Under the Law

CHAPTER XXV "TERRY!" Evening came heavily, the river, flattened to an unearthly yellow calm, had thrown back all day field-heaviness, the prolific scent of grasses. The house was hot, the trees held lax droop of layered leaves. Languidly in the tepid air moved hundreds of unseen little ships of pollen, bringing to human breathing a thickness as of a new element. The fire-flies carrying their lanterns slowly up from dark grass, clotted beneath a shrub, or hung in tiny constellations by a tree; while out on the roadways the black automobiles rolled pompously like haughty monsters whose eyes, scornful and contemptuous, looked far ahead past all poetry of tree and water toward future summer nights when all the world should be a shattering brilliance of moving engines. The house seemed to ache with loneliness and the desolation of souls at variance. There was no noisy gathering of the Bunch on the porch of the Judge's home. Miss Aurelia worried over the absence of Minga and Dunstan. She had retired early to "collect her thoughts," she told herself, supporting this enterprise by taking with her a novel by which her friend, Mrs. Spoyd, set great store and which, so its owner told Miss Aurelia, contained "not one unpleasant thing." Miss Aurelia who read a chapter out of "Something" every night, now read a blissful chapter out of this novel. Here there were such minute descriptions of crockery and curtains as delighted her soul; here married people all "got on" well; in this book the children arrayed in fresh pinks and blues played happily with clean spools or pretty blocks against backgrounds of hollyhocks. The little brooks ran without roiling, mad dogs kept away from villages and arranged their lives to be killed when convenient by intrepid lads educated for the purpose. The minister was handsome, good and healthy, and said what was expected, the doctor cured all fractures whether of skull or mind, the tax collector sent in his bills only when people had the money, and the young people sprang up together in couples like Noah's ark and married and started on a wonderful advertisement-perfected housekeeping. "Why?" asked Miss Aurelia, yawning and settling down for the night. "Why don't more people write pleasant books and plays like this? I think all writers who write disagreeable things should be snubbed and made to feel uncomfortable, they should not be asked to dinner nor treated politely in any way until they stop writing about slums and dirty people and of unpleasant married problems. That," said Miss Aurelia, putting out the light, "would soon discourage them from writing horrid books, and then life would become normal and we should forget the things we don't want to think about. I should think," soliloquized Miss Aurelia, putting her handkerchief under her pillow, "that writers should realize that unless they write only about normal things that they will never be popular." It was after ten, but Sard had not gone up-stairs, yet the figure of the Judge, sitting aloof in one corner of the piazza, smoking and staring at the river, magnetized while it antagonized her. Her father had not spoken to her since the day Colter went away. The girl believed that he knew in some way that she had met Colter after his forbidding it. She could explain the seeming disobedience of this final interview. She wanted to explain it. With all the misery of her young heart she wanted to explain. Sard, moving wistfully under the great trees, looked up into the branches spread over her. "What are your laws?" she asked as of old. The girl, hot with surging new things, with new blind impulses and passions, asked but one thing, to be true to a law, to the highest laws of all, yet the great law that called men and women fiercely, insistently to each other seemed to be set forever at variance with other laws, laws that those same men and women themselves had made and sustained. What should one be faithful to, what repudiate? "What shall be my laws?" whispered the girl. She felt trembling that fierce law of blood and ardent spirit that bade her follow Colter now, get to him if she could, this night! Sard looked up, her eyes wide, her body swept on the tidal streams of summer night, her tremulous being still vibrated to the remembered clasp of a man's hand, of the sense of mystery surrounding that man, his unuttered call to her.... His truth for her truth. The isolation of youth, such as Sard's, is very great. No human hand can help it. It walks a way of loneliness that glimmers and is drenched with strange lights that bewilder and if it comes to any help at all it is the knowledge of the glory of loneliness, the glory of the fighter, who at last prefers the sense of ambush and the hazard of the wrong trail. Who prefers to pierce the jungle and fight his way out into a clearing—alone. Yet to those who question the night, that time when the earth is abandoned by its one angel, the sun, there comes inevitably out of the dreaming quiet the one word, Patience. "Our law is Patience," said the trees to Sard. The girl, a swift hand passed over her eyes, went in by way of the terrace; she passed the dark form sitting there; half pushing herself, half afraid she tiptoed toward it, to make peace, to ask forgiveness. Then, as softly, she tiptoed back; for deep in her heart Sard knew that there would be only one condition of forgiveness, that she repudiate the best and dearest thing that had come into her life, she must give up Colter. Now passion swept over against any calm she could win, the girl saw vehemently that one man's face with the look of gentleness and dumb pain. "I can't give him up," she said fiercely. Sard drew a long breath; she began climbing slowly up-stairs to bed. As she stood at the foot of the tower room stairs the hall clock struck eleven; there was a sudden whir of wheels and lights on the drive outside; she heard indistinctly lowered voices of men, some long thing, covered, was taken to the kitchen, sudden stir and commotion ran like wild fire through the house. Like a spell the summer night was breathless and Sard was aware of heat and suffocation in her own throat; the telephone began ringing, a man's voice speaking with the Judge. Her father's questions and commands were issued curt, annoyed, angry and then finally hushed and with a knife-like anxiety the girl flew to the head of the lower stair; there were slow footsteps coming up into the upper hall. The light fell upon a stretcher,—Dunstan—his boyish head bloody, his mouth slightly open. Two men climbing gently with something collapsed and, stricken in their arms, the little huddled form of Minga. Suddenly from the kitchen Dora's piercing wail, "Terry! Terry!" CHAPTER XXV THE MEDE AND THE PERSIAN The handsome man and woman that drove up to the great door of the Bogarts' home got out with a leisureliness that seemed the result of good nerve structure rather than deliberate intention. Whatever the anxiety in their hearts they did not show it in gestures or voices. Mrs. Gerould, however, kept rather intent eyes upon the electric bell; her gloved finger pushed; she pulled the scarf around her shoulders with a little nervous twitch. Her husband flicked some dust from his shoes. The two talked in low voices until the Bogarts' cook opened the door; as they realized the absence of pretty Dora, their grave faces grew more apprehensive. Cook was expansive; she smoothed the sleeve of Mrs. Gerould's silk motor coat. "Ye ain't been worried about Minga, Mrs. Gerould? There's nothing the matter with her, Praise be God!