The Right of Way, Complete - Gilbert Parker
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Judge, jury, and public riveted their eyes upon Charley Steele. He had
now drawn a little farther away from the jury-box; his eye took in the
judge as well; once or twice he turned, as if appealingly and
confidently, to the people in the room. It was terribly hot, the air was
sickeningly close, every one seemed oppressed--every one save a lady
sitting not a score of feet from where the counsel for the prisoner
stood. This lady's face was not one that could flush easily; it belonged
to a temperament as even as her person was symmetrically beautiful. As
Charley talked, her eyes were fixed steadily, wonderingly upon him. There
was a question in her gaze, which never in the course of the speech was
quite absorbed by the admiration--the intense admiration--she was feeling
for him. Once as he turned with a concentrated earnestness in her
direction his eyes met hers. The message he flashed her was
sub-conscious, for his mind never wavered an instant from the cause in
hand, but it said to her:
"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you." For another quarter of
an hour he exposed the fallacy of purely circumstantial evidence; he
raised in the minds of his hearers the painful responsibility of the law,
the awful tyranny of miscarriage of justice; he condemned prejudice
against a prisoner because that prisoner demanded that the law should
prove him guilty instead of his proving himself innocent. If a man chose
to stand to that, to sternly assume this perilous position, the law had
no right to take advantage of it. He turned towards the prisoner and
traced his possible history: as the sensitive, intelligent son of godly
Catholic parents from some remote parish in French Canada. He drew an
imaginary picture of the home from which he might have come, and of the
parents and brothers and sisters who would have lived weeks of torture
knowing that their son and brother was being tried for his life. It might
at first glance seem quixotic, eccentric, but was it unnatural that the
prisoner should choose silence as to his origin and home, rather than
have his family and friends face the undoubted peril lying before him?
Besides, though his past life might have been wholly blameless, it would
not be evidence in his favour. It might, indeed, if it had not been
blameless, provide some element of unjust suspicion against him, furnish
some fancied motive. The prisoner had chosen his path, and events had so
far justified him. It must be clear to the minds of judge and jury that
there were fatally weak places in the circumstantial evidence offered for
the conviction of this man.
There was the fact that no sign of the crime, no drop of blood, no
weapon, was found about him or near him, and that he was peacefully
sleeping at the moment the constable arrested him.
There was also the fact that no motive for the crime had been shown. It
was not enough that he and the dead man had been heard quarrelling. Was
there any certainty that it was a quarrel, since no word or sentence of
the conversation had been brought into court? Men with quick tempers
might quarrel over trivial things, but exasperation did not always end in
bodily injury and the taking of life; imprecations were not so uncommon
that they could be taken as evidence of wilful murder. The prisoner
refused to say what that troubled conversation was about, but who could
question his right to take the risk of his silence being misunderstood?
The judge was alternately taking notes and looking fixedly at the
prisoner; the jury were in various attitudes of strained attention; the
public sat open mouthed; and up in the gallery a woman with white face
and clinched hands listened moveless and staring. Charley Steele was
holding captive the emotions and the judgments of his hearers. All
antipathy had gone; there was a strange eager intimacy between the
jurymen and himself. People no longer looked with distant dislike at the
prisoner, but began to see innocence in his grim silence, disdain only in
his surly defiance.
But Charley Steele had preserved his great stroke for the psychological
moment. He suddenly launched upon them the fact, brought out in evidence,
that the dead man had struck a woman in the face a year ago; also that he
had kept a factory girl in affluence for two years. Here was motive for
murder--if motive were to govern them--far greater than might be
suggested by excited conversation which listeners who could not hear a
word construed into a quarrel--listeners who bore the prisoner at the bar
ill-will because he shunned them while in the lumber-camp. If the
prisoner was to be hanged for motive untraceable, why should not these
two women be hanged for motive traceable!
