At first William did not listen. He was filled with a blind fury that Daniel should do it, that his own brother should drag him out into public view as a young man who had made a fool of himself and married a dancer. Then her sweet, vibrating, captivating voice, with a French note in it and the spell of sex, reached him, and he had to listen.
First came the story of their marriage—he knew that; then the story of her birth and childhood—he knew that in part, and it was sad. The stillness in the room affected him. He began to feel the wave of sympathy rising. They liked her; she was winning them. Something stirred in his heart. His old passion for her was not yet cold, and that voice—that delightful, hurrying voice—he couldn’t shut it out. Reluctantly he raised his eyes.
Row upon row of faces! He had never seen so many faces. He knew many of them. His old friends and his acquaintances were there, and strangers. Then he heard Daniel’s voice, and it cut like a knife-thrust:
“And your first meeting with this man Corwin?”
William turned and looked at her then. The light from the little lamp on the recorder’s desk was playing strange tricks. It caught Fanchon’s face now and illuminated it—a face small and pale and piquant, with the eyes of a wild fawn, the adorable face that William had seen first in Paris—only a few months ago!
He gazed fixedly at it, breathing hard. The old spell laid hold of him, for she had turned and was looking at him. There was an appeal in that look, almost a cry for help, and it held him.
Then he heard her voice again, and he began to listen, in a dull way at first, and then with growing amazement, with rising fury. She was telling her story—her pitiful, sordid story. Women wept; but there was nothing touching in it to her husband. It was a revelation, a cruel, sordid revelation of a lie. She had lied to him and deceived him.
Pity died in his heart, the spell broke, he leaned back in his chair with folded arms and regarded her coldly and scornfully and bitterly. His look worked upon her like something alien and fierce and inimical; and she broke under it. At the very moment when it seemed as if she had planned it to work upon the jury, Fanchon broke down—broke down into pitiful, passionate tears.
An hour later—after Major Haskins had tried in vain to destroy her story—Daniel rose in his place, and simply, eloquently, without gesture or oratory, he made the plea that won him fame—a brother’s plea for a brother. So eloquent was it that Judge Jessup never spoke at all. There seemed nothing else to say.
Major Haskins summed up for the prosecution. He did it with acrimony, in the old way, tearing Fanchon’s past to pieces and fairly pinning the Carter family, like a lot of butterflies stuck on the board of the cruelest of naturalists, and leaving Mr. Carter gasping with mute fury. Then, at a late hour, Judge Barbour charged the jury, and William Carter rose, white as a sheet, and left the court-house.