He was remanded for a week: a week of feverish public excitement and
of great suspense for those that loved him. His name was dragged through
the mire of the roadways, then held up to execration. He had feasted at
an old man’s table, and, before the generous glow of the host’s wine had
had time to cool, had foully murdered him for money. Imagination boggled
at the conception of a meaner miscreant. Thus the man in the street, who
is seldom guided by the abstract principle of British justice. The press
began to spread abroad a horrible fame. A poet, a brilliant advocate, a
man in the public eye; they extolled his achievements. Those to whom his
name had been hitherto unknown forgot their ignorance and feigned long
acquaintance. His poems were read by self-conscious hundreds. Stories of
forensic triumphs recapitulated by half-penny evening newspapers, with
sensational exaggeration, brought his fame as an advocate whither no
poetry ever penetrated. His friends stood by sickened and helpless.
“If he gets off, there’ll be a boom in Colmans,” said a cynical clubman
to a friend. “He’ll be the darling of the boudoir and the champion of
the thieves’ kitchen. He always was a lucky beggar.”
“Hush, there’s Merriam at your elbow,” whispered the other.
But Gerard had overheard. He gave the speaker an inscrutable look and
passed on.
Habitually taciturn, Gerard spoke very little of his feelings in the
matter. His acquaintances who knew of the close friendship refrained
from allusion. At home he smoked in silence. Irene, measuring his
anxiety by her ideal of the love between Hugh and himself, respected his
reserve. But her own pain burned within her and shone from her eyes in
a strange light. She waited anxiously with him for a promised visit from
Harroway, the solicitor, after his first interview with the prisoner.
Harroway was shown into the smoking-room, sat on a straight-backed chair
away from the fireplace, and mopped his forehead with his handkerchief.
He was a short, stout, florid man, and had walked fast from the police
station; trouble and perplexity had also disturbed legal coolness.
“It’s like trying to ride through a brick wall,” he said. “He won’t open
his mouth. Same story to me as to the magistrate. Can’t bring a single
witness to prove his whereabouts.”
“That’s absurd,” said Gerard. “A man can’t exist a whole night in London
in Stygian solitude.”
“That’s what I told him. A cabman, a servant, a barman, a coffee-stall
keeper--anyone would do. Somebody must have seen him. He says: ‘I left
The Lindens at eleven-thirty and I got home at six-thirty. Assume that I
have lost my memory completely for those seven hours and do what you can
for me.’”
“But can he have lost his memory?” said Irene. “Such things have
happened.”
Harroway shook his head significantly. “Not he. It’s pure suicidal
obstinacy. You know the kind of man. I’m sure I don’t know what to do.
There’s enough against him already--that confounded security of his was
in the missing deed-box. God knows what more the police have up their
sleeve. An alibi is the only thing. I told him. Replies that there is no
question of proving an alibi. You know he might almost as well plead
guilty at once. What _is_ one to do, Merriam?”
“_Cherchez, la femme_,” replied Gerard.
“Well, can either of you give me any idea? You, Mrs. Merriam----?”
“There is someone he is fond of in a way,” said Irene. “But who can it
be? It is someone I don’t know. But surely, if it is a woman, she will
come forward.”
“Don’t be too sure of that,” said Gerard.
“I asked him point-blank,” continued Harroway, “Is the woman----? But
before I could get any further, he turns upon me with one of his Paladin
airs, and tells me he never suggested that a woman was involved.”
“That settles it,” said Gerard. “Either that or guilt.”
“Heaven knows,” sighed Harroway. “And that’s the man I had set my heart
upon making the biggest criminal advocate of the day.”
“Oh, you must go and use all your influence over him, Gerard,” said
Irene, anxiously.
“Do you think I have ever stopped him from doing a pig-headed action,
all the years I have known him?”
“But he loves you above everybody. He must listen to you.”
“Why not yourself?” asked Gerard, in a curious tone that caused the
solicitor to glance sharply at him. “We will both go, Gerard--together.”
“Not a bit of good,” said Harroway, rising to depart. “He sent many kind
messages--says he’ll write at length. But won’t see you. Won’t see
a soul but me. He’s as proud, in that cell, as Lucifer. But what the
dickens he’s got to be proud about in getting himself into this ghastly
mess is more than I can imagine.”
The solicitor gone, Irene turned to Gerard.
“Harroway thinks it will go ill with Hugh.”
“So do I--if he keeps up this attitude.”
