Part 3 (2/2)
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; pus.h.i.+ng 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 blus.h.i.+ng 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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.
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