After Dark - Wilkie Collins (affordable ebook reader .txt) 📗

at the bar with me.” His voice grew less steady, and, for the first time, his color began to change, as Rose lifted her face from his shoulder and looked up at him eagerly. “I implore the tribunal to consider my sister as innocent of all active participation in what is charged against me as a crime—” He went on. “Having spoken with candor about myself, I have some claim to be believed when I speak of her; when I assert that she neither did help me nor could help me. If there be blame, it is mine only; if punishment, it is I alone who should suffer.”

He stopped suddenly, and grew confused. It was easy to guard himself from the peril of looking at Rose, but he could not escape the hard trial to his self-possession of hearing her, if she spoke. Just as he pronounced the last sentence, she raised her face again from his shoulder, and eagerly whispered to him:

“No, no, Louis! Not that sacrifice, after all the others—not that, though you should force me into speaking to them myself!”

She abruptly quitted her hold of him, and fronted the whole court in an instant. The railing in front of her shook with the quivering of her arms and hands as she held by it to support herself! Her hair lay tangled on her shoulders; her face had assumed a strange fixedness; her gentle blue eyes, so soft and tender at all other times, were lit up wildly. A low hum of murmured curiosity and admiration broke from the women of the audience. Some rose eagerly from the benches; others cried:

“Listen, listen! she is going to speak!”

She did speak. Silvery and pure the sweet voice, sweeter than ever in sadness, stole its way through the gross sounds—through the coarse humming and the hissing whispers.

“My lord the president,” began the poor girl firmly. Her next words were drowned in a volley of hisses from the women.

“Ah! aristocrat, aristocrat! None of your accursed titles here!” was their shrill cry at her. She fronted that cry, she fronted the fierce gestures which accompanied it, with the steady light still in her eyes, with the strange rigidity still fastened on her face. She would have spoken again through the uproar and execration, but her brother’s voice overpowered her.

“Citizen president,” he cried, “I have not concluded. I demand leave to complete my confession. I implore the tribunal to attach no importance to what my sister says. The trouble and terror of this day have shaken her intellects. She is not responsible for her words—I assert it solemnly, in the face of the whole court!”

The blood flew up into his white face as he made the asseveration. Even at that supreme moment the great heart of the man reproached him for yielding himself to a deception, though the motive of it was to save his sister’s life.

“Let her speak! let her speak!” exclaimed the women, as Rose, without moving, without looking at her brother, without seeming even to have heard what he said, made a second attempt to address her judges, in spite of Trudaine’s interposition.

“Silence!” shouted the man with the bludgeon. “Silence, you women! the citizen president is going to speak.”

“The prisoner Trudaine has the ear of the court,” said the president, “and may continue his confession. If the female prisoner wishes to speak, she may be heard afterward. I enjoin both the accused persons to make short work of it with their addresses to me, or they will make their case worse instead of better. I command silence among the audience, and if I am not obeyed, I will clear the hall. Now, prisoner Trudaine, I invite you to proceed. No more about your sister; let her speak for herself. Your business and ours is with the man and woman Dubois. Are you, or are you not, ready to tell the court who they are?”

“I repeat that I am ready,” answered Trudaine. “The citizen Dubois is a servant. The woman Dubois is the mother of the man who denounces me—Superintendent Danville.”

A low, murmuring, rushing sound of hundreds of exclaiming voices, all speaking, half-suppressedly, at the same moment, followed the delivery of the answer. No officer of the court attempted to control the outburst of astonishment. The infection of it spread to the persons on the platform, to the crier himself, to the judges of the tribunal, lounging, but the moment before, so carelessly silent in their chairs. When the noise was at length quelled, it was subdued in the most instantaneous manner by one man, who shouted from the throng behind the president’s chair:

“Clear the way there! Superintendent Danville is taken ill!”

A vehement whispering and contending of many voices interrupting each other, followed; then a swaying among the assembly of official people; then a great stillness; then the sudden appearance of Danville, alone, at the table.

