The Judge

The Judge

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Judge, by Rebecca West
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Judge
Author: Rebecca West

Release Date: June 24, 2005 [eBook #16125]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
JUDGE***
E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Martin Pettit, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
(http://www.pgdp.net)

THE JUDGE

by
REBECCA WEST
Author of "The Return Of The Soldier"
New York George H. Doran Company
1922,

TO
THE MEMORY OF
MY MOTHER

BOOK ONE

"Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the
father."
CHAPTER I
I
It was not because life was not good enough that Ellen Melville was
crying as she sat by the window. The world, indeed, even so much of it
as could be seen from her window, was extravagantly beautiful. The
office of Mr. Mactavish James, Writer to the Signet, was in one of
those decent grey streets that lie high on the northward slope of
Edinburgh New Town, and Ellen was looking up the side-street that
opened just opposite and revealed, menacing as the rattle of spears, the
black rock and bastions of the Castle against the white beamless glare
of the southern sky. And it was the hour of the clear Edinburgh twilight,

that strange time when the world seems to have forgotten the sun
though it keeps its colour; it could still be seen that the moss between
the cobblestones was a wet bright green, and that a red autumn had
been busy with the wind-nipped trees, yet these things were not gay,
but cold and remote as brightness might be on the bed of a deep stream,
fathoms beneath the visitation of the sun. At this time all the town was
ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind by the arm and marched
it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh, telling it that to be
weeping with discontent in such a place was a scandalous turning up of
the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle Esplanade, that all day had
proudly supported the harsh, virile sounds and colours of the drilling
regiments, would show to the slums its blank surface, bleached
bone-white by the winds that raced above the city smoke. Now the
Cowgate and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the
disorderly night; the slum-dwellers would foregather about the rotting
doors of dead men's mansions and brawl among the not less brawling
ghosts of a past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and
argument. And Holyrood, under a black bank surmounted by a low
bitten cliff, would lie like the camp of an invading and terrified army....
She stopped and said, "Yon about Holyrood's a fine image for the
institution of monarchy." For she was a Suffragette, so far as it is
possible to be a Suffragette effectively when one is just seventeen, and
she spent much of her time composing speeches which she knew she
would always be too shy to deliver. "There is a sinister air about
palaces. Always they appear like the camp of an invading army that is
uneasy and keeps a good look-out lest they need shoot. Remember they
are always ready to shoot...." She interrupted herself with a click of
annoyance. "I see myself standing on a herring-barrel and trying to hold
the crowd with the like of that. It's too literary. I always am. I doubt I'll
never make a speaker. 'Deed, I'll never be anything but the wee typist
that I am...." And misery rushed in on her mind again. She fell to
watching the succession of little black figures that huddled in their
topcoats as they came down the side-street, bent suddenly at the waist
as they came to the corner and met the full force of the east wind, and
then pulled themselves upright and butted at it afresh with dour faces.
The spectacle evoked a certain local pride, for such inclemencies were
just part of the asperity of conditions which she reckoned as the price

one had to pay for the dignity of living in Edinburgh; which indeed
gave it its dignity, since to survive anything so horrible proved one
good rough stuff fit to govern the rest of the world. But chiefly it
evoked desolation. For she knew none of these people. In all the town
there was nobody but her mother who was at all aware of her. It was six
months since