Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: Her lips trembled, but she spoke in a clear undertone,
audible only to him, which faltered the merest trifle (Page 316.)]
THE LONG LANE'S TURNING
BY
HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES
(Mrs. Post Wheeler)
Author of "Satan Sanderson" "Hearts Courageous," "The Valiants of
Virginia," etc.
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
FRANCES ROGERS
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1917
Copyright, 1916, 1917
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
as "The Heart of a Man"
Copyright, 1917
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY, Inc.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I THE COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENCE
II A MAN AND A WOMAN
III THE AWAKENING
IV THE PRODIGAL
V THE UNLAID GHOST
VI THE JUDGE SITS IN THE LAMPLIGHT
VII ARROWS OF DESIRE
VIII THE THRUST
IX THE TURN OF THE LONG LANE
X AFTER A YEAR
XI CRAIG FINDS HIS WEAPON
XII A HOSTAGE TO THE BOTTLE
XIII THE HEART OF A MAN
XIV THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL
XV THE ONLY WAY
XVI DERELICT
XVII LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT
XVIII THE PRICE
XIX PADDY THE BRICK INTERVENES
XX WHAT MATTERED MOST
XXI CRAIG'S WAY
XXII HARRY DECIDES
XXIII THE BROKEN PICTURE
XXIV THE WOMAN WHO KNEW
XXV ON TRIAL
XXVI THE HAUNTER OF THE SHADOW
XXVII THE END OF THE JOURNEY
XXVIII THE MAN IN THE WHEELED CHAIR
XXIX THE LONE BATTLE
XXX THE GIPSY RING
XXXI AMBUSH
XXXII THE COMING OF JOHN STARK
XXXIII THE UNDERSTUDY
XXXIV THE CRUCIBLE
XXXV SANCTUARY
XXXVI JUBILEE JIM'S JOURNEY
XXXVII THE CALL
XXXVIII THE CHALLENGE
XXXIX THE JAILBIRD
XL GENTLEMEN ALL
XLI DARK DAYS
XLII THE MENDED ROAD
XLIII THE PITFALL
XLIV THE LIGHTED FUSE
XLV THE CHASM
XLVI CRAIG STRIKES
XLVII WITH HIS BACK TO THE WALL
XLVIII THE HEART OF A WOMAN
XLIX THE GOVERNOR TAKES A HAND
L REVELATION
ILLUSTRATIONS
Her lips trembled, but she spoke in a clear
undertone, audible only to him, which faltered
the merest trifle. (Page 316) . . . _Frontispiece_
"I have answered you," she replied, "once and for all.
You will please consider it final"
He turned his head and saw the figure in the doorway.
"Echo!" he cried and rose to his feet
All at once the hound flung up his great head with a
low howl, then, crouching, licked the nerveless
hand that hung down
THE LONG LANE'S TURNING
CHAPTER I
THE COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENCE
The dark was falling over the court-room. A lurid ray of the setting
sun gleamed redly on the dust-streaked window panes, and struggled
disconsolately with the melancholy gleam of the oil lamps that an
awkward attendant with creaking foot-leather had laboriously lighted in
their wall-brackets. Their pale radiance gleamed on the painted faces
of dead jurists that looked down from fly-specked canvases on the walls
and was reflected from the mass of moving, living faces that filled the
room, whose eyes gazed alternately at the Judge's vacant seat, and at
the empty railed space that had penned in the restless jury now
considering their verdict in an upper room--to return again and again
to the spot where sat the man over whose dingy case a medley of voices
had declaimed and wrangled throughout that southern spring day.
He sat slouched in his chair, his narrow, faded-blue eyes, strained and
frightened, fixed on the empty jury-box, his uncertain hand lifting
from time to time to give a swift, furtive touch to his collar or a
thrust to his wiry, sand-coloured hair. In the pallid lamp-light the
hard sneer that had curved his lips during the dragging trial had faded
and his face seemed all at once piteous and younger.
