CHAPTER XV
INTERIM
Claire Harding had now adventured upon a narrow ledge. On the one hand she was bound to show a proper appreciation of Daintree’s exertions, which she herself had inspired; on the other, to feign a purely impersonal or benevolent interest in the unhappy youth on whose behalf those exertions were being made. So all day long she must be ready with a smile as false as any other summer’s, even though she spent the night in prayer for Tom and for her own forgiveness. Yet praying did not bring her peace of mind. She could not convince herself that she was in the right, that even her great end justified means of downright hypocrisy and deceit. There were two ways of looking at her conduct, and Claire, with a breadth of view which was her bane, saw it both ways from the beginning. She was acting a lie to save a life: that was one side of the matter. She was screening the guilty at the expense of the innocent: that was the other side. And if Claire was in any respect singular among women, it was in this inherent and not invariably convenient faculty of seeing the other side whether she would or no.
All her love could not blind her to the terrible strength of the case against Tom, and all her prayers could not unsay what Tom had said to her about the murdered man on the very night of the murder. “I’d hang for the hound, and think the satisfaction cheap at the price!” Those had been his actual words; they were for ever tolling, tolling in her ears; and strong though the case was, would they not have strengthened it still more? And good reason as all the world had to think him guilty, had not she, God help her, better reason than any living man or woman? But oh! she could not and she never would believe it of him; not murder; and even with that cry in her heart she did believe it, but fought to deceive herself a little longer. Her first theory, however, that of self-defence, was virtually shattered by his reported wholesale denials. Then what more was to be said for the desperate hero of a guilty flight, taken at last with the dead man’s possessions upon his person?
Claire could not imagine, but a clever barrister might; nay, would; and she set her teeth, and vowed that Tom should have the finest brain at the Bar to defend him, guilty or not guilty, and though she perjured her soul for the price. But this was not necessary; it was only necessary to act the lie; and Claire scorned herself for the slight comfort that mean distinction gave her against her will. The honest lie was unnecessary because she was dealing with a man of extremes, who neglected many things but did nothing by halves, and whom every passing breath left cold or burning. A breath from Claire could have but one effect, and Daintree was already white-hot for the defence. He had caught fire at a word, and from that moment made it the business of his life to rescue that of an obscure homicide. He could talk of nothing else; his passionate zeal chilled Claire with the thought of what it might turn to should he learn the truth.
Within twenty-four hours of the committal he came in brimful of news and self-importance. Claire was discovered in the garden, and informed who had been retained for the defence in a meaning voice which conveyed no special meaning to her; the name was a big one, but the girl was not a great reader of the newspaper, and she had never heard it before. She looked grateful therefore, but not grateful enough for Daintree, whose greed for her admiration was such that in the next breath he must needs tell her with what figure the big man’s brief had been marked. And then he beamed, for the girl stood thunder-struck at his words.
“Five hundred guineas!” she repeated, slowly. “You are never going to find five—hundred—guineas?”
“And why not?” said he, with ready pique. “Do you think that that colossal sum is beyond my means?”
“For a man of whom you know nothing—who has no claim upon you? Yes, I do!”
“Pardon me,” replied Daintree in his most elaborate manner. “I know at least as much of the young man as does Miss Harding; his case has already excited her sympathy; he has therefore the very strongest claim upon mine.”
“Oh, but you must not do it!” cried Claire, impulsively. “It is too much for you to dream of doing! I am sorry I ever said a word about it! You are too noble, too generous, too good!”
He hung his head a moment, and then exclaimed, with the extraordinary passion of the man, that there was nothing he would not do to win such words from her lips; that she had repaid him already a hundred-fold.
“And remember, it is all for you,” he added, suddenly, as though he had caught her candour. “Let there be no mistake about that between you and me. Whatever I may do is not done for yonder prisoner, but for you and you alone!”
“For me!” whispered Claire; and she could say no more, thinking her voice had already bewrayed her.
“Yes; every bit for you!”
“But how can that be? He is nothing to us either. We did not know the family—you heard of the quarrel? And the young man was very seldom there, never once in our house.” So she still swerved instinctively at the lie direct, and despised herself more than if she had told a dozen. The situation was intolerable to her. She was on the brink of a rash confession, and such an appeal to Daintree’s magnanimity as should move a stone, when he took the last word and left her time to think.
“Miss Harding,” said he, earnestly, “I care not a jot what you may think of this case on mature consideration. I know how it appealed to you the other night, before your great heart pulled you two ways, as it is doing now. But that’s not the point. No, the point is that you asked something of me, and I mean you to know that what you ask of me that you shall receive, if it is in the power of mortal man to give. If I do not rescue this young fellow from the rope, then it is not in the power of mortal man to do so. But I shall, never fear; and then you will perhaps see that your lightest whim is more to me than the commands of God or man! And that’s all the reward I ask.”
