Read Ebook: Oeuvres complètes tome 4 by Sterne Laurence

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Ebook has 216 lines and 17597 words, and 5 pages

"Oh," I said, "he's dead!" And then I poured all the story out in a breath. I saw father's face growing more and more keen and grave and I could feel his fingers gently around my arm as if he feared my turning faint again. Indeed the room around me seemed unreal, but what had happened in the street was still fearfully clear. It was cut into my mind as if it were still before my eyes, the toppling lurch of the falling body, the silk hat rolling into the gutter, and then that fine terrible gentleman that had sprung out after. The moment had stamped him as clear in my memory as years could have done. I could tell how very tall he was, how dark, how his brows made one black bar across his forehead, how his eyes were set deeply under them, how his chin was wide and keen and his left cheek flicked by a white scar near the mouth. At the time in my furious excitement I only knew that I must tell some one everything, or the thing would kill me. But whether it was father's strange stern face, his seeming so calm and going out so quietly, and yet in such haste; or whether it was some memory of the hunted look of the man who had flung away the pistol, I wished I had not described him so exactly. It would have been easy enough to have said I could not remember him clearly.

I was so stunned by what had happened before my eyes that I could not even formulate in my thoughts what it had been. The very impression of terror that remained with me was confused, and mixed with wounding pity. For though he had looked so wild I could not remember that he had seemed ferocious or afraid. The look I remembered had not been fear of what was going to happen to him, but horror of what had been done--and horror at sight of me.

Voices in the street, sounding unwontedly loud and excited, reached me. People were hurrying past the house--all hurrying downward in the same direction. I saw Lee run across the yard and stand peering out of the side gate. I put my hands over my ears, and up and down, up and down I walked; and back and forth Abby followed me with a little plaid shawl she was trying to put over my shoulders.

THE EVIDENCE

It did not seem possible that Mr. Dingley and father could be gone longer than half an hour, but the hands of the clock went to nine and then to ten before I heard them on the steps. I made a dash ahead of Abby, and opened the door. "Did he get away?" The words flew off my tongue before I could think. I knew it had been a dreadfully wrong thing to say. "I mean the other man--is he dead?" I gasped. Father had quickly closed the front door behind him, for there seemed to be quite a crowd in the street, and there in the half dark I could see his face, and Mr. Dingley's, only as palish spots in the gloom. The thought came to me, "Of course he isn't going to tell me anything. He is going to say it is nothing I ought to hear about, and that I must go up-stairs."

"Ellie," he began--then he caught sight of Abby in the dining-room door. He held out his hand to me. "Come into the study, Ellie, Mr. Dingley wants to ask you a question."

It was all so unexpected and so startling to be called into the study where only men went and only business was talked about; and to hear it was Mr. Dingley, not father, who wished to ask me a question, that I wanted to shrink away and escape from the very facts I had been so anxious to know a few minutes before. But father held me by the hand, and I had to drag my feet down the long dark passage that leads to the study, hearing Mr. Dingley striding at my heels.

It was a small room, full of a great litter of papers, and smelling faintly of tobacco and Russia leather. I sat down in the leather armchair that was drawn up to the table. Just opposite me was a window looking directly into the green branches of a weeping willow; and at intervals the wind blew the leaves against the glass with a sound like "Hush!" Up to that moment I had had no memory connected with that room--only the general sense of awe it had given me as a child. But as soon as I was in that chair, facing that window, hearing the "Hush, hush," of the weeping leaves, in a quick distinct flash I saw myself, a naughty child, sitting up in that chair, in anguish of mind over a stolen jam pot, and my mother's face pulled to great gravity, no doubt to keep from laughing at the sight of me. I seemed to hear her voice again, "The truth, Ellie, remember nothing but good ever comes of the truth."

It flitted through my mind as a little, sweet memory, having nothing to do with what was happening at the moment, for the thought in my mind was all, "What has become of the man with the revolver?"

Father had sat down opposite me on a corner of the table, but Mr. Dingley walked to the fireplace, turned his back to it, put his hands behind his coat-tails, buried his big chin deep in his collar, and in just the same cheerful voice he used when he asked me how many hearts I had broken, "Now, Miss Ellie," he said, "what makes you think that the man who came second out of that door had a revolver in his hand?"

I looked at him in astonishment, his question seemed so silly. "Why, because I saw it."

He gave his head a brisk shake. "Yes, but what makes you know you saw it?"

"Because I heard it strike the ground." I was growing more and more bewildered.

"You heard it strike the ground," Mr. Dingley repeated slowly, "but"-- Then with a sudden pouncing forward motion of his head and shoulders, he shot the words at me, "I thought you said he had it in his hand."

"Yes," I stammered, "but that was before."

Mr. Dingley was watching me steadily.

"Now, Miss Ellie, aren't you a little confused on that point?"

I was indeed; but it was his manner that was doing it. He seemed to snatch the words out of my mouth, and turn them into another meaning. "But it was there! you saw it yourselves!" I appealed to him.

