The Right of Way | Page 6

and downcast, and he turned almost
pleadingly towards the judge. The judge pulled his long side-whiskers
nervously, and looked over his glasses in severe annoyance, then
hastily adjourned the sitting and left the bench, while the prisoner saw
with dismay his lawyer leave the court- room with not even a glance
towards him.
On the morning of the third day Charley Steele's face, for the first time,
wore an expression which, by a stretch of imagination, might be called
anxious. He also took out his monocle frequently, rubbed it with his

handkerchief, and screwed it in again, staring straight before him much
of the time. But twice he spoke to the prisoner in a low voice, and was
hurriedly answered in French as crude as his own was perfect. When he
spoke, which was at rare intervals, his voice was without feeling,
concise, insistent, unappealing. It was as though the business before
him was wholly alien to him, as though he were held there against his
will, but would go on with his task bitterly to the bitter end.
The court adjourned for an hour at noon. During this time Charley
refused to see any one, but sat alone in his office with a few biscuits
and an ominous bottle before him, till the time came for him to go back
to the court-house. Arrived there he entered by a side door, and was not
seen until the court opened once more.
For two hours and a half the crown attorney mercilessly made out his
case against the prisoner. When he sat down, people glanced meaningly
at each other, as though the last word had been said, then looked at the
prisoner, as at one already condemned.
Yet Charley Steele was to reply. He was not now the same man that
had conducted the case during the past two days and a half. Some great
change had passed over him. There was no longer abstraction,
indifference, or apparent boredom, or disdain, or distant stare. He was
human, intimate and eager, yet concentrated and impelling: he was
quietly, unnoticeably drunk.
He assured the prisoner with a glance of the eye, with a word scarce
above a whisper, as he slowly rose to make his speech for the defence.
His first words caused a new feeling in the courtroom. He was a new
presence; the personality had a changed significance. At first the public,
the jury, and the judge were curiously attracted, surprised into a fresh
interest. The voice had an insinuating quality, but it also had a
measured force, a subterranean insistence, a winning tactfulness.
Withal, a logical simplicity governed his argument. The flaneur, the
poseur--if such he was--no longer appeared. He came close to the
jurymen, leaned his hands upon the back of a chair--as it were, shut out
the public, even the judge, from his circle of interest--and talked in a

conversational tone. An air of confidence passed from him to the
amazed yet easily captivated jury; the distance between them, so gaping
during the last two days, closed suddenly up. The tension of the past
estrangement, relaxing all at once, surprised the jury into an almost
eager friendliness, as on a long voyage a sensitive traveller finds in
some exciting accident a natural introduction to an exclusive fellow-
passenger, whom he discovers as human as he had thought him
offensively distant.
Charley began by congratulating the crown attorney on his statement of
the case. He called it masterly; he said that in its presentations it was
irrefutable; as a precis of evidence purely circumstantial it was-- useful
and interesting. But, speech-making aside, and ability--and
rhetoric--aside, and even personal conviction aside, the case should
stand or fall by its total, not its comparative, soundness. Since the
evidence was purely circumstantial, there must be no flaw in its cable
of assumption, it must be logically inviolate within itself. Starting with
assumption only, there must be no straying possibilities, no loose ends
of certainty, no invading alternatives. Was this so in the case of the
man before them? They were faced by a curious situation. So far as the
trial was concerned, the prisoner himself was the only person who
could tell them who he was, what was his past, and, if he committed the
crime, what was--the motive of it: out of what spirit--of revenge, or
hatred-- the dead man had been sent to his account. Probably in the
whole history of crime there never was a more peculiar case. Even
himself the prisoner's counsel was dealing with one whose life was hid
from him previous to the day the murdered man was discovered by the
roadside. The prisoner had not sought to prove an alibi; he had done no
more than formally plead not guilty. There was no material for defence