CHAPTER XII
Several of the New York papers the next morning carried editorials commending the verdict. Lydia sitting up in bed with a breakfast tray on her knee, read them coolly through.
"The safety of the highways"—"the irresponsibility of the younger generation, particularly among those of great wealth"—"pity must not degenerate into sentimentality"—"the equal administration of our laws"
So the public was pleased with the verdict, was it? It little knew. She herself was filled with bitterness. The moment of the delivery of the verdict had been terrible to her.
She had not minded the hours of waiting. She had felt deadened, without special interest in what the jury decided. But this had changed the moment word came that the jury had reached a verdict. There was a terrible interval while the familiar roll of their names was called for the last time. Then she was told to stand up and face them, or rather to face the foreman, Josiah Howell, a bearded man with a lined brown face. He looked almost tremulously grave.
Lydia set her jaw, looking at him and thinking, "What business have you interfering in my fate?" But he was not the figure she was most aware of. It was the district attorney, whose excitement she knew was as great as her own.
"How say you?" said a voice. "Guilty or not guilty?"
"Guilty of manslaughter in the second degree," answered the foreman.
Lydia knew every eye in the court room was turned on her. She had heard of defendants who fainted on hearing an adverse verdict—keeled over like dead people. But one does not faint from anger, and anger was Lydia's emotion—anger that "that man" had actually obtained the verdict he wanted. Her breath came fast and her nostrils dilated. How sickening that she had nothing to do but stand there and let him triumph! No subsequent reversal would take away this moment from him.
The jury was thanked and dismissed. Wiley was busy putting in pleas that would enable her to remain at liberty during the appeal of her case. She stood alone, still now as a statue. She was thinking that some day the world should know by what methods that verdict had been obtained.
She had behaved well during her trial; had lived a life of retirement, seeing no one but Wiley and her immediate friends. But there was no further reason for playing a part. On the contrary she felt it would relieve her spirit to show the world—and O'Bannon—that she was not beaten yet. She did not intend to look upon herself as a criminal because he had induced a jury to convict her.
She bought herself some new clothes and went out every night, dancing till dawn and sleeping till noon. She began a new flirtation, this time with a good-looking insolent young English actor, Ludovic Blythe, hardly twenty-one, with a strange combination of wickedness and naïveté that some English boys possess. Her friends disapproved of him heartily.
At his suggestion she engaged a passage for England for early July. Wiley warned her that it was unlikely that the decision in her case would be handed down as soon as that, and if it were not she could not leave the country.
"There's no harm in engaging a cabin, is there?" she answered.
Her plan was to take in the end of the London season, with a few house parties in the English country, to spend September in Venice, two weeks in Paris buying clothes, and to come home in October.
"To Long Island?" Miss Bennett asked.
"Of course. Where else?" answered Lydia. "Do you think I shall allow myself to be driven out of my own home?"
But July came without the decision, and Lydia was obliged to cancel her passage. She was annoyed.
"Those lazy old judges," she said, "have actually adjourned for two months, and now I can't get off until September." Her tone indicated that she was doing a good deal for the law of her country, changing her plans like this.
O'Bannon, she heard, was taking a holiday too—going to Wyoming for a month. She thought that she would like to see something of the West, but instead she took a house at Newport for August—a fevered month. Blythe came to spend Sunday with her and stayed two weeks, fell in love with May Swayne, attempted to use his position as a guest of Lydia's to make himself appear a more desirable suitor in the eyes of the Swayne family—a solid old-fashioned fortune—and was turned out by Lydia after a scene of unusual violence.
A feud followed in which many people took—and changed—sides. Lydia fought gayly, briskly in the open. Her object was not Blythe's death, but his social extinction, and her method was not cold steel but ridicule. The war was won when May was made to see him as an impossible figure, comic, on the make—as perhaps he was, but no more so than when Lydia herself had received him. After this, though he lingered on a few days at a hotel, his ultimate disappearance was certain. Lydia and May remained friends throughout—as much friends as they had ever been. Since the day of their first meeting the two women had never permitted any man to be a friend of both of them.
Albee came and spent a brief twenty-four hours with her between a midnight train and Sunday boat. He was in the midst of a campaign as United States senator from his own state—certain of election. Lydia was kind and patient with him, but frankly bored.
