The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton
court--he had no wish to meet with Cavendish face to face in the
robing-rooms,--a vision of his wife flashed for one vivid instant
through the K.C.'s mind. In that vivid instant, conscience troubled him
again. "Was he being cruel to Aliette?" asked conscience. "Was he
planning yet another cruelty toward this woman he had never seen, this
Lucy Towers?"
"Cavendish defends them both," he thought; and stifled the voice of
conscience.
3
Ronald, when Caroline Staley woke him on that first morning of the
trial, thought neither of Hector nor of Aliette. Hardly, he thought to
himself. To win--and, now that the contest so long anticipated was
actually at hand, he felt that not to win outright would be
disaster--seemed almost impossible, the forlornest of hopes.
Dressing, breakfasting, making his way to Putney Bridge Station, his
mind held only the picture of his client. Visited overnight, the
woman--whose likeness to his own woman never failed to strike a
responsive chord in Ronnie's heart--had afforded no help. Curiously
resigned to an adverse verdict, curiously incurious as to whether that
verdict should be murder or manslaughter, the tense clamor of the
newspapers and the tense pleading of her counsel left her alike unmoved.
"I'll go into the witness-box if you like, sir," she had consented. "But
I don't see what good it'll do. I can only tell them the truth. And I
told them that at the police-station. I never was a liar, sir. I did it
to save Bob."
"I did it to save Bob!" Those words still echoed in the barrister's ears
as he emerged from the gloom of Temple station into sunlight, and turned
down the Embankment toward his chambers, where--Bunce, brief and
witnesses for the defense being already on their way to the court--John
Cartwright alone awaited him.
The solicitor was in his gloomiest mood, thoroughly convinced of Lucy's
guilt.
"Unless Brunton fails on the issue of premeditation," he said, "we
haven't got a dog's chance. Even if he does fail on that point, she'll
get seven years."
At that, poignantly, the human element of the case came home to Ronnie.
It seemed to him as though he saw Aliette's self imprisoned, beating out
her heart--day after day, month after month, year after year--against
the cold walls and the cold bars of a prison-house.
"Not if I can help it," he said hotly.
"Have you decided to put her in the box? H. B.'s a holy terror for
cross-examination."
"Of course I shall put her in the box. I'm not afraid of H. B.! Let's be
off."
John Cartwright--thinking the tactics hopeless--would have protested;
but, realizing from the other's demeanor how much this case meant to
him, realizing (Ronnie's matrimonial position was common gossip in the
offices of Wilberforce, Wilberforce & Cartwright) more than a little of
the secret drama which underlay the public, he kept his own counsel all
the way to the Old Bailey. "At any rate," thought John Cartwright,
"Standon will get the show he's paying for."
It was fifteen minutes to ten by the time their car made Holborn; ten to
when it drew up at the door of the court. Already they could see the
forerunners of a crowd. Public sympathy, astutely roused by Standon, had
enlisted itself on the side of the accused and of her counsel. In any
other country, the little knot of people would have cheered. As it was,
they only stared sympathetically while the cameras clicked and the two
men disappeared from view.
"I'll see to the witnesses," said Cartwright, as the lift jerked them to
the first floor. "You go and get dressed."
In the robing-room Ronnie found Hugh Spillcroft.
"I'm at a loose end," said that genial youth, "so I've come to watch the
show. Going to win?"
"If I can," retorted Ronald grimly. "But it's going to be a devil of a
job."
They passed out of the robing-room, and threaded their way across the
crowded landing toward No. 2 court. By the outer door, its oak and glass
guarded by two enormous constables, stood Bob Fielding and various other
witnesses. The young sailor's face was gray. His whole body, even the
two empty sleeves of the shabby coat, twitched.
"You'll do your best for her, sir?" he stammered. "You'll do your best
for Lucy?"
"I'll do my utmost, Fielding," answered the tall, dignified man in the
wig and gown, the man who was no longer either Aliette Brunton's lover
or Julia Cavendish's son, but only an advocate whose brain, keyed to
contest-pitch, resented any and every unnecessary strain on its
concentration.
With the various other people who tried to detain him, more especially
with Benjamin Bunce and Bertram Standon's secretary, Ronnie's manner was
abrupt, irritable to the point of discourtesy. Knowing that he would
need it all, he husbanded his self-control against the inevitable
face-to-face meeting with Brunton.
"Time to toddle in," reminded Spillcroft.
One of the constables opened for them. Halting just inside the outer
door, Ronnie could see, through the glass panels of the inner, the back
of the great dock, light oak below, glass-and-iron paneled above; and
beyond the dock, on the left of it, the already-occupied jury-box and
the projecting canopy of the judge's dais. Then the outer door closed,
the inner door opened, and they made their way in.
The domed court was a sight, every seat taken. There were ten tiers of
curious heads behind the dock. On the low benches between dock and
witness-box; in the high gallery opposite; and even below the gallery,
among the bewigged counsel who crowded the benches reserved for the bar,
lay spectators packed and packed. At the press table, the reporters sat
so close to one another that their right arms could scarcely reach their
note-books. But Ronnie had no eyes for the crowd; his eyes were all for
his enemy.
