Part 14

“He’s nothing but a kid,” said the colonel with indignation. “I--by gum, Dan, I don’t like to say what I think!”

Virginia clapped her soft hand over his mouth.

“Not another word, grandpa!”

Daniel smiled.

“Never mind, Virginia, the newspapers are blatant. My father read the paper this morning and broke the cream-pitcher--the Wedgewood one, too.”

The colonel caught Virginia’s restraining hand and held it.

“Dan, how’s William?”

Daniel, who was looking at Virginia, became very grave.

“I don’t know how to answer that, colonel. He’s heartbroken over Leigh, I think. He and his wife”--Daniel hesitated, his eyes on Virginia--“have separated,” he concluded in a low voice.

The colonel, who knew it, only wagged his head soberly, but Virginia started. A deep blush rose from her throat to her white forehead. Her eyes fell before Daniel’s, and he saw her hands tremble.

“She loves him still!” he thought bitterly.

He turned, looking paler than ever.

“I must go on. I only stopped to thank you both for your sympathy. We”--he hesitated again--“we appreciate it.”

The colonel laid his hand on the younger man’s shoulder, and his eyes misted.

“I’ll walk to the street with you, Dan,” he said, swallowing a lump in his throat. “I reckon there isn’t much we can do--any of us--but to stand by you-all.”

Daniel looked back at Virginia, raising his hat again, and the two men walked away across the long lawn to the group of cedars that grew by the side gate.

Virginia, left alone, turned and entered the house. She was very pale now, and her lips trembled. She went into the drawing-room and stood looking at the little old picture of William as a boy. She had looked at it a thousand times before, and she remembered that once she had kissed it. They had always been fond of each other and then--or was it a dream?--he had asked her to marry him. They had planned their happiness gaily, with youthful laughter at sorrow and doubt. She had loved him, and he had married--this woman!

Virginia would have been less than human if she had not thrilled at the thought that he must regret it. She felt that he did. He had already almost said so. He had been caught; she knew it! What woman, placed as Virginia was, would not have felt that! In the rush of sympathy for him she blamed only Fanchon.

She remembered the night at the Sunday-school hall and Fanchon’s blanched face at the sight of Corwin. Corwin had made Virginia shudder; but such men as this had been Fanchon’s associates, such men as Corwin had been part of her life, and William Carter had unwittingly married her! In the storm of her resentment, Virginia felt only that William needed her sympathy, he even needed--it was on the tip of her tongue to say--her love!

Then the thing suddenly stood out before her; she saw it in all its horrible nakedness and cruelty. The poor little wayward dancer caught in the snare of her past--whatever that past might be--and in the midst of her fancied security assailed and ruined, snatched from her new happiness, talked about, shamed, and at last cast out!

Yet--poor William! Tears rushed to Virginia’s eyes. Her heart yearned over him. At that moment, when William was breaking with the wife that he had preferred to her, when he was crushed by the scandal that the woman had made of his life, Virginia forgave him.

She sank down on the piano-stool under his childish picture, and, covering her face with her hands, she wept--not for herself, as Fanchon had done, but for William. She had fought hard to crush out her love for him, but at that moment she felt that she had not succeeded, that it was too strong for her, and she trembled.

She trembled at the thought of the look on his face when she had seen him last. She knew that he had come back to her. Virginia, who could not see into the future, still felt a thrill of terror at her heart. It was as if an invisible power walked with her, an invisible hand thrust her toward unforeseen perils, and into ways that she knew not.

Strangely enough, too, in the midst of her emotion, the thought came to her, keenly and vividly--what would Dan think of it? And of her--Virginia? In some way, intuitively, for he had said nothing about it, she knew that Daniel’s attitude toward Fanchon had changed. Something in the very intonation of his voice had told her that; yet he had announced the separation without comment, and had even appeared to assent to Colonel Denbigh’s suppressed recognition of Fanchon’s culpability.

Virginia, weeping for William, trembling at the thought that William’s heart must have turned remorsefully to the memories of their innocent affection, nevertheless flushed at the thought that Daniel would be a witness, a bystander, at any drama that unrolled now in their lives. She had never thought of Daniel before as having any part between William and her, but now it was Daniel’s judgment that mattered. Yet she loved William. She no longer attempted to deny that to herself, she could not--it was William who was suffering and shamed by the woman who had left him.

