"Not so easy, my friend," she said to herself, and just as she said it she heard his voice saying coolly, "Look at the jury, please, not at me."
Her eyes, as she turned them in the desired direction, had a flash in them.
"Miss Thorne, at what hour did you leave Miss Bellington's?"
"I have no way of fixing it precisely—about 2:35."
"You are quite sure it was not later?"
"I cannot be sure within four or five minutes."
"What is the distance from Miss Bellington's to the scene of the accident?"
"About fifteen miles, I should think."
"Your calculation is that as the accident took place at 3:12 and you left at twenty-five minutes to three you drove fifteen miles in thirty-seven minutes—that is to say, at the rate of twenty-four miles an hour. Is that right?"
"Yes."
"And you never ran faster than thirty-five miles an hour?"
"Never."
"Don't look at me. Look at the jury, please."
She found it hard to be dovelike under this repeated admonition. "As if," she thought, "I couldn't keep my eyes off him, whereas, of course, it's human nature to look at the person who's speaking to you."
"You say," he went on, "that you had expected to stay longer at Miss Bellington's than you actually did."
"Yes."
"And what made you change your plans?"
"I found she had an engagement."
"Did she mention it on your arrival?"
"No."
"When did she mention it?"
"After luncheon."
"Was she called to the telephone during your visit?"
"No."
"Are you sure of that?"
There was a pause. The gates of Lydia's memory had suddenly opened. The telephone call, which had made no impression at the time because she had not taken in that it was from O'Bannon, suddenly came back to her. She tried hastily to see its bearing on her case, but he gave her no time.
"Answer my question, please. Will you swear there was no telephone call to your knowledge?"
"No, I cannot."
"In fact there was a telephone call?"
"Yes."
"It was during that telephone call that the engagement was made?"
"I cannot say—I do not know."
"How long did you stay after that telephone?"
"I left at once."
"You put on your hat?"
"Yes."
"And your veil?"
"Yes."
"And a coat?"
"Yes."
It was impossible to be dovelike under this interrogation. The jury were allowing themselves to smile.
"Had your car been left standing at the door?"
"No." She felt that her jaw was beginning to set, and she kept her foot quiet only with an effort.
"You had to wait while it was sent for?"
"Yes."
"In other words, Miss Thorne, you must have waited not less than five minutes after the telephone call came?"
"Probably not."
"Answer yes or no, please."
"No." She flung it at him.
"Then if that telephone came at thirteen minutes before three you must have left not earlier than eight minutes to three, and the accident took place at 3:12, you ran the distance—it is actually thirteen miles and a half—in twenty minutes; that is, at the rate of forty miles an hour."
Wiley protested that there was nothing in evidence to show that the telephone call had been made at thirteen minutes before three, and O'Bannon replied that with the consent of the court he would put the records of the telephone company in evidence to prove the exact hour. This point settled, a pause followed. Lydia half rose, supposing the ordeal over, but O'Bannon stopped her.
"One moment," he said. "You say you have not been arrested for exceeding the speed law for several years. Have you ever been stopped by a policeman?"
Wiley was up in protest at once.
"I object, Your Honor, on the ground of irrelevancy."
The judge said to O'Bannon, "What is the purpose of the question?"
"Credibility, Your Honor. I wish to show that the defendant is not a competent witness as to her own speed."
The judge locked his fingers together, with his elbows on the arms of his chair, and took a ruminative half spin.
"The fact that she was once stopped by the police will not determine that. She might have been violating some other ordinance."
"I will show, if Your Honor permits it, that it was for speeding that she was stopped."
Eventually the question was admitted; and Lydia, testifying more and more reluctantly, more and more aware that the impression she was making was bad, was forced to testify that in the autumn Drummond himself had stopped her. Asked what he had said to her, she answered scornfully that she didn't remember.
"Did he say: 'What do you think this is—a race track?'"
"I don't remember."
"Did he warn you that if you continued to drive so fast he would arrest you?"
"No."
If hate could kill, the district attorney would have been struck down by her glance.
"You don't remember any of the conversation that took place between you?"
"No."
"And you cannot explain why a traffic officer stopped you and let you go without even a warning?"
"No."
"Would it refresh your memory, Miss Thorne, to look at this bracelet which I hold in my hand?"
"I protest, Your Honor!" shouted Wiley, but a second too late. Lydia had seen the bracelet and shrunk from it—with a quick gesture of repugnance.
The line of inquiry was not permitted, the bracelet was not put in evidence, the question was ordered stricken from the records; but the total effect of her testimony was to leave in the minds of the jurors the impression that she was perfectly capable of the conduct which the prosecution attributed to her. Wiley detained her a few moments for redirect examination in the hope of regaining the dove, but in vain.
Miss Bennett was put on the stand to testify to Lydia's habitual prudence as a driver; Governor Albee testified to her excellent record; half a dozen other friends were persuasive, but could not undo the harm she had done her own case.
The district attorney put the telephone-company records in evidence, showing that only one call had been made to the Bellington house between two and three o'clock March eleventh, and that it had been made at thirteen minutes before three.
