Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/151

Rh week. His brain moved sluggishly, his life in the open took shape as a vague memory.

Thus when he was arrested on the charge of murder, he showed so little surprise as to give an unfavourable impression to the police from the start. It was true he looked slightly bewildered, but no more than if he had been mistaken for an acquaintance by a stranger in the street. The peculiar sleepy sense of satisfaction, known only in its fulness to those whose meals are not so regular as they might be, dulled the force of the blow even more effectually than entire ignorance would have done. It was the animal, not the man, which was uppermost.

The police were perplexed. As a rule, criminals might be classed under either of two headings the coarse and callous, or the refined and crushed. But this man belonged to neither. He would have embodied the popular idea of a mild country curate, but of a murderer, never. The worst that could be said of him related to his ragged, unkempt appearance. Of evil his countenance showed not a trace. Weak it was without a doubt, but weak with the weakness of childhood or age, rather than of youth or manhood. Therefore it was without a suspicion of craft, a confused pain looked out from the sunken blue eyes, and that was all.

During the succeeding weeks he awakened to a fuller sense of the gravity of his situation, but either he was indifferent to his own fate, or incapable of understanding that innocence might suffer for guilt; for of all those concerned in the case he was the least anxious as to its progress. Lawyers argued and pleaded, remand after remand was asked for and obtained; witnesses were examined and re-examined, but his demeanour never altered. He was more like a man in a trance than a man on trial for his life, and this the crowd, whose feelings had at first been excited Rh