefer a

cone containing the fumes of a liquid called cataleptol, fortunately

well known in my profession, while still a stranger to criminals."

But the careful Estabrook shook his head.

"You are not serious?" said he doubtfully. "Do you plan for me to take

part in this?"

"There must be two," I said. "And once we have the lady in this room, I

will be willing to guarantee that she will tell all she knows. I cannot

ask my chauffeur to go with me, for I trust him about as implicitly as I

trust a rattlesnake. Which makes me think--can you run a car?"

Estabrook was weakening. He nodded. I looked at my watch and found that

it was after eleven. I drew the curtain and saw that sheets of rain were

still being blown slantwise across the foggy radiance of the arc lights.

There is a trace of the criminal in me. Perhaps all men feel it at

times. Just then, observing the wildness of the storm, I felt the joy

of a midnight misdoing, even more than my desire to find the answer to

MacMechem's question.

"I shall be glad to know how you propose to gain a second admittance,"

said Estabrook, when, after tripping over the wet cobblestones and

bending our shoulders to the drive of the cold rain, we had groped

through the black alley to the dimly lit garage. "I'll also be glad to

know why you suppose you can draw a statement from the old woman."

"My dear fellow," said I, "there is the cause of many of your troubles!

You are always wanting to see your way to the end. And the way there

often must be cut through a trackless waste of events that haven't

happened."

"In light of my experience it seems to me that your statement is

unreasonable," he muttered peevishly; "but since you are satisfied, I

will be, too. If I understand your plan, however, while you sit dry and

comfortable within this machine, I am to ride outside, wet to the

marrow."

At this remark the sleepy garage attendant rubbed his eyes, filling them

with the sting of gasoline, swore, and forgot to submit my new chauffeur

to the inspection of his first surprise. He drew back the door and we

trundled out into the water-swept thoroughfare.

The rain, which had begun with a thin drive, had now settled into one

of those sod-soaking, autumn downpours, commonly called an equinoctial

storm. Estabrook was showing the effect of his nervous strain

by driving the machine through it with a recklessness of which

I disapproved, not only because we had twice skidded like a

curling-stone from one side of the asphalt to the other, but also

because I did not wish undue attention attracted to our course. The

windows in front of me and to the right and left were covered with

streaks of water and fogged with the smoke of my cigarettes which, in

my pleasurable excitement, I smoked one after the other; therefore

everything outside--the spots of light which lengthened into streaks,

the shadows, the other vehicles, the glaring fronts of theatres in

Federal Circle--formed a ribbon of smutched panorama, the running of

which obliterated vertical lines and made all the world horizontal. At

each crossing we jumped, landing again to scoot forward to the next,

where, through the opening of side streets, came the faint sound of

whistles in the harbor; and still, Estabrook,--confound him!--to my

cautions bellowed through the speaking-tube, paid no attention.

With shocking suddenness it occurred to me, for the first time,

seriously, that I had no assurance that this man who drove me was not a

maniac!

I reviewed the meeting with him, the tale he had unfolded, his

distraught actions. I am fairly familiar with psychopathic symptoms and

my summary of all that I had observed in him indicated clearly enough

that he was as sane as any one of us. But for the first time in my life

I realized the feeling of uncertainty about a physician's diagnosis

which a patient must endure. A doctor delivers his opinion as a matter

of self-assertion; the layman receives it as a matter of

self-preservation. Riding in that flying car, I found myself in both

positions. As a physician I was wholly satisfied with my conclusion; as

a man I found myself still in doubt and picturing to myself a wild

ten-minute ride, which I had no power to prevent, ending in a chaos of

broken glass, twisted metal, clothing, blood, and flaming gasoline.

"MacMechem met violent death the moment he became curious as to the

other side of the blue wall," I thought, with a twinge of the

superstitious fear which touches prowlers as well as presidents,

professors as well as paupers.

We were whirling around a corner then, and through the glass and over

Estabrook's broad shoulders, I believed I saw again the treetops of the

park.

"At least he knows where he lives," said I to myself as we drew up to

the curb.

