The Long Lane's Turning Part 12

"Flatterer!" She tapped him on the arm with her parasol. "But I'm not wholly pleased, I a.s.sure you. The headlines are prophetic, I'm afraid.

Presently the politicians will seize upon you, and the first we know you will be in Congress--or the Senate--and the town will have lost you. That's the way it goes!"

"Ah," he said, shaking his head, "who is the flatterer now?"

They had reached the big porch and she drew him into the hall and to the blue parlour, where the Judge sat with Echo, leisurely munching toast. "I've brought Mr. Sevier," she announced, "with his laurels thick upon him, just in time for tea. For my part, I am a wreck from the sun and I shall take mine in my room. But you'll come soon again, won't you?"

She pa.s.sed out, faintly smiling and leaving a perfume of heliotrope behind her, without waiting Harry's answer, which seemed indeed to be given to Echo, since his hand held hers at the moment and his eyes were on her face. The sight for him had blotted everything else. The restful room with its cool shadows, the Judge--all seemed to retire into an inextinguishable and meaningless background, leaving only them two, together. In the year past he had never been so near her; now he marked that while her hair had the same familiar whorl and golden under-lights, her face seemed more serious than of old, her eyes deeper and more wistful.

Since that far-away evening at the Country Club, Echo had pa.s.sed through a confusion of experiences, the more trying as they had been locked in her own breast. It had been more than Harry Sevier: it was her love for him that had been fought over during that long year. When he had left her that night with his kiss burning on her hand, she had known instinctively that he had gone to do battle. What she had said had stung him deeply, yet she could not have recalled a word. It had been the cry of wounded pride, of stricken ideals, of reproach, of protest against the dominancy of the thing she hated over the man she loved. As the long months of autumn and winter wore away she had seemed, with a singular clarity of vision, to see his temptation and to enter spiritually into his struggle. They had met only a few times and then in public places and more than once her eye had distinguished the traces of the conflict. Something deep in her had told her that when he came to her again that conflict would be ended. So, at sight of him on the threshold, Echo's heart had leaped into turbulent beating.

Here, at last, they were face to face--it was the closure of the past, the burgeoning of the new!

There was a desultory conversation over the tea, and then the Judge went back to his chair in the library, and they two strayed out through the open French-window to the wide porch. There, on the top step, she sat down, leaning back against one of the big columns, up which a crimson rambler climbed. He sat lower, at her feet. The smile had faded from both their faces, and a rose that was on her breast, from the tumult of her heart, showered its petals on the stone. He could see the old sun-dial gleaming from its tangle of ivy. He knew its quaint motto:

_Hours fly, flowers die.

New men, new ways, Pa.s.s by; Love stays._

After a silence he lifted his gaze.

"You didn't think," he said in a low voice, "that I stayed away because I--because that same thing had ever happened since the day of the trial?"

"No," she answered, gently, "I knew it hadn't."

A uniformed imp on a bicycle--a postal messenger--careened wildly up the drive with a special delivery letter. They saw him deliver it to old Nelson at the side portico and pedal whistling down a by-path.

"Then," he said quickly, "you know now that it never can again? It has been a year, a round year to-day. I made up my mind that I would not come to you till the last day was out."

"I felt that, too," she said. "I knew what you were thinking. I--I even guessed the year. Was it--so hard?"

"Yes," he answered. "But it would have been harder if I hadn't found it out when I did. The sting of all these months," he went on, "has been your thought of me! Every day, every hour, I have seen you as you looked that night at the 'Farm.' I shall never deserve that look again--Echo!"

She turned toward him at that, as if with a sudden impulse, her eyes like sapphire stars, her lips parted, but she did not speak. The failing sunlight spattered down through the moving foliage in green-gilt flashes that tinged her face and touched her hair with the soft burnish of Venetian gold, like that of a figure he remembered in St. Mark's. Behind her reared the seamed and grey old column--a faded background of age for a figure of immortal youth--and he knew suddenly that the picture of her, as he saw her at that moment, had covered forever the painful memory. There was only the ardent, unconditional now: only Echo and the dear old porch and the dimming daylight--and a bluebird singing from the heart of a tree--ever henceforward to be symbols to him of woman's love and--home!

He leaned toward her, his hand groping for hers, outstretched on the cool stone beside her, and said in a voice shaken, in spite of himself:

"Echo--it _is_ just as it was a year ago, isn't it?"

She caught her hand--the one he groped for--to her cheek. She rose, and for an instant it seemed as if she had not heard. Then her glance wavered and fell and a bright, rich colour stained her cheeks like a sudden flush of rosy sun-set. But she had slightly turned away and he did not see it.

"Ah!" he said, looking up at her. "I may say it now--may I not?--what you must have known all along. I love you, I love you! Only you and your love, dear--that is all I ask of G.o.d!... Echo--"

There was a sudden sound behind them, a hoa.r.s.e cry from the room they had left. Both turned sharply toward the French-window. Then she was down the long porch like a flying shadow.

He followed, to find her bending over the form of her father, slipped sideways on the leathern sofa, his face bluish-white and a paper crumpled in his rigid hand. At the same moment Nelson thrust his woolly head through the rear door.

