Dark Hollow Part 8

"But if John should be proved to have suffered wrongfully? If he should be shown to have been innocent?"

"Innocent?"

"Yes. I have always had doubts of his guilt, even when circ.u.mstances bore most heavily against him; and now, as I look back upon the trial and remember certain things, I feel sure that you had doubts of it, yourself."

His rebuke was quick, instant. With a force and earnestness which recalled the court-room he replied:

"Madam, your hopes and wishes have misled you. Your husband was a guilty man; as guilty a man as any judge ever pa.s.sed sentence upon."

"Oh!" she wailed forth, reeling heavily back and almost succ.u.mbing to the shock, she had so thoroughly convinced herself that what she said was true. But hers was a courageous soul. She rallied instantly and approaching him again with face uncovered and her whole potent personality alive with magnetism, she retorted:

"You say that, eye to my eye, hand on my hand, heart beating with my heart above the grave of our children's mutual happiness?"

"I do."

Convinced; for there was no wavering in his eye, no trembling in the hand she had clasped; convinced but ready notwithstanding to repudiate her own convictions, so much of the mother-pa.s.sion, if not the wife's, tugged at her heart, she remained immovable for a moment, waiting for the impossible, hoping against hope for a withdrawal of his words and the reillumination of hope. Then her hand fell away from his; she gave a great sob, and, lowering her head, muttered:

"John Scoville smote down Algernon Etheridge! O G.o.d! O G.o.d! what horror!"

A sigh from her one auditor welled up in the silence, holding a note which startled her erect and brought back a memory which drove her again into pa.s.sionate speech:

"But he swore the day I last visited him in the prison, with his arms pressed tight about me and his eye looking straight into mine as you are looking now, that he never struck that blow. I did not believe him then, there were too many dark spots in my memory of old lies premeditated and destructive of my happiness; but I believed him later, AND I BELIEVE HIM NOW."

"Madam, this is quite unprofitable. A jury of his peers condemned him as guilty and the law compelled me to pa.s.s sentence upon him. That his innocent child should be forced, by the inexorable decrees of fate, to suffer for a father's misdoing, I regret as much, perhaps more, than you do; for my son--beloved, though irreconcilably separated from me--suffers with her, you say. But I see no remedy;--NO REMEDY, I repeat. Were Oliver to forget himself so far as to ignore the past and marry Reuther Scoville, a stigma would fall upon them both for which no amount of domestic happiness could ever compensate. Indeed, there can be no domestic happiness for a man and woman so situated. The inevitable must be accepted. Madam, I have said my last word."

"But not heard mine," she panted. "For me to acknowledge the inevitable where my daughter's life and happiness are concerned would make me seem a coward in my own eyes. Helped or unhelped, with the sympathy or without the sympathy of one who I hoped would show himself my friend, I shall proceed with the task to which I have dedicated myself. You will forgive me, judge. You see that John's last declaration of innocence goes farther with me than your belief, backed as it is by the full weight of the law."

Gazing at her as at one gone suddenly demented, he said:

"I fail to understand you, Mrs.--I will call you Mrs. Averill. You speak of a task. What task?"

"The only one I have heart for: the proving that Reuther is not the child of a wilful murderer; that another man did the deed for which he suffered. I can do it. I feel confident that I can do it; and if you will not help me--"

"Help you! After what I have said and reiterated that he is guilty, GUILTY, GUILTY?"

Advancing upon her with each repet.i.tion of the word, he towered before her, an imposing, almost formidable figure. Where was her courage now?

In what pit of despair had it finally gone down? She eyed him fascinated, feeling her inconsequence and all the madness of her romantic, ill-digested effort, when from somewhere in the maze of confused memories there came to her a cry, not of the disappointed heart but of a daughter's shame, and she saw again the desperate, haunted look with which the stricken child had said in answer to some plea, "A criminal's daughter has no place in this world but with the suffering and the lost"; and nerved anew, she faced again his anger which might well be righteous, and with almost preternatural insight, boldly declared:

"You are too vehement to quite convince me, Judge Ostrander. Acknowledge it or not, there is more doubt than certainty in your mind; a doubt which ultimately will lead you to help me. You are too honest not to.

