She became aware suddenly that the room had hushed, the jury was re-entering. She hardly heard the foreman's crisp "Guilty, your Honour!" She was trembling, there was a scent in her nostrils like the fumes of poppies, and the room seemed to be swaying to and fro. She turned away her head, daring to look no longer.
"Prisoner at the bar, stand up!"—the clerk's metallic admonition seemed to come from far away. She strove to look now, but a swimming dizziness was upon her and the shadows of the room were turning black. She had never fainted in her life, and the thought of fainting now filled her with terror. She rose to her feet, fighting back the sickness with all her strength, stepped into the aisle, and in a moment more the fresh outer air, sweet and reviving, struck her quivering face.
Her going had made no stir, had been unnoted, perhaps, by a dozen in the court-room. She could not guess that in the instant she had risen, with blank eyes and unsteady feet, the prisoner at the bar had half-turned and for a breath his gaze had fastened upon her face.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE HAUNTER OF THE SHADOW
But for the iron control to which he had schooled himself, Sevier, in that second, must have made a panic movement of betrayal. He dragged his eyes away instantly, his heart beating as if it must burst, as the deliberate judicial accents struck across the courtroom:
"I have no desire to say anything to add to your anxiety of mind. The rulings of the court, if they have had any bias, have not leaned to the side of the Commonwealth. There is no legal right that has not been afforded you and if you have not chosen to meet the evidence with candour it is to be presumed that it is because candour could have lent no degree of mitigation to the circumstances. The jury has found you guilty as charged, and I should be doing less than my duty, if I allowed sympathy based upon imagined facts to subtract from the full legal penalty. The judgment of this court is, therefore, that you be imprisoned in the state's penitentiary during a period of twenty years."
Harry hardly heard the pronouncement for the mental confusion that held him. Echo knew! All the time while he had been fighting back recognition, she had known! How had she guessed? Had his voice, perhaps, that night when he had saved her, betrayed him? He remembered her white and agonised look when he had thrust her from the door of Craig's house and bade her run. A doubt, coupled with his absence from home, would have driven her, somehow or other, to discover the truth. She had been near him often, perhaps, realising the situation, conscious of what he had been striving for, knowing that only silence for a time could save them both! In that instant's view he had seen the look of suffering and sickness in her face. In these long weeks—if, indeed, she had known it so long—what an anguish of anxiety she must have been enduring!
As the voice ceased and he sat down, through the warm wave that was coursing over him, Harry felt a chilling realisation of the risk she had run in coming there. An impulsive word, an indiscreet look, and suspicion might have been roused leading to discovery. Sitting before this bar he was only an unknown criminal, a submerged "John Doe" on whom the make-shift expediency of the law spent itself. But the veil once lifted, he would be Harry Sevier, club-man and lawyer whose pleading folk had once flocked to hear, now caught in the vise of the law and proven thief and degenerate.