She put down her embroidery and removed a long end of red silk thread

which she had been carrying on the tip of her tongue.

"I should certainly say not!" she answered. "He's all wore out. They

couldn't repair him any more."

"The machine or the man?"

"Both," said she. "But they weren't much of an attraction. Of course

there wasn't supposed to be any man--only the machine--the automaticon

they called it. But it didn't make enough money the last year or two to

pay the repairs. The old man that run it was a swell chessplayer. The

old man got sick and the machine got broken. Both were about at the end

of the rope. So he went away three weeks ago and the machine is stored

in the cellar now."

"Where did you say the old man lived?" I asked.

"I didn't say. But I'll write it down for you. It's a scene-painting

loft over by the river."

She scribbled on a slip of paper, "J. Lecompte, 5 East India Place."

"Thank you," I said.

"Um-m. You can't fool me," said she. "You're in the show business!"

This was a thrust of her curiosity, but I merely bowed and left her.

"Go home as quickly as you can," I whispered to the chauffeur. "Give Mr.

Estabrook, my guest, this slip of paper. Tell him to lose no time. Tell

him to bring the revolver he will find in the top drawer of my desk!

Don't wait for me. I'll walk."

The man gazed at me stupidly a moment before he started the machine.

"He believes I am crazy," I said to myself as I saw him turn the corner.

"Whether or not he is right, the interview will be at least

interesting."

You will agree with me that these words forecasted accurately.

CHAPTER II

IN THE PAINTED GARDEN

East India Place is not a well-known thoroughfare. In fact, it is a

court, hidden between truck stables and concealed also by the boxes and

bales of commission merchants. Even on a sunshiny day the dank bottom of

this court is dark and smells as if it were under rather than on the

earth. A warehouse occupies one side, the other presents several

doorways, which might once have been the entrances to sailors' lodgings,

but which now are plastered with the rude signs of junk dealers. The

numbers on these houses were all even--2-4-8-10--which left me the

conclusion that Number 5 must be the warehouse and that the

scene-painting loft must be on the top floor of the grimy building.

Indeed, I could see that a skylight had been superimposed on the roof

and my eye caught the sign at the entrance, "The Mohave Scenic Studios."

I began the ascent of boxed wooden stairways, musty with the odors of

ships' cargoes. At the top a sign confronted me, "No Admittance Except

on Business. This means You"; but beneath it in red, white, and blue

paint, was the message, "Used for Storage. New Studio at 43 Barkiston

Avenue."

I knocked. There was no answer. I tried the stump of a knob; the door

yielded. I found myself in a large room with rolls and rolls of canvas

in piles and huge scenic back drops pendant from the high ceiling. A

skylight above, with rotting curtains drawn across the square panes,

threw a strange green glare over everything. A peculiar aromatic odor,

such as is sometimes wafted over the footlights into the audience, gave

the deserted place a theatrical flavor which was heightened by the

presence of gilded papier-maché statuettes and a huge representation of

the god Buddha leaning against the bare brick wall. A spider had spun a

web above one of this god's bare shoulders; it glinted in a chance ray

of direct sunlight which had entered through a tear in the curtain

overhead. Above me a staging held a kitchen chair, some fire pails, and

several pots whose sides were smirched with the colors they contained.

The only sign of human life was the faint warm odor of pipe smoke.

Knowing, then, that some one beside myself was in the loft, I proceeded

gingerly between two vast canvases which hung side by side, preparing

myself on my soft-footed way down this aisle to see the man I sought as I

emerged from the other end. I imagined I heard a nervous, suppressed

cough, indicating that the other already knew of my invasion of his

strange abode.

This was not the fact. For a moment, looking from the opening, I had

ample opportunity, without being seen, to observe all that spread itself

before me. A painted drop hung against the wall, upon which, in delicate

colors of Italian blue and rich green, was stretched a vast, imposing,

and beautiful view of the Gardens of Versailles, with a wealth of

flowers in full bloom extending along the velvet greensward into the

depth of the landscape, where, white and regal, walls and pillars rose

toward the clear sky of spring. A modern grotesque had invaded this

regal scene and forbidden ground, and had placed his cot, disordered

with newspapers and ragged red blankets, so boldly in the foreground

that at first sight the impropriety of his presence was shocking. I

could see that the man sat upon his cot cross-legged; his back,

pitifully thin under a spare white shirt, was turned toward me. With one

sinewy, aged hand he fondled the wisps of faded hair upon his head; with

the other he moved small objects over a flat board. He was a lonely

monarch upon a throne of squalor; he was playing a solitary game of

chess!

"The Sheik of Baalbec!" I whispered to myself.

The creature stopped, looked up at the skylight and its green curtains

and drew a miserable sigh from the depths of his lungs. It was such a

sigh that I could not restrain a shudder.

"Julianna," said I.

He drew his head down between his shoulders like a frightened turtle and

held himself stiffly as one who has been doused with a pail of ice

water. For several moments he did not move; when at last he turned

around, his expression was patient rather than vicious, sad rather than

terror-stricken.

"What do you want?" he said, and held his mouth open so that he, too,

seemed like an automaton, the springs of which had failed.

The pause gave me the opportunity to observe that he was not the man

with the gold fillings. Indeed, the only part of him which seemed well

preserved--which, as it were, he had saved from the wreck--was a row of

white, even teeth!

"What do you want?" he repeated. "I have never seen you before. I know

no reason for your speaking a word to me."

"Your daughter--" I began.

"I have no daughter," he cried, his eyes blazing with sudden passion.

"Who are you? I tell you that you are talking nonsense. I have no

daughter!"

"Fine words," I said threateningly; "fine words. But this is no time for

them. She is in vital danger--"

"Danger!" he screamed, clawing at the red blankets. "My God! Has it

come? What form? Quick, I say! What form?"

"It is because you can shed light upon it that I have come," said I. "We

know little. She has sent her husband away--"

"Damn him!" he choked.

"She has locked herself in her room. She has been so for three weeks.

The maid--"

"Margaret Murchie," he whispered. "She believes that I am dead?"

I nodded.

"I know nothing," he said. "The girl is not of me or mine."

"Come, come," said I. "It is time for disclosure."

He arose, searched under the corner of the mattress a moment, and then,

with a quick, panther-like movement, sprang upon the bed again, holding

a revolver in his two claws.

"I have no idea of what you mean," he cried. "I will not be questioned.

If I shoot, it is self-defense. You understand that. Nor will any one be

the wiser. She is not my daughter. I know nothing of her."

"You know everything," I cried, as anger made me reckless. "It will not

pay you to flourish that weapon. Listen!"

"Some one else coming!" he whispered.

"Yes," I shouted. "You have seen him before. It is young Estabrook."

The wizened creature immediately hid the revolver under the folds of the

blanket and began to play nervously with the chessmen. Both of us

waited, listening to the approach of the footsteps which came so

cautiously behind the pendant canvas.

To see at last that I was right, that the newcomer was Estabrook, was a

relief.

"Well," said the young man, appearing suddenly around the corner. "I

came. I thought I heard your voice, Doctor. You were talking?"

I pointed.

The worn, colorless face of the other man gazed up at us pathetically;

his body had relaxed into the hollows of his disordered cot. Against the

scene of regal gardens which was luminous as if the painted sky itself

bathed all in the soft light of a spring evening, the man and his face

were ridiculous and incongruous. His presence in that half-real setting

seemed a satire upon the beauties achieved by man and God.

"Who?" asked Estabrook involuntarily.

"The Sheik of Baalbec," I said.

The man looked up at me again.

"Mortimer Cranch," said I.

He fell forward on his face. It was several moments before any of us

moved. Cranch spoke first. He had arisen, and now stood with his sad

eyes fixed upon Estabrook, and I noticed for the first time that his

mouth and lips showed suffering and, perhaps, strength.

"It is this, above all things, I hoped would never come," said he. "You

have resurrected me from the dead. I was buried. You have dug me up.

Whatever good you may get from this strange meeting, make the most of

it. If it will help to guard against the danger spoken of by this man

you address as Doctor, I will be satisfied."

"You dog!" cried Estabrook, hot with emotions of violence. "It is you

who were responsible for the death of Judge Colfax."

The other held out his knotted hands toward me.

"The whole story!" he cried. "Not a part. You must know the whole

story."

"Briefly," I commanded.

He nodded, and began to pace the foreground of the Gardens of

Versailles, back and forth like a tethered beast in a park. His voice

was dispassionate. The narrative proceeded in a monotone. But if fiends

could conceive a tale more dark, they would whisper it among themselves.

For this, told in the somewhat quaint narrative of a former generation,

was his story.

BOOK VI

A PUPPET OF THE PASSIONS

CHAPTER I

THE VANISHED DREAM

There is only one person now in this world who could have told you my

name. I have been sure that she has long believed me to be dead. That

person is Margaret Murchie, and it is only too plain that she has told

you all that she knows of me. Parts of my life she does not know. My

testimony as to these is now given against my prayers, for I have prayed

that I never would have to uncover my heart to any living man.

My first two recollections are of my birthplace and of my mother. A

lifetime has passed, yet I remember both as plainly as if they were

before me now. I was heir to a fine old colonial estate which, because

of diminishing fortunes and increasing troubles extending over two

generations, had been allowed to run down. My great-great-grandfather,

whose portrait hung in the old parlor between two mirrors that extended

solemnly from floor to ceiling, had been a sea-captain and shipowner,

and, it is said, a privateer as well. Whatever strange doings he had

seen, one thing is certain; he returned after one mysterious voyage with

great wealth, a sword-wound through his middle, ruined health, and a

desire for respectability, social position, and a reputation for piety.

It had been he who had built the immense house which, in my childhood,

was shaded by huge gnarled trees, under which crops of beautiful but

poisonous toadstools were almost eternally sprouting.

If the great house was like a tomb, my mother was like a flower in it. I

recall the sweetness of her timid personality, the half-frightened eyes

which looked at me sometimes from the peculiar solitude of her mind, and

the faint perfume of her dress when, as a child, I would rest my head in

her lap and beg her to tell me of my father's brave and good life.

If I grew up somewhat headstrong and self-confident, it was in part due

to a faith in my inheritance. The delicate and refined lips of my

mother, upon which prayers were followed by lies and lies by prayers,

taught me an almost indescribable belief in my own strength. The fruit

forbidden by moral law to the ordinary man seemed to belong of right to

me. No sensation, no indulgence, no excess seemed to threaten me. I knew

my mother's philosophy of pleasure was different from mine, and,

reaching an early maturity, I concealed from her the experiments I made

in tasting daintily and rather proudly of life's pleasures. Before my

boyhood had gone, my natural cleverness and my selection of friends had

introduced me to many follies, each of which I regarded as a taste of

life which in no way meant a weakness. Weakness I was sure was not the

legacy of character which I possessed, and I failed to notice that I no

longer sipped of the various poisons which the world may offer, but

feverishly drank long drafts.