Lydia, with the wisdom that comes specially to the courageous, knew that her trial had gone against her as she left the stand. Miss Bennett was hopeful as they drove home. Bobby actually congratulated her on the clearness and weight of what she had said.
Albee, whose own investigation had closed brilliantly the day before, came that evening to say good-by to her. He was called back to his native state on business and was leaving on a midnight train.
Since the accident Lydia had been seeing Albee every day—had used him and consulted him, and yet had almost forgotten his existence. Now as she waited for his appearance it came to her with a shock of surprise that she had once come very near to engaging herself to him; that in parting like this for a few weeks he might make the assumption that she intended to be his wife. She thought she could make her trial a good excuse for refusing to consider such a proposal. That would get rid of him without hurting his feelings. She thought of the phrase, "A woman situated as I am cannot enter into an engagement." The mere idea of such a marriage was now intensely repugnant to her. How could she have contemplated it?
He entered, leonine yet neat in his double-breasted blue serge with a pearl in his black tie. He took her hand and beamed down upon her as if many things were in his heart that he would not trouble her with at this crisis by uttering.
"Ah, my dear," he said, "I wish I might be here to-morrow to see your triumph, but I'll be back in a month or so, and then—meantime I leave you in good hands. Wiley is capital. His summing up to-morrow will be a masterpiece. And remember, if by any chance—juries are chancy, you know—they do bring in an adverse verdict, on appeal you're safe as a church." He raised a cold, rigid little hand to his lips.
With her perfect clear-sightedness she saw he was deserting her and was glad to get him out of her way. She had not even an impulse to punish him for going.
The next morning it was raining torrents. It seemed as if the globe itself were spinning in rain rather than ether. Rain beat on the streets of New York so that the asphalt ran from curb to curb in black brooks; rain swept across the open spaces of the country, and as they ran through the storm water spouted in long streams from the wheels of the car. In the court room rain ran down the windows on each side of the American flag in liquid patterns. The court room itself had a different air. The electric lights were on, the air smelled of mud and rubber coats, and Judge Homans, who suffered from rheumatism, was stiff and grim.
A blow awaited Lydia at the outset. She had not understood that the defense summed up first—that the prosecution had the last word with the jury. What might not "that man" do with the jury by means of his hypnotic sincerity? She dreaded Wiley's summing up, too, fearing it would be oratorical—all the more because he kept disclaiming any such intention.
"The day has gone by for eloquence," he kept saying. "One doesn't attempt nowadays to be a Daniel Webster or a Rufus Choate. But of course it is necessary to touch the hearts of the jury."
She thought that O'Bannon's appeal was to their heads, and yet Wiley might be right. People were such geese they might prefer Wiley's method to O'Bannon's.
As soon as court opened Wiley began his summing up, and even his client approved of his simple, leisurely manner. He was very clear and effective with the merely legal points. The crime of manslaughter in the first degree—a crime for which a sentence of twenty years might be imposed—had not been proved. Nor was there credible evidence of criminal negligence, without which a verdict of manslaughter in the second degree could not be found. As he reviewed the facts he contrived to present a picture of Lydia's youthfulness, her motherlessness, of Thorne's early beginnings as a workingman, of his death leaving Lydia an orphan. He made her beauty and wealth seem a disadvantage—a terrible temptation to an ambitious young prosecutor with an eye to newspaper headlines. He made it appear as if juries always convicted young ladies of social position, but that this particular jury by a triumph of fair-mindedness were going to be able to overcome this prejudice. One juror who had wept over Alma Wooley now shed an impartial tear for Lydia.
"Gentlemen of the jury," Wiley ended, "I ask you to consider this case on the facts and the facts alone—not to be led away by the emotional appeals of an ambitious and learned young prosecutor who has the ruthlessness that so often goes with young ambition; not to convict an innocent girl whose only crime seems to be that she is the custodian of wealth that her father, an American workingman, won from the conditions of American industry. If you consider the evidence alone you will find that no crime has been committed. I ask you, gentlemen, for a verdict of not guilty."
Lydia, with her eyes slanted down to the red carpet at a spot a few feet from O'Bannon's chair, saw that Miss Bennett turned joyfully to Eleanor, that Bobby was trying to catch her eye for a congratulatory nod; but she did not move a muscle until O'Bannon rose and crossed over to the jury. Her eyes followed him. Then she remembered to turn and give her own counsel a mechanical smile—a smile such as a nurse gives a clever child who has just built a fort on the beach which the next wave is certain to sweep away.
"Gentlemen of the jury," said O'Bannon—and he bit off his words sharply; indeed, he and Wiley seemed to have changed rôles. He who had been so cool through the trial now showed feeling, a sort of quiet passion—"this is not a personal contest between the distinguished counsel for the defense and myself. Neither my youth nor my ambition nor my alleged ruthlessness are in question. The only question is, does the evidence show beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed the crime for which she has been indicted?"
Then without an extra phrase, almost without an adjective, he went on quickly piling up the evidence against her until it reached its climax in the proof of the shortness of time that had elapsed between her leaving Eleanor's and the accident.
