The Judgment House

㣾The Judgment House

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Title: The Judgment House
Author: Gilbert Parker
Release Date: Feb, 2003 [EBook #3746] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on August 15, 2001] [This file was last updated on June 13, 2002]
Edition: 11
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE JUDGMENT HOUSE
by Gilbert Parker

NOTE
Except where references to characters well-known to all the world occur in these pages, this book does not present a picture of public or private individuals living or dead. It is not in any sense a historical novel. It is in conception and portraiture a work of the imagination.
"Strangers come to the outer wall-- (Why do the sleepers stir?) Strangers enter the Judgment House-- (Why do the sleepers sigh?) Slow they rise in their judgment seats, Sieve and measure the naked souls, Then with a blessing return to sleep. (Quiet the Judgment House.) Lone and sick are the vagrant souls-- (When shall the world come home?)"
"Let them fight it out, friend! things have gone too far, God must judge the couple: leave them as they are-- Whichever one's the guiltless, to his glory, And whichever one the guilt's with, to my story!
"Once more. Will the wronger, at this last of all, Dare to say, 'I did wrong,' rising in his fall? No? Let go, then! Both the fighters to their places! While I count three, step you back as many paces!"
"And the Sibyl, you know. I saw her with my own eyes at Cumae, hanging in a jar; and when the boys asked her, 'What would you, Sibyl?' she answered, 'I would die.'"
"So is Pheidippides happy for ever,--the noble strong man Who would race like a God, bear the face of a God, whom a God loved so well: He saw the land saved he had helped to save, and was suffered to tell Such tidings, yet never decline, but, gloriously as he began So to end gloriously--once to shout, thereafter to be mute: 'Athens is saved!' Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed."
"Oh, never star Was lost here, but it rose afar."

THE JUDGMENT HOUSE

BOOK I

CHAPTER I
THE JASMINE FLOWER
The music throbbed in a voice of singular and delicate power; the air was resonant with melody, love and pain. The meanest Italian in the gallery far up beneath the ceiling, the most exalted of the land in the boxes and the stalls, leaned indulgently forward, to be swept by this sweet storm of song. They yielded themselves utterly to the power of the triumphant debutante who was making "Manassa" the musical feast of the year, renewing to Covent Garden a reputation which recent lack of enterprise had somewhat forfeited.
Yet, apparently, not all the vast audience were hypnotized by the unknown and unheralded singer, whose stage name was Al'mah. At the moment of the opera's supreme appeal the eyes of three people at least were not in the thraldom of the singer. Seated at the end of the first row of the stalls was a fair, slim, graciously attired man of about thirty, who, turning in his seat so that nearly the whole house was in his circle of vision, stroked his golden moustache, and ran his eyes over the thousands of faces with a smile of pride and satisfaction which in a less handsome man would have been almost a leer. His name was Adrian Fellowes.
Either the opera and the singer had no charms for Adrian Fellowes, or else he had heard both so often that, without doing violence to his musical sense, he could afford to study the effect of this wonderful effort upon the mob of London, mastered by the radiant being on the stage. Very sleek, handsome, and material he looked; of happy colour, and, apparently, with a mind and soul in which