Chapter 14

Cynthe herself had meant to keep away from this trial. She knew it was no place for her to carry the awful secret that she had hidden away in her heart. No matter how deeply she might have it hidden, the fear hung over her that men would probe for it. A word, a look, a hint might be enough to set some on the search for it and she had had a superstition that it was a secret of a nature that it could not be hidden forever. Some day some one would tear it from her heart. She knew that it was dangerous for her to be in Danton during these days when the hill people were talking of nothing but the killing of Rogers and hunting for any possible fact that might make Jeffrey Whiting's story believable. But she had been drawn irresistibly to the trial and had sat all day yesterday and to-day listening feverishly, avidly to every word that was said, waiting to hear, and praying against hearing the name of the man she had loved. The idea of protecting his name and his memory from the blight of his deed had become more than a religion, more than a sacred trust to her. It filled not only her own thought and life but it seemed even to take up that great void in her world which Rafe Gadbeau had filled.

When she had heard his name mentioned in that sudden questioning of the Bishop, she had almost jumped from her seat to cry out to him that he must know nothing. But that was foolish, she reflected. They might as well have asked the stones on the top of the Gaunt Rocks to tell Rafe Gadbeau's secret as to ask it from the Bishop.

But this girl was different. You could not tell what she might do under the test. If she stood the test, if she kept the seal unbroken upon her lips, then would Cynthe be her willing slave for life. She would love that girl, she would fetch for her, work for her, die for her!

When that point-blank question came leaping upon the tortured girl in the stand, Cynthe rose to her feet. She expected to hear the girl stammer and blurt out something that would give them a chance to ask her further questions. But when she saw the girl reel and quiver in pain, when she saw her gasp for breath and self-control, when she saw the hunted agony in her eyes, a great light broke in upon the heart of Cynthe Cardinal. Here was not a pale girl of the convent who could not know what love was! Here was a woman, a sister woman, who could suffer, who for the sake of one greater thing could trample her love under foot, and who could and did sum it all up in one steady word--"Nothing."

Cynthe Cardinal revolted. Her quickened heart could not look at the torture of the other girl. She wanted to run forward and throw herself at the feet of the other girl as she came staggering down from the stand and implore her pardon. She wanted to cry out to her that she must tell! That no man, alive or dead, was worth all this! For Cynthe Cardinal knew that truth bitterly. Instead, she turned and ran like a frightened, wild thing out of the room and up the street.

She had seen the Bishop come direct from the little church to the court. And as she watched his face when he came down from the stand, she knew instinctively that he was going back there. Cynthe understood. Even M'sieur the Bishop who was so wise and strong, he was troubled. He thought much of the young Whiting. He would have business with God.

She slipped noiselessly in at the door of the church and saw the Bishop kneeling there at the end of the pew, bowed and broken.

He was first aware of her when he heard a frightened, hurrying whisper at his elbow. Some one was kneeling in the aisle beside him, saying:

_Mon Pere, je me 'cuse._

The ritual would have told him to rise and go to the confessional. But here was a soul that was pouring its secret out to him in a torrential rush of words and sobs that would not wait for ritual. The Bishop listened without raising his head. He had neither the will nor the power to break in upon that cruel story that had been torturing its keeper night and day. He knew that it was true, knew what the end of it would be. But still he must be careful to give no word that would show that he knew what was coming. The French of the hills and of Beaupre was a little too rapid for him but it was easy to follow the thread of the story. When she had finished and was weeping quietly, the Bishop prompted gently.

"And now? my daughter."

