THE SILEHCE OF DEAN MAITLAND.

Evening Star, Issue 7188, 16 April 1887, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE SILEHCE OF DEAN MAITLAND.

[Bv Maxwell Gray.]

All Rights Reserved, CHAPTER XVII.

The Alma Lee who appeared in the witness-box was a very different being from the happy and innocent girl who rode home in Long’s waggon to the music of the bells in the grey November evening, unconscious of the complicated meshes of trouble which the Fates were weaving about the simple strand of her commonplace lot. Her experience of the bitter realities of life had added a terrible lustre to her beauty, and developed her character in an unexpected direction. It was a nature, as Lilian said, full of noble possibilities and strong for good or for evil, and in its perversion it resembled some mighty stream turned aside from its natural course, and overflowing its banks in now and disastrous ways, bringing devastation where it should have brought blessing. The shame which would have crushed slenderer and sweeter natures kindled a scornful indignation in Alma, and a sense of the cruel disproportion of her punishment to her guilt—a guilt which looked angel-faced by the side of a thousand deeper sins which daily pass not oidy unavenged, but almost as matters of course kindled a fierce resentment in her. Suffering had hardened her; she was a moral ruin ; and when she. stepped with a firm and not ungraceful carriage into the witness-box, and looked round the Court with haughty defiance, every one compared her bearing with that of the prisoner, and pronounced them a pair of impenitent evil-doers. Alma’s features had lost their youthful softness and indecision of outline; they were now like chiselled marble, firm and pure and beautiful in curve. They had indeed been chiselled into shape by tbe sharp strokes of passion and suffering and wrong —terrible sculptors, to whom the human face is as wax ready for modelling. The dark, almond-shaped, rather melancholy eyes now burned with the fire of intense resolution ; the full, rich red lips were fuller, but firmer; they met in a curve of sharpest accuracy, their former pretty wilfulness forgotten with girlhood and innocence. Her figure had expanded into a statuesque nobility, and all rustic awkwardness in her gestures was now swallowed up in the unconscious dignity of her tragic fate. Her appearance created great surprise, and a murmur of involuntary admiration stirred the Court as she entered the box, and cast her defiant glance around. It was no gentle, penitent Magdalen, as people expected, but a proud, self-reliant woman, magnificent even in ruin. The girl in the waggon said her prayers daily, hoped for heaven, and would by no means have told a lie. So she thought, for she had never endured temptation, and had never needed to practise selfrestraint in her easy, simple life, though she knew self-denial, but it was the self-denial of impulse, not principle. The woman in the witness-box still prayed—she had prayed for the death of her unborn child—out she no longer hoped for heaven. She knew that it is not for such as love man more than God, and renounce it at the bidding of another, and yet she did not repent; she knew that her brief season of evil-doing was the sweetest in her life, sweeter far than any hopes of heaven had ever been; she regretted only that it was past for ever. She was now an outcast from heaven above and from the world below, and lies were of little consequence to her. As she stood in the witness-box, one voice rang in her ears and through her heart with these words of terror: “Oh, Alma, save me, save me ! You know I never meant it!” It was almost the last voice she heard before the terrible darkness that came upon her when she felt that her hour was come, and there was no one to pity her. When at last the darkness cleared and her reason returned, that voice rang piercingly through all the chambers of her brain, awaking all the bitter misery of the past months with the added tragedy of that fatal night, and making her wish she had never been born. But nature, so inexorably just in exacting debts, is equally just in paying them, and had in reserve an unsuspected store of wealth for the unfortunate girl. When she saw the beautiful child for whose death she had prayed, a fresh spring opened within her, and she rejoiced over him with the strong passion of her nature. Once more she had something to love and live for, to deyote herself to body and soul, something entirely her own, all the more her own that he was scorned and rejected by others. Her joy in this innocent creature restored her to health

of mind and body, and deepened her old, never-dying love for the man who had long ceased to love her—the man whose imploring cry: “Oh, Alma, save me, save me!” always rang in her heart. Mr Braxton, the counsel for the prosecution, handled this his favourite witness with the utmost delicacy of his art. To have her sworn, and say: “I am Alma Lee, etc.; the deceased, Benjamin Lee, was my father. I last saw him alive on the afternoon of December 31,” was simple enough, but the difficulty was to get anything more from her. It was between four and five o’clock, she said, under the dexterous handling of Mr Braxton—a handling fiercely criticised ■by Mr Hawkshaw, and often provoking a battle-royal between the counsel, and obliging Mr Justice Manby more than once to cast his truncheon into the arena as a signal to cease fighting. She was in the wood known as Temple Copse with a friend. That friend, she admitted reluctantly at length, was her child’s father; his name could in no wise be extracted from her. “ Were you in the wood by appointment ?” from Mr Braxton. “Yes.” “ Did the tom letter produced refer to the appointment?” “ Yes.” “ Was it written by the prisoner?” Furious onslaught on the part of Mr Hawkshaw, interposition of Mr Justice Manby, and repetition of the question in a different form. “By whom was the letter produced written ?” Silence on the part of witness* At last, after delicate manipulation on -the part of Mr Braxton; “It was written by the person I met in the wood.” Sensation in Court, which was crowded, and included a few ladies of lovely feature and rich attire.

