The restrained curiosity and inaudible comments which greeted his
passage through the lower floor of the hotel gave place to a livelier
interest when he was readily recognized on the street. The news of the
murder had, evidently, already become city property. He was indicated to
individuals unaware of his identity, with a rapid sketch of the crime,
of fabulous ascribed possessions, and hinted oriental indulgence. He
strode on rapidly, his shoulders squared, his expression contemptuous,
challenging; but within he was possessed by an apprehension increasing
at every step. It was not, fortunately, far from Sanderson's Hotel to
the City Hall; west on Chestnut Street they reached their destination at
the following corner. The loungers from the trees before the State House
had gathered, with an increasing mob aware of the hearing within, at the
entrance to the municipal offices. The windows on either side of the
marble steps were crowded with faces, ribald or blank or censorious, and
Jasper Penny had to force his way into the building. He tried to recall
if there was another, more private, ingress, through which Susan might
be taken; but his thoughts evaded every discipline; they whirled in a
feverish course about the sole fact of the public degradation he had
brought on Susan Brundon. They passed the doors of civic departments, he
saw their signs--Water, City Treasurer, and then entered the Mayor's
chamber.
The latter was seated at a table facing the room with his back to a wide
window, opening on the blank brick wall of the Philosophical Society
building; and at one side the High Constable of the district in which
the murder had been committed was conversing with the Sheriff. Beside
them, Jasper Penny saw, there were only some clerks present and three
policemen. The Mayor spoke equably to the Ironmaster, directed a chair
placed for his convenience, and resumed the inspection of a number of
reports. He had a gaunt, tight-lipped face framed in luxuriant whiskers,
a severely moral aspect oddly contradicted by trousers of tremendous
sporting plaid, a waistcoat of green buckskin cassimere, while his silk
hat held a rakish, forward angle. The Constable and Sheriff punctuated
their converse by prodigious and dexterous spitting into a dangerously
far receptacle, and the clerks and police murmured together. The Mayor,
finally glancing at a watch enamelled, Jasper Penny saw, with a fay of
the ballet, spoke to the room in general. "Ten and past. Well! Well!
Where are the others? Who is to come still, Hoffernan?"
"Mr. Jannan, sir; and a witness," a clerk answered. The other gazed at
the paper before him.
"Susan Brundon," he read in a loud, uncompromising tone. Jasper Penny's
eyes narrowed belligerently; he would see that these pothouse
politicians gave Susan every consideration possible. He was, with
Stephen, a far from negligible force in the city elections. "School
mistress," the Mayor read on. "Never heard of her or her school. Ah--"
Stephen Jannan had entered with Susan.
Jasper rose as she came forward, and the Mayor had the grace to remove
his hat. She wore, he saw, the familiar dress of wool, with a sober,
fringed black silk mantle, black gloves and an inconspicuous bonnet. She
met his harried gaze, and smiled; but beneath her greeting he was aware
of a supreme tension. There was, however, no perceptible nervousness in
the manner of her accepting an indicated place; she sat with her hands
quietly folded in her lap, the mantle drooping back over the chair.
Stephen Jannan, facing the Mayor, made a concise statement in a cold,
deliberate voice. "I now propose to show your honour," he finished,
"that, between the hours in which Daniel Culser is said to have been
shot to death, my client was peacefully in the company of Miss Brundon,
strolling in an opposite quarter of the city."
"Hoffernan," the Mayor pronounced, waving toward the seated woman. The
clerk advanced with a Bible; and, rising, Susan followed the words of
the oath in a low, clear voice. To Jasper Penny the occasion seemed
intolerably prolonged, filled with needless detail. Never had Susan
Brundon appeared more utterly desirable, never had his need to protect,
shield, her been stronger. He--protect her, he added bitterly; rather he
had betrayed her, dragged her immaculate sweetness down into the foul
atmosphere of a criminal hearing. His attention, fastening on the
trivialities of the interior, removed him in a species of self-hypnotism
from the actualities of the scene. He heard, as if from a distance, the
questioning of the Mayor, "At what time, exactly, did you say? How did
you know that?" Susan said, "I saw the clock at the back of the hall. I
noticed it because I wondered if the younger children had retired."
"You say you walked with Mr. Penny--where?... How long did you remain at
the river? No way of knowing. Seemed surprisingly short, I'll venture."
Why didn't Stephen put an end to such ill-timed jocularity? "And Mr.