“There is something beneath,” said Irene, moving to the stool by the
fire, near his feet, and putting her hand on his knee. “We had a talk
on the day before. I wrote to you at Edinburgh about it. He was on
the point of committing some folly--hoped we would not think him a
scoundrel. What does it mean?”
Gerard stretched out his arms and clasped his hands behind his head.
“I’m sure I don’t know. The man was always like that. One never could
tell his next escapade. What’s the matter? You’re shivering.”
“Oh, I am frightened, Gerard, dear. I have a foreboding that ill will
come of it--for all of us.”
“What the dickens has it got to do with you and me?” said Gerard.
She sat silent for awhile, looking into the flaming abysses and
fantastic crags of the fire. Then suddenly she turned, excited, clasped
his knees and looked passionately into his face.
“We must move heaven and earth, Gerard. He is your second self. If he
should--if anything should happen to him--he would be with us always,
reproaching us with his dead eyes for not saving him. I owe him your
life, my beloved--and mine--for without you I should die--Gerard, dear.”
She was a little excited, spoke a trifle shrilly. Gerard unclasped his
hands and bent forward. Interpreting the gesture according to her heart,
she knelt and swiftly closed his arms around her, and nestled close to
him.
“You may be sure I shall do all I can,” he said.
She closed her eyes. The man’s calm strength of voice, the hidden
strength of his frame reassured her fears.
“Forgive me for doubting while you are here to save him,” she murmured,
in her blind faith.
A few moments later some domestic duty summoned her away. Gerard rose,
and stretched himself and yawned.
“Oh, damn!” he said, irritably.
Then, lighting his pipe, he strode out the house, and tramped along the
Heath Road, with the air of a man who is justifying to himself a series
of expletives.
*****
The week expired. Hugh was again brought before the magistrates and
committed for trial.
The key turned in the cell-door in Holloway Gaol, and he was left alone
for the night. In a state of semi-sanity he abandoned himself to the
ghastly panorama of the day, as it passed and repassed in incoherent
fragments before his eyes. He was prostrate with fatigue and strain,
utterly brain-weary, incapable of lucid arrangement of ideas, almost of
calculating the weight of the evidence against him.
Fresh facts had been brought to light. The butler had heard him speak in
angry tones when he had entered the room with the spirit-tray. The
entry in Israel’s private ledger assigning the stolen deed-box as the
depository of the £5,000 security had been confirmed by the confidential
clerk. Moreover, the empty box had been discovered, broken open, in the
trunk of a hollow tree in the wood behind The Lindens. The prisoner had
returned with a mysterious parcel of which he could give no account. On
searching his rooms after arrest, the police had found the grate full
of scrupulously reduced paper-ash. The inference was that this ash
represented the stolen bond. It was another instance of the irony that
marked this extraordinary freak of circumstances. Even his careful
destruction of Minna’s letters and all memorials of her was turned into
evidence against him. Medical testimony placed one o’clock and five as
the extreme limits between which the murder could possibly have been
committed. Probabilities pointed to three o’clock.
In his sleepless and disordered, fancy, the witnesses jostled each other
in the box, giving inconsequent scraps of evidence. But clearest before
his mind rose the picture of Minna, his wife, the sole person in the
universe that could be absolutely certain of his innocence. There she
stood, appalling in the wreckage of her beauty, a thin, black, pinched
figure, hollow-eyed, drawn-lipped, telling the half truth that was more
damnable than a lie. She had parted from Mr. Colman at eleven, had gone
up to her room. Had heard no sound in the house till she was awakened in
the morning to learn the horrible news. The relations between Mr. Colman
and her father had always been most cordial. He had dined with them that
evening, her father in the best of spirits. Mr. Hart had never mentioned
that Mr. Colman was a client. Clients were not visiting acquaintances.
That was all. She had not met his eyes, scarcely those of the Crown
prosecutor or the magistrate when they questioned her. Had replied
doggedly, in the deep, hard voice he had grown so familiar with of late.
But one year ago it had stirred all the fibres in his body. To-day not a
vestige of its richness remained.
She floated fantastic in his memories. Once during the night he fell
into a brief half-sleep. She gave him again the brown-paper parcel--but
loose this time, so that the paper slipped away, and revealed a halter.
He woke sweating with the nightmare. Anything approaching sleep was
thenceforth impossible. The dim, perpetual, inextinguishable light in
his cell grew to a maddening irritation. He yearned for the soothing
comfort of darkness. He wrapped his head in his bedclothes to shut out
the light--but with the ill success familiar to all who have tried it.