Alma continued, amid a repetition of skirmishes between the two counsel, and many rebellions against Mr Braxton on her own part, to give the following evidence : She had been standing on the spot where her father subsequently fell for some minutes wit)i the mysterious friend, who was dressed in the fatal, grey suit, and carried the stick produced in Court, He offered her money for her child’s support—a bag of gold. This she had refused many fumes, when her father appeared suddenly. 'He carried a stick —a rough and heavy staff, fresh cut from the hedge—was angry and excited, dashed the bag of gold to fhe f round, stamped on it, and ' began upraiding the voting man. Ho ordered his daughter to leave them, and she did so. She waited outside the copse, listening, and fearful that something would happen. She neard voices indistinctly, and at last sounds like men struggling. §ne turned faint, and when' she recovered a little' there was silence. She was returning to the wood, when a figure rushed towards her, bleeding in' the face, the grey suit torn and stained, and coVered with brambles and dead leaves. He said—here the witness broke down, and tvept so bitterly that she could not speak for some time—he said that ho had killed her father by an accidental blow that he had given in defending himself; that Lee had assaulted him with great violence, of which he bore the mark; and at last he entreated her to save him, “ I promised that I would never betray him,” said Alma, with calm simplicity, as she drew her black drapery round her, " and I never will.” She related further that she bade him leave the spot quickly, before her mother returned from Melbourne and met him, and that he did so ; and that she herself regained her hoine as quickly as possible,' and went to bed, being very ill, and knew and heard nothing of the . search for and discdvery of her father’s body until her partial recovery weeks later. 11 TJie eVidendO of Judkins was fuller than • that'he' gave 'at Oldport. He deposed to seeing Alma enteil the' Wood' shortly before

Everard entered it from the opposite direction, Ingram Swaynestone also witnessed to seeing her, or rather a female form which he supposed to be hers, among the hazels which bordered the copse, as he rode up the meadow before he met the grey-suited figure. Swaynestone had often seen the two together in the spring, knew that Everard visited Mrs Lee twice a day, and had seen Alma accompany him on his homeward way some distance, in earnest conversation with him. Judkins, in describing these meetings, said, in the witness-box: “ They walked slow and strolling, like people who keep company. 1 ’ All this Alma admitted. Dr Everard made her accompany him through a field or two sometimes, she said, that she might have fresh air, which, he said, she needed. He used to give her directions about her mother, and receive her account of her symptoms; he used also to ask her about plants, explain them to her, and ask her to procure him specimens. They could not say much respecting the symptoms before the woman who helped to nurse Mrs Lee, because she was indiscreet, and told all to the patient. Dr Everard had given her a book or some trifle every Christmas since she was six or seven years old. Alma was told of the peril of concealing a felony, she was threatened with committal for contempt, she was informed that she became an accessory to her father’s death after the fact if she continued to conceal the name of his murderer; but she was stubborn, trembling and turning pale at the words “ accessory after the fact.” She was further told that her oath required her not only to say whether or no the prisoner was the man who dealt the fatal blow, but to reveal the name of the actual murderer, supposing the accused to be innocent. Alma trembled more and more as her examination proceeded ; the heavy air made her giddy and faint, and the unaccustomed excitement and agitation of her terrible position confused her faculties. To the question: “Had the prisoner, on leaving the wood, the stick produced in his hand ?” she replied : “ No; he was wringing his hands,” and she made similar slips ; and, finally, to the question: “Is the man who met yen in the copse the prisoner in the dock, or some other man?” she replied, with a sob and a shudder, in words that thrilled every ear in the building, “ It is the prisoner.” When Everard heard these fatal words, he trembled so that lie seemed about to fall; the sweat of agony stood on his brow and dabbled the short, curly brown hair that he had pushed over it in the growing agitation of Alma’s evidence ; and the eyes with which he gazed upon the pale and shuddering witness had a dazed and filmy look. In one moment the real truth flashed upon him, illuminated by the lightning of Alma’s passionate glances, and the whole history arranged itself dramatically before him in its minutest details with a vivid distinctness that never more left him.

