Chapter XV: Book V: I (2)

At first the monotony of the long silent winter days was intolerable. But gradually, by such short degrees, that she hardly realised the change taking place within her, she grew to love her solitude and to be grateful for it. For the first time since she had left Monterey her hours were absolutely her own. She had longed for the solitude of a forested mountain top. From her prison window she could see the naked tops of a clump of trees above the buildings opposite, and even her obedient imagination could not expand them to primeval heights; but at least she had solitude and not a petty detail to annoy her.

She sometimes wondered if it mattered where one spent the few years of this unsatisfactory life. Nothing was of permanent satisfaction. Strongly as she had been infatuated with newspaper work the interest would have lasted only just so long. She found her modernity slipping from her, herself relapsing into the dreaming child of the tower with vague desire for something her varied experience of the world had not helped her to find. Inevitably she came to know herself and the large demands of her nature, and as inevitably she said to Morgan Steele one day,—

“I think you have known all along that it was a mistake.”

“Yes,” he said, “I have known it.”

“You have everything—everything,—good looks and distinction, brains and modernity, magnetism of a queer cold sort, knowledge of women and kindness of heart—I cannot understand. But the spark, the response, the exaltation is not there,—the splendid rush of emotion. I love you, but not in the way that makes matrimony marriage.”

He looked at her with his peculiar smile, an expansion of one corner of his mouth which gave him something of the expression of a satyr. “You were badly in need of a companion, and you found one in me. You wanted to be understood, and I understood you. You wanted sympathy, and I sympathised with you; but I am not the man, and I have never for one moment deluded myself.”

“Then why would you have allowed me to drift into matrimony with you?—as I should have done if I had not come here.”

“Because the experiment would have been no more dangerous than most matrimonial experiments. And it would have been very delightful for a time.”

“I should have loved you a good deal,” she said musingly, “and habit is a tremendous force. And I should never have permitted myself to recognise a mistake again—if the decisive step had been taken. Tell me—” she added abruptly, “do you believe that if I had married you that you would always have loved me?”

“I certainly should never have been so unwise as to promise to, for that is something no man can foretell. The chances are that I should not. All phases of feeling are temporary,—all emotions, all desires, all fulfilment. Life itself is temporary.”

“Should you have been true to me?”

“O-h-h, how in thunder can a man answer a question like that? That is something he never knows till the time comes. If he is sensible he wastes no time making resolutions, and if he is honest he makes no promises.”

“You do not love me,” she exclaimed triumphantly.

“I am merely more honest, perhaps more analytical than most men,—that is all. The man who swears he will love forever the woman that pleases him most is simply talking from the depths of ignorance straight up through his hat. No man knows anything—what he will do or feel to-morrow. He knows nothing of himself until his time comes to die, and then he knows blamed little.”

Patience shook her head. “I don’t know. You may be right in the analysis, but I think you lose a good deal. Love may be a species of insanity, but the man whose brain is crystal is not to be envied by the man whose brain can scorch reason and thought at times. You may save yourself heartbreak, but you miss heaven. If you are a type of the future, woman will change too. Man has been at woman’s feet throughout the centuries. You and your kind will place her on an exact level with yourselves and teach her that love means a comfortable coupling of personalities. Something primitive has gone out of you. You have every ingredient in your make-up except love. Liking and passion don’t make love. When it fades out of man altogether chivalry and homage will go with it. You would do a great deal for me, but you are incapable of any splendid self-sacrifice. You are entirely selfish, although in the most charming way.”

“You are quite right,” he said smiling, “I have not much love in me; just enough to make life a comfortable and pleasant sojourn, but not enough to induce a regret were I obliged to toss it over to-morrow—”

“Nor to make it a life of bitter misery did I leave it.”

“No—to be perfectly frank I should not be bitterly miserable. I should regret—but I should work and readjust myself. I have never yet given a glance to the past. I give few to the future. No man gets more out of the present—”

“I won’t be loved like that,” said Patience, passionately.

He leaned forward and took her hand, patting it gently. “You have depths and heights in your nature which I fully appreciate but which I could never stir nor satisfy,” he said. “Some man will. It won’t be all that you expect—you have too much imagination—but you will have your day. With your nature that is inevitable. I am sorry to give you up. You are the most delightful woman I shall ever know. And if you had married me things would probably have gone along satisfactorily enough. I should have kept your mind occupied and talked to you about yourself—those are the secrets of success in matrimony.”

“Marriage with you would be like playing at matrimony. I want a home and husband and children. I have seen enough to know that unless one is a fanatic like Miss Tremont or Miss Beale, or the temporary result of a new and forced civilisation like Hal, or a mercenary wanton like Rosita—in short, if one is woman _par excellence_, and most of us, clever or otherwise, even gifted, usually are, nothing else is worth the toil and perplexity of being alive. But you mustn’t leave me,” she added hurriedly; “I can’t stand it here if you don’t come to see me.”

“I shall come exactly as I have done. Why not? Our love-making has barely progressed beyond friendship: we shall hardly recognise any change. I should feel lost if I could not have a talk with you once in a while. I intend to have that for the rest of my life. It isn’t usually the man that proposes the brother racket, but I merely define the basis upon which we have really stood all along.”

