1 Next morning, Saturday, after breakfast, a very subdued Jimmy and Mollie broke the news of their formal engagement. To both of them the events of overnight, remembered in the prosaic day, seemed curiously out of perspective. They had, they decided, "gone off the deep end"; and, being rather casual young people, left it at that, content to enjoy the happiness which their emotional plunge had brought them.
Jimmy, of course, changed his original plan of returning to town by the evening train. The usual notice for the "Daily Telegraph" was drafted, Clyst Fullerford and the baronet communicated with in two conventional letters, and the inevitable bottle of champagne broached for luncheon.
Though Julia did not share that bottle, the engagement was like a draft of wine to her mentality. She felt that the alliance of the Wilberforces with the Fullerfords could only benefit her secret schemes; and, strong in that feeling, put all cerebral turmoils away. On Saturday afternoon, quite undisturbed by the swish and pat from the tennis-court, she worked two hours, and on Sunday morning, three.
Aliette, delighted though she was at her sister's obvious happiness (for some time past she had guessed that only her own peculiar position could be hindering Mollie's chance of matrimony), found it hard to restrain a vague jealousy, a trace of petty resentment. Soon Mollie would be a married woman. Whereas she----
And in Aliette's lover the resentment was tenfold stronger. The utter legality and social correctness of the whole procedure infuriated him. It took all his self-control to make semblance of congratulating the "lucky couple." His overnight absorption in a "vulgar murder-case" seemed absurd. Every time he looked at Aliette, graceful on the tennis-court or dignified across the dinner-table, he said to himself: "If only we could be 'engaged,' if only we could be legally married."
But Monday morning--the two men traveled to London together, leaving Julia at her anvil and the sisters surreptitiously planning trousseaux--brought back the nervous excitement of Friday night with a rush. No sooner had Ronnie arrived at Pump Court than Benjamin Bunce--a little soured by the setback suffered in the civil courts, yet tolerably optimistic about the new criminal work--informed him that Mr. John Cartwright had been on the telephone twice before ten o'clock and would be glad of a conference as soon as possible.
"It's about this shooting case at Brixton. Perhaps you've read about it, sir," confided Benjamin; and Ronnie's heart leaped at the confidence.
At twelve o'clock precisely the clerk announced the solicitor, who came in clutching an armful of the Sunday papers, which he flung down on the barrister's table with a curt "Here you are. Here's your murder at last."
For John Cartwright, John Cartwright was phenomenally moved. A man of five-and-fifty, domed of forehead, bald of pate, his black pupils--which possessed the inclination to squint--prominent under rimless eye-glasses of peculiar magnification, he had those thin, unemotional lips, those bony, unemotional hands, which are so often found in the legal profession. But to-day the unemotional lips twitched, and the bony hands were almost feverish in their excitement as they drew a battered pocket-book from the tail of a battered black coat, fumbled for an envelope, and handed it over.
"Read what's in that," said John Cartwright, "and see if it isn't a plum."
"That" turned out to be a letter from the millionaire editor of the "Democratic News," a new Sunday illustrated paper devoted almost exclusively to those readers whom unkind journalists describe, when they foregather with one another, as "the father-of-the-family public."
Bertram Standon--he had so far refused two titles and owned one Derby winner--was apparently much exercised over "this unfortunate woman, Mrs. Towers." "I feel convinced," he wrote to his friend, Sir Peter Wilberforce, Bart., who had turned the letter over to his partner, "that she is more sinned against than sinning; and in the cause of honest justice, no less than in the cause of honest journalism, I have decided that--should the coroner's court bring in a verdict of wilful murder against her or the ex-sailor, Fielding--I will put all my personal resources, and all the resources of my paper, at their disposal. Will you therefore have the case watched on my behalf, and, should the verdict go as I am afraid it will, take any steps you consider necessary."
"A stunt, I should imagine," decided Cartwright, "and not a very new stunt at that. Bottomley, you may remember, once did the same thing. Still, it may not be a stunt. Standon's a curious fellow. Sometimes his heart gets away with his brain. It certainly has in this case."
"You think Lucy Towers and Fielding guilty then?"
"Not a doubt, I should say. Still, that's not our affair. Our job is to give Standon as good a run as we can for his money. The inquest, I see, has been adjourned for a week. When it comes on again you'll have to go down."
