BOOK V

I

The editor-in-chief of the New York “Eye” sat in the large

revolving-chair in his private room, dictating to a typewriter answers

to the great pile of letters on the desk before him. He opened one

letter after another with expert swiftness, glanced over it, gave it a

few lines of response, or tossed it, half read, into a wastebasket. But

although his heed to duty was alert, his brow was contracted, and he was

carrying on a double train of thought. The subconsciousness was not

pleasant.

Arnold Sturges was one of the most remarkable men in New York. Not

thirty-three, he had been editor-in-chief of one of the great newspapers

of the United States for a year and a half. He had elected journalism as

the safety-valve for a superabundant nervous energy and a means to

gratify ambition and love of power. Although possessed of a little

fortune he had begun his career on the city staff. As a reporter he had

worked as hard as if twenty-five dollars a week stood between him and

starvation. He had risen rapidly from one editorship to another, and

still no half naked man down in the printing-rooms worked more lustily.

His rushing career was by no means due to work alone, nor yet to his

superlative cleverness: it was said of him that he could smell news a

week off, and not only ahead but backward; by which was meant that he

knew the subtle and valuable relation that old news occasionally holds

to that of the moment. Naturally, he had made many brilliant and

memorable coups.

When friends had blocked his way he had thrust them aside as lightly as

he seemed to spurn less material obstacles. Body and brain he was the

dauntless servant of the “Eye;” its personality was his; his very nerves

were tuned to its sensational policy. He lived for it, and would have

died for it. He hardly regarded himself as an individual, although his

fine intellect, his bold executive ability, his splendid suggestions,

had been large factors in the success of the paper.

Cold, cruel, charming, calculating, enthusiastic, audacious,

unscrupulous, fearless, relentless, brilliant, executive, had he been a

factor in the French Revolution his name would have become infamously

immortal. As it was, he was supreme in the field he had deliberately

chosen ten years before, immediately after graduating from Harvard with

such honours that the faculty had sent for and severally congratulated

him upon his future.

He lived with a soubrette with whom he spent his evenings, playing

_parchisi_.

To-day he was in a serious quandary. Three days before he had paid

fifteen hundred dollars for a scandalous story relative to one of the

most fashionable families in Westchester County,—a story which bore

truth on the face of it, but which he had not yet published, as it was

necessary to go through the form of verification. The family meanwhile

had heard of the sale, and brought tremendous pressure to bear upon him

to suppress the story: the owner of the “Eye” was travelling in Europe.

Lawyers had called and harangued. A woman had gone to his apartment and

wept at his feet. A man had flourished a pistol. For tears and threats

he cared nothing, but it had occurred to him when too late that the

owner of the “Eye” purposed to build in Westchester County and had

aspirations to the Country Club. Despite the fact that the story would

make the sensation of the day, the owner might be moved to fury. On the

other hand, he had paid fifteen hundred dollars for the facts, and must

justify himself. It was the first time in his career that he had made a

serious mistake, and he was in a cold rage.

The man would have given pleasure to a physiognomist; he was a type so

marked, so essentially modern, that an amateur could not have misplaced

him, as one easily could so commonplace a type as Beverly Peele. His

forehead was full and wide, his grey eyes piercing, restless, hard as

ice. The nose was finely cut, the mouth licentious, the face thin and

sallow. At each extremity of the jaw was an abnormal development of

muscle. His small thin figure was as lithe as a panther, and so crowded

with pure nerve force that it seemed to shed electricity. His attire was

fashionable and elegant. In flannel shirt and overalls he would still

have looked a product of the higher civilisation.

The door opened. He wheeled about with a frown, then smiled pleasantly.

“Oh, it’s you, Van,” he said. “I’ll be through in a minute. Sit down.”

The man that had entered bore so striking a resemblance to Sturges that

the two men might have been twins. He was, in fact, three years younger

than his brother. Yet there were some points of difference. Van

Cortlandt Sturges’ mouth was a straight line, his hair was many shades

lighter, almost flaxen, and he was several inches taller. But the

expression of the upper part of the two faces was identical. He, too,

had left Harvard with high honours, and ambition devoured him. Although

only thirty he was District Attorney of Westchester County. But as yet

his fame had not gone beyond its borders, although within them his dry

incisive bitter eloquence had carried many juries. Criminals in their

cells thought on him with terror. He had sent several men to the chair,

but no man that had been defended by Garan Bourke. People said of him

lightly that he would not go out of his way to be President of the

United States until he had thrashed Bourke on his own ground.

“I’d like ten minutes as soon as possible,” he said. “I have an

important communication to make.”

“I’ll hear it now.” To the typewriter: “You can go. Don’t return until I

ring, and tell Tom to stand in front of the door and admit no

one.—Well, what is it?”

“Have you made up your mind to publish that Westchester County scandal?”

“How do you know anything about that?”

“They sent for me yesterday and besought me to use my influence with

you. I am engaged to the woman’s sister.”

“The devil you are! This is bad—bad. But I can’t do anything. I paid

fifteen hundred dollars for that story.”

“I know you did. If I could give you a better, would you let that go?”

“Wouldn’t I? It’s a white elephant. I thought you didn’t know me so

little as to come here with sentiment. Fire away.”

“Of course you remember the Gardiner Peeles, although you never go

anywhere. You went to one or two children’s parties there when you were

a kid. Well, Beverly Peele died suddenly night before last, supposedly

of an overdose of morphine administered by himself. Now, old Lewis, the

family physician, is a great friend of mine, and likely to be

communicative in his cups. Last night he dined with me, and after he was

pretty well loaded told me a remarkable yarn. It seems that Mrs. Beverly

had not been on good terms with her husband since the early days of

their marriage, and had threatened to leave him from time to time. He

treated her well, and was desperately in love with her. She, as far as

is known, had nothing against him but personal dislike. She is said to

have frequently expressed hatred of him in violent terms. Well, winter

before last she left him, came to New York, and went to work on the

‘Day.’ The Peeles did everything to induce her to return, but she only

consented to go back temporarily this summer to nurse her husband, who

had been attacked with a chronic but not immediately fatal complaint.

Meanwhile it seems she had fallen in love with some one, and she met him

every Thursday in a wood. Jim, a stable boy, who had been brought up on

the place and was devoted to Beverly Peele, watched her, but said

nothing to his master, as he was cautiously waiting for some proof of

criminality. On the afternoon of Peele’s death there was a tremendous

scene between the lovers: young Mrs. Peele telling a furious story of

her husband’s refusal to give her divorce, of his threat to have her

watched, to expose her if she took a lover, and to live until ninety if

he had to go abroad and live at a foreign spa. She reiterated that she

hated him, and had frequently had the impulse to murder him. The lover

invited her to go to Texas, and she demurred, as she disliked scandal.

Jim told this story to Lewis when driving him home from the

death-bed,—his own horse had cast a shoe,—and the doctor advised him

to keep quiet.

“The night after the interview between the lovers—or rather the

following morning—Peele died of an overdose of morphine. She says he

took it himself; but it is a remarkable fact that never before—not in a

single instance—had he dropped the morphine himself. He had had a nurse

from the first, and when the pain was on he shook like a leaf. And

yet she asserts that she did not drop it that particular night, and

adds—by way of explanation—that they had had a violent quarrel and

he had refused to let her wait on him. While he was dying and the

others were working over him, she behaved in the most heartless

manner,—deliberately went to bed in the next room and went to sleep.

When Lewis awakened her, however, and told her that Peele was dead, she

displayed symptoms of abject terror, and tore across the hall and locked

herself in another room. Now, what do you think of it?”

Sturges’ eyes were glittering like smoked diamonds. “My God!” he cried.

“That’s a grand story! a corker! I’ll have Bart Tripp, the best

detective reporter in New York, up there inside of two hours. Between

whiskey and gold he’ll get every fact out of the servants they’ve got.

It’s worth two of the other. A young, beautiful, swagger woman accused

of murdering her husband, and that husband a Peele of Peele Manor! The

‘Eye’ will be read in the very bowels of the earth.”

“And I shall conduct the case for the prosecution.”

“The ‘Eye’ will let people know it. Don’t worry about that. Does Lewis

remember that he told you?”

“Not a word.”

II

On the following Sunday Patience arose early. Beverly had been in the

family vault down in the hollow for a week. She had wished to leave

immediately after the funeral, but had remained at the insistence of

Hal, who had returned at once, and was doubly depressed by her brother’s

death and the gloomy house. Mrs. Peele had gone to bed with a violent

attack of neuralgia some days ago, and had not risen since. Honora was

in constant attendance. Mr. Peele never opened his lips except to ask

for what he wanted. Burr, as a matter of course, spent the days in New

York or at a private club house in the neighbourhood.

Patience had moved into a room adjoining Hal’s. She kept the light

burning all night.

“I’ll be all right when I get back to New York,” she said, “but I have a

horror of death. I can’t help it.”

“Who hasn’t?” asked Hal. “I wish I were a man—or could be as selfish as

one.”

On this Sunday morning Patience rose after a restless night, and went

downstairs as soon as she was dressed. The “Day” and the “Eye”—Burr’s

favorite newspaper—lay on a table in the hall. She carried them into

the library and turned them over listlessly, then remembered that a

great Westchester County scandal had been promised for the Sunday “Eye”

by the issue of the day before, and that Hal and Burr were on the alert,

suspecting that they half knew the story already.

