The Love-Story of Aliette Brunton
The clerk came in to ask if he might go. "Yes," said Brunton; "go. Go as
soon as you like." The clerk went out, leaving him alone; alone with his
Furies.
The Furies showed him Aliette, infinitely fastidious, infinitely
desirable; they showed him Renée, Renée who would even now be awaiting
him; they showed Lucy, Lucy Towers, stubborn in her cell. "Don't let her
go free from her cell," whispered the Furies. "You're not beaten yet.
She did kill the man. Convict her, Hector Brunton. Convict her of
manslaughter."
They showed him Cavendish, Cavendish gloating at the prospect of
victory. "To be beaten," whispered the Furies, "to be beaten by
Cavendish, by the adulterer who stole away your wife!"
But all the time Hector Brunton knew in his inmost soul that he had
sought to compass the death of an innocent woman; that he had sinned
against his own code, against the holy ghost of justice.
And gradually, terrifyingly, the reason of that sinning was brought home
to him. He had sinned, not as a woman sins, lovingly, but for sheer
hate. Out of his hatred for Cavendish he had plotted--as surely as any
murderer--the death of Lucy Towers.
And suddenly, starkly, irresistibly, it was brought home to him
that--even as he had plotted the death of Lucy Towers--so, and for the
same hideous reason, he had plotted the social ruin of his own wife.
Till finally the ultimate pretext, the pretext of his love for Aliette,
was stripped from him, and he saw that love in all its hideous
nakedness, as lust--the savage sadic lust which had hounded him to
crime.
* * * * *
David Patterson had long gone home; but Brunton sat on--alone in his
chambers--alone with his conscience, naked before his God. His worldly
house, the sure material legal house of his own making, had crashed, in
that one second of time when he watched Lucy Towers step down from the
dock, to ruin. The law, basis of work and life, lay--a tablet shattered
to ten thousand fragments--at his feet. Ghosts--the palpable ghosts of
those two women for the compassing of whose ruin he had invoked the
law--sidled about the darkling room, terrifying him. He knew himself a
prisoner--prisoner in the invisible house of God.
Was there no way out? No escape from God's house of conscience? Had he,
abiding by the letter of man's law, forfeited--for all time--the
merciful spirit of the law of God?
"Yes," said conscience, "there is one way out. One way, and one way
only, of escape. Make reparation, Hector Brunton. Set both these women
free."
Must he, then, give up everything--wife, vengeance, victory--because of
this one damnable insistent whisper, this whisper of conscience that was
driving him to madness?
And now, again, he saw the phantoms--phantom of Aliette and phantom of
Lucy Towers. They were behind bars--bars--innocent women behind bars
which he, Hector Brunton, had socketed home with his own hands.
* * * * *
At last, thought of those bars drove him into the night. King's Bench
Walk lay deserted, chill-gleaming under autumnal trees. Leaves strewed
it, swishing against his boots as he strode. "Autumn," thought Brunton.
"Autumn! We've reached middle age, the year and I. And what have I
garnered? Nothing."
Suddenly he realized whither his feet were carrying him; suddenly he
found himself under the colonnade of Pump Court, at the door of his
rival's chambers. The door was shut, the court deserted. Yet for a long
time Brunton stood by the door; stood, as a man stands who waits for
some sign, for an opening window or the gleam of a light. But no window
opened, no light gleamed.
He came, hardly knowing how, out of the gloom of the Temple into the raw
glare of empty Fleet Street. In front of him uprose the long façade of
the high courts, the courts where he had won fame and money. What did
fame and money matter to him--to Hector Brunton, who, gaining the whole
legal world, had lost his own soul?
2
Counsel for the defense, as he watched counsel for the prosecution make
his way into court next morning, could almost feel sorry for the man.
Brunton, the overbearing, overconfident Brunton, looked the veriest
wreck of his old self. He tottered rather than walked to his seat. His
eyes were dull, bloodshot; his hands trembled; his jowl twitched and
twitched.
The judge had not yet arrived; and Ronnie's eyes, switching here and
there about the packed court, suddenly envisaged, below the judge's
dais, the "exhibits" of the prosecution: among them the revolver which
had killed its man. More than once, in the last year, he, Ronald
Cavendish, had known the desire to kill his man. But now, looking on the
wreck which had been Brunton, he knew the desire dead. No longer could
he even hate Brunton. The man was beaten--beaten.
Bunce, approaching, handed up a telegram: "Congratulations. Masterly.
Feel confident of your success. BERTRAM STANDON."
Ronnie's heart glowed at the penciled words. Already he saw success,
fame, victory; already the sentences he would speak throbbed in his
brain. And then, abruptly, the sight of Lucy Towers entering the
witness-box for reëxamination recalled the fact that Brunton was still
undefeated. The alternative charge of manslaughter had yet to be fought
out between them!
The judge took his seat. The short reëxamination of Lucy Towers
began--ended. Quietly she went back to the dock; quietly she took her
seat by the blue-uniformed wardress.
"Robert Fielding!" called the constables on guard outside the doors.
The armless sailor, unskilled in law, had taken small comfort from the
morning's papers. His face, shaved clean, was gray with apprehension;
his whole body drooped as he made his way into the box. Ronnie could see
pity written clear on the faces of the jury. The fat matron--she still
wore her red hat--made a convulsive movement as if to assist, when the
crier of the court lifted the Bible to the kiss of that trembling mouth.
Even the two dour spinsters seemed moved.
Robert Fielding's tale of the happenings at Laburnum Grove on the
afternoon of July 5 corroborated his cousin's in almost every detail.
Yet he told it haltingly; only when Ronnie asked, "Have you any
knowledge of the relations between Mrs. Towers and her husband?" did any
certainty come into the low voice.
"Nobody except me," said Robert Fielding, "knows all that Lucy had to
put up with from that fellow. He was always a wrong 'un, was Bill
Towers. I looked after her all I could, but a cripple like me hasn't got
much chance."
"Did you ever make any secret of your affection for your cousin?"
"No, sir."
"When you told James Travers that your cousin's husband ought to be
shot, what did you mean to imply?"
The sailor hesitated; and Ronnie, nervous of the one weakness left in
his case, tried to prompt him. "When you told James Travers that Bill
Towers ought to be shot, did you have any intention----"
But at that, the judge intervened--leading questions being barred in
law; and Ronnie, a trifle annoyed with himself for the solecism,
repeated his former query.
Again Fielding hesitated; then he said, self-excusingly: "When I made
that remark, I made it as a good many of us who have been in the service
do make it--in a general sort of way, meaning that Bill Towers was a bad
lot, and that it wouldn't be any loss if somebody did shoot him."
"I see." Ronnie smiled; and a man on the jury, obviously an ex-service
man, smiled with him. "Now, about the pistol--or rather the revolver.
Can you tell us how long it had been in your possession?"
"Two years, I should say."
"Had it always been loaded?"
"Yes. Ever since I can remember."
"When did your cousin first know that you possessed this revolver?"
"Not until that afternoon."
"Which afternoon?"
"The afternoon she shot Bill Towers."
"One other point. James Travers told us that you said to him, 'I'd
rather cut off my right hand than that Lucy should marry Bill Towers.'
Did you ever make such a statement to James Travers?"
The sailor looked down, piteously, at his two empty sleeves. "I may
have," he said. "But if I did, it must have been a long time ago."
"Before she married?"
"Yes, before she married."
"James Travers also told us that you said to him, when you showed him
the revolver, 'This will cook Bill's goose for him.' Did you say that?"
"Yes." The answer was hardly audible. "He'd been knocking Lucy
about--and I was mad with him."
"Was there any other reason why you were mad with him?"
"Yes, there was." And the sailor--fears momentarily forgotten--rapped
out, so swiftly that even the judge could not stop him, "He drank, and
he was carrying on with another woman. Everybody in the house knew about
it."
On the hush which followed that statement--a statement confirmatory of
the point which Ronnie, without specifically alleging it, had been
trying to establish ever since his opening question to Maggie
Peterson--fell the last question of Mr. Justice Heber: "Do you know, of
your own knowledge, any woman other than his wife with whom the dead man
was on terms of sexual intimacy?"
And Robert Fielding, looking squarely into those gleaming spectacles,
answered, "Yes, my lord. With Maggie Peterson. Many's the time I've seen
the blackguard a-sneaking into her room."
3
At two o'clock of the afternoon, in a court packed to suffocation point,
Ronald Cavendish rose to begin his final speech for the defense of Lucy
Towers.
Robert Fielding's testimony, unshaken in cross-examination, had been
followed by more evidence, collected by Standon's assiduous reporters,
as to the character of the dead man; and that evidence--Ronnie
felt,--coupled with the arrest of Maggie Peterson, made the main issue,
the issue of wilful murder, safe.
Nevertheless, the Wixton imagination in him was doubtful of the second
issue, the issue of manslaughter. In England, the unwritten law did not
run; and although, thanks to the press, the streets outside were black
with people, with a mob hungry for news of the verdict, determined on
his client's acquittal, Ronnie knew the difficulties of securing that
acquittal too well for overconfidence.
Again he had spent the luncheon interval alone;
praying--voicelessly--that his oratory might not fail; visualizing
always those two dour-faced spinsters on the jury, and Mr. Justice
Heber, having summed up in cold legal phraseology the bare facts of the
case, awarding, on the jury's recommendation, the lenient sentence of a
year's imprisonment.
In those few seconds of time before his speech began, Ronnie's
imagination could almost hear the murmur of the mob without. The murmur
flustered him. After all, Lucy _had_ shot her husband. Between her, pale
in the dock, and the dark cell of felony, stood only a dumb advocate, a
fencer unskilled with the sword of the spoken word.
Till suddenly, standing there silent before Lucy's peers, it seemed to
Ronnie as though all the emotions of the last year stirred in his heart,
as though all that pity for womankind which Aliette had engendered in
him fought for utterance at his lips. For one fleeting moment, his keen
gaze swept the court, envisaging judge, jury, the motionless figure of
his client, the constable and the wardress either side of her, the
spectators standing two-deep round the closed doors, Benjamin Bunce,
David Patterson, John Cartwright, Brunton. For one fleeting moment he
thought of Brunton, and of the wrong which Brunton had done to the woman
he loved. Then, gravely, quietly, feeling the sword of the spoken word
quiver like a live blade at his lips, he engaged his enemy.
Sentence by calm sentence, Julia Cavendish's son--making scarcely a