THE ROSEBUD MOUTH.
"What in the world is he smiling for?" asked Emily. Inspector
McCausland's smile was a barometer of her own uneasiness, and she could
not help remarking his unusual geniality at the opening of the court on
Wednesday.
The previous day's work had closed with a sturdy wrangle between
Shagarach and the district attorney. Whether it was that Shagarach's
charge of perjury was not sufficiently supported (it was merely
Aronson's word against Serena's) or that Bigelow's inelastic mind
characteristically clung in the face of cogent proof to the convictions
it had already formed, he had objected might and main to the proposed
issue of a warrant and even gone so far as to protest against his
learned brother's effort to intimidate a witness of the weaker sex.
McCausland had amicably agreed to secure the attendance of Miss Lamb for
cross-examination, and so the confusion subsided. Miss Lamb was there
and so was the inspector. But what made him smile?
"Good morning, Miss Barlow," said a familiar voice, close to Emily's
ear.
"Bertha Lund!" she exclaimed. There it was, the large, fair Swedish
face, with sparkling blue eyes that danced with the pleasure of the
surprise. After a moment of silent study Emily gave her a bear-like
squeeze and only released her that she might shake hands with Robert.
"It's none of my doing, Mr. Robert," said Bertha. "If I could, I'd have
staid home in Upsala, but I gave my word to Mr. McCausland that I'd come
back, and here I am to keep it."
"But we thought you were lost. We saw the body and buried it," cried
Emily.
"Oh, that was another Bertha Lund. Mr. McCausland thought it was me,
too."
"Another one from Upsala?"
"Why, if you took all the Bertha Lunds and Nils Nilssons in Upsala you
could fill a big town with them," said the housemaid, laughing.
"And how did you happen to go home to Sweden?" asked Robert.
"Mrs. Arnold wanted another house-girl and I'd told her about my sister
Christina, who is old enough now to be handy. She was kind enough to
pay my passage over so I could bring her out with me, and let me stay
all summer, too. Did you ever see such goodness?"
"She's a very uncommon mistress, certainly," said Emily.
"It was the day after we were talking at Hillsborough that I started,"
said Bertha. "Do you remember?"
"Yes, indeed," answered Emily, brightening up, "and now let us finish
that talk. I have a hundred questions I want to ask you. Shall you
testify to-day?"
"No; I've only just got here and the lawyer said he would leave me till
the last. The voyage is very tiresome, you know."
"Then come with me," cried Emily, with animation, and drew Bertha after
her into the ante-room. Here Robert caught a glimpse of her from time to
time questioning, explaining, measuring with her hands, as if she were
satisfying herself on doubtful points of her theory. And when she
finally came out, in the middle of Miss Lamb's cross-examination, her
face wore a smile so auroral that even Chief Justice Playfair's eyes
left the witness and wandered over toward the true-hearted girl.
"Mr. Aronson told you that he worked on his knees at this mysterious
safe?" was Shagarach's opening question to Miss Lamb.
"On his knees," answered the maiden, still bonneted and fanning herself
with Emily's fan, which she had forgotten to return in the excitement of
the previous evening.
"Mr. Aronson is not an uncommonly tall man, is he?"
"A trifle taller than you are."
"But yet not above the average," persisted Shagarach.
"Perhaps not."
"The government wishes us to believe that there was a bomb purposely
placed under this safe. That would raise it from the floor several
inches, would it not?"
"I suppose so. I know nothing about the bomb."
"Will you kindly explain how the locksmith could be kneeling while at
work on a safe which, according to the testimony of Miss Lund, at the
hearing, was resting on a shelf as high as her waist from the ground?"
The witness fanned herself nervously and once or twice opened her lips
to reply, but no sound came forth. A wave of frightened sympathy passed
through the spectators in the prolonged interim of silence, like that
which seizes an audience when an orator falters and threatens to break
down.
"You do not answer, Miss Lamb?"
"I feel faint," said the girl. A chair and a glass of water were hurried
to her aid.
"Are you sure this is the man Aronson who visited you?" asked Shagarach
when she had recovered.
"Oh, yes."
"Then we have two Aronsons in the case; Mr. Saul Aronson, my assistant,
and Mr. Jacob Aronson, the piano dealer, who will testify to having
received the postal card copied on the blotting-pad. And this Mr.
Aronson who visited you declared that he had been a locksmith, if I
understood your story?"
"He said so."
"That is not surprising. Mr. Aronson, my assistant, was formerly a
locksmith. What was the date of your interview?"
"The first part of July. I can't remember the exact day," replied the
witness, a bit nettled. The rusticity was rubbing on again in her
manner, and to Saul Aronson it actually seemed that her cheekbones were
becoming prominent, like those of her horrid aunt whom he had met on
that fateful evening. But this may have been an optical illusion. The
sympathy of the spectators trembled in the balance. She seemed so young
and dove-like. But there stood Shagarach confronting her, hostile,
skeptical, uncompromising.
"Mr. Aronson had made this alleged attempt to open a safe on Sunday
evening, you said?"
"On the evening of the Sabbath."
Here Aronson gesticulated and whispered in Shagarach's ear. The lawyer
listened calmly.
"When did you first become acquainted with him?"
"I don't remember exactly. He came to our meetings for a long time
before I was introduced to him."
Serena blushed a little and Aronson's cheeks were all abloom.
"He was a convert to your faith?"
"So we thought."
"How long had he been converted?"
"I don't know."
