CHAPTER XXV
ON TRIAL
The painful suggestions that had come to Echo over the teacups possessed her next day, when she drove with Nancy in the morning and in the afternoon, alone, selected her final steamer purchases—for she had made her farewells at home and was to go next day directly to New York, meeting Mrs. Spottiswoode on board the steamer. She was restless and uneasy and the thought of the trial proceeding at the court-house that day obsessed her. Here she was, she, Echo Allen, save for the escaped marauders themselves, the only one who had witnessed the deed whose imagined details the law was now laboriously reconstructing only a block away.
The thought brought a burning self-consciousness which began to be threaded by a fearful curiosity. She was feeling the repellent fascination that the scene of a hazardous episode ever after possesses for the secret actor in it.
Instinctively the lode-stone had drawn her steps to Court House Square. She looked across at the broad, open doorway. Why not go in? She had attended trials at home. She could find a place in the rear where she would be unobserved. For an instant the thought crossed her mind that the prisoner might recognise her, but then she remembered that on that night at Craig's house she had worn a light veil.
She crossed the square quickly, and with sudden decision went up the steps and into the building. An usher sat on a stool by a door that stood ajar and before she knew it he had pushed it open and she found herself in the court-room.
In that room, unguessed by all who had watched and listened during the dragging trial that was now rushing swiftly to end, weird forces had been contending. In touch with the old, familiar things, but with a high-coloured unnaturalness, Harry Sevier had stood ceaseless guard over his secret, every sense and instinct on the qui vive to minimise the chances of recognition.
The night of his arrest, as he lay sleepless in his police-cell, he had thought out certain obvious details of the game he intended to play and had lost no time in putting them into practice. He had worn his waving hair, rather long; during his detention he reversed this habit and instead of its customary parting, brushed it straight back from his forehead. Later he took stock of personal mannerisms and altered by unrelaxing watchfulness and determination the natural register of his voice. Always his mind had retained the sense of fate that had come to him when he sat in the alcove with Paddy the Brick's pistol clapped to his temple. Drink had driven him to that strange journey that had ended in tragedy, but had it not been, nevertheless, some over-ruling design that had brought him to Craig's house, where the unbelievable accident of his presence had saved Echo? But for that, she would now be Craig's wife, or the centre of a wretched scandal. If he held his course, and played his cards as they fell, perhaps fate would guide him still! So far the gipsy ring had brought him luck, he thought whimsically, and he had kept it on his finger.
But withal, it had been a straining interval. There had been, first, the fear that Craig would die, casting its grisly shadow across the floor; and this had woven with the dread, that never lessened, of the moment when he should recover consciousness. The first morning's newspapers had made a feature of Craig's assertion that he did not know the woman who had awaited his coming in his library; but Harry held in his mind the certainty that his own recognition must inevitably result in Echo's involvement.
He had adopted his course of silence because it was the only one open to him at the moment, but the event had justified his choice. It was the unexpected that had happened. The time-limit of the law which bounds murder had passed, and Craig was still alive. Nor had he recovered consciousness. But even with these assurances, Harry had had hourly to fight with the dread of some accidental confrontation which should pierce the screen and this dread had infinitely increased with the opening of the trial, when he became perforce the cynosure of hundreds of curious eyes.
But here also fate had been kind. It was now the second day of the proceedings, for Harry's personal qualities, no less than his strange pertinacity, had roused a keen professional interest in the attorney who had been assigned to defend him, and the latter had made a fight which his client, whose legal experience judged the outcome certain, would gladly have exchanged for the inept blunderings of the veriest tyro.
However, no chance encounter had betrayed him and as the District Attorney rose for his final clinching of the nail of evidence, Harry had felt a great relief that the ordeal was so nearly finished.
