1 Hector Brunton tottered out of his car and up the steps into his chambers like a man in a palsy. Three clients were waiting in the outer office for consultations. He told Patterson: "Send them away. Get rid of them. Say I'm too ill to see anybody." Then heavily he sat down at his desk.
The shock of Maggie Peterson's arrest, climaxing emotion, was still on him. Definitely his experience knew himself defeated. "God!" he muttered, "another night--another night of the rack."
The previous night had been torment enough. Then he had thought: "I may fail. Cavendish may have something up his sleeve"; then he had seen only success in jeopardy; dreaded only the failure of his vengeance. But now--now he was beaten--worse than beaten--delivered up, body and soul, to the Furies.
The clerk came in to ask if he might go. "Yes," said Brunton; "go. Go as soon as you like." The clerk went out, leaving him alone; alone with his Furies.
The Furies showed him Aliette, infinitely fastidious, infinitely desirable; they showed him Renée, Renée who would even now be awaiting him; they showed Lucy, Lucy Towers, stubborn in her cell. "Don't let her go free from her cell," whispered the Furies. "You're not beaten yet. She did kill the man. Convict her, Hector Brunton. Convict her of manslaughter."
They showed him Cavendish, Cavendish gloating at the prospect of victory. "To be beaten," whispered the Furies, "to be beaten by Cavendish, by the adulterer who stole away your wife!"
But all the time Hector Brunton knew in his inmost soul that he had sought to compass the death of an innocent woman; that he had sinned against his own code, against the holy ghost of justice.
And gradually, terrifyingly, the reason of that sinning was brought home to him. He had sinned, not as a woman sins, lovingly, but for sheer hate. Out of his hatred for Cavendish he had plotted--as surely as any murderer--the death of Lucy Towers.
And suddenly, starkly, irresistibly, it was brought home to him that--even as he had plotted the death of Lucy Towers--so, and for the same hideous reason, he had plotted the social ruin of his own wife.
Till finally the ultimate pretext, the pretext of his love for Aliette, was stripped from him, and he saw that love in all its hideous nakedness, as lust--the savage sadic lust which had hounded him to crime.
David Patterson had long gone home; but Brunton sat on--alone in his chambers--alone with his conscience, naked before his God. His worldly house, the sure material legal house of his own making, had crashed, in that one second of time when he watched Lucy Towers step down from the dock, to ruin. The law, basis of work and life, lay--a tablet shattered to ten thousand fragments--at his feet. Ghosts--the palpable ghosts of those two women for the compassing of whose ruin he had invoked the law--sidled about the darkling room, terrifying him. He knew himself a prisoner--prisoner in the invisible house of God.
Was there no way out? No escape from God's house of conscience? Had he, abiding by the letter of man's law, forfeited--for all time--the merciful spirit of the law of God?
"Yes," said conscience, "there is one way out. One way, and one way only, of escape. Make reparation, Hector Brunton. Set both these women free."
Must he, then, give up everything--wife, vengeance, victory--because of this one damnable insistent whisper, this whisper of conscience that was driving him to madness?
And now, again, he saw the phantoms--phantom of Aliette and phantom of Lucy Towers. They were behind bars--bars--innocent women behind bars which he, Hector Brunton, had socketed home with his own hands.
At last, thought of those bars drove him into the night. King's Bench Walk lay deserted, chill-gleaming under autumnal trees. Leaves strewed it, swishing against his boots as he strode. "Autumn," thought Brunton. "Autumn! We've reached middle age, the year and I. And what have I garnered? Nothing."
Suddenly he realized whither his feet were carrying him; suddenly he found himself under the colonnade of Pump Court, at the door of his rival's chambers. The door was shut, the court deserted. Yet for a long time Brunton stood by the door; stood, as a man stands who waits for some sign, for an opening window or the gleam of a light. But no window opened, no light gleamed.
He came, hardly knowing how, out of the gloom of the Temple into the raw glare of empty Fleet Street. In front of him uprose the long fa?ade of the high courts, the courts where he had won fame and money. What did fame and money matter to him--to Hector Brunton, who, gaining the whole legal world, had lost his own soul?
