CHAPTER XXXII.
MRS. CARRUTH REMOVES HER VEIL.
After luncheon came the speeches.
Sir Haselton Jardine's was as deadly as it very well could have been.He was not a bit of an orator. He reminded one of an automatic figureas much as anything, as if he had been wound up to go. He went quietlyon, in the same placid, passionless sort of whisper, but as clear as abell. One never lost a syllable he uttered. He never faltered orstumbled. The words, as they flowed from him, were exactly adapted tothe meaning they were intended to convey. He fitted them together withthe dexterity of an artist in mosaic.
One began almost to feel that one was listening to the voice of doom.
He recounted the story. He observed that it did not appear to bedisputed that the prisoner had travelled in the same compartment withthe woman who was dead. He did not know what the defence would be. Butif it was intended to suggest that death had been the result ofaccident, he asked the attention of the jury to the medical evidence.It was shown by that that death had not been caused by falling from thetrain. The woman had been strangled--strangled by a man's two hands.The degree of violence which had been used not only inevitablysuggested premeditation, but also great resolution in carrying out whathad been premeditated. The murderer had resolved to kill, and he didkill.
They could not say with certainty what happened after the train leftBrighton. A feature of the case was that the efforts of the police hadfailed in establishing the dead woman's identity. So far as they coulddiscover she was nameless. No one had come forward to claim her--to saywho she was. She seemed to have come from nowhere. No one seemed tohave missed her now that she had gone. It was a mystery. He could notsay if the prisoner had it in his power to supply them with the key tothat mystery. Men live double lives. The witness Taunton had told themthat what he had heard had caused him to conclude that the man andwoman in the next compartment were acquaintances. That might have beenthe case. In that connection he would merely remark--that the prisonerwas a married man; that the woman was young and pretty; that she wasfar advanced in pregnancy; that she wore no wedding-ring.
In these facts they might, possibly, find a motive for the crime.
A great crime had been committed. A young woman, scarcely more than agirl, who would shortly have become a mother, had been done to death.So far as one could perceive, there were no palliating circumstances.It was the other way. The crime was the act of a coward, as well as ofa criminal. He did not desire to press the case unduly against theprisoner. It was his duty to ask them, as jurymen, if the facts whichhad been presented were not adequate to bring the crime home to him. Ifthey deemed them inadequate, then, without showing fear or favour, itwas their duty to say so.
Sir Haselton Jardine sat down.
And Mr. Bates got up.
Mr. Bates began by remarking that he did not propose to call anywitnesses for the defence.
Then, in that case, in view of the body of evidence which had beencalled for the other side, Tommy's goose was cooked, and he was donefor. Mr. Bates might have as well kept still. A general movement whichtook place in the court seemed to be a voiceless expression of thisconsensus of opinion.
Mr. Bates said that, in taking this course, he was almost overwhelmedby a sense of responsibility. That was chiefly owing to the fact thatthe law of England was still in such a state that the prisoner couldnot go into the box and testify. He was exceedingly anxious to give histestimony, but it could not be received as evidence. If he had spokenout at first he might not, and probably would not, have been in theposition which he was occupying now. But he had shrunk from the coursewhich a wiser man would have pursued--shrunk from it for reasons whichwere natural enough, but which still, he was bound to say, wereinsufficient. Now it was too late. His voice could not be heard.
It was his duty, as the prisoner's advocate, to lay before the jury theprisoner's story.
Then Mr. Bates told what had really happened, and told it very wellindeed. His story was literally accurate. I did not detect a singlediscrepancy. I think I should have done! He was frank almost to afault. He nothing extenuated, nothing set down in malice. Nothing wasomitted--even the dotting of the i's.
And yet I doubt if a soul in court, with the exception, perhaps, ofTommy's wife, believed a word he said.
To me, listening up there, the thing was inconceivably funny.
The chief difficulty which Mr. Bates had to contend with, as he owned,and as one perceived without his owning it, was the medical evidence.He admitted that it was difficult to reconcile it with the prisoner'sstory. The prisoner declared that he did not understand it; that it hadcome upon him with the force of a surprise.
His theory was that the woman had been stunned by her fall from thetrain. As she was unconscious, or before she had recovered, somestraggling vagabond had found her lying on the bank. He had robbed her.To effect his purpose he had had to add murder to robbery. Theprosecution had not laid stress upon the point, but she evidently hadbeen robbed. There was not the slightest tittle of evidence to connectthe prisoner with the robbery, so counsel for the Crown had been wisenot to dwell upon it. On the other hand there was complete absence ofmotive, and the fact that nothing of any sort could have belonged tothe dead woman had been found in the possession of the prisoner.
