The Queen Against Owen Part 13

But his opponent at once objected, and the judge ruled the question out. Mr. Lewis's indignant declaration, therefore, which Prescott had struck out of his brief with such prompt disdain, fared equally ill in court, and was not allowed to get to the ear of the judge or jury.

At last the evidence was gone through, and then the prosecuting counsel stood up and made the final announcement:

'That is the case for the Crown, my lord.'

'I will adjourn for half an hour,' observed the judge, getting on his feet.

The whole court rose with him, and in a few minutes the entire place was empty.

CHAPTER VII.

HALF AN HOUR.

Scrambling, rus.h.i.+ng, hurrying, squeezing, talking, laughing, and sighing, the great throng poured out of the building and dispersed down the streets of Abertaff. One topic was on every tongue. The fate of the prisoner was the sole thing discussed. They weighed the evidence, they repeated it, they distorted it. Some were violently in favour of the prisoner, and considered half the witnesses to be committing perjury. Others were violently against her, and could not see, so they professed, a shadow of doubt in the case from first to last. Others, again, in complete doubt as to how the case would end, wisely declined to commit themselves till they had heard more of the defence.

Then, again, these parties were subdivided into groups. There was the ignorant group, who knew nothing about the case, and went about asking questions of their wiser neighbours. There was the mysterious group, who suspected many things, but said nothing, contenting themselves with shaking their heads in corners, and suggesting that not half the real motives of the parties to the affair had come out at all. And there was the well-informed group of those who had watched the whole thing from first to last, and knew more, far more, about it than the counsel on either side, or the criminal either, for that matter.

And they were not churlish in bestowing their information, either.

There were the Lewisite partisans, who knew exactly the value of the jewels to a halfpenny, and how they were kept in a box under the bed, and how the prisoner had carried them off by stealth, and buried them somewhere in the sands of Newton Bay. Some of these, the more charitably disposed, could go even further than this. They explained how it was that the prisoner had never meant to commit the murder at all, but simply to steal the jewels, but had been interrupted in the act by the unexpected waking of the deceased woman. They grew impressive as they pictured the elder woman suddenly roused from sleep by the midnight robber, and the emotions of that robber detected in the act of guilt. They could tell you how she started back in terror, and then, realizing that ruin was upon her, succ.u.mbed to temporary frenzy, and with the weapon which she had brought to open the jewel-chest dealt the fatal blow to her unhappy victim.

Others, less lenient in their views, had obtained quite different details. They could relate numerous previous attempts of the prisoner on the life of her benefactress. They knew how she had sought to introduce poison into her food, from which she was only saved by a miraculous chance, which caused her to be summoned from the table just as she was about to taste the fatal dish. Also how she had on one occasion led her victim along the cliff with the well-formed purpose of pus.h.i.+ng her over the edge; only the curate happened to come along and meet them, and accompanied them till the opportunity was gone.

The Owenite section, on the other hand, had their account, equally authentic, and, if possible, more minute and graphic than the other.

They would tell you more about their villain, Lewis, than he himself could possibly have remembered. They took you back to his childhood.

They started you with the well-known story of his beating his little sister, the sister in the North whom he had refused to go and see.

They explained the causes which led to his expulsion from school after school. They tracked him to Australia, and unearthed dark secrets in his life out there which would have made the bushranger Kelly reject him from his historic gang. Finally, they brought him back to England a ruined desperado, intent on getting at his relative's wealth by fair means or foul. The robbery of her jewels was only part of his scheme.

By killing her he obtained the whole of her wealth at once. Then a victim became necessary--a stalking-horse to mislead the minions of justice, and whose punishment would ensure his own safety. He was thus a double murderer.

So the tongues wagged. Meanwhile the object of these rumours had made his way round in a towering pa.s.sion to the seat from which his solicitor was trying to get away.

'What does this mean?' he cried, as soon as he got near enough to speak without being heard by others. 'Are you playing me false? Where is Mr. Prescott?'

'He was called away into the other court,' said Mr. James Pollard, the barrister's brother, who was a partner with his father in the Porthstone firm.

'He ought not to have gone. Your brother managed the case wretchedly.

I wasn't allowed to say the most important thing of all.'

'My brother did the best he could. No one could dream that Prescott would desert us like this. I shall never give him another brief, I promise you.'

By this time they had got outside the door of the court-house. They turned towards a hotel close by, where a general luncheon was put on the table for the convenience of people having business in the a.s.size-courts. The civil court had risen a few minutes before the other, and the place was crowded with solicitors, witnesses, jurymen, and the general public.

'Look here, Mr. Pollard,' Lewis said, as they fought their way into the room, 'I could have proved that about the jewels up to the hilt if I had been allowed. Why, my aunt was speaking to me about them that very night, and she said Miss Owen knew of them.'

'And why on earth didn't you tell me all this before?' retorted the solicitor.

'I thought I had.'

'Thought you had! Goodness me! that's just like you laymen. You keep back the chief points in a case, and then you're angry with us because we don't guess them by instinct. Why didn't you tell the judge this when he was examining you?'

