XV

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

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

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

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

Simms opened the case for the defence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patience was put on the witness stand next. The supreme effort to overcome nervousness gave her an icy and repellent demeanour. Never had she held her back as erect, her head as high. She kept her eyelids half lowered, and spoke with scarcely any change of inflection. She told the story of the night as she had told it in rehearsal many times. There had been a quarrel an hour before she heard the deceased get up and go to the lavatory. She offered to drop his morphine, and he replied with an oath that she should never do another thing for him as long as he lived, that he hoped she would leave the house by the first train next morning. His sudden silence upon his return to his bed excited her apprehension, and she called the family.

When Bourke sat down and the district attorney arose and confronted her she shivered suddenly. Bourke’s rich strong voice and kind magnetic gaze had given her courage, but this man with his eyes like grey ice, his mechanical smile, and cold smooth voice conjured up a sudden awful picture of the execution room at Sing Sing. Her insight appreciated with exactitude the pitiless ambition of the man, knew that he stood pledged to his future to send her to her death. He made her admit all the damning facts of the evidence against her, the facts which stood out like phosphorescent letters on a black wall, and to acknowledge her abhorrence of the man that had been her husband. But all this had been anticipated: at least he could not confuse her.

Again two days and a part of a third were monopolised by experts. These two illustrious chemists testified, through the same bewildering mass of detail as that employed by their equally illustrious predecessors, that there was not enough morphine in Beverly Peele’s stomach to kill a cat.

There was a short interval, after the second expert had been permitted to leave the stand, during which Bourke and Simms and Lansing conferred together, preparatory to the summing up of the former. As Bourke was about to rise, the district attorney stood up, cleared his throat, and said: “One moment, please. Will Miss Honora Mairs kindly take the stand?”

Bourke was on the alert in an instant. “The case for the prosecution has closed,” he said.

“This is by special permission of the Court,” replied the district attorney, coldly.

As Honora ascended the stand there was a deep murmur of admiration. She looked like an angel, nothing less. She wore a white lawn frock, girt with a blue sash; a large white leghorn lined with azure velvet, against which the baby gold of her hair shone softly. Her great blue eyes had the clear calm serenity of a young child. Patience drew her breath in a series of short gasps. Bourke sat with clenched hands.

“We understand,” said the district attorney, severely, “that you did not tell all you knew the other day, and that you have signified your willingness to now tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Is this true?”

Honora bowed her head with an expression of deep humility, as a child might that had been justly rebuked.

“You had not slept at all upon that fatal night?”

“No.”

“Your door was open?”

“Yes.”

“You did see somebody enter the lavatory?”

“Yes.”

“Whom did you see?”

There was a moment’s breathless silence, during which Patience wondered if a clock had ever ticked so loudly, or if the sun had ever shone with so vicious a glare.

“Whom did you see?” repeated the district attorney.

“The prisoner.”

“What did she do?”

“She dropped some thirty or forty drops of morphine, I should say, then half filled the glass with water, as usual.”

“You did not see the deceased go to the lavatory that night.”

“No.”

“Nor any one else until the defendant called you?”

“No.”

“That is all.”

Mr. Bourke sprang to his feet, his nostrils dilating, his fine face quivering with unassumed scorn and indignation.

“You admit that you perjured yourself the other day?”

“I could not make up my mind to—”

“Never mind what you had not made up your mind to do. You admit that you perjured yourself?”

“Yes,” gently.

“That in other words you lied.”

“Yes, sir.” Her voice was like the quiver of a violin.

“What proof are we to have that you are not lying now?”

“I am not lying. My conscience gave me no rest.”

“It will give you more, I suppose, if you will have succeeded in swearing away the life of an innocent woman. Yes, yes!—Exactly how long did Mrs. Peele remain in the lavatory?”

“I cannot remember. Five or ten minutes.”

“State the exact time.”

“Perhaps five.”

“And a few moments later when she ran into your room you pretended to be asleep: Why did you assume sleep; what reason had you for lying at that time?”

“I had dropped off.”

“You had been sufficiently wide awake five minutes before to note precisely all these other things, and then had promptly fallen into a sound sleep. Is that your usual habit?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you speak to the prisoner when she came into the lavatory?”

“No.”

“Were not you in the habit of holding a conversation with her upon such occasions?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why did you not address her on that night?”

“I was very sleepy, and had nothing in particular to say.”

“But you were not too sleepy to note carefully all the details in the evidence you have just given. You can go,—and to the devil,” he muttered. He thrust his hands into his pockets and wheeled about, looking at Patience with such intensity of gaze that she moved suddenly forward. Her face was pale, but her eyes blazed with rage. Bourke glanced at the clock.

“It is twenty minutes to one,” he said. “I would ask your honour to adjourn until two. I must have time to digest this new testimony. Its remarkable glibness prevented me from giving it the running deliberation that it demanded.”

The judge sulkily dismissed the court. As Patience passed out of the room with Tarbox she heard the word “angel” more than once, and knew that it did not refer to her.

Patience was not conscious of fear as she ate her luncheon. Her heart was black with rage. “I’d willingly murderher,” she thought, “and my conscience wouldn’t trouble me the least little bit.”

