CHAPTER XIV
THE TRAGEDY DEEPENS
IT was a terrible and dismaying blow that had fallen so tragically upon the hopes of triumph and vindication. Herriard on his way to the Countess Alexia with the news—which had been sent to him at once—called at Gastineau’s, being anxious to gather every grain of hope there might be of making the best of this bitter disappointment.
“I have not come to worry you any more about Campion,” was Herriard’s greeting, with a short bitter laugh of discomfiture. “The poor fellow will never give evidence now. He is dead.”
Gastineau gave him a sharp glance of surprised enquiry. He was lying back in a state of greater listlessness than Herriard ever remembered to have seen in him since the first effects of the accident.
“Dead? How?”
Herriard told him. “It happened in Piccadilly, by the Green Park; within sight of Vaux House. And it is a bad blow for us, with all deference to your views.”
“I fear I must continue in disagreement with you,” Gastineau returned, with a confident smile. “I am of opinion that the cabman who knocked down the late Mr. Campion has unwittingly done your side a substantial service.”
Herriard took an impatient turn across the room. “Gastineau, you carry your opinion, your scepticism, too far. Surely between us you need not make such a point of maintaining it so obstinately.”
He spoke with a certain amount of heat, with the sense of disappointment stinging him doubly, in his heart and head.
As Gastineau’s eyes followed his impatient movement they seemed to laugh subtly. “If,” he said, “you will give the situation a moment’s calm thought, my dear Geof, you will see what I mean by suggesting that by this man’s death your client is no worse off, but, on the contrary, has gained an advantage.”
“It would take a more penetrating intellect than mine to see that,” Herriard returned, with ill-humoured sarcasm.
“At least let me try to put it to you,” Gastineau rejoined, with a smile at the other’s temper. “Now, take the position dispassionately. First of all, what are you going for? To clear Countess Alexia’s reputation of the slander that has touched it. That, I grant you, with this man Campion’s evidence you would have done triumphantly—if it had withstood all the hot attacks which would have been made upon it. The evidence he would have given, had he lived, is now common knowledge; his narrative, his uncontradicted narrative, has been published by enterprising journalists; everybody knows it. So you stand in the position to-day of having got your examination-in-chief before the public without any chance of cross-examination by the other side. Is not that a score? You have succeeded in getting the world’s sympathy for your interesting client, and it will be augmented rather than diminished by this unlooked-for incident, which will assuredly be regarded as a cruel blow.”
“As it is,” Herriard murmured; beginning, however, to see the cloud’s bright side.
“Of course,” Gastineau agreed; “but it won’t hurt you. It is far, far better for you than one shaky answer in the witness-box. Yes; to sum up, you have the status quo ante, with the sympathy transferred to your side, the dead man’s uncontradicted, and, now, uncontradictable, evidence on record in the public mind. And you must remember that, in a case of this sort, it is the public, not the jury, which gives the real verdict. Yes, my dear Geof, you are to be congratulated, or, at least, the Countess is. Come! confess you see it.”
“Oh, yes,” Herriard answered, recovering somewhat from the blankness of his discomfiture; “I admit we are in a far better position now than before Campion turned up. Still, I cannot agree that we gain by his death. I am absolutely convinced that his evidence would have remained unshaken before Macvee’s big guns; and I cannot understand why you have all along taken such a prejudiced view of the poor man and the genuineness of his testimony.”
“It is scarcely worth while discussing it now,” Gastineau replied, with a half yawn. “I am quite ready to admit that I may have been utterly wrong. Had it not been for the seriousness of the issue I could be sorry that the question of the stability of his evidence can never now be settled. As it is we may consign the question to the limbo of the great undecided, and rest content with the gain it has brought us. I suppose the poor fellow was dead when picked up?”
“No,” Herriard answered; “he lived for ten minutes, and was able to give an account of the accident. It appears he was running after a cab, in which he had recognized again the man we are in search of, the man who is supposed to have killed Martindale. In his excitement poor Campion failed to notice a hansom which swung out of Berkeley Street, and ran him down.”
