CHAPTER XVII
END OP THE TRIAL
It was!
Tom had entered the dock with his eyes on those sloping seats; it was Nicholas Harding sure enough, in the very same place, and there in good time, yet ashamed of being there at all, or why did he duck his great head the instant Tom appeared? There were more pressing questions than that, however. Why had he come? What did he know? Had Claire told him all, and sent him to see the end?
The prisoner’s heart began to beat as no witness and neither counsel had set it beating yet. A new and fierce desire for life and liberty ran like wildfire through his sluggish blood. Get off he must; his innocence must and should be proved, if only to baulk that vindictive snob come to glory in his destruction. His soul railed and sickened to think it was Claire’s father.
But a new light played in his eyes; a new fire flamed in his face; and, to complete the transformation, he leant across the bulwark of the dock, and the gaze that had been so errant and so apathetic was eagerly concentrated upon the white-whiskered doctor in the witness-box. Spectators of the day before looked on and marvelled at a change so marked. And Nicholas Harding was among the number, for, once satisfied that it was he, Tom had not deigned to look a second time in his direction.
The cross-examination of the medical man was longer and more persistent than that of any preceding witness. But nothing came of it. The object was also unusually patent and direct: it was to prove that death must have been all but instantaneous, and that it could not have occurred before the small hours of the fatal night. But this stepping-stone to an alibi was one whereon the witness could be neither led nor driven to set a foot. The upshot of much questioning and some ghastly details was merely to show the impossibility of fixing the time of death to an hour. The later period was not inconceivable, but more than that the witness would not say; whereupon Culliford was rude to him, and Tom sighed, for he felt instinctively that the doctor would have helped him if he could.
“One moment, Dr. Westmacott,” said the opposing leader, rising to re-examine as Culliford sat down. “You have told the jury that it is not absolutely impossible for this murder to have taken place as late as two o’clock in the morning; will you kindly tell them whether such a fact would be at variance with your experience as a medical man?”
“It would.”
Culliford shifted angrily in his place.
“May we not take it,” pursued the other, “that in your professional—”
Culliford sprang to his feet.
“You may not!” cried he. “My lord, I must protest against this form of question. My friend is leading. He shall not lead! This is a matter of life or death—I say life or death, for my friend’s instruction. He need not think that he is going to make it the latter by fair means or by foul!”
This righteous outburst was justified by the incidental letter, but certainly not by the essential spirit of the prosecution, which had struck the very prisoner as a miracle of restraint and moderation. The case against him had never been unduly pressed; all the pressing and browbeating had been upon his own side; and again Tom deplored what struck him as almost prejudicial ungraciousness on his counsel’s part. And it did no good; the question was put afresh, with a blush, but in an admissible form; and Dr. Westmacott stood down, having given it as his professional opinion that there was every probability of the crime having been committed before midnight rather than after.
Counsel for the prosecution, with the colour still in his face, then called his last witness, a Newgate wardsman, with the pointed observation that the jury were at length in possession of the facts; they should now hear the incredible story with which the prisoner sought to explain those facts away.
Up came Culliford on the instant, to object to the word “incredible,” which his own asperity had provoked.
“Is my friend going to make two speeches?” said he, sarcastically. “Let him keep his comments until he addresses the jury once and for all; it is for them to say what is incredible and what is not.”
Tom’s heart sank, for he had a depressing intuition that all this rancour was the sign of a losing side. But he was not in a position to gauge its effect upon the open mind of the average hearer.
“That fellow will save him yet,” said one to another in the sloping seats to the right. “He is fighting splendidly—taking every chance.”“Yes, yes; he has earned his money; may he succeed!”
The other made no reply.
“Have you no sympathy with him—you, of all men?” asked the last speaker in an indignant whisper.
Nicholas Harding lowered his head. “Hush! hush! He is looking this way. I don’t think he has seen me yet; he mustn’t know that I am here.”
