Читать книгу Branded, or, The Daughters of a Convict - Gerald Biss - Страница 4

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"AS swiftly and as surely as I snuff out this candle, so swiftly and surely do you by your verdict snuff out the life of a fellow-creature. Gentlemen of the jury, may the Almighty direct your verdict."

And as he sat down the great advocate leant forward impressively with a grave gesture and extinguished between his finger and thumb the flickering candle near him, his eyes fixed solemnly upon the twelve intent men in the jury-box.

Then he sank back into his seat, wearily wiping the perspiration from his forehead and pushing his full-bottomed wig back from his brow, immediately inert from the reaction of the intense strain.

The Old Bailey was hot and stifling at the close of a long day, and everyone was tired, sustained only by suppressed excitement and keen interest. It was the third day of the great Jerningham case, with which the whole country was ringing, and England was agog for the verdict, stirred as it seldom is by a criminal trial. Being a Saturday, the judge had announced his intention of sitting late, so as to conclude the case before Sunday, rather than adjourn over the week-end.

It had been a scorching hot July day, and the sun had blazed incessantly and mercilessly into the court, crowded beyond endurance. As it set and darkness began to fall, the heat had not abated, and the foetid atmosphere seemed to grow even more stifling. There was a heavy feeling of thunder in the air.

The Old Bailey, narrow, cramped, and uncomfortable, looked murky in the deepening gloom, with no other light save the flickering candles, and out of the dimness peered grim, expectant faces.

The judge on the bench seemed weary as he sorted his notes, but the counsel on both sides, despite the hard work of the week, were keenly alert, as they played the great game of their profession, with a life as the stake. Still, for once, the sympathies of all had been strangely touched, contrary to logic and evidence. On the side of the prosecution there was no animus, merely a cool, well-reasoned statement of facts, unusually colorless in its moderation, as the Attorney-General asked for a verdict on the overpowering evidence he had accumulated. Opposed to him was not only the passionate eloquence of the greatest lawyer of the day, typically Irish in his enthusiasm and his power of stirring souls, carrying the court at times off its feet with a rush of words and an exuberance of eagerness, yet sinking to well-modulated passages where reason was met by reason and logic battled with logic. There was also a further note of deep sincerity of belief in the prisoner's innocence, that unprofessional personal expression of opinion which sometimes slips from an advocate who pleads a cause, rather than a great case. All the personality of the lawyer had been thrown into the scales, and it seemed as though he had staked his whole professional reputation upon the result.

In his conduct of the case, Sir Patrick O'Brien, Q.C., M.P., had been most ably and willingly seconded by his junior, Caton Bramber, who had served his apprenticeship in the courts and on circuit with lesser briefs, and now for the first time appeared in a really big case, which had set the whole world talking. His enthusiasm had been hardly second to that of his leader, and it had helped him to subdue all natural nervousness at such a crucial moment in his career, with the result that he had been brilliant, a worthy aide-de-camp to a great general, and had earned the hearty congratulations, not only of his briefless brethren, but also of the leading lights of the profession. In a short week he had sprung from obscurity to find himself praised and paragraphed on all sides, and whatever the result of the Jerningham case, it had certainly assured Caton Bramber's future. Yet as he sat by his leader, carried away by his great speech with its impressive ending, his thoughts were centred more upon the result of the case than his own career.

For Helen Jerningham was a very beautiful woman, young and fascinating. As she stood in the dock in her widow's weeds, arraigned upon the charge of having poisoned her husband, she presented a pathetic picture. Her face was pale, and there was weariness in her eye, but her pluck had never once failed her, nor had she flinched under the ordeal. She was only twenty-three, as she stood called upon to face the most terrible accusation which can be levelled against a human being, and it required an iron will and a nerve of steel for a girl to hold her head up and meet her accusers.

Helen Jerningham was a peculiarly beautiful woman, and this was unquestionably a point in her favor, commanding public sympathy and making her cause the easier to plead. In France such beauty would have meant acquittal, but in England hearts are harder and emotions more easily curbed, and the case against her was unquestionably black.

Her widow's cap, in the full fashion of the day, almost hid her glorious hair, but here and there a stray curl of auburn forced its way on to her forehead, curving like a tiny tongue of flame upon her dead-white face. The very colorlessness of the oval contour accentuated the blackness of the tired eyes and the brows above and the red fulness of the lips of her small mouth. The nostrils of her little nose were highly arched, and moved sensitively as a question or a word struck home, but otherwise the lovely face, reproduced in all the weekly papers, and scanned by millions of curious eyes, remained impassive. That her life hung in the balance seemed of little moment to her beside the daily staring of the inquisitive crowd, and the glaring publicity afforded to her unhappy married life.

