The Earl's promise

by Mrs. J. H. Riddell

Mr. D’Almarez made no secret of his chagrin at the result of this interview, and it taxed his politeness sorely to listen to Miss Moffat’s account of it with even ordinary patience.

He had hoped that to her Scott would speak openly. He had expected to obtain some information which might bring the crime under the head of accident rather than design, and enable him to fight for a verdict of manslaughter instead of murder. It was known to every one in the county that Mr. Brady had not treated the man well; and if Scott could only be got to state what actually passed on the last occasion he and his enemy ever met, the lawyer felt something might be done, supposing the blow had been struck without premeditation, and that high and passionate words had preceded it.

If a jury could be argued or coaxed into believing Scott did not leave his home with the deliberate intention of murdering Mr. Brady, the man’s chance was by no means hopeless; and there was this in his favour, that the owner of Maryville had actually on the day of the murder started to go to Dublin, although for some unexplained reason he failed to continue his journey, so that it was unlikely Scott could have expected to meet him near the Castle Farm.

On the other hand, it was against the accused that he knew Mr. Brady intended to eject him from the house—that he had publicly stated, “Brady should never come into it alive,” and that he expressed his intention of sticking to the old place even if it was pulled down about his ears.

Still, considering what Mr. Brady had been, and the amount of fancied or real injury he inflicted on Amos, considering that the one man had always been a dishonest reprobate, and the other a hardworking decent, well-conducted fellow, who never cheated a neighbour of a halfpenny; that he had a son down in fever, and children clamouring for bread; that he might well be nearly distraught with want of food, and mental anguish; considering what a picture a clever barrister might fill in from these outlines, Mr. D’Almarez did not despair of doing something for Scott, if only he could be induced to confess. And now it seemed he did not intend to confess; and the lawyer, chafing with irritation, had to sit and listen to a woman’s maunderings about innocence and Scott’s religious utterances and other matters of the same kind, all of which Mr. D’Almarez mentally summed up in one word, “Rubbish!”

“It is all very well, Miss Moffat” he said, when she finished, “for Scott to talk goody twaddle—excuse the expression—to a lady or a parson; but that sort of thing will not go down with a judge or a jury. He mistakes his position; the period has not yet arrived for that kind of conversation. Time enough for religious exercises when he has done with lawyers and been turned over to the chaplain. You must pardon my plain speaking. The only hope there is of saving Scott lies with himself, and if he will persist in trying to hoodwink me and playing at this foolish game of hide-and-seek with his own attorney, I am afraid there is not a chance of saving him.”

“But, Mr. D’Almarez,” pleaded Grace, “suppose the man has nothing to tell, suppose he is not guilty, suppose he has really tried to make his peace with God, expecting nothing from man, and that every word he said to me to-day were true, the natural expression of a broken and a contrite heart, in which not a hope, so far as this world is concerned, still lingers?”

The lawyer smiled. It was very right and proper, of course, for a lady to talk in this strain, but it was a style of conversation for which he himself did not much care, and very possibly had Miss Moffat been older and uglier and poorer, he might not have listened to it even with the amount of politeness he evinced.

“I cannot suppose an impossibility,” he answered. “Your own kindness of disposition and Scott’s solemn assertions have, you must allow me to say, blinded your judgment. If you exercise it you will understand that it is a simple impossibility for Scott to be innocent. He may be innocent of intentional murder, and that is the only point we can try to make in his favour, but his hands are not clean in the matter as he tries to make us believe.

“Remember the hatred he entertained for Mr. Brady, recollect all he had suffered through him, recall the expressions he was habitually in the practice of using concerning him, the threats he uttered not farther back than the day before the murder, and then pass on to the murder itself. Mr. Brady is found dead in a lonely road leading straight to the Castle Farm. He has been killed by a blow, and that blow it is not disputed must have been dealt by a stick, and that stick one belonging to Scott, which is found at a little distance as if flung away in a panic. According to Scott’s own account he was not in the divisional road at all that night, and yet it was the most direct route back from Mr. Hanlon’s, where he admits he called. He says he started to go round by Lennon’s, but he never went there. He says he lost his stick on the previous day, but he does not know where or how, and he cannot even remember the places at which he stopped, or whether he missed his stick before his return home, or whether he ever missed it till it was found after the murder.