CHAPTER XIII.
"And may the Lord have mercy on your soul!" The deep-pitched words fell slowly on Marcella's ears, as she sat leaning forward in the gallery of the Widrington Assize Court. Women were sobbing beside and behind her. Minta Hurd, to her left, lay in a half-swoon against her sister-in-law, her face buried in Ann's black shawl. For an instant after Hurd's death sentence had been spoken Marcella's nerves ceased to throb—the long exhaustion of feeling stopped. The harsh light and shade of the ill-lit room; the gas-lamps in front of the judge, blanching the ranged faces of the jury; the long table of reporters below, some writing, but most looking intently towards the dock; the figure of Wharton opposite, in his barrister's gown and wig—that face of his, so small, nervous, delicate—the frowning eyebrows a dark bar under the white of the wig—his look, alert and hostile, fixed upon the judge; the heads and attitudes of the condemned men, especially the form of a fair-haired youth, the principal murderer of Charlie Dynes, who stood a little in front of the line, next to Hurd, and overshadowing his dwarf's stature—these things Marcella saw indeed; for years after she could have described them point by point; but for some seconds or minutes her eyes stared at them without conscious reaction of the mind on the immediate spectacle.
In place of it, the whole day, all these hours that she had been sitting there, brushed before her in a synthesis of thought, replacing the stream of impressions and images. The crushing accumulation of hostile evidence—witness after witness coming forward to add to the damning weight of it; the awful weakness of the defence—Wharton's irritation under it—the sharpness, the useless, acrid ability of his cross-examinations; yet, contrasting with the legal failure, the personal success, the mixture of grace with energy, the technical accomplishment of the manner, as one wrestling before his equals—nothing left here of the garrulous vigour and brutality of the labourers' meeting!—the masterly use of all that could avail, the few quiet words addressed at the end to the pity of the jury, and by implication to the larger ethical sense of the community,—all this she thought of with great intellectual clearness while the judge's sonorous voice rolled along, sentencing each prisoner in turn. Horror and pity were alike weary; the brain asserted itself.
The court was packed. Aldous Raeburn sat on Marcella's right hand; and during the day the attention of everybody in the dingy building had been largely divided between the scene below, and that strange group in the gallery where the man who had just been elected Conservative member for East Brookshire, who was Lord Maxwell's heir, and Westall's employer, sat beside his betrothed, in charge of a party which comprised not only Marcella Boyce, but the wife, sister, and little girl of Westall's murderer.
On one occasion some blunt answer of a witness had provoked a laugh coming no one knew whence. The judge turned to the gallery and looked up sternly—"I cannot conceive why men and women—women especially—should come crowding in to hear such a case as this; but if I hear another laugh I shall clear the court." Marcella, whose whole conscious nature was by now one network of sensitive nerve, saw Aldous flush and shrink as the words were spoken. Then, looking across the court, she caught the eye of an old friend of the Raeburns, a county magistrate. At the judge's remark he had turned involuntarily to where she and Aldous sat; then, as he met Miss Boyce's face, instantly looked away again. She perfectly—passionately—understood that Brookshire was very sorry for Aldous Raeburn that day.
The death sentences—three in number—were over. The judge was a very ordinary man; but, even for the ordinary man, such an act carries with it a great tradition of what is befitting, which imposes itself on voice and gesture. When he ceased, the deep breath of natural emotion could be felt and heard throughout the crowded court; loud wails of sobbing women broke from the gallery.
"Silence!" cried an official voice, and the judge resumed, amid stifled sounds that stabbed Marcella's sense, once more nakedly alive to everything around it.
The sentences to penal servitude came to an end also. Then a ghastly pause. The line of prisoners directed by the warders turned right about face towards a door in the back wall of the court. As the men filed out, the tall, fair youth, one of those condemned to death, stopped an instant and waved his hand to his sobbing sweetheart in the gallery. Hurd also turned irresolutely.
"Look!" exclaimed Ann Mullins, propping up the fainting woman beside her, "he's goin'."
Marcella bent forward. She, rather than the wife, caught the last look on his large dwarf's face, so white and dazed, the eyes blinking under the gas.
Aldous touched her softly on the arm.
"Yes," she said quickly, "yes, we must get her out. Ann, can you lift her?"
Aldous went to one side of the helpless woman: Ann Mullins held her on the other. Marcella followed, pressing the little girl close against her long black cloak. The gallery made way for them; every one looked and whispered till they had passed. Below, at the foot of the stairs, they found themselves in a passage crowded with people—lawyers, witnesses, officials, mixed with the populace. Again a road was opened for Aldous and his charges.
