The Blue Wall Part 34

"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 G.o.d. 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 pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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. G.o.d 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. d.a.m.n 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 cla.s.ses, so used to violence that they did not stare at me. I thanked the good old rough crowd, the fist-pounding, the hard-talking, hoa.r.s.e-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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s. 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, pa.s.sionate 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.