AND IS FOUND WANTING.
After the noon recess Bertha was called to finish her testimony, with
the promise that she would not be detained long.
"A description of the study, Miss Lund, when you were dusting."
"Everything was left just as it was when the professor fell dead on the
threshold Tuesday evening."
"Did you notice any foreign substance--any accumulation of what might
afford fuel for a fire?"
"No, sir."
"Any odor?"
"Only that the room was close from being shut up."
"Describe the contents of the room."
"Well, it was full of books, on shelves that ran all around."
"Yes?"
"Two windows; a cage before one, the nearest to the door, and a writing
desk before the one in the farthest corner."
"Well?"
"A safe partly built in the wall beside the door."
"How high from the ground?"
"About up to my waist."
"Did you notice anything underneath it?"
"Yes, there was the gunpowder box Mr. Robert put there."
"A box full of gunpowder placed there by Floyd?"
"Yes, sir."
This statement made a profound impression, but Badger did not push the
subject further. The prisoner almost smiled.
"Well?" Badger said.
"Oh, everything else was just as the professor left it. His slippers
under his chair, his dressing-gown over the back of it, his spectacles
on the desk, his bible laid down open. He was going to meet a caller,
you know, when he was taken with the stitch."
"Very well. Perhaps we have had enough of the professor," said Badger.
But the accused did not find these minutiae trivial. For the first time
his proud face broke and he hid the tears with his hand. The mention of
the bible, slippers and the other personal mementos had called up the
dearest picture he ever knew.
All the grand life, equally compounded of whims and principles, passed
before him at Bertha's mention of the empty chair.
But the sympathy of the spectators was short-lived. While Robert wept a
strain of sad music stole into the court-room. Faint at first, it rose
in volume as the players approached, but still with a muted sound, as if
their instruments were muffled. The drum-beats were rare and
unobtrusive, and the burden of the melody, if melody it were, was borne
by proud bugles and quivering oboes. Its cadences were old and
mysterious, like some Gregorian chant intoned in cloisters before organ
and orchestra had trained our ears to the chords of harmony. No wonder
the court-room was hushed until it died away in the distance.
It was the Masonic dead march, for on this day the funerals of the dead
whom Robert Floyd was accused of murdering were being held. Oscar
Schubert, as a member of the mystic order, was buried with all the pomp
of its ceremonies, and it was his cortege, proceeding to the sepulcher,
whose passage occasioned this pause in the trial.
The revulsion of sympathy was instant. Every man in the court-room saw
the wife and two children, sitting behind drawn curtains in the carriage
of the chief mourners, and beyond this picture the bodies of six
victims, four of them young girls, done to death at the prompting of
avarice. The prisoner himself seemed to understand, for he shut his
teeth, though his bold eyes still dared the multitude. But they rested
more and more upon the lovely face which was his one point of
consolation in that unfriendly assemblage. Badger's indifferent voice
showed no quiver when he asked Miss Lund to step down and called for
Robert Floyd. It was a brusque opening.
"What was contained in the safe in your uncle's study?"
"I never opened it."
"You knew, however?"
"What he had told me."
"Was his will there?"
"I have reason to believe so."
"Did you believe so on Saturday, while you were in the room with Miss
Lund?"
"I did not give the matter any thought at that time." Floyd spoke as
though the spirit burned hot within him. "And I will add----"
"Nothing," said Badger. But the judge looked up.
"This is a court, not a court-martial," he said, quietly, a pale,
studious man. "The witness has a right to modify his answers."
"I have only this to say," continued Floyd, "to hasten as much as
possible this preposterous trial, that I indorse every word of Miss
Lund's testimony, and accept it and proffer it as my own upon the points
which it covers."
"We prefer----" But the district attorney interrupted his assistant.
"Are you aware, Mr. Floyd, of the gravity of the position in which Miss
Lund's testimony involves you? Sole opportunity is almost the major head
among those which the government is required to prove."
"I accept it in toto, subject to the privilege of volunteering a
statement if my examination is incomplete or misleading."
