POOR Bob Henry, shut up in the county jail, had indeed said aright when he wrote Pembroke that both blacks and whites were “agin him.” Pembroke could scarcely find one of the negro race to testify to Bob Henry’s previous good character—and as he sifted his own evidence and surmised the State’s, he saw that but for the witness Cave had ferreted out, things would indeed have looked black for Bob Henry. At that time the apprehension as to the way the negroes in their freedom would behave toward the whites was as yet sinister, and the Hibbses, whose relative the dead man was, worked up the feeling against his supposed murderer with considerable astuteness. They were among the largest subscribers to Mr. Cole’s salary, and as such they gave their views freely to Mr. Cole upon the impropriety of his going to see Bob Henry in jail, and exerting himself to stem the tide against him among the black people.
Mr. Cole’s fair little face flushed up at this criticism delivered from old Mr. Hibbs in a loud and dictatorial voice on the court house green before a crowd of persons.
“Mr. Hibbs—I—I—am a minister of the gospel, sir, and my duty is to condole with the afflicted, sir,—and—however sir,—whatever may be your opinion of that poor wretch in the jail yonder, and however it may conduce to—to—unpopularity, I shall continue to visit him. I have sympathy with the erring,” he said, remembering that terrible evening at The Beeches.
A heavy hand descended upon Mr. Cole’s shoulder, and Colonel Berkeley’s handsome face shone at him.
“Right you are, Cole. You’re a little prig sometimes, but you are something of a man, sir—something of a man!”
Mr. Cole blushed with pleasure at this dubious compliment.
Olivia Berkeley’s heart was touched with pity for the unfortunate negro. His ailing wife came every day to tell the same rambling and piteous story. Besides, Cave had been at work with her—and he had great power with young imaginations. Pembroke felt a certain anxiety about the case. It was one of those which gave room for the sympathetic oratory which in the country districts in the South yet obtains. He felt at first that if he could make the jury weep, his success as a lawyer would be assured and immediate. But if he failed it would mean long years of toil at his profession to gain that which by a happy inspiration he could win at a single coup. He worked hard, and prepared himself—not solely for oratory, because the Hibbses had not only engaged a formidable array of local talent, but had got one, if not two great men from afar, and the attorney-general himself, to help the state. Pembroke went to Cave despondent and nervous about this.
“It is the best thing in the world for you,” answered Cave. “Don’t you see, the prosecution has taken the form of a persecution? And the bringing in of outside talent is the greatest luck I ever heard of. The jury, if I know anything of human nature, will not try the prisoner according to the law and the evidence. They will try you and the lawyers from elsewhere—with a strong predisposition in favor of their own county man. It will go hard with them if they can’t find some way to discount the outsiders. Of course, I don’t say that this feeling will be immediately developed, but it will come out just as certainly as arithmetical progression.”
“I hope so,” Pembroke answered devoutly.
The day of the trial came—a sunshiny one in midwinter. Every man in the county turned out. Nothing delights a rural Virginian so much as a forensic argument. He will ride twenty miles to hear it, and sit it out, in cold, or heat, or wet, or misery, or anything. Then, besides the interest naturally attaching to the case, was the curiosity to see and hear Pembroke. He had not added to his popularity by his absence after the war—and Madame Koller had been a millstone around his neck latterly. His father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather had been great lawyers before him—indeed there was no tradition or history which went back to the time when there had not been a Pembroke practicing successfully at the bar in the county. So while there was a current of disapproval against him, there was a strong undercurrent of local sympathy in his favor also.
Pembroke appeared early on the ground that morning, with Miles. It was his first opportunity except at the Campdown races to meet the county people of all classes generally. He went about among them cool, affable, and smiling.
“Oyez, oyez, oyez!” the sheriff’s loud voice rang out from the court house steps—and the crowd poured into the old brick building, and Pembroke, slipping in by another way entered upon the strain which lasted for five days and nights.