Penny had spoken to you of his--his relations with Mrs. Scofield, the
woman in whose house Culser was killed. Did he refer to her on this
particular evening, standing by the river's brink?" Susan replied in the
negative. "Did he seem ill at ease, worried about anything? Was he
hurried in manner?"
To all of this Susan Brundon answered no, in a voice that constantly
grew lower, but which never faltered, hesitated. The Mayor turned aside
for a whispered consultation with the High Constable. The former nodded.
"Have you any--shall we say--proprietary interest in Mr. Penny's
affairs?" Her reply was hardly audible in the room stilled for what
might be revealed. "No," she breathed, her gloved fingers interlacing.
Jasper Penny's lips were drawn in a hard line; Stephen gazed fixedly at
the floor. The Mayor gesticulated affably toward the lawyer. "That'll
do," he declared. "Pleasure, Mr. Penny, to have you so completely
cleared. I shall have to demand your assistance further,
though--knowledge of Mrs. Scofield. And, in the case of her apprehension
and trial, you will, of course, be called. Communication will be made
through Mr. Jannan. No doubt in our mind now of the facts." A policeman
opened the door and a surge of the curious pressed in. "Take her away,"
Jasper Penny whispered to Jannan; "this is damnable."
Susan rose, gathering up her mantle, and moved to Stephen Jannan's side.
He offered his arm with a formal courtesy, and together they made their
way out through the corridor. Jasper, lost in a moody abstraction,
waited until they had vanished; and then, with a lowered head, walked
rapidly over Chestnut Street in the direction of the terminus of the
railroad for Jaffa. A brigade of cars was made up; he took a place and
was immediately dragged on and over the viaduct to the plane and waiting
engine beyond. He could see, from the demeanour of the loungers on the
Jaffa platform, that the news of the murder, his connection with it, had
preceded him. To-morrow's papers would provide them with full accounts,
the name of Susan Brundon among the maculate details.... The meanest
cast boy in his works would regard him, the knowledge of Essie, with a
leer.
His mother was at the main door of Myrtle Forge, pale but composed.
"Take Mr. Penny's overcoat," she brusquely directed a servant. He had
never seen a more delectable supper than the one awaiting him; and he
tasted most of what found its way to his plate--he owed that to the
maternal solicitude secretly regarding him, hastily masked as he met his
mother's gaze. Sitting later in accustomed formality the dulness of a
species of relief folded him. The minor sounds of his home, the
deliberate loudness of an old clock, the minute warring of his mother's
bone needles, her sister's fits of coughing, painfully restrained,
soothed his harried being; subjected to an intolerable strain his
overwrought nerves had suddenly relaxed; he sank back in a loose, almost
somnolent, state. A mental indolence possessed him; the keen incentives
of life appeared far, unimportant, his late rebellions and desires
inexplicable. Even the iron was a heavy load; the necessity of
constantly meeting new conditions with new processes, of uprooting month
by month most with which the years had made him familiar, seemed beyond
his power.
A faint dread crept into his consciousness; he roused himself sharply,
straightened his shoulders, glanced about to see if his tacit surrender
had been noticed--this lassitude creeping over him, the indifference,
was, at last, the edge of the authentic shadow of age, of decay; it was
the deadening of the sensibilities preceding death. He banished it
immediately, and all his desire, his need, his sense of the horror of
the past day, surged back, reanimated him, sent the blood strongly to
its furthest confines. But, none the less, a vague, disturbing memory of
the other lingered at the back of his perceptions; he had a fresh
realization of the necessity for him to make haste, to take at
once--before the hateful anodyne of time had betrayed his vigour--what
life still, and so fully, held.
His desire for Susan increased to an intensity robbing it of a greater
part of the early joy; it had, now, a fretful aspect drawing him into
long and painfully minute rehearsals of his every contact with her, and
of the disgraceful publicity brought upon her by his past. At the usual
hour the hot wine appeared; the glassful was pressed on Amity Merken;
his mother drank hers with the familiar, audible satisfaction. An old
custom, an old compound, brought from Germany many years ago, binding,
in its petty immortality, distant times, places, beings. He saw that his
mother was noticeably less able than she had been the week before; her
hands fumbled at her knitting, shook holding the glass. Her lined face
quivered as she said good night. He bent and kissed a hot, dry brow,
conscious of the blanched skull under her fading colour, her ebbing
warmth. He had done this, too--hastened her death; she must have
suffered inordinately in her prideful affection. She said nothing,
beyond the repeated admonition that he must not sit up into the night.
