WILLIAM CARTER spent the days after the shooting entirely alone in his
office at the Payson Building. He slept there on the old couch, and for
the most part ate there, Moses, the elevator-boy, running errands for
him to the delicatessen store and then devouring the viands after he
had brought them. For William ate practically nothing, though he drank
a good deal.
Mr. Payson, who had found him once or twice in a state of stupor,
called up Mr. Carter on the telephone the day before the trial.
“You’d better come over and see William,” he advised. “He’s in no
condition to do business.”
Mr. Carter, who had just returned to his office after a long talk with
Leigh, was shaken; but he picked up his hat, clapped it down again on
his gray head, and started determinedly for the Payson Building. He
felt that his cup was full. He even experienced a sensation of ire at
Payson for having acquired wealth to build this huge edifice of mottled
brick and sandstone.
“Looks like a huge loaf of ginger-bread,” Mr. Carter grumbled to
himself.
But he was glad that it happened to be in full blast, as he would have
expressed it, and the throng of shoppers had no time to notice him.
Moses took him up in an elevator that was designated as “for employees
only.” He made some ado, too, about moving aside a basketful of empty
bottles to make room for his passenger. Mr. Carter shoved the basket
with his foot.
“What’s that?” he asked sharply.
Moses looked plaintive.
“Ain’t had no time to pitch ’em outen heah, suh. Dey’s from Mist’
Wilyum’s room.”
Mr. Carter restrained an impulse to count the bottles, and said
nothing. At the eighth floor he got out and walked reluctantly across
the hall to his son’s door. He opened it without knocking and looked in.
William was seated at his desk, his arms hanging down at his sides
and his eyes fixed on the wall opposite. There was no indication of
intemperance unless it lay in the deathly pallor and the disheveled
hair. Mr. Carter strode over to the table and struck it loudly with his
fist to call attention to his presence.
“We’d be honored if you’d come home,” he said dryly. “You’ve nothing to
fear there--she’s cleared out.”
William raised his haggard eyes.
“How about Leigh? I haven’t seen Dan for days.”
“Dan’s trying to save his brother from”--Mr. Carter’s voice grew
suddenly hoarse--“from eighteen years’ imprisonment.”
“Good Lord!” cried William aghast. “They couldn’t do that--he’s nothing
but a kid!”
Mr. Carter walked over to the windows and shut and fastened them; then
he picked up his son’s hat and handed it to him.
“You come home with me,” was all he said.
William went.
His adoring mother received him like the returned prodigal, and Emily
waited on him with eyes red from weeping. No one mentioned Fanchon; the
family seemed to have resolved to let her drop out of sight forever.
With Daniel’s aid, William managed to see Leigh that night for the
first time since the shooting.
It was a moment of horrible embarrassment and humiliation for William.
He was shocked, too, at the sight of the boy’s white face and the dark
rings under his girlish eyes. Leigh had gone through deep waters on his
account, yet it was one of those things that cannot be talked about.
“My job, Leigh,” he said laconically. “You had no business to take it
away from me.”
Leigh blushed like a girl.
“I couldn’t hear Fanchon slandered like that,” he cried. “I had to do
it!”
William bowed his head, looking down at the floor of the cell. He
hadn’t the heart to tell the boy that he believed the slanders.
Curiously enough, under Leigh’s clear eyes, he felt ashamed of
believing in them; but his inveterate rage against his wife remained
undiminished. She had deceived him, he no longer believed in her, and
he was furious against her for the ruin she had wrought. The very fact
that he had been head over ears in love with her embittered him the
more. It was an intolerable humiliation.
He left Leigh in a passion of sorrow and self-accusation, and went home
to spend a sleepless night. Toward morning, from sheer exhaustion,
he dozed off into troubled dreams. He thought he had been cast into
a fiery furnace along with Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego; he could
see three shadowy figures moving like giants through fields of flame.
Presently an angel touched him on the shoulder and called to him--in
French. The angel had the face of Fanchon.
He awoke with a groan and found his mother standing at the foot of his
bed. She had recovered sufficiently to move about the house now in a
striped calico wrapper that made her look twenty years older.
“It’s the day of the trial, Willie,” she said brokenly. “Papa and Dan
went an hour ago. Are--are you going to testify? Dan said he wouldn’t
call you.”
“The State will,” replied William apathetically, getting out of bed.
His mother looked at him anxiously.
“I’m afraid they’re going to call Fanchon,” she faltered.
He started. For some reason he had never thought of this, and he felt
a pang of horrid dismay. It couldn’t be that Judge Jessup and Dan
meant to do that. But the State? William experienced a new and rending
sensation. He felt like a helpless beetle pinned to the board of a
naturalist; he couldn’t escape public dissection.
“Perhaps you’d better not go, Willie,” suggested his mother fondly.
“Emily and I are going to stay here at the telephone to-day. Papa
promised to ’phone us everything, and we shall be terribly nervous and
frightened. Stay with us, dear.”
William realized that he was still a boy to her, and that now, when his
unacceptable wife had left him, he was nearer than ever. Nevertheless,
he began to look for his clothes.
“I shall go straight there, of course,” he said sharply. “Please tell
Miranda I want only a cup of hot coffee.”
“Oh, Willie, you must eat something!” she cried tearfully. “You’ll ruin
your health--there are corn muffins, too.”
He had always had a weakness for corn muffins, and, acting on the
advice of Miranda, his mother had ordered them to console him. But
William would have none of them. He was dressing rapidly, in a fever of
impatience, when Emily arrived outside his door and put her lips close
to the key-hole to shout to him:
“Papa says you needn’t hurry down there. He doesn’t think they’ll get a
jury until next week. Dan’s used up one panel already.”
William had not thought of this, and he slackened his efforts a little
only to hear his sister’s return.
“Mama says stay and have some muffins. They’re lovely and brown--I ate
five.”
The fact that murder in the second degree did not carry the death
sentence had reassured Emily’s hitherto impaired appetite. Like
Miranda, she ate to keep up her spirits.
William swallowed a cup of coffee, and left with the consciousness that
his mother, Emily, and Miranda considered him on the verge of suicide.
He made his way to the court-house by the church lane and the rear
alleys. Public curiosity had become intolerable to him, and he had a
horror of meeting an acquaintance.
It seemed only last week that he had brought Fanchon up the train
platform to meet his father. He had been proud of her beauty then;
he had thought her unique and fascinating, and he had even liked the
sensation she made in the old humdrum town. Now, he could not think
of her without a shudder. He felt as if she had pilloried him in the
public square. He would never be able to endure the place again,
nor the people in it. It was too small. Each man knew all about his
neighbor’s business. He remembered hearing Judge Jessup say that he
found it hard to live in such a “nosey” community. It even filled
William with intolerant wrath when a group of little pickaninnies
stopped playing to gaze, and he heard the loud stage whisper:
“Dat’s him!”
The husband of the woman for whom Corwin had been shot!
He plunged desperately into the basement of the court-house, and
ascended the marble steps to a pair of swinging baize doors labeled in
huge letters:
CRIMINAL COURT No. 1.
The room, a large one at the northeast corner of the old building, was
crowded to suffocation. The windows were all open, and from them one
could see the sunshine on the broad leaves of the mulberry-tree in the
quadrangle. Judge Barbour, a cousin of the doctor’s, was on the bench,
and William recognized a group of reporters below him, on one side. On
the other side Daniel was challenging a juror, his face tense and one
long forefinger pointing at the man.
William had not seen his brother in court for a long time, and he had a
curious feeling that this white-faced, tense lawyer wasn’t his brother
at all. It seemed to him that there had been a metamorphosis, that some
magic had been at work, that this wasn’t lame Dan, the brother whom he
had rather discounted. Here was a face so pre-eminently a face of power
that William gaped at it, as the pickaninnies outside the court-house
had gaped at him. He could feel, too, that Daniel was holding the
crowded room, and that the men and boys on the window-sills, and out
roosting in the mulberry branches that overlooked the court-room, were
all drawn by the magic of his tongue.
Slowly, deliberately, using all his privilege of challenge, Daniel was
picking his jury, while Judge Jessup, senior counsel for the defense,
sat between Mr. Carter and the prisoner at the dock. Reluctantly, with
a feeling of personal shame, William turned his eyes slowly toward his
young brother--the boy who was suffering vicariously for him.
Leigh’s youth seemed appalling in that place. The boy, with his
white face and his dark-ringed eyes, looked fifteen. He had a long
lock of light brown hair that was usually tossed back from his white
forehead--a Byronic effect that Leigh secretly cherished. It was
hanging down now, limp and disheveled, and he kept clutching at his
necktie with nervous fingers; but there was a light in his eyes, a
singular light, as if he saw something inspiring and beautiful.
William tried to follow his glance, to discover what had inspired
that rapt look, but the crowd was so great that he could not even get
through it to sit beside his father. He found standing-room near the
door, where he seemed to be unnoticed, and watched the proceedings with
a growing feeling of shame that he was not in Leigh’s place.
Daniel was engaged now in a tilt with the commonwealth attorney, Major
Haskins, a man who William knew had once quarreled with his father,
and who was known to be vindictive. Haskins was flushed and excited,
declaiming loudly, while Daniel, keeping his temper admirably, scored
again and again. It was the case of a skilled toreador baiting a
bull. Major Haskins, like the finest bulls in the arena, charged in a
straight line, never swerving, and, like the toreador, Daniel dodged
lightly on first one side and then the other, parrying the attack but
goading the enemy.
Something in the extreme dexterity of the goading surprised William
again.
“I didn’t know Dan had it in him,” he thought with an accession of
unexpected pride in this taciturn brother, who had suffered so long and
so silently. Then he heard an excited whisper from a woman in front of
him.
“There she is--the dancer! Look--over to the right--they say she’s
going on the stand!”
William shrank as if from a physical blow, and his sensitive egotism
shivered. This, then, was to be his crowning humiliation, this crowd
gathered to stare at his wife!
Of course Leigh had been looking at her; he might have known it. The
boy was a fool about her, as he himself had been a fool. William felt
an unbearable sensation of suffocation; the air of the crowded room was
unfit to breathe. People had found him out, too. The companion of the
woman who had whispered so loudly had spotted him. They were looking
back covertly over their shoulders and talking in audible undertones.
“What d’you suppose he was doing?”
“That’s her husband--back there.”
“Not really! Oh, my----”
“Say! Pull Jenny’s dress----”
“She’ll want to see him.”
William turned, pushed past the men in the doorway, and almost
staggered into the corridor. It was absolutely empty. Every living soul
who could squeeze into the court-room had done so. A short flight of
marble steps descended to a door which opened on the quadrangle and he
could see the sunshine on the lowest step. He started down, bent on
escape, and came face to face with Colonel Denbigh.
The old man, attired in a light gray summer suit with a white waistcoat
and a broad straw hat, looked like the personification of an untroubled
conscience. He held out a friendly hand.
“How are you, William? I came down to”--he hesitated and smiled
gravely--“to give your father and Leigh my moral support. Can’t seem to
do anything else, can I? Anything for you?” he added, after a moment’s
farther hesitation.
William shook his head, turning a deep red.
“I ought to be in Leigh’s place,” he said chokingly, “but I’m worse
off.”
The colonel gave him a keen look. It was impossible not to see that the
young man’s position was heartrending, and he pitied him. At the same
time he still felt a righteous indignation against Fanchon’s husband.
“By gum, it serves him right,” he thought.
Then he was so ashamed of himself that he shook hands with William
again. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.
“I’ll go and sit by your father--if I can get there,” he said kindly.
“I hope your mother’s better. Bearing up, eh?”
“She’s better,” said William thickly, averting his eyes. “It’s
intolerable to me, Colonel Denbigh, that she should have to suffer so
about Leigh on my account. If the boy had only come straight to me!”
he added with suppressed passion, his lip quivering suddenly like a
woman’s on the verge of tears.
The colonel nodded his head thoughtfully.
“I know--but it’s spilt milk, William. We’ll hope for the best. They
tell me Dan’s a smart fellow. Going to be the best lawyer in this town,
Judge Jessup says. He’ll get his brother off.”
“That won’t save my face,” William replied bitterly, plunging abruptly
down the steps and out into the quadrangle.
The colonel, left alone, stood a moment looking after him, considering
him. Come to look at it, he thought, it was a pretty bad place--even
for a lummox. He had always thought well of William, he had once
imagined him as the possible husband of Virginia, but now----
The colonel tugged at his white mustache with a grim face. He was
thinking of Virginia’s face on the stairs, the soft sadness of that
profile.
“It can’t be that Jinny cares!” he cried indignantly under his breath.
Then, unable to endure the idea, he swung open the baize doors and
worked his way into the crowded court-room. There was a little stir in
it now, an air of relief. The twelfth juror had just been accepted.