XII.
The finger of the dead man still pointed at Alethea. His ghastly eyes were fixed upon her. The chair of the juryman in front of him had sustained his weight in the same position in which he had fallen when the first shock of the idea that the witness had seen a spectre instead of the boy, alive and well, had thrilled through the room.
For a few moments it was a scene of strange confusion. The crowd rose from their seats, and surged up to the bar. New-comers were rushing in from the halls. Some one was calling aloud the name of the principal physician of the place. Many were clamoring to know what had happened. The judge’s voice sounded suddenly. “Look out for your prisoner, Mr. Sheriff!” he exclaimed sharply; for the officer still stood as if transfixed beside the dead man, on whose shoulder he had laid hold. No hand, however heavy, could rouse him from the slumber into which he had fallen.
The sheriff turned toward the prisoner. The proud mountaineer, keenly sensitive to an indignity, burst out angry and aggrieved. “I hain’t budged a paig!” he cried. And indeed he had not moved. “It’s jes’ ’kase you-uns set thar in jedgmint, an’ I hev ter set hyar an’ be tried, ez ye kin say sech ez that ter me!”
Harshaw had vehemently clutched his client’s arm as a warning to be silent. To his relief, he perceived that Gwinnan had not heard. He was absorbed in directing a physician to be called, and formally adjourned court until nine o’clock the following morning. The reluctant jurymen, quivering with excitement and consumed with curiosity as to the subsequent proceedings, were led off from the scene in charge of an officer,—himself a martyr to duty,—with many an eager backward glance and thought. The crowd hung around outside with unabated excitement. Often it effected an entrance and surged through the doors, to be turned out again by the orders of the physicians. Many climbed on the window-ledges to look through. The lower branches of the hickory-trees swarmed with the figures of nimble boys. The wind now was high. The boughs swayed back and forth with a monotonous clashing. Leaves continually fell from them like the noiseless flight of birds. The moon showed the pale, passionless sky; a planet swung above the distant mountains, burning with the steadfast purity of vestal fires; the inequalities of the hills and dales on which the rugged little town was built—very dark beneath the delicately illumined heavens—showed in the undulating lines of lighted windows, glimmering points stretching out into the gloom. Constantly the weighted gate clanged as men trooped into the court-house yard. The shadows seemed to multiply the number of the crowd.
Suddenly there was a cry: “He’s comin’! They’re bringin’ him! He’s comin’!”
The expectation had been so strong that the physician would pronounce it some transient paroxysm of the heart, which he was known to often suffer, that the crowd was stricken into a shocked silence to recognize the undertaker among the men coming out and bearing a litter on which the motionless figure was stretched. One glance at it, and there seemed nothing so inanimate in all nature. The moon, the trees, even the invisible wind, were endowed with redundant life, with identity, with all the affirmations of speculation, of imagination, in comparison with the terrible nullity of this thing that once was Peter Rood. It expressed only a spare finality.
It was strange to think he could not hear the wind blow, straight from the mountains, the dull thud of the many feet that followed him through the gate and down the street; could not see the moon which shone with a ghastly gleam upon his stark, upturned face. He was dead!
He was so dead that already his world was going on with a full acceptation of the idea. He had no longer an individuality as Peter Rood; he was only considered as a dead man. Considered as a dead man, he furnished the judge with a puzzle which irritated him. Gwinnan could not remember any case in which a man had died upon a jury, and he debated within himself whether this instance came under the statute leaving it to the discretion of the court, in the case of a sick juror, to discharge the jury and order a new one to be impaneled, or to excuse the juror and summon another in his place from the by-standers. He went into one of the lawyers’ offices, and turned over a few books in search of precedent.
The attorney-general utilized the respite. He had lingered at the scene for a time, animated by curiosity. But when one of the physicians who had been summoned to the court-house, returned to his office, after the vain efforts to resuscitate the man, he found the attorney for the State seated before the wood fire, his hands clasped behind his head, his feet stretched out upon the hearth, his chair tilted back upon its hind legs, waiting for him in comfortable patience.
There was no carpet on the floor. The small windows were lighted by tiny panes of glass. The hearth was broken in many places, but painted a bright red with a neat home-made varnish of powdered bricks mixed with milk, commonly used in the country. There were several splint-bottomed chairs, an easy-chair, and one or two tables; book-cases covered the walls from the floor to the ceiling. It was the doctor’s professional opinion that tobacco was the ruin of the country; on the high mantelpiece were ranged several varieties of pipe, from the plebeian cob and brier-root to the meerschaum presented by a grateful patient, all bearing evidences of much use.
