Marriott awoke with a start when the summons came. The jury had agreed; his heart leaped into his throat. What was the verdict? He had a confused sense of the time, the world outside was dark; he could have slept but a few minutes, surely it was not much later than midnight. He switched on the electric light, and looked at his watch. It was half-past six--morning. He dressed hurriedly, and went out.
The clammy air smote him coldly. The day was just breaking, a yellow haze above the roofs toward the east. He hurried along the damp pavement, an eager lonely figure in the silent streets; the light spread gradually, creeping as it were through the heavy air; a fog rolled over the pavements and the world was cold and gray. An early street-car went clanging past, filled with working-men. These working-men were happy; they smoked their pipes and joked--Marriott could hear them, and he thought it strange that men could be happy anywhere in the world that morning. But these fancies were not to be indulged with the leisurely sense in which he usually philosophized on that life of which he was so conscious; for the court-house loomed huge and portentous in the dawn. And suddenly the light that was slowly suffusing the ether seemed to pause; there was a hesitation almost perceptible to the eye in the descent of morning on the world; it was, to Marriott's imagination, exactly, as if the sun had suddenly concluded to shine no longer on the just and the unjust alike, but would await the issue then yeaning beneath that brooding dome, and see whether men would do justice in the world. Somewhere, Marriott knew, in that gray and smoky pile, the fate was waiting, biding its time. What would it be?
He had remained at the court-house the night before with Pennell and Lamborn, several of the court officials and attachés, and a dwindling group of the morbid and the curious. An immediate agreement had been expected, allowing, of course, for the delay necessary to a preservation of the decencies, but as the hours dragged by, Marriott's hopes had risen; each moment increased the chance of an acquittal, of a disagreement, or of some verdict not so tragic as the one the State had striven for. His heart had grown lighter. But by midnight he was wholly exhausted. Intelligence, which knows no walls, had somehow stolen out from the jury room; there was some eccentricity in this mighty machine of man, and no immediate agreement was to be expected. And then Marriott had left, trusting Pennell to remain and represent the defendant at the announcement of the verdict. It was about the only duty he felt he could trust to Pennell. And now, hurrying into the court-house, his hopes rose once more.
Something after all of the effect of custom was apparent in the atmosphere of the court-room, where the tribunal was convened thus so much earlier than its wonted hour. The room was strange and unreal, haunted in this early morning gloom by the ghosts of the protagonists who had stalked through it. Glassford was already on the bench, his eyes swollen, his cheeks puffed. Lamborn was there, in the same clothes he had worn the day before,--it was plain that he had not had them off at all. And there, already in the box, sat the jury, blear-eyed, unkempt, disheveled, demoralized, with traces yet of anger, hatred and the fury of their combat in their faces, a caricature of that majesty with which it is to be presumed this institution reaches the solemn conclusions of the law. And there, at the table, still strewn with the papers that were the debris of the conflict, sat Archie, the sorry subject over which men had been for days quarreling and haggling, harrying and worrying him like a hunted thing. He sat immobile, gazing through the eastern windows at the waiting and inscrutable dawn of a day swollen with such tragic possibilities for him.
Glassford looked sleepily at Marriott as he burst through the doors. His glance indicated relief; he was glad the conclusion had been reached at this early hour, even if it had haled him from his warm bed; he was glad to be able thus to trick the crowd and have the law discharge its solemn function before the crowd came to view it.
"Gentlemen of the jury," he said, "have you agreed upon a verdict?"
"We have, your Honor." Broadwell was rising in his place.
Glassford nodded to the clerk, who walked across the floor, his heels striking out sharp sounds. Marriott had paused at the little gate in the railing. He clutched at it, and supported himself in the weakness that suddenly overwhelmed him. It seemed to him that the clerk took a whole age in crossing that floor. He waited. Broadwell had handed the clerk a folded document. The clerk took it and opened it; it fluttered in his fingers. Now he hastily cast his eye over it, and Marriott thought: "There still is hope--hope in each infinitesimal portion of a second as he reads it--" for he was reading now:
"'We, the jury, impaneled and sworn well and truly to try and true deliverance make in the cause wherein the State is plaintiff and Archie Koerner is defendant, for verdict do find and say that we find the defendant--'" Marriott gasped. The clerk read on:
"'--guilty as charged in the indictment'."