Paul Ralston

All of Sunday Mr. and Mrs. Ralston spent with Paul, who was calmer than either of his parents.

“I think my bones must have contracted some of Miss Hansford’s prophetic nature,” he said to his mother, “for I feel it in them that something will turn up in my favor,—the right man appear, perhaps, at the last and own up.”

His mother tried to smile, but her heart was heavy with fear of what the result might be. Her husband had employed the very best talent in Boston, while the prosecution was rather lame in experience at least. But it had an unbroken chain of evidence, beginning with the quarrel at the hotel and ending with the revolver and the story Elithe would tell. Popularity and a good name could scarcely stem that tide, and when at parting she brushed his brown hair from his forehead, she thought with a shudder of the shears which would soon cut that soft hair short and of the prison garb which would disfigure her son’s manly form, if he escaped——. There was a gurgling sound in her throat when she got so far, and the tight clasp around Paul’s neck, as she whispered “Good-bye, my boy, good-bye,” was like a mother’s farewell to her dead child. She would see him on the morrow, it was true, first for a few moments in the jail, and then in the Court House, a prisoner arraigned on trial for his life, and she would almost rather he had died a baby in her arms than see him there.

“Come, Fanny, come,” the judge said, unwinding her arms from Paul’s neck and gently pushing her towards the door.

When his parents were gone Paul threw himself upon his bed and sobbed so loud that the jailer’s wife heard him in the hall outside and cried herself for the unhappy man. Tom came before long, cheerful as usual, but for once his cheerfulness failed in its effect.

“Don’t, Tom,” Paul said, “don’t try to rouse hopes which can not be fulfilled, and don’t think me weak if I cry. I shall be braver to-morrow and face it like a man.”

They were both crying now,—Paul and Tom, who had broken down for the first time and gave way so utterly that it was Paul’s task to comfort and soothe.

“Let me cry a bit, and don’t touch me,” Tom said, shaking off Paul’s hands; then regaining his composure he continued: “We were boys together, Mr. Paul, you the master, I the servant, but you never made me feel that, and now misfortune has brought us very close together, so close that—would you mind if—if—I kissed you as your mother did? I should like to remember it when—.” Tom finished the sentence in his own mind one way, and Paul another as like two girls they kissed each other and said good-bye.

Then Paul was really alone through the longest night he had ever known and which seemed the shortest when it was over and daylight looked through the window. He did not go to bed, but sat the whole night through, thinking of what was before him, and feeling sure that he did not reach the reality or know how it would feel to confront his friends and acquaintances and strangers and the rabble, men and women,—more women than men,—who would come to see him and hear him tried for his life. He was glad Clarice was not to be there. All his tenderness for her was in full force; her selfish letter was forgotten, her faults condoned, and she was only the girl he loved and had hoped to make his wife. He would have been glad to have seen her once and heard her say she loved him still, but he felt no hardness towards her because she had kept aloof from him. She couldn’t come, he said, and then he thought of Elithe and his heart gave a sudden throb of something inexplicable to himself. She would be in the courtroom and he was sorry to have her see him humiliated and charged with murder, and sorry for her that she must testify against him. He didn’t blame her. He didn’t blame anybody, although there came into his mind the thought “Why has God allowed this when he knows I am innocent.” He knew prayers had been offered for him in all the churches, for Tom had told him so and during the dark days of his incarceration he had prayed himself as he had never done before. God had not answered and he was still a prisoner, and the day was breaking over the sea, a glorious September day such as he had seen and revelled in many a time in the old life gone forever, for if he were freed it could never be quite the same again. A man, however innocent he might be, who had been tried for his life, could not hold his head as he had held it before.

“I must stoop always,” he said. “I find myself doing it now when I walk. Tom and I used to be just of a height. Now I am the shorter. I noticed it last night when we stood together before the glass.”

It was a little change to think of this and wonder at it, but the pain came back again when he heard some one outside of the building say to another, “Fine day for the trial. The town will be full. They say there isn’t standing room now at the hotels.”

