by Grant Allen
‘No, you don’t,’ Mr. Roper responded, with a hasty flank movement in the direction of the door, against which he planted himself solidly as an animated barrier. ‘No thoroughfare this way! By order of the vestry! If you try to move, take care I don’t serve you as your Duchess served her respected husband. You can’t see her hanged, you say? Well, you ain’t bound to go and see her hanged, unless you like; and even then you can’t do it without an order from the sheriff. But she’s all right, Lord bless you! Don’t you trouble about her. They won’t hang a Duchess, not if they know it. Why, a Duke’s younger son, even, is always allowed an opportunity to hook it; and when it comes to a woman, even the beastly Radicals themselves wouldn’t allow ’em to hang her.’
For Mr. Roper’s political sentiments, as is usual with his order, were all on the side of Our Old Nobility.
The girl tried to raise herself once more, and fell back a second time.
‘Arthur,’ she cried, with the impotent rage of illness, ‘you’re a fiend; you’re a devil; upon my word I’m ashamed of you. You’ve no pity in your heart. I can’t think how I ever took up with such a wretch as you are. If only you’d seen how kind she was to me, and how she nursed me through that fever, I believe even you’d let me go and try to save her — and that when you know what wicked dreadful lies they’re telling about her in all the newspapers!’
Mr. Roper eyed his glass, with the sunlight streaming through, in contemplative mood, and responded philosophically, in the character of a man who thoroughly understands the practical working of British justice:
‘Oh, that’s all gammon, you know, Bess. That don’t amount to anything. What the papers say is neither here nor there. Mere rumour — mere rumour. The trial’s the rub. When a thing comes into Court, it gets thoroughly sifted down to the very bottom. English jury system; grand old constitution; noble palladium of British liberty. And the truth comes out — mostly — a sight too often, in fact, for my taste, when a fellow’s got an interest of his own in concealing it. But that’s not how it will be this time. When your Duchess comes into Court, her counsel’ll get her off as easy as winking, don’t you be afraid of it! Look at the way that clever young chap, Erskine, got me off that time on the burglary charge — and that, too, when I was really the fellow they wanted.’
And Mr. Roper, shutting one eye the better to admire the beaded bubbles in his glass, pursed his lips into a circle and whistled unconcernedly.
‘That’s just it,’ the girl cried passionately, raising herself once more, and staggering to her feet. ‘That’s just it. You were guilty, you see. But she’s innocent.’
‘Pretty bad opinion you seem to have,’ Mr. Roper observed, musing, ‘of the laws of your country! Pretty bad opinion! And yet they’ve treated you and me precious well, so far, Bess; the palladium’s protected us, and will in future, I expect — if you don’t go and make a blooming fool of yourself. But what do you mean, my girl, by calling me guilty, I should like to know?’ Mr. Roper continued, bridling up with indignation. ‘The expression’s unparliamentary; totally unfit for the society of gentlemen. I’ll admit I’m the man who was in the house at the time, with a sectional jemmy “concealed about my person,” as the Act phrases it. But what of that, I say? Circumstantial evidence — mere circumstantial evidence — and liable to error. A gentleman may be lounging about a neighbour’s house most innocently any day. The jury acquitted me. I won’t stand these imputations against my moral character.’
As he spoke, Miss Pomeroy had glided quietly and unobtrusively toward the window, and was trying to open it now with trembling fingers. Mr. Roper’s eye was so intent upon his bubbling brandy that he hardly noticed her at first; but when he looked up, with a start and a sudden oath he rushed over and caught her wrist hard in his hand at the critical moment.
‘You sneaking little devil!’ he cried angrily, dragging her back by main force to her place on the sofa, and laying her down there once more in no very gentle fashion. ‘So you were going to shout out of the window and raise the street, were you? You miserable little white-livered, methodistical turncoat! I like your impertinence. I’ll teach you to go trying to peach on me and call in the coppers. No unkindness meant, but I’ll take it out of you, Bess, if ever you dare to open that window. I’ll break every bone in your body before I let you get me into trouble. You shan’t stir out of this room till that woman’s tried and hanged, or acquitted. Duchess indeed! Much I care for your Duchesses! Much reason the nobs have given me to care for ’em; though I’ve always backed ’em! Well, no matter. Here you are, and here you’ll stick till the woman swings for it.’
