“I don’t know that,” Mrs. Chetwinde replied, with a rather disconcerting dryness.
She was using her fan slowly and monotonously, as if, perhaps, she were trying to make her mind calm by the repetition of a physical act.
“I’m sorry the foreman said they couldn’t agree,” Dion said, almost in a whisper. “Even if the verdict is for Mrs. Clarke, I’m afraid that will go against her.”
“If she wins she wins, and it’s all right. Cynthia’s not the sort of woman who cares much what the world thinks. The only thing that really matters is what the world does; and if she gets the verdict the world won’t do anything—except laugh at Beadon Clarke.”
A loud buzz of conversation rose from the court. Presently the light began to fade, and the buzz faded with it; then some lights were turned on, and there was a crescendo of voices. It was possible to see more clearly the multitude of faces, all of them hot, nearly all of them excited and expressive. A great many people were standing, packed closely together and looking obstinate in their determined curiosity. Most of them were either staring at, or were trying to stare at Mrs. Clarke, who was now talking to her solicitor. Esme Darlington was eating a meat lozenge and frowning, evidently discomposed by the jury’s dilemma. Lady Ermyntrude Clarke had lifted her veil and was whispering eagerly to her son, bending her head, and emphasizing her remarks with excited gestures which seemed to suggest the energy of one already uplifted by triumph. Beadon Clarke listened with the passivity of a man encompassed by melancholy, and sunk deep in the abyss of shame. Aristide Dumeny was reading a letter which he held with long-fingered, waxen-white hands very near to his narrow dark eyes. His close-growing thick hair looked more glossy now that there was artificial light in the court; from the distance its undulations were invisible, and it resembled a cap of some heavy and handsome material drawn carefully down over his head. Hadi Bey retained his vivid, alert and martial demeanor. He was twisting his mustaches with a muscular brown hand, not nervously, but with a careless and almost a lively air. Many women gazed at him as if hypnotized; they found the fez very alluring. It carried their thoughts to the East; it made them feel that the romance of the East was not very far from them. Some of them wished it very near, and thought of husbands in silk hats, bowlers, and flat caps of Harris tweed with the dawning of a dull distaste. The woman just behind Dion was talking busily to her neighbor. Dion heard her say:
“Some women always manage to have a good time. I wish I was one of them. Dick is a dear, but still——” She whispered for a minute or two; then out came her voice with, “There must be great chances for a woman in the diplomatic world. I knew a girl who married an attache and went to Bucharest. You can have no idea what the Roumanians——” whisper, whisper, whisper.
That woman was envying Mrs. Clarke, it seemed, but surely not envying her innocence. Dion began to be conscious of faint breaths from the furnace of desire, and suddenly he saw the gaunt and sickly-smiling head of hypocrisy, like the flat and tremulously moving head of a serpent, lifted up above the court. Only a little way off Robin, now better, but still “not quite the thing,” was lying in his cozy cot in the nursery of No. 5 Little Market Street, with Rosamund sitting beside him. The window to-day, for once, would probably be shut as a concession to Robin’s indisposition. A lamp would be burning perhaps. In fancy, Dion saw Rosamund’s head lit up by a gentle glow, her hair giving out little gleams of gold, as if fire were caught in its meshes. How was it that her head always suggested to him purity; and not only her purity but the purity of all sweet, sane and gloriously vigorous women—those women who tread firmly, nobly, in the great central paths of life? He did not know, but he was certain that the head of no impure, of no lascivious woman could ever look like his Rosamund’s. That nursery, holding little Robin and his mother in the lamplight, was near to this crowded court, but it was very far away too, as far as heaven is from hell. It would be good, presently, to go back to it.
Chime after chime dropped down frostily into the almost rancid heat of the court. Time was sending its warning that night was coming to London.
An epidemic of fidgeting and of coughing seized the crowd, which was evidently beginning to feel the stinging whip of an intense irritation.
“What on earth,” said the voice of a man, expressing the thought which bound all these brains together, “what on earth can the jury be up to?”