The Law and the Lady

Concluding the marriage service of the Church of England in those well-known words, my uncle Starkweather shut up his book, and looked at me across the altar rails with a hearty expression of interest on his broad, red face. At the same time my aunt, Mrs. Starkweather, standing by my side, tapped me smartly on the shoulder, and said,

“Valeria, you are married!”

Where were my thoughts? What had become of my attention? I was too bewildered to know. I started and looked at my new husband. He seemed to be almost as much bewildered as I was. The same thought had, as I believe, occurred to us both at the same moment. Was it really possible⁠—in spite of his mother’s opposition to our marriage⁠—that we were man and wife? My aunt Starkweather settled the question by a second tap on my shoulder.

“Take his arm!” she whispered, in the tone of a woman who had lost all patience with me.

I took his arm.

“Follow your uncle.”

Holding fast by my husband’s arm, I followed my uncle and the curate who had assisted him at the marriage.

He did not delay. He came to my side and took my hand.

“Do you know who this is?” he said to his mother.

She answered, looking at me with a courteous bend of her head:

“A lady I met on the beach, Eustace, who kindly restored to me a letter that I dropped. I think I heard the name” (she turned to the landlady): “Mrs. Woodville, was it not?”

My husband’s fingers unconsciously closed on my hand with a grasp that hurt me. He set his mother right, it is only just to say, without one cowardly moment of hesitation.

“Mother,” he said to her, very quietly, “this lady is my wife.”

She had hitherto kept her seat. She now rose slowly and faced her son in silence. The first expression of surprise passed from her face. It was succeeded by the most terrible look of mingled indignation and contempt that I ever saw in a woman’s eyes.

“I pity your wife,” she said.

With those words and no more, lifting her hand she waved him back from her, and went on her way again, as we had first found her, alone.

I wonder whether that’s the book you have been looking after? Are you like me? Do you like reading trials?”

Trials? Had I heard her aright? Yes: she had said trials.

I answered by an affirmative motion of my head. I was still speechless. The girl sauntered in her cool way to the fireplace, and, taking up the tongs, returned with them to the bookcase.

“Here’s where the book fell,” she said⁠—“in the space between the bookcase and the wall. I’ll have it out in no time.”

I waited without moving a muscle, without uttering a word.

She approached me with the tongs in one hand and with a plainly bound volume in the other.

“Is that the book?” she said. “Open it, and see.”

I took the book from her.

“It is tremendously interesting,” she went on. “I’ve read it twice over⁠—I have. Mind you, I believe he did it, after all.”

Did it? Did what? What was she talking about? I tried to put the question to her. I struggled⁠—quite vainly⁠—to say only these words: “What are you talking about?”

She seemed to lose all patience with me. She snatched the book out of my hand, and opened it before me on the table by which we were standing side by side.

“I declare, you’re as helpless as a baby!” she said, contemptuously. “There! Is that the book?”

I read the first lines on the title page⁠—

A Complete Report of

the Trial of

“Eustace was tried in Scotland,” he said. “There is a verdict allowed by the Scotch law, which (so far as I know) is not permitted by the laws of any other civilized country on the face of the earth. When the jury are in doubt whether to condemn or acquit the prisoner brought before them, they are permitted, in Scotland, to express that doubt by a form of compromise. If there is not evidence enough, on the one hand, to justify them in finding a prisoner guilty, and not evidence enough, on the other hand, to thoroughly convince them that a prisoner is innocent, they extricate themselves from the difficulty by finding a verdict of Not Proven.”

“Was that the Verdict when Eustace was tried?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“The jury were not quite satisfied that my husband was guilty? and not quite satisfied that my husband was innocent? Is that what the Scotch Verdict means?”

“That is what the Scotch Verdict means. For three years that doubt about him in the minds of the jury who tried him has stood on public record.”

I saw (or fancied I saw, in the obscurity) a long room with a low ceiling. The dying gleam of an ill-kept fire formed the only light by which I could judge of objects and distances. Redly illuminating the central portion of the room, opposite to which we were standing, the firelight left the extremities shadowed in almost total darkness. I had barely time to notice this before I heard the rumbling and whistling sounds approaching me. A high chair on wheels moved by, through the field of red light, carrying a shadowy figure with floating hair, and arms furiously raised and lowered working the machinery that propelled the chair at its utmost rate of speed. “I am Napoleon, at the sunrise of Austerlitz!” shouted the man in the chair as he swept past me on his rumbling and whistling wheels, in the red glow of the firelight. “I give the word, and thrones rock, and kings fall, and nations tremble, and men by tens of thousands fight and bleed and die!” The chair rushed out of sight, and the shouting man in it became another hero. “I am Nelson!” the ringing voice cried now. “I am leading the fleet at Trafalgar. I issue my commands, prophetically conscious of victory and death. I see my own apotheosis, my public funeral, my nation’s tears, my burial in the glorious church. The ages remember me, and the poets sing my praise in immortal verse!” The strident wheels turned at the far end of the room and came back. The fantastic and frightful apparition, man and machinery blended in one⁠—the new Centaur, half man, half chair⁠—flew by me again in the dying light. “I am Shakespeare!” cried the frantic creature now. “I am writing Lear, the tragedy of tragedies.