With a grave, grateful smile, which hovered for an instant round her lips, and a pathetic look from her weary eyes, she dumbly thanked the great Q.C. for his splendid speech on her behalf, and then she relapsed once more immobile into the chair in the dock between the grim guardians of her person.

Slowly, and with a stern, unemotional face, the Attorney-General rose, exercising the right of his office to have a last word on behalf of the Crown, and in a cold, measured voice he recapitulated the damning evidence—the incarnation of the Avenger of Death. Each sentence fell like a drop of ice-cold water upon the enthusiasm aroused by the speech for the defence, and his metallic voice, harsh from suppressed emotion and a desire to do justice at the same time to his duty and the prisoner, adduced fact after fact, logically arrayed, which affected the straining ears and palpitating hearts of the listeners far more than any outburst of eloquence, any tirade of partisanship, could possibly have done. It was as though each calm, cold word was the far-off echo of the wretched woman's death-knell.

The court was crowded with friends who had frequented the Jerninghams' house, seeking emotion from the sight of a social sister on the rack, and ready in the main to take one side or the other, according as the verdict should go. They had dined with Montagu Jerningham, not because they had liked him particularly, but because he had given admirable dinners, and the music at his house had always been so good. Helen Jerningham had been adored by the men privately, and the women publicly, but behind her back many a jealous word and thought had been flung by the latter at her beauty and her voice. Still, it had always been a house to dine at, and the Jerninghams, or, rather, the wife, had always been counted an addition to any party. So society was proportionately horrified from esprit de corps to find itself involved in such a middle-class scandal as a poisoning case. It was inclined to resent it bitterly—at least, the feminine section of decorous dowagers and outshone ingenues was; and it blamed itself the more for having received Helen Jerningham with open arms. For she had not, they consoled themselves, originated from out their select circles.

Five years previously she had flashed like a brilliant, fiery meteor, across the social sky in the season, and had instantaneously become the rage. No one had stopped to inquire her origin; her voice had been her passport. She had made her debut at a ballad concert, and scored one of those extraordinary successes which so seldom fall to the lot of an artist; and within a month hostesses were tumbling over each other to engage Helen Stanton and her marvellous contralto for their parties.

Of all, no one was more completely carried away than Montagu Jerningham, the well known connoisseur, dilettante, and lover of music. A man close on forty, and with all the artistic propensities of a notorious free-liver, he had always steered clear of the shoals of matrimony, until just before Helen Stanton's appearance upon the social stage, when—whether from a desire to settle down, or from the prospect of more money to spend on art treasures—he had become engaged to the rather elderly heiress of the wealthy Lord Paignton. But so outrageous and undisguised had been his conduct after Helen's debut that the old peer had angrily insisted upon breaking off the match, leaving him free to press on his middle-aged courtship. Yielding to sheer insistence and force of will, by the end of the season Helen had consented to become his wife, and they had been married almost immediately.

At first their life had been happy enough, and she had striven to make him a good wife; but it did not take long for her to prove the pettiness of his nature and to fathom the coarseness of his mind. Soon he on his side had tired of his new toy, his latest objet d'art, and regretted his freedom; and children had brought his discontent to a climax. More responsibility and less money to spend galled his mean nature, and his wife soon learnt to regret on her side her youthful error of judgment. His whole time at home was spent in nagging at her in furious outbursts of jealousy against any man who came to the house, and at times he had not refrained from using actual violence. Life with him had by degrees become almost intolerable, and she had seriously thought of separating from him, but she had always hoped for better things, and for the sake of her children had postponed any final step until—well, until his death.

Though she had always kept a bold front to the world, little by little, principally through his conduct to her in public, their domestic relations had become the public property of their friends, and in many a West-end boudoir and drawing-room, to say nothing of club smoking-rooms, they had often of late come under discussion. Then had come the tragedy, and society had crowded to the Old Bailey, the modern Golgotha of malefactors.

Such thoughts of the past even in the tense present were subconsciously darting in and out of the minds of many of those in court, brooding a sympathy with the woman in the dock, whether guilty or not guilty. But in on them broke the clear, cold voice, as it went on incisively, never betraying emotions or rising above its original pitch, as the Attorney-General marshalled his points, grim and black, when stripped of sentiment and sympathy.

He did not speak for long, simply recapitulating the facts adduced in the evidence of the last five days, and pointing out where Sir Patrick O'Brien's speech had fallen short in point of refutation, and where it had erred on the side of emotion and rhetoric.