She opened the “Eye” and glanced at the headlines of the first page. In

the place of honour, the extreme left hand column, she found her story:

WAS IT MURDER?

AN OLD MANOR HOUSE IN WESTCHESTER COUNTY MAY

HAVE BEEN THE THEATRE OF A GREAT CRIME!

A YOUNG WIFE SUSPECTED OF THE FOUL DEED!

Patience read ten lines. Then she stumbled to her feet, spilling the

papers to the floor. Her skin felt cold and wet, her knees trembled, her

hands moved spasmodically. Something within her seemed disintegrating.

She got to the door and up to her room. Aside from the horror which sat

in each nerve centre and jabbered, she was conscious of but one idea:

she must fly. She flung off her robe and put on the black frock she had

bought out of deference to the family’s grief. She scratched herself and

thrust the buttons into the wrong holes, but she could call no one to

her assistance. She was thankful it was so early; she could get away

without encountering any of the family. She was about to put on her

black bonnet when her muddled consciousness emitted another flash and

bade her disguise herself; detectives would have orders to search for a

woman in weeds. She tore off the mourning frock, dropping it to the

floor, and got herself into a grey one, then pinned on a grey hat

trimmed with pink flowers. She thrust a few things into a bag, and ran

down the stair. She reached the station in time to flag the 8.30 train

for New York. Some one else boarded the same train, but she did not see

him.

Having accomplished her flight, her thoughts travelled to the objective

point. Inevitably her woman’s instinct turned to the man whose duty it

was to protect her. She convinced herself femininely that if she could

reach him all would be well; he not only loved her, but he was so

amazingly clever.

At the station in New York she walked deliberately to a cab and gave the

man Morgan Steele’s address. She looked neither to the right nor to the

left, consequently did not see that the man who had boarded the train at

Peele Manor stood at her elbow when she gave the order, and followed her

immediately.

When the cab reached the house in which Morgan Steele lived, she

dismissed it and ran up the steps. She rang again and again, pacing the

narrow stoop in an agony of fear and impatience. At the end of ten

minutes an irritable half dressed Frenchman came shuffling down the

stairs. There were no curtains on the door, and the man’s expression

struck new terror to her heart.

“What is it?” he asked surlily, as he opened the door.

“I—I—must see Mr. Steele.”

“Mr. Steele is asleep. He does not receive visitors at this hour.”

“I must see him.” Her cheeks were flaming under the man’s scrutiny.

“Here,” she opened her purse and gave him a bill, then pushed him aside

and ran upstairs. She remembered that Steele had told her that his rooms

were on the second floor, front. The halls were as dark as midnight. She

had to feel with her hands for a door. There was one at the end facing

the hall. She knocked so loudly that Steele sprang out of bed.

“What is it?” he cried.

“It is I. Open the door—quick!”

Steele made no reply until he opened a door at the side of the hall. He

had tied himself into a bath robe.

“Good heavens!” he said, “why have you come here? Are you mad?”

“Oh, I think I am. Lock the door—quick. Oh, haven’t you heard? Didn’t

you know about it before? The ‘Day’ is right next door to the ‘Eye.’ Why

didn’t you warn me?”

“What on earth are you talking about? What has happened? Do sit down and

calm yourself.”

“The ‘Eye’ is out with a big story that I murdered Beverly Peele. That

is what is the matter.”

“What? Oh, you poor child! The damned rascals! But you shouldn’t have

come here. Don’t you know that the ‘Eye’ will watch every move you make?

It takes the clever woman to do the wrong thing, every time!”

He went to the window and peered out, then clenched his teeth, and

raising his arm brought it down violently.

“They can’t put me in prison, can they?”

He pressed his finger to a bell. “I must read what they have to say.

They are very wary, and never would have printed such a story unless

they had had a good deal of circumstantial evidence. But they will need

a terrible lot to convict you. Don’t worry.”

“Oh, how can you be so cool?”

“Some one has to be cool, my dear girl. If you cannot think I must think

for you.” A man has not much sentiment at that hour of the morning;

still, Steele had sympathy in his nature, and was profoundly disturbed.

The servant came up with the newspapers, and Steele ordered coffee and

rolls from the restaurant below. He threw himself into a chair, opened

the “Eye,” and read the story through deliberately, word for word, while

Patience walked nervously up and down the room. When he had finished he

laid the newspaper on the table.

“It’s a damned bad case,” he said.

“You don’t believe I did it, do you?”

He looked at her for a moment with his peculiarly searching gaze. “No,”

he said, “you didn’t do it. You’d be even more interesting if you had.

But that’s not the question. We’ve got to make others believe you didn’t

do it. The first thing for you to do is to go directly back to Peele

Manor. Tell them you came up to see Miss Merrien and to engage rooms.

Anything you like—only go back there and wait. If you are arrested, it

must be from there, and there must be no suggestion of fear on your

part—you must brace up and carry it off.”

The waiter entered with the coffee and rolls, and Steele made her drink

and eat.

“It is 9.45,” he said. “You can catch a train that goes between ten and

eleven.”

When Patience had finished she drew on her gloves. “I’ll go,” she said,

“and I’ll try to do as you say. I’ve made a fool of myself, but I won’t

again—I promise. I can be as cold as stone, you know. That’s the New

England part of me. And so long as I know that you care I sha’n’t break

down—in public at least.”

“Oh, I care fast enough—poor little woman. Here, leave that bag, for

heaven’s sake. You mustn’t go back with that.”

III

When Patience arrived at Peele Manor she knew before she reached the

house that her story had been read and told. The gardener turned on his

heel as she passed him and walked hastily away. A new stable boy stared

at her until she thought his eyes would fly from their sockets.

As she entered the front door, Hal ran forward and threw her arms about

her.

“Oh, Patience! Patience!” she sobbed hysterically. “That brutal paper!

How could they do such a thing? Have they no heart nor soul?”

“You don’t believe it then?” said Patience, gratefully.

“Of course I don’t believe it—believe such a thing of _you_! Oh, I’m so

glad you’ve come back. They were all sure you’d run away; but I knew you

hadn’t. It is only the guilty that hide—But why on earth did you put on

that grey frock?”

“Oh, I don’t know. How can one know what one’s doing—What does your

father say?”

The girls were in one of the small reception-rooms. Hal removed

Patience’s hat and gloves.

“Oh, this has been the most terrible day of my life,” she said

evasively. “But you must be prudent, Patience dear. You must wear

black—What is it?”

A servant had entered the room.

“Mr. Peele would like to see Mrs. Beverly in the library!”

Patience rose and shook herself a little, as if she would shake her

nerves into place. Hal’s face flushed, and she turned away.

As Patience crossed the hall she met Latimer Burr. He held out his hand

and pressed hers warmly.

“This is terrible, Patience,” he said; “but remember that Hal and I are

always your friends. If the worst comes to the worst I’ll send you my

attorney. Remember that, and don’t engage any one else, for he’s one of

the ablest criminal lawyers in the country.”

“Oh, you are good!” she said. She smiled even through the grateful tears

which sprang to her eyes. Burr had grown a visible inch. His chest and

lips were slightly extended.

Mr. Peele sat in a large chair, his elbows on the arms, his finger-tips

lightly pressed together. As Patience stood before him she felt as if

transfixed by two steel lances.

“You murdered my son.”

“I did not.” Her courage came back to her under the overt attack.

“You murdered my son. The evidence is conclusive to me as a lawyer—and

to my knowledge of you. My error was that I regarded your threats as

feminine ravings. I wish you to leave my house at once—within the hour.

I shall not have you arrested, but if you are I shall appear against

you; and I have some evidence, as you will admit. You have dishonoured

an ancient house,” he continued with cold passion, “and you have left it

without an heir. Its name, after nearly three hundred years in this

country alone, must die with me. If you had borne a son I should move

heaven and earth to get you out of the country, but now I hope to heaven

you’ll go to the chair.”

Patience shuddered and chilled, but she answered: “You despised your

son, and you should be thankful that he left no second edition of

himself.”

“He was my son, and the last of his name. Now, kindly leave this house.”

Patience went up to her room and began to pack her trunk. Hal followed,

and when she heard what her father had said cried bitterly. She helped

Patience to pack, assisted her into the black clothes, then walked to

the station with her and stood conspicuously on the platform, waving her

hand as the train moved off.

IV

Patience went directly to her old quarters in Forty-Fourth Street. She

told the cabman not to lift her trunk down until she ascertained if

there was a vacant room in the house. The bell was answered by a maid

that had been there in her time. The girl stifled a scream and fled.

Patience shut the door behind her with a hand that trembled again, and

went slowly upstairs to Miss Merrien’s room. A solemn voice answered her

knock. When she opened the door Miss Merrien sprang up and came forward.

Her face was drawn, her eyes were red.

“Oh, Mrs. Peele!” she cried.

“Do you believe it? If you do, I’ll go at once.”

“Of course I don’t believe it! How can you ask me? Sit down. How good of

you to come here. Tell me—are you terribly frightened?”

“No, I don’t think I am now. Why should I be? If I am so unlucky as to

have been tossed up in the news hat of the ‘Eye,’ I cannot help it; and

I suppose this is only the beginning. If I have to go to jail I have to,

and that is the end of it; but they cannot possibly convict me, for I am

innocent.”

“Oh, you always were the bravest woman I ever knew. It is like

you—Come.”

The door opened, and the landlady entered and closed it carefully behind

her. She was a tall thin elderly woman with a refined face stamped with

commercial unquiet. Her grey hair was piled high. Her voice was low, and

well modulated. She looked at Patience out of faded blue eyes in which

there was a faint sparkle of resentment.