The next day he forced himself to read to the end the report of the
murder in the _Gazette_. The references to Susan Brundon were as scant
as, evidently, Stephen Jannan could arrange; but her name, her Academy,
were invested with an odious publicity. Jasper Penny saw again that he
was a person of moment; his part in the affair gave it a greatly
augmented importance. Yet now the worst, he told himself, was at an end;
the publicity would recede; after a decent interval he could see Susan.
This mood was interrupted by an imperative communication from
Stephen--he must be in the other's office at eleven o'clock to-morrow.
Nothing more definite was said; but Jasper Penny was not wholly
surprised to see Essie Scofield huddled in a chair at the lawyer's
table. She had made an attempt at the bravado of apparel, but it had
evidently failed midway; her hair hung loosely about a damp brow, the
strings of her bonnet were in disarray, a shawl partially hid a bodice
wrongly fastened. Her face was apathetic, with leaden shadows and dark
lips ceaselessly twisting, now drawn into a petulant line, now drooping
in childish impotence. She glanced at him fleetly as he entered, but
said nothing. Robbed of the pretensions of pride, stripped of feminine
subterfuge, she was appalling. He involuntarily recalled the Essie who
had swept him into a riot of emotion--a vivid and palpitating creature
radiating the exuberance of careless health and youth. She could not, he
calculated, be beyond thirty-seven now. He abruptly ceased his
speculation, turned from her, with a feeling of impropriety. Stephen
Jannan said shortly:
"Al Schimpf will be here. It seemed to me he was the best man to retain.
It's obvious that I can't defend her. You will, of course, require
everything possible done." Essie Scofield shivered. "I don't want to go
into court," she articulated, "and answer all the dreadful questions."
There was a stir without, and a hugely fat man in a black cape fastened
with a silver chain and velvet collar entered. Al Schimpf's face was so
burdened with rolling chins that he disregarded the customary fashion of
whiskers, but a grizzled moustache lay above his well-formed lips, and
an imperial divided his heavy, aggressive chin. He was, evidently, fully
informed of the case before him; for, after saluting Jannan and Jasper
Penny, he, seated himself directly before Essie Scofield, fastening upon
her an unwavering, glacial gaze.
"Now, pay attention," he proceeded at once.
"I'll go over a few facts--this Daniel Culser, you were in love with
him; no length you wouldn't go, lost your senses completely; and he--all
he cared about was the money he could wring out of you. As soon as you
were paid the sums that Mr. Penny allowed you, this Culser got it from
you; he took every cent and wanted more. Said he would leave you unless
you got hold of something really worth while. Then, of course, you
carried on, promised to get him more and more; said you could force a
fortune from Mr. Penny, anything to keep the young man. Hey?" he
demanded suddenly.
The woman looked up with a haggard wonder, an irrepressible shudder; her
hands raised and fell, and she nodded dumbly.
"Then, while Culser was in the house, Mr. Penny unexpectedly turned up
and said--perhaps before Daniel himself--that you could expect nothing
more, and made it plain that he was not to be intimidated. Daniel Culser
was for leaving you, didn't intend to hang around for a bloody little
quarterly; and, when you realized that he meant, or you thought he
meant, what he said, you went crazy and shot him.... What!" He got no
response from her now; she cowered away from him, hiding behind an
updrawn shoulder, a fold of the shawl. "But listen to this," Al Schimpf
shot at her, leaning forward, "here's what happened, and you must
remember every fact:
"The fellow had been around the house day after day. You had encouraged
him at first; but then you got frightened; he beat you--hear
that?--struck you with his fist, and threatened worse if you didn't go
through old Penny's pocket for him. He even hinted at something you
might do together, and then get away with a mint. Culser was at it when
Mr. Penny called, and took it up when he left, at about six o'clock. He
said he wanted money bad, debts were hounding him; and he was going to
get it out of Penny, out of you. There's where you said you would warn
Jasper Penny; and remember how he struck you, in the back, because you
turned, and it hurts yet--there up by the left shoulder, the left
shoulder, the left! Then, he had been drinking in your house and at a
tavern, he threatened to kill you if you didn't do what he wanted. You
honestly thought he'd do it, and snatched a pistol out of a table
drawer, and.... Do you understand? That's what happened, and it's all
you know. Said he would kill you, apparently commenced then, and you
acted in self-protection. Now, repeat that."
