A night of stars, seen through swaying tree-tops whose leaves crisping to their fall, murmured gently of vanished hopes and approaching death.
Below, a long, low building with a lighted window here and there, surrounded by a heavy growth of trees which are but the earnest of the illimitable stretch of the Adirondack woods which painted darkness on the encircling horizon.
In the air, one other sound beside the restless murmur I have mentioned,— the lap, lap of the lake whose waters bathed the bank which supported this building.
Such the scene without.
Within, Reuther seated in the glow of a hospitable fire of great logs, talking earnestly to Mr. Black. As they were placed, he could see her much better than she could see him, his back being to the blaze and she, in its direct glare.
He could, therefore, study her features, without offence, and this he did, steadily and with deep interest, all the while she was talking. He was looking for signs of physical weakness or fatigue; but he found none. The pallor of her features was a natural pallor, and in their expression, new forces were becoming apparent, which give him encouragement, rather than anxiety, for the adventure whose most trying events lay still before them.
Crouching low on the hearth could be seen the diminutive figure of Miss Weeks. She had no time to waste even in a solitude as remote as this, and was crocheting busily by the firelight. Her earnestness gave character to her features which sometimes lacked significance. Reuther loved to glance at her from time to time, as she continued her conversation with Mr. Black.
This is what she was saying:
“I cannot point to any one man of the many who have been about us ever since we started north. But that we have been watched and our route followed, I feel quite convinced. So does Miss Weeks. But, as you saw, no one besides ourselves left the cars at this station, and I am beginning to hope that we shall remain unmolested till we can take the trip to Tempest Lodge. How far is it, Mr. Black?”
“Twenty-five miles and over a very rough mountain road. Did I not confidently expect to find Oliver there, I should not let you undertake this ride. But the inquiries I have just made lead me to hope for the best results. I was told that yesterday a young man bound for Tempest Lodge, stopped to buy a large basket of supplies at the village below us. I could not learn his name and I saw no one who could describe him; but the fact that any one not born in these parts should choose to isolate himself so late in the year as this, in a place considered inaccessible after the snow flies, has roused much comment.”
“That looks as if — as if —”
“As if it were Oliver. So it does; and if you feel that you can ride so far, I will see that horses are saddled for us at an early hour to-morrow morning.”
“I can ride, but will Oliver be pleased to see us at Tempest Lodge. Mr. Black, I had an experience in Utica which makes it very hard for me to contemplate obtruding myself upon him without some show of permission on his part. We met — that is, I saw him and he saw me; but he gave me no opportunity — that is, he did not do what he might have done, had he felt — had he thought it best to exchange a word with me.”
“Where was this? You were not long in Utica?”
“Only one night. But that was long enough for me to take a walk down one of the principal thoroughfares and it was during this walk I saw him. He was on the same side of the street as myself and rapidly coming my way, but on his eye meeting mine — I could not mistake that unconscious flash of recognition — he wheeled suddenly aside into a cross-street where I dared not follow him. Of course, he did not know what hung on even a momentary interview. That it was not for myself I—” The firelight caught something new to shine upon — a tear on lashes which yet refused to lower themselves.
Mr. Black fidgeted, then put out his hand and laid it softly on hers.
“Never mind,” he grumbled; “men are —” he didn’t say what; but it wasn’t anything very complimentary. “You have this comfort,” said he: “the man at the Lodge is undoubtedly Oliver. Had he gone West, he wouldn’t have been seen in Utica three days ago.”
“I have never had any doubt about that. I expect to see him tomorrow, but I shall find it hard to utter my errand quick enough. There will be a minute when he may misunderstand me. I dread that minute.”
“Perhaps, you can avoid it. Perhaps after you have positively identified him I can do the rest. We will arrange it so, if we can.”
Her eyes flashed gratitude, then took on a new expression. She had chanced to glance again at Miss Weeks, and Miss Weeks was not looking quite natural. She was still crocheting, or trying to, but her attitude was constrained and her gaze fixed; and that gaze was not on her work, but directed towards a small object at her side, which Reuther recognised from its open lid to be the little lady’s workbox.
“Something is the matter with Miss Weeks,” she confided in a low whisper to Mr. Black. “Don’t turn; she’s going to speak.”
But Miss Weeks did not speak. She just got up, and, with a careless motion, stood stretching herself for a moment, then sauntered up to the table and began showing her work to Reuther.
“I’ve made a mistake,” she pettishly complained. “See if you can find out what’s wrong.” And, giving the work into Reuther’s hand, she stood watching, but with a face so pale that Mr. Black was not astonished when she suddenly muttered in a very low tone:
“Don’t move or show surprise. The shade of the window is up, and somebody is looking in from outside. I saw his face reflected in the mirror of my work-box. It isn’t any one I know, but he was looking very fixedly this way and may be looking yet. Now I am going to snatch my work. I don’t think you’re helping me one bit.”
She suited the action to the word; shook her head at Reuther and went back to her old position on the hearth.
“I was afraid of it,” murmured Reuther. “If we take the ride tomorrow, it will not be alone. If, on the other hand, we delay our trip, we may be forestalled in the errand upon which so much depends. We are not the only ones who have heard of the strange young man at Tempest Lodge.”
The answer came with quick decision. “There is but one thing for us to do. I will tell you what it is a little later. Go and sit on the hearth with Miss Weeks, and mind that you laugh and chat as if your minds were quite undisturbed. I am going to have a talk with our host.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s the cry of a loon.”
“How awful! Do they often cry like that?”
“Not often in the nighttime.”
Reuther shuddered.
Mr. Black regarded her anxiously. Had he done wrong to let her join him in this strange ride?
“Shall we go back and wait for broad daylight?” he asked.
“No, no. I could not bear the suspense of wondering whether all was going well and the opportunity being given you of seeing and speaking to him. We have taken such precautions — chosen so late (or should I say so early) a start — that I’m sure we have outwitted the man who is so watchful of us. But if we go back, we cannot slip away from him again; and Oliver will have to submit to an humiliation it is our duty to spare him. And the good judge, too. I don’t care if the loons do cry; the night is beautiful.”
And it was, had their hearts been in tune to enjoy it. A gibbous moon had risen, and, inefficient as it was to light up the recesses of the forest, it illumined the tree-tops and brought out the difference between earth and sky. The road, known to the horses, if not to themselves, extended like a black ribbon under their eyes, but the patches of light which fell across it at intervals took from it the uninterrupted gloom it must have otherwise had. Mr. Sloan, who was at once their guide and host, promised that dawn would be upon them before they reached the huge gully which was the one dangerous feature of the road. But as yet there were no signs of dawn; and to Reuther, as well as to Mr. Black, this ride through the heart of a wilderness in a darkness which might have been that of midnight by any other measure than that of the clock, had the effect of a dream in which one is only sufficiently in touch with past commonplaces to say, “This is a dream and not reality. I shall soon wake.” A night to remember to the end of one’s days; an experience which did not seem real at the time and was never looked back upon as real — and yet, one with which neither of them would have been willing to part.
Their guide had prophesied truly. Heralded by that long cry of the loon, the dawn began to reveal itself in clearness of perspective and a certain indefinable stir in the still, shrouded spaces of the woods. Details began to appear where heretofore all had been mass. Pearl tints proclaimed the east, and presently these were replaced by a flush of delicate colour deepening into rose, and the every-day world of the mighty forest was upon them with its night mystery gone.
But not the romance of their errand, or the anxiety which both felt as to its ultimate fulfilment. This it had been easier to face when they themselves as well as all about them, were but moving shadows in each other’s eyes. Full sight brought full realisation. However they might seek to cloak the fact, they could no longer disguise from themselves that the object of their journey might not be acceptable to the man in hiding at Tempest Lodge. Reuther’s faith in him was strong, but even her courage faltered as she thought of the disgrace awaiting him whatever the circumstances or however he might look upon his father’s imperative command to return.
But she did not draw rein, and the three continued to ride up and on. Suddenly, however, one of them showed disturbance. Mr. Sloan was seen to turn his head sharply, and in another moment his two companions heard him say:
“We are followed. Ride on and leave me to take a look.”
Instinctively they also glanced back before obeying. They were just rounding the top of an abrupt hill, and expected to have an uninterrupted view of the road behind. But the masses of foliage were as yet too thick for them to see much but the autumnal red and yellow spread out below them.
“I hear them; I do not see them,” remarked their guide. “Two horses are approaching.”
“How far are we now from the Lodge?”
“A half-hour’s ride. We are just at the opening of the gully.”
“You will join us soon?”
“As quickly as I make out who are on the horses behind us.”
Reuther and the lawyer rode on. Her cheeks had gained a slight flush, but otherwise she looked unmoved. He was less at ease than she; for he had less to sustain him.
The gully, when they came to it, proved to be a formidable one. It was not only deep but precipitous, descending with the sheerness of a wall directly down from the road into a basin of enormous size, where trees stood here and there in solitary majesty, amid an area of rock forbidding to the eye and suggestive of sudden and impassable chasms. It was like circumambulating the sinuous verge of a canyon; and for the two miles they rode along its edge they saw no let-up in the steepness on one side or of the almost equally abrupt rise of towering rock on the other. It was Reuther’s first experience of so precipitous a climb, and under other circumstances she might have been timid; but in her present heroic mood, it was all a part of her great adventure, and as such accepted.
The lawyer eyed her with growing admiration. He had not miscalculated her pluck.
As they were making a turn to gain the summit, they heard Mr. Sloan’s voice behind them. Drawing in their horses, they greeted him eagerly when he appeared.
“Were you right? Are we followed?”
“That’s as may be. I didn’t hear or see anything more. I waited, but nothing happened, so I came on.”
