In a flash she realized what she had done. It is so hard to build and defend a fortress of lies, and she was very old and not very wise, tired out, confused by the stare of the mob and the knowledge that every word she uttered endangered the life she had borne. Now she felt that she had undone everything. She blamed herself for ruining the work of years. She saw her son led to death because of her blunder. Her answer to the question and the patient courtesy of the attorney was to throw her hands into the air, toss her white head to and fro, and give up the battle. The tears came like a gush of blood from a deep wound; they poured through the lean fingers she pressed against her gaunt cheeks, and she shook with the dry, weak weeping of senility and utter desolation. Then her old arms yearned for him as when a babe.
"I want my boy! I want my boy!"
The judge grew very busy among his papers, the prosecuting attorney swallowed hard. The jurymen thought no more of evidence and of the stability of the laws. They all had mothers, or memory-mothers, and they only resolved that whatever crime Stephen Coburn might have committed, it would be a more dastardly crime for them to drive their twelve daggers into the aching breast that had suckled him. On the instant the trial had resolved itself into "The People vs. One Poor Old Mother." The jury's tears voted for them, and their real verdict was surging up in one thought:
"This white haired saint wants her boy: he may be a black sheep, but she wants him, and she shall have him, by—" whatever was each juryman's favorite oath.
When the judge had finished his charge the jury stumbled on one another's heels to get to their sanctum. There they reached a verdict so quickly that, as the saying is, the foreman was coming back into the court-room before the twelfth man was out of it. Amazed at their own unanimity, they were properly ashamed, each of the other eleven, for their mawkish weakness, and their treachery to the stern requirements of higher citizenship. But they went home not entirely unconsoled by the old woman's cry of beatitude at that phrase, "Not Guilty."
She went among them sobbing with ecstasy, and her tears splashed their hands like holy water. It was all outrageously illegal, and sentimental, and harmful to the sanctity of the law. And yet, is it entirely desirable that men should ever grow unmindful of the tears of old mothers?
IV
The road came pouring down from the wooded hills, and the house faced the pond as before. But there was a new guest in the house. Up-stairs, in a room with a sloping wall and a low ceiling and a dormer window, sat a young man whose face had been prominent so long in the press and in the court-room that now he preferred to keep away from human eyes. So he sat in the little room and read eternally. He had acquired the habit of books in the whitewashed cell where he had spent the three of his years that should have been the happiest, busiest, best of all. He read anything he could find now—old books, old magazines, old newspapers. Finally he read even the old family Bible his mother had toted into his room for his comfort. It was a bulky tome with print of giant size and pictures of crude imagery, with here and there blank pages for recording births, deaths, marriages. Here he found the names of all his brothers and sisters, and all of them were entered among the deaths. The manners of the deaths were recorded in the shaky handwriting of fresh grief: Alice Anne, scarlet fever; James Arthur, Jr., convulsions; Andrew Morton, whooping-cough; Cicely Jane, typhoid; Amos Turner, drowned while saving his brother Stephen's life; Edward John, killed in train wreck.
Sick at heart, he turned away from the record, but the book fell open of itself at a full-page insert of the Decalogue, illuminated by some artless printer with gaudy splotches of gold, red and blue and green initials, and silly curlicues of arabesque, as if the man had been ignorant of what they meant, those ten pillars of the world.