—only the fright, and they've given her somethin' to sleep on. But him! Oh, it seems that I can hear him callin' me now—Mr. Dunstan—our bye—it was me he was always teasin' and raisin' the divil wit." The cook trembled; she burst out again: "Gawd love him, the poor child wanted to save our Terry, poor bye—now that wasn't no way to help, was it? Now, Mr. Dunstan's gone and got the law onto himself, he's under arrest! But them two," the cook wiped her streaming eyes, "their little hearts was broke over Terry bein' in the jug, and now look at it—Terry's dead! Yes'm," cook's motherly heart broke over it, her head went down into her red hands. "The guards was after them when they got him in the car, and fired. Yes'm, the poor boy's gorn. Well, he's better aff, that's what I tell Dora, he's better aff! I keep tellin' her that," blubbered cook. The Mede and Persian looked increasingly grave. The telegram had been telephoned to them and they had stepped into a car and driven out at once without much sense of tragedy—before this the two had been hurried to scenes of Minga's dénouements, expecting some result of physical rashness, of too much dancing, or a bad sore throat and fever, some predicament of finance easy of rescue, but here was a prank with more serious development and one tragic result. Minga and Dunce had played for high stakes this time; perhaps their playing was forever over! "Where's her room?" the two parents were at the door before cook could get the directions out of her mouth. On the way they encountered Miss Aurelia carrying a hot-water bottle in her hand, a flask of aromatic spirits of ammonia in the other. The lady had been wandering about with these for hours; now like a fountain of tears with fireworks of explanations round it, she began sending up hysterical rockets. "Oh, Mrs. Gerould, Minga will be glad—I don't suppose I—you should talk to her now ... and Mr. Gerould, how do you do? Sard will know; she is with Minga—but our Dunstan, did you know? Had you heard the—er particulars?—he—they, under arrest!" Sobbing, Miss Aurelia, with that superb power of tears that some people possess, talked through a steady sliding of drops that ran down sluices of pale cheeks until the two Geroulds in spite of anxiety looked on admiringly—"the poor—er—criminal, Terry—is dead—one can—er"—sniff,—"hardly grieve—but our boy, our Dunstan"—sob—"is gravely injured—the shoulders and head—fractures—they fear for his life——" To the gentle soothing of the Mede and Persian, Miss Aurelia leaned like a wind-blown branch, but the gusts of weeping came anew and the branch merely swayed; the two newcomers after a while detached themselves; with a sense of relief they stepped into Minga's room. Sard rose swiftly out of the dark; Mrs. Gerould caught her two hands. "Minga's all right," the girl whispered. "They gave her something quieting because she was so horrified—Terry, you see—Terry is dead." The young form straightened; Sard spoke with grave calmness. "Terry's troubles are over." The Geroulds took her hands—together they spoke encouragingly to her. "Dear, you've been such a brick, we're proud of you; Eleanor Ledyard has told us how you worked to save Terry, and you've done our little Minga so much good." The big-hearted man and woman longed to take the strained look of tragedy from this young face. There were other things they knew that had turned Sard grave and old in this one summer. They scanned her anxiously, wishing she were not so set and stern. "When Dunstan gets out of the woods,"—they patted her hands—"you come to us for a while and—and—well, we want to help." This kind man and woman, understanding her, standing by her, shook the girl to her depths. Sard's lips trembled. "I'd like to," she said, her eyes thrilled—"I'd like," Sard said simply, "to earn my own living; maybe you would help me do that." Her eyes deepened and thrilled, and in them the Geroulds read the old story, Youth at bay, yet they heard her words, "But I mustn't leave my father now—not now." Sard, with a curious little gesture, motioned in the direction of Dunstan's room. "Of course not." Mrs. Gerould looked at her understandingly; the tall, graceful woman went softly over to the little bed and turned the night-light to see her daughter's sleeping face. The little bobbed head was deep in the pillows. Minga opened her eyes slightly and drowsily closed them. "Sard," she spoke with the curious distinctness of a person speaking under a drug, "I thought the Mede and the Persian were here—they are so dear—if they were here, you know"—Minga spoke drowsily, "Dunstan would get all right and Terry would come alive, the Mede and the Persian would fix it. They—they are hummers." The man and the woman looked long and lovingly at her; then they looked at each other, shaking their heads, the little figure on the bed was so dear to them, yet they, absorbed in their love for each other, seemed to have so little power, so little direction over her. This was their only child; she had had all the care and love they could lavish on her, yet she seemed as remote as an alien to all they believed and felt. They, the Mede and Persian, were deliberate, slow-thinking people of the agricultural age; Minga, the one child of their union, was the strange electric vivacious spirit of a machine age. It was this simple fact that the couple hardly realized that made it impossible for them to train their little daughter in the way they thought she should go. Minga must train herself in the way she would go. Somehow, they believed, she would train herself right. Sard, at last, remembered her duties as daughter of the house. "Your room is all ready," she whispered; "there's a nurse coming in here at about four and then I shall go to bed." She led them down the hall, halting ever so slightly outside Dunstan's door, half pausing to hear the footsteps of the nurse on guard there, explaining: "The fracture isn't fatal, but it's a horrid splintered one, and they must torture him some more to-morrow, the car upset; it threw Minga free, but it fell on him—and Terry's body——" Sard drew a long shuddering sigh. Somewhat bewildered the two parents waited to hear more. "But Terry," asked Mr. Gerould rather desperately, "how was it he was with Dunstan and Minga?" "They