He fell back in the chair and covered his face with his hand and wept like a child.
I looked at the Judge and I could have believed he was a bronze statue. He never moved an eyelash. I could not see him breathe. He seemed a metal figure and he frightened me and the child frightened me, because it slept through it all so calm, so innocent--a little quiet thing.
"Well, Chalmers," said the Judge at last, "what do you mean to do? You're going away. Are you going to leave your daughter here?"
Monty's head was bowed over so his face did not show, but I saw him shiver just as if the Judge's words had blown across him with a draft as cold as ice.
"I'm going to Idaho," he said. "I'm going away to-night. I've got to leave the baby. You know that. Put it in an institution and don't let the people know who its father was. Some day my blood will speak to it, Judge, but half my trouble was knowing what I was."
"You love this little daughter?" the Judge whispered.
Monty just shivered again and bowed his head. It was hard to believe he was a murderer. Everything seemed like a dream, with Monty's chest heaving and falling like the pulse of a body's own heart.
"You never want her to know of you--anything about you?" asked the Judge.
"Every man has good in him," said the Judge slowly. "You had better go--now!"
Without a word, then, Monty got up and went. He did not rush off like the reporter. He stopped and touched the baby's dirty little dress with the tips of his fingers. And then he went, and the front door closed slowly and creaked, and the screen door closed slowly and creaked, and his shoes came down slowly on the walk and creaked, and the iron gate-latch creaked. I went to the window and looked out one side of the flapping curtain, and I saw Monty Cranch move along the fence and raise his arms and stop and move again. In the moonlight, with its queer shadows, he still looked like half man and half ape, scuttling away to some place where everything is lost in nothing.
"We can't do anything more to-night," said the Judge, touching my shoulder. "Take the child upstairs."
"Stop!" he said huskily. "Let me look at her. What is in that body? What is in that soul? What is it marked with? What a mystery!"