The Judgment House

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

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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