“I’m taking more than my share,” protested Walter. “It was all Tasker’s fault. I myself am as innocent as your grandfather.”
Elaine sighed in exasperation and turned away, unable to understand why everything he said in his defence made scorn and hatred grow in her heart. In reality it was not her faith in his innocence, that wavered, but her faith in Walter; it really did not occur to her that her kind affectionate rather simple husband could be a deliberate swindler, but he seemed to her weak and contemptible, utterly unable to give her the strong support she craved, unworthy of her love.
As for Walter, everything Elaine said seemed to him to imply a doubt of his innocence, and because Elaine was the most precious thing on earth to him, he fought this doubt with all the reassurances at his command. His phrase about being as innocent as Henry Clay Crosland made him feel sick every time he uttered it, but he measured her reaction to it by the degree of his own, and thought it must sound very sacred and convincing. The look in Elaine’s lovely eyes—a look part scorn, part piteous appeal, part angry question—haunted him; he could not forget it, and was always mentally arguing and justifying before that brilliant glance. The only ease he had, all the long five months before the trial, came when he visited Moorside Place; for he knew his mother and Rosamond both believed him guilty. Their eyes held no question, no doubt, but only sad knowledge and resignation. “I didn’t see how you could get so rich so soon, Walter love,” said his mother in her low tones to him, the first time he visited her after his arrest: “Without…” She never finished the sentence, but Walter knew its ending, and did not attempt to contradict her view. It was peace to be in her quiet company—Rosamond, who had her own resentments about her brother’s freedom while Tasker was in custody, often left them alone—and to feel her all-forgiving love enfolding him. To leave her and return to Clay Hall was to awake from a narcotic to the pain it had been given to lull; Elaine’s eyes greeted him, burning as Walter thought with accusation, and soon he was defending himself as usual, saying it was all Tasker’s fault, swearing that he himself was as innocent as her grandfather. This phrase occurred with increasing frequency in his conversation, and each time it came it made husband and wife recoil, and widened the gap between them.
At last the slow months passed and the day set for the trial, which was to take place at the West Riding autumn assizes, arrived. Elaine insisted on being present at the trial, and had arranged to attend with her mother and Rosamond; she dreaded it unspeakably, for she was sure that Walter would not quit himself like a man, yet felt she owed so much in loyalty to her husband. Walter on the other hand felt it would be an almost intolerable torment to him to see her in court while question after question extracted from witnesses the facts which proved his complicity in Tasker’s guilt; but since she expected, on his word, to hear him triumphantly proved innocent, how, without shaking her belief in him, could he beg her not to go? Marian Tasker was not to be present, but that was hardly an argument Walter could use to a wife who believed him Tasker’s dupe. It had been arranged that Walter should proceed to the court with his solicitor in one car, the three women in another; the husband and wife therefore had to part at Clay Hall, knowing that when they next saw each other, Walter would be in the dock. Both felt that it was a momentous parting; Walter strained his wife to him, pressed his lips to her cheek as though he could never drink enough of its lovely bloom; Elaine was melting into tenderness when he murmured in her ear:
“I’m innocent, darling, innocent as your grandfather!”
The phrase had become to Elaine an obscene mockery. She shuddered slightly in her husband’s arms, and though she kissed him and wished him luck, her farewell was artificial and her kisses cold.
An hour later Elaine, her mother, and Rosamond, entered the building where the assizes were being held, together.
“The stage and the cinema have much to answer for,” thought Rosamond, as they walked along the echoing corridors, which were lined with tip-up red velvet seats, as though arranged as sitting-out places for one of the dances Walter and Elaine had loved. “Nowadays real events seem just like pre-arranged spectacles, and we expect them to be well rehearsed and staged.”
