The butler’s evidence was black against him. What saving admission could Gardiner, his counsel, ablest cross-examiner of the day though he was, get out of this man? Wearily he glanced at the window, dwelling with a shiver on the grey, gaunt walls of Newgate—the last abode of the condemned man’s brief span of life, hiding the condemned cell and the gallows—and on the irony of the doves of Newgate courtyard that flashed their white wings in the overshadowed air. It was then that he turned the quick glance at Irene which she intercepted and interpreted as one of appeal. Gardiner rose to cross-examine the butler. There was little hope of shaking the evidence.
“Oh, God! How my heart aches!” said Irene to Gerard, pressing her hand to her bosom.
“Hush!” he replied. “Don’t give way. Let us follow this closely.”
But the meshes seemed tighter drawn than ever around Hugh. Her nerve began to fail. Outside the bright spring sunshine flooded the sky. Not a ray entered the murky court, where the heat was oppressive, the air stifling. The judge, notorious for his horror of draughts, had caused all the windows to be closed. Irene gasped for breath. A faint nausea made her head swim. She closed her eyes and leaned against her husband. For a few moments she lost consciousness. Gerard, intent upon the evidence, remained unaware of her condition.
Suddenly a confused murmur of voices aroused her with a start. Samuels was leaving the witness-box. Gardiner was regarding Hugh with a little air of triumph. The mass of wigged heads below her was agitated like the backs of a flock in motion.
“What’s the matter? I wasn’t listening?” she whispered.
Gerard, not catching her words, concluded they contained merely some expression of emotion, and nodded to her vaguely. Soon absorbed in the evidence of the next witness, Parsons, the porter at the mansion, Irene let her question pass and forgot the incident.
Thus a material point for Hugh’s defence, an admission by Samuels that he had heard a noise like the slamming of the front door at half-past eleven, the hour when Hugh claimed to have left the house, had escaped her cognisance.
The only point in his client’s favour that Gardiner elicited from the porter, was the statement that the brown paper parcel which the prisoner was carrying on the morning of the murder was neatly tied with string, and in no wise resembled a hastily wrapped up bundle of documents.
Other witnesses followed. Again Irene felt the deadly faintness coming over her. It was nature’s penalty for insufficient food, sleep and air. She struggled against it with all her strength.