Brunton sat very still, like a mastiff on watch, in the far corner of
the front bench just below the three unoccupied thrones of the judge's
dais. The gray eyes under the gray horsehair, fixed on the jury as
though to hypnotize them, did not deign to notice the entrance of
counsel for the defense. Nevertheless, Ronnie, taking his seat below the
dock at the opposite end of the bench, knew instinctively that Brunton
was aware of him.
Sitting, the barrister could no longer see his enemy. Henry
Smith-Assher's vast Pickwickian back blocked his view. But the mental
vision still remained; and with it, strengthening the will to win, came
the first fierce gush of personal hatred.
"His lordship's late," whispered Spillcroft.
Ronnie, controlling himself, settled his back comfortably against the
oak; glanced through his brief; and glanced up covertly from his brief
at the jury. There were nine men and three women in the box. The men
looked to be ordinary orderly citizens, apparently of the shop-keeping
class, their faces bovine, their eyes unimaginative. Of the women, two
were hard-featured, sour-faced spinsters whom he felt instinctively
would be difficult to convince, and the third a fat, good-natured matron
of five-and-forty, with a string of false pearls round her ample neck
and a feathered hat on her jaunty head. He decided not to challenge any
of them.
The click of an opening door disturbed further scrutiny; and a moment
later there appeared, on the right of the judge's dais, a man's figure
in full court dress--silk stockings on his legs, lace ruffle at his
throat, and sword at his side--who ushered in his lordship, robed in the
scarlet and ermine of full ceremonial, and, following his lordship, two
portly creatures in aldermanic robes, chains of office round their
necks.
"Silence!" called the crier of the court.
Rising to his feet, Ronnie felt the tense pull of the crowd. The crowd
expected him to speak; expected oratory of him. Supposing he were to
fail them! The tongue felt like leather in his mouth. His mind blurred.
He forgot every detail of the case. To sit down again, to fumble among
the papers on the desk in front of him, was positive relief.
The crier of the court began swearing in the jury. One by one the nine
men and the three women rose from their places, answering to their names
and to the quaint old formula: "You shall well and truly try, and true
deliverance make, between our sovereign lord the king and the prisoner
at the bar, whom you shall have in charge, and a true verdict give
according to the evidence." Last of all, from the back of the box,
answered the fat and friendly matron.
"_Quel chapeau!_" whispered Hugh Spillcroft from behind; and a second
later, as it seemed to Ronnie, he heard the sound of feet moving up the
steps below the dock; and caught sight of Lucy's face pale above the
pale oak.
Her gaze sought his trustfully; and at that precise moment Ronnie's
ears, nervously attuned, were aware of the faintest gasp behind him, of
the whistling breath-intake of a man shocked beyond self-control.
Turning his head, he saw Brunton; Brunton---gray eyes staring, jowl
a-twitch, teeth bit to the underlip.
To Brunton, startled almost out of his wits by the unexpected
apparition; to Brunton with his preconceived idea of the blowzy
slum-woman, it was as though Aliette herself stood before him; as though
the wraith of her had materialized, Banquo-like, to fight for Cavendish.
Then, as Lucy Towers, upright between wardress and constable, proud,
dignified, aloof with Aliette's own aloofness, her brown head bare, her
brown eyes unflinching, her hands--small as Aliette's own--gripping the
edge of the dock, smiled down at Ronnie, the last least whisper of
conscience was still in the K.C.'s soul; and he swore to himself that
the very likeness of this woman to the wife who had deserted him should
be her doom. "Vengeance," he thought. "Vengeance indeed!"
The crier of the court was reading the indictment. "Murdered her
husband--William Towers--by shooting him," read the crier; and Brunton,
watching his victim as a snake watches the bird, saw that her eyes,
Aliette's own vivid eyes, were still on Cavendish.
"Prisoner at the bar, do you plead guilty or not guilty?"
"Not guilty, my lord," came Aliette's own shy voice.
And a moment afterwards, cool, self-controlled, pitiless, deadly sure of
every deadly word, the "hanging prosecutor" rose to speak.
"My lord and members of the jury"--the man was all actor now, an actor
keyed to cold genius by the hot urge of suppressed rage,--"you have
already heard the indictment against this woman. It is an indictment on
the charge of murder, the penalty for which is death. The actual facts
of the case will not, I fancy, be disputed. Let me give them to you as
briefly as I can. At about six o'clock on the afternoon of the fifth of
July last, a police-constable on duty in Brixton heard the noise of a
revolver-shot from No. 25 Laburnum Grove, a block of working-class
flats.
"Entering these flats, the constable--as he will tell you in his
evidence--found, in a room on the third floor, the prisoner and a man, a
certain Robert Fielding, of whom the less said the better. At their
feet, a bullet-wound through his heart, lay the dead body of the
prisoner's husband, William Towers. In the woman's hand was a smoking
revolver, one cartridge of which--and one only--had been fired.
"The constable arrested both the man and the woman. He took them to
Brixton police-station. There, Lucy Towers, entirely on her own
initiative, made a clean breast of the whole business. Her confession,
which you will hear, is--I shall submit--even without the other evidence
in possession of the Crown, sufficient to merit the rope."
Now, pausing, Brunton grew aware of his enemy. His enemy was eying him,
quietly, dispassionately. For a second his concentration failed. Then,
pitiless, the deadly speech flowed on.