"There is always," says Bertram Standon in his book "How I Fought Fleet Street," "a psychological news-moment. To be premature with news is even worse than to be dilatory with it. The editor who knows when not to publish is worth his weight in gold."
In the Towers-public defender stunt, the proprietor of the "Democratic News" backed his maxim to the limit. Clean through a newsless August, and well into a newsless September, he stirred the pool of the controversy he had started; whipped up every ripple of public interest to a wave of excitement over the guilt or innocence of Lucy Towers; but gave no hint of the rope he, Standon the Magnificent, intended to pull when finally the last act of the great drama should be launched upon London.
Even Ronnie, chafing for his chance, could ascertain no detail of the magnate's intention. Cartwright, pumped whenever etiquette allowed it, only beamed, "Wait and see!" Jimmy, who must have known something, had disappeared into Devonshire. At her second ordeal, the trial before the magistrate, Lucy Towers--still represented by the same unimposing solicitor--reserved her defense and was formally committed for trial at the Old Bailey.
Meanwhile Julia Cavendish worked on.
2
Physically and mentally, as day followed September day, Ronnie's mother felt well--better, indeed, than at any other period of her illness. The weapon of her forging grew sharp and sharper under her hand.
Despite the realization, every time she set pencil to paper, that the candle of her life was burning remorselessly to its socket, that her mind and her body must alike expire at task's completion, she experienced no fear. Her brain, rapt in the creative ecstasy of Julia Cavendish, living novelist, regarded Julia Cavendish, dying woman, from a point of view of the coolest detachment.
Outwardly, to her watchers, to Ronnie, nurse, Aliette, and Mrs. Sanderson, she played a part; the part of the convalescent. That they, in their ignorance, should believe the part she played to be real, gave to her detachment a whimsical and peculiar happiness.
And always in those days the illusion of immortality sustained her. She used to think, lying weary of work on her great bed: "Like Horace, I shall not utterly die. Dying, I shall leave my Ronnie this sword of the written word. What greater proof of love and service could any son or any god require?"
For now, almost at the end of her race with death, Julia Cavendish knew the conviction of Godhead. The priest-hoisted sectarian idol of her middle years lay shattered into a thousand fragments. In its stead was a spiritual Presence, all-pervading, all-comprehending, all-pardoning: an Individual of Individuals, to whom, freed from the slave-allegiance of the formal churches, each unhampered soul must fight its own unhampered way: a Soul of Souls who--despising no man-made creed--yet demanded more than any creed made of man, even the courage to look on life and death and Himself alike fearlessly.