He was nervous, more nervous than he had ever been before, but that was to be accounted for by other than professional reasons. Victory, he felt, would mean everything to him: yet there were moments when he could almost wish for defeat. It was something, however, to think that if he won, it would be by his own unaided conduct of the case, and somehow he felt that he would not care for Gastineau to have a hand in the victory.
Countess Alexia repeated her denial of all knowledge of how Captain Martindale came by his death with unswerving, convincing straightforwardness: the Duke of Lancashire had his uncomfortable quarter of an hour in the witness-box, but got off with less ridicule than might have been expected, although with a by no means modified conviction that persons of his class should be by law exempt from such appearances, or at least from cross-examination. The truculent and uncompromising Macvee made a fiercely argumentative appeal to common sense on behalf of his clients; Herriard an equally logical and more chivalrously passionate speech for the Countess, who was the real defendant, and at the end of a two days’ trial, after an ominously long deliberation, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty against the peccant editors who were duly mulcted in heavy fines, and one, the worst offender, to a short term of imprisonment.
So the victory was gained; the popular appetite, which was getting rather tired of the food, was satisfied; yet, somehow, there seemed, after all, to be a cloud over it in place of the glorious sunshine there should have been. This feeling was borne uncomfortably in upon Geoffrey Herriard as he went back to his chambers in the Temple. There was joy in his heart: he could still feel in his own the grateful—might he not now think loving?—pressure of Alexia’s hand when he had congratulated her and received for a reward a look that told him his happiness was assured. Yet, underneath all this elation, there lurked the thought that it was an unsatisfactory victory. Doubt, that terrible doubt, that hateful bugbear, had not been, as he had hoped, utterly and finally annihilated. The verdict had seemed half-hearted, as though gained by sympathy against men’s harder judgment. Campion’s testimony was, so to speak, in the air; but it had not been admitted, for there had been no time between his wounding and his death to find a magistrate to take his depositions.
Macvee had rather curled his lip at the lagging verdict. “What you people had better do now,” he had said gruffly to Herriard as they gathered up their briefs, “is to move heaven and earth to find out who did kill Martindale. A pity for all parties Campion came to an untimely end; I should dearly like to have had him in that box.”
“It is just as well for your client’s liberty and pockets you hadn’t,” Herriard had retorted, with a laugh. “The man and his evidence were absolutely genuine.”
“They all are—in the solicitor’s office,” came the cynical reply. “Anyhow, I should have liked to try a touch of the acid—the lingua fortis—eh?”
There are men with whom it is as futile to argue as to reason with a drunkard; men whose logic is a sneer or a shout, whose axioms are adaptable to their line of argument, whose postulates are taken for granted, and whose conclusions consist, fittingly, in having the last word.
Mr. Macvee went off with a self-satisfied nod, strong in the assumption that Campion’s death was a piece of bad luck for him, and, indeed, had lost him his case. Herriard, when he had congratulated and taken leave of Countess Alexia and her brother, left the Courts with his mind full of the situation’s perplexity.
“We must not rest till Martindale’s murderer is found,” he said seriously to Mr. Bowyer, the solicitor, who, with his dapper managing clerk, was waiting for him in the corridor.
Old John Bowyer pursed his lips. He was eminent and highly respectable in his line, and his line was not the hunting down of criminals.