The Long Lane's Turning Part 13

It was the opening of the door of Echo's room which he had heard. For hours she had lain sleepless, her brain throbbing, strange painful pictures flitting under her closed eyelids. Her home world, which had always seemed simple and uncomplex, even in its darker aspects, had suddenly become fateful and mysterious, a thing of secret depths and shaming, piteous revelations. Her own father's past had held a secret that would not bear the light! That he had loved another woman than her mother--afterward--that, though the thought was repellent, perhaps he could not have helped. But that he had ever, ever as a pa.s.sing phase, yielded to an infatuation which had taken no thought of consequence or of convention smote her with a kind of terror. Now, through his own reckless act, he had become the prey of a shameless woman--of a blackmailer.

For that was what it seemed to her. It did not occur to her that his letter might have fallen into other hands. In her imagination, back of the situation stood the woman who had tempted him, almost to his complete undoing, in his youth, now--a very wanton!--holding out the badge of his indiscretion, for a price! The photograph had come to him with its blunt threat typed at the top: "For Possible Release May 3rd."

Echo had seen the like many a time written upon her father's printer's-proofs. It meant released for publication. His letter was to be spread broadcast--unless he met the demand! The hideous vulgarity of his predicament sent pulsing waves of shame and humiliation over her. It seemed suddenly that their conventional, well-ordered existence had dropped all at once into an unnatural and hateful environment, the murky, unredeemable atmosphere of the yellow-backed novel and the tawdry film-play. Thoughts such as these had fought with the acute sympathy that had all her life made her and her father in feeling wellnigh inseparable, stabbing her love with the reflection that his deepest heart had, after all, been locked from her.

Gradually, however, the sharper corrosive ache had dulled away, leaving an overmastering sense of his trouble. Since Nelson had helped him to his room after his fainting in the library, she had not seen him, for though he had with curious stubbornness, it had seemed to her, refused to have the doctor come, he had not appeared at dinner. She wondered whether he was now asleep, or lying wide-eyed, nursing thoughts like hers. Finally there had stolen over her an odd uneasiness, a thriving anxiety. That tenuous telegraphy whose laws evade a.n.a.lysis though its operations are familiar and which, ever since her childhood, had called from her a subconscious and involuntary response to his moods that had sometimes startled them both by its eerie suggestion, now flooded her mind with a sense of warning. She slipped out of bed to peer through the blind. She could see a window of the library: light was sifting from between its heavy curtains--her father was not in his room, then; he was there. She thrust her feet into worsted slippers, threw a kimono over her nightgown and ran quickly down the stair.

The light footfall, the whispering rustle, did not reach the Judge. He was unaware of the girl who had paused uncertainly on the threshold.

His mind was arguing the final phase of his problem.

What he purposed would cut the Gordian knot, make plain-sailing for others, if not for himself. He would have rendered no decision on the crucial case. With his escape the problem would solve itself. Craig would have nothing to gain then in publis.h.i.+ng the letter. "Why not?"

he muttered. "It is justifiable--it is neither gross nor cowardly--to issue one's-self a ticket into the hereafter in order to avert shame from the innocent and secure peace to those one loves!" His wife was provided for. His elimination from her equation of life, he reflected with a tinge of bitterness, would not deeply disturb her even, centred existence. Echo, he thought likely, would marry Sevier. And Chilly--of what earthly use was his life to Chilly? "I will do it," he said to himself. He stretched out his hand--toward the silver-mounted revolver.

But he drew it back. A further clearer conception had come to him in that last instant to give him pause. What, after all, was he about to do? Himself aside, all that was dearest to him aside, was not the act he contemplated at bottom the murder of a principle, the betrayal of a trust that he held for the State? He was a public officer, who had taken oath in the presence of his a.s.sociates worthily to execute the functions of his high office, to do justice and fear not. For him the sin of omission could be no less than the sin of commission. Would such a s.h.i.+fty suppression of his decision be one whit less a treason than the rendering of a mendacious one? Either equally besmirched his honour! Something deeper in him than dread of death, deeper even than his present fear of life, stirred and throbbed. No, whatever the outcome, no matter what it held for him and his, he must go through with it to the bitter end! He buried his face in his hands.

As he sat thus stirless, the sense came to him of another presence in the room. Another's breath seemed to enwrap the place with feeling.

He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway. "Echo!" he cried and rose to his feet.

[Ill.u.s.tration: He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway.

"Echo!" he cried, and rose to his feet]

She came to him quickly, a little diffidently. "I couldn't help it, dear! I felt you--worrying, and I had to come." Suddenly her eyes fell on the revolver on the desk. She sprang and s.n.a.t.c.hed at it in panic. "That! Oh, not that! Not that!"

"I--it was in my drawer," he said. "Surely you--"

"Ah," she cried. "I know! You--you received a letter this afternoon.

It made you faint. You haven't been yourself since you read it. And now you--"

He drew a shaking hand across his eyes. "No, dear," he said more steadily. "It would not have been--what you think. There was a moment when--but it has gone, and forever." He took the revolver from her hand, returned it to the drawer and locked it. "There," he said, "I give you the key. It will not happen now." There was in his wailing speech a kind of hopeless acquiescence and finality.

Her heart was beating hard with a painful embarra.s.sment. "Can you--can't you tell me what the letter was?"

He looked at her palely, his features working. She would have to know soon enough, yet he shrank with a fastidious pain from telling her.

What would she think of him? "Twenty years ago," he said, "when I was a young man, I wrote an--an unwise letter. It--it had to do with some one who died the year it was written, but whose memory I--I treasure.