Immediately after recess Mr. Bourke began his summing up. He commenced quietly, shaking the loose cloth of the table in an absent manner. His language was colloquial as he spoke to the jury of its grave responsibilities, and complimented it upon the “unusual intelligence which it had so far made evident.” He passed naturally to the subject in hand, and dwelt eloquently upon the character of the defendant, of her lonely pathetic youth, her high ideals, her remarkable intelligence, her ignorance of the world which had led her to fall in love with the first handsome and attractive man that had addressed her.

His voice rose to tragic pitch as he dwelt upon the terrible awakening of such a woman, bound for life to such a man,—a sensual, ill-tempered, selfish brute, who was a disgrace to the nineteenth century.

He depicted two years of uncomplaining wifely devotion (until Patience became lost in admiration of the defendant), the husband’s frantic rages about nothing, his unrecognition of her superiority, his ignorant determination to make her his slave—his plaything—she, a woman whom such men as James E. Field and Gardiner Peele delighted to honour.

Then he dropped again into pathos (which never for a moment degenerated into bathos) and described the desolate life of such a woman in an empty frivolous brainless society (faint murmur and indignant rustle in the gallery), a society of idle people with neither soul nor intelligence, but who squandered the money wrested from the People, the great People, of whom the Gentlemen of the Jury were twelve worthy and doubtless long suffering members.

It was not until he had emphasised and recapitulated with every resource of his splendid vocabulary, every modulation of his glorious voice, by controlled and telling gesture, by sudden tremendous bursts of indignation, the married life of the prisoner, that he passed to the day and night of the tragedy. He began with the morning, and dwelt upon every detail of the day. Before he reached midnight he had Beverly Peele in a frame of mind for both suicide and murder. He sent him to bed with black skin and white flecked nose and chaos in his heart. With a magnificent burst of scorn he quoted his shameful language when his wife had offered to get him the morphine, the oaths he had used to a “refined and elegant and patient woman.” Then he took him to the lavatory, showed him jerking the stopper from the morphine bottle, and recklessly pouring a fourth of its contents into a glass. “He knew that he had to die anyhow, and he could at least die happy in a hideous revenge.” In brief and vivid phrase he cited several similar instances in legal history.

Then he returned to Peele Manor and denounced the jealous woman who for five years had nursed fury in her heart, and who, on the witness stand, here, Gentlemen of the Jury, conceived, at the unfortunate suggestion of the speaker, the frightful revenge upon a woman who had treated her with unvarying kindness. She did not speak at once, partly because her lying tale needed rehearsing, partly because she believed that the case for the prosecution would win without her. But when she saw that the case for the prosecution was wholly lost she arrayed herself like an angel, that she might the better impose upon the unworldly Gentlemen of the Jury, and swore away a woman’s life.

The several assertions on the defendant’s part that she felt disposition to murder he tore to rags and flung in the face of the jury. Had not every high tempered person—could not the Gentlemen of the Jury recall having exclaimed in bitter moments: “I wish you were dead! I could kill you!” With deep regret and remorse he would confess that he had used similar expressions many times.

Then with consummate skill he dilated upon the impossibility of so clever a woman as the defendant doing aught so stupid as to murder in the manner of the accusation. When there was nothing left to say on this subject he expatiated upon the lack of motive with a technical and personal brilliancy which made even the cross-grained old judge lean forward with a cynical smile.

The interviews, even the final ones, with the mysterious stranger, he treated with contempt, although the contempt was sufficiently long drawn out to impress the jury with every most insignificant detail. It, was the mere longing for companionship of a lonely woman: that was the beginning and the end of it. The lover, the intention of either to marry, he disposed of with a vehemence which made Simms twist about suddenly and look at Lansing; but the young man was regarding his chief with rapt admiration.

Not so much as the scraping of a boot heel was heard in the court room. Patience glanced at the district attorney. His face was set and sullen.

After every possible point had been considered Bourke concluded with an appeal so stirring, so ringing, so thrilling that every person in the court room except the district attorney sat forward and held his breath. No such burst of passion had ever been heard in that room before. Patience covered her face with her hands. Her heart beat suffocatingly. The blood pounded in her ears; but not one note of that wonderful voice, not one phrase of fire, escaped her.

Is there any possible condition in which a man can appear to such supreme advantage as when pleading for the life of a fellow being, more particularly of a young and beautiful woman? How paltry all the time-worn rescues of woman from sinking ship and runaway horse and burning house. A great criminal lawyer standing before the jury box with a life in his hand has the unique opportunity to display all the best gifts ever bestowed upon man: genius, brain, passion, heart, soul, eloquence, a figure instinct with grace and virility, a face blazing with determination to snatch a man or woman from the most awful of dooms.

And all in two short hours.

If those in the court room for whom the case had no personal interest were at Bourke’s feet, hanging upon his words, adoring him for the moment, what were the feelings of the woman for whom he was making so desperate and manly a fight? She forgot her danger, forgot everything but the man, the reckless joy of loving, of being swept out of her calm orbit at last. Her analytical brain was dulled, her arms ached, her heart shook her body.

As Bourke made a few supplementary remarks calculated to take the wind out of the district attorney’s sails,—references to the young man’s ambition, his youthful eagerness to become famous, what the winning of such a great case would mean to him, and to his remarkable cleverness and skill with a jury,—Patience heard Simms say to Lansing: “My God! Bourke has surpassed even himself. Even he never got as high as that before.”

“He’s the greatest man in the country, God bless him!” said Lansing.

