The Crime and the Criminal Part 59

MRS. CARRUTH REMOVES HER VEIL.

After luncheon came the speeches.

Sir Haselton Jardine's was as deadly as it very well could have been.

He was not a bit of an orator. He reminded one of an automatic figure as much as anything, as if he had been wound up to go. He went quietly on, in the same placid, pa.s.sionless sort of whisper, but as clear as a bell. One never lost a syllable he uttered. He never faltered or stumbled. The words, as they flowed from him, were exactly adapted to the meaning they were intended to convey. He fitted them together with the dexterity of an artist in mosaic.

One began almost to feel that one was listening to the voice of doom.

He recounted the story. He observed that it did not appear to be disputed that the prisoner had travelled in the same compartment with the woman who was dead. He did not know what the defence would be. But if it was intended to suggest that death had been the result of accident, he asked the attention of the jury to the medical evidence.

It was shown by that that death had not been caused by falling from the train. The woman had been strangled--strangled by a man's two hands.

The degree of violence which had been used not only inevitably suggested premeditation, but also great resolution in carrying out what had been premeditated. The murderer had resolved to kill, and he did kill.

They could not say with certainty what happened after the train left Brighton. A feature of the case was that the efforts of the police had failed in establis.h.i.+ng the dead woman's ident.i.ty. So far as they could discover she was nameless. No one had come forward to claim her--to say who she was. She seemed to have come from nowhere. No one seemed to have missed her now that she had gone. It was a mystery. He could not say if the prisoner had it in his power to supply them with the key to that mystery. Men live double lives. The witness Taunton had told them that what he had heard had caused him to conclude that the man and woman in the next compartment were acquaintances. That might have been the case. In that connection he would merely remark--that the prisoner was a married man; that the woman was young and pretty; that she was far advanced in pregnancy; that she wore no wedding-ring.

In these facts they might, possibly, find a motive for the crime.

A great crime had been committed. A young woman, scarcely more than a girl, who would shortly have become a mother, had been done to death.

So far as one could perceive, there were no palliating circ.u.mstances.

It was the other way. The crime was the act of a coward, as well as of a criminal. He did not desire to press the case unduly against the prisoner. It was his duty to ask them, as jurymen, if the facts which had been presented were not adequate to bring the crime home to him. If they deemed them inadequate, then, without showing fear or favour, it was their duty to say so.

Sir Haselton Jardine sat down.

And Mr. Bates got up.

Mr. Bates began by remarking that he did not propose to call any witnesses for the defence.

Then, in that case, in view of the body of evidence which had been called for the other side, Tommy's goose was cooked, and he was done for. Mr. Bates might have as well kept still. A general movement which took place in the court seemed to be a voiceless expression of this consensus of opinion.

Mr. Bates said that, in taking this course, he was almost overwhelmed by a sense of responsibility. That was chiefly owing to the fact that the law of England was still in such a state that the prisoner could not go into the box and testify. He was exceedingly anxious to give his testimony, but it could not be received as evidence. If he had spoken out at first he might not, and probably would not, have been in the position which he was occupying now. But he had shrunk from the course which a wiser man would have pursued--shrunk from it for reasons which were natural enough, but which still, he was bound to say, were insufficient. Now it was too late. His voice could not be heard.

It was his duty, as the prisoner's advocate, to lay before the jury the prisoner's story.

Then Mr. Bates told what had really happened, and told it very well indeed. His story was literally accurate. I did not detect a single discrepancy. I think I should have done! He was frank almost to a fault. He nothing extenuated, nothing set down in malice. Nothing was omitted--even the dotting of the i's.

And yet I doubt if a soul in court, with the exception, perhaps, of Tommy's wife, believed a word he said.

To me, listening up there, the thing was inconceivably funny.

The chief difficulty which Mr. Bates had to contend with, as he owned, and as one perceived without his owning it, was the medical evidence.

He admitted that it was difficult to reconcile it with the prisoner's story. The prisoner declared that he did not understand it; that it had come upon him with the force of a surprise.

His theory was that the woman had been stunned by her fall from the train. As she was unconscious, or before she had recovered, some straggling vagabond had found her lying on the bank. He had robbed her.

