Never had the little town of Cummerhays been stirred to its depths as
it was on a certain April morning, when it awoke to find that it had
rendered itself famous after a fashion which would cause its existence
to become known wherever an English newspaper penetrated. Its name
would be in everybody's mouth for weeks to come. It felt that it could
never again sink into utter obscurity.
For the prisoners--about whose alleged attempt to rob the train all
sorts of wild rumours were afloat--had after their capture been put
into the train and brought on to Cummerhays, and were for the present
lodged in the town jail. The magistrates would assemble at ten
o'clock, when the preliminary inquiry would take place. But even a
deeper interest, if that were possible, centred itself in the arrest
of the alleged murderer of the Baron von Rosenberg, who was said to
have actually been working as a signalman on the line for the past
three or four months. It was dreadful to think that the lives of
several hundreds of respectable people should have been at the mercy
of such a miscreant!
The town-hall was besieged by an excited crowd long before the opening
of the doors, and had the justice-room been three times larger than it
was, it might easily have been filled three times over. Among the
foremost ranks of the surging crowd, and maintaining his position with
passive tenacity, was a man on whom many curious eyes were bent. He
was a foreigner--so much was evident at a glance--and that of itself
was enough to excite the curiosity of the good folk of Cummerhays,
many of whom had never been a score miles from home. He was very lean
and very sallow, with drawn-in cheeks and sharply defined cheek-bones.
He had deep-set eyes, black and burning, with something in them of the
expression of a half-famished wild animal. He wore small gold circlets
in his ears, and was dressed in a coat of frayed velveteen, with a
soft felt hat; and a coloured silk handkerchief knotted loosely round
his throat. He spoke to no one, and no one spoke to him; but now and
then his lips worked strangely, as though he were holding a silent
colloquy with some invisible companion. He was the one man in the
crowd who was the least incommoded by the crowd. Those nearest to him
shrank a little from him, involuntarily as it were. He was a being of
a different world from theirs, and they knew not what to make of him.
Jules Picot--for he it was--had arrived in Cummerhays at a late hour
the preceding night, having walked there from another town about a
dozen miles away. By what strange chance his wandering footsteps had
brought him by many devious paths to this place of all others, and at
this particular time, will be told a little later on. He had hired a
bed for the night at the _Wheatsheaf Inn_, a cheap and unpretentious
hostelry. He was up and had ordered his breakfast by eight o'clock
next morning, and it was while waiting for that meal to be brought him
that his attention was attracted by some conversation in the taproom
which he could not help overhearing. The pallor of his face grew
deeper as he listened; but whatever other emotion the change might
arise from, it certainly had not its origin in fear.
"Soh! It is for this that I have been brought here," he muttered, half
to himself and half aloud, in French. "Now I understand."
Going into the taproom, he put a few questions to the men to whose
talk he had been listening. Having ascertained what he wanted to know,
he left the house without waiting for his breakfast, and bent his
steps in the direction of the town-hall. At a quarter to ten o'clock,
when the doors were thrown open, Jules Picot was one of the first to
push his way forward, or to be pushed forward by those behind him,
into the small penned-up space allotted in the justice-room of
Cummerhays to the general public. In three minutes the place was
crannied to its utmost limits.
A few minutes after ten, the magistrates entered one by one and took
their seats, their clerk having preceded them by a few seconds. They
were three in number, all venerable gentlemen. One was partially
blind; one partially deaf; while the third, who had a very red face
and took the lead in everything, was quick-tempered and aggressive in
his manner. There were two cases of drunkenness and one of theft to be
disposed of before the great sensation of the day would begin.
Everybody seemed relieved when they were over; and presently a flutter
of intense excitement ran through the court as three men, in charge of
as many constables, filed in and were placed in the dock. Then, after
a brief pause, a fourth man was ushered in whose left arm was
supported by a sling, and a murmur ran round that this was the alleged
murderer of the German Baron. A moment later another door opened, and
there glided in a female in black, closely veiled, who sat down on a
chair in the background which one of the officials handed her with a
bow. The prisoner with his arm in a sling was also allowed to be
seated a little way from the dock in which the other men had been
placed.
When the mountebank beheld Gerald Brooke, whom he still knew only by
the name of "Mr. Stewart," marched in as a prisoner, and when he saw,
and his quick eyes recognised, the veiled figure in black who entered
immediately afterwards, he was seized with a vertigo, which caused the
room, the magistrates, and the prisoners to surge up and down before
his eyes as though they were being tempest-tossed at sea. "Mon Dieu!
est-il possible?" he exclaimed half aloud. Then he buried his face in
his hands for a time, while a cloud seemed to lift itself slowly from
his brain, and much became clear to him that had been dark before.
The charge against the first three prisoners was one of assault and
attempted robbery; but against one of them there was a supplementary
charge of attempted murder. That against the fourth prisoner was the
much more serious charge of murder. But from what the magistrates
could understand of the case at present, this fourth prisoner was so
mixed up with the charge against the other three--he being the man who
had been assaulted and bound and afterwards shot by one of them--that
the poor gentlemen, who had never before had to investigate a case of
such gravity, or one which presented so many peculiar features, were
fairly at their wits' ends to know how to deal with it from a strictly
legal point of view. Thus it fell out that the whole of the prisoners
found themselves in court at the same time. It was now, however,
suggested by the clerk that the prisoner on the capital charge should
be put back while the examination of the others was being proceeded
with. This suggestion was at once acted upon.
