Chapter 21: The Verdict

The carriage rolled out of Paddington into the familiar London streets. The gaiety of summer clothed the city. High white clouds sailed in a sea of blue, houses were gay with window flowers, women in bright clothing, themselves like flowers, gave colour to the streets. In Oxford Street flags were flying, the signals of a recent victory in Africa. There was an indescribable sense of resurrection in the air, as if not alone the earth, but the hearts of men and women had won release from some deep grave of fear. Arthur watched the scene with dull, unseeing eyes; and to his morbid sensitiveness it seemed as though London laughed in mockery of his grief.

Vickars sat beside him in silence; Bundy watched the two anxiously, his eyes full of tears. He wished to say something comforting; and from time to time made some casual remark, but uttered it hesitatingly, with an apologetic smile. It was precisely like the action of a good friendly dog, who lays his warm head on his master’s unresponsive hand, and watches him with wistful eyes, delicately fearful of intrusion on a grief he cannot comprehend. It was evident, however, that Bundy had something which he really wished to say, and at last it came.

“You’ll be wondering, after what I said to you in New York, why I haven’t helped your father?”

“No. I’ve never thought about it, except to know you would be as good as your word.”

“And so I would have been. But——”

“You needn’t explain. There is too much love between us for that.”

“But I must. And I would rather do it at once and get it over. Your father refused all help. You, know his pride, and he’s prouder now than ever he was. One might almost suppose it pleased him to stand alone, to fight with his back to the wall, to defy the world to do its worst on him. And I believe that is what he really does feel.”

“I think I can understand.”

“Then you’ll understand why I could not help him, why no one could. I offered him anything he liked to ask, and this is what he said: ‘No, Bundy; I’ve brewed the cup, and I’ll drink it. I don’t want any sugar in it. No one shall ever say that Archibold Masterman was a coward.’ That was what he said to me, and he said it like a fallen emperor. It was foolish, but there was something great in it too. I felt that it was great.”

“I think so too.”

“It was great.” The phrase was a portrait—vital, indubitable, convincing. During all these miserable days and nights Arthur had laboured to fashion some portrait of his father. He had seen him bent, shame-stricken, prematurely aged; had imagined him leaning on his young strength for succour, acknowledging his errors, voluble in explanation, perhaps fierce in accusation of those who had failed him or betrayed him; had, in fact, seen him in every attitude but the real one; and now, as though a curtain lifted, he saw his father painted at a touch, with an instinctive penetration, an absolute veracity. He was a fighter, and would fight to the last. His pride fed upon defeat. Calamity had given him nerves of steel. He would drink the cup that he had brewed, and drink it with a smile. “No sugar”—that phrase said everything. Pity, sympathy, help, consolation—he was above them, beyond them, indifferent to them; a man who bared his breast to the flight of arrows, thrust his hand in the flame without a shudder, challenged the thunderbolt, upheld while the flame consumed him by a scorn more potent than his anguish. Yes, it was great—a Promethean greatness, which defies the heart-eating vulture. He might have known so much, if he had thought about it. In a sense, he had always known it, for he had always, even as a boy, felt the element of greatness in his father. But now, for the first time, he really measured it, and his heart quailed before it, foreseeing elements in this imminent meeting with his father which he had not so much as guessed.

They had driven fast. The carriage passed rapidly by the old Church of St. Sepulchre, and under the walls of Newgate, stopping at last at the mean, insignificant doors of the Old Bailey.

The pavements were thronged. From the court a great crowd was pouring out. And already, from the neighbouring newspaper offices, men and boys were racing breathlessly, shouting “Verdict!” Above the clamour of the street the shrill cry rose, “Verdict! Verdict!”

Bundy leapt from the carriage, and plunged into the throng. He came back a moment later, waving an evening paper.

“What is it?”

“Scales five years; Masterman acquitted!”

“Thank God!”

And then the tension broke. Arthur found himself sobbing, with the arm of Vickars round his neck.

“Take me to my father at once,” he said. “I wish to go home with him.”

“Very well,” said Bundy. “Wait here till I find him.”

The crowd rapidly thinned, till, in a few moments, where a roaring torrent of life had run, but an insignificant ripple flowed and eddied. The tragic bubble, so long watched by thousands of eager eyes, had burst; it was a thing of the past, to be speedily forgotten. The carriage moved unimpeded now to the doors of the court. A few stragglers still hung around, in the hope of seeing once more the protagonists in the finished drama.

A long black van with a grated door at the back drew up against the curb. Two policemen came out of the court-house, looked warily up and down the street, and disappeared again. The man who drove the van nodded to them, and went on reading his evening paper.

The policemen reappeared, with a man walking between them. The man’s head was bowed, his coat-collar turned up, his hat drawn down over his eyes.

Arthur had a brief glimpse of a face yellow as wax, a pair of shifty, bloodshot eyes, and he shuddered. It was Scales. The door of the van closed, and, through the barred window, that yellow, awful face looked out, in a last glimpse at liberty. A long, terrible look, gathering up and flashing to the memory things that would be seen no more, unforgetable things that would become the torture of sleep and dreams, little things, such as sunlight flashing on a pool of water, sparrows in the gutter, a broken flower lying in the road, a girl’s languorous face turned toward her lover, a beggar gazing into the window of a cook-shop—and then the lids fell upon the bloodshot eyes, and the van rolled away.

“And that might have been my father,” thought Arthur. And with the thought came a pang of pity for the man in the black van. Not a good man, not even a lovable man; without grace, without charm, inherently mean-natured—yet, were he a thousandfold worse than he was, to be pitied as a creature going to the torture. And, after all, who should judge even a Scales with justice, who declare how far he was a victim of the evil system which had inflamed his avarice—the victim, too, perhaps of some potency of evil in his own blood, some ghostly hand stretched out of the illimitable past, from whose predestined clutch he could not escape? Ah, God! who should judge?