had stolen him from a prison gang working on the highway." It was curious that these three desperately anxious people half smiled with appreciation of Dunstan's and Minga's method, while they realized its deadly solemnity. The two Geroulds looked aghast. "The prison guard shot him like a rabbit." The girl turned a look of intense bitterness on the kindly man and woman standing there. "You see," said Sard, and her face and eyes were a mask of hardness, "Terry was sentenced to twenty years in prison at hard labor; it was thought to be a kind sentence; he was under the law, and the law must not be cheated." The girl's face was bitter in a way not good to see. The Mede and the Persian did not, however, meet it with cold logic. This was not a time for that. When they were alone in their room the Geroulds locked the door and commenced talking to each other. As the Persian slipped into a frilly dressing-robe and groped in her bag for a flashlight, she cautioned the Mede, "You turn in and sleep a lot, dear; the long drive tired you. I'll come back in a few hours. I want to relieve Sard and watch Minga and see how she comes out of this." The Mede acquiesced. Taking off his collar, he sought for his tooth paste. "Apparently your daughter is a body-snatcher," he remarked. "I'm glad I sold that stock last week and that call money is improving. I expect we'll have a lot of legal stuff on our hands. It will be Minga's Christmas present keeping her out of jail. I'll try to see Shipman to-morrow and find out what he thinks. Under arrest! your daughter, Madam, is—ahem—exceptional." "Your daughter when she is in trouble," remarked the Persian blandly,—"I'm glad I have a permanent wave; your daughter's activities make it necessary for me to look my best at all times." "Your daughter when she's discreditable, you know," returned the Mede with decision. They laughed. The Persian went over and rested her head against the Mede's arm. "No wonder I want Minga to be happy always," she said; "no wonder I've spoiled her so. I've always been so ridiculously happy and spoiled by you." "You've been ridiculous, all right," said the Mede with conviction. "I've been the happy one—well," he kissed her, then bit off the end of a cigar, "we've got to pull Minga out of this scrape and read her the riot act and make her sit up and face her iniquities, by Jove!" "You," the Persian looked back at him from the door, "must scold her terribly, cut half her allowance and forbid her to accept any more invitations for a year. You remember, I always wanted you to punish her when she was little." "Oh, you did?" The Mede rummaged in the bathroom for his safety razor; he now fitted this instrument together, standing in dressing-gown surveying a blue chin. "I am to put on the thumbscrews, am I? Madam, I do not interfere with your peculiar offspring——" The Mede, looking in the glass, drew a ruminative thumb over his chin. "I am for helping that poor child, Sard; she's a tigress in a crate here—I'm going to help uncrate her." The Persian, lingering by the door, laughed a little helplessly. "Sard," she said in a low voice, "gives me the shivers; that fearful kind of girl who wants to reform the whole world before six o'clock, get life laundered before dinner, you know." "I do know," said the thoughtful Mede, "and it's the kind I like; the kind that gets busy and doesn't wait for George to do it. I was like that myself. I mean, at Sard's age I wanted to reform the world. I began by marrying you." "You didn't let George do that! Do you want to be pinched?" asked the Persian viciously. "Come—come," said the Mede, "where are the matches? After I have a smoke—Patty," he looked toward the pretty rose-frilled figure at the door—"you can't suppose our little duck is hurt anyway, do you? They're not fooling us?" Mr. Gerould paused, turning a rather worried face on his wife. He waved the safety razor solemnly. That lady, to allay his fears, came close up to him. "Minga Gerould is my child," she said emphatically; "she is made of rubber, the rest of her is steel, her mind is a duck's back. Her will is a kite, her imagination is fireproof, her humor is Charlie Chaplin and her heart is sound." "I believe you." The Mede tinkered with his razor and looked about the room. "Rather comfy here," he remarked. "Who took the car to the garage, anybody? I didn't lock it. Well, I guess there's no need to worry; that fellow Colter is here yet, isn't he? Eleanor Ledyard heard a lot about him from Watts; thinks he may be her husband's brother. What rot you women invent and you call it intuition. I keep worrying about Sard's face. I'd like to get a look at the fellow. Did you say you wanted to kiss me again?" "I did not," said the Persian, her soft eyes challenging him. "But I could give Minga another kiss for you when she wakes up. I am willing to do that," said the Persian with an air of benevolence. "You will do what I tell you," said the Mede belligerently. He pulled the tall rosy lady toward him and lifted her face to his. "My life," said the Mede, "is a wreck between the two demons, wife and daughter." He pressed a second kiss on a face that seemed the rosier by something in that second kiss. The two looked at each other with a sudden deep look of laughing devotion. Such things do sometimes happen! CHAPTER XXVI PENALTIES Sard came into Dunstan's room with the mail. The nurse, a calm-faced, serious woman of mature years, smiled at her. "I'm glad you've come; we're getting a little sick of each other." The haggard face of the boy looked out from the surgeon's trestlework of the fractured arm and shoulder. "Drool!" said the weak voice querulously. "Drool! she means that I've been nagging her until she's half crying." The lad looked his sick mortification; he knew he could not control his peevishness, not just yet. He tried to cover it with the old impishness. "Never mind, Miss Crayden, try to imagine I'm your husband; let me, the tender partner of your life, wipe up the floor with you." In spite of the humorous quirk around the mouth, the nurse seemed glad to get away. She did not deny his self-accusation. "If you're going to be around for a while," to the sister, "I think I'll just take a brisk walk." "Take a brisk walk" after the all-night vigil, "take a brisk walk" that late August day with its breathless depths of dusty overgrowth, its sultry world of tapestried leaf hangings. The thing made the youthful ones smile. Dunce looked after the retreating form, firm and crisp in its white uniform, murmuring—"A brisk walk—at ninety-two in the shade." "She kids herself along pretty well, doesn't she?" demanded the invalid; then as his weak voice went into a squeak,—"Say, how long I got to hang here like a dry worm on the end of a fish-hook? Oh, Sard, when does this rotten weakness end? Say, why don't you get me some dog poison and put me out of my misery?" There was a haunted look in the boy's