Glimpses of truth more bitter than death to believe had come upon him many a time before, only to be driven away by the scornful incredulity of a loyal and generous nature. As the evidence developed before him, these glimpses became more frequent and more difficult to combat, though the hateful suspicions were never dwelt upon ; but now, in that moment of vivid, heartpiercing revelation, every little suspicious circumstance, unnoticed at the time, rose up with magic swiftness, and fitted into its natural place in one long unbroken chain of perfectly sequent, convincing evidence. Words, gestures, accents, once regarded in such different lights, now showed clear in one lurid flame ; widely floating reminiscences, conjectures, hypotheses rushed together in a coherent whole, and an awful sense of the mystery of human iniquity caused Everard’s soul to swoon within him. A faint groan escaped him, audible, low as it was, in the startled, momentary silence of the Court. “ There is no God,” he said within himself ; there is no good, no help anywhere.” After this, the trial, which was virtually at an end, seemed to have no further Interest for him. He stood in his dreadful place like one crucified, and listened abstractedly to the further proceedings Alma’s crossexamination, Mr Braxton’s triumphant “That, my lord, closes the evidence for the prosecution,” Mr Hawkshaw’s labored and lame address, the few and feeble witnesses for the defence, and the Judge’s able and comprehensive summing up—with a listless face and a soul full of darkness.

Cyril was not in Court when Alma's examination was thus concluded. He had listened to part of it on the previous day, and then rushed away, unable to bear it. On this morning ho had felt unequal to bearing more, and a friend, seeing his condition of mental unrest, had recommended hiip to try a brisk walk, promising to tell him whac passed whenever he should return to the vicinity of the Court. Cyril wandered restlessly about, more haggard and feverish than ever, trying to brace himself to the performance of his obvious and longneglected duty, and yet, with the unreason of weak and sanguine temperaments, hoping against hope that something might still turn up to absolve him from the necessity before which every fibre of his being shuddered in mortal anguish.

The old-fashioned streets seemed to him like the architecture of dreams, and the figures hurrying to and fro had no more reality for him than the flitting phantoms of a nightmare. The blood throbbed in his temples like the piston of a steam-engine ; he wondered how his brain had borne its dreadful pressure so long. He wandered into the sweet, sunny stillness of the Close, and strove to calm himself by the peaceful suggestions and hallowed associations of the semi-monastic spot. The voices of children at play cairje harmoniously over the wall of the canon’s gardens; some quietly-dressed ladies went by; the dean issued from beneath the lovely pointed arches which formed a porch to the Deanery, and walked with a dignified quiet, free from loitering, across the sunshiny grass. Cyril looked wistfully at Ids bland, wholesome, yet delicate face, and remarked to himself on the peculiarly English combination of piety and aristocracy, which is the special note of the higher ranks of Anglican clergy, and wondered whether piety or aristocracy were the larger ingredient in the mixture so pleasing to some minds. Years afterwards he recalled these idle reflections, as people recall the trifles which belong to the critical moments of life and become stamped upon the memory along with the crises themselves. The rook§ were busy in the great leafless elms, sailing across the blue sky or clustering about the boughs with a confused, reiterated cawing, which recalled the breezy downs of homo and the white peace of boyhood. .

The massive cathedral looked solemnly peaceful in the bright, cold, spring sunshine, which made the flying buttresses and other salient points cast sharply-cut shadows on its grey surface. It seemed |o offer peace tp pyril's distracted soul, and he left the sunshine and entered the vast building, soothed for a moment by its shadowy echoing stillness. Some idea of betaking himself to' prayer possessed him, but he could not collect his thoughts, and he rose from his knees and paced the echoing aisles, looking up, as if for help, into the deep shadow of the arched roof. Some organ notes soon soared thither—a brief prelude ; then Mendelssohn’s air “If with all your hearts ye truly seek l)fe.” His fancy supplied the mellow pathos of a tenor voice to the lovely melody, and he stood beneath tho' sofid arches of the great Norman transept! wistful and hushed for a moment. “Oh that I knew where I might find Him J” he echoed. The air died away, and, after a brief pause, one of Bach’s magnificent fugues was thundered forth in complex, ever-increasing majesty, till it seemed charged with the agony and passion and exultation of some great war of young and mighty nations, full of the “ confused noise and garments rolled in blood,” which belong to the warrior's battle. The tumult echoed through all the recesses of Cyril’s being ; it gave an outlet to the stormy agitation within him. He surrendered himself to the full power of the mighty harmony, glad to lose himself, if but for a moment. But the conflict of the contrapuntal parts harmonised too well with the conflict in his soul; it was no longer a battle of the warrior, but a strife of powers, celestial and infernal,

tie covered his face with his hand, leaning against a pillar, and seemed to see countless legions of warring angels ’■ flash in glittering cohorts' over the universe, and then to hear the crash of the countercharge