Great as the crowd was at first, it increased every day. Within two hours of the swearing in of the jury, just what Cave had predicted came to pass. The prosecution saw that the jury was on the side of a Pembroke—the Pembrokes had always been prime favorites with juries in that county, and the present one was no exception. Naturally, this nettled the attorney-general and the other great men who appeared for the State. It was certainly an exasperating thing to come so far to find twelve men obstinately bent on seeing things from the point of view of a handsome, plausible young advocate. The court, however, was all that could be desired. The attorney-general expressed his belief to his colleagues that if French Pembroke relied upon an eloquent speech, and the precedent of a Pembroke always carrying the winning colors in a jury trial, he would be mistaken—because Judge Randolph, silent and grim, looked keenly after the law. It was, as Pembroke knew, no easy undertaking to face the array of lawyers before him. Like them, he was shrewd enough to see that it would be a poor triumph to obtain a verdict that would not stand. Bob Henry became to him merely an incident. He looked day after day, during the trial, at the negro’s ashy, scared face in the prisoner’s dock, and sometimes felt a kind of wonder that a creature so ignorant and so inconsequential could be of such tremendous importance to any human being. For Bob Henry took up Pembroke’s mind, his soul, his nights, his days. He worked all day for him, the tension never weakening from the time he entered the court room in the morning, until by the light of sputtering candles he saw Bob Henry walked off in the sheriff’s custody at night. Then Pembroke would go to his little office, and lighting his lamp, begin work on his books and his notes. Even Cave and Miles were unwelcome then. He was engaged in a fierce intellectual struggle that he must fight out for himself. He had meant in the beginning to keep himself in condition, but he found out that it was one of the times when the soul triumphs over the body. He would throw himself on the lounge in his office toward daylight and snatch three or four hours of heavy and dreamless sleep, and then wake up with his faculties as keen and tireless as if he had slept for a week. He did not grow haggard and wild-eyed as men sometimes do under these excitements. He was pale, but singularly self-possessed and alert, and looked invariably trim and composed. He forgot everything in those days but the negro he was trying to save from the gallows. The lawyers who opposed him pounded him unmercifully. They too, caught the infection of enthusiasm. It would be scandalous to be beaten by an untried hand in such a case as that, with such admirable fighting ground as they had.
One afternoon, when the court adjourned early on account of a slight illness of one of the jurors, Pembroke mounted his horse and rode off far into the woodlands. When he was out of sight of the village he put spurs to his horse and dashed along the country road. It did him good. He felt already as if he had gained strength enough to last him even at the rate he was using it up if the trial should last two weeks more. Presently he brought his horse down to a walk, and enjoyed the strange restfulness and strength he felt possessing him. Suddenly he came face to face with Olivia Berkeley, riding quietly along the same road.
It would be no exaggeration to say he had forgotten her existence. He had not thought once of her or of Madame Koller, or Ahlberg, anybody but Bob Henry. It had not been ten days since he had seen her, but he felt as if it had been ten years. She looked very pretty and Amazon-like on her light-built black, in her close habit.
“Papa tells me great things of you,” she said, after the first greeting. “He is up, storming and swearing for breakfast by sunrise, so as to be at the court-house by nine o’clock. I never expected to see him so happy again in dear old Virginia. It is some excitement for him. As for Jane, she is beginning to think Bob Henry a martyr and a hero combined.”
Pembroke smiled. It was not the first praise that had reached his ears, but the first that he had heeded. He had quite lost sight in the last few extraordinary days of any outside view of what he was doing—but praise from a pretty woman—especially praise so obviously sincere, is dear to man’s heart.
“I am sorry the Colonel should be so uproarious in consequence of the trial.”
“He is, I assure you. But I—I—too, feel very great interest in your success. How much more noble this is than dawdling on the continent! You will not get any money by it, but think—the whole county will admire and applaud you—and think of those two poor black creatures.”
