The Heart of a Woman
Page 26
CHAPTER XXVI
THE NEXT WITNESS PLEASE
The air grew more and more heavy as the morning dragged on. It was nowclose on twelve o'clock.
Frederick Power, hall porter of the Veterans' Club had finished hisevidence. With the precision of a soldier he had replied curtly and tothe point to every question put to him, and had retold all that hadoccurred on that foggy night, in the smoking room and the lobby of theVeterans' Club in Shaftesbury Avenue.
It was but a repetition of what he had told Sir Thomas Ryder inColonel Harris's presence the day before. Louisa had had it all atfull length from her father; she had drawn the whole story out of him,point by point, just as the man had told it originally. ColonelHarris, reluctant to tell her, was gradually driven to concealingnothing from her. Moreover, since she had made up her mind to attendthe inquest she might as well hear it all from him first, the betterto be prepared for the public ordeal.
Though she knew it all, she listened attentively to every word whichFrederick Power uttered, lest her father had--in telling her--omittedsome important detail. She heard again at full length the account ofLuke's visit to the Veterans' Club, his desire to see Philip deMountford, the interview in the smoking room behind closed doors, theangry words of obvious, violent quarrelling.
Then Luke's return to the lobby, his departure, the final taunt spokenby Philip and the look of murder in his eye, sworn to by the hallporter. She listened to it all, and heard without flinching the lastquestion which the coroner put to the witness:
"Did Mr. de Mountford's visitor carry a stick when he left the club?"
"'E 'ad a stick, sir, when 'e came," was the porter's reply, "and I'anded it to 'im myself when 'e left."
Louisa had been sitting all this while at the extreme end of the rowof chairs, right up against the wall. She sat with her back to thewall, her head leaning against it, her hands hidden within the foldsof a monumental sable muff lying idly in her lap. She had her fatheron her right, and beyond him Mr. Dobson and his clerk; she saw themall in profile as they looked straight before them, at the coroner andat each succeeding witness.
Luke sat farther on, and, as he was slightly turned toward her, shecould watch his face all the while that she listened to the hallporter's evidence. It was perfectly still, the features as if mouldedin wax; the eyes which actually were a clear hazel appeared quite darkand almost as if they had sunk back within their circling lids. He satwith arms folded, and not a muscle in face or body moved. Nostone-carved image could have been more calm, none could have been somysterious.
Louisa tried to understand and could not. She watched him, not caringwhether the empty-headed fools who sat all round saw her watching himor not.
When the coroner asked the hall porter about the stick and the mangave his reply, Luke turned and met Louisa's fixed gaze. Themarble-like stillness of his face remained unchanged, only the eyesseemed as if they darkened visibly. At least to her it seemed as if avelvety shadow crept over them, an inscrutable, an un-understandableshadow, and the rims assumed a purple hue.
It was her fancy of course. But Luke's eyes were naturally bright, ofvarying tones of gray, blue, or green, with never a shadow beneaththem. Now they appeared cavernous and dark, and again as he met hergaze, that swift flash of intense misery.
No longer had she the feeling that she was living in a dream, nolonger that this was a theatre wherein she and Luke and the dead manwere puppets dancing and squirming for the benefit of shallow-hearteddolts. That sense of unreality left her together with the hystericaldesire to laugh which had plagued her so in the earlier part of theproceedings. On the contrary, now an overwhelming feeling of intensereality oppressed her, so that she could have screamed with the awfulsoul agony which the sight of Luke's misery had caused her.
All her nerves were on the rack, her every faculty concentrated on theone supreme desire to understand and to know.
Love, the omnipotent, had encountered an enemy--grim, unexplainedMystery--and he sat pondering, almost cowed by this first check to hissupreme might. Louisa had sought and compelled Luke's gaze, and Lovehad gleamed in one great flash out of her eyes. Yesterday, at herglance, he had knelt at her feet and buried his sorrow with hisaching head in the scented palm of the dearly loved hand.
To-day the look of Love brought but a surfeit of misery, an additionalload of sorrow. The eyes in response remained tearless and hard andcircled with the dark rings of utter hopelessness.
I'll grant you that if Louisa Harris had been an extraordinary woman,a woman endowed with a wonderfully complex, wonderfully passionate, orwonderfully emotional nature--if, in fact, she had been the trueproduct of this century's morbid modernity--she would, whilstadmitting Luke's guilt, have burned with a passion of self-sacrifice,pining to stand beside him pilloried in the dock, and looking forwardto a veritable world of idealistic realism in the form of apicturesque suicide, after seeing the black flag hoisted over Newgateprison.
But Louisa, though a modern product of an ultra-modern world, was anabsolutely ordinary woman--just a commonplace, sensible creature whothought and felt in a straight and essentially wholesome manner.Though she had read Tolstoi and Dostoyefsky and every Scandinavian andRussian crack-brain who has ever tried to make wrong seem right, blackappear white, and animalism masquerade as love, yet she had never beenled away from her own clean outlook on life.
She loved Luke and would have given--did in fact give--her whole lifeto him: but she loved him without analysis or thought of self. Itnever entered her mind at this moment to wonder if he were guilty ornot guilty, if he was capable or not of committing a crime to gain hisown ends. All that troubled her was his misery, which she would havegiven her very soul to alleviate, and the hopelessness in him whichshe had given the world to console.
The mystery troubled her, not the sin: the marble-like rigidity of hisface, not the possibility of the crime.
For the moment, however, she was brought back quickly enough topresent realities. The coroner--satisfied with Frederick Power'sanswers--was giving him a moment's breathing space. The grating offountain pens against paper was heard from that corner of the roomwhere sat the journalists: the crowd waited silent and expectant,for--unversed though most people there present were in proceedings ofthis kind--yet instinctively every one felt that one great crucialmoment was just about to come; one great, leading question was justabout to be put.
The coroner had fingered the papers before him for the space of a fewseconds, then he looked up once more at the witness, his elbow restingon the table, his fleshy chin buried in his hand, in an attitude whichobviously was habitual to him.
"This visitor," he said speaking loudly and clearly, "who called thenight before last at the Veterans' Club and had an interview with thedeceased, you saw him well, of course?"
"Yes, sir," was the prompt reply.
"You would know him again?"
"Certainly, sir."
"Looking round this room now, should you say that he was present?"
The man looked across the room straight at Luke and said pointing tohim:
"Yes, sir; the gentleman sitting there, sir."
As every one had expected the reply, no one seemed astonished. Themany pairs of eyes that turned on Luke now expressed a certain measureof horrified compassion, such as might be bestowed on some dangerousanimal brought to earth by a well-aimed gun shot.
The coroner made no comment. He turned to the jury, glancing alongeither row of solemn faces, on both sides of the long table. Then hesaid:
"Would any of you gentlemen like to ask this witness a question?"
Receiving no reply, he added:
"Next witness, please!"