The Right of Way
"They had lived and loved, and walked and worked in their own way,
and the world went by them. Between them and it a great gulf was
fixed: and they met its every catastrophe with the Quid Refert? of
the philosophers."
"I want to talk with some old lover's ghost,
Who lived before the god of love was born."
"There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and
none of them is without signification."
CHAPTER I
THE WAY TO THE VERDICT
"Not guilty, your Honour!"
A hundred atmospheres had seemed pressing down on the fretted people in the
crowded court-room. As the discordant treble of the huge foreman of the jury
squeaked over the mass of gaping humanity, which had twitched at skirts, drawn
purposeless hands across prickling faces, and kept nervous legs at a gallop, the
smothering weights of elastic air lifted suddenly, a great suspiration of relief
swept through the place like a breeze, and in a far corner of the gallery a
woman laughed outright.
The judge looked up reprovingly at the gallery; the clerk of the court
angrily called "Silence!" towards the offending corner, and seven or eight
hundred eyes raced between three centres of interest—the judge, the prisoner,
and the prisoner's counsel. Perhaps more people looked at the prisoner's counsel
than at the prisoner, certainly far more than looked at the judge.
Never was a verdict more unexpected. If a poll had been taken of the judgment
of the population twenty-four hours before, a great majority would have been
found believing that there was no escape for the prisoner, who was accused of
murdering a wealthy timber merchant. The minority would have based their belief
that the prisoner had a chance of escape, not on his possible innocence, not on
insufficient evidence, but on a curious faith in the prisoner's lawyer. This
minority would not have been composed of the friends of the lawyer alone, but of
outside spectators, who, because Charley Steele had never lost a criminal case,
attached to him a certain incapacity for bad luck; and of very young men, who
looked upon him as the perfect pattern of the person good to see and hard to
understand.
During the first two days of the trial the case had gone wholly against the
prisoner, who had given his name as Joseph Nadeau. Witnesses had heard him
quarrelling with the murdered man, and the next day the body of the victim had
been found by the roadside. The prisoner was a stranger in the lumber-camp where
the deed was done, and while there had been morose and lived apart; no one knew
him; and he refused to tell even his lawyer whence he came, or what his origin,
or to bring witnesses from his home to speak for his character.
One by one the points had been made against him—with no perceptible effect
upon Charley Steele, who seemed the one cool, undisturbed person in the
courtroom.
Indifferent as he seemed, seldom speaking to the prisoner, often looking out
of the windows to the cool green trees far over on the hill, absorbed and
unbusinesslike, yet judge and jury came to see, before the second day was done,
that he had let no essential thing pass, that the questions he asked had either
a pregnant aptness, opened up new avenues of deliberation, or were touched with
mystery—seemed to have a longer reach than the moment or the hour.
Before the end of this second day, however, more attention was upon him than
upon the prisoner, and nine-tenths of the people in the court-room could have
told how many fine linen handkerchiefs he used during the afternoon, how many
times he adjusted his monocle to look at the judge meditatively. Probably no
man, for eight hours a day, ever exasperated and tried a judge, jury, and
public, as did this man of twenty-nine years of age, who had been known at
college as Beauty Steele, and who was still so spoken of familiarly; or was
called as familiarly, Charley Steele, by people who never had attempted to be
familiar with him.
The second day of the trial had ended gloomily for the prisoner. The coil of
evidence had drawn so close that extrication seemed impossible. That the
evidence was circumstantial, that no sign of the crime was upon the prisoner,
that he was found sleeping quietly in his bed when he was arrested, that he had
not been seen to commit the deed, did not weigh in the minds of the general
public. The man's guilt was freely believed; not even the few who clung to the
opinion that Charley Steele would yet get him off thought that he was innocent.
There seemed no flaw in the evidence, once granted its circumstantiality.
During the last two hours of the sitting the prisoner had looked at his
counsel in despair, for he seemed perfunctorily conducting the case: was
occupied in sketching upon the blotting-pad before him, looking out of the
window, or turning his head occasionally towards a corner where sat a half-dozen
well-dressed ladies, and more particularly towards one lady who watched him in a
puzzled way—more than once with a look of disappointment. Only at the very close
of the sitting did he appear to rouse himself. Then, for a brief ten minutes, he
cross-examined a friend of the murdered merchant in a fashion which startled the
court-room, for he suddenly brought out the fact that the dead man had once
struck a woman in the face in the open street. This fact, sharply stated by the
prisoner's counsel, with no explanation and no comment, seemed uselessly
intrusive and malicious. His ironical smile merely irritated all concerned. The
thin, clean-shaven face of the prisoner grew more pinched and downcast, and he
turned almost pleadingly towards the judge. The judge pulled his long
side-whiskers nervously, and looked over his glasses in severe annoyance, then
hastily adjourned the sitting and left the bench, while the prisoner saw with
dismay his lawyer leave the court-room with not even a glance towards him.