Father and Mr. Dingley glanced at each other, and a strange thought came to me with a rush of relief. "Wasn't he dead, had he gone away, didn't you find anything?"

The answering look of their faces made my heart go down like lead. "We found everything as you told us except the revolver. There was no revolver there."

I sat clutching the arms of the chair, staring hard at Mr. Dingley, who seemed suddenly to have become a stranger to me. "Then some one must have picked it up."

"But, Miss Ellie, you say that the street was absolutely deserted when this thing occurred; and when I reached the spot there was a woman looking out of a window, and some laborers running up from Sutter Street, but no one had yet reached the place. Now, how could--"

Father struck in, "No, Jim, you'll only frighten her!" In a lower voice he said something that sounded like, "Not on the stand yet." Then, leaning toward me, across the table, resting on his elbow until his face was level with my own, "I know you must have been much frightened at what you saw, child, and it's possible you may have been a little hysterical, isn't it? It's possible you might have fancied a revolver in his hand, isn't it, when there was none there?"

He said this very slowly and gently, as if he were trying to soothe me, but looking straight into his eyes I saw a sharp anxious light there, and the conviction came to me that he very much wanted me to have been mistaken. Mr. Dingley, from the fireplace, was watching me hard, as if he were trying, with that incredulous look of his, to force it on me that I must be mistaken. And then the thought floated through my mind that in some way it would be better for that handsome, terrible man if I could say I hadn't seen a revolver. I tried to make myself believe that they were right; I shut my eyes. The picture came to me as if it were before me still, and nothing in it was more clear than that thing of steel and pearl. "I wasn't hysterical," I said, "I saw it plainly."

"Could you take your oath in court?" father said in a stern voice.

"Oh, yes."

Father dropped my hand and leaned back. He looked puzzled. Mr. Dingley came close to him and said something so low that I couldn't catch it. But father answered in his usual voice as if he had forgotten I was there, "No, Jim, if she says so then she did--be sure of that!" He listened again while Mr. Dingley murmured to him, and the look of their faces, the lowered, hushed tones of their voices, made me feel, more than words could have done, that they were talking about something very serious. All the while Mr. Dingley was speaking father slowly nodded. "I have no doubt you could, Jim," he said at last, "and it's very good of you to offer, but we can't suppress evidence because it happens--" He dropped his voice and I lost the last word.

Mr. Dingley looked silently down for a moment, and I thought he was going to say something more, but finally he only, shrugged. "Well, what time do you want to go down, then?" he said.

Father looked at his watch. "We might as well get this business over as soon as possible. Ellie--" His voice sounded so sharply on my name that I jumped up, all of a nervous tremble. "Go up-stairs and put on your bonnet, I want you to come with me."

I felt that my voice was woefully unsteady.

"Won't you please tell me what is happening and where we are going?"

"Martin Rood has been shot; he is dead. A man has been arrested, corresponding to your description, and we are going down to the prison to see if you can identify him." I stared at father, and my only feeling was one of vague, incredulous wonder. Martin Rood, the fine sleek gentleman whom I had seen swinging out of his gambling-house in the late afternoons--could that have been he, that huddled heap of clothes in the gutter?

"Quickly, Ellie," father's voice reminded me. I went stumbling up-stairs in a burning excitement. I think I had some wild notion of locking myself into my room and defying the house, for the idea of facing that terrible man with his wild terror-stricken face threw me into a panic. But Abby screamed at me that I was treading on my ruffle as I came up-stairs, and captured me; and I let her put another gown on me and my turban and a heavy veil without lifting a finger to help her, as if I had been a child. I knew father was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, and there was no escape, I must go down. When I got into the hall I saw that Mr. Dingley's buggy was standing in front of the house, though it was but a few blocks down Washington Street to the prison on Kearney.

But we did not drive as I had expected straight down Washington, making instead a detour of several blocks, and finally, by means of a little alleyway, coming to the back door of the prison.

The only people in sight were a couple of policemen, but, Mr. Dingley on one side and father on the other, fairly lifted me out by the arms, and hurried me into the building, as if they were afraid of being caught by some one. The first thing I was aware of was the cold gray light falling on us from high overhead, and a faint sickly odor, very faint but very penetrating, the like of which I had never breathed before. We were standing in a flagged hall, looking up through a great well, past gallery after gallery, to a skylight covering the top of the roof. It was the sunshine filtering through the dull, thick, greenish glass which gave that cold, sad-colored light. Within the galleries I caught glimpses of men at work at desks; and over the railings lounged figures, peered faces, disheveled, sodden, disreputable; and sometimes near these a policeman's star twinkled. I saw it all in one upward glance, for I was hurried on. Our steps clattered over the flags of the hall, and then, turning to the right, we began to go down-stairs. I took tighter hold on father's arm, for we seemed to be descending into a dungeon. That sickly, acrid odor grew heavier, making me think of caged animals, and yet, what made it worse, it wasn't quite like an animal either.

