The Long Lane's Turning Part 10

right down to the war. I had all the habits and prejudices of my cla.s.s. Liquor seemed to me like many another thing that was made to minister to individual weakness, but was not in itself obnoxious. And the decanter was never empty on my side-board. Yet even then the new element in politics and in every-day life--the sentiment against liquor--was growing. Times were slowly changing, men's outlook was changing, and I knew--long before I admitted it to myself--that I was a part of an industry which the best thought of the community no longer approved, and that men who championed it were swimming against a deepening and strengthening social current. I was stubborn, but at last there came a day when I--changed too."

His voice had softened, had suddenly become surcharged with feeling.

He leaned over the table and caught up a small oval photograph, set in a black-leathern frame. It was a picture of his son Chisholm, as a boy of perhaps fourteen. He held it out in a hand that slightly trembled:

"That is why I changed, Craig. One night Chilly came home--drunk. I had never seen him intoxicated, had never guessed that he could so far forget himself. He was a mere boy, at school! In that moment the sharp truth came to me. Shame stared at me from my own door-step. I saw the text of the sermon that had been preached into my deaf ears--in my own son!"

He broke off abruptly and set the picture back on the table. When he spoke again his voice was more even:

"That hour, as I sat here in this same room, I--saw. Could anything else have opened my eyes? Perhaps not. But that did. I saw all at once what I had been bolstering. It was no longer a theoretical question of the harm of the club-bar and the corner saloon to the community. They were making a drunkard of _Chilly_! The Trust furnished their stock-in-trade. And I had been the Trust's paid tool--a part of its brain in this state--had guarded it from error, shown how far it could go with impunity under the law, had even made possible its organisation as it exists to-day! I, Chilly's father!

That night I wrote out my resignation as counsel. I mailed it before I slept."

There was a slight pause. Craig's lowering look had been watching the other curiously. The emotion in the older man's voice had touched no chord of response in him. Rather it roused contempt--not for the son, whom he considered a brainless weakling, but for what seemed to him an arrant attempt to evade the issue that stood so sharply and insistently in his own mind. To him no man's motives were pure. The man before him had been not the Trust's servant, but its creature. Had not the Corporation, behind all, set him on his high seat? Was he fool enough to think that he--Craig--was not aware of that? It had expected him to pay in kind, when the need arose, as now it had. And did the other think to throw dust in his eyes with such mawkish sentimentalism--to evade this old tacit obligation by a flimsy pretence of moral scruple?

Craig spoke:

"And--the Corporation. What did it say? Eh?"

"The president of the board came to see me. He was good enough to ask me to reconsider. But I had made my choice."

Craig leaned forward, his arm on the little inlaid desk beside him.

"Let me finish," he said with deliberate meaning. "The board, accepting that decision with the keenest regret, desired to make your retirement the occasion for showing in a tangible way its appreciation of your long and faithful service. A seat on the Supreme Bench being vacant, the Directorate proposed, unless your taste pointed otherwise, to use such influence as it might possess, to gain for your name the consideration in that connection which it deserved."

A look of surprise had crossed the Judge's face as he began. A sensitive flush swept it as he ended. "If you imply that my seat was offered me, Mr. Craig, even tentatively, at that time, or in that connection, you are in error!"

Craig's sneer was open now. There was no more pretence. "If not in so many words, in effect! Pshaw! Do you mean to pretend you would have had that appointment if the Trust hadn't backed you for it? It owned the state bag and baggage then, as it does now--and as it will continue to do! It put you on the Bench and it has kept you there, and you know it!"

The Judge was on his feet now, his flush faded to pallor. He deigned no answer to the flung a.s.sertion. "What is your object in coming to me to say this?" His voice was deep and resonant.

"Just this!" Craig lifted his arm, his big fist clenched, his eyes narrowed. "You were the Trust's counsel and confident for twenty years--till it put you where you are now! Do you think it did that for nothing? It _made_ you, Beverly Allen! And now it has reason to believe that you intend to knife it in the back--to drag the ermine it put on your shoulders into an incendiary hue-and-cry started by demagogues who aim to destroy a great industry!"

"What do you mean, sir?" The Judge's tone was icy.

"I mean the Welles-Scott decision!" Craig said in a low, deadly voice.

"That"--his clenched hand smote the light desk at his elbow with a savage blow--"must be _ours_!"

For an instant there was blank silence. The Judge stood aghast, his very speech frozen with indignation. To him his judicial calling had an element that was almost sacred. This man--to whom he had given the hand of friends.h.i.+p, who had the _entree_ into the exclusive circles of southern gentility--this man a.s.sumed to lay coa.r.s.e fingers upon his vestment of office, to question his integrity as a Judge! He dared to believe him, Beverly Allen, cheaply venal--a puppet, whose legal rulings were at the beck and call of corporate influence! The room seemed suddenly stifling hot. He turned to the window, flung the curtains wide and drew a gulping breath of the fresh air.