Kenbigh looked up quietly as the owner of the appropriated quarters walked in. Dr. Lloyd was a tall, spare man of sixty odd, with a back that never bent, dressed punctiliously in black broadcloth and the most immaculate linen of an old-fashioned style. His thick hair was white. He wore a stiff mustache; his shaven chin was square and resolute; his features were singularly straight. His gray eye expressed great cleverness and goodness, but there was a refined sarcasm in the curl of his lips, and he affected a blunt indifference of manner, not to say brusqueness.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing, doctor,—nothing with my vitals, or I wouldn’t have trusted myself near you. The instinct of self-preservation is strong. I have come for some information.”
“An aching void in the regions of your brain, eh? Well, at your time of life that’s incurable.”
“I want you,” said the lawyer, his eyes roaming around the medical library, ranged upon the wall, with a gloating, gluttonous gleam at the idea of the feast of information within the covers of the volumes, “to lecture me, doctor.”
“Where’s your Medical Jurisprudence?”
“It doesn’t teach me all I want to know about ghosts.”
Surprise was something Dr. Lloyd was never known to express or imply. He sat looking at the visitor with his calm professional eye, as if it were the most habitual thing in the world for sane lawyers to come into his office at night, wanting to know about ghosts.
“I want to know all about absurd illusions,—in people of undoubted sanity.”
“Subject of some scope,” dryly remarked the doctor.
“I want to know all that you know about hallucinations, visions. I want an elaborate exposition of the visual apparatus as connected with the brain, and of the derangement of its nervous functions.”
“Upon my word, you’re a pretty fellow!”
“And then I want you to lend me all your books.” And once more he gazed around on the coveted treasures of the shelves.
One of the great logs had burned in two, the chunks falling forward upon the other blazing sticks. The doctor had made a move toward the tongs, but the lawyer arose, and with a sort of cumbrous agility kicked first one and then the other into the space between the dogs. Dr. Lloyd watched this proceeding with silent disapproval. Far be it from him to put his dapper old-fashioned foot-gear to any such purpose.
The warmth of the fire was grateful, for it had grown much colder without. The wind surged down the street like the passing of many feet, some tumultuous human rush. The fir-tree beside the door was filled with voices, sibilant whisperings, sighs. Clouds were scudding through the sky; Kenbigh could see them from where he sat listening to the doctor’s monologue. The moonlight lay on the old-fashioned garden without, all pillaged by the autumn winds,—the rose-bushes but leafless wands; the arbors, naked trellises; the walks, laid off with rectangular precision, showing what the symmetry of its summer guise had been, as a skeleton might suggest the perfection of the human form. The lights in the two-story frame house beyond—for the doctor’s office was in the yard of his dwelling and the garden lay a little to the rear—were extinguished one by one. A dog close by barked for a time, with echoes from the hills and depressions, and then fell to howling mournfully. The doctor talked on, now and then taking down the books to illustrate; marking the passages with a neat strip of paper in lieu of turning down a leaf, as Kenbigh seemed disposed to do. He piled the volumes beside his apt pupil on the candle-stand, and as the lawyer fell to at them he himself read for a time, as a light recreation, from a history in some twelve volumes. To a country gentleman of ample leisure and bookish habit, this lengthy work was but as a mouthful.
Dr. Lloyd rose at last, knocked the ashes out of his pipe upon the head of one of the fire-dogs, glanced at the absorbed lawyer, and remarked, “You’ll come over to my house to go to bed after a little more, won’t you?”
“Reckon so,” responded Kenbigh, without lifting his head.
The fire flared up the chimney in great white flames; they emanated from a lustrous, restless, pulsing red heart. The sparks flew. The faint and joyous sounds from the logs were like some fine fairy minstrelsy which one is hardly sure one hears. A sylvan fragrance came from the pile of wood in the corner, the baskets of chips, the pine knots.
The doctor left the room, opened the door and looked back.
“Don’t you set the house afire and burn up these books,” he said, with the first touch of feeling in his tones that night.
