The House of the Whispering Pines (41 page)

This witness was no less a person than Arthur himself. Recalled by his
counsel, he was reminded of his former statement that he had left the
club-house in a hurry because he heard his sister Adelaide's voice, and
was now asked if hers was the only voice he had heard.

His answer revealed much of his mind.

"No, I heard Carmel's answering her."

This satisfying Mr. Moffat, he was passed over to Mr. Fox, and a short
cross-examination ensued on this point.

"You heard both your sisters speaking?"

"Yes, sir."

"Any of their words, or only their voices?"

"I heard one word."

"What word?"

"The word, 'Elwood.'"

"In which voice?"

"In that of my sister Adelaide."

"And you fled?"

"Immediately."

"Leaving your two sisters alone in this cold and out-of-the-way house?"

"I did not think they were alone."

"Who did you think was with them?"

"I have already mentioned the name."

"Yet you left them?"

"Yes, I've already explained that. I was engaged in a mean act. I was
ashamed to be caught at it by Adelaide. I preferred flight. I had no
premonition of tragedy—any such tragedy as afterwards occurred. I
understood neither of my sisters and my thoughts were only for myself."

"Didn't you so much as try to account for their both being there?"

"Not then."

"Had you expected Adelaide to accompany your younger sister when you
harnessed the horse for her?"

"No, sir."

"Had not this younger sister even enjoined secrecy upon you in asking you
to harness the horse?"

"Yes, sir."

"Yet you heard the two together in this remote building without
surprise?"

"No, I must have felt surprise, but I didn't stop to analyse my feelings.
Afterward, I turned it over in my mind and tried to make something out of
the whole thing. But that was when I was far out on the links."

A losing game thus far. This the district attorney seemed to feel; but he
was not an ungenerous man though cursed (perhaps, I should say blessed,
considering the position he held) by a tenacity which never let him lose
his hold until the jury gave their verdict.

"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.

"The storm, continuing, obliterated his steps as fast as the ever
whitening spaces beneath received them; but if it had stopped then and
there, leaving those wandering imprints to tell their story, what a tale
we might have read of the first secret conflict in this awakening soul! I
leave you to imagine this history, and pass to the bitter hour when,
racked by a night of dissipation, he was aroused, indeed, to the
magnitude of his fault and the awful consequences of his self-indulgence,
by the news of his elder sister's violent death and the hardly less
pitiful condition of the younger.

"The younger!" The pause he here made was more eloquent than any words.
"Is it for me to laud her virtues, or to seek to impress upon you in this
connection, the overwhelming nature of the events which in reality had
laid her mind and body low? You have seen her; you have heard her; and
the memory of the tale she has here told will never leave you, or lose
its hold upon your sympathies or your admiration. If everything else
connected with this case is forgotten, the recollection of that will
remain. You, and I, and all who wait upon your verdict, will in due time
pass from among the living, and leave small print behind us on the sands
of time. But her act will not die, and to it I now offer the homage of
silence, since that would best please her heroic soul, which broke the
bonds of womanly reserve only to save from an unmerited charge a falsely
arraigned brother."

The restraint and yet the fire with which Mr. Moffat uttered these simple
words, lifted all hearts and surcharged the atmosphere with an emotion
rarely awakened in a court of law. Not in my pulses alone was started the
electric current of renewed life. The jury, to a man, glowed with
enthusiasm, and from the audience rose one long and suppressed sigh of
answering feeling, which was all the tribute he needed for his
eloquence—or Carmel for her uncalculating, self-sacrificing deed. I
could have called upon the mountains to cover
me
; but—God be
praised—no one thought of me in that hour. Every throb, every thought
was for her.

At the proper moment of subsiding feeling, Mr. Moffat again raised
his voice:

"Gentlemen of the jury, you have seen point after point of the
prosecution's case demolished before your eyes by testimony which no one
has had the temerity to attempt to controvert. What is left? Mr. Fox will
tell you—three strong and unassailable facts. The ring found in the
murdered woman's casket, the remnants of the tell-tale bottle discovered
in the Cumberland stable, and the opportunity for crime given by the
acknowledged presence of the defendant on or near the scene of death. He
will harp on these facts; he will make much of them; and he will be
justified in doing so, for they are the only links remaining of the
strong chain forged so carefully against my client.

"But are these points so vital as they seem? Let us consider them, and
see. My client has denied that he dropped anything into his sister's
casket, much less the ring missing from that sister's finger. Dare you,
then, convict on this point when, according to count, ten other persons
were seen to drop flowers into this very place—any one of which might
have carried this object with it?

"And the bit of broken bottle found in or near the defendant's own
stable! Is he to be convicted on the similarity it offers to the one
known to have come from the club-house wine-vault, while a reasonable
doubt remains of his having been the hand which carried it there? No!
Where there is a reasonable doubt, no high-minded jury will convict;
and I claim that my client has made it plain that there is such a
reasonable doubt."