The finger of the dead man still pointed at Alethea. His ghastly eyes
were fixed upon her. The chair of the juryman in front of him had
sustained his weight in the same position in which he had fallen when the
first shock of the idea that the witness had seen a spectre instead of
the boy, alive and well, had thrilled through the room.
For a few moments it was a scene of strange confusion. The crowd rose
from their seats, and surged up to the bar. New-comers were rushing in
from the halls. Some one was calling aloud the name of the principal
physician of the place. Many were clamoring to know what had happened.
The judge’s voice sounded suddenly. “Look out for your prisoner, Mr.
Sheriff!” he exclaimed sharply; for the officer still stood as if
transfixed beside the dead man, on whose shoulder he had laid hold. No
hand, however heavy, could rouse him from the slumber into which he had
fallen.
The sheriff turned toward the prisoner. The proud mountaineer, keenly
sensitive to an indignity, burst out angry and aggrieved. “I hain’t
budged a paig!” he cried. And indeed he had not moved. “It’s jes’ ’kase
you-uns set thar in jedgmint, an’ I hev ter set hyar an’ be tried, ez ye
kin say sech ez that ter me!”
Harshaw had vehemently clutched his client’s arm as a warning to be
silent. To his relief, he perceived that Gwinnan had not heard. He was
absorbed in directing a physician to be called, and formally adjourned
court until nine o’clock the following morning. The reluctant jurymen,
quivering with excitement and consumed with curiosity as to the
subsequent proceedings, were led off from the scene in charge of an
officer,—himself a martyr to duty,—with many an eager backward glance and
thought. The crowd hung around outside with unabated excitement. Often
it effected an entrance and surged through the doors, to be turned out
again by the orders of the physicians. Many climbed on the window-ledges
to look through. The lower branches of the hickory-trees swarmed with the
figures of nimble boys. The wind now was high. The boughs swayed back and
forth with a monotonous clashing. Leaves continually fell from them like
the noiseless flight of birds. The moon showed the pale, passionless sky;
a planet swung above the distant mountains, burning with the steadfast
purity of vestal fires; the inequalities of the hills and dales on
which the rugged little town was built—very dark beneath the delicately
illumined heavens—showed in the undulating lines of lighted windows,
glimmering points stretching out into the gloom. Constantly the weighted
gate clanged as men trooped into the court-house yard. The shadows seemed
to multiply the number of the crowd.
Suddenly there was a cry: “He’s comin’! They’re bringin’ him! He’s
comin’!”
The expectation had been so strong that the physician would pronounce
it some transient paroxysm of the heart, which he was known to often
suffer, that the crowd was stricken into a shocked silence to recognize
the undertaker among the men coming out and bearing a litter on which
the motionless figure was stretched. One glance at it, and there seemed
nothing so inanimate in all nature. The moon, the trees, even the
invisible wind, were endowed with redundant life, with identity, with all
the affirmations of speculation, of imagination, in comparison with the
terrible nullity of this thing that once was Peter Rood. It expressed
only a spare finality.
It was strange to think he could not hear the wind blow, straight from
the mountains, the dull thud of the many feet that followed him through
the gate and down the street; could not see the moon which shone with a
ghastly gleam upon his stark, upturned face. He was dead!
He was so dead that already his world was going on with a full
acceptation of the idea. He had no longer an individuality as Peter
Rood; he was only considered as a dead man. Considered as a dead man, he
furnished the judge with a puzzle which irritated him. Gwinnan could not
remember any case in which a man had died upon a jury, and he debated
within himself whether this instance came under the statute leaving it to
the discretion of the court, in the case of a sick juror, to discharge
the jury and order a new one to be impaneled, or to excuse the juror and
summon another in his place from the by-standers. He went into one of the
lawyers’ offices, and turned over a few books in search of precedent.
The attorney-general utilized the respite. He had lingered at the scene
for a time, animated by curiosity. But when one of the physicians who
had been summoned to the court-house, returned to his office, after the
vain efforts to resuscitate the man, he found the attorney for the State
seated before the wood fire, his hands clasped behind his head, his feet
stretched out upon the hearth, his chair tilted back upon its hind legs,
waiting for him in comfortable patience.
There was no carpet on the floor. The small windows were lighted by tiny
panes of glass. The hearth was broken in many places, but painted a
bright red with a neat home-made varnish of powdered bricks mixed with
milk, commonly used in the country. There were several splint-bottomed
chairs, an easy-chair, and one or two tables; book-cases covered the
walls from the floor to the ceiling. It was the doctor’s professional
opinion that tobacco was the ruin of the country; on the high mantelpiece
were ranged several varieties of pipe, from the plebeian cob and
brier-root to the meerschaum presented by a grateful patient, all bearing
evidences of much use.
