He looked meditatively into my eyes; it was a duel between us.
“I won’t swear,” he said. “You had your face blacked, and didn’t wear a
beard.”
A soft growth of hair had come out over my cheeks whilst I lay in
prison. I rubbed my hand against it, and thought that he had drawn first
blood.
“You must not say ‘you,’” I said. “I swear I was not the man. Did he
talk like me?”
“Can’t say that he did,” Sadler answered, moving from one foot to the
other.
“Had he got eyes like me, or a nose, or a mouth?”
“Can’t say,” he answered again. “His face was blacked.”
“Didn’t he talk Blue Nose--in the Nova Scotian way?”
“Well, he did,” Sadler assented slowly. “But any one could for a
disguise. It’s as easy as...”
Beside me, the turnkey whispered suddenly, “Pull him up; stop his
mouth.”
I said, “Wasn’t he an older man? Didn’t he look between forty and
fifty?”
“What do _you_ look like?” the chief mate asked.
“I’m twenty-four,” I answered; “I can prove it.”
“Well, you look forty and older,” he answered negligently. “So did he.”
His cool, disinterested manner overwhelmed me like the blow of an
immense wave; it proved so absolutely that I had parted with all
semblance of youth. It was something added to the immense waste of
waters between myself and Seraphina; an immense waste of years. I did
not ask much of the next witness; Sadler had made me afraid. Septimus
Hearn, the master of the _Victoria_, was a man with eyes as blue and
as cold as bits of round blue pebble; a little goat’s beard, iron-gray;
apple-coloured cheeks, and small gold earrings in his ears. He had
an extraordinarily mournful voice, and a retrospective melancholy of
manner. He was just such another master of a trader as Captain Lumsden
had been, and it was the same story over again, with little different
touches, the hard blue eyes gazing far over the top of my head; the
gnarled hands moving restlessly on the rim of his hat.
“Afterwards the prisoner ordered the steward to give us a drink of
brandy. A glass was offered me, but I refused to drink it, and he said,
‘Who is it that refuses to drink a glass of brandy?’ He asked me what
countryman I was, and if I was an American.”
There were two others from the unfortunate _Victoria_--a Thomas Davis,
boatswain, who had had one of Nikola’s pistol-balls in his hip; and a
sort of steward--I have forgotten his name--who had a scar of a cutlass
wound on his forehead.
It was horrible enough; but what distressed me more was that I could
not see what sort of impression I was making. Once the judge who was
generally asleep woke up and began to scratch furiously with his quill;
once three of the assessors--the men in short wigs--began an animated
conversation; one man with a thin, dark face laughed noiselessly,
showing teeth like a white waterfall. A man in the body of the court on
my left had an enormous swelling, blood-red, and looking as if a touch
must burst it, under his chin; at one time he winked his eyes furiously
for a long time on end. It seemed to me that something in the evidence
must be affecting all these people. The turnkey beside me said to his
mate, “Twig old Justice Best making notes in his stud-calendar,” and
suddenly the conviction forced itself upon me that the whole thing, the
long weary trial, the evidence, the parade of fairness, was being gone
through in a spirit of mockery, as a mere formality; that the judges and
the assessors, and the man with the goitre took no interest whatever in
my case. It was a foregone conclusion.
A tiny, fair man, with pale hair oiled and rather long for those days,
and with green and red signet rings on fingers that he was forever
running through that hair, came mincingly into the witness-box. He
held for a long time what seemed to be an amiable conversation with Sir
Robert Gifford, a tall, portentous-looking man, who had black beetling
brows, like tufts of black horsehair sticking in the crannies of a
cliff. The conversation went like this:
“You are the Hon. Thomas Oldham?”
“Yes, yes.”
“You know Kingston, Jamaica, very well?”
“I was there four years--two as the secretary to the cabinet of his
Grace the Duke of Manchester, two as civil secretary to the admiral on
the station.”
“You saw the prisoner?”
“Yes, three times.”
I drew an immense breath; I thought for a moment that they had delivered
themselves into my hands. The thing must prove of itself that I had been
in Jamaica, not in Rio Medio, through those two years. My heart began
to thump like a great solemn drum, like Paul’s bell when the king
died--solemn, insistent, dominating everything. The little man was
giving an account of the “’bawminable” state of confusion into which
the island’s trade was thrown by the misdeeds of a pirate called Nikola
el Demonio.
“I assure you, my luds,” he squeaked, turning suddenly to the judges,
“the island was wrought up into a pitch of... ah... almost disloyalty.
The... ah... planters were clamouring for... ah... separation. And, to
be sure, I trust you’ll hang the prisoner, for if you don’t...”
