THE MIRACLE.
It was after two o'clock when, breathless, spiritless, and penniless,
Saul Aronson arrived at the court-room again. The examination of Bertha
was nearly ended.
"Will you take these spectacles, Miss Lund?" said Shagarach, handing
Bertha a pair. They looked like the "horns" that used to straddle our
grandfathers' noses, being uncommonly large, circular in shape and
fitted with curved wires to pass over the ears.
"Do they bear any resemblance to Prof. Arnold's?"
"I thought they were his at first."
"Let us suppose they are. Will you kindly leave the stand and adjust
them on this desk near the window exactly as the professor's spectacles
lay on his desk that afternoon?"
Bertha took the spectacles without hesitation, walked over to the
crier's desk and placed them on its edge, with their wires toward the
window. Then she laid a book under the wires. This made the glasses tip
a little downward. The sun was shining in fiercely.
"I believe there was a waste basket in the study?" continued Shagarach.
"Yes, sir."
"Like this one?" He held up an uncommonly capacious basket, over two
feet high.
"The very same kind."
"And as full as this is?"
"Fuller. It was just bursting with papers."
"What kind of paper?"
"Black wrapping paper that comes off the professor's books."
"Something like this?"
"Just like that."
The paper in Shagarach's wicker basket was not black, exactly, but of a
deep shade which could hardly be described by the name of any known
color.
"Why are you wearing a white dress, Miss Lund?"
Bertha blushed a little.
"Because light colors are cooler."
"Coolness is a strong recommendation on a day like this. Do you remember
whether the Saturday of the fire was as warm?"
"It was very hot, I know."
"The hottest day of a hot June, was it not?"
"Well, I couldn't answer that. The thermometer goes up and down like a
jumping-jack here."
"You had pulled up the study curtains so as to let in the sunlight, I
believe?"
"Yes, sir. That was for the poor canary. And, besides, the professor
used to say the sunlight was good--good for plants and animals and
everything that has life in it."
"The sun, then, was shining down on the desk where the spectacles lay?"
"Just as you see it here, sir."
She pointed to the desk, by which she was still standing.
"You know, from your own experience in dresses, that dark colors absorb
more heat than light ones?"
"Sir?"
"Light dresses are cooler than dark ones?"
"Yes, sir."
"Brown paper burns more quickly than white?"
"Oh, yes. You can kindle a fire with brown paper better."
"Will you take the waste-basket and place it on the floor just as far
from those spectacles as the waste-basket in the study stood, and in the
same direction."
Bertha measured off a short distance with her eye, picked up the basket,
shifted it once or twice, and finally set it down with a satisfied air.
"There!"
"It stood just behind the desk, then?"
"What is the drift of all this?" interrupted the district attorney, his
deep voice falling on a breathless silence. A presentiment had spread
from one to another that the solution was at hand.
"We are reproducing the exact condition of the study at the time the
fire occurred. These spectacles, containing powerful cataract lenses,
are made from the same prescription as Prof. Arnold's, by his optician,
Mr. Dean. The large basket, a mild eccentricity of the professor's, and
the black paper, are also duplicates."
"What do you hope to prove?" asked Chief Justice Playfair. His answer
was a shrill cry, like a bird note, from Emily, who had never withdrawn
her eye from the waste basket.
"It's catching!"
Every eye in the court-room turned. Those who sat near enough beheld two
tiny holes, like worm holes, suddenly pierced in the black paper, where
the rays of light converged through the tilted lenses. Each had a crisp,
brown margin around it. Gradually they widened and spread, as though
instinct with life, one working faster than the other. Then suddenly a
little circle of flame curled out, and before the onlookers realized the
miracle in progress, the waste basket was throwing up red tongues of
fire and sighing softly. If it were not for Sire's furious barking the
railing of the bar might have caught. As it was, its varnish had begun
to crackle before the nearest court officer recovered his presence of
mind and threw the blazing basket out of the window.
Gazing at Shagarach the spectators waited breathlessly for an
elucidation. Before speaking he walked over and shook hands warmly with
Emily. When he turned at last, his words came forth like a whirlwind.
"I think nothing more is needed to convince us of the source from which
this fire originated. We have reproduced every circumstance of its
occurrence in order to provide you with ocular demonstration. The sun
supplying extraordinary heat, the burning glass duplicated by an expert
and placed in position by a trustworthy witness, the focal distance
estimated by her, the highly combustible fuel, identical in color and
substance--can you not turn back in imagination and see happening in
that deserted study all that has happened here? Can you not follow it on
to the destruction of the mantel fringe just above, the awaking of the
sleepy dog, the mad leap of the flames from wall to wall, and at last
that whole irresistible carnival of the elements? It was no human torch,
but the hot gaze of the sun, condensed through these powerful lenses,
which lit that funeral pyre and dug graves for seven human beings. Fate,
working out its processes in that lonely room, was the mysterious
incendiary toward whom we have all been blindly groping."
As Shagarach pointed upward in his awful close, the audience, on the
very brink of an outburst, held back their enthusiasm for an instant.
But the chief justice was seen to bow his head, and at once the
excitement broke all barriers. A loud spontaneous cheer, rendered half
articulate by cries of "Shagarach, Shagarach!" scattered to the winds
the customary restraints of the surroundings. Women embraced each other;
strangers shook hands warmly; Emily Barlow rushed over and hugged
Rosalie March, and drops were glistening on Chief Justice Playfair's
eyelashes when he lifted his head. McCausland, standing agape on the
threshold of his ante-room, completed the happy picture.