"We shall endeavor to make it both adequate and fair," said the district
attorney.
"Leaving the safe for a moment," resumed the examiner, "will you kindly
relate your movements, Mr. Floyd, subsequent to the time when Bertha
left you to go upstairs?"
The young man hesitated. The pause was so long as to be embarrassing.
Old John Davidson coughed loudly to relieve his agitation. When the
witness spoke at last he seemed to be remembering with difficulty.
"I remember leaving the house and walking about among the fields, in the
park, I think. Yes, I took a car for the park. In the evening I called
upon Miss Barlow."
He looked up at the aureoled face and faintly smiled. The sight appeared
to revive him. "From that point my recollections become as distinct as
usual. But----" He hesitated once more and Badger left him unaided in
his distress. "The truth is, this was my first visit since his death to
my uncle's study. The executor had telegraphed and afterward written me
to close and lock it. This I did. But that afternoon I was expecting a
visit from him----"
"Who is this executor?"
"Mr. Hodgkins Hodgkins."
"Of the firm of Hodgkins, Hodgkins & Hodgkins?"
"I believe so. My aunt, Mrs. Arnold, had called at 3 o'clock to say that
he had arrived from New York and would take possession of the papers
that afternoon. So I unlocked the room and let the servant dust it. The
whole meaning of my loss seemed to come over me then, when I saw the
empty chair. Before that I had been calm enough. But the sight dazed and
staggered me. I went out, fled, taking no note of time or place. I
believe, I know, I was in the park, but until I arrived at Miss
Barlow's, outward occurrences made little memorable impression upon me."
"I presume you saw or were seen by persons on the way?"
"I do not remember any one in particular."
"Are we to understand," said the district attorney, listening intently,
"that you passed this long period in a species of reverie or trance?"
"An intense fit of abstraction," answered Robert; but the district
attorney looked puzzled, as if an utterly new and virgin problem had
been put before him to solve.
"Without food until you returned at 11 o'clock to the fire?" asked
Badger.
"Excepting a light lunch at Miss Barlow's. Her mother noticed some
fatigue in me and pressed me to take refreshment."
"Was there no mention of the fire there--a fire which was destroying
your home?"
"We spoke of it casually, but I did not know until later that it was
destroying my home."
"Was it not described in the evening papers?"
"Not in the early editions, Badger," put in the district attorney. "Only
in the later specials."
"Very well. Now let us get back to the safe. Your uncle had made a will,
I believe?"
"He made a will several weeks ago."
"What were the terms of that document?"
"I do not know them in full."
"As to your share?"
"My legacy was $20,000."
"Out of an estate valued at?"
"I have heard $10,000,000."
"You are an anarchist, Mr. Floyd?"
"No, sir."
"But a radical of some sort?"
"I am a socialist; a developer, not a destroyer."
"Ah!" said Badger. His exclamation was icy cold. "And you differed from
your uncle on other points, did you not?"
"We took the liberty of honest men to differ."
"In religion?"
"Yes. He was a high churchman. I am--simply a Christian."
This avowal of a creed brought titters among the spectators, who
apparently were accustomed to definitions narrower if more precise.
"And as a result of these quarrels your uncle disinherited you?"
"Sir?"
For a moment the prisoner's outburst of indignation checked the current
of opinion which had been flowing swiftly against him.
"In one sentence you have managed to outrage the dead as well as the
living--and to convey two impressions distinctly false. My uncle and I
never quarreled, never! He was a father and more than a father to me.
Neither did he disinherit me. It was his wish to assign me the whole
property. I begged him to omit me without more than a memento or
keepsake, that I might enter life as he had done, as every man should,
untrammeled--but with the advantage, I feel sure, of an example and an
inspiration given to few to enjoy. The sum left me was far in excess of
my desires."
There was another long silence after this statement, but it expressed
only incredulity.
"When was this very extraordinary will drawn up?"
"Three weeks ago."
"The witnesses are living, then? It is to be presumed that they, too,
were not carried off by the holocaust which so reduced our population
last Saturday." Badger's sarcasm was brutal, but it told.
