"You have a right to explain yourself fully," said he, after a momentary struggle in which his generosity triumphed over his pride. "When you did think of your sisters, what explanation did you give yourself of the facts we have just been considering?"
"I could not imagine the truth, so I just satisfied myself that Adelaide had discovered Carmel's intentions to ride into town and had insisted on accompanying her. They were having it out, I thought, in the presence of the man who had made all this trouble between them."
"And you left them to the task?"
"Yes, sir, but not without a struggle. I was minded several times to return. This I have testified to before."
"Did this struggle consume forty minutes?"
"It must have and more, if I entered the hold in Cuthbert Road at the hour they state."
Mr. Fox gave up the game, and I looked to be the next person called. But it was not a part of Mr. Moffat's plan to weaken the effect of Carmel's testimony by offering any weak corroboration of facts which nobody showed the least inclination to dispute. Satisfied with having given the jury an opportunity to contrast his client's present cheerfulness and manly aspect with the sullenness he had maintained while in doubt of Carmel's real connection with this crime, Mr. Moffat rested his case.
There was no testimony offered in rebuttal and the court took a recess.
When it reassembled I cast another anxious glance around. Still no Carmel, nor any signs of Sweetwater. I could understand her absence, but not his, and it was in a confusion of feeling which was fast getting the upper hand of me, that I turned my attention to Mr. Moffat and the plea he was about to make for his youthful client.
I do not wish to obtrude myself too much into this trial of another man for the murder of my betrothed. But when, after a wait during which the prisoner had a chance to show his mettle under the concentrated gaze of an expectant crowd, the senior counsel for the defence slowly rose, and, lifting his ungainly length till his shoulders lost their stoop and his whole presence acquired a dignity which had been entirely absent from it up to this decisive moment, I felt a sudden slow and creeping chill seize and shake me, as I have heard people say they experienced when uttering the common expression, "Some one is walking over my grave."
It was not that he glanced my way, for this he did not do; yet I received a subtle message from him, by some telepathic means I could neither understand nor respond to—a message of warning, or, possibly of simple preparation for what his coming speech might convey.
It laid my spirits low for a moment; then they rose as those of a better man might rise at the scent of danger. If he could warn, he could also withhold. I would trust him, or I would, at least, trust my fate. And so, good-bye to self. Arthur's life and Carmel's future peace were trembling in the balance. Surely these were worth the full attention of the man who loved the woman, who pitied the man.
At the next moment I heard these words, delivered in the slow and but slightly raised tones with which Mr. Moffat invariably began his address:
"May it please the court and gentlemen of the jury, my learned friend of the prosecution has shown great discretion in that, so far as appears from the trend of his examinations, he is planning no attempt to explain the many silences and the often forbidding attitude of my young client by any theory save the obvious one—the natural desire of a brother to hide his only remaining sister's connection with a tragedy of whose details he was ignorant, and concerning which he had formed a theory derogatory to her position as a young and well-bred woman.
"I am, therefore, spared the task of pressing upon your consideration these very natural and, I may add, laudable grounds for my client's many hesitations and suppressions—which, under other circumstances, would militate so deeply against him in the eyes of an upright and impartial jury. Any man with a heart in his breast, and a sense of honour in his soul, can understand why this man—whatever his record, and however impervious he may have seemed in the days of his prosperity and the wilfulness of his youth—should recoil from revelations which would attack the honour, if not the life, of a young and beautiful sister, sole remnant of a family eminent in station, and in all those moral and civic attributes which make for the honour of a town and lend distinction to its history.
"Fear for a loved one, even in one whom you will probably hear described as a dissipated man, of selfish tendencies and hitherto unbrotherly qualities, is a great miracle-worker. No sacrifice seems impossible which serves as a guard for one so situated and so threatened.
"Let us review his history. Let us disentangle, if we can, our knowledge of what occurred in the clubhouse, from his knowledge of it at the time he showed these unexpected traits of self-control and brotherly anxiety, which you will yet hear so severely scored by my able opponent. His was a nature in which honourable instincts had forever battled with the secret predilections of youth for independence and free living. He rebelled at all monition; but this did not make him altogether insensible to the secret ties of kinship, or the claims upon his protection of two highly gifted sisters. Consciously or unconsciously, he kept watch upon the two; and when he saw that an extraneous influence was undermining their mutual confidence, he rebelled in his heart, whatever restraint he may have put upon his tongue and actions. Then came an evening, when, with heart already rasped by a personal humiliation, he saw a letter passed. You have heard the letter and listened to its answer; but he knew nothing beyond the fact—a fact which soon received a terrible significance from the events which so speedily followed."
Here Mr. Moffat recapitulated those events, but always from the standpoint of the defendant—a standpoint which necessarily brought before the jury the many excellent reasons which his client had for supposing this crime to have resulted solely from the conflicting interests represented by that furtively passed note, and the visit of two girls instead of one to The Whispering Pines. It was very convincing, especially his picture of Arthur's impulsive flight from the club-house at the first sound of his sisters' voices.
"The learned counsel for the people may call this unnatural," he cried. "He may say that no brother would leave the place under such circumstances, whether sober or not sober, alive to duty or dead to it—that curiosity would hold him there, if nothing else. But he forgets, if thus he thinks and thus would have you think, that the man who now confronts you from the bar is separated by an immense experience from the boy he was at that hour of surprise and selfish preoccupation.
"You who have heard the defendant tell how he could not remember if he carried up one or two bottles from the kitchen, can imagine the blank condition of this untutored mind at the moment when those voices fell upon his ear, calling him to responsibilities he had never before shouldered, and which he saw no way of shouldering now. In that first instant of inconsiderate escape, he was alarmed for himself,—afraid of the discovery of the sneaking act of which he had just been guilty—not fearful for his sisters. You would have done differently; but you are all men disciplined to forget yourselves and think first of others, taught, in the school of life to face responsibility rather than shirk it. But discipline had not yet reached this unhappy boy—the slave, so far, of his unfortunate habits. It began its work later; yet not much later. Before he had half crossed the golf-links, the sense of what he had done stopped him in middle course, and, reckless of the oncoming storm, he turned his back upon the place he was making for, only to switch around again, as craving got the better of his curiosity, or of that deeper feeling to which my experienced opponent will, no doubt, touchingly allude when he comes to survey this situation with you.