"Pineapple Jupiter says he introduced you to Mr. Aronson about four
months ago, if the district attorney reckons rightly from his periodic
hair-cuts. Then at the time of the visit to your house in July he must
have been a convert nearly two months?"
"Perhaps."
"But the will was only drawn on June 7. And Mr. Aronson, I understand
you to testify, yielded to this temptation before he was converted?"
The witness did not answer, but looked around the court-room as if for
sympathy.
"Are we to understand that he broke into the safe before the will was
placed there?"
The witness fluttered her fan nervously and her lips were quivering. She
looked down.
"Sunday evening, you said. You are probably not aware that Prof. Arnold
read in his own library every Sunday evening up to the time of his
death?"
Serena began to cry. Instantly the tension of the audience was relaxed
and comments passed to and fro.
"She belongs to the romantic school of statisticians," whispered Wye.
Ecks responded with a cartoon of "Miss Meekness, making a slip of the
decimal point."
"Religious mania; hysterical mendacity," a doctor diagnosed it, with a
pompous frown.
"Little minx had a craving for notoriety," said a woman, elderly,
unmarried and plain.
"I should say it illustrates the pernicious effect of novel reading on a
rustic brain," murmured a clerical personage, clearing his throat before
he delivered himself.
Suddenly Shagarach's insistence left him. His voice softened. With his
very first question, the distressed look, half of reproach, half of
sympathy, toward Serena, cleared away from Aronson's face.
"Wasn't Mr. Aronson agitated on that evening, Miss Lamb?"
She blushed amid her tears and her answer was less defiant.
"Extremely agitated."
"Wasn't his story to you somewhat confused in the telling?"
"Very confused, yes, sir."
"And perhaps the outlines blurred still more in your memory by the lapse
of time?"
"Perhaps. I meant to speak of that myself," answered Serena,
brightening. Whereat the entire court-room brightened. Shagarach's
inflections became kind, almost genial now. One would have thought she
was his own witness, he stroked her so gently.
"And his accent was somewhat hard to follow?"
"Oh, very."
"He is not perfectly familiar with our language as yet?"
"No, he speaks it poorly."
The court-room was all curiosity.
"Didn't this picture of the study, which you have quoted, come in as
part of his description of a law case?"
"Why, yes; he began talking about the Floyd case."
"In which he was deeply interested at that time, as my assistant. That,
however, he did not make clear to you?"
"No."
"Can you swear that this whole picture of a Sunday-night entrance and
experiment on the safe was not an imaginary one--a piece of fiction,
invented and vividly told in the first person to illustrate what Robert
Floyd might easily have done if he had desired to destroy the will, but
what----"
Shagarach inclined slightly toward the jury, "but what he evidently did
not do?"
"Perhaps. Truly I couldn't catch half of what he was saying when he
began to talk rapidly."
"I myself am a locksmith. He could come and give me money. We go Sunday
night. Nobody home. House all still. I get down on my knees. File a
little. Drill. Somebody come. I go away. Come again. Try again."
Serena smiled a smile that sent waves of sunshine through the room.
Shagarach had not once descended to mimicry of his assistant's dialect.
But the broken fragments of speech, the confused arrangement, seemed to
call before Serena's eye an amusing picture of her lovelorn swain's
incoherence.
"Perhaps I was altogether mistaken," she volunteered.
Shagarach waved her with courtesy to the nonplussed though apparently
still obstinate district attorney. A long conference followed among the
prosecuting lawyers, while Emily heaved a sigh of relief.
Over in his front seat Ecks was gazing at Shagarach, as if trying to
pierce the great brow, not opened showily, but masked, as it were, by
the loose-falling hair. The marvelous skill of his tactics--first, the
breaking down of Serena's story through its intrinsic discrepancies,
then the building up from her own lips of a hypothetical case in the
jurors' minds--all without deviating a hair line from true courtesy and
delicacy of treatment--sank deeply into the novelist's heart. He did not
reply to Wye's comment on the underplot.
"Incarnate self-control!" he muttered to himself.
But alas for poor Saul Aronson! It was bad enough to be compelled to
flee from suspicion post haste through the gateway of public ridicule.
But to realize at last that Serena was human and no angel--capable of
pique, brusqueness and tears--capable even of resisting Shagarach! The
scales of illusion fell from his eyes and he hung his head, a chastened
youth.
"The redirect is deferred," said Bigelow, and Serena, after returning
the fan to Emily, stepped softly out. Her footfalls barely broke the
dead silence as she picked her way through the crowd.
Aronson lifted his eyes to her face. What imperfections he noted now!
The eyebrows too level, the rosebud mouth too small and the cheekbones
unmistakably present, even if barely breaking the curve. It was fated
so. Doubtless in time he would follow old Abraham Barentzen's counsel
and take some comely daughter of Israel to wife, well-dowered, a good
housekeeper, and free from tittle-tattle. But never again would his
naive heart palpitate with such virginal ecstasy as when he first gazed
through the rose-misted spectacles of love on that sweetly imperfect
gentile maiden.
"We shall now offer a mass of evidence," said the district attorney,
"tending to prove the crucial point of exclusive opportunity."
Seven witnesses took the box, one after another, and in response to
Badger's questions, swore that they were neighbors of the Arnolds, were
wide-awake and observant about the time of the fire, but saw no person
coming out of the house either in front or rear. The evidence was
negative, but cumulatively it produced its effect, leading the minds of
the jury away from Serena Lamb and her legend to the real core of the
puzzle. By the time the last witness on this point arrived, a cordon of
watchers, completely environing the house, had been drawn around it by
the government, and it seemed impossible that any one could have slipped
through unobserved.