Kenbigh looked up quietly as the owner of the appropriated quarters
walked in. Dr. Lloyd was a tall, spare man of sixty odd, with a back
that never bent, dressed punctiliously in black broadcloth and the most
immaculate linen of an old-fashioned style. His thick hair was white.
He wore a stiff mustache; his shaven chin was square and resolute;
his features were singularly straight. His gray eye expressed great
cleverness and goodness, but there was a refined sarcasm in the curl of
his lips, and he affected a blunt indifference of manner, not to say
brusqueness.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing, doctor,—nothing with my vitals, or I wouldn’t have trusted
myself near you. The instinct of self-preservation is strong. I have come
for some information.”
“An aching void in the regions of your brain, eh? Well, at your time of
life that’s incurable.”
“I want you,” said the lawyer, his eyes roaming around the medical
library, ranged upon the wall, with a gloating, gluttonous gleam at the
idea of the feast of information within the covers of the volumes, “to
lecture me, doctor.”
“Where’s your Medical Jurisprudence?”
“It doesn’t teach me all I want to know about ghosts.”
Surprise was something Dr. Lloyd was never known to express or imply. He
sat looking at the visitor with his calm professional eye, as if it were
the most habitual thing in the world for sane lawyers to come into his
office at night, wanting to know about ghosts.
“I want to know all about absurd illusions,—in people of undoubted
sanity.”
“Subject of some scope,” dryly remarked the doctor.
“I want to know all that _you_ know about hallucinations, visions. I want
an elaborate exposition of the visual apparatus as connected with the
brain, and of the derangement of its nervous functions.”
“Upon my word, you’re a pretty fellow!”
“And then I want you to lend me _all_ your books.” And once more he gazed
around on the coveted treasures of the shelves.
One of the great logs had burned in two, the chunks falling forward upon
the other blazing sticks. The doctor had made a move toward the tongs,
but the lawyer arose, and with a sort of cumbrous agility kicked first
one and then the other into the space between the dogs. Dr. Lloyd watched
this proceeding with silent disapproval. Far be it from him to put his
dapper old-fashioned foot-gear to any such purpose.
The warmth of the fire was grateful, for it had grown much colder
without. The wind surged down the street like the passing of many feet,
some tumultuous human rush. The fir-tree beside the door was filled with
voices, sibilant whisperings, sighs. Clouds were scudding through the
sky; Kenbigh could see them from where he sat listening to the doctor’s
monologue. The moonlight lay on the old-fashioned garden without, all
pillaged by the autumn winds,—the rose-bushes but leafless wands; the
arbors, naked trellises; the walks, laid off with rectangular precision,
showing what the symmetry of its summer guise had been, as a skeleton
might suggest the perfection of the human form. The lights in the
two-story frame house beyond—for the doctor’s office was in the yard of
his dwelling and the garden lay a little to the rear—were extinguished
one by one. A dog close by barked for a time, with echoes from the
hills and depressions, and then fell to howling mournfully. The doctor
talked on, now and then taking down the books to illustrate; marking the
passages with a neat strip of paper in lieu of turning down a leaf, as
Kenbigh seemed disposed to do. He piled the volumes beside his apt pupil
on the candle-stand, and as the lawyer fell to at them he himself read
for a time, as a light recreation, from a history in some twelve volumes.
To a country gentleman of ample leisure and bookish habit, this lengthy
work was but as a mouthful.
Dr. Lloyd rose at last, knocked the ashes out of his pipe upon the head
of one of the fire-dogs, glanced at the absorbed lawyer, and remarked,
“You’ll come over to my house to go to bed after a little more, won’t
you?”
“Reckon so,” responded Kenbigh, without lifting his head.
The fire flared up the chimney in great white flames; they emanated from
a lustrous, restless, pulsing red heart. The sparks flew. The faint and
joyous sounds from the logs were like some fine fairy minstrelsy which
one is hardly sure one hears. A sylvan fragrance came from the pile of
wood in the corner, the baskets of chips, the pine knots.
The doctor left the room, opened the door and looked back.
“Don’t you set the house afire and burn up these books,” he said, with
the first touch of feeling in his tones that night.
The results of the attorney-general’s vigil were abundantly manifest in
his speech to the jury the following day. For that body was recruited
by summoning another talesman in Rood’s place, and the trial perforce
began anew; Gwinnan apparently thinking this alternative served better
the ends of justice than to risk the delays and vicissitudes of again
securing a competent jury. This decision encouraged Mink, who had been
tortured by the fear that by some disaster the case would be continued
to the next term. He was not now greatly perturbed by the strange turn
which the attorney-general had contrived to give to Alethea’s testimony.