To a stranger there would have seemed little in the circumstances to
inspire the popular interest the full room betokened. The accused was
a rough sawyer, known to his fellows of the logging camp as "Paddy the
Brick," with a history of sluggishness and inebriety behind him. The
crime of which he stood charged was the theft of a comrade's earnings,
the story merely one of those sordid dramas of menial life which were
so familiar. The evidence, though purely circumstantial, was, to a
casual eye, sufficiently conclusive.
Yet in the minds of most of those who had filled the dingy court room
during the two days just passed, there had been until the last hour a
general expectation that the man would be cleared. This had been based
upon nothing save the common knowledge that his counsel was Harry
Sevier.
The latter had never failed to justify the expectations that had
habitually heralded his doings. Young, likable, perfectly equipped and
knowing his southern world, he had returned, after a half dozen years
of foreign schooling, to step into a social niche readily accorded him
by those who had seen little of him since boyhood. His grey eyes and
crisp, dark beard, had been distinguishing marks of forebears whose
lives had been lived in that neighbourhood and who had left their vivid
impress upon the institutions of their time; statesmen, diplomats and
soldiers had been of that line, and he himself, with his characteristic
mannerisms, his unimpeachable grooming, his nice observance of the
social code, had come to be regarded as the perfect pattern of his
type. Left an orphan at an early age, he had inherited a comfortable
property and the income of a city block, and he spent the money
judiciously, if lavishly. His Panhard was the swiftest car in town, as
his offices were the most sumptuous, though ostentatiously simple in
appointment. He had a Japanese valet, and the "at homes" which he
occasionally gave in his bachelor apartment, though they might be
dominated "pink teas" by the envious unbidden, were affairs to which an
_entree_ was a hallmark. He maintained also a shooting-box on an upper
slope of the Blue Ridge--a comfortable bungalow set in a hundred acres
of wilderness--whither of autumns he and a dozen other choice spirits
were wont to fare for a fortnight's tramping and fishing, sleeping on
pungent hemlock boughs and eating homely food cooked by the single
negro servant who lived there as caretaker. He had a gift for private
theatricals--he was in constant demand of the Amateur Dramatic
Club--and had more than a _dilettante_ appreciation of music and art.
As regards his profession, he had injected into the somewhat
cut-and-dried legal life of the old Capital an unusual and winning
element of personality and a method at variance with established usage.
His very eccentricities had set him apart from the mass, who were so
glamoured with the sordid things of life; and the apparent contempt for
material reward with which he defended poor and unknown clients as
readily as rich and influential ones had its appeal to a class which
possessed imagination and ideals. There had seldom been a case in
which he had not successfully employed a curious subterranean logic--an
apparently wilful insistence upon what seemed at first glance the
unvital and immaterial--as a preliminary to a swift _volte-face_ by
which he turned the evidence at a new and unexpected angle of
inference, and drove home the doubt with a brilliant display of oratory
which captivated and--for the moment--convinced. In the four years in
which he had stamped his individuality upon the town, not only had he
never lost a criminal case, but he had created a certain conviction
that a trial in which he figured would offer unmistakable elements of
surprise and entertainment. So that the Criminal Court had come, in a
way, to be the fashion, and the sombre chambers of justice saw many an
assemblage that would have graced another sort of gathering.
Seldom, however, on this day had Harry's glance through his gold-rimmed
eye-glasses wandered to the benches. With many there he had danced and
golfed and bridged a hundred times. That, however, had been play;
this, which had come to furnish another and quite as fascinating a sort
of entertainment for them, was what he had chosen to make the more
serious business--in so far as anything had been serious to him--of his
life. So that his apparent disregard of this tribute to his
personality for the sober business in hand, set over against the
palpable frivolity of purpose that actuated the moiety of his audience,
was, after all, only another indication to them of that fine sense of
the fitting for which his world admired him.
