Escaping from the house, Brand felt all that squalor and shame fall away like the husk of a nut. Now he was, at length, free. He did not contemplate the future except as a blank canvas for the purpose of his own achievement. He did not consider the possibility of a jury releasing Eustace and putting him in the financier’s place. It would be some weeks before the trial was held, and that interim space he regarded as the span of his personal life. During that period he must be uninterrupted, untouched by the wild flurry of suspicion and fear in which this trial would be engulfed. He left England that night, and was instantly swallowed up in the purlieus of the Paris he knew. Anonymous as a shadow he went in and out of the tall, narrow houses, spoke with men at corners and in cafés, drank and worked and conceived, a man so divorced from the occurrences of all previous time that he might have no connection with any other Hildebrand Gray the world had known. It was not fame and not hope that he pursued so relentlessly during that period. Having beheld the work he must do, he proceeded to achieve it; as to the consequences, he found them no concern of his. Like some tense, electric, indomitable spirit of Labour, he exhausted his actual life.
Part VI
Witness for the Defence
1
Miles Amery, travelling back to town with his wife, observed in troubled tones, “I’m not happy about this, Ruth. I’m in the position of a chap who was at Charterhouse with me. He was an R.C., destined for the priesthood. He was a nice chap, but one day (he was about eighteen) he came to me and said, ‘It’s no good; I can’t go through with this.’ I asked him what was his difficulty. I thought perhaps he was jibbing at the discipline the Catholic Church imposes on her priesthood; they have to go where they’re sent, can’t marry, and so forth. But he said, ‘No,’ it wasn’t that. It was the dogmatic side of it that finished him. ‘I envy your true believer and your convinced atheist,’ he said. ‘I’d stand thankfully in either camp. But I’m in the damnable position of knowing that the Catholic faith is true, without believing a word of it.’ That’s my position at the moment.”
“About Eustace?”
“Yes. I know, from all the evidence, that he’s guilty, but I don’t believe an atom of it. To begin with, why should your father have given him that money? Secondly, do you think a man like Eustace, who’s accustomed to risks and evasions, and has been all his life, is going to fling away all his hopes (and they were centred in Mr. Gray) for an infantile flash of temper? It’s so much more typical of Brand than of anyone else in the house that my suspicions, in spite of the evidence, keep turning in his direction. If it had been a premeditated murder, then I’d believe readily enough that Eustace was guilty, and be prepared to swear on oath that it couldn’t be Brand. Psychologically it would be as impossible for him to sustain such a mood as it would be improbable for Eustace to take up a paper-weight and hit another man over the head. You have to remember that the man’s a gambler, a speculator, accustomed to risks; he must have had several narrow shaves before this, and so far he’s managed to come out all right. That kind of experience breeds a caution—a reckless caution if you like, but a caution nevertheless. It puts a man perpetually on his guard, and though certain things may have the power to break through that guard, I don’t believe your father was one of them. A man of Eustace’s experience doesn’t see red and commit murder because of a few hard words he must have anticipated. Besides, he could make things uncommonly bad for your father, if they were both alive, while, dead, Gray was no manner of use to him. This affair is the London and New York Exchange ramp over again, and I don’t see how your father could have avoided implication. Even if he got off scot free, his reputation was bound to suffer. And there’s something else. That cheque. If Eustace had got his hands on that cheque, no power in this world would have persuaded him to destroy it. Literally, he wouldn’t dare.”
Ruth said, in distress, “Oh, Miles, you aren’t going to try and come into this on Eustace’s side? Even if he didn’t kill father, what he has done in ruining thousands of poor people who trusted him is much worse. Already there have been heaps of suicides, and what are they but deaths lying at Eustace’s door?”
Miles touched her hand affectionately. “Don’t forget you’re talking to a lawyer,” he said. “That’s not evidence.”
But, although he was determined to put the matter out of his mind, since it was clearly no concern of his, he discovered himself examining the evidence during every leisure hour that fell to his lot, endeavouring to trace some leakage, some false trail, some place where the police had gone astray. As always, when this mood was upon him, he lost sight of personalities. He was not pro Eustace or contra Brand. He was for the true explanation and against obscurity.
2
There is a theory that a man attracts to himself those qualities, occurrences, and fortunes with which his thoughts are most constantly engaged. Miles had never held such a belief; never, indeed, considered the subject. Yet, shortly before the trial, he was unexpectedly drawn from his comfortable insignificance, and confronted with a situation that was to tax to the uttermost his integrity and his personal feeling. He was working at his desk one morning when his clerk came in to say that a young woman