"This way, Mr. Raeburn," said a policeman, with alacrity. "Stand back, please! Is your carriage there, sir?"
"Let Ann Mullins take her—put them into the cab—I want to speak to Mr.
Wharton," said Marcella in Aldous's ear.
"Get me a cab at once," he said to the policeman, "and tell my carriage to wait."
"Miss Boyce!"
Marcella turned hastily and saw Wharton beside her. Aldous also saw him, and the two men interchanged a few words.
"There is a private room close by," said Wharton, "I am to take you there, and Mr. Raeburn will join us at once."
He led her along a corridor, and opened a door to the left. They entered a small dingy room, looking through a begrimed window on a courtyard. The gas was lit, and the table was strewn with papers.
"Never, never more beautiful!" flashed through Wharton's mind, "with that knit, strenuous brow—that tragic scorn for a base world—that royal gait—"
Aloud he said:
"I have done my best privately among the people I can get at, and I thought, before I go up to town to-night—you know Parliament meets on Monday?—I would show you what I had been able to do, and ask you to take charge of a copy of the petition." He pointed to a long envelope lying on the table. "I have drafted it myself—I think it puts all the points we can possibly urge—but as to the names—"
He took out a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket.
"It won't do," he said, looking down at it, and shaking his head. "As I said to you, it is so far political merely. There is a very strong Liberal and Radical feeling getting up about the case. But that won't carry us far. This petition with these names is a demonstration against game preserving and keepers' tyranny. What we want is the co-operation of a neighbourhood, especially of its leading citizens. However, I explained all this to you—there is no need to discuss it. Will you look at the list?"
Still holding it, he ran his finger over it, commenting here and there. She stood beside him; the sleeve of his gown brushed her black cloak; and under his perfect composure there beat a wild exultation in his power—without any apology, any forgiveness—to hold her there, alone with him, listening—her proud head stooped to his—her eye following his with this effort of anxious attention.
She made a few hurried remarks on the names, but her knowledge of the county was naturally not very serviceable. He folded up the paper and put it back.
"I think we understand," he said. "You will do what you can in the only quarter"—he spoke slowly—"that can really aid, and you will communicate with me at the House of Commons? I shall do what I can, of course, when the moment comes, in Parliament, and meanwhile I shall start the matter in the Press—our best hope. The Radical papers are already taking it up."
There was a sound of steps in the passage outside. A policeman opened the door, and Aldous Raeburn entered. His quick look ran over the two figures standing beside the table.
"I had some difficulty in finding a cab," he explained, "and we had to get some brandy; but she came round, and we got her off. I sent one of our men with her. The carriage is here."
He spoke—to Marcella—with some formality. He was very pale, but there was both authority and tension in his bearing.
"I have been consulting with Miss Boyce," said Wharton, with equal distance of manner, "as to the petition we are sending up to the Home Office."
Aldous made no reply.
"One word, Miss Boyce,"—Wharton quietly turned to her. "May I ask you to read the petition carefully, before you attempt to do anything with it? It lays stress on the only doubt that can reasonably be felt after the evidence, and after the judge's summing up. That particular doubt I hold to be entirely untouched by the trial; but it requires careful stating—the issues may easily be confused."
"Will you come?" said Aldous to Marcella. What she chose to think the forced patience of his tone exasperated her.
"I will do everything I can," she said in a low, distinct voice to
Wharton. "Good-bye."
She held out her hand. To both the moment was one of infinite meaning; to her, in her high spiritual excitement, a sacrament of pardon and gratitude—expressed once for all—by this touch—in Aldous Raeburn's presence.
The two men nodded to each other. Wharton was already busy, putting his papers together.
"We shall meet next week, I suppose, in the House?" said Wharton, casually. "Good-night."
* * * * *
"Will you take me to the Court?" said Marcella to Aldous, directly the door of the carriage was shut upon them, and, amid a gaping crowd that almost filled the little market-place of Widrington, the horses moved off. "I told mamma, that, if I did not come home, I should be with you, and that I should ask you to send me back from the Court to-night."
She still held the packet Wharton had given her in her hand. As though for air, she had thrown back the black gauze veil she had worn all through the trial, and, as they passed through the lights of the town, Aldous could see in her face the signs—the plain, startling signs—of the effect of these weeks upon her. Pale, exhausted, yet showing in every movement the nervous excitement which was driving her on—his heart sank as he looked at her—foreseeing what was to come.
As soon as the main street had been left behind, he put his head out of the window, and gave the coachman, who had been told to go to Mellor, the new order.
"Will you mind if I don't talk?" said Marcella, when he was again beside her. "I think I am tired out, but I might rest now a little. When we get to the Court, will you ask Miss Raeburn to let me have some food in her sitting-room? Then, at nine o'clock or so, may I come down and see Lord Maxwell and you—together?"