Since Harshaw had found that any one claimed to have seen Tad after
the report of the boy’s death he had felt confident of an acquittal,
laying much stress on the necessity of proving the _corpus delicti_, as
he phrased it; and Mink accepted his lawyer’s opinion and relied upon
it. He had not been greatly affected by Rood’s fate, so absorbed was he
by his own interests; but it was a moment of tense excitement when the
testimony again reached the juncture at which, on the preceding day, the
unfortunate juror had leaned forward and pointed at the witness, his
question failing on his lips in the dumbness of death. Nothing further
was elicited from Alethea except that she did believe in ghosts, but that
she was sure she had seen Tad alive, albeit he had stood among the graves
with a blanched face, disappearing in a moment, lost in the mist.
The whole testimony occupied much less time than on the previous day, and
as the afternoon progressed it began to be apparent that the case would
go to the jury before the court adjourned.
The surprise of the day was the speech of the attorney-general. It opened
simply enough. He sought to show that it was impossible for Tad to be
alive. The poor boy was doubtless at the bottom of the river. How could
it be otherwise? Assume, as his learned opponent would have them believe,
that he had swum ashore. Where was he now? The suggestion that he was
in the custody of some enemy of the prisoner, who sought by concealing
him to effect the incarceration of Reuben Lorey in the penitentiary for
a long term, was so absurd that he hesitated to argue such a foolish
position before so intelligent a body of men as the jury whom he had the
pleasure of addressing. Who would, for revenge, encounter the hazards
of such a scheme? The boy was as well known throughout the section as
Piomingo Bald. Any chance glimpse of him by a casual visitor would fling
the conspirators themselves into the clutches of the law, that would be
loath to lightly loose its hold on such rascals. Who would voluntarily
burden themselves with the support of an idiot? If anybody had found Tad,
he would have been mighty quick to carry the boy back to old man Griff.
Say that no one had detained him,—what then? He was an idiot, incapable
of taking care of himself. If he were wandering at large, starving, half
clad, would not some one have seen him besides Alethea Sayles, in all
these weeks, gentlemen, in all these months? It was a remarkable story
that the witness had told,—a remarkable story. (The counsel seemed to
find fit expression of his sense of its solemnity by sinking his basso
profundo to a thunderous mutter.) No one for a moment could doubt the
sanity of that witness. She was evidently a girl of fine common sense;
an excellent girl, too,—no one could for a moment doubt the truth of any
word she uttered. The fact was, Alethea Sayles saw a strange thing that
night. She thought she saw Tad. It was only his image, not himself. “The
forlorn boy is dead, gentlemen,” he continued. “She saw the fantasy of
her own anxious, overwrought brain. He was in her mind. She had pondered
long upon him, and upon the plight of her lover, who had killed him. What
wonder, then, that in the mist, and the flickering moonlight, and the
lonely midnight, she should fancy that she saw him!”
He told the gaping and amazed jury that this was not an isolated
instance. He mentioned other victims of hallucination; he detailed the
strange experiences of Nicolai, of Spinoza, of Dr. Bostock, of Lord
Londonderry, of Baron de Géramb, of Leuret, of Lord Brougham.
Harshaw, who had sat listening, with his hands in his pockets and his
legs crossed, a smile of ostentatious derision upon his face, grew grave
upon the mention of the last name. He had never heard of the others,
but to attempt to bolster a theory of spectral apparition by this name,
revered in the profession, was, he felt, a juridical sacrilege that
should cause the attorney-general to be at the very least stricken from
the rolls.
As Kenbigh went on, expounding the relative and interdependent functions
of the brain and eye, the fine and subtle theories of spiritual and
physical life, its vague boundaries, its unmeasured capabilities,—the
deductions, the keen analysis of science, all reduced to the vernacular
in the mouth of a man trained by years of practice to speak to the
people,—Harshaw sat in blank dismay. He had never heard of any spiritual
manifestation but the vulgar graveyard ghost, usually headless, stalking
in its shroud to accomplish missions of vengeance upon the very ignorant
in the deep midnight. But Kenbigh’s account of sundry ethereal-minded
and mild-mannered spectres, with a preference for high company, singing,
appearing at dinner-tables, conversing agreeably, arrayed in conventional
garb, as decorous and reasonable and as mindful of etiquette as if
still bound by all the restraints of the world, the flesh, and the
devil, disappearing as noiselessly as they had come, with no appreciable
result of the visit,—it shocked every sense of precedent within him.