"This, gentlemen of the jury," he concluded, after having addressed them for an hour and a half, "is briefly the case for the prosecution. I have endeavored not only to be brief, but also to put the facts to you without prejudice. Believe me, it is not my wish that the wretched woman in the dock should pay the penalty of her crime, but justice demands it, and I am here as the representative of the law which demands justice. These are the facts, and I hand over the responsibility into your keeping. Find your verdict without fear or favor, and if any reasonable doubt exist remember that it is the prisoner's right to be accorded the benefit."

The Attorney-General sat down, white despite the warmth of the court, and the judge began to arrange his papers finally as he cleared his throat to sum up.

Caton Bramber groaned. He had realised how the Attorney-General's cold logic and clear statement of the case, which his own feelings made him revolt from, must effect the jury.

His leader leant over to him, and whispered:

"The worst sort of speech, scrupulously fair and even generous, but it will carry more weight with the jury for that very reason. If only Benson had made an impassioned speech we should have been certain of winning. It all depends on the judge now."

"Gentlemen," began the judge, readjusting his glasses and peering at the jury through them, "it is my unhappy duty to charge you in this peculiarly painful case, and to ask you to decide whether the prisoner at the bar is guilty or not guilty. In the first place, it is my pleasure to say that never before since my elevation to the bench has it fallen to my lot to hear more able or suitable speeches than those of the Attorney-General and Sir Patrick O'Brien. The speech which you have just listened to seems to be the model of what such a speech should be—short, concise, stripped of rhetoric, and adhering strictly to facts, not striving after a conviction for conviction's sake, but adducing the accumulation of evidence, and even ceding any grave point at issue, if not sufficiently established. On the other hand, Sir Patrick O'Brien has left no device of rhetoric, no power of pleading, no method of forcing sympathy untried, while at the same time dealing with the facts in the most masterful fashion. But unfortunately, gentlemen, I am here in the invidious position of having to strip off all devices of rhetoric and to eschew all use of sympathy. My duty is simply to give you the facts and to direct you upon the law. The latter is quite simple. If the prisoner at the bar is guilty, she is guilty of the foulest crime in the calendar, and is liable to the utmost penalty of the law. If she is not guilty, she is a much wronged woman, and must instantly be set free. There is no intricate point of law involved in the case. That is all plain sailing—guilty or not guilty, with their alternative extremes.

"As to the facts, the case seems to me a very simple one, and to rest upon one point only. Did the prisoner or did the prisoner not know, when she administered the fatal dose to her husband, that it was loaded with poison? That she did administer the fatal dose with her own hands admits of no doubt. Now let me recapitulate the facts in brief."

Then the judge began to go over the story of the case. How on the fatal morning in May Mrs. Jerningham had found a registered parcel on the breakfast table addressed to her, and had opened it. It was found to contain a bottle mounted in a silver stand for the dressing-table. The bottle itself was a well-known one containing "Brand's Saline Powder," an old-established proprietary article, recommended, amongst other things, for headaches, and much used for that purpose in fashionable circles. No note was enclosed with it, but Mrs. Jerningham did not seem to think anything of that. An oversight, her counsel suggested, and she expected one later on by post. That morning Mr. Jerningham was very crapulous, and his wife proposed a dose of the "saline powder." He consented, asking where the bottle had come from. Her answer was that "she had bought it," as she had not wished, according to her own statement, to arouse his jealousy by saying that she did not know. She mixed the drink herself in a glass of water, brought by the butler, and he drank it. Shortly afterwards he was taken very ill, and the doctor was sent for. Mr. Jerningham, however, expired before he could arrive, but before expiring he was overheard to say to his wife, "You've done for me at last," and would not allow her to come near him while he remained conscious. The bottle of powder was found to be strongly impregnated with cyanide of potassium. That Mr. Jerningham had died of cyanide of potassium poisoning there was no question, and it had certainly been administered to him by his wife. The question was whether she knew that the salts were impregnated with poison.

