NAME AND NATURE
The prisoner's evidence concluded with a perfectly simple if somewhat
hesitating account of her own doings during the remainder of the night
of her husband's murder. That story has already been told in greater
detail than could be extracted even by the urbane but deadly
cross-examiner who led for the Crown. A change had come over the manner
in which Rachel was giving her evidence; it was as though her strength
and nerve were failing her together, and henceforth the words had to be
put into her mouth. Curiously enough, the change in Mrs. Minchin's
demeanor was almost coincident with the single and rather sinister
display of feeling upon the part of the white-haired gentleman who had
followed every word of the case. On the whole, however, her story bore
the stamp of truth; and a half-apologetic but none the less persistent
cross-examination left it scarcely less convincing than before.
There was one independent witness for the defence, in addition to the
experts in photography and chains. The landlady of the house at which
Rachel called, in the early morning, on her way home with the cab, was
about five minutes in the witness-box, but in those five minutes she
supplied the defence with one of its strongest arguments. It was at
least conceivable that a woman who had killed her husband might coolly
proceed to pack her trunk, and thereafter fetch the cab which was to
remove herself and her effects from the scene of the tragedy. But was it
credible that a woman of so much presence of mind, to whom every minute
might make the difference between life and death, would, having found
her cab, actually drive out of her way to inquire after a sick friend,
or even a dying lover, before going home to pick up her luggage and to
ascertain whether her crime was still undetected? Suppose it were a
lover, and inquire one must: would one not still leave those inquiries
to the last? And having made them, last or first; and knowing the grim
necessity of flight; would one woman go out of her way to tell another
that she "had to go abroad very suddenly, and was going for good?"
"Inconceivable!" cried the prisoner's counsel, dealing with the point;
and the word was much upon his lips during the course of a long and very
strenuous speech, in which the case for the Crown was flouted from
beginning to end, without, perhaps, enough of concentration on its more
obvious weaknesses, or of respect for its undoubted strength. For the
prisoner's proceedings on the night of the murder, however, supposing
she had committed it, and still more on the morning after, it would have
been difficult to find a better epithet; the only drawback was that this
one had seen service in the cause of almost every murderer who ever went
to the gallows--as counsel for the prosecution remarked in his reply,
with deadly deference to his learned friend.
"On the other hand," he went on, wagging his eyeglasses with leisurely
deliberation, and picking his words with a care that enhanced their
effect, after the unbridled rhetoric of the defence--"on the other hand,
gentlemen, if criminals never made mistakes, inconceivable or not as we
may choose to consider them--if they never made those mistakes, they
would never stand in that dock."
It was late on the Saturday afternoon when the judge summed up; but a
pleasant surprise was in store for those who felt that his lordship must
speak at greater length than either of the counsel between whom he was
to hold the scales. The address from the bench was much the shortest of
the three. Less exhaustive than the conventional review of a
complicated case, it was a disquisition of conspicuous clearness and
impartiality. Only the salient points were laid before the jury, for the
last time, and in a nutshell, but with hardly a hint of the judge's own
opinion upon any one of them. The expression of that opinion was
reserved for a point of even greater import than the value of any
separate piece of evidence. If, said the judge, the inferences and
theory of the prosecution were correct; if this unhappy woman, driven to
desperation by her husband, and knowing where he kept his pistols, had
taken his life with one of them, and afterwards manufactured the traces
of a supposititious burglary; then there was no circumstance connected
with the crime which could by any possibility reduce it from murder to
manslaughter. The solemnity of this pronouncement was felt in the
farthest corner of the crowded court. So they were to find her guilty of
wilful murder, or not guilty at all! Every eye sped involuntarily to the
slim black figure in the dock; and, under the gaze of all, the figure
made the least little bow--a movement so slight and so spontaneous as to
suggest unconsciousness, but all the more eloquent on that account.
Yet to many in court, more especially to the theatrical folk behind the
man with the white hair, the gesture was but one more subtle touch in
an exhibition of consummate art and nerve.
"If they do acquit her," whispered one of these wiseacres to another,
"she will make her fortune on the stage!"
Meanwhile the judge was dealing at the last with the prisoner's evidence
in her own behalf, and that mercifully enough, though with less
reticence than had characterized the earlier portions of his address. He
did not think it possible or even desirable to forget that this was the
evidence of a woman upon trial for her life. It must not be discredited
on that account. But it was for the jury to bear in mind that the story
was one which admitted of no corroboration, save in unimportant details.