Here was his chance. He appeared to impeach subtly every intelligence in
the room for having had any preconviction about the prisoner's guilt. He
compelled the jury to feel that they, with him, had made the discovery of
the unsound character of the evidence. The man might be guilty, but their
personal guilt, the guilt of the law, would be far greater if they
condemned the man on violable evidence. With a last simple appeal, his
hands resting on the railing before the seat where the jury sat, his
voice low and conversational again, his eyes running down the line of
faces of the men who had his client's life in their hands, he said:
"It is not a life only that is at stake, it is not revenge for a life
snatched from the busy world by a brutal hand that we should heed to-day,
but the awful responsibility of that thing we call the State, which,
having the power of life and death without gainsay or hindrance, should
prove to the last inch of necessity its right to take a human life. And
the right and the reason should bring conviction to every honest human
mind. That is all I have to say."
The crown attorney made a perfunctory reply. The judge's charge was
brief, and, if anything, a little in favour of the prisoner--very little,
a casuist's little; and the jury filed out of the room. They were gone
but ten minutes. When they returned, the verdict was given: "Not guilty,
your Honour!"
Then it was that a woman laughed in the gallery. Then a whispering voice
said across the railing which separated the public from the lawyers:
"Charley! Charley!"
Though Charley turned and looked at the lady who spoke, he made no
response.
A few minutes later, outside the court, as he walked quickly away, again
inscrutable and debonair, the prisoner, Joseph Nadeau, touched him on the
arm and said:
"M'sieu', M'sieu', you have saved my life--I thank you, M'sieu'!"
Charley Steele drew his arm away with disgust. "Get out of my sight!
You're as guilty as hell!" he said.
CHAPTER II
WHAT CAME OF THE TRIAL
"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you." So Charley Steele's
eyes had said to a lady in the court room on that last day of the great
trial. The lady had left the court-room dazed and exalted. She, with
hundreds of others, had had a revelation of Charley Steele; had had also
the great emotional experience of seeing a crowd make the 'volte face'
with their convictions; looking at a prisoner one moment with eyes of
loathing and anticipating his gruesome end, the next moment seeing him as
the possible martyr to the machinery of the law. She whose heart was used
to beat so evenly had felt it leap and swell with excitement, awaiting
the moment when the jury filed back into the court-room. Then it stood
still, as a wave might hang for an instant at its crest ere it swept down
to beat upon the shore.
With her as with most present, the deepest feeling in the agitated
suspense was not so much that the prisoner should go free, as that the
prisoner's counsel should win his case. It was as if Charley Steele were
on trial instead of the prisoner. He was the imminent figure; it was his
fate that was in the balance--such was the antic irony of suggestion. And
the truth was, that the fates of both prisoner and counsel had been
weighed in the balance that sweltering August day.
The prisoner was forgotten almost as soon as he had left the court-room a
free man, but wherever men and women met in Montreal that day, one name
was on the lips of all-Charley Steele! In his speech he had done two
things: he had thrown down every barrier of reserve--or so it seemed--and
had become human and intimate. "I could not have believed it of him," was
the remark on every lip. Of his ability there never had been a moment's
doubt, but it had ever been an uncomfortable ability, it had tortured
foes and made friends anxious. No one had ever seen him show feeling. If
it was a mask, he had worn it with a curious consistency: it had been
with him as a child, at school, at college, and he had brought it back
again to the town where he was born. It had effectually prevented his
being popular, but it had made him--with his foppishness and his
originality--an object of perpetual interest. Few men had ventured to
cross swords with him. He left his fellow-citizens very much alone. He
was uniformly if distantly courteous, and he was respected in his own
profession for his uncommon powers and for an utter indifference as to
whether he had cases in court or not.
Coming from the judge's chambers after the trial he went to his office,
receiving as he passed congratulations more effusively offered than, as
people presently found, his manner warranted.
For he was again the formal, masked Charley Steele, looking calmly
through the interrogative eye-glass. By the time he reached his office,
greetings became more subdued. His prestige had increased immensely in a
few short hours, but he had no more friends than before. Old relations
were soon re-established. The town was proud of his ability as it had
always been, irritated by his manner as it had always been, more
prophetic of his future than it had ever been, and unconsciously grateful
for the fact that he had given them a sensation which would outlast the
summer.
All these things concerned him little. Once the business of the
court-room was over, a thought which had quietly lain in waiting behind
the strenuous occupations of his brain leaped forward to exclude all
others.