"A particularly serious responsibility rests upon you, gentlemen, in this case. The counsel for the defense seems to assume that the rich fare less well in our courts of law than the poor. That has not been my experience. I should be glad as a believer in democracy if I could believe that justice is more available to the poor than to the rich, but I cannot. Last month in this very court a boy, younger than the defendant, who earned his living as a driver of a delivery wagon, was sentenced to three years in prison for a lesser crime, and on evidence not one-tenth as convincing as the evidence now before you. A great many of us felt sorry for that boy, too, but we felt that essential justice was done. If through sentiment or pity essential justice cannot be done in this case, if sex, wealth or conspicuous position is a guarantee of immunity, a blow will be dealt to the respect for law in this country for which you gentlemen must take the responsibility. If you find by the evidence that the defendant has committed the crime for which she is indicted I ask you to face that fact with courage and honesty, and to bring in a verdict of guilty."
There was a gentle stir in the court. The attendant announced that anyone who wished to leave the court must do so immediately. No one would be allowed to move while the judge was charging. No one moved. The doors were closed, the attendants leaning against them.
Wiley bent over and whispered, "That sort of class appeal doesn't succeed nowadays. Give yourself no concern."
Concern was the last emotion Lydia felt, or rather she felt no emotion at all. Her interest had suddenly collapsed, the game was over. She was aware that the air of the court room was close and that she felt inexpressibly tired, especially in her wrists.
The judge wheeled toward the jury and drew in his chin until it seemed to rest upon his spinal column.
"Gentlemen of the jury," he said, "we have now reached that stage in this trial when it is my duty to present the matter for your deliberation. You know that the law makes a distinction between the duty of the court and the duty of the jury. You are the judge and the only judge of the facts, but you must accept the law from the court. You must not consider whether or not you approve of the law; whether you could or could not make a better law."
Lydia suppressed a yawn.
"The tiresome old man," she thought. "He actually seems to enjoy saying all that."
His Honor went on defining a reasonable doubt:
"It is not a whim or a speculation or a surmise. It is a doubt founded on reason—on a reason which may be stated."
Lydia thought, "Imagine drawing a salary for telling people that a reasonable doubt is a doubt founded on reason." She had not imagined that she would be bored at any moment of her own trial, but she was—bored beyond belief.
"I must call your attention to Section 30 of the Penal Law, which says that whenever a crime is distinguished into degrees, the jury, if they convict, must find the degree of the crime of which the prisoner is guilty. Manslaughter is a crime distinguished into degrees—namely, the first and the second degree."
Lydia thought that if by this time the jury did not know the distinction between the two they must be half-witted, but His Honor went on to define them:
"In the first degree, when committed without design to effect death by a person committing or attempting to commit a misdemeanor."
She thought that she knew that phrase now, as when she was a child she had known some of the rules of Latin grammar—verbs conjugated withad, ante, con, in, inter—what did they do? How funny that she couldn't remember. Her eyes had again fixed themselves on the spot on the carpet so near O'Bannon's feet that she was aware of any movement on his part, and yet she was not looking at him. A fly came limply crawling into her vision, and her eyes followed it as it lit on O'Bannon's boot. She glanced up to where his hand was resting on his knee, and then wrenched her eyes away—back to the floor again.
"If you find that the defendant is not guilty of manslaughter in the first degree you must then consider whether or not she is guilty of manslaughter in the second degree—that is, whether she occasioned the death of Drummond by an act of culpable negligence. Culpable negligence has been defined by Recorder Smyth in the case of—in the case of the People against Bedenseick as the omission to do something which a reasonable and prudent man would do, or the doing of something which such a man would not do under the circumstances of each particular case. Or, what is the same thing——"
How incredibly tiresome! She glanced at the jury. They were actually listening, drinking in the judge's words. All of a sudden she knew by his tone that he was coming to an end.
"If you find that a killing has taken place, but that it is not manslaughter in either degree, then it is your duty to acquit. If on the other hand you find the defendant guilty in either degree you must not consider the penalty which may be imposed. That is the province of the court; yours is to consider the facts. Such, gentlemen, is the law. The evidence is before you. You are at liberty to believe or to disbelieve the testimony of any witness in part or as a whole, according to your common sense. Weigh the testimony, giving each fact its due proportion; and then, according to your best judgment, render your verdict."
His Honor was silent. There were a few requests to charge from both sides, and the jury filed solemnly out. Almost without a pause the next case was called, the attendant's voice ringing out as before—"The case of the People against——"
Lydia felt disinclined to move, as if even her bones were made of some soft dissoluble material. Then she saw that she had no choice. The next prisoner was waiting for her place—an unshaven, hollow-eyed Italian, with a stout, gray-clad lawyer who looked like Caruso at his side. As she left the court she could hear the clerk calling the new jury.
"William Roberts."
"Seat Number One."
Judge Homans flattered himself particularly on the celerity with which his court moved.
Several of the New York papers the next morning carried editorials commending the verdict. Lydia sitting up in bed with a breakfast tray on her knee, read them coolly through.
