I felt too guilty to speak. He knew all that was in my mind. Suddenly he took my hand.
“Come along, then,” he said, “and let’s have a peep. Papa needn’t know.”
He shouldn’t have tempted me, nor should I have succumbed. A murder romance was no book for a child, though my father figured in it as a Paladin championing the wronged and oppressed.
I hung back a moment, but the creature cooed and whistled to me. “Come and see Joshua,” he said, “with his back to the wall, and papa in front daring ’em all to come on.”
The picture was irresistible. I let myself be persuaded and run out, tingling all over.
It was a dingy November morning. The old town seemed dull and uneasy, and a tallow-faced clock on a church dawdled behind time, as if it had stopped to let something unpleasant go by. That might have been a posse of melancholy javelin-men, who, with a ludicrous little strutting creature at their head—a sort of pocket drum-major, in sword and cocked hat and with a long staff in his hand—went splashing past at the moment. The court-house, what with the fog and drip, met us like the mouth of a sewer, and I was half-inclined to cry off so disenchanting an adventure, when my companion tossed me up in his arms and carried me within. Through halls and passages, smelling of cold, trodden mud, we were passed with deference, and suddenly were swung and shut into a room where there were lights and a great foggy hush.
I saw before me the scarlet judge. I knew him well enough, but never awful like this—a shrunk ferret with piercing eyes looking out of a gray nest. I saw the wigs of the counsel; but their bobtails seemed cocked with an unfamiliar viciousness. I saw the faces of the Jury, set up in two rows like ghostly ninepins; and then I saw another, a face by itself, a face like a little shrewd wicked gurgoyle, that hung yellow and alone out of the mist of the court. And that face, I knew, was the face of Joshua.
The terrible silence ticked itself away, and there suddenly was my father standing up before them all, and talking in a quick impassioned voice. My skin went cold and hot. If I reaped little of the dear tones, I understood enough to know that he spoke impetuously for the prisoner, heaping scorn upon the prosecution. Never, he said, in all his experience had he known calumny visit a soul so spotless as the one it was now his privilege to defend. The process would be laughably easy, it was true, and he would only dwell upon what must be to the jury a foregone conclusion—the accused’s innocence, that was to say—with the object to crush with its own vicious fallacies a prosecution which, indeed, he could not help remarking bore more the appearance of a persecution.
Mr. Quayle at this point laughed a little under his breath and whispered, “Bravo!” in my ear, as he eased his burden by resting my feet on the back of a bench. As for me, I was burning and shooting all over with pride, as my eyes went from my father to the poor little ugly prisoner in the dock, and back again.
The accused, went on my father (in substance. I can only give the briefest abstract of his speech), would not deny that there had been differences between him and his brother. Indeed, it would be useless to, in the face of some recent notorious evidence to the contrary. But did not all history teach us the folly of jumping, on the strength of an unguarded word, to fatal conclusions? Had not one of our own monarchs (surnamed Fitz-Empress, as he need not remind the jury) suffered a lifelong regret from the false interpretation put upon a rash utterance of his? “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” he had cried, in an unthinking moment. “You shall pay for this!” had been Joshua Pilbrow’s threat to his brother, under a like aggravation, in the sale-room. “Gentlemen,” said my father, “how deadly the seeming import, how laughable the explanation in either case. King Henry cried only distractedly for some one to persuade his importunate Chancellor to leave him alone. Joshua Pilbrow meant no more than to insist that his brother should ‘stand the whole racket’ of a purchase of which he himself had disapproved. Hence, gentlemen, these tears!”