The Broken Gate Part 39

He led her into the room he had just left. Racked as he was himself, he knew it would be too cruel an unkindness to tell Miss Julia now of what had befallen Aurora Lane the night before.

"The reason I came to you first," said Miss Julia--"before I went to Aurora--was about the boy--about Don. You see, he confessed--the half-wit did--before he was killed. The sheriff and others and his own father heard him say that he had killed Tarbush, don't you see? He'd gone wild, don't you see--he was a maniac. It was a madman killed Tarbush. Why, Don didn't do it--I _told_ you he couldn't have done it!

Didn't I?

"So now it's all cleared--and I'm so glad!" she concluded, breathless.

"What's all this you are telling me, Miss Julia? Why, this is basic evidence--it does end the case! But you say there were witnesses to this confession?" A vast relief came into Judge Henderson's ashen face.

"Yes, yes, the sheriff and Eph Adamson and Nels Jorgens--they all heard him. And the poor boy--his body's in the justice's office now. They've sent a messenger after his mother--poor thing--oh, poor woman that she is!"

"Where is Adamson now--where's the sheriff?"

"As I said, the sheriff is here in the building somewhere. Old Eph Adamson won't speak to anyone. He seems half out of his own mind now.

But he doesn't blame the sheriff. They say he's sorry for Aurora. Why?

"So you see," said Miss Julia, leaping over a vast sea of intervening facts, "everything's all right now." And she sighed a great soft sigh of complete content. "Of course Don didn't do it. I knew that all along."

"Where's Anne--my ward?" asked Judge Henderson suddenly. "I want to speak to her a moment."

"I don't know," said Miss Julia. But she smiled, and all her choicest dimples came out in fine array. "I shouldn't wonder if she was in jail!

Now I've got to go over to Aurora's. All this news, you know----"

But Miss Julia did not hasten away. To the contrary, she seemed not unwilling to linger yet a time--unconsciously. The truth was that all her heart was happy, with the one supreme happiness possible for her in all her life. For a second time she was here, standing face to face with her hero. So she sighed and smiled and dimpled and talked over this thing and that--until at length she turned and caught sight of the two pictures, the one on the wall, the other on the desk--which both men had left there, forgotten.

"Why, what's this?" said she. "I gave Mr. Brooks this one this morning,"

she said. "He might at least have returned it to me. He said he wanted to borrow it for a little while. Was he here?"

"He just went away," said Judge Henderson uneasily. "He was here just now."

Miss Julia was taking up the little photograph and looking from it to the lithograph with soft eyes.

"Isn't it fine?" said she. "Fine!" But she did not say which one of the two faces she saw before her was most in her mind.... And then in the little room with its dusty windows and its tumbled books and map-hung walls, Miss Julia leaped to the great fundamental conclusion of her own life.

She saw out far into the time of star dust and the soft vague light and the whirling nebulae. She saw all the great truths--saw the one great truth for any woman--saw her hero standing here--the dream father of her own dream child.... But Miss Julia never grasped the real, the inferior, the human truth at all. On the contrary, she made a vast and very beautiful mistake. She had a.s.signed a dream father to her dream son, but no more. That Judge William Henderson was the father indeed of Dieudonne Lane she no more suspected than she suspected herself to be his actual mother. So, therefore, it had been only a path of dreams that Horace Brooks had followed when he saw her look from the boy's to the father's face. It was only a path of dreams now that again her eyes followed, as she looked from the portrait of the youth to the man who stood before her. Ah! Miss Julia. Poor, little, happy Miss Julia!

"So now, Judge," said she at last, "you can clear him, after all. It will be so fine for you to do that--so dramatic--so fitting, won't it?"

If Judge Henderson could have spoken, perhaps he would have done so; but she misunderstood his choking silence. She was miles away from the actual truth; and never was to know it in all her life.

"Don hadn't any father," said she. "His father's dead long ago, or Aurora would have told me. He's in his grave--and she'll not open it even for me, who have loved her so much. But if he had had a father..."

Her voice ceased wistfully.

Judge Henderson coughed, his hands at his throat. She did not see his face.

"... If only he could have had a father like--this!"

Her own little hand fell gently--ever so gently--on the lithographed face of the great man, her hero, her champion--who always was to be such for her. It was the boldest act of all her quiet life. Her hand was very gentle, but as it fell, perhaps it dealt the heaviest blow to the vanity, the egotism, the innate selfishness of the man ever he had known, even in this swift series of blows he was now receiving. For once remorse, regret, understanding smote him sore. He saw how little he had earned what life had given him. He saw--himself!

