For a long time he remained perfectly still, gazing out upon the scene before him, seeing in it only dreariness and despair accentuated by the encroaching shadows; and all the time, as if to keep out some haunting sound, he pressed both hands over his ears.
And the change had come so suddenly, so unexpectedly. Only a little while before, flushed with the pride of his first success, the blood surging happily through his veins, he had waited with the others for the verdict, and as the words rang out across the hushed courtroom, "To be hanged by the neck until you are dead!" they fell upon his overstrained nerves like an electric shock. Something within him snapped, and in the next moment he found himself looking into the miserable, hopeless eyes of the prisoner as they led him from the room.
After that Sargent felt the buoyancy and joy and triumph slip completely away from him. He was aware of nothing but the sound of those words, he heard them whispered over the courtroom, he heard them in the congratulations of his friends, he heard nothing else during the speech-making at the tavern, and now he knew that they had followed him to his retreat on the bluff, for he saw them written in lurid letters across the scarlet sunset.
At first in the chaotic whirling of his thoughts, he could not comprehend the strange effect upon him; he could see no reason for the sinister obsession. He had gotten what he had been concentrating all his energies upon for the past week. Why should the outcome overwhelm him in this unlooked for manner! He puzzled over it, attempting to separate the last expression of the prisoner's face and the meaning of the words. They were too analogous to bear separation, and gradually, gaining force with its development, came to Sargent the terrifying realization that without him the sentence would not have been pronounced. A kindred thought followed—more fearful than the first—in which he saw himself the murderer, not the prisoner who had committed the deed to escape detection, but he, a lawyer under the sanction of the laws of God and man committing the same deed in the name of justice and righteousness. And so the world would think of him; but how different he knew it was. Righteousness and justice had not once entered his thoughts; only hatred and revenge. Hatred and revenge! He had said them aloud to himself at night, to keep them from slipping out of his mind for even one second. And now he was to be paid for this deed with money, blood-money, as the prisoner had been rewarded with the same.
Where was the difference? Was not each a taking of life? Was not any man whose life was taken by another, murdered? Could there be any need in the world great enough to abrogate that command of God's—"Thou shalt not kill!"
He rose from the ground, and walked recklessly on into the woods that crowned the bluff. The sunset was gone now, and only a misty twilight hung through the vista of trees. A refreshing breeze from the north brushed against his flushed face and brought a tingle to his feverish senses. With the exhilaration came an added sharpness to his perceptions.
Argue as he would, he could not make himself realize that it was an ethical view of the case that he was taking. He saw himself at the outset of his career, with this man's blood upon his hands, and instinctively, with the insight that comes in a crisis of revulsion, he knew that no matter how long he lived, he would never be able to approve of capital punishment. The personal application was what riveted the chains of his conviction. The simple statement that without his speech the prisoner would have been free, answered eloquently all doubts and questions. It was he alone, who was to bring this man to death; it was useless to evade the responsibility.
"To be hanged by the neck until you are dead."
In a moment of terrifying excitement he spoke the words aloud, to gain a better effect of their significance, and with the sound of his own voice, the words received a more intimate meaning. Deeper under their weight he sank, until it was by a supreme effort that he checked himself in his mad striding, and turned back toward the town. There was some one there, who could surely show him a new aspect of the case, in which he could realize that the responsibility did not rest upon him alone. A new thought, a suggestion, a word of sympathetic understanding would mean so much to him—but all that praise, that enthusiastic admiration so lavishly bestowed upon him because he had made a speech that would rob a man of his life! He could not bear to think of hearing it again.
When he descended the hill the lights were glowing from the many windows of the town, as if a reflection of the star-lit night. There were not many doors open, for the spring night had suddenly grown cool, and the barred portals seemed to Sargent to look down upon him with an aloofness and withdrawal that expressed the attitude of the thinking world toward him. If it were not the sentiment of that day, it would be when people came to know and to judge him from the hidden motives.