Читать книгу The Long Lane's Turning - Hallie Erminie Rives - Страница 6

The dark was falling over the court-room. A lurid ray of the setting sun gleamed redly on the dust-streaked window panes, and struggled disconsolately with the melancholy gleam of the oil lamps that an awkward attendant with creaking foot-leather had laboriously lighted in their wall-brackets. Their pale radiance gleamed on the painted faces of dead jurists that looked down from fly-specked canvases on the walls and was reflected from the mass of moving, living faces that filled the room, whose eyes gazed alternately at the Judge's vacant seat, and at the empty railed space that had penned in the restless jury now considering their verdict in an upper room—to return again and again to the spot where sat the man over whose dingy case a medley of voices had declaimed and wrangled throughout that southern spring day.

He sat slouched in his chair, his narrow, faded-blue eyes, strained and frightened, fixed on the empty jury-box, his uncertain hand lifting from time to time to give a swift, furtive touch to his collar or a thrust to his wiry, sand-coloured hair. In the pallid lamp-light the hard sneer that had curved his lips during the dragging trial had faded and his face seemed all at once piteous and younger.

To a stranger there would have seemed little in the circumstances to inspire the popular interest the full room betokened. The accused was a rough sawyer, known to his fellows of the logging camp as "Paddy the Brick," with a history of sluggishness and inebriety behind him. The crime of which he stood charged was the theft of a comrade's earnings, the story merely one of those sordid dramas of menial life which were so familiar. The evidence, though purely circumstantial, was, to a casual eye, sufficiently conclusive.

Yet in the minds of most of those who had filled the dingy court room during the two days just passed, there had been until the last hour a general expectation that the man would be cleared. This had been based upon nothing save the common knowledge that his counsel was Harry Sevier.

The latter had never failed to justify the expectations that had habitually heralded his doings. Young, likable, perfectly equipped and knowing his southern world, he had returned, after a half dozen years of foreign schooling, to step into a social niche readily accorded him by those who had seen little of him since boyhood. His grey eyes and crisp, dark beard, had been distinguishing marks of forebears whose lives had been lived in that neighbourhood and who had left their vivid impress upon the institutions of their time; statesmen, diplomats and soldiers had been of that line, and he himself, with his characteristic mannerisms, his unimpeachable grooming, his nice observance of the social code, had come to be regarded as the perfect pattern of his type. Left an orphan at an early age, he had inherited a comfortable property and the income of a city block, and he spent the money judiciously, if lavishly. His Panhard was the swiftest car in town, as his offices were the most sumptuous, though ostentatiously simple in appointment. He had a Japanese valet, and the "at homes" which he occasionally gave in his bachelor apartment, though they might be dominated "pink teas" by the envious unbidden, were affairs to which an entrée was a hallmark. He maintained also a shooting-box on an upper slope of the Blue Ridge—a comfortable bungalow set in a hundred acres of wilderness—whither of autumns he and a dozen other choice spirits were wont to fare for a fortnight's tramping and fishing, sleeping on pungent hemlock boughs and eating homely food cooked by the single negro servant who lived there as caretaker. He had a gift for private theatricals—he was in constant demand of the Amateur Dramatic Club—and had more than a dilettante appreciation of music and art.

As regards his profession, he had injected into the somewhat cut-and-dried legal life of the old Capital an unusual and winning element of personality and a method at variance with established usage. His very eccentricities had set him apart from the mass, who were so glamoured with the sordid things of life; and the apparent contempt for material reward with which he defended poor and unknown clients as readily as rich and influential ones had its appeal to a class which possessed imagination and ideals. There had seldom been a case in which he had not successfully employed a curious subterranean logic—an apparently wilful insistence upon what seemed at first glance the unvital and immaterial—as a preliminary to a swift volte-face by which he turned the evidence at a new and unexpected angle of inference, and drove home the doubt with a brilliant display of oratory which captivated and—for the moment—convinced. In the four years in which he had stamped his individuality upon the town, not only had he never lost a criminal case, but he had created a certain conviction that a trial in which he figured would offer unmistakable elements of surprise and entertainment. So that the Criminal Court had come, in a way, to be the fashion, and the sombre chambers of justice saw many an assemblage that would have graced another sort of gathering.

