The Long Lane's Turning Part 21

In that room, unguessed by all who had watched and listened during the dragging trial that was now rushing swiftly to end, weird forces had been contending. In touch with the old, familiar things, but with a high-coloured unnaturalness, Harry Sevier had stood ceaseless guard over his secret, every sense and instinct on the _qui vive_ to minimise the chances of recognition.

The night of his arrest, as he lay sleepless in his police-cell, he had thought out certain obvious details of the game he intended to play and had lost no time in putting them into practice. He had worn his waving hair, rather long; during his detention he reversed this habit and instead of its customary parting, brushed it straight back from his forehead. Later he took stock of personal mannerisms and altered by unrelaxing watchfulness and determination the natural register of his voice. Always his mind had retained the sense of fate that had come to him when he sat in the alcove with Paddy the Brick's pistol clapped to his temple. Drink had driven him to that strange journey that had ended in tragedy, but had it not been, nevertheless, some over-ruling design that had brought him to Craig's house, where the unbelievable accident of his presence had saved Echo? But for that, she would now be Craig's wife, or the centre of a wretched scandal. If he held his course, and played his cards as they fell, perhaps fate would guide him still! So far the gipsy ring had brought him luck, he thought whimsically, and he had kept it on his finger.

But withal, it had been a straining interval. There had been, first, the fear that Craig would die, casting its grisly shadow across the floor; and this had woven with the dread, that never lessened, of the moment when he should recover consciousness. The first morning's newspapers had made a feature of Craig's a.s.sertion that he did not know the woman who had awaited his coming in his library; but Harry held in his mind the certainty that his own recognition must inevitably result in Echo's involvement.

He had adopted his course of silence because it was the only one open to him at the moment, but the event had justified his choice. It was the unexpected that had happened. The time-limit of the law which bounds murder had pa.s.sed, and Craig was still alive. Nor had he recovered consciousness. But even with these a.s.surances, Harry had had hourly to fight with the dread of some accidental confrontation which should pierce the screen and this dread had infinitely increased with the opening of the trial, when he became perforce the cynosure of hundreds of curious eyes.

But here also fate had been kind. It was now the second day of the proceedings, for Harry's personal qualities, no less than his strange pertinacity, had roused a keen professional interest in the attorney who had been a.s.signed to defend him, and the latter had made a fight which his client, whose legal experience judged the outcome certain, would gladly have exchanged for the inept blunderings of the veriest tyro.

However, no chance encounter had betrayed him and as the District Attorney rose for his final clinching of the nail of evidence, Harry had felt a great relief that the ordeal was so nearly finished.

Almost the great danger was past! With his conviction and the pa.s.sing of sentence upon him, the Judicial arm of the law would have delivered him to the Executive. Danger of publicity would be over, and Echo might be told the truth, without danger of recoil upon herself. A thousand times in his cell he had wondered how he should accomplish this. In some way it could be brought about--some safe and secret way--just how he would have leisure to decide. No one, not even Mason, his counsel, need be trusted with the significant secret that had such power to blast. She must be well instructed so that no false step could mar his plan. She must take no one into her confidence--must tell her story privately to the Governor, who had known her from her childhood. He was a just and discreet man and Harry did not doubt the outcome. His own story could supplement hers, and after a sufficient interval, executive pardon would quietly release him. He could step back into his old niche, and all would be as before. Even if Craig recovered, he would be powerless, since an accusation could not lie against a pardoned man, and Craig would not bring a charge that was at once bootless and incredible. Nor would he wreak an empty revenge upon Echo. He had once declared that he had not known the woman in the library, and, since she was lost to him in any case, he would not hazard a public reversal of his testimony that all would unite to call dastardly. The one thing Craig valued which men in the ma.s.s could give him, aside from power and money, was his place in the social sun, and he would not risk this. In the publication of the letter, or letters, that would have involved her father, he doubtless would not have been publicly known; in this matter he would run the gauntlet of popular southern opinion and would be well aware that the act would d.a.m.n him.

So Harry told himself. The real story would be buried, and the world--his world and Echo's--would never know!

Thus he was thinking as he listened dully to the prosecutor's scathing _resume_. His elbow was on the long table by which he sat, his brow in his hand, shielding his eyes from the sunlight that sent darting arrows across the cool, dim room as the windowshade waved in the light breeze.

He could not see the door at the rear of the room swing open, nor the figure of the woman who entered--to pause, momentarily confused in the quick transition from the sunny Square to the shadow of the interior.

