"What!—murder her—God in heaven forbid," he exclaimed.
"Is not this your knife?"
"It is!"
"And how came it here—if not used by you—in this unknown manner?"
"It was stolen from me by that arch-demon, Mark Dermot," said Luke, shuddering to the very heart, as he mentioned that name.
"That has got to be proved," cried one of the crowd, who happened to be a friend of Mark's, "we can't take your bare word for it. Let him be secured."
But Luke needed no securing. Listlessly he suffered them to pinion his arms; and in the same room with the precious casket which once contained his heart's treasure, he abided the remainder of the night, in a state of mental torture utterly incapable of being rendered into words.
The morning after this awful occurrence, a coroner's jury was summoned, and the identity of the knife having been proved, added to his own admission, and the fact of his having had a quarrel with her the day before being testified to, every circumstance tended to fix the guilt upon him; a verdict was delivered accordingly, and Luke Bryant stood charged with the murder of one for whom he would willingly have shed his last drop of blood.
With a degree of effrontery consonant with his general character, Black Mark made his appearance amongst the spectators who attended the inquiry, and was loudest in denunciation against the supposed criminal. It only remained now for the accused, who had been removed during the inquest, to be brought into the chamber of death, previously to the warrant being drawn out for his final committal, to be tried at the ensuing quarter sessions. He was conducted into the room; with a listless, apathetic gaze he looked around him mechanically, for he cared not now what fate might do to him, when suddenly his eyes rested on Mark Dermot. The consciousness of everything that had taken place seemed all to flash through his brain at once.
"Murderer!" he cried. "Can it be that Heaven's lightning slumbers! Friends!—behold that fiend; who, not content with the life's blood of one victim, now comes to triumph in a double murder!"