To effect his purpose he had had to add murder to robbery. The prosecution had not laid stress upon the point, but she evidently had been robbed. There was not the slightest t.i.ttle of evidence to connect the prisoner with the robbery, so counsel for the Crown had been wise not to dwell upon it. On the other hand there was complete absence of motive, and the fact that nothing of any sort could have belonged to the dead woman had been found in the possession of the prisoner.

He admitted that the suggestion that murder had been committed after the fall from the carriage was well worthy the attention of the jury.

The prisoner made a mistake--which however, he submitted, was the mistake which we might naturally have expected from a const.i.tutionally nervous man--in not giving the alarm immediately the accident took place. He ought to have spoken when they reached Victoria. He ought not to have allowed himself to be frightened by the blackmailing Taunton.

But, after all, these were all mistakes which a perfectly innocent man, of his const.i.tution, in his position, might have made. We none of us could absolutely rely upon having our wits about us when we most wanted them.

The prisoner had made mistakes. He owned it. But he begged the jury to consider that the law did not permit him to put the prisoner into the witness-box, and that the prisoner was convinced that, if he only might be suffered to tell his tale his innocence would be established. Above all, he entreated them not to send a fellow-creature to an ignominious death because he had yielded to the promptings of a timorous const.i.tution and had not played the man.

When Mr. Bates sat down the judge summed up.

And he did it very briefly.

He pooh-poohed Mr. Bates's story altogether. He told the jury that they were at liberty to believe it, if they could. But it was not supported by a shred of evidence. It was disproved in several essential particulars, and it was his duty to inform them that it was contrary to every principle of English law that an _ex parte_ statement which was without any sort of corroboration should be allowed to weigh, for an instant, against a large and authenticated body of evidence which had been sworn to by credible and impartial witnesses. At the same time, if there was any doubt in their minds, let the prisoner have the benefit of it; though, so far as he was concerned, he had not the least doubt in his own mind that the man was guilty, and, if they did their duty, they would say so.

Of course this was not exactly what he did say, and of course he said a good deal more than this, but this is the gist of what his saying amounted to. Certainly the judge's summing-up was every whit as d.a.m.ning as Sir Haselton's speech had been. Mr. Justice Hunter had evidently himself no doubt upon the matter, and, by inference, he took it for granted that no one else could have any either.

The jury followed the judge's lead. They never left their places. They whispered together for a few moments. Then one of them announced that they were prepared with their verdict.

"Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?"

"Guilty."

Some one told the prisoner to stand up. He stood up.

"Have you anything to say, prisoner, why sentence should not be p.r.o.nounced against you?"

The prisoner had something to say--just a word or two.

He was very white. He was clinging to the rail in front of him. His throat seemed parched. It seemed all that he could do to speak.

I noticed that his wife was looking at him with upturned face, and that her eyes were streaming with tears.

"I am innocent. I did not do it. I did not kill her. I never touched her. There is something I do not understand."

That was all he had to say--and that was not enough.

As the judge very soon made him comprehend.

He took a black thing out of a tin box which was at his side and perched it on the top of his wig, and he sentenced Tommy to be hanged; and, in sentencing him, he gave it to him hot.

He told him that instead of exhibiting any signs of remorse for the dreadful thing he had done he had just uttered an infamous lie to add to the rest of his crimes. That lie had extinguished any spark of pity which he might have felt. Tommy had been guilty of as wicked, as cruel, and as cowardly a murder as had ever come within the range of the judge's experience. He might not hope for mercy. There was no circ.u.mstance of extenuation. He had behaved more like a devil than a man. He was a disgrace to his cla.s.s and to his station, and he had brought shame upon our common manhood; and the sentence of the court was that he should be taken to the place from whence he came, and there be hanged by the neck till he was dead; and might G.o.d have mercy on his soul!

And that was the end of it--or it might have been, if it had not been for me.

I don't know how it was; I don't know whether the devil prompted me or not. But the idea came to me, all at once, with a force which was beyond my powers of resistance.

And I did it!

I dropped my cloak, I removed my veil, and I stood up where I knew that Tommy would see me. And he did see me. He looked my way, and he saw me, and he knew me too!

And I smiled at him.

And with sudden, instant recognition he stretched out his arms towards me in a kind of frenzy; and he tried to speak, or shout, or do something, but he couldn't. And before he could get a word out edgeways the warder bustled him down the stairs below.