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Ebook has 99 lines and 8633 words, and 2 pages

THE LIFTED BANDAGE

MARY RAYMOND SHIPMAN ANDREWS

New York Charles Scribner's Sons

The man let himself into his front door and, staggering lightly, like a drunken man, as he closed it, walked to the hall table, and mechanically laid down his hat, but still wearing his overcoat turned and went into his library, and dropped on the edge of a divan and stared out through the leaded panes of glass across the room facing him. The grayish skin of his face seemed to fall in diagonal furrows, from the eyes, from the nose, from the mouth. He sat, still to his finger-tips, staring.

He was sitting so when a servant slipped in and stood motionless a minute, and went to the wide window where the west light glared through leafless branches outside, and drew the shades lower, and went to the fireplace and touched a match. Wood caught and crackled and a cheerful orange flame flew noisily up the chimney, but the man sitting on the divan did not notice. The butler waited a moment, watching, hesitating, and then:

"Have you had lunch, sir?" he asked in a tentative, gentle voice.

The staring eyes moved with an effort and rested on the servant's face. "Lunch?" he repeated, apparently trying to focus on the meaning of the word. "Lunch? I don't know, Miller. But don't bring anything."

With a great anxiety in his face Miller regarded his master. "Would you let me take your overcoat, Judge?--you'll be too warm," he said.

He spoke in a suppressed tone as if waiting for, fearing something, as if longing to show sympathy, and the man stood and let himself be cared for, and then sat down again in the same unrestful, fixed attitude, gazing out again through the glittering panes into the stormy, tawny west sky. Miller came back and stood quiet, patient; in a few minutes the man seemed to become aware of him.

"I forgot, Miller. You'll want to know," he said in a tone which went to show an old bond between the two. "You'll be sorry to hear, Miller," he said--and the dull eyes moved difficultly to the anxious ones, and his voice was uninflected--"you'll be sorry to know that the coroner's jury decided that Master Jack was a murderer."

The word came more horribly because of an air of detachment from the man's mind. It was like a soulless, evil mechanism, running unguided. Miller caught at a chair.

"I don't believe it, sir," he gasped. "No lawyer shall make me. I've known him since he was ten, Judge, and they're mistaken. It's not any mere lawyers can make me believe that awful thing, sir, of our Master Jack." The servant was shaking from head to foot with intense rejection, and the man put up his hand as if to ward off his emotion.

"I wish I could agree with you," he said quietly, and then added, "Thank you, Miller." And the old butler, walking as if struck with a sickness, was gone.

The man sat on the edge of the divan staring out of the window, minute after minute; the November wind tossed the clean, black lines of the branches backward and forward against the copper sky, as if a giant hand moved a fan of sea-weed before a fire. The man sat still and stared. The sky dulled; the delicate, wild branches melted together; the diamond lines in the window blurred; yet, unmoved, unseeing, the eyes stared through them.

The burr of an electric bell sounded; some one came in at the front door and came to the door of the library, but the fixed figure did not stir. The newcomer stood silent a minute, two minutes; a young man in clerical dress, boyish, with gray, serious eyes. At length he spoke.

"May I come in? It's Dick."

The man's head turned slowly and his look rested inquiringly on his nephew. It was a minute before he said, as if recognizing him, "Dick. Yes." And set himself as before to the persistent gazing through the window.

"I lost you at the court-house," the younger man said. "I didn't mean to let you come home alone."

"Thank you, Dick." It seemed as if neither joy nor sorrow would find a way into the quiet voice again.

The wind roared; the boughs rustled against the glass; the fire, soberly settled to work, steamed and crackled; the clock ticked indifferently; there was no other sound in the room; the two men were silent, the one staring always before him, the other sitting with a hand on the older man's hand, waiting. Minutes they sat so, and the wintry sky outside darkened and lay sullenly in bands of gray and orange against the windows; the light of the logs was stronger than the daylight; it flickered carelessly across the ashiness of the emotionless face. The young man, watching the face, bent forward and gripped his other hand on the unresponsive one in his clasp.

"Uncle," he asked, "will it make things worse if I talk to you?"

"No, Dick."