His words were surly and his looks sour; they, therefore, forebore to question him further, especially as their keenest interest lay ahead, rather than behind them. They were nearing Tempest Lodge. As it broke upon their view, perched like an eagle’s eyrie on the crest of a rising peak, they drew rein, and, after a short consultation, Mr. Sloan wended his way up alone. He was a well~known man throughout the whole region, and would be likely to gain admittance if any one could. But all wished the hour had been less early.
However, somebody was up in the picturesque place. A small trail of smoke could be seen hovering above its single chimney, and promptly upon Mr. Sloan’s approach, a rear door swung back and an old man showed himself, but with no hospitable intent. On the contrary, he motioned the intruder back, and shouting out some very decided words, resolutely banged the door shut.
Mr. Sloan turned slowly about.
“Bad luck,” he commented, upon joining his companions. “That was Deaf Dan. He’s got a warm nest here, and he’s determined to keep it. ‘No visitors wanted,’ was what he shouted, and he didn’t even hold out his hand when I offered him the letter.”
“Give me the letter,” said Reuther. “He won’t leave a lady standing out in the cold.”
Mr. Sloan handed over the judge’s message, and helped her down, and she in turn began to approach the place. As she did so, she eyed it with the curiosity of a hungry heart. It was a compact structure of closely cemented stone, built to resist gales and harbour a would-be recluse, even in an Adirondack winter. One end showed stacks of wood through its heavily glazed windows, and between the small stable and the west door there ran a covered way which insured communication, even when the snow lay high about the windows.
The place had a history which she learned later. At present all her thoughts were on its possible occupant and the very serious question of whether she would or would not gain admittance to him.
Mr. Sloan had been repulsed from the west door; she would try the east. Oliver (if Oliver it were) was probably asleep; but she would knock, and knock, and knock; and if Deaf Dan did not open, his master soon would.
But when she found herself in face of this simple barrier, her emotion was so strong that she recoiled in spite of herself, and turned her face about as if to seek strength from the magnificence of the outlook.
But though the scene was one of splendour inconceivable, she did not see it. Her visions were all inner ones. But these were not without their strengthening power, as was soon shown. For presently she turned back and was lifting her hand to the door, when it suddenly flew open and a man appeared before her.
It was Oliver. Oliver unkempt and with signs upon him of a night’s work of study or writing; but Oliver!— her lover once, but now just a stranger into whose hand she must put this letter.
She tried to stammer out her errand; but the sudden pallor, the starting eyes — the whole shocked, almost terrified appearance of the man she was facing, stopped her. She forgot the surprise, the incredulity of mind with which he would naturally hail her presence at his door in a place so remote and of such inaccessibility. She only saw that his hands had gone up and out at sight of her, and to her sensitive soul, this looked like a rebuff which, while expected, choked back her words and turned her faintly flushing cheek scarlet.
“It is not I,” burst from her lips in incoherent disclaimer of his possible thought. “I’m just a messenger. Your father —”
“It IS you!” Quickly his hands passed across his eyes. “How —” Then his glance, following hers, fell on the letter which she now remembered to hold out.
“It’s the copy of a telegram,” she tremblingly explained, as he continued to gaze at it without reaching to take it. “You could not be found in Detroit and as it was important that you should receive this word from your father, I undertook to deliver it. I remembered your fondness for this place and how you once said that this is where you would like to write your book, and so I came on a venture — but not alone — Mr. Black is with me and —”
“Mr. Black! Who? What?” He was still staring at his father’s letter; and still had made no offer to take it.
“Read this first,” said she.
Then he woke to the situation. He took the letter, and drawing her inside, shut the door while he read it. She, trembling very much, did not dare to lift her eyes to watch its effect, but she was conscious that his back and not his face was turned her way, and that the moment was the stillest one of her whole life.
Then there came a rattling noise as he crushed the letter in his hand.
“Tell me what this means,” said he, but he did not turn his head as he made this request.
“Your father must do that,” was her gentle reply. “I was only to deliver the letter. I came — we came — thus early, because we thought — we feared we should get no opportunity later to find you here alone. There seem to be people on the road — whom — whom you might feel obliged to entertain and as your father cannot wait —”
He had wheeled about. His face confronted hers. It wore a look she did not understand and which made him seem a stranger to her. Involuntarily she took a step back.
“I must be going now,” said she, and fell — her physical weakness triumphing at last over her will power.
“Oliver? Where is Oliver?”
These were Reuther’s first words, as, coming to herself, she perceived Mr. Black bending helplessly over her.
The answer was brief, almost indifferent. Alanson Black was cursing himself for allowing her to come to this house alone.
“He was here a moment ago. When he saw you begin to give signs of life, he slid out. How do you feel, my — my dear? What will your mother say?”
“But Oliver?” She was on her feet now; she had been lying on some sort of couch. “He must — Oh, I remember now. Mr. Black, we must go. I have given him his father’s letter.”
“We are not going till you have something to eat. Not a word. I’ll —” Why did his eye wander to the nearest window, and his words trail away into silence?
Reuther turned about to see. Oliver was in front, conversing earnestly with Mr. Sloan. As they looked, he dashed back into the rear of the house, and they heard his voice rise once or twice in some ineffectual commands to his deaf servant, then there came a clatter and a rush from the direction of the stable, and they saw him flash by on a gaunt but fiery horse, and take with long bounds the road up which they had just laboured. He had stopped to equip himself in some measure for this ride, but not the horse, which was without saddle or any sort of bridle but a halter strung about his neck.
This was flight; or so it appeared to Mr. Sloan, as he watched the young man disappear over the brow of the hill. What Mr. Black thought was not so apparent. He had no wish to discourage Reuther whose feeling was one of relief as her first word showed.
“Oliver is gone. We shall not have to hurry now and perhaps if I had a few minutes in which to rest ——”
She was on the verge of fainting again.
And then Alanson Black showed of what stuff he was made. In ten minutes he had bustled about the half-deserted building, and with the aid of the dazed and uncomprehending deaf-mute, managed to prepare a cup of hot tea and a plate of steaming eggs for the weary girl.
After such an effort, Reuther felt obliged to eat, and she did; seeing which, the lawyer left her for a moment and went out to interview their guide.
“Where’s the young lady?”
This from Mr. Sloan.
“Eating something. Come in and have a bite; and let the horses eat, too. She must have a rest. The young fellow went off pretty quick, eh?”
“Ya-as.” The drawl was one of doubt. “But quickness don’t count. Fast or slow, he’s on his way to capture — if that’s what you want to know.”
“What? We are followed then?”
“There are men on the road; two, as I told you before. He can’t get by them — IF that’s what he wants to do.”
“But I thought they fell back. We didn’t hear them after you joined us.”
“No; they didn’t come on. They didn’t have to. This is the only road down the mountain, and it’s one you’ve got to follow or go tumbling over the precipice. All they’ve got to do is to wait for him; and that’s what I tried to tell him, but he just shook his arm at me and rode on. He might better have waited — for company.”
Mr. Black cast a glance behind him, saw that the door of the house was almost closed and ventured to put another question.
“What did he ask you when he came out here?”
“Why we had chosen such an early hour to bring him his father’s message.”
“And what did you say?”
“Wa’al, I said that there was another fellow down my way awful eager to see him, too; and that you were mortal anxious to get to him first. That was about it, wasn’t it, sir?”
“Yes. And how did he take that?”
“He turned white, and asked me just what I meant. Then I said that some one wanted him pretty bad, for, early as it was, this stranger was up as soon as you, and had followed us into the mountains and might show up any time on the road. At which he gave me a stare, then plunged back into the house to get his hat and trot out his horse. I never saw quicker work. But it’s no use; he can’t escape those men. They know it, or they wouldn’t have stopped where they did, waiting for him.”
Mr. Black recalled the aspect of the gully, and decided that Mr. Sloan was right. There could be but one end to this adventure. Oliver would be caught in a manifest effort to escape, and the judge’s cup of sorrow and humiliation would be full. He felt the shame of it himself; also the folly of his own methods and of the part he had allowed Reuther to play. Beckoning to his host to follow him, he turned towards the house.
“Don’t mention your fears to the young lady,” said he. “At least, not till we are well past the gully.”
“I shan’t mention anything. Don’t you be afeared of that.”
And with a simultaneous effort difficult for both, they assumed a more cheerful air, and briskly entered the house.
It was not until they were well upon the road back that Reuther ventured to speak of Oliver. She was riding as far from the edge of the precipice as possible. In descent it looked very formidable to her unaccustomed eye.
“This is a dangerous road for a man to ride bareback,” she remarked. “I’m terrified when I think of it, Mr. Black. Why did he go off quite so suddenly? Is there a train he is anxious to reach? Mr. Sloan, is there a train?”
“Yes, Miss, there is a train.”
“Which he can get by riding fast?”
“I’ve known it done!”
“Then he is excusable.” Yet her anxious glance stole ever and again to the dizzy verge towards which she now unconsciously urged her own horse till Mr. Black drew her aside.
“There is nothing to fear in that direction,” said he. “Oliver’s horse is to be trusted, if not himself. Cheer up, little one, we’ll soon be on more level ground and then for a quick ride and a speedy end to this suspense.”
He was rewarded by a confiding look, after which they all fell silent.
A half-hour’s further descent, then a quick turn and Mr. Sloan, who had ridden on before them, came galloping hastily back.
“Wait a minute,” he admonished them, putting up his hand to emphasise the appeal.
“Oh, what now?” cried Reuther, but with a rising head instead of a sinking one.
“We will see,” said Mr. Black, hastening to meet their guide. “What now?” he asked. “Have they come together? Have the detectives got him?”
“No, not HIM; only his horse. The animal has just trotted up — riderless.”
