He saw his acquittal hovering on the lips of his peers. Lord Chandois' kindly face was beaming with delight, Sir Robert Catline and Mr. Gilbert Gerard were conversing quite excitedly: his own friends, Sir Henry Beddingfield and Lord Mordaunt, Lord Huntingdon and Sir John Williams, were openly expressing their intense satisfaction.
But for him, what did it all mean? An acquittal based on a lie, and that lie told by a woman to save him!
But a lie for all that, and one which he could not refute, without telling the whole truth to his judges and branding _her_ publicly as a murderess and worse.
He, who had ever held his own honour, his pride, the cleanness of his whole existence as a fetish to be worshipped, now saw himself forced to barter all that which he held so sacred and gain his own life in exchange. How much more gladly would he have heard his death-sentence pronounced now by his friend's kind lips. Death--however ignominious--would have purified and exalted honour.
Mechanically he listened to Lord Chandois' speech, and mechanically he protested. The web was tightly woven around him, and he was powerless to tear it asunder.
"Robert Duke of Wessex and of Dorchester," said the Lord High Steward, "Earl of Launceston, Wexford, and Bridthorpe, Baron of Greystone, Ullesthorpe and Edbrooke, premier peer of England, the lords, your peers, have found you not guilty of this crime of murder."
"My lords," said Wessex in a final appeal, which he himself felt was a hopeless one, "I thank you from my heart, but I cannot accept this decision; it is based on a falsehood, the hysterical outpourings of a misguided heart, and . . ."
But already the Lord High Steward had interrupted him.
"My lord Duke," he said, "the tale this lady hath at last spoken in open Court was one guessed at by all your friends; she hath not only followed the dictates of her conscience, but hath taken a heavy burden from the hearts of your triers, and one which would have saddened many of us, even to our graves. Had it been my terrible duty to pass death-sentence upon you, which had the lady not spoken I should have been bound to do, I myself would have felt akin to a murderer. We cannot but thank heaven that Lady Ursula's heart was touched at the eleventh hour, and that you were not allowed to sacrifice your honour and your life in so worthless a cause."