So, until the dawn, he remained staringly awake, and the phantasmagoria
of his trial swept endlessly on.
Faces of friends, anxious, incredulous, seen in the crowded little
court, rose up before him. Gerard’s and Irene’s most continuously. She
wore a tight-fitting dark-blue jacket and a little toque to match, set
amid the fair waves of her hair. He remembered vividly every detail--the
white stitching of her black gloves. He strove to keep her image before
him--the sweetness of her smile, the trust in her grey eyes. But
Minna, hard and sullen, came and blotted out the more gracious fantasy.
Again he recalled Irene--the last scene, before he was led away to the
prison van, when friends crowded round the dock; Gerard among the first.
“It’s bound to come right, Hugh. We’ll do our best.”
Irene had struggled forward and the others had fallen back. And she had
put up both hands, which he, leaning over, had taken in his; and he had
seen the great pain burning beneath her eyes.
“Oh, Hugh, if our love for you can do anything--use it--God bless you!”
A hurried speech, uttered in the swiftness of the hand-clasp. He tried
to keep it with him as a charm against the bugbears of the night. But
until the warder came at half-past six to wake him, they swam before him
in a whirling, reiterative circle, recurring almost rhythmically like
the separate monstrosities of horses in an infernal merry-go-round.
Day came, and with it clearness of mind and logical sense of proportion.
When Harroway, the solicitor, arrived, he discussed the situation with
practised acuteness. His defence was clear. The stealing of the security
was too ludicrous an expedient for a man of his intelligence. Besides,
its legal value was that of a blank sheet of foolscap. Of this Hart’s
confidential clerk had full knowledge. Would a jury believe a man to be
so idiotic as to commit a murder in order to steal that which he knew
to be worthless? Was it likely that a man who had committed a murder at
three o’clock would deliberately postpone his return home--a quarter
of an hour’s walk--until an hour when his arrival would be certain to
attract attention? But Harroway shook his head dolefully.
“Of course we’ll put all that forward. But the self-incriminating
stupidity of criminals is a by-word. If the attorney or
solicitor-general is prosecuting and takes his privilege of answering
Gardiner, he will convince the jury of this little fact. It would be
much more to the point if you would tell us how to prove an alibi.
That’s the infernal part of it. No one is such a damned fool as to
believe that you were lying drunk and invisible in a gutter all night.
You _can_ prove an alibi if you like, can’t you?”
“Certainly,” replied Hugh, with a baffling twirl of his moustache. “But
I am going to do no such thing. Please consider that final. If you and
Gardiner can’t get me off without it--well, I’ll hang. _Jouir, mourir
et ne rien dire!_ And that’s the end of it.”
He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged his shoulders
magnificently. The stout solicitor rose with irritation.
“You are a confounded anachronism. You were meant for the Marquis
de--de--God-knows-what in the French Revolution. You would think it a
fine thing to stay the hangman until you had used your toothpick. You
don’t understand that a life like yours is of value nowadays. You are
risking it--braving the gallows for some infernal woman. It stands to
reason. I am sick of women!”
“So am I, Harroway,” replied Hugh, coolly. “You seem to have got them on
the brain. Let us change the conversation.”
Soon afterwards Harroway departed, and the day wore on. The next passed
and the next, and other days followed in dreary succession. They added
ten years to his life. In spite of defiant resolve to consider no phase
of the prison discipline and degradation, the taint of the cell ate into
his flesh and weakened his soul with strange cowardices. Sometimes the
weight of evidence crushed him overwhelmingly and he shook in an
agony of terror at the consequences. The strain of silence and secrecy
suffocated him. Like a diver who has just exceeded his habitual period
of immersion, he felt that in another moment his temples would burst and
his heart fail. Then he would ask himself passionately the reason of his
silence, rebel against the self-imposed imprisonment of speech. Was
she worth the folly of this sacrifice--she whose inconceivable avarice
seemed to have annihilated elementary human emotion? If the loss of her
money should kill her--were it not better that she should die? To brave
the trial, secure acquittal, live through the eternal after-stain of
suspicion--for that he was prepared. But to face the gallows--accept
her gift of the halter--his courage failed him. The cold sweat of the
nightmare broke out from head to foot. He clung desperately to life.
Once a shaft of sunlight streamed into his cell and abutted on the
opposite whitewashed wall. He sat on his wooden chair and leaned against
the bed and watched the dust dancing in the gold. Touching some hidden
chord of forgotten association--a child’s poetic fancy long ago,
perhaps, translating the glory of glistening motes in the quivering
mystery of the beam--it awakened an unutterable torture of yearning for
the free air of the world. He threw himself on the bed and buried his
face in the pillow to prevent a cry from passing his lips.