After he had gone Patience drew a long sigh of relief. The first terrible mistake of her life was buried with Beverly Peele. A second had been averted. Something seemed rebuilding within her: the undeflected continuation of the little girl in the tower. For the first time she understood herself as absolutely as mortal can; and she paid a tribute to the zigzag of life which had helped her to that final understanding.

IX

On the third of February she received a letter, the handwriting of whose address made her change colour: she had seen it once on Mrs. Peele’s desk. It was the first communication of any sort that she had received from the man who was to defend her life. She opened the letter with angry curiosity.

MY DEAR MRS. PEELE, [it read],—You will pardon me I am sure for
not having called before this when I tell you that I have had a
rush of civil cases which have hardly given me time for sleep
and have kept me constantly in New York. And of course you have
understood that there was really nothing I could do until my
able confederate, Mr. Simms, had gathered in and digested all
the facts in the case. Now, however, I am free, and the time has
come when I shall be obliged to see you twice a week until the
first of March. I have worked the harder in order to be at
liberty to devote myself wholly to your case. Need I add how
absolute that devotion will be, my dear Mrs. Peele, or how
entirely every resource I possess shall be at your service?

At two o’clock on Monday I shall be in the sheriff’s private
office with Mr. Simms and my assistant, Mr. Lansing. Will you
kindly meet us there?

With highest regard, I am, dear Mrs. Peele,

Yours faithfully,
GARAN BOURKE.

Patience read this carefully worded epistle twice, then laughed and shrugged her shoulders.

“I am glad he has declared himself,” she thought. “Of course I should have ignored the past, but it is a relief to think that there will be no awkwardness.”

X

On Monday at two o’clock Tarbox came up to her cell to escort her down to the sheriff’s office.

“Bourke’s there, and I never saw him looking better,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Oh, he’ll pull you through. Don’t you worry.”

Patience was very nervous, but her years of self-repression and her experience at Peele Manor had forged a key with which she could at times lock nerve and muscle into subjection. As she entered the sheriff’s office she smiled upon Mr. Bourke as graciously as any young and beautiful woman would be expected to smile upon a great lawyer enlisted in her service.

Bourke came forward with the same ballast, although the red was in his face.

“It was better for you to come down here,” he said. “There could be no privacy in your cell, and we must have absolute privacy for these meetings. Of course you know that we are going to rehearse you. Mrs. Peele, this is my assistant, Mr. Lansing.” He indicated a good-looking well-dressed young fellow, with boyish blue eyes and a tilted nose. She liked him at once and gave him her hand. Mr. Simms had risen as she entered, and they had nodded distantly.

“Take this chair, Mrs. Peele,” continued Bourke. “Yes. This is the first of many rehearsals. We shall keep them up until the trial. You will imagine yourself on the witness stand. Mr. Simms, whom, fortunately, you don’t like, is the district attorney, Lansing is the judge, I am the counsel for the defence. I shall make the direct examination, and then Mr. Simms will cross-examine you with all the subtlety, the venom, and the irritating minutiæ of a district attorney determined to make himself immortal. I think we have outlined with reasonable completeness all that will or can be asked you, so that you can hardly be taken off your guard: you must be prepared to give direct answers without suspicious promptness, and avoid saying anything that could be misconstrued.”

“Must I go on the stand?” asked Patience, fearfully. “I thought one was not obliged to, and I shall be so nervous.”

Bourke shook his head emphatically. “The judge might reiterate a hundred times to the jury that your failure to go on the witness stand should not be counted against you, and still it would count—more than anything. It is something a jury never overlooks. These rehearsals are to keep you from being nervous, as much as anything else.”

“Do you believe I am innocent?” asked Patience, giving way to an uncontrollable impulse.

“I do—both personally and professionally.”

Simms laughed. “Bourke is so enthusiastic,” he said, “that if he had made up his professional mind that you were innocent, the personal would follow suit.”

“No, but I do,” said Bourke, laughing, and looking at Patience with eyes which for the moment were more kind than keen. “Now, here goes.”

When the two hours’ rehearsal were over she was very pale. “I did not know the case could look so black,” she said.

“It is a black case,” said Simms.

“Do you really take so much interest?” she asked Bourke, curiously. “You make me feel as if the issue were yours and not mine. Or is that only your professional pride?”

“Bourke is the most ambitious man at the New York bar,” said Simms.

“And the most human,” added Lansing.

Patience smiled at the young man and turned to Bourke, whose eyes were twinkling. “I take a very deep personal interest in your case,” he said gallantly.

“Bourke is an Irishman,” said Simms, with sarcasm.

“We’ll excuse you,” said Bourke. “You know you have business with Sturges,” and Simms gathered up his papers and retired, followed by Lansing. As the door closed Bourke’s face changed. He became serious at once.