The awakening came in extraordinary form. I had not had my eighteenth

birthday when, upon a beautiful moonlit night in spring, a man and a

woman, more sober and much older than I, drove me out to my gate, begged

me to say less of the nobility of the horse which they had whipped into

a froth of perspiration, and left me to make my way alone along the long

path of huge flagstones to the house.

A light burned in the hall. I stood there looking for a long time in the

mirror of the old mahogany hatrack, with a growing conviction that my

reflected image looked extraordinarily like some one I had seen before.

I finally recognized myself as being an exact counterpart of my

great-great-grandfather's portrait. This did not shock me, though the

idea was a new one. I remember I laughed and brushed some white powder

from my sleeve. The powder did not come off readily; it was with some

thought of finding a brush that I gave my serious attention to the

handles of one of the little drawers. My awkward movement resulted in

pulling it completely out. Chance brought to light at that moment an

object long hidden behind the drawer itself. The thing fell to the

floor; I stooped dizzily to pick it up. It was an old glove!

It was an old glove, musty with age and yet still filled with the

individuality of the man who had worn it and still creased in the

distinctive lines of his hand. As I held it, I imagined that it was

still warm from the contact of living flesh, that it still carried faint

whiffs of its owner's personality as if he had a moment before drawn it

from his fingers. What maudlin folly seized me, I cannot say. I remember

that I exclaimed to myself affectionately, as one might who, like

Narcissus, worshiped his own image in a pool. I pressed the glove to my

face, delighting in its imagined likeness to myself. I gave it, in my

intoxicated fancy, the attributes of a living being. To me it seemed

alive with vital warmth. It had long lain a corpse. My touch had

thrilled it as its contact now thrilled me.

With it, pressing it against my cheek, I turned toward the portière of

the library, and as chance would have it, making a misstep when my head

was swimming, I went plunging forward into the folds of this curtain.

Because of this I found myself sitting flat upon the hardwood floor,

gibbering like an idiot at the dim light which showed the bookcases

which extended around the room from floor to ceiling.

At last, out of the haze of my befuddled mind, I saw my mother. She did

not speak; she did not cry. She had come down the stairs, and now her

face shone out of the clouds of other objects, quiet, set, as immovable

and as white as a death mask. She came near me and, taking the glove

from my hand, examined it in the manner of a prospective purchaser.

The next morning, in the midst of a horror of brilliant sunlight, she

told me the truth about my father. He had not been brave. He had not

been good.

"The glove was his," she said in her dead, cold voice. "Are you not

afraid?"

"Of what?" I asked.

"Of yourself," she whispered.

"Yes," said I. "Mortally!"

I had believed in my strength. Now a few hours had taught me the terrors

of self-fear. The ghastly story of inheritance of wild passions from

grandfather to grandfather, from father to son, pressed on my brain like

a leaden disk thrust into my skull. I had first learned the joy of

experiment with my strength; I was now to learn the pains of the ghosts

which always seemed to be mocking the assertions of my will. A line of

them, fathers and sons, pointed fingers at me and laughed. "You are

doomed," said they in matter-of-fact voices. I spent my days between

determination to indulge myself, for the very purpose of testing my

power in self-control, and the sickening relaxation of moral force that

occurs from the mere deprivation of all hope of victory in the battle.

The excuses of intemperance were never so clever as those I devised for

my own satisfaction; the bald truth, that I had taught my body

enjoyments which would never be shaken off before old age or infirmity

had placed them out of my reach, was never better known than to me.

Fortunately my mother died before the outbreak of my barbarous nature

had broken down the pride which caused me to conceal my true self from

the daylit world. I sold the home and cursed its dank old trees and

toadstools and silent, gloomy chambers the day I signed the deed. I went

to city after city, leaving each as it threatened me with ennui or with

retribution. Money went scattering hither and thither, spent madly,

given, stolen, borrowed, with no regret but that the piper might some

day, when the pay was no longer forthcoming, refuse to play.

Perhaps all would have been different had I not been pursued by a

fiendish fortune at games of chance. As if Fate meant that my ruin

should be complete, she saw to it that I was provided with funds for

the journey. I have seen my last penny hang on the turn of a card, and

come screaming back to me with a small fortune in its wake. Everywhere,

misconstruing the results, men whispered of my luck. It was only once

that the truth was told: at Monte Carlo a pair of red-painted,

consumptive lips pouted at me with terrible coquetry over the table.

"Pah!" said they. "The Devil takes us all on application. It is only

very few he _chooses_! Monsieur has won again!"

She was right, but there is an end to all things and the end of all my

ruinous luck came at Venice. It came with Margaret Murchie; it came, I

believe, at the very instant that I saw her sitting in a café there--saw

her sitting alone, golden from head to foot, golden of hair, golden of

skin, golden rays shining from her eyes, showers of gold in the motions

of her body--a living creature of gold, shining as a great mass of it,

warm and bright and untarnished as a coin fresh from the pressure of the

dies. I took her with me to Tuscany--stole her from an old vixen of a

fortune-teller. Ah, I see she did not tell you all!--Never mind. There

was no disgrace for her--she might well have told everything! She needed

no blush for the story. It was the only pretty thing in my life.

The trees of that country grow at the edges of green meadows, tall and

stately as the trees of Lorrain's brush. Sheep, with soft-sounding

bells, feed along the rich rolls of the land. Birds sing in the thicket

at daybreak. The hills are alive with springs of matchless clearness.

Butterflies hover over hedges and dart into half-concealed gardens.

For a month we played there like children. Her ignorance was charming.

Her mind was like a fresh canvas; I could paint whatever I chose upon

it, and loving her, I painted none but beautiful pictures, pictures of

the divine things that were still left in the violated mortal sanctuary

of the soul of Mortimer Cranch.

What did I accomplish by spreading all the fruits of my education and my

familiarity with refinement before her? What did I accomplish by my

mastery of mind? I accomplished my undoing! You need not ask how. I will

tell you. I made this healthy, glowing Irish lass believe in the beauty

of character which I insisted she possessed. I made her believe that she

was a noble creature and that she was capable of fine womanly

unselfishness. It was like the influence of the hypnotist. My own

fanciful conception of her, at first described merely to awake in her

the pleasures of admiration, became, when repeated, convincing to

myself. I began to feel sure that she had the rare qualities which I had

ascribed to her. I found myself desperately in love with her--not only

intoxicated by the beauty of her body and the sound of her laugh, but by

real or imagined beauty of character as well. This acted upon her

powerfully. She, too, began to believe. Her capacity for goodness

expanded. A sadness came over her.

"Why are you so thoughtful?" I said to her one midday as we sat together

on a ledge overlooking the peaceful valley.

"Don't ask," she said bitterly, looking at the ground.

Curiosity then drove me mad. For two days I persecuted her with cruel

questions. I believed that some regret for a secret in her past was

troubling her. At last she told me. I believe she told me truly. She

said that she knew that a girl without education and refinement could

have no hope of being taken through life by me. She spoke simply of the

unhappiness it would bring me if I were tied to her.

"Tell me that you love me!" I cried.

She shook her head.

"I am not your equal," she said. "You have been the one who has made me

good, if I am good at all. Didn't you say that I would be capable of any

sacrifice for love?"

"Why, yes," I said.

"Hush," she whispered and laid her hand on mine.

The next day she had disappeared. No one knew when or how or where she

had gone. She had vanished. She left no word. Her room was empty. And

there on the tiled floor, in the sunlight, was the rosette from a

woman's slipper. It spoke of haste, of farewell; it was enough to

convince me that Margaret was not a creature of my imagination. But the

little tawdry decoration, and the faint aroma of her individual

fragrance which still clung to it, was all that was left of her and my

selfish dreams.

I traveled all the capitals in search of her or of Mrs. Welstoke, to no

purpose. My resources dwindled. The wheel and the cards mocked my

attempts to repair my state. Fortune had dangled salvation in front of

me, had snatched it away, and now laughed at my attempts to put myself

in funds. I was shut off from a search for my happiness. When I had

played to gain money for my damnation, as if with the assistance of the

Evil One, I had won; now that I sought regeneration, a malicious fiend

conducted the game and ruined me.

I remember of thinking how I had begun life with full assurance of my

power over all the world and, above all, over myself. I was sitting on a

chair on the pavement in front of a miserable little café at Brest,

looking down at my worn-out shoes.

"Well," said I, aloud, "some absinthe--a day of forgetfulness--and

then--I will begin life anew."

It was the same old tricky promise--the present lying to the future and

making everything seem right.

I clapped my hands. A slovenly girl served me, standing with her fat red

hands pressed on her hips as I gazed down into the glass.

"Drink," said she. She was a cockney, after all.

"Must I?" I asked.

She nodded solemnly. And so I drank.

CHAPTER II

MARY VANCE

Eight days later I was taken on board a sailing-vessel, and when we were

out at sea and my nerves had steadied, I was forced by a villainous

captain to the work of a common sailor. From that experience as a

laborer I never recovered. My mind learned the comfort of association

with other minds which conceived only the most elementary thoughts. The

savage vulgarity of stevedores, strike-breakers, ships' waiters, circus

crews, and soldiers had a charm to me of which I had never before

dreamed. I entered the brotherhood of those at life's bottom and found

that again I was looked upon as a man superior to my associates and

perhaps more fortunate. Even though I exhibited a brutality equal to

any, I was regarded as a person of undoubted cleverness. If the great or

showy classes of mankind would no longer flatter my vanity, the vicious

and uncivilized classes would still perform that office. Fate threw me

among them, so that nothing should be left undone to cajole me toward

the last point of degradation.

I kept no track of those years, nor understood why Mary Vance ever

married me, nor why she was willing to be so patient, so loyal, so

tender, and so kind. I had come from above and was going down. She had

come from the dregs; she was going up. We met on the way. I married her,

not because I loved her, but because she loved me and I could not

understand it. She was a lonely, tired little gutter-snipe, who had gone

on the stage, had had no success whatever, and whose pale red hair was

always stringing down around her neck and eyes; but even then I could

not see why she picked me out for her devotion. She was like a dog in

her faithfulness. I can see her now as she was one night, snarling and

showing her teeth, keeping the police from taking me to a patrol box. I

can see her cooking steak over a gas jet. She thought my name was John

Chalmers. I learned to love her at last. I learned to love her, and

because of it I learned to hate myself. She deserved so much and had so

little from me beside my temper, my wildness, and abuse.

When we were at our wits' end for pennies to buy food, the little girl

came. The only thing we had not pawned was a gold locket that had never

been off her neck because it was wished on by her mother and had always

kept her from harm, as she said. She took it off and put it on the

baby's neck and tears came to my eyes--the first in thirty-five years.

"We will call her Mary," I said, choking with happiness.

