But Furneaux, to suit his own purposes, had contrived that the tag of lace should come last; and with its mute appeal for vengeance everything in favor of Osborne was swept out of the bosom of His Majesty's lieges, and only wrath and abhorrence raged there.
Why, if he had actually killed Rose de Bercy, Osborne should carry about that incriminating bit of lace in his bag, no one seemed to stop to ask; but when the dreadful thing was held up before his eyes, the twelve good men and true looked at it and at each other, and a sort of shuddering abhorrence pervaded the court.
Even the Italian Antonio, who had contrived to be present as representing some obscure paper in Paris—the very man who had put the lace into the bag—shook his head over Osborne's guilt, being, as it were, carried out of himself by the vigor and rush of the mental hurricane which swept around him!
When Osborne, put into the box, repeated that the "celt" was really his, this candor now won no sympathy. When he said solemnly that the bit of lace had been secreted among his belongings by some unknown hand, the small company of men present in court despised him for so childish a lie.
His spirit, as he stood in that box, exposed to the animus of so many spirits, felt as if it was being hurried by a kind of magnetic gale to destruction; his fingers, his knees shivered, his voice cracked in his throat; he could not keep his eyes from being wild, his skin from being white, and in his heart his own stupefied conscience accused him of the sin that his brothers charged him with.
Though the jury soon ascertained from the coroner's injunctions what their verdict had to be, they still took twenty minutes to think of it. However, they knew well that the coroner had spoken to them under the suggestion of the police, who, no doubt, would conduct their own business best; so in the end they came in with the verdict of "willful murder committed by some person or persons unknown."
And now it was the turn of the mob to have their say. The vast crowd was kept in leash until they were vouchsafed just a glimpse of Osborne, in the midst of a mass of police guarding him, as he emerged from the court to his automobile. Then suddenly, as it were, the hoarse bellow of the storm opened to roar him out of the universe—an overpowering load of sound for one frail heart to bear without quailing.
But if Osborne's heart quailed, there was one heart there that did not quail, one smooth forehead that suddenly flushed and frowned in opposition to a world's current, and dared to think and feel alone.
As the mob yelped its execration, Rosalind Marsh cried a protest of "Shame, oh, shame!"
For now her woman's bosom smote her with ruth, and her compassion championed him, believed in him, refused to admit that he could have been so base. If she had been near him she would have raised her veil, and gazed into his face with a steady smile!