immediately after he had taken his seat a door was thrown open and the jury filed in, and then a black-gowned usher came forward and shrilly called for silence.
"Stand up, gentlemen! Hats off, please! Gentlemen, the Court!"
With solemn, measured steps, and heads bent as if absorbed in profoundest meditation, the judges slowly proceeded to their seats. The president formally declared the court open, whereupon the clerk rose immediately to read the indictment.
The Clerk of the Court at Cahors was a most excellent man, but modesty was his distinguishing characteristic and his chief desire appeared to be to shun responsibility, figure as little prominently as possible, and even escape observation altogether. Assizes were not often held at Cahors, and he had had few occasions to read an indictment as tragic as this present one, with the result that he lacked confidence now. He read in a toneless, monotonous voice, so nervously and softly that nobody in the body of the court could hear a word he said, and even the jury were obliged to lean their elbows on the desk before them and make an ear trumpet of their hands to find out what it was all about.
Etienne Rambert, however, was only a few feet from the clerk; he did not miss a word, and it was evident from his nervous movements every now and then that some passages in the indictment hit him very hard indeed, and even lessened his general confidence.
When the clerk had finished Etienne Rambert sat still, with his forehead resting in his hands, as if crushed by the weight of the memories the indictment had evoked. Then the sharp, thin voice of the President of the Court snapped the chain of his thoughts.
"Stand up, sir!"
And pale as death Etienne Rambert rose and folded his arms across his breast. In firm, yet somehow muffled tones, he answered the preliminary formal questions. His name was Hervé Paul Etienne Rambert; his age, fifty-nine; his occupation, a merchant, owning and working rubber plantations in South America. Then followed the formal enquiry whether he had heard and understood the indictment which had just been read.
"I followed it all, sir," he replied, with a little gesture expressive of his sense of the gravity of the facts detailed and the weight of the evidence adduced, which won general sympathy for him. "I followed it all, but I protest against some of the allegations, and I protest with my whole energy against the suggestion that I have failed in my duty as a man of honour and as a father!"
The President of the Court checked him irritably.
"Excuse me, I do not intend to permit you to extend the pleadings indefinitely. I shall examine you on the various points of the indictment, and you may protest as much as you please." The unfeeling rudeness provoked no comment from the defendant, and the President proceeded. "Well, you have heard the indictment. It charges you first with having aided and abetted the escape of your son, whom an enquiry held in another place had implicated in the murder of the Marquise de Langrune; and it charges you secondly with having killed your son, whose body has been recovered from the Dordogne, in order that you might escape the penalty of public obloquy."
At this brutal statement of the case Etienne Rambert made a proud gesture of indignation.
"Sir," he exclaimed, "there are different ways of putting things. I do not deny the purport of the indictment, but I object to the summary of it that you present. No one has ever dared to contend that I killed my son in order to escape public obloquy, as you have just insinuated. I am entirely indifferent to the worlds opinion. What the indictment is intended to allege, the only thing it can allege, is that I wrought justice upon a criminal who ought to have filled me with horror but whom, nevertheless, I ought not to have handed over to the public executioner."
This time it was the judge's turn to be astonished. He was so accustomed to the cheap triumphs that judges look to win in court that he had expected to make mincemeat of this poor, broken old man whom the law had delivered to his tender mercy. But he discovered that the old man had fine courage and replied with spirit to his malevolent remarks.
"We will discuss your right to take the law into your own hands presently," he said, "but that is not the question now: there are other points which it would be well for you to explain to the jury. Why, in the first place, did you obstinately decline to speak to the examining magistrate?"
"I had no answer to make to the examining magistrate," Etienne Rambert answered slowly, as if he were weighing his words, "because in my opinion he had no questions to put to me! I do not admit that I am charged with anything contrary to the Code, or that any such charge can be formulated against me. The indictment charges me with having killed my son because I believed him to be guilty of the murder of Mme. de Langrune and would not hand him over to the gallows. I have never confessed to that murder, sir, and nothing will ever make me do so. And that is why I would not reply to the examining magistrate, because I would not admit that there was anything before the court concerning myself: because, since the dreadful tragedy in my private life was exposed to public opinion, I desired that I should be judged by public opinion, which, sir, is not represented by you who are a professional judge, but by the jury here who will shortly say whether I am really a criminal wretch: by the jury, many of whom are fathers themselves and, when they think of their own sons, will wonder what appalling visions must have passed through my mind when I was forced to believe that my boy, my own son, had committed a cowardly murder! What sort of tragedy will they think that must have been for a man like me, with sixty years of honour and of honourable life behind him?"
The outburst ended on a sob, and the whole court was moved with sympathy, women wiping their eyes, men coughing, and even the jury striving hard to conceal the emotion that stirred them.
The judge glared round the court, and after a pause addressed the defendant again with sarcastic phrases.
"So that is why you stood mute during the enquiry, was it, sir? Odd! very odd! I admire the interpretation you place upon your duty as an honourable man. It is — quaint!"
Etienne Rambert interrupted the sneering speech.
"I am quite sure, sir, that there are plenty of people here who will understand and endorse what I did."
The declaration was so pointedly personal that the judge took it up.
"And I am quite sure that people of principle will understand me when I have shown them your conduct as it really was. You have a predilection for heroics; it will not be without interest to bring things to the point. Your attitude throughout this affair has been this: — it is not for me to anticipate the issue of the enquiry which will be held some day into the murder of Mme. de Langrune, but I must recall the fact that the moment you believed your son was the murderer, the moment you discovered the blood-stained towel which furnished the circumstantial evidence of his guilt, you — the man of honour, mind you, — never thought of handing over the culprit to the police who were actually in the precincts of the château, but only thought of securing his escape, and helping him to get away! You even accompanied him in his flight, and so became in a sense his accomplice. I suppose you do not deny that?"
Etienne Rambert shook with emotion and answered in ringing tones.
"If you are of opinion, sir, that that was an act of complicity on my part, I will not only not deny it, I will proclaim it from the housetops! I became the accomplice of a murderer by inducing him to run away, did I? You forget, sir, that at the moment when I first believed my son was the culprit — I was not his accomplice then, I suppose? — there was a bond between him and me already that I could not possibly break: he was my son! Sir, the duty of a father — and I attach the very loftiest meaning to the word 'duty' — can never entail his giving up his son!"
A fresh murmur of sympathy through the court annoyed the judge, who shrugged his shoulders.