Nothing made a difference, it seemed. Silence or words must simply fall without effect on the rock bottom of despair. The young man halted, as if dismayed, before this overpowering inertia of hopelessness; he drew a quick breath.

"A coroner's jury isn't infallible. I don't believe it of Jack--a lot of people don't believe it," he said.

The older man looked at him heavily. "You'd say that. Jack's friends will. I've been trained to weigh evidence--I must believe it."

"Listen," the young man urged. "Don't shut down the gates like that. I'm not a lawyer, but I've been trained to think, too, and I believe you're not thinking squarely. There's other evidence that counts besides this. There's Jack--his personality."

"It has been taken into consideration."

"It can't be taken into consideration by strangers--it needs years of intimacy to weigh that evidence as I can weigh it--as you--You know best of all," he cried out impulsively, "if you'll let yourself know, how impossible it was. That Jack should have bought that pistol and taken it to Ben Armstrong's rooms to kill him--it was impossible--impossible!" The clinched fist came down on the black broadcloth knee with the conviction of the man behind it. The words rushed like melted metal, hot, stinging, not to be stopped. The judge quivered as if they had stung through the callousness, touched a nerve. A faint color crawled to his cheeks; for the first time he spoke quickly, as if his thoughts connected with something more than gray matter.

"You talk about my not allowing myself to believe in Jack. You seem not to realize that such a belief would--might--stand between me and madness. I've been trying to adjust myself to a possible scheme of living--getting through the years till I go into nothingness. I can't. All I can grasp is the feeling that a man might have if dropped from a balloon and forced to stay gasping in the air, with no place in it, nothing to hold to, no breath to draw, no earth to rest on, no end to hope for. There is nothing beyond."

"Everything is beyond," the young man cried triumphantly. "'The end,' as you call it, is an end to hope for--it is the beginning. The beginning of more than you have ever had--with them, with the people you care about."

"Listen," the clergyman cried again. "You are not judging Jack as fairly as you would judge a common criminal. You know better than I how often juries make mistakes--why should you trust this jury to have made none?"

"I didn't trust the jury. I watched as I have never before known how to watch a case. I felt my mind more clear and alert than common."

"Alert!" he caught at the word. "But alert on the side of terror--abnormally clear to see what you dreaded. Because you are fair-minded, because it has been the habit of your life to correct at once any conscious prejudice in your judgment, you have swayed to the side of unfairness to yourself, to Jack. Uncle," he flashed out, "would it tear your soul to have me state the case as I see it? I might, you know--I might bring out something that would make it look different."

Almost a smile touched the gray lines of his face. "If you wish."

The young man drew himself into his chair and clasped his hands around his knee. "Here it is. Mr. Newbold, on the seventh floor of the Bruzon bachelor apartments, heard a shot at one in the morning, next his bedroom, in Ben Armstrong's room. He hurried into the public hall, saw the door wide open into Ben's apartment, went in and found Ben shot dead. Trying to use the telephone to call help, he found it was out of order. So he rushed again into the hall toward the elevator with the idea of getting Dr. Avery, who lived below on the second floor. The elevator door was open also, and a man's opera-hat lay near it on the floor; he saw, just in time, that the car was at the bottom of the shaft, almost stepping inside, in his excitement, before he noticed this. Then he ran down the stairs with Jack's hat in his hand, and got Dr. Avery, and they found Jack at the foot of the elevator shaft. It was known that Ben Armstrong and Jack had quarrelled the day before; it was known that Jack was quick-tempered; it is known that he bought that evening the pistol which was found on the floor by Ben, loaded, with one empty shell. That's the story."

The steady voice stopped a moment and the young man shivered slightly; his look was strained. Steadily he went on.

"For me there is no doubt. I never knew him to hold malice. He was violent sometimes, but that he could have gone about for hours with a pistol in his pocket and murder in his heart; that he could have planned Ben Armstrong's death and carried it out deliberately--it's a contradiction in terms. It's impossible, being Jack. You must know this--you know your son--you know human nature."

"Thank you, Dick."

The absolute lack of impression on the man's judgment was plain.