As Bourke finally dropped upon his chair he turned to Patience. Their eyes met and lingered; and in that moment each passed into the other’s keeping.

Sturges lost no time taking his stand before the jury box. It was the hour of his life, but he was not nervous. His long thin figure leaning toward the box as he rested his finger tips on the table, showed as fine a repose of nerve as of brain. His clear-cut face with the cruel mouth and pleasant smile was calm and unclouded.

He began by defending himself against Mr. Bourke’s remarks, and asserted with convincing emphasis that when he had taken the oath of office he had left his personal ambition behind him with his personal interests, and had given himself body and soul and brain to the People of Westchester County. Then he made an equally earnest statement of the grave responsibilities of a district attorney, his solemn duty to the People, the necessity to smother all promptings of humanity that he might do what was best for the People—“The greatest good of the greatest number.”

Then he painted Patience as black as Bourke had enamelled her white. With masterly ingenuity he made each juror feel what an awful being a bad woman was, an unloving undutiful wife; what a curse each man of them would writhe under had Fate played him as scurvy a trick as it had played poor Beverly Peele; that no unloved husband’s life would be safe were not such women exploited and punished, that if the Gentlemen of the Jury were weak enough to consider her sex they might be imperilling the lives of countless thousands. For the matter of that, he reiterated, crime had no sex.

He took up each detail of the story, and in the light of his interpretation Patience was the modern Lucretia Borgia and Beverly Peele an injured, peaceable, affectionate husband, who had been sacrificed by an abandoned woman to whom he had given his honoured name, his fortune, and his love.

He scarcely raised his voice. There was no passion in his utterance; but he manufactured a mosaic, bit by bit, each fragment fitting so exactly that the design was without crevice or crack. He demonstrated mathematically that the tardy evidence of Miss Mairs had been superfluous; that the chain of circumstantial evidence was symmetrical and complete, and that no possible motive beyond duty to her conscience could be attributed to her. With devilish adroitness, without a direct phrase, he managed to filter into those twelve small brains the secret of the inspired eloquence of the eminent counsel for the defence,—in behalf of his young and beautiful client.

While he was talking, the skeleton trees beyond the windows grew dim of outline, the mass of colour in the gallery faded. An official came out of the library behind the court room and lit the tall gas lamps on either side of the bench. The judge looked like a bas-relief in pink and silver against the dark panelling of the background. The rest of the room was in shadow. The light of the near jet fell full upon Sturges’ stern face.

Patience’s life from “its fiendish childhood” was rehearsed with such consecutive logic that crime at some point of such a woman’s career was inevitable. The only wonder was that it had not been committed sooner. The threats, he demonstrated, whether uttered in moments of passion or not, were the significant output of a brooding mind. The “cruel letter to a dying man” was read with slow and indignant emphasis. Then the events of the fatal day and night, the quarrels, the prisoner’s fury at being denied a divorce, the deceased’s threat to live twenty years to spite her, her carefully rehearsed and absurd story that her husband had dropped the morphine himself,—something he knew himself physically incapable of doing,—the equal absurdity of his suicide when a greater revenge lay in his hands, her brutal indifference while he lay dying, were deliberately gone over with passionless and insidious effect. The quiet half-lit room was oddly in keeping with the deadly methods of the man.

When he had made the most of her flight on the morning of the “Eye” story, he paused a moment, during which the rising wind could be heard in the trees. Within, there was no sound. No one seemed breathing. Bourke and Patience were in deep shadow. With an instinct of protection he clasped his hand suddenly about hers.

Sturges resumed, with lowered and vibrating voice:

“And—where—Gentlemen of the Jury,—was—this—woman—arrested?——In the house of a harlot!” He paused another half moment. “In the house of her oldest friend, La Rosita, one of the most abandoned women in America.”

Bourke’s hand twitched spasmodically. Simms twisted his neck, and shot at Lansing an uneasy glance. Patience shuddered. For the moment she forgot Bourke. She felt as if a cobra were folding her about,—very slowly, and gently, and inexorably.

When Sturges sat down the jury was told to rise. The judge stood under one of the lamps and read them his charge. He explained that unless they could find the prisoner guilty of murder in the first degree—of deliberate premeditated murder—they must acquit her. As the final quarrel had taken place an hour before the killing it was obviously impossible that she could have dropped the morphine in a moment of excitement; and a verdict of self-defence would be equally absurd. He also charged them that they were to consider the law in the case and nothing but the law,—that human sympathy must have no place in their verdict.

Bourke was too able a lawyer not to have the last word. As the judge sat down, he arose with several sheets of manuscript, and for twenty minutes asked the judge to charge the jury so and so, practically recapitulating all the strong points of the defence. The judge answered mechanically, “I so charge,” and at last the patient jury was conducted out of the court room and locked up. Bourke was surrounded at once.

As Tarbox, with Patience on his arm, left the court house and its crowd behind him, he exclaimed, “By God, that was a great speech of Bourke’s! There never has been a summing up like that in my time before, not even by him. But he’s the smartest man in Westchester County! Hanged if I don’t think he’s the smartest man in the State of New York. He’ll be in the United States Senate yet.”

After dinner Patience went back to the court room to remain until ten o’clock, at which time the jury, if it had not come to a decision, would be locked up for the night. She sat surrounded by her counsel and the lawyers that had taken so deep an interest in the case. Bourke sat very close to her, and once or twice as she met his eyes she forgot the terrible moment to come. Few people were in the court house. No one expected a verdict that night.

