Part 14

As she came in, Mink was quick to notice the interest on Gwinnan’s face,—a sort of grave curiosity without any element of disrespect. She had a look in her eyes which Mink had often seen before, and which at once rebuked and angered him,—an expression of spiritual earnestness, of luminous purity; he had sneered at it as “trying to look pious.” She sat down in the witness-chair, and pushed back from her forehead her long bonnet; under its brown rim her golden hair showed in lustrous waves. Her saffron kerchief was knotted beneath her round chin. Her face was slightly flushed with the excitement of the moment, but she was not flurried, nor embarrassed, nor restless, nor uncouth, as many of her predecessors had been. Her deliberate, serious manner gave her an air of great value, and as she began to reply to the questions, her clear-voiced, soft drawl pervaded the court-room, singularly silent now, and there was a growing impression that hers was the important testimony for which all had been waiting. Harshaw’s manner served to confirm this. He was repressed, grave; only the quick, nervous glance of his opaque blue eye indicated his excitement; his questions were framed with the greatest care, and some of these were strange enough to excite comment. He asked her first to tell all that she knew about the party in the woods that night,—whether they were drinking and had access to any ample supply of liquor. She recited her adventure at Boke’s barn, and detailed the subsequent interview with the moonshiner and her refusal to keep his secret, throughout scarcely suppressed excitement in the court-room, for every man knew that with the words she courted martyrdom and took her life in her hands. Harshaw seemed to prize this attestation of her courage and her high sense of the sacred obligations of her oath, and dexterously contrived it so that the judge and the jury should be fully impressed with the crystalline purity of her moral sense, with her immovable determination to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He persevered in the examination of this point with great pertinacity, despite many stormy wrangles with the attorney for the State as to the pertinence and admissibility of the evidence, and the occasional ruling of the judge against him. Enough was secured, however, to prove that despite the limitations of the bonded still, Mink had had the opportunity to get drunk if he chose, and his habits were not those of a teetotaler.

The lawyer’s questions then became more inexplicable.

“When you discovered that you could give some testimony in this case, what did you do?”

Alethea pushed back her bonnet still further, and stared at him.

“Why, you-uns know,” she said.

“Tell the jury.”

Like many rural witnesses, she persisted in addressing the judge. She would fix her serious brown eyes on the stolid wooden faces in the jury-box, then lift them to the judge and answer.

“I kem down ter the jail ter see Reuben, an’ tell him.”

“And did you see him?”

She looked at Harshaw, with a deep humiliation and resentment intensifying the flush on her delicate cheek to a burning crimson. His gravity, the respect of his manner, reassured her. She replied with her deliberate dignity,——

“You-uns know mighty well he wouldn’t see me.”

“Then what did you do?”

She seemed for a moment doubtful if she would answer.

“I dunno how ye hev forgot,” she said slowly. “_I_ hain’t.”

“I want you to tell the jury,” he explained.

“I tried to make you listen.”

“And what did I do?”

Once more she pushed her brown bonnet further from her golden head, and looked at him silently.

The pause was so long that the attorney-general remarked that really he could not see the pertinence of the examination.

The judge spoke presently: “Counsel would do well not to harass the witness with unnecessary questions.”

What new life was in the man’s tones! He had forgotten to drawl. There had been many a badgered witness on the stand to-day whom he had not interfered to protect. Mink eyed him narrowly through the closing dusk. He was leaning forward upon the desk. He was listening with no impartial judicial interest. A personal concern was expressed in his face.

The sympathetic cadence in his voice struck on other ears than Mink’s. It was like an open sesame to Alethea’s heart. The pent-up indignation burst forth. She was all at once eager to tell the affronts she could not resent. “He wouldn’t listen ter me, jedge!” she cried. “He ran from me,—actially ran down the street. An’ I didn’t know what ter do. An’ nobody knowed ’bout ’n it but me. An’ I dassent tell nobody ’ceptin’ the lawyer. An’ Jerry Price,—him ez air on the jury,—he ’lowed ef I knowed suthin’ I wanted ter tell in court, he’d _make_ the lawyer listen, an’ so he did. An’ I tole him.”

“When was that?” asked Harshaw.

“Yestiddy mornin’.”

“So that was the reason you didn’t tell it before?”

“I war feared ter tell ennybody but the lawyer, ’kase Reuben’s enemies mought fix it somehows so ’twouldn’t be no ’count.”

“Well, what was this you wanted to tell?”

Her face was growing dim among the glooms. The dusky figures within the bar, the shadowy judge, the indistinct mass of the crowd, the great windows,—indefinite gray squares,—seemed for a moment the darker because of a dull suffusion of yellow light in the halls, falling through the doorways, and heralding the coming of the lamps.

“I wanted to tell that I seen Tad Simpkins arter they ’lowed he war drownded.”

There was absolute silence for a moment; then, wild commotion. Men were talking loudly to each other in the crowd. The lights came in with a flare. Several of the jury requested to have the answer repeated. The attorney-general began to ask a question, left off, and bent his head to his notes. A sudden shrill, quaking voice pierced the tumult.