She gazed at him in a trembling confusion. "But," she objected, "he was
only--he said. Oh! I was afraid I'd lose him." The lawyer moved closer
to her, his unwinking, grey-green eyes like slate. "He said he'd kill
you," he reiterated; "remember that, if you don't want to hang. He
struck you; where?" After a long pause she replied haltingly, "In the
back." Al Schimpf nodded, "Good. And he said you both were to get away
with a mint. He told you it would be easy; the old man would gladly buy
silence; and, by heaven, if he didn't--"
Jasper Penny stonily watched the intolerable degradation of the woman
bullied into the safety of a lie. This was worse than anything that had
gone before; he fell deeper and deeper into a strangling, humiliating
self-loathing. Stephen Jannan's handsome countenance was fixed and pale;
one hand lay on the table, empty and still. In the silence between
Schimpf's insistent periods Jasper Penny could hear Essie's sobbing
inspirations; he was unable to keep his gaze from her countenance,
jelly-like and robbed of every trace of human dignity. He wondered
vaguely at an absence of any sense of responsibility for what Essie
Scofield had become; he felt that an attitude of self-accusation, of
profound regret for the way they had taken together, should rest upon
him; but the thought, the effort, were perfunctory, obviously insincere.
If now he had a different, perhaps deeper, sense of responsibility, he
had known nothing of it in the first months of his contact with her....
A different man, he reiterated; and one as faithfully representative as
he was to-day. But totally another; men changed, evolved, progressed.
Jasper Penny was convinced that it was a progression; but in a broad
manner beyond all hope of his comprehension, and entirely outside
dogmatic good and evil. The germ of it must have been in him from the
first; his burning necessity for Susan, he told himself, had been born
in him, laid dormant until, yes--it had been stirred into activity by
Essie Scofield, by the revulsion which had followed that natural
development.
He was suddenly conscious that Al Schimpf had ceased domineering Essie.
The lawyer swung about, facing them with an expression of commonplace
satisfaction. "It's all in fine order," he declared. "I want, if
possible, to study our jury through a preliminary case or so. We shall,
of course, surrender our client at once, without making any difficulty
about moving her from one police district to another. I can produce a
witness to the fact that this Culser openly said that he expected
shortly to come into more money. And he had dishonoured debts all about.
You will have to appear, Mr. Penny; no way out of that, but our defence
should go like a song. Now, Mrs. Scofield, I have a carriage outside."
When they had gone Jasper Penny and Jannan sat in a lengthening silence.
Stephen's hand moved among the papers on the table; the other drew a
deep breath. "I regret this tremendously for you," Stephen Jannan said
at last. He spoke with feeling; his momentary anger at the entanglement
of Susan vanished. "But it will pass, Jasper. You are too solid a man to
be hurt permanently by private scandal. And you have no concrete
political position to invite mud slinging. Yes, it will drop out of
mind, and your iron will continue to support enterprise, extension."
"But Susan," Jasper Penny demanded, "what about her? Where is she?"
"With Graham at Shadrach. She was badly torn, and I insisted on her
retreating for a week or more. There is a very capable assistant at the
Academy. It's too early to speak conclusively, but I am afraid that
Susan's usefulness is ended there. Have you seen the cheaper sheets?
Every one, of course, is buying them. Rotten! The assistant, I
understand, is anxious to procure the school, and I am considering
allowing her the capital. Something might be arranged paying Susan an
income.... If she would accept; confoundly difficult to come about."
"I am going to marry her," Jasper Penny asserted once more.
"What was the initial trouble?" the other asked, tersely.
"Essie." Stephen frowned.
"She would hit on that," he agreed; "stand until the last gasp of some
fantastic conception of right."
Jasper explained:
"She thinks I ought to marry Essie, mostly on account of the child. She
likes me, too, Stephen; I think I may tell you that. Well, I'll keep at
her and at her. In the end she will get tired of refusal." The other
shook his head doubtfully. "I've known Susan a good many years, and I
have never seen her lose an ideal, or even an idea, yet."
Jasper Penny rose. "Meanwhile I'll have to go through with this trial.
Thank God, Susan has no part in it." He warmly gripped Stephen's palm.
"You're worth something in a life, immovable. Thank you, Stephen."