He had not seen Craig's sudden start. For at the smas.h.i.+ng blow of his fist on the fragile Italian desk, a curious thing had happened. Its catch loosened by the jar, a tiny carven panel had fallen with a little click, and a thin sheaf of yellowed letters had dropped and spread fan-wise beside his hand. The backs of the envelopes were uppermost, and across the top one was written in a dim, twirly hand and faded ink, the initials _B.A._

A thought darted like cold lightning through Craig's brain.

"B.A."--Beverly Allen! Whose were those old letters? The initials were in a woman's hand. What if they held a clue to the old story Treadwell, his attorney, had spoken of? A quick instinct inspired him.

His hand closed over them quickly--went to his breast--as the Judge turned from the window.

The latter had regained self-control. He stood erect and tall, his leonine head thrown back, his eyes s.h.i.+ning, and in his face a look the other had never seen in it before. "You have presumed," he said, "to say to me what I would not have believed any representative of your corporation would dare to say. And you have taken advantage of my hospitality to say it in my own house. I choose now to believe this message an individual one, springing from a personal and base initiative rather than from the responsible Directorate which I once served. 'Once,' I say. For I serve it no longer. I am now a member of the Judiciary of this commonwealth. Because the corporation furthered my candidacy, you a.s.sume that it 'made' me. Perhaps it did.

But it never owned my conscience or my integrity! Nor does it now, thank G.o.d!"

As he spoke he had stepped to the wall and pushed a bell. "Nelson," he said, to the entering butler, "show this gentleman to the door."

Craig had risen to his feet. He looked at the other an instant with livid face. Then he went rapidly to the hall and s.n.a.t.c.hed up his hat and stick. The outer door closed heavily behind him.

In his room at the hotel Cameron Craig took the sheaf of letters.

Under the electric-light he drew the folded leaves one by one from their worn envelopes and spread them open before him. A look of chagrin crossed his face. No woman had written them; they had been penned by the Judge himself--he was familiar with the heavy, characteristic hand-writing. Were they, then, only some old letters to his wife, perhaps? He was holding one leaf to the light. Suddenly his eye caught. He made an exclamation. His face lighted with amaze and savage exultation.

What a weapon blind luck, ironic fate, had put into his hands, in the very face of the man for whom he had craved it! For on that leaf, etched in remorseless ink, was what would open an old grave, drag into the daylight the corpse of an ign.o.ble pa.s.sion, cast scorn upon the writer's name and blight and wither present and future! How little, after all, the tricks of the body changed! Twenty years--and yet, _his letter_!

What matter when it had been penned, or whether the woman were long dead to whom he had once written that blazing indiscretion? He, the jurist of spotless living and good repute--to be shown forth to the world as a moral fraud, a husband and father who had once stood shamelessly ready to fling home and reputation on the sc.r.a.p-heap in a disgraceful flight "without benefit of clergy!" The woman presumably had scorned his offer--since she had sent him back his letters--and yet on the page still stood the black intention, in black and white! What incredible folly had led him to preserve it? Twenty years ago--in the dead past--and yet there it was, to be used in the living present, the blunt handwriting, recognisable at a glance, d.a.m.ning and beyond denial!

He laughed aloud. It was Echo's father whom he held in his hand! If he did not come to terms, so much the better, since the blow would strike her too. She thought herself above him, did she? What if this story should be spread abroad in yellow headlines, babbled of in club and boudoir, smirked at on street-corners? Would she hold herself so high then? Well, if he was so far beneath her pride, that should bring her to his level! He felt no p.r.i.c.k of shame at the base move he contemplated, no smart of pity for the ruin it should bring. Ambition in which was no tincture of honourable scruple wove, with the desire to humble the woman who would have none of him, to a resolution as unyielding as steel.

He gathered up the letters and put them carefully into his pocket. In another hour he was on the train, speeding to his home in the next state.

CHAPTER XII

A HOSTAGE TO THE BOTTLE

The speech of the day before of which Treadwell had spoken so enthusiastically to Cameron Craig, had indeed given to the crowd, which had been wont on past occasions to gather at the old court-house when he spoke, another revelation of Harry Sevier. It had been impromptu--not the outgrowth of deliberate plan. The non-appearance of a much-heralded speaker had thrust the exigency upon him without warning, and he had acquiesced only in a keen desire to save from blank failure a meeting in whose principles and object he was by his very character deeply interested. The tortuous involutions of local politics had never interested him, but he had thrilled to the stirring beneath the surface of the great forces of good and evil and the present agitation for clean government had found him enrolled, without question, on its side.

As he stepped forward to face the great curtain of faces that stretched outward and upward beyond the footlights, he had not known what he should say. Indeed, while he slowly "felt" his audience in his opening sentences, the sub-conscious part of his mind had been full of a matter foreign to the subject at hand. There had come to him a fleeting recollection of the last time he had spoken in public--the day upon which he had betrayed his client and put a man, of whose innocence an instinct deeper-rooted than reason had convinced him, into the striped habiliments of the convict. The sharp, aching compunction of that thought had never left him. Since that day, though he went daily to his sumptuous office, he had taken no new case. He had gone always with that sin clanking against his conscience and the memory of the trial had focused always in that glimpse, across the ma.s.s of faces, of a woman's look of puzzle and hurt. During the months since then that face had hung before his fevered vision as a far, cool oasis to the desert wayfarer. These had been black months of fierce, untiring battle with the appet.i.te to which he had surrendered himself, and which he had sworn to conquer. There had been times when the avid thirst had seized him by the throat, when endurance had almost failed: days when he had sat in his inner office, with door locked and blinds down, fighting desperately with the strenuous impulse that seemed to be dragging him bodily, as if with fleshly hands, to the little wall-cabinet whose door had never been unlocked since the day of that sinister court-recess.