"Good!" I whispered to him, when I had stepped out into the swash of

the rain. "Frankly, I hardly enjoyed it. You drive like a demonstrator."

"I'm a ruin of nerves," he answered, shivering. "I'm afraid I'm a poor

assistant for you, anyway. What do you want me to do?"

"Just climb inside there where it is warmer," I said, clapping him on

the shoulder. "I'll be back in a minute."

"Back in a minute?" he repeated as if dazed.

"From the Marburys', if you don't mind," I explained.

He leaned back against the cushions, disregarding the fact that with

every nervous movement water ran from him as from a squeezed sponge.

"Oh, I forgot your patient," said he, with a twitching mouth. "But, for

God's sake, don't keep me waiting long!"

I shook my head in answer; then ran, rather than walked, up the

Marburys' steps; indeed, that night taught me how active a corpulent old

codger can be if the need comes.

Miss Peters evidently had been at the window in her night vigil,

watching the storm; she opened the door.

"Well?" said I.

"The tide has turned."

Under the hall light I looked up at her stony, expressionless face. The

Sphinx itself was never more noncommittal.

"What do you mean?"

"I supposed you knew," she whispered. "I supposed that was why you came

back to-night so late."

I exclaimed in a hoarse and savage whisper. I was furious. This time I

had fought with disease not only, as in a common struggle, with

carnivorous Death, but as a hardened sinner whose heart has suddenly

opened to a child.

"Virginia is dead!" I said, glaring at her.

She never changed the coldness of her tone.

"No," she said. "She is going to get well."

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

"The blue wall," she answered with a sneer.

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

As I pushed open the door, I observed that the nurse had procured a red

silk shade to screen the single electric lamp on the table. The yellow

rays were changed to a pink, reflected on the wall, sending their rosy

lights into the depths of that bottomless blue; the breaking of a clear

day after a spring rain has no softer mingling of colors. For a moment I

looked at the chart, then with new hope turned toward Virginia herself.

Either the new tints diffused by the lamp deceived the eye, or the

little girl's pale skin had in fact been warmed by a new response from

the springs of life. She was sleeping quietly, her innocent face turned

a little toward me and in the faint, illusive smile at her mouth, and in

the relaxation of her beautiful hands, I read the confirmation of Miss

Peters's prophecy. I, too, believed just then that Virginia would not

die, and that, as so rarely happens in this disease, her recovery would

be complete.

"It is a wild night," said the bony nurse when I had tiptoed out of the

room.

She seemed to be wishing to draw from me an opinion on the extraordinary

rally the child had made. That was her way; she always invited

discussion of a subject by comments about something wholly irrelevant.

"We shall see," I answered again. "A relapse might be fatal.

To-morrow--we shall see."

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

"Yes," said I, "and the treatment till then must be the same. Who

knows--"

"Who knows?" she repeated.

A blast of wind and water and the closing of the door seemed to deny an

answer. I found myself on the steps again, looking into the staring eyes

of my car, and, with a sharp jump of my thoughts, wondering how we were

to accomplish the work we had come to do. I descended, however, and

when I had reached the door of my limousine, I saw Estabrook's drawn

face pressed close to the glass. It was the sight of him that gave me an

idea; it was his first words that, for a moment, drove it from my mind.

"Look! Look!" he said to me. "Look at her window!"

I had merely noticed that a new, bright light shone there; now, in a

quick glance over my shoulder, I saw a shadow on the curtain--the shadow

of a figure standing with its arms extended above a head, thrown back as

if in agony.

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

He took my wrist in the grip of his cold hand. "My God, Doctor, I don't

know," he said. "It looks--its motions, its attitudes, its posture!--it

looks like the thing I saw outside the Judge's window!"

CHAPTER II

MARGARET

Well, now,--his words made me shudder! I confess it with some

reluctance. Of course a doctor comes in contact with enough real

horrors. They become ordinary. It is those undefined, doubtful things

which run fear through the veins like a drug. Nevertheless I caught

myself in time to conceal my nervousness.

"Here, here, Estabrook!" I said in a sharp, businesslike tone. "We

didn't come to watch drawn curtains. The question is, did you bring your

keys?"