Four hours later I was on a wharf, crawling around on my hands and knees

in the madness of alcohol, with a New York policeman and a gang of

longshoremen roaring with laughter at my predicament. It was on that

occasion that, as my brain cleared, I saw what I had done. I had sworn a

thousand times never to do it. And now it had come about. I had become

responsible for another living human thing with the blood of my veins

coursing in its own! I had committed the crime of all crimes!

To describe the horror of this thought is impossible. It never left me.

I began to devise a means to undo this dreadful work of mine. I prayed

for days--savagely and breaking out into curses--that the little

laughing, mocking thing should die.

"She has your eyes," said Mary, looking up at me with a smile on her

gaunt, starved face.

I rushed from the dirty lodgings like a man with a fiend in pursuit; the

words followed me. I roared out in my pain.

"I will do it!" I said over and over again. "I will kill the child. I

will kill it."

I believed I was right. I believed the best of me and not the worst of

me had spoken. I believed I must atone for my crime by another. I

believed I should begin to prepare the way.

"Suppose she should die," I said to my wife.

"Then grief would kill me, too," she said.

I could not stand the look on her face.

"This is the only happiness I ever had," she said, pressing the little

body close to her.

I believed then that I could never do what I had planned. I knew I could

never take Mary's happiness away. I felt myself caught like a rat in a

trap. The blood of my fathers was going on in a new house of flesh and

bone! I had done the great crime! And there was no help for it!

We move, however, like puppets of the show. Just see!

Within a month the doctor at the clinic had said that my wife was

incurable with consumption.

"The worst trouble with it all," said he, "is that she will suffer

without hope and for no purpose."

"Death would be good luck?" said I.

"The kindest thing of all," he answered, killing a fly on the window

ledge, as if to demonstrate it.

I was trembling all over with wild nerves, a wild brain-madness. I shut

my eyes craftily as I went down the steps.

"She may go first," I whispered to myself. "I will kill her in the name

of God. And then the other and the Devil is cheated!"

Was I a madman? I cannot say! I had sense enough to prepare myself by

days of drinking, during which I deliberately and cruelly beat whatever

tenderness remained in me into insensibility. I suffered no doubts,

however, for I was sure that I had planned a crime which, unlike all my

others, was founded on unselfishness. I believed I had dedicated myself

at last to a supreme test of goodness and love.

The question of what would become of me after I had done this terrible

thing never entered my mind. My desire was to place Mary where she need

suffer no more, where she would be free from hardships and labors, from

lingering disease and slow death, and from my ungoverned brutalities.

Above all, however, I wanted to accomplish the second murder--made

possible to me by the first. A monomania possessed me. I wanted to put

an end forever to my strain of blood before it was too late--before it

had escaped me through the body of my little daughter.

My zeal, I suppose, was like that of a religious fanatic; but it did not

blind me to the horror of my undertaking. I cried out aloud at the

picture of the sad, reproachful eyes of my poor wife, fixed upon me as

they might be when the film of death passed over them. I knew that I

must do the thing in a way which would prevent her sensing my purpose,

even in the last flicker of time in which her understanding remained.

I can't go on!... Wait!...

Well, it was over. I fled. Dripping, I rushed from the river bank. I had

planned to go back after the baby. I forgot it entirely. The meadows

became alive with shapes and faces. I swear to you that I believed a

terrible green glow hung over the hole in the black water behind me. I

thought this water had opened to receive her. I had not seen it close

again. There was a hole there! She lay in the bottom of it, screaming

terrible screams. The grass of the slope was filled with creatures who

had seen all. The moon rose up the sky with astounding rapidity. Its

rays dropped like showers of arrows. Every sparkling drop of dew became

an eye that watched me as I fled. I sought dark shadows; the moon

snatched them away from me. I ran over the soft carpet of new

vegetation; it seemed to echo with the sounds of a man in wooden shoes,

fleeing over a tiled floor. I fell over in a faint. I regained

consciousness with indescribable agonies.

Then and then only did I remember the flask in my pocket. I drank. The

stimulant, contrary to my expectation, flew into my brain like fire. I

was crazy for more of this relief. I had believed it would sharpen my

wits for further action; I found it made me disregard the existence of a

world. And instead of suffering fear or regret, I was mad with joy. I

drained the flask, hummed a tune, grew foolish in my mutterings to my

own ears, and at last, glad of the warmth of the spring night, welcomed

sleep as a luxury never before enjoyed by mortal man in all of history.

It is unnecessary to tell you of my awakening. Though no one was about,

the air seemed to ring with the news of a floating body. I had slept,

but that wonderful sleep had robbed me of all possibility of defending

myself. Believing this, I tried to escape the town. The sun was worse

than the moon. It poked fun at me. From the moment I awoke to look into

the face of this mocking sun, I knew that my capture could not be

prevented. The very fact that I myself believed so thoroughly that I

could not escape, determined the outcome. To feel the hand of the law on

my shoulder was a blessed relief. It seemed to save me so much useless

thought and unavailing effort. It was as welcome as death must be to a

pain-racked incurable. This touch of the hand of the law is a blessed

thing; it is as comforting as the touch of a mother's hand. So lovely

did it seem that it put me into a mind when, for a little kindly

encouragement, I would have said, "You have opened your doors to welcome

me in. God bless you for your insight. I am the man!"

I do not know why I shook my head at my accusers with stupid

complacency. My denial of guilt seemed to me a trivial lie. I had become

a man of wood. I went through my trial like a carven image. I seemed to

myself to be a puppet, a jointed figure, a manikin. In a dull, insensate

way I had learned to hate the Judge as a superior being who showed

loathing for me on his face. The jury foreman and all the rest there in

the court-room day after day were as little to me as a lot of

mountebanks on a stage. Yet it was the foreman, with his red, bursting

face and thin, yellow hair and fat hand stuck in his trousers' pocket,

who awakened me from this strange and comfortable coma of the trial.

"Because of reasonable doubt," he said, with his unconscious humor, "we

find the prisoner"--here he paused and shifted his feet like a schoolboy

who has forgotten his piece--"we find him not guilty."

Not guilty! I was free! It crashed in upon my senses. Suddenly there

came back to me the existence of my little daughter--the existence of my

blood--the fact that I had pledged myself to another crime in the name

of humanity--that its execution awaited me. Damn them! They had gone

wrong. They had thrown me back on the world. They had denied me the

comfort of the law--that thing which had touched me on the throat with

its firm hands and had promised me oblivion. They had left me staring at

the terrible mind-picture of a little child asleep in its crib with the

thing that was me lurking in its heart, in its lungs, in the cells of

its brain.

"I did it," I whispered to my lawyer.

"You spoke too late," he said, gathering up his papers. "You have been

tried. And for that crime you can never be tried again! Come with me. I

have a carriage outside. Where are you going?"

"For alcohol!" I said, gritting my teeth.

"That is a matter of indifference to me," he replied, sniffing with a

miserable form of contempt. "Our relationship is over anyhow!"

His eyes were upon me with the same expression as the others. They

looked at me everywhere. Youthful eyes ran along beside the carriage; a

hundred pairs watched me after I had alighted and the vehicle had gone.

The darkness came on as a kind thing which threw a merciful blanket over

me. I thanked the night. I was grateful for the world's vicious classes,

so used to violence that they did not stare at me. I thanked the good

old rough crowd, the fist-pounding, the hard-talking, hoarse-voiced

loafers whose leers showed envy of my notoriety. And all the time I

thought of my child, of the blood of my fathers which, against all my

vows, had escaped again, and with the stimulant whirling in my head, I

determined to go back to the other end of town, to the house where I

knew this menace to the world lay smiling in its crib.

Yet when I had carried out all but the last chapter of my plans, when

I, like a thief, had slipped off into the night with my little daughter

in my arms, I found that I held her tight against my aching heart. At

last I knew fear--no longer the fear that I would not carry out my aim,

but fear that I would.

Again, out of the grass and down from the apple trees, drops of dew

glinted through the darkness like a thousand human eyes. Then suddenly

they all vanished, and as I walked along in the shadows I believed that

some one trod behind. I heard soft footsteps in the grass. I thought I

felt human breath upon my neck. Some one came behind me and yet I did

not dare to look, for I knew if I turned I would see the pale, thin face

of Mary, with her wistful eyes.

She was there--

I say, visible or not, she was there. I knew then, as if I had heard her

command, that I must go up the slope to the Judge's house and knock upon

the door. As I walked, she walked with me, watching me as I held the

sleeping baby in my arms, fearing perhaps that in my drunken course I

would fall.

And then--after I had been knocked senseless by the reporter's fist and

at last regained consciousness--then, after all the years, at that

terrible moment, a self-confessed murderer, a half-witted, half-sodden,

disheveled, driven, half-wild creature, what prank did Fate play? Who

stood there, gazing at me with full recognition in her eyes and begging

for my life? You know the story already. It was Margaret, the woman of a

thousand dreams,--the woman I had lost.

CHAPTER III

THE GHOST

You know, too, of that night. But this you do not know--that a mile out

of the village I sat on a boulder in a hillside pasture and watched the

flames of a terrible fire, without any knowledge of what house was

burning, and that it was not until a man came along the road long after

daybreak, with a shovel over his shoulder, that I had the energy to

stir.

He saw me as I got up; he waved his hand.

"Bad fire," he shouted, not recognizing me.

"Whose house?" I asked.

"Judge Colfax."

My heart came gurgling up into my throat.

"Anybody lost in it?" I asked, trembling.

"No," said he. "Everybody got out. The servant got out and the Judge

saved his baby and there wasn't anybody else in it. Those three. That

was all."

His words stunned me at first. I said them over and over after he had

gone, because I could not seem to believe their meaning. Those three!

That was all! What I could not do by my will, another Will had done. The

Great Hand had swept away my fears! Above my grief I felt the presence

of one marvelous fact. The inheritance I had allowed to escape me had

been ended again! Once more my body was the only body in all the world

containing the terrible ingredients of my strain of blood. I raised my

face toward the blue of heaven and gave vent to a long cry of

triumphant, hysterical, passionate exultation.

I became possessed of the desire to make sure, to ask again, to hear

once more the phrase, "Those three. That was all," and then turn my back

on the town forever. With this idea I walked swiftly into the village,

choosing a back street until I had reached a point opposite the smoking

ruins of the Judge's house. The crowd was still buzzing back and forth

along the fence and gathered about the old-fashioned fire engine that

was still spitting sparks and pumping water. I slipped into the back

yard of the house just across the street, half afraid to show myself,

half mad to ask some one the question I had asked the man with the

shovel.

Then, suddenly, as I stood hesitating, I heard Margaret Murchie's voice

in the window above me--I recognized it instantly.

"There is some one at the door, Judge. The secret is safe with me," she

whispered.

At the same moment something fell at my feet. It was the tiny locket my

child had worn on its little neck from the day the mother had fastened

it there. What secret had Margaret meant? The locket was the answer! I

had been a plaything of some unknown, malicious fiend again. The rescued

baby was not the Judge's baby. That was the secret! The child I heard

crying there was mine!