On the morning of the third day Charley Steele's face, for the first time,
wore an expression which, by a stretch of imagination, might be called anxious.
He also took out his monocle frequently, rubbed it with his handkerchief, and
screwed it in again, staring straight before him much of the time. But twice he
spoke to the prisoner in a low voice, and was hurriedly answered in French as
crude as his own was perfect. When he spoke, which was at rare intervals, his
voice was without feeling, concise, insistent, unappealing. It was as though the
business before him was wholly alien to him, as though he were held there
against his will, but would go on with his task bitterly to the bitter end.
The court adjourned for an hour at noon. During this time Charley refused to
see any one, but sat alone in his office with a few biscuits and an ominous
bottle before him, till the time came for him to go back to the court-house.
Arrived there he entered by a side door, and was not seen until the court opened
once more.
For two hours and a half the crown attorney mercilessly made out his case
against the prisoner. When he sat down, people glanced meaningly at each other,
as though the last word had been said, then looked at the prisoner, as at one
already condemned.
Yet Charley Steele was to reply. He was not now the same man that had
conducted the case during the past two days and a half. Some great change had
passed over him. There was no longer abstraction, indifference, or apparent
boredom, or disdain, or distant stare. He was human, intimate and eager, yet
concentrated and impelling: he was quietly, unnoticeably drunk.
He assured the prisoner with a glance of the eye, with a word scarce above a
whisper, as he slowly rose to make his speech for the defence.
His first words caused a new feeling in the courtroom. He was a new presence;
the personality had a changed significance. At first the public, the jury, and
the judge were curiously attracted, surprised into a fresh interest. The voice
had an insinuating quality, but it also had a measured force, a subterranean
insistence, a winning tactfulness. Withal, a logical simplicity governed his
argument. The flaneur, the poseur—if such he was—no longer appeared. He came
close to the jurymen, leaned his hands upon the back of a chair—as it were, shut
out the public, even the judge, from his circle of interest—and talked in a
conversational tone. An air of confidence passed from him to the amazed yet
easily captivated jury; the distance between them, so gaping during the last two
days, closed suddenly up. The tension of the past estrangement, relaxing all at
once, surprised the jury into an almost eager friendliness, as on a long voyage
a sensitive traveller finds in some exciting accident a natural introduction to
an exclusive fellow-passenger, whom he discovers as human as he had thought him
offensively distant.
Charley began by congratulating the crown attorney on his statement of the
case. He called it masterly; he said that in its presentations it was
irrefutable; as a precis of evidence purely circumstantial it was—useful and
interesting. But, speech-making aside, and ability—and rhetoric—aside, and even
personal conviction aside, the case should stand or fall by its total, not its
comparative, soundness. Since the evidence was purely circumstantial, there must
be no flaw in its cable of assumption, it must be logically inviolate within
itself. Starting with assumption only, there must be no straying possibilities,
no loose ends of certainty, no invading alternatives. Was this so in the case of
the man before them? They were faced by a curious situation. So far as the trial
was concerned, the prisoner himself was the only person who could tell them who
he was, what was his past, and, if he committed the crime, what was—the motive
of it: out of what spirit—of revenge, or hatred—the dead man had been sent to
his account. Probably in the whole history of crime there never was a more
peculiar case. Even himself the prisoner's counsel was dealing with one whose
life was hid from him previous to the day the murdered man was discovered by the
roadside. The prisoner had not sought to prove an alibi; he had done no more
than formally plead not guilty. There was no material for defence save that
offered by the prosecution. He had undertaken the defence of the prisoner
because it was his duty as a lawyer to see that the law justified itself; that
it satisfied every demand of proof to the last atom of certainty; that it met
the final possibility of doubt with evidence perfect and inviolate if
circumstantial, and uncontradictory if eye-witness, if tell-tale incident, were
to furnish basis of proof.
