"Can"t!" I roared at him.
"No," he said. "Not yet. I have promised her. She has my word."
"But think, man, what may be going on there!" I said.
"I have sworn not to pa.s.s the door," he said obstinately. "Heaven knows I am nearly crazy for light upon all this. But I must keep my word!"
As if to lend emphasis to his exclamation, a gust of wind roaring through the trees of the park brought the first deluge of rain--a cold, stinging downpour of the wild autumn night. Estabrook shivered. I could see that he was a man, badly tired, unnerved, and still dizzy from the blow I had given him.
"Follow me," said I roughly. "You need warmth--stimulant. And I want your story, Estabrook."
He looked at me with an empty stare, but at last nodded his a.s.sent, and without another word between us, we came to this house and into this very room.
He sat there before the fire--burning then as it is now--and as the warmth penetrated his trembling body, he seemed to regain his self-composure.
I saw then that this young man, well under forty, did not lack distinction of appearance. His head was carried upon his strong neck in the masterful manner of those who have true poise and strength of personality. His hair had turned gray above his ears, and his well-shaven face carried those lines that the grim struggles of our modern civilization gouge into the fullness of youth and health.
"I must tell somebody," he said, while I was observing his features upon which the firelight danced. "I have never dreamed that I would come to such a pa.s.s. But you shall hear my love story. You may be able to throw some light upon it. Contrary to the notion of my friends, who consider me incapable of adventure, my experience in the affections is one that offers opportunity for speculation--it would appeal to a great detective!"
I leaned forward quickly. Such a statement from any man might awaken interest, but Estabrook was not any man. He represented the essence of conventional society. He belonged to a family of well-preserved traditions, a family whose reputation for conservative conduct and manners of cold self-restraint was well known in a dozen cities. They were that particular family, of a common enough name, which was known as the Estabrookses Arbutus. Jermyn had had a dozen grandfathers who, from one to another, had handed down the practice of law to him, as if for the Estabrooks it was an heirloom.
"Perhaps I had better tell you from the beginning," said he, drawing the back of his fine hand across his forehead. "For it is strange--strange!
And who can say what the ending will be?"
I counseled him to calm himself and asked that he eliminate as much as possible all unnecessary details of his story. I shall repeat, then, as accurately as possible, the story he told me. I will attempt to write it in his own words....
BOOK II
THE AUTOMATIC SHEIK
CHAPTER I
A WOMAN AT TWENTY-TWO
Some men do not fall in love. I had supposed from the beginning of my interest in such things that I was one of these men. I did not doubt that all of us have an inherent tendency, perhaps based upon our coa.r.s.er natures, to love this or that woman thrown in our way by a fortunate or unfortunate chance. But the traditions of our family were strong; I had been educated by all those who were near to me in earlier life to look upon marriage, not as a result of natural instinct so much as the result of a careful and diplomatic choice of an alliance. I had been taught--not in so many words, but by the acc.u.mulation of impressions received in my home and in my youthful training--that one first scrutinized a woman"s inheritance of character, wealth, and position, and as a second step fell in love with her.
This cannot be called sn.o.bbishness. It is prudence. And I followed this course until I was nearly thirty years old. If the test of its success lies in the fact that I had never had more than a temporary affection, sometimes stimulated by the curve of a bare shoulder and sometimes by the angle of a bright mind, then it had successfully kept me from the altar.
And yet you shall see that at last I reversed the order of our traditions; you shall see, too, that it resulted in one of the strangest of courtships and a tangle of mystery of which the rest of the world knows nothing, but which you have adequate proof threatens my happiness and the ghastly end of which may now be skulking within the walls of my house.
The wild weather of this night, with the howl of the wind and the rattle of dead leaves driven against the blinds, is in extraordinary contrast to the day of beautiful spring sunlight when I first set eyes upon her who was Julianna Colfax.
It is not necessary to tell you who her father was, because you have probably many times toasted your feet before the grate in the club with him.
He was a master of human interest, as grizzled as that old Scotch hound which became his constant companion after Mrs. Colfax died, and his contact with all those hosts of men and women, for whom he administered justice so faithfully for more than twenty years, had stamped on his shaven face sad but warm and sympathetic lines. All men liked him and those who knew him best loved him heartily. Under his gruffness there was a lot of sentiment and tenderness. After his reserved moments, when he was silent and cold, he would burst forth into indulgences of fine, dry humor, like an effervescent fluid which gains in sparkling vigor by remaining corked awhile. It was commonly said--and often said by Judge Graver, of the Supreme Court--that old Colfax remained in the comparative obscurity of a probate judgeship simply from an innate modesty and a belief that he had found his work in life in which he might best serve humanity without hope of personal power and glory.
Gaunt, tall, stoop-shouldered, gray, walking the same path each day,--home, court-house, club, neighbors, home,--with a grapevine stick as thick as a fence-post in his hand--such was her father.
Exactly seven years ago the first of last June, on a spring day when I believe every bird that dared came into the city to make his song heard, I came up from downtown and dropped off a surface car before the gleaming white pillars of the new probate court building. My pocket was stuffed with a lot of doc.u.ments in that Welson _vs._ Welson litigation, which I had just succeeded in closing.