Without asking me questions, he handed them over.

"Now, understand me," I said, for I could see that in truth he was in no

condition to offer much assistance. "My advice is for you to take these

keys and walk into your own house."

"I can't do that," he said irritably. "I've told you I can't do it--and

why I can't."

"Then understand me further," I said when a shriek of wind had gone off

down the avenue. "I have debated this question and decided that we must

not disturb your wife. She has warned against that, and perhaps it is

better to assume she is not insane and take her warning."

"Yes, yes," he cried. "That is right."

"I shall not parley with Margaret Murchie," I went on. "Move a little! I

have something I want to reach under the seat. There!--I shall not ask

her to come. She will have no choice. It will all be over before she has

time to cry out. And you must be ready to help me carry her into this

car."

"The law--" he began.

"Oh, I know that," said I. "But it is a choice of doing this, or

nothing. Any other course either makes you break your confounded,

nonsensical word of honor, or else raises a noise that will bring the

reporters around like so many vultures. It is your affair, after all.

Shall I stop here?"

Again, as I spoke, I felt the pleasurable thrill of adventure which I

had supposed had gone with my youth.

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

"Yes."

"As you say!" he agreed. "The old servant knows. She must tell. I can't

stand it any longer. She must be made to tell."

I nodded. He indicated the proper key with a touch of his forefinger.

Whereupon, crossing the sidewalk again and ascending the Estabrooks'

steps with as much unconcern as if they had been my own, I fitted the

key softly and turned the lock.

The very instant that I tried to open the heavy door, however, I knew

that a watcher who had been observing our movements through the silk

curtains was behind it. I felt a resisting pressure. I heard a stifled

scream. It was no moment for indecision. With an unbelievable rapidity

of thought, I estimated the chances of the unseen person being armed,

the hazard of his giving vent to an uproar which would bring the

neighborhood about our ears. Then I threw my body against the door with

all the force I could muster. It yielded suddenly; with a crash it flew

back against the tiled wall. I was precipitated forward and a second

later found myself in the ridiculous performance of rolling around on

the floor with what felt to me like a fat wash, consigned to a laundry.

It was, however, a bundle from which choking imprecations and grunts

exploded, and which for a turn or two was enlivened with upheavals of

some strength. Well enough to laugh now, but at that moment, you may be

sure, I was searching with my free hand for the person's mouth.

I had meant to be gentle: if I clapped my hand over the source of the

little cries and protests, when I had found it, with something more than

decision, you must blame the circumstances. I had expected to surprise

old Margaret from behind and give her such a whiff of cataleptol that

she would have suffered no inconvenience. Unfortunately I had not at

first known that it was she whom I had encountered, and now there were

obvious difficulties in the way of my applying my saturated gauze to her

nose.

"Be still!" I commanded, trying to uncork my vial, with a single hand.

"Be still. No harm will come to you."

Her reply was a well-placed thrust of her two old knees which nearly

sent me through the glass. It placed me in a position, however, where I

could, with a push of my foot, close the door and shut us into the

vestibule, so that her clamor, which had broken forth again, might be

muffled.

Furthermore, I now had my chance to unloose my anæsthetic. I can hear

the squeak of that fat cork now; I can recall the pleasure of smelling

those dizzy fumes as I thrust the gauze into her face. Time after time

she succeeded in thrusting it aside with her clawing hands; time after

time I succeeded in jamming it back again against her nose. The scene is

not one I recall with pride, but my brief excuse must be that I do not

like to have my undertakings fail. The delicacies of the best of us,

moreover, depart at critical junctures.

However that may be, the important point is that finally I felt her

struggles subside. Her hands no longer acted with intelligence; they

moved about wildly in front of her face, as if to push away a tangle of

cobwebs. Her head rolled to and fro; the gurglings, sputters,

half-uttered cries of rage, ceased.

"Breathe again!" said I, with the habitual phrase of the surgeon

administering an anæsthetic. "Breathe away--breathe away--Ah,

now!--breathe--breathe--breathe!"

