Orsini gazed blandly into the irate and contemptuous countenance thrust toward him. “No, sair,” he replied regretfully. “If that jail was up on a hill with trees around it, then I was not in that jail.”
Once more the courtroom, reckless of the gavel, yielded to helpless and hilarious uproar, and for this time they were spared. One look at Mr. Lambert’s countenance, a full moon in the throes of apoplexy, had undermined even Judge Carver’s iron reserves. The gavel remained idle while he indulged himself in a severe attack of coughing behind a large and protective handkerchief. The red-headed girl was using a more minute one to mop her eyes when she paused, startled and incredulous. Across the courtroom, Patrick and his wife Susan were laughing into each other’s eyes, for one miraculous moment the gay and care-free comrades of old; for one moment—and then, abruptly, memory swept back her lifted veil and they sat staring blankly at the dreadful havoc that lay between them, who had been wont to seek each other in laughter. Slowly, painfully, Sue Ives wrenched her eyes back to their schooled vigilance, and after an interminable breath, Pat Ives turned his haunted ones back to the window, beyond which the sky was still blue. Only in that second’s wait the red-headed girl had seen the dark flush sweep across his pallor, and the hunger in those imploring eyes, frantic and despairing as those of a small boy who had watched a beloved hand slam a heavy door in his face.
“Why, he loves her!” thought the red-headed girl. “He loves her dreadfully!” Those few scattered seconds when laughter and hope and despair had swept across a court—how long—how long they seemed! And yet they would have scantily sufficed to turn a pretty phrase or a platitude on the weather. They had just barely served to give the portly Lambert time to recover his breath, his voice, and his venom, all three of which he was now proceeding to utilize simultaneously and vigorously.
“I see, I see. You’re particular about your jails—like them in valleys, do you? Now be good enough to answer my question without any further trifling.”
“What question is that?”
“Have you ever been in jail?”
Mr. Orsini’s expression became faintly tinged with caution, but its affability did not diminish. “When?” he inquired impartially.
“When? Any time! Will—you—answer—my—question?”
Thus rudely adjured, his victim yielded to the inevitable with philosophy, humour, and grace. “Not any time—no, no! That is too exaggerate’. But sometimes—yes—I do not deny that sometimes I have been in jail.”
Under the eyes of the entranced spectators, Mr. Lambert’s rosy jowls darkened to a fine, deep, full-bodied maroon. “You don’t deny it, hey? Well, that’s very magnanimous and gratifying—very gratifying indeed. Now will you continue to gratify us by telling us just why you went to jail?”