Part 114 (1/2)
”Come,” said Lawyer Ball, in a coaxing tone, ”let us be pleasant. Of course you were not with Richard Hare--West Lynne is always ill-natured- -you were on a visit to Captain Thorn, as--as any other young lady might be?”
Afy hung her head, cowed down to abject meekness.
”Answer the question,” came forth the chairman's voice again. ”Were you with Thorn?”
”Yes,” though the answer was feeble enough.
Mr. Ball coughed an insinuating cough.
”Did you remain with him--say two or three years?”
”Not three.”
”A little over two, perhaps?”
”There was no harm in it,” shrieked Afy, with a catching sob of temper.
”If I chose to live in London, and he chose to make a morning call upon me, now and then, as an old friend, what's that to anybody? Where was the harm, I ask?”
”Certainly--where was the harm? I am not insinuating any,” returned Lawyer Ball, with a wink of the eye furthest from the witness and the bench. ”And, during the time that--that he was making these little morning calls upon you, did you know him to be Levison?”
”Yes. I knew him to be Captain Levison then.”
”Did he ever tell you why he had a.s.sumed the name of Thorn?”
”Only for a whim, he said. The day he spoke to me in the pastrycook's shop at Swainson, something came over him, in the spur of the moment, not to give his right name, so he gave the first that came into his head. He never thought to retain it, or that other people would hear of him by it.”
”I dare say not,” laconically spoke Lawyer Ball. ”Well, Miss Afy, I believe that is all for the present. I want Ebenezer James in again,” he whispered to an officer of the justice-room, as the witness retired.
Ebenezer James reappeared and took Afy's place.
”You informed their wors.h.i.+ps, just now, that you had met Thorn in London, some eighteen months subsequent to the murder,” began Lawyer Ball, launching another of his shafts. ”This must have been during the period of Afy Hallijohn's sojourn with him. Did you also see her?”
Mr. Ebenezer opened his eyes. He knew nothing of the evidence just given by Afy, and wondered how on earth it had come out--that she had been with Thorn at all. He had never betrayed it.
”Afy?” stammered he.
”Yes, Afy,” sharply returned the lawyer. ”Their wors.h.i.+ps know that when she took that trip of hers from West Lynne it was to join Thorn not Richard Hare--though the latter has borne the credit of it. I ask you, did you see her? for she was then still connected with him.”
”Well--yes, I did,” replied Mr. Ebenezer, his own scruples removed, but wondering still how it had been discovered, unless Afy had--as he had prophesied she would--let out in her ”tantrums.” ”In fact, it was Afy whom I first saw.”
”State the circ.u.mstances.”
”I was up Paddington way one afternoon, and saw a lady going into a house. It was Afy Hallijohn. She lived there, I found--had the drawing- room apartments. She invited me to stay to tea with her, and I did.”
”Did you see Captain Levison there?”
”I saw Thorn--as I thought him to be. Afy told me I must be away by eight o'clock, for she was expecting a friend who sometimes came to sit with her for an hour's chat. But, in talking over old times--not that I could tell her much about West Lynne, for I had left it almost as long as she had--the time slipped on past the hour. When Afy found that out she hurried me off, and I had barely got outside the gate when a cab drove up, and Thorn alighted from it, and let himself in with a latch- key. That is all I know.”
”When you knew that the scandal of Afy's absence rested on Richard Hare, why could you not have said this, and cleared him, on your return to West Lynne?”
”It was no affair of mine, that I should make it public. Afy asked me not to say I had seen her, and I promised her I would not. As to Richard Hare, a little extra scandal on his back was nothing, while there remained on it the worse scandal of murder.”