What she said, and the manner in which she said it, could only add to his uneasiness; but he assented, put a cushion behind her, wrapped the rugs round her, and then sat silent, train after train of close and anxious thought passing through his mind as they rolled along the dark roads.
When they arrived at Maxwell Court, the sound of the carriage brought
Lord Maxwell and Miss Raeburn at once into the hall.
Aldous went forward in front of Marcella. "I have brought Marcella," he said hastily to his aunt. "Will you take her upstairs to your sitting-room, and let her have some food and rest? She is not fit for the exertion of dinner, but she wishes to speak to my grandfather afterwards."
Lord Maxwell had already hurried to meet the black-veiled figure standing proudly in the dim light of the outer hall.
"My dear! my dear!" he said, drawing her arm within his, and patting her hand in fatherly fashion. "How worn-out you look!—Yes, certainly—Agneta, take her up and let her rest—And you wish to speak to me afterwards? Of course, my dear, of course—at any time."
Miss Raeburn, controlling herself absolutely, partly because of Aldous's manner, partly because of the servants, took her guest upstairs straightway, put her on the sofa in a cheerful sitting-room with a bright fire, and then, shrewdly guessing that she herself could not possibly be a congenial companion to the girl at such a moment, whatever might have happened or might be going to happen, she looked at her watch, said that she must go down to dinner, and promptly left her to the charge of a kind elderly maid, who was to do and get for her whatever she would.
Marcella made herself swallow some food and wine. Then she said that she wished to be alone and rest for an hour, and would come downstairs at nine o'clock. The maid, shocked by her pallor, was loth to leave her, but Marcella insisted.
When she was left alone she drew herself up to the fire and tried hard to get warm, as she had tried to eat. When in this way a portion of physical ease and strength had come back to her, she took out the petition from its envelope and read it carefully. As she did so her lip relaxed, her eye recovered something of its brightness. All the points that had occurred to her confusedly, amateurishly, throughout the day, were here thrown into luminous and admirable form. She had listened to them indeed, as urged by Wharton in his concluding speech to the jury, but it had not, alas! seemed so marvellous to her then, as it did now, that, after such a plea, the judge should have summed up as he did.
When she had finished it and had sat thinking awhile over the declining fire, an idea struck her. She took a piece of paper from Miss Raeburn's desk, and wrote on it:
"Will you read this—and Lord Maxwell—before I come down? I forgot that you had not seen it.—M."
A ring at the bell brought the maid.
"Will you please get this taken to Mr. Raeburn? And then, don't disturb me again for half an hour."
And for that time she lay in Miss Raeburn's favourite chair, outwardly at rest. Inwardly she was ranging all her arguments, marshalling all her forces.
When the chiming clock in the great hall below struck nine, she got up and put the lamp for a moment on the mantelpiece, which held a mirror. She had already bathed her face and smoothed her hair. But she looked at herself again with attention, drew down the thick front waves of hair a little lower on the white brow, as she liked to have them, and once more straightened the collar and cuffs which were the only relief to her plain black dress.
The house as she stepped out into it seemed very still. Perfumed breaths of flowers and pot-pourri ascended from the hall. The pictures along the walls as she passed were those same Caroline and early Georgian beauties that had so flashingly suggested her own future rule in this domain on the day when Aldous proposed to her.
She felt suddenly very shrinking and lonely as she went downstairs. The ticking of a large clock somewhere—the short, screaming note of Miss Raeburn's parrot in one of the ground-floor rooms—these sounds and the beating of her own heart seemed to have the vast house to themselves.
No!—that was a door opening—Aldous coming to fetch her. She drew a childish breath of comfort.
He sprang up the stairs, two or three steps at a time, as he saw her coming.
"Are you rested—were they good to you? Oh! my precious one!—how pale you are still! Will you come and see my—grandfather now? He is quite ready."
She let him lead her in. Lord Maxwell was standing by his writing-table, leaning over the petition which was open before him—one hand upon it. At sight of her he lifted his white head. His fine aquiline face was grave and disturbed. But nothing could have been kinder or more courtly than his manner as he came towards her.
"Sit down in that chair. Aldous, make her comfortable. Poor child, how tired she looks! I hear you wished to speak to me on this most unhappy, most miserable business."
Marcella, who was sitting erect on the edge of the chair into which Aldous had put her, lifted her eyes with a sudden confidence. She had always liked Lord Maxwell.
