Mr. Campion's Lucky Day & Other Stories (31 page)

The comfortable silence continued for some time.

It was the judge who spoke first.

“When one is very old,” he observed in that thin quiet voice of his, “sitting in the warm is perhaps the most delightful thing in life.”

His guest laughed.

“Warmth of body, warmth of mind, and the contemplation of great moments,” he said. “I don’t see how any man can ask for more. Ours was an interesting profession. I suppose we saw more of life than most men.”

“Yes,” said the old man without complacency. “I suppose we did. So much looking on makes one impersonal. For comfort of mind I think I recommend the Bench. With you, Betterley, of course, it was different.

“I always felt that when you threw that amazing energy of yours into a defence, for the moment you actually identified yourself with your client. Was that so?”

Lord Coggeshall’s heavy white lids were drawn down over his eyes. He looked, if anything, a trifle bored.

“Why, yes, I suppose I did,” he admitted at last. “One’s personal judgment is naturally biased on such occasions. The whole system of justice is absurd, of course; an imperfect formula for testing right and wrong.”

“Exactly. The set-piece battle between God and the devil,” said Mr. Justice Fordred.

His guest looked up, and the heavy eyes, which were capable of so many changes of colour, flecked for a moment with interest.

“The old beliefs are breaking up,” he said. “Who looks on good and evil as separate living entities nowadays?”

“I do,” said his host, without change of tone.

“In God, yes, perhaps, but not the devil.”

Lord Coggeshall seemed more surprised than amused and there was a flash of his old power behind his words.

“Evil itself, complete and unexplained, is surely not admitted now? Human excesses, accidents of heredity and the disasters of unintelligence cover everything, don’t they?”

The judge spoke mildly and his little old-lady appearance was intensified by the blandness of his expression.

“I don’t think so myself, but then perhaps I am unlucky. You see, I have seen the devil twice.”

Lord Coggeshall looked at him steadily. They were both men of intellect, equals, and in the circumstances it was natural that each should do the other the courtesy of a serious hearing.

“In the dock?”

“Yes.”

There was a pause, and the old judge’s lips moved ruminatively for a moment as though they tried out words.

“Of course,” he said at last, “you may wonder how I knew it was the deviI, how I came to be sure on such an extraordinary point.

“The first time I was not sure. I was impressed, startled, even a little frightened, and although the explanation which I afterwards reached did then occur to me I was loath to admit it.

“It was soon after I was made a judge: my fifth murder trial. I was on circuit, and I reached the Wembourne Assize Court to find a
cause célèbre
awaiting me. It was difficult to know why this particular case had seized the public imagination. On the face of it the facts were very ordinary.”

Lord Coggeshall looked into the round blue eyes.

“I defended, didn’t I?” he said.

“Yes, you defended. You know the man I’m talking about, so we needn’t mention his name. I may as well go through the facts, though. The accused and his wife had a small grocery business in a prosperous country town. They were wealthy, as such people measure wealth, and they were tolerably happy.

“An old woman, a maiden lady, if I remember, took lodgings with them. She had very little money, barely enough to live on, but by practising economy she was just able to live in the respectability she loved.

“Yet from the moment she came into the house the evidence showed plainly that the husband began to make the plans which afterwards cost him his life. The old woman was persuaded to invest her entire savings in the business. She did this willingly, and never at any time, it seemed, did she complain or suggest that the very meagre profits the deal showed were in any way unfair.

“Now—and this, to my mind, was the horrible part of the case—the grocer murdered the old woman after obtaining her money. He already had her money. Presumably she could cost him nothing now, save her food, and she was not unpleasant, you understand. On the contrary, she was very useful. Yet he killed her deliberately after planning the method with care and a certain amount of intelligence—the jury convicted him and l sentenced him.

“Now, that’s all there is to the story.”

He paused and regarded his guest thoughtfully.

“You remember him in court?” he inquired.

“Yes. Amazing, wasn’t he? Rather proud of himself at first. In all my interviews with him, both before and during the trial, I found him incomprehensible. Some of these fellows, you know, never realise what they’ve done until they actually get into court, but he knew.”