As he entered his office he was thinking of that girl's face in the
court-room, with its flush of added beauty which he and his speech had
brought there. "What a perfect loveliness!" he said to himself as he
bathed his face and hands, and prepared to go into the street again. "She
needed just such a flush to make her supreme Kathleen!" He stood, looking
out into the square, out into the green of the trees where the birds
twittered. "Faultless--faultless in form and feature. She was so as a
child, she is so as a woman." He lighted a cigarette, and blew away
little clouds of smoke. "I will do it. I will marry her. She will have
me: I saw it in her eye. Fairing doesn't matter. Her uncle will never
consent to that, and she doesn't care enough for him. She cares, but she
doesn't care enough. . . . I will do it."
He turned towards a cupboard into which he had put a certain bottle
before he went to the court-room two hours before. He put the key in the
lock, then stopped. "No, I think not!" he said. "What I say to her shall
not be said forensically. What a discovery I've made! I was dull, blank,
all iron and ice; the judge, the jury, the public, even Kathleen, against
me; and then that bottle in there--and I saw things like crystal! I had a
glow in my brain, I had a tingle in my fingers; and I had success,
and"--his face clouded--"He was as guilty as hell!" he added, almost
bitterly, as he put the key of the cupboard into his pocket again.
There was a knock at the door, and a youth of about nineteen entered.
"Hello!" he said. "I say, sir, but that speech of yours struck us all
where we couldn't say no. Even Kathleen got in a glow over it. Perhaps
Captain Fairing didn't, for he's just left her in a huff, and she's
looking--you remember those lines in the school-book:
"'A red spot burned upon her cheek,
Streamed her rich tresses down--'"
He laughed gaily. "I've come to ask you up to tea," he added. "The
Unclekins is there. When I told him that Kathleen had sent Fairing away
with a flea in his ear, he nearly fell off his chair. He lent me twenty
dollars on the spot. Are you coming our way?" he continued, suddenly
trying to imitate Charley's manner. Charley nodded, and they left the
office together and moved away under a long avenue of maples to where, in
the shade of a high hill, was the house of the uncle of Kathleen Wantage,
with whom she and her brother Billy lived. They walked in silence for
some time, and at last Billy said, 'a propos' of nothing:
"Fairing hasn't a red cent."
"You have a perambulating mind, Billy," said Charley, and bowed to a
young clergyman approaching them from the opposite direction.
"What does that mean?" remarked Billy, and said "Hello!" to the young
clergyman, and did not wait for Charley's answer.
The Rev. John Brown was by no means a conventional parson. He was smoking
a cigarette, and two dogs followed at his heels. He was certainly not a
fogy. He had more than a little admiration for Charley Steele, but he
found it difficult to preach when Charley was in the congregation. He was
always aware of a subterranean and half-pitying criticism going on in the
barrister's mind. John Brown knew that he could never match his
intelligence against Charley's, in spite of the theological course at
Durham, so he undertook to scotch the snake by kindness. He thought that
he might be able to do this, because Charley, who was known to be frankly
agnostical, came to his church more or less regularly.
The Rev. John Brown was not indifferent to what men thought of him. He
had a reputation for being "independent," but his chief independence
consisted in dressing a little like a layman, posing as the athletic
parson of the new school, consorting with ministers of the dissenting
denominations when it was sufficiently effective, and being a "good
fellow" with men easily bored by church and churchmen. He preached
theatrical sermons to societies and benevolent associations. He wanted to
be thought well of on all hands, and he was shrewd enough to know that if
he trimmed between ritualism on one hand and evangelicism on the other,
he was on a safe road. He might perforate old dogmatical prejudices with
a good deal of freedom so long as he did not begin bringing "millinery"
into the service of the church. He invested his own personal habits with
the millinery. He looked a picturesque figure with his blond moustache, a
little silk-lined brown cloak thrown carelessly over his shoulder, a
gold-headed cane, and a brisk jacket half ecclesiastical, half military.
He had interested Charley Steele, also he had amused him, and sometimes
he had surprised him into a sort of admiration; for Brown had a
temperament capable of little inspirations--such a literary inspiration
as might come to a second-rate actor--and Charley never belittled any
man's ability, but seized upon every sign of knowledge with the
appreciation of the epicure.
John Brown raised his hat to Charley, then held out a hand.
"Masterly-masterly!" he said. "Permit my congratulations. It was the one
thing to do. You couldn't have saved him by making him an object of pity,
by appealing to our sympathies."