"But then," she added hastily, and flushed to the roots of her hair--"I beg your pardon. That could not have been, of course. Don's father--the way he was born--why, _Don's_ father couldn't have been a man like _you_! We all know that."

Miss Julia hobbled on away now to find her friend, Aurora Lane. She did not know the story of the night before. Miss Julia was very, very happy. She had her boy and his father after all--and both were above reproach! And she never told, not in all her life--and she never knew, not in all her life. And as she hobbled now up the walk beyond the little gate--somewhat repentant that her own eagerness had kept her away thus long from Aurora, she felt no remorse in her heart that she had not told Aurora Lane the real secret of her own life. "Because," remarked Miss Julia, to herself, like any woman, "there is one secret she has never told me--she has never told me who was Don's father!"

Poor little Miss Julia! Ah, very happy, very happy, little Miss Julia!

Because she was a woman.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE STATE VS. DIEUDONNe LANE

Judge Henderson, haggard, shaken, turned and walked down one of the halls which traversed the courthouse building. In the central s.p.a.ce, where the two halls crossed at right angles, was a curving stair leading up to the courtrooms and the offices of the immediate servants of justice. As he stood here he saw again the tall figure of Horace Brooks approaching. He walked even more stooped forward than was usually his case, shambling, his feet turned out at wide angles. His great face in its fringe of red beard hung forward--but it bore now nothing but smiles. It showed nothing of triumph over the man he saw standing here waiting, humble and broken. He himself had said that he lacked birth and breeding. If so, whence got he this strange gentleness which marked his face now, as he stepped up to Judge Henderson--the man who but now had stood between him and success--who must always, so long as he lived, stand between him and happiness--the man whom he had beaten?

"Judge," said Horace Brooks, "I reckon about the best thing we can do is to go right on up to the court and get this thing cleaned up. You've heard the news by now?"

Henderson nodded. "Yes, just now."

"Well, that softens up a lot of things, doesn't it? It will make things easier for everyone concerned--a whole lot easier for you and me, Judge.

Now we can ask for the quas.h.i.+ng of this indictment and the court can't help granting it. Cowles is there. He's just gone up. Adamson is with him."

So they went up before the court, and the judge listened to the story of the sad-faced officer and the sad-faced old man with him. And presently the clerk at his side inscribed in the records: "The State vs. Dieudonne Lane, murder in the first degree. Indictment quashed on motion of a.s.sistant State's Attorney."

"You will discharge the prisoner from custody, Mr. Sheriff," said the judge.

"I'd like to say, if it please the Court," said Cowles, drawing a large and adequate handkerchief from his pocket and blowing a large and adequate nose, "that last night, at the time of the--the disturbance which these gentlemen here helped me to quell--this same young man that's just been discharged--why, he helped me as much as anybody."

"What do you mean?" demanded the judge severely. "You let him out of your custody when he was under commitment?"

"Yes, your Honor. I may have been short in some of my duties, your Honor. I let a woman--a young woman--go in there last night to see him for a few minutes. When she went out I must have forgot to lock the door. What they said, now, it must have stirred me up some way. When the mob formed and came to the jail the prisoner had walked out. But right at the worst of it, there he was. And after it he went on back to jail alone. When I got back he was in his cell. The door wasn't locked even then. My wife wasn't there.

"I reckon, your Honor, we've all of us sort of made a general mistake,"

concluded Dan Cowles deprecatingly. "I allowed I'd tell this Court about it."

So, amid the frowning silence of the court, and the silence as well of all who heard this, the two attorneys, the sheriff and Ephraim Adamson walked on down the winding stairs.

Adamson saw coming across the courthouse yard the figure of an angular woman, dressed in calico, a sun-bonnet on her head, a sodden handkerchief in her hand. He walked on hurriedly to meet her. At the very spot where so lately he and his son had stood to challenge the world to combat, he took this gaunt old woman in his arms, in the sunlight before all the world. "Mother!" said he.

And at about this same time--since after all the world and life and swift keen joy of living must go on just the same--two young persons stood not far distant from that scene; stood not in the full light of the sun, stood not in the wisdom and sadness of middle age, but in youth--in youth and the glory and splendor of the vast, ineffable, indispensable illusion. The dim twilight which lighted them might have been the soft, vague light of the world's own dawning--the same which poor Miss Julia had seen that very day.

Cowles hastened away from the door after he had thrown back the bolts--the bolts and bars which had been laughed at by love all this time. The young man came out into the stone-floored hall where Anne Oglesby stood waiting for him--all beautiful and fresh and clean and sweet--fragrant as a very flower in her worthiness for love.

"Don!" she said, and held out her arms, running toward him.

"Oh, Anne! Anne!"

His arms went about her. And this time there was no one there to see.