It was exactly at half-past nine that the jury filed solemnly in. Patience’s knees jerked suddenly upward. She lost her breath for a moment. Bourke leaned over her and took her hand, regardless of the curious people surrounding them.

“Be brave. Be brave,” he said hurriedly. “Now is the time for all your pride and disdain.”

When she was ordered to stand up and face the jury, she did so with an air so collected and so haughty that even Simms murmured: “By Jove, she is a thoroughbred.”

There was a moment of horrible and vibrating silence, during which Patience’s brain reiterated hilariously: “Twelve little Jurymen all in a row. Twelve little heads all in a row.” Then the foreman was asked for the verdict. He cleared his throat, and without moving a muscle of his face, remarked,—

“Guilty.”

The district attorney sat down suddenly and hid his face with a convulsive hand. Patience resumed her seat with a mien as stolid as that of the twelve jurors. Bourke’s face blanched, but he sprang to his feet and demanded that the jury be polled. Each solemn “Yes,” twelve and unhesitating, sounded like a knell. Then Bourke demanded a Stay, which was granted by the impassive judge, and Patience was led through the silent crowd from the court room to her cell. Tarbox escorted her mutely, his face turned away. At the door of her cell he attempted to speak, but gave it up and retreated hastily.

Patience threw off her hat and sat down on the edge of the bed. The verdict, she knew now, had not been a surprise. But she thought little of the verdict. She was waiting for something else. It came in a moment. She heard a quick impatient step on the ground below, then a rapid ascent of stair, a word or two at the door, Tarbox’s retreating step.

Bourke was in the cell. His face was white, but that of Patience as she rose and confronted him was not.

“I don’t care!” she said. “I don’t care! I believe I am happier than any woman alive.”

The red sprang to his face. He took her outstretched hands and held them to lips and eyes for a moment, then caught her in his arms and kissed her until the rest of the world lay dull, and all life was in that quiet cell.

A year later they took her to Sing Sing. The General Term had refused her a new trial, the Court of Appeals had sustained the lower court. Bourke had won nothing but additional glory.

He did not go with her to Sing Sing. She saw him alone for an hour before Tarbox came to take her away. Her composure was greater than his. He was torn with horror and defeat, and his surpassing love for the woman. Not that he had given up hope by any means, nor the fight; but he knew the fearful odds, and he cursed the law which he had outwitted and played with so often and so brilliantly.

“I wish we were back in the middle ages,” he said savagely, “when a man took his rights and regulated justice by brute force. We are not half men now that we are under the yoke of a thing that operates blindly, and strikes by chance where it should strike, in nine cases out of ten. Good God! Good God! it seems incredible that I canletyou go, that I shall stand by and see Tarbox lead you away. Think of the combined intellect of the world and the centuries having done no more for man than that. I must stand aside and see you go to a hideous cell in the Death House—O my God!”

He had awakened the woman down to the depths; to-day he called to life the maternal instinct in her. She put her arms about him with the passionate strength of one who would transmit courage and hope through physical pressure.

“Listen,” she said; “I don’t mind one cell more than another—and I know, Iknow, that you will save me. I feel it. I am not going to die. You are a man of genius. Everybody says that—everybody—I know that you will have an inspiration at the last minute. And I have been happy, happy, happy! Don’t forget that—not ever. I would go through twenty times what I have suffered in all my life for this past year. Don’t you think I can live on that for a month or two? Why, I can feel your touch, the pressure of your arms for hours after you leave me. I shall be with you every minute—”

He threw back his head, shaking it with a brief violent motion characteristic of him.

“Very well,” he said, “very well; it is not for me to be weak when you are strong. Perhaps it is because the prize is so great that the fight is so long and desperate. Oh, you wonderful woman!

“Tell me,” he said after a moment, “that it has all been as perfect to you as to me. I want to hear you say that, but I know it, I know it.”

“Oh,—I—I—”

Tarbox came and took her away. He looked as if he had lost home and friends and fortune, and did not speak from White Plains to Sing Sing. The details of the trip interested her less than such details are supposed to interest the condemned that look their last on sky and land; her head ached, and the glare of the Hudson blinded her; but as the train neared Sing Sing she opened her eyes suddenly, then sat forward with a note of admiration.

The river was covered with a dense rosy mist which half obscured the opposite shore, giving it the effect of an irregular group of islands. Above was a calm lake of yellow fire surrounded by heavy billows of boiling gold; beyond, storm clouds, growing larger and darker.

As they drove, a few moments later, to the prison, the great grey battlemented pile was swimming in the same rosy glow. Patience murmured satirically:

“‘The splendour falls on castle walls.’”

“‘The splendour falls on castle walls.’”

“‘The splendour falls on castle walls.’”

“‘The splendour falls on castle walls.’”

Tarbox looked at her in amazement. “Oh,” he said, “how do you manage it?”

“All hope is not gone,” she replied; “there is still the governor.” But she knew how slender that hope was. The governor was on the eve of re-election; public feeling was multiplied against her; the “Eye” was clamouring for her life, and strutting like a turkey cock; the “Eye” and Tammany Hall were one; the governor was the creature of Tammany Hall.

