Part 33 (2/2)
Louisa tried to understand and could not. She watched him, not caring whether the empty-headed fools who sat all round saw her watching him or not.
When the coroner asked the hall porter about the stick and the man gave his reply, Luke turned and met Louisa's fixed gaze. The marble-like stillness of his face remained unchanged, only the eyes seemed as if they darkened visibly. At least to her it seemed as if a velvety shadow crept over them, an inscrutable, an un-understandable shadow, and the rims a.s.sumed a purple hue.
It was her fancy of course. But Luke's eyes were naturally bright, of varying tones of gray, blue, or green, with never a shadow beneath them. Now they appeared cavernous and dark, and again as he met her gaze, that swift flash of intense misery.
No longer had she the feeling that she was living in a dream, no longer that this was a theatre wherein she and Luke and the dead man were puppets dancing and squirming for the benefit of shallow-hearted dolts. That sense of unreality left her together with the hysterical desire to laugh which had plagued her so in the earlier part of the proceedings. On the contrary, now an overwhelming feeling of intense reality oppressed her, so that she could have screamed with the awful soul agony which the sight of Luke's misery had caused her.
All her nerves were on the rack, her every faculty concentrated on the one supreme desire to understand and to know.
Love, the omnipotent, had encountered an enemy--grim, unexplained Mystery--and he sat pondering, almost cowed by this first check to his supreme might. Louisa had sought and compelled Luke's gaze, and Love had gleamed in one great flash out of her eyes. Yesterday, at her glance, he had knelt at her feet and buried his sorrow with his aching head in the scented palm of the dearly loved hand.
To-day the look of Love brought but a surfeit of misery, an additional load of sorrow. The eyes in response remained tearless and hard and circled with the dark rings of utter hopelessness.
I'll grant you that if Louisa Harris had been an extraordinary woman, a woman endowed with a wonderfully complex, wonderfully pa.s.sionate, or wonderfully emotional nature--if, in fact, she had been the true product of this century's morbid modernity--she would, whilst admitting Luke's guilt, have burned with a pa.s.sion of self-sacrifice, pining to stand beside him pilloried in the dock, and looking forward to a veritable world of idealistic realism in the form of a picturesque suicide, after seeing the black flag hoisted over Newgate prison.
But Louisa, though a modern product of an ultra-modern world, was an absolutely ordinary woman--just a commonplace, sensible creature who thought and felt in a straight and essentially wholesome manner.
Though she had read Tolstoi and Dostoyefsky and every Scandinavian and Russian crack-brain who has ever tried to make wrong seem right, black appear white, and animalism masquerade as love, yet she had never been led away from her own clean outlook on life.
She loved Luke and would have given--did in fact give--her whole life to him: but she loved him without a.n.a.lysis or thought of self. It never entered her mind at this moment to wonder if he were guilty or not guilty, if he was capable or not of committing a crime to gain his own ends. All that troubled her was his misery, which she would have given her very soul to alleviate, and the hopelessness in him which she had given the world to console.
The mystery troubled her, not the sin: the marble-like rigidity of his face, not the possibility of the crime.
For the moment, however, she was brought back quickly enough to present realities. The coroner--satisfied with Frederick Power's answers--was giving him a moment's breathing s.p.a.ce. The grating of fountain pens against paper was heard from that corner of the room where sat the journalists: the crowd waited silent and expectant, for--unversed though most people there present were in proceedings of this kind--yet instinctively every one felt that one great crucial moment was just about to come; one great, leading question was just about to be put.
The coroner had fingered the papers before him for the s.p.a.ce of a few seconds, then he looked up once more at the witness, his elbow resting on the table, his fleshy chin buried in his hand, in an att.i.tude which obviously was habitual to him.
”This visitor,” he said speaking loudly and clearly, ”who called the night before last at the Veterans' Club and had an interview with the deceased, you saw him well, of course?”
”Yes, sir,” was the prompt reply.
”You would know him again?”
”Certainly, sir.”
”Looking round this room now, should you say that he was present?”
The man looked across the room straight at Luke and said pointing to him:
”Yes, sir; the gentleman sitting there, sir.”
As every one had expected the reply, no one seemed astonished. The many pairs of eyes that turned on Luke now expressed a certain measure of horrified compa.s.sion, such as might be bestowed on some dangerous animal brought to earth by a well-aimed gun shot.
The coroner made no comment. He turned to the jury, glancing along either row of solemn faces, on both sides of the long table. Then he said:
”Would any of you gentlemen like to ask this witness a question?”
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