“H’m! I quite agree with you, it is a pity,” Gastineau observed, in an indifferently sceptical tone; “a pity that the all-important Mr. Campion has come to so unromantic an end. It would have been highly interesting to have seen what sort of a figure he would have cut in the witness-box, with Joshua Standish Macvee for a vis-à-vis.”
“I can imagine but one result,” Herriard replied, with a dry reserve. “Well, I am going on to Green Street to do what I can to lighten this blow. Your view of the matter will at least help me to do that.”
“Yes,” Gastineau agreed; “I think you may venture to congratulate Countess Alexia. The reckless cabby did your client no bad turn.”
“Perhaps not,” Herriard returned; “but we did not want to win like that.”
“Better like that than not at all,” Gastineau rejoined. “You now have the Countess practically cleared so far as the world is concerned. The passing of Campion rehabilitates her by providing a very plausible, if, to legal minds, somewhat unconvincing, solution of the mystery.”
The pointed significance in his tone was not to be ignored. Herriard started up, impelled by the shock of a conviction then first realized. “Gastineau,” he exclaimed, in a tone of protest, almost of indignation, “you are not going to tell me you think the Countess guilty?”
The other smiled meaningly. “My dear Geof, I am not blind to possibilities and probabilities, if you are; but then, perhaps, I have not the same reason.”
It was the first time that Herriard had known his friend to sneer at him, and the tone of the last words stung him uncomfortably. In that instant he realized how the fissure between them was extending; and the situation which seemed so swiftly developing was made none the less unhappy by its incomprehensibility, by its being devoid of an adequate cause. A difference of opinion. Was that to dissolve the close partnership, that alliance of theirs against the world? It seemed pitifully absurd. Herriard had vowed that no act of his should help to widen the breach. It was curious how this case had come between them; there seemed such animus behind Gastineau’s arguments, and as Herriard’s feeling was all the other way, it became increasingly difficult for him to keep to his resolve. “My dear fellow, it is preposterous,” was all he could trust himself to say. “I can hardly think you mean it seriously.”
“I merely say that I see nothing inherently improbable in the suggestion,” Gastineau replied, in his keen argumentative manner. “In fact, from the circumstantial evidence we have, the probabilities are, pace the late Mr. Campion, all the other way. I will simply put one point to you. Why and how should another man, the person whom Campion declared he saw, stab Martindale to death with an ornament from Countess Alexia’s hair? Why should he want to do it at all? and, if so, why and how with that particular weapon? At least it points to the Countess being an accessory before the fact. Now I really should like to hear a good rebutting argument against that.”
Herriard had turned away from him, and was leaning with his arms on the mantelpiece. “The argument is,” he replied, in a voice low from restraint, “that the Countess lost the ornament. And my unshakable belief is that she had nothing to do with Martindale’s death either as principal or accessory.”
“Your argument is nebulously vague and just conceivable, but at the same time wildly improbable,” Gastineau returned, in his quiet, cutting tone. “But that you seem not a little épris with your fair client I should not think you in earnest in putting it forward.”
Herriard raised his head and turned to the couch. “Gastineau, if you really think the Countess guilty, for Heaven’s sake, let the case never be mentioned between us again. We don’t want to quarrel; it would ill become me to be at issue with you to whom I owe so much, but it is certain that if we pursue this subject we shall quarrel, since my whole sense revolts from your theory. So let it be taboo.”
Gastineau laughed, and his laugh was as a sneer at the other’s heated earnestness.
“We never should have come near to joining issue had you not let your heart run away with your head. A lawyer ceases to be a lawyer when he allows feelings and prejudices to interfere with his judgment. So far as our profession goes a man must be all head, a legal thinking machine, if you like. It is not perhaps an ideal equipment, but it is the only workable one.”
