Part 10

She pushed her dewy spectacles back in her gray hair and pressed the letter to her lips; she was smiling as only old mothers smile over letters from their far-off children. The man's face softened, too, with the ache that battle-scarred fathers feel, thinking of their sons in the thick of the fight. Then he unfolded his paper, set his glasses on his big nose, and pursed his lips to read what was new in the world at large. His wife sat still, just remembering, perusing old files and back numbers of the gazettes of her boy's past, remembering him from her first vague thrill of him to his slow youth, to manhood, and the last good-by kiss.

Nothing was heard from either of them for a long while, save the creak of her chair and the rustle of his paper as he turned to the page recording the results in the incessant Gettysburgs over the prices of corn, pork, poultry, butter, and eggs. They were history to him. He could grow angry over a drop in December wheat, and he could glow at a sign of feverishness in oats. To-day he was profoundly moved to read that October ribs had opened at 10.95 and closed at 11.01, and depressed to see that September lard had dropped from 11.67 to 11.65.

As he turned the paper his eye was caught by the head-lines of an old and notorious trial at law, and he was confirmed in his wrath. He growled:

"Good Lord, ain't that dog hung yet?"

"What you talkin' about, Paw?"

"I was just noticin' that the third trial of Tom Carey is in full swing again. It's cost the State a hundred thousand dollars already, and the scoundrel ain't punished yet."

"What did he do, Paw?"

The old man blushed like a boy as he stammered: "You're too young to know all he did, Maw. If I told you, you wouldn't understand. But it ended in murder. If he'd been a low-browed dago they'd have had him railroaded to Jericho in no time. But the lawyers are above the law, and they've kept this fellow from his deserts till folks have almost forgot what it was he did. It's disgraceful. It makes our courts the laughing-stock of the world. It gives the anarchists an excuse for saying that there's one law for the poor and another for the rich."

After the thunder of his ire had rolled away there was a gentle murmur from the old woman. "It's a terrible thing to put a man to death."

"So it is, Maw, and if this fellow had only realized it he'd have kept out of trouble."

"He was excited, most likely, and out of his head. What I mean is, it's a terrible thing for a judge and a jury to try a man and take his life away from him."

"Oh, it's terrible, of course, Maw, but we've got to have laws to hold the world together, ain't we? And if we don't enforce 'em, what's the use of havin' 'em?"

Silence and a far-away look on the wrinkled face resting on the wrinkled hand and then a quiet question:

"Suppose it was our Steve?"

"I won't suppose any such thing. Thank God there's been no stain on any of our family, either side; just plain hard-workin' folks--no crazy ones, no criminals."

"But supposing it was our boy, Paw?"

"Oh, what's the use of arguin' with a woman! I love you for it, Maw, but--well, I'm sorry I spoke."

He returned to his paper, growling now and then as he read of some new quibble devised by the attorneys for the defense. As softly and as surreptitiously as it begins to rain on a cloudy day, she was crying. He turned again with mock indignation.

"Here, here! What you turning up about now?"

"I want to see my boy. I'm worried. He may be sick. He'd never let us know."

The old man tried to cajole her from her forebodings, tried to reason them away, laugh them away. At last he said, with a poor effort at gruffness:

"Well, for the Lord's sake, why don't you go? He's always askin' us to come and see him. I'm kind o' homesick for a sight of the boy m'self. You haven't been to town for a month of Sundays. Throw a few things in a valise and I'll hitch up. We'll just about make the next train from the village."

She needed no coercion from without. She rose at once. As she opened the squeaky screen-door he was clumping down the steps. He paused to call back:

"Oh, Maw!"

"Yes, Paw!"

"Better tuck in a jar of those preserves you been puttin' up. The boy always liked those better 'n most anything. Don't wrap 'em in my nightshirt, though."

She called out, "All right," and the slap of the screen-door was echoed a moment later by a similar sound in the barn, accompanied by the old man's voice:

"Give over, Fan."

II

The elevator-boy hesitated. "Oh, yes-sum, I got a pass-key, all right, but I can't hahdly let nobody in Mista Coburn's 'pahtment 'thout his awdas."

"But we're his mother and father."

"Of co'se I take yo' wud for that, ma'am, but, you see, I can't hahdly let nobody--er--um'm--thank you, sir--well, I reckon Mista Coburn might be mo' put out ef I didn't let you-all in than ef I did."

The elevator soared silently to the eighth floor, and there all three debarked. The boy was so much impressed with the tip the old man had slipped him that he unlocked the door, put the hand-baggage into the room, snapped the switch that threw on all the lights, and said, "Thank you, sir," again as he closed the door.