During this prolonged, grappling struggle he had never been to Midfields. He had seen Echo but occasionally, walking or driving on the street, or less frequently at functions from which he could not absent himself without remark. There had been no confidences between them. Never had he leaned to her to whisper: "You see! Do I do well?"

Never had her lips said, "I know ... I know, and I am watching!" yet his heart had told him that she was alive to the issue, that she felt the forces conflicting for the mastery. She had not been in the audience on this day, but as the faces pulsed and receded till they wove into a grey blur in the misty blaze of the incandescents, Harry's inner vision had a swift memory of her face as it had looked in that old court-house scene.

And with it, as though it had been a key to the disused mental machinery, strangely and wonderfully there had come back to him, in a sudden flas.h.i.+ng illumination like summer lightning, a surging return of the old power, the vivid rush of lambent images in his brain and the burning, insistent phrase to his tongue--the power that he had thought gone forever with that shuddering failure of a year before.

As he felt again the old native ability rising in him, strong and undismayed, and once more his own, without hostage given to the bottle, a stinging delight had swept through him. It was the fruit of victory, and fiercely sweet in proportion to the bitterness of the struggle.

Yet in his new sensitiveness the realisation had held a flicker of self-shame. Never in those old days had he employed that talent for the greater good: only for individual ambition, often for the blunt defeating of the clear ends of justice! It was another Harry Sevier who spoke now, one to whom conscience now stood as mentor, to whom principle was become a guiding star. The leashed power and restraint had been bred of that long struggle, and from the fresh mastery of self which he had so hardly gained, flowed forth a subtle magnetic quality that held his listeners mute. In the hush that wrapped the great a.s.semblage the speaker of the day, late by an hour, had entered the back of the stage, to wave back the nonplussed chairman and to seat himself in the rear, enthralled by the white magic that swayed all alike. The speech had held no rodomontade, none of the pyrotechnics that, had lent a flavour of sensation to past court trials. It had been on a higher plane than appeal to superficial feeling or ingrained prejudice. It had brought no accusation, pointed no finger, save backward to old ideals of community respect, and forward to the wave of independent thought that was sweeping over sister states to break in thundering force upon the crags of misrule.

It had closed in a note of hope and of promise, and ended with the hall hushed in that greatest tribute to true oratory--absolute silence.

Next day, wherever men congregated in the little capital, Harry Sevier's name was on every lip. It was flung wide, too, in newspaper headlines until the ripple stirred far borders. Of this he himself could not be unaware. He knew that never in the old days had he spoken as he had spoken then. He was conscious also that in the trial of himself his faculties had been reorganised and renewed, had emerged sounder and truer from the strenuous testing, and that the fire through which he had pa.s.sed had burned away the rubble and left metal that was more worthy. Nor could he fail to realise that at a single step he had attained to a new and unfamiliar status in the community. He felt this not so much in the multiple congratulations of the many, as in a certain new deference that he distinguished in more reserved greetings.

Beneath all, however, but one opinion profoundly concerned him--Echo's.

As he swung along the street this afternoon, the thought of her excluded all others.

Rounding the corner, a voice came to him--a ribald, good-humoured voice, inviting some one to "come and have a drink." He turned abruptly. Chisholm Allen stood a little way from him, before a swing-door through which sifted the clink of gla.s.ses and boisterous conversation.

Chilly was decidedly the worse for wear. Much water had run under the bridges since he had tussled with old Nelson, the butler, over the decanter of sherry. His face was pallid and the marks of incorrigible weakness and self-indulgence showed clearly through its habitual good-nature. Chilly's feet were set in the paths of dalliance and he had ceased to care if anybody knew it. He greeted the newcomer, however, with a trace of embarra.s.sment which he dissipated with a laugh, as he said:

"The invitation's for you, if you like, Harry. We'll have one to the silver-tongued orator! What do you say?"

For answer Harry linked an arm in his and turned him down the street--away from the swing-door. "Come up to my rooms, Chilly, it's cool there and we haven't had a talk for a blue moon. No, we'll consider the drink afterward."

Just at the moment a carriage and pair bowled by them. It was drawn by the Allens' bays and Echo was on the rear seat. She had seen the action, had caught its import, and Harry had a flas.h.i.+ng glance from her dark eyes that sent the blood coursing to his fingers. Chilly too, however, had seen the swift exchange. He frowned, then laughed again.

"You should join the Salvation Army," he said, satirically. "They've a rescue corps, I believe. I know a pretty ensign, and she shall come and pin a nice little medal on your manly chest!"