Part 41 (1/2)
”And how did you happen to go home to Sweden?” asked Robert.
”Mrs. Arnold wanted another house-girl and I'd told her about my sister Christina, who is old enough now to be handy. She was kind enough to pay my pa.s.sage over so I could bring her out with me, and let me stay all summer, too. Did you ever see such goodness?”
”She's a very uncommon mistress, certainly,” said Emily.
”It was the day after we were talking at Hillsborough that I started,” said Bertha. ”Do you remember?”
”Yes, indeed,” answered Emily, brightening up, ”and now let us finish that talk. I have a hundred questions I want to ask you. Shall you testify to-day?”
”No; I've only just got here and the lawyer said he would leave me till the last. The voyage is very tiresome, you know.”
”Then come with me,” cried Emily, with animation, and drew Bertha after her into the ante-room. Here Robert caught a glimpse of her from time to time questioning, explaining, measuring with her hands, as if she were satisfying herself on doubtful points of her theory. And when she finally came out, in the middle of Miss Lamb's cross-examination, her face wore a smile so auroral that even Chief Justice Playfair's eyes left the witness and wandered over toward the true-hearted girl.
”Mr. Aronson told you that he worked on his knees at this mysterious safe?” was s.h.a.garach's opening question to Miss Lamb.
”On his knees,” answered the maiden, still bonneted and fanning herself with Emily's fan, which she had forgotten to return in the excitement of the previous evening.
”Mr. Aronson is not an uncommonly tall man, is he?”
”A trifle taller than you are.”
”But yet not above the average,” persisted s.h.a.garach.
”Perhaps not.”
”The government wishes us to believe that there was a bomb purposely placed under this safe. That would raise it from the floor several inches, would it not?”
”I suppose so. I know nothing about the bomb.”
”Will you kindly explain how the locksmith could be kneeling while at work on a safe which, according to the testimony of Miss Lund, at the hearing, was resting on a shelf as high as her waist from the ground?”
The witness fanned herself nervously and once or twice opened her lips to reply, but no sound came forth. A wave of frightened sympathy pa.s.sed through the spectators in the prolonged interim of silence, like that which seizes an audience when an orator falters and threatens to break down.
”You do not answer, Miss Lamb?”
”I feel faint,” said the girl. A chair and a gla.s.s of water were hurried to her aid.
”Are you sure this is the man Aronson who visited you?” asked s.h.a.garach when she had recovered.
”Oh, yes.”
”Then we have two Aronsons in the case; Mr. Saul Aronson, my a.s.sistant, and Mr. Jacob Aronson, the piano dealer, who will testify to having received the postal card copied on the blotting-pad. And this Mr. Aronson who visited you declared that he had been a locksmith, if I understood your story?”
”He said so.”
”That is not surprising. Mr. Aronson, my a.s.sistant, was formerly a locksmith. What was the date of your interview?”
”The first part of July. I can't remember the exact day,” replied the witness, a bit nettled. The rusticity was rubbing on again in her manner, and to Saul Aronson it actually seemed that her cheekbones were becoming prominent, like those of her horrid aunt whom he had met on that fateful evening. But this may have been an optical illusion. The sympathy of the spectators trembled in the balance. She seemed so young and dove-like. But there stood s.h.a.garach confronting her, hostile, skeptical, uncompromising.
”Mr. Aronson had made this alleged attempt to open a safe on Sunday evening, you said?”
”On the evening of the Sabbath.”
Here Aronson gesticulated and whispered in s.h.a.garach's ear. The lawyer listened calmly.
”When did you first become acquainted with him?”
”I don't remember exactly. He came to our meetings for a long time before I was introduced to him.”
Serena blushed a little and Aronson's cheeks were all abloom.
”He was a convert to your faith?”
”So we thought.”
”How long had he been converted?”
”I don't know.”
”Pineapple Jupiter says he introduced you to Mr. Aronson about four months ago, if the district attorney reckons rightly from his periodic hair-cuts. Then at the time of the visit to your house in July he must have been a convert nearly two months?”
”Perhaps.”
”But the will was only drawn on June 7. And Mr. Aronson, I understand you to testify, yielded to this temptation before he was converted?”
The witness did not answer, but looked around the court-room as if for sympathy.
”Are we to understand that he broke into the safe before the will was placed there?”
The witness fluttered her fan nervously and her lips were quivering. She looked down.
”Sunday evening, you said. You are probably not aware that Prof. Arnold read in his own library every Sunday evening up to the time of his death?”
Serena began to cry. Instantly the tension of the audience was relaxed and comments pa.s.sed to and fro.
”She belongs to the romantic school of statisticians,” whispered Wye. Ecks responded with a cartoon of ”Miss Meekness, making a slip of the decimal point.”
”Religious mania; hysterical mendacity,” a doctor diagnosed it, with a pompous frown.
”Little minx had a craving for notoriety,” said a woman, elderly, unmarried and plain.
”I should say it ill.u.s.trates the pernicious effect of novel reading on a rustic brain,” murmured a clerical personage, clearing his throat before he delivered himself.
Suddenly s.h.a.garach's insistence left him. His voice softened. With his very first question, the distressed look, half of reproach, half of sympathy, toward Serena, cleared away from Aronson's face.
”Wasn't Mr. Aronson agitated on that evening, Miss Lamb?”