"The safety of the highways"—"the irresponsibility of the younger generation, particularly among those of great wealth"—"pity must not degenerate into sentimentality"—"the equal administration of our laws——"
So the public was pleased with the verdict, was it? It little knew. She herself was filled with bitterness. The moment of the delivery of the verdict had been terrible to her.
She had not minded the hours of waiting. She had felt deadened, without special interest in what the jury decided. But this had changed the moment word came that the jury had reached a verdict. There was a terrible interval while the familiar roll of their names was called for the last time. Then she was told to stand up and face them, or rather to face the foreman, Josiah Howell, a bearded man with a lined brown face. He looked almost tremulously grave.
Lydia set her jaw, looking at him and thinking, "What business have you interfering in my fate?" But he was not the figure she was most aware of. It was the district attorney, whose excitement she knew was as great as her own.
"How say you?" said a voice. "Guilty or not guilty?"
"Guilty of manslaughter in the second degree," answered the foreman.
Lydia knew every eye in the court room was turned on her. She had heard of defendants who fainted on hearing an adverse verdict—keeled over like dead people. But one does not faint from anger, and anger was Lydia's emotion—anger that "that man" had actually obtained the verdict he wanted. Her breath came fast and her nostrils dilated. How sickening that she had nothing to do but stand there and let him triumph! No subsequent reversal would take away this moment from him.
The jury was thanked and dismissed. Wiley was busy putting in pleas that would enable her to remain at liberty during the appeal of her case. She stood alone, still now as a statue. She was thinking that some day the world should know by what methods that verdict had been obtained.
She had behaved well during her trial; had lived a life of retirement, seeing no one but Wiley and her immediate friends. But there was no further reason for playing a part. On the contrary she felt it would relieve her spirit to show the world—and O'Bannon—that she was not beaten yet. She did not intend to look upon herself as a criminal because he had induced a jury to convict her.
She bought herself some new clothes and went out every night, dancing till dawn and sleeping till noon. She began a new flirtation, this time with a good-looking insolent young English actor, Ludovic Blythe, hardly twenty-one, with a strange combination of wickedness and naïveté that some English boys possess. Her friends disapproved of him heartily.
At his suggestion she engaged a passage for England for early July. Wiley warned her that it was unlikely that the decision in her case would be handed down as soon as that, and if it were not she could not leave the country.
"There's no harm in engaging a cabin, is there?" she answered.
Her plan was to take in the end of the London season, with a few house parties in the English country, to spend September in Venice, two weeks in Paris buying clothes, and to come home in October.
"To Long Island?" Miss Bennett asked.
"Of course. Where else?" answered Lydia. "Do you think I shall allow myself to be driven out of my own home?"
But July came without the decision, and Lydia was obliged to cancel her passage. She was annoyed.
"Those lazy old judges," she said, "have actually adjourned for two months, and now I can't get off until September." Her tone indicated that she was doing a good deal for the law of her country, changing her plans like this.
O'Bannon, she heard, was taking a holiday too—going to Wyoming for a month. She thought that she would like to see something of the West, but instead she took a house at Newport for August—a fevered month. Blythe came to spend Sunday with her and stayed two weeks, fell in love with May Swayne, attempted to use his position as a guest of Lydia's to make himself appear a more desirable suitor in the eyes of the Swayne family—a solid old-fashioned fortune—and was turned out by Lydia after a scene of unusual violence.
A feud followed in which many people took—and changed—sides. Lydia fought gayly, briskly in the open. Her object was not Blythe's death, but his social extinction, and her method was not cold steel but ridicule. The war was won when May was made to see him as an impossible figure, comic, on the make—as perhaps he was, but no more so than when Lydia herself had received him. After this, though he lingered on a few days at a hotel, his ultimate disappearance was certain. Lydia and May remained friends throughout—as much friends as they had ever been. Since the day of their first meeting the two women had never permitted any man to be a friend of both of them.
Albee came and spent a brief twenty-four hours with her between a midnight train and Sunday boat. He was in the midst of a campaign as United States senator from his own state—certain of election. Lydia was kind and patient with him, but frankly bored.
"There's more stuff in Bobby," she confided to Benny, "who doesn't expect you to tremble at his nod. I hate fake strong men. I always feel tempted to call their bluff. It's a hard rôle they want to play. If they don't break you, you despise them. If they do—why, you're broken, no good to anyone."
She asked Eleanor to come and spend August with her, but Eleanor refused, saying, what was true enough, that she couldn't bear Newport. She could bear even less constant association with Lydia at this moment. Lydia's one preoccupation when they were together was to destroy Eleanor's friendship for O'Bannon. Often in old times Eleanor had laughed at the steady persistence that Lydia put into this sort of campaign of hate, but she could not laugh now, for as a matter of fact her friendship with O'Bannon was already destroyed. She hardly saw him, and if she did there was a veil between them. He was kind, he was open with her, he was everything except interested.