Seldom, however, on this day had Harry's glance through his gold-rimmed eye-glasses wandered to the benches. With many there he had danced and golfed and bridged a hundred times. That, however, had been play; this, which had come to furnish another and quite as fascinating a sort of entertainment for them, was what he had chosen to make the more serious business—in so far as anything had been serious to him—of his life. So that his apparent disregard of this tribute to his personality for the sober business in hand, set over against the palpable frivolity of purpose that actuated the moiety of his audience, was, after all, only another indication to them of that fine sense of the fitting for which his world admired him.

Through the long morning the evidence had accumulated. One by one the merciless rivets had been driven home by the prosecuting attorney. The chain of evidence seemed flawless. And Harry Sevier's cross-examination had seemed scarcely more than perfunctory—had appeared somehow to miss that subtle and pregnant suggestion, that longer reach that heretofore had uncovered a hitherto unnoted but baffling doubt. Yet to those who knew him this but pointed to a more effective climax, a more engrossing sensation when the psychological moment should arrive and that appealing figure arise to insert the nicely calculated spoke in the wheel that, under the manipulation of the state's attorney, was rolling so swiftly in its ominous course; and on the back-benches, where sat a group of members of the Country Club, a whispered bet that the accused this time would not get off, found as usual no taker.

Evidence finished, the Court rose for a recess and Harry vanished through a side-door. Ten minutes later he was in his office. He vouchsafed no word to the clerk who sat in the outer room, but passed quickly through to the inner sanctum and closed and locked the door. The self-control bred of the strenuous occupation of the court room had slipped now from his face, leaving it suddenly strained. There were moist drops upon his forehead but his hands were arid and dry. He drew the blind to shut out the dull, grey, winter light and switched on the electric desk-lamp, and as he did so his eyes turned stealthily to the wall—to a locked cabinet whose key was in his pocket.

They turned again almost immediately to the baize-covered desk, where stood a plain, flat silver frame. It held a photograph of a portrait painted by Sargent which had been a salon favourite of a few years before. It was that of a young girl, seated and leaning intently forward from an arm chair. One hand was at her throat, the other dropped against the dusky shoulder of a dog stretched at her feet, and in her dark eyes was the eternal question which maidenhood asks of life. The lines of the face were cameo-like, and its southern beauty held that particular blend of ingeniousness and hauteur that is the result of the selection and inbreeding of generations. He stood still a moment, looking fixedly at it, his tongue touching his lips, before he crossed the room and turned the picture face-down upon the desk. He almost ran to the cabinet, unlocked its mirrored door, and took from it a bottle and a glass. He poured out a full goblet of the gurgling liquid and drank it off. Then he drew a long breath.

"Yes," he said, "I'll lie to myself no more! I've got to have it or throw up the sponge. It was my own once, that wonderful gift—whatever it is. Once it was my own brain, unhelped, that sent the glow to my heart and the fire to my tongue—till words had glorious colours and pictures painted themselves out of nothing. Once it was my own mind that saw a problem as clear as crystal. But I wasn't content. I wanted the short cut, and this showed me the way. And now—now—I've dropped the reins. It's not Harry Sevier that wins cases—it's that bottle!"

