The Greatest Murder Mysteries of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Читать онлайн книгу.
were in the room with your late master when the prisoner called upon him?” asked the counsel.
“I was.”
“Will you state what passed between the prisoner and your master?”
“It is scarcely in my power to do so. At that time I understood no English. My master was seated at his cabinet, looking over papers and accounts. I fancy the prisoner asked him for money. He showed him papers both printed and written. My master opened a pocket-book filled with notes, the pocket-book afterwards found on his nephew, and gave the prisoner a bank note. The prisoner appeared to make a good impression on my late master, who talked to him in a very cordial manner. As he was leaving the room, the prisoner made some remark about me, and I thought from the tone of his voice, he was asking a question.”
“You thought he was asking a question?”
“Yes. In the Hindostanee language we have no interrogative form of speech, we depend entirely on the inflexion of the voice; our ears are therefore more acute than an Englishman’s. I am certain he asked my master some questions about me.”
“And your master——?”
“After replying to him, turned to me, and said, ‘I am telling this gentleman what a faithful fellow you are, Mujeebez, and how you always sleep in my dressing-room.’ ”
“You remember nothing more?”
“Nothing more.”
The Indian’s deposition, taken in the hospital at the time of the trial of Richard Marwood, was then read over to him. He certified to the truth of this deposition, and left the witness-box.
The landlord of the Bargeman’s Delight, Mr. Darley, and Mr. Peters (the latter by an interpreter), were examined, and the story of the quarrel and the lost Indian coin was elicited, making considerable impression on the jury.
There was only one more witness for the crown, and this was a young man, a chemist, who had been an apprentice at the time of the supposed death of Jabez North, and who had sold to him a few days before that supposed suicide the materials for a hair-dye.
The counsel for the prosecution then summed up.
It is not for us to follow him through the twistings and windings of a very complicated mass of evidence; he had to prove the identity of Jabez North with the prisoner at the bar, and he had to prove that Jabez North was the murderer of Mr. Montague Harding. To the mind of every spectator in that crowded court he succeeded in proving both.
In vain the prisoner’s counsel examined and cross-examined the witnesses.
The witnesses for the defence were few. A Frenchman, who represented himself as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, failed signally in an endeavour to prove an alibi, and considerably damaged the defence. Other witnesses appeared, who swore to having known the prisoner in Paris the year of the murder. They could not say they had seen him during the November of that year—it might have been earlier, it might have been later. On being cross-examined, they broke down ignominiously, and acknowledged that it might not have been that year at all. But they had known him in Paris about that period. They had always believed him to be a Frenchman. They had always understood that his father fell at Waterloo, in the ranks of the Old Guard. On cross-examination they all owned to having heard him at divers periods speak English. He had, in fact, spoken it fluently, yes, even like an Englishman. On further cross-examination it also appeared that he did not like being thought an Englishman; that he would insist vehemently upon his French extraction; that nobody knew who he was, or whence he came; and that all any one did know of him was what he himself had chosen to state.
The defence was long and laboured. The prisoner’s counsel did not enter into the question of the murder having been committed by Jabez North, or not having been committed by Jabez North. What he endeavoured to show was, that the prisoner at the bar was not Jabez North; but that he was a victim to one of those cases of mistaken identity of which there are so many on record both in English and foreign criminal archives. He cited the execution of the Frenchman Joseph Lesurges, for the murder of the Courier of Lyons. He spoke of the case of Elizabeth Canning, in which a crowd of witnesses on either side persisted in supporting entirely conflicting statements, without any evident motive whatsoever. He endeavoured to dissect the evidence of Mr. William Withers; he sneered at that worthy citizen’s wholesale slaughter of the English of her most gracious Majesty and subjects. He tried to overthrow that gentleman by ten minutes on the wrong side of the Slopperton clocks; he did his best to damage him by puzzling him as to whether the truck he spoke of had two legs and one wheel, or two wheels and one leg: but he tried in vain. Mr. Withers was not to be damaged; he stood as firm as a rock, and still swore that he carried the dead body of Jim Lomax out of Blind Peter and on to the heath, and that the man who commanded him so to do was the prisoner at the bar. Neither was Mr. Augustus Darley to be damaged; nor yet the landlord of the Bargeman’s Delight, who, in spite of all cross-examination, preserved a gloomy and resolute attitude, and declared that “that young man at the bar, which his hair was then light, had a row with a young woman in the tap-room, and throwed that there gold coin to her, which she chucked it back savage.” In short, the defence, though it lasted two hours and a half, was a very lame one; and a close observer might have seen one flash from the blue eyes of the man standing at the bar, which glanced in the direction of the eloquent Mr. Prius, Q.C., as he uttered the last words of his peroration, revengeful and murderous enough, brief though it was, to give to the spectator some idea that the Count de Marolles, innocent and injured victim of circumstantial evidence as he might be, was not the safest person in the world to offend.
The judge delivered his charge to the jury, and they retired.
There was breathless impatience in the court for three-quarters of an hour; such impatience that the three-quarters seemed to be three entire hours, and some of the spectators would have it that the clock had stopped. Once more the jury took their places.
“Guilty!” A recommendation to mercy? No! Mercy was not for such as he. Not man’s mercy. Oh, Heaven be praised that there is One whose mercy is as far above the mercy of the tenderest of earth’s creatures as heaven is above that earth. Who shall say where is the man so wicked he may not hope for compassion there?
The judge put on the black cap and delivered the sentence.
“To be hanged by the neck!”
The Count de Marolles looked round at the crowd. It was beginning to disperse, when he lifted his slender ringed white hand. He was about to speak. The crowd, swaying hither and thither before, stopped as one man. As one man, nay, as one surging wave of the ocean, changed, in a breath, to stone. He smiled a bitter mocking defiant smile.
“Worthy citizens of Slopperton,” he said, his clear enunciation ringing through the building distinct and musical, “I thank you for the trouble you have taken this day on my account. I have played a great game, and I have lost a great stake; but, remember, I first won that stake, and for eight years held it and enjoyed it. I have been the husband of one of the most beautiful and richest women in France. I have been a millionaire, and one of the wealthiest merchant princes of the wealthy south. I started from the workhouse of this town; I never in my life had a friend to help me or a relation to advise me. To man I owe nothing. To God I owe only this, a will as indomitable as the stars He made, which have held their course through all time. Unloved, unaided, unprayed for, unwept; motherless, fatherless, sisterless, brotherless, friendless; I have taken my own road, and have kept to it; defying the earth on which I have lived, and the unknown Powers above my head. That road has come to an end, and brought me—here! So be it! I suppose, after all, the unknown Powers are strongest! Gentlemen, I am ready.” He bowed and followed the officials who led him from the dock to a coach waiting for him at the entrance to the court. The crowd gathered round him with scared faces and eager eyes.
The last Slopperton saw of the Count de Marolles was a pale handsome face, a sardonic smile, and the delicate white hand which rested upon the door of the hackney-coach.
Next morning, very early, men with grave faces congregated at street-corners, and talked together earnestly. Through Slopperton