And now the full, true, but improbable particulars of the prisoner’s last interview with the murdered man were laid before the jury by a hostile witness; and the great Culliford smiled again. Bassett had furnished him with a circumstantial statement of what the prisoner had said, whereby those of the witness were checked, amended and supplemented in cross-examination. The great man’s artifice had been entirely unforeseen; his “friend” sat aghast, while the infirmary wardsman perspired for twenty minutes under Culliford’s fire. Here he had exaggerated; there forgotten and filled in with a fancy detail; and “On your oath, sir!” thundered through the court with thrilling iteration. With the release of this varlet, the case for the prosecution closed upon an anti-climax. Culliford then stated that he should call no witnesses for the defence, in the tone of a man who could call twenty if he chose; and sat down with the most confident air, having thus secured the last word.
Counsel for the Crown proceeded to address the jury upon the whole case, beginning nervously but warming to his work. Stung by Culliford’s tactics and irritated by his manner, this mild gentleman abandoned for the nonce that becoming restraint which is still the accepted note of a criminal prosecution, and described murder and murderer in no measured terms. If the former had been brought home to the prisoner at the bar—if the prisoner were held to stand duly and fairly identified with the latter—then the heaviest punishment known to the law would be light in comparison with his crime. The defence he characterised as “indubitably brilliant”; yet he was afraid that the fireworks of his learned friend but served to illuminate the weakness of his case. For he had browbeaten witnesses as to minutiæ of time and place; but what had he disproved? The grievance? The threats? The fact that the prisoner and the deceased were seen together near the spot where the murder was committed, about the time of its commission? No, there had been a gallant attempt to disprove that, but it remained as much a certainty as the ownership of the lethal weapon, the black facts of the prisoner’s flight, and that possession of the dead man’s watch and chain which even counsel’s learned friend had not attempted to explain away. To be sure, he had elicited to the full, instead of attempting to disallow, the extraordinary story with which the accused had sought since his incarceration to account for those stubborn facts. The prisoner said he had given a receipt for the watch and chain! Then where was the receipt? And was that a credible or an incredible tale? Counsel had been reminded that this was for gentlemen of the jury to decide. Then let them do so; and if they found that story credible, then their duty was clear, and they would unhesitatingly acquit the prisoner at the bar; but if incredible, then their duty was no less clear, and they would discharge that duty like brave men and true, and so keep the oath which they had sworn to Almighty God. Counsel resumed his seat after a speech of astonishing power, and the court adjourned for luncheon.
Tom neither bit nor supped. “There’s still Culliford,” he kept saying to himself, “and compared with the other, he’s a giant to a dwarf. But what can he find to say to all that? Oh, what can he find to say for me now?” And the elderly turnkey’s pitying glances were a bitterer thing than his involuntary insult of the day before.
Culliford’s great speech may be dismissed in the shortest space, since only a verbatim report could do justice to the passionate eloquence and artistic force of an oration which held the court entranced for close upon two hours. And even then you would lose the dramatic pauses, the fine use of emphasis, the infinite variety of tone, now passionate, now persuasive, now sweetly reasonable; the slow movements and the quick—in a word, the masterly manipulation, by this born advocate, of every note in the oratorical gamut.
The speech opened with wholesale denunciations of a “virulent prosecution,” its “witnesses corrupt with prejudice” and their “back-handed identifications,” but especially of “that miserable gang of petty cheats—that school of sharks—of whom the witness Vale was a pretty specimen, and the dead man Blaydes the acknowledged ringleader.” Was such a man likely to have but one enemy swearing vengeance upon his discreetly hidden head? More probably a hundred, any one of whom might have committed this crime, and any one of whom might have pleaded unparalleled extenuation into the bargain. Why, the man carried a sword-stick—even to an evening party—to protect his miserable life! And counsel drew a true and vivid picture of the last encounter and the last parting between Blaydes and Erichsen; but here assumed his most matter-of-fact tone and air, because the matter really sounded less like a fact than any with which he had to deal. The receipt? Nothing more natural; the watch was to be pawned, not kept, and the ticket returned to the owner. Its disappearance? Nothing simpler; had not everything disappeared from the dead man’s pockets? The receipt had found its way into that of the real murderer; so had the diamond pin.
