"It must appear to the jury as a singular thing that you only, and nobody else, should have seen this mysterious entry," continued Serjeant Siftem.
"Perhaps nobody else looked for it; they'd have seen it if they had," shortly returned the witness, who felt himself an aggrieved man, and spoke like one, since Mynn and Mynn had publicly accused him that day of having gone down to St. James's in his sleep, and seen the entry in a dream alone.
"Does it not strike you, witness, as being extraordinary that this one particular entry, professed to have been seen by your eyes, and by yours alone, should have been abstracted from a book safely kept under lock and key?" pursued Serjeant Siftem. "I am mistaken if it would not strike an intelligent man as being akin to an impossibility."
"No, it does not strike me so. But events, hard of belief, happen sometimes. I swear the marriage was in the book last November: why it is not there now, is the extraordinary part of the affair."
It was no use to cross-examine the witness further; he was cross and obstinate, and persisted in his story. Serjeant Siftem dismissed him; and Hunt was called, the clerk of the church, who came hobbling in.
The old man rambled in his evidence, but the point of it was, that he didn't believe any abstraction had been made, not he; it must be a farce to suppose it; a crotchet of that great lawyer, Fauntleroy; how could the register be touched when he himself kept it sure and sacred, the key of the safe in a hiding-place in the vestry, and the key of the church hanging up in his own house, outside his kitchen door? His rector said it had been robbed, and in course he couldn't stand out to his face as it hadn't, but he were upon his oath now, and must speak the truth without shrinking.
Serjeant Wrangle rose. "Did the witness mean to tell the court that he never saw or read the entry of the marriage?"
"No, he never did. He never heard say as it were there, and he never looked."
"But you were present when the witness Omer examined the register?" persisted Serjeant Wrangle.
"Master Omer wouldn't have got to examine it, unless I had been," retorted Hunt to Serjeant Wrangle. "I was a-sitting down in the vestry, a-nursing of my leg, which were worse than usual that day; it always is in damp weather, and—"