Eleanor loved O'Bannon, but with so intellectual a process that she was not far wrong in considering it was a friendship. She would have married him if he had asked her, but she would have done so principally to insure herself of his company. If anyone could have guaranteed that they would continue all their lives to live within a few yards of each other she would have been content—content even with the knowledge that every now and then some other less reasonable woman would come and sweep him away from her. She knew he was of a temperament susceptible to terrible gusts of emotion, but she considered that that was her hold upon him—she was so safe.
The remoteness that came to their relation now indicated another woman, and yet she knew his everyday life well enough to know that he was seeing no one except herself and Alma Wooley; and though there was some gossip about his attention to the girl, Eleanor felt she understood the reason for it. Alma made him feel emotionally what he knew rationally—that his prosecution of Lydia had been merely an act of justice. Alma thought him the greatest of men and was tremulously grateful to him for establishing her dead lover as a hero—a man killed in the performance of his duty. To her imagination Lydia was an unbelievable horror, like a wicked princess in a fairy tale. Eleanor wondered if she did not seem somewhat the same to O'Bannon. He never mentioned her name when she, Eleanor, spoke of her. It was like dropping a stone into a bottomless well. She listened and listened, and nothing came back from O'Bannon's abysmal silence. He spoke of her only once, and that was when he came to say good-by to Eleanor the day he started for Wyoming. He was eager to get away—into those mountains, to sleep under the stars and forget everything and everybody in the East.
"Mercy," Eleanor thought, "how ruthless men are! I wouldn't let any friend of mine see I was glad to leave him, even if I were."
"It's a rotten job—mine," he said. "I'm always sending people to prison who are either so abnormal they don't seem human or else so human they seem just like myself."
Presently Eleanor mentioned that Lydia had asked her to go to Newport for a month. O'Bannon turned on her sharply.
"And are you going?"
She said no, but it did not save her from his contempt.
"I don't see how you can be a friend of that woman's, Eleanor," he said.
"Lydia has the most attaching qualities when you know her, Dan."
"Attaching!" he broke out with a suppressed irritation she had never seen—a strange hate of her, Eleanor, for saying such a thing. "Arrogant, inflexible, using all her gifts—her brains and her incredible beauty—just to advance her own selfish ends!"
An impulse based partly on pure loyalty but partly on the idea that she could improve her position by showing her friend was not quite a monster made her answer, "You wouldn't believe, Dan, how if she really cares for you she can be tender almost clinging."
"For God's sake don't let's talk of her!" said O'Bannon, and it was on this note that they parted.
He wrote to her only once, though his letters to his mother were always at her disposal. She saw a great deal of the old lady, who developed a mild pleurisy as soon as her son's back was turned and didn't want Dan told of it. Eleanor spent most of that hot August taking care of her.
"I want him to have an uninterrupted holiday," said Mrs. O'Bannon firmly. "He hasn't been well. He doesn't sleep as he ought to, and he's cross, and you know it's not like Dan to be cross."
On the last day of August he was back, lean and sunburned, announcing himself to be in excellent condition. His first question was about the Thorne case.
"Are you anxious about it?" said his mother.
"Not a bit. They can't reverse us," he answered.
After Labor Day Lydia moved back to her Long Island house, and she was there when the decision in her case was handed down. The verdict of the lower court was sustained. It was a great blow to her—perhaps the first real blow she had ever received. She had so firmly made up her mind that the former verdict had been the result of undue influence of the district attorney that she had thought it impossible that the higher court would uphold it. Another triumph for "that man!" The idea of punishment was horrible to her—to be fined as a criminal. She still did not conceive it a possibility that she could be sent to prison.
"I can think of lots of ways in which I'd rather spend a thousand dollars," was her only comment.
But day and night she thought of the scene in court when she must present herself for sentence. In secret her courage failed her. It would be the visible symbol of O'Bannon's triumph over her. Yet her will threw itself in vain against the necessity. Nothing but death could save her. It would be short anyhow. She knew how it would be. She and Wiley would appear in the midst of some other wretch's trial. There would be whisperings about the judge's desk, and O'Bannon would be there—not looking at her, but triumphing in his black heart, and the judge would say "A thousand-dollar fine," or—no, nothing so succinct. He would find it an opportunity to talk about her and her case first. And then she would pay the money and leave court, a convicted criminal.
And then the second stage would begin. It would be her turn. She would give her life to getting even with O'Bannon. She who had always needed a purpose—a string on which to thread her life—had found it in hate. Most people found it in love, but for her part she enjoyed hate. It was exciting and active, and, oh, what a climax it promised! Yes, like the adventuress in the melodrama, she would go to him herself and say: "I've waited ten years to ruin you, and now I've done it. Have you been wondering all these years what was against you—what held you back and poisoned everything you touched? It was I!"