She knew his flowery speeches, and what to allow for his habitual rhetoric; on this occasion, however, he rang only too true. Yet as she looked at him pensively, his eyes fell, as they had sometimes fallen before; it was as though, with all his passion for her, there was a something sinister and dishonest underneath, and he felt it when he looked long enough in her eyes. Claire did not connect honesty with herself at present, nor did she view the question at all from this point; but she found herself speculating upon the origin of the quarrel between Daintree and his people; and she thought of the flowers that had come back to him from his mother’s grave.
Later in the evening she worked out her own position, shuddered at the passing impulse to confess (which had long since passed), put Tom’s life before her self-respect and determined to act better from that hour. So the play went on before an audience of one, who had been taken behind the scenes, but who now looked on with eyes that saw not, so absorbing were his own affairs. In very truth, however, there was an audience of two; and but little was lost upon the unseen onlooker.
Daintree meanwhile spent hours every day with Mr. Bassett, the solicitor, or in waiting for him at his office; in the evening he would return to Avenue Lodge with the latest news of the prisoner Erichsen.
One day he had been removed to the prison infirmary; not that there was much the matter with him, but the surgeon was credited with a desire to reward Erichsen’s humanity towards a fellow-prisoner, who was said to have died in his arms.
But another fellow-prisoner he had fought tooth-and-nail the night before; and Mr. Bassett had a shrewd suspicion that the real object of the removal was to isolate a desperate man.
However that might be, he was doing pretty well in the infirmary; was said to be depressed, but not unable to eat or sleep. Daintree reminded Claire that the prisoner was having all his meals sent in from a neighbouring chop-house, and who it was that had ordered them. It was himself.
Erichsen was inundated with letters. Most were from religious strangers, who took his guilt for granted, and indicated several only ways to that mercy in another world which was neither to be expected nor desired in is. But the one that had given him the greatest annoyance was thought to have come from a near relative, for it was very long and he had torn it in many pieces, and then retorted in three lines and given it to the surgeon to post.
Claire knew who the relative was. She had gone the length of calling at Avenue Lodge, on her flight through town to the Continent, and her chief lament was not that murder had been committed, presumably by Tom, but that her name had been disgraced, her trust abused, her money spent in riot, and her life rendered unendurable in her native land. The lady was Tom’s step-mother.
There was another letter which he seemed to expect every day, and yet not to expect, and it never came, but they thought he must be in love. Claire considered it unlikely; how could a lover have done such a thing? And had he ever written to any girl? Daintree said he would inquire.
No friends had been to see him, no relations; but a noble lord, the same who had encumbered the bench at the Marylebone office, brought a party of friends, and received payment in kind for his insolent questions. The prisoner was reported to have asked him if there were no hospitals where his lordship could see the legs and arms cut off and listen to the screams; to have recommended bodily tortures, as likely to provide better sport than a poor dull devil like himself, and suggested the nearest slaughter-house if all else failed. His lordship had raised his cane and been cuttingly invited to lay it on, as he might not have such a chance every day. Whereupon the party retreated, highly amused, all but their leader, who was said to have marched straight across the street to book a window for the execution.
When Claire heard this story, she showed her feelings in a rather perilous manner. “Well done!” she cried, and clapped her hands. “So they have not taken all the spirit out of him yet! Let us be thankful, Mr. Daintree,” she added in an instant, “that it is at least a man of spirit whose cause you have espoused. Next to an innocent man, a spirited man has the best claim on one’s sympathy. It would be dreadful if he were neither the one nor the other!”
“But you know that I believe him to be both.”
“I have heard you say so. Yet you never go near him yourself.”
Daintree admitted his repugnance to personal contact with the prisoner. “I certainly prefer to draw the line at that,” said he, “especially as it could do no good. No, it was bad enough seeing him at Marylebone. I would give something to forget his face.”
“And why?” cried Claire. “Because in your heart, like all the rest of the world, you know him to be guilty! You may be sensitive, but you wouldn’t be as sensitive as all that if you honestly believed in his innocence. You do not. Yet you go on spending your money, throwing it away to gratify a passing impulse of mine! It’s madness, Mr. Daintree, it is indeed.”
The tears stood in her eyes as she spoke. But he had turned away as if unable to deny his latent unbelief; otherwise her face might have betrayed her even then. She felt that it must do so in the end; it was but another question of time. Such interviews left her spirit prostrate, her heart worn out with beating, and yet she sought them herself. The craving for news of Tom only deepened with the sense of his guilt. When Daintree was absent, the girl counted the hours till his return; when he returned, if she was not there to meet him, it was in order that he might think her less eager to hear than he to tell. And once when he not only thought so, but told her what he thought in his touchiest manner, it was a great moment for the actress, who was ceasing to feel ashamed of her part, what with custom and the dire necessity of it.
