back against the wall, his hand on her forehead and the beautiful
flexing arch of her neck rising ... swanlike.
"Watch out!" There was a raw nail in the wall where a picture had hung.
Murphy had kept knocking it awry and she had removed it. "Watch out,
Red! No-o--no--"
Through the star-spangled red he glimpsed her once where the hair swept
off her brow, and for the moment, to his blurred craziness, it was as if
through the red her brow was shotted with little scars and pock marks
from glass, and a hot surge of unaccountable sickness fanned the
enormous silence of his rage.
With or without his knowing it, that raw nail drove slowly home to the
rear of Winnie's left ear, upward toward the cerebellum as he tilted and
tilted, and the convex curve of her neck mounted like a bow stretched
outward.
* * * * *
There was little about Jason's trial to entitle it to more than a
back-page paragraph in the dailies. He sat through those days, that
were crisscrossed with prison bars, much like those drowned figures
encountered by deep-sea divers, which, seated upright in death, are
pressed down by the waters of unreality.
It is doubtful if he spoke a hundred words during the lean, celled weeks
of his waiting, and then with a vacuous sort of apathy and solely upon
advice of counsel. Even when he took the stand, undramatically, his
voice, without even a plating of zest for life, was like some old drum
with the parchment too tired to vibrate.
Women, however, cried over him and the storm in his eyes and the
curiously downy back of his neck where the last of his youth still
marked him.
To Sara, from her place in the first row, on those not infrequent
occasions when his eyes fumbled for hers, he seemed to drown in her
gaze--back--somewhere--
On a Friday at high noon the jury adjourned, the judge charging it with
a solemnity that rang up to wise old rafters and down into one woman's
thirsty soul like life-giving waters.
In part he told the twelve men about to file out, "If there has been
anything in my attitude during the recital of the defendant's story,
which has appeared to you to be in the slightest manner prejudiced one
way or another, I charge you to strike such mistaken impressions from
your minds.
"I have tried honestly to wash the slate of my mind clean to take down
faithfully the aspects of this case which for two weeks has occupied
this jury.
"If you believe the defendant guilty of the heinous crime in question,
do not falter in your use of the power with which the law has vested
you.
"If, on the other hand and to the best of your judgment, there has been
in the defendant's life extenuating circumstances, er--a limitation
of environment, home influence, close not the avenues of your fair
judgment.
"Did this man in the kind of er--a--frenzy he describes and to which
witnesses agree he was subject, deliberately strain back the Ross
woman's head until the nail penetrated?
"If so, remember the law takes knowledge only of self-defense.
"On the other hand, ask of yourselves well, did the defendant, in the
frenzy which he claims had hold of him when he committed this unusual
crime, know that the nail was there?
"_Would Winnie Ross have met her death if the nail had not been there?_
"Gentlemen, in the name of the law, solemnly and with a fear of God in
your hearts, I charge you."
It was a quick verdict. Three hours and forty minutes.
"Not guilty."
In the front row there, with the titillating folderols on her bonnet and
her hand at her throat as if she would tear it open for the mystery of
the pain of the heartbeat in it, Sara Turkletaub heard, and, hearing,
swooned into the pit of her pain and her joy.
Her son, with brackets of fatigue out about his mouth, was standing over
her when she opened her eyes, the look of crucifixion close to the front
of them.
"Mother," he said, pressing her head close to his robes of state and
holding a throat-straining quiver under his voice, "I--I shouldn't have
let you stay. It was too--much for you."
It took her a moment for the mist to clear.
"I--Son--did somebody strike? Hit? Strange. I--I must have been hurt.
Son, am I bleeding?" And looked down, clasping her hand to the bosom of
her decent black-silk basque.
"Son, I--It was a good verdict, not? I--couldn't have stood it--if--if
it wasn't. I--Something--It was good, not?"
"Yes, mother, yes."
"Don't--don't let that boy get away, son. I think--those tempers--I can
help--him. You see, I know--how to handle--Somehow I--"
"Yes, mother, only now you must sit quietly--"
"Promise me, son, you won't let him get away without I see him?"
"Yes, dear, only please now--a moment--quiet--"
You see, the judge was very tired, and, looking down at the spot where
her hand still lay at her bosom as if to press down a hurt, the red of
her same obsession shook and shook him.
Somehow it seemed to him, too, that her dear heart was bleeding.
THE END