"There's more stuff in Bobby," she confided to Benny, "who doesn't expect you to tremble at his nod. I hate fake strong men. I always feel tempted to call their bluff. It's a hard rôle they want to play. If they don't break you, you despise them. If they do—why, you're broken, no good to anyone."
She asked Eleanor to come and spend August with her, but Eleanor refused, saying, what was true enough, that she couldn't bear Newport. She could bear even less constant association with Lydia at this moment. Lydia's one preoccupation when they were together was to destroy Eleanor's friendship for O'Bannon. Often in old times Eleanor had laughed at the steady persistence that Lydia put into this sort of campaign of hate, but she could not laugh now, for as a matter of fact her friendship with O'Bannon was already destroyed. She hardly saw him, and if she did there was a veil between them. He was kind, he was open with her, he was everything except interested.
Eleanor loved O'Bannon, but with so intellectual a process that she was not far wrong in considering it was a friendship. She would have married him if he had asked her, but she would have done so principally to insure herself of his company. If anyone could have guaranteed that they would continue all their lives to live within a few yards of each other she would have been content—content even with the knowledge that every now and then some other less reasonable woman would come and sweep him away from her. She knew he was of a temperament susceptible to terrible gusts of emotion, but she considered that that was her hold upon him—she was so safe.
The remoteness that came to their relation now indicated another woman, and yet she knew his everyday life well enough to know that he was seeing no one except herself and Alma Wooley; and though there was some gossip about his attention to the girl, Eleanor felt she understood the reason for it. Alma made him feel emotionally what he knew rationally—that his prosecution of Lydia had been merely an act of justice. Alma thought him the greatest of men and was tremulously grateful to him for establishing her dead lover as a hero—a man killed in the performance of his duty. To her imagination Lydia was an unbelievable horror, like a wicked princess in a fairy tale. Eleanor wondered if she did not seem somewhat the same to O'Bannon. He never mentioned her name when she, Eleanor, spoke of her. It was like dropping a stone into a bottomless well. She listened and listened, and nothing came back from O'Bannon's abysmal silence. He spoke of her only once, and that was when he came to say good-by to Eleanor the day he started for Wyoming. He was eager to get away—into those mountains, to sleep under the stars and forget everything and everybody in the East.
"Mercy," Eleanor thought, "how ruthless men are! I wouldn't let any friend of mine see I was glad to leave him, even if I were."
"It's a rotten job—mine," he said. "I'm always sending people to prison who are either so abnormal they don't seem human or else so human they seem just like myself."
Presently Eleanor mentioned that Lydia had asked her to go to Newport for a month. O'Bannon turned on her sharply.
"And are you going?"
She said no, but it did not save her from his contempt.
"I don't see how you can be a friend of that woman's, Eleanor," he said.
"Lydia has the most attaching qualities when you know her, Dan."
"Attaching!" he broke out with a suppressed irritation she had never seen—a strange hate of her, Eleanor, for saying such a thing. "Arrogant, inflexible, using all her gifts—her brains and her incredible beauty—just to advance her own selfish ends!"
An impulse based partly on pure loyalty but partly on the idea that she could improve her position by showing her friend was not quite a monster made her answer, "You wouldn't believe, Dan, how if she really cares for you she can be tender almost clinging."
"For God's sake don't let's talk of her!" said O'Bannon, and it was on this note that they parted.
He wrote to her only once, though his letters to his mother were always at her disposal. She saw a great deal of the old lady, who developed a mild pleurisy as soon as her son's back was turned and didn't want Dan told of it. Eleanor spent most of that hot August taking care of her.
"I want him to have an uninterrupted holiday," said Mrs. O'Bannon firmly. "He hasn't been well. He doesn't sleep as he ought to, and he's cross, and you know it's not like Dan to be cross."
On the last day of August he was back, lean and sunburned, announcing himself to be in excellent condition. His first question was about the Thorne case.
"Are you anxious about it?" said his mother.
"Not a bit. They can't reverse us," he answered.
After Labor Day Lydia moved back to her Long Island house, and she was there when the decision in her case was handed down. The verdict of the lower court was sustained. It was a great blow to her—perhaps the first real blow she had ever received. She had so firmly made up her mind that the former verdict had been the result of undue influence of the district attorney that she had thought it impossible that the higher court would uphold it. Another triumph for "that man!" The idea of punishment was horrible to her—to be fined as a criminal. She still did not conceive it a possibility that she could be sent to prison.
"I can think of lots of ways in which I'd rather spend a thousand dollars," was her only comment.