2
Counsel for the defense, as he watched counsel for the prosecution make his way into court next morning, could almost feel sorry for the man. Brunton, the overbearing, overconfident Brunton, looked the veriest wreck of his old self. He tottered rather than walked to his seat. His eyes were dull, bloodshot; his hands trembled; his jowl twitched and twitched.
The judge had not yet arrived; and Ronnie's eyes, switching here and there about the packed court, suddenly envisaged, below the judge's dais, the "exhibits" of the prosecution: among them the revolver which had killed its man. More than once, in the last year, he, Ronald Cavendish, had known the desire to kill his man. But now, looking on the wreck which had been Brunton, he knew the desire dead. No longer could he even hate Brunton. The man was beaten--beaten.
Bunce, approaching, handed up a telegram: "Congratulations. Masterly. Feel confident of your success. Bertram Standon."
Ronnie's heart glowed at the penciled words. Already he saw success, fame, victory; already the sentences he would speak throbbed in his brain. And then, abruptly, the sight of Lucy Towers entering the witness-box for re?xamination recalled the fact that Brunton was still undefeated. The alternative charge of manslaughter had yet to be fought out between them!
The judge took his seat. The short re?xamination of Lucy Towers began--ended. Quietly she went back to the dock; quietly she took her seat by the blue-uniformed wardress.
"Robert Fielding!" called the constables on guard outside the doors.
The armless sailor, unskilled in law, had taken small comfort from the morning's papers. His face, shaved clean, was gray with apprehension; his whole body drooped as he made his way into the box. Ronnie could see pity written clear on the faces of the jury. The fat matron--she still wore her red hat--made a convulsive movement as if to assist, when the crier of the court lifted the Bible to the kiss of that trembling mouth. Even the two dour spinsters seemed moved.
Robert Fielding's tale of the happenings at Laburnum Grove on the afternoon of July 5 corroborated his cousin's in almost every detail. Yet he told it haltingly; only when Ronnie asked, "Have you any knowledge of the relations between Mrs. Towers and her husband?" did any certainty come into the low voice.
"Nobody except me," said Robert Fielding, "knows all that Lucy had to put up with from that fellow. He was always a wrong 'un, was Bill Towers. I looked after her all I could, but a cripple like me hasn't got much chance."
"Did you ever make any secret of your affection for your cousin?"
"No, sir."
"When you told James Travers that your cousin's husband ought to be shot, what did you mean to imply?"
The sailor hesitated; and Ronnie, nervous of the one weakness left in his case, tried to prompt him. "When you told James Travers that Bill Towers ought to be shot, did you have any intention----"
But at that, the judge intervened--leading questions being barred in law; and Ronnie, a trifle annoyed with himself for the solecism, repeated his former query.
Again Fielding hesitated; then he said, self-excusingly: "When I made that remark, I made it as a good many of us who have been in the service do make it--in a general sort of way, meaning that Bill Towers was a bad lot, and that it wouldn't be any loss if somebody did shoot him."
"I see." Ronnie smiled; and a man on the jury, obviously an ex-service man, smiled with him. "Now, about the pistol--or rather the revolver. Can you tell us how long it had been in your possession?"
"Two years, I should say."
"Had it always been loaded?"
"Yes. Ever since I can remember."
"When did your cousin first know that you possessed this revolver?"
"Not until that afternoon."
"Which afternoon?"
"The afternoon she shot Bill Towers."
"One other point. James Travers told us that you said to him, 'I'd rather cut off my right hand than that Lucy should marry Bill Towers.' Did you ever make such a statement to James Travers?"
The sailor looked down, piteously, at his two empty sleeves. "I may have," he said. "But if I did, it must have been a long time ago."
"Before she married?"
"Yes, before she married."
"James Travers also told us that you said to him, when you showed him the revolver, 'This will cook Bill's goose for him.' Did you say that?"
"Yes." The answer was hardly audible. "He'd been knocking Lucy about--and I was mad with him."
"Was there any other reason why you were mad with him?"
"Yes, there was." And the sailor--fears momentarily forgotten--rapped out, so swiftly that even the judge could not stop him, "He drank, and he was carrying on with another woman. Everybody in the house knew about it."
On the hush which followed that statement--a statement confirmatory of the point which Ronnie, without specifically alleging it, had been trying to establish ever since his opening question to Maggie Peterson--fell the last question of Mr. Justice Heber: "Do you know, of your own knowledge, any woman other than his wife with whom the dead man was on terms of sexual intimacy?"