Virginia was softly wiping the tears from her eyes when she heard her grandfather coming back. She rose, looked hastily into the mirror, and, reassured by the face she saw there, went out into the hall and met him.

“I thought you were going to walk all the way into town with Dan,” she remarked casually.

The colonel shook his head.

“I only went to the corner. Jinny, the trial’s to be next week. Judge Jessup has managed to rush it before the court adjourns this session. It seems Mrs. Carter can’t bear the suspense, and I reckon the boy can’t, either. I never did think Leigh had much grit--not even when he ate lollypops,” he added grimly, eying Virginia.

“I know his poor mother has gone to pieces,” she replied gently. “Emily told me as much. Poor Emily, she’s cried so hard that paint won’t help her white eyelashes now.”

The colonel, who had discovered that Virginia had been crying herself, looked thoughtful. They turned and walked through the hall together to the staircase. Virginia started to ascend--she wanted to escape--but her grandfather had more news for her.

“Dan’s a kind of clam,” he observed after a moment’s pause, “but I got something out of him. Fanchon has told him her story. He believes that it will help save Leigh. He’s going to put her on the stand.”

Virginia, leaning on the banister, blushed again.

“I thought she’d left William,” she said in a low voice.

“So she has--so she has; but Dan says she’ll do anything to save Leigh. She seems to be fond of that fool kid. Got him under her thumb, I suppose, and then made him do her bidding. I reckon she’d better go on the stand. It’s the only thing she can do. But, by gum, I’m sorry for Johnson Carter and his wife, and Emily and Dan.”

“And William,” suggested Virginia softly.

“No!” thundered the colonel. “No! I’m not a mite sorry for that lummox--he went and married her! He----”

The old man stopped with his mouth open. Lucas, the negro driver, had just appeared at the back door, his arms full of green ears of corn.

“Been up de hill, suh,” he explained genially, “an’ Col’nel Colfax’s son, he don’ send yo’ all dis yere corn. Golden Bantam--dat’s what he call it, same as dey calls dem lil no-account chickens.”

“It looks small,” said the colonel. “How about that horse? Did you like it, Lucas?”

“Yessuh, I like ’im, but he don’ like me. He’s very good horse, Pole Star’s grandson, but I reckon I scared ob ridin’ him. Sam Bun, he Mist’ Colfax’s man--he say dat horse bit four men las’ Saturday week.”

“I don’t want him,” said Virginia laughing. “Hear any news up there, Lucas? How’s Miss Sally?”

“Gone to de springs, Miss Jinny. I did heah on de road back ’bout young Mis’ Carter--de one dat done got Mist’ Corwin shot.” He looked over his green corn at the colonel. “She’s stayin’ up to Quantah’s place now.”

“Eh!” The colonel stared. “Pretty poor place isn’t it, Lucas?”

“Sho is, suh. Ain’t noffin’ dere now but de woman, Mis’ Quantah, an’ dat bug-house boy ob hers. Dey sold de cow las’ week to de butcher. Ain’t no place fo’ quality nohow. Yessuh, Mis’ Wilyum Carter up dere now. She lef’ Mist’ Wilyum or Mist’ Wilyum lef’ her, I don’t know--”

“Lucas, you take that corn to the kitchen. I want some for dinner.”

“Yessuh,” said Lucas, and went.

The colonel turned to Virginia.

“That Quantah place is pretty forlorn. Can that girl be as poor as that? I thought Mrs. Quantah was about down and out.”

“Why, grandpa, the place is a wreck! There can’t be a decent room up-stairs!” Virginia’s face was still flushed, she clung to the banister. “I can’t understand.”

The colonel looked grave.

“She’s going on the stand for Leigh. The Carters oughtn’t to allow this.” He turned and laid his hand on his granddaughter’s shoulder. “Jinny,” he said quietly. “I reckon we mustn’t judge it too hard, but--well, I’m beginning to pity that girl.”

Virginia said nothing. She was afraid that her grandfather felt her trembling under his hand.

