  HAD Forbes read the papers he would have known that the storm had not subsided yet. The wealth of Enslee could not bribe the least mercy; it was rather a stimulus to the press. At the height of the tempest the funeral of Persis was held. Almost nobody attended it, and the few that did were rather drawn by curiosity than respect. Those who knew Persis well were afraid to be seen in the company even of her body. They were busy denying their earlier intimacy or telling how they had foreseen this disaster. She went in lonely state to join the silent throng in the cemetery, and she knew no more of the storm that raged about her than the world knew of the one high achievement of her soul. She was like some little brilliant bird of paradise flung to the ground by a lightning stroke. The storm roared on, the ferocity of the newspaper attacks increased with every extra. The fact that a theory was hinted in an early edition was taken as proof enough for a positive statement in a later. Finally there were demands for the arrest of the husband. The district-attorney was busy, however, on an Augean task—the cleaning out of the police stable. He delayed or forbore to take up the Enslee matter. He was accordingly attacked as a toady to the rich. This stung him to an investigation. And at last the police entered into the affair. Enslee was sent for and cross-questioned by commissioners. He was at bay, and he revealed unexpected gifts of evasion. Willie's lawyers stood by him. They were high-priced But even now Hallard and his cronies would not let him rest above ground or Persis beneath. Conflicting bits of Enslee's testimony were published in parallel columns, and his explanation that Persis, in her final rage, had seized the knife from his hand and stabbed herself was declared impossible and unconvincing. Her dying statement, as sworn to by Crofts, stood, however, as the one strong shelter over Enslee's head. The skeptics insisted that Crofts, being deaf, had heard wrong or been bribed to perjury. None of them dreamed that Persis could have devised that snow-white lie as her atonement to the man she had betrayed. Hallard was obsessed with an idea that if Persis' body were exhumed it would be shown that she could not have dealt the fatal wound with her own hand. He had once organized a campaign against a decision of the court sentencing a valet to the penitentiary, and kept it up until the prison gates were opened and the man gained an opportunity to tell his story anew. He was found guilty again and sent back to his cell; but the despotic power of the press was demonstrated. If Hallard could open the penitentiary, why not the grave in which a corpus delicti had been hastily hidden? With every weapon in the vast armory of newspaperdom Hallard waged his battle. The political ambition of the district-attorney finally yielded to the coercion. An order was obtained from the court commanding the officials of the cemetery to unseal the tomb where Persis' body had been stored until the great monument Enslee had commissioned could be made ready to weigh her down irretrievably. Forbes, having regained his courage in his absence in the wilderness, was seized with a mad desire to gaze upon his beloved's face once more and to whisper to her a prayer that she forgive him for abandoning her in her Permission to be present at the exhumation was secured with little difficulty, and the two men joined the group of court officials and the six experts who were to decide from examination whether or not Persis could have inflicted the fatal wound upon herself. |
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