"Yes," she said, struggling to keep down eagerness and emotion. "Yes, I came to bring you this petition, which is to be sent up to the Home Secretary on behalf of Jim Hurd, and—and—to beg of you and Aldous to sign it, if in any way you can. I know it will be difficult, but I thought I might—I might be able to suggest something to you—to convince you—as I have known these people so well—and it is very important to have your signatures."
How crude it sounded—how mechanical! She felt that she had not yet command of herself. The strange place, the stately room, the consciousness of Aldous behind her—Aldous, who should have been on her side and was not—all combined to intimidate her.
Lord Maxwell's concern was evident. In the first place, he was painfully, unexpectedly struck by the change in the speaker. Why, what had Aldous been about? So thin! so frail and willowy in her black dress—monstrous!
"My dear," he said, walking up to her and laying a fatherly hand on her shoulder, "my dear, I wish I could make you understand how gladly I would do this, or anything else, for you, if I honourably could. I would do it for your sake and for your grandfather's sake. But—this is a matter of conscience, of public duty, both for Aldous and myself. You will not surely wish even, that we should be governed in our relations to it by any private feeling or motive?"
"No, but I have had no opportunity of speaking to you about it—and I take such a different view from Aldous. He knows—everybody must know—that there is another side, another possible view from that which the judge took. You weren't in court to-day, were you, at all?"
"No. But I read all the evidence before the magistrates with great care, and I have just talked over the crucial points with Aldous, who followed everything to-day, as you know, and seems to have taken special note of Mr. Wharton's speeches."
"Aldous!"—her voice broke irrepressibly into another note—"I thought he would have let me speak to you first!—to-night!"
Lord Maxwell, looking quickly at his grandson, was very sorry for him.
Aldous bent over her chair.
"You remember," he said, "you sent down the petition. I thought that meant that we were to read and discuss it. I am very sorry."
She tried to command herself, pressing her hand to her brow. But already she felt the irrevocable, and anger and despair were rising.
"The whole point lies in this," she said, looking up: "Can we believe Hurd's own story? There is no evidence to corroborate it. I grant that—the judge did not believe it—and there is the evidence of hatred. But is it not possible and conceivable all the same? He says that he did not go out with any thought whatever of killing Westall, but that when Westall came upon him with his stick up, threatening and abusing him, as he had done often before, in a fit of wild rage he shot at him. Surely, surely that is conceivable? There is—there must be a doubt; or, if it is murder, murder done in that way is quite, quite different from other kinds and degrees of murder."
Now she possessed herself. The gift of flowing persuasive speech which was naturally hers, which the agitations, the debates of these weeks had been maturing, came to her call. She leant forward and took up the petition. One by one she went through its pleas, adding to them here and there from her own knowledge of Hurd and his peasant's life—presenting it all clearly, with great intellectual force, but in an atmosphere of emotion, of high pity, charged throughout with the "tears of things." To her, gradually, unconsciously, the whole matter—so sordid, commonplace, brutal in Lord Maxwell's eyes!—had become a tragic poem, a thing of fear and pity, to which her whole being vibrated. And as she conceived it, so she reproduced it. Wharton's points were there indeed, but so were Hurd's poverty, Hurd's deformity, Hurd as the boyish victim of a tyrant's insults, the miserable wife, the branded children—emphasised, all of them, by the occasional quiver, quickly steadied again, of the girl's voice.
Lord Maxwell sat by his writing-table, his head resting on his hand, one knee crossed over the other. Aldous still hung over her chair. Neither interrupted her. Once the eyes of the two men met over her head—a distressed, significant look. Aldous heard all she said, but what absorbed him mainly was the wild desire to kiss the dark hair, so close below him, alternating with the miserable certainty that for him at that moment to touch, to soothe her, was to be repulsed.
When her voice broke—when she had said all she could think of—she remained looking imploringly at Lord Maxwell.
He was silent a little; then he stooped forward and took her hand.
"You have spoken," he said with great feeling, "most nobly—most well—like a good woman, with a true compassionate heart. But all these things you have said are not new to me, my dear child. Aldous warned me of this petition—he has pressed upon me, still more I am sure upon himself, all that he conceived to be your view of the case—the view of those who are now moving in the matter. But with the best will in the world I cannot, and I believe that he cannot—though he must speak for himself—I cannot take that view. In my belief Hurd's act was murder, and deserves the penalty of murder. I have paid some attention to these things. I was a practising barrister in my youth, and later I was for two years Home Secretary. I will explain to you my grounds very shortly."
And, bending forward, he gave the reasons for his judgment of the case as carefully and as lucidly as though he were stating them to a fellow-expert, and not to an agitated girl of twenty-one. Both in words and manner there was an implied tribute, not only to Marcella, but perhaps to that altered position of the woman in our moving world which affects so many things and persons in unexpected ways.