“You are crediting me with more than I deserve,” he said, finding it difficult to explain that what he was doing had long passed out of the region of a desire for applause, and indeed, of the feeling of compassion which had once inspired him. Now it was the overpowering intellectual and natural bent that was having its own way. Pembroke had been born a lawyer, although he did not suspect it.
In taking his thoughts back to that remote period before the trial begun, Olivia had brought Madame Koller to mind.
“Have you seen Elise—Madame Koller—lately?” The first name slipped out involuntarily. He rarely called Madame Koller by it at any time—but now, by one of those tricks which memory serves all people, her name came to his lips not only without his will, but against it. His face turned a deep red, and he bit his lip in anger and vexation. Olivia straightened herself up on her horse and smiled at him that peculiar indulgent smile, and addressed him in those gentle tones that betokened the freezing up of her sympathies and the coming to life of her contempt. He knew only too well the meaning of that appalling sweetness. “No, I have not. But to-morrow I will probably see her. Shall I remember you to her?”
“If you please,” replied Pembroke, wishing Madame Koller at the devil, as he often did. Often—but not always.
Then they drifted into commonplace, and presently they parted, Pembroke galloping back to the village, despising himself almost as much as the day he had allowed his anger to lead him into the quarrel with Ahlberg.
But when he reached his dingy little office, Olivia Berkeley, Madame Koller, Ahlberg, all faded rapidly out of his mind. That great game of skill in which he was engaged, the stake being a human life, again absorbed him. And then the critical time came, when, after having tried to prove that the negro’s blow had not killed Hackett, he had to bring out his theory that a dead and missing man was the murderer. Hackett’s boon companions, who formed a community of lawless loafers, had been unaccountably shy about attending the trial. Like the rest of their class, they regarded a sensational murder trial as the most fascinating occasion in life. They were great frequenters of the court house, particularly of its low drinking places during “court week,” but not one of them showed up in the first days of the trial. Cave brought this significant news to Pembroke, who knew few persons in the miscellaneous crowd that he saw every day. It made his heart beat hard and fast with the hope of a coming success. The Hibbses and their retainers, and a certain set of people who overcame their dislike to the Hibbs family out of exaggerated sympathy for a Northern man with Southern sympathies, for which Hackett had posed, formed a kind of camp to themselves in the court room.
The lawyers for the State found out that Pembroke knew all the weak spots in their theory that Bob Henry’s blow killed Hackett, but there was no suspicion of any evidence forthcoming to support Pembroke’s theory that another hand struck the blow. Hackett’s association with the deserters had evidently been carefully concealed by him, as it would have ostracized him utterly.
Therefore, when Pembroke, putting off until the last possible moment, summoned John Jones and George Robinson and about a dozen others of the “deserters’ gang,” as it was called, his opponents were taken by surprise. One day only was taken up with their evidence. Each witness, debarred by Judge Randolph’s orders from communicating with the other, told a rambling, lying, frightened story, out of which Pembroke gleaned the midnight carousal, a quarrel, a blow—all of them running away, and leaving Hackett to his fate. In one point, however, they all agreed—that the man, William Marsh, who was fearfully cut by Hackett’s knife, and who disappeared to die, was the one who struck the fatal blow that knocked Hackett senseless, and from which he never rallied. All were eager to lay it on the dead man, and so to shift the suspicion from themselves. The State, of course, impugned the character of the witnesses, but that was a work of supererogation. They had no characters to impugn. Yet, both judge and jury saw, that without the slightest objection to perjuring themselves on the part of this precious gang, they were involuntarily proving that Marsh, not Bob Henry, was the murderer. Then Cave’s protégé, a small, ragged, undersized boy of fifteen, was introduced. He was diffident, and shy, and trembling in every limb, but his testimony was perfectly plain and straightforward, so much so that an eminent gentleman on the side of the prosecution, roared out to him, “Now, young man, tell us if this remarkably straight story of yours didn’t have help from somewhere. Have you talked with anybody about this evidence?”