Through the long morning the evidence had accumulated. One by one the
merciless rivets had been driven home by the prosecuting attorney. The
chain of evidence seemed flawless. And Harry Sevier's
cross-examination had seemed scarcely more than perfunctory--had
appeared somehow to miss that subtle and pregnant suggestion, that
longer reach that heretofore had uncovered a hitherto unnoted but
baffling doubt. Yet to those who knew him this but pointed to a more
effective climax, a more engrossing sensation when the psychological
moment should arrive and that appealing figure arise to insert the
nicely calculated spoke in the wheel that, under the manipulation of
the state's attorney, was rolling so swiftly in its ominous course; and
on the back-benches, where sat a group of members of the Country Club,
a whispered bet that the accused this time would not get off, found as
usual no taker.
Evidence finished, the Court rose for a recess and Harry vanished
through a side-door. Ten minutes later he was in his office. He
vouchsafed no word to the clerk who sat in the outer room, but passed
quickly through to the inner sanctum and closed and locked the door.
The self-control bred of the strenuous occupation of the court room had
slipped now from his face, leaving it suddenly strained. There were
moist drops upon his forehead but his hands were arid and dry. He drew
the blind to shut out the dull, grey, winter light and switched on the
electric desk-lamp, and as he did so his eyes turned stealthily to the
wall--to a locked cabinet whose key was in his pocket.
They turned again almost immediately to the baize-covered desk, where
stood a plain, flat silver frame. It held a photograph of a portrait
painted by Sargent which had been a _salon_ favourite of a few years
before. It was that of a young girl, seated and leaning intently
forward from an arm chair. One hand was at her throat, the other
dropped against the dusky shoulder of a dog stretched at her feet, and
in her dark eyes was the eternal question which maidenhood asks of
life. The lines of the face were cameo-like, and its southern beauty
held that particular blend of ingeniousness and hauteur that is the
result of the selection and inbreeding of generations. He stood still
a moment, looking fixedly at it, his tongue touching his lips, before
he crossed the room and turned the picture face-down upon the desk. He
almost ran to the cabinet, unlocked its mirrored door, and took from it
a bottle and a glass. He poured out a full goblet of the gurgling
liquid and drank it off. Then he drew a long breath.
"Yes," he said, "I'll lie to myself no more! I've got to have it or
throw up the sponge. It was my own once, that wonderful gift--whatever
it is. Once it was my own brain, unhelped, that sent the glow to my
heart and the fire to my tongue--till words had glorious colours and
pictures painted themselves out of nothing. Once it was my own mind
that saw a problem as clear as crystal. But I wasn't content. I
wanted the short cut, and this showed me the way. And now--now--I've
dropped the reins. It's not Harry Sevier that wins cases--it's that
bottle!"
He began to stride up and down the narrow room; deep lines had etched
themselves in the mobile face. "There was the Davencourt Case," he
said to himself. "Not a shred of decent evidence to go on, and the
whole court packed with prejudice, and he was as guilty as the devil.
Yet I won! That was only a year ago, but I couldn't do it now--without
what is in that decanter! All day yesterday I was heavy, my mind was
as blank as a glacier. In the cross-examination I couldn't see a foot
before me. But for this half-hour it would go hard with my client at
the finish. As it is I wouldn't want a better foil than old Maitland
for the prosecution. How he has slaved over his witnesses! I might
have made some of the testimony that sounded so damning look like a
cocked-hat if I had gone about it in his laborious way. For this
'Paddy the Brick' has plenty of friends, for all his crookedness. Half
the logging-camp, apparently, chipped in to make up my retaining-fee.
But pshaw! what's the use? I can get him off without it. In the last
analysis it's feeling, not facts, that will sway them--feeling first,
and then conscience. Every man of them must see _himself_, first
shivering in the shoes of my thief, and then wearing the Judge's gown.
When the psychological moment comes there is only to drive home the
fallibility of circumstantial evidence and sear those twelve
slow-going, matter-of-fact brains with a sense of the inherent
perversity of appearances!" He smiled bitterly. "Especially," he
added, "when there's whisky in the story. My client was drunk as a
boiled owl when he was arrested--the stolen plunder might easily have
been put on him, as he claims it was. The jury will understand that.