"Ah!" The clergyman sprang to his feet and stood, his eyes blazing, despairing, looking down at the bent, listless figure. How could he let a human being suffer as this one was suffering? Quickly his thoughts shifted their basis. He could not affect the mind of the lawyer; might he reach now, perhaps, the soul of the man? He knew the difficulty, for before this his belief had crossed swords with the agnosticism of his uncle, an agnosticism shared by his father, in which he had been trained, from which he had broken free only five years before. He had faced the batteries of the two older brains at that time, and come out with the brightness of his new-found faith untarnished, but without, he remembered, scratching the armor of their profound doubt in everything. One could see, looking at the slender black figure, at the visionary gaze of the gray wide eyes, at the shape of the face, broad-browed, ovalled, that this man's psychic make-up must lift him like wings into an atmosphere outside a material, outside even an intellectual world. He could breathe freely only in a spiritual air, and things hard to believe to most human beings were, perhaps, his every-day thoughts. He caught a quick breath of excitement as it flashed to his brain that now, possibly, was coming the moment when he might justify his life, might help this man whom he loved, to peace. The breath he caught was a prayer; his strong, nervous fingers trembled. He spoke in a tone whose concentration lifted the eyes below him, that brooded, stared.

"It is the same thing with us too. The same spirit-substance underlies both worlds and there is no separation in space, only in view-point. Life goes on--it's just transfigured. It's as if a bandage should be lifted from our eyes and we should suddenly see things in whose presence we had been always."

The rushing, eager voice stopped. He bent and laid his hand on the older man's and stared at his face, half hidden now in the shadows of the lowering fire. There was no response. The heavy head did not lift and the attitude was unstirred, hopeless. As if struck by a blow he sprang erect and his fingers shut hard. He spoke as if to himself, brokenly.

Suddenly the clinched fists flung out as if of a power not their own, and his voice rang across the room.

"God!" The word shot from him as if a thunderbolt fell with it. "God! Lift the bandage!"

A log fell with a crash into the fire; great battling shadows blurred all the air; he was gone.

The man, startled, drew up his bent shoulders, and pushed back a lock of gray hair and stared about, shaking, bewildered. The ringing voice, the word that had flashed as if out of a larger atmosphere--the place was yet full of these, and the shock of it added a keenness to his misery. His figure swung sideways; he fell on the cushions of the sofa and his arms stretched across them, his gray head lying heedless; sobs that tore roots came painfully; it was the last depth. Out of it, without his volition, he spoke aloud.

"God, God, God!" his voice said, not prayerfully, but repeating the sound that had shocked his torture. The word wailed, mocked, reproached, defied--and yet it was a prayer. Out of a soul in mortal stress that word comes sometimes driven by a force of the spirit like the force of the lungs fighting for breath--and it is a prayer.

"God, God, God!" the broken voice repeated, and sobs cut the words. And again. Over and over, and again the sobbing broke it.

As suddenly as if a knife had stopped the life inside the body, all sound stopped. A movement shook the man as he lay face down, arms stretched. Then for a minute, two minutes, he was quiet, with a quiet that meant muscles stretched, nerves alert. Slowly, slowly the tightened muscles of the arms pushed the shoulders backward and upward; the head lifted; the face turned outward, and if an observer had been there he might have seen by the glow of the firelight that the features wet, distorted, wore, more than all at this moment, a look of amazement. Slowly, slowly, moving as if afraid to disturb something--a dream--a presence--the man sat erect as he had been sitting before, only that the rigidity was in some way gone. He sat alert, his eyes wide, filled with astonishment, gazing before him eagerly--a look different from the dull stare of an hour ago by the difference between hope and despair. His hands caught at the stuff of the divan on either side and clutched it.

All the time the look of his face changed; all the time, not at once, but by fast, startling degrees, the gray misery which had bound eyes and mouth and brow in iron dropped as if a cover were being torn off and a light set free. Amazement, doubting, incredulous came first, and with that eagerness, trembling and afraid. And then hope--and then the fear to hope. And hunger. He bent forward, his eyes peered into the quiet emptiness, his fingers gripped the cloth as if to anchor him to a wonder, to an unbelievable something; his body leaned--to something--and his face now was the face of a starved man, of a man dying from thirst, who sees food, water, salvation.

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