4.—That her outcry had alarmed the prisoner in his turn, causing him to leave most of the bottles below, and hasten up to the room, where he completed the deed with which he had previously threatened her.
5.—That poison having failed, he resorted to strangulation; after which—or before—came the robbery of her ring, the piling up of the cushions over the body in a vain endeavour to hide the deed, or to prolong the search for the victim. Then the departure—the locking of the front door behind the perpetrator; the flight of the grey horse and cutter through the blinding storm; the blowing off of the driver’s hat; the identification of the same by means of the flour-mark left on its brim by the mechanic’s wife; the presence of a portion of one of the two abstracted bottles in the stable where the horse was put up; and the appearance of Arthur with the other bottle at the door of the inn in Cuthbert Road, just as the clock was striking half-past eleven.
This latter fact might have been regarded as proving an alibi, owing to the length of road between the Cumberland house and the place just mentioned, if there had not been a short cut to town open to him by means of a door in the wall separating the Cumberland and Fulton grounds—a door which was found unlocked, and with the key in it, by Zadok Brown, the coachman, when he came home about three next morning.
All this stood; not an item of this testimony could be shaken. Most of it was true; some of it false; but what was false, so unassailable by any ordinary means, that, as I have already said, the clouds seemed settling heavily over Arthur Cumberland when, at the end of the sixth day, the proceedings closed.
The night that followed was a heavy one for me. Then came the fateful morrow, and, after that, the day of days destined to make a life-long impression on all who attended this trial.
XXV
“I AM INNOCENT”
All is oblique,
There’s nothing level in our cursed natures,
But direct villainy. Therefore, be abhorred
All feasts, societies, and throngs of men!
His semblable, yea, himself, Timon disdains.
Timon of Athens.
I was early in my seat. Feeling the momentousness of the occasion—for this day must decide my action for or against the prisoner—I searched the faces of the jury, of the several counsel, and of the judge. I was anxious to know what I had to expect from them, in case my conscience got the better of my devotion to Carmel’s interests and led me into that declaration of the real facts which was forever faltering on my tongue, without having, as yet, received the final impetus which could only end in speech.
To give him his rightful precedence, the judge showed an impenetrable countenance but little changed from that with which he had faced us all from the start. He, like most of the men involved in these proceedings, had been a close friend of the prisoner’s father, and, in his capacity of judge in this momentous trial, had had to contend with his personal predilections, possibly with concealed sympathies, if not with equally well-concealed prejudices. This had lent to his aspect a sternness never observable in it before; but no man, even the captious Mr. Moffat, had seriously questioned his rulings; and, whatever the cost to himself, he had, up to this time, held the scales of justice so evenly that it would have taken an audacious mind to have ventured on an interpretation of his real attitude or mental leaning in this case.