“I dare say,” Herriard replied, in a tone of doubtful conviction. “Happily, or unhappily, very few of us can quite succeed in stifling our private judgment of those with whom we have to deal.”
“True. And the man who succeeds best in that makes the best lawyer, other things being equal,” Gastineau returned dogmatically. “Now we won’t quarrel, Geof, over the last word of this burning subject, but I must give it you in the form of a word of warning. Let me as an older man of the world than yourself, and as one who has nothing more to gain or lose in this world, put you on your guard against the state into which you are drifting.”
“What do you mean?”
“I refer to the Countess Alexia. That is all, and I will say no more, except that if you let yourself go too far in that direction you will bitterly repent it.”
Herriard repressed the words that sprang to his lips. “Very well, Gastineau,” he responded simply; “I take your warning in the spirit in which it is given.”
An inscrutable smile flitted across Gastineau’s face, as he nodded in response to the other’s words.
And so they parted.
Herriard went towards Green Street in a perplexed and uneasy state of mind. There could be only one explanation of Gastineau’s warning, and it was that he believed Countess Alexia guilty. But that was utterly preposterous. Herriard comforted himself with the thought that his friend knew little of the Countess, having only met her casually in society years before. His was a hard, judicial brain; he would believe anything of anybody if the legal probabilities pointed to such a conclusion; the human element in the case, if not entirely ignored, would be reduced to an equation and governed by the law of mathematical chances. But, logic or no logic, the idea that the Countess might be guilty was monstrous. Knowing her as he did, Herriard was sure that she had not even the most venial and innocent connection with Martindale’s death. Nor, putting bias away, could he find the slightest ground for discrediting Campion’s testimony. Well, thank Heaven, the case would soon be brought, as he fully anticipated, to a happy conclusion, and his relations with the Countess need never again form the subject of argument.
“I have brought you bad news,” he said to her when they met.
Alexia’s face paled for an instant, as her eyes questioned him apprehensively. He told her what had happened, and the pros and cons of its probable effect upon the case.
“I am inclined to think we are not so very much worse off,” he said, “by the poor fellow’s death, shocking as it is, and greatly as we must regret it. You must not take it so much to heart, Countess,” he added, for he could see how dismayed and anxious the news had made her.
“Oh, but I fear, I fear,” she returned, in a low voice.
“Indeed you need not fear,” he urged encouragingly.
“When I think what is at stake how can I help it?”
He leaned forward. “Countess, you have no cause for fear,” he said half-interrogatively. The words were spoken more to give Gastineau’s suggestion the lie than to satisfy any doubt in his own mind. Next moment he hated himself for the inflexion that made them seem a question. With the swift intuition of a clever woman she divined the subtle equivocalness of the speech. Perhaps she felt it was not altogether uncalled-for, that it was reasonable. She looked at him steadily, frankly, and her look sealed his self-condemnation.
“I have only one cause for fear,” she said, “a miscarriage of justice, the possible success of a vile slander.”
“I am sure of that, Countess,” he replied, with a warmth bred of repentance. “And I should think none the less of you if your fear extended farther. But I have no dread at all of the issue of this case, and wish I could infect you with my certainty.”
“I think you have,” she responded, with an effort at conviction. “But in this world things go curiously wrong sometimes, and, while there is suspense, there must, to a woman, at least, be fear.”
“I hate the thought of your fear,” he said in a lower voice; “it seems to increase my responsibility.”
Alexia smiled. “No, no, my friend,” she protested, “you must not think that. You, at least, cannot fail; your victory is already gained.”
“Not yet,” he replied deprecatingly; “still, I am confident that it will be.”