More than that he would not say. It was for them to judge of that story
as they had heard it for themselves, on its own merits, but also in
relation to the other evidence. If the jury believed it, there was an
end of the case. If they had any reasonable doubt at all, the prisoner
was entitled to the full benefit of that doubt, and they must acquit
her. If, on the other hand, the facts taken together before and after
the murder brought the jury to the conclusion that it was none other
than the prisoner who had committed the murder--though, of course, no
one was present to see the act committed--they must, in duty to their
oaths, find her guilty.
During the judge's address the short November day had turned from
afternoon to night, and a great change had come over the aspect of the
dim and dingy court. Opaque globes turned into flaring suns;
incandescent burners revealed unsuspected brackets; the place was warmed
and lighted for the first time during the week. And the effect of the
light and warmth was on all the faces that rose as one while the judge
sidled from the bench, and the jury filed out of their box, and the
prisoner disappeared down the dock stairs for the last time in ignorance
of her fate. Next moment there was the buzz of talk that you expect in a
theatre between the acts, rather than in a court of justice at the
solemn crisis of a solemn trial. It was like a class-room with the
master called away. Hats were put on again in the bulging galleries;
hardly a tongue was still. On the bench a red-robed magnate and another
in knee-breeches exchanged views upon the enlarged photographs which had
played so prominent a part in the case; in the well the barristers' wigs
nodded or shook over their pink blotters and their quill pens; gentlemen
of the Press sharpened their pencils and indulged in prophecy; and on
their right, between the reporters and the bench, the privileged few,
the literary and theatrical elect, discussed the situation with abnormal
callousness, masking emotion with a childlike cynicism of sentiment and
phrase.
And for once the stranger in their midst, the man with more outward
distinction than any one of them, the unknown man with the snowy hair,
could afford to listen to what they had to say.
"No chance, my dear man. Not an earthly!"
"I'm not so sure of that."
"Will you bet?"
"No, hang it! What a beast you are! But I thought the woman was speaking
the truth."
"You heard what the judge said. Where's your corroboration? No, they
ought never to have let her go into the box. I hear she insisted. But it
hasn't saved anybody yet."
"The new law? Then it shows her pluck!"
"But not necessarily her innocence, dear boy."
Thus one shaven couple. Others had already exhausted the subject.
"Yes, I finished it down at Westgate last week."
"Satisfied?"
"In a way. It depends so much on the cast."
"These actor-managers--what?"
"More or less. I must be off. Dining out."
"What! Not going to wait for the end of the fourth act?"
"No, I'm late as it is. Ta-ta!"
The white-haired man was amused. He did not turn round, nor, if he had,
would he have known the retreating gentleman for the most eminent of
living playwrights; but he knew the reason for his sudden retreat. A
hush had fallen, and some one had whispered, "They're coming!" The
light-hearted chatter had died away on the word; perhaps it was not so
light-hearted after all. But the alarm was false, there was no sign of
the jury, and the talk rose again, as the wind will in a storm.
"We shall want a glass when this is over," whispered one of the pair who
had argued about the case.
"And we'll have it, too, old man!" rejoined his friend.
The white-haired man was grimly interested. So this was the way men
talked while waiting to hear a fellow-creature sentenced to death! It
was worth knowing. And this was what the newspaper men would call a low
buzz--an expectant hush--this animated babble! Yet the air was charged
with emotion, suppressed perhaps, but none the less distinguishable in
every voice. Within earshot a perspiring young pressman was informing
his friends that to come there comfortably you should commit the murder
yourself, then they gave you the Royal Box; but his teeth could be heard
chattering through the feeble felicity. The white-headed listener curled
a contemptuous nostril. They could joke, and yet they could feel! He
himself betrayed neither weakness, but sat waiting patiently and idly
listening, with the same grim jaw and the same inscrutable eye with
which he had watched the prisoner and the jury alternately throughout
the week. And when the latter at last returned, and then the former, it
was the same subtle stare that he again bent upon them both in turn.
The jury had been absent but forty minutes after all; and their
expedition seemed as ill an omen as their nervous and responsible faces.