By a natural reaction the outburst was succeeded by a spell of tense
repression, amid which the district attorney rose and moved the
withdrawal of the case against Robert Floyd. The foreman of the jury
announced that he and his associates had long been agreed upon the
innocence of the accused, and Chief Justice Playfair, dignified as an
archbishop blessing his flock, expressed in his golden idiom the common
feeling of thankfulness that the trial had so felicitous a termination.
And so the logic of Richard McCausland and the psychology of Meyer
Shagarach were both overmatched by the intuitions of a loyal girl--a
girl who knew something about lenses because she dealt with cameras, and
who brought to the problem a concentration of thought as powerful as
that of the sunlight on the professor's spectacles. Both the lawyer and
the detective came forward promptly to pay her their homage; and the
last she saw of McCausland he was focusing one of the lenses on the end
of his cigar, readily obtaining the desired red light.
But Emily was not holding court even for them while there was still a
stroke of work to be done. Her second thought was of Harry in his cell.
With admirable modesty avoiding Robert's kiss, she took him and Rosalie
by the hand and made them friends at once. Then, leaving Beulah Ware to
chat with Brother Tristram, the trio sped over to the jail. At the
court-house door they met Dr. Silsby, who came flying along, florid and
out of breath, mopping his face with a napkin which he had probably
mistaken in his hurry for a handkerchief.
"Is it over?" he cried.
"Over? We're acquitted," cried Emily, using a reckless plural. "What
makes you so late?"
"Stopped to nib a quill after lunch," grumbled the director of the
Arnold Academie, as he gave Robert a pump-handle squeeze.
It was a changed Harry that stepped out of the cell in murderers' row.
In the confidence of the preceding night the two cousins had grown
closer together than ever before. After all, as Harry had said on the
stand, they were both Arnolds and the sole survivors of that eccentric
blood.
But a stronger bond was soon to rivet them together in the waxing amity
of the two girls, one of whom was dearer than kin to each of the
cousins. Rosalie's exclusiveness and the wealth she continued to enjoy
with an equanimity he could not understand at first prevented Robert
from doing full justice to her. But on acquaintance she proved as merry
(among her chosen few) as any lassie, and a certain child-like
innocence, all the more singular from her association with the stage,
made a charming foil to the ripe womanly beauty of her person.
Moreover, as the months roll by, and Robert learns more and more what
men and women really are, he lowers his standards gradually as to what
may be expected of them. Not that he has given up his ideals. Far from
it! He is still a socialist; and, what is better, a sower of good seed
in action, placing goodly portions of his income here and there, with
something of his uncle's bow-wow manner, to be sure, as though it were
no personal pity tugging at his heart-strings, but only an abstract
desire to see things ship-shape in the world, an impatience at disorder.
But this affected matter-of-factness doesn't suffice to shake off the
blessings of his pensioners.
If he chooses to set all orthodoxy by the ears with that series of
fire-brand polemics which, as readers remember, succeeded the "Modest
Proposal for a Consumers' Trust," so that one old granny among his
opponents has already christened him "the Legicide," what do Mrs. Lacy
and Mrs. Riley know or care? I fancy most of us, if we were burdened
with a maniac son or blessed with the love of a dutiful boy like
Walter, would accept assistance for their sakes, and ask no questions of
the giver.
Mrs. Arnold is too old now ever to forget that her maiden name was Alice
Brewster. It was the fear of staining that name with the published
details of a petty intrigue that caused her to sail for Europe so
suddenly. For it was she, conscious of her own financial straits, and
anxious for Harry if his inheritance should be cut off, who had
conducted the correspondence with Ellen Greeley. In this there was
nothing criminal; but much to wound her pride. So she had fled from the
ordeal of testifying before Shagarach, and the disclosures which she
foresaw were inevitable.
Her embarrassments have since been tided over and the family fortune
saved, at least from total shipwreck. The match with Rosalie March
guarantees to Harry the gratification of all his tastes; and, as the
young couple are coming to Woodlawn to live, the sting of separation is
softened. Ah, the fond jealous mothers who must forget their own
honeymoons to chide the child that only obeys divine injunctions in
cleaving to another when the time is ripe!
Of Emily Barlow what more can be said? Praise is superfluous; intrusion
on her betrothal joys, soon to merge into marriage happiness, deeper if
less unmixed with care, an impertinence.
Of late the whole world seems conspiring to bless her. Only the other
day Tristram March won the sculpture prize at the academy with his
life-size group "Driftwood Pickers at the Sea Level." The critics have
gone mad over the boldness of his conception--one figure erect and
peering far off, two stooping and adding to their fagot bundles. The
whole ocean is there in that fretted line of surf--a bare suggestion.
One interpreter has gone so far as to see in the figures a type of
humanity itself, on the margin of some mysterious beneficent element
which surrounds it. But the salient fact to Emily is that Tristram won
the prize, and is striving might and main for another more precious--the
hand of the dark, collected girl who gave him both subject and
inspiration during their memorable week at Digby.
And Shagarach--the iron will, the giant mind--what is his destiny? To be
always a criminal lawyer, a consorter with publicans and sinners?
Always, we may be sure, to protect the innocent, to whatever sphere the
buoyancy of his genius may lift him; and whether he wear ultimately the
ermine or the laurel wreath he will never forget one cause, which
brought him, with much added celebrity and some unhappiness, the
friendship of three couples so rare and fine--that great search for the
Incendiary which is registered (not without pique) in Inspector
McCausland's private docket as "The Eye-Glass Fiasco."
THE END.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Note: Hyphen variations left as printed.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Incendiary, by W. A. (William Augustine) Leahy