The judge went on to dwell upon the other points in the case, paying particular attention to the unhappy marital relations of Mr. and Mrs. Jerningham, not seeking in any way to exculpate him, but pointing out that such a state of affairs might induce, though it could not justify, murder. The hand-writing evidence as to the address was, as usual, conflicting, and, at best was only secondary or corroborative evidence, so it might be dismissed as cancelling itself. The theory of the defence was that the packet was sent by some enemy of Mrs. Jerningham, with a view to poisoning her, but little or no evidence had been produced to back up this theory. On the other hand, the post-office official who had registered the parcel remembered two peculiar facts—that the lady who had registered it had worn a very thick veil, and that she had red hair. In reply to this the defence had asked if anyone who desired secrecy would have registered the parcel at all, thereby drawing attention to themselves, but it was his duty to point out that even the cleverest criminal usually gave themselves away by some stupid oversight. Again, the prisoner's maid swore that her mistress never wore veils, and had never to her knowledge possessed one, but at how many shops in London could they not be purchased? Then there was the prisoner's own statement that she had bought it herself, which, though speciously accounted for, was very prejudicial. It had not been definitely proved, on the other hand, where the bottle and silver stand had been purchased, but they were standard articles, and could be bought almost anywhere without attracting attention. They might even have been laid aside for months, and, perhaps, not originally bought with the intention of murder at all. As to the poison itself, the prosecution had proved that cyanide of potassium was easily obtainable, and was often used for cleaning jewellery, of which the prisoner had a large quantity. Too much reliance must not be placed upon the maid's denial that she ever used it. There were, too, other common purposes for which it was used. Thus the judge continued for just over an hour, summing up in a self-satisfied manner, sweeping away all theories, and sticking closely to the facts, which, in their nakedness, made Sir Patrick O'Brien groan in his seat.

"There are ways of putting things," he murmured to his junior; "and this is deadly—damning."

Caton Bramber nodded moodily as the judge concluded his solemn charge, and the jury began to file out of the dock.

For close on an hour the spectators sat huddled together in silent suspense, glad of each other's company in the gloom of the old court. Seldom has the Old Bailey looked more grim and solemn, and awe was in every heart. The dock was empty, the bench was empty, the seats of the counsel were empty. But the rest of the court was packed.

Just before midnight there was a stir, and the various counsel and officials hurriedly made their way back to their seats.

The judge followed, and the black cap, conspicuous on his desk, sent a thrill through the breathless court.

Then the jury filed into the box one by one, with pale, anxious faces, and took their seats with eyes averted from the dock.

Last of all, the prisoner, pale but brave, was brought up from below, and once more put into the dock, where for three days she had stood passively fighting for her life.

Then a silence fell.

"Are you all agreed upon your verdict?" came the familiar formula of the clerk of arraigns.

"We are," said the foreman, in a voice choked with emotion.

"Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?"

"Guilty!" was the answer, in little more than a hasty whisper; "but we wish to recommend her to mercy."

A murmur of protest rose from the back of the court, which almost instantly gathered volume. By a great effort silence was restored, the judge angrily threatening to have the court cleared.

Then he motioned the attendants to lead the prisoner forward, and the clerk of arraigns again spoke.

"Prisoner at the bar, have you anything to say why you should not be sentenced according to the law?"

In reply came the clear contralto voice, which had won London, ringing clear and true through the dim court:

"Nothing, my lord, except that I am not guilty—Not Guilty!"

The whole court was profoundly moved by this outburst, with the exception of the judge, who motioned sharply for silence as he arranged the black cap on his wig.

There was a fascination in the simple action, and the eyes of all were glued upon the little square of black, placed corner-wise on the judge's head.

There was a catch in the throats of the men, and the women began to weep hysterically.

At length the judge spoke, turning towards the white-faced woman in the dock with a stern expression.

"Helen Jerningham," he said, in a measured voice, which seemed to cut its way into every heart in the court, "a jury of your fellow-countrymen has found you guilty of the foulest act in the whole category of crime. You have been convicted—and I consider that no other verdict could have been reasonably brought in on the overwhelming evidence offered against you—of having poisoned him whom you promised to love, honor, and obey, yet, at the same time, you have been recommended to mercy. No provocation could lessen the guilt of such an awful crime, and, though the recommendation shall be forwarded to the proper quarter, I beg of you to make your peace with Almighty God, and can hold out to you little hope of any alteration of the sentence of the court. And that is that you be taken from the place where you now stand to the place whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, and may God have mercy on your soul."

"Amen," came solemnly from the chaplain's lips.

In the body of the court there was tense silence and bated breath.

Outside the great clock struck midnight with a harsh, clanging note, which seemed to go through and through everybody in the court.

While the judge had been pronouncing sentence, the prisoner had stood erect at the front of the dock, unsupported and facing the man who was dooming her to disgrace and a felon's death.

When he had finished she stood for an instant as though about to speak. Then she turned round slowly and silently, with no sign but a slight stately inclination of her head, and rapidly disappeared down the narrow stairs.

Thus the world saw the last of Helen Jerningham in all her radiant beauty.

As the judge left the bench a murmur of protest again rose in court, accompanied by sobs, and outside a hoarse roar of disapproval and disgust could be heard, announcing the fact that the verdict was known to the mob in the street.

Then a sudden vivid flash of lightning illuminated the weird scene, followed by a reverberating peal and crash of thunder, and the rain began to fall in big, heavy drops.