A sudden thought came to him; the conviction that if he were to put his fate to the touch it should be now; that to wait would be the timid, unchivalrous trick of an opportunist, and as he realized that the moment had come he stood dismayed. He glanced at the Countess, with a strange diffidence, for in his dealings with men and women confidence had become almost as second nature. The constrained silence that had come upon them seemed to prick him on; each second it lasted made the urgency cumulative. And yet words failed him. What could he say to her? How could he say it? His eyes rested on the graceful lines of her figure, the exquisite colouring and contour of her head. She was not a girl, but a woman of matured sensibilities for sympathy and love; the one woman he had met whom he longed to ask to share his life, the one woman in whose company he would be more content to face trouble than to pass a cloudless existence with any other. Yet how could he but hesitate? She was above him in rank; there was something royal in the very turn of her head, in the subtle splendour that seemed to exhale from her presence. True he was somebody now in the world; he had made his name both at the Bar and in the House. Then, with the encouraging thought, the spectre of his deceit rose up and stood between him and his love, till he wished she were guilty that they might meet on more equal terms. Still, that present one was the moment to be seized. That thought was insistent; it was under the shadow of this sharp disappointment that he must risk the question.
As he stood hesitating and tongue-tied, Alexia looked up, as it were with a glance of enquiry as to the reason of the silence. It was a provocative lifting of the deep grey eyes, and it drew him into speech as though moved by an enchanter’s touch outside the pale of calculation.
“Countess,” he said, “I wish I might, without offence, ask for the crown of my victory.”
She seemed to shrink a little from him, as she replied in a low voice, yet steadily, “The victory is not yet won; the crown is of doubtful glory.”
His tongue was loosened now. “Never to me,” he declared with passion. “Countess, it is all that I covet in this world; it can never be anything less to me than pure gold. Ah, if I might ever hope to wear it!”
But she made no responsive sign. “It is not time to speak of that,” she said, in a voice in which the feeling was so repressed that it seemed cold.
“If,” he rejoined, in a like tone, “it may ever be, surely this is the time.”
Again she looked at him; there was gratitude and, he thought, something yet more to be desired in her eyes. “No, my friend,” she said, with gentle denial; “not now.”
“Alexia,” he pleaded, laying his hand on her arm, “let me tell you how I love you.”
But again she shook her head, and moved away from the tentative caress. “No,” she replied; “you must not speak a word of that to me.”
“Not yet?”
She hesitated a moment or two, and in the pause his hopes swiftly grew. Then, almost in a whisper, the words came repeated, “Not yet.”
As he realized what those words meant, joy thrilled him beyond all power of the restraint he owed her. “Alexia, my love!” The cry burst out from the rapture of his good fortune. But she turned quickly to him, putting out her hands protestingly.
“No, no, please; not that,” she said, and in the entreaty there was a touch of command. “I know that you, of all men, will respect my wish.”
“It is hard,” he returned submissively, “but I must. If you knew how hard, dear Countess, you would forgive me.”
“I have nothing to forgive,” she replied simply; and for a while no more was spoken between them.
Then their talk reverted to the burning subject of the trial, till presently Count Prosper came in.
He had heard at his club the news of Campion’s death, and the friends he was with had tried to lessen the shock it gave him.
“You have an excellent man in Herriard,” Sir Perrott Aspall had remarked encouragingly.
“Couldn’t have a better,” Baron de Daun had agreed. “Quite the best man at the Bar for that sort of case, since Paul Gastineau.”
“By the way,” another man of the group broke in, “talking of Gastineau, an extraordinary thing happened to me the other evening. As I was walking across the Green Park a man passed me whom I could have sworn was Paul Gastineau.”
“What, the Paul Gastineau?” Sir Perrott asked, with a smile of toleration for another man’s stupidity.
“The Paul Gastineau,” the other maintained. “The K.C. Member for Starbury. I knew him well.”
“But,” Sir Perrott objected, with all the superiority which disbelief in the obviously impossible confers, “Paul Gastineau, the K.C., and all that, was killed some years ago in a railway accident in Spain.”
“Yes,” retorted the other; “that is just what made my seeing him in the Green Park so extraordinary.”