The results of the attorney-general’s vigil were abundantly manifest in his speech to the jury the following day. For that body was recruited by summoning another talesman in Rood’s place, and the trial perforce began anew; Gwinnan apparently thinking this alternative served better the ends of justice than to risk the delays and vicissitudes of again securing a competent jury. This decision encouraged Mink, who had been tortured by the fear that by some disaster the case would be continued to the next term. He was not now greatly perturbed by the strange turn which the attorney-general had contrived to give to Alethea’s testimony. Since Harshaw had found that any one claimed to have seen Tad after the report of the boy’s death he had felt confident of an acquittal, laying much stress on the necessity of proving the corpus delicti, as he phrased it; and Mink accepted his lawyer’s opinion and relied upon it. He had not been greatly affected by Rood’s fate, so absorbed was he by his own interests; but it was a moment of tense excitement when the testimony again reached the juncture at which, on the preceding day, the unfortunate juror had leaned forward and pointed at the witness, his question failing on his lips in the dumbness of death. Nothing further was elicited from Alethea except that she did believe in ghosts, but that she was sure she had seen Tad alive, albeit he had stood among the graves with a blanched face, disappearing in a moment, lost in the mist.
The whole testimony occupied much less time than on the previous day, and as the afternoon progressed it began to be apparent that the case would go to the jury before the court adjourned.
The surprise of the day was the speech of the attorney-general. It opened simply enough. He sought to show that it was impossible for Tad to be alive. The poor boy was doubtless at the bottom of the river. How could it be otherwise? Assume, as his learned opponent would have them believe, that he had swum ashore. Where was he now? The suggestion that he was in the custody of some enemy of the prisoner, who sought by concealing him to effect the incarceration of Reuben Lorey in the penitentiary for a long term, was so absurd that he hesitated to argue such a foolish position before so intelligent a body of men as the jury whom he had the pleasure of addressing. Who would, for revenge, encounter the hazards of such a scheme? The boy was as well known throughout the section as Piomingo Bald. Any chance glimpse of him by a casual visitor would fling the conspirators themselves into the clutches of the law, that would be loath to lightly loose its hold on such rascals. Who would voluntarily burden themselves with the support of an idiot? If anybody had found Tad, he would have been mighty quick to carry the boy back to old man Griff. Say that no one had detained him,—what then? He was an idiot, incapable of taking care of himself. If he were wandering at large, starving, half clad, would not some one have seen him besides Alethea Sayles, in all these weeks, gentlemen, in all these months? It was a remarkable story that the witness had told,—a remarkable story. (The counsel seemed to find fit expression of his sense of its solemnity by sinking his basso profundo to a thunderous mutter.) No one for a moment could doubt the sanity of that witness. She was evidently a girl of fine common sense; an excellent girl, too,—no one could for a moment doubt the truth of any word she uttered. The fact was, Alethea Sayles saw a strange thing that night. She thought she saw Tad. It was only his image, not himself. “The forlorn boy is dead, gentlemen,” he continued. “She saw the fantasy of her own anxious, overwrought brain. He was in her mind. She had pondered long upon him, and upon the plight of her lover, who had killed him. What wonder, then, that in the mist, and the flickering moonlight, and the lonely midnight, she should fancy that she saw him!”
He told the gaping and amazed jury that this was not an isolated instance. He mentioned other victims of hallucination; he detailed the strange experiences of Nicolai, of Spinoza, of Dr. Bostock, of Lord Londonderry, of Baron de Géramb, of Leuret, of Lord Brougham.
Harshaw, who had sat listening, with his hands in his pockets and his legs crossed, a smile of ostentatious derision upon his face, grew grave upon the mention of the last name. He had never heard of the others, but to attempt to bolster a theory of spectral apparition by this name, revered in the profession, was, he felt, a juridical sacrilege that should cause the attorney-general to be at the very least stricken from the rolls.