But day and night she thought of the scene in court when she must present herself for sentence. In secret her courage failed her. It would be the visible symbol of O'Bannon's triumph over her. Yet her will threw itself in vain against the necessity. Nothing but death could save her. It would be short anyhow. She knew how it would be. She and Wiley would appear in the midst of some other wretch's trial. There would be whisperings about the judge's desk, and O'Bannon would be there—not looking at her, but triumphing in his black heart, and the judge would say "A thousand-dollar fine," or—no, nothing so succinct. He would find it an opportunity to talk about her and her case first. And then she would pay the money and leave court, a convicted criminal.
And then the second stage would begin. It would be her turn. She would give her life to getting even with O'Bannon. She who had always needed a purpose—a string on which to thread her life—had found it in hate. Most people found it in love, but for her part she enjoyed hate. It was exciting and active, and, oh, what a climax it promised! Yes, like the adventuress in the melodrama, she would go to him herself and say: "I've waited ten years to ruin you, and now I've done it. Have you been wondering all these years what was against you—what held you back and poisoned everything you touched? It was I!"
Other people, she knew, thought such things and never put them in action. But she had no reason to distrust the power of her own will, and never had she willed anything as she willed this. She began to arrange it. There were three ways in which you could hurt a man—through his love, through his ambitions and through his finances. A crooked politician like O'Bannon might suffer most by being ruined politically. She must always keep some hold on Albee for that. Money probably wouldn't greatly matter to O'Bannon. But love—he was an emotional creature. Women, she felt sure, played a tremendous rôle in his life. And he was attractive to them—accustomed to success probably. Oh, to think that she had been for a few seconds acquiescent in his arms! And yet that meant that she had power over him. She knew she had power. Should that be her method—to make him think that she had seen him not as an enemy but as a hero, a crusader, a master, that she was an adoring victim? Oh, how easily she could make love to him, and how successfully! She could imagine going down on her knees to him, winding herself about him, only she must have the climax ready so that at the same second she would destroy both his love and career. She must wait, and it would be hard to wait; but she must wait until she and Albee had dug a deep pit. Then she would call him to her and he would have to come. It was by thinking these thoughts that she managed to come into court calm and cold as steel.
"What have you now to say why the judgment of the court should not be pronounced upon you?"
The judge beckoned her and Wiley to his desk. O'Bannon was already there, standing so close that her arm would have touched his if she had not shrunk away. She trembled with hate. It was horrible to be so near him. She heard his own breath unsteadily drawn. Across the space that parted them waves of some tangible emotion leaped to and fro. She looked up at him and found that he, with clenched hands and drawn brows, was looking at her. So they remained.
"Your Honor," said Wiley in his smooth tones, "I would like to ask that a fine rather than a prison sentence be imposed on this prisoner, not only on account of her youth and previous good record, but because to a woman of her sheltered upbringing a prison sentence is a more severe punishment than the law contemplated."
"I entirely disagree with you, counselor," said the judge in a loud ringing tone. "The feature that makes the court so reluctant ordinarily to impose prison sentences is the subsequent difficulty in earning a living. That consideration is entirely absent in the present case. On the other hand, to impose a fine would be palpably ridiculous, constituting for this defendant no punishment whatsoever. I sentence this prisoner"—the judge paused and drew in his chin—"to not less than three nor more than seven years in state's prison."
She heard Wiley passionately pleading with Judge Homans. A blue-coated figure was now standing beside her. It was still incredible.
"This is your doing," she heard her own voice saying very softly to O'Bannon.
To her surprise she saw that emotion, what emotion she did not know, made it impossible for him to answer. His eyes stared at her out of a face whiter than her own. It was his emotion that communicated her own situation to her. His hand on the desk was shaking. She knew he could not have done what she proceeded to do. She turned and walked with the policeman to the iron-latticed passageway that led to jail.
As the door clanged behind her O'Bannon turned and walked out of court, and getting into his car drove away westward. At two in the morning Eleanor was waked by a telephone from Mrs. O'Bannon. Dan had not come home. She was afraid something had happened to him. A man in his position had many enemies. Did Eleanor think that some friend or lover of that Thorne girl
Oh, no, Eleanor was sure not!
The next morning—for a small town holds few secrets—she knew that O'Bannon had returned at six o'clock, drunk.
"Oh, dear heaven," thought Eleanor, "must he re-travel that road?"