Elizabeth Pomeroy put her hands to her face, and burst into a flood of wild hysterical tears.
‘Oh, I wish I was stronger,’ she cried. ‘I do wish I was stronger; I’d like to be well and myself again, that’s all. If I was, though you’re a man and I’m a woman, I wouldn’t be afraid to wrestle with you for it, Arthur — I’d get out of this room, if you stood in my way with a loaded pistol. I’d be a match for you then, for I’ve got a devil in me when I’m roused; I’ll tell you that. I’d kill you, but I’d get out and I’d save the Duchess.’
She spoke with fierce energy. Mr. Roper regarded her cynically meanwhile, with keen eyes of satisfaction.
‘I dare say you would,’ he said, smiling serenely. ‘It wouldn’t much surprise me if you turned against your best friend some day in one of your blessed tantrums. You’re a bad un when your blood’s up, and no mistake! But it soon blows over; that’s one comfort. If I thought you meant all you say, I’d scrag you as you lie there, as soon as look at you, for I hate ingratitude. But I know you of old. You always were given to these fits of the liver. Remorse, the parsons call it. I call it liver. You’ll be right again by-and-by, and you’ll thank me for not letting your own hysterical passion get the better of you like this. Meanwhile, thank heaven! you’re safe enough for the present. You’re as weak as a cat, the Lord be praised! and all through your own silly imprudence, too, in exposing yourself too soon after typhoid fever.’
The girl flushed up crimson at this last ungenerous taunt.
‘Why, it was for you, Arthur!’ she cried; ‘it was for your sake that I did it. I exposed myself on the leads to watch the house as you told me, and to give you your cue when there was a good chance of doing business. You ungrateful man! You’d send me to my death, and that’s all the thanks I’d ever get for it.’
Mr. Roper smiled once more.
‘It’s the privilege of our sex,’ he retorted calmly, with a passing glance at the glass, where his own features were reflected, ‘to benefit by the touching devotion of women. They do like me, I admit. There’s a round dozen of ’em, one place or another, that ‘ud willingly die for me.’
The girl rose once more and staggered towards the window. Mr. Roper rose in turn, and blocked her way with determined resolution. The girl seized his hands. The head of the profession was a slim-built man, but his limbs were of iron. Miss Pomeroy was frail, but she had the fierce momentary strength so often seen in hysterical women. The brandy had stimulated her into a brief outburst of vigour. It was nerve against muscle, energy against brute force, impulse against inertia, passion against passivity. She flung herself madly upon him.
‘I will go,’ she cried aloud, ‘whether you let me or no. I’ll choke you where you stand, you brute! I’ll rouse the house with screaming.’
For a minute she fought wildly; she seethed with anger; then her strength broke down. Mr. Roper’s strong arms were too much in the end for her. She burst into hot tears once more, and half fell to the ground. Mr. Roper lifted her up, more tenderly than before, and carried her like a baby across the room. He laid her down on the sofa, a sobbing, quivering, jelly-like mass, and proceeded to administer once more his favourite panacea of a thimbleful to the half-fainting creature.
‘Now, mind you, Bess,’ he added warningly, with one uplifted finger raised against her as against a naughty child who has tried to be disobedient, ‘if
ever you venture to go to door or window again till that woman’s hanged, or not hanged, as the case may be, by the laws of your country, why, as sure as I’m standing here, I’ll wring your neck for it! I’m a placable, easy-going, tender-hearted gentleman when I have my own way, and, as you very well know, I don’t like violence. But I mean what I say now — this is a time for being firm. You mark my words: as sure as I’m standing here I’ll wring your neck for it.’
Miss Pomeroy only doubled herself together on her sofa, and, with inarticulate sobs, gave herself up to a perfect feminine saturnalia of misery.
CHAPTER XLIII.
MODUS OPERANDI.
