It was impossible for Boyce to keep the blood from receding now and then from his face. When that stern woman’s eyes were bent on him, he seemed to feel their searching fire, and grew deadly pale, though his glance never rested on her once. Two or three times the accused lad made a step or two forward, with his hand clenched, tempted to strike his fellow clerk for the slander he was uttering; but a touch of the old woman’s hand brought him back to her side, and the perjured wretch told his story to the end, without interruption of any kind.
CHAPTER LIX.
THE EXAMINATION COMPLETED.
Then Smith the grocer took the stand. There was human feeling in this man, and he bitterly repented the step he had taken after his wife learned of it, and put in her passionate protest. But compunction came too late. His charge had been made; the case was taken out of his hands. He would gladly have softened, or withheld his own evidence; but the oath enforced upon him was a sacred obligation to speak the truth, and against his own will Smith gave in his evidence honestly.
While he was speaking a gentleman came into the court-room, and quietly drew toward Mrs. Laurence and her son, who caught him by the hand and whispered,
“Oh, take her home! don’t let her stand here to be looked at so! Feel her hands; they are cold as stones! Let them take me. I am a man, and can bear it; but a night in one of those cells would kill any woman! Please, oh, please! We haven’t another friend on earth but Mrs. Smith and you, since he has turned against us.”
Here James cast a look full of mournful reproach on Smith, whose voice began to falter, and once more he besought permission to withdraw the charge and let these two helpless creatures go. Guilty as they were, he did not like to see them punished.
Then the old woman advanced toward the judge and spoke. It was the first time she had uttered anything but dry, hard monosyllables, since her entrance into the court-room.
“If you are to decide this,” she said, firmly; but still with respect, “I ask that this man shall show us no mercy that can leave a suspicion of wrong on me, or on my boy. If you are a just judge, search out the truth, find the guilty persons; first and foremost wring the perjury from that young man’s soul, for he is perjured.”
Boyce tried to evade the long, steady finger which the woman pointed at him; but there was a force and weird fascination in her look which held him motionless. He grew coldly white to the lips, and the ruddy hair rose upon his temples like meadow-grass lifted by the wind.
“That—that is libelous,” he faltered at last. “I only come to do my duty, and because Mr. Smith wanted me to.”