Although it was her own brother, and the man she loved, who were on trial, and the day was one of bitter humiliation and anguish to her, she could not quite disabuse her mind of an agreeable sensation of excitement, as though she were present at some theatrical performance; her teeth chattered, and she felt an inclination to giggle; of these reactions she was ashamed. It was the more difficult for her to feel the reality of the occasion and the majesty of the law because the Tasker-Haigh case was a “notorious” one, exciting, on account of the many firms and large sums of money involved, immense interest throughout the West Riding; although they entered the building by a back entrance a large crowd of spectators was gathered there to see the personages of the drama arrive, three press photographers took pictures of Elaine as she mounted the steps, backing and dipping in the slightly ridiculous manner of their kind, and the high bright court—painted in blue and gold and decked in red baize, with the autumn sun glittering on the Royal Arms—was full of people. Elaine, in charmingly austere black with white at wrist and throat, a small fashionable hat and a short dark rich fur coat, looked, as usual, exquisitely lovely; and Rosamond admired her composure—she occasionally drew a sudden deep breath, and her eyes were almost unbearably brilliant; but she held herself erect and still, and looked ahead without seeing anything she wished not to see, with matchless dignity. The judge’s scarlet and miniver, the wigs of the barristers crowding the court, the legal phraseology and antiquarian ceremonial, did nothing to remove from a mind naturally unsusceptible to pomp the impression of assisting at some histrionic representation; but Rosamond was reminded that all this was truth and not theatre in the terrible moment when the accused were brought in, from a staircase beneath the court, and placed at the bar. The dock was surrounded by spikes, as though the men on trial were dangerous animals; it was horrible. Walter looked, thought Rosamond in her grief, exactly what the word accused connotes in most people’s minds; to her it seemed that guilt was written on every line of his ghastly and despairing countenance. Tasker on the contrary looked spruce and jaunty; his blue eyes roved about the court, he made a slight cheerful signal to an old couple whom Rosamond saw sitting near by in the shelter of a pillar, and really looked as though he were enjoying the occasion. The two men had been charged, and other formalities observed, on the previous afternoon, so that it was not long before the counsel for the prosecution began his speech.
At first this was such an anguish to both Rosamond and Elaine that they held down their heads, suffering almost too intensely to hear; but it was not long before the sheer interest of his narrative so won upon them that they forgot their shame and listened spellbound. For there emerged from his narrative Tasker’s infinite capacity for affairs. The shifts, the devices, the complex and subtle operations, the courage, the resource, the initiative, the ingenuity, the leadership, which he had employed to revive and maintain his sinking credit during the past four years, were made clear in all their astounding and far-reaching ramifications. It was revealed, for example, that he had raised money on the Heights business the very morning he bought it from Walter, negotiating the matter the instant the banks opened, to cover a cheque posted in part settlement of a spinning account the day before. The risks he had run, the daring and reckless coups he had brought off with triumphant assurance, had all the ring of romance. “What a man!” thought Rosamond, unable to withhold some measure of admiration; and it was evident that the spectators thought the same, for at some instance of the continued credulity of one of Tasker’s dupes—it concerned the falsification of a minute book beneath the secretary’s very nose—there was an irrepressible titter from all sides of the court. At this Tasker looked up and smiled, well pleased, his blue eyes flashing; but the judge rebuked the unseemly merriment caustically, and Rosamond remembered Henry Clay Croslan
d, and blushed, ashamed. As the trial went on she was more and more struck out of her initial prejudice against the pomp of the judge and into admiration for his stern integrity and consummate ability; never having attended a court of law before, she was constantly surprised by his interventions in the handling of the case, and his exchanges with the various barristers concerned; and noted how some doubtful point, the existence of which she herself had perhaps not even suspected, was always elucidated by his action. Regarding his stern aloof expression, hearing his penetrating comment, Rosamond felt a repeated qualm of fear; with such a judge she felt there was no chance that Walter should escape punishment and, having learned his lesson, live a humble honest life, which was what she hoped for him. By comparison with the judge the jury seemed muddled and insignificant; the verdict was in their hands, she knew, but the moulding of it lay surely with the bench.
Only the last quarter of the speech of the counsel for the prosecution was devoted to Walter, but that was enough to put Rosamond and Elaine into torments of shame. The line adopted was that in Walter, Tasker had found an able and unscrupulous tool, somebody to do the dirty detail work, though not admitted to a view of the whole operation. This was of all others the view most humiliating to Walter, and Rosamond, stealing a glance of commiseration at Elaine, was not surprised to see her eyes hard and glittering, her cheek pale. With the termination of counsel’s speech, the proceedings were adjourned for the day; and as soon as the judge and the accused had left the court, Rosamond whispered in Elaine’s ear:
“That was only one side, of course.”
“Of course,” said Elaine impatiently in her high little voice. “Did you think the trial was over?”