Other people, she knew, thought such things and never put them in action. But she had no reason to distrust the power of her own will, and never had she willed anything as she willed this. She began to arrange it. There were three ways in which you could hurt a man—through his love, through his ambitions and through his finances. A crooked politician like O'Bannon might suffer most by being ruined politically. She must always keep some hold on Albee for that. Money probably wouldn't greatly matter to O'Bannon. But love—he was an emotional creature. Women, she felt sure, played a tremendous rôle in his life. And he was attractive to them—accustomed to success probably. Oh, to think that she had been for a few seconds acquiescent in his arms! And yet that meant that she had power over him. She knew she had power. Should that be her method—to make him think that she had seen him not as an enemy but as a hero, a crusader, a master, that she was an adoring victim? Oh, how easily she could make love to him, and how successfully! She could imagine going down on her knees to him, winding herself about him, only she must have the climax ready so that at the same second she would destroy both his love and career. She must wait, and it would be hard to wait; but she must wait until she and Albee had dug a deep pit. Then she would call him to her and he would have to come. It was by thinking these thoughts that she managed to come into court calm and cold as steel.
"What have you now to say why the judgment of the court should not be pronounced upon you?"
The judge beckoned her and Wiley to his desk. O'Bannon was already there, standing so close that her arm would have touched his if she had not shrunk away. She trembled with hate. It was horrible to be so near him. She heard his own breath unsteadily drawn. Across the space that parted them waves of some tangible emotion leaped to and fro. She looked up at him and found that he, with clenched hands and drawn brows, was looking at her. So they remained.
"Your Honor," said Wiley in his smooth tones, "I would like to ask that a fine rather than a prison sentence be imposed on this prisoner, not only on account of her youth and previous good record, but because to a woman of her sheltered upbringing a prison sentence is a more severe punishment than the law contemplated."
"I entirely disagree with you, counselor," said the judge in a loud ringing tone. "The feature that makes the court so reluctant ordinarily to impose prison sentences is the subsequent difficulty in earning a living. That consideration is entirely absent in the present case. On the other hand, to impose a fine would be palpably ridiculous, constituting for this defendant no punishment whatsoever. I sentence this prisoner"—the judge paused and drew in his chin—"to not less than three nor more than seven years in state's prison."
She heard Wiley passionately pleading with Judge Homans. A blue-coated figure was now standing beside her. It was still incredible.
"This is your doing," she heard her own voice saying very softly to O'Bannon.
To her surprise she saw that emotion, what emotion she did not know, made it impossible for him to answer. His eyes stared at her out of a face whiter than her own. It was his emotion that communicated her own situation to her. His hand on the desk was shaking. She knew he could not have done what she proceeded to do. She turned and walked with the policeman to the iron-latticed passageway that led to jail.
As the door clanged behind her O'Bannon turned and walked out of court, and getting into his car drove away westward. At two in the morning Eleanor was waked by a telephone from Mrs. O'Bannon. Dan had not come home. She was afraid something had happened to him. A man in his position had many enemies. Did Eleanor think that some friend or lover of that Thorne girl——
Oh, no, Eleanor was sure not!
The next morning—for a small town holds few secrets—she knew that O'Bannon had returned at six o'clock, drunk.
"Oh, dear heaven," thought Eleanor, "must he re-travel that road?"
Lydia and her guard arrived at the prison early in the evening. She had been travelling all through the hot, bright September day. For the first hour she had been only aware of the proximity of the guard, of the crowded car, the mingled smell of oranges and coal smoke, the newspaper on the floor, trodden by every foot, containing probably an account of her departure for her long imprisonment. Then, her eyes wandering to the river, she suddenly remembered that it would be years before she saw mountains and flowing water again. Perhaps she would never see them again.
During the previous winter she had gone with Benny and Mrs. Galton to visit a prison in a neighboring state—a man's prison. It was considered an unfortunate example. Scenes from that visit came back to her in a series of pictures. A giant negro highwayman weaving at an immense loom with a heavy, hopeless regularity. Black, airless punishment cells—"never used nowadays," the warden had said lightly, and had been corrected by a low murmur from the keeper; two of them were in use at the moment. The tiers of ordinary cells, not so very much better, with their barred loopholes. And the smells—the terrible prison smells. At their best, disinfectant and stale soap; at worst—Lydia never knew that it was possible to remember a smell as she now remembered that one. But most of all she remembered the chalky pallor of some of the prisoners, some obviously tubercular, others twitching with nervous affections. She doubted coolly if many people were strong enough to go through years of that sort of thing.
So she would look at the river as if she might never see it again.
They were already in the Highlands, and the hills on the eastern side—her side of the river—were throwing a morning shadow on the water, while across the way the white marble buildings at West Point shone in the sunlight. Storm King with its abrupt bulk interposed itself between the two sections of new road—the road which Lydia had so much desired to see finished. She and Bobby had had a plan to motor along it to the Emmonses some day—Newburgh. There was a hotel there where she had stopped once for luncheon on her way to Tuxedo from somewhere or other. Then presently the bridge at Poughkeepsie, and then the station at which she had got out when she had spent Sunday with the Emmonses, the day Evans had been arrested and had confessed to that man——There was the very pillar she had waited beside while the chauffeur looked up her bags. Now the river began to narrow, there were marshy islands in it, and huge shaky ice houses along the brink. It all unrolled before her like a picture that she was never going to see again. Then Albany, set on its hills, and the train, turning sharply, rumbled over the bridge into the blackened station. Almost everybody in the car got out here, for the train stopped some time; but she and her guard remained sitting silently side by side. Then presently they were going on again, through the beautiful wide fertile valley of the Mohawk——They were getting near, very near. She felt not frightened but physically sick. She wondered if her hair would be cut short. Of course it would. It seemed to her like an indignity committed by O'Bannon's own hand.