And at last she was still. I threw the gauze into the corner. I got up

panting, for I am not built for exercise, and, panting still, I peeped

out through the silk curtains to be sure that in our little adventure we

had attracted no attention.

The wind-driven rain still swept down the streets under the iridescent

glows of the arc lights, my car still stood like a forlorn, forgotten

thing in the gutter. In one direction the wet perspective of the avenue

appeared as empty as a street scene on a drop curtain. But when I turned

my eyes the other way my heart gave quick response. Just beyond the iron

fence stood a patrolman.

He had stopped and seemed to be looking directly at the door behind

which I stood. I could see his two bare hands on the iron railing. They

were very conspicuous against the rubber coat--wet, black, and

shiny--which covered his burly figure, and he used them to sway himself

softly backward and forward. It seemed to me that he was debating how to

act, and I believe that I learned then, peeping through the glass, to

what extent guilt and the desire for secrecy will sharpen the

imagination.

I say this, because, almost at the moment that I felt sure he had taken

a step forward toward me, I saw that not his face but his back was

turned toward me, that his hands were behind him and that he had leaned

for a moment on the rail, perhaps to look at the physician's green cross

on my lights. A second later he ducked his helmet into the driving rain

and, walking on, turned into the shadows of the cross-street.

I knew then I had no time to lose. I had been delayed; Margaret Murchie

might regain her senses. And yet, when I had signaled to Estabrook, when

he, without a word, had come, and when I felt the excitement most

keenly, I found myself impressed not with the necessities of the moment,

but rather with the extraordinary grotesqueness of the situation.

"Take her about the knees," said I, and then touched his elbow.

"Estabrook," I added, "this--mind you--happens in a twentieth-century

metropolis."

He did not answer, because the old servant, dashed in her upturned face

by a stream of water running from the coping, moved her arms feebly and

uttered a groan.

"Quick!" said I. "Drop her and crank up the car. I'll do the rest."

He obeyed.

I dragged the burdensome weight of my victim, if you will so call her,

and thrust it into the interior of the vehicle. Estabrook was already on

the chauffeur's seat; as quickly as I tell it, the car had begun to pick

up speed over the wet and slippery street. We flashed by a light or two

and I saw that Margaret Murchie's eyes had lost their stare of

unconsciousness.

"Margaret," said I, "you are all right. Be sensible. There is Mr.

Estabrook in front."

She shook herself convulsively as if to throw off the remnants of the

anæsthetic. Then she caught my sleeve.

"Oh, it's terrible," she cried. "Ye have taken me away from Julie! Bring

me back to her, do you hear? You and Mr. Estabrook--What do ye want of

me?"

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

"You want me to tell it? After all these years? And it's no fault of

mine or hers!"

Suddenly she became excited again.

"Take me back!" she screamed. "You don't know what you do! Take me back

to my Julie! She may need me sore enough!"

"Have sense," I said close to her ear. "We are going to the bottom of

this. You must tell everything--everything from beginning to end."

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

Side.

"It's awful," she said finally. "And it has gone far enough. It's been

more than I can bear. It's time for me to tell! If you, whoever you are,

and Mr. Estabrook will hear, you shall have it all--the living truth of

it--the bottom of what I know."

"Good!" said I. "And now we'll go to my house."

"No, no," she exclaimed. "There is no need for that. I would not be from

the girl while these awful minutes is going by. Who can say what would

happen? Oh, no, sir. Take your cab back to our door, and then--sitting

on this seat--with my eye on that terrible house--and less need of any

of us to worry--I can tell ye all from the first to the last."

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

"Very well," I said. "That is agreed."

And then, picking up the speaking-tube, I told the wretched man at the

wheel. He swung us around; we turned back, and in five minutes more

drew up again, according to my direction, not by the Estabrooks' door,

but under the spreading limbs of the oak across from the Marburys'

ornate residence.

"Take some of this, my boy," I said as he crawled, wet and trembling,

into the interior. "It will be good for you, and for you, Margaret,

too!"

"Oh, Mr. Estabrook!" she exclaimed when she had swallowed the stimulant,

"I lied to you. I once lied to you very sore, as you shall see."