“Good God! the child’s instinct was true. He has been thrown —”
“No.” Mr. Sloan’s mouth was close to the lawyer’s ear. “There is another explanation. If the fellow is game, and anxious enough to reach the train to risk his neck for it, there’s a path he could have taken which would get him there without his coming round this turn. I never thought it a possible thing till I saw his horse trotting on ahead of us without a rider.” Then as Reuther came ambling up, “Young lady, don’t let me scare you, but it looks now as if the young man had taken a short cut to the station, which, so far as I know, has never been taken but by one man before. If you will draw up closer — here! give me hold of your bridle. Now look back along the edge of the precipice for about half a mile, and you will see shooting up from the gully a solitary tree whose topmost branch reaches within a few feet of the road above.”
She looked. They were at the lower end of the gully which curved up and away from this point like an enormous horseshoe. They could see the face of the precipice for miles.
“Yes,” she suddenly replied, as her glance fell on the one red splash showing against the dull grey of the cliff.
“A leap from the road, if well-timed, would land a man among some very stalwart branches. It’s a risk and it takes nerve; but it succeeded once, and I dare say has succeeded again.”
“But — but — if he didn’t reach — didn’t catch —”
“Young lady, he’s a man in a thousand. If you want the proof, look over there.”
He was pointing again, but in a very different direction now. As her anxious eye sought the place he indicated, her face flushed crimson with evanescent joy. Just where the open ground of the gully melted again into the forest, the figure of a man could be seen moving very quickly. In another moment it had disappeared amid the foliage.
“Straight for the station,” announced Mr. Sloan; and, taking out his watch, added quickly; “the train is not due for fifteen minutes. He’ll catch it.”
“The train south?”
“Yes, and the train north. They pass here.”
Mr. Black turned a startled eye upon the guide. But Reuther’s face was still alight. She felt very happy. Their journey had not been for naught. He would have six hours’ start of his pursuers; he would be that much sooner in Shelby; he would hear the accusation against him and refute it before she saw him again.
But Mr. Black’s thoughts were less pleasing than hers. He had never had more than a passing hope of Oliver’s innocence, and now he had none at all. The young man had fled, not in response to his father’s telegram, but under the impulse of his own fears. They would not find him in Shelby when they returned. They might never find him anywhere again. A pretty story to carry back to the judge.
As he dwelt upon this thought, his reflections grew more and more gloomy, and he had little to say till he reached the turn where the two men still awaited them.
In the encounter which followed no attempt was made by either party to disguise the nature of the business which had brought them thus together. The man whom Mr. Black took to be a Shelby detective nodded as they met and remarked, with a quick glance at Reuther:
“So you’ve come without him! I’m sorry for that. I was in hopes that I might be spared the long ride up the mountain.”
Mr. Black limited his answer to one of his sour smiles.
“Whose horse is this?” came in peremptory demand from the other man, with a nod towards the animal which could now be seen idly grazing by the wayside. “And how came it on the road alone?”
“We can only give you these facts,” rejoined the lawyer. “It came from Tempest Lodge. It started out ahead of us with the gentleman we had gone to visit on its back. We did not pass the gentleman on the road, and if he has not passed you, he must have left the road somewhere on foot. He did not go back to the Lodge.”
“Mr. Black —”
“I am telling you the absolute truth. Make what you will of it. His father desires him home; and sent a message. This message this young lady undertook to deliver, and she did deliver it, with the consequences I have mentioned. If you doubt me, take your ride. It is not an easy one, and the only man remaining at the Lodge is deaf as a post.”
“Mr. Black has told the whole story,” averred the guide.
They looked at Reuther.
“I have nothing to add,” said she. “I have been terrified lest the gentleman you wish to see was thrown from the horse’s back over the precipice. But perhaps he found some way of getting down on foot. He is a very strong and daring man.”
“The tree!” ejaculated the detective’s companion. He was from a neighbouring locality and remembered this one natural ladder up the side of the gully.
“Yes, the tree,” acknowledged Mr. Sloan. “That, or a fall. Let us hope it was not a fall.”
As he ceased, a long screech from an approaching locomotive woke up the echoes of the forest. It was answered by another from the opposite direction. Both trains were on time. The relief felt by Reuther could not be concealed. The detective noticed it.
“I’m wasting time here,” said he. “Excuse me, Mr. Black, if I push on ahead of you. If we don’t meet at the station, we shall meet in Shelby.”
Mr. Black’s mouth twisted grimly. He had no doubt of the latter fact.
Next minute, they were all cantering in the one direction; the detective very much in the advance.
“Let me go with you to the station,” entreated Reuther, as Mr. Black held up his arms to lift her from her horse at the door of the hotel.
But his refusal was peremptory. “You need Miss Weeks, and Miss Weeks needs you,” said he. “I’ll be back in just five minutes.” And without waiting for a second pleading look, he lifted her gently off and carried her in.
When he returned, as he did in the time specified, he had but one word for her.
“Gone,” said he.
“Thank God!” she murmured and turned to Miss Weeks with a smile.
Not having a smile to add to hers, the lawyer withdrew.
Oliver was gone — but gone north.
When Mr. Black came into Shelby, he came alone. He was anxious to get back; anxious to face his enemies if he had any; anxious to see Deborah and explain. Miss Weeks and Reuther followed on more slowly; this was better for them and better for him, and better, too, for Deborah, who must hear his story without the distraction of her daughter’s presence.
It was dark when he stepped on to the platform, and darker still when he rang the bell of Judge Ostrander’s house. But it was not late, and his agitation had but few minutes in which to grow, before the gate swung wide and he felt her hand in his.
She was expecting him. He had telegraphed the hour at which he should arrive, and also when to look for Reuther. Consequently there was no necessity for preliminaries, and he could ask at once for the judge and whether he was strong enough to bear disappointment.
Deborah’s answer was certainly disconcerting.
“I’ve not seen him. He admits nobody. When I enter the library, he retreats to his bed-room. I have not even been allowed to hand him his letters. I put them on his tray when I carry in his meals.”
“He has received letters then?”
“Unimportant ones, yes.”
“None from Oliver?”
“Oh, no.”
A pause.
“Deborah?”
Another pause. The echo of that name so uttered was too sweet in her ear for her to cut it short by too hasty a reply. When she did speak, it was humbly, or should I say, wistfully.
“Yes, Mr. Black.”
“I am afraid he never will hear from Oliver. The boy gave us the slip in the most remarkable manner. I will tell you when we get inside.”
She led him up the walk. She moved slowly, and he felt the influence of her discouragement. But once in the lighted parlour, she turned upon him the face he knew best — the mother face.
“Did Reuther see him?” she asked.
Then he told her the whole story.
When she had heard him through, she looked about the room they were in, with a lingering, abstracted gaze he hardly understood till he saw it fall with an indescribable aspect of sorrow upon a picture which had lately been found and rehung upon the wall. It was a portrait of Oliver’s mother.
“I am disappointed,” she murmured in bitter reflection to herself. “I did not expect Oliver to clear himself, but I did expect him to face his accusers if only for his father’s sake. What am I to say now to the judge?”
“Nothing to-night. In the morning we will talk the whole subject over. I must first explain myself to Andrews, and, if possible, learn his intentions; then I shall know better what to advise.”
“Did the officer you met on your return from Tempest Lodge follow you to Shelby?”
“I have not seen him.”
“That is bad. He followed Oliver.”
“It was to be expected.”
“Oliver is in Canada?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Which means —”
“Delay, then extradition. It’s that fellow Flannagan who has brought this upon us. The wretch knows something which forbids us to hope.”
“Alas, yes.” And a silence followed, during which such entire stillness rested upon the house that a similar thought rose in both minds. Could it be that under this same roof, and only separated from them by a partition, there brooded another human being helplessly awaiting a message which would never come, and listening, but how vainly, for the step and voice for which he hungered, though they were the prelude to further shame and the signal for coming punishment.
So strong was this thought in both their minds, that the shadow deepened upon both faces, as though a presence had passed between them; and when Mr. Black rose, as he very soon did, it was with an evident dread of leaving her alone with this thought.
They were lingering yet in the hall, the goodnight faltering on their lips, when suddenly their eyes flashed together in mutual question, and Deborah bent her ear towards the street.
An automobile was slowing up — stopping — stopping before the gates! Deborah turned and looked at Mr. Black. Was it the police? No, for the automobile was starting up again — it was going. Whoever had come had come to stay. With eyes still on those of Mr. Black, whose face showed a sudden change, she threw her hand behind her and felt wildly about for the door-knob. She had just grasped it — when the bell rang. Never had it sounded so shrill and penetrating. Never had it rung quite such a summons through this desolate house. Recoiling, she made a motion of entreaty.
“Go,” she whispered. “Open! I cannot.”
Quickly he obeyed. She heard him pass out and down the walk, and through the first gate. Then there came a silence, followed by the opening of the second gate. Then, a sound like smothered greetings, followed by quickly advancing steps and a voice she knew:
“How is my father? Is he well? I cannot enter till I know.”
It was Oliver!— come from some distant station, or from some other line which he had believed unwatched. Tumultuous as her thoughts were, she dared not indulge in them for a moment, or give way to gratitude or any other emotion. There were words to be said — words which must be uttered on the instant and with as much imperiousness as his own.
