"I must be tired," he answered. "It has been a strain. It was nothing."
We went out onto the porch for a moment when we were below, and stood out of sight behind the vines. The street was still crowded with curious people, and there was a great black hole with the elm trees, scorched brown, drooping over it--a hole filled with the ashes that were all that was left of the home. Men were playing a hose into it and every time they moved the stream, here or there, a great hiss and cloud of vapor came up. Some one had hung the Judge"s straw hat on a lilac bush and there it advertised itself. But the Judge drew himself up and stiffened his body and set his teeth, as he looked at that scene, and I knew then he would not break down again, but would play the game he had begun to the end.
Indeed, I felt his fingers at my sleeve.
"I shall slip away to get the locket," he whispered. "Do you understand?
Just a moment. Tell them I will be right back."
He went around the house and I into the hall.
"Judge Colfax will return in a minute," I explained.
"Of course!" said Miss Danforth. "We will wait for him."
The minutes pa.s.sed. He did not come back.
"Where did you say he went?" asked the old barrister--or lawyer, as you call them.
I shook my head and turned the baby onto my other arm. In a second more I heard his voice on the porch.
"Margaret!" he called.
I went out to him.
His face showed his nervousness again. His fingers trembled as he took the baby from me.
"Go! Look!" he whispered. "I cannot find it!"
This was my chance! I went. The gra.s.s below the window had grown long and was matted down; people on the street were watching me and I did not dare to drop on my knees for fear some well-meaning and unwelcome a.s.sistance might come for the search. Nevertheless I pushed my toes, I thought, over every inch of the ground below the window. I doubled and redoubled the s.p.a.ce. At last the Danforths" cook raised the screen.
"What are ye doing?" said she. "Come in. The baby"s food is here already."
What could I say? How could I avoid going? There was no way. But the Judge had not found the locket. Nor had I.
But the Judge had other worries, I"m telling you. He feared the news of the fire would reach his wife in some wrong way and he telegraphed her.
She answered by saying she was leaving for home. Brave woman that she was! The telegram said, "It is worth the fire to feel the leap of the heart when I know that you all were saved for me."
"Will she ever know?" he whispered, staring down at the laughing baby, with its little pink, curved mouth. "Will she ever know? I did this for her. G.o.d, tell me if I was right!"
"Be easy, sir," I said to him. "Have no fear. There is no one in the world but you and me can tell the story of last night. After these weeks and weeks your wife has been away, there is n.o.body but me or you who can say this child is not--"
"Julianna," he choked.
"Yes, sir," said I.
I was right. What it cost the Judge"s soul I do not know. But that the lie he acted in the name of love was not discovered by the thin woman and wife, whose only beauty was in the light of her eyes, I know very well. The years that she lived--it was after we all came to this city, when the Judge took his new office--were happy enough years for her.
Rare enough is the brand of devotion he gave to her; rare enough was the beauty and sweetness of the girl that grew up calling her "Mother."
In all that time never a word did he say to me of what only he and I knew, and I have often thought of what faith he must have had in human goodness--what full, unchanging, constant, n.o.ble faith--to trust a servant the way he seemed to trust me by his silence. I have believed ever since that no man or animal can long be mean of soul under the terrible presence of kindness and confidence. For all the trickery that the inherited character of my mother and that Madame Welstoke had poured into my nature was driven bit by bit out of my heart by the trust the Judge put in me, and his looking upon me as a good and honest woman.
Long before my love for Julianna had grown strong, I knew that I never could bring myself to use my knowledge of the Judge"s secret to wring money from him, or in fact for any other purpose than to feel sorrow for what his fear of the future must have made him suffer.
I knew well enough how the blood of the daughter preyed upon his mind.
There is no child that, sooner or later and more than once, does not come to a time of badness and stubbornness and mischief, and when those times came to Julianna, the Judge would watch her as if he expected to see her turn into a snake like magic in a fairy story. More than that, for days he would be odd and silent, and when he thought no one was looking at him, he would sit with his face in his hands, thinking and brooding and afraid.
I found out, too, that he had tried to trace the father, John Chalmers, back to the days when he wore his own name, and it may have been that then he would have strived to go back to Monty"s father and grandfather, and so on, as far as he could go. I knew about it because one day I was looking through his desk drawers--prying has always been a failing with me!--and I found a letter from Mr. Roddy, the newspaper reporter, who I had almost forgotten. Mr. Roddy said that he never had been able to find anything of the murderer"s history before the time he was employed in Bermuda, and I know my heart jumped with pleasure, for I could not see what good it would do for the Judge to know; and I felt, for some reason, that the name of Cranch was one that both he and I would not have smudged with the owner"s misdeeds and folly. You may say that it was strange that pictures of love--the love which came and went like the shadow of a flying bird, flitting across a wall--should have still been locked up in an old woman"s heart. But they were there to be called back, as they are now, with all their colors as clear and bright as the pictures of Julianna"s future that the Judge used to see pa.s.s before the eyes of his fear.
