Chapter 14

"You've heard of obsessions--of men seized every six months with an irresistible desire to drink--of kleptomaniacs who, having all they need or wish, must steal or go mad--of others driven by inexplicable impulse, mania, to set fire to buildings, for the thrill they get out of seeing the flames burst forth. Well, from my earliest childhood until that moment when Roy Dalton attacked me, I had fought an impulse even more terrible than those. God, what a tyranny! It drove me, drove me, that obsession, at times amounting to mental compulsion, to strike, to stab, to make the blood flow!"

He rose, getting to his feet slowly, so that his burly bulk gained in size, like the slow upheaval of a hillside. Swollen as his face had been, it expanded now a trifle more. His nostrils coarsened more perceptibly. The puffiness that had been in the back of his neck extended entirely around his throat. He hung forward over the table, giving all his attention to Hastings, who was unmoved, incredulous.

"The Brace woman will tell you I had to kill him," he proceeded more swiftly, displaying a questionable ardour, like a man foreseeing defeat. "The mistake I made was in running away--a bitter mistake! But those unnecessary wounds, twenty-eight that need not have been made! The obsession to see the blood flow drove me to acts which a jury, I thought, would not understand. And, if you don't see the force of my explanation, Hastings, if you don't understand, I shall be in little better plight--after all these years!"

He put, there, a sorrowful appeal into his voice; but a sly contradiction of it showed faintly in his face, a hint that he took a crafty pleasure in dragging into the light the depravity he had kept in darkness for a lifetime.

"I got away. I drifted to Virginia, working hard, studying much. I became a lawyer. But always I had that affliction to combat; all my life, man!--always! There were periods months long when devils came up from the ugly corners of my soul to torture and tempt me.

"It wasn't the ordinary temptation, not a weak, pale idea of 'I'd like to kill and see the blood!'--but an uproar, an imperial voice, an endless command: 'Kill! Draw blood! Kill!'--What it did to me----

"But to this day I've beaten it! I've been a good citizen. I've observed the law. I've refused to let that involuntary lust for blood ruin me or cast me out.

"Let me tell you how. I decided that, if I had a hand in awarding just punishments, my affliction would be abated enough for me to live in some measure of security. There you have the explanation of my being on the bench. I cheated the obsession to murder by helping to imprison or execute those who did murder!

"That's why I can tell you of my innocence of the Brace murder. Do you think I'd tell it unless I knew there could be not even an excuse for suspecting me? On the other hand, if I had kept silent as to the true motive that drove my hand to those unnecessary mutilations of young Dalton--the only time, remember, that my weakness ever got the better, or the worse, of me!--if I had kept silent on that, you would have had ground for suspecting me of a barbarous murder then, and, arguing from that, of the Brace murder now.

"Do I make myself clear?--Do you want me to go into further detail?"

He sank slowly back to his chair, spent by the strain of supreme effort. His breathing was laboured, stertorous.

"That, Crown," Hastings denounced, "is a confession! Knowing he's caught, he's got the insolence to whine for mercy because of his 'sufferings'! Think of it! The thing of which he boasts is the thing for which he deserves death--since death is supposed to be the supreme punishment. He tells us, in self-congratulatory terms, that he curbed his inhuman longings, satisfied his lust for blood, by going on the bench and helping to 'punish those who did murder!'

"Too cowardly to strike a blow, he skulked behind the protection of his position. He made of the judicial robe an assassin's disguise. On the bench, he was free to sate his thirst for others' sufferings--adding to a sentence five undeserved years here, ten there; slipping into his instructions to juries a phrase that would mean the death penalty!

"He revelled in judicial murders. He gloated over the helpless people who, looking to him for justice, were merely the victims of his abhorrent cruelty. He loved the look of sick surprise in their starting eyes. He got a filthy joy out of seeing a man turn pale. He rubbed his hands in glee when a woman swooned. He----"

"I can't stand that--can't stand it!" Sloane protested, hands over his eyes.

"What more do you want, to prove his guilt, his abominable guilt?" Hastings swept on. "You have the motive, hatred of this woman here and her daughter--you have the proof of the letter sent to him making the compulsory appointment--you have his own crazy explanation of his homicidal impulse, from which, by the way, he never sought relief, a queer 'impulse' since it gave him time, hours, to plan the crime and manufacture the weapon with which he killed!"

"I said at the start," Wilton put in hoarsely, "this man Hastings was only theorizing. If he had anything to connect me with----"

"I have!" Hastings told him, and came to a standstill in front of the sheriff, bending over him, as if to drive each statement into Crown's reluctant mind.

