Part 16

Virginia, who had been standing by the telephone, walked slowly across the room to a window that overlooked the town. It was a spot that showed the old place in its most homelike and friendly aspect, with its wreath of foliage--now, in midsummer, at the full height of its beauty--and its background of lovely hills. She could see from here the long gable of Dr. Barbour’s roof, and over there the chimneys of the Paysons’ more pretentious mansion. Behind the tall poplars was the Carter house, and yonder the cross-tipped spire of the church. Beyond these she caught a glimpse of a distant cupola, and knew it to be the apex of the court-house. A pleasant, warm haze hung in the summer atmosphere, and she could hear the tinkling bell on a passing peddler’s cart.

Virginia tried not to think. She did not want to think of William watching his wife go on the stand for such a cause; but as she leaned forward her hands gripped the window-sill until the delicate knuckles whitened.

She was still there when Lucas came driving back from town. He had taken the colonel to court in an antiquated rockaway that belonged in the family. He was returning alone now, with a number of bundles in the rockaway, topped by a large ripe watermelon. Virginia watched him drive in the gate and on to the stables.

Presently he came along on foot, with his watermelon on his shoulder. Virginia called to him.

“Where did you get your melon, Lucas?”

“Presen’ fo’ de col’nel, Miss Jinny.” Lucas turned his shoulder around for her to look at the melon. “Ain’t he a beauty! Sho’ he is! Mist’ Payson, he give him to me. He say: ‘Luke, yo’ take him to de col’nel fo’ a presen’.’”

Virginia admired the melon.

“Grandfather isn’t coming back until late,” she said. “Did he tell you when to come for him, Lucas?”

“No, Miss Jinny, he ain’t a comin’ till it’s over, I reckon. Yo’ oughter see dat court-house! Ain’t no gettin’ inter it. Mis’ Wilyum Carter, she testifyin’. Seems like it mus’ be motion-picture show, Miss Jinny. I saw Mist’ Wilyum Carter myse’f. He was goin’ in ayonnah, an’ he look--Miss Jinny, he look like one ob dese yere white-spine cucumbers--he ain’t got no more colluh ’cept green.”

“That’s all right, Lucas. Take that watermelon down to the kitchen and get Lucy to put it on ice. The colonel may want it when he comes home.”

“Yes, Miss Jinny, I sho’ will. I’s-- Say, Miss Jinny, Mirandy, Miz Carter’s help, she say Mist’ Wilyum gwine to get divorcement.”

“Never mind about Miranda,” said Virginia hastily. “You get that melon out of the sun.”

“He ain’t gwine to get hurt in de sun, Miss Jinny. He’s jus’ ripe--yo’ heah him?” Lucas gave the melon a scientific tap. “Yo’ heah him? He’s all right, he sho’ is, Miss Jinny. Mirandy, she say Mist’ Carter--de ole man--he raise ruction ’bout it when Mist’ Leigh shoot dat man----”

“Lucas,” said Virginia, “I never listen to gossip. You take that melon to the kitchen!”

“Yes, Miss Jinny, yes, miss, I’s goin’, but Mirandy----”

Virginia thrust her fingers into her ears and retreated. Half laughing, half crying, she threw herself into a chair beside the piano. Her heart was beating stormily, and she hated herself for it. Then she lifted her eyes slowly, reluctantly, to the little picture of William as a child. It still hung beside her piano. The sight of it filled her mind with a strange tumult of thoughts; yet, strangely enough, the vision she saw most clearly was Daniel’s face of pain as she stood beside him, her hand on his shoulder. She blushed at the thought of it now.

At that very moment, when Virginia sat with her eyes hidden in her hands, trying to shut out the little tormenting imps that thrust that picture before her, a stranger scene was being staged in the old court-house. The court-room was so densely crowded that even the sweet summer air which came in through the open windows grew close and stifling. The window-sills were full, and the trees outside bore human fruit upon the branches that commanded the upper panes of those windows.

