XXII
William Carterspent the days after the shooting entirely alone in his office at the Payson Building. He slept there on the old couch, and for the most part ate there, Moses, the elevator-boy, running errands for him to the delicatessen store and then devouring the viands after he had brought them. For William ate practically nothing, though he drank a good deal.
Mr. Payson, who had found him once or twice in a state of stupor, called up Mr. Carter on the telephone the day before the trial.
“You’d better come over and see William,” he advised. “He’s in no condition to do business.”
Mr. Carter, who had just returned to his office after a long talk with Leigh, was shaken; but he picked up his hat, clapped it down again on his gray head, and started determinedly for the Payson Building. He felt that his cup was full. He even experienced a sensation of ire at Payson for having acquired wealth to build this huge edifice of mottled brick and sandstone.
“Looks like a huge loaf of ginger-bread,” Mr. Carter grumbled to himself.
But he was glad that it happened to be in full blast, as he would have expressed it, and the throng of shoppers had no time to notice him. Moses took him up in an elevator that was designated as “for employees only.” He made some ado, too, about moving aside a basketful of empty bottles to make room for his passenger. Mr. Carter shoved the basket with his foot.
“What’s that?” he asked sharply.
Moses looked plaintive.
“Ain’t had no time to pitch ’em outen heah, suh. Dey’s from Mist’ Wilyum’s room.”
Mr. Carter restrained an impulse to count the bottles, and said nothing. At the eighth floor he got out and walked reluctantly across the hall to his son’s door. He opened it without knocking and looked in.
William was seated at his desk, his arms hanging down at his sides and his eyes fixed on the wall opposite. There was no indication of intemperance unless it lay in the deathly pallor and the disheveled hair. Mr. Carter strode over to the table and struck it loudly with his fist to call attention to his presence.
“We’d be honored if you’d come home,” he said dryly. “You’ve nothing to fear there—she’s cleared out.”
William raised his haggard eyes.
“How about Leigh? I haven’t seen Dan for days.”
“Dan’s trying to save his brother from”—Mr. Carter’s voice grew suddenly hoarse—“from eighteen years’ imprisonment.”
“Good Lord!” cried William aghast. “They couldn’t do that—he’s nothing but a kid!”
Mr. Carter walked over to the windows and shut and fastened them; then he picked up his son’s hat and handed it to him.
“You come home with me,” was all he said.
William went.
His adoring mother received him like the returned prodigal, and Emily waited on him with eyes red from weeping. No one mentioned Fanchon; the family seemed to have resolved to let her drop out of sight forever. With Daniel’s aid, William managed to see Leigh that night for the first time since the shooting.
It was a moment of horrible embarrassment and humiliation for William. He was shocked, too, at the sight of the boy’s white face and the dark rings under his girlish eyes. Leigh had gone through deep waters on his account, yet it was one of those things that cannot be talked about.
“My job, Leigh,” he said laconically. “You had no business to take it away from me.”
Leigh blushed like a girl.
“I couldn’t hear Fanchon slandered like that,” he cried. “I had to do it!”
William bowed his head, looking down at the floor of the cell. He hadn’t the heart to tell the boy that he believed the slanders. Curiously enough, under Leigh’s clear eyes, he felt ashamed of believing in them; but his inveterate rage against his wife remained undiminished. She had deceived him, he no longer believed in her, and he was furious against her for the ruin she had wrought. The very fact that he had been head over ears in love with her embittered him the more. It was an intolerable humiliation.
He left Leigh in a passion of sorrow and self-accusation, and went home to spend a sleepless night. Toward morning, from sheer exhaustion, he dozed off into troubled dreams. He thought he had been cast into a fiery furnace along with Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego; he could see three shadowy figures moving like giants through fields of flame. Presently an angel touched him on the shoulder and called to him—in French. The angel had the face of Fanchon.
He awoke with a groan and found his mother standing at the foot of his bed. She had recovered sufficiently to move about the house now in astriped calico wrapper that made her look twenty years older.
“It’s the day of the trial, Willie,” she said brokenly. “Papa and Dan went an hour ago. Are—are you going to testify? Dan said he wouldn’t call you.”
“The State will,” replied William apathetically, getting out of bed.
His mother looked at him anxiously.
