Dark Hollow Part 42

He faltered, not knowing how to proceed. There was nothing strange in this. There could not have been much encouragement in my expression. I was holding on to myself with much too convulsive a grasp.

"Sometimes I think," he recommenced, "that you don't feel quite sure of this man Scoville's guilt. Is that so? Tell me, father."

I did not know what to make of him. There was no shrinking from me; no conscious or unconscious accusation in voice or look, but there was a desire to know, and a certain latent resolve behind it all that marked the line between obedient boyhood and thinking, determining man. With all my dread--a dread so great I felt the first grasp of age upon my heart-strings at that moment--I recognised no other course than to meet this inquiry of his with the truth--that is, with just so much of the truth as was needed. No more, not one jot more. I, therefore, answered, and with a show of self-possession at which I now wonder:

"You are not far from right, Oliver. I have had moments of doubt. The evidence, as you must have noticed, is purely circ.u.mstantial."

"But a jury has convicted him."

"Yes."

"On the evidence you mention?"

"Yes."

"What evidence would satisfy YOU? What would YOU consider a conclusive proof of guilt?"

I told him in the set phrases of my profession.

"Then," he declared as I finished, "you may rest easy as to this man's right to receive a sentence of death."

I could not trust my ears.

"I know from personal observation," he proceeded, approaching me with a firm step, "that he is not only capable of the crime for which he has been convicted, but that he has actually committed one under similar circ.u.mstances, and possibly for the same end."

And he told me the story of that night of storm and bloodshed,--a story which will be found lying near this, in my alcove of shame and contrition.

It had an overwhelming effect upon me. I had been very near death.

Suicide must have ended the struggle in which I was engaged, had not this knowledge of actual and unpunished crime come to ease my conscience. John Scoville was worthy of death, and, being so, should receive the full reward of his deed. I need hesitate no longer.

That night I slept.

But there came a night when I did not. After the penalty had been paid and to most men's eyes that episode was over, I turned the first page of that volume of slow retribution which is the doom of the man who sins from impulse, and has the recoil of his own nature to face relentlessly to the end of his days.

Scoville was in his grave.

I was alive.

Scoville had shot a man for his money.

I had struck a man down in my wrath.

Scoville's widow and little child must face a cold and unsympathetic world, with small means and disgrace rising, like a wall, between them and social sympathy, if not between them and the actual means of living.

Oliver's future faced him untouched. No shadow lay across his path to hinder his happiness or to mar his chances.

The results were unequal. I began to see them so, and feel the gnawing of that deathless worm whose ravages lay waste the breast, while hand and brain fulfil their routine of work, as though all were well and the foundations of life unshaken.

I suffered as only cowards suffer. I held on to honour; I held on to home; I held on to Oliver, but with misery for my companion and a self-contempt which nothing could abate. Each time I mounted the Bench, I felt a tug at my arm as of a visible, restraining presence. Each time I returned to my home and met the clear eye of Oliver beaming upon me with its ever growing promise of future comrades.h.i.+p, I experienced a rebellion against my own happiness which opened my eyes to my own nature and its inevitable demand. I must give up Oliver; or yield my honours, make a full confession and accept whatever consequences it might bring.

I am a proud man, and the latter alternative was beyond me. With each pa.s.sing day, the certainty of this became more absolute and more fixed.

In every man's nature there lurk possibilities of action which he only recognises under stress, also impossibilities which stretch like an iron barrier between him and the excellence he craves. I had come up against such an impossibility. I could forego pleasure, travel, social intercourse, and even the companions.h.i.+p of the one being in whom all my hopes centred, but I could not, of my own volition, pa.s.s from the judge's bench to the felon's cell. There I struck the immovable,--the impa.s.sable.

I decided in one awful night of renunciation that I would send Oliver out of my life.

The next day I told him abruptly ... hurting him to spare myself ...

that I had decided after long and mature thought to yield to his desire for journalism, and that I would start him in his career and maintain him in it for three years if he would subscribe to the following conditions:

They were the hardest a loving father ever imposed upon a dutiful and loving son.

First: he was to leave home immediately ... within a few hours, in fact.

Secondly: he was to regard all relations between us as finished; we were to be strangers henceforth in every particular save that of the money obligation already mentioned.

Thirdly: he was never to acknowledge this compact, or to cast any slur upon the father whose reasons for this apparently unnatural conduct were quite disconnected with any fault of his or any desire to punish or reprove.

Fourthly: he was to pray for his father every night of his life before he slept.

Was this last a confession? Had I meant it to be such? If so, it missed its point. It awed but did not enlighten him. I had to contend with his compunctions, as well as with his grief and dismay. It was an hour of struggle on his part and of implacable resolution on mine. Nothing but such hardness on my part would have served me. Had I faltered once he would have won me over, and the tale of my sleepless nights been repeated. I did not falter; and when the midnight stroke rang through the house that night, it separated by its peal, a sin-beclouded but human past from a future arid with solitude and bereft of the one possession to retain which my sin had been hidden.

I was a father without a son--as lonely and as desolate as though the separation between us were that of the grave I had merited and so weakly shunned.

And thus I lived for a year.

But I was not yet satisfied.

The toll I had paid to Grief did not seem to me a sufficient punishment for a crime which entailed imprisonment if not death. How could I insure for myself the extreme punishment which my peace demanded, without bringing down upon me the full consequences I refused to accept.

You have seen to-day how I ultimately answered this question. A convict's bed! a convict's isolation.

Bela served me in this; Bela who knew my secret and knowing continued to love me. He gathered up these rods singly and in distant places and set them up across the alcove in my room. He had been a convict once himself.

Being now in my rightful place, I could sleep again.

But after some weeks of this, fresh fears arose. An accident was possible. For all Bela's precautions, some one might gain access to this room. This would mean the discovery of my secret. Some new method must be devised for securing me absolutely against intrusion. Entrance into my simple, almost unguarded cottage must be made impossible. A close fence should replace the pickets now surrounding it--a fence with a gate having its own lock.

And this fence was built.

This should have been enough. But guilt has terrors unknown to innocence. One day I caught a small boy peering through an infinitesimal crack in the fence, and, remembering the window grilled with iron with which Bela had replaced the cheerful cas.e.m.e.nt in my den of punishment, I realised how easily an opening might be made between the boards for the convenience of a curious eye anxious to penetrate the mystery of my seclusion.

And so it came about that the inner fence was put up.

This settled my position in the town. No more visits. All social life was over.

It was meet. I was satisfied at last. I could now give my whole mind to my one remaining duty. I lived only while on the Bench.

March Fifth, 1898.

There is a dream which comes to me often: a vision which I often see.