Part 16 (1/2)
Why didn't Stephen put an end to such ill-timed jocularity? ”And Mr.
Penny had spoken to you of his--his relations with Mrs. Scofield, the woman in whose house Culser was killed. Did he refer to her on this particular evening, standing by the river's brink?” Susan replied in the negative. ”Did he seem ill at ease, worried about anything? Was he hurried in manner?”
To all of this Susan Brundon answered no, in a voice that constantly grew lower, but which never faltered, hesitated. The Mayor turned aside for a whispered consultation with the High Constable. The former nodded.
”Have you any--shall we say--proprietary interest in Mr. Penny's affairs?” Her reply was hardly audible in the room stilled for what might be revealed. ”No,” she breathed, her gloved fingers interlacing.
Jasper Penny's lips were drawn in a hard line; Stephen gazed fixedly at the floor. The Mayor gesticulated affably toward the lawyer. ”That'll do,” he declared. ”Pleasure, Mr. Penny, to have you so completely cleared. I shall have to demand your a.s.sistance further, though--knowledge of Mrs. Scofield. And, in the case of her apprehension and trial, you will, of course, be called. Communication will be made through Mr. Jannan. No doubt in our mind now of the facts.” A policeman opened the door and a surge of the curious pressed in. ”Take her away,”
Jasper Penny whispered to Jannan; ”this is d.a.m.nable.”
Susan rose, gathering up her mantle, and moved to Stephen Jannan's side.
He offered his arm with a formal courtesy, and together they made their way out through the corridor. Jasper, lost in a moody abstraction, waited until they had vanished; and then, with a lowered head, walked rapidly over Chestnut Street in the direction of the terminus of the railroad for Jaffa. A brigade of cars was made up; he took a place and was immediately dragged on and over the viaduct to the plane and waiting engine beyond. He could see, from the demeanour of the loungers on the Jaffa platform, that the news of the murder, his connection with it, had preceded him. To-morrow's papers would provide them with full accounts, the name of Susan Brundon among the maculate details.... The meanest cast boy in his works would regard him, the knowledge of Essie, with a leer.
His mother was at the main door of Myrtle Forge, pale but composed.
”Take Mr. Penny's overcoat,” she brusquely directed a servant. He had never seen a more delectable supper than the one awaiting him; and he tasted most of what found its way to his plate--he owed that to the maternal solicitude secretly regarding him, hastily masked as he met his mother's gaze. Sitting later in accustomed formality the dulness of a species of relief folded him. The minor sounds of his home, the deliberate loudness of an old clock, the minute warring of his mother's bone needles, her sister's fits of coughing, painfully restrained, soothed his harried being; subjected to an intolerable strain his overwrought nerves had suddenly relaxed; he sank back in a loose, almost somnolent, state. A mental indolence possessed him; the keen incentives of life appeared far, unimportant, his late rebellions and desires inexplicable. Even the iron was a heavy load; the necessity of constantly meeting new conditions with new processes, of uprooting month by month most with which the years had made him familiar, seemed beyond his power.
A faint dread crept into his consciousness; he roused himself sharply, straightened his shoulders, glanced about to see if his tacit surrender had been noticed--this la.s.situde creeping over him, the indifference, was, at last, the edge of the authentic shadow of age, of decay; it was the deadening of the sensibilities preceding death. He banished it immediately, and all his desire, his need, his sense of the horror of the past day, surged back, reanimated him, sent the blood strongly to its furthest confines. But, none the less, a vague, disturbing memory of the other lingered at the back of his perceptions; he had a fresh realization of the necessity for him to make haste, to take at once--before the hateful anodyne of time had betrayed his vigour--what life still, and so fully, held.
His desire for Susan increased to an intensity robbing it of a greater part of the early joy; it had, now, a fretful aspect drawing him into long and painfully minute rehearsals of his every contact with her, and of the disgraceful publicity brought upon her by his past. At the usual hour the hot wine appeared; the gla.s.sful was pressed on Amity Merken; his mother drank hers with the familiar, audible satisfaction. An old custom, an old compound, brought from Germany many years ago, binding, in its petty immortality, distant times, places, beings. He saw that his mother was noticeably less able than she had been the week before; her hands fumbled at her knitting, shook holding the gla.s.s. Her lined face quivered as she said good night. He bent and kissed a hot, dry brow, conscious of the blanched skull under her fading colour, her ebbing warmth. He had done this, too--hastened her death; she must have suffered inordinately in her prideful affection. She said nothing, beyond the repeated admonition that he must not sit up into the night.
The next day he forced himself to read to the end the report of the murder in the _Gazette_. The references to Susan Brundon were as scant as, evidently, Stephen Jannan could arrange; but her name, her Academy, were invested with an odious publicity. Jasper Penny saw again that he was a person of moment; his part in the affair gave it a greatly augmented importance. Yet now the worst, he told himself, was at an end; the publicity would recede; after a decent interval he could see Susan.
This mood was interrupted by an imperative communication from Stephen--he must be in the other's office at eleven o'clock to-morrow.
Nothing more definite was said; but Jasper Penny was not wholly surprised to see Essie Scofield huddled in a chair at the lawyer's table. She had made an attempt at the bravado of apparel, but it had evidently failed midway; her hair hung loosely about a damp brow, the strings of her bonnet were in disarray, a shawl partially hid a bodice wrongly fastened. Her face was apathetic, with leaden shadows and dark lips ceaselessly twisting, now drawn into a petulant line, now drooping in childish impotence. She glanced at him fleetly as he entered, but said nothing. Robbed of the pretensions of pride, stripped of feminine subterfuge, she was appalling. He involuntarily recalled the Essie who had swept him into a riot of emotion--a vivid and palpitating creature radiating the exuberance of careless health and youth. She could not, he calculated, be beyond thirty-seven now. He abruptly ceased his speculation, turned from her, with a feeling of impropriety. Stephen Jannan said shortly:
”Al Schimpf will be here. It seemed to me he was the best man to retain.