Echo's heart was beating hard as she slipped into a vacant seat next the aisle, conscious that the man who was speaking was Meredith, whom she had met at tea the day before, and that he was closing his final speech for the prosecution. She looked about her, at the jury who seemed apathetic and a trifle bored, at the Judge who was writing perfunctorily on the pad before him, and then her gaze slipped, half-stealthily, to the long table before the bar, where the prisoner should be sitting. But though she leaned forward to look, she could not see him for the intervening figures. Then, suddenly, the deliberate, judicial utterance of the District Attorney caught her attention. He was rounding to a final period and the meaning of what he was saying smote through her self-command to the last, inner corner of her shrinking consciousness and made the room whirl about her:

"The counsel for the defence has attempted to read a romantic meaning into the obduracy with which this thief and would-be murderer has held to his policy of silence. He has invited you to believe that this silence indicates a n.o.ble desire to shield a woman's reputation. The name of a woman who thrusts herself, unexpected and unattended, into a man's house at dead of night! The name of a woman the innocence of whose errand is effectually denied by her precipitate flight and her craven hiding!"

Echo sank back into her seat, breathless. She listened to the brief, conventional charge, saw the jurors file out, heard the stir and movement of relaxation sweep over the room, yet she was unconscious of the lapse of time. The public, open declaration had seemed to set the final flaming seal upon the incident, voicing, as if with a monster siren, the shameful meaning! She had cringed at Mrs. Moncure's smiling innuendo; now the scathing indictment was burning itself on her brain.

"_A woman who thrusts herself unexpected and unattended into a man's house at dead of night!_"--the words seemed to stab her over and over like poisoned daggers. She was that--that woman! She imagined herself rising in that suffocating room and saying distinctly, "It is I he said that of--I, Echo Allen!" She saw herself on the witness-stand, heckled and badgered, faltering an unbelievable story to sceptical ears. There was rolling over her an overwhelming dread, and her hands had clenched till the nails struck purple crescents into her palms.

She became aware suddenly that the room had hushed, the jury was re-entering. She hardly heard the foreman's crisp "Guilty, your Honour!" She was trembling, there was a scent in her nostrils like the fumes of poppies, and the room seemed to be swaying to and fro. She turned away her head, daring to look no longer.

"Prisoner at the bar, stand up!"--the clerk's metallic admonition seemed to come from far away. She strove to look now, but a swimming dizziness was upon her and the shadows of the room were turning black.

She had never fainted in her life, and the thought of fainting now filled her with terror. She rose to her feet, fighting back the sickness with all her strength, stepped into the aisle, and in a moment more the fresh outer air, sweet and reviving, struck her quivering face.

Her going had made no stir, had been unnoted, perhaps, by a dozen in the court-room. She could not guess that in the instant she had risen, with blank eyes and unsteady feet, the prisoner at the bar had half-turned and for a breath his gaze had fastened upon her face.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE HAUNTER OF THE SHADOW

But for the iron control to which he had schooled himself, Sevier, in that second, must have made a panic movement of betrayal. He dragged his eyes away instantly, his heart beating as if it must burst, as the deliberate judicial accents struck across the courtroom:

"I have no desire to say anything to add to your anxiety of mind. The rulings of the court, if they have had any bias, have not leaned to the side of the Commonwealth. There is no legal right that has not been afforded you and if you have not chosen to meet the evidence with candour it is to be presumed that it is because candour could have lent no degree of mitigation to the circ.u.mstances. The jury has found you guilty as charged, and I should be doing less than my duty, if I allowed sympathy based upon imagined facts to subtract from the full legal penalty. The judgment of this court is, therefore, that you be imprisoned in the state's penitentiary during a period of twenty years."

Harry hardly heard the p.r.o.nouncement for the mental confusion that held him. Echo knew! All the time while he had been fighting back recognition, she had known! How had she guessed? Had his voice, perhaps, that night when he had saved her, betrayed him? He remembered her white and agonised look when he had thrust her from the door of Craig's house and bade her run. A doubt, coupled with his absence from home, would have driven her, somehow or other, to discover the truth.

She had been near him often, perhaps, realising the situation, conscious of what he had been striving for, knowing that only silence for a time could save them both! In that instant's view he had seen the look of suffering and sickness in her face. In these long weeks--if, indeed, she had known it so long--what an anguish of anxiety she must have been enduring!