It was dark when they reached the station, so dark that she could not get a definite idea of anything but the great wall of the prison, and the clang of the unbarring of the great gate. Later she came to know the doorway with its incongruous beauty—the white door with its fanlight and side windows, and two low stairways curving up to it, and, above, the ironwork porch, supported on square ironwork columns of a leaf pattern, suggestive somehow of an old wistaria vine. But now she knew nothing between the gate and the opening of the front door.
She entered what might have been the wide hall of an old-fashioned and extraordinarily bare country house. A wide stairway rose straight before her, and wide, old-fashioned doors opened formally to left and right.
She was taken into the room at the right—the matron's room. While her name and age and crime were being registered she stood staring straight before her where bookshelves ran to the ceiling. She could recognise familiar bindings—the works of Marion Crawford and Mrs. Humphry Ward.
Calm brown-eyed women seemed to surround her, but she would not even look at them. Their impersonal kindness seemed to be founded on the insulting knowledge of her utter helplessness. They chatted a little with the guard who had brought her. Was the train late? Well, not as bad as last time.
She wondered how soon they would cut her hair.
After a little while she was taken through a long corridor directly to a spacious bathroom. Her clothes, wrapped in a sheet, were borne away. At this Lydia gave a short laugh. It pleased her as a sign that the routine in her case was palpably ridiculous—to take away her things as if they were infected. She was given a bath, a nightgown of most unfriendly texture was handed to her, and presently she was locked in her cell—still in possession of her hair.
She felt like an animal in a trap—could imagine herself running along the floor smelling at cracks for some hope of escape, with that strange head motion, up and down, up and down, of a newly caged animal.
More even than the locks and bolts, she minded the open grille in the door, like an eye through which she might at any moment of the day or night be spied upon. At every footstep she prepared herself to meet with a defiant stare the eyes of an inspector. The cell was hardly a cell, but a room larger than most hall bedrooms. The bed had a white cover; so had the table; and the window, though barred, was large. But this made no impression on Lydia. She was conscious of being locked in. Only her pride and her hard common sense kept her from beating at the door with her bare hands and making one of those screaming outbreaks so familiar to prison officials.
She who had never been coerced was now to be coerced in every action, surrounded everywhere by symbols of coercion. She who had been so intense an individualist that she had discarded a French model if she saw other women wearing it was now to wear a striped gingham dress of universal pattern. She whose competent white hands had never done a piece of useful work was sentenced to not less than three or more than seven years of hard labor. What would that be—hard labor? The vision of that giant negro working hopelessly at his loom was before her all night long.
All night long she wandered up and down her cell, now and then laying her hand on the door to assure herself of the incredible fact that it was locked. Only for a few minutes at dawn she fell asleep, forgetting the catastrophe, the malignant fate that had overtaken her, and woke imagining herself at home.
When her cell door was unlocked she stepped out into the same corridor along which she had passed the night before. She found it a blaze of sunlight. Great patches of sunlight fell in barred patterns on the boards of the floor, scrubbed as white as the deck of a man-of-war. Remembering the gloomy granite loopholes of her imagination, this sun seemed insolently bright.
The law compels every prisoner, unless specially exempted, to spend an hour a day in school. Lydia's examination was satisfactory enough to exempt her, but she was set to work in the schoolroom, giving out books, helping with papers, erasing the blackboards, collecting the chalk and erasers. In this way the whole population of the prison—about seventy-five women—passed before her in the different grades. She might have found interest and opportunity, but she was in no humor to be coöperative.
She sat there despising them all, feeling her own essential difference—from the bright-eyed Italian girl who had known no English eighteen months before and was now so industrious a student, to the large, calm, unbelievably good-tempered teacher. The atmosphere of the room was not that of a prison school but of a kindergarten. That was what annoyed Lydia—that these women seemed to like to learn. They spelled with enthusiasm—these grown women. Up and down pages they went, spelling "passenger" and "transfer" and "station"—it was evidently a lesson about a trolley car. Was she, Lydia Thorne, expected to join joyfully in some such child-like discipline? In mental arithmetic the competition grew keener. Muriel, a soft-voiced colored girl, made eight and seven amount to thirteen. The class laughed gayly. Lydia covered her face with her hands.
"Oh," she thought, "he might better have killed me than this!"
It seemed to her that this terrible impersonal routine was turning on her like a great wheel and grinding her into the earth. What incredible perversity it Was that no one—no prisoner, no guard, not even the clear-eyed matron—would see the obvious fact that she was not a criminal as these others were.