“I see that you have a trunk on your cab, Mrs. Peele,” she said, “I am

very sorry that I have no room.”

“I had no intention of asking you for a room,” said Patience, haughtily.

“I merely came to call on Miss Merrien; and as I have only a few moments

to spare, I should be obliged if you would leave us alone.”

The landlady retired in disorder, and Miss Merrien exhausted her

vocabulary of invective.

“What is the use?” said Patience. “She is right. In the struggle for

bread and butter it must be self first, last, and always. If it were

known—as it would be—that I had been arrested from her house every

other lodger would leave. Well, I must go roof-hunting.” She laughed

suddenly. “If I do go to jail I suppose you’ll come to interview me. I

hope so. Good-bye.”

Miss Merrien, although not a demonstrative girl, kissed her

affectionately. “The ‘Day’ will defend you for all it’s worth—you know

that. And I needn’t say anything about myself.”

Patience told her cabman to drive to the Holland House, but when he

stopped there she did not get out. Reflection had convinced her that no

hotel in New York would take her in. She dared not give a false name

lest her motive should be misconstrued. She put her head out of the

window and gave the man Rosita’s address.

“There is no other way,” she thought. “I cannot live in a cab. Mrs.

Field would take me in, but I have no right to make such a test of

friendship as that.”

Rosita received her with open arms. She was looking very beautiful in

flowing nainsook and lace, and exhaled a new and delicious perfume.

“Patita! Patita _mia_!” she purred. “_Pobrecita!_ Who would have thought

that this would happen to my _lili_.” (Her accent was more pronounced

than ever.)

“Can I stay with you until they arrest me, or this blows over?”

“You shall stay with me forever. ‘Are we not bound by the ties of

childhood?’ That is a line in my new opera. Isn’t it funny? Ay, Patita,

I am so sorry.” And she sent down for the trunk and removed Patience’s

hat.

V

The next morning Patience was awakened by Rosita’s ecstatic voice. She

opened her eyes to see her hostess standing at the bedside, the “Eye” in

her hand, her face radiant.

“Patita!” she cried. “Read it—there is a whole column about you and

me.”

Patience sat up in bed. “Is that why you were so glad to have me come

here?” she asked.

“Patita! Do not look at me like that. Oh, if I could only look that way

when I am stage mad!—but they always say I look like an angry baby. Of

course, that was not the reason, Patita _mia_; but it is heavenly to be

written about; do not you think so? And, of course, every new story

about me—and such a sensation as this—means a perfect rush—”

“Give me the paper, please.”

She read the column while Rosita pattered back to her room and ate her

dainty breakfast. Every move she had made on the day before was

chronicled. On another page an editorial commented on the facts of her

having visited a young man’s apartment, and finally taken refuge with

the notorious Spanish woman.

She dressed herself hastily in her black garments, and locked and

strapped her trunk. “I’ll go straight down and give myself up,” she

thought. “It’s what I ought to have done yesterday. It’s eleven o’clock.

I wish it were nine. Come.”

“Two gentlemen to see madame,” said the maid.

“What—who—what do they look like?”

“Like policemen, and yet not, madame.”

Patience gasped. Her knees gave way. Again she experienced that horrible

feeling of disintegration. Her untasted breakfast stood on a table by

the bed. She hastily drank a cup of black coffee, then walked steadily

to the drawing-room.

“You have come for me?” she asked of the men.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Where am I to go?”

“To the jail at White Plains, Westchester County. You are arrested on

charge of murder;” and he displayed the warrant.

Patience touched the bell button. “Take my trunk downstairs to the cab,”

she said to the butler. Then she stepped to the portières and said

good-bye to Rosita.

“She’s a cool one,” said one man to the other. “She done it.”

They went down in the elevator. As they left it, one of the men preceded

her, the other followed close. Both entered the cab with her. She felt

that they were regarding her with the frank curiosity of their kind, and

kept her eyes fixed on the street with an expressionless stare. On the

train they gave her a seat to herself, each taking the outside of

another, one before and one behind. The passengers did not suspect the

meaning of the party. She saw no one she knew. It was not the line that

passed Peele Manor. For small mercies she was duly thankful. She

guessed, however, that a meagre wiry black-eyed young man on the

opposite side of the aisle, a man with a mean sharp common face, was

Bart Tripp. He stared at her until she thought she should scream aloud,

or, what would be almost as fatal, relax the proud calm of her face. It

was with a sigh of profound relief that she stepped from the train at

White Plains.

“We won’t meet no one,” said one of the detectives, as they entered the

hack. “The sheriff’s got ready for you, I guess; he was wired yesterday;

but we took good care not to say what train we was coming on, so there

wouldn’t be no crowd. Feeling’s pretty high against you, I guess.”

As they drove through the ugly little town, Patience wondered why it was

called White Plains. She had never seen a more undulating country. One

or two of the environing hills were almost perpendicular. She also

noticed with the minute observance of persons approaching crises, that

the court house was a big handsome building of grey stone, and decided

that she liked its architecture. The extension behind, one of the

keepers told her, was the jail.

She was escorted before a police justice, who read the charge and

explained such privileges as the law allowed her; then to the sheriff’s

office, where she was registered. A crowd of men were in the office.

They watched her with deep but respectful attention, as she answered the

many questions put to her, but she managed to maintain her impassive

demeanour. There was a buzz of excitement by this time all through the

court house, and a little of it began to communicate itself to her. The

few that are sustained through life’s trials by public interest are

immeasurably fortunate. Before the sheriff—who could not have treated

her with more consideration were she a dethroned queen—had finished,

word had gone up into the court room, and a sudden trampling on the back

stair indicated that the case in hand had lost its interest.

“That’s all,” said the sheriff, hurriedly. “Guess you’d better get

along.—Tarbox,” he called.

A short stout man with a ruddy kind face came forward, offered Patience

his arm, pushed his way through the crowd of men in the hall, and led

her out of a back door and down a long yard beside the jail. At the end

of the building he inserted a key in a lock.

“Go right up, ma’am,” he said politely, and she ascended a narrow flight

of stairs. At its head he unlocked another door, and again they

ascended, again a door was unlocked. Then Patience stepped into a long

low clean well-lighted room. In the middle of its length was a stove

over which a kettle boiled. On a bench sat four women. At each end and

on one side were low grated windows. On the other side were a number of

grated doors.

The man led Patience to the upper end of the room and swung open the

door of the corner cell. It was a large cell, and had it not been for

the low window with its iron bars would have been in no wise different

from any room of simple comfort. A red carpet covered the floor. The bed

in the corner was fresh and spotless. The rest of the furniture was new

and convenient. There were even a large rocker and a student’s lamp.

Over the door a curtain had been hung.

“Why!” exclaimed Patience, “are all prison cells like this?”

“No, ma’am, they’re not; but you see when we have a lady—which isn’t

often—we do what we can to make her feel at home. We can’t afford to

forget that this is the swell county of New York, you know. And of

course you’re the finest person we’ve ever had. You’ll be treated well

here,—you needn’t worry about that. I’ll order one of them girls

outside to wait on you.”

“You are very good.” For the first time tears threatened.

“Well, I’ll try to be to you, ma’am. I’m John Tarbox, deputy sheriff,

jailor, warden, and all the rest of it. I shall look after you. I’ll

call twice a day, and anything you want you’ll get. If any of them

hussies out there get to fighting just sing out the window, and I’ll

lock them up.”

“You won’t lock me in?”

“Oh, no—there’s no need for that. This cell’s no stronger than the

whole place. Well, make yourself comfortable. I’ll send over to the

hotel to get a lunch for you. You must be hungry. Keep a stiff upper

lip.”

Patience, when she was alone, drew a long breath and looked about her.

The cheerful room, the unexpected kindness of the sheriffs, had raised

her spirits. She took off her hat and tossed it on the bed.

“I may as well take the situation humourously,” she thought. “It helps

more than anything else in life, I’ve discovered. This can’t last

forever, and they can’t convict me. The serious people of this world

have always struck me as being the most farcical. So here goes my ninth

or tenth lesson in philosophy. Such is life.”

After luncheon Mag, the improvised maid, unpacked the trunk and shook

out the pretty garments with many expressions of rapture. Patience gave

her a red frock, and the girl was her slave thenceforth.

The afternoon hours revolved like a clogged wheel in a muddy stream.

Excitement and novelty kept horror at bay, but she knew that it lurked,

biding its time.

When night came she lit the lamp and tried to read a magazine that

Tarbox had brought her; but it fell from her hands again and again. Her

ears acted independently of her will. She had never known so terrible a

stillness. The women had gone to bed at half past seven. No voice came

from the distant street. The silence of eternity seemed to have

descended upon those massive walls.

She was in jail!

She sprang to her feet, shuddering; then set her teeth and knelt by the

window.

The heat waves of August hid the stars. Beyond the jail-yard was a mass

of buildings, but no light in any window. Now and again a tramp came

forth from his quarters on the ground floor and strolled about the yard,

smoking his pipe; but he made no sound, and in his grey dilapidation

looked like a parodied ghost. One of the women cursed loudly in her

sleep, then collapsed into silence. An engine whistle shrieked,

hilarious with freedom, but the rattle of the train was too distant to

carry to straining ears.