"What do you take to be the secret, then?" asked Charley, with a look
half abstracted, half quizzical. "Terror--sheer terror. You startled the
conscience. You made defects in the circumstantial evidence, the imminent
problems of our own salvation. You put us all on trial. We were under the
lash of fear. If we parsons could only do that from the pulpit!"
"We will discuss that on our shooting-trip next week. Duck-shooting gives
plenty of time for theological asides. You are coming, eh?"
John Brown scarcely noticed the sarcasm, he was so delighted at the
suggestion that he was to be included in the annual duck-shoot of the
Seven, as the little yearly party of Charley and his friends to Lake
Aubergine was called. He had angled for this invitation for two years.
"I must not keep you," Charley said, and dismissed him with a bow. "The
sheep will stray, and the shepherd must use his crook."
Brown smiled at the badinage, and went on his way rejoicing in the fact
that he was to share the amusements of the Seven at Lake Aubergine--the
Lake of the Mad Apple. To get hold of these seven men of repute and
position, to be admitted into this good presence!--He had a pious
exaltation, but whether it was because he might gather into the fold
erratic and agnostical sheep like Charley Steele, or because it pleased
his social ambitions, he had occasion to answer in the future. He gaily
prepared to go to the Lake of the Mad Apple, where he was fated to eat of
the tree of knowledge.
Charley Steele and Billy Wantage walked on slowly to the house under the
hill.
"He's the right sort," said Billy. "He's a sport. I can stand that kind.
Did you ever hear him sing? No? Well, he can sing a comic song fit to
make you die. I can sing a bit myself, but to hear him sing 'The Man Who
Couldn't Get Warm' is a show in itself. He can play the banjo too, and
the guitar--but he's best on the banjo. It's worth a dollar to listen to
his Epha-haam--that's Ephraim, you know--Ephahaam Come Home,' and 'I
Found Y' in de Honeysuckle Paitch.'"
"He preaches, too!" said Charley drily.
They had reached the door of the house under the hill, and Billy had no
time for further remark. He ran into the drawing-room, announcing Charley
with the words: "I say, Kathleen, I've brought the man that made the
judge sit up."
Billy suddenly stopped, however, for there sat the judge who had tried
the case, calmly munching a piece of toast. The judge did not allow
himself the luxury of embarrassment, but bowed to Charley with a smile,
which he presently turned on Kathleen, who came as near being
disconcerted as she had ever been in her life.
Kathleen had passed through a good deal to look so unflurried. She had
been on trial in the court-room as well as the prisoner. Important things
had been at stake with her. She and Charley Steele had known each other
since they were children. To her, even in childhood, he had been a
dominant figure. He had judicially and admiringly told her she was
beautiful--when he was twelve and she five. But he had said it without
any of those glances which usually accompanied the same sentiments in the
mouths of other lads. He had never made boy-love to her, and she had
thrilled at the praise of less splendid people than Charley Steele. He
had always piqued her, he was so superior to the ordinary enchantments of
youth, beauty, and fine linen.
As he came and went, growing older and more characteristic, more and more
"Beauty Steele," accompanied by legends of wild deeds and days at
college, by tales of his fopperies and the fashions he had set, she
herself had grown, as he had termed it, more "decorative." He had told
her so, not in the least patronisingly, but as a simple fact in which no
sentiment lurked. He thought her the most beautiful thing he had ever
seen, but he had never regarded her save as a creation for the perfect
pleasure of the eye; he thought her the concrete glory of sensuous
purity, no more capable of sentiment than himself. He had said again and
again, as he grew older and left college and began the business of life
after two years in Europe, that sentiment would spoil her, would scatter
the charm of her perfect beauty; it would vitalise her too much, and her
nature would lose its proportion; she would be decentralised! She had
been piqued at his indifference to sentiment; she could not easily be
content without worship, though she felt none. This pique had grown until
Captain Tom Fairing crossed her path.
Fairing was the antithesis of Charley Steele. Handsome, poor,
enthusiastic, and none too able, he was simple and straightforward, and
might be depended on till the end of the chapter. And the end of it was,
that in so far as she had ever felt real sentiment for anybody, she felt
it for Tom Fairing of the Royal Fusileers. It was not love she felt in
the old, in the big, in the noble sense, but it had behind it selection
and instinct and natural gravitation.