The warden was in his office. He greeted her with elaborate politeness, albeit puffed with alcohol and pride. She handed him what valuables she had not presented to Tarbox, and answered his questions in a manner not calculated to placate his Irish dignity. Then she turned to say good-bye to Tarbox, but he had disappeared. The head-keeper, a big kindly man, who pressed her arm in a paternal manner, led her down long echoing corridors, past rows and tiers of cells, and yards full of Things in striped garments, and talked to her in the manner one adopts to a frightened child, until she said:—

“I am not going to have hysterics; nor am I at all sure that I am to be executed—but please don’t imagine that I don’t appreciate your kindness.”

“Well, I like that,” he said. “To tell the truth the prospect of having a woman here has half scared me out of my wits. But if you won’t take on, I’ll do everything I can to make you comfortable. We’ve put a woman servant in there to wait on you. I hope myself it won’t be for long. The evidence is pretty black, but some of us has our opinion all the same.”

“Must I go into the Death House? I think I shouldn’t mind it so much if they’d put me anywhere else.”

“I’m afraid you must, ma’am. That’s the custom in these parts.” He opened a door with a huge key, and Patience did not need to be told that she was in the famous Death House.

A long corridor with a high window at either end; on one side a row of cells separated from the main corridor by an iron fence sufficiently removed from the cells to make space for a narrow promenade. Where the middle cell should have been was a dark arched stone passage terminated by a stout oaken door. Patience knew that it led to the execution room. Two guards walked up and down the corridor. At the end, a sullen-looking woman stood over a stove, making tea.

“You’ve got the house all to yourself,” said the keeper, with an attempt at jocularity. “If there’d been any men here I guess you’d have been sent to Dannemora, but it’s always Sing Sing for the swells, when it’s possible, you know.”

He opened the gate of the iron fence and led her down to the cell at the extreme end. It was large and well lighted, but very different from the cell at White Plains.

“Are you going to lock me in?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am, I must. If everything ain’t comfortable, just let me know.”

The key grated in the lock. The head-keeper with an encouraging smile walked away. Patience crouched in a corner, for the first time fully realising the awfulness of her position, her imagination leaping to the room beyond the passage. What did it look like, that horrible chair? How long—how long—the hideously practical details of electric execution—the awful mystery of it—the new death to which imagination had not yet become accustomed—

There was no sound but the monotonous pacing of the death watch. The world beyond those stone walls might have sprung away into space, leaving the great beautiful prison alone on a whirling fragment.

She sprang to her feet and clenched her hands. “I’ll not go mad and make an everlasting fool of myself,” she thought. “If I have to die, I’ll die with my head up and my eyes dry. If I have the blood of the aristocrat in me I’ll prove it then, not die like a flabby woman of the people. The people! O God, how I hate the people!”

A great petition was sent to the governor. It was signed uniformly by men and women of the upper class.

It is not the aristocrats that do the electing in the United States. The lower classes were against her to a man. Her personality enraged them; her unreligion, her disdainful bearing, her intellect, her position, antagonised the superstitious and ambitious masses more than her crime. Inevitable result: the governor refused to pardon.

Honora returned to Peele Manor from town in April. Bourke’s attempts to see her were frustrated by a bodyguard of servants. He took up his residence in the little village adjoining the grounds. He hardly knew what he hoped. But Honora Mairs was the last and only resource, and he could not keep away from her vicinity. He did not go to Sing Sing. It had been agreed between himself and Patience that he should stay away: they had no desire to communicate through iron bars.

The execution was set for the seventh of May. On the evening of the sixth, while walking down the single street of the village Bourke came face to face with the new priest of the district.

“Tim Connor!” he exclaimed, forgetting for the moment, in the sudden retrospect which this man’s face unrolled, the horror that held him.

“Well, it’s me, sure enough, Garan, and I’ve been hunting for you these two days. I heard you were here, but faith, I’ve been busy!—not to say I’ve been away for two weeks.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Six months, come June, it is since I left old Ireland; and I’m wanting to tell you that the creek we used to wade in is as tempting to the boys as ever, and that the bog you pulled me out of has moved on a mile and more. Twenty times I’ve been for going across the country to call on you and have a good grip of the hand, and to bless you again for letting me live to do good work; but I was caught in a net here—But what’s the matter—Are you ill?—Oh, sure! sure! This terrible business! I remember! Poor young thing!”

He laid his arm about the shoulders of the other man and guided him to his house. There, in his bare little study, he brewed an Irish toddy, and the two men drank without a spoken toast to the old times when they had punched each other’s head, fought each other’s battles, and shared each other’s joys, two affectionate rollicking mischievous Irish lads.

The priest spoke finally.

“Nothing else is talked of here in the village,” he said; “but you don’t hear a word of it mentioned over at the house.”

“What house?”

“Peele Manor, to be sure.”

“Do you go there?”

“Occasionally—to dine; or to talk with Miss Mairs. We are amiable friends, although she doesn’t confess to me.”

Bourke raised his head slowly. Something seemed to swirl through his heavy heart.

“Is Honora Mairs a Catholic?” he asked.

“She is indeed, and, like all converts, full to the brim and running over.”

Bourke leaned forward, his hand clinching about his chin, his elbow pressing his knee with such force that his arm vibrated. He had been raised a Catholic—he knew its grip. His mind was trained to grasp opportunities on the moment, to work with the nervous yet mathematical rapidity of electric currents. And like all great lawyers he was a great actor.

“Tim,” he said meditatively, “I’m feeling terribly bad over that poor girl I couldn’t save.”