She clutched the bars and shook them, then crouched, trembling and

gasping. She dropped forward, resting her face on her arms. Her fine

courage retreated, and mocked her. She had no wish to recall it. She

longed passionately for the strong arm and the strong soul of a man. The

independence and self-reliance which Circumstance had implanted, seemed

to fade out of her; she was woman symbolised. No shipwrecked mariner was

ever so desolate; for nothing in all life is so tragic as a woman forced

to stand and do battle alone.

It was only when she arose, shivering and exhausted, and groped her way

to bed, that it occurred to her that in those appalling moments she had

not thought of Morgan Steele.

VI

In the morning she awoke with a start and a chill, and sprang out of

bed, governed by an impulse to fling herself against the bars. But sleep

had refreshed her, and she sat down and reasoned herself into courage

and hope once more. The tussle with the world develops the iron in a

woman’s blood, and Patience’s experiences of the last year and a half

stood her in good stead now. When the girl came in to arrange her room

and Tarbox brought her breakfast, the commonplace details completed her

poise. The morning mail brought her letters from Steele and Hal.

DEAR GIRL [Steele’s ran],—You are blue and frightened and

lonesome. I wish I were there to cheer you up. But the first day

will be the worst. Remember that liberty is not far off. They

cannot convict you. I shall see you a few hours after you get

this.

M. S.

Oh, Patience dear [Hal had written], it has come! I wish I could

tell you how terribly I feel. But cheer up, old girl. It will

come out all right—I know it will. Latimer is hustling me out

of the country so I cannot appear as a witness—he says I would

do you more harm than good. But he will stay and see you

through. His attorney will call on you at once. I send you a box

to cheer you up a little. Do write to me, and always remember

that I am your sister

HAL.

The box arrived an hour later. It contained her silver toilet-set, and

all the paraphernalia of a well-groomed and pretty woman, a bottle of

cologne, a box of candy, eight French novels, a large box of handsome

writing paper, and a bolt of black satin ribbon. Patience arranged the

toilet-set on the bureau, halved the candy with the women, then sat down

with a volume of Bourget. When Tarbox came up an hour later with a card

she was still reading, and quite herself.

“Well,” he said, “I’m glad, I am, to see you so contented and so cool,”

he added, mopping his brow. “This gent is below. He says he’s one of the

lawyers in the case. I hoped you’d have Bourke. He’s the smartest man in

Westchester County! Shall I tell him to come up, or would you like to

see him down in the sheriffs office? Anything to please you.”

“Oh, here, by all means, if he doesn’t mind the stairs.”

Tarbox gazed at her admiringly. “Well, ma’am,” he ejaculated, “you are

cool, but I for one believe it’s the coolness of innocence. You never

did murder!” and he walked hastily away as if ashamed of his enthusiasm.

The lawyer’s card bore the name of Eugene A. Simms. He came up at once,

a short thick-set man of thirty, with a square shrewd dogged face, a low

brow, a snub nose, and black brilliant hard eyes. He came in with a

bustling aggressive business-like air, scanning Patience as if he

expected to find all the points of the case written upon her. Patience

conceived an immediate and violent dislike to him.

“Will you sit down?” she said stiffly. “You are Mr. Burr’s lawyer, I

believe.”

“Oh, no. That’s Bourke. He has charge of the case. I’m getting it up. I

shall attend the coroner’s inquest and get the case in shape for Mr.

Bourke to conduct.”

The blood rose to Patience’s hair and receded to her heart, which

changed its time; but she asked no questions.

Simms leaned forward and fixed her with his unpleasant eyes. “Be

perfectly frank with me,” he said, abruptly. “It’s best. We can’t work

in the dark. We’ll pull you through; that’s what we are here for.”

“You take it for granted that I am guilty, I suppose?”

“I’m bound to say that all the revealed facts point that way. But of

course that makes no difference to us. In fact, the harder a case is the

better Bourke likes it—”

“Does Mr. Bourke believe that I am guilty?”

“I haven’t discussed it with him. He merely called me in, put the facts

in my hands, and told me to go to work. I haven’t seen him since.”

“I will be perfectly frank with you,” said Patience, who had recovered

herself. “I did not murder Mr. Peele. I am not wholly an idiot. If I had

wished to poison him do you suppose I would have selected the drug I was

known to administer?”

“You might have done it in a moment of passion. You had had a quarrel

with him that night.”

“So much the more reason why I would not make such a fatal mistake. It

is quite true that when in a passion I frequently expressed the wish to

kill him. I will also tell you that one night when dropping the morphine

I was seized with an uncontrollable impulse to give him a double dose. I

dropped twenty-six drops. But fortunately it takes some time to do that,

and meanwhile the impulse weakened, and I anathematised myself as a

fool. No man nor woman of respectable brains ever made a mistake like

that.”

“What is your own theory?”

“I hardly believe that he committed suicide. I think that he was wild

with pain, and did not count the drops. He was probably half blind. On

the other hand, he was capable of anything when in a rage.”

Mr. Simms scraped the floor with his boot-heels and beat a tattoo on his

knee with his fingers. “Very well,” he said at last. “We take your word,

of course. Now tell me as nearly as you can, every circumstance of that

night, and give me a general idea of your relations with him and your

reasons for leaving him. It is going to be one of the biggest fights

this State has ever seen, and we want all the help you can give us.”

After he had gone Patience fell into a rage. Why had not Bourke come

himself instead of sending his underling? If he hesitated to meet her

after the abominable words he had used that second night at Peele Manor

why had he undertaken her case at all? Her pride revolted at the thought

of being defended by him, of owing her life to him. Once she was at the

point of writing him a haughty note declining to accept his services;

but Latimer Burr’s kindness deserved a more gracious acknowledgment.

Again, she took up her pen to inform him that unless he apologised he

must understand that she could have no relations with him; but her

lively fear of making herself ridiculous came to the rescue, and she

threw the pen aside. She resumed her novel, but it had lost its flavour.

Bourke’s face was on every page. The interview in the elm walk wrote

itself between the French lines; and the subsequent conversation in the

library danced in letters of red. She hated Bourke the more bitterly

because he had once been something more to her than any other man had

been. She worked herself into such a bad humour that she almost snubbed

Miss Merrien and a “Day” artist who came to interview and sketch her;

and when Morgan Steele arrived, late in the afternoon, she was as

perverse and unreasonable as if the widowed châtelaine of Peele Manor

with the world at her feet. He understood her mood perfectly, although

not the cause of it, and guyed her into good humour and her native sense

of the ridiculous.

“Oh, I do like you,” she said. “You understand me so. Any other man

would go off in a huff. And I won’t always be like this. I suppose I am

nervous and upset and all the rest of it. Who wouldn’t be? And you know

I am tremendously fond of you.”

“I know you are,” he said dryly. “As you will have ample time for

reflection and meditation in the next few months, you will find out just

how fond. But I am more glad than I can say to find you in this mood. It

is as healthy as irritability in illness. I am even willing to be

sacrificed.”

Patience put out her hand and patted his soft hair with a spasm of

genuine affection. “You are the dearest boy in the world,” she said,

“and I do love you. For all your uncanny wisdom and cold-blooded

philosophy you are just a big lovable good-natured boy.”

“Just the kind of fellow a woman would like to have for a brother, in

short.”

“No! No! I think it will be the most charming thing in the world to be

married to you. You are such a compound. You will interest me forever.

Most people are such bores after a little.”

“If you hadn’t started out in life with ideas upside-down, you would

really love me in loving me no more than you do now. But ideals and the

fixed idea have got to be worked out to the bitter end, as you are fond

of remarking. In reality, happiness means a comfortable state of affairs

between a man and a woman with plenty of brains, philosophy, and

passion, who are wholly congenial in these three matters, and have

chucked their illusions overboard. However, we won’t discuss the matter

any further at present. How do you like being the sensation of the day?”

“Am I?”

“Are you? Every newspaper in town had a big story this morning, and of

course the news has gone all over the country. Nothing else is to be

heard in the trains or in Park Row. Oh, you will have plenty to sustain

you. Lots of women would give their heads to be in your place.”

He dined with her and remained until eight o’clock. After he had gone,

Patience sat for some time lost in a pleasurable reverie. He always left

her in a good humour, and she unquestionably loved him. Few women could

help loving Morgan Steele. She sighed once as she reflected that love

was not the tremendous passion she had once imagined it to be; in all

her dreams she had never pictured it as a restful and tranquillising

element; but she conceded that Steele’s philosophy was correct.

And if he did not inspire her with a mightier passion it was her fault,

not his. Miss Merrien had told her of one brilliant newspaper woman who

had made a wilful idiot of herself on his behalf, and of a popular and

gifted actress who at one time had taken to haunting the “Day” office,

much to the enjoyment of his fellow editors and to his own futile wrath.

“No,” she thought, “I made a mistake once, and the shock was so great

that it either benumbed or stunted me; or else the imaginary me was

killed and the real developed. And after such a marriage I doubt if

there are depths or heights left in one’s nature.”

Then her mind drifted to her predicament, and she wondered that the

workings of fear had so wholly ceased. “I suppose it is because that man

is going to defend me,” she said, ruthlessly, at last. “They say he

could save a man that had been caught driving a knife into another man’s

heart with a hammer; so it is quite natural that I should feel safe.”

VII

The next day a box of books and periodicals arrived from Steele. Rosita

thoughtfully subscribed to a clipping bureau, and sent Patience daily a

heavy package of “stories,” editorials, and telegrams of which she was

the heroine. Patience became so bewildered over the contradictory

descriptions of her personal appearance, the various versions of her

marital drama, the hundred and one theories for the murder and defence,

the ingenious analyses of her character, and the conflicting information

regarding her girlhood, that she wondered sometimes if a person could

come forth from the hands of so many creators and retain any original

birthmarks. The “Eye” telegraphed to its correspondent in San Francisco

to investigate her childhood, and the correspondent evidently

interviewed all her old enemies. Her mother’s happy career was detailed

with glee, and her own “sulky, moody, eccentric, murderous propensities”

were brilliantly epitomised. The story was entitled “She Tried To Murder

Her Mother,” and the “Eye’s” perfervid joy at this discovery throbbed in

an editorial.

The story was copied the length and breadth of the United States; but it

is only fair to add that Mr. Field’s eloquent leaders in her defence

were as widely quoted.

Miss Beale came to see her at once, and after a few tears and an

emphatic warning that “this terrible ordeal was the logical punishment

of her blasphemy of and disrespect to the Lord,” announced her intention

to sit by her during the trial, and let the jury see what a president of

the W. C. T. U. thought of a prisoner whose life was in their hands.

Patience told her that she loved her, and indeed was deeply grateful.

She spent her mornings reading the newspapers and attending to her

correspondence. Tarbox always paid her a short call, and usually

discoursed of Garan Bourke, whom he admired extravagantly. For a half

hour before luncheon she permitted her fellow prisoners to sit before

her in a wondering semi-circle while she manicured her nails and drew

vivid word-pictures of the superior comforts incident upon the

resignation of alcohol. With the exception of Mag they were

weather-beaten creatures, with hollow eyes and weak pathetic mouths.

They admired Patience superlatively. She was touched by their devotion,

and occasionally read them the funny stories in the illustrated

weeklies. They listened with open mouth and voiceless laughter, which,

however, expressed itself vocally when the stories were told in Irish or

German dialect. Patience gave them the papers, and they pasted the

pictures on the walls of the corridor. Never before had the female ward

of the White Plains Jail presented so festive an appearance. When the W.

C. T. U. ladies came to sing to the prisoners they were inclined to be

horrified; but Patience assured them that love of art, however

manifested, was a hopeful sign.

She was very comfortable. She had saved a thousand dollars,—to be

exact, Miss Merrien had saved them for her,—and she could command all

the small luxuries of prison life. The ugly walls of her cell had been

draped with red cloth, and a low bookcase was rapidly filling with the

literature of the moment. She would never have consented to save those

thousand dollars had not Miss Merrien represented that by judicious

economy she could manage to spend every third year abroad. They did her

good service now; she could accept great favours, but not small ones.

Graceful tributes were to be expected by every charming woman; but if

she had been dependent upon friends for the small comforts of her daily

life she would have gone without them.

The W’s and Y’s of Mariaville forgave her, and brought her flowers,

tracts, and spiritual admonitions. She received the former with

gratitude and the latter with grace. Miss Merrien came as often as her

duties permitted, and so did all the other newspaper women she had ever

known or heard of. She was interviewed for nearly every newspaper in the

Union, and in most cases treated with sensational kindness. Many

strangers and a few old friends called.

Steele came regularly once a week. He dared not come oftener. The “lover

in the case” was still a mystery, and it was as well that he should

remain so. Five other newspaper men lived in his house; therefore

Patience’s visit had told Bart Tripp nothing beyond the fact that she

had indubitably called on a young man at his apartments at a quarter

past nine in the morning.

But despite the fact that much of her time was occupied Patience grew

very restless and nervous, after the novelty wore off. She spent hours

pacing up and down the corridor, and every evening after dark Tarbox

took her out in the jail-yard for a walk; but she had been used to long

walks and hours in the open air all her life, and no woman ever lived

less suited to routine and restraint of any sort. Fear did not return,

although the coroner’s jury had pronounced her guilty and she had been

indicted by the Grand Jury.

VIII

When the dark days of winter came little light struggled through the low

grating, and she was obliged to keep her lamp burning most of the time.

Steele sent her one with a rose-coloured shade which shed a cheerful

light but hurt her eyes. When the storms began visitors came

infrequently. Moreover, as public interest cannot be kept at concert

pitch for any length of time, there was less and less about her in the

newspapers. Steele, who understood the intimate relationship between

public interest and the resignation of a prisoner, assured her that when

her trial came off in March she would once more be the popular news of

the day.

At first the monotony of the long silent winter days was intolerable.

But gradually, by such short degrees, that she hardly realised the

change taking place within her, she grew to love her solitude and to be

grateful for it. For the first time since she had left Monterey her

hours were absolutely her own. She had longed for the solitude of a

forested mountain top. From her prison window she could see the naked

tops of a clump of trees above the buildings opposite, and even her

obedient imagination could not expand them to primeval heights; but at

least she had solitude and not a petty detail to annoy her.

She sometimes wondered if it mattered where one spent the few years of

this unsatisfactory life. Nothing was of permanent satisfaction.

Strongly as she had been infatuated with newspaper work the interest

would have lasted only just so long. She found her modernity slipping

from her, herself relapsing into the dreaming child of the tower with

vague desire for something her varied experience of the world had not

helped her to find. Inevitably she came to know herself and the large

demands of her nature, and as inevitably she said to Morgan Steele one

day,—

“I think you have known all along that it was a mistake.”

“Yes,” he said, “I have known it.”

“You have everything—everything,—good looks and distinction, brains

and modernity, magnetism of a queer cold sort, knowledge of women and

kindness of heart—I cannot understand. But the spark, the response, the

exaltation is not there,—the splendid rush of emotion. I love you, but

not in the way that makes matrimony marriage.”

He looked at her with his peculiar smile, an expansion of one corner of

his mouth which gave him something of the expression of a satyr. “You

were badly in need of a companion, and you found one in me. You wanted

to be understood, and I understood you. You wanted sympathy, and I

sympathised with you; but I am not the man, and I have never for one

moment deluded myself.”

“Then why would you have allowed me to drift into matrimony with

you?—as I should have done if I had not come here.”

“Because the experiment would have been no more dangerous than most

matrimonial experiments. And it would have been very delightful for a

time.”

“I should have loved you a good deal,” she said musingly, “and habit is

a tremendous force. And I should never have permitted myself to

recognise a mistake again—if the decisive step had been taken. Tell

me—” she added abruptly, “do you believe that if I had married you that

you would always have loved me?”

“I certainly should never have been so unwise as to promise to, for that

is something no man can foretell. The chances are that I should not. All

phases of feeling are temporary,—all emotions, all desires, all

fulfilment. Life itself is temporary.”

“Should you have been true to me?”

“O-h-h, how in thunder can a man answer a question like that? That is

something he never knows till the time comes. If he is sensible he

wastes no time making resolutions, and if he is honest he makes no

promises.”

“You do not love me,” she exclaimed triumphantly.

“I am merely more honest, perhaps more analytical than most men,—that

is all. The man who swears he will love forever the woman that pleases

him most is simply talking from the depths of ignorance straight up

through his hat. No man knows anything—what he will do or feel

to-morrow. He knows nothing of himself until his time comes to die, and

then he knows blamed little.”

Patience shook her head. “I don’t know. You may be right in the

analysis, but I think you lose a good deal. Love may be a species of

insanity, but the man whose brain is crystal is not to be envied by the

man whose brain can scorch reason and thought at times. You may save

yourself heartbreak, but you miss heaven. If you are a type of the

future, woman will change too. Man has been at woman’s feet throughout

the centuries. You and your kind will place her on an exact level with

yourselves and teach her that love means a comfortable coupling of

personalities. Something primitive has gone out of you. You have every

ingredient in your make-up except love. Liking and passion don’t make

love. When it fades out of man altogether chivalry and homage will go

with it. You would do a great deal for me, but you are incapable of any

splendid self-sacrifice. You are entirely selfish, although in the most

charming way.”

“You are quite right,” he said smiling, “I have not much love in me;

just enough to make life a comfortable and pleasant sojourn, but not

enough to induce a regret were I obliged to toss it over to-morrow—”

“Nor to make it a life of bitter misery did I leave it.”

“No—to be perfectly frank I should not be bitterly miserable. I should

regret—but I should work and readjust myself. I have never yet given a

glance to the past. I give few to the future. No man gets more out of

the present—”

“I won’t be loved like that,” said Patience, passionately.

He leaned forward and took her hand, patting it gently. “You have depths

and heights in your nature which I fully appreciate but which I could

never stir nor satisfy,” he said. “Some man will. It won’t be all that

you expect—you have too much imagination—but you will have your day.

With your nature that is inevitable. I am sorry to give you up. You are

the most delightful woman I shall ever know. And if you had married me

things would probably have gone along satisfactorily enough. I should

have kept your mind occupied and talked to you about yourself—those are

the secrets of success in matrimony.”

“Marriage with you would be like playing at matrimony. I want a home and

husband and children. I have seen enough to know that unless one is a

fanatic like Miss Tremont or Miss Beale, or the temporary result of a

new and forced civilisation like Hal, or a mercenary wanton like

Rosita—in short, if one is woman _par excellence_, and most of us,

clever or otherwise, even gifted, usually are, nothing else is worth the

toil and perplexity of being alive. But you mustn’t leave me,” she added

hurriedly; “I can’t stand it here if you don’t come to see me.”

“I shall come exactly as I have done. Why not? Our love-making has

barely progressed beyond friendship: we shall hardly recognise any

change. I should feel lost if I could not have a talk with you once in a

while. I intend to have that for the rest of my life. It isn’t usually

the man that proposes the brother racket, but I merely define the basis

upon which we have really stood all along.”

After he had gone Patience drew a long sigh of relief. The first

terrible mistake of her life was buried with Beverly Peele. A second had

been averted. Something seemed rebuilding within her: the undeflected

continuation of the little girl in the tower. For the first time she

understood herself as absolutely as mortal can; and she paid a tribute

to the zigzag of life which had helped her to that final understanding.

IX

On the third of February she received a letter, the handwriting of whose

address made her change colour: she had seen it once on Mrs. Peele’s

desk. It was the first communication of any sort that she had received

from the man who was to defend her life. She opened the letter with

angry curiosity.

MY DEAR MRS. PEELE, [it read],—You will pardon me I am sure for

not having called before this when I tell you that I have had a

rush of civil cases which have hardly given me time for sleep

and have kept me constantly in New York. And of course you have

understood that there was really nothing I could do until my

able confederate, Mr. Simms, had gathered in and digested all

the facts in the case. Now, however, I am free, and the time has

come when I shall be obliged to see you twice a week until the

first of March. I have worked the harder in order to be at

liberty to devote myself wholly to your case. Need I add how

absolute that devotion will be, my dear Mrs. Peele, or how

entirely every resource I possess shall be at your service?

At two o’clock on Monday I shall be in the sheriff’s private

office with Mr. Simms and my assistant, Mr. Lansing. Will you

kindly meet us there?

With highest regard, I am, dear Mrs. Peele,

Yours faithfully,

GARAN BOURKE.

Patience read this carefully worded epistle twice, then laughed and

shrugged her shoulders.

“I am glad he has declared himself,” she thought. “Of course I should

have ignored the past, but it is a relief to think that there will be no

awkwardness.”

X

On Monday at two o’clock Tarbox came up to her cell to escort her down

to the sheriff’s office.

“Bourke’s there, and I never saw him looking better,” he said, rubbing

his hands. “Oh, he’ll pull you through. Don’t you worry.”

Patience was very nervous, but her years of self-repression and her

experience at Peele Manor had forged a key with which she could at times

lock nerve and muscle into subjection. As she entered the sheriff’s

office she smiled upon Mr. Bourke as graciously as any young and

beautiful woman would be expected to smile upon a great lawyer enlisted

in her service.

Bourke came forward with the same ballast, although the red was in his

face.

“It was better for you to come down here,” he said. “There could be no

privacy in your cell, and we must have absolute privacy for these

meetings. Of course you know that we are going to rehearse you. Mrs.

Peele, this is my assistant, Mr. Lansing.” He indicated a good-looking

well-dressed young fellow, with boyish blue eyes and a tilted nose. She

liked him at once and gave him her hand. Mr. Simms had risen as she

entered, and they had nodded distantly.

“Take this chair, Mrs. Peele,” continued Bourke. “Yes. This is the first

of many rehearsals. We shall keep them up until the trial. You will

imagine yourself on the witness stand. Mr. Simms, whom, fortunately, you

don’t like, is the district attorney, Lansing is the judge, I am the

counsel for the defence. I shall make the direct examination, and then

Mr. Simms will cross-examine you with all the subtlety, the venom, and

the irritating minutiæ of a district attorney determined to make himself

immortal. I think we have outlined with reasonable completeness all that

will or can be asked you, so that you can hardly be taken off your

guard: you must be prepared to give direct answers without suspicious

promptness, and avoid saying anything that could be misconstrued.”

“Must I go on the stand?” asked Patience, fearfully. “I thought one was

not obliged to, and I shall be so nervous.”

Bourke shook his head emphatically. “The judge might reiterate a hundred

times to the jury that your failure to go on the witness stand should

not be counted against you, and still it would count—more than

anything. It is something a jury never overlooks. These rehearsals are

to keep you from being nervous, as much as anything else.”

“Do you believe I am innocent?” asked Patience, giving way to an

uncontrollable impulse.

“I do—both personally and professionally.”

Simms laughed. “Bourke is so enthusiastic,” he said, “that if he had

made up his professional mind that you were innocent, the personal would

follow suit.”

“No, but I do,” said Bourke, laughing, and looking at Patience with eyes

which for the moment were more kind than keen. “Now, here goes.”

When the two hours’ rehearsal were over she was very pale. “I did not

know the case could look so black,” she said.

“It is a black case,” said Simms.

“Do you really take so much interest?” she asked Bourke, curiously. “You

make me feel as if the issue were yours and not mine. Or is that only

your professional pride?”

“Bourke is the most ambitious man at the New York bar,” said Simms.

“And the most human,” added Lansing.

Patience smiled at the young man and turned to Bourke, whose eyes were

twinkling. “I take a very deep personal interest in your case,” he said

gallantly.

“Bourke is an Irishman,” said Simms, with sarcasm.

“We’ll excuse you,” said Bourke. “You know you have business with

Sturges,” and Simms gathered up his papers and retired, followed by

Lansing. As the door closed Bourke’s face changed. He became serious at

once.

“Mrs. Peele,” he said, “it would be foolish and unkind to conceal from

you the fact that you are in a very grave position. I have never known a

more damaging chain of circumstantial evidence. The only jury we can

possibly get together, the only men in Westchester County who will know

nothing about the case, will be farmers and small tradespeople. These

men are narrow minded, unworldly, religious, bigoted people who will

look with horror upon a woman accused of murder; who will be surlily

prejudiced against you because you did not love your husband, and

because you left him; and above all they are likely to think you should

be executed if for no other reason than because,”—He hesitated. The

blood came into his face. “Tell me, is it true? I don’t believe it. I

can’t believe it—”

“That I had a lover? No, I did not have a lover. If that spy reports

exactly what he heard, he must himself prove that I did not. I liked—I

do like—a man, a former editor of mine, immensely. At that time I

believed myself in love with him; but I was as mistaken as I suppose all

impulsive and mentally lonely people are once or oftener in their

lifetimes. Although he visits me now we have come to a complete

understanding. I shall not marry him.”

Bourke looked at the floor for a moment. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes.

That is a great point, of course. Well—as a rule I can do anything I

like with a jury in Westchester County; I know and have known for twenty

years almost every man within forty miles; but we shall have to go out

into the highways and byways for talesmen: your case has attracted

almost universal attention. It is just possible, therefore, that the

jury may convict you—Don’t be frightened—Don’t look like

that—please!—If that happens I shall take the case to the General

Term, and failing that, to the Court of Appeals. One way or another I

shall get you off—I pledge you my life on that,” he added vehemently.

“Will you put your faith in me and keep up?”

“I am sure no woman could help it,” said Patience, smiling graciously.

That night, somewhat to her amusement, she thought on Bourke with a

certain sweet tremor until she fell asleep. She did not yet love him,

but he satisfied her imagination; and he was the first man that ever

had.

XI

Patience was rehearsed eight or ten times, Mr. Simms cross-examining by

a different method upon each occasion, racking his brain for new points

with which to confound her. She began to feel quite at ease on the

witness stand, and equal to the coming tilt with the district attorney.

Aside from a natural nervousness she felt no fear of the approaching

crisis, rather an excited interest. The papers were booming her again,

and she would have been less than American had she not appreciated her

position as heroine of the most sensational drama of the day.

In the last week of February, however, she received information which

induced her first misgiving: Miss Beale was down with pneumonia. That

superlatively healthy person loved fresh air only less than she loved

the Lord, and slept with her windows open in mid-winter. Despite habit

she invariably caught cold when travelling, as the one window of a small

sleeping-room was likely to be at the head of her bed. She had defied

Nature once too often.

When Patience told Mr. Bourke of Miss Beale’s illness, the red streaked

his face, as it had a habit of doing when he was disturbed. They were

alone in the office.

“Will it make much difference?” she asked anxiously.

“Oh, no, I hope not; only she would have been a great card. She is known

and respected throughout the county, and I should have dinned her in the

ears of the jury. But you should have some woman with you. Is there no

one else?”

Patience shook her head. “No one that would be of use. I have few women

friends. Women don’t like me much, I think. Mrs. Burr was my most

intimate friend, but her husband naturally wanted to keep her out of the

affair, and sent her off to Europe.”

“It is odd. I cannot think of you as friendless. You attract and

antagonise more strongly than any one I ever saw.”

He was staring hard at her, and she turned her head away, colouring

slightly. It was the first time they had been alone since the initial

rehearsal, although he and the other lawyers had often lingered, after

business was over, to talk with her. Apparently she and he were the best

of friends, and their former acquaintance had not been recognised by a

glance.

“I wonder if we really are friends,” he said abruptly, then shook his

shoulders slightly, as if, having made the plunge, he would not retreat.

Patience beat her fingers lightly on the desk, but did not turn her face

to him.

“Our relationship is very agreeable,” she said coolly. “I am delighted

that Mr. Simms, for instance, is not my counsel.”

There was a moment’s suggestive silence, and then he said: “I

understand. I can be nothing but counsel to you until I apologise. I

have not done so before because there is no excuse to offer. I can only

explain: you had deceived and outwitted and made a fool of me, and I was

furious. Moreover, I was horribly disappointed. I am perfectly well

aware that all that is no excuse. I was bitterly ashamed afterwards, and

far more furious with myself than I had been with you. I have never

ceased to deplore it. We might at least have been friends—”

“Ah, you forgave me then?” asked Patience, looking at his flushed face

with a smile. He had never looked more awkward nor more attractive.

“Oh, yes; my offence was so much worse, you see, I had to.”

“Well,” she said, giving him her hand gracefully, “we will forgive each

other.”

He accepted her hand promptly and evinced no disposition to relinquish

it. “You are so cold, though,” he said ruefully. “Your forgiveness is

merely indifference. But of course,” hastily, “you are absorbed in much

weightier matters than friendship. I can imagine how insignificant all

other episodes of your past must seem—”

“Oh, if it were not for you I might have been here before to-day, and in

a much worse predicament. I doubt if I should have left him as soon as I

did if it had not been for your unpleasant truths. I was drifting, and

also drifting toward morbidity, where I might have been capable of

anything. If I had really killed him and been arrested I should have

said so, and even you could not have saved me.”

“Oh, it would have been easier: I could have got you off on the plea of

insanity. But am I really a link in the chain? I am egoistical—and

interested—enough to be—pleased.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, laughing a little. “You have had a good deal more

to do with forging some of the links than you imagine.”

His hand was beginning to tremble, and she withdrew her own. He did not

attempt to recapture it, and for a moment they regarded each other

defensively. He had avoided the mistake of mistakes for thirty-six

years, and the very flavour of romance about his experience with this

woman made him wary. She had been mistaken twice and had ordered her

imagination to sleep. Something within him pulled her, but none knew

better than she the independent activity of sex. Still, like all women,

fire was dear to her fingers. His eyes had a gleam in them which made

her experience keenly the pleasurable sensation of danger.

“Did you know that night that I had forgotten our conversation in the

tower?” he said, laughing uneasily. “Well, I will admit that I had, but

I certainly remember the conversation in the elm walk—every word of it.

It was a singular conversation,” he continued hurriedly. “I have not

found her yet, by the way. What is love, anyhow? Something always seems

to be lacking. I have wanted a good many women, but there were shallows

somewhere.”

Patience had taken a chair and was fanning herself slowly. She answered

with a judicial air, as of one deciding some abstract point to which she

had given exhaustive study: “The lack is spiritual emotion. People of

strong natures who are really in love are shaken by a passion that for

the time being demands no physical expression. It is only when it

subsides, in fact, that the other manifests itself. On the other hand,

the unimpassioned, the physically meagre, are incapable of even

imagining such an exaltation of emotion. It is the supreme convulsion of

mystery. And it must be impossible to feel it more than once in a

lifetime—for more than one person, I mean.”

“Have you ever felt it?” he asked abruptly. He was sitting opposite her,

his brows drawn together, regarding her intently. Her cool impersonality

nonplussed him.

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

“From the organ. If one wants to read the riddle of human nature let him

listen to the organ for ten minutes. It lashes the soul—the emotional

nature—up to its utmost possibilities. One knows instinctively—that

is, if one is given to reasoning at all; for instincts are dead letters

without analysis—that only one other force can cause a mightier tumult,

a greater exaltation. Those that do not reason mistake it for a desire

to spread their wings and fly to the throne of grace.”

Bourke set his lips and looked at the floor. “Of course you are right,”

he said. “A man would never know that until he had felt it. It takes a

woman to divine it. Perhaps it is as well he doesn’t know it—there is

one disappointment the less in life if such moments never come to him;

and I doubt if they come to many. Either the savage is too strong in

most of us, or we never come within range of the responsive spark. I

have held that if there is any meaning at all in the progress of man out

of barbarism it is that he shall become a brain with a refinement and

intensity of passion which shall give happiness without disgust. But you

go beyond me.”

“Oh, we are both right,” said Patience, rising. “We are much better off

than our ancestors. I like so much to talk to you. When I am free you

must come to see me often.”

“I shall, indeed. How gracefully you fan yourself. I never saw any one

use the fan in exactly the same way.”

“I learned how from the old Spanish women in Monterey. They hold the

thumb outwards, you know. That makes all the difference in the world.

_Au revoir._”

XII

The trial began on the eighth of March. Patience slept ill the night

before, and arose early. She looked forward to the day’s ordeal with

mingled nervousness and curiosity. Her faith in Bourke was complete, and

her mind was of the order that craves experience. She could not divest

herself of the idea that she was about to play the part of heroine in a

great human drama. And assuredly there has been no such theatre as the

court room since the world began.

She dressed herself with extreme care, in a tailor frock and toque of

black and white. The costume was becoming, but she shook her head at her

reflection in the mirror: hers was not the type of beauty to appeal to

the class of men in whose hands her life would be; rather they would

resent its cold pride, its manifest of race and civilisation. She

remembered her youthful satisfaction in the fact that “common men did

not like her.” Rosita or Honora would carry a jury by storm, but she was

too subtle to appeal to men outside of her own social sphere. Tarbox

liked her because she was game and dependent on him for comfort: it was

doubtful if he thought her pretty. He came up at ten minutes to ten. He

wore a new suit of clothes, and looked excited and impatient.

“There’s a lot of swells come,” he said without preliminary; “some from

New York and some from the county. We’ve got ’em up in the gallery, and

they look fine in their new spring clothes, I tell you. First time I

ever seen swells in this court house. I rather thought they didn’t go in

for that kind of thing.”

“They go in for fads, and you can as easily tell where lightning will

strike next as what will be the next fad to possess fashionable women.

Where is Mr. Bourke?”

“Up in the court room, I guess. Ready?”

A few moments later he led her up the stair at the back of the court

room. A crowd of men at the door parted to let her enter, staring at her

with eager curiosity. As she walked down the room to her seat beside her

counsel she was conscious of a deep level of men’s faces below and a

tier of high-bred faces and bright spring gowns in the gallery above.

She felt as if she were being shot upon a battery of eyes, and an

impulse to turn and run; she looked like a black and white effigy of

pride.

The large handsome room was tinted a pale blue and stencilled about the

mouldings. The Bench and panelling behind it, the desks and tables, were

of black walnut. Four long windows on each side of the room revealed the

naked trees of March and the cheerless landscape. On the right of

Patience’s chair was the empty jury box, before her the Bench. In the

space thus formed—flanked on the other side by the talesmen summoned

for the trial and at the back by the audience—was a right angle of long

study tables, three or four round tables, and many chairs. Every chair

was occupied. Writing pads lay on the smaller tables. Patience

recognised several of the reporters. By one of the long tables before

the jury box sat Bourke, Simms, and Lansing. The former whispered to her

that many of the men within the rail were eminent lawyers who had come

to hear the case tried.

The judge sat alone on the Bench: an old man with pink face and head and

neck, a close band of silver hair at the base of his skull. His face was

narrow, his upper lip long. On either side of his mouth was a deep rut.

The nose was coarse and strong, the eyes behind the spectacles

humourous, severe, and a little sly. His silver chin-tuft was shaped

like the queen of hearts.

Just below the Bench, beside one of the long tables, sat a man whom

Patience did not notice at once, but to whom, as the judge called the

court to order, she turned suddenly, conscious of a fixed gaze. He sat

with one arm along the table, the other hand absently rolling a piece of

paper. His narrowed eyes were regarding her with cold speculation.

Patience shuddered. She knew that he was Sturges, the district attorney.

Tarbox had told and retold the history of his jealousy of Bourke, and

his registered vow to win one of the great legal battles of which they

were occasionally chief combatants. And this was the greatest! The man’s

face was set. He looked like a fate.

The clerk called a name. A man shuffled into the jury box. Sturges stood

up and put the usual questions. He spoke with exaggerated courtesy.

Occasionally he smiled: a mechanical smile, as if an invisible string

connected each corner of his mouth with a manipulator at the back of his

head. His voice was soothing and cultivated, his manner almost

deferential to the humble man in the box. Patience followed every motion

and word with fascinated attention. When he asked the talesman if he had

“any conscientious scruples regarding capital punishment as practised in

this State,” she felt the touch of icy fingers and her feet slipping

into an open grave. Bourke, who divined her sensations, smiled

encouragingly; and after she had heard the question some fifty times,

she ceased to attach any personal meaning to it.

They were four days impannelling the jury. The first time Patience stood

up to face an accepted juror she regarded the hairy and ill-kept farmer

with such haughty and disdainful eyes that Bourke whispered hurriedly:

“For God’s sake don’t look at them like that or they’ll send you up out

of spite. Remember that this class of people is always at war with its

betters.”

“I can’t help it,” said Patience. “It’s humiliating to think of being at

the mercy of men like that.”

When the box was filled at last she regarded the occupants attentively.

They were hard-featured men of middle age, with long bare upper lip and

compressed mouth. Their grey skin was furrowed with lines of care and

hardship, their chin whiskers grizzled and scant. Their eyebrows stood

out over faded eyes in wrinkled sockets. But what excited Patience’s

wonder was the small size of the heads. She had never seen twelve heads

so little. They were hardly an advance upon their hairy ancestors.

Throughout the trial she furtively watched the twelve faces of those

twelve meagre heads. Never once did their expression, stolid and set,

change. At night they haunted her. She awoke in the morning with a

violent start, seeing them for a moment in a row on the foot board of

her bed. She speculated, at times, upon the lives of those men, those

pinched grubbing lives, and felt for them a sort of terrified pity. What

a mere glimpse of the world she had had, after all, and what ugly strata

it had! What was the matter with civilisation?