But the hand which adjusted her coat shook, and the swift rise and fall of her slight breast revealed her agitation. In the corridor she raised her handkerchief to her lips once or twice, but faced the crowd at the door composedly. They drove to Clay Hall, where after some time they were joined by Walter; he looked completely exhausted, and could hardly drink the tea which Elaine, in a cool artificial little tone, pressed upon him; but presently he seemed to come out of a daze to exclaim, hitching his chair nearer to his wife’s and staring at her dully:
“I’m innocent!”
“Oh, Walter!” cried Elaine, starting in irrepressible irritation. She bit her lip, however, controlled her voice, and added gently: “We all know that, darling.”
Rosamond had the agreeable task of reporting all this to her mother.
The trial lasted some nine days. The case for the prosecution, once counsel’s opening speech was over, seemed to Rosamond both dull and difficult to follow; for days on end witnesses (of whom the wretched Dollam, against whom his Accountants’ society would certainly take disciplinary action, was one) reeled forth figures and technical financial and textile terms until the facts they were trying to prove seemed to Rosamond to become hopelessly confused, lost in a mass of contradictory detail. Indeed for the first time she began to find excuses for her brother; anyone, she thought, might make a false step amid so many complications. She could see, however, that Tasker followed all this with close attention, and that his counsel and Walter’s tried to shake the Crown’s witnesses in cross-examination, unsuccessfully. During these days the crowd of spectators diminished, but they increased again when the counsel for the defence made their eloquent, ironical, witty, pathetic, but as it seemed to Rosamond fundamentally unsound speeches, in which they represented Tasker and Walter as honest men ruined by the long continuance of the slump. Or rather, that was how Tasker’s counsel represented the matter; Walter’s dwelt on his client’s youth and inexperience, and implied that Walter, though not perhaps the dupe, for that was an ugly word, was at least the mere junior, the mere subordinate employee, of Tasker. Rosamond stirred restlessly under this; it was a stab in Tasker’s back, she thought; and even though it were partly true, how could Walter countenance a plea so shameful? Elaine too moved her little hands restlessly in her lap.
But it was during the following days, when the witnesses for the defence were being examined, that the interest of the case rose to its height from the public’s point of view. For Walter and Tasker had naturally both elected to give evidence in their own defence; and Tasker as a witness enlivened the proceedings to the pitch of a music-hall turn, and provided the journalists with endless copy. It was almost impossible to believe him seriously guilty; he looked so well-groomed, so assured, was so obviously enjoying himself, so jolly. His blue eyes sparkled, his tones, though gruff, were audible and easy; he was respectful to the judge, courteously ironic to the counsel; under cross-examination his replies were so full of wit that the court bubbled with laughter, and several times the prosecution had to quit a subject in discomfiture. He had a habit of replying to an opening question with: “I may as well say frankly”—something or other which the prosecution was just about to drag out from him to his disadvantage; he thus took the wind out of counsel’s sails, foiled his questions, and threw the emphasis on his own creditable desire to assist the court’s investigations—as evinced for example by his voluntary surrender to the police, on which he harped skilfully, not often enough to be wearisome. A good impression was created, too, by his cheerful assumption of complete responsibility. If there was any blame, it was his, he said; not Walter Haigh’s and certainly not Henry Clay Crosland’s. To Rosamond’s eyes, sharpened by love, it seemed that he thus took the blame not particularly because he thought it all his, or to save Walter, but because he knew himself so much stronger than Walter, knew himself a grown man to Walter’s child. No single damaging admission was wrung from him—or rather, no admission in a damaging manner; once or twice—about Heights and about Valley, for example—he said “Yes,” with such an air of briskness that the jury seemed unmoved, but Rosamond observed that the judge made a note, and intervened with further enquiries which confirmed the answer.
