Lady Lucy fell back in her chair. Her unwonted color had disappeared, and the old hand lying in her lap--a hand thin to emaciation--shook a little.
"Is not this too painful for us both, Sir James?--can we continue it? I have my duty to think of; and yet--I cannot, naturally, speak to you with entire frankness. Nor can I possibly regard your view as an impartial one. Forgive me. I should not have dreamed of referring to the matter in any other circ.u.mstances."
"Certainly, I am not impartial," said Sir James, looking up. "You know that, of course, well enough."
He spoke in a strong full voice. Lady Lucy encountered a singular vivacity in the gray eyes, as though the whole power of the man"s personality backed the words.
"Believe me," she said, with dignity, and not without kindness, "it is not I who would revive such memories."
Sir James nodded quietly.
"I am not impartial; but I am well informed. It was my view which affected the judge, and ultimately the Home Office. And since the trial--in quite recent years--I have received a strange confirmation of it which has never been made public. Did Oliver report this to you?"
"He told me certain facts," said Lady Lucy, unwillingly; "but I did not see that they made much difference."
"Perhaps he did not give them the right emphasis," said Sir James, calmly. "Will you allow _me_ to tell you the whole story?--as it appears to me."
Lady Lucy looked distressed.
"Is it worth while," she said, earnestly, "to give yourself so much pain? I cannot imagine that it could alter the view I take of my duty."
Sir James flushed, and sternly straightened himself. It was a well-known gesture, and ominous to many a prisoner in the dock.
"Worth while!" he said. "Worth while!--when your son"s future may depend on the judgment you form."
The sharpness of his tone called the red also to Lady Lucy"s cheek.
"Can anything that may be said now alter the irrevocable?" she asked, in protest.
"It cannot bring the dead to life; but if you are really more influenced in this matter by the heinousness of the crime itself, by the moral infection, so to speak--that may spring from any kinship with Juliet Sparling or inheritance from her--than by any dread of social disgrace or disadvantage--if that be true!--then for Oliver"s sake--for that poor child"s sake--you _ought_ to listen to me! There, I can meet you--there, I have much to say."
He looked at her earnestly. The slight, involuntary changes of expression in Lady Lucy, as he was speaking, made him say to himself: "She is _not_ indifferent to the social stigma--she deceives herself!"
But he made no sign of his perception; he held her to her word.
She paused, in evident hesitation, saying at last, with some coldness:
"If you wish it, Sir James, of course I am quite ready to listen. I desire to do nothing harshly."
"I will not keep you long."
Bending forward, his hands on his knees, his eyes upon the ground, he thought a moment. When he began to speak, it was in a quiet and perfectly colorless tone.
"I knew Juliet Wentworth first--when she was seventeen. I was on the Midland Circuit, and went down to the Milchester a.s.sizes. Her father was High Sheriff, and asked me, with other barristers of the Circuit, not only to his official dinner in the county town, but to luncheon at his house, a mile or two away. There I saw Miss Wentworth. She made a deep impression on me. After the a.s.sizes were over, I stayed at her father"s house and in the neighborhood. Within a month I proposed to her. She refused me. I merely mention these circ.u.mstances for the sake of reporting my first impressions of her character. She was very young, and of an extraordinarily nervous and sensitive organization. She used to remind me of Horace"s image of the young fawn trembling and starting in the mountain paths at the rustling of a leaf or the movement of a lizard. I felt then that her life might very well be a tragedy, and I pa.s.sionately desired to be able to protect and help her. However, she would have nothing to do with me, and after a little while I lost sight of her. I did happen to hear that her father, having lost his first wife, had married again, that the girl was not happy at home, and had gone off on a long visit to some friends in the United States. Then for years I heard nothing. One evening, about ten years after my first meeting with her, I read in the evening papers the accounts of a "Supposed Murder at Brighton." Next morning Riley & Bonner retained me for the defence. Mr. Riley came to see me, with Mr. Sparling, the husband of the incriminated lady, and it was in the course of my consultation with them that I learned who Mrs. Sparling was. I had to consider whether to take up the case or not; I saw at once it would be a fight for her life, and I accepted it."
"What a terrible--terrible--position!" murmured Lady Lucy, who was shading her eyes with her hand.
Sir James took no notice. His trained mind and sense were now wholly concerned with the presentation of his story.