eyes that tried to smile listlessly as he pawed over his mail. "Letter from Bumpy Dodge asking about college. Well, I guess I don't get back to college—— No, Bumpy, old sport, I guess I do a turn in jail, what?" He looked questioningly at his sister. "Nothing from Minga, I suppose? Well, I don't blame her; I did get her into a mess, the newspaper rot and all. I wonder," said Dunstan soberly, "what I was thinking of," he looked at Sard curiously, "I wonder if I thought at all. I don't believe I did think—I just felt, and feeling isn't the whole show, I guess. Well, Minga and I certainly gummed the game." The figure lying trussed in a bower of splints and bandages was silent a moment. "Gimme a cigarette, Sardine," then, at her denying look, "Why, haven't they lifted the ban yet? Say, when does this surgeon Sunday-school end, anyway? You'd think those tinkering old 'Docs' were women the way they go on. Why, in the war they gave the chaps cigarettes in their very coffins, and me with just a cracked rib and a little allegro adrumata medulla medusa Madonna crackiosis—can't have a smoke." It was not the old Dunce so much as his determined imitation of the Dunce that had been. A young chap of nineteen cannot go through the experience of having a man of his own age shot to death across his knees without some changes which, in spite of modern science, we will assume are more than chemical. With the sinking down of Terence O'Brien's fair, curly head, his gasping, his blood sprinkled over the car in its crazy speed, the crash, their own capture, and in his own mortal pain seeing the fugitive lying beside him, blood pouring out of his mouth, his eyes closing on the warm summer sunset—with this picture, Dunstan's inner youth closed. His boy's body, badly cracked and shaken, could be mended, made almost perfect again, but his soul with the one great wound in it now stood up and commanded strong meat for its sustenance. Under the law! Dunstan must now stand face to face with law! In his first interview with his father, with his knowledge of the process of this law, came the sense of rising to punishment that he felt able, nay, glad to meet. After almost twenty years, and twenty years did not seem long against the years Terry had lost, after twenty years of glad life Dunstan instead of bringing freedom had brought death to the wild, young Irish lad; he, who had had the advantages of education, of some measured temperate views of life; he, who for a reckless impulse had not considered what it is a man or woman puts in motion when they start out to defy the accepted law, now saw reasons for law. Such parts of the long frame as were not pinned in plaster writhed. Dunstan's thoughts went to Minga —what did she think of it all? Did she feel the same way, like one carrying a great burden? The bullet of the guard who had shot Terry had barely escaped Minga's head before the car had overturned and he, Dunstan, who ought by his very man's nature to have protected her, had brought her into all this. Oh, he was a nice chap, a splendid fellow. Ah, well, civilization was a trap anyway, a scheme, a plan to defeat frank square things. The thing to do was to cast off the whole silly rot, get off somewhere, where a man got out of the cheap lying pattern of things, where a man really lived, realized himself, rode, killed, loved, hated without a pink worsted design to remind him that he had "broken the law." Sard looked over at him. "Stop squirming!" she ordered sternly, then—"Dear old Pirate, don't you know that convalescing is the hardest time of all?" She went over to the bed, scrutinizing her brother. "Is the light in your eyes?" she asked anxiously. "Shall I read to you? Do you want a fresh drink?" "I want a fresh Hades," growled the invalid. "I want——" All of a sudden Dunstan's face broke; he could not move, but lay here shaking. The girl, looking away from him, was silent. "If Minga would only write," at last he groaned. "Perhaps she doesn't know what to say," comforted the sister. "Dunce," said Sard thoughtfully; she stood by the bed. "Dunce," in a mild patience unlike her, "I guess you and I are up against it, aren't we? We must have, somewhere, ancestors not like Dad and lit tle Mother and Aunt Aurelia, race-horse ancestors that wanted things to happen and to happen quick bang, right off, and they don't, they just won't. No matter what we do, we have to wait, no matter how much we care," said Sard slowly, "we just have to wait; everybody has to wait, I guess. It's a sort of law." "Terry didn't wait," said Dunce bitterly; "he, thank God, got out." "I've been reading," she returned thoughtfully, she was trying to draw him out of this mood, "a book that tells how Venice grew up out of the sea; and it seems like life somehow. The streams came down from the mountains carrying grains, just grains, Dunce, of sand, and the ice and snow rolled down more clay and sand, all the currents of the sea kept carrying deposits to one spot until," absorbedly the girl recounted the dreamy geologic tale, her eyes fixed on distance. Dunstan heard her through patiently. "Sounds like the rags old Colter used to chew," he said, not uninterestedly. "By the way, Sard, what became of that mucker; turned out to be a ne'er-do-well, after all? What?" His companion was silent. Something in her face contracted as she tried to answer lightly. "Oh, I guess he's all right. Mr. Shipman has been following him up. He was ill after he left here. Then he went to work somewhere, and then I don't exactly know," said Sard. "Mr. Shipman is keeping his eye on him. I don't exactly know——" The invalid tried to change his position. "That so? Got him work, did he?" he asked. "Say, ain't Shipman the dear old prophet? By Gad, Sardine, what makes a gray-headed chap like that and what makes an old spinny like Miss Crayden homely, you know, and out of the game, what makes 'em do all they can for you and not cuss you back when you cuss and not let you get the blue devils, but hold umbrellas of hope over you and keep reminding you of another You that's back of you, sort of, and ringing up your good deeds like spiritual fares and everything. Say," said Dunstan earnestly, "I want to know. These old-timers, there ain't much in it for them. They must know it. Why in thunder do they keep making everybody on the Merry-go-round think they are going to get the Gold Ring?" His sister laughed. Sard, perching on Dunstan's bed, thoughtfully traced out the pattern of the white counterpane. The girl, thinner, with a look of limpid patience in the brook-clear eyes, tried to answer the question to herself. What, indeed, had made Shipman, who she had guessed was a baffled, lonely man, turn from his own concerns to help and encourage her? Why should he, to whom she could give nothing, keep the dark eyes with their look of "courage" so fixed upon her that even when he was not there she saw the look, heard the