“Y—y—yes, sir,” stammered the boy, frightened half out of his life.
“Who was it?” thundered the lawyer.
“Mr.—Mr.—Cave.”
“Aha, I thought so. Now, sir, tell us what Mr. Cave said to you—and be careful—very careful.”
The boy looked perfectly helpless and hopeless for a moment. Pembroke almost felt himself tremble.
“He said—he said, sir, some of the lawyers would holler at me, and maybe confuse me—but if I jes’ stuck to the truth, and didn’t tell nothin’ but what I seen with my own eyes, I’d come out all right!”
Shouts of applause greeted this, which the sheriff vainly tried to quell. The great man remarked to his personal staff, sotto voce, “It’s all up. Pembroke’s case is too strong for us.”
It was late in the afternoon of the fifth day when Pembroke’s closing argument was over, and the jury had been instructed and had retired. The Judge’s instructions rather damped Pembroke’s hopes. The testimony of the deserters, while actually of great effect, was legally not worth much—their motive in shoveling the blame on Marsh was too obvious. And Cave’s protégé, although his testimony was remarkably straightforward, was little better than a vagabond boy. Pembroke was not so sanguine of his own success as his opponents were.
The court house was dimly lighted by a few sputtering candles and an ill-burning lamp. The Judge sat up straight and stern, fatigued with the long trial, but willing to wait until six o’clock, the usual hour of adjournment, for the jury. The shabby court-room was filled with men, eager, talkative, but almost breathless with excitement—for by some occult means, they divined that the jury wouldn’t be long making up its verdict.
The negro sat in the dock, more ghastly, more ashy than ever. Pembroke rose to go to his office. He felt his iron nerve beginning to give way, but a voice—piteous and pleading—reached him.
“Fur God’s sake, Marse French, doan’ go ’way. I want you fur ter stay by me.”
Pembroke sat down again, this time a little nearer the poor prisoner, whose eyes followed him like a dog’s.
A hush settled down upon the audience. There was no pretense of attending to any other business. The opposing lawyers rested wearily in uncomfortable postures about the court-room. They talked in whispers among themselves. Pembroke knew by instinct what they were saying. It was that the jury was hopelessly gone, but that there remained hope yet in the stern and silent Judge, whose instructions had been brief and in no way indicative of which way his judgment inclined. It was not the result of this trial which concerned them, it was the prospect of another.
Among practiced lawyers, nothing is easier to tell than the views of a judge on a criminal case—after the decision has been rendered. About an hour of the suspense had been endured when a message came that the jury had agreed upon a verdict. The expectant crowd suddenly became hushed and motionless. Not as wise as the lawyers, there was utter uncertainty among them as to—not only whether the prisoner was guilty or not, but whether Pembroke alone and single-handed, had vanquished the veterans before him.
The jury filed in and took their places, and the formalities were gone through, when the foreman said in a loud voice, “Not guilty.” A wild and tumultuous cheering broke forth. Like the poor prisoner, Pembroke felt dazed. The end was not yet by any means. The opposing lawyers were on their feet in a moment—the sheriff shouted for order—and in the midst of this, a sudden silence came and Pembroke found himself—he hardly knew how—on the platform shaking hands with Judge Randolph.
“I congratulate you, sir,” he heard the Judge’s voice saying afar off. “You have maintained the reputation of your distinguished father for the tact and judgment with which you have defended your client. You have a great career before you. It is most encouraging to see such an example among the younger members of the bar.”
Then there was a wild commotion. Pembroke felt himself choking, trembling, utterly unable to reply. The pause to hear what he would say became painfully prolonged. He began “Your Honor”—and after repeating it twice, became utterly dumb.
“You may retire, Mr. Pembroke,” said Judge Randolph, with a smile, “your modesty is equal to your abilities.”