As Kenbigh went on, expounding the relative and interdependent functions of the brain and eye, the fine and subtle theories of spiritual and physical life, its vague boundaries, its unmeasured capabilities,—the deductions, the keen analysis of science, all reduced to the vernacular in the mouth of a man trained by years of practice to speak to the people,—Harshaw sat in blank dismay. He had never heard of any spiritual manifestation but the vulgar graveyard ghost, usually headless, stalking in its shroud to accomplish missions of vengeance upon the very ignorant in the deep midnight. But Kenbigh’s account of sundry ethereal-minded and mild-mannered spectres, with a preference for high company, singing, appearing at dinner-tables, conversing agreeably, arrayed in conventional garb, as decorous and reasonable and as mindful of etiquette as if still bound by all the restraints of the world, the flesh, and the devil, disappearing as noiselessly as they had come, with no appreciable result of the visit,—it shocked every sense of precedent within him. He was country-bred and did not know that when ghosts are fashionable they conduct themselves as fashionable people do. He noted keenly the discrepancies in the scientific explanations. Always, despite its show of learning, its systems, its terminology, its physiology, its psychology, and its persistent reference of supernatural appearances to natural causes, Reason retires from the spectral exhibition with some admission of occult influences, not fully understood,—in effect making a bow to the ghost in question, “Saving your presence.” He noticed, too, that the jury were listening with that intentness and eager interest which characterize every mind, even the most ignorant, in considering things of the other world, manifestations of hidden agencies. When he rose to reply he felt at a loss. The sound, however, of his own hearty voice ringing against the walls, instead of the sepulchral basso profundo of the attorney for the State, the motion of his own stalwart arm sawing the air,—for he was in the habit of impressing his views with a good deal of muscular exertion,—had an invigorating effect upon him, and brought him back to his normal state of confidence and bluster. He found words for his ready scorn. He sought to discredit the attorney-general’s phantoms. He did not know where the counsel got these old women’s tales; they were an insult to the intelligence of the jury. The learned counsel knew mighty well he wasn’t going to be called upon for his authorities,—medical books can’t be produced as evidence in a court of justice, much less ghost stories, “Raw-head and bloody-bones”! For his own part, he didn’t believe a word of them. A fact is a thing that can be proved. The law requires authentication. “Henry Brougham, Lord Chancellor, saw visions, did he? And may be Lord Coke dreamed dreams,” he sneered indignantly. “And Lord Mansfield perchance walked in his sleep. And who knows they did? And what drivel is this! Gentlemen, we live in the nineteenth century!”
The aspersion of Lord Brougham—for thus he considered the anecdote—was very bitter to him. He was a man of few enthusiasms, and such hero-worship as was possible to him had been expended upon the great lights of his profession whose acquaintance he had formed in his early reading of law, some twenty years ago. He so dwelt upon this point that the jury received the valuable impression that Henry Brougham was a chancellor and a “valley man,” hailing from Knoxville, perhaps, and was held in high esteem by the lawyers in Shaftesville, and that Harshaw seemed to think the attorney-general had slandered him. He wrenched himself from this phase of the subject with some difficulty. “Gentlemen,” he said sarcastically, “the attorney-general is a mighty smart man. He’s got a heap of learning lately about visions.” He glanced down obliquely at his opponent; he would have given a good deal to know how the counsel for the State came by his information. He could have sworn that it was not indigenous. “But there are plenty of folks in this town could have told him just as much and more. He’s mighty particular to show the difference between il-lusion and de-lusion, and hallucination and mania. Visions! That ain’t what we call ’em, gentlemen. Down here in the flat woods we call ’em—‘snakes’!” The hit told, and he went on, encouraged. “Right over yonder in Tim Becker’s saloon they keep every assortment of vision. Men have seen green rabbits there, and black dogs, and snakes, and whole menageries of hallucinations. Is anybody going to believe Alethea Sayles had the jim-jams that night, coming from camp-meeting? She had no call to see visions! This girl had her head in her hands; she was leaning on the fence; she felt some one touch her; she looked up, and saw the boy before her. Mighty few of the ghosts that we have heard of had such consistency of entity as to make their presence perceived by the sense of touch; on the contrary, it is thus that their unreality is often demonstrated in these same fables. A lady passes her fan through one immaterial image. A man thrusts his knife vainly into the misty heart of another. And why does this instance differ? Because, gentlemen, there was no phantom. It was Tad Simpkins in flesh and blood. The fugitive boy sees Alethea Sayles, whom he knows well; he is about to appeal to her; he lays his hand on her hand. She lifts her head, and at the unexpected appari—sight, she screams, and the foolish boy is frightened, and flees!”
He went on to say that he would impose upon the patience of this court and jury only for a few moments longer. He wanted to contradict the statements of the attorney-general that no one would voluntarily burden himself with the support of a useless member of society. “How many yaller dogs at your houses, gentlemen? I’d be afraid to count how many at mine. How many of your wife’s relations? No, gentlemen, none of us are so rich in this world’s goods as we deserve to be, but we ain’t got down to dividing bread and meat that close yet. As to the reckless crime of keeping the boy in hiding in order to put Mink Lorey in the penitentiary for involuntary manslaughter,—why, gentlemen, if there were not just such reckless people continually committing crimes, the consequences of which they cannot escape, the attorney-general and I would have nothing to do. We’d have to suck our paws for a living, like a bear in the winter, and look at one another,—a profitless entertainment, gentlemen.”
He sat down, his pink smile enlivening his countenance, well satisfied with his efforts and with the prospects of the case.
The attorney-general, who had the last word, was very brief in saying it. The judge charged the jury, and he, too, was brief. The long slant of sunshine falling athwart the room was reddening when the jury were led out by the officer to their deliberations, noisily ascending the stairs to the jury-room above, assigned to their use.