words and knew that the lawyer's strength and help were hers to call upon? Sard did not know that Watts Shipman, after Colter's collapse and his subsequent recovery and revelations, had been to Judge Bogart's with astounding news. The lawyer had sat in the Judge's library giving fact after fact of the distinction, nay, the actual academic fame of the Judge's hired man. "He's chipper enough now," he placidly told the Judge; "he's enormously improved! Last time I saw him he was walking up and down the campus at a reunion, laughing and talking with old comrades." The lawyer fixed rather scrutinizing eyes on his superior. "You wouldn't," he said tentatively, "I beg your pardon if I interfere, but your daughter is so noble, so superb a little fighter. You wouldn't stand in the way now—of anything?" There was a long silence. The Judge, some obstinacy in his throat, sat staring ahead of him. The new sense of Sard, a girl, a young unformed girl, having somehow gotten at the fine intelligence and soul that had dwelt concealed in this man, staggered him. Meticulously Shipman had given him every detail. Dr. Martin Ledyard's heroic effort to save his friends from the terrible scourge of Congo smallpox, the desertion of the natives with canoes, the subsequent shock of learning of his brother's trouble and suicide, the fever in the hospital, his sudden rising and escape with only the clothes he wore from the beginning of convalescence, the tale of his long wandering from farm to farm, the half sustained body and mind a blank, the exposure and terror of a partial memory, were things that Shipman had gotten from Ledyard's own lips bit by bit, and they had been confirmed by the specialist to whom the lawyer had taken Colter. That the eminent scientist had completely recovered, a recovery that had begun the very hour that Sard had recognized him as he sat on the village curb for what he was, was an established medical fact. "Surely," Watts Shipman leaned forward, the face he bent on the Judge was solemn, "you could not interfere with your daughter's happiness now. Ledyard," said the lawyer mildly, "is not likely to come to her until he has your permission." "Sard," said the Judge, his eyes had a light of the book of Moses in them, "Sard is to come to her father and acknowledge her impatience and disrespect." "Pshaw!" The lawyer rose. He walked to the window and looked out. Then, his mouth torn between rage and amusement, he said politely, "Ahem! I don't exactly see how she could under the circumstances do that exact thing." "That is all I ask," said the Judge finally. No sense of the ridiculous came to his rescue. He got up, went to a bookshelf and took down book after book, examined its cover for dust and blemish, and returned it without opening to the shelf. It was a curious habit of the Judge's to do this when deep in thought. Somehow it was like his treatment of human beings, thought Shipman. "As for my son," remarked the gray-lipped mouth, "he will learn, he will learn something about the Law." Judge Bogart went back to his chair. He sat down, stretched out his legs and fixed his look upon the other man. "He will learn something about the Law," said he implacably. "I have done nothing to spare him," said the Judge with an air of satisfaction. Yet Dunstan's first interview with his father had not had all this quality of implacability. The boy's fever over, his limbs lightened of certain casts and the eyes deep and haunted, were things to meet which the older man had braced, things from which the Judge, with all his hardness, had shrunk; even the judicial habit could not overlook the danger the Judge had been in, of losing his son, the man who bore his name. With a curious sense of pride he, himself, could not understand, a perception of the absurd gallantry, the chivalry underlying the actions of a fool breaker of laws, the old man, his own prerogatives negatived, had fairly to screw up his courage to begin the interview as he determined it should be begun. "You know that you will have to meet the penalty," he rasped. The dark eyes met the gooseberry ones squarely. "Yes, sir, I've looked the thing up." "It is likely," said the Judge dryly, "that you will have to give up college and go into business, if indeed you are spared incarceration. The fine is very heavy; you are, in spite of bail, under arrest." At the word "incarceration" a swift gleam in Dunstan's eyes gave his father absurd hope. He was not injured, then—he was—all right—that was the old impudence, curse it. "I shall be glad," said the young fellow slowly, "to take any penalty that is rightfully mine, that would come to any man that did what I did, that had," the boy gulped a moment, "that had broken the law he lived under ." "Ah," the old gray face, the hard-boiled eyes, looked watchfully upon the young face with its fierce pride—"then you realize that you were a fool, that you risked my name, your own honor, to save from just punishment a ruffian who had broken the law?" Something wild, desperate, leaped into the face on the pillows; it was a hurt, appealing look, different from Sard's fiery pride and steady intention; it was not so defiant, it was the more helpless and miserable, as who would say, "I am punished enough." The Judge's eyes on the thin young face at sight of this look felt a sudden strange pang. It reminded him of— "We love Foddy—Foddy won't put us in prison with the naughty prisoners." Oh, little woman lips; oh, soft little hands and sweet voice; oh, hundred innocent tendernesses and faiths and needs—— The Judge stared at his son; the dark eyes closed and Dunstan lay there like death, only one long, thin hand clenched and unclenched on his chest. They rise up sometimes, these who were our forbears and become our good angels; when we need them and call sincerely they rise up in our eyes and hearts and speak for us. If we have kept the house garnished and clean only the best of them will come to us bearing in their hands lamps to light our paths; when we call out in sheer agony for light and leading, all the noblest and fairest of our line rise up for a hundred comforting and strengthening ministries, to lead us on our blind path. Dunstan's mother, standing in his lad's eyes, had risen once and looked at her husband. "Dearest," said the little timid voice, "what are you doing with my son—our boy? Treat our little Dunstan fairly." For a long time the old Judge stood at the window, the gray lips trembling, the gooseberry eyes desperately blinking. "The heart bowed down with weight of woe," thought the Judge, "I will go down and play that record—she—she was fond of it." At last he turned toward his son's bed. "There," said the Judge. He cleared his throat with a rasp that could have been heard in the garage. "Hum—I—I guess I've been breaking a law, too, hey?" He glanced up at the nurse who had just entered. "I don't want to disobey the doctor's laws." He