“I know it air a true word!” cried the old miller, clasping his hands. “God would not deliver my soul ter hell. I fund him in my youth, but my age air the age o’ the backslider. He would not desert me, though! An’ I hev been gin ter do my good works o’ faith anew. I’ll find my boy. I’ll make amends. I’ll”——

The sheriff’s insistence, “Silence in court!” had no coercion for him. He began to sob and cry aloud, and to call the idiot’s name, and was finally taken by the deputy and led out of the court-room, the officer promising to come and let him know as soon as Alethea had disclosed the boy’s whereabouts.

Mink glanced around him in triumph. His lip curved. A brilliant elation shone in his eyes. He tossed back, with an arrogant gesture, his long, red, curling hair, gilded by the lamplight to a brighter hue. He joyed to see the discomfiture of his detractors, who had given their testimony with all the gusto that appertains to stamping on a man, literally and metaphorically, who is already down. He noted, too, the surprise and pleasure in Ben Doaks’s eye, in Jerry Price’s freckled, ugly face, and, strangely enough, Peter Rood looked transfigured. His surly scowl was gone, as if it had never existed. His swarthy face was irradiated by his great excited eyes. A flush dyed his cheek. His breath came in quick gasps. He seemed inordinately relieved, delighted. What! because the forlorn little idiot was not dead? Mink could not understand it. With not even a surmise to explain the demonstration, he stared in suddenly renewed gravity at his old enemy on the jury.

As soon as order was restored, Harshaw resumed his questions.

“Tell the jury when and where you saw him, and how you are sure it was after he was reputed to be drowned.”

“’Kase ’twar on the Monday o’ the camp-meetin’ in Eskaqua Cove, an’ that warn’t begun till arter the mill war busted down,” said Alethea.

She detailed the scene at the little school-house in her uncouth phrasings, every syllable carrying conviction to her hearers. Her bonnet had fallen quite back on her shoulders. Her face was delicately ethereal in the lamplight,—so much of the sincerities of her nature it expressed, so fine and true an intelligence, that, beautiful as it was, it was still more spiritual. The strange story she had told was improbable. Looking upon her face it was impossible to doubt it.

“That night, what did you do?”

“I let Buck an’ the rest o’ the fambly go by ter aunt Dely’s house, an’ whenst they war out o’ sight I called Tad, but he wouldn’t answer. An’ then I climbed over the fence, an’ sarched an’ sarched fur him. But I couldn’t find him,—not in the house, nor under it, nare one. Then I went on ter aunt Dely’s,—Mis’ Purvine’s,” she added, decorously, remembering that her relative was a stickler for etiquette, and might not relish the familiar appellation of kinship in a public assembly. “I never tole nobody, ’kase I war feared ez whoever hed Tad a-hidin’ of him fur spite agin Reuben would hear ’bout’n it, an’ take him so fur away ez we-uns couldn’t never ketch him agin. I went back ter the school-house over an’ over, a-sarchin’ fur him, hopin’ he’d take a notion ter kem thar agin. An’ at last I ’lowed I’d tell the lawyer.”

It had become very plain to the listeners that it was in the interests of his client that Harshaw had permitted his own rude conduct to be made public. The prosecution could not now reasonably demand why a hue and cry had not been raised, and why the boy was not brought into court, as it was very evident that because of the witness’s mistaken secrecy and the lawyer’s purblind folly the facts had not become known to the defense until the preceding day, when it was futile to search a place where the fugitive had been glimpsed three months before.

The attorney-general, about to cross-examine the witness, cleared his throat several times on a low key. He began with a deliberation and caution which indicated that he considered her formidable to the interests of the State. He sat with his side to the table,—the rural lawyer seldom rises save to address the court,—with one elbow upon it, and the other hand twirling his heavy gold watch-chain that festooned his ample stomach. More than once he desisted in this operation, and passed his hand soothingly over his bald head, as if he were encouraging his ideas. He at once sought to show an interested motive in the testimony.

Was she a relation of the prisoner? Was she not interested in him? Was he not her lover? Ah, he had been! And he was not now? And why?

Alethea’s simple and modest decorum in answering these questions abashed the ridicule that the mere mention of the tender passion always excites in a rural crowd. She only threw added light upon her character when she replied:

“Reuben didn’t like folks ter argufy with him. I useter beg him not ter play kyerds, an’ be so powerful gamesome, an’ drink whiskey, an’ git in sech a many scrapes. An’ he ’lowed ’twarn’t my business. An’ I reckon ’twarn’t But it never ’peared-like ter me ez sech goin’s-on war right, an’ I couldn’t holp sayin’ so. An’ so he ’lowed ez me an’ him couldn’t agree, an’ thar war no use a-tryin’.”

Mink glanced up at Gwinnan to note the impression of this plain statement. The judge was looking at _him_.