When you see that I have some reason for the hopes I express, your sense of justice will prevail and you will confide to me the point untouched or the fact unmet, which has left this rankling dissatisfaction to fester in your mind. That known, my way should broaden;--a way, at the end of which I see a united couple--my daughter and your son. Oh, she is worthy of him--" the woman broke forth, as he made another repellent and imperative gesture. "Ask any one in the town where we have lived."

Abruptly, and without apology for his rudeness, Judge Ostrander again turned his back and walked away from her to an old-fashioned bookcase which stood in one corner of the room. Halting mechanically before it, he let his eyes roam up and down over the shelves, seeing nothing, as she was well aware, but weighing, as she hoped, the merits of the problem she had propounded him. She was, therefore, unduly startled when with a quick whirl about which brought him face to face with her once more, he impetuously asked:

"Madam, you were in my house this morning. You came in through a gate which Bela had left unlocked. Will you explain how you came to do this?

Did you know that he was going down street, leaving the way open behind him? Was there collusion between you?"

Her eyes looked up clearly into his. She felt that she had nothing to disguise or conceal.

"I had urged him to do this, Judge Ostrander. I had met him more than once in the street when he went out to do your errands, and I used all my persuasion to induce him to give me this one opportunity of pleading my cause with you. He was your devoted servant, he showed it in his death, but he never got over his affection for Oliver. He told me that he would wake oftentimes in the night feeling about for the boy he used to carry in his arms. When I told him--"

"Enough! He knew who you were then?"

"He remembered me when I lifted my veil. Oh, I know very well that I had not the right to influence your own man to disobey your orders. But my cause was so pressing and your seclusion seemingly so arbitrary. How could I dream that your nerves could not bear any sudden shock? or that Bela--that giant among negroes--would be so affected by his emotions that he would not see or hear an approaching automobile? You must not blame me for these tragedies; and you must not blame Bela. He was torn by conflicting duties, and only yielded because of his great love for the absent."

"I do not blame Bela."

Startled, she looked at him with wondering eyes. There was a brooding despair in his tone which caught at her heart, and for an instant made her feel the full extent of her temerity. In a vain endeavour to regain her confidence, she falteringly remarked.

"I had listened to what folks said. I had heard that you would receive n.o.body; talk to n.o.body. Bela was my only resource."

"Madam, I do not blame YOU."

He was scrutinising her keenly and for the first time understandingly.

Whatever her station past or present, she was certainly no ordinary woman, nor was her face without beauty, lit as it was by pa.s.sion and every ardour of which a loving woman is capable. No man would be likely to resist it unless his armour were thrice forged. Would he himself be able to? He began to experience a cold fear,--a dread which drew a black veil over the future; a blacker veil than that which had hitherto rested upon it.

But his face showed nothing. He was master of that yet. Only his tone.

That silenced her. She was therefore scarcely surprised when, with a slight change of att.i.tude which brought their faces more closely together, he proceeded, with a piercing intensity not to be withstood:

"When you entered my house this morning, did you come directly to my room?"

"Yes. Bela told me just how to reach it."

"And when you saw me indisposed--unable, in fact, to greet you--what did you do then?"

With the force and meaning of one who takes an oath, she brought her hand, palm downward on the table before her, as she steadily replied:

"I flew back into the room through which I had come, undecided whether to fly the house or wait for what might happen to you, I had never seen any one in such an attack before, and almost expected to hear you fall forward to the floor. But when you did not and the silence, which seemed so awful, remained unbroken, I pulled the curtain aside and looked in again. There was no change in your posture; and, alarmed now for your sake rather than for my own, I did not dare to go till Bela came back.

So I stayed watching."

"Stayed where?"

"In a dark corner of that same room. I never left it till the crowd came in. Then I slid out behind them."

"Was the child with you--at your side I mean, all this time?"

"I never let go her hand."

"Woman, you are keeping nothing back?"

"Nothing but my terror at the sight of Bela running in all b.l.o.o.d.y to escape the people pressing after him. I thought then that I had been the death of servant as well as master. You can imagine my relief when I heard that yours was but a pa.s.sing attack."

Sincerity was in her manner and in her voice. The judge breathed more easily, and made the remark:

"No one with hearing unimpaired can realise the suspicion of the deaf, nor can any one who is not subject to attacks like mine conceive the doubts with which a man so cursed views those who have been active about him while the world to him was blank."

Thus he dismissed the present subject, to surprise her by a renewal of the old one.

"What are your reasons," said he, "for the hopes you have just expressed? I think it your duty to tell me before we go any further."