“Sure and I should think you would, Garan. My heart’s breaking for her myself.”

“Did you read the trial, Tim?”

“No, faith, I didn’t. I’ve been too busy with these godless folk. Sure they get away from us priests when they get into America. It’s only one more drop to hell.”

“You’re right, Tim, you’re right. You always saw things at a glance. But I’ve got a great work for you to do,—a great work for you and for the Church.”

“You have, Garan? You have? Out with it, my boy.”

“Do you remember the time when Paddy Flannagan was accused of murdering his old grandmother for the sake of the money in her stocking?” continued Bourke, in the same half absent tone, and lapsing gradually into brogue. “He was convicted, you know, and the whole town was set on him, and we two boys were the worst of the lot. Do you remember how we used to hoot under his jail window at night? And then, quite by accident, at the last minute, two days before he was going to be hanged, you discovered the man that had committed the murder, and you ran as fast as your legs could carry you to save Paddy, shouting all the way,—and that it was the happiest day of your life?”

“Yes, yes!” exclaimed the priest, his face aglow. Bourke had thrown himself back in his chair, his eyes dwelling on his old friend with a smile of affectionate satisfaction.

“It’s a grand thing to save a human life, isn’t it, Tim?”

“It is, indeed; the grandest, next to saving an immortal soul.”

“I’m going to give you a chance to do both,—the soul of one woman and the life of another.”

“Garan, Garan, what do you mean?”

“Just let me tell you a few things first, a few things you don’t know already.” He gave a concise but picturesque and thrilling account of Patience’s life and of her trial. As he repeated Honora’s testimony, the priest, who had followed his recital with profound interest, leaned forward with sombre brows.

“That woman lied,” concluded Bourke, abruptly.

“I’m afraid so. I’m afraid so.”

“And if she doesn’t open her accursed perjured lips between now and to-morrow morning at eleven o’clock, that woman up there—” he caught the priest’s shoulders suddenly, his face contracting with agony—“the woman I love, Tim, will be murdered. My God, man, don’t you see what you’ve got to do?”

Honora was lying on a couch in her celestial bedroom. No incense burned. The screen was folded closely about the altar. The windows were open. The pure air of spring, the peaceful sounds of night,—disturbed now and again by the hideous shriek of an engine,—the delicate perfume of flowers, played upon her irritated senses. She held a bottle of smelling salts in her hand. On the table beside her was a jolly looking bottle of Benedictine.

There was a tap at the door. Honora answered wearily. A maid entered.

“It’s Father Connor, miss, and he wants to see you particular.”

“Tell him I cannot see him—no, tell him to come up.”

She rose hurriedly and smoothed her hair. Mr. and Mrs. Peele had gone South. She was alone in the house, and welcomed the brief distraction of the priest’s visit.

“You will pardon me for asking you to come up here,” she said as he entered. “But I am in dishabille, and I did not want to keep you waiting. How kind of you to come!”

“Sure it is always a pleasure to see you anywhere, Miss Mairs,” he said, taking the seat she indicated. “What should I do without you in this godless place?”

Several candles burned. The moonlight wandered in, making a ghastly combination. Honora lay back in her chair, looking very pale and beautiful. The priest’s profile was toward her for a moment after he ceased speaking, a strong lean determined profile. She watched it warily. But he turned suddenly to her and smiled, and told her an absurd episode of one of his village delinquents.

“Faith, Miss Mairs,” he concluded, “you’ve got to help me. They’re too much for one poor priest. I’m not one to flatter, but your face would be enough to make a sinner think of heaven—sure it’s the face of an angel! Between the two of us and with the Grace of God we’ll reform the village and drive the dirty politicians into the Church or out of the country.”

Honora smiled radiantly, and held out her hand. “I will work with you,” she said. “I intend to devote my life to the Church.”

He held her hand closely, in a strong masculine clasp.

“I believed it of you. But why don’t you go to confession, my child?”

The muscles under Honora’s fair skin contracted briefly, and she attempted to withdraw her hand; but the priest held it closely.

“I shall go to you next week.”

“To-night,” he said with soft insistence; “to-night. Do you know it was that brought me here to-night? I’ve been knowing ever since I came that something troubled you—was eating your heart out—but I didn’t like to speak. I thought every day you would come to me, and I didn’t like to intrude. But to-night I said, ‘I will!’ I couldn’t get up my courage when I first came in; but I’m glad I’ve spoken, for I know you’ll be after confessing now. Poor girl! But remember, dear child, the comfort and consolation our blessed Church has for every sinner. Come.”

Honora turned her face away, and shook her head.

The priest put out a long arm, and grasping the screen drew it away from the altar. Then he leaned forward, and laying his hands on her shoulders drew her slowly forward and pressed her to her knees. He laid his hand on her head.

“Confess,” he said, solemnly.

And Honora suddenly burst into wild sobbing, and confessed that Beverly Peele had dropped his own morphine that night, that his shaking hand had refused to obey his will, and that, blind with pain, he had poured a fourth of the contents into the glass, mixed it with water, and gulped it down; that she had not gone to his assistance because she wished him to die, and the responsibility to fall upon his wife.

Then she sprang to her feet and smote her hands together.

“I did not intend to confess until all was over, but—I—Oh—it has been horrible here alone these two days—but I would not yield to superstition and go away—and you found me in a weak moment.”