"Enough--enough!" he cried. "What of her--my wife? She is still alive?"

"Have no fear," replied the old woman. "It's not death that's with us,

I'm believing."

The poor fellow wrung his hands.

"But, by the Saints, what I'll tell you now is true," she said, putting

her hands first on his knees and then on mine. "Look! The light is

shining on my face and you can read it if you like. Sure, I'm praying

that you may use the knowledge to save us all."

"Go on," said the young man hoarsely.

And thereupon, in an awkward, jerking manner, which I can only hope to

suggest in the repetition, she told a tale of strange mingling of good

and evil. This was her story....

BOOK IV

A PUPIL OF THE GREAT WELSTOKE

CHAPTER I

LES TROIS FOLIES

I was born on the Isle of Wight. My father was a seafaring man. He owned

his own vessel--a brigantine as sailed from the Thames to British South

Africa and sometimes around the Hope to Madagascar.

Where he met my mother I never knew. He was Scotch and she was an Irish

beauty, I can tell you. Looking back on it now, I believe she was of

rich and proud people and that they had cast her off for her folly in

marrying a man that was rough of cheek and speech, for all his ready

good heart. She was as delicate and high-strung and timid, as he was

brown, big, and fearless as to anything, be it man or typhoon. And yet

it was she who could stick to one purpose as if the character of a

bulldog was behind the slender, girlish face of her, while he was always

making for this and that end, charging at life with head down, like a

bull.

I can see the two of them now, walking together arm in arm, when he'd

come back out of the sea; I can see them strolling off down along the

old hedges of the garden, or sitting beneath the thatched roof of our

cottage which had stood the wind sweeping off the Channel for more time

than any one at Bolanbywick could remember. She looked like a child

beside him, for his shoulders would measure three of the width of hers.

It was from him I have my frame that once called to the eyes of men to

see the figure that it held, though I say it myself. But from her I got

many a trait that fitted me badly, because craftiness and stubbornness

and a weakness for sentiment and the like of that, had best be in a body

small enough to tame them.

The two of them loved each other completely, each in their way, but it

was well that they had no other children. It was well, perhaps, that

when I was seventeen I had grown strong and quick as a hound. My mother

went with him then for her first voyage since her honeymoon, and it was

the last ever seen of her or him, or the only property we owned, which

was the vessel and a cargo of cotton ducks and sheetings for

speculation, bound to the Gold Coast. Sometimes the sea opens its mouth

like that, and the jaws close again.

There was no more education for me! My father's sister was a

boarding-house keeper in London. I was staying with her then, and when

the lawyer found there was no insurance, life, ship, or cargo, she was

for setting me to work the next morning. Poor woman, she had slaved her

life against dust in halls and cockroaches and couples who wanted rooms

without references and the heart had gone from her, and when she died

she left the best of two thousand pound to a clairvoyant and

card-reader, who had robbed her week after week for ten years and more.

I took a place as companion to an old lady, going to Odymi in Hungary.

It was there one of the doctors, who had seen my two bare forearms,

spoke of my strength and told me that I could make good money as a

rubber in the baths, and I was glad of the change from the old woman. I

was proud and short of tongue and patience with her, and we were always

snarling at each other. But time wears those edges off people, I can

tell you!

It was there, at the baths, I fell in with the woman who called herself

Madame Welstoke. She was an evil woman, and of the worst of such,

because she was one who never seemed bad at first, and then, little by

little, as she showed herself, you could get used to her deviltry and

for each step you could find an apology or excuse, until at last the

thing she had done yesterday seemed all right to-day and you were ready

for some new invention of hers to-morrow.

Mainly she treated diseases by the laying on of hands, and the best that

could be said of her as to that was she preyed on the rich and would

take no patients she thought were short of at least fifty pounds to

spend for her mumbo-jumbo and gimcracks. She would talk in a very smooth

voice to those she got in her web--about the flow of vital energy and

the power of positive and negative currents over the valves of the heart

and circulation of the blood. She would roll up her eyes and complain of

how the treatments, which consisted of laying her fingers on a person's

temples and wrists, exhausted her, and at first I thought she really

meant it, and when her good, old motherly face was turned away, many was

the time I laughed. And finally, when I began to see that most of her

patients improved and some were cured, I stopped laughing, for there was

the evidence before my eyes and no denying it.