I felt like a creature in a haunted place, pursued by devils, mocked by

strange voices in the air, deceived by the senses, tricked by

unrealities, persecuted by memories, the victim of fear, falsities, and

impotent rage. I rushed away from the spot, walked many miles, and at

last, coming to the railroad again, I took a train and for weeks,

without money, rode westward on freight trains. I dropped out of sight.

I lost my name. I even lost much of my flesh. I was as thoroughly dead

as a living man could be. The world had buried me.

Almost immediately the body and its organs, which had borne up with such

infernal endurance for the express purpose of making the ruin of my soul

complete, gave way. Suddenly my stomach, as if possessing a malicious

intelligence of its own, refused the stimulant with which I had helped

to accomplish my slide to the bottom of life and with which I had

expected to be able to dull the mental and physical pains of my final

accounting. My mind now found itself picturing with feverish desire all

the old pleasures. At the same moment my flesh and bones forbade me to

enjoy them. My body had caught my mind like a rat in a trap!

Day followed day, week, week, and year, year. It was a weary monotony of

manual labor, poverty, restless travel, on foot, and hopeless attempts

to recover my birthright--the privileges of excess--which had gone from

me forever. Cities and their bright lights laughed at me.

I suffered the tortures of insomnia, the pains of violent rheumatism,

the dreadful imprisonment of a partial paralysis. I was in and out of

hospitals. I spent months on my back, entertained only by my lurid

memories. My mind became starved for new material on which to work. It

was at that period that I first learned to obscure the awful presence of

my own personality by flinging my thoughts into the problems of chess.

I recalled often enough the fact that somewhere I had a daughter. No

night passed that I did not go to sleep wondering where she might be. I

realized that she was growing up somewhere. I realized, too, that a

child of fancy was growing up in my mind. I could see her in her crib, a

laughing baby uttering meaningless sounds, clasping a flower in her fat

little fist. I could see her in short skirts, trying to walk upstairs,

clinging to the banister. I could hear her first words. I saw her

learning to read. Little by little her hair grew. It reached a length

which made a braid necessary. At times I saw her laugh,--this child of

the imagination,--and once, left alone at dusk, she had wept over some

cross word that had been spoken to her. I could see her tears glisten on

her cheeks in the fading light.

"Little girl!" I cried aloud. "Come to me! It's I! Little girl!"

The sound of my own voice startled me. I found myself sitting in the

Denver railroad station with my hands clasped around my thin knees.

No man's own blood ever haunted him more than mine. I had not seen the

child, yet I loved her. She had no knowledge of my existence, yet she

seemed to call to me. I suffered a dreadful thought--the fear that I

should die before I saw her and feasted my eyes upon my own. I struggled

to keep myself from going to seek her. I felt as one who, being dead,

impotently desires to return to the world and touch the hands of the

living. Year after year the desire grew strong to rise from my grave and

call out that she was mine.

At last I yielded to my temptation--fool that I was! I came eastward. I

made cautious inquiry. I arrived in this city where I had heard the

Judge had gone. The mere fact of proximity to her made me tremble as I

alighted from the train. I had expected difficulties in finding her. But

when I telephoned to the name I had found in the book and heard a voice

say that the Judge had just gone out with his daughter, I felt that I

was in a dream. A strange faintness came over me. The glass door of the

booth reflected my image--the face of a frightened old man. It was

remarkable that I did not fall forward sprawling, unconscious.

Before seeking a lodging I sat for hours in a park. Young girls passed,

fresh, beautiful, laughing, going home from school.

"Can that be she?" I asked a dozen times, looking after one of those

chosen from among the others. "What can she be like? What would she say

to me?"

Suddenly I realized again that I did not exist, that she could not know

that I had ever existed, that whatever pain it might cost me, she must

never know. If I saw her, it must be as a ghost peeping through a

crevice in the wall. These were my thoughts as I sat on the park bench

hour after hour until a little outcast pup--a thin, bony creature,

kicked and beaten, came slinking out of the gathering dusk and licked my

hand. It was the first love I had felt in years. My whole being screamed

for it. I caught up the pariah and warmed its shivering body in my

arms. This was the dog that, two years later, I lost along with the

locket in the Judge's old garden where I had gone indiscreetly, praying

that I might get a peep in the window and see my own girl--so wonderful,

so beautiful, so good--reading by the lamp.

You need not think I had not seen her before. If I spent my working

hours manipulating the automaton at the old museum, all my leisure I

spent in seeking a glimpse of my own daughter. The very sight of her was

nourishment to my starving heart. Many is the time I have hobbled along

far behind her as she walked on the city pavements. Months on end I

strolled by the house at night to throw an unseen caress up at a lighted

window. I have seen a doctor's carriage at that door with my heart in my

mouth. I have seen admiration, given by a glance from a girl friend,

with a father's pride so great and real that it took strength of mind to

restrain myself from stopping the nearest passer-by and saying, "Look!

She is mine!"

Again the malicious fortune into which I was born was making game of me;

it had made my daughter more than a mere girl, whom I was forbidden to

claim. It had made her the loveliest creature in the world! I cried out

against it all. I knew that if I would, I could claim her. She was mine.

I had the right of a father. She was still a child. I loved her. I

wanted to have the world know that whatever else I had done and whatever

doubts I had once felt about the blood that was in my veins and hers,

now I was sure that I could claim a great achievement and hold aloft the

gift to mankind of this blooming flower.

I remembered then, however, what I had been. I saw in the bit of mirror

in my squalid lodgings a countenance stained with the indelible ink of

vice and moulded beyond repair by excesses and the sufferings of shame.

Could I present this horror to my daughter? Could I destroy her by

claiming her? Could I blight her life by thrusting my love for her

beyond the secret recesses of my own heart?

"No!" I whispered. And I prayed for strength.

Above all, I knew that except for regaining, by reading books, the

refinement of my youth, I was not changed. I knew I was not, and never

should be free from the old vicious fiends within myself. I could not,

had I come to her with health, prosperity, and a good name, have offered

her safety from my brutal nature. I had even abused the dog which had

been my only companion and the one living thing that had love for me in

its heart. I can see its eyes upon me now, with their reproach, and, I

imagine, with their distrust. I had cowed its spirit with my passions of

rage, my kicks and my curses, for each of which I had felt a torment of

regret and with each of which came a hundred vain vows to myself never

to let my nature get the best of me again. I had grown old, but I could

not trust myself more than before. I even feared that some day I might

reveal voluntarily my existence to my daughter, so that a final and

terrible, unspeakable culminating evil deed should mark the end of my

career. I feared this even more than another narrow escape from

accidental disclosure, such as I had had in my first attempt to enter

the old garden on that winter night I remember so well.

At these times I have kept away for weeks and weeks, mad for want of the

sight of her. I had been forbidden liquor by wrecked organs, but now the

sound of her voice at a distance, the sight of her perfect skin was like

a draft of wine to me. Crazed with the lack of it, I always at last gave

up my struggle, and with my heart filled with the tormented affections

of a father, I went back to my watching and waiting, to my interest in

her school, her clothes, her young friends, her health, her afternoon

walks. I watched Margaret Murchie, too, with strange memories that

caught me by the throat. And ever and ever I watched the Judge. Unseen,

unknown, careful never to show myself often in the neighborhood for fear

of attracting attention, as sly as a fox, suffering like a thing in an

inferno, and no more than a lonesome ghost, I tried to determine if the

Judge were acting my part as he should--he who had taken what was mine

by the gift of God.

Chance, as you now know, threw him into a place where he was no longer a

stranger to me. He became a visitor to the "Man with the Rolling Eye,"

though I believe he used to call my automaton "The Sheik of Baalbec." It

was my delight to beat him in a battle of skill and at the same time,

from my peephole, scan his face to read his character.

At last one day he brought this young man, Estabrook.

What awakened all my sense of danger then, I cannot explain. I only know

that as this young man walked toward the machine, I realized a truth

that had never so presented itself before. My daughter was no longer a

girl! She was now a woman! Some man would come for her. And I believe I

would have been filled with hatred and fear, no matter what man he had

been.

That night I tossed upon my bed, feverish with new thoughts. I realized

that soon there would be a turn in the road of my own child's destiny. I

realized with agony which I cannot describe that I could use no guiding

hand. I hungered for the responsibility of a father. I cried out aloud

that now, in this choosing of men, I should have a word. I writhed as I

had often writhed, because, loving her too much, I was forbidden to

perform the offices of my affection. The tears that had come before now

came again, and I wept for hours, as I had wept on other occasions.

I began a new and indiscreet observation. I found that this young man

was a real menace. I followed him as he walked with her, liking him no

better when I saw a look in my daughter's eyes that never had been there

before. I would have interfered with his lovemaking, had I been able.

"God," I whispered, "I am only a ghost!"

Then chance gave me, I thought, an opportunity to strike at his courage.

He is here. He can tell you of the message the automaton scrawled for

him on a bit of paper. But he cannot tell the anxious hours, the frantic

hours, a tormented outcast spent before that message was written,

lurking in front of the Judge's house, watching with eyes red with

sleeplessness for every little sign of what was going on. Nor can he

tell you of the terror that came into a lonely creature's soul the night

the Judge came down his front steps and met a shadow of the past, face

to face. It is only I who may describe the horror of that meeting. The

recognition of my identity by a dog who whined and cowered, and then by

a man, whose breath gurgled in his throat and whose skin turned white,

are things that no man knows but me.

I can see the Judge's face now. It looked upon me with the same accusing

expression that I knew so well, and I slunk away believing that the

worst had at last come. He had seen behind the mask of my years, my

physical decline and my suffering. In one glance, before he turned

dizzily back toward the house, he had taken my secret away from me. He

knew me!

The madness of desperation came over me then. It was that which caused

me to write the message through the hand of my automaton; it was that

which led me to conceive the folly that, being known by the Judge to be

living, I might, in the name of my love for my daughter, tell him out of

my own mouth that I would never molest them.

I had stood all that man could bear. For the second time in my

desperation, I entered the garden. I climbed the balcony. The Judge was

there. Estabrook was there. They both saw me. I fled with their staring

eyes pursuing me.

What more can I tell?

You have heard.

I am a miserable man.

BOOK VII

THE PANELED DOOR

CHAPTER I

THE SCRATCHING SOUND

Estabrook listened to the story of Mortimer Cranch, sometimes staring

into the wizened face of the speaker, sometimes gazing into the depths

of the painted Gardens of Versailles. When at last, in a hollow voice

which reverberated through the scene loft, Cranch had ended, the younger

man jumped forward with his eyes blazing, his hands clenched, his

nostrils distended.

"What is wrong with my wife now?" he roared. "You know. Tell me or I'll

tear you to pieces!"

There was a moment in which the place was as still as a tomb. I myself

drew no breath, but watched the half-bald head of the criminal shake

sadly.

Then suddenly he looked up. With one claw-like finger, he pointed at

Estabrook. Hate and distrust were in his eyes.