She walked up and down the room, talking the more rapidly, the more unreservedly, as the priest made no comment. And after all the years of immobility it was joy to speak out everything in her crowded heart and brain.

“Oh, I am not a monster, I am not abnormal, I am merely a result. It began—when did it begin? I was a child when I came here—I remember little that happened before—it has always been therôleof the poor cousin, I remember no other—no other! never! never! I had to learn patience at an age when other children are clamouring for their little desires. I had to learn humility when other children—while I watched my cousins take all the goods and joys of childhood as their divine right. While their little world was at their feet I was learning to cringe and watch and wait and smile upon people I hated, and listen to people that bored me to death, and suffer vicariously for all the shortcomings of the Peele family when my aunt was in one of her cold rages. It was early that I learned the lesson that if I would occupy a supportable position in life I must ‘work’ people; I must cultivate will and tact—how I hate the loathsome word—and study the natures of those about me, and play upon them; that I must acquire absolute self repression, be a sort of automaton, that, being once wound up properly, never makes a false move. I believe that was one thing which drove me to the Catholic Church,—the unspeakable relief that I should find in confession,—that and one other thing—”

She paused abruptly, and pressed her hands to her face, to which the blood had sprung.

“I loved Beverly Peele,” she continued violently. “I do not know when it began; when I was old enough to fall in love, I suppose, and that is young enough with a woman. When we were children we used to play at being married. Even after he was grown and was rather wild, he used to come back to me in the summer time and tell me that he cared for no one else. I knew all his faults, his weaknesses, his limitations, mental and moral and spiritual,—none better. But I loved him. I worshipped him. He was not even a companion to me, for I was always intellectually ambitious. Not a taste but music did we have in common. I have seen him in raging tempers that would make any other woman despise him—when he seemed an animal, a savage. But nothing made any difference to me. A woman loves or she does not love—that is the beginning and the end. There is no more relation between cause and effect in an infatuated woman’s mind than—Oh, well, I can’t be finding similes.

“One night he came in here. The next night I kissed the pillow his head would lie on. For a year I was happy; for another I alternated between joy and anguish, jealousy and peace, despair and hope. Then a year of misery, during which he brutally cast me off. It was that which drove me to the Catholic Church—not only the peace it promised, but the knowledge that with baptism my sin would be washed away—for when happiness went remorse began. I have not a brain of iron, like that woman he married. She could snap her past in two and fling it behind her. She could snap her fingers at moral laws, if it suited her purpose, and know no regret, provided she had had nothing to regret meanwhile. That was one reason why I hated her.

“Oh, how I hated her! How I hated her! Beverly never had any reserve, and he made love to her before my eyes. He was infatuated. His affection for me was an incidental fancy compared to his mad passion for that woman. And month after month! Month after month! And I loved him still!

“I never dared say to myself that when the time came I should have vengeance, for such a resolution I should be obliged to confess; and the priest would make me promise to thrust it out, or refuse me absolution. But down in my heart I knew that when the hour came the temptation would conquer. It came first when I let him drink the morphine. And when I saw her in court, when her lover gave me that sudden suggestion, when I knew that I could send her to that horrible chair—” She threw out her arms and laughed hysterically, “O God, I was almost happy again.”

The priest rose and stood before her. There were tears in his eyes.

“Poor woman!” he said. “Poor woman!”

Honora’s face convulsed, but she shut her lips resolutely and tapped the floor with her foot.

“There is pardon and peace in the Church,” he continued softly; “and not only for the sake of that poor girl at Sing Sing, battling to-night with horror and terror, sleepless, listening to the solemn tramp of the death watch, counting the hours that are marching her to that hideous death, but for the future peace of your own soul, speak out and save her. Think of the years of torment, of remorse, when you will not have the excitement of the present, the pressure of your wrongs to sustain you. Speak out, and I will give you absolution, and your soul shall know peace.”

But Honora threw back her head and laughed.

“No! No!” she said. “I am not so weak as that. I have no intention of going to pieces at the last moment. It is only her death that will give me peace.”

He bent his long body backward, drawing himself up to his full imposing height.

“And have you thought of what will be the penalty?” he said, in a low voice, and with an intonation that was almost a chant.

She shuddered, but dragged her eyes away.

“I don’t care!” she said passionately. “I don’t care!”

“You are sure?” he said, in the same voice.

She drew two short breaths. “Oh, go away and leave me,” she said. “Why did you come here? I did not intend to confess until all was over.”

“And you expected absolution?”

“I would have done any penance. I would have burnt my flesh with red-hot irons—”

He gave a short, scornful laugh.

“The Church wants no such makeshift penances,” he said passionately. “It has no use for the sinner that commits deliberate crime to-day and comes cringing and triumphant to the confessional to-morrow. We have no use for such as you,” he suddenly shouted, flinging out his arm and pointing his index finger at her. “You are a disgrace to the Church, a pollution; you are the lips of the leper upon the pure body of a Saint. We have no place for such as you. We have only one method by which to deal with you and such as you—” He curved his body, and his voice fell to a hollow monotone: “Ex-commu-nica-tion.”

The woman stared at him with pale distended eyes, no breath issuing from her dry lips, then sank to the floor, a miserable, collapsed, quivering heap. The priest went to the window and called to a man who stood on the walk below.