He began to stride up and down the narrow room; deep lines had etched themselves in the mobile face. "There was the Davencourt Case," he said to himself. "Not a shred of decent evidence to go on, and the whole court packed with prejudice, and he was as guilty as the devil. Yet I won! That was only a year ago, but I couldn't do it now—without what is in that decanter! All day yesterday I was heavy, my mind was as blank as a glacier. In the cross-examination I couldn't see a foot before me. But for this half-hour it would go hard with my client at the finish. As it is I wouldn't want a better foil than old Maitland for the prosecution. How he has slaved over his witnesses! I might have made some of the testimony that sounded so damning look like a cocked-hat if I had gone about it in his laborious way. For this 'Paddy the Brick' has plenty of friends, for all his crookedness. Half the logging-camp, apparently, chipped in to make up my retaining-fee. But pshaw! what's the use? I can get him off without it. In the last analysis it's feeling, not facts, that will sway them—feeling first, and then conscience. Every man of them must see himself, first shivering in the shoes of my thief, and then wearing the Judge's gown. When the psychological moment comes there is only to drive home the fallibility of circumstantial evidence and sear those twelve slow-going, matter-of-fact brains with a sense of the inherent perversity of appearances!" He smiled bitterly. "Especially," he added, "when there's whisky in the story. My client was drunk as a boiled owl when he was arrested—the stolen plunder might easily have been put on him, as he claims it was. The jury will understand that. There's probably not a man on it who doesn't get squiffy now and then."

He stopped in his walk and held up a hand against the light—it wavered ever so little. The draught had not yet brought its accustomed poise of nerve—its tense certitude, its mental glow and confidence. With an impatient gesture he turned again to the cabinet. "One used to do it," he said; "it will evidently take more to-day to restore our bold Turpin to his career on the highway!" He set the empty glass in its place with a short laugh.

"Curious," he said. "If he were innocent and drink had got him into this scrape, there would be a poetic justice in drink's getting him out!"

As he turned to lock the cabinet, the bell of his desk-telephone rang—three short, sharp rings. It was the clerk's warning that the court was about to reassemble. He drew a deep breath, and cast a quick glance at the little mirrored door. No tinge was rising in his colourless face, no warming tingle in his veins. His hands were uncertain and his fingers had an odd numbness. A keen, cold edge of anxiety touched him. Always heretofore, when he had sat with the black decanter, he had felt the wonderful, slow change—the gradual glow creeping through every nerve, the tightening of muscle and sinew as for a race, the thrilling, glad sense of renewed power and unleashed ability and the inevitable quivering rush of lambent images in his brain. The signal was too long in coming to-day—and he could not wait! His hand shook as it reached again to the little shelf. An instant he hesitated—for a breath, while the light twinkled from the deep-cut facets, he strove to remember whether he had drunk one glass or two. Then with a frown he poured the draught and drinking it off, locked the cabinet, and went hurriedly out.

When he entered the courtroom, the wide space had filled again and the State's Attorney had opened his address—a brief one, icily emotionless and rigidly exact—the very background upon which so often Harry Sevier's winged words had spelled victory for a cause prejudged as lost. And he was to reply—with the final speech for whose inspiration he had fled to that locked cabinet in the darkened inner-office. Paddy the Brick listened with the look of some trapped thing gazing at its captor, sometimes turning toward his counsel a furtive wavering glance that was blent equally of dread and dog-like appeal. These glances were unreturned. Harry Sevier sat motionless, his eyes straight before him.

But behind that mask Harry's thought was turning and turning upon itself. The sudden sharp edge of anxiety that had caught him in his office had grown to a thriving fear. His ally was failing him. The master, whose upper hand he had just acknowledged—whose aid had been so freely given him in really vital moments—was forsaking him at the turn of a wretched, second-rate case of common thievery! He realised it with a sickening sense of wonder that mingled with a dull anger at the littleness of the issue, and through the confused mist of his mind his inner ear seemed to hear a far-distant sardonic laughter—as though the Djin of the bottle laughed in the locked wall-cabinet at his dismay.

He rose to speak for the defence with an icy clog upon his faculties, while beneath that frozen surface the something that had been shackled reared and struggled vainly. Vocabulary, cunning of phrase, and logical sequence of argument had not deserted him; he realised this with a blind rage that seemed with a singular separateness to lie outside of himself—to associate itself strangely with the prisoner. But the persuasion that had so often checkmated justice, the calculated force, the insinuating tactfulness, the living, warm appeal that had had their way in the past were absent. He had a curious feeling of duality, as though two Harry Seviers had suddenly and painfully drawn apart—the one whose measured voice was speaking, and the other which clamoured and appealed, conscious only of its own deadly smother and of the despairing face of the man with the wiry sand-coloured hair who sat slouched in his chair beside him.