"And now, _Mon Pere_, must I tell? I would not tell. I loved Rafe Gadbeau. As long as I shall live I shall love him. For his good name I would die. But I cannot see the suffering of that girl, Ruth. _Mon Pere_, it is too much! I cannot stand it. Yet I cannot go there before men and call my love a murderer. Consider, _Mon Pere_. There is another way. I, too, am guilty. I wished for the death of that man. I would have killed him myself, for he had made Rafe Gadbeau do many things that he would not have done. He made my love a murderer. I went to keep Rafe Gadbeau from the setting of the fire. But I would have killed that man myself with the gun if I could. So I hated him. When I saw him fall, I clapped my hands in glee. See, _Mon Pere_, I am guilty. And I called joyfully to my love to run with me and save himself, for he was now free from that man forever. But he ran in the path of the fire because he feared those other men.

"But see, _Mon Pere_, I am guilty. I will go and tell the court that I am the guilty one. I will say that my hand shot that man. See, I will tell the story. I have told it many times to myself. Such a straight story I shall tell. And they will believe. I will make them believe. And they will not hurt a girl much," she said, dropping back upon her native shrewdness to strengthen her plea. "The railroad does not care who killed Rogers. They want only to punish the young Whiting. And the court will believe, as I shall tell it."

"But, my daughter," said the Bishop, temporising. "It would not be true. We must not lie."

"But M'sieur the Bishop, himself," the girl argued swiftly, evidently separating the priest in the confessional from the great bishop in his public walk, "he himself, on the stand--"

The girl stopped abruptly.

The Bishop held the silence of the grave.

"_Mon Pere_ will make me tell, then--the truth," she began. "_Mon Pere_, I cannot! I--!"

"Let us consider," the Bishop broke in deliberately. "Suppose he had told this thing to you when he was dying. You would have said to him: Your soul may not rest if you leave another to suffer for your deed. Would he not have told you to tell and clear the other man?"

"To escape Hell," said the girl quickly, "yes. He would have said: Tell everything; tell anything!" In the desolate forlornness of her grief she had not left to her even an illusion. Just as he was, she had known the man, good and bad, brave and cowardly--and had loved him. Would always love him.

"We will not speak of Hell," said the Bishop gently. "In that hour he would have seen the right. He would have told you to tell."

"But he confessed to M'sieur the Bishop himself," she retorted quickly, still seeming to forget that she was talking to the prelate in person, but springing the trap of her quick wit and sound Moral Theology back upon him with a vengeance, "and he gave _him_ no leave to speak."

The Bishop in a panic hurried past the dangerous ground.

"If he had left a debt, would you pay it for him, my daughter?"

"_Mon Pere_, with the bones of my hands!"

"Consider, then, he is not now the man that you knew. The man who was blind and walked in dark places. He is now a soul in a world where a great light shines about him. He knows now that which he did not know here--Truth. He sees the things which here he did not see. He stands alone in the great open space of the Beyond. He looks up to God and cries: _Seigneur Dieu_, whither go I?

"And God replying, asks him why does he hesitate, standing in the open place. Would he come back to the world?

"And he answers: 'No, my God; but I have left a debt behind and another man's life stands in pledge for my debt; I cannot go forward with that debt unpaid.'

"Then God: 'And is there none to cancel the debt? Is there not one in all that world who loved you? Were you, then, so wicked that none loved you who will pay the debt?'

"And he will answer with a lifted heart: 'My God, yes; there was one, a girl; in spite of me, she loved me; she will make the debt right; only because she loved me may I be saved; she will speak and the debt will be right; my God, let me go.'"

The Bishop's French was sometimes wonderfully and fearfully put together. But the girl saw the pictures. The imagery was familiar to her race and faith. She was weeping softly, with almost a little break of joy among the tears. For she saw the man, whom she had loved in spite of what he was, lifted now out of the weaknesses and sins of life. And her love leaped up quickly to the ideal and the illusions that every woman craves for and clings to.

"This," the Bishop was going on quietly, "is the new man we are to consider; the one who stands in the light and sees Truth. We must not hear the little mouthings of the world. Does he care for the opinions or the words that are said here? See, he stands in the great open space, all alone, and dares to look up to the Great God and tell Him all. Will you be afraid to stand in the court and tell these people, who do not matter at all?