“Mrs. Peele,” he said, “it would be foolish and unkind to conceal from you the fact that you are in a very grave position. I have never known a more damaging chain of circumstantial evidence. The only jury we can possibly get together, the only men in Westchester County who will know nothing about the case, will be farmers and small tradespeople. These men are narrow minded, unworldly, religious, bigoted people who will look with horror upon a woman accused of murder; who will be surlily prejudiced against you because you did not love your husband, and because you left him; and above all they are likely to think you should be executed if for no other reason than because,”—He hesitated. The blood came into his face. “Tell me, is it true? I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it—”

“That I had a lover? No, I did not have a lover. If that spy reports exactly what he heard, he must himself prove that I did not. I liked—I do like—a man, a former editor of mine, immensely. At that time I believed myself in love with him; but I was as mistaken as I suppose all impulsive and mentally lonely people are once or oftener in their lifetimes. Although he visits me now we have come to a complete understanding. I shall not marry him.”

Bourke looked at the floor for a moment. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes. That is a great point, of course. Well—as a rule I can do anything I like with a jury in Westchester County; I know and have known for twenty years almost every man within forty miles; but we shall have to go out into the highways and byways for talesmen: your case has attracted almost universal attention. It is just possible, therefore, that the jury may convict you—Don’t be frightened—Don’t look like that—please!—If that happens I shall take the case to the General Term, and failing that, to the Court of Appeals. One way or another I shall get you off—I pledge you my life on that,” he added vehemently. “Will you put your faith in me and keep up?”

“I am sure no woman could help it,” said Patience, smiling graciously.

That night, somewhat to her amusement, she thought on Bourke with a certain sweet tremor until she fell asleep. She did not yet love him, but he satisfied her imagination; and he was the first man that ever had.

XI

Patience was rehearsed eight or ten times, Mr. Simms cross-examining by a different method upon each occasion, racking his brain for new points with which to confound her. She began to feel quite at ease on the witness stand, and equal to the coming tilt with the district attorney. Aside from a natural nervousness she felt no fear of the approaching crisis, rather an excited interest. The papers were booming her again, and she would have been less than American had she not appreciated her position as heroine of the most sensational drama of the day.

In the last week of February, however, she received information which induced her first misgiving: Miss Beale was down with pneumonia. That superlatively healthy person loved fresh air only less than she loved the Lord, and slept with her windows open in mid-winter. Despite habit she invariably caught cold when travelling, as the one window of a small sleeping-room was likely to be at the head of her bed. She had defied Nature once too often.

When Patience told Mr. Bourke of Miss Beale’s illness, the red streaked his face, as it had a habit of doing when he was disturbed. They were alone in the office.

“Will it make much difference?” she asked anxiously.

“Oh, no, I hope not; only she would have been a great card. She is known and respected throughout the county, and I should have dinned her in the ears of the jury. But you should have some woman with you. Is there no one else?”

Patience shook her head. “No one that would be of use. I have few women friends. Women don’t like me much, I think. Mrs. Burr was my most intimate friend, but her husband naturally wanted to keep her out of the affair, and sent her off to Europe.”

“It is odd. I cannot think of you as friendless. You attract and antagonise more strongly than any one I ever saw.”

He was staring hard at her, and she turned her head away, colouring slightly. It was the first time they had been alone since the initial rehearsal, although he and the other lawyers had often lingered, after business was over, to talk with her. Apparently she and he were the best of friends, and their former acquaintance had not been recognised by a glance.

“I wonder if we really are friends,” he said abruptly, then shook his shoulders slightly, as if, having made the plunge, he would not retreat.

Patience beat her fingers lightly on the desk, but did not turn her face to him.

“Our relationship is very agreeable,” she said coolly. “I am delighted that Mr. Simms, for instance, is not my counsel.”

There was a moment’s suggestive silence, and then he said: “I understand. I can be nothing but counsel to you until I apologise. I have not done so before because there is no excuse to offer. I can only explain: you had deceived and outwitted and made a fool of me, and I was furious. Moreover, I was horribly disappointed. I am perfectly well aware that all that is no excuse. I was bitterly ashamed afterwards, and far more furious with myself than I had been with you. I have never ceased to deplore it. We might at least have been friends—”

“Ah, you forgave me then?” asked Patience, looking at his flushed face with a smile. He had never looked more awkward nor more attractive.

“Oh, yes; my offence was so much worse, you see, I had to.”

“Well,” she said, giving him her hand gracefully, “we will forgive each other.”

He accepted her hand promptly and evinced no disposition to relinquish it. “You are so cold, though,” he said ruefully. “Your forgiveness is merely indifference. But of course,” hastily, “you are absorbed in much weightier matters than friendship. I can imagine how insignificant all other episodes of your past must seem—”

“Oh, if it were not for you I might have been here before to-day, and in a much worse predicament. I doubt if I should have left him as soon as I did if it had not been for your unpleasant truths. I was drifting, and also drifting toward morbidity, where I might have been capable of anything. If I had really killed him and been arrested I should have said so, and even you could not have saved me.”

“Oh, it would have been easier: I could have got you off on the plea of insanity. But am I really a link in the chain? I am egoistical—and interested—enough to be—pleased.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, laughing a little. “You have had a good deal more to do with forging some of the links than you imagine.”