The attorney-general went on, hoping to find a discrepancy in her testimony, yet hardly knowing how he had best approach it. The court-room had relapsed into absolute silence. One could hear in the pauses the slight movement of the branches of the trees without as the light wind stirred. They were distinctly visible beside the windows, for the night was fair. All the long upper sashes gave upon a sky of a fine, pure azure, seeming more delicate for the dull yellow lamplight flooding the room. The moon with an escort of clouds was riding splendidly up toward the meridian; now and then they closed jealously about her, and again through their parting ranks she looked out radiantly and royally on her realms below. The frost touched the panes here and there with a crystalline sparkle. The attorney-general fixed his eyes upon the moon as he pondered; then, his fingers drumming lightly upon the table, he asked, “It was at the little school-house on the road to Bethel camp-ground?”

“Yes, sir,” said Alethea.

“Were you ever there before?”

“A many a time,” said Alethea. “The folkses in Eskaqua Cove goes thar ter preachin’.”

He glanced again absently at the moon, his fingers still drumming on the table.

“It’s a church-house, then,” he said, adopting the vernacular, “as well as a school-house?”

“Yes, sir,” assented the witness.

“Well, is this fence by which you were standing the fence around the play-yard?”

“Naw, sir,” said Alethea, amazed at the idea of this civilized provision for youthful sports. “The palin’s air round three sides o’ the house, leavin’ out the side whar the door be, ter pertect the graves.”

The drumming fingers of the attorney-general were suddenly still. “It is a graveyard, then?” he said, in a sepulchral undertone, overmastered himself by the surprise.

“Yes, sir. Folks air buried thar. It’s a graveyard.”

There was a pause.

“There’s no place more appropriate for a boy in poor Tad’s predicament to be!” cried the lawyer. “Look here,” squaring himself before the table and placing his elbows upon it, “do you believe in ghosts?”

Harshaw had changed color; he had been fiercely biting his red lips and stroking his yellow beard throughout these interrogatories, seeing their drift more clearly, perhaps, than the prosecuting officer did. Now he sprang to his feet, and insisted that the attorney for the State should not be permitted to play upon the superstition of the witness. She had seen no ghost. The court would not, he hoped, permit the questions to take the form of an attempt to persuade a witness—of great native intelligence, indeed, and of the highest moral worth, but densely ignorant, and doubtless saturated with the ridiculous superstitions of the uneducated—that in seeing this fugitive lad she had beheld a supernatural manifestation. “In one moment, sir,” he interpolated, addressing Peter Rood, who sat in the back row of the jury, and who had suddenly bent forward, pointing a long finger at the witness, as if he were about to ask a question. “The boy doubtless swam out of the river, and being a maltreated little drudge ran away, and is now somewhere held in hiding by persons inimical to the prisoner. The witness had a glimpse of him. There is no man here ignorant enough to believe that she saw a ghost,—least of all the learned and astute counsel for the State.”

“I don’t believe she saw a ghost,” said the attorney-general, still seated, cocking up his eyes at his vehement opponent. “I do believe, however, most firmly, that the witness had an illusion, hallucination.”

There was a stir in the audience and the jury as he uttered these big words. They seemed to represent something more vaguely formidable than a ghost.

“Counsel must conduct the examination on a reasonable basis,” remarked the judge.

“I will do so, your Honor,” in the basso profundo of deep respect.

Mink, agitated, trembling with the sudden shock, leaned forward and looked with burning eyes at Alethea. How was she discrediting the testimony she had given for him? How was she jeopardizing his fate?

She was almost overcome for a moment. Her nerves were shaken; she was appalled by the sudden revolution her simple disclosure had wrought. Her lips trembled, her eyes filled, but she made a gallant struggle for self-control, and answered in a steady voice the attorney-general’s next question.

“Did the boy wear a hat, or was he bare-headed?”

There was suppressed excitement in the audience, for Tad’s hat and coat, recovered from the river, had been shown to the jury while she was in the ante-room with the other witnesses.

“I didn’t notice,—’twar so suddint”

“How was he dressed?”

“I didn’t see,” faltered Alethea.

“What _did_ you see?”

“I seen his face, ez clear ez I see yourn this minit.”

“How did he look,—hearty?”

“Naw, sir; he looked mighty peaked. His face war bleached,”—a thrill ran through the crowd,—“an’ I reckon he war skeered ez he seen me, fur he ’peared plumb tarrified.”

“How long did you see his face?”

“A minit, mebbe; the fog passed ’twixt us.”

“Ah, there was fog!”

The attorney-general cast a triumphant sidelong glance at the jury.

He paused abruptly, and turned toward them.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, addressing Peter Rood. “I had quite forgotten you wanted to ask a question.”

It did not immediately strike him as odd that the man was still in the same position,—in the shadow, leaning forward, supported on the back of the chair of the juryman in front of him, and still pointing at the witness with a long finger.

The judge took note of the lapse of time. “Mr. Sheriff,” he said, irritably, “wake that juror up. The man’s asleep.”

There was a stir in the jury-box among the attentive eleven men. The juror on whose chair the immovable figure leaned turned his head, and met the fixed gaze of the eyes so close to his own.

He sprang up with a loud cry.

“The man is dead!” he shrieked.

XII.

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.”