Читать книгу The Right of Way — Complete - Gilbert Parker - Страница 9

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“When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you.” So Charley Steele’s eyes had said to a lady in the court room on that last day of the great trial. The lady had left the court-room dazed and exalted. She, with hundreds of others, had had a revelation of Charley Steele; had had also the great emotional experience of seeing a crowd make the ‘volte face’ with their convictions; looking at a prisoner one moment with eyes of loathing and anticipating his gruesome end, the next moment seeing him as the possible martyr to the machinery of the law. She whose heart was used to beat so evenly had felt it leap and swell with excitement, awaiting the moment when the jury filed back into the court-room. Then it stood still, as a wave might hang for an instant at its crest ere it swept down to beat upon the shore.

With her as with most present, the deepest feeling in the agitated suspense was not so much that the prisoner should go free, as that the prisoner’s counsel should win his case. It was as if Charley Steele were on trial instead of the prisoner. He was the imminent figure; it was his fate that was in the balance—such was the antic irony of suggestion. And the truth was, that the fates of both prisoner and counsel had been weighed in the balance that sweltering August day.

The prisoner was forgotten almost as soon as he had left the court-room a free man, but wherever men and women met in Montreal that day, one name was on the lips of all-Charley Steele! In his speech he had done two things: he had thrown down every barrier of reserve—or so it seemed—and had become human and intimate. “I could not have believed it of him,” was the remark on every lip. Of his ability there never had been a moment’s doubt, but it had ever been an uncomfortable ability, it had tortured foes and made friends anxious. No one had ever seen him show feeling. If it was a mask, he had worn it with a curious consistency: it had been with him as a child, at school, at college, and he had brought it back again to the town where he was born. It had effectually prevented his being popular, but it had made him—with his foppishness and his originality—an object of perpetual interest. Few men had ventured to cross swords with him. He left his fellow-citizens very much alone. He was uniformly if distantly courteous, and he was respected in his own profession for his uncommon powers and for an utter indifference as to whether he had cases in court or not.

Coming from the judge’s chambers after the trial he went to his office, receiving as he passed congratulations more effusively offered than, as people presently found, his manner warranted.

For he was again the formal, masked Charley Steele, looking calmly through the interrogative eye-glass. By the time he reached his office, greetings became more subdued. His prestige had increased immensely in a few short hours, but he had no more friends than before. Old relations were soon re-established. The town was proud of his ability as it had always been, irritated by his manner as it had always been, more prophetic of his future than it had ever been, and unconsciously grateful for the fact that he had given them a sensation which would outlast the summer.

All these things concerned him little. Once the business of the court-room was over, a thought which had quietly lain in waiting behind the strenuous occupations of his brain leaped forward to exclude all others.

As he entered his office he was thinking of that girl’s face in the court-room, with its flush of added beauty which he and his speech had brought there. “What a perfect loveliness!” he said to himself as he bathed his face and hands, and prepared to go into the street again. “She needed just such a flush to make her supreme Kathleen!” He stood, looking out into the square, out into the green of the trees where the birds twittered. “Faultless—faultless in form and feature. She was so as a child, she is so as a woman.” He lighted a cigarette, and blew away little clouds of smoke. “I will do it. I will marry her. She will have me: I saw it in her eye. Fairing doesn’t matter. Her uncle will never consent to that, and she doesn’t care enough for him. She cares, but she doesn’t care enough.... I will do it.”

He turned towards a cupboard into which he had put a certain bottle before he went to the court-room two hours before. He put the key in the lock, then stopped. “No, I think not!” he said. “What I say to her shall not be said forensically. What a discovery I’ve made! I was dull, blank, all iron and ice; the judge, the jury, the public, even Kathleen, against me; and then that bottle in there—and I saw things like crystal! I had a glow in my brain, I had a tingle in my fingers; and I had success, and”—his face clouded—“He was as guilty as hell!” he added, almost bitterly, as he put the key of the cupboard into his pocket again.

There was a knock at the door, and a youth of about nineteen entered.

“Hello!” he said. “I say, sir, but that speech of yours struck us all where we couldn’t say no. Even Kathleen got in a glow over it. Perhaps Captain Fairing didn’t, for he’s just left her in a huff, and she’s looking—you remember those lines in the school-book: