The lane was still again, save for the unwonted sounds coming from the
groups which had gathered round the two women, and were now moving
beside them along the village street a hundred yards ahead.
Marcella stood in a horror of memory--seeing Hurd's figure cross the
moonlit avenue from dark to dark. Where was he? Had he escaped? Suddenly
she set off running, stung by the thought of what might have already
happened under the eyes of that unhappy wife, those wretched children.
As she entered the village, a young fellow ran up to her in breathless
excitement. "They've got 'im, miss. He'd come straight home--'adn't made
no attempt to run. As soon as Jenkins" (Jenkins was the policeman)
"heared of it, ee went straight across to 'is house, an' caught 'im. Ee
wor goin' to make off--'is wife 'ad been persuadin' ov 'im all night.
But they've got him, miss, sure enough!"
The lad's exultation was horrible. Marcella waved him aside and ran on.
A man on horseback appeared on the road in front of her leading from
Widrington to the village. She recognised Aldous Raeburn, who had
checked his horse in sudden amazement as he saw her talking to the boy.
"My darling! what are you here for? Oh! go home--go _home_!--out of
this horrible business. They have sent for me as a magistrate. Dynes is
alive--I _beg_ you!--go home!"
She shook her head, out of breath and speechless with running. At the
same moment she and he, looking to the right, caught sight of the crowd
standing in front of Hurd's cottage.
A man ran out from it, seeing the horse and its rider.
"Muster Raeburn! Muster Raeburn! They've cotched 'im; Jenkins has got
'im."
"Ah!" said Aldous, drawing a long, stern breath; "he didn't try to get
off then? Marcella!--you are not going there--to that house!"
He spoke in a tone of the strongest remonstrance. Her soul rose in anger
against it.
"I am going to _her_" she said panting;--"don't wait."
And she left him and hurried on.
As soon as the crowd round the cottage saw her coming, they divided to
let her pass.
"She's quiet now, miss," said a woman to her significantly, nodding
towards the hovel. "Just after Jenkins got in you could hear her crying
out pitiful."
"That was when they wor a-handcuffin' him," said a man beside her.
Marcella shuddered.
"Will they let me in?" she asked.
"They won't let none ov _us_ in," said the man. "There's Hurd's sister,"
and he pointed to a weeping woman supported by two others. "They've kep'
her out. But here's the inspector, miss; you ask him."
The inspector, a shrewd officer of long experience, fetched in haste
from a mile's distance, galloped up, and gave his horse to a boy.
Marcella went up to him.
He looked at her with sharp interrogation. "You are Miss Boyce? Miss
Boyce of Mellor?"
"Yes, I want to go to the wife; I will promise not to get in your way."
He nodded. The crowd let them pass. The inspector knocked at the door,
which was cautiously unlocked by Jenkins, and the two went in together.
"She's a queer one," said a thin, weasel-eyed man in the crowd to his
neighbour. "To think o' her bein' in it--at this time o' day. You could
see Muster Raeburn was a tellin' of her to go 'ome. But she's allus
pampered them Hurds."
The speaker was Ned Patton, old Patton's son, and Hurd's companion on
many a profitable night-walk. It was barely a week since he had been out
with Hurd on another ferreting expedition, some of the proceeds of which
were still hidden in Patton's outhouse. But at the present moment he was
one of the keenest of the crowd, watching eagerly for the moment when he
should see his old comrade come out, trapped and checkmated, bound
safely and surely to the gallows. The natural love of incident and
change which keeps life healthy had been starved in him by his
labourer's condition. This sudden excitement had made a brute of him.
The man next him grimaced, and took his pipe out of his mouth a moment.
"_She_ won't be able to do nothin' for 'im! There isn't a man nor boy
in this 'ere place as didn't know as ee hated Westall like pison, and
would be as like as not to do for 'im some day. That'll count agen 'im
now terrible strong! Ee wor allus one to blab, ee wor."
"Well, an' Westall said jus' as much!" struck in another voice; "theer
wor sure to be a fight iv ever Westall got at 'im--on the job. You
see--they may bring it in manslarter after all."
"'Ow does any one know ee wor there at all? who seed him?" inquired a
white-haired elderly man, raising a loud quavering voice from the middle
of the crowd.
"Charlie Dynes seed 'im," cried several together.
"How do yer know ee seed 'im?"
From the babel of voices which followed the white-haired man slowly
gathered the beginnings of the matter. Charlie Dynes, Westall's
assistant, had been first discovered by a horsekeeper in Farmer Wellin's
employment as he was going to his work. The lad had been found under a
hedge, bleeding and frightfully injured, but still alive. Close beside
him was the dead body of Westall with shot-wounds in the head. On being
taken to the farm and given brandy, Dynes was asked if he had recognised
anybody. He had said there were five of them, "town chaps"; and then he
had named Hurd quite plainly--whether anybody else, nobody knew. It was
said he would die, and that Mr. Raeburn had gone to take his deposition.
"An' them town chaps got off, eh?" said the elderly man.
"Clean!" said Patton, refilling his pipe. "Trust them!"
Meanwhile, inside this poor cottage Marcella was putting out all the
powers of the soul. As the door closed behind her and the inspector, she
saw Hurd sitting handcuffed in the middle of the kitchen, watched by a
man whom Jenkins, the local policeman, had got in to help him, till some
more police should arrive. Jenkins was now upstairs searching the
bedroom. The little bronchitic boy sat on the fender, in front of the
untidy fireless grate, shivering, his emaciated face like a yellowish
white mask, his eyes fixed immovably on his father. Every now and then
he was shaken with coughing, but still he looked--with the dumb devoted
attention of some watching animal.
Hurd, too, was sitting silent. His eyes, which seemed wider open and
more brilliant than usual, wandered restlessly from thing to thing about
the room; his great earth-stained hands in their fetters twitched every
now and then on his knee. Haggard and dirty as he was, there was a
certain aloofness, a dignity even, about the misshapen figure which
struck Marcella strangely. Both criminal and victim may have it--this
dignity. It means that a man feels himself set apart from his kind.
Hurd started at sight of Marcella. "I want to speak to her," he said
hoarsely, as the inspector approached him--"to that lady"--nodding
towards her.
"Very well," said the inspector; "only it is my duty to warn you that
anything you say now will be taken down and used as evidence at the
inquest."
Marcella came near. As she stood in front of him, one trembling ungloved
hand crossed over the other, the diamond in her engagement ring
catching the light from the window sparkled brightly, diverting even for
the moment the eyes of the little fellow against whom her skirts were
brushing.
"Ee might ha' killed me just as well as I killed 'im," said Hurd,
bending over to her and speaking with difficulty from the dryness of his
mouth. "I didn't mean nothink o' what happened. He and Charlie came on
us round Disley Wood. He didn't take no notice o' them. It was they as
beat Charlie. But he came straight on at me--all in a fury--a
blackguardin' ov me, with his stick up. I thought he was for beatin' my
brains out, an' I up with my gun and fired. He was so close--that was
how he got it all in the head. But ee might 'a' killed me just as well."
He paused, staring at her with a certain anguished intensity, as though
he were watching to see how she took it--nay, trying its effect both on
her and himself. He did not look afraid or cast down--nay, there was a
curious buoyancy and steadiness about his manner for the moment which
astonished her. She could almost have fancied that he was more alive,
more of a _man_ than she had ever seen him--mind and body better fused,
more at command.
"Is there anything more you wish to say to me?" she asked him, after
waiting.
Then suddenly his manner changed. Their eyes met. Hers, with all their
subtle inheritance of various expression, their realised character, as
it were, searched his, tried to understand them--those peasant eyes, so
piercing to her strained sense in their animal urgency and shame. _Why_
had he done this awful thing?--deceived her--wrecked his wife?--that was
what her look asked. It seemed to her too _childish_--too _stupid_ to be
believed.
"I haven't made nobbut a poor return to _you_, miss," he said in a
shambling way, as though the words were dragged out of him. Then he
threw up his head again. "But I didn't mean nothink o' what happened,"
he repeated, doggedly going off again into a rapid yet, on the whole,
vivid and consecutive account of Westall's attack, to which Marcella
listened, trying to remember every word.
"Keep that for your solicitor," the inspector said at last, interrupting
him; "you are only giving pain to Miss Boyce. You had better let her go
to your wife."
Hurd looked steadily once more at Marcella. "It be a bad end I'm come
to," he said, after a moment. "But I thank you kindly all the same.
_They'll_ want seein' after." He jerked his head towards the boy, then
towards the outhouse or scullery where his wife was. "She takes it
terr'ble hard. She wanted me to run. But I said, 'No, I'll stan' it
out.' Mr. Brown at the Court'll give you the bit wages he owes me. But
they'll have to go on the Union. Everybody'll turn their backs on them
now."
"I will look after them," said Marcella, "and I will do the best I can
for you. Now I will go to Mrs. Hurd."
Minta Hurd was sitting in a corner of the outhouse on the clay floor,
her head leaning against the wall. The face was turned upward, the eyes
shut, the mouth helplessly open. When Marcella saw her, she knew that
the unhappy woman had already wept so much in the hours since her
husband came back to her that she could weep no more. The two little
girls in the scantiest of clothing, half-fastened, sat on the floor
beside her, shivering and begrimed--watching her. They had been crying
at the tops of their voices, but were now only whimpering miserably, and
trying at intervals to dry their tear-stained cheeks with the skirts of
their frocks. The baby, wrapped in an old shawl, lay on its mother's
knee, asleep and unheeded. The little lean-to place, full of odds and
ends of rubbish, and darkened overhead by a string of damp clothes--was
intolerably cold in the damp February dawn. The children were blue; the
mother felt like ice as Marcella stooped to touch her. Outcast misery
could go no further.
The mother moaned as she felt Marcella's hand, then started wildly
forward, straining her thin neck and swollen eyes that she might see
through the two open doors of the kitchen and the outhouse.
"They're not taking him away?" she said fiercely. "Jenkins swore to me
they'd give me notice."
"No, he's still there," said Marcella, her voice shaking. "The
inspector's come. You shall have notice."
Mrs. Hurd recognised her voice, and looked up at her in amazement.
"You must put this on," said Marcella, taking off the short fur cape she
wore. "You are perished. Give me the baby, and wrap yourself in it."
But Mrs. Hurd put it away from her with a vehement hand.
"I'm not cold, miss--I'm burning hot. He made me come in here. He said
he'd do better if the children and I ud go away a bit. An' I couldn't go
upstairs, because--because--" she hid her face on her knees.
Marcella had a sudden sick vision of the horrors this poor creature must
have gone through since her husband had appeared to her, splashed with
the blood of his enemy, under that same marvellous moon which--
Her mind repelled its own memories with haste. Moreover, she was aware
of the inspector standing at the kitchen door and beckoning to her. She
stole across to him so softly that Mrs. Hurd did not hear her.
"We have found all we want," he said in his official tone, but under his
breath--"the clothes anyway. We must now look for the gun. Jenkins is
first going to take him off to Widrington. The inquest will be held
to-morrow here, at 'The Green Man.' We shall bring him over." Then he
added in another voice, touching his hat, "I don't like leaving you,
miss, in this place. Shall Jenkins go and fetch somebody to look after
that poor thing? They'll be all swarming in here as soon as we've gone."
"No, I'll stay for a while. I'll look after her. They won't come in if
I'm here. Except his sister--Mrs. Mullins--she may come in, of course,
if she wants."
The inspector hesitated.
"I'm going now to meet Mr. Raeburn, miss. I'll tell him that you're
here."
"He knows," said Marcella, briefly. "Now are you ready?"
He signed assent, and Marcella went back to the wife.
"Mrs. Hurd," she said, kneeling on the ground beside her, "they're
going."
The wife sprang up with a cry and ran into the kitchen, where Hurd was
already on his feet between Jenkins and another policeman, who were to
convey him to the gaol at Widrington. But when she came face to face
with her husband something--perhaps the nervous appeal in his strained
eyes--checked her, and she controlled herself piteously. She did not
even attempt to kiss him. With her eyes on the ground, she put her hand
on his arm. "They'll let me come and see you, Jim?" she said, trembling.
"Yes; you can find out the rules," he said shortly. "Don't let them
children cry. They want their breakfast to warm them. There's plenty of
coal. I brought a sack home from Jellaby's last night myself. Good-bye."
"Now, march," said the inspector, sternly, pushing the wife back.
Marcella put her arm round the shaking woman. The door opened; and
beyond the three figures as they passed out, her eye passed to the
waiting crowd, then to the misty expanse of common and the dark woods
behind, still wrapped in fog.
When Mrs. Hurd saw the rows of people waiting within a stone's throw of
the door she shrank back. Perhaps it struck her, as it struck Marcella,
that every face was the face of a foe. Marcella ran to the door as the
inspector stepped out, and locked it after him. Mrs. Hurd, hiding
herself behind a bit of baize curtain, watched the two policemen mount
with Hurd into the fly that was waiting, and then followed it with her
eyes along the bit of straight road, uttering sounds the while of low
anguish, which wrung the heart in Marcella's breast. Looking back in
after days it always seemed to her that for this poor soul the true
parting, the true wrench between life and life, came at this moment.
She went up to her, her own tears running over.
"You must come and lie down," she said, recovering herself as quickly as
possible. "You and the children are both starved, and you will want your
strength if you are to help him. I will see to things."
She put the helpless woman on the wooden settle by the fireplace,
rolling up her cloak to make a pillow.
"Now, Willie, you sit by your mother. Daisy, where's the cradle? Put the
baby down and come and help me make the fire."
The dazed children did exactly as they were told, and the mother lay
like a log on the settle. Marcella found coal and wood under Daisy's
guidance, and soon lit the fire, piling on the fuel with a lavish hand.
Daisy brought her water, and she filled the kettle and set it on to
boil, while the little girl, still sobbing at intervals like some little
weeping automaton, laid the breakfast. Then the children all crouched
round the warmth, while Marcella rubbed their cold hands and feet, and
"mothered" them. Shaken as she was with emotion and horror, she was yet
full of a passionate joy that this pity, this tendance was allowed to
her. The crushing weight of self-contempt had lifted. She felt morally
free and at ease.
Already she was revolving what she could do for Hurd. It was as clear
as daylight to her that there had been no murder but a free fight--an
even chance between him and Westall. The violence of a hard and
tyrannous man had provoked his own destruction--so it stood, for her
passionate protesting sense. That at any rate must be the defence, and
some able man must be found to press it. She thought she would write to
the Cravens and consult them. Her thoughts carefully avoided the names
both of Aldous Raeburn and of Wharton.
She was about to make the tea when some one knocked at the door. It
proved to be Hurd's sister, a helpless woman, with a face swollen by
crying, who seemed to be afraid to come into the cottage, and afraid to
go near her sister-in-law. Marcella gave her money, and sent her for
some eggs to the neighbouring shop, then told her to come back in half
an hour and take charge. She was an incapable, but there was nothing
better to be done. "Where is Miss Harden?" she asked the woman. The
answer was that ever since the news came to the village the rector and
his sister had been with Mrs. Westall and Charlie Dyne's mother. Mrs.
Westall had gone into fit after fit; it had taken two to hold her, and
Charlie's mother, who was in bed recovering from pneumonia, had also
been very bad.
Again Marcella's heart contracted with rage rather than pity. Such wrack
and waste of human life, moral and physical! for what? For the
protection of a hateful sport which demoralised the rich and their
agents, no less than it tempted and provoked the poor!
When she had fed and physically comforted the children, she went and
knelt down beside Mrs. Hurd, who still lay with closed eyes in
heavy-breathing stupor.
"Dear Mrs. Hurd," she said, "I want you to drink this tea and eat
something."
The half-stupefied woman signed refusal. But Marcella insisted.
"You have got to fight for your husband's life," she said firmly, "and
to look after your children. I must go in a very short time, and before
I go you must tell me all that you can of this business. Hurd would tell
you to do it. He knows and you know that I am to be trusted. I want to
save him. I shall get a good lawyer to help him. But first you must take
this--and then you must talk to me."
The habit of obedience to a "lady," established long ago in years of
domestic service, held. The miserable wife submitted to be fed, looked
with forlorn wonder at the children round the fire, and then sank back
with a groan. In her tension of feeling Marcella for an impatient moment
thought her a poor creature. Then with quick remorse she put her arms
tenderly round her, raised the dishevelled grey-streaked head on her
shoulder, and stooping, kissed the marred face, her own lips quivering.
"You are not alone," said the girl with her whole soul. "You shall never
be alone while I live. Now tell me."
She made the white and gasping woman sit up in a corner of the settle,
and she herself got a stool and established herself a little way off,
frowning, self-contained, and determined to make out the truth.
"Shall I send the children upstairs?" she asked.
"No!" said the boy, suddenly, in his husky voice, shaking his head with
energy, "I'm not a-going."
"Oh! he's safe--is Willie," said Mrs. Hurd, looking at him, but
strangely, and as it were from a long distance, "and the others is too
little."
Then gradually Marcella got the story out of her--first, the misery of
alarm and anxiety in which she had lived ever since the Tudley End raid,
owing first to her knowledge of Hurd's connection with it, and with the
gang that had carried it out; then to her appreciation of the quick and
ghastly growth of the hatred between him and Westall; lastly, to her
sense of ingratitude towards those who had been kind to them.
"I knew we was acting bad towards you. I told Jim so. I couldn't hardly
bear to see you come in. But there, miss,--I couldn't do anything. I
tried, oh! the Lord knows I tried! There was never no happiness between
us at last, I talked so. But I don't believe he could help himself--he's
not made like other folks, isn't Jim--"
Her features became convulsed again with the struggle for speech.
Marcella reached out for the toil-disfigured hand that was fingering and
clutching at the edge of the settle, and held it close. Gradually she
made out that although Hurd had not been able of course to conceal his
night absences from his wife, he had kept his connection with the Oxford
gang absolutely dark from her, till, in his wild exultation over
Westall's discomfiture in the Tudley End raid, he had said things in his
restless snatches of sleep which had enabled her to get the whole truth
out of him by degrees. Her reproaches, her fears, had merely angered and
estranged him; her nature had had somehow to accommodate itself to his,
lest affection should lose its miserable all.
As to this last fatal attack on the Maxwell coverts, it was clear to
Marcella, as she questioned and listened, that the wife had
long foreseen it, and that she now knew much more about it
than--suddenly--she would allow herself to say. For in the midst of her
out-pourings she drew herself together, tried to collect and calm
herself, looked at Marcella with an agonised, suspicious eye, and fell
silent.
"I don't know nothing about it, miss," she stubbornly declared at last,
with an inconsequent absurdity which smote Marcella's pity afresh. "How
am I to know? There was seven o' them Oxford fellows at Tudley End--that
I know. Who's to say as Jim was with 'em at all last night? Who's to say
as it wasn't them as--"
She stopped, shivering. Marcella held her reluctant hand.
"You don't know," she said quietly, "that I saw your husband in here for
a minute before I came in to you, and that he told me, as he had already
told Jenkins, that it was in a struggle with him that Westall was shot,
but that he had fired in self-defence because Westall was attacking him.
You don't know, too, that Charlie Dynes is alive, and says he saw
Hurd--"
"Charlie Dynes!" Mrs. Hurd gave a shriek, and then fell to weeping and
trembling again, so that Marcella had need of patience.
"If you can't help me more," she said at last in despair, "I don't know
what we shall do. Listen to me. Your husband will be charged with
Westall's murder. That I am sure of. He says it was not murder--that it
happened in a fight. I believe it. I want to get a lawyer to prove it. I
am your friend--you know I am. But if you are not going to help me by
telling me what you know of last night I may as well go home--and get
your sister-in-law to look after you and the children."
She rose as she spoke. Mrs. Hurd clutched at her.
"Oh, my God!" she said, looking straight before her vacantly at the
children, who at once began to cry again. "_Oh, my God_! Look here,
miss"--her voice dropped, her swollen eyes fixed themselves on
Marcella--the words came out in a low, hurried stream--"It was just
after four o'clock I heard that door turn; I got up in my nightgown and
ran down, and there was Jim. 'Put that light out,' he says to me, sharp
like. 'Oh, Jim,' says I, 'wherever have you been? You'll be the death o'
me and them poor children!' 'You go to bed,' says he to me, 'and I'll
come presently.' But I could see him, 'cos of the moon, almost as plain
as day, an' I couldn't take my eyes off him. And he went about the
kitchen so strange like, puttin' down his hat and takin' it up again,
an' I saw he hadn't got his gun. So I went up and caught holt on him.
An' he gave me a push back. 'Can't you let me alone?' he says; 'you'll
know soon enough.' An' then I looked at my sleeve where I'd touched
him--oh, my God! my God!"
Marcella, white to the lips and shuddering too, held her tight. She had
the _seeing_ faculty which goes with such quick, nervous natures, and
she saw the scene as though she had been there--the moonlit cottage, the
miserable husband and wife, the life-blood on the woman's sleeve.
Mrs. Hurd went on in a torrent of half-finished sentences and fragments
of remembered talk. She told her husband's story of the encounter with
the keepers as he had told it to her, of course with additions and
modifications already struck out by the agony of inventive pain; she
described how she had made him take his blood-stained clothes and hide
them in a hole in the roof; then how she had urged him to strike across
country at once and get a few hours start before the ghastly business
was known. But the more he talked to her the more confident he became of
his own story, and the more determined to stay and brave it out.
Besides, he was shrewd enough to see that escape for a man of his
deformity was impossible, and he tried to make her understand it so. But
she was mad and blind with fear, and at last, just as the light was
coming in, he told her roughly, to end their long wrestle, that he
should go to bed and get some sleep. She would make a fool of him, and
he should want all his wits. She followed him up the steep ladder to
their room, weeping. And there was little Willie sitting up in bed,
choking with the phlegm in his throat, and half dead of fright because
of the voices below.
"And when Hurd see him, he went and cuddled him up, and rubbed his legs
and feet to warm them, an' I could hear him groanin'. And I says to him,
'Jim, if you won't go for my sake, will you go for the boy's?' For you
see, miss, there was a bit of money in the house, an' I thought he'd
hide himself by day and walk by night, and so get to Liverpool perhaps,
and off to the States. An' it seemed as though my head would burst with
listening for people comin', and him taken up there like a rat in a
trap, an' no way of provin' the truth, and everybody agen him, because
of the things he'd said. And he burst out a-cryin', an' Willie cried.
An' I came an' entreated of him. An' he kissed me; an' at last he said
he'd go. An' I made haste, the light was getting so terrible strong; an'
just as he'd got to the foot of the stairs, an' I was holding little
Willie in my arms an' saying good-bye to him--"
She let her head sink against the settle. There was no more to say, and
Marcella asked no more questions--she sat thinking. Willie stood, a
wasted, worn figure, by his mother, stroking her face; his hoarse
breathing was for the time the only sound in the cottage.
Then Marcella heard a loud knock at the door. She got up and looked
through the casement window. The crowd had mostly dispersed, but a few
people stood about on the green, and a policeman was stationed outside
the cottage. On the steps stood Aldous Raeburn, his horse held behind
him by a boy.
She went and opened the door.
"I will come," she said at once. "There--I see Mrs. Mullins crossing the
common. Now I can leave her."
Aldous, taking off his hat, closed the door behind him and stood with
his hand on Marcella's arm, looking at the huddled woman on the settle,
at the pale children. There was a solemnity in his expression, a mixture
of judgment and pity which showed that the emotion of other scenes
also--scenes through which he had just passed--was entering into it.
"Poor unhappy souls," he said slowly, under his breath. "You say that
you have got some one to see after her. She looks as though it might
kill her, too."
Marcella nodded. Now that her task, for the moment, was nearly over, she
could hardly restrain herself nervously or keep herself from crying.
Aldous observed her with disquiet as she put on her hat. His heart was
deeply stirred. She had chosen more nobly for herself than he would have
chosen for her, in thus daring an awful experience for the sake of
mercy. His moral sense, exalted and awed by the sight of death,
approved, worshipped her. His man's impatience pined to get her away, to
cherish and comfort hen Why, she could hardly have slept three hours
since they parted on the steps of the Court, amidst the crowd of
carriages!
Mrs. Mullins came in still scared and weeping, and dropping frightened
curtseys to "Muster Raeburn." Marcella spoke to her a little in a
whisper, gave some counsels which filled Aldous with admiration for the
girl's practical sense and thoughtfulness, and promised to come again
later. Mrs. Hurd neither moved nor opened her eyes.
"Can you walk?" said Aldous, bending over her, as they stood outside the
cottage. "I can see that you are worn out. Could you sit my horse if I
led him?"
"No, let us walk."
They went on together, followed by the eyes of the village, the boy
leading the horse some distance behind.
"Where have you been?" said Marcella, when they had passed the village.
"Oh, _please_ don't think of my being tired! I had so much rather know
it all. I must know it all."
She was deathly pale, but her black eyes flashed impatience and
excitement. She even drew her hand out of the arm where Aldous was
tenderly holding it, and walked on erect by herself.
"I have been with poor Dynes," said Aldous, sadly; "we had to take his
deposition. He died while I was there."
"He died?"
"Yes. The fiends who killed him had left small doubt of that. But he
lived long enough, thank God, to give the information which will, I
think, bring them to justice!"
The tone of the magistrate and the magnate goaded Marcella's quivering
nerves.
"What is justice?" she cried; "the system that wastes human lives in
protecting your tame pheasants?"
A cloud came over the stern clearness of his look. He gave a bitter
sigh--the sigh of the man to whom his own position in life had been, as
it were, one long scruple.
"You may well ask that!" he said. "You cannot imagine that I did not
ask it of myself a hundred times as I stood by that poor fellow's
bedside."
They walked on in silence. She was hardly appeased. There was a deep,
inner excitement in her urging her towards difference, towards attack.
At last he resumed:
"But whatever the merits of our present game system may be, the present
case is surely clear--horribly clear. Six men, with at least three guns
among them, probably more, go out on a pheasant-stealing expedition.
They come across two keepers, one a lad of seventeen, who have nothing
but a light stick apiece. The boy is beaten to death, the keeper shot
dead at the first brush by a man who has been his life-long enemy, and
threatened several times in public to 'do for him.' If that is not
brutal and deliberate murder, it is difficult to say what is!"
Marcella stood still in the misty road trying to command herself.
"It was _not_ deliberate," she said at last with difficulty; "not in
Hurd's case. I have heard it all from his own mouth. It was a
_struggle_--he might have been killed instead of Westall--Westall
attacked, Hurd defended himself."
Aldous shook his head.
"Of course Hurd would tell you so," he said sadly, "and his poor wife.
He is not a bad or vicious fellow, like the rest of the rascally pack.
Probably when he came to himself, after the moment of rage, he could not
simply believe what he had done. But that makes no difference. It was
murder; no judge or jury could possibly take any other view. Dynes's
evidence is clear, and the proof of motive is overwhelming."
Then, as he saw her pallor and trembling, he broke off in deep distress.
"My dear one, if I could but have kept you out of this!"
They were alone in the misty road. The boy with the horse was out of
sight. He would fain have put his arm round her, have consoled and
supported her. But she would not let him.
"Please understand," she said in a sort of gasp, as she drew herself
away, "that I do _not_ believe Hurd is guilty--that I shall do my very
utmost to defend him. He is to me the victim of unjust, abominable laws!
If _you_ will not help me to protect him--then I must look to some one
else."
Aldous felt a sudden stab of suspicion--presentiment.
"Of course he will be well defended; he will have every chance; that you
may be sure of," he said slowly.
Marcella controlled herself, and they walked on. As they entered the
drive of Mellor, Aldous thought passionately of those divine moments in
his sitting-room, hardly yet nine hours old. And now--_now_!--she walked
beside him as an enemy.
The sound of a step on the gravel in front of them made them look up.
Past, present, and future met in the girl's bewildered and stormy sense
as she recognised Wharton.