“Moffat is sly. Moffat has something up his sleeve. I will wait till he sees fit to show it,” was my thought; then, as I caught a wild and pleading look from Ella, I added in positive assertion to myself, “And so must she.”
Answering her unspoken appeal with an admonitory shake of the head, I carelessly let my fingers rest upon my mouth until I saw that she understood me and was prepared to follow my lead for a little while longer.
My satisfaction at this was curtailed by the calling of Arthur Cumberland to the stand to witness in his own defence.
I had dreaded this contingency. I saw that for some reason, both his counsel and associate counsel, were not without their own misgivings as to the result of their somewhat doubtful experiment.
A change was observable in this degenerate son of the Cumberlands since many there had confronted him face to face. Physically he was improved. Enough time had elapsed since his sudden dropping of old habits, for him to have risen above its first effects and to have acquired that tone of personal dignity which follows a successful issue to any moral conflict. But otherwise the difference was such as to arouse doubt as to the real man lurking behind his dogged, uncommunicative manner.
Even with the knowledge of his motives which I believed myself to possess, I was at a loss to understand his indifference to self and the immobility of manner he maintained under all circumstances and during every fluctuation which took place in the presentation of his case, or in the temper of the people surrounding him. I felt that beyond the one fact that he could be relied upon to protect Carmel’s name and Carmel’s character, even to the jeopardising of his case, he was not to be counted on, and might yet startle many of us, and most notably of all, the little woman waiting to hear what he had to say in his own defence before she threw herself into the breach and made that devoted attempt to save him, in his own despite, which had been my terror from the first and was my terror now.
Perjury! but not in his own defence—rather in opposition to it—that is what his counsel had to fear; and I wondered if they knew it. My attention became absorbed in the puzzle. Carmel’s fate, if not Ella’s—and certainly my own—hung upon the issue. This I knew, and this I faced, calmly, but very surely, as, the preliminary questions having been answered, Mr. Moffat proceeded.
The witness’s name having been demanded and given and some other preliminary formalities gone through, he was asked:
“Mr. Cumberland, did you have any quarrel with your sister during the afternoon or evening of December the second?”
“I did.” Then, as if not satisfied with this simple statement, he blurted forth: “And it wasn’t the first. I hated the discipline she imposed upon me, and the disapproval she showed of my ways and the manner in which I chose to spend my money.”