"Can't I see the prisoners beforehand?"
"Better not, as I take our instructions."
"But we might get them off at the inquest."
"Where would Bertram Standon's stunt come in if we did?" said John Cartwright satirically, and so closed the interview.
2
During the week which preceded the adjourned inquest on William Towers, Bertram Standon held his journalistic hand; and--Fleet Street being momentarily occupied with the controversy of "Submarines v. Battleships"--no further details of the tragedy became available.
Reperusing the week-end papers of an evening, it seemed to Ronnie that the case against the woman--whose likeness to Aliette waned and waned the more one scrutinized her photograph--looked black enough. Apparently she had shot her husband during an altercation in another man's room. The other man, a sailor who had lost both his arms in the war, was her cousin, and--the reports suggested--her lover.
All the same, the "vulgar murder-case" continued to excite both his personalities: the magisterial Cavendish because of a curious inward conviction--the conviction he had voiced to Wilberforce--that "the woman was no murderess": and the imaginative Wixton because if the coroner's jury found her guilty he might at last get his chance--slim though that chance appeared--of a big forensic victory.
Night after night, therefore, Caroline Staley, who, in the absence of her mistress, had relapsed into the perfect bachelor housekeeper, completely idle from ten to four, and completely assiduous for the rest of the time, left her master at work in the little sitting-room of the "ridiculous flat," studying--with his mother's own concentration--first in his red "Gibson and Weldon," and thereafter at length, the reports of Rex v. Lesbini, of Rex v. Simpson, of Rex v. Greening (in which it is definitely held that, though the sight of adultery committed with his wife gives sufficient provocation for a husband to plead manslaughter, the major accusation must hold good if the woman be only mistress of the accused), and of any other case that might, by the vaguest possibility, have some bearing on the problematic defense of Lucy Towers.
3
On the Saturday, Ronnie, as usual, went down to Daffadillies. Mollie had returned to Clyst Fullerford. Julia and Aliette, informed of the new work, were enthusiastic.
"It'll be a public prosecution, I suppose?" asked Julia.
"Of course. All murder cases are conducted by the director of public prosecutions. But I haven't got the brief yet."
"Not even a watching brief?" put in Aliette.
Ronnie laughed. "Where did you pick up that phrase?"
"In the newspapers, I suppose." Aliette, remembering from whose lips she had last heard the expression, blushed faintly. And next morning, Sunday, the front page of the "Democratic News" again reminded her of Hector.
Standon, nervous lest some of his titled brethren in Fleet Street should appropriate the stunt, devoted his Napoleonic leader-page to "The Quality of Mercy."
Standon dared not, of course, comment on a case which was still "sub judice," but Standon could and did dare to comment at great length on "one-sided justice," on the delays demanded by the police at inquests, on the hardships suffered by those who could not afford "our overpaid silks," and on the crying need of a "public defender."
"Our 'hanging prosecutor,'" howled Standon, "is paid by the state. Who pays for the defense of his victims? Why, even as I write, there lie in Brixton Prison a man and a woman who--for all we know--may be as innocent of the charge brought against them as I am. Next week they will be haled before the coroner. The police will have sifted every vestige of evidence against them. But who will have sifted the evidence in their defense? No one! I ask the great-hearted British people, whose generosity to the weak and unhappy never fails, whether this is justice or a travesty of justice; whether, in any properly constituted community, the very finest legal brains obtainable would not have been placed immediately and without any fee whatsoever entirely at the service of these two unfortunates, who now lie in a felon's cell, hoping against hope, if they are innocent, as I believe them to be innocent, that some public-spirited person will come forward and give them, out of mere charity, money. Money! The shame of it!! The shame of it!!!"
The "silly season," when newsprint gasps for "copy" as a drowning man for air, was already on Fleet Street; and Standon's article, duly garnished with photographs of Lucy Towers, of Bob Fielding, the ex-sailor, and of "Big Bill" Towers, started a controversy which relegated both submarines and battleships to the editorial scrap-heap.
"Mark my words," said John Cartwright, calling for Ronnie on the Tuesday morning, "the Cairns case will be nothing to this one. If by any chance you were to get Lucy Towers off, you'd be a............