After the remaining prisoners had answered to the names entered on the
charge-sheet, the first witness was called, but not till the red-faced
magistrate had intimated that he and his colleagues only intended to
take sufficient evidence that day to justify a remand. The first
witness proved to be Mr. Sturgess, a London jeweller. His evidence
went to show that, accompanied by a trustworthy assistant, he had left
home the previous day on his way to Lord Leamington's seat, a few
miles beyond Cummerhays, having in his charge a box containing jewelry
to the value of several thousands of pounds. All had gone well till he
reached Greenholme, at which place he had to wait an hour and change
to the branch line; but on his arrival there, he had found a telegram
awaiting him from his partner in London in which he was told on no
account to pursue his journey without first obtaining an escort of
four or five constables. No reason was furnished by the telegram for
taking such extraordinary precautions and he could only surmise that
an attempt was about to be made to rob him of the box, and that by
some means his partner at the last moment had obtained wind of the
affair. Fortunately, through the courtesy of the police authorities at
Greenholme he experienced no difficulty in obtaining the required
escort, and under its protection he resumed his journey by the next
train.
The next witness to answer to his name was the driver of the train,
who deposed to everything having gone right till he was just inside
the distance signal of Cinder Pit Junction, which showed "line clear,"
when he and his mate were startled by the explosion of a fog-signal.
He at once whistled and put on all the brake-power at his command, and
could not have gone more than forty or fifty yards farther before a
second signal exploded; and then he could just make out the figure of
a woman standing on the embankment and beating the air with both her
arms as a sign for him to stop, which, as the brakes were on already,
he was not long in doing. After that, the police took charge of the
affair, and he did just as they told him.
The next witness called was Margery Shook. She had been sitting out of
sight behind a large screen which sheltered their worships from any
possible draughts at the lower end of the room. As she entered the
witness-box she shot a glance of venomous hatred towards Crofton,
which would have killed him then and there if looks had power to slay.
The nature of the evidence she had to give we know already. More than
once her peculiar phraseology caused a titter to run through the
court, which was, however, promptly suppresed.
Clara Brooke was the next person called upon. As she raised her veil
her eyes met those of Crofton for a moment, while a faint colour
suffused her cheeks, only to die out as quickly as it had come. A low
murmur of commiseration passed like a sigh through the court; and the
eyes of many there filled with tears when they beheld her pale
beautiful face, for it had been whispered about that this was the wife
of the man who was accused of murder. The evidence she had to offer
was given clearly and unhesitatingly; with the purport of it we are
sufficiently acquainted already. When she had told all she had to
tell, she let her veil drop and went back to the seat she had occupied
before.
The next and last witness whose evidence it was proposed to take at
present was the Greenholme sergeant of police. He told how he had been
instructed by his superintendent to take four men and accompany the
gentleman from London as far as Cummerhays. Then he narrated how the
train had come to a stand in consequence of the explosions of the
fog-signals; and how, when he and his men alighted from it, they had
found the witness Margery Shook, who gave them to understand that the
train was about to be attacked a little way farther on. How the girl
had scarcely finished telling them this when up ran the signalman, who
had been released by his wife; and how, under his guidance, he,
witness, and his men had succeeded in surprising the would-be thieves
and in capturing three of their number; and finally, how the signalman
had been severely wounded by Crofton, one of the prisoners, firing his
revolver point-blank at him.
"You have omitted one little episode," said Crofton in cold measured
tones as the sergeant was about to step down from the witness-box;
"you have forgotten to tell these worthy gentlemen that it was I who
recognised the so-called signalman as Gerald Brooke, the man charged
with the wilful murder of the Baron von Rosenberg, and that I
denounced him as such then and there."
"That is so, your worships," said the sergeant.
"We quite understand that already," remarked the red-faced
magistrate; "but it is a point on which we need not enter at present,
more especially seeing that the prisoner in question has already
admitted that his name is Gerald Brooke, and that he is in point of
fact the man for whose apprehension a reward of three hundred pounds
is still unclaimed." With that the magistrates laid their heads
together and consulted for a little while among themselves.
By Picot, sitting quietly among the general public and watching
everything with restless burning eyes, all these proceedings were only
imperfectly understood. Why Gerald Brooke had been brought in a
prisoner and almost immediately taken out again without any charge
being brought against hi, was a mystery to the mountebank. Neither
could he understand how "la belle madame" and "Margot," as he termed
them, came to be mixed up in such a strange fashion with the prisoners
at the bar, in one of whom he had at once recognised the man he had
gagged and bound to his chair in the house in Pymm's Buildings. He
lacked the key to the situation, and wanting that, he could only look
on and listen, and feel himself becoming more bewildered after each
witness that appeared on the scene. Not that he troubled himself
greatly about these things; something of much deeper import lay at the
back of all his wandering thoughts about this matter or the other. He
had been led to that place, his footsteps had been mysteriously guided
thither--he could see it all now--for a certain purpose, and that
purpose, as he sat there, was never for one moment out of his mind.
The magistrates having brought their brief consultation to an end,
intimated that the prisoners at the bar would be remanded till the
following Monday. They were at once removed; and after a brief pause,
Gerald Brooke took his stand in their place. Having answered to his
name in the usual way, the red-faced magistrate leaned forward a
little to address him. "Gerald Brooke," he began, "you stand charged
on the verdict of a coroner's jury with the wilful murder of Otto von
Rosenberg, commonly called the Baron von Rosenberg, at Beaulieu, in
the county of ----, on Thursday, the 28th day of June last. The crime
having been committed outside the jurisdiction of this court, all we
have now to do is"---
Suddenly a man with gold circlets in his ears and holding a soft felt
hat in his hands stood up in the body of the court, and addressing
himself directly to the magistrate, said in a voice which all there
could hear "Pardonnez moi, s'il vous plaît, monsieur, but I--Jules
Picot--and not the prisoner at the bar, am the man who killed Otto von
Rosenberg."