At first I used to think that the master was princ.i.p.ally in terror because of the chance that some strange trick of fate would show his wife the truth. The older and more beautiful and the more lovable and affectionate the little daughter grew, and the weaker and whiter the poor deceived woman, the worse the calamity would have been. Perhaps I thought this was the Judge"s fear, because of its being my own. I was always feeling that the blow was about to fall, and I prayed that Mrs.
Colfax would no longer be living when it came.
But at last she was gone. She died when Julianna was eleven, and had long braids of hair that would have been the envy of the mermaids, and eyes that had begun to grow deep like pools of cool water, and a figure that had begun to be something better than the stalkiness of a child.
Mrs. Colfax died with a little flickering smile one day, and the Judge put his arms around her and then fell on his knees. She looked thin and worn, but very happy.
"Sleep," he whispered to her.
And then he opened the door and called Julianna.
"You must not be afraid, dear," he said to her. "Death is here, but Death is not terrible. See! She has smiled. We can tell that she knew that we would see her again in a little while, can"t we?"
"Why, yes," said Julianna. "For she never thought first of herself, but of us."
Then the Judge put out his arms and held the girl close to him, so that I knew a fresh love for her had come into his heart. Perhaps on account of it he had more fear than ever. One day he brought home a book in a green cover; I read the words on the back--"Some Aspects of Heredity."
Nor was that book the last of its kind he bought or sat reading till late at night, with his pipe held in the crook of his long fingers and his forehead drawn down into a scowl. I could tell he was wondering about the mystery of that which goes creeping down from mother or father to son and daughter, and on and on, like a starving mongrel dog that slinks along after a person, dropping in the gra.s.s when a person speaks cross to it, running away when a person turns and chases it, and then, when it has been forgotten, a person looks around and there it is again, skulking close behind. "And then," as Madame Welstoke used to say, folding her hands, "if you call it "Heredity," it knows its name and wags its tail!"
One would have said that the Judge always expected that some creature like that would crawl up behind the girl. I used to imagine, when Julianna came into the room, that he looked over her shoulder or behind her, as if he expected to see it there with its grinning face. And, moreover, I"ve seen him look at the soft, fine skin of her round forearms, or the little curls of hair at the back of her neck, or the lids of her eyes, when they were moist in summer, or the half moons on the nails of her fingers, as if he might be able to see there some sign of her birth or the first bruises made by this thing called "Heredity,"
that would say, if it could talk, "Come. Don"t you feel the thrill of my touch? You belong not to yourself, my dear, but to me."
I knew. And as the girl came into womanhood, and he saw, perhaps, that I was watching her, too, I think he longed for sympathy and wanted the relief of speech. Finally he spoke. It was late one night and he had his hand on the stair rail, when he heard me locking the window in the hall.
He turned quickly.
"Margaret," he whispered.
"Yes, sir," I answered.
"Thank G.o.d, she is a woman and not a man," he said, out of a clear sky; "for a woman is better protected against herself."
For a moment he seemed to be thinking; then he looked at the floor.
"Does Julianna ever take a gla.s.s of sherry or claret when I am not at dinner?" he asked. "I thought it had gone quickly."
"Why, no!" I replied.
He nodded the way he did when he was satisfied--the way a toyshop animal"s head nods--less and less until it stops.
"I"m sorry I asked," he said. "Good-night."
What he had said was enough to show me that his imagination had been sharpened and sharpened and sharpened. Perhaps you know how it is when some one does not come back until late at night, and how, when you are waiting, listening to the ticking of the clock, or the sounds of footsteps or cab horses in the street, coming nearer and nearer and then going farther and farther away, you can imagine all kinds of things like highway robbery and accidents and hospitals, and the telephone seems ready to jump at you with a piece of bad, bad news. So it was with him, except that he did not see pictures of what had happened, but pictures of what might come. I knew that he feared the character that might crop out of the good and beautiful girl, and I thought sometimes, too, that he still had fits of believing, though the past was buried under the years, that sometime the ugly ghost of the truth would come rapping on the window pane in the dead o" night.
Perhaps I can say, in spite of the fact that we never knew of a certainty, that it did. We had cause to know that, barring the Judge and me and Monty Cranch, wherever he might have been, a new and strange and evil thing showed itself as the fourth possessor of our secret.