Throwing the door wide, she called down the steps:
“Yes, he is well. Come in, Mr. Ostrander, and you, too, Mr. Black. Instructions have been given me by the judge, which I must deliver at once. He expects you, Oliver,” she went on, as the two men stepped in. “But not knowing when, he bade me say to you immediately upon your entrance (and I am happy to be able to do this in Mr. Black’s presence), that much as he would like to be on hand to greet you, he cannot see you to-night. You may wish to go to him — but you must restrain this wish. Nor are you to talk, though he does not forbid you to listen. If you do not know what has happened here, Mr. Black will tell you, but for to-night at least, and up to a certain hour to-morrow, you are to keep your own counsel. When certain persons whose names he has given me can be gotten together in this house, he will join you, giving you your first meeting in the presence of others. Afterwards he will see you alone. If these plans distress you,— if you find the delay hard, I am to say that it is even harder for him than it can be for you. But circumstances compel him to act thus, and he expects you to understand and be patient. Mr. Black, assure Mr. Ostrander that I am not likely to overstate the judge’s commands, or to add to or detract from them in the least particular — that I am simply the judge’s mouthpiece.”
“You may believe that, Mr. Ostrander.” Young Ostrander bowed.
“I have no doubt of the fact,” he assured her, with an unsuccessful effort to keep his trouble out of his voice. “But as my father allows me some explanation, I shall be very glad to hear what has happened here to occasion my imperative recall.”
“Do you not read the papers, Mr. Ostrander?”
“I have not looked at one since I started upon my return.”
Mr. Black glanced at Deborah, who was slipping away. Then he made a move towards the parlour.
“If you will come in and sit down, Mr. Ostrander, I’ll tell you what you have every right to know.”
But when they found themselves alone together, Oliver’s manner altered.
“One moment,” said he, before Mr. Black could speak. “I should like to ask you first of all, if Miss Scoville is better. When I left you both so suddenly at Tempest Lodge, she was not well. I—”
“She is quite recovered, Mr. Ostrander.”
“And is here?”
“Not yet. I came back quickly — like yourself.”
Involuntarily their glances met in a question which perhaps neither desired to have answered. Then Oliver remarked quite simply:
“My haste seemed warranted by my father’s message. Five minutes,— one minute even is of great importance when you have but fifteen in which to catch a train.”
“And by such a route!”
“You know my route.” A short laugh escaped him. “I feared the delay — possibly the interference — But why discuss these unimportant matters! I succeeded in my efforts. I am here, at my father’s command, unattended and, as I believe, without the knowledge of any one but yourself and Mrs. Scoville. But your reason for these hasty summons — that is what I am ready now to hear.” And he sat down, but in such a way as to throw his face very much into the shadow.
This was a welcome circumstance to the lawyer. His task promised to be hard enough at the best. Black night had not offered too dark a screen between him and the man thus suddenly called upon to face suspicions the very shadow of which is enough to destroy a life. The hardy lawyer shrunk from uttering the words which would make the gulf imaginatively opening between them a real, if not impassable, one. Something about the young man appealed to him — something apart from his relationship to the judge — something inherent in himself. Perhaps it was the misery he betrayed. Perhaps it was the memory of Reuther’s faith in him and how that faith must suffer when she saw him next. Instantaneous reflections; but epoch-making in a mind like his. Alanson Black had never hesitated before in the face of any duty, and it robbed him of confidence. But he gave no proof of this in voice or manner, as pacing the floor in alternate approach and retreat, he finally addressed the motionless figure he could no longer ignore.
“You want to know what has happened here? If you mean lately, I shall have to explain that anything which has lately occurred to distress your father or make your presence here desirable, has its birth in events which date back to days when this was your home and the bond between yourself and father the usual and natural one.”
Silence in that shadowy corner! But this the speaker had expected, and must have exacted even if Oliver had shown the least intention of speaking.
“A man was killed here in those old days — pardon me if I am too abrupt — and another man was executed for this crime. You were a boy — but you must remember.”
Again he paused; but no more in expectation of or desire for an answer than before. One must breathe between the blows he inflicts, even if one is a lawyer.
“That was twelve years ago. Not so long a time as has elapsed since you met a waif of the streets and chastised him for some petty annoyance. But both events, the great and the little, have been well remembered here in Shelby; and when Mrs. Scoville came amongst us a month or so ago, with her late but substantial proofs of her husband’s innocence in the matter of Etheridge’s death, there came to her aid a man, who not only remembered the beating he had received as a child, but certain facts which led him to denounce by name, the party destined to bear at this late day the onus of the crime heretofore ascribed to Scoville. That name he wrote on bridges and walls; and one day, when your father left the courthouse, a mob followed him, shouting loud words which I will not repeat, but which you must understand were such as must be met and answered when the man so assailed is Judge Ostrander. Have I said enough? If so, raise your hand and I will desist for to~night.”
But no movement took place in the shadow cast by Oliver’s figure on the wall before which Mr. Black had paused, and presently, a voice was heard from where he sat, saying:
“You are too merciful. I do not want generalities but the naked truth. What did the men shout?”
“You have asked for a fact, and that I feel free to give you. They shouted, ‘Where is Oliver, your guilty son, Oliver? You saved him at a poor man’s expense, but we’ll have him yet.’ You asked me for the words, Mr. Ostrander.”
“Yes.” The pause was long, but the “Yes” came at last. Then another silence, and then this peremptory demand: “But we cannot stop here, Mr. Black. If I am to meet my father’s wishes tomorrow, I must know the ground upon which I stand. What evidence lies back of these shouts? If you are my friend,— and you have shown yourself to be such,— you will tell me the whole story. I shall say nothing more.”
Mr. Black was not walking now; he was standing stock-still and in the shadow also. And with this space and the double shadow between them, Alanson Black told Oliver Ostrander why the people had shouted: “We will have him yet.”
When he had quite finished, he came into the light. He did not look in the direction he had avoided from the first, but his voice had a different note as he remarked:
“I am your father’s friend, and I have promised to be yours. You may expect me here in the morning, as I am one of the few persons your father has asked to be present at your first interview. If after this interview you wish anything more from me, you have only to signify it. I am blunt, but not unfeeling, Mr. Ostrander.”
A slight lift of the hand, visible now in the shadow, answered him; and with a silent bow he left the room.
In the passage-way he met Deborah.
“Leave him to himself,” said he. “Later, perhaps, you can do something for him.”
But she found this quite impossible. Oliver would neither eat nor sleep. When the early morning light came, he was sitting there still. Was his father keeping vigil also? We shall never know.
Ten o’clock! and one of the five listed to be present had arrived~-the rector of the church which the Ostranders had formerly attended.
He was ushered into the parlour by Deborah, where he found himself received not by the judge in whose name he had been invited, but by Mr. Black, the lawyer, who tendered him a simple good morning and pointed out a chair.
There was another person in the room,— a young man who stood in one of the windows, gazing abstractedly out at the line of gloomy fence rising between him and the street. He had not turned at the rector’s approach, and the latter had failed to recognise him.
And so with each new arrival. He neither turned nor moved at any one’s entrance, but left it to Mr. Black to do the honours and make the best of a situation, difficult, if not inexplicable to all of them. Nor could it be seen that any of these men — city officials, prominent citizens and old friends, recognised his figure or suspected his identity. Beyond a passing glance his way, they betrayed neither curiosity nor interest, being probably sufficiently occupied in accounting for their own presence in the home of their once revered and now greatly maligned compeer. Judge Ostrander, attacked through his son, was about to say or do something which each and every one of them secretly thought had better be left unsaid or undone. Yet none showed any disposition to leave the place; and when, after a short, uneasy pause during which all attempts at conversation failed, they heard a slow and weighty step approaching through the hall, the suspense was such that no one but Mr. Black noticed the quick whirl with which Oliver turned himself about, nor the look of mortal anguish with which he awaited the opening of the door and his father’s entrance among them. No one noticed, I say, until, simultaneously with the appearance of Judge Ostrander on the threshold, a loud cry swept through the room of “Don’t! don’t!” and the man they had barely noticed, flashed by them all, and fell at the judge’s feet with a smothered repetition of his appeal: “Don’t, father, don’t!”
Then, each man knew why he had been summoned there, and knowing, gazed earnestly at these two faces. Twelve years of unappeased longing, of smothered love, rising above doubts, persisting in spite of doubts, were concentrated into that one instant of mutual recognition. The eye of the father was upon that of the son and that of the son upon that of the father and for them, at least in this first instant of reunion, the years were forgotten and sin, sorrow and on-coming doom effaced from their mutual consciousness.
Then the tide of life flowed back into the present, and the judge, motioning to his son to rise, observed very distinctly:
“DON’T is an ambiguous word, my son, and on your lips, at this juncture, may mislead those whom I have called here to hear the truth from us and the truth only. You have heard what happened here a few days ago. How a long-guarded, long-suppressed suspicion — so guarded and so suppressed that I had no intimation of its existence even, found vent at a moment of public indignation, and I heard you, you, Oliver Ostrander, accused to my face of having in some boyish fit of rage struck down the man for whose death another has long since paid the penalty. This you have already been told.”
“Yes.” The word cut sharply through the silence; but the fire with which the young man rose and faced them all showed him at his best. “But surely, no person present believes it. No one can who knows you and the principles in which I have been raised. This fellow whom I beat as a boy has waited long to start this damnable report. Surely he will get no hearing from unprejudiced and intelligent men.”
“The police have listened to him. Mr. Andrews, who is one of the gentlemen present, has heard his story and you see that he stands here silent, my son. And that is not all. Mrs. Scoville, who has loved you like a mother, longs to believe in your innocence, and cannot.”
A low cry from the hall.
It died away unheeded.