His hand was beginning to tremble, and she withdrew her own. He did not attempt to recapture it, and for a moment they regarded each other defensively. He had avoided the mistake of mistakes for thirty-six years, and the very flavour of romance about his experience with this woman made him wary. She had been mistaken twice and had ordered her imagination to sleep. Something within him pulled her, but none knew better than she the independent activity of sex. Still, like all women, fire was dear to her fingers. His eyes had a gleam in them which made her experience keenly the pleasurable sensation of danger.

“Did you know that night that I had forgotten our conversation in the tower?” he said, laughing uneasily. “Well, I will admit that I had, but I certainly remember the conversation in the elm walk—every word of it. It was a singular conversation,” he continued hurriedly. “I have not found her yet, by the way. What is love, anyhow? Something always seems to be lacking. I have wanted a good many women, but there were shallows somewhere.”

Patience had taken a chair and was fanning herself slowly. She answered with a judicial air, as of one deciding some abstract point to which she had given exhaustive study: “The lack is spiritual emotion. People of strong natures who are really in love are shaken by a passion that for the time being demands no physical expression. It is only when it subsides, in fact, that the other manifests itself. On the other hand, the unimpassioned, the physically meagre, are incapable of even imagining such an exaltation of emotion. It is the supreme convulsion of mystery. And it must be impossible to feel it more than once in a lifetime—for more than one person, I mean.”

“Have you ever felt it?” he asked abruptly. He was sitting opposite her, his brows drawn together, regarding her intently. Her cool impersonality nonplussed him.

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

“From the organ. If one wants to read the riddle of human nature let him listen to the organ for ten minutes. It lashes the soul—the emotional nature—up to its utmost possibilities. One knows instinctively—that is, if one is given to reasoning at all; for instincts are dead letters without analysis—that only one other force can cause a mightier tumult, a greater exaltation. Those that do not reason mistake it for a desire to spread their wings and fly to the throne of grace.”

Bourke set his lips and looked at the floor. “Of course you are right,” he said. “A man would never know that until he had felt it. It takes a woman to divine it. Perhaps it is as well he doesn’t know it—there is one disappointment the less in life if such moments never come to him; and I doubt if they come to many. Either the savage is too strong in most of us, or we never come within range of the responsive spark. I have held that if there is any meaning at all in the progress of man out of barbarism it is that he shall become a brain with a refinement and intensity of passion which shall give happiness without disgust. But you go beyond me.”

“Oh, we are both right,” said Patience, rising. “We are much better off than our ancestors. I like so much to talk to you. When I am free you must come to see me often.”

“I shall, indeed. How gracefully you fan yourself. I never saw any one use the fan in exactly the same way.”

“I learned how from the old Spanish women in Monterey. They hold the thumb outwards, you know. That makes all the difference in the world. _Au revoir._”

XII

The trial began on the eighth of March. Patience slept ill the night before, and arose early. She looked forward to the day’s ordeal with mingled nervousness and curiosity. Her faith in Bourke was complete, and her mind was of the order that craves experience. She could not divest herself of the idea that she was about to play the part of heroine in a great human drama. And assuredly there has been no such theatre as the court room since the world began.

She dressed herself with extreme care, in a tailor frock and toque of black and white. The costume was becoming, but she shook her head at her reflection in the mirror: hers was not the type of beauty to appeal to the class of men in whose hands her life would be; rather they would resent its cold pride, its manifest of race and civilisation. She remembered her youthful satisfaction in the fact that “common men did not like her.” Rosita or Honora would carry a jury by storm, but she was too subtle to appeal to men outside of her own social sphere. Tarbox liked her because she was game and dependent on him for comfort: it was doubtful if he thought her pretty. He came up at ten minutes to ten. He wore a new suit of clothes, and looked excited and impatient.

“There’s a lot of swells come,” he said without preliminary; “some from New York and some from the county. We’ve got ’em up in the gallery, and they look fine in their new spring clothes, I tell you. First time I ever seen swells in this court house. I rather thought they didn’t go in for that kind of thing.”

“They go in for fads, and you can as easily tell where lightning will strike next as what will be the next fad to possess fashionable women. Where is Mr. Bourke?”

“Up in the court room, I guess. Ready?”

A few moments later he led her up the stair at the back of the court room. A crowd of men at the door parted to let her enter, staring at her with eager curiosity. As she walked down the room to her seat beside her counsel she was conscious of a deep level of men’s faces below and a tier of high-bred faces and bright spring gowns in the gallery above. She felt as if she were being shot upon a battery of eyes, and an impulse to turn and run; she looked like a black and white effigy of pride.

The large handsome room was tinted a pale blue and stencilled about the mouldings. The Bench and panelling behind it, the desks and tables, were of black walnut. Four long windows on each side of the room revealed the naked trees of March and the cheerless landscape. On the right of Patience’s chair was the empty jury box, before her the Bench. In the space thus formed—flanked on the other side by the talesmen summoned for the trial and at the back by the audience—was a right angle of long study tables, three or four round tables, and many chairs. Every chair was occupied. Writing pads lay on the smaller tables. Patience recognised several of the reporters. By one of the long tables before the jury box sat Bourke, Simms, and Lansing. The former whispered to her that many of the men within the rail were eminent lawyers who had come to hear the case tried.

