III
At last the judge comes up and the officials stream in.
“Call Jean Bower!”
What all the people there have been waiting for with almost savage longing is now about to take place, and every eye in Court save the prisoner’s fastens on Jean Bower.
The slight girlish figure ascends the steps into the witness-box. She is painfully pale—her pallor enhanced by her plain black coat and skirt. Yet, strange to say, Jean Bower does not make a pleasant impression. She is too quiet, too self-possessed. It is difficult to visualize her as the heroine of a criminal love drama.
After she has been sworn, Sir Almeric takes her through the story which is now almost tiresomely familiar to most of those present. She sticks firmly to the unlikely tale that till the return of Henry Garlett, four months after his wife’s death, he and she had been on terms of formal acquaintance—nothing more.
And then at last there comes the thrill for which all these men and women who crowd the public galleries to suffocation have been waiting.
“I suppose I may assume that after his return, this last autumn, you became deeply attached to Mr. Garlett?”
There follows a long pause—twice Jean Bower opens her pale lips, but no answer comes from them. Then, slowly, she bends her head.
“Do you still love him?”
The question is asked in a hard, unemotional voice. But it seems to galvanize the witness into eager, passionate, palpitating life.
She cries out strongly, almost triumphantly: “With all my heart and soul.”
The advocate for the Crown turns away. He has scored a great point. The jury have doubtless been moved by that cry of love and faith, but he, Sir Almeric Post, will soon show them, with the pitiless logic for which he is famed, that the very fact of this overwhelming passion discredits the whole of the evidence Jean Bower has just tendered in so lifeless and composed a manner.
The entire crux of the case turns on what were the real relations of Henry Garlett and Jean Bower before Mrs. Garlett’s death. Were the girl to admit even warm innocent friendship on her employer’s part she would be helping to prove the case for the Crown. And now, who, with any knowledge of feminine human nature, can doubt that she has lied—splendide mendax, as the old Latin tag puts it—“a splendid lie, but a lie all the same?”
“Thank you, Miss Bower; that will do,” he says suavely.
As Sir Harold Anstey is taking the place of his brother advocate in order to re-examine the unhappy girl who all unwittingly has done his client such a fatal mischief by that cry of devoted love, there is an unwonted stir, even a struggle, at one of the doors. Across the now silent Court ring out the words:
“I must speak now—I must speak now!”
The judge leans forward, and Sir Harold turns round, a frown on his face. For the moment public attention is diverted from the slight figure in the witness-box.
Sir Harold, after a whispered word with the Crown counsel, observes:
“One of the female witnesses has only just arrived, my lord, and she seems to have become hysterical.”
Again the loud wailing, the unrestrained voice is heard:
“I must speak—I must speak now.”
Hastily Sir Almeric takes a hand.
“The young woman who desires so urgently to be heard, my lord, was formerly parlour-maid at the Thatched House. I doubt, however, if she is in a fit condition to go into the witness-box to-day at all. I understand she has just come from her husband’s death-bed.”
The judge leans forward.
“Do you regard her as an important witness, Sir Almeric?”
“No, my lord. She was moving about the house during the night of Mrs. Garlett’s death. Also she has evidence to tender concerning the secret meetings which took place between Henry Garlett and some unnamed young woman in a wood before Mrs. Garlett’s death.”
Again there rises that strange, unnatural cry—loud, defiant:
“I demand to be heard now! I have the right to be heard now!”
The judge frowns. He peers forward till he thinks he distinguishes the hysterical young woman who has been making such an unseemly disturbance, and then he says, slowly, distinctly, and severely:
“You will be heard when I direct you to be heard. And I now direct that your evidence shall be taken after the rest of the witnesses for the prosecution have been examined, cross-examined, and re-examined.”
During this long altercation Jean Bower, standing in the witness-box, is growing paler and paler. She clutches convulsively the ledge before her, and Sir Harold looks at her with concern. He does not wish her to faint before she has answered his questions; on the other hand he tells himself that the sight of a fainting young woman always touches your more sentimental juryman.
The great advocate happens to be, however, a far more imaginative man than is Sir Almeric Post, and he realizes that Jean Bower’s ordeal has lasted long enough. So, to the disappointment of the Court, he does not address many questions to the young woman who has just acknowledged her passionate love for Harry Garlett, and for the sake of whose love the immense majority—almost every human being present at the trial—believe he has committed a singularly foul and dastardly murder.
Sir Almeric does not trouble to re-examine the witness. He knows by now that he has practically won his case, and he has no wish to cause any of the hapless human beings connected with this painful story any unnecessary distress.