Whether or no she had power to heal, I would have stayed with her. Her

influence was like slow rot and the germ of it was deep-seated before

you could even see that it was time to resist it. I was acting as her

maid in private at first, and before other people, wherever we

went,--Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Monte Carlo, and lots of places I have

forgotten,--I was supposed to be her daughter who had joined her from

New York. And it was all one to me, for I was drawing a fine pay and

living very rich and I could see that the name and game of Mrs.

Welstoke spelled prosperity.

All this, of course, was before I even saw the Judge, but I was getting

my training, and learning how easy money could be made to come through a

little fol-de-rol here and a bit of blackmail there, and introducing one

class of society to another in the next place. It was easy to salve my

conscience, because the old adventuress was curing many a poor sleepless

or rheumatic creature who could spend money like dirt to get the result,

and besides, she took an interest in me enough to make me wonder why,

and she was always keeping her eyes open like a pilot to see that I

didn't meet any man who might be after me. To tell the truth, she talked

so much of the villainy of males and the horrors of marriage that

finally I believed what she said and turned my young face away from all

men, just as if good, timid, and bad were run out of the same mould.

We were in Paris when she showed her hand, and, strange enough, she

chose to do it one afternoon when we were driving in the Bois with a

thousand fine gowns and faces to distract the attention.

"The trouble, Margaret," says she, "is that our reputation runs on ahead

of us. Here in Paris it is the same as at Vienna and Rome--we have much

more than we can attend to. I can't put my hands on two fools at once,

and I am always pained because I am American by birth, as I never yet

told you before, and I hate to see five dollars slip by, as we say over

there."

"It's too bad," I answers, "for there is no way to help it."

"Indeed!" she says. "I'm not so sure. I haven't made you my daughter for

nothing. And I'm thinking of having you treat those who I can't."

"Me!" I cries, very surprised. "You know well enough that I have no

power."

At this she leaned back on the cushions and nearly put her broadness on

Midget, her toy lap-dog, sitting beside her. But she threw her head back

and laughed her own natural laugh, as coarse as a fishmonger's and

different from the ripples she could give when anybody was around.

"Power?" says she. "Child alive! I have no power, you simple girl. When

I put my fingers on their silly heads, my hands might as well be resting

on a sawdust pincushion in the Sahara Desert."

"But the cures?" says I, looking to see if the _cocher_ could overhear

us.

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

looked serious.

"Many a time, when I go to sleep of nights, I think of that myself," she

says, patting my hand.

"I actually know no more of the reason for those cures than you.

Nevertheless I know surely enough it's not me that cures them. No. I

think it's their own wills. A bit of claptrap fools them into exerting

their own minds on their bodies, and by the same token the fear of

weakness will make the weakness itself. So the world rolls around, my

dear."

It was those words of hers I have never forgotten. I've never forgotten,

for one reason, because, when I began to play for patients and worked

over them with the talk and flap-dash and monkey-shine, and got them to

pay their money freely, then half the time they would improve and say

they felt the flow of vitality, and some of them went away well and

sound as biscuits, when, before they had come to us, they had had

doctors and drugs and baths and changes of climate for nothing. I even

knew some who would swear that Welstoke's daughter had more power of

healing than the great Welstoke herself, and among them, too, was rich

and terribly cultured people, who would come with veils in closed

carriages and would be afraid their husbands would find out, and then,

if they didn't pay the bill rendered, all that was necessary was to

threaten suit to have them go into a panic and rush the money to us in a

hurry. It is wonderful how easy a person drops into new views of what is

fair and right when their surroundings change, and something else is

wonderful--the fact that I, who sit here with the two of you now, a

broken old housemaid, once had gowns as fashionable as any on the

Continent, and that without a penny of inheritance or a single love

affair.