stood for a moment looking down at his son. "I have a letter from that little vixen Minga," said Dunstan's father; then as he saw the slow red creep into the boy's cheek, "I think—ahem—I think she shows character—she seems to realize that her conduct was—I'll send it up to you," said the Judge. He held out his hand. "You and I must protect Minga," he said slowly; "we must keep her out of this thing. Hey, What? Have her out here, hey? Cheer us up some—hey—What?" The two men looked at each other; under their differing ages was the same cool facing of facts. Dunstan did not turn from his knowledge of himself, a man who had incurred the penalty of the law; neither did the Judge as father turn from that fact. Facts are sometimes the most wholesome curative things of life. When two people resolutely face them together, with the same degree of earnestness and honesty, they construct a bridge over great abysses of distrust, misunderstanding and heart-break. The Judge started for the door. "Take care of yourself," he said as he looked wistfully at those dark eyes that had held just for one moment the dear wife's look. Then the Judge remembered Dunstan's love of a joke. "If you ever steal a murderer again," he said, "I'll thrash you within an inch of your life." It was a joke! It was made with an effort; the very machinery creaked and the finished product looked dusty and wizened, but it was a joke! Dunstan, the dark-eyed humorist, saw it and grinned. The Judge returned to the bed. Two hands went spontaneously out, a grim, dry, purple one and a slim, thin, weak one. They clinched—then the door closed and the Judge went down-stairs. Late that evening Miss Bogart heard the phonograph circling forth the "heart bowed down with weight of woe."... She turned another page in the "pleasant" book. "My poor brother," said Miss Aurelia to herself; "he seems to turn naturally to the—er—melancholy—but I should think," the lady thought sleepily, "that now that Colter isn't Colter at all, but the celebrated scientist Dr. Ledyard, that he, she, they——" CHAPTER XXVII THE JUDGE IS IMPRESSED It was late September; the yellow maples threw gold on sky and ground; oaks and hickories were mantled in ruddy purples. Along the banks of the river the solemn procession of outgoing summer was begun; on dry nights mountain fires spread crackling smoky fringes. The Westchester hills, the hills of Pocantico, were trailed in grape-colored mists; bloom was on the Ramapos; amethystine smokes along the Highlands and the Palisades. There was drowse and arrest in the air, a kind of heat that was different from summer, more dazing, more intensely keyed, with greater power to make one restless. Sard, lying on her couch in the tower-room, felt as if a world was closing in on her, as if the sky pressed and the hills leaned to smother. She had been reading to Dunstan, for the first time sitting up in his wheeled chair, had seen him drift off to sleep, and had then put down her book with an unconquerable sense of listlessness, of lack of purpose that had somehow closed in on her. The girl, her body and mind built for action, for creative and progressive things, found herself victimized by a slowly narrowing circle of life, static, unimaginative, unprogressive; she was the fiery center of a wooden wheel of existence that revolved in accustomed sameness with no effort, to no purpose. "When Dunstan gets well," thought Sard desperately, "when Dunstan doesn't need me, what shall I do then? Aunt Aurelia doesn't really need me, Father will have nothing to do with me unless I—just—just capitulate. And I can't do that. What shall I do?" The girl's mind, shrinking from her father's idea of her, went over the situation; the only way to clear up that situation was to say she had been mistaken in Colter, that she proudly told herself she could never do. But supposing Colter never came back, never—came—back to Willow Roads? Life would go on the same and, of course, one could adapt one's self to anything; with a shiver the girl tried to think what this adaptation would mean. As far as those of her own group were concerned, there was no life. All mingling with the Bunch was over. Life, then, would mean social cliques and women's clubs, more or less boss controlled, politically influenced, "run" by one or two personalities, powerful in prestige but prejudiced and limited as to opportunity or progress. In such gatherings the girl instinctively felt there could be nothing constructive for her; the chemistry of these organizations was controlled by the acids of personal dislike or preference, or jealousy. Little careful nothings of possessions or dress were the intellectual meat of these associations, the inhibitions of the mentally torpid or the censorious attitude of the unimaginative virtuous. None of these things attracted a girl of Sard's impulse, a soul that demanded fine contacts, the eager mingling of men and women in associations of tolerance and forward looking, the stimulus of persons of vivid experience. Sard mentally said "No" to it all. Yet it was characteristic of her inherent nobility that she should attempt to force herself to an interest in these home matters, to attempt to form herself humbly on that narrow model. "It isn't nice to be choosy and exclusive," thought the girl; "real people are never that. I mustn't be 'superior,' whatever I do." She bent puzzled brows. "What would Colter have thought to be the right thing, to stay here and grow smaller and more timid and with less fresh impulse, or to break away, earn my own living, and, from Father's point of view, forfeit my right to my home?" "Ah! what would Colter think?" That was the sentence that dominated all Sard's life now. From under her pillow the girl drew a letter from Watts Shipman—eagerly her eye sought one passage—one she had read and reread: "I must not tell you all the circumstances, they are not mine to tell. Colter will want to tell you himself, but I have been able to help a little and I am rejoiced for the man you helped to save. Our friend Colter has surely come into his own, Miss Sard, and it is rather a magnificent Own. I do congratulate you on your discrimination in tramps. I suspect you have created a tradition that will some day be like a final degree. 