The judge sat alone on the Bench: an old man with pink face and head and neck, a close band of silver hair at the base of his skull. His face was narrow, his upper lip long. On either side of his mouth was a deep rut. The nose was coarse and strong, the eyes behind the spectacles humourous, severe, and a little sly. His silver chin-tuft was shaped like the queen of hearts.

Just below the Bench, beside one of the long tables, sat a man whom Patience did not notice at once, but to whom, as the judge called the court to order, she turned suddenly, conscious of a fixed gaze. He sat with one arm along the table, the other hand absently rolling a piece of paper. His narrowed eyes were regarding her with cold speculation. Patience shuddered. She knew that he was Sturges, the district attorney. Tarbox had told and retold the history of his jealousy of Bourke, and his registered vow to win one of the great legal battles of which they were occasionally chief combatants. And this was the greatest! The man’s face was set. He looked like a fate.

The clerk called a name. A man shuffled into the jury box. Sturges stood up and put the usual questions. He spoke with exaggerated courtesy. Occasionally he smiled: a mechanical smile, as if an invisible string connected each corner of his mouth with a manipulator at the back of his head. His voice was soothing and cultivated, his manner almost deferential to the humble man in the box. Patience followed every motion and word with fascinated attention. When he asked the talesman if he had “any conscientious scruples regarding capital punishment as practised in this State,” she felt the touch of icy fingers and her feet slipping into an open grave. Bourke, who divined her sensations, smiled encouragingly; and after she had heard the question some fifty times, she ceased to attach any personal meaning to it.

They were four days impannelling the jury. The first time Patience stood up to face an accepted juror she regarded the hairy and ill-kept farmer with such haughty and disdainful eyes that Bourke whispered hurriedly: “For God’s sake don’t look at them like that or they’ll send you up out of spite. Remember that this class of people is always at war with its betters.”

“I can’t help it,” said Patience. “It’s humiliating to think of being at the mercy of men like that.”

When the box was filled at last she regarded the occupants attentively. They were hard-featured men of middle age, with long bare upper lip and compressed mouth. Their grey skin was furrowed with lines of care and hardship, their chin whiskers grizzled and scant. Their eyebrows stood out over faded eyes in wrinkled sockets. But what excited Patience’s wonder was the small size of the heads. She had never seen twelve heads so little. They were hardly an advance upon their hairy ancestors. Throughout the trial she furtively watched the twelve faces of those twelve meagre heads. Never once did their expression, stolid and set, change. At night they haunted her. She awoke in the morning with a violent start, seeing them for a moment in a row on the foot board of her bed. She speculated, at times, upon the lives of those men, those pinched grubbing lives, and felt for them a sort of terrified pity. What a mere glimpse of the world she had had, after all, and what ugly strata it had! What was the matter with civilisation?

XIII

On the fourth day the district attorney opened the case with an address to the jury which was a masterpiece of temperate statement and damning suggestion. He dwelt long upon the remarkable points of the case: the youth and beauty and intelligence and social position of the defendant, the distinguished family which had been plunged into sorrow and disgrace by her crime, the extraordinary interest the crime had excited throughout the civilised world. He then gave a running account, clear and straightforward and decisive, of what the prosecution would prove, and concluded with a cold, terse, but reiterated warning that the prisoner at the bar was entitled to no sympathy because of her sex and position; that he and the jury were there for one purpose only: to consider the facts of the case and to do their plain duty, utterly regardless of consequences to the individual. Every word was chosen and weighed, and told like the ring of a steel hammer on a steel plate.

Dr. Lewis was then called to prove the fact of Beverly Peele’s death, and his vigorous story weighed heavily in the scales against the defence. The moment the district attorney sat down Bourke was on his feet. For a moment he stood lifting and shaking the loose cloth of the table beside him; then asked one or two random questions which put the witness for the prosecution quite at his ease. In the course of a moment the witness began to writhe, and at the end of five minutes manifested his consciousness of the fact that he was a small country practitioner, to be regarded by any intelligent jury with contempt. Nevertheless, it was impossible to shake his testimony.

He was followed by the New York physician, a man of eminence, who had assisted at the death-bed, then by the coroner. The fact of young Peele’s death being firmly established in the jury box, a chemist was put upon the stand to testify that he had found morphine in the stomach of the deceased. He was worried and badgered and ridiculed and derided by Bourke, who temporarily infected everybody in the court room with his scorn of the exercise of chemistry as applied to morphine in the stomach of a dead man, but held his ground, having been maltreated in a like manner many times before. Following, came a civil engineer, who described the grounds and general position of Peele Manor to the jury; and the testimony for the day was over.

The next morning the prosecution passed on to the motive. Honora was the first witness called. She wore a black frock and hat, and looked dignified and sad. In her clear childlike voice she described to the jury her moment of confusion and horror when awakened from a profound sleep by the prisoner; told the mournful story of the unavailing attempts at resuscitation; and hesitatingly admitted, in full detail, the unmistakable indifference of the wife. To the latter testimony Mr. Bourke “objected,” as he had done to similar testimony by the doctors, but the objection was over-ruled by the judge. She also admitted having seen from her window the defendant returning from town after her early visit on the morning of the “Eye” story, inappropriately attired in grey and pink, and having discovered the newspapers in confusion on the library floor before any other member of the household except the prisoner had arisen. She related Patience’s previous complaint that her husband always waited until she was in her first heavy sleep before demanding the morphine, and her fear lest she should some night give him an overdose. The jury must have been small headed indeed, to fail to understand the district attorney’s insinuations regarding the prisoner’s deep-laid scheme to avert suspicion.

