"Yes, there was." And the sailor--fears momentarily forgotten--rapped out, so swiftly that even the judge could not stop him, "He drank, and he was carrying on with another woman. Everybody in the house knew about it."
On the hush which followed that statement--a statement confirmatory of the point which Ronnie, without specifically alleging it, had been trying to establish ever since his opening question to Maggie Peterson--fell the last question of Mr. Justice Heber: "Do you know, of your own knowledge, any woman other than his wife with whom the dead man was on terms of sexual intimacy?"
And Robert Fielding, looking squarely into those gleaming spectacles, answered, "Yes, my lord. With Maggie Peterson. Many's the time I've seen the blackguard a-sneaking into her room."
3
At two o'clock of the afternoon, in a court packed to suffocation point, Ronald Cavendish rose to begin his final speech for the defense of Lucy Towers.
Robert Fielding's testimony, unshaken in cross-examination, had been followed by more evidence, collected by Standon's assiduous reporters, as to the character of the dead man; and that evidence--Ronnie felt,--coupled with the arrest of Maggie Peterson, made the main issue, the issue of wilful murder, safe.
Nevertheless, the Wixton imagination in him was doubtful of the second issue, the issue of manslaughter. In England, the unwritten law did not run; and although, thanks to the press, the streets outside were black with people, with a mob hungry for news of the verdict, determined on his client's acquittal, Ronnie knew the difficulties of securing that acquittal too well for overconfidence.
Again he had spent the luncheon interval alone; praying--voicelessly--that his oratory might not fail; visualizing always those two dour-faced spinsters on the jury, and Mr. Justice Heber, having summed up in cold legal phraseology the bare facts of the case, awarding, on the jury's recommendation, the lenient sentence of a year's imprisonment.
In those few seconds of time before his speech began, Ronnie's imagination could almost hear the murmur of the mob without. The murmur flustered him. After all, Lucy had shot her husband. Between her, pale in the dock, and the dark cell of felony, stood only a dumb advocate, a fencer unskilled with the sword of the spoken word.
Till suddenly, standing there silent before Lucy's peers, it seemed to Ronnie as though all the emotions of the last year stirred in his heart, as though all that pity for womankind which Aliette had engendered in him fought for utterance at his lips. For one fleeting moment, his keen gaze swept the court, envisaging judge, jury, the motionless figure of his client, the constable and the wardress either side of her, the spectators standing two-deep round the closed doors, Benjamin Bunce, David Patterson, John Cartwright, Brunton. For one fleeting moment he thought of Brunton, and of the wrong which Brunton had done to the woman he loved. Then, gravely, quietly, feeling the sword of the spoken word quiver like a live blade at his lips, he engaged his enemy.