Walter, alas, made by no means such a good witness. White and trembling, guilt written all over his face, which was damp with perspiration, he stumbled over his answers, contradicted himself, made assertions which did not agree with Tasker’s evidence, seemed at times to be really unable to follow the questions addressed to him, and fell a pitiable victim to cross-examination. The judge exhorted him irritably to compose himself and reply more audibly; Walter then made an effort to gather his wits, but this resulted in a disagreeable appearance of effrontery, and presently he put the crown on his alienation of the general sympathy by indulging in a silly display of temper to the prosecuting counsel. His case was torn to shreds remorselessly. It was bad enough for herself, thought Rosamond in anguish, to watch that relentless probing, hear those ironic deadly questions—“You passed the prospectus for issue? You were aware of the value of the Heights Mill business? No? Well, you knew what you had sold it for? Oh, that wasn’t the current value, you think? How many years had passed since you sold the business to Leonard Tasker? Oh, it was only months? And the textile industry was undergoing a deep depression? Yet you thought the value of the business had increased by five times? Ah, not as much as five times; thank you. You passed the prospectus for issue? I put it to you that you saw the prospectus before issue? What did you say to Leonard Tasker on that occasion? You said nothing; thank you.” Yes, it was bad enough for Rosamond to listen to this, who had always believed Walter guilty; but for Elaine, thought Rosamond in profound compassion, for Elaine, who had believed her husband innocent, to see him thus exposed and degraded before her eyes must be terrible indeed. In the lunch hour she suggested, and Mrs. Crosland supported the suggestion as strongly as her gentle nature allowed, that Elaine should return to Clay Hall and wait for news there; but Elaine, her reddened lips lurid in her deathly face, shook her head, clinging obstinately (or gallantly) to the belief that Walter was innocent and there was nothing to fear.
The lunch-hour newspapers came out with posters: Astounding Revelations in Tasker Case; Haigh’s Evidence; and accordingly the court was more than ever crowded that af
ternoon. Even the seats reserved by courtesy for their party were partially invaded—by the old couple to whom Rosamond had seen Tasker make signals on the first day of the trial, who had hitherto remained modestly concealed behind their pillar, in, the shadow of the gallery.
Whenever Walter entered the court his eyes at once flew in the direction of Elaine, and they did so now while his foot was still on the last stair. He had spent a grilling hour with his counsel, who was furious with him for throwing his case away—Tasker on the contrary merely shrugged his shoulders and smiled sardonically—and felt weak and broken; his mind was in a state to receive profound impressions from any trifle which presented itself. Accordingly Tasker, who preceded him into court, was vexed but hardly surprised when Walter suddenly clutched his arm to draw him back, and with pale face and dilated eyes demanded wildly in a whisper:
“Who are those two? Those over there—beside Elaine?”
Tasker craned his neck to look in the direction indicated, and replied calmly: “That’s my father and mother.”
Walter drew a deep breath, and released his arm.
“I thought it was my father,” he panted.
“No,” said Tasker calmly, as before: “It’s mine. They’ve come in from Stone Green to see the trial. Don’t go seeing ghosts now, Walter,” he added with rough kindness: “We’ve enough on without that.”
The warders now intimated that this whispering must cease, and the two men stepped forward into the dock.
But Walter could not keep his eyes from the old couple. He’s exactly like my father, he thought, except of course older; the white hair, the shrunken bent figure, the pale blue eyes, the veined hands, the neat shabby coat—oh, he’s exactly like my father! And the woman at his side: stout, short, heavy, with a rather perplexed and intimidated air, wearing a pathetic black lace scarf and an ill-chosen hat, her work-roughened hands nervously clutching a large handkerchief, her head quivering a little as she gazed anxiously at her son—in another dozen years, Mrs. Haigh would look just like that. And they’re Tasker’s parents, thought Walter: Tasker’s. But they look so respectable! So honest, so essentially decent! Impossible to think of the son of such people as the monster Walter had lately considered Tasker! They were so ordinary; Tasker must have been ordinary too, as a lad. Tasker had parents just like Walter’s. Tasker must have been an ordinary decent lad. There was some connection somewhere between those two statements, thought Walter, puzzled; something he was on the brink of but could not quite discover; something he could almost, but not quite, see. His counsel put him in the witness box again to re-examine him, and this time his answers were given in quite a different tone. He sounded sincere and calm, but preoccupied; the judge indeed begged him ironically to be so kind as to give the court his full attention. Walter replied: “I’m sorry, my lord”—and at his voice there was a stir of surprise in the court, Rosamond lifted her head eagerly, and Elaine turned her lovely eyes full upon her husband in a look of hope. For it was the voice of the old Walter; the kind candid honest young Walter whom she had loved. His counsel, seeing the good impression he was creating, skilfully prolonged his re-examination; nothing could alter the damning facts of the case, but Walter now looked like an honest man who has made one false step and is paying terribly for it, instead of the cowardly and pettifogging villain he had appeared before.
A Modern Tragedy Page 40
