CHAPTER V
In the Book of Job it all happened, to Job, in the apparent compass of one piece of time not broken by diurnal intervals, not mitigated by recuperative cessations between blow and blow. It seemed to Rosalie that it was like that it happened also to her. There seemed no interval. It seemed to her wrath on wrath, visitation upon visitation, judgment upon judgment.
It seemed to her that she was no sooner come down out of the Old Bailey—her hand touching at things for support, her vision vertiginous, causing the solid ground to be in motion, her ears resonant, crying through her brain the words she saw in Huggo’s look as they removed him; it seemed to her she was no sooner out from there than she was at the telephone and summoned by the foreign friend and was there with Doda and was in process of “Oh, Doda!”—“Oh, mother!”; it seemed to her she was no sooner out from that than she was with that burly messenger, going with him, returning from him. There were days and nights walled up in weeks and months between these things, but that is how they seemed to Rosalie.
The syndicate was laid by the heels, one here, one there, Huggo in France, very shortly after the warning that had put Huggo in flight. The syndicate went through the police court where was unfolded a story sensational with surprising sums of money, captivating with ingenuity of fraud covered up by fraud to help new fraud again. The syndicate stood in the dock at the Old Bailey. Those two of the syndicate described by the prosecution and by the judge as the principals were sentenced to three years’ penal servitude. “You,” said the judge, addressing with a new note in his voice the third prisoner, “You, Occleve, stand in a different—”
Rosalie began to pray.
Harry would not attend the trial. He had done all that could be done, and of his position there was very much that he was able to do, and had attended the police court during the initial proceedings. He would not go to the Old Bailey. He would not go out. He would not read the papers. He used to sit about the house. “My son a felon.... My boy a felon. My son.... My eldest son....”
Rosalie was given a seat in the floor of the court on the first days of the hearing. On the day when the verdict was to be given and sentence passed she could not bear that. An usher, much pitying, obtained her a place in the gallery. She looked down immediately upon her Huggo. Her hands, upon the ledge before her, were all the time clasped. Her eyes alternately were in her hands and on her Huggo. Her heart moved between her Huggo and her God.
“You, Occleve, stand in a different position. . . .”
She began to pray. All of her being, all of her soul, all of her life, with a spiritual and a physical intensity transcending all that her body and her mind had ever known, was in apotheosis of supplication. “O God the Father! O God the Father! O God the Father!”