"All is well with us," Welstoke used to say, "and all will be well if

you have the sense to keep out of a match with some lying-tongued

creature who, on his side, will believe nothing you say, and will cast

sheeps' eyes at every plump blonde from Benares to Buffalo. Besides

which, my dear, there never was one of them that didn't snore. Remember

that and you are safe."

Indeed, I thought I was safe, as she called it. I believed that the

affectionate natures of my father and of my mother had offset each other

in me, for three years went by and never a thought did I give to love of

man. And when it came, there was a flit of it like the shadow of a

flying bird that comes and goes on the wall and is none the less hard to

forget. It is so with all, I'm thinking, high and low, rich and poor; we

see these shadows of what might be, and whist! they are gone again, as

if to say we'd live again in another world and there is plenty of time

in other lives than ours--time for the right head to lean on the

shoulder that was meant for it and this hand to touch that!

Be that as it may, the thing happened the winter we were at Venice.

Madame Welstoke was in her heyday then, with plenty of money to give

dinners for the little crowd that was made up out of dark-brown

society--the old men who'd tell of nearly reaching greatness and the

like of that, with champagne running from the corners of their eyes and

their voices cracking with all the bad-spent years. And there were fat,

jeweled women, too, hanging on alimony or adventure, and middle-aged men

from this country, who had left New York or Philadelphia for one reason

or another of their own, and talked about rates of interest and whistled

tunes that were popular in the United States in the seventies, and had a

word or two for my shoulders.

"Be careful how you talk too much," old Welstoke would say. "It's a very

fair presentment you make with a bit of rouge, and a hairdresser, and

keeping your big hands under the table as much as possible. Whatever you

do, listen, and be on your guard, if the conversation runs to letters or

music. One way to be educated is to be silent!"

Perhaps she laid it on so heavy about my lack of "finish," as she called

it, that when my one moment came to speak and say in my plain way a word

or two, it gagged me in my throat and would not slide out.

In those days a French Jew, named Vorpin, had a place just off the

Grand Canal, called "Trois Folies," and by waiting till mid-evening for

dinner, we could find the café well-nigh empty. The truth was I went

there often alone when a fit of depression was on me, and it was no

wonder these fits came. A week of idleness, taken by a person who comes

from my class, and should be working eight and ten hours a day, is a

misfortune often longed for and seldom recognized when it has come.

Little did I think that evening, of which you will hear, that what

happened there was to have its hold on Julianna Colfax, who had not then

been thought of as coming into the terrible clutches of that which has

followed us like a skulk o' night.

The café was long, and longer yet with its gilt mirrors on the white

walls and its row of empty gilded chairs, and I found a table in the

corner. Perhaps a man and woman or two was there, either too late or too

early for the gayeties that went on. I have forgotten. I only know that

the sound of lapping water came in through the lattice beside my table

and a breeze, too, that cooled my bare neck and would not cool my head,

which was full of thoughts of my days in the old garden in the Isle of

Wight and my mother's song and the colored crayon of my father, looking

very stern, and hanging over the green old china vases on the mantel.

I believe the first thing that made me look up was a crash of glass, of

crockery, the exclamation of the waiters, and running feet.

"So here is where they boast of excitement?" roared a thick voice. "And

yet a man must make it himself."

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

then.

"Bah!" he cried, beginning to laugh like a stevedore. "I'm an American.

Monte Carlo and all that! I'll pay, you frog-catchers! Take that! Ask

the proprietor if that will cover the damage!"

A great explosion of squeaky French followed, a word or two of Italian.

The waiters parted and this American stepped out. I had expected to see

him taller, but his power was in the weight of his shoulders, the easy

swing of his drunken progress down the aisle. The devil-may-care was in

him--in his handsome, laughing, wild eyes--the look of a child mad with

the promise of a world of pleasures.

"Pay?" he roared again. "I pay as I go! Live? I live as I like! Out of

the way, dishes! You are here to-day; on the ashheap to-morrow! So with

all of us."

With that he pulled off another tablecloth, sending the glassware

rolling into splinters.

"Come! Collect!" he said, holding a fistful of notes in the air. "How

much? How much? Quickly! I see mirrors down beyond! You lie, you

mirrors! I'm walking straight! You lie!"