The crowd dimmed the light like a flock of locusts darkening the sun in the east, and some one had lit a green-shaded lamp on the recorder’s desk. The light from it flared up on the face of the prisoner--a pale, boyish face with girlish eyes. Near him sat his family. Mrs. Carter had summoned all her courage to be with her boy at the supreme moment, and Emily was there, too, with tearful eyes and a red nose, looking very unlike the Emily who had painted her lashes. Beside her sat William Carter, then his father and Colonel Denbigh.

William sat with his eyes down and his hands clenched on the arms of his chair. He never looked up, not even when Daniel and Judge Jessup scored a victory and got Mrs. William Carter’s testimony admitted as being relevant to the defense. Bernstein had already told his story--a story of the scandal, and of Corwin’s slanders.

Poor Mrs. Carter hardly dared to look up. She had a terrible sensation of sinking and falling through space, common to nightmare. William’s wife talked about like that! She put out a groping hand, caught Emily’s hot, moist fingers, and held them. They didn’t dare even to look at each other, and Emily sniffed hard to keep back the tears. It was the first time she had heard the details.

The prisoner went white; he realized suddenly that his reckless act had given the scandal huge publicity, that it was ruinous to the woman whom he had tried to defend. Humiliation swept over him, and he sank down in his chair, staring straight in front of him. Like William, he did not look up when Fanchon was called.

There was an expectant stir, followed by a hush. A small figure in black, with a huge hat and a floating veil, came slowly forward and took the oath. Judge Jessup stepped gallantly aside, and Daniel Carter, very pale, very relentless, took the witness.

For the first time William looked up. He looked persistently at his brother, and seemed to be trying to avoid looking at his wife; but he was aware of her, even before she began to answer Daniel’s terrible questions that seemed to drive straight into her past, to lay it open and set it, throbbing and pitiful and full of pain, before the jury, before the packed court-room, before the little world in which the Carters had always lived quiet and sober and respected.

At first William did not listen. He was filled with a blind fury that Daniel should do it, that his own brother should drag him out into public view as a young man who had made a fool of himself and married a dancer. Then her sweet, vibrating, captivating voice, with a French note in it and the spell of sex, reached him, and he had to listen.

First came the story of their marriage--he knew that; then the story of her birth and childhood--he knew that in part, and it was sad. The stillness in the room affected him. He began to feel the wave of sympathy rising. They liked her; she was winning them. Something stirred in his heart. His old passion for her was not yet cold, and that voice--that delightful, hurrying voice--he couldn’t shut it out. Reluctantly he raised his eyes.

Row upon row of faces! He had never seen so many faces. He knew many of them. His old friends and his acquaintances were there, and strangers. Then he heard Daniel’s voice, and it cut like a knife-thrust:

“And your first meeting with this man Corwin?”

William turned and looked at her then. The light from the little lamp on the recorder’s desk was playing strange tricks. It caught Fanchon’s face now and illuminated it--a face small and pale and piquant, with the eyes of a wild fawn, the adorable face that William had seen first in Paris--only a few months ago!

He gazed fixedly at it, breathing hard. The old spell laid hold of him, for she had turned and was looking at him. There was an appeal in that look, almost a cry for help, and it held him.

Then he heard her voice again, and he began to listen, in a dull way at first, and then with growing amazement, with rising fury. She was telling her story--her pitiful, sordid story. Women wept; but there was nothing touching in it to her husband. It was a revelation, a cruel, sordid revelation of a lie. She had lied to him and deceived him.

Pity died in his heart, the spell broke, he leaned back in his chair with folded arms and regarded her coldly and scornfully and bitterly. His look worked upon her like something alien and fierce and inimical; and she broke under it. At the very moment when it seemed as if she had planned it to work upon the jury, Fanchon broke down--broke down into pitiful, passionate tears.

An hour later--after Major Haskins had tried in vain to destroy her story--Daniel rose in his place, and simply, eloquently, without gesture or oratory, he made the plea that won him fame--a brother’s plea for a brother. So eloquent was it that Judge Jessup never spoke at all. There seemed nothing else to say.

Major Haskins summed up for the prosecution. He did it with acrimony, in the old way, tearing Fanchon’s past to pieces and fairly pinning the Carter family, like a lot of butterflies stuck on the board of the cruelest of naturalists, and leaving Mr. Carter gasping with mute fury. Then, at a late hour, Judge Barbour charged the jury, and William Carter rose, white as a sheet, and left the court-house.

