‘Ah, there should ought to have been a London detective brought down,’ muttered another juryman, who had taken little part hitherto. ‘One of them would have puzzled it out, you may depend.’
‘Well, I don’t see what more you would have,’ said the other farmer, Rees, rising in his turn. ‘Here is this young woman, sleeping in the next room, going out at night secretly, under some pretence of headaches—why didn’t she tell other people about them beside that chemist?—and here you have her mistress murdered, and the blood found on the door of her own room the next morning. What more do you want?’
He sat down. It was now the tailor’s turn.
‘And how do you know Lewis didn’t put the blood there?’ he asked. ‘I believe it’s Lewis myself. Anyway, one of them must have done it, that’s clear.’
But this was felt to be a weak defence, and the next two jurymen shook their heads, and professed themselves unable to throw any light upon the question. Then it was the turn of the boat proprietor.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘what’s the good of our trying to come to a verdict when we’re none of us sure which of them did it? Better give it up, and tell the judge we can’t agree.’
But the foreman would not hear of this.
‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘we are here sworn to do justice between man and man and mete out punishment to the guilty, and we must not shrink from our task. We have heard the case through, and if we are not competent to give a verdict on it, who is?’
This was felt to be unanswerable. Not only were the foreman’s words worthy of attention in themselves, but he was a great man, the reputed possessor of twelve thousand a year; he wore a frock coat and a white waistcoat as well, and his word was, therefore, practically equivalent to law.
There remained only the watchmaker. He felt a friendly feeling towards the prisoner, but he was troubled by real misgivings as to her innocence.