"The main facts, as I see them, were these. Juliet Wentworth had married--four years before this date--a scholar and archaeologist whom she had met at Harvard during her American stay. Mr. Sparling was an Englishman, and a man of some means who was devoting himself to exploration in Asia Minor. The marriage was not really happy, though they were in love with each other. In both there was a temperament touched with melancholy, and a curious incapacity to accept the common facts of life. Both hated routine, and were always restless for new experience. Mrs. Sparling was brilliant in society. She was wonderfully handsome, in a small slight way; her face was not unlike Miss Curran"s picture of Sh.e.l.ley--the same wildness and splendor in the eyes, the same delicacy of feature, the same slight excess of breadth across the cheek-bones, and curly ma.s.s of hair. She was odd, wayward, eccentric--yet always lovable and full of charm. He was a fine creature in many ways, but utterly unfit for practical life. His mind was always dreaming of buried treasure--the treasure of the archaeologist: tombs, vases, gold ornaments, papyri; he had the pa.s.sion of the excavator and explorer.
"They came back to England from America shortly after their marriage, and their child was born. The little girl was three years old when Sparling went off to dig in a remote part of Asia Minor. His wife resented his going; but there is no doubt that she was still deeply in love with him. She herself took a little house at Brighton for the child"s sake. Her small startling beauty soon made her remarked, and her acquaintances rapidly increased. She was too independent and unconventional to ask many questions about the people that amused her; she took them as they came--"
"Sir James!--dear Sir James." Lady Lucy raised a pair of imploring hands. "What good can it do that you should tell me all this? It shows that this poor creature had a wild, undisciplined character. Could any one ever doubt it?"
"Wild? undisciplined?" repeated Sir James. "Well, if you think that you have disposed of the mystery of it by those adjectives! For me--looking back--she was what life and temperament and heredity had made her. Up to this point it was an innocent wildness. She could lose herself in art or music; she did often the most romantic and generous things; she adored her child; and but for some strange kink in the tie that bound them, she would have adored her husband. Well!"--he shrugged his shoulders mournfully--"there it is: she was alone--she was beautiful--she had no doubt a sense of being neglected--she was thirsting for some deeper draught of life than had yet been hers--and by the hideous irony of fate she found it--in gambling!--and in the friendship which ruined her!"
Sir James paused. Rising from his chair, he began to pace the large room. The immaculate butler came in, made up the fire, and placed the tea: domestic and comfortable rites, in grim contrast with the story that held the minds of Lady Lucy and her guest. She sat motionless meanwhile; the butler withdrew, and the tea remained untouched.
"Sir Francis and Lady Wing--the two fiends who got possession of her--had been settled at Brighton for about a year. Their debts had obliged them to leave London, and they had not yet piled up a sufficient mountain of fresh ones to drive them out of Brighton. The man was the disreputable son of a rich and hard-working father who, in the usual way, had d.a.m.ned his son by removing all incentives to work, and turning him loose with a pile of money. He had married an adventuress--a girl with a music-hall history, some beauty, plenty of vicious ability, and no more conscience than a stone. They were the centre of a gambling and racing set; but Lady Wing was also a very fine musician, and it was through this talent of hers that she and Juliet Sparling became acquainted. They met, first, at a charity concert! Mrs. Sparling had a fine voice, Lady Wing accompanied her. The Wings flattered her, and professed to adore her. Her absent whimsical character prevented her from understanding what kind of people they were; and in her great ignorance of the world, combined with her love of the romantic and the extreme, she took the persons who haunted their house for Bohemians, when she should have known them--the majority of them--for scoundrels.
You will remember that baccarat was then the rage. The Wings played it incessantly, and were very skilful in the decoying and plunder of young men. Juliet Sparling was soon seized by the excitement of the game, and her beauty, her evident good breeding and good faith, were of considerable use to the Wings" _menage_. Very soon she had lost all the money that her husband had left to her credit, and her bankers wrote to notify her that she was overdrawn. A sudden terror of Sparling"s displeasure seized her; she sold a bracelet, and tried to win back what she had lost. The result was only fresh loss, and in a panic she played on and on, till one disastrous night she got up from the baccarat-table heavily in debt to one or two persons, including Sir Francis Wing. With the morning came a letter from her husband, remonstrating in a rather sharp tone on what her own letters--and probably an account from some other source--had told him of her life at Brighton; insisting on the need for economy, owing to his own heavy expenses in the great excavation he was engaged upon; and expressing the peremptory hope that she would make the money he had left her last for another two months--"
Sir James lingered in his walk. He stared out of window at the square garden for a few moments, then turned to look frowning at his companion.