of the dusky armies of hell. Now the bright-armored squadrons are driven back, and Cyril’s heart shakes within him. Is hell stronger than heaven? Shall wrong conquer right ? Michael, the Prince himself, is driven back, and the fiend, with the face of marred but never-forgotten glory, is triumphant. But no; the adamantine swords flash out again, the dazzling wings cleave the blue ether, and the vast squadrons of dusky horror are driven back—back into endless abysses of chaotic night. The angel trumpets peal out in heartstirring triumph, the music ceases, and Cyril is left alone, his cheek pressed against the chill, rough stone, and hot tears rushing down his lace. Was the angel combat for a human soul ? or was all the tumult of war only the strife within one narrow human breast ? In that case, he felt he was undone —his will was too weak; evil was too strong for him. He could find no peace, even in that holy place. He turned and paced rapidly down the long nave, and offered to a stray sightseer, in his abstraction, the striking spectacle of an ascetic-looking young clergyman wearing his hat in a cathedral.

“Young man,” said the stranger, solemnly accosting him, “ are you aware that this building is consecrated ?” Cyril flushed, and tore off his hat, murmuring some words of explanation. Then he rushed out into the sunshine, where he met bis friend, evidently with big tidings. “ Well ?” he asked, his lips growing dry with apprehension. “ Well, Maitland, I am afraid it is all up with the poor fellow. There is no doubt now; Alma Lee has confessed all.”

“ All ?” asked Cyril, steadying himself against the stone lintel of the side door. “ Yes. She was outside the copse. She heard a struggle; Everard rushed out, covered with blood, and said he had accidentally struck the fatal blow in selfdefence, and implored her to save him.” “ Everard ? Did she swear that Everard did it said Cyril, in a strained, unmusical voice.

“ Yes; she swore to him at last. Not that anyone had the slightest doubt. Poor fellow! he should have pleaded guilty. After all, what is accidental homicide in self-defence ?”

“ What, indeed ! ” returned Cyril, in the same strange voice, with an unusual look in his face.

He was silent for a while, and his friend said nothing, sympathising with his trouble. Then he pulled himself from the lintel with an effort, and walked quickly away. “ I must go to the Court at once,” he said, with quiet determination. “ I would stay away, if I were you,” said the friend, accompanying him nevertheless. “After all,” he added, with blundering attempts at consolation, “the poor fellow has not been to blame. As for that entanglement, Maitland, you must not judge it from a clerical point of view. The world smiles on these youthful follies. As a medical man in practice it would have gone against him; but then, he is not yet in practice, and every one knows that young blood is not iced. His blunder was in denying it. If he had but pleaded guilty, Manby would have let him down easily enough. Such a magnificent girl, too ! Few men but Braxton would have dragged it out of her. She looked like death when she said it. You see, she has sworn to shield him. Fancy letting that out in the witness-box ! ” “ You sec,” interrupted Cyril, suddenly—for this kind of talk was more than he could bear—“ lam a clergyman, and must look at these things from a clerical point of view.”

Cyril’s very slight evidence had not been of sufficient importance to be repeated at the trial; Lilian’s was, however, deemed important from its very feebleness and the evident -reluctance with which she gave it. Mr Braxton was so very sarcastic about her reasons for disbelieving the evidence of her senses, that even Mr Justice Manby, who was human, and touched by Lilian’s gentle and sorrowful dignity—not to speak of her youth and beauty—threw the legis of his office over her, and pronounced Mr Braxton’s observations to be irrelevant.

The other witnesses merely repeated what has already been recorded, though with more detail, and all stood cross-examination well, Mr Hawkshaw’s endeavors to show that Judkins’s suspicions of Everard were but the forgeries of jealousy, served only to fasten the imputation more deeply upon the accused. The feigned handwriting was pronounced by experts to be that of Everard, They relied greatly upon the formation of a capital T, which was made in the French ipanner. Everard smiled mournfully when he heard this. He thought of the far-otf school-time, when he and the twins had been first puzzled and then enchanted by their French teacher’s Ts. He thought of one wet afternoon, when they got a gridiron and heated it red-hot, and had a mock Masonic initiation, of which the house-dog, Rover swathed in a dressing gown, and occasionally uttering whines of remonstrance —was Grand Master. And how they vowed absurd vows, one of which was to be ever faithful to the persecuted French T. He recalled a solemn discussion at the end of the initiation as to the amount of guilt which would be incurred by either of the twins in breaking their vows. Cyril argued that neither of them could singly commit more than half a crime, and Henry replied that in that case neither ought singly to eat more than half a dinner. All this happy and guileless fooling enacted itself again in Everard’s memory while his fate was being decided in the serious strife of the barristers who pleaded for and against his innocence, and made him feel, like Francesca da Rimini in Hell, that “ there is no greater pain than remembering happy times in misery.” ( To he continued. I