“And Mr. Black, her husband’s counsel,” continued the father, in the firm, low tones of one who for many long days and nights had schooled himself for the duty of this hour, “shares her feeling. He has tried not to; but he does. They have found evidences — you know them; proofs which might not have amounted to much had it not been for the one mischievous fact which has undermined public confidence and given point to these attacks. I refer to the life we have led and the barriers we have ourselves raised against our mutual intercourse. These have undone us. To the question, ‘Why these barriers?’ I can find no answer but the one which ends this struggle. Succumbing myself, I ask you to do so also. Out of the past comes a voice — the voice of Algernon Etheridge, demanding vengeance for his untimely end. It will not be gainsaid. Not satisfied with the toll we have both paid in these years of suffering and repression,— unmindful of the hermit’s life I have led and of the heart disappointments you have borne, its cry for punishment remains insistent. Gentlemen — Hush! Oliver, it is for me to cry DON’T now — John Scoville was a guilty man — a murderer and a thief — but he did not wield the stick which killed Algernon Etheridge. Another hand raised that. No, do not look at the boy. He is innocent! Look here! look here!’” And with one awful gesture, he stood still,— while horror rose like a wave and engulfed the room — choking back breath and speech from every living soul there, and making a silence more awful than any sound~-or so they all felt, till his voice rose again and they heard —
“You have trusted to appearances; you must trust now to my word. I am the guilty man, not Scoville, and not Oliver, though Oliver may have been in the ravine that night and even handled the bludgeon I found at my feet in the recesses of Dark Hollow.”
Then consternation spoke, and muttered cries were heard of “Madness! It is not we who are needed here but a physician!” and dominating all, the ringing shout:
“You cannot save me so, father. I hated Etheridge and I slew him. Gentlemen,” he prayed in his agony, coming close into their midst, “do not be misled for a moment by a father’s devotion.”
His lifted head, his flashing eye, drew every look. Honour confronted them in a countenance from which all reserve had melted away. No guilt showed there; he stood among them, a heroic figure.
Slowly, and with a dread which no man might measure, the glances which had just devoured his young but virile countenance passed to that of the father. They did not leave it again. “Son?” With what tenderness he spoke, but with what a ring of desolation. “I understand your effort and appreciate it; but it is a useless one. You cannot deceive these friends of ours — men who have known my life. If you were in the ravine that night, so was I. If you handled John Scoville’s stick, so did I, AND AFTER YOU! Let us not struggle for the execration of mankind; let it fall where it rightfully belongs. It can bring no sting keener than that to which my breast has long been subject. Or —” and here his tones sank, in a last recognition of all he was losing forever, “if there is suffering in a once proud man flinging from him the last rag of respect with which he sought to cover the hideous nakedness of an unsuspected crime, it is lost in the joy of doing justice to the son who would take advantage of circumstances to assume his father’s guilt.”
But Oliver, with a fire which nothing could damp, spoke up again:
“Gentlemen, will you see my father so degrade himself? He has dwelt so continually upon the knowledge which separated us a dozen years ago that he no longer can discriminate between the guilty and the innocent. Would he have sat in court; would he have uttered sentences; would he have kept his seat upon the bench for all these years, if he had borne within his breast this secret of personal guilt? No. It is not in human nature to play such a part. I was guilty — and I fled. Let the act speak for itself. The respect due my father must not be taken from him.”
Confession and counter-confession! What were they to think! Alanson Black, aghast at this dread dilemma, ran over in his mind all that had led him to accept Oliver’s guilt as proven, and then, in immediate opposition to it, the details of that old trial and the judge’s consequent life; and, voicing the helpless confusion of the others, observed with forced firmness:
“We have heard much of Oliver’s wanderings in the ravine on that fatal night, but nothing of yours, Judge Ostrander. It is not enough for you to say that you were there; you must prove it.”
“The proof is in my succumbing to the shock of hearing Oliver’s name associated with this crime. Had he been guilty — had our separation come through his crime and not through my own, I should have been prepared for such a contingency, and not overwhelmed by it.”
“And were you not prepared?”
“No, before God!”
The gesture accompanying this oath was a grand one, convincing in its fervour, its majesty and power.
But facts are stubborn things, and while most of those present were still thrilling under the effect of this oath, the dry voice of District Attorney Andrews was heard for the first time, in these words:
“Why, then, did you, on the night of Bela’s death, stop on your way across the bridge to look back upon Dark Hollow and cry in the bitterest tones which escape human lips, ‘Oliver! Oliver! Oliver!’ You were heard to speak this name, Judge Ostrander,” he hastily put in, as the miserable father raised his hand in ineffectual protest. “A man was lurking in the darkness behind you, who both saw and heard you. He may not be the most prepossessing of witnesses, but we cannot discredit his story.”
“Mr. Andrews, you have no children. To the man who has, I make my last appeal. Mr. Renfrew, you know the human heart both as a father and a pastor. Do you find anything unnatural in a guilty soul bemoaning its loss rather than its sin, in the spot which recalled both to his overburdened spirit?”
“No.”
The word came sharply, and it sounded decisive; but the ones which followed from Mr. Andrews were no less so.
“That is not enough. We want evidence, actual evidence that you are not playing the part your son ascribes to you.”
The judge’s eyes glared, then suddenly and incomprehensively softened till the quick fear that his mind as well as his memory had gone astray, vanished in a feeling none of them could have characterised, but which gave to them all an expression of awe.
“I have such evidence,” announced the judge. “Come.”
Turning, he stepped into the hall. Oliver, with bended head and a discouraged mien, quickly followed. Alanson Black and the others, casting startled and inquiring looks at each other, brought up the rear. Deborah Scoville was nowhere to be seen.
At the door of his own room, the judge paused, and with his hand on the curtain, remarked with unexpected composure: “You have all wondered, and others with you why for the last ten years I have kept the gates of my house shut against every comer. I am going to show you.”
And with no further word or look, scarcely even giving attention to Oliver’s anguished presence, he led them into the study and from there on to that inner door known and talked of through the town as the door of mystery. This he slowly opened with the key he took from his pocket; then, pausing with the knob in his hand, he said:
“In the years which are past, but two persons beside myself have crossed this threshold, and these only under my eye. Its secret was for my own breast. Judge what my remorse has been; judge the power of my own secret self-condemnation, by what you see here.”
And, entering, he reached up, and pulled aside the carpet he had strung up over one end of the room, disclosing amid a number of loosened boards, the barred cell of a condemned convict.
“This was my bed, gentlemen, till a stranger coming into my home, made such an acknowledgment of my sin impossible!”
Later, when the boards he had loosened in anticipation of this hour were all removed, they came upon a packet of closely written words hidden in the framework of the bed.
It read as follows:
Whosoever lays hands on this MS. will already be acquainted with my crime. If he would also know its cause and the full story of my hypocrisy, let him read these lines written, as it were, with my heart’s blood.
I loved Algernon Etheridge; I shall never have a dearer friend. His odd ways, his lank, possibly ungainly figure crowned by a head of scholarly refinement, his amiability when pleased, his irascibility when crossed, formed a character attractive to me from its very contradictions; and after my wife’s death and before my son Oliver reached a companionable age, it was in my intercourse with this man I found my most solid satisfaction.
Yet we often quarrelled. His dogmatism frequently ran counter to my views, and, being myself a man of quick and violent temper, hard words sometimes passed between us, to be forgotten the next minute in a hand-shake, or some other token of mutual esteem. These dissensions — if such they could be called — never took place except in the privacy of his study or mine. We thought too much of each other to display our differences of opinion abroad or even in the presence of Oliver; and however heated our arguments or whatever our topic we invariably parted friends, till one fateful night.
O God! that years of repentance, self-hatred and secret immolation can never undo the deed of an infuriated moment. Eternity may console, but it can never make me innocent of the blood of my heart’s brother.
We had had our usual wordy disagreement over some petty subject in which he was no nearer wrong nor I any nearer right than we had been many times before; but for some reason I found it harder to pardon him. Perhaps some purely physical cause lay back of this; perhaps the nervous irritation incident upon a decision then pending in regard to Oliver’s future, heightened my feelings and made me less reasonable than usual. The cause does not matter, the result does. For the first time in our long acquaintance, I let Algernon Etheridge leave me, without any attempt at conciliation.
If only I had halted there! If, at sight of my empty study, I had not conceived the mad notion of waylaying him at the bridge for the hand-shake I missed, I might have been a happy man now, and Oliver — But why dwell upon these might-have-beens! What happened was this:
Disturbed in mind, and finding myself alone in the house, Oliver having evidently gone out while we two were disputing, I decided to follow out the impulse I have mentioned. Leaving by the rear, I went down the lane to the path which serves as a short cut to the bridge. That I did this unseen by anybody is not so strange when you consider the hour, and how the only person then living in the lane was, in all probability, in her kitchen. It would have been better for me, little as I might have recognised it at the time, had she been where she could have witnessed both my going and coming and faced me with the fact.
John Scoville, in his statement, says that after giving up his search for his little girl, he wandered up the ravine before taking the path back which led him through Dark Hollow. This was false, as well as the story he told of leaving his stick by the chestnut tree in the gully at foot of Ostrander Lane. For I was on the spot, and I know the route by which he reached Dark Hollow and also through whose agency the stick came to be there.
Read, and learn with what tricks the devil beguiles us men.
I was descending this path, heavily shadowed, as you know, by a skirting of closely growing trees and bushes, when just where it dips into the Hollow, I heard the sound of a hasty foot come crashing up through the underbrush from the ravine and cross the path ahead of me. A turn in the path prevented me from seeing the man himself, but as you will perceive and as I perceived later when circumstances recalled it to my mind, I had no need to see him to know who it was or with what intent he took this method of escape from the ravine into the fields leading to the highway. Scoville’s stick spoke for him, the stick which I presently tripped over and mechanically picked up, without a thought of the desperate use to which I was destined to put it.
Etheridge was coming. I could hear his whistle on Factory Road. There was no mistaking it. It was an unusually shrill one and had always been a cause of irritation to me, but at this moment it was more; it roused every antagonistic impulse within me. He whistling like a galliard, after a parting which had dissatisfied me to such an extent that I had come all this distance to ask his pardon and see his old smile again! Afterwards, long afterwards, I was able to give another interpretation to his show of apparent self~satisfaction, but then I saw nothing but the contrast it offered to my own tender regrets, and my blood began to boil and my temper rise to such a point that recrimination took the place of apology when in another moment we came together in the open space between the end of the bridge and Dark Hollow.