As Honora gave her testimony Patience saw Mr. Bourke’s eyes sparkle. She knew that some pregnant idea had flashed into that lightning-like brain. As the district attorney took his seat he rose slowly and smiled sociably at Honora. She bent her head slightly; she had always liked him.

“Miss Mairs,” he said haltingly, his eyes wandering to the judge, as if in search of inspiration, his hand flirting the loose cloth of the table, “you are sure that Mrs. Peele wore a gray gown to New York that morning?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the condition of the newspapers seemed to you to indicate great agitation of mind?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, yes. And she returned in an hour or two, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Miss Mairs!” he thundered, turning suddenly upon her and pointing a rigid finger straight at her startled face, “are you sure that you were asleep when Mrs. Peele awakened you on the night of Beverly Peele’s death?”

Patience drew her breath sharply. She closed her eyes. Honora had not been asleep that night! The certainty came to her as suddenly and as positively as it had come to Bourke.

For the fraction of a moment Honora hesitated. Every man and woman in the court room was breathless. Several had started to their feet.

“Quite sure,” she replied finally, and that silver shallow voice did not falter.

“You are _sure_ that you heard no one go to the lavatory that night, before Mrs. Peele spoke to you?” He hurled the words at her as the Great Judge might hurl the final sentence on Judgment Day.

“Sure.”

“Was your door open that night?”

“I don’t remember.”

Patience leaned over and whispered to Lansing, who sprang forward and whispered to Bourke.

“The night was hot,” continued Bourke. “Were you not in the habit of leaving your door open on hot nights?”

“Sometimes.”

“Was it not always your custom?”

“Not always. When I thought of it I opened the door, but I frequently forgot it.”

“Yes! Yes! You are quite sure you cannot remember whether or not it was open on that night?”

“I cannot remember.”

“Do you remember any other nights on which Mrs. Peele went to the lavatory to drop the morphine?”

“Yes, sir; a great many.”

“But of this all important night you remember nothing?”

“No, sir.”

“Yes! Mrs. Peele never was called upon to drop the morphine until after twelve o’clock. Were you in the habit of lying awake until late?”

“Yes.”

“But on this night you went to sleep early?”

“Yes.”

“You heard or saw—you are on your oath, remember—nothing whatever until Mrs. Peele called you?”

“Nothing.”

“You can go.—She is lying,” he whispered to Patience. “Damn her, I’ll make her speak yet if I have to throttle it out of her.”

Mr. Peele was the witness next called. He was treated with extreme diffidence by the district attorney, and even the judge gave him a fraternal smile. He told the story of the momentous night with parental indignation finally controlled, then, in spite of repeated “objections” and constant nagging, the significant tale of wifely indifference and desertion, and read to the jury “that cruel letter written to a dying man” the day before the defendant returned to nurse her husband. He repeated with the dramatic effect of the legal actor those dark insinuations of the prisoner: “You had better let me go! I feel that I shall kill him if I stay!” And later in the town house when she had struck her husband in the face: “You had better keep him out of my way. Do you know that once I tried to kill my own mother?”

He told of her eager interest in untraceable poisons one night when the subject of murder had come up at the dinner-table, her cold-blooded analysis of human motives.

Then he passed on to the painfully significant history of the day before the death: her demand for a divorce; her fury at her husband’s refusal; her acknowledgment that she had quarrelled violently with the deceased a short time before calling the family to his death-bed.

As he spoke Patience’s blood congealed. The woman he depicted was enough to inspire any jury with horror. It was herself and not herself, a Galatea manufactured by a clever lawyer.

But it was Mr. Bourke’s privilege to give the Galatea a soul. Despite the older man’s greater legal experience, his superior wariness and subtlety, he was forced to admit that his son was a fool; that his son’s wife was a woman of brilliant intellect driven to desperation at being tied down to a fool; that so long as she had lived with him she had done her duty; that when she had returned as his nurse she had fulfilled her part of the contract to the letter; that never had she given her husband cause for real jealousy; that the witness himself had made a companion of her, and that he had been bitterly disappointed in his son.

The terrible facts could not be stricken out, but Mr. Peele, nevertheless, was made to pass the most uncomfortable hours of his life. “And in spite of these threats,” exclaimed Bourke, with the accentuation of one addressing an idiot at large, “in spite of the precision with which you remembered them, you permitted your family to implore her to return and become your son’s nurse; you permitted her to sleep in a room communicating with his, where, in a fit of passion—if she is the woman you profess to believe her to be—she could have murdered him in the dead of night with a carving knife or a hatchet, before any one—even the lightly sleeping Miss Mairs—could have flown to the rescue; you permitted her—” he turned suddenly and faced the jury, then wheeled about and regarded Mr. Peele with scornful inquiry—“you permitted her to drop morphine for your son, and to have unrestrained access to the drug, knowing that he in his agony would swallow whatever she gave him without question. Will you kindly explain to the jury whether this mode of proceeding was ingenuousness on your part, or criminal connivance?”