"You know!" he piped in a thin but terrible voice. There was no doubting

the sincerity of his accusation.

"I know?" cried Estabrook, falling back. "I know?"

"It began when you left the house!" cried Cranch. "I've always watched

on and off since you married her. I'm her father. I've loved her as no

one knows. It was my right to watch. I've been nearly mad with worry.

What have you done to her? You have dug me out of the grave, I tell you.

Now we're face to face. What have you done with my girl?"

The lonely, ruined man had thrown his arms forward. He wore dignity. For

a passing second he became a figure to inspire awe; for a moment he

seemed the incarnation of a great self-sacrifice. And in that pause he

saw that Estabrook's expression had suddenly filled with sympathy, as if

in a flash a warmer circulation of blood stirred in his veins; as if,

suddenly, his sight had been cleared so that he could picture all the

suffering which Cranch had been forced to keep locked up within himself,

through dragging years. He reached for the extended, bare, and bony

wrist of the older man and grasped its cords in his strong fingers.

"Come," said he softly, "there is no time for us who have loved her so

much, each in his own way, to misunderstand."

Cranch did not answer. He did not move a muscle. But his eyes filled

with the thin tears of aged persons.

"And now, Doctor," said Estabrook, wheeling toward me, "we must find

out if Margaret has sent us word."

He plucked my sleeve; he started toward the stairs. He turned his back

on the Gardens of Versailles and the vagrant who kneeled beside the cot

in the foreground, with his face buried in the red blankets.

It was the hoarse call of this ghost of a man that stopped us.

"Estabrook!" he said.

"Yes."

"We may never meet again."

The younger man went back and without speaking, clasped the other's

hand.

"You will tell one person--just one--about me?" asked Cranch.

"Julianna!" Estabrook exclaimed with horror.

The other shook his head patiently from side to side.

"I meant Margaret Murchie," he whispered.

Then, feeling the wistful gaze of his worn and watery eyes upon our

backs, we left the Mohave Scenic Studio forever. A run across town in my

car brought us again to my door. My scrawny busybody of a maid opened it

before I had opportunity to even draw forth my key.

"Four or five telephone calls," she said with her impudent importance,

"but only one is pressing."

"One?" cried I, "who from?"

"Somebody I don't know, Doctor. Margaret Somebody. She left a message.

She wouldn't say no more than just one word."

"What was that word?" cried Estabrook at my shoulder.

"Danger."

I suppose that both of us felt the shock and then the tingle of

excitement in the meaning of that phrase, interpreted in the light of

our understanding.

"Doctor!" the young man shouted.

"Yes, Estabrook," said I; "keep your nerve. I think I have the key to

this problem in my possession. I have not yet explained. I did not want

to do so unless it was necessary. But if I am right you must not weaken.

You must be ready to throw your whole strength into loyalty and

affection for your wife and courage to protect her at any cost!"

"I'm ready!" he cried. "I feel that I must win her all over again. She

is as fresh and new and beautiful to me as the day I first saw her. And

I love her now as never before!"

"Jump into the car, then!" I commanded, and turning to my chauffeur,

whispered, "To the Marburys'. Where we were this morning. And

what--we--want--is--speed!"

He nodded, but I have no doubt that Estabrook and I both cursed him for

his caution as he slowed down at the crossings, and finally, when, to

conform to the traffic regulation, he circled in front of the banker's

house.

This time neither of us looked up at either residence, but ran forward

toward the Estabrooks' door. I pressed the bell centred in the Chinese

bronze.

Suddenly, however, the unfortunate husband grasped the arm of my coat.

"My promise!" he exclaimed.

"You mean to keep it at any cost?"

"Yes," said he. "I trusted her judgment and her loyalty, and gave her my

word."

"Pah!" I exploded angrily. His literal sense of honor, his narrow

conscience which led him into inexpediency, seemed to me a part of a

feminine rather than of a masculine nature, and more ridiculous than

high-minded.

"Well, wait here, then," I snapped back at him as Margaret Murchie

opened the door. "If necessary I will call you."

The old servant said nothing until we were in the hall, but her face was

white with fear. I read on it the word she had transmitted to us by

telephone. And whether or not it was my imagination, I felt the presence

of a crisis and a forewarning that the inexplicable events which I had

observed were now to come to some explosive end.

Margaret's first words, said to me with her two large hands raised as

if to ward off a menace, were not reassuring.

"The scratching noise!" she cried. "The soft scratching noise!"

I turned her toward me by grasping her shoulder.

"No hysteria," I said firmly. "Every second may count. Tell me quickly

what has happened."

"Yes, sir," she said, bracing herself. "I've done as you told me--very

faithful. I went this morning to get my orders from her. I don't say the

voice that answered me weren't hers."

"Well, would you say it was?" I asked savagely.

"I think I would, sir," she replied. "It was strange and changed and

soft. I could hardly hear it. She said she didn't require anything. So I

came away."

"And then--?"

"And then I did as you told me. I went to her door often enough and

listened. You told me not to call to her unless there wasn't any sound.

But there was a sound--a dreadful sound after a body had listened to it

a bit."

"A sound?"

"Yes, a scratching sound. Sometimes it would stop and then it would go

on again. And all the time it seemed to me more than ever that she

wasn't alone in that room."

"Wasn't alone! What made you think so?" I exclaimed.

"I couldn't just say," answered Margaret. "I've never been able to say.

It's just a feeling--a strange and terrible feeling, sir, that somebody

else is there. But the scratching sound I heard with my two ears. And

you never heard so worrying a sound before!"

"It has stopped?" I said.

"Yes, it has stopped. It stopped just before I telephoned. I thought I

heard something touch the door and I went up and listened. I couldn't

hear anything. I knocked. I got no answer. I remembered your orders. I

wasn't sure whether I could hear breathing or not inside, but I didn't

dare to wait. I called your office, sir. And I thank God you're here!"

"And you didn't break open the door? You didn't even try the knob?"

She looked at me dumbly. Her mouth twitched with her terror.

"I didn't dare. I've had courage for everything in this world, sir," she

said. "But I didn't dare to open that door! I'm glad somebody else has

come into this dreadful house!"

"Which is the room?" I asked.

"Come with me," she replied, beginning her climb of the broad stairs.

Her feet made no noise on the soft carpeting; nor did mine. The whole

house, indeed, seemed stuffy with motionless air, as if not even sound

vibrations had disturbed the deathlike fixity of that interior. As we

turned at the top toward the paneled white door, which I knew as by

instinct was the one we sought, for the first time I became conscious of

the faint ticking of a clock somewhere on the floor above us.

"I've forgot to wind the rest," whispered the old servant, as if she had

divined my thought. "They were driving me mad."

I nodded to show her that now I, too, was beginning to feel the effect

of the strange state of affairs which I had first sensed from the other

side of the blue wall.

"Leave me here," I said to her softly. "Go down to Mr. Estabrook. He is

in the vestibule. He has a message for you from long ago."

I may have spoken significantly; she may have been at that moment

peculiarly sharp to read the meanings behind plain sentences. Whatever

the case, her face lit up with joy--the characteristic, joyful

expression that never comes to the faces of men and few times to the

face of a woman. For a moment youth seemed to return to her. The last

traces of the limber strength of body, gone with her girlhood, came

back. She wore no longer, at that second, the mien of a nun of household

service. She was transfigured.

"It's Monty Cranch!" she cried under her breath. "He isn't dead! I knew

he wasn't. I knew it always."

"Go now," I said. "Mr. Estabrook has something of a story to tell you."

She left me then, standing alone before that white expanse of door. I

was literally and figuratively on the threshold of poor MacMechem's

mystery, knowing well that the solution of it would explain the strange

influence that had registered its effects upon my patient, little

Virginia Marbury.

I listened with my ear pressed softly against the door. No other sign of

life came to me than that of soft breathing. Indeed, even then I had to

admit to myself that I might have imagined the sound. I stood back, as

one does in such circumstances, half afraid to act--half afraid that to

touch the knob or assault the closed and silent room would be to bring

the sky crashing down to earth, turn loose a pestilence, set a demon

free, or expose some sight grisly enough to turn the observer to stone.

I found myself sensing the presence of a person or persons behind the

opaque panels; my eyes were trying, as eyes will, to look through the

painted wooden barrier.

My glance wandered to the top of the door, back again to the middle,

downward toward the bottom. The house was so still, now that Margaret

had stepped out of it into the vestibule, that the ears imagined that

they heard the beating of great velvety black wings. The gloom of the

drawn blinds produced strange shadows, in which the eyes endeavored to

find lurking, unseen things that watched the conduct and the destinies

of men. But my eyes and ears returned again each time to their vain

attention to the entrance of that room, as if the stillness and the

gloom bade me listen and look, while I stood there hesitant.

At last the reason for my hesitancy, the reason for my reluctance, the

reason for my staring, suddenly appeared as if some fate had directed my

observation. A corner of an envelope was protruding from beneath the

door!

I felt as I pulled the envelope through that the next moment might bring

a piteous outcry from within, as if I had drawn upon the vital nerves of

an organism. Yet none came; I found myself erect once more with the

envelope in my hand, reading the writing on its face. It was scrawled in

a trembling hand.

"Margaret," it said, "send for my husband. Give him this envelope

without opening it yourself. Give it to him before he comes to this

door."

"Poor woman!" I said with a sudden awakening of sympathy. "Poor, poor

woman!"

With my whispered words repeating themselves in my mind, I retraced my

way along the hall, down the stairs.

I opened the front door quietly. My first glance showed me the

countenance of the old servant; it was lighted by the words which the

young man was saying to her.

"Estabrook," said I.

He jumped like a wounded man.

"She is not dead?" he groaned.

"No," said I; "not dead. Come in. She has sent for you."

"Sent for me!" he cried, trying to dash by me.

"Wait," I commanded. "Before you go, come into this reception room. This

message is for you."

He took the envelope, almost crunching it in his nervous fingers.

"Remember what I told you," I cautioned him.

"Told me?"

"Yes. To be strong," said I. "To be loyal."

He nodded, then ran his finger under the flap. There were several sheets

of thin paper folded within.

"Her writing!" he exclaimed. "But so strange--so steady--so much like

her writing when I first knew her. Why, Doctor, it is her old

self--it's Julianna."

"Sit down," I suggested.

He spread the papers on his knee.

As he read on, I saw the color leave his skin, I saw his hands draw the

sheets so taut that there was danger of their parting under the strain.

I heard the catch in each breath he took. As he read, I looked away,

observing the refined elegance of the room in which we were sitting and

even noting the bronze elephant on the mantel which I remembered was the

very one which Judge Colfax had thrown at the dog "Laddie." It was not

until he had reached forward and touched my sleeve that I knew he had

finished.

I looked up then. He had buried his head in the curve of his arm. His

body seemed to stiffen and relax alternately as if unable to contain

some great grief or some great joy which accumulated and burst forth,

only to accumulate again.

I heard him whisper, "Julianna."