He was in no better mood than myself to encounter insult, and what had been a simple difference between us flamed into a quarrel which reached its culmination when he mentioned Oliver’s name with a taunt, which the boy, for all his obstinate clinging to his journalistic idea, did not deserve.
Knowing my own temper, I drew back into the Hollow.
He followed me.
I tried to speak.
He took the word out of my mouth. This may have been with the intent of quelling my anger, but the tone was rasping, and noting this and not his words, my hand tightened insensibly about the stick which the devil (or John Scoville) had put in my hand. Did he see this, or was he prompted by some old memory of boyish quarrels that he should give utterance to that quick, sharp laugh of scorn! I shall never know, but ere the sound had ceased, the stick was whirling over my head — there came a crash and he fell. My friend! My friend!
Next moment the earth seemed too narrow, the heavens too contracted for my misery. That he was dead — that my blow had killed him, I never doubted for an instant. I knew it, as we know the face of Doom when once it has risen upon us. Never, never again would this lump of clay, which a few minutes before had filled the Hollow with shrillest whistling, breathe or think or speak. He was dead, DEAD, DEAD!— And I? What was I?
The name which no man hears unmoved, no amount of repetition makes easy to the tongue or welcome to the ear! . . . the name which I had heard launched in full forensic eloquence so many times in accusation against the wretches I had hardly regarded as being in the same human class as myself, rang in my ear as though intoned from the very mouth of hell. I could not escape it. I should never be able to escape it again. Though I was standing in a familiar scene — a scene I had known and frequented from childhood, I felt myself as isolated from my past and as completely set apart from my fellows as the shipwrecked mariner tossed to precarious foot~hold on his wave-dashed rock. I forgot that other criminals existed. In that one awful moment I was in my own eyes the only blot upon the universe — the sole inhabitant of the new world into which I had plunged — the world of crime — the world upon which I had sat in judgment before I knew —
What broke the spell? A noise? No, I heard no noise. The sense of some presence near, if not intrusive? God knows; all I can say is that, drawn, by some other will than my own, I found my glance travelling up the opposing bluff till at its top, framed between the ragged wall and towering chimney of Spencer’s Folly, I saw the presence I had dreaded, the witness who was to undo me.
It was a woman — a woman with a little child in hand. I did not see her face, for she was just on the point of turning away from the dizzy verge, but nothing could have been plainer than the silhouette which these two made against the flush of that early evening sky. I see it yet in troubled dreams and desperate musings. I shall see it always; for hard upon its view, fear entered my soul, horrible, belittling fear, torturing me not with a sense of guilt but of its consequences. I had slain a man to my hurt, I a judge, just off the Bench; and soon . . . possibly before I should see Oliver again . . . I should be branded from end to end of the town with that name which had made such havoc in my mind when I first saw Algernon Etheridge lying stark before me.
I longed to cry out — to voice my despair in the spot where my sin had found me out; but my throat had closed, and the blood in my veins ceased flowing. As long as I could catch a glimpse of this woman’s fluttering skirt as she retreated through the ruins, I stood there, self-convicted, above the man I had slain, staring up at that blotch of shining sky which was as the gate of hell to me. Not till their two figures had disappeared and it was quite clear again did the instinct of self-preservation return, and with it the thought of flight.
But where could I fly? No spot in the wide world was secret enough to conceal me now. I was a marked man. Better to stand my ground, and take the consequences, than to act the coward’s part and slink away like those other men of blood I had so often sat in judgment upon.
Had I but followed this impulse! Had I but gone among my fellows, shown them the mark of Cain upon my forehead, and prayed, not for indulgence, but punishment, what days of gnawing misery I should have been spared!
But the horror of what lay at my feet drove me from the Hollow and drove me the wrong way. As my steps fell mechanically into the trail down which I had come in innocence and kindly purpose only a few minutes before, a startling thought shot through my benumbed mind. The woman had shown no haste in her turning! There had been a naturalness in her movement, a dignity and a grace which spoke of ease, not shock. What if she had not seen! What if my deed was as yet unknown! Might I not have time for — for what? I did not stop to think; I just pressed on, saying to myself, “Let Providence decide. If I meet any one before I reach my own door, my doom is settled. If I do not —”
And I did not. As I turned into the lane from the ravine I heard a sound far down the slope, but it was too distant to create apprehension, and I went calmly on, forcing myself into my usual leisurely gait, if only to gain some control over my own emotions before coming under Oliver’s eye.
That sound I have never understood. It could not have been Scoville since in the short time which had passed, he could not have fled from the point where I heard him last into the ravine below Ostrander Lane. But if not he, who was it? Or if it was he, and some other hand threw his stick across my path, whose was this hand and why have we never heard anything about it? It is a question which sometimes floats through my mind, but I did not give it a thought then. I was within sight of home and Oliver’s possible presence; and all other dread was as nothing in comparison to what I felt at the prospect of meeting my boy’s eye. My boy’s eye! my greatest dread then, and my greatest dread still! In my terror of it I walked as to my doom.
The house which I had left empty, I found empty; Oliver had not yet returned. The absolute stillness of the rooms seemed appalling. Instinctively, I looked up at the clock. It had stopped. Not at the minute — I do not say it was at the minute — but near, very near the time when from an innocent man I became a guilty one. Appalled at the discovery, I fled to the front. Opening the door, I looked out. Not a creature in sight, and not a sound to be heard. The road was as lonely and seemingly as forsaken as the house. Had time stopped here too? Were the world and its interests at a pause in horror of my deed? For a moment I believed it; then more natural sensations intervened and, rejoicing at this lack of disturbance where disturbance meant discovery, I stepped inside again and went and sat down in my own room.
My own room! Was it mine any longer? Its walls looked strange; the petty objects of my daily handling, unfamiliar. The change in myself infected everything I saw. I might have been in another man’s house for all connection these things seemed to have with me or my life. Like one set apart on an unapproachable shore, I stretched hands in vain towards all that I had known and all that had been of value to me.
But as the minutes passed, as the hands of the clock I had hastily rewound moved slowly round the dial, I began to lose this feeling. Hope which I thought quite dead slowly revived. Nothing had happened, and perhaps nothing would. Men had been killed before, and the slayer passed unrecognised. Why might it not be so in my case? If the woman continued to remain silent; if for any reason she had not witnessed the blow or the striker, who else was there to connect me with an assault committed a quarter of a mile away? No one knew of the quarrel; and if they did, who could be so daring as to associate one of my name with an action so brutal? A judge slay his friend! It would take evidence of a very marked character to make even my political enemies believe that.
As the twilight deepened I rose from my seat and lit the gas. I must not be found skulking in the dark. Then I began to count the ticks measuring off the hour. If thirty minutes more passed without a rush from without, I might hope. If twenty?— if ten?— then it was five! then it was — Ah, at last! The gate had clanged to. They were coming. I could hear steps — voices — a loud ring at the bell. Laying down the pen I had taken, up mechanically, I moved slowly towards the front. Should I light the hall gas as I went by? It was a natural action, and, being natural, would show unconcern. But I feared the betrayal which my ashy face and trembling hands might make. Agitation after the news was to be expected, but not before! So I left the hall dark when I opened the door.
And thus decided my future.
For in the faces of the small crowd which blocked the doorway, I detected nothing but commiseration; and when a voice spoke and I heard Oliver’s accents surcharged with nothing more grievous than pity, I realised that my secret was as yet unshared, and seeing that no man suspected me, I forebore to declare my guilt to any one.
This sudden restoration from soundless depths into the pure air of respect and sympathy confused me; and beyond the words KILLED! STRUCK DOWN BY THE BRIDGE! I heard little, till slowly, dully like the call of a bell issuing from a smothering mist, I caught the sound of a name and then the words, “He did it just for the watch;” which hardly conveyed meaning to me, so full was I of Oliver’s look and Oliver’s tone and the way his arm supported me as he chided them for their abruptness and endeavoured to lead me away.
But the name! It stuck in my ear and gradually it dawned upon my consciousness that another man had been arrested for my crime and that the safety, the reverence and the commiseration that were so dear to me had been bought at a price no man of honour might pay.
But I was no longer a man of honour. I was a wretched criminal swaying above a gulf of infamy in which I had seen others swallowed but had never dreamed of being engulfed myself. I never thought of letting myself go — not at this crisis — not while my heart was warm with its resurgence into the old life.
And so I let pass this second opportunity for confession. Afterwards, it was too late — or seemed too late to my demoralised judgment.
My first real awakening to the extraordinary horrors of my position was when I realised that circumstances were likely to force me into presiding over the trial of the man Scoville. This I felt to be beyond even my rapidly hardening conscience. I made great efforts to evade it, but they all failed. Then I feigned sickness, only to realise that my place would be taken by Judge Grosvenor, a notoriously prejudiced man. If he sat, it would go hard with the prisoner, and I wanted the prisoner acquitted. I had no grudge against John Scoville. I was grateful to him. By his own confession he was a thief, but he was no murderer, and his bad repute had stood me in good stead. Attention had been so drawn to him by the circumstances in which the devil had entangled him, that it had never even glanced my way and now never would. Of course, I wanted to save him, and if the only help I could now give him was to sit as judge upon his case, then would I sit as judge whatever mental torture it involved.