Paw opened it to give the boy another coin and say: "Don't you let on that we're here. It's a surprise."

The boy, grinning, promised and descended, like an imp through a trap.

The old couple stood stock-still, hesitating to advance. So many feelings, such varied timidities, urged them forward, yet held them back. It was the home of the son they had begotten, conceived, tended, loved, praised, punished, feared, prayed for, counseled, provisioned, and surrendered. Years of separation had made him almost a stranger, and they dreaded the intrusion into the home he had built for himself, remote from their influence. Poor, weak, silly old things, with a boy-and-girlish gawkishness about them, the helpless feeling of uninvited guests!

"You go first, Paw."

And Paw went first. On the sill of the drawing-room he paused and swept a glance around. He would have given an arm to be inspired with some scheme for whisking his wife away or changing what she must see. But she was already crowding on his heels, pushing him forward. There was no retreat. He tried to laugh it off.

"Well, here we are at last, as the fellow doesn't say in the circus."

There was nothing to do but sit down and wait. The very chairs were of an architecture and upholstery incongruous to them. They knew something of luxury, but not of this school. There was nowhere for them to look that something alien did not meet their eyes. So they looked at the floor.

"It gets awful hot in town, don't it?" said Paw, mopping his beaded forehead.

"Awful," said Maw, dabbing at hers.

Eventually they heard the elevator door gride on its grooves. All the way in on the train they had planned to hide and spring out on the boy. They had giggled like children over the plot. It was rather their prearrangement than their wills that moved them to action. Automatically they hid themselves, without laughter, rather with a sort of guilty terror. They found a deep wardrobe closet and stepped inside, drawing the door almost shut.

They heard a key in the lock, the click of a knob, the sound of a door closed. Then a pause. They had forgotten to turn off the lights. Hurrying footsteps, loud on the bare floor, muffled on the rugs. How well they knew that step! But there was excitement in its rhythm. They could hear the familiar voice muttering unfamiliarly as the footsteps hurried here and there. He came into the room where they were. They could hear him breathe now, for he breathed heavily, as if he had been running. From place to place he moved with a sense of restless stealth. At length, just as they were about to sally forth, he hurried forward and flung open their door.

Standing among the hanging clothes, the light strong on their faces, they seemed to strike him at first as ghosts. He stared at them aghast, and recoiled. Then the old ghosts smiled and stepped forward with open arms. But he recoiled again, and his welcome to his far-come, heart-hungry parents was a groan.

They saw that he had a revolver in his hand. His eyes recurred to it, and he turned here and there for a place to lay it, but seemed unable to let it go. His mother flung forward and threw her arms about him, her lips pursed to kiss him, but he turned away with lowered eyes. His father took him by the shoulders and said:

"Why, what's the matter, boy? Ain't you glad to see your Maw--and me?"

For answer he only breathed hard and chokingly. His eyes went to the revolver again, then roved here and there, always as if searching for a place to hide it.

"Give that thing to me, Steve," the old man said. And he took it in his hands, forcing from the cold steel the colder fingers that clung as if frozen about the handle.

Once he was free of the weapon, the boy toppled into a chair, his mother still clasping him desperately.

The old man knew something about firearms. He found the spring, broke the revolver, and looked into the cylinder. In every chamber was the round eye of a cartridge. Three of them bore the little scar of the firing-pin.

Old Coburn leaned hard against the wall. He looked about for a place to hide the horrible machine, but he, too, could not let go of it. His mouth was full of the ashes of life. He would have been glad to drop dead. But beyond the sick, clammy face of his son he saw the face of his wife, an old face, a mother's face, witless with bewilderment. The old man swallowed hard.

"What's happened, Steve? What's been goin' on?"

The young man only shook his head, ran his dry tongue along his lips, tore a piece of loose skin from the lower one with his teeth, and breathed noisily through nostrils that worked like a dog's. He pushed his mother's hands away as if they irked him. The old man could have struck him to the ground for that roughness, but the prayers in the mother's eyes restrained him.

"Better tell us, Steve. Maybe we might help you."

The young man's head worked as if he were gulping at a hard lump; his lips moved without sound, his gaze leaped from place to place, lighting everywhere but on his father's waiting, watching eyes, and always coming back to the revolver with a loathing fascination. At last he spoke, in a whisper like the rasp of chafed husks:

"I had to do it. He deserved it."