'In 19— he was discovered by Miss Sard Bogart, which justified his previous achievements in a blaze of glory. Forgive me for being enigmatic. Courage! Miss Winged Victory, that you may be happy in a parlous world is the deep wish of your true friend, " Watts Shipman ." Sard went over it hungrily for the hundredth time. She knew this paragraph by heart; it swept her with impatient excitement. Why was it all so obscure? Why was so little told her? Had Colter really found himself? What was that real self? The girl's heart stood still; perhaps since Watts wrote this something had happened.... The afternoon wore on; the girl, with an ejaculation, sprang up. "What do I mean by loafing around like this?" Sard inquired hotly. "Colter never loafed, he was always busy mending, rearranging, working, studying. I can't stand this lazy life, I won't, I won't just drift; I will be like Colter." She went into the little dressing-room and bathed her face, looking with wonder into the eyes grown so dark and wide, so strangely listening and startled. She flung open a drawer and lifted out a clean white dimity, a frock with fresh frills and a soft sash. Sard rustled into it with a little winged sense of pining for the air, to be moving, going somewhere, experiencing something. But the soft white seemed vapid to the serious brown eyes so unaware of their own vitality. Sard, frowning upon this absence of color, opened a casket and took out a long rope of cut amber beads. Her mother's necklace, a thing honey-like with sun-color, quivering with golden lights. "Funny," thought the girl, ruminatively, "I never cared to wear these before." She ran the smooth clicking morsels of amber through caressing fingers. "Little Mother," she thought tenderly, "I suppose these reached almost to your knees; they hardly come to my waist. I'm not a bit like you." With yearning face, the girl turned to her bookshelves. Sard vaguely thought of going down to the river edge to read. The young fingers paused over "The Sonnets from the Portuguese"; not until this summer had Sard understood these exquisite verses. Now, almost with reverence she drew the volume forth. It was a girl's way to evade all the cold questions, all the sneering comments, the Gorgon stare of "practical life." With some sense of being companioned by the little book, Sard gave a touch here and there to her pretty room, patted a pillow, pulled down a shade and started to leave it. Miss Aurelia's flat heels clapped up the stairs; the face that met Sard's look was mystified and potential. Her aunt, taking a chair, gasped a little. "Aunt Reely," scolded Sard, "how you pant; you take these stairs too fast. I do believe you get more tired than you let us see; you've got to go easier," said Sard in gentle bullying. The girl these days had been wistfully tender of her aunt. Sard had great need to be tender to someone. Miss Aurelia exulted in the solicitude. "Sard and I are very much alike," she had told Mrs. Spoyd; "we are congenial." The timid lady exulted in what seemed to her like the opening of a new régime. To have Sard's companionship in all her little flutters and wonderings and excitements! Miss Aurelia had carefully swept up Sard's heart for her. Everything to the aunt's perception was neatly ticketed and put away; all reminiscence of that er—unfortunate—er, infatuation for the "Man on the Place." Now, however, the rabbity mouth looked awed. Miss Aurelia was more uncertain than usual; she eyed Sard irresolutely. "Someone has er—called—could you go down at once—I see you are presentable. I—you see," said Miss Aurelia with elaboration, "I am very untidy." Miss Bogart was invariably perfectly groomed and arranged; Sard giggled in derision. "Aunt Reely, what more could you do to be 'presentable,' as you call it?" "My—er—hands," explained Miss Aurelia, with curious firmness—"I have been polishing those little Chinese brasses on my desk and they——" She displayed fingers that looked immaculate, but which she insisted smelled of brass polish. "It takes so long to get off. Now, if you could run down," insisted the lady mildly. "Of course." The girl ran a comb through her tawny hair. "Don't you know who it is?" "Dora said some name like the minister's, I thought. Or was it a lady? I did not pay attention." Miss Aurelia sniffed violently at her fingers. "Phew, phew! Sometimes I think they should invent a brass polish that is odorless. You never know when you've got rid of it. Could you go down at once? It seems so rude to keep them—him—waiting, and I always think," said Miss Aurelia nervously, "that when one is not sure the living-room is dusted, it is better to give him—her—them—less time to look about." It was not different from her aunt's usual incoherence. Sard hardly noticed the tremor, the little excited pat. She went slowly down the stairs across the hall, pushing back the heavy portière of the living-room. The man who turned from the window and came toward her did not wear an old gray flannel shirt and khaki trousers. He was clad in the white flannels that make a man look taller, lighter, of a cooler vigor and grace. The hair that swept back from his forehead was a bright chestnut, and his face was—— Sard stood half turning for flight. The man did not yet take her hand, but he looked swiftly into her eyes. "Was it unfair to come like this?" he demanded. It was evident that he could hardly leash the note of gladness in his voice. "Miss Aurelia thought it better not to tell you, that if you knew you might not come down." There was unutterable tenderness in the light of those eyes. "I could not wait," the man admitted quickly. There was a moment's silence, in which she stood staring at him. This was Colter, the Man on the Place. This was not Colter. This was a glad, confident person, who, something came into Sard's throat, was sure—sure of everything. Much younger, much more buoyant than that one she had known! And, too sure! The tall man looked at her, his expression changing slightly. Then as he glanced at the hand she had not offered him, "I—I have been talking with your father," he said quietly. Sard tried to smile back, tried to smile in greeting, sympathy, but her heart pounded. She was instinct for flight, a thing suddenly confronted with strangeness, facing someone who was—too eager! Slight as the hesitation was, the man saw it. He did not move except with great gentleness to draw her to a chair. He stood speaking tranquilly, with a curious authority Sard had never seen before. It made her thrill. "I have been talking to Judge Bogart," this triumphant man in white flannels said easily; "he gave me permission to see you. I have told him about myself; you see," he smiled, "I have found out who I am! Sard, aren't you glad? Don't you care?" "You have found out—who you are?" said the girl thickly, childishly. Her gaucherie was painful to her and evident and very dear to the man perceiving it. The deep fire-blue eyes rested on hers a moment. An indefinable softness crept into them, replacing that look of confidence and power. The tall frame bent a little toward her, and she was aware as of a curious tenseness of resolution—a self-control such as she had felt that night in the little fruit orchard. Colter, who looked at her with understanding, knew that for the moment his chiefest hold on Sard was gone. Drinking her down with a thirst born of his knowledge of her, yet this triumphant man before her realized that now that he no longer had need of her compassion she had as yet no other kind of passion for him! The dark days being