"Remember, it is not for Jeffrey Whiting. It is not for the sake of Ruth Lansing. It is because the man you loved calls back to you, from where he has gone, to do the thing which the wisdom he has now learned tells him must be done. He has learned the lesson of eternal Truth. He would have you tell."

"_Mon Pere_, I will tell the tale," said the girl simply as she rose from her knees. "I will go quickly, while I have yet the courage."

The Bishop went with her to one of the counsel rooms in the courthouse and sent for Dardis.

"This girl," he told the lawyer, "has a story to tell. I think you would do wisely to put her on the stand and let her tell it in her own way. She will make no mistakes. They will not be able to break her down."

Then the Bishop went back to take up again his business with God.

As a last, and almost hopeless, resort, Jeffrey Whiting had been put upon the stand in his own defence. There was nothing he could tell which the jurors had not already heard in one form or another. Everybody had heard what he had said that morning on Bald Mountain. He had not been believed even then, by men who had never had a reason to doubt his simple word. There was little likelihood that he would be believed here now by these jurors, whose minds were already fixed by the facts and the half truths which they had been hearing. But there was some hope that his youth and the manly sincerity with which he clung to his simple story might have some effect. It might be that a single man on that jury would be so struck with his single sturdy tale that he would refuse to disbelieve it altogether. You could never tell what might strike a man on a jury. So Dardis argued.

Jeffrey Whiting did not care. If his counsel wished him to tell his story he would do so. It would not matter. His own friends did not believe his story. Nobody believed it. Two people _knew_ that it was true. And those two people had stood up there upon the stand and sworn that they did not know. One of them was a good man, a man of God, a man he would have trusted with every dear thing that life held. That man had stood up there and lied. The other was a girl whom he loved, and who, he was sure, loved him.

It had not been easy for Ruth to tell that lie--or maybe she did not consider it a lie: he had seen her suffer terribly in the telling of it. He was beginning to feel that he did not care much what was the outcome of the trial. Life was a good thing, it was true. And death, or a life of death, as a murderer, was worse than twenty common deaths. But that had all dropped into the background. Only one big thing stood before him. It laid hold upon him and shook him and took from him his interest in every other fact in the world.

Ruth Lansing, he thought he could say, had never before in her life told a lie. Why should she have ever told a lie. She had never had reason to fear any one; and they only lie who fear. He would have said that the fear of death could not have made Ruth Lansing lie. Yet she had stood up there and lied.

For what? For a church. For a religion to which she had foolishly given herself. For that she had given up him. For that she had given up her conscience. For that she had given up her own truth!

It was unbelievable. But he had sat here and listened to it.

He had heard her lie simply and calmly in answer to a question which meant life or death to him. She had known that. She could not have escaped knowing it if she had tried. There was no way in which she could have fooled herself or been persuaded into believing that she was not lying or that she was not taking from him his last hope of life.

Jeffrey Whiting did not try to grapple or reason with the fact. What was the use? It was the end of all things. He merely sat and gazed dumbly at the monstrous thing that filled his whole mental vision.

He went forward to the witness chair and stood woodenly until some one told him to be seated. He answered the questions put him automatically, without looking either at the questioner or at the jury who held his fate in their hands. Men who had been watching the alert, keen-faced boy all day yesterday and through to-day wondered what had happened to him. Was he breaking down? Would he confess? Or had he merely ceased hoping and turned sullen and dumb?

Without any trace of emotion or interest, he told how he had raced forward, charging upon the man who was setting the fire. He looked vacantly at the Judge while the latter ordered that part of his words stricken out which told what the man was doing. He showed no resentment, no feeling of any kind. He related how the man had run away from him, trailing the torch through the brush, and again he did not seem to notice the Judge's anger in cautioning him not to mention the fire again.

At his counsel's direction, he went through a lifeless pantomime of falling upon one knee and pointing his rifle at the fleeing man. Now the man turned and faced him. Then he heard the shot which killed Rogers come from the woods. He dropped his own rifle and went forward to look at the dying man. He picked up the torch and threw it away.