XIII

On the fourth day the district attorney opened the case with an address

to the jury which was a masterpiece of temperate statement and damning

suggestion. He dwelt long upon the remarkable points of the case: the

youth and beauty and intelligence and social position of the defendant,

the distinguished family which had been plunged into sorrow and disgrace

by her crime, the extraordinary interest the crime had excited

throughout the civilised world. He then gave a running account, clear

and straightforward and decisive, of what the prosecution would prove,

and concluded with a cold, terse, but reiterated warning that the

prisoner at the bar was entitled to no sympathy because of her sex and

position; that he and the jury were there for one purpose only: to

consider the facts of the case and to do their plain duty, utterly

regardless of consequences to the individual. Every word was chosen and

weighed, and told like the ring of a steel hammer on a steel plate.

Dr. Lewis was then called to prove the fact of Beverly Peele’s death,

and his vigorous story weighed heavily in the scales against the

defence. The moment the district attorney sat down Bourke was on his

feet. For a moment he stood lifting and shaking the loose cloth of the

table beside him; then asked one or two random questions which put the

witness for the prosecution quite at his ease. In the course of a moment

the witness began to writhe, and at the end of five minutes manifested

his consciousness of the fact that he was a small country practitioner,

to be regarded by any intelligent jury with contempt. Nevertheless, it

was impossible to shake his testimony.

He was followed by the New York physician, a man of eminence, who had

assisted at the death-bed, then by the coroner. The fact of young

Peele’s death being firmly established in the jury box, a chemist was

put upon the stand to testify that he had found morphine in the stomach

of the deceased. He was worried and badgered and ridiculed and derided

by Bourke, who temporarily infected everybody in the court room with his

scorn of the exercise of chemistry as applied to morphine in the stomach

of a dead man, but held his ground, having been maltreated in a like

manner many times before. Following, came a civil engineer, who

described the grounds and general position of Peele Manor to the jury;

and the testimony for the day was over.

The next morning the prosecution passed on to the motive. Honora was the

first witness called. She wore a black frock and hat, and looked

dignified and sad. In her clear childlike voice she described to the

jury her moment of confusion and horror when awakened from a profound

sleep by the prisoner; told the mournful story of the unavailing

attempts at resuscitation; and hesitatingly admitted, in full detail,

the unmistakable indifference of the wife. To the latter testimony Mr.

Bourke “objected,” as he had done to similar testimony by the doctors,

but the objection was over-ruled by the judge. She also admitted having

seen from her window the defendant returning from town after her early

visit on the morning of the “Eye” story, inappropriately attired in grey

and pink, and having discovered the newspapers in confusion on the

library floor before any other member of the household except the

prisoner had arisen. She related Patience’s previous complaint that her

husband always waited until she was in her first heavy sleep before

demanding the morphine, and her fear lest she should some night give him

an overdose. The jury must have been small headed indeed, to fail to

understand the district attorney’s insinuations regarding the prisoner’s

deep-laid scheme to avert suspicion.

As Honora gave her testimony Patience saw Mr. Bourke’s eyes sparkle. She

knew that some pregnant idea had flashed into that lightning-like brain.

As the district attorney took his seat he rose slowly and smiled

sociably at Honora. She bent her head slightly; she had always liked

him.

“Miss Mairs,” he said haltingly, his eyes wandering to the judge, as if

in search of inspiration, his hand flirting the loose cloth of the

table, “you are sure that Mrs. Peele wore a gray gown to New York that

morning?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the condition of the newspapers seemed to you to indicate great

agitation of mind?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, yes. And she returned in an hour or two, you say?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Miss Mairs!” he thundered, turning suddenly upon her and pointing a

rigid finger straight at her startled face, “are you sure that you were

asleep when Mrs. Peele awakened you on the night of Beverly Peele’s

death?”

Patience drew her breath sharply. She closed her eyes. Honora had not

been asleep that night! The certainty came to her as suddenly and as

positively as it had come to Bourke.

For the fraction of a moment Honora hesitated. Every man and woman in

the court room was breathless. Several had started to their feet.

“Quite sure,” she replied finally, and that silver shallow voice did not

falter.

“You are _sure_ that you heard no one go to the lavatory that night,

before Mrs. Peele spoke to you?” He hurled the words at her as the Great

Judge might hurl the final sentence on Judgment Day.

“Sure.”

“Was your door open that night?”

“I don’t remember.”

Patience leaned over and whispered to Lansing, who sprang forward and

whispered to Bourke.

“The night was hot,” continued Bourke. “Were you not in the habit of

leaving your door open on hot nights?”

“Sometimes.”

“Was it not always your custom?”

“Not always. When I thought of it I opened the door, but I frequently

forgot it.”

“Yes! Yes! You are quite sure you cannot remember whether or not it was

open on that night?”

“I cannot remember.”

“Do you remember any other nights on which Mrs. Peele went to the

lavatory to drop the morphine?”

“Yes, sir; a great many.”

“But of this all important night you remember nothing?”

“No, sir.”

“Yes! Mrs. Peele never was called upon to drop the morphine until after

twelve o’clock. Were you in the habit of lying awake until late?”

“Yes.”

“But on this night you went to sleep early?”

“Yes.”

“You heard or saw—you are on your oath, remember—nothing whatever

until Mrs. Peele called you?”

“Nothing.”

“You can go.—She is lying,” he whispered to Patience. “Damn her, I’ll

make her speak yet if I have to throttle it out of her.”

Mr. Peele was the witness next called. He was treated with extreme

diffidence by the district attorney, and even the judge gave him a

fraternal smile. He told the story of the momentous night with parental

indignation finally controlled, then, in spite of repeated “objections”

and constant nagging, the significant tale of wifely indifference and

desertion, and read to the jury “that cruel letter written to a dying

man” the day before the defendant returned to nurse her husband. He

repeated with the dramatic effect of the legal actor those dark

insinuations of the prisoner: “You had better let me go! I feel that I

shall kill him if I stay!” And later in the town house when she had

struck her husband in the face: “You had better keep him out of my way.

Do you know that once I tried to kill my own mother?”

He told of her eager interest in untraceable poisons one night when the

subject of murder had come up at the dinner-table, her cold-blooded

analysis of human motives.

Then he passed on to the painfully significant history of the day before

the death: her demand for a divorce; her fury at her husband’s refusal;

her acknowledgment that she had quarrelled violently with the deceased a

short time before calling the family to his death-bed.

As he spoke Patience’s blood congealed. The woman he depicted was enough

to inspire any jury with horror. It was herself and not herself, a

Galatea manufactured by a clever lawyer.

But it was Mr. Bourke’s privilege to give the Galatea a soul. Despite

the older man’s greater legal experience, his superior wariness and

subtlety, he was forced to admit that his son was a fool; that his son’s

wife was a woman of brilliant intellect driven to desperation at being

tied down to a fool; that so long as she had lived with him she had done

her duty; that when she had returned as his nurse she had fulfilled her

part of the contract to the letter; that never had she given her husband

cause for real jealousy; that the witness himself had made a companion

of her, and that he had been bitterly disappointed in his son.

The terrible facts could not be stricken out, but Mr. Peele,

nevertheless, was made to pass the most uncomfortable hours of his life.

“And in spite of these threats,” exclaimed Bourke, with the accentuation

of one addressing an idiot at large, “in spite of the precision with

which you remembered them, you permitted your family to implore her to

return and become your son’s nurse; you permitted her to sleep in a room

communicating with his, where, in a fit of passion—if she is the woman

you profess to believe her to be—she could have murdered him in the

dead of night with a carving knife or a hatchet, before any one—even

the lightly sleeping Miss Mairs—could have flown to the rescue; you

permitted her—” he turned suddenly and faced the jury, then wheeled

about and regarded Mr. Peele with scornful inquiry—“you permitted her

to drop morphine for your son, and to have unrestrained access to the

drug, knowing that he in his agony would swallow whatever she gave him

without question. Will you kindly explain to the jury whether this mode

of proceeding was ingenuousness on your part, or criminal connivance?”

Mr. Peele’s under lip pressed the upper almost to the septum of his

nose. His eyes half closed and glittered unpleasantly; but he controlled

himself and answered,—

“I paid no attention to her threats at the time.”

“Ah! You did not believe in them? You admit that?”

“I classed them with the usual hysterical ravings of women. That was my

error.”

“State, if you please, your specific reasons for your change of mind.

You will hardly, as a lawyer, claim to have been converted to the

defendant’s capacity for crime by the mere fact that your son died of an

overdose of morphine?”

And throughout the long day Mr. Bourke hectored him, fighting him, point

by point, smashing to bits his testimony relative to the events of the

day preceding the death, evidence to which he was not an eye-witness,

which he had received at second hand from his wife and son. The “cruel

letter written to a dying man” was disposed of in a similar manner.

“You believed your son to be in a precarious condition when you

counselled them to send for your son’s wife?”

“I did.”

“But you believed with the doctors that if she returned, thereby

bringing him peace of mind as well as tender care, he had excellent

chances for life?”

“I did.”

“And Mrs. Burr was instructed to present that phase of the question to

the defendant, with all the force of which she was capable?”

“Yes.”

“And the defendant so understood it?”

“I suppose she did.”

“And yet you assert that this purely business-like letter, written by a

self-respecting woman, was addressed to a dying man, while at the same

time you assert that this man could be cured by the gratification of a

whim, and that you had taken particular pains to make the defendant

aware of the fact!”

When Mr. Peele finally left the stand, he looked battered and limp.

XIV