Part 10

Caleb set his teeth hard, and the light came into his eyes,--the light that some people dreaded. “Judge,” he said sternly, “I’m accountable to no man, neither am I a coward. Mrs. Eaton may say what she pleases; being a woman, she is beyond my reach.”

The judge got up and drove his hat down hard on his head with his favorite gesture, as though he put the lid on to suppress the impending explosion. “By gum!” he said, and walked out.

That evening Caleb found Sammy asleep in the old leather armchair with his yellow head on the arm, and he snatched him out of it, in spite of Sammy’s vigorous protests, and put him to bed. He never thought that Diana’s arms might have held the child as pitifully, for Diana had a noble heart.

Then followed the greatest case of disputed nomination ever contested west of the Mississippi. The old court-house was packed to its limit, and there were one or two hardy spirits who climbed the tree outside and listened through the open windows. Feeling ran so high when Aaron Todd testified that there was a column of militia in Townhouse Square. It was hot; they were cutting oats in the fields and the rye was nearly ripe, while all the grapes were coloring like new wine.

Aylett and Eaton fought step by step, inch by inch, and the court sat from early morning until candle-light, yet it was three weeks before it went to the jury, and they had been twenty-nine days getting that jury!

Two brilliant lawyers from the East spoke for the defense, and Judge Hollis opened for the plaintiff. It was afternoon; the judge had made an able if somewhat grandiloquent plea, and the court-house was so thronged that men stood on the window-sills, shutting out the view from the trees. Caleb Trench closed the case for Yarnall, and men, remembering his Cresset speech, had refused to leave the court-room for dinner, fearful of losing their seats--or their standing room. Eaton alone left abruptly when he began to speak.

Trench had a peculiarly rich voice, low-toned but singularly clear; he used no gestures, and his attitudes were always easy and unembarrassed when he forgot himself in his work. His personality counted, but it was neither that nor his eloquence which held the court-room spellbound; it was the force of his logic, the power to get down to the root of things, to tear away all illusions and show them the machine as it had existed for nearly twenty years. Incidentally, as it seemed to some, he showed them, beyond all doubt, the fraud and intimidation that had renominated Governor Aylett.

The lights were burning in the court-room and outside in the square when Judge Ladd charged the jury. Not a man left his place as the jurors filed out, except Trench. He went to send a message to Aunt Charity about his two waifs at home, who must not go supperless. He was still out, and Judge Hollis sent for him hastily when the jury came back in twenty minutes. They brought in a verdict of guilty as indicted; the illegal use of money, corruption in office, and intimidation were the charges against Aylett and Eaton and ten others.

At half-past nine that night the militia had to charge in the court-house square to disperse the crowd.

XVIII

COLONEL ROYALL and Diana drove into town in the morning; it was a long drive from Eshcol, and the road led past Paradise Ridge. Diana, from her side of the carriage, noticed the little cabin where Jean Bartlett had died, and saw the shambling figure of Zeb leaning against the door-post. Zeb was talking to a well-dressed man whose back was toward her. A low-growing horse-chestnut partly hid his figure, but afterwards she remembered a curious familiarity about it. At the time her heart was bitter. She had heard nothing but Mrs. Eaton’s version of the scandal of Paradise Ridge for a month, and once, when she drove past the Cross-Roads, she had seen Sammy’s chubby figure sprawling under the trees beside Caleb Trench’s office.

If he were the child’s father, he had certainly taken up the burden squarely. Diana pushed all thought of it out of her mind by main force, yet two hours later it would come back. She remembered, too, that meeting on the trail, and her heart quaked. In some mysterious, unfathomable way the man loomed up before her and mastered her will; she could not cast him out, and she stormed against him and against herself. Outwardly she was listening to Colonel Royall. At heart, too, she was deeply concerned about her father; the colonel was failing, he had been failing ever since spring set in. All her life Diana had felt that, in spite of their devotion to each other, there was a door shut between them, she had never had his full confidence. Yet, she could not tell how she knew this, what delicate intuition revealed the fact of his reticence. She had twice asked Dr. Cheyney what secret trouble her father had, and the old man had looked guilty, even when he denied all knowledge. Diana felt the presence of grief, and she had assumed that it was especially poignant at the season when he kept the anniversary of his wife’s death. Yet, lately, she wondered that he had never taken her to her mother’s grave. Mrs. Royall had died when Diana was three years old, and was buried in Virginia. More than this Diana had never known, but she did know that her room at Broad Acres had been locked the day of her death and that no one ever went there except her father and the old negro woman who kept it spotless and “just as Miss Letty left it.”

