The Long Lane's Turning Part 9

Lawrence Treadwell, the attorney, sat in his office negligently smoking a segar and staring down through the open window upon the busy thoroughfare beneath. Outside was the spring sunshine and the smell of growing trees. Just across from the building stood the city's new Opera House, over whose ambitious entrance was still stretched a canvas sign advertising a ma.s.s-meeting held the evening before under the auspices of the Civic Club.

He read the lettering reflectively as he blew out clouds of the fragrant, opalescent incense: "Protest Against Machine-Rule." He smiled. The old revolt of the Quixotic handful against the entrenched forces that had governed the city for a generation--one more of the popular ebullitions which punctuate modern progress, the familiar periodic dust-storms from whose turmoil the Old Guard emerged, moveless as ever in the saddle, to a new campaign dictated by the mighty Over-Lord, the great Public Services Corporation which, through its multiple ramifications, a.s.sumed to control the state's franchises, to dictate its significant legislation--even to influence its judiciary.

As he read the words on the canvas bellying in the breeze, his smile was cynical.

Yet the smile had a touch of wistfulness too. The movement had grown out of the general unrest, the keener public conscience, that had accompanied the political renaissance that in the past year had been sweeping over a dozen commonwealths. In the old southern city, wherein principles were not yet become mere hypocrisies and folk still preserved old-fashioned political ideals, it had attained to the prestige of well-known names and engaging personalities. Their forefathers had been men to whom honour and cleanliness in public life had meant all things and who had governed as naturally as they had breathed. And there were many among these to whom the new era, with its open sneer at public trust and its subservience to great aggregations of wealth selfishly employed, had become an increasing reproach. The man who gazed down from the office window had long ago made his choice. He had no illusions. He knew to what allegiance he owed his present position. It had been the reward of long and faithful service! Yet sometimes still the bonds chafed--sometimes still the new spirit that was stirring abroad struck through his ingrained habit, calling to him to do the impossibly fanatical thing!

There was a knock at the door and a man entered. It was Cameron Craig.

He responded briefly to the lawyer's greeting and coming to the window, stood a moment beside him, looking down at the hurrying wheeled traffic, the loitering pavement pedestrians--and the flapping canvas sign. He laughed a little, but without mirth.

"You were there, I suppose," he said.

Treadwell nodded. "Yes. It's tilting at the windmills, of course."

"They began too late," said Craig grimly. "The ticket is safe enough this year. But next year--the Gubernatorial campaign--if they only had fire enough to keep the blaze going till then, they might give us trouble."

The other did not answer. His eyes had rested briefly on Craig's face, then again had sought the window. He was thinking that his visitor had not changed for the better during the past two months. The fact, indeed, would have been apparent to a casual eye. The virulent force and will were no less noticeable, but there was now a kind of glaze over his face--a certain fierce and sullen quality that seemed a reflection of inner bitterness.

The judicial eye clove to the fact. Since that far-away night at the "Farm," Craig's pa.s.sion had never loosened its grip. It was characteristic of the man that he had on that occasion played the only card in his hand, not blindly, but by instinct and without hesitation.

But while he had apparently gained his point, it had been borne to him gradually that his very method of play had lost him infinitely more than he had gained. In the mind of the woman he desired he had transgressed the rules of the game, and the realisation maddened him.

Never since then had he heard her name coupled with Harry Sevier's.

Never had he seen them together. This had given him satisfaction. But if he had shattered her regard for the man whom he now hated more tenaciously than he had ever hated anything in his whole life, the fact had seemed to hold no advantage for himself. On several visits to the city, he had invented reasons to call at the Allen house, but he had soon learned that he was not to meet Echo there. He had, however, seen her elsewhere more than once--when her gaze had gone by him as if he had been empty air. Though his veins burned with the fever of the famished, he had not ventured to challenge that cold aloofness. But it had rankled and stung him almost beyond endurance, till he had come to thirst avidly for some kind of test between them--for action, whatever the result might mean. And the fierce desire that raged within him, feeding on itself, had left its sinister traces on his face.

Abruptly Craig withdrew his gaze. "I see young Sevier held forth last night. The last time I heard him was in court, just a year ago. The young fop! He'd do better to stick to his lawbooks--though I hear he has no cases anymore."

"It's his own choice," the attorney answered coldly. He liked Harry Sevier and he resented the other's tone, no less than the words. "He could have a new client every day if he wanted. As a matter of fact he hasn't taken a case since the one you speak of. He fought for six months trying to get through an appeal on that. It was the first criminal case he had ever lost and it cut him up some, I fancy. Of course it's ridiculous to take it so to heart, but I swear I can't help liking him for it! He's not merely a fop, either. In my opinion he comes mighty near being just what that crowd at the Civic Club have been looking for."

Craig's eyes had not left Treadwell's. "In what way?" he asked.

"As a spokesman. They know what they believe and what they want to fight for. But they've been inarticulate. Most of them are blue-blooded old fogies, with their souls full of fine ideals, but with no leader. In him (and in that speech of his last night he threw in his lot with them absolutely) they have a finely trained legal mind--for with all his old fire-works Sevier always had that--and a natural orator besides. You should have heard him last night! For two hours he held that great audience in a perfect spell. 'The finest exhibition of southern oratory since the war' the papers called it this morning, and I tell you, Craig, they weren't far wrong!"