The hall we came out into was smaller and darker than the one above it, and empty except for a policeman standing by a door. To him Mr. Dingley handed his card, and, after a few minutes, we were admitted to a small office. It was divided in half by a railing; on the inner side was a desk, at which a man with a star on his coat was writing under the light of a green-shaded lamp. He came forward, opened a gate in the railing for us to enter, shook hands with Mr. Dingley and father, and then was introduced to me. His name did not reach me, but I understood the words "Chief of Police." Then all three talked together in low voices, while I sat where I had been bidden, in a chair close to the railing. Once or twice the man with the star glanced at me, and then, presently, they all looked at me, and I couldn't distinguish one face from another. My head was whirling so with excitement I felt as if I were living in a dream. Yet when the man with the star began speaking I heard him with curious distinctness.

"All that is necessary for you to do, Miss Fenwick, is to tell me whether you recognize the person you saw this morning."

I sat forward on the edge of my chair. I tried to draw a deep breath, but the sickly atmosphere seemed choking me. There was the tread of feet outside the door; it opened and two officers came in, stopping one on each side of the doorway; and then, with a queer shock, I saw not the one man I had expected, but a file of men, shuffling one behind the other, and linked together by what seemed a long steel chain, from wrist to wrist, into the seeming of a single thing. This thing halted opposite the railing, and faced about before me, where it appeared to me as a line of heads and moving arms and legs and shuffling feet. But among them all I saw only one individual. It was absurd if they had expected to confuse me with these other creatures. I saw him instantly and I knew him past hope of mistaking. His clothes were all torn and disordered; there was a cut on his forehead and a bloodstained bandage showed on his wrist beneath his sleeve; and the bitter way he held his head up and stared straight past me at the wall made him seem quite grim and yet, somehow, very forlorn. A lump rose in my throat. I heard the Chief of Police saying, "Is there any person here you recognize?" I swallowed hard and opened my lips, but the only sound that came was like a sob.

Quickly the prisoner turned his eyes on me. There crossed his face again a look like the faint shadow of that look which had transfixed me, as he burst out of the door. But in a moment it was gone, and he smiled. Such a smile, so warm and kind, as if he were reassuring and encouraging me to go on! It transformed him from a terrifying presence into something beautiful. It made me forget the others and the room and, curiously, in their place, came the confusing memory of a ball-room and a slim boy with black brows whirling down the polished floor with his splendid partner, both in a gale of laughter. Those long white hands, now linked together with a chain,--hadn't I seen them holding up a woman's filmy draperies?

"Speak, Ellie," my father's voice said. "Can't you tell us?"

It brought me back from my fancies with a great start, and before I knew what I was saying I had stammered out, "Yes." The next moment I realized they were all waiting, waiting for and looking at me; and it seemed as if I could not go on with the truth. It was only the thought that everything depended on me, and that, whatever I said, father would believe it, that nerved me to get through with it.

"He is that one," I said, "the fourth from the end."

The Chief of Police looked at me sternly. "You are sure of that?"

"Quite sure." I was surprised at how steady; my voice had grown.

The Chief of Police said something in a lifted voice, the line of prisoners filed out with one of the policemen, and left the man I had pointed out alone in front of me. It was then I noticed how his hands were awkwardly carried in front of him, held by two steel bands around his wrists, with a chain like a bracelet-chain swinging between. The sight of it affected me strangely. I had a new bracelet which also had two bands with a chain between, but they were of gold, and both were worn on the one hand.

The Chief of Police came and stood beside me, and said, "Look at this person, Miss Fenwick;" and I had been looking at him all the time, as if by doing that I could make him understand how terribly I wished I had never seen him. "Can you take your oath--could you take your oath in open court that he is the man?"

The Chief's voice sounded solemn, and those words "oath" and "open court" made me feel frightened. But I saw he held up his hand, palm out, and mechanically I held up mine. "Yes," I repeated after him, "I can take my oath in open court." My voice sounded very loud to me, and clear, and not at all like my own.

There was a pause, and now they were no longer looking at me, but at the man standing alone in the middle of the room, as if the chain between his wrists had made him different from them, as if he wasn't a man at all, but a stone. Yet I couldn't look at him like that. He was not at all dreadful to look at, only so alone and fiercely proud and wretched looking that something ached inside of me just to see his face.

Then the Chief of Police nodded at the policeman and said, "That will do." But before the man could move forward the prisoner had walked straight up to the rail, and standing there scarcely two feet from me, in such a low voice that only I could hear, "I am sorry I frightened you this morning," he said. "If I had known you were passing I should have managed it differently."

This all happened so quickly that I had hardly seen how dark his eyes were before father thrust between us, and I heard his voice, sounding very low, and saying something about infernal impudence and not presuming to come near me. The policeman touched the dark man's elbow. He started, half-turned on the man, made a movement with his hands; but then he felt the jerk of the chain. The blood rushed to his face. With the policeman holding his arm he walked away across the room, and I wondered what sort of place he was being taken to. It wasn't until the door had closed upon him that I realized how angry father was. Mr. Dingley was saying that prisoners ought not to be permitted to speak without permission, but the Chief leaned over his desk, smiling at me, and asked, "What did the prisoner say to you?"

"He apologized for frightening me," I answered.

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