He admitted that the suggestion that murder had been committed afterthe fall from the carriage was well worthy the attention of the jury.
The prisoner made a mistake--which however, he submitted, was themistake which we might naturally have expected from a constitutionallynervous man--in not giving the alarm immediately the accident tookplace. He ought to have spoken when they reached Victoria. He ought notto have allowed himself to be frightened by the blackmailing Taunton.But, after all, these were all mistakes which a perfectly innocent man,of his constitution, in his position, might have made. We none of uscould absolutely rely upon having our wits about us when we most wantedthem.
The prisoner had made mistakes. He owned it. But he begged the jury toconsider that the law did not permit him to put the prisoner into thewitness-box, and that the prisoner was convinced that, if he only mightbe suffered to tell his tale his innocence would be established. Aboveall, he entreated them not to send a fellow-creature to an ignominiousdeath because he had yielded to the promptings of a timorousconstitution and had not played the man.
When Mr. Bates sat down the judge summed up.
And he did it very briefly.
He pooh-poohed Mr. Bates's story altogether. He told the jury that theywere at liberty to believe it, if they could. But it was not supportedby a shred of evidence. It was disproved in several essentialparticulars, and it was his duty to inform them that it was contrary toevery principle of English law that an _ex parte_ statement which waswithout any sort of corroboration should be allowed to weigh, for aninstant, against a large and authenticated body of evidence which hadbeen sworn to by credible and impartial witnesses. At the same time, ifthere was any doubt in their minds, let the prisoner have the benefitof it; though, so far as he was concerned, he had not the least doubtin his own mind that the man was guilty, and, if they did their duty,they would say so.
Of course this was not exactly what he did say, and of course he said agood deal more than this, but this is the gist of what his sayingamounted to. Certainly the judge's summing-up was every whit as damningas Sir Haselton's speech had been. Mr. Justice Hunter had evidentlyhimself no doubt upon the matter, and, by inference, he took it forgranted that no one else could have any either.
The jury followed the judge's lead. They never left their places. Theywhispered together for a few moments. Then one of them announced thatthey were prepared with their verdict.
"Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?"
"Guilty."
Some one told the prisoner to stand up. He stood up.
"Have you anything to say, prisoner, why sentence should not bepronounced against you?"
The
prisoner had something to say--just a word or two.
He was very white. He was clinging to the rail in front of him. Histhroat seemed parched. It seemed all that he could do to speak.
I noticed that his wife was looking at him with upturned face, and thather eyes were streaming with tears.
"I am innocent. I did not do it. I did not kill her. I never touchedher. There is something I do not understand."
That was all he had to say--and that was not enough.
As the judge very soon made him comprehend.
He took a black thing out of a tin box which was at his side andperched it on the top of his wig, and he sentenced Tommy to be hanged;and, in sentencing him, he gave it to him hot.
He told him that instead of exhibiting any signs of remorse for thedreadful thing he had done he had just uttered an infamous lie to addto the rest of his crimes. That lie had extinguished any spark of pitywhich he might have felt. Tommy had been guilty of as wicked, as cruel,and as cowardly a murder as had ever come within the range of thejudge's experience. He might not hope for mercy. There was nocircumstance of extenuation. He had behaved more like a devil than aman. He was a disgrace to his class and to his station, and he hadbrought shame upon our common manhood; and the sentence of the courtwas that he should be taken to the place from whence he came, and therebe hanged by the neck till he was dead; and might God have mercy on hissoul!
And that was the end of it--or it might have been, if it had not beenfor me.
I don't know how it was; I don't know whether the devil prompted me ornot. But the idea came to me, all at once, with a force which wasbeyond my powers of resistance.
And I did it!
I dropped my cloak, I removed my veil, and I stood up where I knew thatTommy would see me. And he did see me. He looked my way, and he saw me,and he knew me too!
And I smiled at him.
And with sudden, instant recognition he stretched out his arms towardsme in a kind of frenzy; and he tried to speak, or shout, or dosomething, but he couldn't. And before he could get a word out edgewaysthe warder bustled him down the stairs below.
BOOK IV--THE CRIMINAL.
(_The Author tells the Tale_.)