The threat is made now to publish it, and this would--would shame and harm that memory and me."

"Some one who is dead?" she repeated bewildered. The picture her fancy had painted was fading out. "Then how--"

"The old letter has fallen into unfriendly hands."

"And it must come back to hurt you--to spoil your life now! Something written before I was born! It sha'n't! It sha'n't!" She spoke with pa.s.sionate abandon, her words struck out like fire from flint, from the horror of the knowledge that had sprung to her at sight of the gleaming thing at which she had s.n.a.t.c.hed. "But you can pay the price, no matter how much it is! Take my pearls--my rings--my gowns."

He shook his head. "It's not money: what I am asked to pay is my honour. I am required to alter my judicial decision on the Welles-Scott case ... to hand down a legal lie."

She looked at him with parted lips. "The Welles-Scott case!"

"Yes. Much hangs on this decision. The great corporate interests--but you would not understand."

She threw herself beside his chair and knelt close to him. A great compa.s.sion was welling up in her, mingling itself with deep anger at the cowardly attack upon him. She had known of such conscienceless warfare in political life--acts of "character a.s.sa.s.sins" which knew neither pity nor honourable scruple. "Who has the letter?" she asked.

"Cameron Craig. It came with his card."

She started violently. Cameron Craig! He who had once asked her to marry him, who had a.s.serted his love for her--he, now bent on her father's ruin! She had a darting memory of that heavy, ruthless jaw, those lowering, determined eyes. Cameron Craig? She lifted a stricken face.

"You see!" he said. "I remember you once said to me that he was not 'one of us.' He isn't. That is why I know that he will stop at nothing. He will do what he threatens. There is no way out."

She rose to her feet. Her heart was beating so that her breath came with difficulty and a mist was before her eyes. "You will hand down the decision." It was a statement, not a question.

"G.o.d help me--I must!"

"When?"

"A week from to-day, as I have announced."

She leaned and put her arm about his neck, the key of the drawer still clenched in her cold hand, and kissed him on the forehead. Even in that numb moment she felt a certain pride that he, who had known a pa.s.sing weakness, was yet, in this crucial moment, so strong.

"You must go back to bed now," he said, heavily. "You are going to your aunt's to-morrow, aren't you?"

She nodded, her cheek still against his. "I shall take the early train, before you are up. But I shall be back next day."

She withdrew her arms. "Good night," she half-whispered, then looked at the locked drawer. "You will not--you will not--"

"I promise," he said.

"Whatever happens?"

"Whatever happens."

An instant later she was gone.

CHAPTER XV

THE ONLY WAY

As Echo stood once more in the dim light of her blue-and-white room, it seemed to her to belong to some blithe past life which she had lived long ago and discarded--as if she were suddenly an intruder into the peace and quiet it enfolded. For though her hands were like ice, her veins were beating hot and her mind was filled with the heat of a fiery furnace.

Cameron Craig held her father's name, his career, his whole happiness, and that of them all--her mother, Chilly, herself--in his hand. His was the power to crush and to ban. This man had professed to love her.

She remembered what he had said to her that day in the garden--a year ago: "Since I met you the whole world has been changing for me.... You have entered into my blood and my brain, and the want of you has coloured all I have thought and done ... Echo, Echo!" The words seemed to wreathe about her, to return to her in pelted reverberations from the wall. She could save the situation. She could marry Cameron Craig.

The weird thought had rushed through her like a cold flame with the voicing of that name in the library. He would do it. More than the decision, more than any material ambition, he desired her. The letter--and the photographic plate--should be the price!

As she fought with herself through the long night hours, distraught yet tearless, it came to her with agonised reiteration that the resolve marked the end for her of all that makes life young. Up to a year ago she had been a girl; her deeper emotions had been unstirred, her soul unknown to herself. Only from the moment at the "Farm" when she had sent Harry Sevier from her to his battle with appet.i.te, had she known the real meaning of life. Since then she had had the sweetness of learning love's unfolding in denial, and that very day it had come to fruition. Could it have been only that afternoon that the confession had trembled on his lips, when her heart had seemed to beat audibly, like little songs of joy? Now the cup was dashed from her lips. And he would never know--she could never tell him! That was the deep and piteous treason to which she must contribute!

She crept to the window and looked out over the garden, its elfish vapours dimly lighted by a thin, silver crescent-moon that seemed hanging like a gipsy ear-ring from a swarthy cloud. Below her the box-bordered paths showed in a sunken cross. The hemlock in its centre, with its triple spires, had been brought, a tiny seedling, by her great-great-grandmother from White Sulphur Springs, rooted in a gourd tied on the back of an old buff-coloured coach. The old lady's quaint portrait hung still in the dining-room, just above the diamond-leaded cabinet that held the tea-set of gold and lapiz lazuli blue, from which Jefferson and Randolph had drunk, and her garlanded silver basket whose inscription read, "From a lover of fifty years to his bride."

Echo felt a little s.h.i.+ver in her heart, as painful contrasting pictures thronged before her disordered fancy--pictures of herself as Craig's wife. She saw herself, young in years but with sere joys and blasted ideals, all youth's impulses dead in her, the wife of a man whose bodily presence she loathed and whose character, even before this, she had detested. A chill pa.s.sed through her, and she dropped the curtain and shut out the moonlight. But what if her father stood ruined, the mark of public pity and covert sneers? She thought of the pearl-handled revolver. He would have given his life to checkmate fate, if that had but been possible to him. And she was his daughter!