The Incendiary Part 41

"And how did you happen to go home to Sweden?" asked Robert.

"Mrs. Arnold wanted another house-girl and I'd told her about my sister Christina, who is old enough now to be handy. She was kind enough to pay my pa.s.sage over so I could bring her out with me, and let me stay all summer, too. Did you ever see such goodness?"

"She's a very uncommon mistress, certainly," said Emily.

"It was the day after we were talking at Hillsborough that I started," said Bertha. "Do you remember?"

"Yes, indeed," answered Emily, brightening up, "and now let us finish that talk. I have a hundred questions I want to ask you. Shall you testify to-day?"

"No; I've only just got here and the lawyer said he would leave me till the last. The voyage is very tiresome, you know."

"Then come with me," cried Emily, with animation, and drew Bertha after her into the ante-room. Here Robert caught a glimpse of her from time to time questioning, explaining, measuring with her hands, as if she were satisfying herself on doubtful points of her theory. And when she finally came out, in the middle of Miss Lamb's cross-examination, her face wore a smile so auroral that even Chief Justice Playfair's eyes left the witness and wandered over toward the true-hearted girl.

"Mr. Aronson told you that he worked on his knees at this mysterious safe?" was s.h.a.garach's opening question to Miss Lamb.

"On his knees," answered the maiden, still bonneted and fanning herself with Emily's fan, which she had forgotten to return in the excitement of the previous evening.

"Mr. Aronson is not an uncommonly tall man, is he?"

"A trifle taller than you are."

"But yet not above the average," persisted s.h.a.garach.

"Perhaps not."

"The government wishes us to believe that there was a bomb purposely placed under this safe. That would raise it from the floor several inches, would it not?"

"I suppose so. I know nothing about the bomb."

"Will you kindly explain how the locksmith could be kneeling while at work on a safe which, according to the testimony of Miss Lund, at the hearing, was resting on a shelf as high as her waist from the ground?"

The witness fanned herself nervously and once or twice opened her lips to reply, but no sound came forth. A wave of frightened sympathy pa.s.sed through the spectators in the prolonged interim of silence, like that which seizes an audience when an orator falters and threatens to break down.

"You do not answer, Miss Lamb?"

"I feel faint," said the girl. A chair and a gla.s.s of water were hurried to her aid.

"Are you sure this is the man Aronson who visited you?" asked s.h.a.garach when she had recovered.

"Oh, yes."

"Then we have two Aronsons in the case; Mr. Saul Aronson, my a.s.sistant, and Mr. Jacob Aronson, the piano dealer, who will testify to having received the postal card copied on the blotting-pad. And this Mr. Aronson who visited you declared that he had been a locksmith, if I understood your story?"

"He said so."

"That is not surprising. Mr. Aronson, my a.s.sistant, was formerly a locksmith. What was the date of your interview?"

"The first part of July. I can't remember the exact day," replied the witness, a bit nettled. The rusticity was rubbing on again in her manner, and to Saul Aronson it actually seemed that her cheekbones were becoming prominent, like those of her horrid aunt whom he had met on that fateful evening. But this may have been an optical illusion. The sympathy of the spectators trembled in the balance. She seemed so young and dove-like. But there stood s.h.a.garach confronting her, hostile, skeptical, uncompromising.

"Mr. Aronson had made this alleged attempt to open a safe on Sunday evening, you said?"

"On the evening of the Sabbath."

Here Aronson gesticulated and whispered in s.h.a.garach's ear. The lawyer listened calmly.

"When did you first become acquainted with him?"

"I don't remember exactly. He came to our meetings for a long time before I was introduced to him."

Serena blushed a little and Aronson's cheeks were all abloom.

"He was a convert to your faith?"

"So we thought."

"How long had he been converted?"

"I don't know."

"Pineapple Jupiter says he introduced you to Mr. Aronson about four months ago, if the district attorney reckons rightly from his periodic hair-cuts. Then at the time of the visit to your house in July he must have been a convert nearly two months?"

"Perhaps."

"But the will was only drawn on June 7. And Mr. Aronson, I understand you to testify, yielded to this temptation before he was converted?"

The witness did not answer, but looked around the court-room as if for sympathy.

"Are we to understand that he broke into the safe before the will was placed there?"

The witness fluttered her fan nervously and her lips were quivering. She looked down.

"Sunday evening, you said. You are probably not aware that Prof. Arnold read in his own library every Sunday evening up to the time of his death?"

Serena began to cry. Instantly the tension of the audience was relaxed and comments pa.s.sed to and fro.

"She belongs to the romantic school of statisticians," whispered Wye. Ecks responded with a cartoon of "Miss Meekness, making a slip of the decimal point."

"Religious mania; hysterical mendacity," a doctor diagnosed it, with a pompous frown.

"Little minx had a craving for notoriety," said a woman, elderly, unmarried and plain.

"I should say it ill.u.s.trates the pernicious effect of novel reading on a rustic brain," murmured a clerical personage, clearing his throat before he delivered himself.

Suddenly s.h.a.garach's insistence left him. His voice softened. With his very first question, the distressed look, half of reproach, half of sympathy, toward Serena, cleared away from Aronson's face.

"Wasn't Mr. Aronson agitated on that evening, Miss Lamb?"

She blushed amid her tears and her answer was less defiant.

"Extremely agitated."

"Wasn't his story to you somewhat confused in the telling?"

"Very confused, yes, sir."

"And perhaps the outlines blurred still more in your memory by the lapse of time?"

