"Well?" Badger said.
"Oh, everything else was just as the professor left it. His slippers under his chair, his dressing-gown over the back of it, his spectacles on the desk, his bible laid down open. He was going to meet a caller, you know, when he was taken with the stitch."
"Very well. Perhaps we have had enough of the professor," said Badger. But the accused did not find these minutiae trivial. For the first time his proud face broke and he hid the tears with his hand. The mention of the bible, slippers and the other personal mementos had called up the dearest picture he ever knew.
All the grand life, equally compounded of whims and principles, passed before him at Bertha's mention of the empty chair.
But the sympathy of the spectators was short-lived. While Robert wept a strain of sad music stole into the court-room. Faint at first, it rose in volume as the players approached, but still with a muted sound, as if their instruments were muffled. The drum-beats were rare and unobtrusive, and the burden of the melody, if melody it were, was borne by proud bugles and quivering oboes. Its cadences were old and mysterious, like some Gregorian chant intoned in cloisters before organ and orchestra had trained our ears to the chords of harmony. No wonder the court-room was hushed until it died away in the distance.
It was the Masonic dead march, for on this day the funerals of the dead whom Robert Floyd was accused of murdering were being held. Oscar Schubert, as a member of the mystic order, was buried with all the pomp of its ceremonies, and it was his cortege, proceeding to the sepulcher, whose passage occasioned this pause in the trial.
The revulsion of sympathy was instant. Every man in the court-room saw the wife and two children, sitting behind drawn curtains in the carriage of the chief mourners, and beyond this picture the bodies of six victims, four of them young girls, done to death at the prompting of avarice. The prisoner himself seemed to understand, for he shut his teeth, though his bold eyes still dared the multitude. But they rested more and more upon the lovely face which was his one point of consolation in that unfriendly assemblage. Badger's indifferent voice showed no quiver when he asked Miss Lund to step down and called for Robert Floyd. It was a brusque opening.
"What was contained in the safe in your uncle's study?"
"I never opened it."
"You knew, however?"