In a Little Town Part 21

"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 n.o.ble 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 b.u.t.tresses against the thrust of a solid wall of humanity. Outside, the halls, the stairs, and the sidewalk were jammed with the mob crus.h.i.+ng 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 circ.u.mstantial evidence as fast as the State could weave it was another.

The Coburn case had become a notorious example of that peculiarly American inst.i.tution, 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 s.h.i.+ft 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, p.a.w.ned as collateral, or blanketed with mortgages.

As he had comforted his wife when they had witnessed the bolt from the blue, so now he sat facing her in her third ordeal. Only now she was not on the home porch, but in the arena. He could not hold her hands. Now she dared not close her eyes and cry; it was not the work of one thunderbolt she had to see. Now, under the darting questions of the court-examiner, she was like a frightened girl lost in the woods and groping through a tempest, with lightning thrusts pursuing her on every side, st.i.tching the woods with fire like the needle in a sewing-machine stabbing and stabbing at the dodging shuttle.

The old woman had gone down into the pit for her son. She had been led through the bogs and the sewers of vice. Almost unspeakable, almost unthinkable wickedness had been taught to her till she had become deeply versed in the lore that saddens the eyes of the scarlet women of Babylon. But still her love purified her, and almost sanctified the strategy she practised, the lies she told, the truths she concealed, the plots she devised with the uncanny canniness of an old peasant. People not only felt that it was her duty to fight for her young like a mad she-wolf, but they would have despised her for any failure of sacrifice.

She sat for hours baffling the inquisitor, foreseeing his wiles by intuition, evading his masked pitfalls by instinct. She was terribly afraid of him, yet more afraid of herself, afraid that she would break down and become a brainless, weeping thing. It was the sincerity of her fight against this weakness that made her so dangerous to the prosecuting attorney. He wanted to compel her to admit that her son had confessed his deed to her. She sought to avoid this admission. She had not guessed that he was more in dread of her tears than of her guile. He was gentler with her than her own attorneys had been. At all costs he felt that he must not succeed too well with her.

The whole trial had become by now as academic as a game of chess, to all but the lonely, homesick parents. The prosecuting attorney knew that the mother was not telling the truth; the judge and the jury knew that she was not telling the truth. But unless this could be geometrically demonstrated the jury would disregard its own senses. Yet the prosecutor knew that if he succeeded in trapping the mother too abruptly into any admission dangerous to her son she would probably break down and cry her dreary old heart out, and then those twelve superhuman jurors would weep with her and care for nothing on earth except her consolation.

The crisis came as crises love to come, without warning. The question had been simple enough, and the tone as gentle as possible: "You have just stated, Mrs. Coburn, that your son spoke to you in his apartment the day he is alleged to have committed this act, but I find that at the first and second trials you testified that you did not see him in his apartment at all. Which, please, is the correct statement?"

In a flash she realized what she had done. It is so hard to build and defend a fortress of lies, and she was very old and not very wise, tired out, confused by the stare of the mob and the knowledge that every word she uttered endangered the life she had borne. Now she felt that she had undone everything. She blamed herself for ruining the work of years. She saw her son led to death because of her blunder. Her answer to the question and the patient courtesy of the attorney was to throw her hands into the air, toss her white head to and fro, and give up the battle.

The tears came like a gush of blood from a deep wound; they poured through the lean fingers she pressed against her gaunt cheeks, and she shook with the dry, weak weeping of senility and utter desolation. Then her old arms yearned for him as when a babe.

"I want my boy! I want my boy!"

The judge grew very busy among his papers, the prosecuting attorney swallowed hard. The jurymen thought no more of evidence and of the stability of the laws. They all had mothers, or memory-mothers, and they only resolved that whatever crime Stephen Coburn might have committed, it would be a more dastardly crime for them to drive their twelve daggers into the aching breast that had suckled him. On the instant the trial had resolved itself into "The People _vs._ One Poor Old Mother."

The jury's tears voted for them, and their real verdict was surging up in one thought:

"This white haired saint wants her boy: he may be a black sheep, but she wants him, and she shall have him, by--" whatever was each juryman's favorite oath.

When the judge had finished his charge the jury stumbled on one another's heels to get to their sanctum. There they reached a verdict so quickly that, as the saying is, the foreman was coming back into the court-room before the twelfth man was out of it. Amazed at their own unanimity, they were properly ashamed, each of the other eleven, for their mawkish weakness, and their treachery to the stern requirements of higher citizens.h.i.+p. But they went home not entirely unconsoled by the old woman's cry of beat.i.tude at that phrase, "Not Guilty."

She went among them sobbing with ecstasy, and her tears splashed their hands like holy water. It was all outrageously illegal, and sentimental, and harmful to the sanct.i.ty of the law. And yet, is it entirely desirable that men should ever grow unmindful of the tears of old mothers?

IV

The road came pouring down from the wooded hills, and the house faced the pond as before. But there was a new guest in the house. Up-stairs, in a room with a sloping wall and a low ceiling and a dormer window, sat a young man whose face had been prominent so long in the press and in the court-room that now he preferred to keep away from human eyes. So he sat in the little room and read eternally. He had acquired the habit of books in the whitewashed cell where he had spent the three of his years that should have been the happiest, busiest, best of all. He read anything he could find now--old books, old magazines, old newspapers.

Finally he read even the old family Bible his mother had toted into his room for his comfort. It was a bulky tome with print of giant size and pictures of crude imagery, with here and there blank pages for recording births, deaths, marriages. Here he found the names of all his brothers and sisters, and all of them were entered among the deaths. The manners of the deaths were recorded in the shaky handwriting of fresh grief: Alice Anne, scarlet fever; James Arthur, Jr., convulsions; Andrew Morton, whooping-cough; Cicely Jane, typhoid; Amos Turner, drowned while saving his brother Stephen's life; Edward John, killed in train wreck.

Sick at heart, he turned away from the record, but the book fell open of itself at a full-page insert of the Decalogue, illuminated by some artless printer with gaudy splotches of gold, red and blue and green initials, and silly curlicues of arabesque, as if the man had been ignorant of what they meant, those ten pillars of the world.

Stephen smiled wanly at the bad taste of the decoration, till one line of fire leaped from the text at him, "Thou Shalt Not Kill." But he needed no further lessoning in that wisdom. He retreated from the accusing page and went to lean against the dormer window and look out upon the world from the jail of his past. No jury could release him from that. Everywhere he looked, everywhere he thought, he saw evidence of the penalty he had brought upon his father and mother, more than upon himself and his future. He knew that his father's life-work had been ruined, and that his honorable career would be summed up in the remembrance that he was the old man who bankrupted himself to save his son from the gallows. He knew that this very house, which remained as the last refuge, was mortgaged again as when his father and mother had come into it before he was born. The ironic circle was complete.

Down-stairs he could hear the slow and heavy footsteps of his father, and the creak of the chair as he dropped heavily into it. Then he heard the screen-door flap and heard his mother's rocking-chair begin its seesaw strain. He knew that their tired old hands would be clasped and that their tired old eyes would be staring off at the lightning-shattered oaks. He heard them say, just about as always:

"What you been doin', Paw?"

"Just putterin' 'round the barn. What you been doin', Maw?"