Читать книгу The Incendiary - William Augustine Leahy - Страница 14

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After the noon recess Bertha was called to finish her testimony, with the promise that she would not be detained long.

"A description of the study, Miss Lund, when you were dusting."

"Everything was left just as it was when the professor fell dead on the threshold Tuesday evening."

"Did you notice any foreign substance—any accumulation of what might afford fuel for a fire?"

"No, sir."

"Any odor?"

"Only that the room was close from being shut up."

"Describe the contents of the room."

"Well, it was full of books, on shelves that ran all around."

"Yes?"

"Two windows; a cage before one, the nearest to the door, and a writing desk before the one in the farthest corner."

"Well?"

"A safe partly built in the wall beside the door."

"How high from the ground?"

"About up to my waist."

"Did you notice anything underneath it?"

"Yes, there was the gunpowder box Mr. Robert put there."

"A box full of gunpowder placed there by Floyd?"

"Yes, sir."

This statement made a profound impression, but Badger did not push the subject further. The prisoner almost smiled.

"Well?" Badger said.

"Oh, everything else was just as the professor left it. His slippers under his chair, his dressing-gown over the back of it, his spectacles on the desk, his bible laid down open. He was going to meet a caller, you know, when he was taken with the stitch."

"Very well. Perhaps we have had enough of the professor," said Badger. But the accused did not find these minutiae trivial. For the first time his proud face broke and he hid the tears with his hand. The mention of the bible, slippers and the other personal mementos had called up the dearest picture he ever knew.

All the grand life, equally compounded of whims and principles, passed before him at Bertha's mention of the empty chair.

But the sympathy of the spectators was short-lived. While Robert wept a strain of sad music stole into the court-room. Faint at first, it rose in volume as the players approached, but still with a muted sound, as if their instruments were muffled. The drum-beats were rare and unobtrusive, and the burden of the melody, if melody it were, was borne by proud bugles and quivering oboes. Its cadences were old and mysterious, like some Gregorian chant intoned in cloisters before organ and orchestra had trained our ears to the chords of harmony. No wonder the court-room was hushed until it died away in the distance.

It was the Masonic dead march, for on this day the funerals of the dead whom Robert Floyd was accused of murdering were being held. Oscar Schubert, as a member of the mystic order, was buried with all the pomp of its ceremonies, and it was his cortege, proceeding to the sepulcher, whose passage occasioned this pause in the trial.

The revulsion of sympathy was instant. Every man in the court-room saw the wife and two children, sitting behind drawn curtains in the carriage of the chief mourners, and beyond this picture the bodies of six victims, four of them young girls, done to death at the prompting of avarice. The prisoner himself seemed to understand, for he shut his teeth, though his bold eyes still dared the multitude. But they rested more and more upon the lovely face which was his one point of consolation in that unfriendly assemblage. Badger's indifferent voice showed no quiver when he asked Miss Lund to step down and called for Robert Floyd. It was a brusque opening.

"What was contained in the safe in your uncle's study?"

"I never opened it."

"You knew, however?"

"What he had told me."

"Was his will there?"

"I have reason to believe so."

"Did you believe so on Saturday, while you were in the room with Miss Lund?"

"I did not give the matter any thought at that time." Floyd spoke as though the spirit burned hot within him. "And I will add——"

"Nothing," said Badger. But the judge looked up.

"This is a court, not a court-martial," he said, quietly, a pale, studious man. "The witness has a right to modify his answers."

"I have only this to say," continued Floyd, "to hasten as much as possible this preposterous trial, that I indorse every word of Miss Lund's testimony, and accept it and proffer it as my own upon the points which it covers."

"We prefer——" But the district attorney interrupted his assistant. "Are you aware, Mr. Floyd, of the gravity of the position in which Miss Lund's testimony involves you? Sole opportunity is almost the major head among those which the government is required to prove."

"I accept it in toto, subject to the privilege of volunteering a statement if my examination is incomplete or misleading."