And Robert Fielding, looking squarely into those gleaming spectacles, answered, "Yes, my lord. With Maggie Peterson. Many's the time I've seen the blackguard a-sneaking into her room."
3
At two o'clock of the afternoon, in a court packed to suffocation point, Ronald Cavendish rose to begin his final speech for the defense of Lucy Towers.
Robert Fielding's testimony, unshaken in cross-examination, had been followed by more evidence, collected by Standon's assiduous reporters, as to the character of the dead man; and that evidence--Ronnie felt,--coupled with the arrest of Maggie Peterson, made the main issue, the issue of wilful murder, safe.
Nevertheless, the Wixton imagination in him was doubtful of the second issue, the issue of manslaughter. In England, the unwritten law did not run; and although, thanks to the press, the streets outside were black with people, with a mob hungry for news of the verdict, determined on his client's acquittal, Ronnie knew the difficulties of securing that acquittal too well for overconfidence.
Again he had spent the luncheon interval alone; praying--voicelessly--that his oratory might not fail; visualizing always those two dour-faced spinsters on the jury, and Mr. Justice Heber, having summed up in cold legal phraseology the bare facts of the case, awarding, on the jury's recommendation, the lenient sentence of a year's imprisonment.
In those few seconds of time before his speech began, Ronnie's imagination could almost hear the murmur of the mob without. The murmur flustered him. After all, Lucy had shot her husband. Between her, pale in the dock, and the dark cell of felony, stood only a dumb advocate, a fencer unskilled with the sword of the spoken word.
Till suddenly, standing there silent before Lucy's peers, it seemed to Ronnie as though all the emotions of the last year stirred in his heart, as though all that pity for womankind which Aliette had engendered in him fought for utterance at his lips. For one fleeting moment, his keen gaze swept the court, envisaging judge, jury, the motionless figure of his client, the constable and the wardress either side of her, the spectators standing two-deep round the closed doors, Benjamin Bunce, David Patterson, John Cartwright, Brunton. For one fleeting moment he thought of Brunton, and of the wrong which Brunton had done to the woman he loved. Then, gravely, quietly, feeling the sword of the spoken word quiver like a live blade at his lips, he engaged his enemy.
Sentence by calm sentence, Julia Cavendish's son--making scarcely a gesture, referring hardly to a note--traversed the statements of his enemy and of the witnesses for his enemy; sentence by grave sentence, he demonstrated to those twelve watchful faces, to the nine men and the three women in the jury-box, that the crime---if crime it were--had been committed on a sudden impulse, without motive, without malice, without premeditation.
"Members of the jury, if we except the evidence of Maggie Peterson--evidence which we now know to be one tissue of lies,--what proof have we of motive or of malice aforethought? No proof, no proof whatsoever. When counsel for the Crown dared to call my client an adulteress, on what did he base his foul allegation? On the word of a proved liar. I venture to tell him that, if any one fact has emerged from the evidence which he has seen fit to put before you, it is the fact of my client's fidelity to the blackguard whom she had the misfortune to marry."
At that, fearfully, the "hanging prosecutor" craned forward in his seat; and fearfully--as though it were of himself and not of the dead that Ronnie spoke--his bloodshot eyes glanced up at the set, stern face of counsel for the defense. But counsel for the defense deigned him never a glance. Terribly, counsel for the defense went on:
"My lord, members of the jury, he, counsel for the Crown, is a distinguished, perhaps our most distinguished advocate. Behind him are all the resources of the public purse, of the public power. Yet I, the humblest of pleaders, should not be doing my duty to my client did I not tell him that this prosecution to which he has thought fit to add the weight of his advocacy is a prosecution founded on false witness, bolstered on perjury, a prosecution which no just advocate would have dared to support."
With those words, unprofessional, unpremeditated--for now the sword of oratory had outlunged Ronnie's self-control, so that he spoke from his heart, careless of etiquette,--a shiver of excitement rippled the gray-wigged heads behind. The wigged heads nodded toward one another, whispering, "I say! Why the deuce don't Brunton protest!" But Brunton did not protest. And counsel for the defense spoke o............