Cora was on the point of saying why she threw the book, and whose name was on the t.i.tle-page, but she checked herself in time. It had been very difficult to persuade her that her interests were safe in the hands of Lettice"s brother, and even now she had occasional misgivings on that point. Sydney went on quickly.
"A book lying close to your hand, you mean?"
"She said a certain book," Mr. Milton interjected.
"You must make allowance for her," said the judge. "You know she is French, and you should follow her in two languages at once. No doubt she meant "some book or other." The point has no importance."
"And then," said Sydney, "you altered your positions?"
"We stood facing each other."
"What happened next?"
"Suddenly--I had not moved--an evil look came in his face. He sprang to the table, and took from the drawer a long, sharp poignard. I remembered it well, for he had it when we were married."
"What did he do then?"
"He raised it in his hand; but I had leaped upon him, and then began a terrible struggle."
The court was excited. Alan and his counsel were almost the only persons who remained perfectly cool.
"It was an unequal struggle?"
"Ah, yes! I became exhausted, and sank to the ground."
"Before or after you were stabbed?"
"He stabbed me as I fell."
"Could it have been an accident?"
"Impossible, for I fell backward, and the wound was in front."
After Sydney had done with his witness, Mr. Milton took her in hand; and this was felt by every one to be the most critical stage of the trial.
Milton did his best to shake Cora"s evidence, not without a certain kind of success. He turned her past life inside out, made her confess her infidelity, her intemperance, her brawling in the streets, her conviction and fine at the Hammersmith Police Court. It was all he could do to restrain himself from getting her to acknowledge the reason of her visit to Maple Cottage; but his instructions were too definite to be ignored. He felt that the introduction of Miss Campion"s name would have told in favor of his client--at any rate, with the jury; and he would not have been a zealous pleader if he had not wished to take advantage of the point.
By this time Cora was in a rage, and she damaged herself with the jury by giving them a specimen of her ungovernable temper. The trial had to be suspended for a quarter of an hour, whilst she recovered from a fit of hysterics; but it said much for her crafty shrewdness that she was able to adhere, in the main, to the story which she had told. She was severely cross-examined about the scene in Surrey Street, and especially about the dagger. She feigned intense surprise at being asked and pressed as to her having brought the weapon with her; but Mr. Milton could not succeed in making her contradict herself.
Then the other witnesses were heard and counsel had an opportunity of enforcing the evidence on both sides. Mr. Milton was very severe on his learned friend for introducing matter in his opening speech, on which he did not intend to call witnesses; but in his own mind he had recognized the fact that there must be a verdict of guilty, and he brought out as strongly as he could the circ.u.mstances which he thought would weigh with the court in his client"s favor. Sydney was well content with the result of the trial as far as it had gone. There had been no reference of any kind to his sister Lettice; and, as he knew that this was due in some measure to the reticence of the defence, it would have argued a want of generosity on his part to talk of the cruelty of the prisoner in stopping his wife"s allowance because she had molested him in the street.
The judge summed up with great fairness. He picked out the facts which had been sworn to in regard to the actual receiving of the wound, which, he said, were compatible with the theory of self-infliction, with that of wilful infliction by the husband, and with that of accident. As for the first theory, it would imply that the dagger had pa.s.sed from the prisoner"s hands to those of his wife, and back again, and it seemed to be contradicted by the evidence of the landlady and the other lodger.
Moreover, it was not even suggested by the defence, which relied upon the theory of accident. An accident of this kind would certainly be possible during a violent struggle for the possession of the dagger. Now the husband and wife virtually accused each other of producing this weapon and threatening to use it. It was for the jury to decide which of the two they would believe. There was a direct conflict of evidence, or allegation, and in such a case they must look at all the surrounding circ.u.mstances. It was not denied that the dagger belonged to the prisoner, but it was suggested in his behalf that the wife had purloined it some time before, and had suddenly produced it when she came to her husband"s apartments in Surrey Street. If that could be proved, then the woman had been guilty of perjury, and her evidence would collapse altogether. Now there were some portions of her evidence which were most unsatisfactory. She had led a dissolute life, and was cursed with an ungovernable temper. But, on the other hand, she had told a consistent tale as to the occurrences of that fatal afternoon, and he could not go so far as to advise the jury to reject her testimony as worthless.
His lordship then went over the remaining evidence, and concluded as follows:--
"Gentlemen, I may now leave you to your difficult task. It is for you to say whether, in your judgment, the wound which this woman received was inflicted by herself or by her husband. If you find that it was inflicted by her husband, you must further decide, to the best of your ability, whether the prisoner wounded his wife in the course of a struggle, without intending it, or whether he did at the moment wittingly and purposely injure her. The rest you will leave to me. You have the evidence before you, and the const.i.tution of your country imposes upon you the high responsibility of saying whether this man is innocent or guilty of the charge preferred against him."
The jury retired to consider their verdict, and after about three-quarters of an hour they returned into court.