Judge, jury, and public riveted their eyes upon Charley Steele. He had now
drawn a little farther away from the jury-box; his eye took in the judge as
well; once or twice he turned, as if appealingly and confidently, to the people
in the room. It was terribly hot, the air was sickeningly close, every one
seemed oppressed—every one save a lady sitting not a score of feet from where
the counsel for the prisoner stood. This lady's face was not one that could
flush easily; it belonged to a temperament as even as her person was
symmetrically beautiful. As Charley talked, her eyes were fixed steadily,
wonderingly upon him. There was a question in her gaze, which never in the
course of the speech was quite absorbed by the admiration—the intense
admiration—she was feeling for him. Once as he turned with a concentrated
earnestness in her direction his eyes met hers. The message he flashed her was
sub-conscious, for his mind never wavered an instant from the cause in hand, but
it said to her:
"When this is over, Kathleen, I will come to you." For another quarter of an
hour he exposed the fallacy of purely circumstantial evidence; he raised in the
minds of his hearers the painful responsibility of the law, the awful tyranny of
miscarriage of justice; he condemned prejudice against a prisoner because that
prisoner demanded that the law should prove him guilty instead of his proving
himself innocent. If a man chose to stand to that, to sternly assume this
perilous position, the law had no right to take advantage of it. He turned
towards the prisoner and traced his possible history: as the sensitive,
intelligent son of godly Catholic parents from some remote parish in French
Canada. He drew an imaginary picture of the home from which he might have come,
and of the parents and brothers and sisters who would have lived weeks of
torture knowing that their son and brother was being tried for his life. It
might at first glance seem quixotic, eccentric, but was it unnatural that the
prisoner should choose silence as to his origin and home, rather than have his
family and friends face the undoubted peril lying before him? Besides, though
his past life might have been wholly blameless, it would not be evidence in his
favour. It might, indeed, if it had not been blameless, provide some element of
unjust suspicion against him, furnish some fancied motive. The prisoner had
chosen his path, and events had so far justified him. It must be clear to the
minds of judge and jury that there were fatally weak places in the
circumstantial evidence offered for the conviction of this man.
There was the fact that no sign of the crime, no drop of blood, no weapon,
was found about him or near him, and that he was peacefully sleeping at the
moment the constable arrested him.
There was also the fact that no motive for the crime had been shown. It was
not enough that he and the dead man had been heard quarrelling. Was there any
certainty that it was a quarrel, since no word or sentence of the conversation
had been brought into court? Men with quick tempers might quarrel over trivial
things, but exasperation did not always end in bodily injury and the taking of
life; imprecations were not so uncommon that they could be taken as evidence of
wilful murder. The prisoner refused to say what that troubled conversation was
about, but who could question his right to take the risk of his silence being
misunderstood?
The judge was alternately taking notes and looking fixedly at the prisoner;
the jury were in various attitudes of strained attention; the public sat open
mouthed; and up in the gallery a woman with white face and clinched hands
listened moveless and staring. Charley Steele was holding captive the emotions
and the judgments of his hearers. All antipathy had gone; there was a strange
eager intimacy between the jurymen and himself. People no longer looked with
distant dislike at the prisoner, but began to see innocence in his grim silence,
disdain only in his surly defiance.
But Charley Steele had preserved his great stroke for the psychological
moment. He suddenly launched upon them the fact, brought out in evidence, that
the dead man had struck a woman in the face a year ago; also that he had kept a
factory girl in affluence for two years. Here was motive for murder—if motive
were to govern them—far greater than might be suggested by excited conversation
which listeners who could not hear a word construed into a quarrel—listeners who
bore the prisoner at the bar ill-will because he shunned them while in the
lumber-camp. If the prisoner was to be hanged for motive untraceable, why should
not these two women be hanged for motive traceable!
Here was his chance. He appeared to impeach subtly every intelligence in the
room for having had any preconviction about the prisoner's guilt. He compelled
the jury to feel that they, with him, had made the discovery of the unsound
character of the evidence. The man might be guilty, but their personal guilt,
the guilt of the law, would be far greater if they condemned the man on violable
evidence. With a last simple appeal, his hands resting on the railing before the
seat where the jury sat, his voice low and conversational again, his eyes
running down the line of faces of the men who had his client's life in their
hands, he said:
"It is not a life only that is at stake, it is not revenge for a life
snatched from the busy world by a brutal hand that we should heed to-day, but
the awful responsibility of that thing we call the State, which, having the
power of life and death without gainsay or hindrance, should prove to the last
inch of necessity its right to take a human life. And the right and the reason
should bring conviction to every honest human mind. That is all I have to say."
The crown attorney made a perfunctory reply. The judge's charge was brief,
and, if anything, a little in favour of the prisoner—very little, a casuist's
little; and the jury filed out of the room. They were gone but ten minutes. When
they returned, the verdict was given: "Not guilty, your Honour!"
Then it was that a woman laughed in the gallery. Then a whispering voice said
across the railing which separated the public from the lawyers: "Charley!
Charley!"
Though Charley turned and looked at the lady who spoke, he made no response.
A few minutes later, outside the court, as he walked quickly away, again
inscrutable and debonair, the prisoner, Joseph Nadeau, touched him on the arm
and said:
"M'sieu', M'sieu', you have saved my life—I thank you, M'sieu'!"
Charley Steele drew his arm away with disgust. "Get out of my sight! You're
as guilty as hell!" he said.