The mother had not seen the nicks on the cartridges, but she needed no such evidence. She wailed:

"You don't mean that you--no--no--you didn't k-kill-ill-ill--"

The word rattled in her throat, and she went to the floor like a toppling bolster. It was the old man that lifted her face from the rug, ran to fetch water, and knelt to restore her. The son just wavered in his chair and kept saying:

"I had to do it. He was making her life a--"

"Her life?" the old man groaned, looking up where he knelt. "Then there's a woman in it?"

"Yes, it was for her. She's had a hard time. She's been horribly misunderstood. She may have been indiscreet--still she's a noble woman at heart. Her husband was a vile dog. He deserved it."

But the old man's head had dropped as if his neck were cracked. He saw what it all meant and would mean. He would have sprawled to the floor, but he caught sight of the pitiful face of his old love still white with the half-death of her swoon. He clenched his will with ferocity, resolving that he must not break, could not, would not break. He laid a hand on his son's knee and said, appealingly, in a low tone, as if he were the suppliant for mercy:

"Better not mention anything about--about her--the woman you know, Steve--before your mother, not just now. Your mother's kind of poorly the last few days. Understand, Steve?"

The answer was a nod like the silly nodding of a toy mandarin.

It was a questionable mercy, restoring the mother just then from the bliss of oblivion, but she came gradually back through a fog of daze to the full glare of fact. Her thoughts did not run forward upon the scandal, the horror of the public, the outcry of all the press; she had but one thought, her son's welfare.

"Did anybody see you, Steve?"

"No. I went to his room. I don't think anybody s-saw me--yes, maybe the man across the hall did. Yes, I guess he saw me. He was at his door when I came out. He looked as if he sus-suspected-ed me. I suppose he heard the shots. And probably he s-saw the revol-ver. I couldn't seem to let it drop--to le-let it drop."

The mother turned frantic. "They'll come here for you, Stevie. They'll find it out. You must get away--somewhere--for just now, till we can think up something to do. Father will find some way of making everything all right, won't you, Paw? He always does, you know. Don't be scared, my boy. We must keep very calm." Her hands were wavering over him in a palsy. "Where can he go, Paw? Where's the best place for him to go? I'll tell you, Steve. Is your--your car anywhere near?"

"It's outside at the door. I came back in it."

She got to her feet, and her urgency was ferocious. "Then you get right in this minute and go up to the old place--the little old house opposite the pond. Go as fast as you can. You know the place--where we lived before you were born. There's two big oak-trees st-standing there, and a pond just across the road. You go there and tell Susan--what shall he tell Susan, father? What shall he tell Susan? We'll stay here, and--and we'll bribe the elevator-boy to say you haven't come home at all, and if the po-po-lice come here we'll say we're expecting you, but we haven't seen you for ever so long. Won't we, Paw? That's what we'll say, won't we, Paw?"

The old man stood up to the lightning like an old oak. Trees do not run. They stand fast and take what the sky sends them. Old Coburn shook his white hair as a tree its leaves in a blast of wind before he spoke.

"Steve, my boy, I don't know what call you had to do this, but it's no use trying to run away and hide. They'll get you wherever you go. The telegraph and the cable and the detectives--no, it's not a bit of use. It only makes things look worse. Put on your hat and come with me. We'll go to the police before they come for you. I'll go with you, and I'll see you through."

But flight, not fight, was the woman's one hope. She was wild with resistance to the idea of surrender. Her panic confirmed the young man in his one impulse--to get away. He dashed out into the hall, and when the father would have pursued, the mother thrust him aside, hurried past, and braced herself against the door. He put off her clinging, clutching hands as gently as he might, but she resisted like a tigress at bay, and before he could drag her aside they heard the iron-barred door of the elevator glide open and clang shut. And there they stood in the strange place, the old man staggered with the realization of the future, the old woman imbecile with fear.

What harm is it the honest oaks do, that Heaven hates them so and its lightnings search them out with such peculiar frenzy?

III

Having no arenas where captive gladiators and martyrs satisfy the public longing for the sight of bleeding flesh and twitching nerve, the people of our day flock to the court-rooms for their keenest excitements.

The case of "The People _vs._ Stephen Coburn" had been an intensely popular entertainment. This day the room was unusually stuffed with men and women. At the door the officers leaned like buttresses against the thrust of a solid wall of humanity. Outside, the halls, the stairs, and the sidewalk were jammed with the mob crushing toward the door for a sight of the white-haired mother pilloried in the witness-box and fighting with all her poor wits against the shrewdest, calmest, fiercest cross-examiner in the State.

In the jury-box the twelve silent prisoners of patience sat in awe of their responsibilities, a dozen extraordinarily ordinary, conspicuously average persons condemned to the agony of deciding whether they should consign a fellow-man to death or release a murderer among their fellow-men.

Next the judge sat Sarah Coburn, her withered hands clenched bonily in the lap where, not so many years ago, she had cuddled the babe that was now the culprit hunted down and abhorred. The mere pressure of his first finger had sent a soul into eternity and brought the temple of his own home crashing about his head.

Next the prisoner sat his father, veteran now with the experience that runs back to the time when the first father and mother found the first first-born of the world with hands reddened in the blood of the earliest sacrifice on the altar of Cain.

People railed in the street and in the press against the law's delay with Stephen Coburn's execution and against the ability of a rich father to postpone indefinitely the vengeance of justice. Old Coburn had forced the taxpayers to spend vast sums of money. He had spent vaster sums himself. The public and the prosecution, his own enormously expensive lawyers, his son and his very wife, supposed that he still had vast sums to spend. It was solely his own secret that he had no more. He had built his fortune as his father had built the stone wall along his fields, digging each boulder from the ground with his hands, lugging it across the irregular turf and heaving it to its place. Every dollar of his had its history of effort, of sweat and ache. And now the whole wall was gone, carried away in wholesale sweeps as by a landslide.

In his business he had been so shrewd and so close that people had said, "Old Coburn will fight for five days for five minute's interest on five cents." When his son's liberty was at stake he signed blank checks, he told his lawyers to get the best counsel in the nation. He did not ask, "How much?" He asked, "How good?" Every technical ruse that could be employed to thwart the prosecution he employed. He bribed everybody bribable whose silence or speech had value. Dangerous witnesses were shipped to places whence they could not be summonsed. Blackmailers and blackguards fattened on his generosity and his fear.

The son, Stephen Coburn, had gone to the city, warm-hearted, young, venturesome, not vicious, had learned life in a heap, sowed his wild oats all at once, fallen among evil companions, and drifted by easy stages into an affair of inexcusable ugliness, whence he seemed unable to escape till a misplaced chivalry whispered him what to do. He had found himself like Lancelot with "his honor rooted in dishonor" and "faith unfaithful kept him falsely true." But Stephen Coburn was no Lancelot, any more than his siren was a Guinevere or her slain husband a King Arthur. He was simply a well-meaning, hot-headed, madly enamoured young fool. The proof of this last was that he took a revolver to his Gordian knot. Revolvers, as he found too late, do not solve problems. They make a far-reaching noise, and their messengers cannot be recalled.

His parents had not known the city phase of their son. They had known the adorable babe he had been, the good boy weeping over a broken-winged robin tumbled from a nest, running down-stairs in his bare feet for one more good-night kiss, crying his heart out when he must be sent away to school, remembering their birthdays and abounding in gentle graces. This was the Stephen Coburn they had known. They believed it to be the real, the permanent, Stephen Coburn; the other was but the victim of a transient demon. They could not believe that their boy would harm the world again. They could not endure the thought that his repentance and his atonement should be frustrated by a dishonorable end.

The public knew only the wicked Stephen Coburn. His crime had been his entrance into fame. All the bad things he had done, all the bad people he had known, all the bad places he had gone, were searched out and published by the detectives and the reporters. To blacken Stephen Coburn's repute so horribly that the jurors would feel it their inescapable duty to scavenge him from the offended earth, that was the effort of the prosecution. To prevent that blackening was one of the most vital and one of the most costly features of the defense. To deny the murder and tear down the web of circumstantial evidence as fast as the State could weave it was another.

The Coburn case had become a notorious example of that peculiarly American institution, the serial trial. The first instalment had ended in a verdict of guilty. It had been old Coburn's task to hold up his wife and his son in the collapse of their mad despair, while he managed and financed the long, slow struggle with the upper courts till he wrung from them an order for a new trial. This had ended, after weeks of torment in the court-room and forty-eight hours of almost unbearable suspense, in a disagreement of the jury. The third trial found the prosecution more determined than ever, and acquainted with all the methods of the defense. The only flaw was the loss of an important witness, "the man across the hall," whom impatient time had carried off to the place where subpoenas are not respected. His deposition and his testimony at the previous trials were as lacking in vitality as himself.

And now once more old Coburn must carry everything upon his back, aching like a world-weary Atlas who dares not shift his burden. But now he was three years weaker, and he had no more money to squander. His house, his acres, the cattle upon his hills, his blooded thoroughbreds, his patriarchal stallions, his town lots, his bank-building, his bonds and stocks, all were sold, pawned as collateral, or blanketed with mortgages.