The Blue Wall Part 7

"I cannot understand Laddie's acting that way," she said in a vexed tone. "He has done it twice now in the last two days. What can have happened to him?"

"He is very old, isn't he?" I inquired.

"Yes," she said, and a little coquettish smile flitted across her face.

"He is older than I am. Come, Laddie. Come here, sir. What's the matter, old pal?"

"Age," said I. "There has never been a dog grow old in our family that he didn't sooner or later develop a kind of second puppyhood. I have seen them do all manner of inexplicable things, and one old, toothless, wire-haired terrier used to snap at his shadow on the wall."

"I should hate to have him die," said Julianna when we were on the street again. She put her arm about his s.h.a.ggy neck and I wished that I were he.

At her door I took off my glove. It was done unconsciously, but she saw it--she took off one of hers. Then she laughed and put her hand in mine.

After that walk I became the victim of all the mental follies which descend upon a man so thoroughly in love. My work suffered. I found myself at one moment reading down a page of digests of cases prepared for me by my a.s.sistants; in the next, I would be sitting again in Judge Colfax's easy-chair, and before me I could see Julianna's smiling lips, reflecting the lamplight upon their moist surfaces. In her name I would drive myself to my task again, and then, without knowing when the transition occurred, I would be standing on a gravel path dappled with sunlight and the dancing shadows of maple leaves, and she would be standing before me again with the breeze moving brown-and-gold strands of hair at the edge of her firm white neck.

It is doubtful whether I thought of Judge Colfax, or chess, or the strange meeting in the garden, or the Sheik at all. I wondered about nothing save the question of how soon I could say to Julianna what lay in my heart to say to her. Therefore it was necessary for me to review in my mind many things when, upon waking a morning or two afterward, I found, among the letters which my man had brought to the chair beside my bed, a note from the girl herself.

I did not know at first that it was from her: I had never seen her writing before. I remember that I said, "Who can this be?" and that I studied the outside for several moments before I opened the envelope.

"My father," it said, "has not been very well, I think. I wish that you could make a point of calling on him at the court-house some afternoon this week. I want to know if the change in him rests partly in my own imagination. You could determine this at once. I would be so grateful.

J. COLFAX.--P.S. Why not induce him to ask you to dinner. His indiscreet daughter would be delighted. J. C."

This was the sort of note that she would write: it was not hysterical, and yet it conveyed to me the urgency of her request; it was not frivolous, and yet in its postscript it was boldly mischievous. It accomplished the result she wished. She had wanted me to make up my mind that I would see the Judge before night and to see her as soon as possible. I determined to do both.

All day long it rained, drawing a wet shroud of gloom over the pavements, the granite walls of the buildings, and the adamant perspective of the streets. Standing in my office window, I could see the flow of black umbrellas moving up and down town, like two torpid snakes. But though I am ordinarily sensitive to the effect of a long drizzle, it failed on that day to depress me. Life had freshened. There was romance in it, possibilities, dreams. Instead of complaining to myself that the sky had lowered until its opaque rotunda seemed to touch the tops of the higher buildings, I rejoiced as I went uptown and looked out the cab window at each open square, that the cold spring downpour had freshened all the vegetation and brightened these city fresh-air s.p.a.ces as if by magic. When I found myself in the Judge's study, my mood could not have been more cheerful.

I had expected to find him in the despondency which Julianna had described to me; instead, when I had a chance to study his expression before he knew I was there, I came to the conclusion that his thoughts, whatever they might be, were pleasant thoughts and not the anxious thoughts of one who is hara.s.sed by secret apprehensions.

He was a fine picture of a man, sitting there above his old desk, his long hands spread out upon an open book, the lines in his shaven face expressing a life of faithful service, gentleness, humor, and self-control, his blue eyes as bright as those of a youth, looking out at some picture which his imagination was painting on the opposite wall of the room. I stood watching him a moment before I stirred.

"Ha!" he exclaimed as soon as I had made my presence known. "Estabrook, you are the very man I wanted to see!"

"I had imagined it," I answered. "What more?"

He blinked his eyes. "Wait a moment, you rascal," he said, brushing the sleeves of his black coat. "Take a cigar, sit down a moment. Let me collect my thoughts. I must say I hesitate to launch too quickly a subject with which I have not dealt for a good many years and one, if I remember rightly, I treated with considerable awkwardness on the former occasion."

"When was that, sir?" I asked.

"When I courted my wife," he said solemnly, looking for a moment at the floor.