There's probably not a man on it who doesn't get squiffy now and then."
He stopped in his walk and held up a hand against the light--it wavered
ever so little. The draught had not yet brought its accustomed poise
of nerve--its tense certitude, its mental glow and confidence. With an
impatient gesture he turned again to the cabinet. "One used to do it,"
he said; "it will evidently take more to-day to restore our bold Turpin
to his career on the highway!" He set the empty glass in its place
with a short laugh.
"Curious," he said. "If he _were_ innocent and drink _had_ got him
into this scrape, there would be a poetic justice in drink's getting
him out!"
As he turned to lock the cabinet, the bell of his desk-telephone
rang--three short, sharp rings. It was the clerk's warning that the
court was about to reassemble. He drew a deep breath, and cast a quick
glance at the little mirrored door. No tinge was rising in his
colourless face, no warming tingle in his veins. His hands were
uncertain and his fingers had an odd numbness. A keen, cold edge of
anxiety touched him. Always heretofore, when he had sat with the black
decanter, he had felt the wonderful, slow change--the gradual glow
creeping through every nerve, the tightening of muscle and sinew as for
a race, the thrilling, glad sense of renewed power and unleashed
ability and the inevitable quivering rush of lambent images in his
brain. The signal was too long in coming to-day--and he could not
wait! His hand shook as it reached again to the little shelf. An
instant he hesitated--for a breath, while the light twinkled from the
deep-cut facets, he strove to remember whether he had drunk one glass
or two. Then with a frown he poured the draught and drinking it off,
locked the cabinet, and went hurriedly out.
When he entered the courtroom, the wide space had filled again and the
State's Attorney had opened his address--a brief one, icily emotionless
and rigidly exact--the very background upon which so often Harry
Sevier's winged words had spelled victory for a cause prejudged as
lost. And he was to reply--with the final speech for whose inspiration
he had fled to that locked cabinet in the darkened inner-office. Paddy
the Brick listened with the look of some trapped thing gazing at its
captor, sometimes turning toward his counsel a furtive wavering glance
that was blent equally of dread and dog-like appeal. These glances
were unreturned. Harry Sevier sat motionless, his eyes straight before
him.
But behind that mask Harry's thought was turning and turning upon
itself. The sudden sharp edge of anxiety that had caught him in his
office had grown to a thriving fear. His ally was failing him. The
master, whose upper hand he had just acknowledged--whose aid had been
so freely given him in really vital moments--was forsaking him at the
turn of a wretched, second-rate case of common thievery! He realised
it with a sickening sense of wonder that mingled with a dull anger at
the littleness of the issue, and through the confused mist of his mind
his inner ear seemed to hear a far-distant sardonic laughter--as though
the Djin of the bottle laughed in the locked wall-cabinet at his dismay.
He rose to speak for the defence with an icy clog upon his faculties,
while beneath that frozen surface the something that had been shackled
reared and struggled vainly. Vocabulary, cunning of phrase, and
logical sequence of argument had not deserted him; he realised this
with a blind rage that seemed with a singular separateness to lie
outside of himself--to associate itself strangely with the prisoner.
But the persuasion that had so often checkmated justice, the calculated
force, the insinuating tactfulness, the living, warm appeal that had
had their way in the past were absent. He had a curious feeling of
duality, as though two Harry Seviers had suddenly and painfully drawn
apart--the one whose measured voice was speaking, and the other which
clamoured and appealed, conscious only of its own deadly smother and of
the despairing face of the man with the wiry sand-coloured hair who sat
slouched in his chair beside him.