"We shall endeavor to make it both adequate and fair," said the district attorney.

"Leaving the safe for a moment," resumed the examiner, "will you kindly relate your movements, Mr. Floyd, subsequent to the time when Bertha left you to go upstairs?"

The young man hesitated. The pause was so long as to be embarrassing. Old John Davidson coughed loudly to relieve his agitation. When the witness spoke at last he seemed to be remembering with difficulty.

"I remember leaving the house and walking about among the fields, in the park, I think. Yes, I took a car for the park. In the evening I called upon Miss Barlow."

He looked up at the aureoled face and faintly smiled. The sight appeared to revive him. "From that point my recollections become as distinct as usual. But——" He hesitated once more and Badger left him unaided in his distress. "The truth is, this was my first visit since his death to my uncle's study. The executor had telegraphed and afterward written me to close and lock it. This I did. But that afternoon I was expecting a visit from him——"

"Who is this executor?"

"Mr. Hodgkins Hodgkins."

"Of the firm of Hodgkins, Hodgkins & Hodgkins?"

"I believe so. My aunt, Mrs. Arnold, had called at 3 o'clock to say that he had arrived from New York and would take possession of the papers that afternoon. So I unlocked the room and let the servant dust it. The whole meaning of my loss seemed to come over me then, when I saw the empty chair. Before that I had been calm enough. But the sight dazed and staggered me. I went out, fled, taking no note of time or place. I believe, I know, I was in the park, but until I arrived at Miss Barlow's, outward occurrences made little memorable impression upon me."

"I presume you saw or were seen by persons on the way?"

"I do not remember any one in particular."

"Are we to understand," said the district attorney, listening intently, "that you passed this long period in a species of reverie or trance?"

"An intense fit of abstraction," answered Robert; but the district attorney looked puzzled, as if an utterly new and virgin problem had been put before him to solve.

"Without food until you returned at 11 o'clock to the fire?" asked Badger.

"Excepting a light lunch at Miss Barlow's. Her mother noticed some fatigue in me and pressed me to take refreshment."

"Was there no mention of the fire there—a fire which was destroying your home?"

"We spoke of it casually, but I did not know until later that it was destroying my home."

"Was it not described in the evening papers?"

"Not in the early editions, Badger," put in the district attorney. "Only in the later specials."

"Very well. Now let us get back to the safe. Your uncle had made a will, I believe?"

"He made a will several weeks ago."

"What were the terms of that document?"

"I do not know them in full."

"As to your share?"

"My legacy was $20,000."

"Out of an estate valued at?"

"I have heard $10,000,000."

"You are an anarchist, Mr. Floyd?"

"No, sir."

"But a radical of some sort?"

"I am a socialist; a developer, not a destroyer."

"Ah!" said Badger. His exclamation was icy cold. "And you differed from your uncle on other points, did you not?"

"We took the liberty of honest men to differ."

"In religion?"

"Yes. He was a high churchman. I am—simply a Christian."

This avowal of a creed brought titters among the spectators, who apparently were accustomed to definitions narrower if more precise.

"And as a result of these quarrels your uncle disinherited you?"

"Sir?"

For a moment the prisoner's outburst of indignation checked the current of opinion which had been flowing swiftly against him.

"In one sentence you have managed to outrage the dead as well as the living—and to convey two impressions distinctly false. My uncle and I never quarreled, never! He was a father and more than a father to me. Neither did he disinherit me. It was his wish to assign me the whole property. I begged him to omit me without more than a memento or keepsake, that I might enter life as he had done, as every man should, untrammeled—but with the advantage, I feel sure, of an example and an inspiration given to few to enjoy. The sum left me was far in excess of my desires."

There was another long silence after this statement, but it expressed only incredulity.

"When was this very extraordinary will drawn up?"

"Three weeks ago."

