“Them’s the reporters,” whispered her friend. “They don’t like coming till the last minute, for they has to be the last to go. At an ordinary inquest there are only two—maybe three—attending, but now every paper in the kingdom has pretty well applied for a pass to that reporters’ table.”
He looked consideringly down into the well of the court. “Now let me see what I can do for you—”
Then he beckoned to the coroner’s officer: “Perhaps you could put this lady just over there, in a corner by herself? Related to a relation of the deceased, but doesn’t want to be—” He whispered a word or two, and the other nodded sympathetically, and looked at Mrs. Bunting with interest. “I’ll put her just here,” he muttered. “There’s no one coming there to-day. You see, there are only seven witnesses—sometimes we have a lot more than that.”
And he kindly put her on a now empty bench opposite to where the seven witnesses stood and sat with their eager, set faces, ready—aye, more than ready—to play their part.
For a moment every eye in the court was focused on Mrs. Bunting, but soon those who had stared so hungrily, so intently, at her, realised that she had nothing to do with the case. She was evidently there as a spectator, and, more fortunate than most, she had a “friend at court,” and so was able to sit comfortably, instead of having to stand in the crowd.
But she was not long left in isolation. Very soon some of the important-looking gentlemen she had seen downstairs came into the court, and were ushered over to her seat while two or three among them, including the famous writer whose face was so familiar that it almost seemed to Mrs. Bunting like that of a kindly acquaintance, were accommodated at the reporters’ table.
“Gentlemen, the Coroner.”
The jury stood up, shuffling their feet, and then sat down again; over the spectators there fell a sudden silence.
And then what immediately followed recalled to Mrs. Bunting, for the first time, that informal little country inquest of long ago.
First came the “Oyez! Oyez!” the old Norman-French summons to all whose business it is to attend a solemn inquiry into the death—sudden, unexplained, terrible—of a fellow-being.