Mr. Peele’s under lip pressed the upper almost to the septum of his nose. His eyes half closed and glittered unpleasantly; but he controlled himself and answered,—

“I paid no attention to her threats at the time.”

“Ah! You did not believe in them? You admit that?”

“I classed them with the usual hysterical ravings of women. That was my error.”

“State, if you please, your specific reasons for your change of mind. You will hardly, as a lawyer, claim to have been converted to the defendant’s capacity for crime by the mere fact that your son died of an overdose of morphine?”

And throughout the long day Mr. Bourke hectored him, fighting him, point by point, smashing to bits his testimony relative to the events of the day preceding the death, evidence to which he was not an eye-witness, which he had received at second hand from his wife and son. The “cruel letter written to a dying man” was disposed of in a similar manner.

“You believed your son to be in a precarious condition when you counselled them to send for your son’s wife?”

“I did.”

“But you believed with the doctors that if she returned, thereby bringing him peace of mind as well as tender care, he had excellent chances for life?”

“I did.”

“And Mrs. Burr was instructed to present that phase of the question to the defendant, with all the force of which she was capable?”

“Yes.”

“And the defendant so understood it?”

“I suppose she did.”

“And yet you assert that this purely business-like letter, written by a self-respecting woman, was addressed to a dying man, while at the same time you assert that this man could be cured by the gratification of a whim, and that you had taken particular pains to make the defendant aware of the fact!”

When Mr. Peele finally left the stand, he looked battered and limp.

XIV

As soon as the court had opened on the following morning, Mrs. Peele was called. She looked haughtily askance at the worn Bible as the clerk rattled off the oath, bent her head as would she whiff upon what plebeian lips had touched so often and so evidently, and took the witness chair as were she mounting a throne. She was apparelled in crape. Only her intimate friends could have told whether the backward bend of her head was due to the weight of her veil or the weight of her ancestors. At first she stared at the district attorney with haughty resentment, as, for the benefit of the humble jury, he curtly asked her several direct questions; but remembering that he was “a Sturges,” and also recalling her husband’s admonitions, she unbent, and even condescended to address the jury. Her tale of the night in no wise differed from her husband’s; but her accentuation of Patience’s dark threats and marital deficiencies was all her own. Her suggestion of a lover in the case caused a sudden movement in the jury box, although the stolid faces did not relax. Under cross-examination much of her testimony was as effectually demolished as her husband’s had been.

Two maid servants followed. They testified to violent quarrels between the young couple. Then the butler testified to the reiterant and emphatic command of the prisoner on the day before the death to send to New York for morphine.

The prosecution produced its trump card: the stable boy who had spied upon the interviews between the prisoner and the mysterious lover. The man had evidently been carefully rehearsed—as Bourke later on pointed out to the jury—for his memory of the eight or ten interviews he had witnessed needed little refreshing. His “best recollection” was given glibly and ungrammatically. He dilated upon the young man’s remarkable personal beauty, and observed that it far outshone his beloved Mr. Beverly’s. They had talked principally of books in all but the last two interviews, but had looked perfectly happy. His account of the last two interviews created a profound impression in the court room, even the jury leaning forward slightly. The judge frowned and wheeled his chair sharply when the man gave the gist of the prisoner’s matter-of-fact objection to living with a man who was not her husband.

Mr. Bourke’s rich voice had never rung with deeper indignation and disgust, never shaped itself to more cutting sarcasm than when he made the man see himself and the jury see him as a coward, a cur, a spy, a liar, an eager schemer for an innocent woman’s life. “You felt it your duty,” he concluded, “to spy upon a woman of irreproachable reputation who met a friend in an open wood in broad daylight—Yes, yes,” with all the lingering scornful emphasis which only he could give that simple word. “You never felt yourself a cowardly scoundrel meddling in what was none of your business—No! No!” He turned to the jury with the passion still upon his face, but when he took his seat he smiled encouragingly to his admiring young client.

“Wouldn’t he make an actor?” whispered Simms. “I never saw him do the lofty indignation act with finer effect.”

“Well, he would be a great actor, at least,” retorted Patience, “and I am convinced that you would be a very small one.”

“Just wait,” said Simms, angrily. “I’ve got to talk to this jury about you in a day or two, and if you don’t forget I ever doubted you I’ll eat my hat. The best lawyer’s the best fakir, and a few days from now you’ll see what an ambitious man I am.”

“Miss Rosita Thrailkill,” called the district attorney when the court opened next morning. The audience stood up to a man.