He stopped, somewhat embarra.s.sed by his own enthusiasm, and wondering at the dark look on the other's face. Perhaps to hide this, Craig turned away. His fingers were twitching and for an instant he was not wholly master of himself. When he spoke, however, he had regained his governance.

"After all, it wasn't the future of this anti-machine campaign that I came to talk about. There's something nearer home that is worrying me."

"What's the trouble?"

"The Welles-Scott case decision. It is to be handed down on the first of May. It must be in our favour."

The other looked surprised. "But surely it will be."

"It's not on the cards. I thought I knew the Judge, but there are signs that I'm afraid of."

The attorney sniffed incredulously. "Judge Allen!" he exclaimed.

"Why, the trust made him. And it keeps him made, I should think, too."

Craig shook his head. "He's been talking lately. We've had warnings from some who are very close to him. This decision _must_ be what we want it to be. Voters are thinking more than they used to. If these Civic Club people keep up the agitation--particularly if they link on to the prohibition movement, as they are likely to do--the distillery may become a live issue in the next state campaign. That's the great danger. And this Welles-Scott case strikes at the heart of the matter.

If the Trust loses this decision it will be the signal for a crop of bills in the next legislature that will cost us a cool million to fight. And they may lead anywhere. I tell you we _have_ to have it!"

The other mused a moment. "The Judge, of course, can't be reached in--in ordinary ways."

"Of course not. He's not venal. We've been able to depend on him so long because he has grown up with the Trust--he was its counsel for many years--and its interests were his. He thought with it. His mind ran in the same groove. But Beverly Allen, the Trust's counsel, and Judge Allen of the Supreme Court are different propositions. I always thought this test case was a mistake! But I was overruled. Well, we've got to have the decision. If one way won't bring it about, another shall. Something will have to--persuade him. He must have a weak spot. We must find it, that's all."

"His life's been an open book, if that's what you mean," said the attorney, slowly.

"Few men's life are open books," returned Craig, with cynical shortness. "There's apt to be a page pasted down somewhere. That part of it is your business. If there's any such page in his case, you find it! I don't care how small a page it is, or how long ago it was pasted down. If it's there I want it!"

"His record was combed with a fine-tooth comb when he went on the bench," said Treadwell. "The Trust wanted a man that the opposition couldn't get anything on. That was before your time, of course. I went over the report myself. There wasn't anything there--nothing but the vaguest suspicion of an old love affair that was polished off twenty years ago."

Craig turned sharply. "A love affair! After his marriage?"

"Why yes, I think so. But there weren't any details. And the woman died abroad long ago."

"What was her name?"

Treadwell looked at him curiously. A faint flush had crept over his face. "See here, Craig," he said, "after all, there's a limit to decency. At the most it was nothing but a pa.s.sing infatuation--an innocent one. There was not the faintest breath of scandal. And as I told you, the woman is dead."

Craig's eyes were boring into him. "Treadwell," he said in a hard voice, "you don't seem to understand. This is a big game, and there is no limit! None! And I intend to win it! _What was her name?_"

The other leaned to knock the ash from his segar. There was a tense pause before he replied. "I have forgotten."

"Where are the old reports?"

"They were destroyed."

Craig looked at him an instant, his eyes like sparkling points of steel. He opened his lips to speak, but he did not. Instead, with a shrug of incredulous contempt, he caught up his hat, turned to the door, opened it and went out.

Treadwell listened to the heavy footsteps descending the stair. Then he went and shut the door.

"The hound!" he said under his breath.

CHAPTER XI

CRAIG FINDS HIS WEAPON

From his chair in the library at Midfields that night, just beyond the circle of radiance cast by the big reading-lamp, Cameron Craig looked steadily at the Judge from under his bushy eyebrows, as the latter said:

"Yes, it is true that I was for years affiliated with the interests you represent. I was their attorney. The connection ceased when I, myself, severed it, eleven years ago."

Craig's lips, that had been set in a hard line, parted in a satiric smile. He was leading doggedly up to what he purposed to say. "To its profound loss," he said from the shadow. "You had cogent reasons, no doubt."

The other mused a moment, his pallid, scholarly face averted. "I'll tell you, if you like," he said at length. "But you will understand that I challenge no one else's convictions. I a.s.sume to sit in judgment only upon my own."

Craig nodded. "Of course."

"I made the connection we are speaking of," continued the Judge, "when I was a young man, just beginning practice. The liquor problem was young then too. Communities did not take it too seriously--particularly in the south where drinking was a matter of course with gentlemen. The white-ribbon movement was in its infancy and John B. Gough had hardly been heard of. To me--to the men I knew--the 'temperance' agitation seemed a mere recurring fad, fostered by pious and well-meaning persons, which cropped up--a kind of moral seven-year locust--at periodic intervals. People lived more or less as their grandfathers had lived before them on their plantations. And their fathers had been fox-hunting, hard-living 'three-bottle men'