Lord Stowell shivered, and said suddenly with haste, “Mr. Oldham,
address yourself to Sir Robert.”
I was almost happy; the cloven hoof had peeped so damningly out. The
little man bowed briskly to the old judge, asked for a chair, sat
himself down, and arranged his coat-tails.
“As I was saying,” he prattled on, “the trouble and the worry that this
man caused to His Grace, myself, and Admiral Rowley were inconceivable.
You have no idea, you... ah... can’t conceive. And no wonder, for, as it
turned out, the island was simply honeycombed by his spies and agents.
You have no idea; people who seemed most respectable, people we
ourselves had dealings with...”
He rattled on at immense length, the barrister taking huge pinches
of yellow snuff, and smiling genially with the air of a horse-trainer
watching a pony go faultlessly through difficult tricks. Every now and
then he flicked his whip.
“Mr. Oldham, you saw the prisoner three times. If it does not overtax
your memory pray tell us.” And the little creature pranced off in a new
direction.
“Tax my memory! Gad, I like that. You remember a man who has had your
blood as near as could be, don’t you?”
I had been looking at him eagerly, but my interest faded away now. It
was going to be the old confusing of my identity with Nikola’s. And yet
I seemed to know the little beggar’s falsetto; it was a voice one does
not forget.
“Remember!” he squeaked. “Gad, gentlemen of the jury, he came as near as
possible------You have no idea what a ferocious devil it is.”
I was wondering why on earth Nichols should have wanted to kill such a
little thing. Because it was obvious that it must have been Nichols.
“As near as possible murdered myself and Admiral Rowley and a Mr.
Topnambo, a most enlightened and loyal... ah... inhabitant of the
island, on the steps of a public inn.”
I had it then. It was the little man David Mac-donald had rolled down
the steps with, that night at the Ferry Inn on the Spanish Town road.
“He was lying in wait for us with a gang of assassins. I was stabbed
on the upper lip. I lost so much blood... had to be invalided... cannot
think of horrible episode without shuddering.”
He had seen me then, and when Ramon (“a Spaniard who was afterwards
proved to be a spy of El Demonio’s--of the prisoner’s. He was hung
since”) had driven me from the place of execution after the hanging of
the seven pirates; and he had come into Ramon’s store at the moment
when Carlos (“a piratical devil if ever there was one,” the little man
protested) had drawn me into the back room, where Don Balthasar and
O’Brien and Seraphina sat waiting. The men who were employed to watch
Ramon’s had never seen me leave again, and afterwards a secret tunnel
was discovered leading down to the quay.
“This, apparently, was the way by which the prisoner used to arrive and
quit the island secretly,” he finished his evidence in chief, and the
beetle-browed, portly barrister sat down. I was not so stupid but what
I could see a little, even then, how the most innocent events of my past
were going to rise up and crush me; but I was certain I could twist him
into admitting the goodness of my tale which hadn’t yet been told. He
knew I had been in Jamaica, and, put what construction he liked on it,
he would have to admit it. I called out:
“Thank God, my turn’s come at last!”
The faces of the Attorney-General, the King’s Advocate, Sir Robert
Gifford, Mr. Lawes, Mr. Jervis, of all the seven counsel that were
arrayed to crush me, lengthened into simultaneous grins, varying at the
jury-box. But I didn’t care; I grinned, too. I was going to show them.
It was as if I flew at the throat of that little man. It seemed to me
that I must be able to crush a creature whose malice was as obvious and
as nugatory as the green and red rings that he exhibited in his hair
every few minutes. He wanted to show the jury that he had rings; that
he was a mincing swell; that I hadn’t and that I was a bloody pirate. I
said:
“You know that during the whole two years Nichols was at Rio I was
an improver at Horton Pen with the Macdonalds, the agents of my
brother-in-law, Sir Ralph Rooksby. You must know these things. You were
one of the Duke of Manchester’s spies.”
We used to call the Duke’s privy council that. “I certainly know
nothing of the sort,” he said, folding his hands along the edge of the
witness-box, as if he had just thought of exhibiting his rings in that
manner. He was abominably cool. I said:
“You must have heard of me. The Topnambos knew me.”
“The Topnambos used to talk of a blackguard with a name like Kemp who
kept himself mighty out of the way in the Vale.”
“You knew I was on the island,” I pinned him down.
“You used to _come_ to the island,” he corrected. “I’ve just explained
how. But you were not there much, or we should have been able to lay
hands on you. We wanted to. There was a warrant out after you tried to
murder us. But you had been smuggled away by Ramon.”