Had O'Bannon's power reached even into the isolation of prison and dictated that she should be treated like everyone else—she who was so different from these uneducated, emotional, unstable beings about her?
It was her former maid, Evans, who destroyed this illusion. The different wards of the prison ate separately; and as Evans was not in her ward they did not meet during the day. They met in the hour after tea, before the prisoners were locked in their cells for the night; an hour when in the large hall they were allowed to read and talk and sew and tat—tatting was very popular just then.
Lydia had sunk into a rocking-chair. She could not fix her mind on a book, and she did not know how to sew or tat, and talk for talk's sake had never been one of her amusements. She was thinking "One day has gone by out of perhaps seven years. In seven years I shall be thirty-three," when she felt some one approaching her, and looking up she saw it was Evans.
Evans, in a striped cotton, did not look so different from the lady's maid of the old days, except, as Lydia noticed with vague surprise, she had put on weight. She came with the hurried walk that made her skirts flip out at her heels—the same walk with which she used to come when she was late to dress Lydia for dinner. She almost expected to hear the familiar, "What will you wear, miss?" A dozen memories flashed into her mind—Evans polishing her jewels in the sunlight, Evans locked in the disordered bedroom refusing her confidence to everyone, and then collapsing and confessing to "that man."
She looked away from the approaching figure, hoping the girl would take the hint; but no, Evans was drawing up a chair with something of the manner of a hostess to a new arrival.
"Oh, Evans!" was Lydia's greeting, very much in her old manner.
"You'd better call me Louisa here—I mean, it's first names we use," said Evans.
The fact had already been called to her former employer's attention by Muriel, who had done nothing but call her Lydia in a futile effort to be friendly. She steeled herself to hear it from Evans, who, however, managed to avoid it. She gossiped of the prison news, and tried to cheer and help this newcomer with whatever wisdom she had acquired. Lydia neither moved nor answered nor again looked up.
"As the matron says," Evans ran on, "the worst is over when you get here. It's the trial and the sentence and the journey that's worst. After a week or so you'll begin to get used to it."
Lydia's nostrils trembled.
"I shall never get used to it," she said. "I don't belong here. What I did was no crime."
There was a short pause. Lydia waited for Evans' cordial agreement to what seemed a self-evident assertion. None came. Instead she said gently, as she might have explained to a child, "Oh, miss, they all think that!"
"Think what?"
"That what they did was no real harm—that they were unjustly condemned. There isn't one here who won't tell you that. The worse they are the more they think it."
Lydia had looked up from her contemplation of the gray rag rug. No sermon could have stopped her as short as that—the idea that she was exactly like all the other inmates. She protested, more to herself than to Evans.
"But it is different! What I did was an accident, not a deliberate crime."
Evans smiled her old, rare, gentle smile.
"But the law says it was a crime."
Horrible! Horrible but true! Lydia was to find that every woman there felt exactly as she did; that she was a special case; that she had done nothing wrong; that her conviction had been brought about by an incompetent lawyer, a vindictive district attorney, a bribed jury, a perjured witness. The first thing each of them wanted to explain was that she—like Lydia—was a special case.
The innocent-looking little girl who had committed bigamy. "Isn't it to laugh?" said she. "Gee, when you think what men do to us! And I get five years for not knowing he was dead! And what harm did I do him anyway?"
And the gaunt elderly stenographer who had run an illicit mail-order business for her employers. One of them had evidently occupied her whole horizon, taking the place of all law, moral and judicial.
"He said it was positively legal," she kept repeating, believing evidently that the judge and jury had been pitifully misinformed.
And there was the stout middle-aged woman with sandy hair and a bland competent manner—she was competent. She had made a specialty of real-estate frauds.
"I was entirely within the law," she said, as one hardly interested to argue the matter.
And there were gay young mulatto girls and bright-eyed Italians, who all said the same thing—"everyone does it; only the other girl squealed on me"—and there were the egotists, who were never going to get into this mess again. Some girls had to steal for a living; they had brains enough to go straight. Even the woman who had attempted to kill her husband felt she had been absolutely within her rights and after hearing her story Lydia was inclined to agree with her.
Only Evans seemed to feel that her sentence had been just.
"No, it wasn't right what I did," she said, and she stood out like a star, superior to her surroundings. She only was learning and growing in the terrible routine. It soon began to seem to Lydia that this little fool of a maid of hers was a great person. Why?
Locked in her cell from dark to daylight, Lydia spent much of the time in thinking. Like a great many people in this world, she had never thought before. She had particularly arranged her life so she should not think. Most people who think they think really dream. Lydia was no dreamer. She lacked the romantic imagination that makes dreams magical. Clear-sighted and pessimistic when she looked at life, the reality had seemed hideous, and she looked away as quickly as possible, looked back to the material beauty with which she had surrounded herself and the pleasant activities always within reach. Now, cut off from pleasure and beauty, it seemed to her for the first time as if there were a real adventure in having the courage to examine the whole scheme of life. Its pattern could hardly be more hideous than that of every day.
What was she? What reason had she for living? What use could life be put to? What was the truth?
A verse she could not place kept running through her head: