Felder had been among the last to leave the court-room. He was discomfited and angry. He had meant to make a telling point for the defense, and the unbalanced imagination of a strolling, bigot gospeller had undone him. His own precipitate and ill-considered action had uncovered an idiotic mare"s-nest, to taint his appeal with bathos and open his cause with a farcical anti-climax. He glumly gathered his scattered papers, put with them the leaf of the newspaper from which the district attorney had read, and despatched the lot to his office by a messenger.
At the door of the court-house Doctor Brent slipped an arm through his.
"Too bad, Tom," he said sympathizingly. "I don"t think you quite deserved it."
Felder paced a moment without speaking. "I need evidence," he said then, "--anything that may help. I made a mistake. You heard all the testimony?"
The other nodded.
"What did you think of it?"
"What could any one think? I give all credit to your motive, Tom, but it"s a pity you"re mixed up in it."
"Why?"
"Because, if there"s anything in human evidence, he"s a thoroughly worthless reprobate. He lay for Moreau and murdered him in cold blood, and he ought to swing."
"The casual view," said the lawyer gloomily. "Just what I should have said myself--if this had happened a month ago."
His friend looked at him with an amused expression. "I begin to think he must be a remarkable man!" he said. "Is it possible he has really convinced you that he isn"t guilty?"
Felder turned upon the doctor squarely. "Yes," he returned bluntly. "He has. Whatever I may have believed when I took this case, I have come to the conclusion--against all my professional instincts, mind you--that he never killed Moreau. I believe he"s as innocent as either you or I!"
The physician looked puzzled. "You believe Moreau"s hand didn"t write that accusation?"
"I don"t know."
"Do you think he lied?"
"I don"t know what to think. But I am convinced Hugh Stires isn"t lying. There"s a mystery in the thing that I can"t get hold of." He caught the physician"s half-smile. "Oh, I know what you think," he said resentfully. "You think it is Miss Holme. I a.s.sure you I am defending Hugh Stires for his own sake!"
"She played you a close second to-day," observed the doctor shrewdly.
"That carnation--I never saw a thing better done."
Felder drew his arm away. "Miss Holme," he said almost stiffly, "is as far from acting--"
"My dear fellow!" exclaimed the other. "Don"t snap me up. She"s a gentlewoman, and everything that is lovely. If she were the reason, I should honor you for it. I"m very deeply sorry for her. For my part, I"m sure I wish you might get him off. She loves him, and doesn"t care who sees it, and if he were as bad as the worst, a woman like that could make a man of him. But I know juries. In towns like this they take themselves pathetically in earnest. On the evidence so far, they"ll convict fast enough."
"I know it," said the lawyer despondently. "And yet he"s innocent. I"d stake my life on it. It"s worthless as evidence and I shan"t introduce it, but he has as good as admitted to her that he knows who did it."
"Come, come! Putting his neck into the noose for mere Quixotic feeling?
And who, pray, in this G.o.dforsaken town, should he be sacrificing himself for?" the doctor asked satirically.
"That"s the rub," said the lawyer. "n.o.body. Yet I hang by my proposition."
"Well, he"ll hang by something less tenuous, I"m afraid. But it won"t be your fault. The crazy evangelist was only an incident. He merely served to jolt us back to the normal. By the way, did you hear him splutter after he got out?"
"No."
"You remember the story he told the other night of the minister who was caught gambling on his own communion table? Well, Hugh Stires is not only the Reverend Henry Something-or-other, but he is that man, too! The crack-brained old idiot would have told the tale all over again, only the crowd hustled him.
"There he is now," he said suddenly, as a light sprang up and voices broke out on the opposite corner. "The gang is standing by. I see your friend Barney McGinn," he added, with a grim enjoyment. "I doubt if there are many converts to-night."
Even as he spoke, there came a shout of laughter and warning. The spectators scattered in all directions, and a stream of water from a well-directed hose deluged the itinerant and his music-box.
Ten minutes later the street preacher, drenched and furious, was trundling his melodeon toward Funeral Hollow, on his way to the coast.
CHAPTER XLII
THE RECKONING
As Harry stood again in the obscure half-darkness of his cell, it came to him that the present had a far-reaching significance--that it was but the handiwork and resultant of forces in his own past. He himself had brewed the bitter wormwood he must drink. Jessica"s quivering arraignment on that lurid wedding-day in the white house in the aspens--it had been engraven ever since on his buried memory!--rang in his mind:
_You were strong and he was weak. You led and he followed. You were "Satan Sanderson," Abbot of the Saints, the set in which he learned gambling. You helped to make him what he has become!_
They had made variant choice, and that choice had left Harry Sanderson in training for the gaiters of a bishop, and Hugh Stires treading the paths of dalliance and the gambler. But he himself had set Hugh"s feet on the red path that had pointed him to the shameful terminus. He had gambled for Hugh"s future, forgetting that his past remained, a thing that must be covered. He had won Hugh"s counters, but his own right to be himself he had staked and lost long before that game on the communion table under the painted crucifixion.
The words he had once said to Hugh recurred to him with a kind of awe: "Put myself in your place? I wish to G.o.d I could!"
Fate--or was it G.o.d?--had taken him at his word. He had been hurled like a stone from a catapult into Hugh"s place, to bear his knavery, to suffer his dishonor, and to redeem the baleful reputation he had made.
He had been his brother"s keeper and had failed in the trust; now the circle of retribution, noiseless and inexorable as the wheeling of that vast scorpion cl.u.s.ter in the sky, evened the score and brought him again to the test! And, in the supreme strait, was he, a poor poltroon, to step aside, to cry "enough," to yield ign.o.bly? Even if to put aside the temptation might bring him face to face with the final shameful penalty?
This, then, was the meaning of the strange sequence of events through which he had been pa.s.sing since the hour when he had awakened in the box-car! Living, he was not to betray Hugh; the Great Purpose behind all meant that he should go forward on the path he had chosen to the end!
A step outside the cell, the turning of the key. The door opened, and Jessica, pale and trembling, stood on the threshold.
"I can not help it," she said, as she came toward him, "though you told me not to come. I have trusted all the while, and waited, and--and prayed. But to-day I was afraid."
She paused, locking her hands before her, looking at him in an agony of entreaty. When she had fled from the court-room to the open air, she had walked straight away toward the mountain, struggling in the cool wind and motion against the feeling of physical sickness and anguish. But she had only partly regained her self-possession. Returning, the thinning groups about the dim-lit door had made it clear that the session was over. In her painful confusion of mind she had acted on a peremptory impulse that drove her to the jail, where her face had quickly gained her entrance.
"Surely, surely," she went on, "the man you are protecting has had time enough! Hasn"t he? Won"t you tell them the truth now?"
He knew not how to meet the piteous reproach and terror of that look.
She had not heard the street preacher"s declaration, he knew, but even if she had, it would have been to her only an echo of the old mooted likeness. He had given her comfort once--but this was no more to be. No matter what it meant to him, or to her!
"Jessica," he said steadily, "when you came to me here that first day, and I told you not to fear for me, I did not mean to deceive you. I thought then that it would all come right. But something has happened since then--something that makes a difference. I can not tell who was the murderer of Moreau. I can not tell you or any one else, either now or at any time."
She gazed at him startled. She had a sudden conception of some element hitherto unguessed in his make-up, something inveterate and adamant.
Could it be that he did not intend to tell at all? The very idea was monstrous! Yet that clearly was his meaning. She looked at him with flashing eyes.
"You mean you will not?" she exclaimed bitterly. "You are bent on sacrificing yourself, then! You are going to take this risk because you think it brave and n.o.ble, because somehow it fits your man"s gospel!
Can"t you see how wicked and selfish it is? You are thinking only of him, and of yourself, not of me!"
"Jessica, Jessica!" he protested with a groan. But in the self-torture of her questionings she paid no heed.