Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories
Page 25
“Winked?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Justice Fordred solemnly. “He winked. It’s no good, Betterley, I can’t explain it to you, but it was like no other sign I have ever seen on a man’s face. First there was a kind of smirking, secret smile, and then came the wink.
“I’ve never told this to anyone before. It takes a person in one’s own profession to whom to make such an extraordinary confession. Forgive me if I tell you that it was a desire to make this confession which prompted me to ask you here tonight.
“Of course I explained it to myself at the time as a nervous affliction, something physical, and yet I knew that I was deceiving myself, for I assure you, Betterley, that no words of mine can describe quite that smirk, quite that incongruous, utterly incomprehensible wink. That was the first time I saw the devil.
‘The second time,” continued the judge, “was very different. It was many years later. You were in court again, I remember.
“The second time, I say, was more curious, because the whole thing was even more incomprehensible than the first.”
Lord Coggeshall looked up.
‘You mean the Stanton wife murder?”
‘Yes. How did you know?”
The other man shrugged his shoulders.
“Intuition. Go on.”
“The defence, which you conducted so ably, was one of insanity, if I remember rightly,” said Mr. Justice Fordred. “Stanton was a gentleman. He had a big country house, a wife who adored him. They had two young children and there was no record of any quarrel they had ever had.
“And yet he killed his wife. Strangled her, if you remember, slowly and systematically.
“You had a fine array of expert witnesses, I remember. But so had the prosecution, and the court spent several days listening to doctors arguing.
“In the end, in spite of your oratory, and, if I may say so, the most brilliant defence a man ever had, the jury retired, and after only some twenty minutes or so Stanton was brought back into the dock to receive sentence of death.”
Mr. Justice Fordred, unfolded his smooth hands and leant forward a little in his high-backed chair.
“I was much perturbed in my own mind about the verdict. The facts of the case and the man who stood before me did not seem to tally. The facts told the story of a maniac. The man was sane.
“I have always tried to guard myself from the most dangerous of all emotions, that blinding, unreasoning pity which dulls the working of the brain like a drug, and yet I was sorry for the man. He looked so young, so obviously shaken by the ordeal through which he was passing. But my duty was clearly indicated, and I began those terrible words, the thought of which even now makes me feel physically sick.
“It was not until I had reached the final sentence, the brutal and disgusting truth stated so baldly that the meanest intelligence may grasp it, that the thing I never expected to see again happened.
“Across the face of the boy—for he was a good thirty years younger than myself, and I have always in my mind considered him that—there passed an incredible change. At first I thought my eyes were deceiving me and that my age was playing me tricks. But across that white, agonised face there passed that sneering, smirking smile which I had seen only once before, and then he winked.
“I remember very little that happened in the next two or three minutes. The Press, I know, reported that the judge seemed much overcome. It was a horrible experience—horrible, and yet enlightening.
“That was the second time I saw the devil.”
The quiet voice stopped, and the silence in the little room was no longer comfortable. The light of the candles seemed less mellow, less friendly, the silver seemed to have lost its gleam, and the cigar on the judge’s plate had burned down to the butt and smelt acrid and unpleasant.
It had also turned a little cold.
Lord Coggeshall moved his head, so that his great handsome face, with its deep lines and heavily lidded eyes, was directly towards the older man.
“Yes,” he said, “very interesting. You had found him out, you see.”
And then across the handsome face, so well known to the whole populace of the proudest race in the world, there formed the beginnings of a faint, secretive smile.
It grew and vanished. Then one of the thick white lids descended slowly over a dark eye.
The little judge sat very still. In his austerity he seemed to have grown in magnitude and importance. His fine hands quivered, but they were not clenched. He sighed, sharply, decisively.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Betterley, that’s what I wanted to know.”
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Mr. Campion’s Lucky Day