Neither Colonel Royall nor old Judy ever vouchsafed any explanation of this room, its quaintly beautiful furniture and the apparently unchanging spotlessness of the muslin curtains and the white valance of the mahogany four-poster. Once, when she was a child, Diana had crept in there and hidden under the bed, but hearing the key turn in the lock when old Judy left the room, her small heart had quaked with fear and she had remained crouching in a corner, still under the bed, not daring to look out lest she should indeed see a beautiful and ghostly lady seated at the polished toilet-table, or hear her step upon the floor. She stayed there three hours, then terror and loneliness prevailed and she fancied she did hear something; it was, perhaps, the rustle of wings, for she had been told that angels had wings, and if her mamma were dead she was, of course, an angel. The rustle, therefore, of imaginary wings was more than Diana could bear, and she lifted up her voice and wept. They had been searching the house for her, and it was her father who drew her out from under the bed and carried her, weeping, to the nursery. Then he spoke briefly but terribly to the mammy in charge, and Diana never crept under the white valance again.

She remembered that scene to-day as the carriage drove on under the tall shade trees, and she remembered that Colonel Royall had never looked so ill at this time of the year since the time when he was stricken with fever in midsummer, when she was barely fifteen. Then he had been out of his head for three days and she had heard him call some one “Letty!” and then cry out: “God forgive me--there is the child!” He had been eighteen months recovering, and she saw presages of illness in his face; his eyes were resting sadly and absently, too, on the familiar landscape. Diana winced, again conscious of the shut door. It is hard to wait on at the threshold of the heart we love.

They were crossing the bridge when a long silence was broken. Below them some negroes were chanting in a flatboat, and their voices were beautiful.

“Away down South in de fields of cotton, Cinnamon seed and sandy bottom, Look away, look away, Look away, look away!”

“Pa,” said Diana suddenly, “do you believe in the verdict?”

The colonel took off his hat and pushed back his thick white hair. “I reckon I’ve got to, Di,” he replied reluctantly.

“Then you think Jacob is a bully and a fraud,” said Diana, with the unsparing frankness of youth.

“Heaven forbid!” said the colonel gently.

“I thought you wanted me to marry him,” she pursued, victory in her eye.

The colonel reddened. “Diana,” he said, “I don’t want you to marry anybody.”

She smiled. “Thank you,” she said; “after all, the verdict has done some good in this State, Colonel Royall.”

They were at the court-house door now, and there was a crowd in the square. The colonel got down and helped out Diana, and they walked into the arched entrance of the basement together. “I didn’t want to leave you out there to be stared at by that mob,” said the colonel; “people seem to know us at a glance.”

Diana laughed softly. “Of course no one would remember you,” she said maliciously; “they’re looking at my new hat.”

“I reckon they are,” said her father dryly; “we’ll have to find a place to hide it in.”

As he spoke they passed the last doorkeeper, and walked down the stone-paved corridor toward the elevator. It was absolutely still. On the left hand was a small room with one large window looking out into the court where a tree of heaven was growing. It had sprung from a seed and no one had cut it down. The window was barred, but the cool air of the court came in, for the sash was open. It was a room that they called “the cage,” because prisoners waited there to be summoned to the court-room to hear the verdict, but Colonel Royall did not know this. There were a narrow lounge in it, two chairs and a table.

“Wait here,” he said to Diana, “I shan’t be ten minutes. I want to see Judge Ladd, and I know where he is up-stairs. Court has adjourned for luncheon, and you won’t be disturbed.”