As the voice ceased and he sat down, through the warm wave that was coursing over him, Harry felt a chilling realisation of the risk she had run in coming there. An impulsive word, an indiscreet look, and suspicion might have been roused leading to discovery. Sitting before this bar he was only an unknown criminal, a submerged "John Doe" on whom the make-shift expediency of the law spent itself. But the veil once lifted, he would be Harry Sevier, club-man and lawyer whose pleading folk had once flocked to hear, now caught in the vise of the law and proven thief and degenerate.

In the emptying room he felt the cool hand of his counsel touch his own, and followed him--with a watchful deputy-sheriff now in hand-reach--to a side door that opened into a chamber at the rear of the court-room. On the threshold the lawyer turned to the sheriff.

"There's no hurry, Jerry," he said peevishly. "You wait out here a few minutes. The old man himself is coming. He wants to see him."

"Mr. Mason," said Sevier as the other closed the door. "I shall not pretend to thank you for your interest and kindness."

The man of briefs shrugged his shoulders. "There's nothing to thank me for," he answered briskly. "Now, if I had cleared you--"

Harry nodded. "Naturally, you couldn't do that. You were at a disadvantage."

"Thanks to you!"

"Yes, I didn't a.s.sist you much, I know."

"Didn't help me at all," came back in a growl.

"No doubt you think I might have," said Harry. "But please don't count me unresponsive. It is only that the logic of the situation appealed to me as unanswerable. But it is a privilege," he added, with the glimmer of a smile, "to have been a.s.sociated with you."

Mason looked at him with a twist to his saturnine lips. "You have been my most remarkable client," he said. "It would have pleased me to have gotten you off. But unluckily for you, I'm no Harry Sevier."

It was fortunate that the face of the man beside him was turned away, or he might have seen it go white and startled. "I'm sure I lost no chance I might have had," said the other slowly, "even though you're not Harry Sevier, whoever he is."

The other laughed shortly. "He's a lawyer in the next state. I heard him plead once. _He_ didn't bother with evidence! He'd clear Judas Iscariot with that silver tongue of his! Ah, well..." He shrugged his shoulders again, and turned to a closed door. "I'll see if the old man is ready."

"One moment." Harry had drawn the ring with the square uncut emerald from his finger, and now he held it out. "I should consider it a favour, if you would take this--it has no particular value, I am sorry to say--as a little remembrance."

Mason turned the ring over in his hands. Under the churlish pose a guilty flush stole up his lean, eccentric face that betrayed unmistakably the friendliness and liking he had learned for the man whose plight angered and whose att.i.tude puzzled him. "Thank you!" he said, and a sudden smile made the grim demeanour all at once soft and human. He slipped it on his finger. "Thank you! I shall be proud to keep it."

He opened the door and Sevier followed him into the room adjoining.

There, looking out of the window, the fingers of one thin hand in his plenteous blue-grey beard, the other behind him, stood the Governor of the State. Harry felt a thrill run through him. He knew the older man by sight, for they had met once casually in the past. Had Echo already spoken? Did the other know?

"Governor," said the lawyer, "I beg to present my client, whose cause I have so poorly represented."

In the deep grey, kindly eyes that were studying him attentively, Harry saw instantly, however, that there was no hidden knowledge, and his heart, that had leaped quickly, dropped into measured beating. He bowed.

"My counsel did wonders," he said, "but the day of miracles is past."

The reply was simple enough, but the visitor unconsciously looked his surprise. He had been prepared for something in a way unusual, for Mason had employed his intimacy to inspire something of his own keen interest in his client. Face to face with the latter, the Governor understood the lawyer's puzzlement. Here was a man who had been arrested as a house-breaker and who, caught in the very act, had shot a man down. Yet he found it suddenly credible, as Mason had declared, that the man was no ordinary burglar, was indeed, or had been, a gentleman. But there were gentlemen-thieves! He met Harry's tone with noncommittal courtesy.

"You will not consider this an intrusion, I hope," he said. "My friend here was anxious that I should see you. He has been deeply concerned in your case."

"It is a pleasure," Harry replied simply. "He has been put to considerable pains, in which there is very little credit, I am afraid."

"His interest," the Governor went on, "as he has a.s.sured me, arises from a conviction that there is some hidden element in the affair that, if it had been brought out, might have put a different face upon it."

Harry bowed but did not answer.

"You have a good reason, I take it, for maintaining the silence as to yourself which my friend here finds so difficult?"

"The very best," said Harry grimly.