There was a sort of buzz all round the court.
Lord Stowell said, “Yes, yes;” and then, “Now, Mr. King’s Advocate, I
suppose Mr. Alfonso Jervis opens for you.”
A dusty wig swam up from just below my left hand, almost to a level with
the dock.
The old judge shut his eyes, with an air of a man who _is_ going a
long journey in a post-chaise. Mr. Baron Garrow dipped his pen into an
invisible ink-pot, and scratched it on his desk. A long story began to
drone from under the wig, an interminable farrago of dull nonsense, in
a hypochondriacal voice; a long tale about piracy in general; piracy in
the times of the Greeks, piracy in the times of William the Conqueror...
_pirata nequissima Eustachio_, and thanking God that a case of the sort
had not been heard in that court for an immense lapse of years. Below
me was an array of wigs, on each side a compressed mass of humanity,
squeezed so tight that all the eyeballs seemed to be starting out of
the heads towards me. From the wig below, a translation of the florid
phrases of the Spanish papers was coming:
“His very Catholic Majesty, out of his great love for his ancient friend
and ally, his Britannic Majesty, did surrender the body of the notorious
El Demonio, called also...”
I began to wonder who had composed that precious document, whether it
was the _Juez de la Primera Instancia_, bending his yellow face and
sloe-black eyes above the paper, over there in Havana--or whether it was
O’Brien, who was dead since the writing.
All the while the barrister was droning on. I did not listen because
I had heard all that before--in the room of the Judge of the First
Instance at Havana. Suddenly appearing behind the backs of the row of
gentlefolk on the bench was the pale, thin face of my father. I wondered
which of his great friends had got him his seat. He was nodding to me
and smiling faintly. I nodded, too, and smiled back. I was going to show
them that I was not cowed. The voice of the barrister said:
“M’luds and gentlemen of the jury, that finishes the Spanish evidence,
which was taken on commission on the island of Cuba. We shall produce
the officer of H. M. S. Elephant, to whom he was surrendered by the
Spanish authorities at Havana, thus proving the prisoner to be the
pirate Nikola, and no other. We come, now, to the specific instance,
m’luds and gentlemen, an instance as vile...”
It was some little time before I had grasped how absolutely the Spanish
evidence damned me. It was as if, once I fell into the hands of the
English officer on Havana quays, the identity of Nikola could by no
manner of means be shaken from round my neck. The barrister came to the
facts.
A Kingston ship had been boarded... and there was the old story over
again. I seemed to see the Rio Medio schooner rushing towards where I
and old Cowper and old Lumsden looked back from the poop to see her come
alongside; the strings of brown pirates pour in empty-handed, and
out laden. Only in the case of the _Victoria_ there were added the
ferocities of “the prisoner at the bar, m’luds and gentlemen of the
jury, a fiend in human shape, as we shall prove with the aid of the most
respectable witnesses....”
The man in the wig sat down, and, before I understood what was
happening, a fat, rosy man--the Attorney-General--whose cheerful gills
gave him a grotesque resemblance to a sucking pig, was calling “Edward
Sadler,” and the name blared like sudden fire leaping up all over the
court. The Attorney-General wagged his gown into a kind of bunch behind
his hips, and a man, young, fair, with a reddish beard and a shiny suit
of clothes, sprang into a little box facing the jury. He bowed nervously
in several directions, and laughed gently; then he looked at me and
scowled. The Attorney-General cleared his throat pleasantly...
“Mr. Edward Sadler, you were, on May 25th, chief mate of the good ship
_Victoria...._”
The fair man with the beard told his story, the old story of the ship
with its cargo of coffee and dye-wood; its good passage past the Gran
Caymanos; the becalming off the Cuban shore in latitude so and so, and
the boarding of a black schooner, calling itself a Mexican privateer. I
could see all that.
“The prisoner at the bar came alongside in a boat, with seventeen
Spaniards,” he said, in a clear, expressionless voice, looking me full
in the face.
I called out to the old judge, “My Lord... I protest. This is perjury. I
was not the man. It Was Nichols, a Nova Scotian.”
Mr. Baron Garrow roared, “Silence,” his face suffused with blood.
Old Lord Stowell quavered, “You must respect the procedure....”
“Am I to hear my life sworn away without a word?” I asked.
He drew himself frostily into his robes. “God forbid,” he said; “but at
the proper time you can cross-examine, if you think fit.”
The Attorney-General smiled at the jury-box and addressed himself to
Sadler, with an air of patience very much tried:
“You swear the prisoner is the man?”
The fair man turned his sharp eyes upon me. I called, “For God’s sake,
don’t perjure yourself. You are a decent man.”
“No, I won’t swear,” he said slowly. “I think he was. He had his face
blacked then, of course. When I had sight of him at the Thames Court I
thought he was; and seeing the Spanish evidence, I don’t see where’s the
room....”
“The Spanish evidence is part of the plot,” I said.
The Attorney-General snickered. “Go on, Mr. Sadler,” he said. “Let’s
have the rest of the plot unfolded.”
A juryman laughed suddenly, and resumed an abashed sudden silence.
Sadler went on to tell the old story.... I saw it all as he spoke; only
gaunt, shiny-faced, yellow Nichols was chewing and hitching his trousers
in place of my Tomas, with his sanguine oaths and jerked gestures. And
there was Nichol’s wanton, aimless ferocity.
“He had two pistols, which he fired twice each, while we were hoisting
the studding-sails by his order, to keep up with the schooner. He fired
twice into the crew. One of the men hit died afterwards....”
Later, another vessel, an American, had appeared in the offing, and the
pirates had gone in chase of her. He finished, and Lord Stowell moved
one of his ancient hands. It was as if a gray lizard had moved on his
desk, a little toward me.
“Now, prisoner,” he said.
I drew a deep breath. I thought for a minute that, after all, there was
a little fair play in the game--that I had a decent, fair, blue-eyed
man in front of me. He looked hard at me; I hard at him; it was as if
we were going to wrestle for a belt. The young girl on the bench had her
lips parted and leant forward, her head a little on one side.