THE NEXT WITNESS PLEASE
The air grew more and more heavy as the morning dragged on. It was now
close on twelve o'clock.
Frederick Power, hall porter of the Veterans' Club had finished his
evidence. With the precision of a soldier he had replied curtly and to
the point to every question put to him, and had retold all that had
occurred on that foggy night, in the smoking room and the lobby of the
Veterans' Club in Shaftesbury Avenue.
It was but a repetition of what he had told Sir Thomas Ryder in
Colonel Harris's presence the day before. Louisa had had it all at
full length from her father; she had drawn the whole story out of him,
point by point, just as the man had told it originally. Colonel
Harris, reluctant to tell her, was gradually driven to concealing
nothing from her. Moreover, since she had made up her mind to attend
the inquest she might as well hear it all from him first, the better
to be prepared for the public ordeal.
Though she knew it all, she listened attentively to every word which
Frederick Power uttered, lest her father had--in telling her--omitted
some important detail. She heard again at full length the account of
Luke's visit to the Veterans' Club, his desire to see Philip de
Mountford, the interview in the smoking room behind closed doors, the
angry words of obvious, violent quarrelling.
Then Luke's return to the lobby, his departure, the final taunt spoken
by Philip and the look of murder in his eye, sworn to by the hall
porter. She listened to it all, and heard without flinching the last
question which the coroner put to the witness:
"Did Mr. de Mountford's visitor carry a stick when he left the club?"
"'E 'ad a stick, sir, when 'e came," was the porter's reply, "and I
'anded it to 'im myself when 'e left."
Louisa had been sitting all this while at the extreme end of the row
of chairs, right up against the wall. She sat with her back to the
wall, her head leaning against it, her hands hidden within the folds
of a monumental sable muff lying idly in her lap. She had her father
on her right, and beyond him Mr. Dobson and his clerk; she saw them
all in profile as they looked straight before them, at the coroner and
at each succeeding witness.
Luke sat farther on, and, as he was slightly turned toward her, she
could watch his face all the while that she listened to the hall
porter's evidence. It was perfectly still, the features as if moulded
in wax; the eyes which actually were a clear hazel appeared quite dark
and almost as if they had sunk back within their circling lids. He sat
with arms folded, and not a muscle in face or body moved. No
stone-carved image could have been more calm, none could have been so
mysterious.
Louisa tried to understand and could not. She watched him, not caring
whether the empty-headed fools who sat all round saw her watching him
or not.
When the coroner asked the hall porter about the stick and the man
gave his reply, Luke turned and met Louisa's fixed gaze. The
marble-like stillness of his face remained unchanged, only the eyes
seemed as if they darkened visibly. At least to her it seemed as if a
velvety shadow crept over them, an inscrutable, an un-understandable
shadow, and the rims assumed a purple hue.
It was her fancy of course. But Luke's eyes were naturally bright, of
varying tones of gray, blue, or green, with never a shadow beneath
them. Now they appeared cavernous and dark, and again as he met her
gaze, that swift flash of intense misery.
No longer had she the feeling that she was living in a dream, no
longer that this was a theatre wherein she and Luke and the dead man
were puppets dancing and squirming for the benefit of shallow-hearted
dolts. That sense of unreality left her together with the hysterical
desire to laugh which had plagued her so in the earlier part of the
proceedings. On the contrary, now an overwhelming feeling of intense
reality oppressed her, so that she could have screamed with the awful
soul agony which the sight of Luke's misery had caused her.
All her nerves were on the rack, her every faculty concentrated on the
one supreme desire to understand and to know.
Love, the omnipotent, had encountered an enemy--grim, unexplained
Mystery--and he sat pondering, almost cowed by this first check to his
supreme might. Louisa had sought and compelled Luke's gaze, and Love
had gleamed in one great flash out of her eyes. Yesterday, at her
glance, he had knelt at her feet and buried his sorrow with his
aching head in the scented palm of the dearly loved hand.
To-day the look of Love brought but a surfeit of misery, an additional
load of sorrow. The eyes in response remained tearless and hard and
circled with the dark rings of utter hopelessness.
I'll grant you that if Louisa Harris had been an extraordinary woman,
a woman endowed with a wonderfully complex, wonderfully passionate, or
wonderfully emotional nature--if, in fact, she had been the true
product of this century's morbid modernity--she would, whilst
admitting Luke's guilt, have burned with a passion of self-sacrifice,
pining to stand beside him pilloried in the dock, and looking forward
to a veritable world of idealistic realism in the form of a
picturesque suicide, after seeing the black flag hoisted over Newgate
prison.
But Louisa, though a modern product of an ultra-modern world, was an
absolutely ordinary woman--just a commonplace, sensible creature who
thought and felt in a straight and essentially wholesome manner.
Though she had read Tolstoi and Dostoyefsky and every Scandinavian and
Russian crack-brain who has ever tried to make wrong seem right, black
appear white, and animalism masquerade as love, yet she had never been
led away from her own clean outlook on life.
She loved Luke and would have given--did in fact give--her whole life
to him: but she loved him without analysis or thought of self. It
never entered her mind at this moment to wonder if he were guilty or
not guilty, if he was capable or not of committing a crime to gain his
own ends. All that troubled her was his misery, which she would have
given her very soul to alleviate, and the hopelessness in him which
she had given the world to console.
The mystery troubled her, not the sin: the marble-like rigidity of his
face, not the possibility of the crime.
For the moment, however, she was brought back quickly enough to
present realities. The coroner--satisfied with Frederick Power's
answers--was giving him a moment's breathing space. The grating of
fountain pens against paper was heard from that corner of the room
where sat the journalists: the crowd waited silent and expectant,
for--unversed though most people there present were in proceedings of
this kind--yet instinctively every one felt that one great crucial
moment was just about to come; one great, leading question was just
about to be put.
The coroner had fingered the papers before him for the space of a few
seconds, then he looked up once more at the witness, his elbow resting
on the table, his fleshy chin buried in his hand, in an attitude which
obviously was habitual to him.
"This visitor," he said speaking loudly and clearly, "who called the
night before last at the Veterans' Club and had an interview with the
deceased, you saw him well, of course?"
"Yes, sir," was the prompt reply.
"You would know him again?"
"Certainly, sir."
"Looking round this room now, should you say that he was present?"
The man looked across the room straight at Luke and said pointing to
him:
"Yes, sir; the gentleman sitting there, sir."
As every one had expected the reply, no one seemed astonished. The
many pairs of eyes that turned on Luke now expressed a certain measure
of horrified compassion, such as might be bestowed on some dangerous
animal brought to earth by a well-aimed gun shot.
The coroner made no comment. He turned to the jury, glancing along
either row of solemn faces, on both sides of the long table. Then he
said:
"Would any of you gentlemen like to ask this witness a question?"
Receiving no reply, he added:
"Next witness, please!"