XXII

WILLIAM CARTER spent the days after the shooting entirely alone in his office at the Payson Building. He slept there on the old couch, and for the most part ate there, Moses, the elevator-boy, running errands for him to the delicatessen store and then devouring the viands after he had brought them. For William ate practically nothing, though he drank a good deal.

Mr. Payson, who had found him once or twice in a state of stupor, called up Mr. Carter on the telephone the day before the trial.

“You’d better come over and see William,” he advised. “He’s in no condition to do business.”

Mr. Carter, who had just returned to his office after a long talk with Leigh, was shaken; but he picked up his hat, clapped it down again on his gray head, and started determinedly for the Payson Building. He felt that his cup was full. He even experienced a sensation of ire at Payson for having acquired wealth to build this huge edifice of mottled brick and sandstone.

“Looks like a huge loaf of ginger-bread,” Mr. Carter grumbled to himself.

But he was glad that it happened to be in full blast, as he would have expressed it, and the throng of shoppers had no time to notice him. Moses took him up in an elevator that was designated as “for employees only.” He made some ado, too, about moving aside a basketful of empty bottles to make room for his passenger. Mr. Carter shoved the basket with his foot.

“What’s that?” he asked sharply.

Moses looked plaintive.

“Ain’t had no time to pitch ’em outen heah, suh. Dey’s from Mist’ Wilyum’s room.”

Mr. Carter restrained an impulse to count the bottles, and said nothing. At the eighth floor he got out and walked reluctantly across the hall to his son’s door. He opened it without knocking and looked in.

William was seated at his desk, his arms hanging down at his sides and his eyes fixed on the wall opposite. There was no indication of intemperance unless it lay in the deathly pallor and the disheveled hair. Mr. Carter strode over to the table and struck it loudly with his fist to call attention to his presence.

“We’d be honored if you’d come home,” he said dryly. “You’ve nothing to fear there--she’s cleared out.”

William raised his haggard eyes.

“How about Leigh? I haven’t seen Dan for days.”

“Dan’s trying to save his brother from”--Mr. Carter’s voice grew suddenly hoarse--“from eighteen years’ imprisonment.”

“Good Lord!” cried William aghast. “They couldn’t do that--he’s nothing but a kid!”

Mr. Carter walked over to the windows and shut and fastened them; then he picked up his son’s hat and handed it to him.

“You come home with me,” was all he said.

William went.

His adoring mother received him like the returned prodigal, and Emily waited on him with eyes red from weeping. No one mentioned Fanchon; the family seemed to have resolved to let her drop out of sight forever. With Daniel’s aid, William managed to see Leigh that night for the first time since the shooting.

It was a moment of horrible embarrassment and humiliation for William. He was shocked, too, at the sight of the boy’s white face and the dark rings under his girlish eyes. Leigh had gone through deep waters on his account, yet it was one of those things that cannot be talked about.

“My job, Leigh,” he said laconically. “You had no business to take it away from me.”

Leigh blushed like a girl.

“I couldn’t hear Fanchon slandered like that,” he cried. “I had to do it!”

William bowed his head, looking down at the floor of the cell. He hadn’t the heart to tell the boy that he believed the slanders. Curiously enough, under Leigh’s clear eyes, he felt ashamed of believing in them; but his inveterate rage against his wife remained undiminished. She had deceived him, he no longer believed in her, and he was furious against her for the ruin she had wrought. The very fact that he had been head over ears in love with her embittered him the more. It was an intolerable humiliation.

He left Leigh in a passion of sorrow and self-accusation, and went home to spend a sleepless night. Toward morning, from sheer exhaustion, he dozed off into troubled dreams. He thought he had been cast into a fiery furnace along with Shadrach, Meshech and Abednego; he could see three shadowy figures moving like giants through fields of flame. Presently an angel touched him on the shoulder and called to him--in French. The angel had the face of Fanchon.

He awoke with a groan and found his mother standing at the foot of his bed. She had recovered sufficiently to move about the house now in a striped calico wrapper that made her look twenty years older.

“It’s the day of the trial, Willie,” she said brokenly. “Papa and Dan went an hour ago. Are--are you going to testify? Dan said he wouldn’t call you.”

“The State will,” replied William apathetically, getting out of bed.

His mother looked at him anxiously.