Then he turned to fight the fire. (This time the Judge did not rule out the word.) Then his rifle had exploded in his hands, the bullet going just past his ear. The charge had scorched his neck. It was a simple story. The thing _might_ have happened. It was entirely credible. There were no contradictions in it. But the manner of Jeffrey Whiting, telling it, gave no feeling of reality. It was not the manner of a man telling one of the most stirring things of his life. He was not telling what he saw and remembered and felt and was now living through. Rather, he seemed to be going over a wearying, many-times-told tale that he had rehearsed to tedium. A sleeping man might have told it so. The jury was left entirely unconvinced, though puzzled by the manner of the recital.

Even Lemuel Squires' harping cross questions did not rouse Jeffrey to any attention to the story that he had told. At each question he went back to the point indicated and repeated his recital dully and evenly without any thought of what the District Attorney was trying to make him say. He was not thinking of the District Attorney nor of the story. He was still gazing mentally in stupid wonder at the horrible fact that Ruth Lansing had lied his life away at the word of her church.

When he had gotten back to the little railed enclosure where he was again the prisoner, he sat down heavily to wait for the end of this wholly irrelevant business of the trial. Another witness was called. He did not know that there was another. He had expected that Squires would begin his speech at once.

He noticed that this witness was a girl from French Village whom he had seen several times. Now he remembered that she was Rafe Gadbeau's girl. What did they bring her here for? She could not know anything, and why did they want to pester the poor thing? Didn't the poor little thing look sorry and troubled enough without fetching her down here to bring it all up to her? He roused himself to look reassuringly at the girl, as though to tell her not to mind, that it did not matter anyway, that he knew she could not help him, and that she must not let them hurt her.

Dardis, to forestall objections and to ensure Cynthe against interruptions from the prosecutor or the Judge, had told her to say nothing about fire but to speak directly about the killing of Rogers and nothing else. So when, after she had been sworn, he told her to relate the things that led up to the killing, she began at the very beginning:

"Four years ago," she said, "Rafe Gadbeau was in Utica. A man was killed in a crowd. His knife had been used to kill the man. Rafe Gadbeau did not do that. Often he has sworn to me that he did not know who had done it. But a detective, a man named Rogers, found the knife and traced it to Rafe Gadbeau. He did not arrest him. No, he kept the knife, saying that some day he would call upon Rafe Gadbeau for the price of his silence.

"Last summer this man Rogers came into the woods looking for some one to help get the people to sell their land. He saw Rafe Gadbeau. He showed him the knife. He told him that whatever he laid upon him to do, that he must do. He made him lie to the people. He made him attack the young Whiting. He made him do many things that he would not do, for Rafe Gadbeau was not a bad man, only foolish sometimes. And Rafe Gadbeau was sore under the yoke of fear that this man had put upon him.

"At times he said to me, 'Cynthe, I will kill this man one day, and that will be the end of all.' But I said, '_Non, non, mon Rafe_, we will marry in the fall, and go away to far Beaupre where he will never see you again, and we will not know that he ever lived.'"

Cynthe had forgotten her audience. She was telling over to herself the tragedy of her little life and her great love. Genius could not have told her how better to tell it for the purpose for which her story was here needed. Dardis thanked his stars that he had taken the Bishop's advice, to let her get through with it in her own way.

"But it was not time for us to marry yet," she went on. "Then came the morning of the nineteenth August. I was sitting on the back steps of my aunt's house by the Little Tupper, putting apples on a string to hang up in the hot sun to dry." The Judge turned impatiently on his bench and shrugged his shoulders. The girl saw and her eyes blazed angrily at him. Who was he to shrug his shoulders! Was it not important, this story of her love and her tragedy! Thereafter the Judge gave her the most rigid attention.

