“How find you the prisoner? Guilty or Not Guilty?”
“We find him—Guilty.”
Chapter Forty Seven.
“I have Something to Say.”
“Guilty.”
The fateful word rang through the room, producing something like a shuddering gasp among the close-packed audience. It rang in the brain of the prisoner, “Guilty! Dorrien of Cranston to be hanged—to be hanged by the neck until dead. Guilty!” Thus the hideous refrain danced through the wretched man’s brain in clanging rhythm. And what he had gone through during the trial alone—apart from the period which had elapsed since his arrest—was sufficient expiation for a score of murders far more cold-blooded and deliberate than this, for it was as a thousand years of hell.
The most astonished person in the room, perhaps, as this verdict was given, was the judge himself; and forthwith his opinion of the intelligence of juries, at no time high, underwent a stride of improvement. This was an intelligent jury. For his lordship was as morally certain of the prisoner’s guilt as though he had seen him perpetrate the homicide, yet how any jury could convict on the face of his summing up was a marvel. His trained mind had recognised that the evidence legally was not sufficient to hang a dog, and he had summed up accordingly, yet the jury had convicted. It now remained to pass the dread and only sentence of the law. Already his lordship was nervously fumbling with the black cap.
The prisoner felt as though shot through the head, as though a numbing, sledge-hammer blow had descended upon his faculties. Was this real, this sea of ghastly faces in the deathlike gloom of the ill-lighted hall, the grim, red-robed pronouncer of doom, now turning to face him? Was it real, or some terrible nightmare from which he would awaken directly with a thrill of horror combined with intense relief and thankfulness? Then he became dimly aware of an official voice asking if he had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon him. So dim did the voice sound to his wrought-up fancy that the question had to be repeated.