She closed her eyes. The man’s calm strength of voice, the hidden strength of his frame reassured her fears.
“Forgive me for doubting while you are here to save him,” she murmured, in her blind faith.
A few moments later some domestic duty summoned her away. Gerard rose, and stretched himself and yawned.
“Oh, damn!” he said, irritably.
Then, lighting his pipe, he strode out the house, and tramped along the Heath Road, with the air of a man who is justifying to himself a series of expletives.
The week expired. Hugh was again brought before the magistrates and committed for trial.
The key turned in the cell-door in Holloway Gaol, and he was left alone for the night. In a state of semi-sanity he abandoned himself to the ghastly panorama of the day, as it passed and repassed in incoherent fragments before his eyes. He was prostrate with fatigue and strain, utterly brain-weary, incapable of lucid arrangement of ideas, almost of calculating the weight of the evidence against him.
Fresh facts had been brought to light. The butler had heard him speak in angry tones when he had entered the room with the spirit-tray. The entry in Israel’s private ledger assigning the stolen deed-box as the depository of the £5,000 security had been confirmed by the confidential clerk. Moreover, the empty box had been discovered, broken open, in the trunk of a hollow tree in the wood behind The Lindens. The prisoner had returned with a mysterious parcel of which he could give no account. On searching his rooms after arrest, the police had found the grate full of scrupulously reduced paper-ash. The inference was that this ash represented the stolen bond. It was another instance of the irony that marked this extraordinary freak of circumstances. Even his careful destruction of Minna’s letters and all memorials of her was turned into evidence against him. Medical testimony placed one o’clock and five as the extreme limits between which the murder could possibly have been committed. Probabilities pointed to three o’clock.
In his sleepless and disordered, fancy, the witnesses jostled each other in the box, giving inconsequent scraps of evidence. But clearest before his mind rose the picture of Minna, his wife, the sole person in the universe that could be absolutely certain of his innocence. There she stood, appalling in the wreckage of her beauty, a thin, black, pinched figure, hollow-eyed, drawn-lipped, telling the half truth that was more damnable than a lie. She had parted from Mr. Colman at eleven, had gone up to her room. Had heard no sound in the house till she was awakened in the morning to learn the horrible news. The relations between Mr. Colman and her father had always been most cordial. He had dined with them that evening, her father in the best of spirits. Mr. Hart had never mentioned that Mr. Colman was a client. Clients were not visiting acquaintances. That was all. She had not met his eyes, scarcely those of the Crown prosecutor or the magistrate when they questioned her. Had replied doggedly, in the deep, hard voice he had grown so familiar with of late. But one year ago it had stirred all the fibres in his body. To-day not a vestige of its richness remained.