Sending for Mr. Black, I asked him pointblank whether in face of the circumstance that the victim of this murder was my best friend, he would not prefer to plead his case before Judge Grosvenor. He answered no: that he had more confidence in my equity even under these circumstances than in that of my able, but headstrong, colleague; and prayed me to get well. He did not say that he expected me on this very account to show even more favour towards his client than I might otherwise have done, but I am sure that he meant it; and, taking his attitude as an omen, I obeyed his injunction and was soon well enough to take my seat upon the Bench.
No one will expect me to enlarge upon the sufferings of that time. By some I was thought stoical; by others, a prey to such grief that only my duty as judge kept me to my task. Neither opinion was true. What men saw facing them from the Bench was an automaton wound up to do so much work each day. The real Ostrander was not there, but stood, an unseen presence at the bar, undergoing trial side by side with John Scoville, for a crime to make angels weep and humanity hide its head: hypocrisy!
But the days went by and the inexorable hour drew nigh for the accused man’s release or condemnation. Circumstances were against him — so was his bearing which I alone understood. If, as all felt, it was that of a guilty man, it was so because he had been guilty in intent if not in fact. He had meant to attack Etheridge. He had run down the ravine for that purpose, knowing my old friend’s whistle and envying him his watch. Or why his foolish story of having left his stick behind him at the chestnut? But the sound of my approaching steps higher up on the path had stopped him in mid~career and sent him rushing up the slope ahead of me. When he came back after a short circuit of the fields beyond, it was to find his crime forestalled and by the very weapon he had thrown into the Hollow as he went skurrying by. It was the shock of this discovery, heightened by the use he made of it to secure the booty thus thrown in his way without crime, which gave him the hang-dog look we all noted. That there were other reasons — that the place recalled another scene of brutality in which intention had been followed by act, I did not then know. It was sufficient to me then that my safety was secured by his own guilty consciousness and the prevarications into which it led him. Instead of owning up to the encounter he had so barely escaped, he confined himself to the simple declaration of having heard voices somewhere near the bridge, which to all who know the ravine appeared impossible under the conditions named.
Yet, for all these incongruities and the failure of his counsel to produce any definite impression by the prisoner’s persistent denial of having whittled the stick or even of having carried it into Dark Hollow, I expected a verdict in his favour. Indeed, I was so confident of it that I suffered less during the absence of the jury than at any other time, and when they returned, with that air of solemn decision which proclaims unanimity of mind and a ready verdict, I was so prepared for his acquittal that for the first time since the opening of the trial, I felt myself a being of flesh and blood, with human sentiments and hopes. And it was:
“Guilty!”
When I woke to a full realisation of what this entailed (for I must have lost consciousness for a minute, though no one seemed to notice), the one fact staring me in the face — staring as a live thing stares — was that it would devolve upon me to pronounce his sentence; upon me, Archibald Ostrander, an automaton no longer, but a man realising to the full his part in this miscarriage of justice.
Somehow, strange as it may appear, I had thought little of this possibility previous to this moment. I found myself upon the brink of this new gulf before the dizziness of my escape from the other had fully passed. Do you wonder that I recoiled, sought to gain time, put off delivering the sentence from day to day? I had sinned,— sinned irredeemably — but there are depths of infamy beyond which a man cannot go. I had reached that point. Chaos confronted me, and in contemplation of it, I fell ill.
What saved me? A new discovery, and the loving sympathy of my son Oliver. One night — a momentous one to me — he came to my room and, closing the door behind him, stood with his back to it, contemplating me in a way that startled me.
What had happened? What lay behind this new and penetrating look, this anxious and yet persistent manner? I dared not think. I dared not yield to the terror which must follow thought. Terror blanches the cheek and my cheek must never blanch under anybody’s scrutiny. Never, never, so long as I lived.
“Father,”— the tone quieted me, for I knew from its gentleness that he was hesitating to speak more on his own account than on mine —“you are not looking well; this thing worries you. I hate to see you like this. Is it just the loss of your old friend, or — or~-”
He faltered, not knowing how to proceed. There was nothing strange in this. There could not have been much encouragement in my expression. I was holding on to myself with much too convulsive a grasp.
“Sometimes I think,” he recommenced, “that you don’t feel quite sure of this man Scoville’s guilt. Is that so? Tell me, father.”
I did not know what to make of him. There was no shrinking from me; no conscious or unconscious accusation in voice or look, but there was a desire to know, and a certain latent resolve behind it all that marked the line between obedient boyhood and thinking, determining man. With all my dread — a dread so great I felt the first grasp of age upon my heart-strings at that moment — I recognised no other course than to meet this inquiry of his with the truth — that is, with just so much of the truth as was needed. No more, not one jot more. I, therefore, answered, and with a show of self-possession at which I now wonder:
“You are not far from right, Oliver. I have had moments of doubt. The evidence, as you must have noticed, is purely circumstantial.”
“But a jury has convicted him.”
“Yes.”
“On the evidence you mention?”
“Yes.”
“What evidence would satisfy YOU? What would YOU consider a conclusive proof of guilt?”
I told him in the set phrases of my profession.
“Then,” he declared as I finished, “you may rest easy as to this man’s right to receive a sentence of death.”
I could not trust my ears.
“I know from personal observation,” he proceeded, approaching me with a firm step, “that he is not only capable of the crime for which he has been convicted, but that he has actually committed one under similar circumstances, and possibly for the same end.”
And he told me the story of that night of storm and bloodshed,— a story which will be found lying near this, in my alcove of shame and contrition.
It had an overwhelming effect upon me. I had been very near death. Suicide must have ended the struggle in which I was engaged, had not this knowledge of actual and unpunished crime come to ease my conscience. John Scoville was worthy of death, and, being so, should receive the full reward of his deed. I need hesitate no longer.
That night I slept.
But there came a night when I did not. After the penalty had been paid and to most men’s eyes that episode was over, I turned the first page of that volume of slow retribution which is the doom of the man who sins from impulse, and has the recoil of his own nature to face relentlessly to the end of his days.
Scoville was in his grave.
I was alive.
Scoville had shot a man for his money.
I had struck a man down in my wrath.
Scoville’s widow and little child must face a cold and unsympathetic world, with small means and disgrace rising, like a wall, between them and social sympathy, if not between them and the actual means of living.
Oliver’s future faced him untouched. No shadow lay across his path to hinder his happiness or to mar his chances.
The results were unequal. I began to see them so, and feel the gnawing of that deathless worm whose ravages lay waste the breast, while hand and brain fulfil their routine of work, as though all were well and the foundations of life unshaken.
I suffered as only cowards suffer. I held on to honour; I held on to home; I held on to Oliver, but with misery for my companion and a self-contempt which nothing could abate. Each time I mounted the Bench, I felt a tug at my arm as of a visible, restraining presence. Each time I returned to my home and met the clear eye of Oliver beaming upon me with its ever growing promise of future comradeship, I experienced a rebellion against my own happiness which opened my eyes to my own nature and its inevitable demand. I must give up Oliver; or yield my honours, make a full confession and accept whatever consequences it might bring. I am a proud man, and the latter alternative was beyond me. With each passing day, the certainty of this became more absolute and more fixed. In every man’s nature there lurk possibilities of action which he only recognises under stress, also impossibilities which stretch like an iron barrier between him and the excellence he craves. I had come up against such an impossibility. I could forego pleasure, travel, social intercourse, and even the companionship of the one being in whom all my hopes centred, but I could not, of my own volition, pass from the judge’s bench to the felon’s cell. There I struck the immovable,— the impassable.
I decided in one awful night of renunciation that I would send Oliver out of my life.
The next day I told him abruptly . . . hurting him to spare myself . . . that I had decided after long and mature thought to yield to his desire for journalism, and that I would start him in his career and maintain him in it for three years if he would subscribe to the following conditions:
They were the hardest a loving father ever imposed upon a dutiful and loving son.
First: he was to leave home immediately . . . within a few hours, in fact.
Secondly: he was to regard all relations between us as finished; we were to be strangers henceforth in every particular save that of the money obligation already mentioned.
Thirdly: he was never to acknowledge this compact, or to cast any slur upon the father whose reasons for this apparently unnatural conduct were quite disconnected with any fault of his or any desire to punish or reprove.
Fourthly: he was to pray for his father every night of his life before he slept.
Was this last a confession? Had I meant it to be such? If so, it missed its point. It awed but did not enlighten him. I had to contend with his compunctions, as well as with his grief and dismay. It was an hour of struggle on his part and of implacable resolution on mine. Nothing but such hardness on my part would have served me. Had I faltered once he would have won me over, and the tale of my sleepless nights been repeated. I did not falter; and when the midnight stroke rang through the house that night, it separated by its peal, a sin-beclouded but human past from a future arid with solitude and bereft of the one possession to retain which my sin had been hidden.
I was a father without a son — as lonely and as desolate as though the separation between us were that of the grave I had merited and so weakly shunned.
And thus I lived for a year.
But I was not yet satisfied.
The toll I had paid to Grief did not seem to me a sufficient punishment for a crime which entailed imprisonment if not death. How could I insure for myself the extreme punishment which my peace demanded, without bringing down upon me the full consequences I refused to accept.
You have seen to-day how I ultimately answered this question. A convict’s bed! a convict’s isolation.
Bela served me in this; Bela who knew my secret and knowing continued to love me. He gathered up these rods singly and in distant places and set them up across the alcove in my room. He had been a convict once himself.
Being now in my rightful place, I could sleep again.
But after some weeks of this, fresh fears arose. An accident was possible. For all Bela’s precautions, some one might gain access to this room. This would mean the discovery of my secret. Some new method must be devised for securing me absolutely against intrusion. Entrance into my simple, almost unguarded cottage must be made impossible. A close fence should replace the pickets now surrounding it — a fence with a gate having its own lock.
And this fence was built.