Fairing declared his love. She would give him no answer. For as soon as
she was presented with the issue, the destiny, she began to look round
her anxiously. The first person to fill the perspective was Charley
Steele. As her mind dwelt on him, her uncle gave forth his judgment, that
she should never have a penny if she married Tom Fairing. This only
irritated her, it did not influence her. But there was Charley. He was a
figure, was already noted in his profession because of a few masterly
successes in criminal cases, and if he was not popular, he was
distinguished, and the world would talk about him to the end. He was
handsome, and he was well-to-do-he had a big unoccupied house on the hill
among the maples. How many people had said, What a couple they would
make-Charley Steele and Kathleen Wantage!
So, as Fairing presented an issue to her, she concentrated her thoughts
as she had never done before on the man whom the world set apart for her,
in a way the world has.
As she looked and looked, Charley began to look also. He had not been
enamoured of the sordid things of the world; he had been merely curious.
He thought vice was ugly; he had imagination and a sense of form.
Kathleen was beautiful. Sentiment had, so he thought, never seriously
disturbed her; he did not think it ever would. It had not affected him.
He did not understand it. He had been born non-intime. He had had
acquaintances, but never friendships, and never loves or love. But he had
a fine sense of the fitting and the proportionate, and he worshipped
beauty in so far as he could worship anything. The homage was cerebral,
intellectual, temperamental, not of the heart. As he looked out upon the
world half pityingly, half ironically, he was struck with wonder at the
disproportion which was engendered by "having heart," as it was called.
He did not find it necessary.
Now that he had begun to think of marriage, who so suitable as Kathleen?
He knew of Fairing's adoration, but he took it as a matter of course that
she had nothing to give of the same sort in return. Her beauty was still
serene and unimpaired. He would not spoil it by the tortures of emotion.
He would try to make Kathleen's heart beat in harmony with his own; it
should not thunder out of time. He had made up his mind that he would
marry her.
For Kathleen, with the great trial, the beginning of the end had come.
Charley's power over her was subtle, finely sensuous, and, in deciding,
there were no mere heart-impulses working for Charley. Instinct and
impulse were working in another direction. She had not committed her mind
to either man, though her heart, to a point, was committed to Fairing.
On the day of the trial, however, she fell wholly under that influence
which had swayed judge, jury, and public. To her the verdict of the jury
was not in favour of the prisoner at the bar--she did not think of him.
It was in favour of Charley Steele.
And so, indifferent as to who heard, over the heads of the people in
front of her, to the accused's counsel inside the railings, she had
called, softly: "Charley! Charley!"
Now, in the house under the hill, they were face to face, and the end was
at hand: the end of something and the beginning of something.
There was a few moments of casual conversation, in which Billy talked as
much as anybody, and then Kathleen said:
"What do you suppose was the man's motive for committing the murder?"
Charley looked at Kathleen steadily, curiously, through his monocle. It
was a singular compliment she paid him. Her remark took no heed of the
verdict of the jury. He turned inquiringly towards the judge, who, though
slightly shocked by the question, recovered himself quickly.
"What do you think it was, sir?" Charley asked quietly.
"A woman--and revenge, perhaps," answered the judge, with a
matter-of-course air.
A few moments afterwards the judge was carried off by Kathleen's uncle to
see some rare old books; Billy, his work being done, vanished; and
Kathleen and Charley were left alone.
"You did not answer me in the court-room," Kathleen said. "I called to
you."
"I wanted to hear you say them here," he rejoined. "Say what?" she asked,
a little puzzled by the tone of his voice.
"Your congratulations," he answered.
She held out a hand to him. "I offer them now. It was wonderful. You were
inspired. I did not think you could ever let yourself go."
He held her hand firmly. "I promise not to do it again," he said
whimsically.
"Why not?"
"Have I not your congratulations?" His hand drew her slightly towards
him; she rose to her feet.
"That is no reason," she answered, confused, yet feeling that there was a
double meaning in his words.
"I could not allow you to be so vain," he said. "We must be
companionable. Henceforth I shall congratulate myself--Kathleen."