"That gentleman is like him—very like him—that's all I'll swear to. His manner of dress, his stand, his height, yes, and his face, his mustache, the chin, the few hairs there between the eyebrows—remarkably like, sir—for I recollect the man well enough. It may have been his double, but I'm not here to swear positively it was Mr. Osborne, because I'm not sure."
"We will take it, then, that, assuming there were two men, the one was so much like the other that you swear it was either Mr. Osborne or his double?" the coroner said.
"Well, I'll go so far as that, sir," agreed Campbell, and, at this admission, Furneaux glanced at a veiled figure that sat among the witnesses at the back of the court.
He knew that Rosalind Marsh was present, and his expression softened a little. Then he looked at another veiled woman—Hylda Prout—and saw that her eyes were fastened, not on the witness, but ever on Rosalind Marsh, as though there was no object, no interest, in the room but that one black-clothed figure of Rosalind.
Campbell's memory of the drive was ransacked, and turned inside out, and thrashed and tormented by one and another to weariness; and then it was the turn of Hester Bates, all tears, to tell how she had seen someone like unto Osborne on the stairs at five to eight, whose feet seemed to reel like a drunken man's, and who afterwards impressed her, when she thought of it, as a shape rather of limbo and spirit-land than of Mayfair and everyday life.
Then the flint ax-head, or celt, was presented to the court, and Hylda Prout was called to give evidence against her employer. She told how she had missed an ax-head from the museum, and also a Saracen dagger, but whether this was the very ax-head that was missing she could not say. It was very like it—that was all—and even Osborne showed his amaze at her collectedness, her calm indifference to many eyes.
"May I not be allowed to examine it?" he asked his solicitor.
"Why not?" said the coroner, and there was a tense moment when the celt was handed him.
He bent over it two seconds, and then said quietly: "This is certainly one of my collection of flints!"
His solicitor, taken quite aback, muttered an angry protest, and a queer murmur made itself felt. Osborne heard both the lawyer's words and the subdued "Ah!" of the others echoing in his aching heart. By this time he was as inwardly sensitive to the opinion of the mob as a wretch in the hands of inquisitors to the whim and humors of his torturers.