I saw his hand extending the paper toward me with the evident meaning

that I should read it.

I took it from him.

I have that very paper now. It reads as follows.

BOOK VIII

FROM THE WOMAN'S HAND

CHAPTER I

THE VOICE OF THE BLOOD

I am a miserable woman.

Before I ask you to return to me, I am determined that you shall know

the truth. I beg you to read this and consider well what I am and what I

have done before you undertake life with me or again bring your love

into my keeping. This I ask for your sake and for my own; for yours,

because I grant that you have been deceived and owe me nothing; for my

own, because I believe that I have borne all that I can, and to have you

come back to me without knowing all, and without still loving me as you

used to love me, would break my heart.

I must not write you with emotion; I must stifle my desire to cry out

for your sympathy. I shall write without even the tenderness of a woman.

I am the daughter of a murderer.

In my veins is an inheritance of unspeakable, viciousness.

Before the death of him who I had believed all my life was my own

father, I was wholly in ignorance of my own nature. I believed that I

took from two noble parents the full assurance that I would be exempt

from weakness, that I, with brain cells formed like theirs, would

possess forever their tenderness, their geniality, and their strength of

will.

You know well how strong a faith I had in the power of inherited

character. To it I attributed all that was good in me. I realize now how

cruel is this doctrine of heredity; I have spent my strength and given

my soul in a battle to prove that I was wrong, that it is not a true

doctrine and that God and the human will can laugh in its face.

Without knowing my experience, however, you cannot know to what extent I

have been successful. I must tell the story of the tempests which have

swayed my mind, of the contests between good and evil, of the narrow

gate where my will has made its last defense against the onslaught of

terror and destruction.

To my task!

You remember the paper that I burned at dawn which my foster father had

dropped from his fingers, stiffening in death. It was his last message

to me, written in infinite pain and in an agony of doubt, intended to

warn me of the truth that I was not by inheritance strong, but weak, not

good, but bad. It told me that I was not the daughter of my mother,

whose gentle goodness seemed to fill the old home like a lingering

aroma, nor of him who was so strong and so respected of all men, but the

daughter of a pitiable woman of the tenements who had passed her days in

singing and dancing for pennies thrown at her, and of a man who, having

descended from a long line of exquisite savagery, self-indulgence, and

weakness, had been driven by his inheritance through all excesses and

finally to the murder of his wife and the wish to strangle me in my

crib.

Can you conceive the effect of this truth upon my mind?

At first I was merely frozen with terror. I did not fully grasp the

significance of these lines of writing in which he who loved me so well

had endeavored to soften for me his warning against the latent horrors

that had been locked up within me. At first I did not realize that the

same night which marked his death had marked also the death of my old

self.

Indeed, my first thought was of you. The message had said plainly that I

might consider myself the sole possessor of my secret. I was certain

that you did not know. I felt the desire to prevent you from ever

knowing; I felt the wildness of a tigress at the thought that any one

might take my secret from me. Between your hearing the truth about me

and my giving you up forever, I had no hesitancy of choice. You must

never know, I told myself. Though you were all that was left in my

life, I might send you away, but to tell you the truth about myself

would be, I believed, to end your love for me which was all that was

left to the comfort of my heart. And at that idea I screamed aloud in

agony.

I still possessed my conscience; I promised myself over and over again

in those hours that I would not deceive you. I did not think for a

moment then of asking you to take me with the understanding that you

knew there was some terrible thing about me which you were forbidden to

know. If in those moments, then, when you came to my room at dawn, I

made that bargain with you, so that I might feel your arms about me, and

know that I was not to lose you, it was the act of a woman who had just

lost her girlhood and whose life had been torn to shreds.

I made a terrible mistake. I know it now. The fact that you have

refrained so honorably from asking me the forbidden question and also

the fact of your keeping your promise to stay away during these last

days, though you were in ignorance of my motives in asking it, has shown

me that I might well have disclosed all to you. Without meaning to do

so, I have tested not only your honor but something more. I have proved

to myself that, behind your undemonstrative exterior which I have

sometimes felt was cold, you have that love and tenderness of spirit

which is capable of faith and loyalty and the warmth of which endures

the better because covered. I should have told you because the secret

has mocked me and because nothing can last between man and woman without

truth.

I should have told you, moreover, because you might have prevented the

terrible result of my knowledge of what I am in bone, blood, fibre, and

brain.

That knowledge began its corrupting influence at once; it accumulated

force as time went on. The irresistible pull of that knowledge has

brought me to the point where I know not whether it is heredity, or the

knowledge of it, which presses upon me--which has driven me like a

slave. At times I feel certain that the last message of Judge Colfax,

rather than the danger of which it intended to warn me, has been my

menace.

At first I recalled the fact of my birth and inheritance with resentment

and courage.

"I am myself," I have exclaimed. "I alone am responsible for my life, my

thoughts, my actions. They shall be according to my will to make them."

Then the haunting doubt would oppose itself to my claim. It spoke to me

like a person.

"No," it said. "You are not yourself. You are the victim of fixed laws.

The zebra is striped rather than spotted because its forebears wore

stripes. So with you. You are half murderess and half gutter-snipe. You

are woven according to the pattern. You are moulded according to the

mould. You are a prisoner of heredity. Deceive yourself if you will for

a time, but sooner or later you, like those from whom you came and of

whom you are a part, will be the plaything of self-indulgence and

weakness and passion. Fate has made your image that you see in the

mirror, refined and comely so that you may see the better the work of

heredity when it asserts itself."

This voice was ever at my ear. It became a personal voice. I thought at

first that it was the voice of some other being. At last I came by slow

changes to the belief that it was not a voice outside of me. It was my

Self that spoke. It was the heritage of evil within me. The thing that

whispered to me with its condemning voice, frightening away my courage

and sapping my strength of will, was my own blood!

I began to watch for the outcropping of evil in my conduct--for the

moment when the force of heredity within me would make itself known to

you and to the world. No morning dawned that I did not ask myself if

night would fall without some opening of the gates of my character

behind which so much that was evil, I believed, was clamoring to escape.

I lived in two lives. In one I was your wife and the girl you had

known, who now existed like an automaton, going senselessly through the

acts of day to day existence. In the other I was a condemned victim,

waiting in apprehension for the call of terrible and evil authority.

It was an accident which, at last, made real my fancies.

You remember that I was thrown from a horse. You remember that for days

a torn nerve in my elbow gave me excruciating pain. You remember that,

having regained my senses after the setting of the bone, I would not

allow the doctor to give me any narcotic. You remember my protests

against that form of relief.

I was afraid. I trembled not only with pain. I trembled with terror.

I believed I was on the threshold of danger. I felt the impending of

ruin. Though I had never experienced the sensation of an opiate I even

found my body already crying for its comfort. I found myself struggling

hour after hour with a desire to try myself. I alternated between a

belief that I was strong enough for the test and the instinct that told

me the blood in my veins was waiting like a wild animal to pounce upon a

first form of self-indulgence.

At last I yielded.

"There is no harm in the proper use of this," said the doctor, seeing

my expression,--"by a woman of your type."

I laughed in his face.

I hardly recognized the sound of this laugh; it was not my own. It was

the laugh of a new personality. It was care-free and desperate at one

time.

"There is no need of your suffering so terribly after each adjustment I

make of these cords," said the doctor a few days later, sympathetically.

"But I suffer so at night," said I.

"I will leave you something," said he. "Do not use it oftener than

necessary."

Why should I tell you the imperceptible steps by which, partly because I

believed myself destined to become a victim, I fell an abject slave to

this drug? I need only say that while my arm was still suffering from

its injury I gave myself false promises from time to time. "When the

pain is gone," I said a thousand times, "there will be no need of this

comforter."

When I was obliged to admit that I suffered no more, it was a shock to

find myself secretly procuring the opiate in order to continue its use

undiscovered.

"This will be the last time," I often said.

Then something laughed within me.

It was my blood laughing. It was my blood mocking me.

I began to experience a cycle of terrible emotions which consumed my

days. They began with shame, with injured pride, and terrible grief.

They then passed first to vain resolves, then to fear of myself,

followed by the feeling that what must be is inevitable and that

struggle to escape from the weakness given me by birth was hopeless.

This belief led me over and over again to surrender, but with surrender

came the fear of exposure of my new secret.

As long as I dared I used a prescription which the doctor had given me.

I made guilty trips to the drug store where I had been from the first. I

began to feel that strangers who had followed me into the store by

chance were there by design to spy upon me. My own furtive glances were

enough to excite suspicion. My more frequent purchases were enough to

confirm them. At last one day I read in the eyes of the clerk who waited

on me the question which must have been in his mind. I seized my package

and rushed out onto the street, knowing that I would never dare return.

I went then from one place to another in shrinking fear of detection. In

each one my experience was repeated until I believe I began to wear the

air of a hunted creature.

So suspicious were my actions that at last a drug clerk shook my little

worn-out slip of paper against the glass perfume case and scowled at

me.

"The last half of the doctor's name is torn off," he said insolently.

"Where did you get this?"

I could not speak.

"I'm sorry," he snarled. "We don't sell that under these circumstances.

Where do you live, madam?"

I hurried out into the street.

There I noticed that a tall young man, who had been staring at me, with

a row of gold teeth accenting a diabolical smile, had followed me from

the store. After I had walked half a block to find my carriage, he spoke

to me.

"I can sell you something just as good," he whispered by my side. "I do

a little quiet business in it. It's not for yourself, is it?"

"No," I said, trembling from head to foot. "It is for an unfortunate

woman, whose name must not be disclosed."

"Call her She," he suggested with a leer. "Here is an address. Send a

messenger boy whenever you like. Every one thinks I am a perfume

manufacturer."

This was the opening of greater comfort to me; my terror of detection

was lessened. As time passed I found that my moral sense was being

dulled, little by little. I was fulfilling my destiny. I was living

according to my arrangement of brain cells. In spite of his warning--or

perhaps solely because of it--the fears of my foster father were

realized. I was I!

Four weeks ago came a new thing. It burst like dynamite. It gripped my

heart. It felt along the chords of my womanhood. I could not escape its

presence. It cried to me in the darkness. It walked beside me in the

sunlight.

CHAPTER II

THIS NEW THING

It has been hard for me to tell coldly of my first weakness; it will be

harder still for me to write of what has followed, without letting

escape on this page the emotions which are in my heart. This new thing

awakened me with a start from my slumber of indifference and my

philosophy of defeat.

With a sudden return of my old self I began to have my first doubts

about the powers of heredity. I began to wonder if fear of myself,

inspired by knowledge of whence I came, rather than any true inherited

traits, had not been my undoing. I found that I had not changed so much,

after all. The goodness in me had not gone. I saw in my mirror the

Julianna you had known and loved. I felt new faith.

