She floated fantastic in his memories. Once during the night he fell into a brief half-sleep. She gave him again the brown-paper parcel—but loose this time, so that the paper slipped away, and revealed a halter. He woke sweating with the nightmare. Anything approaching sleep was thenceforth impossible. The dim, perpetual, inextinguishable light in his cell grew to a maddening irritation. He yearned for the soothing comfort of darkness. He wrapped his head in his bedclothes to shut out the light—but with the ill success familiar to all who have tried it. So, until the dawn, he remained staringly awake, and the phantasmagoria of his trial swept endlessly on.
Faces of friends, anxious, incredulous, seen in the crowded little court, rose up before him. Gerard’s and Irene’s most continuously. She wore a tight-fitting dark-blue jacket and a little toque to match, set amid the fair waves of her hair. He remembered vividly every detail—the white stitching of her black gloves. He strove to keep her image before him—the sweetness of her smile, the trust in her grey eyes. But Minna, hard and sullen, came and blotted out the more gracious fantasy. Again he recalled Irene—the last scene, before he was led away to the prison van, when friends crowded round the dock; Gerard among the first.
“It’s bound to come right, Hugh. We’ll do our best.”
Irene had struggled forward and the others had fallen back. And she had put up both hands, which he, leaning over, had taken in his; and he had seen the great pain burning beneath her eyes.
“Oh, Hugh, if our love for you can do anything—use it—God bless you!”
A hurried speech, uttered in the swiftness of the hand-clasp. He tried to keep it with him as a charm against the bugbears of the night. But until the warder came at half-past six to wake him, they swam before him in a whirling, reiterative circle, recurring almost rhythmically like the separate monstrosities of horses in an infernal merry-go-round.
Day came, and with it clearness of mind and logical sense of proportion. When Harroway, the solicitor, arrived, he discussed the situation with practised acuteness. His defence was clear. The stealing of the security was too ludicrous an expedient for a man of his intelligence. Besides, its legal value was that of a blank sheet of foolscap. Of this Hart’s confidential clerk had full knowledge. Would a jury believe a man to be so idiotic as to commit a murder in order to steal that which he knew to be worthless? Was it likely that a man who had committed a murder at three o’clock would deliberately postpone his return home—a quarter of an hour’s walk—until an hour when his arrival would be certain to attract attention? But Harroway shook his head dolefully.
“Of course we’ll put all that forward. But the self-incriminating stupidity of criminals is a by-word. If the attorney or solicitor-general is prosecuting and takes his privilege of answering Gardiner, he will convince the jury of this little fact. It would be much more to the point if you would tell us how to prove an alibi. That’s the infernal part of it. No one is such a damned fool as to believe that you were lying drunk and invisible in a gutter all night. You can prove an alibi if you like, can’t you?”
“Certainly,” replied Hugh, with a baffling twirl of his moustache. “But I am going to do no such thing. Please consider that final. If you and Gardiner can’t get me off without it—well, I’ll hang. Jouir, mourir et ne rien dire! And that’s the end of it.”
He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders magnificently. The stout solicitor rose with irritation.