He was country-bred and did not know that when ghosts are fashionable
they conduct themselves as fashionable people do. He noted keenly the
discrepancies in the scientific explanations. Always, despite its show of
learning, its systems, its terminology, its physiology, its psychology,
and its persistent reference of supernatural appearances to natural
causes, Reason retires from the spectral exhibition with some admission
of occult influences, not fully understood,—in effect making a bow to the
ghost in question, “Saving your presence.” He noticed, too, that the jury
were listening with that intentness and eager interest which characterize
every mind, even the most ignorant, in considering things of the other
world, manifestations of hidden agencies. When he rose to reply he felt
at a loss. The sound, however, of his own hearty voice ringing against
the walls, instead of the sepulchral basso profundo of the attorney for
the State, the motion of his own stalwart arm sawing the air,—for he
was in the habit of impressing his views with a good deal of muscular
exertion,—had an invigorating effect upon him, and brought him back to
his normal state of confidence and bluster. He found words for his ready
scorn. He sought to discredit the attorney-general’s phantoms. He did not
know where the counsel got these old women’s tales; they were an insult
to the intelligence of the jury. The learned counsel knew mighty well
he wasn’t going to be called upon for his authorities,—medical books
can’t be produced as evidence in a court of justice, much less ghost
stories, “Raw-head and bloody-bones”! For his own part, he didn’t believe
a word of them. A fact is a thing that can be proved. The law requires
authentication. “Henry Brougham, Lord Chancellor, saw visions, did he?
And may be Lord Coke dreamed dreams,” he sneered indignantly. “And Lord
Mansfield perchance walked in his sleep. And who knows they did? And what
drivel is this! Gentlemen, _we_ live in the nineteenth century!”
The aspersion of Lord Brougham—for thus he considered the anecdote—was
very bitter to him. He was a man of few enthusiasms, and such
hero-worship as was possible to him had been expended upon the great
lights of his profession whose acquaintance he had formed in his early
reading of law, some twenty years ago. He so dwelt upon this point that
the jury received the valuable impression that Henry Brougham was a
chancellor and a “valley man,” hailing from Knoxville, perhaps, and was
held in high esteem by the lawyers in Shaftesville, and that Harshaw
seemed to think the attorney-general had slandered him. He wrenched
himself from this phase of the subject with some difficulty. “Gentlemen,”
he said sarcastically, “the attorney-general is a mighty smart man. He’s
got a heap of learning lately about visions.” He glanced down obliquely
at his opponent; he would have given a good deal to know how the counsel
for the State came by his information. He could have sworn that it was
not indigenous. “But there are plenty of folks in this town could have
told him just as much and more. He’s mighty particular to show the
difference between _il_-lusion and _de_-lusion, and hallucination and
mania. Visions! That ain’t what _we_ call ’em, gentlemen. Down here in
the flat woods we call ’em—‘snakes’!” The hit told, and he went on,
encouraged. “Right over yonder in Tim Becker’s saloon they keep every
assortment of vision. Men have seen green rabbits there, and black dogs,
and snakes, and whole menageries of hallucinations. Is anybody going
to believe Alethea Sayles had the jim-jams that night, coming from
camp-meeting? She had no call to see visions! This girl had her head in
her hands; she was leaning on the fence; she felt some one touch her; she
looked up, and saw the boy before her. Mighty few of the ghosts that we
have heard of had such consistency of entity as to make their presence
perceived by the sense of touch; on the contrary, it is thus that their
unreality is often demonstrated in these same fables. A lady passes her
fan through one immaterial image. A man thrusts his knife vainly into
the misty heart of another. And why does this instance differ? Because,
gentlemen, there was no phantom. It was Tad Simpkins in flesh and blood.
The fugitive boy sees Alethea Sayles, whom he knows well; he is about
to appeal to her; he lays his hand on her hand. She lifts her head, and
at the unexpected appari—sight, she screams, and the foolish boy is
frightened, and flees!”
He went on to say that he would impose upon the patience of this court
and jury only for a few moments longer. He wanted to contradict the
statements of the attorney-general that no one would voluntarily burden
himself with the support of a useless member of society. “How many yaller
dogs at your houses, gentlemen? I’d be afraid to count how many at mine.
How many of your wife’s relations? No, gentlemen, none of us are so
rich in this world’s goods as we deserve to be, but we ain’t got down
to dividing bread and meat that close yet. As to the reckless crime of
keeping the boy in hiding in order to put Mink Lorey in the penitentiary
for involuntary manslaughter,—why, gentlemen, if there were not just such
reckless people continually committing crimes, the consequences of which
they cannot escape, the attorney-general and I would have nothing to do.
We’d have to suck our paws for a living, like a bear in the winter, and
look at one another,—a profitless entertainment, gentlemen.”
He sat down, his pink smile enlivening his countenance, well satisfied
with his efforts and with the prospects of the case.
The attorney-general, who had the last word, was very brief in saying it.
The judge charged the jury, and he, too, was brief. The long slant of
sunshine falling athwart the room was reddening when the jury were led
out by the officer to their deliberations, noisily ascending the stairs
to the jury-room above, assigned to their use.