Paul stopped his ears lest he should hear more. The town was already full and would be fuller of people come to see him,—Paul Ralston,—once the head of everything, and now brought so low that when he left the jail it would be under an official escort and on his way to the prisoner’s dock accused of murder. The sun was now up and he could hear the stir of life in the street and on the water where row boats were passing, full of people, who had come from Johnstown a few miles up the coast to be on hand when the doors of the Court House were opened. He guessed their object and stopped his ears again to shut out the sound of their voices, which rang as cheerfully as if they were going to his bridal. Once he thought of Clarice. Was she thinking of him in that dread hour? Was she praying for him? He believed so, and bowing his head he prayed for her that God would give her strength to keep up under the strain of that day. Mrs. Stevens was bringing his breakfast, but he turned from it with loathing. Then as he saw the look of disappointment on her face he tried the coffee and the steak, telling her both were excellent, and adding with a smile, “They say criminals eat heartily the very morning before they are hung. I am a criminal in the eyes of the world, but I am not to be hung to-day, and I can’t eat. You are so kind; you always have been. Father will not forget it when I am gone.”

An hour later his father and mother came in, the latter so weak that she could scarcely walk. All night at intervals she had been upon her knees, praying for her boy, and when her husband bade her take some rest she answered, “If Paul were dying in my arms I could not rest, and I feel as if he were dying to us. To-morrow and next day will tell the story. We have done all we can do. Only God can help us now.”

When morning came her strength was nearly gone and she was lifted half fainting into the carriage which took her to the jail through the streets full of people hurrying to the Court House.

“Oh, see them, going to look at Paul,” she said to the judge, who was scarcely less affected than herself.

Tom, who drove them, scowled defiantly at the crowd, a few of whom were nearly knocked down by the spirited horses he did not try to check.

“Careful, Tom, careful. You’ll run over some of them,” the judge said to him.

“Ought to be run over,” was Tom’s reply, as he went dashing along, until the jail was reached.

There was not much time to wait, for the hour was near and Paul must be on hand. Tom had brought him a fresh suit of clothes the day before and he had put them on before his mother came, and except for his face and stooping figure looked a fashionably dressed young man when he stood up to meet her. She was so crushed and helpless and leaned so heavily on him that he felt at once the necessity of bracing himself if he would not have her fainting in his arms.

“Don’t, mother, don’t. It isn’t so very hard; there’ll be some way out of it, and it makes me worse to see you so bad,” he said to her, and with a great effort the little mother nerved herself to calmness.

Max Allen, the constable, was there by virtue of his office, shaking so he could hardly speak.

“I don’t want to go with you, but it’s the law which must be vin-di-cat-ed,” he said to Paul, who answered cheerfully, “All right, Max, I understand, and as long as I am not handcuffed I shan’t mind.”

“Handcuffed,” Max repeated. “I’d like to see ’em make me do that. No, sir! You are going to court like a gentleman in your father’s carriage. I wish to gracious I could walk, as I or’to, but I can’t. You are to go on the back seat with Mrs. Ralston, I in the front with the judge.”

This was the arrangement, and when all was ready the jailer unlocked the door and Paul stepped out into the brightness and freshness of the morning, but before he had time to look about him he was met and nearly knocked down by Sherry. They had forgotten to shut him up and he had followed the carriage to the jail, where, while the judge and Mrs. Ralston were inside, he sniffed under the window and scratched upon the door with low whines of eagerness and delight as if he knew his master were there. The moment Paul appeared there was a roar of joy, and Sherry’s paws were on Paul’s shoulders and his shaggy head was lain first on one side of his neck and then on the other.

“Good Sherry, are you glad to see me?” Paul said, caressing the dog and with some difficulty removing his paws from his neck. “Get down, old fellow, get down, I’ve no time for you now.”

Sherry got down, but crouched at Paul’s feet, wagging his tail with short barks and occasionally leaping up again towards his face. Paul kept his hand upon him, while he inhaled the pure salt air in long breaths and looked about him as if the place were new. To his right was the sea, dotted with sails afar in the horizon,—nearer the shore a boat was coming as fast as steam could bring it, its lower deck black with passengers, who, afraid of being late, were crowding to the front in order to be among the first to land. To the south, over the roofs of other buildings, he could see the cupola of his father’s house, and he winked hard to keep back the tears choking him as he thought he might never enter that house again. He could not see Mrs. Percy’s cottage, nor Miss Hansford’s, but he knew where they were and his eyes wandered from one locality to the other and then went on to the Court House half a mile away and on the same wide street with the jail. He could see the people hurrying there before he entered the carriage and after he was in it and out of the jail yard he could see them more distinctly lining the way and reminding him of ants when their nest is disturbed. All turned their heads to look as the carriage drove by with Sherry in attendance trotting on the side where Paul was sitting and sometimes springing up to see that his master was there. Many lifted their hats, and the piping voice of a little child grasping its mother’s dress called out, “Mam-ma, which is him!”