I felt new faith in the goodness of the plan under which men and women

live and strive. I had always believed in a Divine Spirit if for no

other reason than that I and all living things through all time had

sensed somewhere beyond their full understanding the existence of a

dynamic of creation and order. I believed, if you wish me to phrase it

so, in God. It seemed to me in my new awakening that no human creature

could be made by such a Spirit the plaything of so cruel a thing as

all-powerful heredity.

"He must give us all a chance," I cried with tears on my cheeks. "It

must be true that I can save myself by fight. It cannot be that I will

be deprived of the opportunity of putting an end to this evil descent.

My father sought to strangle me because he believed he would appear in

my blood. Now it is I, who, finding him there, must strangle him!" And

I, in my agony, fell upon my knees and prayed.

You were asleep when, in my bare feet, forgetful of the cold, I stood

hour after hour at the window of my room, listening to your breathing.

In those hours, little by little I realized that it was not escape from

a single weakness or indulgence which I must seek, but that I must

reëstablish mastery over myself. I knew that no help from without would

accomplish this mastery. I made up my mind to fight single-handed, and

to stake myself and if necessary, my life, in a battle to place again my

will upon its throne.

Accordingly I took, as I supposed, my last dose of opiate and under its

influence, which gave me strength, I pleaded with you to leave me alone

in this house for three weeks. You yielded. I then ordered all

furnishings out of my chamber, and all the servants except Margaret out

of the house, to the end that no sight or sound should draw my attention

or my thoughts from my purpose.

I had a plentiful supply of my drug. You will doubtless want to know

what I did with it. I took it with me into my retreat.

My first day I suffered the deprivation but little; it was on the second

that I moved my mattress where I could concentrate all my attention on a

single wall of the four. On the third day I began to lose track of time.

I had feared much, but not the degree of suffering which the pains of

denial now piled upon me in an accumulating load.

Often I fell forward prostrate on the floor, squirming in my agony of

body and mind, while within me a battle went raging on between the

spirit and the flesh. My eyes would search for the packet of drugs lying

on the floor within my reach and rest upon the sight of it, staring as

mad persons must stare. It was my will that held my hand.

Can you imagine the eternal vacillation of such a contest? Then you will

know that desire fighting against reason now drove my will back step by

step until it was tottering on the brink of chaos, and again, in a

triumph of resistance, my determination swept everything before it until

I longed to rise, to throw my arms upward, fingers extended, and cry

aloud my victory.

On the other hand, a thousand moments came when, ready to yield to my

temptation, I have dropped on my knees on the boards and, with my eyes

fixed upon that wall, have prayed like mad, hour after hour, my lips

parched and blood running from my bare knees.

Voices whispered to me that I was a fanatic, pinning my faith to

superstition and the practices of savagery. I whispered back to them

that they should see me victorious at last.

"How long will you fight?" said they mockingly.

"Till desire is gone and the will has nothing to fight for," I answered

them.

"You are insane," they said, speaking like so many devils.

"We shall know better at the end," I replied softly.

These dialogues, the torture of which no one can know, went on

eternally. They were arguments, I knew, between my ingenious mind and

the will which was trying to reclaim its mastery of my thought.

Night and day became all one to me. I lost count of the hours, then of

the days. I became filled with the fear that three weeks would go by,

that you would return too soon, that interruption would come before my

fight had been determined one way or the other. This terror was enough

to weaken me. I felt it many times and on each occasion drew so near the

bare wall that I could throw my weight against it and lose all external

thoughts by staring at the blank surface, with all but one purpose

banished from my mind.

I have eaten merely to live, slept only to repair my strength. Each

morsel of food has added to my bodily anguish, each falling asleep has

meant a horrible awakening to new, exquisite torture of the body. My

hands have become black by resting on the bare boards, my nails torn by

scratching over the covering of my mattress. My hair is matted. My

throat, dry with prayers, is almost voiceless, my lips are cracked like

old leather.

I do not tell you these things to gain your sympathy, but so that, if

you should want to come back to me, you will not be shocked to find me

horrible.

I must go on.

Five days ago my craving began to yield. The blessedness of the relief

is beyond description. Little by little the resistance to my will

weakened. Little by little my will gained mastery. It seemed a youthful

giant, learning its power. It seemed to fill the room, to seek to reach

beyond and find new labors for its strength. I felt the moment approach

when I, no longer a slave of myself, could indeed rise from thanks to

God and feel my triumph sure.

I dared three days ago to touch my drugs, to take them in my hand, to

mock them.

Yesterday I got up. I began to write this message.

I could hear martial music as I wrote and the tramp of a million feet.

It was the army of men and women who have fought against evil and

won,--they who have been masters of themselves. As they passed, they

cheered me, each one; they waved their hats and hands!

And afterward there came a little child and smiled and stretched his

arms out to me. He was glad.

For he is to be my own.

BOOK IX

BEHIND THE WALL

CHAPTER I

AN ANSWER TO MACMECHEM

Such was the message Julianna had sent her husband. I read it and,

without speaking, I arose and touched Estabrook on his shoulder.

"Doctor," said he pathetically.

"Come," said I.

We went up to her door. It was not locked; it opened. She was there.

She was there with a smile of greeting--a beautiful woman, pale with her

suffering, pale as the flower of a night-blooming cactus, but warm with

the vitality given to women who love. The pink light of dusk was on her

calm face.

She was leaning back against the wall. Her great eyes fixed themselves

upon Estabrook without seeing me at all. She did not speak. She seemed

in doubt.

Estabrook hesitated a moment with his hand reaching behind him for my

sleeve. He pulled at it twice, without turning.

"Is she safe?" he whispered hoarsely.

"Yes, in every way. The Lord wouldn't allow the contrary to happen,"

said I. "If she should need me later, call me. I shall be downstairs."

I stepped back then as softly as a cat. I shut the door after me with

the greatest pains. In the reception room below I looked about for the

letter I had laid on my chair. It was gone!

I called Margaret softly. I searched cautiously through the halls,

whispering her name. She was nowhere. At last I brushed against a

hanging which, being withdrawn, disclosed the message itself on the

floor. Its sheets were crumpled together, so that it was evident that

some one else had read it. I suppose that the old servant had done so.

If her curiosity was pardonable, so was my theft. I folded the paper and

thrust it in my pocket as I sat down to wait.

The minutes went by and many of them had gone before I heard some one in

the back part of the house, descending the stairs. The breath of this

person was labored like the breath of one who carries a heavy handbag. A

little later I heard a door creak and a latch click below. Then all was

still.

The house was terribly still. The stillness beat as before, like a thing

with feathery wings. The distant clock tick came and went between these

flurries of silence. I looked at my watch. An hour had gone. It was

growing dark. My patient chauffeur had lit his lights. Passers-by came

and went, in and out of their white glare. I had smoked two cigars.

[Illustration: SHE DID NOT SPEAK. SHE SEEMED IN DOUBT]

Finally a pair of feet ran up the front steps. The bell rang. There

was no movement in the house. It rang again. The feet on the steps

stamped impatiently. Again the bell buzzed. The sound came from some

unexplored region of the house, but the little thing made a shocking

hubbub in that desert of silence.

After this last vehement assault by the newcomer I heard a door open

above. A man, burning one match after another to light his way, came

down the stairs. When he had reached the bottom, I saw that it was

Estabrook. His face was illuminated by the little flame, but a

hundredfold more by an expression of happiness, the equal of which I

have never seen.

"Great Scott, Doctor," he cried in sincere surprise. "I forgot you were

here!"

"Come! Come!" said I. "Some one is wearing his thumb off on that bell."

As he swung the door back, obeying me like a man in a dream, a voice

outside mumbled indistinctly.

"Yes," said Estabrook, "I am he."

Then closing the door he came into the room, fumbling along the wall for

the electric switch. The flood of light disclosed him trying to tear

open an envelope.

As he read the contents, his face grew black as if with rage, then it

brightened again. He uttered an exclamation of pleasure.

"Thank God!" he cried. "Here! Read this. It's from Margaret Murchie."

I took the paper.

"You will never see me again," it said. "I have gone to Monty Cranch.

You won't ever see either of us again. He is going with me. We plan to

finish life, what is left of it, together. We will never turn up again.

You better not worry.

"I have caused enough trouble already," it went on in its rough scrawl.

"I have been wicked enough and had to pay dear for my lies. Julianna is

not the daughter of Monty Cranch. That is the truth. She is the daughter

of the Judge, so help me. Mrs. Welstoke is to blame for that first lie.

I stole the locket from the Cranch baby's neck and after the fire I saw

a chance to get the Judge in my power. I snapped the locket on and I

fooled him otherwise. God knows I suffered enough for it afterward when

I got to love him and Julianna. I never attempted any blackmail. But I

did not dare to tell the truth. It was the only home I had and I was

afraid. I have done the best I could. You will never see me again. Monty

knows now she is not his. I have money saved. We won't come back."

"Well," said Estabrook, when I had tossed it on the table, "I am dumb. I

am the happiest man alive. The Estabrooks, when you come right down to

it quickly, would have been sorry if--"

"Pardon me, sir," I said. "I will call later. You do not need me now and

I will step into the Marburys'."

"But, Doctor!" cried the young man.

I shook my head.

"My dear fellow," said I solemnly, "I cannot bear to hear you talk about

the respectable Estabrooks!"

Our hands met, however, and, I believe, with a warmth that meant more

than many words.

As I went up the Marburys' steps a minute later, I looked up. A light

was burning in Mrs. Estabrook's room. I saw the shadows of a man and a

woman pass the curtain together.

This pretty picture was in my mind as I entered little Virginia's room,

where Miss Peters met me with a smile--the first human smile I had ever

seen on her metallic face.

For many minutes I sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at the child

that I had grown to love, as a foolish old doctor sometimes will. Then I

bent and kissed her cool, white forehead.

"She is out of danger," said I softly.

"Oh, yes," said Miss Peters. "She will get well. You have saved her."

She moved her angular shoulders as she adjusted her belt, she strode

noiselessly across the room and moved the shade on the lamp. The light

now shone so that the blue wall, with its ethereal depths, had turned

rosy as with the light of dawn.

"Suppose, Miss Peters--" said I, after staring at it a moment, "suppose

that you were called upon for one guess about this wall and its effect

upon this child."

She wheeled about and stared at me.

"I've thought of that," she said.

"What's behind that wall?" she mused as if to herself. "As between

something and somebody, it is not a thing, but a person. A person has

been there--perhaps some one overcoming evil or winning some victory

over disease."

"Well," said I, seeing that she was hesitating, "go on."

"I can't exactly go on," she said. "I don't want you to take me for a

fool. Only, don't you suppose that you and I, ourselves, must throw out

some influence that is not seen with the eyes or heard with the ears?

Don't we affect every one near us with our good and evil? Don't we

affect the people who live above and below in apartments, or to the

right and left in houses? Doesn't strength or weakness come through wood

and iron and stone? Didn't it come through this wall, Doctor?"

"My dear Miss Peters," said I, shrugging my shoulders, "how can I say?