"Gentlemen of the jury," said the clerk, "are you agreed upon your verdict?"
"We are," said the foreman.
"Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?"
"We find him guilty of wounding, with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm."
Alan turned his face to the judge. The whole thing had been so precisely rehea.r.s.ed in his mind that no mere detail would take him by surprise. He had expected the verdict, and it had come. Now he expected the sentence; let it come, too. It would hardly be worse than he was prepared for.
To say that Mr. Justice Perkins was dissatisfied with the verdict would be going a little too far; but he almost wished, when he heard it, that he had dwelt at greater length upon the untrustworthy character of Mrs.
Walcott"s evidence. However, he had told the jury that this was a matter for their careful consideration; and he had always been wont, even more than some of his brother judges, to leave full responsibility to his juries in matters of opinion and belief.
"Alan Walcott," he said to the convicted man, "you have had a fair trial before twelve of your peers, who have heard all the evidence brought before them, whether favorable to you or the reverse. In the exercise of their discretion, and actuated as they doubtless have been by the purest motives, they have found you guilty of the crime laid to your charge. No words of mine are necessary to make you appreciate this verdict.
Whatever the provocation which you may have received from this miserable woman, however she may have forgotten her duty and tried you beyond endurance--and I think that the evidence was clear enough on these points--she was still your wife, and had a double claim upon your forbearance. You might well have been in a worse position. From the moment when you took that deadly weapon in your hands, everything was possible. You might have been charged with wilful murder, if she had died, or with intent to murder. You have been defended with great ability; and if the jury believed, as they manifestly did, that your defence, so fat as concerns the introduction of the dagger, could not be maintained then they had no alternative but to find as they actually did find. It only remains for me to pa.s.s upon you such a sentence, within the discretion left me by the law, as seems to be appropriate to your offence, and that is that you be imprisoned and kept to hard labor for the term of six calendar months."
Then the prisoner was removed; the court and the spectators dispersed to dine and amuse themselves; the reporters rushed off to carry their last copy to the evening newspapers; and the great tide of life swept by on its appointed course. No foundering, ship on its iron-bound coast, no broken heart that sinks beneath its waves, disturbs the law-abiding ebb and flow of the vast ocean of humanity.
BOOK V.
LOVE.
"Let us be unashamed of soul, As earth lies bare to heaven above!
How is it under our control To love or not to love?"
ROBERT BROWNING.
CHAPTER XXVII.
COURTSHIP.
Busy as Sydney Campion was, at this juncture of his career, public affairs were, on the whole, less engrossing to him than usual; for a new element had entered into his private life, and bade fair to change many of its currents.
The rector"s education of his son and daughter had produced effects which would have astonished him mightily could he have traced their secret workings, but which would have been matter of no surprise to a psychologist.
He himself had been in the main an unsuccessful man, for, although he had enjoyed many years of peace and quiet in his country parish, he had never attained the objects with which he set out in life. Like many another man who has failed, his failure led him to value nothing on earth so highly as success. It is your fortunate man who can afford to slight life"s prizes. The rector of Angleford was never heard to utter soothing sentiments to the effect that "life may succeed in that it seems to fail," or that heaven was the place for those who had failed on earth. He did not believe it. Failure was terrible misfortune in his eyes: intellectual failure, greatest of all. Of course he wanted his children to be moral and religious; it was indeed important that they should be orthodox and respectable, if they wanted to get on in the world; but he had no such pa.s.sion of longing for their spiritual as he had for their mental development. Neither was it money that he wished them to acquire, save as an adjunct; no man had more aristocratic prejudices against trade and pride of purse than Mr. Campion; but he wanted them--and especially he wanted Sydney--to show intellectual superiority to the rest of the world, and by that superiority to gain the good things of life. And of all these good things, the best was fame--the fame that means success.
Thus, from the very beginning of Sydney"s life, his father sedulously cultivated ambition in his soul, and taught him that failure meant disgrace. The spur that he applied to the boy acted with equal force on the girl, but with different results. For with ambition the rector sowed the seeds of a deadly egotism, and it found a favorable soil--at least in Sydney"s heart. That the boy should strive for himself and his own glory--that was the lesson the rector taught him; and he ought not to have been surprised when, in later years, his son"s absorption in self gave him such bitter pain.
Lettice, with her ambition curbed by love and pity, accepted the discipline of patience and self-sacrifice, set before her by the selfishness of other people; but Sydney gave free rein to his ambition and his pride. He could not make shift to content himself, as his father had done, with academic distinction alone. He wanted to be a leader of men, to take a foremost place in the world of men. He sometimes told himself that his father had equipped him to the very best of his power for the battle of life, and he was grateful to him for his care; but he did not think very much about the sacrifices made for him by others. As a matter of fact, he thought himself worth them all. And for the prize he desired, he bartered away much that makes the completer man: for he extinguished many generous instincts and n.o.ble possibilities, and thought himself the gainer by their loss.
In Lettice, the love of fame was also strong, but in a modified form.