That diamond pin was the one strong point of the defence, and Culliford treated it beautifully; he treated it from every possible point of view. It was of greater value than the watch; a minor witness, the dead man’s landlady, had told them what the dead man had told her, that he had accepted the pin as payment for a debt of seventy guineas; and that statement bore a double significance now. On the one hand, it showed a partiality in the deceased for such transactions as he had afterwards entered into with the prisoner; on the other hand, it proved that if the prisoner had robbed and murdered the deceased, then either he had omitted robbing him of his most valuable possession, or else he had concealed it so skilfully that it had never since been seen or heard of. Surely the one explanation was as unlikely as the other! But the pin was not only the more valuable article, it was the more negotiable; and this capital point was driven home with an irresistible force that lightened every heart in court, that of the prisoner at the bar included. Here was the best argument yet. It left its mark upon every face. Even the judge looked less despondent; but the jury glanced towards the dock as one man; and there was a visible glow upon their cheeks, a visible gladness in their eyes, as though they could look a fellow-creature in the face once more. Then came the defence of the guilty flight, and in a moment there were twelve averted faces in the jury-box, and a very pale one in the dock. Culliford, however, was of all men the man for such a moment; he did not allow an unnecessary second for dwelling upon the great weakness of his case, but plunged therefrom into that final appeal for justice and the benefit of the doubt, in which the youth, position and gallantry of the prisoner were effective allusions, but no part of the plea.
“Do not mistake me, gentlemen,” cried Culliford in conclusion. “I am not craving mercy for a gentleman. I am demanding justice for a man. A young man, gentlemen —perhaps a younger man than any one of us here present—with all his faults and follies thick upon him—with all his life of serious effort and sober work and honest enterprise—ay, and of human happiness, too!—still shining and still smiling in front of him, but so smiling and so shining, gentlemen, across a gulf that you alone can bridge! And yet you must not bridge it on account of the fact of his youth, but simply and singly on account of the possibility of his innocence. Gentlemen, I pray you to remember that the possibility is enough. If a reasonable doubt remains in your mind, if the shadow of a doubt darkens your vision, remember that the benefit of that doubt is the prisoner’s by right; and may God in His mercy direct you to a right and just and generous finding!”
Culliford looked around him grandly, glanced at the clock, and sat down.
Tom wrote “God bless you!” in unsteady characters on a slip of paper, and had it handed down to him by Bassett.
Culliford read it without moving a muscle of his face.
The judge then summed up. Of that depressed and depressing, but perfectly able discourse, there is but one word to be said. It was against the prisoner; and the jury retired to consider their verdict at 5.15.
As Tom turned to leave the dock he noticed a ragged creature with a dirty pocket-handkerchief before his face in the forefront of the central gallery. He remembered the same man similarly affected (as he supposed) the day before. It put him in mind of the one who had lent the coin, but he was not there to-day; and Tom thought of neither any more, nor yet of Nicholas Harding himself, as he went below to await his fate.
Refreshments were offered him, but he could neither eat nor sit down. He could only walk to and fro in the torture-chamber while the turnkeys talked of Culliford’s speech. One vowed it was enough to save any man; but Tom saw the look he gave his companion with the words. It was a relief when Bassett appeared, fresh and dapper as ever, and in the best possible spirits.
“You know,” said he to Tom, “if the worst comes to the worst, we can always get up a petition. There’s nothing like being prepared, and my plans are already laid. My good fellow, you shall make such a stir as no man in your shoes ever made before! All London shall have a chance of signing, for I mean to work it on the house-to-house system. I shall engage a special staff for the purpose! My word, yes, our petition will be the talk of the town—if things go wrong.”
“So you want them to,” said Tom, bluntly.
“I—want them to?” cried Bassett, blushing.
Tom had no heart to push the punishment. “No, no,” said he, with a wan smile, “I was only joking. Good time for a joke, eh? Ha, ha, ha! Look at those turnkeys; they thought I hadn’t a laugh left in me. How goes the time? Six already? I say, do you think that Serjeant Culliford would come down and let me shake his hand? I would like to do that—especially before I know.”