"Then came her temptation. Her father had died a year before, leaving her the trustee of her only sister, who was not yet of age. It had taken some little time to wind up his affairs; but on the day after she received her husband"s letter of remonstrance, six thousand pounds out of her father"s estate was paid into her banking account. By this time she was in one of those states of excitement and unreasoning terror to which she had been liable from her childhood. She took the trust money in order to pay the debts, and then gambled again in order to replace the trust money. Her motive throughout was the motive of the hunted creature. She was afraid of confessing to her husband, especially by letter. She believed he would cast her off--and in her despair and remorse she clung to his affection, and to the hope of his coming home, as she had never yet done.
"In less than a month--in spite of ups and downs of fortune, probably skilfully contrived by Francis Wing and his accomplices--for there can be no question that the play was fraudulent--she had lost four thousand out of the six; and it is clear that more than once she thought of suicide as the only way out, and nothing but the remembrance of the child restrained her. By this time Francis Wing, who was a most handsome, well-bred, and plausible villain, was desperately in love with her--if one can use the word love for such a pa.s.sion. He began to lend her money in small sums. She was induced to look upon him as her only friend, and forced by the mere terror of the situation in which she found herself to propitiate and play him as best she might. One day, in an unguarded moment of remorse, she let him guess what had happened about the trust money. Thenceforward she was wholly in his power. He pressed his attentions upon her; and she, alternately civil and repellent, as her mood went, was regarded by some of the guests in the house as not unlikely to respond to them in the end. Meanwhile he had told his wife the secret of the trust money for his own purposes. Lady Wing, who was an extremely jealous woman, believed at this time that he was merely pretending a pa.s.sion for Mrs. Sparling in order the more securely to plunder what still remained of the six thousand pounds. She therefore aided and abetted him; and _her_ plan, no doubt, was to wait till they and their accomplices had absorbed the last of Mrs. Sparling"s money, and then to make a midnight flitting, leaving their victim to her fate.
"The _denouement_, however, came with frightful rapidity. The Wings had taken an old house at the back of the downs for the summer, no doubt to escape from some of the notoriety they had gained in Brighton. There--to her final ruin--Juliet Sparling was induced to join them, and gambling began again; she still desperately hoping to replace the trust money, and salving her conscience, as to her sister, by drawing for the time on the sums lent her by Francis Wing.--Here at last Lady Wing"s suspicion was aroused, and Mrs. Sparling found herself between the hatred of the wife and the dishonorable pa.s.sion of the husband. Yet to leave them would be the signal for exposure. For some time the presence of other guests protected her. Then the guests left, and one August night after dinner, Francis Wing, who had drunk a great deal of champagne, made frantic love to her. She escaped from him with difficulty, in a pa.s.sion of loathing and terror, and rushed in-doors, where she found Lady Wing in the gallery of the old house, on the first floor, walking up and down in a jealous fury. Juliet Sparling burst in upon her with the reproaches of a woman driven to bay, threatening to go at once to her husband and make a clean breast of the whole history of their miserable acquaintance. She was practically beside herself--already, as the sequel showed, mortally ill, worn out by remorse and sleeplessness, and quivering under the insult which had been offered her. Lady Wing recovered her own self-possession under the stimulus of Juliet"s breakdown. She taunted her in the cruelest way, accused her of being the temptress in the case of Sir Francis, and of simulating a hypocritical indignation in order to save herself with her husband, and finally charged her with the robbery of her sister"s money, declaring that as soon as daylight came she would take steps to set the criminal law in motion, and so protect both herself and her husband from any charge such a woman might bring against them. The threat, of course, was mere bluff.
But Mrs. Sparling, in her frenzy and her ignorance, took it for truth.
Finally, the fierce creature came up to her, s.n.a.t.c.hing at a brooch in the bosom of her dress, and crying out in the vilest language that it was Sir Francis"s gift. Juliet, pushed up against the panelling of the gallery, caught at a dagger belonging to a trophy of Eastern arms displayed on the wall, close to her hand, and struck wildly at her tormentor. The dagger pierced Lady Wing"s left breast--she was in evening dress and _decolletee_; it penetrated to the heart, and she fell dead at Juliet"s feet as her husband entered the gallery. Juliet dropped the dagger; and as Sir Francis rushed to his wife, she fled shrieking up the stairs--her white dress covered with blood--to her own room, falling unconscious before she reached it. She was carried to her room by the servants--the police were sent for--and the rest--or most of the rest--you know."
