The foreman rose and faced the Judge stubbornly, saying:
“Not guilty.”
The Judge polled the jury, glaring fiercely at each man as his name was called, but one after another the men arose and answered gruffly for acquittal. The hill people rushed from the courthouse, running for their horses and shouting the verdict as they ran. Then sleepy little Danton awoke from its September drowse and was aware that something real had happened. The elaborate machinery of prosecution, the whole political power of the county, the mighty grip and pressure of the railroad power had all been set at nothing by the tragic little love story of an ignorant French girl from the hills.
Dardis led Jeffrey Whiting down from the place where he had been a prisoner and brought him to his mother.
Jeffrey turned a long searching gaze down into his mother’s eyes as he stooped to kiss her. What he saw filled him with a bitterness that all the years of his life would not efface. What he saw was not the sprightly, cheery, capable woman who had been his mother, but a grey, trembling old woman, broken in body and heart, who clung to him fainting and crying weakly. What men had done to him, he could shake off. They had not hurt him. He could still defy them. But what they had done to his little mother, that would 267 rankle and turn in his heart forever. He would never forgive them for the things they had done to her in these four weeks and in these two days.
And here at his elbow stood the one person who had to-day done more to hurt his mother and himself than any other in the world could have done. She could have told his mother weeks ago, and have saved her all that racking sorrow and anxiety. But no, for the sake of that religion of hers, for the sake of what some priest told her, she had stuck to what had turned out to be a useless lie, to save a dead man’s name.
Ruth stood there reaching out her hands to him. But he turned upon her with a look of savage, fleering contempt; a look that stunned the girl as a blow in the face would have done. Then in a strange, hard voice he said brutally:
“You lied!”
Ruth dropped her eyes pitifully under the shock of his look and words. Even now she could not speak, could not appeal to his reason, could not tell him that she had heard nothing but what had come under the awful seal of the confessional. The secret was out. She had risked his life and lost his love to guard that secret, and now the world knew it. All the world could talk freely about what she had done except only herself. Even if she could have reached up and drawn his head down to her lips, even then she could not so much as whisper into his ear that he was right, or 268 try to tell him why she had not been able to speak. She saw the secret standing forever between their two lives, unacknowledged, embittering both those lives, yet impassable as the line of death.