“I’m afraid they’re going to call Fanchon,” she faltered.

He started. For some reason he had never thought of this, and he felt a pang of horrid dismay. It couldn’t be that Judge Jessup and Dan meant to do that. But the State? William experienced a new and rending sensation. He felt like a helpless beetle pinned to the board of a naturalist; he couldn’t escape public dissection.

“Perhaps you’d better not go, Willie,” suggested his mother fondly. “Emily and I are going to stay here at the telephone to-day. Papa promised to ’phone us everything, and we shall be terribly nervous and frightened. Stay with us, dear.”

William realized that he was still a boy to her, and that now, when his unacceptable wife had left him, he was nearer than ever. Nevertheless, he began to look for his clothes.

“I shall go straight there, of course,” he said sharply. “Please tell Miranda I want only a cup of hot coffee.”

“Oh, Willie, you must eat something!” she cried tearfully. “You’ll ruin your health--there are corn muffins, too.”

He had always had a weakness for corn muffins, and, acting on the advice of Miranda, his mother had ordered them to console him. But William would have none of them. He was dressing rapidly, in a fever of impatience, when Emily arrived outside his door and put her lips close to the key-hole to shout to him:

“Papa says you needn’t hurry down there. He doesn’t think they’ll get a jury until next week. Dan’s used up one panel already.”

William had not thought of this, and he slackened his efforts a little only to hear his sister’s return.

“Mama says stay and have some muffins. They’re lovely and brown--I ate five.”

The fact that murder in the second degree did not carry the death sentence had reassured Emily’s hitherto impaired appetite. Like Miranda, she ate to keep up her spirits.

William swallowed a cup of coffee, and left with the consciousness that his mother, Emily, and Miranda considered him on the verge of suicide. He made his way to the court-house by the church lane and the rear alleys. Public curiosity had become intolerable to him, and he had a horror of meeting an acquaintance.

It seemed only last week that he had brought Fanchon up the train platform to meet his father. He had been proud of her beauty then; he had thought her unique and fascinating, and he had even liked the sensation she made in the old humdrum town. Now, he could not think of her without a shudder. He felt as if she had pilloried him in the public square. He would never be able to endure the place again, nor the people in it. It was too small. Each man knew all about his neighbor’s business. He remembered hearing Judge Jessup say that he found it hard to live in such a “nosey” community. It even filled William with intolerant wrath when a group of little pickaninnies stopped playing to gaze, and he heard the loud stage whisper:

“Dat’s him!”

The husband of the woman for whom Corwin had been shot!

He plunged desperately into the basement of the court-house, and ascended the marble steps to a pair of swinging baize doors labeled in huge letters:

CRIMINAL COURT No. 1.

The room, a large one at the northeast corner of the old building, was crowded to suffocation. The windows were all open, and from them one could see the sunshine on the broad leaves of the mulberry-tree in the quadrangle. Judge Barbour, a cousin of the doctor’s, was on the bench, and William recognized a group of reporters below him, on one side. On the other side Daniel was challenging a juror, his face tense and one long forefinger pointing at the man.

William had not seen his brother in court for a long time, and he had a curious feeling that this white-faced, tense lawyer wasn’t his brother at all. It seemed to him that there had been a metamorphosis, that some magic had been at work, that this wasn’t lame Dan, the brother whom he had rather discounted. Here was a face so pre-eminently a face of power that William gaped at it, as the pickaninnies outside the court-house had gaped at him. He could feel, too, that Daniel was holding the crowded room, and that the men and boys on the window-sills, and out roosting in the mulberry branches that overlooked the court-room, were all drawn by the magic of his tongue.

Slowly, deliberately, using all his privilege of challenge, Daniel was picking his jury, while Judge Jessup, senior counsel for the defense, sat between Mr. Carter and the prisoner at the dock. Reluctantly, with a feeling of personal shame, William turned his eyes slowly toward his young brother--the boy who was suffering vicariously for him.

Leigh’s youth seemed appalling in that place. The boy, with his white face and his dark-ringed eyes, looked fifteen. He had a long lock of light brown hair that was usually tossed back from his white forehead--a Byronic effect that Leigh secretly cherished. It was hanging down now, limp and disheveled, and he kept clutching at his necktie with nervous fingers; but there was a light in his eyes, a singular light, as if he saw something inspiring and beautiful.