Sir James ceased speaking. A heavy silence possessed the room.
Sir James walked quickly up to his companion.
"Now I ask you to notice two points in the story as I have told it. My cross-examination of Wing served its purpose as an exposure of the man--except in one direction. He swore that Mrs. Sparling had made dishonorable advances to him, and had finally become his mistress, in order to buy his silence on the trust money and the continuance of his financial help. On the other hand, the case for the defence was that--as I have stated--it was in the maddened state of feeling, provoked by his attack upon her honor, and made intolerable by the wife"s taunts and threats, that Juliet Sparling struck the fatal blow. At the trial the judge believed me; the jury--and a large part of the public--you, I have no doubt among them--believed Wing. The jury were probably influenced by some of the evidence given by the fellow-guests in the house, which seemed to me simply to amount to this--that a woman in the strait in which Juliet Sparling was will endeavor, out of mortal fear, to keep the ruffian who has her in his power in a good-humor."
"However, I have now confirmatory evidence for my theory of the matter--evidence which has never been produced--and which I tell you now simply because the happiness of her child--and of your son--is at stake."
Lady Lucy moved a little. The color returned to her cheeks. Sir James, however, gave her no time to interrupt. He stood before her, smiting one hand against another, to emphasize his words, as he continued:
"Francis Wing lived for some eighteen years after Mrs. Sparling"s death.
Then, just as the police were at last on his track as the avengers of a long series of frauds, he died at Antwerp in extreme poverty and degradation. The day before he died he dictated a letter to me, which reached me, through a priest, twenty-four hours after his death. For his son"s sake, he invited me to regard it as confidential. If Mrs. Sparling had been alive I should, of course, have taken no notice of the request.
But she had been dead for eighteen years; I had lost sight completely of Sparling and the child, and, curiously enough, I knew something of Wing"s son. He was about ten years old at the death of his mother, and was then rescued from his father by the Wing kindred and decently brought up. At the time the letter reached me he was a promising young man of eight-and-twenty, he had just been called to the Bar, and he was in the chambers of a friend of mine. By publishing Wing"s confession I could do no good to the dead, and I might harm the living. So I held my tongue. Whether, now, I should still hold it is, no doubt, a question.
"However, to go back to the statement. Wing declared to me in this letter that Juliet Sparling"s relation to him had been absolutely innocent, that he had persecuted her with his suit, and she had never given him a friendly word, except out of fear. On the fatal evening he had driven her out of her mind, he said, by his behavior in the garden; she was not answerable for her actions; and his evidence at the trial was merely dictated either by the desire to make his own case look less black or by the fiendish wish to punish Juliet Sparling for her loathing of him.
"But he confessed something else!--more important still. I must go back a little. You will remember my version of the dagger incident? I represented Mrs. Sparling as finding the dagger on the wall as she was pushed or dragged up against the panelling by her antagonist--as it were, under her hand. Wing swore at the trial that the dagger was not there, and had never been there. The house belonged to an old traveller and sportsman who had brought home arms of different sorts from all parts of the world. The house was full of them. There were two collections of them on the wall of the dining-room, one in the hall, and one or two in the gallery. Wing declared that the dagger used was taken by Juliet Sparling from the hall trophy, and must have been carried up-stairs with a deliberate purpose of murder. According to him, their quarrel in the garden had been a quarrel about money matters, and Mrs.
Sparling had left him, in great excitement, convinced that the chief obstacle in the way of her complete control of Wing and his money lay in the wife. There again--as to the weapon--I had no means of refuting him.
As far as the appearance--after the murder--of the racks holding the arms was concerned, the weapon might have been taken from either place.
And again--on the whole--the jury believed Wing. The robbery of the sister"s money--the incredible rapidity of Juliet Sparling"s deterioration--had set them against her. Her wild beauty, her proud and dumb misery in the dock, were of a kind rather to alienate the plain man than to move him. They believed her capable of anything--and it was natural enough.
"But Wing confessed to me that he knew perfectly well that the dagger belonged to the stand in the gallery. He had often examined the arms there, and was quite certain of the fact. He swore this to the priest.
Here, again, you can only explain his evidence by a desire for revenge."
Sir James paused. As he moved a little away from his companion his expression altered. It was as though he put from him the external incidents and considerations with which he had been dealing, and the vivacity of manner which fitted them. Feelings and forces of another kind emerged, clothing themselves in the beauty of an incomparable voice, and in an aspect of humane and melancholy dignity.
He turned to Lady Lucy.