I can only tell you that you have just finished the longest, the most

human, and, on the whole, in the best sense, the most scientific

observation I have ever known you to make."

CHAPTER II

"WHY CARE?"

There is the tale, all told. Many may want to ask me my theories. I have

none. My story, except as to form, is like the data I keep in every case

which comes before my notice--it is a somewhat incomplete and

matter-of-fact section out of human life. Like poor MacMechem I try to

keep my mind open. I simply offer a narrative of the sequence of events.

One thing only troubles me. Did Margaret Murchie lie when she said Mrs.

Estabrook was the daughter of Cranch? or when she said that she was the

daughter of Judge Colfax? And to this question many will say, "Why

care?" Others will decide--each for himself.

THE END

* * * * * *

TITLES SELECTED FROM

GROSSET & DUNLAP'S LIST

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list

THE SIEGE OF THE SEVEN SUITORS. By Meredith Nicholson. Illustrated by

C. Coles Phillips and Reginald Birch.

Seven suitors vie with each other for the love of a beautiful girl,

and she subjects them to a test that is full of mystery, magic and

sheer amusement.

THE MAGNET. By Henry C. Rowland. Illustrated by Clarence F. Underwood.

The story of a remarkable courtship involving three pretty girls on

a yacht, a poet-lover in pursuit, and a mix-up in the names of the

girls.

THE TURN OF THE ROAD. By Eugenia Brooks Frothingham.

A beautiful young opera singer chooses professional success instead

of love, but comes to a place in life where the call of the heart is

stronger than worldly success.

SCOTTIE AND HIS LADY. By Margaret Morse. Illustrated by Harold M.

Brett.

A young girl whose affections have been blighted is presented with a

Scotch Collie to divert her mind, and the roving adventures of her

pet lead the young mistress into another romance.

SHEILA VEDDER. By Amelia E. Barr. Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher.

A very beautiful romance of the Shetland Islands, with a handsome,

strong-willed hero and a lovely girl of Gaelic blood as heroine. A

sequel to "Jan Vedder's Wife."

JOHN WARD, PREACHER. By Margaret Deland.

The first big success of this much loved American novelist. It is a

powerful portrayal of a young clergyman's attempt to win his

beautiful wife to his own narrow creed.

THE TRAIL OF NINETY-EIGHT. By Robert W. Service. Illustrated by

Maynard Dixon.

One of the best stories of "Vagabondia" ever written, and one of the

most accurate and picturesque of the stampede of gold seekers to the

Yukon. The love story embedded in the narrative is strikingly

original.

Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction

Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York

* * * * * *

THE NOVELS OF CLARA LOUISE BURNHAM

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list.

JEWEL: A Chapter in Her Life. Illustrated by Maude and Genevieve

Cowles.

A sweet, dainty story, breathing the doctrine of love and patience

and sweet nature and cheerfulness.

JEWEL'S STORY BOOK. Illustrated by Albert Schmitt.

A sequel to "Jewel" and equally enjoyable.

CLEVER BETSY. Illustrated by Rose O'Neill.

The "Clever Betsy" was a boat--named for the unyielding spinster

whom the captain hoped to marry. Through the two Betsys a clever

group of people are introduced to the reader.

SWEET CLOVER: A Romance of the White City.

A story of Chicago at the time of the World's Fair. A sweet human

story that touches the heart.

THE OPENED SHUTTERS. Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher.

A summer haunt on an island in Casco Bay is the background for this

romance. A beautiful woman, at discord with life, is brought to

realize, by her new friends, that she may open the shutters of her

soul to the blessed sunlight of joy by casting aside vanity and self

love. A delicately humorous work with a lofty motive underlying it

all.

THE RIGHT PRINCESS.

An amusing story, opening at a fashionable Long Island resort, where

a stately Englishwoman employs a forcible New England housekeeper to

serve in her interesting home. How types so widely apart react on

each other's lives, all to ultimate good, makes a story both

humorous and rich in sentiment.

THE LEAVEN OF LOVE. Frontispiece by Harrison Fisher.

At a Southern California resort a world-weary woman, young and

beautiful but disillusioned, meets a girl who has learned the art of

living--of tasting life in all its richness, opulence and joy. The

story hinges upon the change wrought in the soul of the blasè woman

by this glimpse into a cheery life.

Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction

Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York

* * * * * *

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN'S STORIES OF PURE DELIGHT

Full of originality and humor, kindliness and cheer

THE OLD PEABODY PEW. Large Octavo. Decorative text pages, printed in two

colors. Illustrations by Alice Barber Stephens.

One of the prettiest romances that has ever come from this author's

pen is made to bloom on Christmas Eve in the sweet freshness of an

old New England meeting house.

PENELOPE'S PROGRESS. Attractive cover design in colors.

Scotland is the background for the merry doings of three very clever

and original American girls. Their adventures in adjusting

themselves to the Scot and his land are full of humor.

PENELOPE'S IRISH EXPERIENCES. Uniform in style with "Penelope's

Progress."

The trio of clever girls who rambled over Scotland cross the border

to the Emerald Isle, and again they sharpen their wits against new

conditions, and revel in the land of laughter and wit.

REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM.

One of the most beautiful studies of childhood--Rebecca's artistic,

unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand put midst a circle of

austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a phenomenal

dramatic record.

NEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA. With illustrations by F. C. Yohn.

Some more quaintly amusing chronicles that carry Rebecca through

various stages to her eighteenth birthday.

ROSE O' THE RIVER. With illustrations by George Wright.

The simple story of Rose, a country girl and Stephen a sturdy young

farmer. The girl's fancy for a city man interrupts their love and

merges the story into an emotional strain where the reader follows

the events with rapt attention.

Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York

* * * * * *

STORIES OF WESTERN LIFE

May be had wherever books an sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list

RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, By Zane Grey. Illustrated by Douglas Duer.

In this picturesque romance of Utah of some forty years ago, we are

permitted to see the unscrupulous methods employed by the invisible

hand of the Mormon Church to break the will of those refusing to

conform to its rule.

FRIAR TUCK, By Robert Alexander Wason. Illustrated by Stanley L. Wood.

Happy Hawkins tells us, in his humorous way, how Friar Tuck lived

among the Cowboys, how he adjusted their quarrels and love affairs

and how he fought with them and for them when occasion required.

THE SKY PILOT, By Ralph Connor. Illustrated by Louis Rhead.

There is no novel, dealing with the rough existence of cowboys, so

charming in the telling, abounding as it does with the freshest and

the truest pathos.

THE EMIGRANT TRAIL, By Geraldine Bonner. Colored frontispiece by John

Rae.

The book relates the adventures of a party on its overland

pilgrimage, and the birth and growth of the absorbing love of two

strong men for a charming heroine.

THE BOSS OF WIND RIVER, By A. M. Chisholm. Illustrated by Frank Tenney

Johnson.

This is a strong, virile novel with the lumber industry for its

central theme and a love story full of interest as a sort of

subplot.

A PRAIRIE COURTSHIP, By Harold Bindloss.

A story of Canadian prairies in which the hero is stirred, through

the influence of his love for a woman, to settle down to the heroic

business of pioneer farming.

JOYCE OF THE NORTH WOODS, By Harriet T. Comstock. Illustrated by John

Cassel.

A story of the deep woods that shows the power of love at work among

its primitive dwellers. It is a tensely moving study of the human

heart and its aspirations that unfolds itself through thrilling

situations and dramatic developments.

Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction

Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York

* * * * * *

JOHN FOX, JR'S.

STORIES OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list.

THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE. Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.

The "lonesome pine" from which the story takes its name was a tall

tree that stood in solitary splendor on a mountain top. The fame of

the pine lured a young engineer through Kentucky to catch the trail,

and when he finally climbed to its shelter he found not only the

pine but the _foot-prints of a girl_. And the girl proved to be

lovely, piquant, and the trail of these girlish foot-prints led the

young engineer a madder chase than "the trail of the lonesome pine."

THE LITTLE SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.

This is a story of Kentucky, in a settlement known as "Kingdom

Come." It is a life rude, semi-barbarous; but natural and honest,

from which often springs the flower of civilization.

"Chad," the "little shepherd" did not know who he was nor whence he

came--he had just wandered from door to door since early childhood,

seeking shelter with kindly mountaineers who gladly fathered and

mothered this waif about whom there was such a mystery--a charming

waif, by the way, who could play the banjo better that anyone else

in the mountains.

A KNIGHT OF THE CUMBERLAND. Illustrated by F. C. Yohn.

The scenes are laid along the waters of the Cumberland, the lair of

moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moonshiner's son, and the

heroine a beautiful girl perversely christened "The Blight." Two

impetuous young Southerners fall under the spell of "The Blight's"

charms and she learns what a large part jealousy and pistols have in

the love making of the mountaineers.

Included in this volume is "Hell fer-Sartain" and other stories,

some of Mr. Fox's most entertaining Cumberland valley narratives.

Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction

Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York

* * * * * *

GROSSET & DUNLAP'S DRAMATIZED NOVELS

THE KIND THAT ARE MAKING THEATRICAL HISTORY

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list

WITHIN THE LAW. By Bayard Veiller & Marvin Dana. Illustrated by Wm.

Charles Cooke.

This is a novelization of the immensely successful play which ran

for two years in New York and Chicago.

The plot of this powerful novel is of a young woman's revenge

directed against her employer who allowed her to be sent to prison

for three years on a charge of theft, of which she was innocent.

WHAT HAPPENED TO MARY. By Robert Carlton Brown. Illustrated with scenes

from the play.

This is a narrative of a young and innocent country girl who is

suddenly thrown into the very heart of New York, "the land of her

dreams," where she is exposed to all sorts of temptations and

dangers.

The story of Mary is being told in moving pictures and played in

theatres all over the world.

THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM. By David Belasco. Illustrated by John Rae.

This is a novelization of the popular play in which David Warfield,

as Old Peter Grimm, scored such a remarkable success.

The story is spectacular and extremely pathetic but withal,

powerful, both as a book and as a play.

THE GARDEN OF ALLAH. By Robert Hichens.

This novel is an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit,

barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of vastness and loneliness.

It is a book of rapturous beauty, vivid in word painting. The play

has been staged with magnificent cast and gorgeous properties.

BEN HUR. A Tale of the Christ. By General Lew Wallace.

The whole world has placed this famous Religious-Historical Romance

on a height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time has

reached. The clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, the

perfect reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce

atmosphere of the arena have kept their deep fascination. A

tremendous dramatic success.

BOUGHT AND PAID FOR. By George Broadhurst and Arthur Hornblow.

Illustrated with scenes from the play.

A stupendous arraignment of modern marriage which has created an

interest on the stage that is almost unparalleled. The scenes are

laid in New York, and deal with conditions among both the rich and

poor.

The interest of the story turns on the day-by-day developments which

show the young wife the price she has paid.

Ask for complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction

Grosset & Dunlap, 526 West 26th St., New York