“Say what you want to say or be silent.”
“My lord, it’s not sordid,” he muttered very low. It seemed hopeless to find words until he had slept.
“Mr. Braddock, the witness says that it is not sordid.” The laughter beat upon Andrews’s head, till it felt physically bruised as though by hail.
Mr. Braddock felt himself riding to victory upon a gale of laughter.
“Take your mind back to two mornings ago. We will leave out the night,” he added with a snigger. “Do you remember a woman coming to the cottage?”
“Yes.”
“Is it true that your friend without a surname, Elizabeth, told the woman that you were her brother?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Did she say that you’d been staying with her for a week?”
“I think so. I can’t remember anything. I’m tired.”
“That is all I want to ask you.”
Can I at last sit down and sleep? Andrews wondered incredulously. His doubt was justified. Sir Henry Merriman rose.
“Did you stay at the cottage for a week?”
“No. Two nights. That was all.”
“Think hard. Can’t you remember why she told those lies. They were to help you?”
“Of course. She’d never lie for herself. It was because I was afraid that the woman would talk in the town. I was afraid of Carlyon.”
“Why were you afraid?”
“He knew that I’d betrayed him. He was after me. He came to the cottage while I was there. But she hid me. She fooled him. She was brave like a saint. She drank out of my cup. How can he say there was anything sordid? It’s all lies they tell about her. If I wasn’t so tired I could tell you all.”
“Why did she do all this for you? Were you her lover?”
“No. It was just charity. I’ve never touched her, I swear it.”
“Thank you. That is all.” Andrews stood where he was, unbelieving that the end had at last come, that he had done what Elizabeth had urged him to do, that all was over now and he could sleep. He felt a hand pull at his sleeve. He stumbled down the steps to the floor of the court, still under the influence of the guiding hand, which now pulled him gently and insistently towards the door.
As he passed the dock a voice called to him, “Andrews.” He stopped and looked up. It took him a moment to focus his eyes. Then he saw that it was Tims. “Let me out, Andrews,” he implored.
There was a hostile murmur from the gallery and Andrews flushed. Anger, unreasoning and undirected, against himself, against his father, against this boy who held him for one moment from his sleep, tossed back an answer. “You fool, I’ve put you there.” Then he was outside the Court.
“I want to sleep,” he said. “Can I go?”
He found that he was speaking to an officer. “Not outside I shouldn’t,” the man said. “There’s a crowd there. You ain’t too popular. Better wait till the case is over. They’ll look after you then.”
“Anywhere—a chair.” He put his hand against the wall to support himself.
“There’s the witness’s room.”
“I can’t go back there. They won’t give me any peace. Isn’t there anywhere?”
The officer softened a little. “Here,” he said, “you’d better sit here.” He pointed at a bench against the wall. “It’s against orders,” he added grudgingly, but already Andrews had sank down on it and had let sleep come, instantaneous, dreamless sleep, that carried for one instant only a confusion of faces, bearded angry faces, sniggering red faces, one pale face, a gold mist and then nothing at all.
“That is the case for the Crown.” Sir Henry Merriman’s voice, filtering through the big double doors of the court, came too softly to disturb Andrews, where he slept. To him in a state of content, of unknowing, without dreams, weeks might have passed and not hours. The voice was a clear whisper. That was all. And he had not wakened, when, a long time previously, the Court had risen for luncheon. The whispers of the witnesses had then ceased to sound in the corridor. There had been silence, a shuffle of persons rising to their feet and then, as the doors of the Court swung open, loud voices and a roar of conversation which burst like a bomb. Andrews slept on, slept on through the heavy reluctant return of feet, weighed down by a good meal eaten, slept on as the doors closed and the whispers of the witnesses began again.
The officer in the corridor leant his ear against the door and listened, avid for any excitement to conquer boredom. He cast an eye towards Andrews in the hope of conversation, but Andrews slept. The prisoners inside were making their defence; so much the officer could gather from the broken sentences that reached him. Each man’s defence had been written out for him by his solicitor, and it was read in a toneless stumbling voice. Through the glass front of the door the officer could see the prisoners. The trial was reaching its final stages and so was the light. The Court was veiled depressingly in grey, not yet sufficiently dark to justify the lighting of the candles. The prisoners, in spite of their confidence in the jury, felt the gloom and were a little touched by fear. Each as he read from the sheet of paper in front of him felt the constraining presence of a dead man rise to refute his arguments. A man had been killed. A hundred alibis could not turn that fact into a falsehood. As though by mutual consent, bent on the sacrifice of an unwanted Jonah, they edged a little away from the half-witted youth, until he sat in a small cleared space, which in that crowded Court took on the dimensions of a desert.
Each man’s defence was a little subtly changed. This man at the supposed time of the affray had been drinking with a friend, this man had