"Perhaps, if I am not mistaken, you would have come to me, by and by,"

he went on with the wrinkles gathering at the corners of his eyes.

"Perhaps it is better for me to speak with you now anyhow. I am well along in years. My physician tells me that my cardiac valve--or whatever the blame thing is--is weak."

"He told you recently!" I exclaimed.

"Bless you, no. More than two years ago. I haven't been near him since, except to taste of some old madeira he keeps on his sideboard. No. I can't quite explain why I am anxious to speak of this matter so soon, so hastily. I only want to ask one or two impertinent questions which you will forgive in a man who has grown, as to certain matters, as fussy as an old maid--or a mother."

"Why, I will answer gladly enough," I said awkwardly. I thought I knew what was on his mind; my tongue grew large in my mouth.

He was pacing up and down the room then, but finally he stopped and laughed and grew solemn again.

"Darn it, my boy," he said. "I know you. I like you. I just wanted to know if you had ever been engaged--in the broad sense--engaged to a woman--with promises to fulfill. I just wanted to ask."

"No," said I.

"There!" said he. "I knew it all the time."

"Was there another question?" I asked.

"Why, yes," he said. "Why, yes. I believe I did have another. Now, what was it? I had another question. It was awkward, too, if I remember. I had another."

We both laughed then.

"Yet it seems so strange for me to ask these questions now, doesn't it?" he went on, fingering the pages of a book on the desk. "It is so early and a good deal more natural for you to speak to me than for me to speak to you. But, good G.o.d! there is a reason if you only knew--a reason. Let us say, for instance, that I might not be here then."

"Ask it, sir," I said.

"Why, I was only going to say that, in case you should succeed,--I doubt if you do succeed,--but in case you should succeed in causing her to love you, there would be no withdrawal on your part. Little Julie--my little daughter! Neither of you has known what it means yet. And, Estabrook, when she does, it must not go wrong. I know her well. She will never love but one man. He must not withdraw when he has won her!"

I started to speak angrily.

"Wait!" he cried, with his hands clenched. "He must not be shaken from her by anything--anything for which she is not to blame herself--no matter how strange or terrible--anything. Nothing will come. I know it.

But that must be promised me--to stand by her, no matter what misfortune might descend upon her."

"What could?" I asked in a trembling voice.

"Nothing," the Judge said. "It is not in G.o.d's character to allow such a thing. When you love her, Estabrook, my boy, you will not ask me that question in answer to mine."

"No," I said at once. "There need be no doubts between us, sir. It is not necessary for either of us to answer."

His whole countenance lit up as if my words had fed his soul. I should be sorry to have wiped from my memory the impression of that old man's look, as, without taking his eyes from my face, he reached for his hat.

Yet, to-night, when I, for perhaps the last time, realize again the presence of some infernal, undefined evil, I wonder that I should have been so great a fool and so willingly have neglected even the prudence of a lover. I wonder that I made so blind a bargain. I wonder that I did not ask him, before it was too late, what his conversation with Margaret Murchie in the garden had meant and what secret it was that lurked like a clawed creature of the night, ready to eat away, bit by bit, the happiness of an innocent man.

CHAPTER III

THE TORN Sc.r.a.p

When I left Judge Colfax that day, the only questions in my mind concerned Julianna. To her I had said nothing in so many words of my love, and yet I knew that if the Judge had read my growing sentiment surely, she must have seen it even more clearly. I tried to interpret her friendly, playful, girlish acceptance of my affection as an indication that she, too, felt an increasing fondness for me--a fondness which went beyond that given to a trustworthy friend. But I could not forget that her father, when he had so strangely antic.i.p.ated my request for his consent, had described her as one whose yielding would be sudden and complete--one to whom love would come in sweeping torrent of emotion--one with whom love would thereafter stay eternally. If this were true, she did not love me yet, I reflected. And with a falling of hope, I remembered that the Judge had expressed, for what reason I did not know, his own doubt of my ability to win her.

These were thoughts well adapted to hasten my lovemaking. I made a point of walking to the Monument the next afternoon. I did not meet her there, or on the way along the edge of the park, and I found myself suddenly haunted by the hitherto unconsidered possibility that, as summer was coming on, I might expect at any day that she would leave the city to visit friends or go with the Judge to some resort.

It rained again the following day, and though the downpour ceased in the late afternoon, great gray banks of clouds hung threateningly above the city. Nevertheless, tormented with the notion that we might at any time be separated for several weeks, I went again to the Monument to seek her.