"The witnesses are living, then? It is to be presumed that they, too, were not carried off by the holocaust which so reduced our population last Saturday." Badger's sarcasm was brutal, but it told.

"The witnesses were three neighbors, called in. The servants could not act, as they were remembered in the document."

"No lawyer was present?"

"My uncle seldom employed a lawyer."

Such a statement, relating to a man of Prof. Arnold's wealth, might have excited doubt if his eccentricity on this point had not been noised about beforehand.

"He drew up the will himself, then? Has any one seen it except you?"

"Not so far as I know. I myself never saw it."

"But you knew it was in the safe?"

"I supposed so."

"One moment," said the district attorney, interrupting. "Once more, why did you reopen the study on this particular day?"

"Because I had been informed that Mr. Hodgkins was coming to remove the will."

"By whom were you so informed?"

"Mrs. Arnold drove up about 3 o'clock and mentioned the fact. Indeed, she had expected to find him at the house. He was an old acquaintance of hers, as well as of my uncle—her legal adviser, in fact."

A stylish woman, still fair in spite of her 50 years, was sitting in front of Robert as he testified. She was the widow of Benjamin Arnold's brother, Henry, and her son, Henry, or Harry, had just offered a reward of $5,000 for the incendiary—a sum which McCausland might well have hopes of securing. The inspector was still hovering about the threshold of his ante-room, and now that Floyd's examination was concluded he called the district attorney to one side, apparently urging him to reserve the remainder of his evidence, which would naturally consist of rebuttal of Floyd and corroboration of Bertha. At any rate, Mr. Badger arose, and, announcing that the case was closed, offered a summary of the evidence, rapid, methodical, but unimpressive, like himself. Then the prisoner was asked if he desired to speak in his own behalf.

"Your honor," he said, "this monstrous charge of having set on foot a fire in the most populous section of our noble city overwhelms me so that I am impotent to express the indignation I feel. I leave it to your own sense of justice, your own discrimination, whether I am to be dishonored with the suspicion of an infamous crime, on evidence so flimsy that the bare denial of a veracious man should be sufficient to upset it. I read in many faces around me the hunger for blood; the unthinking call for a victim. Heed that, and my good name is taken from me. I am irreparably wronged. Resist it, and you will prove yourself worthy of the honorable title which you bear."

Not a few were swayed toward the youth by his manifest emotion. But the judge waited fully a minute before he arose and his eyeglasses were trembling in his hand.

"You have elected, against good counsel," he began, "to be your own advocate. I cannot and do not adjudge you unsuccessful, in the sense of having demonstrated your guilt rather than your innocence. But that you have failed to break the government's chain of evidence in its most damaging links—sole opportunity, motive and suspicious conduct, especially after the act—is plain to me, and would be plain to any mind accustomed to weighing such evidence calmly.

"It is true the evidence is wholly circumstantial. No eye but God's saw this foul deed done. But since William Rufus was found dead in the New Forest, with Walter Tyrrell's arrow in his breast, men have been convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence, and will continue to be so convicted as long as probability remains the guide of life.

"I am obliged, therefore, to remand you for trial, not only on the charge of arson, but upon the graver charge of homicide involved in it under the peculiar circumstances of the case. This is not a final verdict. Far be it from me, one erring man, to say that the government has fastened this crime upon you beyond reasonable doubt. But in the face of the evidence which has been brought forward I could not order your release. It becomes my unhappy duty, as the examining magistrate, to commit you to custody, to await the approaching session of the grand jury."

When Emily Barlow awoke from her swoon she found herself in the arms of old John Davidson. Perhaps it was as well she did not hear the jeer of execration which greeted the prisoner outside when he passed over the sidewalk, ironed between two stalwart officers, into the jail van. McCausland's identification with the case had affected public opinion profoundly, for he was said never to have failed to convict a criminal whom he had once brought into court. But possibly the outburst was due to the circumstance that this was the neighborhood in which the Lacy girls lived and that their funeral had taken place that very morning.