“I’m afraid they’re going to call Fanchon,” she faltered.
He started. For some reason he had never thought of this, and he felt a pang of horrid dismay. It couldn’t be that Judge Jessup and Dan meant to do that. But the State? William experienced a new and rending sensation. He felt like a helpless beetle pinned to the board of a naturalist; he couldn’t escape public dissection.
“Perhaps you’d better not go, Willie,” suggested his mother fondly. “Emily and I are going to stay here at the telephone to-day. Papa promised to ’phone us everything, and we shall be terribly nervous and frightened. Stay with us, dear.”
William realized that he was still a boy to her, and that now, when his unacceptable wife had left him, he was nearer than ever. Nevertheless, he began to look for his clothes.
“I shall go straight there, of course,” he said sharply. “Please tell Miranda I want only a cup of hot coffee.”
“Oh, Willie, you must eat something!” she cried tearfully. “You’ll ruin your health—there are corn muffins, too.”
He had always had a weakness for corn muffins, and, acting on the advice of Miranda, his mother had ordered them to console him. But William would have none of them. He was dressing rapidly, in a fever of impatience, when Emily arrived outside his door and put her lips close to the key-hole to shout to him:
“Papa says you needn’t hurry down there. He doesn’t think they’ll get a jury until next week. Dan’s used up one panel already.”
William had not thought of this, and he slackened his efforts a little only to hear his sister’s return.
“Mama says stay and have some muffins. They’re lovely and brown—I ate five.”
The fact that murder in the second degree did not carry the death sentence had reassured Emily’s hitherto impaired appetite. Like Miranda, she ate to keep up her spirits.
William swallowed a cup of coffee, and left with the consciousness that his mother, Emily, and Miranda considered him on the verge of suicide.He made his way to the court-house by the church lane and the rear alleys. Public curiosity had become intolerable to him, and he had a horror of meeting an acquaintance.
It seemed only last week that he had brought Fanchon up the train platform to meet his father. He had been proud of her beauty then; he had thought her unique and fascinating, and he had even liked the sensation she made in the old humdrum town. Now, he could not think of her without a shudder. He felt as if she had pilloried him in the public square. He would never be able to endure the place again, nor the people in it. It was too small. Each man knew all about his neighbor’s business. He remembered hearing Judge Jessup say that he found it hard to live in such a “nosey” community. It even filled William with intolerant wrath when a group of little pickaninnies stopped playing to gaze, and he heard the loud stage whisper:
“Dat’s him!”
The husband of the woman for whom Corwin had been shot!
He plunged desperately into the basement of the court-house, and ascended the marble steps to a pair of swinging baize doors labeled in huge letters:
CRIMINAL COURT No. 1.
The room, a large one at the northeast corner of the old building, was crowded to suffocation. The windows were all open, and from them one could see the sunshine on the broad leaves of the mulberry-tree in the quadrangle. Judge Barbour, a cousin of the doctor’s, was on the bench, and William recognized a group of reporters below him, on one side. On the other side Daniel was challenging a juror, his face tense and one long forefinger pointing at the man.
William had not seen his brother in court for a long time, and he had a curious feeling that this white-faced, tense lawyer wasn’t his brother at all. It seemed to him that there had been a metamorphosis, that some magic had been at work, that this wasn’t lame Dan, the brother whom he had rather discounted. Here was a face so pre-eminently a face of power that William gaped at it, as the pickaninnies outside the court-house had gaped at him. He could feel, too, that Daniel was holding the crowded room, and that the men and boys on the window-sills, and out roosting in the mulberry branches that overlooked the court-room, were all drawn by the magic of his tongue.
Slowly, deliberately, using all his privilege of challenge, Daniel was picking his jury, whileJudge Jessup, senior counsel for the defense, sat between Mr. Carter and the prisoner at the dock. Reluctantly, with a feeling of personal shame, William turned his eyes slowly toward his young brother—the boy who was suffering vicariously for him.
Leigh’s youth seemed appalling in that place. The boy, with his white face and his dark-ringed eyes, looked fifteen. He had a long lock of light brown hair that was usually tossed back from his white forehead—a Byronic effect that Leigh secretly cherished. It was hanging down now, limp and disheveled, and he kept clutching at his necktie with nervous fingers; but there was a light in his eyes, a singular light, as if he saw something inspiring and beautiful.