The roomful seemed very still. The Judge was looking at him fixedly, through bowed horn-glasses set far down on his nose. Harry was aware that in the countenance of the state's attorney puzzle and a stealthy relief struggled together. With desperate narrowness he watched the faces of the jury for a sign, a tentative withdrawal of stolidity that betokened a quickened and awakening interest. But they sat moveless and impassive. There was a last hideous pause, in which he thought the foreman suppressed an incipient yawn, when his own brain refused further struggle. He knew that he had been betrayed. The door of human sympathy would not open—he had lost the magic key.

The reply of the State's Attorney was a mere résumé of the evidence. He had needed no more. The Judge's charge was brief. Then had come the stir of moving bodies and the buzz of whispers—the shuffling of feet as the Judge retired and the jurors filed out—and at length the painful hiatus with the red sunlight and the pallid lamps.

This was broken presently by three measured raps on the door of the jury-room, which, as the Judge re-entered, opened to admit the jurors. They were quickly polled and the verdict given—guilty. The sentence followed immediately.

With the fateful words Harry Sevier turned his eyes, almost as if suddenly awakening from sleep, upon the court-room, and met across the moving benches a woman's concentrated and wondering look. She was Echo Allen, the original of the portrait whose photograph lay face-down upon his office desk. The neutral-tinted presentment, however, had been far from realising the concrete flush of sensuous beauty of its living original, with her straight lithe frame, her hair all a wash of warm russets and sunny golds, framing a face perfect in contour and with a complexion as soft as a moth's wing. And the beauty of this was now deepened, if possible, by the shadow upon it of puzzled pain and inquiry. An instant the gaze between them hung, then it broke as she turned away, gathering her white furs about her throat with a slow, hesitant gesture. With the sudden stab of shame and humiliation that rushed through him—for he had not seen her there before that moment—something seemed to break, too, in Harry's brain; it was the rigid lock which had been somehow put upon his faculties. The emptying room felt all at once a furnace, and little jerking shocks, like tiny electric currents, were running over him, prickling to the tips of his fingers. Intoxication was upon him, sudden and overwhelming, but he did not recognise it. He had never been drunk, in the sense popularly understood. He had always regarded with wondering distaste the occasional abject surrender of mind and body to the effect of alcohol with which he was familiar in men of his class, and the vulgar spree filled him with disgust. He was nicely abstemious at his club and he had never entered a saloon in his life. His indulgences, deeper and more and more frequent as they had grown of late, had been hidden behind the shades of his inner office, and the liquor he had drunk there he had never carried in his legs. For him these cloistered hours had meant no harrowing aftermath of remorse, no shrinking memory of license or ribaldry, but only the strange mental exaltation that had borne him to success. He sat now outwardly calm and collected, but mentally in an odd confusion, grasping at strange alert suggestions that were thronging about him in a lurid phantasmagoria.

He came to his feet with a start, suddenly aware that the slouching figure beside him had arisen at the heavy touch of the sheriff's hand. He took a step forward, the lawyer for a moment again uppermost, the perplexed mind groping for the conventional expression of professional regret. But he did not speak. Instead, as the narrow, red-rimmed eyes stared for a breath into his, Harry's outstretched hand fell at his side and a painful blur swept across his vision. His unsober, kaleidoscopic mind had opened to something that lay naked and anguished beneath the haggard face of the prisoner, something no longer glossed by sullen scowl and sneering bravado—a concrete fact, perturbing and vaguely horrifying, which would not express itself in mental symbols.

With hands clenched and a face like a sleepwalker's, Sevier crossed the emptying room to the side door, where his motor now waited. "Anywhere, Bob," he said thickly, "but go like the devil till I tell you to stop, if it's a thousand miles!"

As the burnished mechanism shot into pace and the cool wind stung his face, the early arc-lights above the roadway swelled to great pallid moons tangled in a net of stars, and in their yellow lustre the thing he had seen in the prisoner's face suddenly shouted itself to his brain. He flung up an arm as though to ward a blow.

"He wasn't guilty!" he gasped. "He never did it, by God!"