But such crises of weakness were rare, and they were always followed by
long intervals of dogged and half-cynical calm. He had sunk far beneath
his ideals of honour in his marriage with Minna Hart. Her taunts had
been just. He, Hugh Colman, who had ever before sinned _en prince_, and
had never shrunk from the eyes of man or woman, had played the part of
a skulking villain. He had married her for her flesh, for her money,
thereby wronging her. He had made her the toy of a week’s passion, and
then neglected and wounded her. Now was the hour, if any there could be
in the world, when he might make expiation both to her and to himself.
He would take his chance, meet his destiny, this time at any rate, like
a man. He would not redeem twenty lives at the price of her money. In
his contradictory way the man was as proud as Lucifer.
The knowledge of the anxiety of his sisters, the dear peaceful women who
worshipped him as the paragon of all the excellencies, was a perpetual
pain. He wrote to them reassuringly, minimised the danger, expatiated
upon the point of honour, and, knowing their sensitive spot, brought
forward, with some twinges of self-contempt, the family pride. Death
before dishonour--but death a remote contingency; thus could his message
be summarised. Old Geoffrey Colman, who had been illustrating the
proverb that threatened men live long, also wrote on the subject of the
family honour. To save it, he was willing to buy up the security--the
history of the reversion was the property of a million wagging tongues.
But this Hugh peremptorily declined. The debt now lay between himself
and Minna. There was the pound of flesh, but not a drop of blood. Sacred
should be the letter of the law.
The days passed, he scarce knew how, eventless, dull, yet filled
with cravings for the vivid life of action that had been first his
inheritance and then his prize. Their inactivity weighed upon him. He
envied his fellow-prisoners, upon whom sentence had been passed and
who had their daily tasks to execute. Chapel, exercise, meals, reading,
sleep--his sole avocations. Now and then came Harroway and with him
Charles Gardiner, Q.C., his friend and counsel.
Other visitors he refused to receive. Sensitive and pliant as was
his nature, yet it was traversed by a seam of flint that rendered it
self-sufficing. He was one of those men, capable of chivalrous impulse
and lasting loyalty, who nevertheless are unable to reveal themselves
entirely to dearest friend or belovedest woman; who reserve, as
a jealous right, a portion of themselves for their own exclusive
possession. Not only were his lips of necessity closed on this matter,
but also, in the battle against circumstances which he had undertaken to
fight single-handed, too vivid expression of sympathy was distasteful.
His sisters would have clung about his neck and unmanned him. Irene,
who would have understood his reticence, he could not receive without
Gerard. And his pride shrank from the idea of meeting even Irene. The
moment’s speech and hand-clasp after the trial had been sufficient to
convince him of her trust in his innocence. But the thrilling pity and
admiration in her eyes, he could not bear. Already she had written:
“You are shielding a woman’s honour at the risk of your life; but what
woman’s trumpery honour is worth such chivalry?” And he had written back
in grim truthfulness: “It is no woman’s honour that I am protecting, and
my attitude is far from heroic.” But he knew her well enough to realise
that she would not believe his disclaimer. To destroy her feminine
conception of his character was impossible; but he could not bear to
masquerade in her presence in the guise of a hero.
And Gerard? During the hours of solitude, when the confused impressions
of past years had bitter opportunities of crystallisation, he had
suffered the shock of the discovery that their present friendship was
but the simulacrum of the old. A quaint fancy figured it forth in his
mind. Once clad in shells of armour, as most men are clad, they had
stood together, gauntleted hand in hand, for mutual defence and common
purpose. Long since they had crept out, donned other mail, but still
stood the hollow figures in futile clasp, somewhat of a mockery. And a
woman came and led them, now and then, each into their old habitations,
whereupon they moved the hands up and down, in spasmodic greeting.
Conceits aside, something had come between them. It was not Irene,
he thought, for she had kept them together, making her boast of their
perfect friendship. Was the phenomenon negative, merely the cessation of
mutual attraction? He could not tell. It was sufficient dismay to
find that, at this time of peril, there were many other men with whose
companionship he could have borne sooner than with Gerard’s. But rather
than allow Irene to suspect this, he would have undergone any tortures
of isolation. So he awaited his trial in proud loneliness.
And from Minna, not a sign of solicitude.