The Paliser case Part 41

"Where is the evidence? Where is it? Where is the evidence? There is not a shred, not a scintilla. On the absence of facts adduced, I shall maintain what I a.s.sert until the last armed Court of Appeals expires.

Hum! Ha!"

Fiercely he turned on Jones. "What were you saying, sir?"

Before Jones could reply, Verelst cut in. "The stiletto is his. He has the opera-ticket. He----"

"Imbeciles tell each other that great men think alike," Jones, interrupting, remarked at Dunwoodie. "I merely happened to be forestalling your views, when a recent decision occurred to me and----"

Jones' remarks were lost, drowned by others, by questions, exclamations, the drivel that amazement creates.

"But, I say----" "Tell me this----" "No evidence!" "The stiletto his!"

"How did Lennox get it?" "Then what about----"

Dunwoodie, fastening on Jones, roared at him. "You tell me the instrument is yours?"

Jones patted his chin. "I did not, but I will."

"How do you know, sir?"

"It has a little love message on it."

"Hum! Ha!" Dunwoodie barked. "Come to my office to-morrow. Come before ten."

Dreamily Jones tilted his hat. "I am not up before ten. Where do you live? In the Roaring Forties?"

But, in the mounting clamour, the answer, if answer there were, was submerged. Jones went out to the street, entered a taxi, gave an address and sailed away, up and across the Park, along the Riverside and into the longest thoroughfare--caravan routes excepted--on the planet.

On a corner was a drug-shop, where anything was to be had, even to umbrellas and, from a sign that hung there, apparently a notary public also. Opposite was a saloon, the Ladies Entrance horribly hospitable.

Jones' trained eye--the eye of a novelist--gathered these things which it dropped in that bag which the subconscious is. Meanwhile the car, scattering children, tooted, turned and stopped before a leprous door.

In the hall, a girl of twelve, with the face of a seraph, and the voice of a fiend, was shrieking at a switchboard. Jones fearing, if he addressed her, that she might curse him, went on and up, higher, still higher, and began to feel quite birdlike. On the successive landings were doors and he wondered what tragedies, what comedies, what aims, lofty, mean or merely diabolic, they concealed. They were all labelled with names, Hun or Hebrew, usually both. But one name differed. It caressed.

There he rang.

When it opened, a strawberry mouth opened also. "Oh!" Ca.s.sy's blue eyes were red. There was fright in them. "It is horrible! Tell me, do you think it was he?"

Jones removed his hat. "I know it was not."

That mouth opened again, opened for breath, opened with relief. Gasping, she stared. "Thank G.o.d! I was afraid----But are you sure? It was I who told him--I thought it my fault. It was killing me. Tell me. Are you really sure?"

Jones motioned. "His lawyer is. I have just seen him."

"He is! Thank G.o.d then! Thank G.o.d! And my father! It has made him ill.

He liked him so! I am going for medicine now. Will you go in and speak to him?"

She turned and called. "It is Mr. Jones--a friend of Mr. Lennox." She turned again. "I will be back in a minute."

Beyond, in the room with the piano and the painted warrior, the musician lay on a sofa, bundled in a rug. There was not much s.p.a.ce on the sofa, yet, as Jones entered, he seemed to recede. Then, cavernously, he spoke.

"Forgive me for not rising. This business has been too much for me. Sit down."

Jones put his hat on the table and drew a chair. "I am sorry it has upset you. It amounts to nothing."

Perplexedly the musician repeated it. "Nothing?"

"I was referring to our friend Lennox."

"You call his arrest nothing?"

"Well, everything is relative. It may seem unusual to be held without bail and yet, if we all were, it would be commonplace."

The musician plucked at the rug. "I suppose everybody thinks he did it?"

"Everybody, no. I don't think so and I am sure your daughter doesn't."

"I wish she would hurry."

"Nor do you."

"No, I don't think so."

"I doubt if the police do either."

"After jailing him!"

Jones, who had been taking in the room, the piano, the portrait, the table, sketched a gesture.

"We are all in jail. The opinion of the world is a prison, our own ideas are another. We are doubly jailed, and very justly. We are depraved animals. We think, or think we think, and what we think others have thought for us and, as a rule, erroneously."

From a phonograph somewhere, in some adjacent den, there floated a tenor aria, the _Bella figlia del amore_, pierced suddenly and beautifully by a contralto's rich voice.

Jones turned. "That's Caruso. I don't know who the Maddelena is. Do you remember Campanini?"

"Yes, I remember him. He was a better actor than Caruso."

"And so ugly that he was good-looking. Caruso is becoming uneven."

Vaguely the musician considered the novelist. "You think so?"

"It rather looked that way last night."

Angelo Cara plucked again at the rug.

"But," Jones continued, "in the 'Terra addio' he made up for it. What an enchantment that duo is!"

The musician's hand moved from the rug to his face. "You were there then?"

I was this morning, thought Jones, but he said: "How sinful Rigoletto is by comparison to Ada--by comparison I mean to the last act."