"But you know where the other—or rather remnants of the other, was found?"
"In my own stable, taken there by my man Zadok Brown, who says he picked it out of one of our waste barrels."
"This is the part of bottle referred to. Do you recognise the label still adhering to it as similar to the one to be found on the bottle you emptied in Cuthbert Road?"
"It is like that one."
"Had you carried that other bottle off, and had it been broken as this has been broken would it not have presented an exactly similar appearance to this?"
"Possibly."
"Only possibly?"
"It would have looked the same. I cannot deny it. What's the use fooling?"
"Mr. Cumberland, the only two bottles known to contain this especial brand of wine were in the clubhouse at ten o'clock that night. How came one of them to get into the barrel outside your stable before your return the next day?"
"I cannot say."
"This barrel stood where?"
"In the passage behind the stable."
"The passage you pass through on your way to the door leading into your neighbour's grounds?"
"Yes."
The dreaded moment had come. This "Yes" had no sooner left Arthur's lips than I saw Ella throw out her innocent arms, and leap impetuously to her feet, with a loud "No, no, I can tell—"
She did not say what, for at the hubbub roused by this outbreak in open court, she fainted dead away and was carried out in her dismayed father's arms.
This necessarily caused a break in the proceedings. Mr. Fox suspended his cross-examination and in a few minutes more, the judge adjourned the court. As the prisoner rose and turned to pass out, I cast him a hurried glance to see what effect had been made upon him by this ingenuous outburst from one he had possibly just a little depreciated. A great one, evidently. His features were transformed, and he seemed almost as oblivious of the countless eyes upon him as she had been when she rose to testify for him in her self-forgetful enthusiasm. As I observed this and the satisfaction with which Mr. Moffat scented this new witness,—a satisfaction which promised little consideration for her if she ever came upon the stand—I surrendered to fate.
Inwardly committing Carmel's future to the God who made her and who knew better than we the story of her life and what her fiery temper had cost her, I drew a piece of paper from my pocket, and, while the courtroom was slowly emptying, hastily addressed the following lines to Mr. Moffat who had lingered to have a few words with his colleague:
"There is a witness in this building who can testify more clearly and definitely than Miss Fulton, that Arthur Cumberland, for all we have heard in seeming contradiction to the same, might have been on the golf-links at the time he swears to. That witness is myself.
"ELWOOD RANELAGH."
The time which elapsed between my passing over this note and his receiving and reading it, was to me like the last few moments of a condemned criminal. How gladly would I have changed places with Arthur, and with what sensations of despair I saw flitting before me in my mind's eye, the various visions of Carmel's loveliness which had charmed me out of myself. But the die had been cast, and I was ready to meet the surprised lawyer's look when his eve rose from the words I had written and settled steadily on my face. Next minute he was writing busily and in a second later I was reading these words:
"Do you absolutely wish to be recalled as a witness, and by the defence? M."
My answer was brief:
"I do. Not to make a confession of crime. I have no such confession to make. But I know who drove that horse. R."
I had sacrificed Carmel to my sense of right. Never had I loved her as I did at that moment.
XXVII
EXPECTANCY
A turning-point had been reached in the defence. That every one knew after the first glance at Mr. Moffat, on the opening of the next morning's session. As I noted the excitement which this occasioned even in quarters where self-control is usually most marked and such emotions suppressed, I marvelled at the subtle influence of one man's expectancy, and the powerful effect which can be produced on a feverish crowd by a well-ordered silence suggestive of coming action.
I, who knew the basis of this expectancy and the nature of the action with which Mr. Moffat anticipated startling the court, was the quietest person present. Since it was my hand and none other which must give this fresh turn to the wheel of justice, it were well for me to do it calmly and without any of the old maddening throb of heart. But the time seemed long before Arthur was released from further cross-examination, and the opportunity given Mr. Moffat to call his next witness.
Something in the attitude he now took, something in the way he bent over his client and whispered a few admonitory words, and still more the emotion with which these words were received and answered by some extraordinary protest, aroused expectation to a still greater pitch, and made my course seem even more painful to myself than I had foreseen when dreaming over and weighing the possibilities of this hour. With something like terror, I awaited the calling of my name; and, when it was delayed, it was with emotions inexplicable to myself that I looked up and saw Mr. Moffat holding open a door at the left of the judge, with that attitude of respect, which a man only assumes in the presence and under the dominating influence of woman.
"Ella!" thought I. "Instead of saving her by my contemplated sacrifice of
Carmel, I have only added one sacrifice to another."
But when the timid faltering step we could faintly hear crossing the room beyond, had brought its possessor within sight, and I perceived the tall, black-robed, heavily veiled woman who reached for Mr. Moffat's sustaining arm, I did not need the startling picture of the prisoner, standing upright, with outheld and repellant hands, to realise that the impossible had happened, and that all which he, as well as I, had done and left undone, suffered and suppressed, had been in vain.
Mr. Moffat, with no eye for him or for me, conducted his witness to a chair; then, as she loosened her veil and let it drop in her lap, he cried in tones which rang from end to end of the court-room: "I summon Carmel Cumberland to the stand, to witness in her brother's defence."
The surprise was complete. It was a great moment for Mr. Moffat; but for me all was confusion, dread, a veil of misty darkness, through which shone her face, marred by its ineffaceable scar, but calm as I had never expected to see it again in this life, and beautiful with a smile under which her deeply shaken and hardly conscious brother sank slowly back into his seat, amid a silence as profound as the hold she had immediately taken upon all hearts.
XXVIII
"WHERE IS MY BROTHER?"
What is the explanation of Carmel's reappearance in town and of this sensational introduction of her into the court-room, in a restored state of health of which no one, so far as known, had had any intimation save the man who was responsible for her appearance? The particulars are due you.
She had passed some weeks at Lakewood, under the eye of the nurse who was detailed to watch, as well as tend her. During these weeks she gave no sign of improvement mentally, though she constantly gained strength otherwise, and impressed everybody with the clear light in her eye and the absence of everything suggestive of gloom in her expression and language. There was the same complete loss of memory up to the time of the tragic occurrence which had desolated her home; the same harping at odd moments on Adelaide's happiness and her own prospect of seeing this dear sister very soon which had marked the opening days of her convalescence. But beyond and back of all this was some secret joy, unintelligible to the nurse, which helped rather than retarded the sick girl's recovery, and made Carmel appear at times as if she walked on air and breathed the very breath of Paradise—an anomaly which not only roused Miss Unwin's curiosity, but led her to regard with something like apprehension, any change in her patient's state of mind which would rob her of the strange and unseen delights which fed her secret soul and made her oblivious of the awful facts awaiting a restored memory.