At this Pembroke felt himself seized by the legs. The crowd carried him out into the night air where another crowd yelled and shouted, he struggling and breathless, and presenting a more undignified appearance than he had ever imagined himself capable of looking. The next thing he found himself on the court-house steps. While in the din and confusion, he recognized occasionally faces by the light of the swinging lantern in the porch of the building. In a moment the attorney-general of the State appeared by his side—a handsome florid man of sixty. He waved imperiously for silence, and the crowd obeyed.
“My friends,” he said, in a strong, musical voice, “our young friend here has made a magnificent fight.” (Yells and cheers.) “He has done more than make an eloquent speech. He has mastered the law in the case.” (More yells and shouts.) “It was the intention of my colleagues and myself to move for a new trial. We have abandoned that intention.” (Yells and shouts wilder and wilder.) “We might possibly get a new trial on technicalities. It would cost the county much, and it would not subserve the cause of justice—for I cheerfully acknowledge to you here, that our young friend has proved conclusively that whoever caused the death of the dead man, the prisoner did not. Now will you not unite with me in giving him three cheers and a tiger!”
The uproar was terrific. Pembroke could say nothing, could do nothing, but bow. Suddenly an inspiration came to him. He turned to the attorney-general who stood behind him and shook hands with him warmly. The other lawyers crowded around him and shook hands. Somebody made way through the crowd for Bob Henry. The negro on seeing Pembroke broke into loud sobbing, and seizing him in both arms called down blessings on him. Then Colonel Berkeley shouldered his way up to him with Miles. At every minute the enthusiasm of the crowd increased. Pembroke was growing deadly pale. The excitement, the sleeplessness, of the last week was telling on him at last. Colonel Berkeley, after a sharp glance at him, took him by the arm, and by dint of hauling and pulling succeeded in wedging his way with Pembroke through the crowd, which in the hullaballoo and semi-darkness, did not know that the hero of the hour was gone, and yelled fiercely, “Speech! Speech!” The attorney-general gratified them.
Colonel Berkeley hustled Pembroke down, back through the court-room, out of a side door, and through byways to where the Isleham carriage stood, and clapped him in it, jumping in after him.
“Cave will look after Miles,” he said, and shouted to Petrarch, who was on the box, “Home.” The coachman laid the whip on his horses and they made the five miles to Isleham in half an hour.
When they reached the house, everything was too recent with Pembroke—his final speech, the excitement, the relief, the collapse—for him to have recovered himself. Olivia met them in the hall. Her father, who relished a new sensation as only a man who loves sensations can, was joyous.
“Congratulate him, my love,” he called out in his merry, jovial voice. “He is a true son of old French Pembroke. Great Cæsar! Haven’t I seen your father carry everything before him just like this! Would that he were alive this night! My darling, you should have heard his speech—a regular Burr and Blennerhassett speech, Olivia—and the effect—by Jove, my dear, I can’t describe it—and the Judge called him up on the bench to congratulate him—and—and—”
The Colonel surged on, telling everything at once. Olivia listened with shining eyes. She had held out her hand to Pembroke in the beginning, and as her father talked she continued to hold the hand in her little strong clasp. For the first time Pembroke was burnt by the fire in her eyes. What a woman for a man full of ambition to have! He had seen Elise Koller wildly enthusiastic about herself—but Olivia had forgotten all about herself. She was coloring, smiling, and sympathetic about him.
“How glad I am—how splendid of you—for that poor negro, too. God will reward you,” she said.
“Now, my boy,” cried the Colonel, “What do you want? Your dinner or your bed?”
“My bed,” answered Pembroke, smiling, but ready to drop. “I want nothing but sleep, and I want to sleep a week. Thank you, Olivia.”
He had never called her by her name since they were boy and girl together. The Colonel in his excitement did not notice it, but Olivia turned a beautiful rosy red. The Colonel dragged Pembroke off to his room. Petrarch put him to bed. Before he slept though, his thoughts returned to Olivia’s soft eyes—while Colonel Berkeley, walking the drawing-room floor downstairs, retailed in flamboyant language, to Olivia, the triumphs of the day.