“Yet, even in the act of crying out murder, you were capable of noticing all the complicated sentiments which you now tell us were in the assailant’s cry!”
“In great excitement one takes no notice of the passage of time—a minute contains as much as an hour.”
“And you expect us to believe that in that minute, and without the help of words, you were enlightened as to the meaning of the act by a mere inarticulate cry?”
“I tell you the impression produced on my mind, as I told it at the coroner’s inquest,” said Dr. Barrère, steadily; “as I have told it to my friends from the first.”
“Yet this did not prevent you from shouting murder?”
“No; it did not prevent me from calling for help in the usual way.”
This was all that could be made of the doctor. It remained the strongest point in poor Jim’s favour, who was, as everybody saw to be inevitable, condemned; yet recommended to mercy because of what Dr. Barrère had said. Otherwise there were many features in the case that roused the popular pity. The bad character of the man who had been killed, the evil influence he was known to have exercised, the injury he had done to Jim himself and to so many others, and the very cause of the quarrel in which Jim had threatened and announced his intention of punishing him—all these things, had Jim been tried in France, would have produced a verdict modified by extenuating circumstances. In England it did not touch the decision, but it produced that vague recommendation to mercy with which pity satisfies itself when it can do no more.
Dr. Barrère took the unfortunate mother and sister home. Mrs. Surtees, broken as she was, could not be absent from the court when her son’s fate was to be determined. She was as one stricken dumb as they took her back. Now and then she would put her trembling hands to her eyes as if expecting tears which did not come. Her very heart and soul were crushed by the awful doom which had been spoken. And the others did not even dare to exchange a look. The horror which enveloped them was too terrible for speech. It was only after an interval had passed, and life, indomitable life which always rises again whatever may be the anguish that subdues it for a moment, had returned in pain and fear to its struggle with the intolerable, that words and the power of communication returned. Then Dr. Barrère told the broken-hearted women that both he himself and others in the town who knew Jim, with all the influence that could be brought to bear, would work for a revision of the sentence. It was upon his own evidence that the hopes which those who were not so deeply, tremendously interested, but who regarded the case with an impartial eye, began to entertain, were founded. “I hope that the Home Secretary may send for me,” he said; “they think he will. God grant it!” He too had worked himself into a kind of hope.
“Oh,” said Agnes, melting for the first time into tears at the touch of a possible deliverance, “if we could go, as they used to do, to the Queen, his mother and his sister, on our knees!”
Mrs. Surtees sat and listened to them with her immovable face of misery. “Don’t speak to me of hope, for I cannot bear it,” she said. “Oh, don’t speak of hope; there is none—none! Nothing but death and shame.”