The look of him, as he turned his ghastly face toward the audience, silenced and steadied them in an instant, just as they were on the point of falling into fresh confusion. Every one stretched forward eagerly to hear what he would say. His lips moved; but the few words that fell from them were inaudible, except to the persons who happened to be close by him. Having spoken, he left the table supported by a police agent, who was seen to lead him toward the private door of the court, and, consequently, also toward the prisoners’ platform. He stopped, however, halfway, quickly turned his face from the prisoners, and pointing toward the public door at the opposite side of the hall, caused himself to be led out into the air by that direction. When he had gone the president, addressing himself partly to Trudaine and partly to the audience, said:

“The Citizen Superintendent Danville has been overcome by the heat in the court. He has retired by my desire, under the care of a police agent, to recover in the open air; pledging himself to me to come back and throw a new light on the extraordinary and suspicious statement which the prisoner has just made. Until the return of Citizen Danville, I order the accused, Trudaine, to suspend any further acknowledgment of complicity which he may have to address to me. This matter must be cleared up before other matters are entered on. Meanwhile, in order that the time of the tribunal may not be wasted, I authorize the female prisoner to take this opportunity of making any statement concerning herself which she may wish to address to the judges.”

“Silence him!” “Remove him out of court!” “Gag him!” “Guillotine him!” These cries rose from the audience the moment the president had done speaking. They were all directed at Trudaine, who had made a last desperate effort to persuade his sister to keep silence, and had been detected in the attempt by the spectators.

“If the prisoner speaks another word to his sister, remove him,” said the president, addressing the guard round the platform.

“Good! we shall hear her at last. Silence! silence!” exclaimed the women, settling themselves comfortably on their benches, and preparing to resume their work.

“Rose Danville, the court is waiting to hear you,” said the president, crossing his legs and leaning back luxuriously in his large armchair.

Amid all the noise and confusion of the last few minutes, Rose had stood ever in the same attitude, with that strangely fixed expression never altering on her face but once. When her husband made his way to the side of the table and stood there prominently alone, her lips trembled a little, and a faint shade of color passed swiftly over her cheeks. Even that slight change had vanished now—she was paler, stiller, more widely altered from her former self than ever, as she faced the president and said these words:

“I wish to follow my brother’s example and make my confession, as he has made his. I would rather he had spoken for me; but he is too generous to say any words except such as he thinks may save me from sharing his punishment. I refuse to be saved, unless he is saved with me. Where he goes when he leaves this place, I will go; what he suffers, I will suffer; if he is to die, I believe God will grant me the strength to die resignedly with him!”

She paused for a moment, and half turned toward Trudaine—then checked herself instantly and went on: “This is what I now wish to say, as to my share in the offense charged against my brother. Some time ago, he told me one day that he had seen my husband’s mother in Paris, disguised as a poor woman; that he had spoken to her, and forced her to acknowledge herself. Up to this time we had all felt certain that she had left France, because she held old-fashioned opinions which it is dangerous for people to hold now—had left France before we came to Paris. She told my brother that she had indeed gone (with an old, tried servant of the family to help and protect her) as far as Marseilles; and that, finding unforeseen difficulty there in getting further, she had taken it as a warning from Providence not to desert her son, of whom she was very passionately fond, and from whom she had been most unwilling to depart. Instead of waiting in exile for quieter times, she determined to go and hide herself in Paris, knowing her son was going there too. She assumed the name of her old and faithful servant, who declined to the last to leave her unprotected; and she proposed to live in the strictest secrecy and retirement, watching, unknown, the career of her son, and ready at a moment’s notice to disclose herself to him, when the settlement of public affairs might reunite her safely to her beloved child. My brother thought this plan full of danger, both for herself, for her son, and for the honest old man who was risking his head for his mistress’s sake. I thought so too; and in an evil hour I said to Louis: ‘Will you try in secret to get my husband’s mother away, and see that her faithful servant makes her really leave France this time?’ I wrongly asked my brother to do this for a selfish reason of my own—a reason connected with my married life, which has not been a happy one. I had not succeeded in gaining my husband’s affection, and was not treated kindly by him. My brother—who has always loved me far more dearly, I am afraid, than I have ever deserved—my brother increased his kindness to me, seeing me treated unkindly by my husband. This made ill-blood between them. My thought, when I asked my brother to do for me what I have said, was, that if we two in secret saved my husband’s mother, without danger to him, from imperiling herself and her son, we should, when the time came for speaking of what we had done, appear to my husband in a new and better light. I should have shown how well I deserved his love, and Louis would have shown how well he deserved his brother-in-law’s gratitude; and so we should have made home happy at last, and all three have lived together affectionately. This was my thought; and when I told it to my brother, and asked him if there would be much risk, out of his kindness and indulgence toward me, he said ‘No.’ He had so used me to accept sacrifices for my happiness that I let him endanger himself to help me in my little household plan. I repent this bitterly now; I ask his pardon with my whole heart. If he is acquitted, I will try to show myself worthier of his love. If