Diana went in obediently and sat down in the chair by the window. She could see nothing but the court enclosed on four sides by the old brick building, and shaded in the centre by the slender tree of heaven. There was no possible view of the street from this room. Opposite the door was the blank wall of the hall; on the other side of that wall were the rooms of the Registrar of Wills and the Probate Court. Outside the door a spiral iron staircase ascended to the offices of the State’s attorney; around the corner was the elevator and to this Colonel Royall went.

Diana leaned back in her chair and surveyed the chill little room; on the walls were written various reflections of waiting prisoners. None were as eloquent as Sir Walter Raleigh’s message to the world, but several meant the same thing in less heroic English. The colonel had been gone ten minutes, and his daughter was watching the branches of the tree as they stirred slightly, as if touched by some tremulous breath, for no wind could reach them here.

It was then that she heard a quick step in the corridor and knew it intuitively. She was not surprised when Caleb Trench stopped involuntarily at the door. They had scarcely met in two months, but the color rushed into her face; she seemed to see him again in the spring woods, though now the hedgerows were showing goldenrod. Involuntarily, too, she rose and they stood facing each other. She tried to speak naturally, but nothing but a platitude came to her lips.

“I congratulate you,” she said foolishly, “on your victory.”

“Miss Royall, I am sorry that everything I do seems like a personal attack upon your people,” he replied at once, and he had never appeared to better advantage; “like the spiteful revenge of a foolish duellist, a sensational politician. Will you do me the justice to believe that my position is painful?”

Diana looked at him and hated herself because her breath came so short; was she afraid of him? Perish the thought! “I always try to be just,” she began with dignity, and then finished lamely, “of course we are a prejudiced people at Eshcol.”

“You are like people everywhere,” he replied; “we all have our prejudices. I wish mine were less. There is one thing I would like to say to you, Miss Royall--” He stopped abruptly, and raised his head. Their eyes met, and Diana knew that he was thinking of Jean Bartlett; she turned crimson.

There was a long silence.

“I shall not say it,” he said, and his strong face saddened. What right had he to thrust his confidence upon her? “You are waiting for your father?” he added; “may I not escort you to another room? This--is not suitable.” He wanted to add that he was amazed at the colonel for leaving her there; he did not yet fully understand the old man’s simplicity.

“I prefer to stay here,” Diana replied, a little coldly; “my father knows I am here.”

It was Caleb’s turn to color. “I beg your pardon.” He stopped again, and then turned and looked out of the window. “I fear I have lost even your friendship now,” he said bitterly.

She did not reply at once; she was trying to discipline herself, and in the pause both heard the great clock in the tower strike one.

“On the contrary, I thank you for offering to find me a pleasanter place to wait in,” Diana said, with an effort at lightness. “It is a little dreary, but I’m sure my father must be coming and--”

She stopped with a little cry of surprise, for there was suddenly the sharp sound of a pistol shot, followed instantly by a second. The reports came from the other side of the hall, and were followed by a tumult in the street.

“What can it be?” she cried, in sudden terror for her father.

Caleb Trench swung around from the window with an awakening of every sense that made him seem a tremendous vital force. He divined a tragedy. Afterwards the girl remembered his face and was amazed at the fact that she had obeyed him like a child.

“Wait here!” he exclaimed, “your father is safe. I will see what it is. On no account leave this room now--promise me!”

She faltered. “I promise,” she said, and he was gone.

It seemed five minutes; it was in reality only ten seconds since the shots were fired. Meanwhile, there was a tumult without, the shouting of men and the rush of many feet. Diana stood still, trembling, her hands clasped tightly together. Even afar off the voice of the mob is a fearsome thing.

XIX

MEANWHILE Colonel Royall and Judge Ladd had been in consultation in the judge’s private office, behind the court-room.

Governor Aylett and Jacob Eaton had definitely decided to appeal the case, and a slight discrepancy in the stenographer’s notes had made it necessary for Colonel Royall to review a part of his testimony. Having disposed of these technicalities, the colonel found it difficult to depart. He and Judge Ladd had been boys together; they met infrequently, and the present situation was interesting.

The colonel stood with his thumbs inserted in the armholes of his marseilles waistcoat, his hat on the back of his head, and a placid smile on his lips. The judge sat at his table, smoking a huge cigar and meditating. In his heart he rather resented the rapid rise of the unknown young lawyer; he had worked his own way up inch by inch, and he had no confidence in meteoric performances, and said so.

