In the shadow, he felt his limbs suddenly trembling. With a kind of fascination his gaze, for the first time since his entrance, lifted to the stage.
It was set as a long flagged corridor of vertical steel bars, into which doors were let at regular intervals, and behind each door showed a bare, forbidding room, furnished with two iron cots, one above the other, and two wooden stools. As he gazed in consternation, a bell clangored and along the corridor came tramping a line of men clad in dingy stripes, pallid face close to shabby shoulder, one knee rising and falling to the damnable rhythm of the prison lock-step.
Harry felt an algid chill creep over him. He sat upright, his whole body rigid, each detail of the significant picture stamping itself upon his quivering perception. Midway of the line a turnkey unlocked a door in the barred wall and two links of the human chain detached themselves and entered—one stooped and crafty and cringing; the other clean-cut and erect with no stamp of vice upon his face. The clanging bolt shot home, the line moved off. Then, in the silence of the house the comely figure leaned against the bars, and John Stark's voice—or was it his, Harry Sevier's?—cried in broken agony:
"And I am innocent—innocent!"
As the curtain descended on the act, amid a crash of orchestral music, Mrs. Spottiswoode turned to Harry with a little shrug.
"It is moving, really, isn't it? But how terribly unnatural! Of course in real life nothing like that could happen to an innocent man. What do you think, Mr. Treadwell?"
But Treadwell did not answer at once. He had turned in surprise to the rear of the box, where a youth in a grey silver-buttoned uniform had parted the curtains. The messenger was looking at Brent, who rose and went to him.
"I beg pardon, sir," the boy said in a low voice, "but they told me at the box-office you were here. Will you please come over to the club? Something is the matter. Perhaps Mr. Sevier will come too."
Brent looked at him—there was agitation in the youthful face. He turned.
"Will you ladies excuse Sevier and me for a few minutes?" he said. "I dare say we shall be back before the curtain goes up again."