Bourke was pacing up and down among the trees, his eyes seldom absent from the man standing motionless in front of the house, or from the light in Honora Mairs’ window. He struck a match every few moments and looked at his watch. He lit a cigar, then found himself biting rapidly along its length with vicious energy. He flung it away and lit another, puffed at it violently, then let it fall to the ground as he pressed his hands suddenly to his eyes, shutting out the picture of Patience in her cell.

All the agony and doubt and despair of the past year were crowded into this hour. Would the priest succeed? Was he clever enough to outwit a clever and implacable woman? If he had only caught her in a moment of weakness. But was there any weakness in that organisation of knit and tempered steel? “He’ll blarney her,” he thought, with sudden hope,—“but bah! you can’t blarney a snake. That will go so far with her and no farther. Only acting can save us. If he can act well enough to fill the stage on which this terrible tragedy is set, and conquer that woman’s imagination, he can save my poor girl, but not otherwise.”

His hands clutched the bushes as he passed. He kicked the gravel from his feet. He cursed aloud, not knowing what he was saying. He felt an intolerable thirst; his eyeballs burned; his heart hammered spasmodically.

He looked at his watch. It was twelve o’clock. His spinning brain conceived the wild project of forcing himself up to that lighted room at the corner of the house and putting the woman to the torture. And at that moment he saw the priest lean out of the window and speak to the notary public, who immediately entered the house.

A half hour later the priest came out of the front door and toward him. He held a paper in his hand.

Bourke was waiting at the door. He took the affidavit from the priest, glanced over it, and thrust it into his pocket.

“Come,” he said. “I’ll get one of the men here to hitch up a team and drive us to the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street station. There we’ll take the train for Forty-second Street, and at the Grand Central the train for Albany. No south bound local will pass here for an hour. I happen to know that the governor is in Albany to-night attending a banquet.”

Patience had given up hope at last. Its death had been accompanied by wonder rather than by despair. Her remarkable experience with Bourke had led her to idealise him even beyond the habit of woman, and her faith in his ability to save her had been absolute. Nevertheless, woman like, she wove elaborate excuses for him, and loved him none the less.

The day had dragged itself into twenty years. The chaplain had called and been dismissed. The warden had visited her and uttered the conventional words of sympathy, to which Patience had listened without expression, loathing the coarse ungrammatical brute. The head-keeper she liked, for she was the first to recognise true sympathy and nobility within whatever bark. Miss Beale had come and wept and kissed her hands through the bars.

“Patience! Patience!” she sobbed. “If it could only be said that you died like a Christian!”

“It can be said that I died like an American gentlewoman of the nineteenth century,” replied Patience. “I am quite satisfied to know that they will be obliged to say that.”

Miss Beale shook her head vigorously. “You will fail when the time comes,” she said. “Only the Lord can sustain you. Please, Patience, let me pray with you.”

“Please let me die in peace,” said Patience, wearily, “and consistently. I shall not make a spectacle of myself. Don’t worry.”

After Miss Beale had gone the prison barber came and shaved a bald spot on the back of her head. She kept her face in the shadow, her teeth set, her skin thrilling with horror.

She sat on the edge of her bed until midnight. In the past two months, despite her faith in Bourke, she had deliberately allowed her mind to dwell upon the execution until fear had worn blunt. She was conscious of none to-night. Moreover, she had the poise of one that has lived close to the great mysteries of life. Were she free she might have a lifetime of happiness with Bourke, but in degree there were many hours of the past year that in mortal limitations could never be surpassed. The people had won their fight, but she felt that she had cheated them at every other point. For, after all, happiness is of kind, not of quantity. They could strike from her many years of life, but had she not lived? And a few years more or less—what mattered it? One must die at the last. She had realised an ideal. She had known love in its profoundest meaning, in its most delicate vibrations. A thousand years could give her no more than that.

Suddenly she lifted her head. The rain was dashing against her high window and against the windows of the corridor. She flushed and trembled and held her breath expectantly. In a moment she lay along the bed, and in a moment more forgot her evil state. Memories without form trooped through her brain: snatches and flashes of childhood and adolescence, glimmers of dawn, and stirrings of deeps, vistas of enchanted future, the rising and receding, rising and receding of Mystery, the vague pleasurable loneliness—the protest of separateness.

Then she pressed her face into the pillows, weeping wildly that she should see Bourke no more. The rain gave him to her in terrible mockery. Every part of her demanded him. She cared nothing for the morrow; she had thought of no to-morrows when with him. Morrows were naught, for there was always the last; but the present are always there to fulfil or torment. She shuddered once. The rain had given her back the power to long and dream; and to longing and dreaming there could be no fulfilment, not in this world, now nor ever.

She beat her clenched hand against the bed, not in fear, but in passionate resentment that she with her magnificent endowment for happiness should be snuffed out in her youth, and that there was no power on earth to assuage her lover’s agony. She wondered where he was, what he was doing. She knew that there was no sleep for him.

Her philosophy deserted her, as philosophy will when the sun is under the horizon. She ceased to be satisfied with what had been; the great love in her soul cried out and demanded its eternal rights. And her fainting courage demanded the man. . . .

Her thoughts suddenly took a whimsical turn. What should she be like in eternity shorn of her stronger part?—for assuredly in her case the man and the woman were one. Was space full of those incomplete shapes?—roaming—roaming—for what?—and whither? She recalled a painting of Vedder’s called “Identity” and Aldrich’s verses beneath:—

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