“Well,” said the colonel slowly, “I reckon I’d better not say anything, Tommy, I’m on the wrong side of the fence; I’m Jacob’s cousin, though I feel like his grandfather.”

The judge knocked the ashes from his cigar and said nothing. It was not in his province to discuss the defendant just then.

“I’d give something handsome,” the colonel continued, “to know how in mischief Trench got such a hold on the backwoodsmen. Todd follows him about like a lapdog, too, yet he doesn’t hesitate to condemn Todd’s methods of getting evidence.”

The judge grunted. “Heard about personal magnetism, haven’t you?” he asked tartly; “that’s what he’s got. I sat up there on the bench and listened when he began to address the jury. I’ve heard hundreds do it; I know the ropes. Well, sir, he took me in; I thought he was going to fall flat. He began as cool and slow and prosy as the worst old drone we’ve got; then he went on. By George, David, I was spellbound. I clean forgot where I was; I sat and gaped like a ninny! He cut right through their evidence; he knocked their witnesses out one by one; he tore their logic to pieces, and then he closed. There wasn’t a shred of ’em left. I charged the jury? Yes, hang it! But I knew what the verdict would be, so did every man-jack in the court-room.”

“Remarkable!” exclaimed the colonel. “I admit it, Tommy; I was there.”

“Then why the devil didn’t you say so?” snapped the judge.

“Thought you saw me; I was in the front row,” replied the colonel, with a broad smile.

“See you?” retorted the judge fiercely, “see you? I didn’t see a damned thing but that young shyster, and before he got through I could have hugged him, yes, sir, hugged him for making that speech.”

The colonel shook with laughter. “Tommy,” he began.

But just then there were two sharp reports of a pistol near at hand, followed by a tumult in the street below. Both men hurried to the window, but the jutting wing of the court-room hid the center of interest, and all they could see was the crowd of human beings huddled and packed in the narrow entrance of the alley that led to the Criminal Court-room. There were confused cries and shoutings, and almost immediately the gong of the emergency ambulance.

“Some one’s been shot,” said Judge Ladd coolly; then he turned from the window and halted with his finger on the bell.

The door from the court-room had opened abruptly and Judge Hollis came in. Both Ladd and Colonel Royall faced him in some anxiety; there was an electric current of excitement in the air.

“Yarnall has been shot dead,” he said briefly.

“My God!” exclaimed Judge Ladd.

Colonel Royall said nothing, but turned white.

“Have they got the assassin?” the judge demanded, recovering his self-control.

“No,” replied Judge Hollis, a singular expression on his face. “No, the shot was fired from the window of the court-room; the room was empty, everybody at dinner, and the windows open; the pistol is on the floor, two chambers empty. Only one man was seen in the window, a negro, and he has escaped.”

“A negro?” the judge’s brows came down, “no, no!” Then he stopped abruptly, and added, after a moment, “Was he recognized?”

“They say it was Juniper,” said Judge Hollis stolidly.

“Wild nonsense!” exclaimed Colonel Royall.

Hollis nodded. His hat was planted firmly on his head and he stood like a rock. “Nevertheless, there’s wild talk of lynching. Ladd, I think we’d better get the lieutenant-governor to call out the militia.”

The storm in the street below rose and fell, like a hurricane catching its breath. Colonel Royall looked out of the window; the crowd in the alley had overflowed into the square, and swollen there to overflow again in living rivulets into every side street. He looked down on a living seething mass of human beings. The sunlight was vivid white; the heat seemed to palpitate in the square; low guttural cries came up. The names of Yarnall and Eaton caught his ear. He remembered suddenly the significance of Judge Hollis’ glance at him, and he did not need to remember the blood feud. Suddenly he saw the crowd give way a little before a file of mounted police, but it closed again sullenly, gathered the little group of officers into its bosom and waited.