To Douglas Harrison and Basil Maclaine those weeks of waiting for Linda’s trial had been very painful. Even the honour of having his name mixed up with a Duchess’s in an aristocratic scandal of the first water hardly made up to Basil for the horror and awe of that appalling outlook if Linda were to be found guilty. Indeed, a certain fascinating fear gave him a deeper sense of personal connection with the Belgravia Mystery than even the circumstances of the case themselves warranted. Except for the imprudence of his frequent calls at Onslow Gardens — an imprudence of which any honourable man might easily have been guilty — Basil had nothing with which to blame himself — in the more recent developments of this affair, at least. It was not his fault if the Duke was jealous. It was not his fault if his goings-out and comings-in had been watched by detectives, and his visits to Onslow Gardens all numbered and docketed. Personal vanity, however, suggested to Basil an explanation of the facts at which everybody else had jumped long since from pure love of scandal, but from which his own knowledge of Linda’s character and motives might surely have saved him at least of all men. It was clear the Duke had been poisoned. It was clear somebody must have poisoned him. Basil half inclined to the startling conclusion that Linda, still desperately in love with him, had determined to get rid of her uncongenial husband in order to marry her old lover. That was everybody else’s conclusion in all England, of course; but to Basil it naturally came with a good deal of difference.
For, however much flattered a man may feel by a Duchess preferring him to her own wedded Duke, he must yet be considerably perturbed in soul by the belief that she has committed a gratuitous murder in order to give full play to her abstract preference. The episode, to put it on no higher ground, makes him naturally nervous. Conscious as Basil was of the perfect innocence of his own relations with Linda, he couldn’t help seeing that other people would almost necessarily put a different interpretation on the facts before them, and would therefore believe him, morally or actually, an accessory before the fact to the Duke’s murder. He was too well acquainted with the psychology of clubland not to know how clubland would read his conduct. This feeling alone, therefore, would have served to make Basil’s position an extremely uncomfortable one; and when there was added to it the probability of Linda’s being found guilty, and the possibility of his being compelled to stand in the dock by her side, it is no wonder that Basil Maclaine lay low as much as practicable during those unhappy days, and that a medical certificate amply excused him, on the ground of ‘nervous prostration,’ from attendance at the Board of Trade in Whitehall.
Indeed, in the world at large, very free comments were expressed by high and low upon Basil’s position. Some people said the fellow ought to be tried with his poor dupe, the Duchess. Some people said Maclaine was always such a calculating beggar that no doubt he’d managed most cleverly to keep out of all compromising matters. And some people said he’d behaved like a cur in encouraging the Duchess to poison her husband, and then leaving her alone — a woman as she was — to bear the brunt of that terrible accusation. A man of any spirit, a man of any honour, a man of any manliness, would have confessed at once, whether he did it or not — would have taken the guilt upon his own shoulders gladly, and saved the lady from the disgrace and odium of such a cruel charge at all hazards.
Everybody felt that to desert the woman with whom he had stood in such tender relations at such a moment was a stain upon his manhood never to be forgiven.
But nobody debated whether Basil had known anything about it at all. Nobody debated whether Linda was in love with Basil or not. The whole world took it for granted, with easy cynicism, that Linda had poisoned her husband for Basil’s sake, and that Basil had either a guilty knowledge of her design, or else sheltered himself behind a still more guilty and disgraceful ignorance.
So Basil remained at home in a most unhappy state of mental perturbation, while the quidnuncs of clubland, taking up his own parable, railed against him to their heart’s content as an unmanly wretch who deserted and betrayed in her hour of need the woman he had ruined.
As for Douglas Harrison, all these foolish cynicisms fell flat for him upon deaf ears. He had but one thought, and that was for Linda. How the world could so misjudge his spotless, stainless queen among women was to him incomprehensible. He had none of the base doubts that misled Basil Maclaine. With a certainty far deeper than any mere collocations of circumstantial fact could avail to shake, he knew she was herself, he knew she was innocent. All he could do was to wonder blindly how on earth such a mass of damning coincidences could by pure chance have arrayed themselves in serried phalanx against her. But was it pure chance? Thinking it over perpetually in his own mind by the light of his psychological knowledge of human nature, a Theory of the murder began slowly to frame itself piecemeal in his brain by gradual stages. Bit by bit, the Theory grew and took definite shape — till, long before the day of the trial itself arrived, the solution stood out clearly before his mind’s eye, a consistent whole and a palpable reality.