A plump willowy Spanish figure undulated behind the jury box, kissed the Bible reverently, and ascended the witness stand. Rosita was clad in black and yellow, a mantilla in place of a hat, and many diamonds. She looked as pretty and as naughty as possible. As she met Patience’s eyes, she wafted her a kiss, and the prisoner groaned in spirit. She gave her name and birthplace with melodious caressing accent and her marked precision of speech. Yes, the defendant had been her dear friend, her best friend, her only intimate friend. Yes, with unaffected reluctance, Mrs. Sparhawk had been disreputable, and Patience had once attempted her life. Yes, she was the prima donna of light opera known as La Rosita. Did she appear before the public in tights and scant attire? Yes, why not? Had she not had a number of lovers? Objected to and sustained. Flashing indignation of soft Spanish eyes. Did she not have the reputation of being a woman of loose and lawless life? Objected to and sustained. Angry rattle of fan. Was it not in her house that the prisoner was arrested? Yes, it was! and she loved her Patita and would always give her shelter.

When the district attorney sat down with an ugly smile on his thin mouth, Bourke, muttering anathema, rose to his feet.

“Was there ever a whisper against your reputation when you were a school-girl in Monterey and most intimate with the prisoner?”

“No, _señor_!” cried Rosita, paying no attention to the objection. “I was a child, and could not even endure boys.”

“How many times have you seen the defendant since you left Monterey?”

Rosita cast up her eyes, then tapped the sticks of her fan successively as she spoke.

“Once she came to see me just after—ah—WCTU died; then once just before she left Mr. Peele; then that day the ‘Eye’ came out and said she had done this so horrible thing. _Ay, dios!_”

“She has called upon you three times only, then, since you were children in Monterey, since you have been the Rosita of the public; in the last five years, in short?”

“_Si, señor_—yes, sir.”

“How long did she remain upon her first visit?”

“Oh, only a little while. I told her something that shocked her, for she was always so proper.”

“What did you tell her?”

“Objected to,” cried the district attorney.

“Objection sustained,” snapped the judge.

“How long did she remain on her second visit?”

“About a half hour. I never knew what she came at all for. She just floated in and out.” Rosita waved her arm with enchanting grace.

“Did she tell you why she came the third time?”

“Because she had no other place to go to. She said no hotel would take her in.”

“She said that her old landlady had refused to admit her, did she not?”

“_Si, señor._”

“Yes, yes!—and that in her terrible extremity she naturally turned to the friend of her childhood?”

“_Si!_” and Rosita wept.

“But that she should not have gone to your house if there had been any possibility of obtaining entrance to a hotel, or if she had not been turned out of her father-in-law’s house?”

“_Ay, yi!_ yes.”

“That is all. You can go.”

During the rest of that day and the two following days the experts for the prosecution had the stand. The innumerable questions asked by the district attorney, the technical details of the cross-examinations, the constant interruptions, and the minutiæ of the evidence emptied the court room after the first hour, and even Patience became bored, and fell to thinking of other things, not forgetting to pity those twelve puzzled little heads in the jury box.

The gist of the evidence was that there was enough morphine in Beverly Peele’s stomach to kill two men.

XV

“Our turn has come,” said Lansing to Patience on the morning after the expert testimony was concluded. “We are confident of success now.”

“But the facts are hideous, and they have painted me black.”

“Mr. Bourke scraped off a good deal, and he’ll have the rest off before he gets through. If he could only make that lying woman open her mouth! You’ve borne yourself splendidly. Keep in good condition for the witness stand. Are you frightened?”

“No,” she said, smiling at Bourke gratefully. “Not a bit.”

Simms opened the case for the defence.

He had a harsh strident voice. He gesticulated as if practising for a prize fight, doubling back and springing forward. He cleared his throat with vicious emphasis and rasped his heels upon the floor. His statements were dry and matter-of-fact, his language bald; but he made a direct vigorous and enthusiastic speech. The jury was informed that it was there to save the life of one of the most brilliant and high-minded young women of the age,—a woman utterly incapable of murder or of any violent act, a woman with the mild and meditative mind of the student. That it would be proved not only that she was far too clever to take life by such clumsy methods, but that she had no object, as she had gained her liberty, and the lover was a myth. The whole prosecution was a malignant and personal prosecution of an innocent but too gifted woman by an absurdly conceited family that had resented her superior intelligence. This and much more of fact and fancy. But Patience, with perverse feminity, liked him none the better, and would not even look at him when he sat down.

Mr. Field was the first witness for the defence. Although compelled under cross-examination to admit the prisoner’s interest in subtle poisons, he managed to convey to the jury that it was merely the result of an unusually brilliant and inquiring mind, a thought born of the moment, of his suggestion. He gave the highest tribute to her cleverness, her work on his paper, and to her reputation.

Latimer Burr was called next, and spoke with enthusiasm of her “unfailing submission to a man of abominable and savage temper until submission ceased to be a virtue.” He had never heard her utter any threats to kill. Yes, it was true that he had engaged counsel for defence. He believed in her thoroughly.

Miss Merrien, her landlady, and Mrs. Blair were put on the stand next morning, and the good character they gave Patience was unshaken by the nagging of the district attorney. Mr. Tarbox testified to her demeanour of innocence during her imprisonment.

“But the defence is weak all the same,” whispered Patience to Lansing. “Not a word can be said in rebuttal. Only Mr. Bourke’s eloquence can save me.”

“Good character goes a long way,” replied Lansing. “You have no idea of its weight with a jury, particularly with a jury of this kind.”