It's obvious that I can't defend her. You will, of course, require everything possible done.” Essie Scofield s.h.i.+vered. ”I don't want to go into court,” she articulated, ”and answer all the dreadful questions.”
There was a stir without, and a hugely fat man in a black cape fastened with a silver chain and velvet collar entered. Al Schimpf's face was so burdened with rolling chins that he disregarded the customary fas.h.i.+on of whiskers, but a grizzled moustache lay above his well-formed lips, and an imperial divided his heavy, aggressive chin. He was, evidently, fully informed of the case before him; for, after saluting Jannan and Jasper Penny, he, seated himself directly before Essie Scofield, fastening upon her an unwavering, glacial gaze.
”Now, pay attention,” he proceeded at once.
”I'll go over a few facts--this Daniel Culser, you were in love with him; no length you wouldn't go, lost your senses completely; and he--all he cared about was the money he could wring out of you. As soon as you were paid the sums that Mr. Penny allowed you, this Culser got it from you; he took every cent and wanted more. Said he would leave you unless you got hold of something really worth while. Then, of course, you carried on, promised to get him more and more; said you could force a fortune from Mr. Penny, anything to keep the young man. Hey?” he demanded suddenly.
The woman looked up with a haggard wonder, an irrepressible shudder; her hands raised and fell, and she nodded dumbly.
”Then, while Culser was in the house, Mr. Penny unexpectedly turned up and said--perhaps before Daniel himself--that you could expect nothing more, and made it plain that he was not to be intimidated. Daniel Culser was for leaving you, didn't intend to hang around for a b.l.o.o.d.y little quarterly; and, when you realized that he meant, or you thought he meant, what he said, you went crazy and shot him.... What!” He got no response from her now; she cowered away from him, hiding behind an updrawn shoulder, a fold of the shawl. ”But listen to this,” Al Schimpf shot at her, leaning forward, ”here's what happened, and you must remember every fact:
”The fellow had been around the house day after day. You had encouraged him at first; but then you got frightened; he beat you--hear that?--struck you with his fist, and threatened worse if you didn't go through old Penny's pocket for him. He even hinted at something you might do together, and then get away with a mint. Culser was at it when Mr. Penny called, and took it up when he left, at about six o'clock. He said he wanted money bad, debts were hounding him; and he was going to get it out of Penny, out of you. There's where you said you would warn Jasper Penny; and remember how he struck you, in the back, because you turned, and it hurts yet--there up by the left shoulder, the left shoulder, the left! Then, he had been drinking in your house and at a tavern, he threatened to kill you if you didn't do what he wanted. You honestly thought he'd do it, and s.n.a.t.c.hed a pistol out of a table drawer, and.... Do you understand? That's what happened, and it's all you know. Said he would kill you, apparently commenced then, and you acted in self-protection. Now, repeat that.”
She gazed at him in a trembling confusion. ”But,” she objected, ”he was only--he said. Oh! I was afraid I'd lose him.” The lawyer moved closer to her, his unwinking, grey-green eyes like slate. ”He said he'd kill you,” he reiterated; ”remember that, if you don't want to hang. He struck you; where?” After a long pause she replied haltingly, ”In the back.” Al Schimpf nodded, ”Good. And he said you both were to get away with a mint. He told you it would be easy; the old man would gladly buy silence; and, by heaven, if he didn't--”
Jasper Penny stonily watched the intolerable degradation of the woman bullied into the safety of a lie. This was worse than anything that had gone before; he fell deeper and deeper into a strangling, humiliating self-loathing. Stephen Jannan's handsome countenance was fixed and pale; one hand lay on the table, empty and still. In the silence between Schimpf's insistent periods Jasper Penny could hear Essie's sobbing inspirations; he was unable to keep his gaze from her countenance, jelly-like and robbed of every trace of human dignity. He wondered vaguely at an absence of any sense of responsibility for what Essie Scofield had become; he felt that an att.i.tude of self-accusation, of profound regret for the way they had taken together, should rest upon him; but the thought, the effort, were perfunctory, obviously insincere.
If now he had a different, perhaps deeper, sense of responsibility, he had known nothing of it in the first months of his contact with her....
A different man, he reiterated; and one as faithfully representative as he was to-day. But totally another; men changed, evolved, progressed.
Jasper Penny was convinced that it was a progression; but in a broad manner beyond all hope of his comprehension, and entirely outside dogmatic good and evil. The germ of it must have been in him from the first; his burning necessity for Susan, he told himself, had been born in him, laid dormant until, yes--it had been stirred into activity by Essie Scofield, by the revulsion which had followed that natural development.
He was suddenly conscious that Al Schimpf had ceased domineering Essie.
The lawyer swung about, facing them with an expression of commonplace satisfaction. ”It's all in fine order,” he declared. ”I want, if possible, to study our jury through a preliminary case or so. We shall, of course, surrender our client at once, without making any difficulty about moving her from one police district to another. I can produce a witness to the fact that this Culser openly said that he expected shortly to come into more money. And he had dishonoured debts all about.
You will have to appear, Mr. Penny; no way out of that, but our defence should go like a song. Now, Mrs. Scofield, I have a carriage outside.”