Virginia, having eaten her dinner in solitary state, sat on the piazza waiting for her grandfather. It was late in August, and the sweet darkness fell early. She watched the earth grow darker and darker until the hilltops stood out, etched in black against a pale sky. Behind her the old house was dark except for the light in the hall, and silent except for the occasional sound of mellow laughter from the kitchen, where the negroes awaited their share of Mr. Payson’s prize watermelon.

Virginia sat very still as the night deepened. The air was full of delicate fragrance from the flower-beds below her feet. Far off at first, and then nearer at hand, the insects began their incessant clamor, which seemed only to make the stillness more complete by contrast. Above, the pale sky began to darken, and one by one the stars came out, softly obscured by clouds and shining through them, as the candles at an altar sometimes shine through a fog of incense.

Time passed; the old clock in the hall chimed. Virginia counted the strokes--ten. How late the colonel was! Then she heard the sound of wheels on the gravel outside the main gate, and Lucas drove the rockaway up to the front door. Her grandfather’s tall head appeared at the steps. He stopped to say a word to Lucas and then came slowly up. Not until then did Virginia rise from her corner.

“Grandpa--is it over?”

He was startled; then he smiled, taking off his hat.

“How cool it is out here--we were baked down-town! I reckon I’ll sit with you, Jinny.”

“Have you dined? Mr. Payson sent a watermelon; it’s on ice for you.”

“I dined with Payson down-town. No, let the watermelon wait. What did you say, Jinny? No, it isn’t over. We waited, but they’ve locked up the jury for the night, so I came home.”

Virginia, who had dropped into her seat again, was trying to be calm.

“There’s a disagreement, then?”

The colonel nodded thoughtfully.

“I reckon there is. Haskins made a big fight, Jinny, but”--the old man drew a long breath--“by gum, I’ve heard that girl’s story--Fanchon’s. She told it on the stand!”

He stopped, drawing a deep breath. He seemed to be contemplating something amazing. Virginia said nothing. She clasped her hands tightly in her lap, looking not at him but at the constellation in front of her. It happened to be the Scorpion, and she began to count the stars silently.

“By gum!” said the colonel again.

Plato came to the door.

“Col’nel, have a julep, suh, or dat watermelon?”

“Nothing at all; I’m not hungry.”

The colonel waved him away; then he turned to Virginia and told her Fanchon’s story. He told it better than she could have hoped to have him tell it.

“She hasn’t been a bad girl, Jinny. That was a relief to me. Haskins tried to slur her, but Daniel brought it out point by point. Married at fifteen, and her old aunt swore that she was eighteen to get money out of it, by gum!”

Virginia, who had listened with emotion, shivered.

“I think it was cruel, grandfather, to make her tell it.”

The old man nodded.

“Not to save Leigh, though. Lordy, Jinny, I never saw Leigh look younger, except that day I caught him with the lollypop. It ought to save him.” He added reluctantly, with a fine sense of justice: “Jinny, I can’t blame William. He got up and left the court. Mr. Carter told me about it. He never knew a darned thing about his wife being a divorced woman, nor about Corwin, nor anything. She lied to him, Jinny.” The colonel leaned back and thrust his thumbs into the armholes of his waistcoat. “I’m kind of sorry for him. He’s going to get a divorce, so they say; but the girl--Fanchon, I mean--she’s tried to save Leigh, and she’s about ruined herself. Jinny, I felt as if it was heroic. I--by gum, come inside, I can’t stand those crickets to-night! They’re on my nerves--shouting ‘Here again, here again!’ Jinny, I’m sorry for them all, but I’m a darned sight sorrier for the girl!”

XXIV

“LEIGH’S acquitted!” Judge Jessup, with a flushed face, bent over to whisper it to Mrs. Carter.

In the crowd and confusion of the court-room she seemed too dazed to hear the foreman of the jury as he answered the judge’s interrogation. She looked up at the old lawyer, her lip quivering like a child.

“Oh, judge! Really and truly?”

He nodded, swallowing a lump in his throat, for Mrs. Carter collapsed, crying like a baby on Emily’s shoulder, and Judge Jessup found it a moving spectacle. He had once had a devoted mother himself.

There was a crowd around Leigh, old friends and sympathizers, and--to Mr. Carter’s horror--newspaper reporters. It made the perspiration stand out in beads on his forehead.

“Heavens, I should think we’d had enough without that,” he groaned inwardly, and then he caught sight of his eldest son’s face.

William was standing behind Leigh, his arms folded and his eyes down. It seemed to his father that he had never seen such wreckage in a young man’s face before. It was as hard as flint. The square jaws were set and the brows bent. William had been drinking the cup of humiliation to the dregs.

“Serves him right,” his father thought hotly, and then: “She’s saved Leigh!”

That sent a thrill of remorse through him, and his eyes followed the line of reporters, which led, like a trail of ants after a dead beetle, straight to the small figure in black on the other side of the court-room. Mr. Carter, perspiring freely and with a sinking heart, beheld his daughter-in-law.

Fanchon was as white as William, but those lovely, fawn-like eyes were soft, appealing, almost childlike. She scarcely heeded the reporters. She seemed unwilling to speak to any one, and, as Mr. Carter looked at her, she began to make her way toward Leigh.

There was a little hum of excited comment as she moved, and the light grace and beauty of the small, black-clad figure had never been more marked. She wore the same big, black hat, and her veil, floating from the wide brim, formed a shadowy background for the small, pointed face--the face that had never shown more fully than it did at that moment its subtle, tantalizing, inimitable charm. Mr. Carter saw it reluctantly, and Leigh saw it with boyish devotion as she came up. They said little. She gave both her small hands to the boy.

“Dear, dear Leigh!” she whispered, a sob in her throat.

“Oh, Fanchon!”

That was all he could gasp out, his eyes too misted to see the beauty of hers. Their hands clung together.

“Dear boy!” Fanchon murmured. “I can’t thank you--you believed in me! I shall remember--_toujours, toujours_!”

He wrung her hands. Then some one else came up to speak to him, and she passed on.

Turning from Leigh, she came face to face with her husband. For a moment she seemed to hold her breath. In the crowd no one saw them but Daniel, who had just come back to sit by his mother and Emily. Fanchon stood still, and her hand went to her side with an involuntary gesture of pain. For an instant she looked at William, but he never raised his eyes. He stood motionless, looking down. There was no sign that he was even aware of her, except a perceptible hardening of the mouth. She turned away blindly, dropping her veil over her face, and started toward the door.

Daniel pressed his mother’s arm.

“Mother, you ought to thank Fanchon. She saved Leigh. It’s been terrible for her.”

“Me? Oh, I can’t!” Mrs. Carter’s lip trembled worse than ever. “It--it wouldn’t do any good.”

“Mother! Don’t you understand? She saved Leigh.”

Mrs. Carter started to her feet.

“Oh, Dan, I’ll--I’ll try!” she stammered.

Daniel seized her arm and led her toward her daughter-in-law. They had to push through the crowd to a side door behind the witness-stand, for Fanchon had already reached it. Her veil was down, and, as Daniel spoke her name, she stood motionless, waiting. There was a difficult moment, and then Mrs. Carter’s tremulous, frightened voice:

“Dan says you saved my boy----”

She stopped. Fanchon had lifted her veil with a tragic gesture and looked at Mrs. Carter, passionate scorn in her beautiful eyes. For a moment she said nothing. Her whole form seemed to quiver from head to foot; then her pale lips moved at first without words.

“I didn’t do it for you,” she said bitterly at last, “nor for your son, nor for any of you--only for Leigh! _Adieu, madame!_”

She turned with a gesture at once tragic and beautiful, the gesture of an actress, made passionate by the bitterness of a woman.

A bailiff held the door open for her, looking after her admiringly and curiously, but without deference. Daniel and his mother, watching her, saw the small black figure disappear down the long corridor, saw it silhouetted a moment against the daylight at some distant door, and then it was gone.

“Oh, Dan, take me home!” gasped Mrs. Carter. “I haven’t done anything wrong, but I--I feel like a pickpocket. She makes me feel that way!”

Daniel made no reply. He was aware, at the moment, that his father, bent on getting Leigh home, was fighting his way out with the boy. Judge Jessup had ’phoned for two taxis, as one would not hold the reunited Carters.

“The jury couldn’t agree at first,” the judge explained joyfully; “but Fanchon’s story did it. When they talked it over, they agreed on acquittal. Good thing, eh?”

He tried to be jovial, for he saw the strain, and he was glad when the two loaded taxis disappeared in the dust of the highroad. It seemed to him that, as a family, they were not joyful.

“Willie looks like a death’s head at the feast,” the old man thought, and turned to shake hands with Colonel Denbigh. “I didn’t do it. No, sir, Daniel Carter did. He’s the coming man. You watch him, Colonel.”

Colonel Denbigh nodded thoughtfully.

“I’ll back Dan,” he said. “But how about that poor girl, Jessup?”

The judge pursed his lips.

“William’s going to get a divorce. Do you reckon he realizes that she gave up everything to save his brother? He’s turning her out for it, eh? Looks that way, far as I can see.”

“By gum!” said the colonel softly, and he averted his eyes.

There was a pause, and then the two old friends went silently over to the club for luncheon.

Meanwhile the Carters had taken Leigh home. Distributed in two taxicabs they arrived in a state of suppressed emotion difficult to describe; but, once in the house, the ice thawed. For the second time Mrs. Carter became hysterical, Emily wept on his neck, and Miranda started in on a wild effort to make preserved cherry tarts in time for luncheon.

Awaiting this event, all the members of the family gathered in the library, sitting around Leigh in a semicircle and looking at him, much as they might have gazed at a wanderer rescued from the perils of some distant and unknown clime. Leigh, who had been thoroughly lectured by his father on the way home, looked limp and white. He sat in Mr. Carter’s large chair and clung to the arms with his thin, white hands, the lock falling low on his forehead and the rims of his eyes suspiciously red. Mr. Carter, trembling with joy at his son’s release, had nevertheless exploded with long-suppressed wrath.

“You’ve had a lesson now, young man,” he had said hoarsely. “Mind you profit by it. If I catch you with shooting-irons again, I’ll lam you for it if you’re as big as the house!”

Leigh, who had indeed had a bitter experience, had made no reply. He was aware of Daniel’s significant silence on the other side. It was a painful moment, only alleviated by his mother’s fond ecstasy and Emily’s sobs. Those two, at least, were glad to get him back on any terms.

Now, in the library, he sat looking about at the family circle with a feeling of pitiful embarrassment. It was almost worse than sitting in the dock. He lifted his eyes reluctantly and found his father still explosive between relief and long-bottled anger. His mother and Emily were still sniffing, while Daniel was engaged at the table, making some notes.

In the corner, alone and morose, sat William. Leigh turned his eyes that way only once. He found his brother’s haggard face unpleasant to look at. He sat again with his eyes down, moving one foot occasionally, or gripping nervously at the arms of his chair.

Miranda came to the door, her brown face wreathed in smiles.

“Lunch is ready, Mis’ Carter, an’ dem tarts came out right smart, yes’m!”

Mrs. Carter rose and laid her hand on Leigh’s shoulder.

“Come, darling,” she said fondly. “We’ve got a nice lunch and some cherry tarts for you.”

The boy rose awkwardly, and his mother led him along, clinging to him, doting upon him, while the rest of the family trailed in the rear. As they entered the dining-room, Leigh counted the places.

“Sit right down here beside mamma,” cooed his mother, patting the chair on her right. “I’ve got lamb chops and green peas--just for you, dear!”

Leigh stood with his hand on the back of his chair, and glanced questioningly up and down the table.

“Where’s Fanchon?” he asked in a low voice.

There was that kind of silence that seems to be audible. It was Mr. Carter who answered him, frowning heavily.

“She left us some time ago,” he said shortly. “I wish you to know, Leigh, that--this family’s done with her. Understand?”