Almost the great danger was past! With his conviction and the passing of sentence upon him, the Judicial arm of the law would have delivered him to the Executive. Danger of publicity would be over, and Echo might be told the truth, without danger of recoil upon herself. A thousand times in his cell he had wondered how he should accomplish this. In some way it could be brought about—some safe and secret way—just how he would have leisure to decide. No one, not even Mason, his counsel, need be trusted with the significant secret that had such power to blast. She must be well instructed so that no false step could mar his plan. She must take no one into her confidence—must tell her story privately to the Governor, who had known her from her childhood. He was a just and discreet man and Harry did not doubt the outcome. His own story could supplement hers, and after a sufficient interval, executive pardon would quietly release him. He could step back into his old niche, and all would be as before. Even if Craig recovered, he would be powerless, since an accusation could not lie against a pardoned man, and Craig would not bring a charge that was at once bootless and incredible. Nor would he wreak an empty revenge upon Echo. He had once declared that he had not known the woman in the library, and, since she was lost to him in any case, he would not hazard a public reversal of his testimony that all would unite to call dastardly. The one thing Craig valued which men in the mass could give him, aside from power and money, was his place in the social sun, and he would not risk this. In the publication of the letter, or letters, that would have involved her father, he doubtless would not have been publicly known; in this matter he would run the gauntlet of popular southern opinion and would be well aware that the act would damn him. So Harry told himself. The real story would be buried, and the world—his world and Echo's—would never know!
Thus he was thinking as he listened dully to the prosecutor's scathing résumé. His elbow was on the long table by which he sat, his brow in his hand, shielding his eyes from the sunlight that sent darting arrows across the cool, dim room as the windowshade waved in the light breeze. He could not see the door at the rear of the room swing open, nor the figure of the woman who entered—to pause, momentarily confused in the quick transition from the sunny Square to the shadow of the interior.
Echo's heart was beating hard as she slipped into a vacant seat next the aisle, conscious that the man who was speaking was Meredith, whom she had met at tea the day before, and that he was closing his final speech for the prosecution. She looked about her, at the jury who seemed apathetic and a trifle bored, at the Judge who was writing perfunctorily on the pad before him, and then her gaze slipped, half-stealthily, to the long table before the bar, where the prisoner should be sitting. But though she leaned forward to look, she could not see him for the intervening figures. Then, suddenly, the deliberate, judicial utterance of the District Attorney caught her attention. He was rounding to a final period and the meaning of what he was saying smote through her self-command to the last, inner corner of her shrinking consciousness and made the room whirl about her:
"The counsel for the defence has attempted to read a romantic meaning into the obduracy with which this thief and would-be murderer has held to his policy of silence. He has invited you to believe that this silence indicates a noble desire to shield a woman's reputation. The name of a woman who thrusts herself, unexpected and unattended, into a man's house at dead of night! The name of a woman the innocence of whose errand is effectually denied by her precipitate flight and her craven hiding!"
Echo sank back into her seat, breathless. She listened to the brief, conventional charge, saw the jurors file out, heard the stir and movement of relaxation sweep over the room, yet she was unconscious of the lapse of time. The public, open declaration had seemed to set the final flaming seal upon the incident, voicing, as if with a monster siren, the shameful meaning! She had cringed at Mrs. Moncure's smiling innuendo; now the scathing indictment was burning itself on her brain. "A woman who thrusts herself unexpected and unattended into a man's house at dead of night!"—the words seemed to stab her over and over like poisoned daggers. She was that—that woman! She imagined herself rising in that suffocating room and saying distinctly, "It is I he said that of—I, Echo Allen!" She saw herself on the witness-stand, heckled and badgered, faltering an unbelievable story to sceptical ears. There was rolling over her an overwhelming dread, and her hands had clenched till the nails struck purple crescents into her palms.
She became aware suddenly that the room had hushed, the jury was re-entering. She hardly heard the foreman's crisp "Guilty, your Honour!" She was trembling, there was a scent in her nostrils like the fumes of poppies, and the room seemed to be swaying to and fro. She turned away her head, daring to look no longer.
"Prisoner at the bar, stand up!"—the clerk's metallic admonition seemed to come from far away. She strove to look now, but a swimming dizziness was upon her and the shadows of the room were turning black. She had never fainted in her life, and the thought of fainting now filled her with terror. She rose to her feet, fighting back the sickness with all her strength, stepped into the aisle, and in a moment more the fresh outer air, sweet and reviving, struck her quivering face.
Her going had made no stir, had been unnoted, perhaps, by a dozen in the court-room. She could not guess that in the instant she had risen, with blank eyes and unsteady feet, the prisoner at the bar had half-turned and for a breath his gaze had fastened upon her face.