Marcella listened, restlessly. She had drawn her hand away, and was twisting her handkerchief between her fingers. The flush that had sprung up while she was talking had died away. She grew whiter and whiter. When Lord Maxwell ceased, she said quickly, and as he thought unreasonably—
"So you will not sign?"
"No," he replied firmly, "I cannot sign. Holding the conviction about the matter I do, I should be giving my name to statements I do not believe; and in order to give myself the pleasure of pleasing you, and of indulging the pity that every man must feel for every murderer's wife and children, I should be not only committing a public wrong, but I should be doing what I could to lessen the safety and security of one whole class of my servants—men who give me honourable service—and two of whom have been so cruelly, so wantonly hurried before their Maker!"
His voice gave the first sign of his own deep and painful feeling on the matter. Marcella shivered.
"Then," she said slowly, "Hurd will be executed."
Lord Maxwell had a movement of impatience.
"Let me tell you," he said, "that that does not follow at all. There is some importance in signatures—or rather in the local movement that the signatures imply. It enables a case to be reopened, which, in any event, this case is sure to be. But any Home Secretary who could decide a murder case on any other grounds whatever than those of law and his own conscience would not deserve his place a day—an hour! Believe me, you mistake the whole situation."
He spoke slowly, with the sharp emphasis natural to his age and authority. Marcella did not believe him. Every nerve was beginning to throb anew with that passionate recoil against tyranny and prejudice, which was in itself an agony.
"And you say the same?" she said, turning to Aldous.
"I cannot sign that petition," he said sadly. "Won't you try and believe what it costs me to refuse?"
It was a heavy blow to her. Amply as she had been prepared for it, there had always been at the bottom of her mind a persuasion that in the end she would get her way. She had been used to feel barriers go down before that ultimate power of personality of which she was abundantly conscious. Yet it had not availed her here—not even with the man who loved her.
Lord Maxwell looked at the two—the man's face of suffering, the girl's struggling breath.
"There, there, Aldous!" he said, rising. "I will leave you a minute. Do make Marcella rest—get her, for all our sakes, to forget this a little. Bring her in presently to us for some coffee. Above all, persuade her that we love her and admire her with all our hearts, but that in a matter of this kind she must leave us to do—as before God!—what we think right."
He stood before her an instant, gazing down upon her with dignity—nay, a certain severity. Then he turned away and left the room.
Marcella sprang up.
"Will you order the carriage?" she said in a strangled voice. "I will go upstairs."
"Marcella!" cried Aldous; "can you not be just to me, if it is impossible for you to be generous?"
"Just!" she repeated, with a tone and gesture of repulsion, pushing him back from her. "You can talk of justice!"
He tried to speak, stammered, and failed. That strange paralysis of the will-forces which dogs the man of reflection at the moment when he must either take his world by storm or lose it was upon him now. He had never loved her more passionately—but as he stood there looking at her, something broke within him, the first prescience of the inevitable dawned.
"You," she said again, walking stormily to and fro, and catching at her breath—"You, in this house, with this life—to talk of justice—the justice that comes of slaying a man like Hurd! And I must go back to that cottage, to that woman, and tell her there is no hope—none! Because you must follow your conscience—you who have everything! Oh! I would not have your conscience—I wish you a heart—rather! Don't come to me, please! Oh! I must think how it can be. Things cannot go on so. I should kill myself, and make you miserable. But now I must go to her—to the poor—to those whom I love, whom I carry in my heart!"
She broke off sobbing. He saw her, in her wild excitement, look round the splendid room as though she would wither it to ruin with one fiery, accusing glance.
"You are very scornful of wealth," he said, catching her wrists, "but one thing you have no right to scorn!—the man who has given you his inmost heart—and now only asks you to believe in this, that he is not the cruel hypocrite you are determined to make him!"
His face quivered in every feature. She was checked a moment—checked by the moral compulsion of his tone and manner, as well as by his words. But again she tore herself away.
"Please go and order the carriage," she said. "I cannot bear any more. I must go home and rest. Some day I will ask your pardon—oh! for this—and—and—" she was almost choked again—"other things. But now I must go away. There is some one who will help me. I must not forget that!"
The reckless words, the inflection, turned Aldous to stone. Unconsciously he drew himself proudly erect—their eyes met. Then he went up to the bell and rang it.
"The brougham at once, for Miss Boyce. Will you have a maid to go with you?" he asked, motioning the servant to stay till Miss Boyce had given her answer.
"No, thank you. I must go and put on my things. Will you explain to Miss
Raeburn?"
The footman opened the door for her. She went.