For now, more than ever, did Claire trust to the genius of the great magician retained for the defence; that vague power was the one hope left for her to cling to, and cling she did with all the might of aching heart and tortured mind. Claire’s notions of a trial were exceedingly simple, although her father had stood his within the year. On the other hand, her belief in the efficacy of counsel was unbounded, because Mr. Harding had been defended by a former officer of the Crown, and the charge had fallen to the ground, and everybody vowed it was the fine defence (combined with innocence); at least, everybody whose opinion Claire was in the way of hearing. Mr. Serjeant Culliford had not been Solicitor-General, but Claire was told that in a criminal case his rival did not exist. One night she heard that Culliford had accepted the brief; the next that he had probably earned his fee already, though Bassett would admit nothing of the kind, but complained instead of his own treatment at the barrister’s hands.
The fact was that Tom ought to have made a statement before the magistrate; then the defence would have had something to work upon at the trial. As it was they had nothing, until the learned serjeant devised a means of obtaining a statement at the eleventh hour. He went to Newgate, made Tom give him his version of the interview with Blaydes and of his subsequent proceedings; disbelieved every word, but kept nodding so encouragingly with his ugly, inscrutable, attentive face that Tom received the very opposite impression, and told his tale with some spirit and a gleam of hope. The great man heard him out, then glared at Bassett (who had given him a certain look), and addressed the prisoner in a kindly undertone.
“That’s all very well,” said he; “the only pity is that we didn’t have it at Marylebone; for you see your tongue will be tied at the Old Bailey. No, no, you couldn’t know. You may thank your solicitor. It was his duty to advise—”
“Excuse me, sir,” interrupted that gentleman, “but I really must protest! I never supposed we should be unable to call a single witness for the defence, and I did not think the story—”
“Think!” snapped Culliford. “Who wants you to think? There’s a class of man, sir, that is most dangerous when it thinks; you appear to belong to it. Be good enough not to interrupt me again; we must have that statement by hook or crook to work upon, and there is only one way now of getting it as evidence. Tell a turnkey or a wardsman what you have told me, Erichsen, and the other side are pretty safe to put him in the box. Then I shall cross-examine him, and have something to talk to the jury about. Do I think we have a leg to stand upon? Two, sir, two, and better ones than they suppose; only tell the turnkeys exactly what you have told me; and good-day to you. Come, Mr. Bassett; I’ve something more to say to you.”
And so Tom had his eyes opened to the little ways of great lawyers, but his impression of his champion was by no means an unfavourable one; for the glib, spruce Bassett he disliked; but this rough tongue and rugged face filled him with confidence, and so redoubled his gratitude towards his unknown ally, who heard that he had spoken of him with tears in his eyes, and who did not fail to let Claire hear it too.
Upon her, meanwhile, the strain was beginning to tell; more than once she was within an ace of breaking down at a tell-tale moment. And just when her nerves were at their highest pitch, and the situation hardly to be borne, there came the new development which well-nigh turned her brain.
It began with a comparatively small matter, the unprovoked insolence of Claire’s maid; but this was the growth of days, not a sudden thing; though it was only when her jangled nerves could endure it no longer that Claire whipped out her purse, put a months wages on the dressing-table, and bade the woman begone.
Hannah the maid put her thin, strong arms akimbo, and burst out laughing in her mistress’s face.
“This instant, eh? And you think you’ll get rid of me for two-pound-five? That you won’t then—nor yet for twenty guineas. So now you know.”
“We shall see,” said Claire, moving over to the bell.
“I wouldn’t ring, miss, if I were you.”
“Then will you go? You have been insolent beyond words; force me to do it, and I shall send for a policeman to turn you out.”
“I wouldn’t do that, miss, either; or I may tell the policeman something you won’t like.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I say; but I don’t mind saying it plainer to oblige. I shall tell him who you were with on the night of a certain murder, and what he said to you, and what you could tell against him in the witness-box if they like to put you there! That’s all, Miss Harding. You look faint. I wouldn’t ring just yet if I were you; here’s a glass of water in the meanwhile.”
Claire had indeed turned white as paper. Instinctively she took the glass, but it slipped through her fingers and fell into the fender with a crash. The room seemed full of pale faces, low brows and venomous black eyes set close together, all spinning round her in nauseous whirligig like demons dancing. She sank into a chair and hid her face; but started and recoiled from the touch of cool fingers, wet with rose-water, upon her temples.