This should have been enough. But guilt has terrors unknown to innocence. One day I caught a small boy peering through an infinitesimal crack in the fence, and, remembering the window grilled with iron with which Bela had replaced the cheerful casement in my den of punishment, I realised how easily an opening might be made between the boards for the convenience of a curious eye anxious to penetrate the mystery of my seclusion.
And so it came about that the inner fence was put up.
This settled my position in the town. No more visits. All social life was over.
It was meet. I was satisfied at last. I could now give my whole mind to my one remaining duty. I lived only while on the Bench.
March Fifth, 1898.
There is a dream which comes to me often: a vision which I often see.
It is that of two broken and irregular walls standing apart against a background of roseate sky. Between these walls the figures of a woman and child, turning about to go.
The bridge I never see, nor the face of the man who died for my sin; but this I see always: the gaunt ruins of Spencer’s Folly and the figure of a woman leading away a little child.
That woman lives. I know now who she is. Her testimony was uttered before me in court, and was not one to rouse my apprehensions. My crime was unwitnessed by her, and for years she has been a stranger to this town. But I have a superstitious horror of seeing her again, while believing that the day will come when I shall do so. When this occurs,— when I look up and find her in my path, I shall know that my sin has found me out and that the end is near.
1909
O shade of Algernon Etheridge, unforgetting and unforgiving! The woman has appeared! She stood in this room to-day. Verily, years are nothing with God.
Added later.
I thought I knew what awaited me if my hour ever came. But who can understand the ways of Providence or where the finger of retributive Justice will point. It is Oliver’s name and not mine which has become the sport of calumny. Oliver’s! Could the irony of life go further! OLIVER’S!
There is nothing against him, and such folly must soon die out; but to see doubt in Mrs. Scoville’s eyes is horrible in itself and to eliminate it I may have to show her Oliver’s account of that long-forgotten night of crime in Spencer’s Folly. It is naively written and reveals a clean, if reticent, nature; but that its effect may be unquestionable I will insert a few lines to cover any possible misinterpretation of his manner or conduct. There is an open space, and our handwritings were always strangely alike. Only our e’s differed, and I will be careful with the e’s.
HER confidence must be restored at all hazards.
My last foolish attempt has undone me. Nothing remains now but that sacrifice of self which should have been made twelve years ago.
“I do not wish to seem selfish, Oliver, but sit a little nearer the window where I can see you whenever I open my eyes. Twelve years is a long time to make up, and I have such a little while in which to do it.”
Oliver moved. The moisture sprang to his eyes as he did so. He had caught a glimpse of the face on the pillow and the changes made in a week were very apparent. Always erect, his father had towered above them then even in his self-abasement, but he looked now as though twenty years, instead of a few days, had passed over his stately head and bowed his incomparable figure. And not that alone. His expression was different. Had Oliver not seen him in his old likeness for that one terrible half-hour, he would not know these features, so sunken, yet so eloquent with the peace of one for whom all struggle is over, and the haven of his long rest near.
The heart, which had held unflinchingly to its task through every stress of self-torture, succumbed under the relief of confession, and as he himself had said, there was but little time left him to fill his eyes and heart with the sight of this strong man who had replaced his boy Oliver.
He had hungered so for his presence even in those days of final shrinking and dismay. And now, the doubts, the dread, the inexpressible humiliation are all in the past and there remains only this,— to feast his eyes where his heart has so long feasted, and to thank God for the blessedness of a speedy going, which has taken the sword from the hand of Justice and saved Oliver the anguished sight of a father’s public humiliation.
Had he been able at this moment to look beyond the fences which his fear had reared, he would have seen at either gate a silent figure guarding the walk, and recalled, perhaps, the horror of other days when at the contemplation of such a prospect, his spirit recoiled upon itself in unimaginable horror and revolt. And yet, who knows! Life’s passions fade when the heart is at peace. And Archibald Ostrander’s heart was at peace. Why, his next words will show.
“Oliver”— his voice was low but very distinct, “never have a secret; never hide within your bosom a thought you fear the world to know. If you’ve done wrong — if you have disobeyed the law either of God or man — seek not to hide what can never be hidden so long as God reigns or men make laws. I have suffered, as few men have suffered and kept their reason intact. Now that my wickedness is known, the whole page of my life defaced, content has come again. I am no longer a deceiver, my very worst is known.”
“Oliver?”— This some minutes later. “Are we alone?”
“Quite alone, father. Mrs. Scoville is busy and Reuther — Reuther is in the room above. I can hear her light step overhead.”
The judge was silent. He was gazing wistfully at the wall where hung the portrait of his young wife. He was no longer in his own room, but in the cheery front parlour. This Deborah had insisted upon. There was, therefore, nothing to distract him from the contemplation I have mentioned.
“There are things I want to say to you. Not many; you already know my story. But I do not know yours, and I cannot die till I do. What took you into the ravine that evening, Oliver, and why, having picked up the stick, did you fling it from you and fly back to the highway? For the reason I ascribed to Scoville? Tell me, that no cloud may remain between us. Let me know your heart as well as you now know mine.”
The reply brought the blood back into his fading cheek.
“Father, I have already explained all this to Mr. Andrews, and now I will explain it to you. I never liked Mr. Etheridge as well as you did, and I brooded incessantly in those days over the influence which he seemed to exert over you in regard to my future career. But I never dreamed of doing him a harm, and never supposed that I could so much as attempt any argument with him on my own behalf till that very night of infernal complications and coincidences. The cause of this change was as follows: I had gone up stairs, you remember, leaving you alone with him as I knew you desired. How I came to be in the room above I don’t remember, but I was there and leaning out of the window directly over the porch when you and Mr. Etheridge came out and stood in some final debate on the steps below. He was talking and you were listening, and never shall I forget the effect his words and tones had upon me. I had supposed him devoted to you, and here he was addressing you tartly and in an ungracious manner which bespoke a man very different from the one I had been taught to look upon as superior. The awe of years yielded before this display, and finding him just human like the rest of us, the courage which I had always lacked in approaching him took instant possession of me, and I determined with a boy’s unreasoning impulse to subject him to a personal appeal not to add his influence to the distaste you at present felt for the career upon which I had set my heart. Nothing could have been more foolish and nothing more natural, perhaps, than the act which followed. I ran down into the ravine with the wild intention, so strangely duplicated in yourself a few minutes later, of meeting and pleading my cause with him at the bridge, but unlike you, I took the middle of the ravine for my road and not the secluded path at the side. It was this which determined our fate, father, for here I ran up against the chestnut tree, saw the stick and, catching it up without further thought than of the facility it offered for whittling, started with it down the ravine. Scoville was not in sight. The moment was the one when he had quit looking for Reuther and wandered away up the ravine. I have thought since that perhaps the glimpse he had got of his little one peering from the scene of his crime may have stirred even his guilty conscience and sent him off on this purposeless ramble; but, however this was, I did not see him or anybody else as I took my way leisurely down towards the bridge, whittling at the stick and thinking of what I should say to Mr. Etheridge when I met him. And now for Fate’s final and most fatal touch! Nothing which came into my mind struck me quite favourably. The encounter which seemed such a very simple matter when I first contemplated it, began to assume quite a different aspect as the moment for it approached. By the time I had come abreast of the Hollow, I was tired of the whole business, and hearing his whistle and knowing by it that he was very near, I plunged up the slope to avoid him, and hurried straight away into town. That is my story, father. If I heard your steps approaching as I plunged across the path into which I had thrown the stick in my anger at having broken the point of my knife-blade upon it, I thought nothing of them then. Afterwards I believed them to be Scoville’s, which may account to you for my silence about this whole matter both before and during the trial. I was afraid of the witness-stand and of what might be elicited from me if I once got into the hands of the lawyers. My abominable reticence in regard to his former crime would be brought up against me, and I was yet too young, too shy and uninformed to face such an ordeal of my own volition. Unhappily, I was not forced into it, and — But we will not talk of that, father.”
“Son,”— a long silence had intervened,—“there is one thing more. When — how — did you first learn my real reason for sending you from home? I saw that my position was understood by you when our eyes first met in this room. But twelve years had passed since you left this house in ignorance of all but my unnatural attitude towards you. When, Oliver, when?”
“That I cannot answer, father; it was just a conviction which dawned gradually upon me. Now, it seems as if I had known it always; but that isn’t so. A boy doesn’t reason; and it took reasoning for me to — to accept —”
“Yes, I understand. And that was your secret! Oh, Oliver, I shall never ask for your forgiveness. I am not worthy it. I only ask that you will not let pride or any other evil passion stand in the way of the happiness I see in the future for you. I cannot take from you the shame of my crime and long deception, but spare me this final sorrow! There is nothing to part you from Reuther now. Alike unhappy in your parentage, you can start on equal terms, and love will do the rest. Say that you will marry her, Oliver, and let me see her smile before I die.”
“Marry her? Oh, father, will such an angel marry me?”
“No, but such a woman might.”
Oliver came near, and stooped over his father’s bed.
“Father, if love and attention to my profession can make a success of the life you prize, they shall have their opportunity.”
The father smiled. If it fell to others to remember him as he appeared in his mysterious prime, to Oliver it was given to recall him as he looked then with the light on his face and the last tear he was ever to shed glittering in his fading eye.
“God is good,” came from the bed; then the solemnity of death settled over the room.
The soft footfalls overhead ceased. The long hush had brought the two women to the door where they stood sobbing. Oliver was on his knees beside the bed, his head buried in his arms. On the face so near him there rested a ray from the westering sun; but the glitter was gone from the eye and the unrest from the heart. No more weary vigils in a room dedicated to remorse and self~punishment. No more weary circling of the house in the dark lane whose fences barred out the hurrying figure within from every eye but that of Heaven. Peace for him; and for Reuther and Oliver, hope!
The End