"Rafe Gadbeau came and sat down on the steps at my feet. I saw that he was troubled. 'What is it, _mon Rafe_?' I asked. He groaned and said one bad word. Then he told me that he had just had a message from Rogers to meet him at the head of the rail with three men and six horses. 'What to do, _mon Rafe_?' 'I do not know,' he said, 'though I can guess. But I will not tell you, Cynthe.'

"'You will not go, _mon Rafe_. Promise me you will not go. Hide away, and we will slip down to the Falls of St. Regis and be married--me, I do not care for the grand wedding in the church here--and then we will get away to Beaupre. Promise me.'

"'_Bien_, Cynthe, I promise. I will not go to him.'

"But it was a man's promise. I knew he would go in the end.

"I watched and followed. I did not know what I could do. But I followed, hoping that somewhere I could get Rafe before they had done what they intended and we could run away together with clean hands.

"When I saw that they had gone toward the railroad I turned aside and climbed up to the Bald Mountain. I knew they would all come back there together. I waited until it was dark and they came. They would do nothing in the night. I waited for the morning. Then I would find Rafe and bring him away. I was desperate. I was a wild girl that night. If I could have found that Rogers and come near him I would have killed him myself. I hated him, for he had made me much suffering.

"In the morning I was in the woods near them. I saw Rafe. But that Rogers kept him always near him.

"I saw Rogers go out of the wood a little to look. Rafe was a little way from him and coming slowly toward me. I called to him. He did not hear. I saw the look in his face. It was the look of one who has made up his mind to kill. Again I called to him. But he did not hear.

"I saw Rogers go running along the edge of the wood. Now he came running back toward Rafe. He stopped and turned.

"The young Whiting was on his knee with the rifle raised to shoot. I looked to Rafe. The sound of his gun struck me as I turned my face. The bullet struck Rogers in the back of the head. I saw. The young Whiting had not fired at all.

"I turned and ran, calling to Rafe to follow me. 'Come with me, _mon Rafe_,' I called. 'I, too, am guilty. I would have killed him in the night. Come with me. We will escape. The fire will cover all. None will ever know but you and me, and I am guilty as you. Come.'

"But he did not hear. And I wished him to hear. Oh! I wished him at least to hear me say that I took the share of the guilt, for I did not wish to be separated from him in this world or the next.

"But he ran back always into the path of the fire, for those other men, the old M'sieur Beasley and the others, were closing behind him and the fire."

She was speaking freely of the fire now, but it did not matter. Her story was told. The big, hot tears were flowing freely and her voice rose into a cry of farewell as she told the end.

"Then he was down and I saw the fire roll over him. Oh, the great God, who is good, was cruel that day! Again, at the last, I saw him up and running on again. Then the fire shut him out from my sight, and God took him away.

"That is all. I ran for the Little Tupper and was safe."

Dardis did not try to draw another word from her on any part of the story. He was artist enough to know that the story was complete in its naïve and tragic simplicity. And he was judge enough of human nature to understand that the jury would remember better and hold more easily her own unthought, clipped expressions than they would any more connected elaborations he might try to make her give.

Lemuel Squires was a narrow man, a born prosecutor. He had always been a useful officer to the railroad powers because he was convinced of the guilt of any prisoner whom it was his business to bring into court. He regarded a verdict of acquittal as hardly less than a personal insult. He denied that there were ever two sides to any case. But his very narrowness now confounded him here. This girl's story was true. It was astounding, impossible, subversive of all things. But it was true.

His mind, one-sided as it was always, had room for only the one thing. The story was true. He asked her a few unimportant questions, leading nowhere, and let her go. Then he began his summing up to the jury.

It was a half-hearted, wholly futile plea to them to remember the facts by which the prisoner had already been convicted and to put aside the girl's dramatic story. He was still convinced that the prisoner was guilty. But--the girl's story was true. His mind was not nimble enough to escape the shock of that fact. He was helpless under it. His pleading was spiritless and wandering while his mind stood aside to grapple with that one astounding thing.