There was a moment's hush, another moment of prophetic murmurs, and then
a stillness worthy of its subsequent description in every newspaper. The
prisoner was standing in the front of the dock, a female warder upon
either hand. The lightning pencil of the new journalist had its will of
her at last. For Mrs. Minchin had dispensed not only with the chair
which she had occupied all the week, but also with the heavy veil which
she had but partially lifted during her brief sojourn in the
witness-box, and never once in the dock. The veil was now flung back
over the widow's bonnet, peaking and falling like a sable cowl, against
which the unearthly pallor of her face was whiter far then that of the
merely dead, just as mere death was the least part of the fate
confronting her. Yet she had raised her veil to look it fairly in the
face, and the packed assembly marvelled as it gazed.
Was that the face that had been hidden from them all these days? It was
not what they had pictured beneath the proud, defiant carriage of its
concealing veil. Was that the face of a determined murderess?
Beautiful it was not as they saw it then, but the elements of beauty lay
unmistable beneath a white mist of horror and of pain, as a lovely
landscape is still lovely at its worst. The face was a thin but perfect
oval, lengthened a little by depth of chin and height of forehead, as
now also by unnatural emaciation and distress. The mouth was at once
bloodless, sweet, and firm; the eyes of a warm and lustrous brown,
brilliant, eloquent, brave--and hopeless!
Yes, she had no hope herself! It was plain enough at the first glimpse
of the deadly white, uncovered face, in the cruel glare of gas. But it
became plainer still as, with sad, unflinching eyes, she watched and
listened while, for the last time, the jurymen answered to their names.
Now they were done. The foreman shifted nervously in his place. In the
overstrain of the last dread pause, the crowded court felt hotter and
lighter than ever. It seemed to unite the glare of a gin palace with the
temperature of a Turkish bath.
"Gentlemen, are you greed upon your verdict?"
"We are."
"Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?"
"Not guilty."
There was a simultaneous gasp from a hundred throats--a distinct cry
from some. Then the Clerk of Arraigns was seen to be leaning forward, a
hand to his ear, for the foreman's voice had broken with excitement. And
every soul in court leaned forward too.
But this time his feelings had a different effect upon the excited
foreman.
"_Not_ guilty!" he almost bawled.
Dead silence then, while the clock ticked thrice.
"And that is the verdict of you all?"
"Of every one of us!"
The judge leant back in his place, his eyes upon the desk before him,
without a movement or a gesture to strike the personal note which had
been suppressed with such admirable impartiality throughout the trial.
But it was several moments before his eyes were lifted with his voice.
"Let her be discharged," was all he said even then; but he would seem to
have said it at once gruffly, angrily, thankfully, disgustedly, with
emotion, and without any emotion at all. You read the papers, and you
take your choice.
So Rachel Minchin was supported from the court before the round eyes of
a hundred or two of her fellow-creatures, in the pitiable state of one
who has been condemned to die, and not set free to live. It was as
though she still misunderstood a verdict which had filled most faces
with incredulity, but none with an astonishment to equal her own. Her
white face had leaped alight, but not with gladness. The pent-up emotion
of the week had broken forth in an agony of tears; and so they half led,
half carried her from the court. She had entered it for the last time
with courage enough; but it was the wrong kind of courage; and, for the
one supreme moment, sentence of life was harder to bear than sentence of
death.
In a few minutes the court was empty--a singular little theatre of pale
varnish and tawdry hangings, still rather snug and homely in the heat
and light of its obsolete gas, and with as little to remind one of the
play as any other theatre when the curtain is down and the house empty.
But there was clamor in the corridors, and hooting already in the
street. Nor was the house really empty after all. One white-haired
gentleman had not left his place when an attendant returned to put out
the lights. The attendant pointed him out to a constable at the door;
both watched him a few moments. Then the attendant stepped down and
touched him on the shoulder.
The gentleman turned slowly without a start. "Ah, you're the man I want
to see," said he. "Was that the Chief Warder in the dock?"
"Him with the beard," said the attendant, nodding.
"Well, give him this, and give it him quick. I'll wait up there till he
can see me."
And he pressed his card into the attendant's palm, with a couple of
sovereigns underneath.
"Wants to see the Chief Warder," explained the attendant to the
constable at the door.
"He's been here all the week," mused the constable aloud. "I wonder who
he is?"
"Name of Steel," whispered the other, consulting the card, as the
gentleman advanced up the steps toward them, the gaslight gleaming in
his silver hair, and throwing his firm features into strong relief.
"And not a bad name for him," said the constable at the door.