“Yes, he knew,” said the judge. “I remember the case revolted me and I spoke the sentence with less distaste than ever before. I can see his face now, white but perfectly controlled, rather stupid, I thought, callous, greedy perhaps, but not more marked than on a dozen or so of other faces in the court around me. What puzzled me was why. Why had he done it? It was not until I had actually given sentence and sat with the black cap on my head, looking across the flowers on my desk, that I suddenly knew.

“Actually as. the last words of the sentence left my mouth he looked at me and winked.”

“Winked?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Justice Fordred solemnly. “He winked. It’s no good, Betterley, I can’t explain it to you, but it was like no other sign I have ever seen on a man’s face. First there was a kind of smirking, secret smile, and then came the wink.

“I’ve never told this to anyone before. It takes a person in one’s own profession to whom to make such an extraordinary confession. Forgive me if I tell you that it was a desire to make this confession which prompted me to ask you here tonight.

“Of course I explained it to myself at the time as a nervous affliction, something physical, and yet I knew that I was deceiving myself, for I assure you, Betterley, that no words of mine can describe quite that smirk, quite that incongruous, utterly incomprehensible wink. That was the first time I saw the devil.

‘The second time,” continued the judge, “was very different. It was many years later. You were in court again, I remember.

“The second time, I say, was more curious, because the whole thing was even more incomprehensible than the first.”

Lord Coggeshall looked up.

‘You mean the Stanton wife murder?”

‘Yes. How did you know?”

The other man shrugged his shoulders.

“Intuition. Go on.”

“The defence, which you conducted so ably, was one of insanity, if I remember rightly,” said Mr. Justice Fordred. “Stanton was a gentleman. He had a big country house, a wife who adored him. They had two young children and there was no record of any quarrel they had ever had.

“And yet he killed his wife. Strangled her, if you remember, slowly and systematically.

“You had a fine array of expert witnesses, I remember. But so had the prosecution, and the court spent several days listening to doctors arguing.

“In the end, in spite of your oratory, and, if I may say so, the most brilliant defence a man ever had, the jury retired, and after only some twenty minutes or so Stanton was brought back into the dock to receive sentence of death.”

Mr. Justice Fordred, unfolded his smooth hands and leant forward a little in his high-backed chair.

“I was much perturbed in my own mind about the verdict. The facts of the case and the man who stood before me did not seem to tally. The facts told the story of a maniac. The man was sane.

“I have always tried to guard myself from the most dangerous of all emotions, that blinding, unreasoning pity which dulls the working of the brain like a drug, and yet I was sorry for the man. He looked so young, so obviously shaken by the ordeal through which he was passing. But my duty was clearly indicated, and I began those terrible words, the thought of which even now makes me feel physically sick.

“It was not until I had reached the final sentence, the brutal and disgusting truth stated so baldly that the meanest intelligence may grasp it, that the thing I never expected to see again happened.

“Across the face of the boy—for he was a good thirty years younger than myself, and I have always in my mind considered him that—there passed an incredible change. At first I thought my eyes were deceiving me and that my age was playing me tricks. But across that white, agonised face there passed that sneering, smirking smile which I had seen only once before, and then he winked.

“I remember very little that happened in the next two or three minutes. The Press, I know, reported that the judge seemed much overcome. It was a horrible experience—horrible, and yet enlightening.

“That was the second time I saw the devil.”

The quiet voice stopped, and the silence in the little room was no longer comfortable. The light of the candles seemed less mellow, less friendly, the silver seemed to have lost its gleam, and the cigar on the judge’s plate had burned down to the butt and smelt acrid and unpleasant.

It had also turned a little cold.

Lord Coggeshall moved his head, so that his great handsome face, with its deep lines and heavily lidded eyes, was directly towards the older man.

“Yes,” he said, “very interesting. You had found him out, you see.”

And then across the handsome face, so well known to the whole populace of the proudest race in the world, there formed the beginnings of a faint, secretive smile.

It grew and vanished. Then one of the thick white lids descended slowly over a dark eye.

The little judge sat very still. In his austerity he seemed to have grown in magnitude and importance. His fine hands quivered, but they were not clenched. He sighed, sharply, decisively.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, Betterley, that’s what I wanted to know.”