"Perhaps. I meant to speak of that myself," answered Serena, brightening. Whereat the entire court-room brightened. s.h.a.garach's inflections became kind, almost genial now. One would have thought she was his own witness, he stroked her so gently.

"And his accent was somewhat hard to follow?"

"Oh, very."

"He is not perfectly familiar with our language as yet?"

"No, he speaks it poorly."

The court-room was all curiosity.

"Didn't this picture of the study, which you have quoted, come in as part of his description of a law case?"

"Why, yes; he began talking about the Floyd case."

"In which he was deeply interested at that time, as my a.s.sistant. That, however, he did not make clear to you?"

"No."

"Can you swear that this whole picture of a Sunday-night entrance and experiment on the safe was not an imaginary one--a piece of fiction, invented and vividly told in the first person to ill.u.s.trate what Robert Floyd might easily have done if he had desired to destroy the will, but what----"

s.h.a.garach inclined slightly toward the jury, "but what he evidently did not do?"

"Perhaps. Truly I couldn't catch half of what he was saying when he began to talk rapidly."

"I myself am a locksmith. He could come and give me money. We go Sunday night. n.o.body home. House all still. I get down on my knees. File a little. Drill. Somebody come. I go away. Come again. Try again."

Serena smiled a smile that sent waves of sunshine through the room. s.h.a.garach had not once descended to mimicry of his a.s.sistant's dialect. But the broken fragments of speech, the confused arrangement, seemed to call before Serena's eye an amusing picture of her lovelorn swain's incoherence.

"Perhaps I was altogether mistaken," she volunteered.

s.h.a.garach waved her with courtesy to the nonplussed though apparently still obstinate district attorney. A long conference followed among the prosecuting lawyers, while Emily heaved a sigh of relief.

Over in his front seat Ecks was gazing at s.h.a.garach, as if trying to pierce the great brow, not opened showily, but masked, as it were, by the loose-falling hair. The marvelous skill of his tactics--first, the breaking down of Serena's story through its intrinsic discrepancies, then the building up from her own lips of a hypothetical case in the jurors' minds--all without deviating a hair line from true courtesy and delicacy of treatment--sank deeply into the novelist's heart. He did not reply to Wye's comment on the underplot.

"Incarnate self-control!" he muttered to himself.

But alas for poor Saul Aronson! It was bad enough to be compelled to flee from suspicion post haste through the gateway of public ridicule. But to realize at last that Serena was human and no angel--capable of pique, brusqueness and tears--capable even of resisting s.h.a.garach! The scales of illusion fell from his eyes and he hung his head, a chastened youth.

"The redirect is deferred," said Bigelow, and Serena, after returning the fan to Emily, stepped softly out. Her footfalls barely broke the dead silence as she picked her way through the crowd.

Aronson lifted his eyes to her face. What imperfections he noted now! The eyebrows too level, the rosebud mouth too small and the cheekbones unmistakably present, even if barely breaking the curve. It was fated so. Doubtless in time he would follow old Abraham Barentzen's counsel and take some comely daughter of Israel to wife, well-dowered, a good housekeeper, and free from t.i.ttle-tattle. But never again would his naive heart palpitate with such virginal ecstasy as when he first gazed through the rose-misted spectacles of love on that sweetly imperfect gentile maiden.

"We shall now offer a ma.s.s of evidence," said the district attorney, "tending to prove the crucial point of exclusive opportunity."

Seven witnesses took the box, one after another, and in response to Badger's questions, swore that they were neighbors of the Arnolds, were wide-awake and observant about the time of the fire, but saw no person coming out of the house either in front or rear. The evidence was negative, but c.u.mulatively it produced its effect, leading the minds of the jury away from Serena Lamb and her legend to the real core of the puzzle. By the time the last witness on this point arrived, a cordon of watchers, completely environing the house, had been drawn around it by the government, and it seemed impossible that any one could have slipped through un.o.bserved.

CHAPTER LIII.

A DUMB EYEWITNESS.

"Hodgkins Hodgkins," answered the first witness who testified after the noon recess.

"When did you first learn that Prof. Arnold had made a will?" asked the district attorney.

"On receipt of a letter from my esteemed friend, dated June 15."

"What was the reason of Prof. Arnold's informing you of his action?"

"A long-standing, I may say a life-long friendship, had induced him to select me as his executor."

"When you heard of his death, what action did you take?"

"I was in New York at the time on important business, which I proceeded to expedite as far as its weighty nature would permit. Large bodies travel slowly, you know. Then when the transaction was completed to my satisfaction I repaired to the city and visited the home of my departed friend, the testator."

"Did you let Floyd know of your coming?"

"I apprised him of my intention and instructed him to lock the room in which the doc.u.ment was guarded."

"Did you actually call on the afternoon of the fire?"

"A short delay, occasioned by my failure to find Mr. Hardwood, the locksmith, who was to a.s.sist me in opening the safe, r.e.t.a.r.ded my arrival until 3:45. At that time the paper was beyond my reach."

"You could not testify as to the contents of the will?"

"Only in a general way."

"Do you know any reason why, if the accused were expecting you, as he stated that he was when he ordered the housemaid to dust the room, do you know any reason why he should leave the house suddenly, without any instructions as to your reception?"

"That's the best point the prosecution has made!" exclaimed Wye.

Ecks was executing a series of caricatures ill.u.s.trating the involution of Hodgkins' face back into a crab-apple. "You leave out his cunning," suggested Wye, looking over the heads.