Death on a Pale Horse by Donald Thomas Page A

her evangelical gentility counted for nothing against that. Unbalanced as she became, her fault was merely a failure to understand that all good things must come to an end, as Moran described it to his cronies. She gave way to some innate moral hysteria that was none of his making. Her mind distracted, she destroyed herself. He invited the world to show him where his fault lay, in law or common sense.
    However noxious he might be, the procedure of the so-called subalterns’ court was no match for his wickedness. According to the account now given to me, evidence was admitted in this midnight court which any English judge would have ruled out as mere hearsay. There was ample testimony which blackened Moran’s character, but it proved nothing. He had ridiculed women as creatures who would dance at a court ball one night and abase themselves before a money-lender on the following morning. If a husband could not support them, they would readily sell themselves. If that was impossible, they would rip the clothes from their own mother’s back and tear the jewels from her throat in order to shine as the stars of the next evening party.
    But men were no better. Moran assured his young friends that a pillar of the community would sell his wife and children, his own soul, to get money for some favourite lechery. It might be the gambling saloon, the stock exchange, a particular woman who could offer a special gratification not to be found elsewhere. Such men would sell the coats off their backs to gratify themselves with the sort of women whom they knew would take their money while regarding them with contempt.
    I was a young man when I heard all this. The portrait of Rawdon Moran seemed to me hardly less evil than that of Satan. And if such a repellent form of Satan were at the bar of subalterns’ justice, perhaps I would not have cast my vote strictly according to the rules of evidence.
    Of course, the midnight court found him guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman—absurdly underrating his crime! It also convicted him, in some form, for causing the poor young woman’s death. But then what was to be done with him? In one view, death itself would hardly be excessive. In another, it was doubtful whether they had grounds to do anything at all. In their enthusiasm to avenge Emmeline Putney-Wilson, they had not considered the dilemma in which they would find themselves.
    And so Captain Canning and the four other members of the lamplit court had withdrawn to consider the verdict and sentence. It was late by then. Indeed, it was almost two o’clock in the morning. When they came back, Moran stood up even before they could command him to do so. Then Captain Canning looked him directly in the eyes. The so-called colonel was now found guilty of causing the death of the young woman by a means far crueller than many forms of murder.
    Had he anything to say? He had not, except to deny the authority of these “boys,” as he chose to call them.
    What of the sentence? He might deserve to die, but officers of a British regiment cannot murder such a man in his turn. As they faced each other, Captain Canning had the courage not to be daunted by the ferocity of Moran’s savage glare. Indeed, the captain continued to look the criminal in the eye and denounce him for conduct unbecoming a British officer and for moral homicide, whatever that might be. There was no sentence this court could pass which would be adequate to that crime—but pass a sentence it must.
    It was therefore the judgment of his comrades that Rawdon Moran, sometime colonel of the Rajah of Kalore’s Militia and now captain in the 109th Albion Fusiliers, should be required to send his papers in forthwith and leave the regiment. Within that regiment, meanwhile, he was to be outlawed. Whatever retribution was inflicted upon him, no officer would contribute to the detection, detention, or punishment of the person who carried it