William tried to follow his glance, to discover what had inspired that rapt look, but the crowd was so great that he could not even get through it to sit beside his father. He found standing-room near the door, where he seemed to be unnoticed, and watched the proceedings with a growing feeling of shame that he was not in Leigh’s place.

Daniel was engaged now in a tilt with the commonwealth attorney, Major Haskins, a man who William knew had once quarreled with his father, and who was known to be vindictive. Haskins was flushed and excited, declaiming loudly, while Daniel, keeping his temper admirably, scored again and again. It was the case of a skilled toreador baiting a bull. Major Haskins, like the finest bulls in the arena, charged in a straight line, never swerving, and, like the toreador, Daniel dodged lightly on first one side and then the other, parrying the attack but goading the enemy.

Something in the extreme dexterity of the goading surprised William again.

“I didn’t know Dan had it in him,” he thought with an accession of unexpected pride in this taciturn brother, who had suffered so long and so silently. Then he heard an excited whisper from a woman in front of him.

“There she is--the dancer! Look--over to the right--they say she’s going on the stand!”

William shrank as if from a physical blow, and his sensitive egotism shivered. This, then, was to be his crowning humiliation, this crowd gathered to stare at his wife!

Of course Leigh had been looking at her; he might have known it. The boy was a fool about her, as he himself had been a fool. William felt an unbearable sensation of suffocation; the air of the crowded room was unfit to breathe. People had found him out, too. The companion of the woman who had whispered so loudly had spotted him. They were looking back covertly over their shoulders and talking in audible undertones.

“What d’you suppose he was doing?”

“That’s her husband--back there.”

“Not really! Oh, my----”

“Say! Pull Jenny’s dress----”

“She’ll want to see him.”

William turned, pushed past the men in the doorway, and almost staggered into the corridor. It was absolutely empty. Every living soul who could squeeze into the court-room had done so. A short flight of marble steps descended to a door which opened on the quadrangle and he could see the sunshine on the lowest step. He started down, bent on escape, and came face to face with Colonel Denbigh.

The old man, attired in a light gray summer suit with a white waistcoat and a broad straw hat, looked like the personification of an untroubled conscience. He held out a friendly hand.

“How are you, William? I came down to”--he hesitated and smiled gravely--“to give your father and Leigh my moral support. Can’t seem to do anything else, can I? Anything for you?” he added, after a moment’s farther hesitation.

William shook his head, turning a deep red.

“I ought to be in Leigh’s place,” he said chokingly, “but I’m worse off.”

The colonel gave him a keen look. It was impossible not to see that the young man’s position was heartrending, and he pitied him. At the same time he still felt a righteous indignation against Fanchon’s husband.

“By gum, it serves him right,” he thought.

Then he was so ashamed of himself that he shook hands with William again. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do.

“I’ll go and sit by your father--if I can get there,” he said kindly. “I hope your mother’s better. Bearing up, eh?”

“She’s better,” said William thickly, averting his eyes. “It’s intolerable to me, Colonel Denbigh, that she should have to suffer so about Leigh on my account. If the boy had only come straight to me!” he added with suppressed passion, his lip quivering suddenly like a woman’s on the verge of tears.

The colonel nodded his head thoughtfully.

“I know--but it’s spilt milk, William. We’ll hope for the best. They tell me Dan’s a smart fellow. Going to be the best lawyer in this town, Judge Jessup says. He’ll get his brother off.”

“That won’t save my face,” William replied bitterly, plunging abruptly down the steps and out into the quadrangle.

The colonel, left alone, stood a moment looking after him, considering him. Come to look at it, he thought, it was a pretty bad place--even for a lummox. He had always thought well of William, he had once imagined him as the possible husband of Virginia, but now----

The colonel tugged at his white mustache with a grim face. He was thinking of Virginia’s face on the stairs, the soft sadness of that profile.

“It can’t be that Jinny cares!” he cried indignantly under his breath.

Then, unable to endure the idea, he swung open the baize doors and worked his way into the crowded court-room. There was a little stir in it now, an air of relief. The twelfth juror had just been accepted.

XXIII