The old man had seen many a fierce fight, he had a scar that he had received at the Battle of the Wilderness, he had a gunshot wound at Gettysburg, but he felt that here was the grimmest of all revelations, the slipping of the leash, the wild thing escaping from its cage, the mob! The low fierce hum of anger came up and filled their ears, he heard the voices behind him, the rushing feet of incoming messengers, the news of the lieutenant-governor’s call for the militia. Then he suddenly remembered Diana, and plunged abruptly down-stairs.

She had been waiting all this while alone in the lower room, yet, before the colonel got there, Caleb Trench came back. He had just told her what had happened when her father appeared.

“My dear child,” said the colonel, “I clean forgot you!”

Diana was very pale, but she smiled. “I know it,” she said, glancing at Caleb. “Once father got excited at the races at Lexington and when some one asked him his name, he couldn’t remember it. He paid a darkey a quarter to go and ask Judge Hollis who he was! Colonel Royall, I must go home.”

“So you must,” agreed the colonel, “but, my dear, the crowd is--er--is rather noisy.”

“It’s a riot, isn’t it?” asked Diana, listening.

They heard, even then, the voice of it shake the still hot air. Then, quite suddenly, a bugle sounded sweetly, clearly.

“The militia,” said the colonel, in a tone of relief. “I reckon we can go home now.”

“You can go by the back way,” said Caleb quietly; “stay here a moment and I’ll see that some one gets your carriage through the inner gate. The troops will drive the mob out of the square.”

He had started to leave the room when Colonel Royall spoke. “Is--is Yarnall really quite dead?”

“Killed instantly,” said Caleb, and went out.

Diana covered her face with her hands; she had been braving it out before him. “Oh, pa!” she cried, “how dreadful! I was almost frightened to death and--and I always thought I was brave.”

“You are,” said the colonel fondly; “I was a brute to forget you--but--well, Diana, it was tremendously shocking.”

Diana’s face grew whiter. “Pa,” she said suddenly, “where--where is Jacob?”

The colonel understood. “God knows!” he said, “but, Diana, he wasn’t in the court-room!”

“Oh, thank God!” she said.

It was then that Caleb came back, and she noticed how pale he looked and how worn, for the long weeks of preparation for the trial and the final ordeal had worn him to the bone. “The carriage is waiting,” he said simply, and made a movement, slight but definite, toward Diana. But she had taken her father’s arm. The colonel thanked the younger man heartily, yet his manner did not exactly convey an invitation. Caleb stood aside, therefore, to let them pass. At the door, Diana stopped her father with a slight pressure on his arm, and held out her hand.

“Good-bye,” she said quietly, “and thank you.”

Caleb watched them disappear down the corridor to the rear entrance where two policemen were on guard. Then he went out, bareheaded, on the front steps and glanced over the heads of the troopers sitting like statues on their horses in front of the court-house. Yarnall’s body had been carried in on a stretcher, and a detachment of the governor’s guard filled the main entrance. Beyond the long files of soldiers the streets were packed with men and women and even children. No one was speaking now, no sounds were heard; there was, instead, a fearful pause, a silence that seemed to Trench more dreadful than tumult. He stood an instant looking at the scene, strangely touched by it, strangely moved, too, at the thought of the strong man who had been laid low and whose life was snapped at one flash, one single missile. Death stood there in the open court.

Then some one cried out shrilly that there was Caleb Trench, the counsel for Yarnall, the dead man’s victorious defender, and at the cry a cheer went up, deep-throated, fierce, a signal for riot. The silence was gone; the crowd broke, rushed forward, hurled itself against the line of fixed bayonets, crying for the assassin.

A bugle sounded again. There was a long wavering flash of steel, as the troopers charged amid cries and threats and flying missiles. A moment of pandemonium and again the masses fell away and the cordon of steel closed in about the square.

At the first sound of his name Caleb Trench had gone back into the court-house. On the main staircase he saw Governor Aylett, Jacob Eaton and a group of lawyers and officers of the militia. He passed them silently and went up-stairs. Outside the court-room door was a guard of police. The door of Judge Ladd’s inner office was open and he saw that it was crowded with attorneys and officials. Judge Hollis came out and laid his hand on Caleb’s shoulder.

“My boy,” he said, “this is the worst day’s work that has ever been done here, and they want to lay it on a poor nigger.”