over, Martin Ledyard, the scientific adventurer, whose name was famous all over the world, was standing irresolute, abashed, not able, it seemed, to win back the bright look of pity from the brook-clear eyes, the little maternal cadence in a girl's voice. He saw her disturbed, at bay. If, however, he felt taken aback, disappointed, there was no hint of it. He looked at her with unutterable tenderness, the kind of look Sard had never before seen on a man's face. "I see," he said simply, "you don't care for me—so much—in my triumph. You think that now I do not need you, Sard? Not need you, my Happiness? Sard," she quivered at her name on his lips, "are you sorry you saved me, sorry I came—back?" She shook her head. She had risen. It was like them both that they should take it standing, trying to be square with each other, striving to get to the thing that lay between them. The Judge, passing through the hall, on an uneasy excited walk, coughed gruffly. Hearing this cough, with a strange feeling of unreality, Sard tried to realize what had happened. There was her father outside, not caring that she was with this man. Why—then—then—the Judge knew then that she had read true! "You say you have talked with Father?" A wild wave of relief tore through the girl; she tried once more to lift her eyes to the face, reading the wistful look dwelling on it, loving it, yet coming no nearer to it. Ah, there would be no more Gorgon "practical life" now. She had seen true, she had known, known —and with a curious effort the girl tried to look smilingly and frankly back at this man. On "Colter's" own face there was left only a trace of the old baffled sadness; new triumph tore through her, "Colter" had won out, won out! As in a dream, she listened to his voice. "I hoped you and I might care for all the 'under-dogs' in the world—together." Then after another short silence: "You remember the night in the little fruit orchard? I think you cared for me then, and I," the man's voice faltered, "I adored you. You remember other times, I think," he said gently, "that you did care and I wanted you to know that that was what cured me, brought things back. I didn't frighten you then, did I, Sard? You put your hand in mine, but," hesitatingly, "I seem to frighten you now; you wouldn't come to me now?" She stood pulling at the amber chain, and after a moment "Colter" also touched the chain. He followed her hand on the golden rope. It seemed to them both that something rather terrible might happen. To Sard, it was as if in this pause some wonderful gate might close, some beautiful thing might pass out, never to return. But the woman that rose up in the girl asserting with vehemence her right to this man frightened that other untried creature, the Winged Victory of freedom and innocent impulses. Things had changed! Oh, how could Sard prevent the gate from closing, the lovely thing from ending, unless she did the thing that it seemed to her she could not do? Instinctively the girl looked to him for help; but he, it seemed, either could not or would not help. No, "Colter" would not make it easy for her. "I came too suddenly," said he decisively; there was a stern note of self-condemnation. "Dear, I wasn't fair to you; I should have thought things out," stammered the man. A swift look of sorrow swept over his face. "Things aren't quite the same, are they?" He hesitated. Oh, no, they were not the same; they were not the same! The girl's heart, plunging, recognized this. It has been so easy to be tender to a baffled, helpless man, someone in trouble; it was so hard to meet this strange, glad, powerful person who attracted her like fatal fire, who, some way, had mastery of her. The gruff cough sounded again outside, the curtain was pulled aside and the Judge entered. He had a furtive air of curiosity and exultation. It was plain he could not keep his hands off. "Hum—ha——" he said. "I've been comparing your—um—papers with Mr. Shipman's—very strange experiences, very strange experiences! Well, sir, I'm glad you came out as you have." The Judge, realizing that he addressed Martin Ledyard, a man whose name ranked high in universities all over the world, was almost humble. He stood straighter, his gooseberry eyes shot honest congratulation. Down deep in his heart, like all men, he honored the man of adventure, more than the man of science. He could not, however, keep the ring of pride from his voice as he turned benevolently to his daughter. "I congratulate you." The Judge blew his nose; he pushed his handkerchief back in his pocket. He stared rather nervously at Sard. "Hum—you've made a distinguished friend." The blunt, carefully-concealed apology went home. Sard drew a long, fluttering breath. This was the man who had stood between her and the world all her life; this was the hard, stern man who had made life possible and impossible for her, who had hindered and ignored and indulged and scouted her; who had insulted and protected her! Some sense of the conflicting laws of parenthood got to Sard's heart, something new and keen leaped to life, this man's blood ran through her veins, something mysterious, a great bond, connected them. Ah! it was the Law. In spite of everything it was the Law! "We love Foddy, little Sard." It was the Law! "Dad," said the girl breathlessly, "you—you know now?" Sard sobbed just once. It was like her to fly to this stern man, to bury her tawny head on his breast. The Judge detached himself, resolutely, with decision. Women did these things, they were to all logic absurd. What did another man, under such circumstances, do? The gooseberry eyes rather shamefacedly consulted the quiet eyes of "Colter." "There," said the Judge to his daughter, "there, I don't know what all this is about!" But the other man knew, and he knew that when the Judge made his embarrassed exit that there was no one for Sard to turn to but him! Therefore, when she, with that little desperate sob, did turn, she did not see his face, for he, somehow, contrived that her own could be hidden. "Colter's" arms tightened about her and his lips whispered on her hair. "I think," said the man softly, "that if we are very quiet we can hear the river freshening." It was the old remembered voice, like a quieting hand laid on her. It was the voice that had spoken that midsummer night in the orchard. Sard, with a little quivering sigh, gave herself to it. No one saw the Judge that evening, but afar off the phonograph could be heard playing, "The Heart Bowed Down With Weight of Woe." Miss Aurelia paused to say "Good-night" to Dunstan. "I always feel relieved when I hear your father playing that tune," she remarked. "It is an indication that he is feeling better, that his mind is relieved. This, ahem, affair of Sard's is—er—very interesting; Mrs. Spoyd, now that she knows the particulars, says that to her it is—er—most affecting!"

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