"The witnesses were three neighbors, called in. The servants could not
act, as they were remembered in the document."
"No lawyer was present?"
"My uncle seldom employed a lawyer."
Such a statement, relating to a man of Prof. Arnold's wealth, might have
excited doubt if his eccentricity on this point had not been noised
about beforehand.
"He drew up the will himself, then? Has any one seen it except you?"
"Not so far as I know. I myself never saw it."
"But you knew it was in the safe?"
"I supposed so."
"One moment," said the district attorney, interrupting. "Once more, why
did you reopen the study on this particular day?"
"Because I had been informed that Mr. Hodgkins was coming to remove the
will."
"By whom were you so informed?"
"Mrs. Arnold drove up about 3 o'clock and mentioned the fact. Indeed,
she had expected to find him at the house. He was an old acquaintance of
hers, as well as of my uncle--her legal adviser, in fact."
A stylish woman, still fair in spite of her 50 years, was sitting in
front of Robert as he testified. She was the widow of Benjamin Arnold's
brother, Henry, and her son, Henry, or Harry, had just offered a reward
of $5,000 for the incendiary--a sum which McCausland might well have
hopes of securing. The inspector was still hovering about the threshold
of his ante-room, and now that Floyd's examination was concluded he
called the district attorney to one side, apparently urging him to
reserve the remainder of his evidence, which would naturally consist of
rebuttal of Floyd and corroboration of Bertha. At any rate, Mr. Badger
arose, and, announcing that the case was closed, offered a summary of
the evidence, rapid, methodical, but unimpressive, like himself. Then
the prisoner was asked if he desired to speak in his own behalf.
"Your honor," he said, "this monstrous charge of having set on foot a
fire in the most populous section of our noble city overwhelms me so
that I am impotent to express the indignation I feel. I leave it to your
own sense of justice, your own discrimination, whether I am to be
dishonored with the suspicion of an infamous crime, on evidence so
flimsy that the bare denial of a veracious man should be sufficient to
upset it. I read in many faces around me the hunger for blood; the
unthinking call for a victim. Heed that, and my good name is taken from
me. I am irreparably wronged. Resist it, and you will prove yourself
worthy of the honorable title which you bear."
Not a few were swayed toward the youth by his manifest emotion. But the
judge waited fully a minute before he arose and his eyeglasses were
trembling in his hand.
"You have elected, against good counsel," he began, "to be your own
advocate. I cannot and do not adjudge you unsuccessful, in the sense of
having demonstrated your guilt rather than your innocence. But that you
have failed to break the government's chain of evidence in its most
damaging links--sole opportunity, motive and suspicious conduct,
especially after the act--is plain to me, and would be plain to any mind
accustomed to weighing such evidence calmly.
"It is true the evidence is wholly circumstantial. No eye but God's saw
this foul deed done. But since William Rufus was found dead in the New
Forest, with Walter Tyrrell's arrow in his breast, men have been
convicted of murder on circumstantial evidence, and will continue to be
so convicted as long as probability remains the guide of life.
"I am obliged, therefore, to remand you for trial, not only on the
charge of arson, but upon the graver charge of homicide involved in it
under the peculiar circumstances of the case. This is not a final
verdict. Far be it from me, one erring man, to say that the government
has fastened this crime upon you beyond reasonable doubt. But in the
face of the evidence which has been brought forward I could not order
your release. It becomes my unhappy duty, as the examining magistrate,
to commit you to custody, to await the approaching session of the grand
jury."
When Emily Barlow awoke from her swoon she found herself in the arms of
old John Davidson. Perhaps it was as well she did not hear the jeer of
execration which greeted the prisoner outside when he passed over the
sidewalk, ironed between two stalwart officers, into the jail van.
McCausland's identification with the case had affected public opinion
profoundly, for he was said never to have failed to convict a criminal
whom he had once brought into court. But possibly the outburst was due
to the circumstance that this was the neighborhood in which the Lacy
girls lived and that their funeral had taken place that very morning.