“Keep away from, me!” she cried faintly. “Do not dare to touch me again. So it was you at the gate that night? I remember now!”
“It was me, miss.”
“You shut it?”
“I did.”
“And pray how do you know who he was?” and her voice was stronger. “You never were at Winwood in your life!”
“Perhaps not; but I can put two and two together as well as most: besides, I’m not that hard of hearing! Come, let’s be plain; you’ve confessed to the master, miss, and you’ve confessed to me.”
There was a pause for proper comprehension; then said the young lady, with ineffable scorn, “And to how many more—through your lips?”
“Never a soul! That was too good a one not to keep. No, I just seen him first, and then set to work to find out who he was. But I never said I seen him to a soul.”
“And why not to me until today?”
“Why, because I wanted to know your game. And it wasn’t that easy to find out; you see, miss, you’re a pretty deep one yourself!”
Claire sat still in her chair. She was now perfectly calm, and even experiencing an odd sense of relief in facing an overt crisis after so many secret tremors and hidden shocks. “And what is your object, Hannah?” said she at last. “Suppose they put me in the witness-box, what would you gain by it? You probably think I would do anything to avoid the exposure; on the contrary, I would tell everything to the whole world if I thought it could do any good. But the case is so black already that, on the other hand, it could do very little harm. Your threat is less terrible than you imagine.”
“Is that so?” with an evil smile. “Hey-day! but it’s an artful one. Suppose I told that there Daintree, instead of the police? What then?”
Claire had suspected this. Yet it took her breath away when it came. “So you are a professional spy!” she gasped. “I might have known it all along, you vile woman, from your face!” To be sure she might have known it then; for the sallow face turned a deeper yellow; the black eyes came as close together as the nozzles of a double-barrelled gun, to blaze as though both triggers had been pulled at once.
“Ah, yes! We don’t all show it in our faces, do we?” hissed the woman. “And which is the worst, I wonder—them that does or them that doesn’t? Is it worse to cheat the man that’s fond of you, like you’ve done, or to tell him, as I mean to do, that he’s being cheated? You think you’ve found me out; he shall find you out! To make one lover pay for the other lover’s defence—a pretty game—and five hundred golden guineas—a pretty price! But he hasn’t paid them yet; no, and he never shall; you may take your oath to that!”
“He must,” said Claire, in a whisper. “The trial begins the day after to-morrow. He has gone too far to draw back now.”
“Not he, when I tell him all I know. He’d pay another five hundred to get your fellow hung! You know him, and you know that, too, as well as I do.”
“I don’t know it,” said Claire, with a last brave effort. “I know that I have been more than once on the verge of telling him myself. But if you tell him—now—after all these dreadful days, well”— with a sob—“it will kill me, and there’s an end of it! Oh, I am no match for a woman like you. Tell me what you want, and it is yours if I have it. Money? You shall have all I’ve got!”
“Which don’t amount to much,” laughed the other. “No, but I’m glad to see you come to reason. Bothered if I don’t admire your game too much not to want to see it out now it’s got so far. Maybe I can lend a hand; but not for money. Here’s your jewel-box; you’ve got to make your faithful maid a few small presents.”
“Oh, take your choice; only hold your tongue.”
So trinkets rang like sovereigns in their tray, as this vulture picked and chose among them, and clawed first a sapphire ring.
“I’ve had my eye on this ever since I came!”
“Then take it.”
“This coral brooch is another of my favourites.”
“Take it, too.”
“These here earrings that you never wear; you’ll never miss them.”
“Take anything you like.”
“All right, then. Just to finish up, I’ll have the diamond pendant—”
“No! That you must leave.”
“You said I was to take anything I liked.”
“Well, it’s true I hope never to have to wear it again. I shall not want it in my grave, and that’s where I hope to go. Oh! oh! the sooner the better!” And the poor girl broke down completely.
“Stuff and nonsense, miss! And see here,” generously; “all you’ve got to do when you want to wear them is to ask me, and I’ll lend you any one of ’em you like, and welcome! Now, then; what do you think of me now?”
And Claire, looking up through her tears, saw the woman decked out already, rings in her ears and on her finger, the brooch and pendant gleaming and glittering on her black stuff dress, and a quiet smile upon her wicked face. Claire could almost have smiled herself.
“And for these you’ll hold your tongue until after the trial?”
“Till all’s blue, you mean! I should think I would—and do anything you like, miss, to lend a hand.”
Her mistress leapt to her feet, a living flame.
“Then put those things in your pocket and be out of my sight! Now—now—before I sacrifice him for a fiend like you!”
And this was how Claire was followed along her narrow ledge, by one who might push her from it at any moment: so that she had now not only her own feet to watch, but the treacherous hand behind her back as well.