"Quick!" she cried, kneeling beside the couch. "He has fainted. Call mother." He went, his aged features twitching with fright.

"I will send Doctor Southall," said Harry quickly. He touched her hand, and with a single backward look at her, hurried out. She heard his step speeding down the gravel drive.

Echo laid a tremulous hand upon her father's, and at the touch the tense fingers relaxed and a crumpled brown paper dropped from them.

She s.n.a.t.c.hed it up--was that what had made him faint? She spread it out: it was a photographic print, unmounted, of the last page of a letter, in his own handwriting. Across the top was printed, in the purple, noncommittal lettering of a typewriter, "For possible release May 3rd."

Then as she gazed, over the agitation of her face grew a shocked bewilderment that rushed headlong to realisation. She started to her feet, and a vivid scarlet flooded her pale face from chin to brow, then slowly ebbed, leaving behind it a frozen anguish. The print fell from her hand. At the same moment the Judge stirred and opened his eyes.

He saw her standing before him; knowledge slipped back.

"Echo--"

She turned swiftly. He had struggled to a sitting posture--his gaze fastened on the crumpled paper on the rug. A little spasm crossed his face. "Reach me that," he said.

She picked it up and laid it in his hand, and he put it into his pocket with shaking fingers. He pa.s.sed his hand across his forehead.

"Where's Sevier?" he asked dully.

"He went to send the doctor. We were on the porch and heard you cry out."

"Ah, yes, I--remember. I tried to call you. I lost track of things for a minute or two, I reckon, But it's nothing. I've had little spells like this before. I don't need Southall--send Nelson to tell him not to come. I'm all right."

Unheeding her protests, he rose and went to his chair, as Mrs. Allen, with unaccustomed agitation on her face, swept into the room.

CHAPTER XIV

THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL

Late that night the Judge sat alone at his desk in the library. There was a faint pungent odour in the room and at his elbow sat an ash-tray on which was a little huddle of brown ashes--all that remained of the photograph whose arrival that afternoon had so disconcerted him. He sat like a stone image, staring out into the moon-lighted garden, but really seeing nothing beyond the range of the poisonous ashes at his side, save a green-and-yellow blur that might have been blent of leaves and moonshine.

He was looking at the Handwriting on the Wall.

All of his early life had been impeccable, all save that single lapse--that "brain-storm" which had convulsed the deep and quiet waters of his nature. It had come and gone with fateful swiftness, and out of the bitterness of the tragic awakening had grown gradually--as a spotless lily springs from the silt--a flower of recompense, which, its roots in the turbid memory, had shed a subtle perfume on his later life. His steady-going career had been laurelled with place and honours, and in Echo he had found compensation for the empty and the missed. And now, after all the years, Fate grinned at him like a gargoyle from the cloud, holding the thunderbolt to destroy him!

Unless he paid the penalty--with his professional integrity!

The Judge knew all at once that in the Great Economy no act of life was lost. His had not been. It had only been covered. Somewhere that old leaf of scribbled paper had lain, inert but potential, waiting the turn of the wheel to bring it to light. By some satanic twist of circ.u.mstance it had come to the hands of his enemy--Craig was his enemy now--and in his hands it spelled his own ruin. What weapon was there to fight with? None. However dastard the act that spread it to the world, he would stand in the eyes of his fellow-men discredited, undermined, morally disestablished, stripped and naked of all those things which were the breath of his life. He thought of his wife--of Echo. For them humiliation, looks askance. His decision on the Welles-Scott case was ready, locked in his drawer--lacking only his signature writ at the bottom--the most vital and far-reaching decision of any he had rendered. On the first of May it was to be handed down.

He remembered the typewritten line on the photograph: "May 3rd!" On that day he would be placarded in the public prints!

A hackneyed text flashed through his mind: "Be sure thy sin will find thee out." He had not sinned, as the world counted it, no. But chasing the first, a second text etched itself as swiftly: "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

The coils had woven inextricably, there was no gap in the meshes.

Suppose he did this thing that Craig demanded, rewrote the decision, perjured himself. Right, by another judgment, would have its way in the end. The act would save him from shame--would save others as well.

What did it matter? Would not such a solution be best for all concerned?

"Thou shalt not do evil that good may come!"--it was curious how the ba.n.a.l, forgotten texts started up, like Jack-in-boxes, from some boyhood covert of his brain! Not matter? Ah, how much it mattered!

Escape by that road was impossible for him. And there was but one other road by which he could evade the issue.

He unlocked a desk-drawer and pushed aside its litter of papers. A small silver-mounted revolver lay there--pointing the one way out. He picked it up, his fingers shrinking at the chill of the cool metal, then laid it on the desk. He took a sheet of paper from its place and began to write: "Dear Echo--"

He started; no, that would not do. He began again: "Dear Charlotte and--"

He paused an instant and listened--his hearing had caught some sound above-stairs. It was not repeated and he bent his head again over the writing. But his fingers would not frame the words. He laid aside the pen. Better, after all, to go all silently, leaving behind him empty speculation, which if painful at first, would become in time but a softened memory!