Paul heard it and laughed. “It’s quite an ovation, isn’t it,” he said to his mother, who could not answer. It was dreadful to her, and she was glad when they reached the Court House and were for a little time alone in the anteroom to which Paul was taken. The Court House was a large one for the size of the town and comparatively new. Mr. Ralston’s money had helped to build it. Indeed, he had given more towards its erection than any one else, and now his son was to be tried in it. Every available seat was taken before the session opened. A great many people had left the Island,—some to avoid being subœnaed, others because business called them home, but their places had been filled and the hotels and boarding houses were doing a thriving business. They were empty this morning. The guests were all at the court house, waiting the appearance of the prisoner. Judge Ralston had taken his seat near where Paul would sit. Beside him was his wife, white and corpse-like. Miss Hansford sat not far away,—with fire in her eyes as they rested on the sea of heads there to look at Paul, and Elithe, who sat beside her, with a blue veil over her hat effectually hiding her face from the eyes bent upon her. There were many rumors in circulation concerning the young girl, who was nearly as much talked of as Paul. That Jack Percy had been in love with her and known to her as Mr. Pennington, until she saw him dying, everybody knew, while many believed that she had been engaged to him, for hadn’t the papers said so? That she was to be the principal witness against Paul was generally understood and great was the anxiety to see her.

“That’s she, with the blue veil, sitting by that cross-looking old woman,” was buzzed about, and many were the wishes expressed that she would remove her veil. She would have to do it when called to the stand, and with that reflection the crowd consoled themselves and waited for Paul, who would not be veiled.

He came at last, walking unsteadily to his seat, with that stoop in his shoulders which had come upon him in prison. He was very pale and thin, with dark rings around his eyes, which for a few minutes he kept upon the floor as if he could not meet the hundreds of eyes watching him and compelling him at last to look up. He had tried to prepare himself for it, and thought he had done so, but, at the sight of so many people,—friends, acquaintances and strangers,—some in the rear of the house, with opera glasses, as if at a play, he felt his strength leaving him, and was more dead than alive when told to stand up and asked if he were guilty. Stumbling to his feet, he answered, “Not guilty,” the words ringing through the room and seeming to come back to him from every corner and every face in front of him. He was very much alive now. The numb feeling which had come over him at first was gone, and it seemed to him his head must burst with the pressure on it. He thought of the band of which Elithe had written and fancied there was a similar one across his forehead and the back of his head,—burning, boring, blinding, and making him lift his hand to loosen it, if possible, or take it away. Just where it pressed so hard was torture. Below it everything was clear, and, without apparent effort, he knew where his father sat, with his mother beside him, her face turned toward him with ineffable love and pity. She believed him wholly innocent,—so did his father, so did Tom, these three and no more. All the rest believed it accidental shooting, and that he was telling lies. This thought hardened him for a moment, and the glance with which he swept the house had in it something like reproach and a sense of injustice. This, however, changed as he met only looks of pity and sympathy, with here and there smiles of recognition. He saw Miss Hansford and Elithe and was glad the latter was veiled, feeling instinctively that, next to himself, she was the one most looked at. He was glad Clarice was not there, but up to the last minute he had hoped she would send him some word of comfort on this day which was to try his soul. But she had not. “She does not care as I thought she would, and she was to have been my wife,” kept repeating itself over and over in his mind during the preliminaries of the trial, which were rather long and tiresome.

There was not much heart in the prosecution, and the opening of the prosecuting attorney showed it. He told what he expected to prove, but indulged in no bursts of eloquence or sarcasm such as frequently mark the openings of similar trials. The jury, drawn with great difficulty, listened rather apathetically, and the audience impatiently, and Paul scarcely at all at first. He was looking at Elithe, trying to get a glimpse of her face, thinking again of the band around her head and wondering if it were as wide and hot as the one round his, benumbing him so that, for a second time, he did not realize where he was or why he was there, until Sherry came rushing in.

Generally, he staid quietly with the horses, and he had kept near them now for a while. Then, as if scenting danger to his master, he went to the Court House, pushed his way into the room, looked around for an instant until he saw Paul. With a bound, he was at his side, uttering cries more like human sounds than those of a canine, as he again put his paws on Paul’s shoulders and looked in his face. There was a stir among the people, which Sherry evidently did not like, for he turned his head from side to side in a threatening kind of way.

“Somebody remove that dog,” the judge said, sternly,—a command more easily given than obeyed.