“Culliford! He’ll have nothing to do with the petition, you know.”
“Hang the petition! I want to thank him for his speech.”
Bassett said he would see. He was away but a minute, and he came back alone.
“Culliford is rather tired,” said he. “He asks you to excuse him, but he sincerely wishes you good luck.”
Tom nodded. He could not speak.
So the hero of that noble, touching, magnificent speech drew the line at shaking him by the hand!
It was the worst thing yet; nothing else compared with it; but it had this merit, that it anticipated the great sting to come, and made the poor wretch smart so terribly in semi-private that his capacity for present anguish was exhausted before his reappearance in the dock. And, besides, it finally prepared him for the worst; for if his very advocate found him guilty in his heart, and for all his beautiful words, what other verdict could he look for from the jury?
Nevertheless, they deliberated until 6.50. Then a sudden hush upstairs emphasised the returning tramp of four-and-twenty feet. And, in a hushed and twilit court, Tom heard the fate which was now no surprise to him, and bore it accordingly as such verdicts are seldom borne. His fine eyes and fresh young face were radiant and serene with the divine light of innocence and valour; consequently the judge felt called upon publicly to lament “a demeanour both callous and defiant”; and so sincere was the lamentation that his voice broke, his lips trembled, and the concluding remarks of his lordship were perfectly unintelligible from emotion. But here ended the judge’s duty in those days, and the court adjourned for yet another night.
In the morning Thomas Erichsen was brought up for the last time, and condemned to death in thoroughly cold blood by the Recorder of the City of London.
Meanwhile one noteworthy circumstance had occurred. Mr. Harding and his companion, Daintree, had been among the first to leave the court. They thus escaped a scene of some confusion in one of the public galleries, the occupants of which were called to order and made to go out row by row. But so great was the crowd already in the street that to get out at all was a difficulty; to reach one’s coach another and a worse. Mr. Harding eventually found his waiting on Ludgate Hill, and directed the coachman to go by Chancery Lane before getting in after Daintree. Just then a man emerged from the seething crowd in the Old Bailey, and waited an instant at the corner; then the carriage drove down Fleet Street with the man after it at a discreet distance.
Harding and Daintree scarcely spoke a word; they were followed up Chancery Lane and across Holborn by the man, a dilapidated creature with a dreadfully disfigured face.
It was now nearly eight o’clock, and in the dusk the man grew bold. The old-fashioned coach had a footboard, seldom used, and the runner coolly sat himself upon it in the region of Russell Square. And he actually kept his seat until, on the outskirts of Regent’s Park, a street Arab shrilly informed the coachman; whereupon the man jumped off, and rushed at the boy with lean arms whirling like windmills, and ragged tails flying in the breeze.
The boy shinned up a lamp-post, and the man stood cursing him from below, with one eye upon the receding coach.
“If I’d the time to waste upon you, I’d break you in two, you blessed little nose!” cried the man, meaning an informer.
“Don’t you talk about noses,” retorted the boy, meaning the literal organ. “You wait till you’ve got one yourself, you blessed old nightmare!”
At this taunt the man’s mutilated face flared diabolically in the dusk, and with a sudden leap he caught the boy by an ankle and brought him headlong to the pavement; then knelt over him, and dashed his head repeatedly upon the flags, with the insensate fury of a criminal lunatic. When the boy lay still, he sprang to his feet, gnashing his teeth, and looking in vain for the coach. He was instantly seized by a gentleman who had seen this dastardly assault from the balcony of his house.
The gentleman was accompanied by his son, and between them they secured the monster, while servants flew in different directions for the police and a doctor.
The boy had a broken head and broken bones; but he escaped with his life, thus saving that of the man, who was duly committed, and became an ornament of Chapel Yard while Tom Erichsen lay under sentence of death in another part of Newgate.
And neither occupant of the coach ever heard or read a word about the matter.