"He got that letter a little after five in the afternoon. He left me here, in this room, with Sloane and Webster, and was gone three-quarters of an hour. That was just before dinner. He had the second floor, on that side of the house, entirely to himself. He took a nail-file from Webster's dressing case, and in Webster's room put a sharper point on it by filing it roughly with the file-blade of his own pen knife.

"That's doubly proved: first, my magnet, with which I went over the floor in Webster's room, picked up small particles of steel. Here they are."

He produced a small packet and, without unwrapping it, handed it to Crown.

"Again: you'll find that the file-blade of his knife retained particles of the steel in the little furrows of its corrugated surface. I know, because last Sunday, as your car came up the driveway, I borrowed his knife, on the pretext of tightening a screw in the blade of mine. And I examined it."

He put up a silencing hand as Wilton forced a jeering laugh.

"But there's more to prove his manufacture and ownership of the weapon that killed the woman. He made the handle from the end of a slat on the bed in the room which I occupied that night. The inference is obvious: he didn't care to risk going outside the house to hunt for the wood he needed; he wouldn't take it from an easily visible place; and, having stolen something from one room, he paid his attention to mine. All this is the supercaution of the so-called 'smart criminal.' It matches the risk he took in returning to the body to hunt for the weapon. That was why he was there when Webster found the body.

"The handle of the dagger matches the wood of the slat I've just mentioned. You won't find that particular slat upstairs now. It was taken out of the house the next day, broken into sections and packed in his bag of golf-sticks. But there is proof in this room of the fact that he and he only made the dagger.

"You'll find in the edge of the large blade of his penknife a nick, triangular in shape, which left an unmistakable groove in the wood every time he cut into it. That little groove shows, to the naked eye, on the end of the shortened slat and on the handle of the dagger. If you doubt it----"

"Thunder!" Crown interrupted, in an awed tone. "You're right!"

He had taken the dagger from his pocket and given it minute scrutiny. He handed it now to Sloane.

Wilton, watching the scene with flaming eyes, sat motionless, his chin thrust down hard upon his collar, his face shining as if it had been polished with a cloth.

Sloane gave the dagger back to Crown before he spoke, in a wheezy, shrill key: "They're there, the marks, the grooves!"

He did not look at Wilton.

Hastings straightened to his full stature, and looked toward Wilton.

"Now, Judge Wilton," he challenged, "you said you preferred to answer the accusation here and now. Do you, still?"

Wilton, slowly raising the heavy lids of his eyes, like a man coming out of a trance, presented to him and to the others a face which, in spite of its flushed and swollen aspect, looked singularly bleak.

"It's not an accusation," he said in his roughened, grating voice. "It's a network of suppositions, of theories, of impossibilities--a crazy structure, all built on the rotten foundation of a previous misfortune."

"Arrest him, Crown!" Hastings commanded sharply.

Wilton tried to laugh, but his heavy lips merely worked in a crazy barrenness of sound. With a vague, clumsy idea of covering up his confusion, he started to light a cigar.

He stopped, hands in mid-air, when Crown, shambling to his feet, said:

"Judge, I've got to act. He's proved his case."

"Proved it!" Wilton made weak protest.

"If he hasn't, let's see your penknife."

Wilton put his hand into his trousers pocket, began the motion that would have drawn out the knife, checked it, and withdrew his hand empty. He managed a mirthless, dreary laugh, a rattling sound that fell, dead of any feeling, from his grimacing lips.

"No, by God!" he refused. "I'll give it to neither of you. I don't have to!"

In that moment, he fell to pieces. With his thick shoulders dropping forward, he became an inert mass bundled against the table edge. The blood went out of his face, so that his cheeks hollowed, and shadows formed under his eyes. He was like the victim of a quick consumption.

Crown's eyes were on Hastings.

"That's enough," the old man said shortly.

"Too much," agreed Crown. "Judge, there's no bail--on a murder charge."

"I'm very glad," Mrs. Brace commented, a terrible satisfaction in her voice. "He pays me--at last."

In the music room Dr. Garnet had just given Lucille and Hastings a favourable report on Berne Webster's condition.

"I should so like to tell him," she said, her glance entreating; "if you'll let me! Wouldn't he get well much faster if he knew it--knew the suspense was all over--that neither he nor father's suspected any more?"

"I think," the doctor gave his opinion with exaggerated deliberation, "it might--in fact, it really will be his best medicine."

She thanked him, stars swimming in her eyes.