There was no stopping him. With a heavy crooked cane in his strong hand

and the perspiration running from his handsome face, he staggered toward

the spot where I was sitting. And yet, though he had raised his stick to

strike the chandelier above the next table and had let out a yelp of

childish delight before he saw me, I had felt no fear of him.

I can tell you, the effect of the meeting of our eyes was astonishing.

I'm thinking there wasn't a muscle in his body that did not pull at him

to straighten him up, to take off his hat, to bend him a little

backward, as if he had thrust his face among thistles.

As I sat there, looking at those brown eyes of his and listening to his

frightened, heavy breathing, I knew well enough I had come to a place

where my road of life split and ran in two directions. There are things

we know, not by thought or reason or culture, but by the instincts, I'm

thinking, that Heaven has put into us along with the rest of the

animals. And he knew it, too, perhaps, for he saw me leaning forward on

my elbows and a little white and scared of something that can't be put

into words at all, and it sobered him, I can tell you.

"What are _you_ doing here?" he said, as though he had known me these

six thousand years.

Silly fool that I was, the color came rushing up into my face and I

feared to speak. Believe it or not as you like, I could see Welstoke's

thin lips saying, "Though your nose and your eyes is very refined, it's

your manner of speech as discloses you, my poor dear," and I was silent

as a stone, for I thought him a fine gentleman.

"Do _you_ disapprove of me?" says he.

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

into his face.

"Somewhere else--some other time," he rather whispered. "God knows how.

But you will remember Monty Cranch. It's not soon you'll be forgetting

him, girl."

With that he turned and walked out of the place as straight as an arrow,

and his words were true--as true as death. And though it was all many

years ago, I can tell you, it seems to me now that I can hear the water

lapping in the canal outside the lattice and see the wind nodding the

flowers on the table that were mocking me--a nosegay one minute, and the

next a bouquet for a tomb of something gone and buried. Nor from then to

now have I opened these lips to tell living soul of that meeting.

Life kept on as it had been going, with many things sliding in and out,

but they have nothing to do with what is hanging over us now. Welstoke

and I finally came to America, however, and then luck began to turn.

There is a great joke behind the scenes of the little dramas of each of

us, and the old lady, who had laid her hand on many a twisted wrist or

swollen elbow, began with a joint in her thumb and in six months' time

was a hundred shapes with the rheumatism. She was all out of scandals

and blackmail then, and lay in bed with her own self coming out, in evil

curses for pain and her losses on 'Change, and slow horses, and she who

had claptrapped thousands was caught herself by a slick brown man who

called himself a Hindoo Yogi and treated her by burning cheap incense in

a brass bowl, and a book of prayer that he called the "Word of

Harmonious Equilibrium."

"You are all I have now," she would say to me after the cupboard was

bare. "Whatever you do, don't get married, my child. These men are all

alike. Some of them begin to get knock-kneed as soon as you marry them,

and others have great fat middles. You have your choice in these

offenses to good taste."

The old fox was wasting breath, though, for I had less notions for men

than ever before. I had only to shut my eyes to see one, and though time

had slid by fast enough, I could only see him as he was, standing half

frightened before me in the Trois Folies. He never seemed to change. I

thought he'd always be the same.

Besides, I was loyal to old Welstoke, if I do say it. I tried hard at

first to keep our patients coming, but it would not go when the Madame

herself was out of the business. I never understood how to hold the

confidence of people, and then the only thing left to us was a

complexion mask that the old lady had invented. It was a failure, at

first, but after I had walked my feet off introducing it, we got a bare

living from it, and I thought it would stand between me and starvation

when Welstoke had gone.

Finally that day came, too, with the undertaker creeping around in his

black, sneaking way, and I found when it was all over that she had

secretly incorporated a face-bleach company and sold all she owned to

it, complexion mask and all, and lost the whole of what she got on that

year's Derby. I've understood from the boarding-house keeper that the

last words she said, was, "Now I'm really plucked!" And that was the end

of her.

CHAPTER II

THE HOUSE ON THE RIVER