Behind those swinging green doors which flank the big bench is the judge"s retiring-room; pushing the crack there wider, I was able to peek in, and saw at once that the old atmosphere of Judge Colfax"s study had not remained in the old dingy court-house, where the dismantlers" picks were already breaking up the ancient mortar, but had followed the personality of the man into these new pretentious quarters. The retiring-room already gave forth an alluring odor of law books and doc.u.ment files, the floor already had been forced into use to bear up little piles of transcripts of evidence, tin doc.u.ment boxes and piles of books, open at reference pages, occupying obscure corners. The Judge"s black silk hat was in its familiar place, resting with the opening upward, on the old black walnut desk which its owner had affectionately brought with him, and which made a strange and cynical contrast with the mahogany woodwork and new rug.
"Come in," he said, and with one of his long-fingered hands he made a gesture toward the opposite side of the room and spoke my name and that of another.
She was there! I had never seen her before. She was there. I had no thought of her ancestry, her wealth, or her position. She was there, and into my throat came something I had never felt before, into my face a suffusion of hot blood, into my lungs a long-held inhalation of breath.
Sometime you may see her. She has changed a little. But then she was twenty-two, and the simplicity of her attire seemed to be at once the propriety of nature and the infinite skill of art. She wore a black gown, without ornamentation, and a black hat of graceful form. Not a harsh or stiff fol-de-rol was about her anywhere. You will pardon me for this detail. But, oh, she was so different from the others. She was a picture there among the law books.
The most attractive thing there can be in a woman is that combination of youth, innocence, glowing health, modesty. The perfect skin, with its grapelike, dusty bloom which shows where the collar droops at the front of the neck, the even lashes, from under which the deep eyes gaze out at you half timidly, the brave, honest uplifting of a rounded chin, the undulations of fine lungs, the almost imperceptible movement of restrained vigor in a poised, delicate, graceful figure, the gentleness and tenderness of a voice which at the same time suggests refinement and decision and strength, the absence of any effort to make an impression, either in manner or dress,--these are rare and beautiful attributes in an age when female children hatch out as artful women without the intervening period of girlhood. After all, the best men of us will not choose one of these modern maidens who imitate the boldness of the character and dress of the adventuress or the stage and opera favorite.
It has become a tiresome feature of our modern life with the insidious faculty of corrupting the manners even of families who know better. She was so different! And in that moment I knew her superiority as a woman.
I could not speak.
We exchanged no words. Yet as we looked at each other in the manner of children, the Judge, I thought, sensed a significance. When my eye sought his, I found a cloud upon his stern face, but immediately, as if he had tossed a haunting thought aside, he laughed.
"Julianna," said he, "this is the Mr. Estabrook who is as insane as I.
That is, he devotes no end of time and energy and seriousness to the game of chess. We have never yet met each other on the field of battle.
Some afternoon, here in this room, however--"
She did not allow him to finish; she said hastily that she must witness the contest.
"Then at my home," he said, beaming at me. "To-morrow will you come to dinner?"
I remember that Julianna had raised her eyes, that they were smiling, and that I received the definite, convincing impression that I was looking at a girl who never had given her love away. I tell you that one feels a truth like that by instinct, and that a woman wears not only her spotlessness, but also her purity of thought, like a faint halo. Yet at that moment I knew she was glad that I had accepted the invitation: there was a blushing eagerness in her eyes, upon her lips, in the movement of her graceful hands. For the rest of the morning I was half dizzy with the mad sense of triumph, of conquest--that strange onslaught of the emotions which gives no quarter to the disordered phalanx of reason.
I must admit that when I met Judge Colfax on the court-house steps the next afternoon to walk home with him, I had not given a thought to his daughter"s forebears or security of place in the social structure. In fact, the social structure had vanished; an individual had, at least for the time, filled its place.
I even jumped when the first sentence the Judge addressed to me began with her name.
"My daughter plays an excellent game herself," he said, as if in explanation of her interest. "In fact, I may say, with an old man"s modesty, that there are only two persons in this city who can win from me consistently. She is one."
"And the other, sir?" I asked as we turned our faces toward the hot stare of the late afternoon sun.
"The other," he said, "is an automaton. I have named it the Sheik of Baalbec. But I believe he calls himself the Player of the Rolling Eye."
It is impossible for me to say why the mere mention of the fanciful name of an automatic chessplayer should have caused me to feel a peculiar uneasiness--the sensation of apprehension. I am not susceptible ordinarily to the so-called warnings of voices from within. And yet I suppose the Judge saw a look of inquiry on my face, for he drew out his large, old-fashioned gold watch, which he carried in his trousers pocket, with his keys.
"We will stop there," said he. "There is time. The automaton has a corner of the lower hallway in the old Natural History Museum. It"s not far out of our way, and if you will start with a problem I will give you and play with him, it will afford me an opportunity to measure you before our game this evening."
Such were the circ.u.mstances which brought me into a mystery not yet solved, the ending of which I fear to guess. In a modern era, when it is commonly supposed that skeletons no longer hang in closets, that day after day brings commonplace occurrences or, at the best, trivial abnormalities to be explained to-morrow, that romance is dead, it is strange that Fate should have picked me, when, by custom and my own desire, I am aloof from all things turbulent, morbid, and uncanny, to play an unwilling part in so extraordinary a drama, or, possibly, a tragedy.
At any rate, that day found me face to face with the half-human personality which the Judge had named the Sheik of Baalbec, and whose eye has cast an evil cloud upon my life.