William tried to follow his glance, to discover what had inspired that rapt look, but the crowd was so great that he could not even get through it to sit beside his father. He found standing-room near the door, where he seemed to be unnoticed, and watched the proceedings with a growing feeling of shame that he was not in Leigh’s place.
Daniel was engaged now in a tilt with the commonwealth attorney, Major Haskins, a man who William knew had once quarreled with his father, and who was known to be vindictive. Haskins was flushed and excited, declaiming loudly, whileDaniel, keeping his temper admirably, scored again and again. It was the case of a skilled toreador baiting a bull. Major Haskins, like the finest bulls in the arena, charged in a straight line, never swerving, and, like the toreador, Daniel dodged lightly on first one side and then the other, parrying the attack but goading the enemy.
Something in the extreme dexterity of the goading surprised William again.
“I didn’t know Dan had it in him,” he thought with an accession of unexpected pride in this taciturn brother, who had suffered so long and so silently. Then he heard an excited whisper from a woman in front of him.
“There she is—the dancer! Look—over to the right—they say she’s going on the stand!”
William shrank as if from a physical blow, and his sensitive egotism shivered. This, then, was to be his crowning humiliation, this crowd gathered to stare at his wife!
Of course Leigh had been looking at her; he might have known it. The boy was a fool about her, as he himself had been a fool. William felt an unbearable sensation of suffocation; the air of the crowded room was unfit to breathe. People had found him out, too. The companion of the woman who had whispered so loudly had spottedhim. They were looking back covertly over their shoulders and talking in audible undertones.
“What d’you suppose he was doing?”
“That’s her husband—back there.”
“Not really! Oh, my——”
“Say! Pull Jenny’s dress——”
“She’ll want to see him.”
William turned, pushed past the men in the doorway, and almost staggered into the corridor. It was absolutely empty. Every living soul who could squeeze into the court-room had done so. A short flight of marble steps descended to a door which opened on the quadrangle and he could see the sunshine on the lowest step. He started down, bent on escape, and came face to face with Colonel Denbigh.
The old man, attired in a light gray summer suit with a white waistcoat and a broad straw hat, looked like the personification of an untroubled conscience. He held out a friendly hand.
“How are you, William? I came down to”—he hesitated and smiled gravely—“to give your father and Leigh my moral support. Can’t seem to do anything else, can I? Anything for you?” he added, after a moment’s farther hesitation.
William shook his head, turning a deep red.
“I ought to be in Leigh’s place,” he said chokingly, “but I’m worse off.”
The colonel gave him a keen look. It was impossible not to see that the young man’s position was heartrending, and he pitied him. At the same time he still felt a righteous indignation against Fanchon’s husband.
“By gum, it serves him right,” he thought.
Then he was so ashamed of himself that he shook hands with William again. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.
“I’ll go and sit by your father—if I can get there,” he said kindly. “I hope your mother’s better. Bearing up, eh?”
“She’s better,” said William thickly, averting his eyes. “It’s intolerable to me, Colonel Denbigh, that she should have to suffer so about Leigh on my account. If the boy had only come straight to me!” he added with suppressed passion, his lip quivering suddenly like a woman’s on the verge of tears.
The colonel nodded his head thoughtfully.
“I know—but it’s spilt milk, William. We’ll hope for the best. They tell me Dan’s a smart fellow. Going to be the best lawyer in this town, Judge Jessup says. He’ll get his brother off.”
“That won’t save my face,” William replied bitterly, plunging abruptly down the steps and out into the quadrangle.
The colonel, left alone, stood a moment lookingafter him, considering him. Come to look at it, he thought, it was a pretty bad place—even for a lummox. He had always thought well of William, he had once imagined him as the possible husband of Virginia, but now——
The colonel tugged at his white mustache with a grim face. He was thinking of Virginia’s face on the stairs, the soft sadness of that profile.
“It can’t be that Jinny cares!” he cried indignantly under his breath.
Then, unable to endure the idea, he swung open the baize doors and worked his way into the crowded court-room. There was a little stir in it now, an air of relief. The twelfth juror had just been accepted.