'Because it wasn't said in the prisoner's presence.'

'Pooh! Why, it was evidence of motive. But there, it's no good trying to explain the law of evidence to you. If any thing's gone wrong, you have yourself to thank for it--a good deal, that's all. What shall you take?'

And they fell to on the refreshments before them.

Meanwhile the barristers, whose self-imposed code forbade them to enter a public hotel room in a town where the a.s.sizes were being held, had straggled off, some to the County Club, and others to the common-room reserved for their especial use in the chief hotel of the place.

Among the latter was Tressamer, who found Prescott awaiting him anxiously, and trying, with poor success, to get through the wing of a fowl. He (Prescott) looked pale and dejected; but Tressamer rushed into the place in a state of exaggerated buoyancy, and loudly called for a bottle of champagne.

'George, how goes it?' cried his friend.

'All went merry as a marriage-bell,' returned the other. 'Have no fear; keep up your heart, old man. Leave it to me; I'll get her off.

Much obliged to you for going away, though. Young Pollard did come some croppers, I can tell you. Buller's against us, of course, on the evidence; but what do I care? I'll get the jury, see if I don't. I'll make a speech this afternoon the like of which hasn't often been heard in this dead-and-alive hole. Lewis, beware! Here's confusion to the guilty, and safety to the innocent!'

He had rattled on in a jerky, excited, nervous manner, and he wound up by drinking off nearly a tumblerful of champagne. Prescott could hardly make him out. He feared the strain of the last few weeks was unhinging his friend's mind.

'Gently,' he said, remonstrating; 'you must keep cool, or you will spoil everything. Beware of old Buller. When he is giving you the most rope, he is getting ready to come down on you most heavily at the end.

I think you'll find it a weak jury. They will do pretty well as the judge tells them.'

'Don't you be afraid, Charlie,' retorted the other in the same unnaturally careless strain; 'it's my case, and I know how to manage it. I've sworn to save her, and, by G.o.d! I'll do it, if I have to declare I did the thing myself! By Jove, didn't I touch up that scoundrel in the witness-box, though! You saw me, Beltrope?'

He called to another barrister, who had been present in court the whole morning.

'Yes, I know,' answered Beltrope; 'but you'd better be awfully careful, Tressamer. So far as I could see, your line of defence is that Lewis must have done it. Now, unless you're prepared with some very strong evidence against him, you'd far better change that tack before it's too late. You'll have old Buller dead against you, as Prescott says, and, I dare say, the jury too. Whatever you do, don't leave it in such a way that they must convict one or the other.'

'Rubbis.h.!.+ You don't understand,' replied Tressamer. 'Wait till you've heard my speech, that's all. Well, I must be off.' He drank some more champagne. 'I want to have a wash just to cool my head.'

And he darted out of the room to go upstairs. The other barristers looked at each other and exchanged meaning glances. They did not like to say much out loud before Prescott, who was known to be Tressamer's friend; but they whispered together, and the tenor of their whispers was precisely that of Prescott's own reflections. Tressamer, they agreed, had lost his head through over-excitement, and would probably create a scene in court that afternoon.

So anxious did Prescott feel, that he at last resolved to bare his own feelings to his friend in the hope of thereby sobering him. He accordingly went up to his bedroom, where he found him with his head in a basin of water, and addressed him in very grave accents:

'George, you must listen to me. You have told me that you love Eleanor Owen, and I suppose, as she has you to defend her, that she returns your love. Now, I have a confession to make to you. I love her, too.'

'What! You, Charles!' He was certainly sobered for the moment.

'Yes. You know I saw something of her as a child. I was fond of her then, I recollect. But to-day, when I saw her, so beautiful, so innocent, in that dreadful place, I found another feeling overmastering me. Oh, do not be afraid! She shall never know it. I shall not try to take her from you. I am not the sort of man to rob his friend. But, George, let me say this to you: that if anything--oh, the thought is horrible!--if any miscarriage of justice should occur, I shall blame you. I shall never forgive you if she comes to harm through your means. Be careful. Oh, great Heaven, man, do your best, your very best! It is the crisis of our lives--of all our lives.

Beware how you fail to prove yourself worthy of your trust.' And without waiting for an answer he turned away, and hastened back to his own work in the Nisi Prius Court.

In spite of the confident opinions expressed by the barristers, the judge's mind was less firmly settled than they supposed. Sir Daniel Buller was in the judges' private room at the court-house, sharing a dish of cutlets with Sir John Wiseman. And, of course, they were discussing the case.

'I tell you what it is, Wiseman,' the first judge was saying, 'there is something in this case that hasn't come out yet. So far, there has been absolutely no real defence. Waiter!'

The waiter darted into the room.

'Look at this cutlet! It's burnt to a cinder. Take it away. And tell your cook, with my compliments, that it's always better to have a thing underdone than overdone, because if it's not cooked enough you can always do it more, but if it's cooked too much you can't do it less. D'you hear?'