He had reasoned out to himself the actual truth as to who had poisoned the Duke of Powysland.
But how to make use of his idea in Linda’s defence? — that was the difficulty. He couldn’t induce Linda’s lawyers to see the matter in the same light as himself, he was very much afraid — hard-headed, unimpressionable people, your great London solicitors, like Walberswick and Garrod, or your eminent Q.C.’s, like Mr. Mitchell Hanbury! If it rested with them alone, Linda’s character would never be cleared — for that to Douglas Harrison, as to Linda herself, was the chief thing at stake in the approaching trial. Sensitive and shrinking as he was by nature, it wasn’t the awful consequences of an adverse verdict he thought about most; it was the indelible stain of such a hideous accusation. He wanted to save Linda from death, of course; but he wanted far more acutely to save her from dishonour.
The lawyers, he knew, would never trouble their heads about trifles like that. If only they could secure an acquittal for their client by hook or by crook, on the merest legal quibble or technical uncertainty, their professional instinct would be amply satisfied. ‘The benefit of the doubt’ would suffice for their need. Enough for them if they could show an absence of reasonable proof that it must have been Linda, and nobody else on earth, who put the morphia ‘by handfuls’ into the Duke’s barley-water. All they would aim at would be merely to damage the case for the Crown by suggesting this, that, or the other possible alternative, and asking the jury on such miserable grounds to acquit their client. But half-measures like those would never satisfy Douglas Harrison. He wanted to prove Linda wholly innocent of the vile crime laid to her charge — innocent on all counts — an unfortunate wife, as pure as snow, and sinned against, not sinning, in all her relations with her dead husband.
Anything less than that, Douglas would not have cared to undertake. And to such a line of argument he felt sure in his own mind Linda’s legal advisers would never commit themselves.
It was while things were standing in this condition that Douglas received one evening by the last post, with profound delight, Linda’s letter from gaol asking him to accept the task of defending her.
For a moment joy stunned him. He could hardly believe his eyes as he read and re-read half a dozen times over that most welcome letter. It was the very opportunity he had hoped and longed for. He could wish nothing bette
r than to be permitted to defend Linda upon those very grounds — not her life, but her honour — and Linda, his Linda, the Linda he had always loved and worshipped with his whole heart and soul — why, Linda, as might be expected of her, took the very same view of the situation as he did. What she cared for was not that her neck should be spared, but that her innocence should be established before the observant eyes of all England.
And yet, the difficulties in the way were almost insuperable!
It wasn’t so much that Douglas himself had quite indirectly been mixed up in the affair. The mere fact that the detectives had kept watch upon his movements didn’t in itself perhaps count for much. That was merely as Basil Maclaine’s fellow-lodger, he believed — and, what was more important, all the world thought the same about that as he did. Maclaine had been the one man whom everybody had talked about; handsome, pushing, a gossip, a lounger, much spread about in the world, eager of notoriety, he was the natural person for scandal to fasten upon, to the complete exclusion of poor humble-minded, shy, retiring Douglas, even if the Duke’s suspicions had not designated him at once as the other chief personage in that sombre tragedy. Douglas had no hesitation on that ground, any more than Linda herself. His very insignificance in the eyes of society had saved his name from being dragged into the forefront of the scandal.
But then he had to fight that terrible dragon of obstruction known to the inner circle as the Etiquette of the Profession. Every vocation in England keeps in stock among its joint properties one of these fearsome monsters of its own peculiar breed, and few outsiders can form any conception to themselves of the pains and penalties attached by the members to all attempts at disturbing or ignoring it.
Even if Mitchell Hanbury, Q.C., had voluntarily consented, as Linda said he had, to retire from the case, Douglas knew he had Walberswick and Garrod still to fight, not to mention the juniors, and the court itself, and the officious friends of the case, and the final bugbear of public opinion.