The roomful seemed very still. The Judge was looking at him fixedly,
through bowed horn-glasses set far down on his nose. Harry was aware
that in the countenance of the state's attorney puzzle and a stealthy
relief struggled together. With desperate narrowness he watched the
faces of the jury for a sign, a tentative withdrawal of stolidity that
betokened a quickened and awakening interest. But they sat moveless
and impassive. There was a last hideous pause, in which he thought the
foreman suppressed an incipient yawn, when his own brain refused
further struggle. He knew that he had been betrayed. The door of
human sympathy would not open--he had lost the magic key.
The reply of the State's Attorney was a mere _resume_ of the evidence.
He had needed no more. The Judge's charge was brief. Then had come
the stir of moving bodies and the buzz of whispers--the shuffling of
feet as the Judge retired and the jurors filed out--and at length the
painful hiatus with the red sunlight and the pallid lamps.
This was broken presently by three measured raps on the door of the
jury-room, which, as the Judge re-entered, opened to admit the jurors.
They were quickly polled and the verdict given--guilty. The sentence
followed immediately.
With the fateful words Harry Sevier turned his eyes, almost as if
suddenly awakening from sleep, upon the court-room, and met across the
moving benches a woman's concentrated and wondering look. She was Echo
Allen, the original of the portrait whose photograph lay face-down upon
his office desk. The neutral-tinted presentment, however, had been far
from realising the concrete flush of sensuous beauty of its living
original, with her straight lithe frame, her hair all a wash of warm
russets and sunny golds, framing a face perfect in contour and with a
complexion as soft as a moth's wing. And the beauty of this was now
deepened, if possible, by the shadow upon it of puzzled pain and
inquiry. An instant the gaze between them hung, then it broke as she
turned away, gathering her white furs about her throat with a slow,
hesitant gesture. With the sudden stab of shame and humiliation that
rushed through him--for he had not seen her there before that
moment--something seemed to break, too, in Harry's brain; it was the
rigid lock which had been somehow put upon his faculties. The emptying
room felt all at once a furnace, and little jerking shocks, like tiny
electric currents, were running over him, prickling to the tips of his
fingers. Intoxication was upon him, sudden and overwhelming, but he
did not recognise it. He had never been drunk, in the sense popularly
understood. He had always regarded with wondering distaste the
occasional abject surrender of mind and body to the effect of alcohol
with which he was familiar in men of his class, and the vulgar spree
filled him with disgust. He was nicely abstemious at his club and he
had never entered a saloon in his life. His indulgences, deeper and
more and more frequent as they had grown of late, had been hidden
behind the shades of his inner office, and the liquor he had drunk
there he had never carried in his legs. For him these cloistered hours
had meant no harrowing aftermath of remorse, no shrinking memory of
license or ribaldry, but only the strange mental exaltation that had
borne him to success. He sat now outwardly calm and collected, but
mentally in an odd confusion, grasping at strange alert suggestions
that were thronging about him in a lurid phantasmagoria.
He came to his feet with a start, suddenly aware that the slouching
figure beside him had arisen at the heavy touch of the sheriff's hand.
He took a step forward, the lawyer for a moment again uppermost, the
perplexed mind groping for the conventional expression of professional
regret. But he did not speak. Instead, as the narrow, red-rimmed eyes
stared for a breath into his, Harry's outstretched hand fell at his
side and a painful blur swept across his vision. His unsober,
kaleidoscopic mind had opened to something that lay naked and anguished
beneath the haggard face of the prisoner, something no longer glossed
by sullen scowl and sneering bravado--a concrete fact, perturbing and
vaguely horrifying, which would not express itself in mental symbols.
With hands clenched and a face like a sleepwalker's, Sevier crossed the
emptying room to the side door, where his motor now waited. "Anywhere,
Bob," he said thickly, "but go like the devil till I tell you to stop,
if it's a thousand miles!"
As the burnished mechanism shot into pace and the cool wind stung his
face, the early arc-lights above the roadway swelled to great pallid
moons tangled in a net of stars, and in their yellow lustre the thing
he had seen in the prisoner's face suddenly shouted itself to his
brain. He flung up an arm as though to ward a blow.
"He wasn't guilty!" he gasped. "He never did it, by God!"