Dark Hollow | Page 2

what else was there to believe? There stood the gate with the
pebble holding it away from the post; and here stood half the
neighbourhood, staring at that pebble and at the all but invisible crack it
made where an opening had never been seen before, in a fascination
which had for its motif, not so much the knowledge that these
forbidden precincts had been invaded by a stranger, as that they were
open to any intruding foot--that they, themselves, if they had courage
enough, might go in, just as this woman had gone in, and see--why,
what she is seeing now--the unknown, unguessed reason for all these
mysteries;--the hidden treasure or the hidden sorrow which would
explain why he, their first citizen, the respected, even revered judge of
their highest court, should make use of such precautions and show such
unvarying determination to bar out all comers from the place he called
his home.
It had not always been so. Within the memory of many there it had
been an abode of cheer and good fellowship. Not a few of the men and
women now hesitating before its portals could boast of meals taken at
the judge's ample board, and of evenings spent in animated
conversation in the great room where he kept his books and did his
writing.
But that was before his son left him in so unaccountable a manner;
before--yes, all were agreed on this point--before that other bitter ordeal

of his middle age, the trial and condemnation of the man who had
waylaid and murdered his best friend.
Though the effect of these combined sorrows had not seemed to be
immediate (one month had seen both); though a half-year had elapsed
before all sociability was lost in extreme self- absorption, and a full one
before he took down the picket-fence which had hitherto been
considered a sufficient protection to his simple grounds, and put up
these boards which had so completely isolated him from the rest of the
world, it was evident enough to the friends who recalled his look and
step as he walked the streets with Algernon Etheridge on one side and
his brilliant, ever-successful son on the other, that the change now
observable in him was due to the violent sundering of these two ties.
Affections so centred wreck the lives from which they are torn; and
Time, which reconciles most men to their losses, had failed to reconcile
him to his. Grief slowly settled into confirmed melancholy, and
melancholy into the eccentricities of which I have spoken and upon
which I must now enlarge a trifle further, in order that the curiosity and
subsequent action of the small group of people in whom we are
interested may be fully understood and, possibly, in some degree
pardoned.
Judge Ostrander was, as I have certainly made you see, a recluse of the
most uncompromising type; but he was such for only half his time.
From ten in the morning till five in the afternoon, he came and went
like any other citizen, fulfilling his judicial duties with the same
scrupulous care as formerly and with more affability. Indeed, he
showed at times, and often when it was least expected, a mellowness of
temper quite foreign to him in his early days. The admiration awakened
by his fine appearance on the bench was never marred now by those
quick and rasping tones of an easily disturbed temper which had given
edge to his invective when he stood as pleader in the very court where
he now presided as judge. But away from the bench, once quit of the
courthouse and the town, the man who attempted to accost him on his
way to his carriage or sought to waylay him at his own gate, had need
of all his courage to sustain the rebuff his presumption incurred.

One more detail and I will proceed with my story.
The son, a man of great ability who was making his way as a journalist
in another city, had no explanation to give of his father's peculiarities.
Though he never came to Shelby--the rupture between the two, if
rupture it were, seeming to be complete--there were many who had
visited him in his own place of business and put such questions
concerning the judge and his eccentric manner of living as must have
provoked response had the young man had any response to give. But he
appeared to have none. Either he was as ignorant as themselves of the
causes which had led to his father's habit of extreme isolation, or he
showed powers of dissimulation hardly in accordance with the other
traits of his admirable character.
All of which closed inquiry in this direction, but left the maw of
curiosity unsatisfied.
And unsatisfied it had remained up to