Sherry refused to be removed and growled savagely at the attendant who tried to get him out. He took his paws from Paul’s neck, and, stretching himself at full length upon the floor, looked as if he meant to stay there.

“Quiet, Sherry!” Paul said, in a low tone, as the dog continued to growl and show his teeth.

In an instant Sherry was quiet and dropped his head between his paws. There was a brief consultation between judge and attorney, with the result that Sherry was permitted to remain as long as he behaved. He seemed to understand the decision, and, with one loud whack of his tail and one uplifting of his eyes to Paul, lay perfectly still while the trial progressed.

The first witness was the clerk at the Harbor Hotel, who had seen Jack when he came. The second, the clerk at the Beach Hotel, where Jack had spent the night. What their testimony had to do with the matter no one could tell. Miss Hansford mentally called the attorney a fool for intruding such matters. She was anxious to get on. So were the spectators, and when the clerks were dismissed they straightened up with new courage and waited for what was to come next. Those who had witnessed the quarrel and knockdown at the hotel were called, their testimony all leaning towards Paul, who, now that his name was used so often, began to listen to what was said and to live it all over again,—hearing Jack’s insulting words, feeling the heavy blow which felled him and involuntarily putting his hand to his side, which was not well yet from the force of Jack’s fist. The boy who had seen him on the sands and heard him say, “I’d like to kill him!” told a straightforward story and identified Paul as the man. The ladies who had been at the Percy cottage when Paul came there testified very unwillingly to the state of high excitement he was in when he left them to find Jack. Miss Hansford’s lodgers, who had been brought from Boston for the trial, took the stand one by one and told of seeing him and speaking to him as he passed the steps on which they were sitting twenty minutes or half an hour before the shot was fired. He was looking for Jack and had asked if they had seen him pass that way.

Up to this point, everything that Paul heard was strictly true and just as he remembered it. He would have sworn to it himself had they asked him to do so. But when Seth Walker, the man who had found the revolver with his initials upon it, came forward, he listened with a different interest, and as Seth described his meeting with Miss Hansford and her agitation as she demanded it of him and hid it under her apron, the confusion in his head increased and there was a buzzing in his brain like the sound of machinery in motion. Here was something he could not understand. The revolver was a mystery which he could not explain.

“It’s mine; but I have no idea how it came there in the woods,” he said, when it was shown to him, and, returning it to the attorney, he sank into his seat with a feeling that it was going hard with the poor wretch being tried for his life.

He was not the wretch. The buzzing in his head had separated him from that man for whom there was scarcely a ghost of a chance, and he began to pity him and to look around to see where he was. He could not find him, but his eyes fell upon Miss Hansford, who had relaxed from her stiff, upright position, and settled down in her chair until she was not much taller than Elithe, sitting beside her. Elithe had not moved perceptibly and might have been asleep, she was so motionless, until Paul said, “It is mine, but I have no idea how it came there in the woods.” Then she clutched at her veil, as if it smothered her. There was something in his voice so sad that her heart ached with a fresh pain and she used all her self-control not to cry out. Very gently, as we touch a sick, restless child, Miss Hansford put her hand on Elithe, who grew quiet again and resumed her former attitude.

It was expected that Miss Hansford would follow Seth Walker, who found the revolver, but it was growing late, and the judge thought it best to adjourn until the day following, when Miss Hansford and Elithe would be put upon the stand and with their testimony and that of the physicians called to attend Jack the prosecution would close. There had been some sharp cross-questioning for the defense, but it had failed to shake the evidence of the witness sworn, and not much had been accomplished either way. As the black mass of human beings surged out of the house, many murmurs of disappointment were heard. They had seen Paul and seen Elithe through her blue veil, but they wanted more than that,—wanted to see her on the stand, and Miss Hansford, too. This would come to-morrow, and, with this to anticipate, they went their different ways, talking of nothing but the trial and the seeming impossibility that Paul could be cleared. He was driven back to jail in his father’s carriage, very quiet and thoughtful and a great deal mystified with all he had heard and seen. His brain was still affected by the pain in his forehead and the back of his neck, and he could not understand clearly what it was all about or why he was conducted to prison, with Max Allen in attendance, instead of that other man who had shot Jack Percy. His father noticed his peculiar state of mind and feared for his reason.

“Better so, perhaps, than something worse. They don’t hang crazy people, or send them to State’s prison, either,” he thought, and, with this grain of comfort, he bade Paul good-night.