The Incendiary: A Story of Mystery

by William Augustine Leahy

  CHAPTER LII.

  THE ROSEBUD MOUTH.

  "What in the world is he smiling for?" asked Emily. InspectorMcCausland's smile was a barometer of her own uneasiness, and she couldnot help remarking his unusual geniality at the opening of the court onWednesday.

  The previous day's work had closed with a sturdy wrangle betweenShagarach and the district attorney. Whether it was that Shagarach'scharge of perjury was not sufficiently supported (it was merelyAronson's word against Serena's) or that Bigelow's inelastic mindcharacteristically clung in the face of cogent proof to the convictionsit had already formed, he had objected might and main to the proposedissue of a warrant and even gone so far as to protest against hislearned brother's effort to intimidate a witness of the weaker sex.McCausland had amicably agreed to secure the attendance of Miss Lamb forcross-examination, and so the confusion subsided. Miss Lamb was thereand so was the inspector. But what made him smile?

  "Good morning, Miss Barlow," said a familiar voice, close to Emily'sear.

  "Bertha Lund!" she exclaimed. There it was, the large, fair Swedishface, with sparkling blue eyes that danced with the pleasure of thesurprise. After a moment of silent study Emily gave her a bear-likesqueeze and only released her that she might shake hands with Robert.

  "It's none of my doing, Mr. Robert," said Bertha. "If I could, I'd havestaid home in Upsala, but I gave my word to Mr. McCausland that I'd comeback, and here I am to keep it."

  "But we thought you were lost. We saw the body and buried it," criedEmily.

  "Oh, that was another Bertha Lund. Mr. McCausland thought it was me,too."

  "Another one from Upsala?"

  "Why, if you took all the Bertha Lunds and Nils Nilssons in Upsala youcould fill a big town with them," said the housemaid, laughing.

  "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 sisterChristina, who is old enough now to be handy. She was kind enough topay my passage over so I could bring her out with me, and let me stayall 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 finishthat talk. I have a hundred questions I want to ask you. Shall youtestify to-day?"

  "No; I've only just got here and the lawyer said he would leave me tillthe last. The voyage is very tiresome, you know."

  "Then come with me," cried Emily, with animation, and drew Bertha afterher into the ante-room. Here Robert caught a glimpse of her from time totime questioning, explaining, measuring with her hands, as if she weresatisfying herself on doubtful points of her theory. And when shefinally came out, in the middle of Miss Lamb's cross-examination, herface wore a smile so auroral that even Chief Justice Playfair's eyesleft the witness and wandered over toward the true-hearted girl.

  "Mr. Aronson told you that he worked on his knees at this mysterioussafe?" was Shagarach's opening question to Miss Lamb.

  "On his knees," answered the maiden, still bonneted and fanning herselfwith Emily's fan, which she had forgotten to return in the excitement ofthe 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 Shagarach.

  "Perhaps not."

  "The government wishes us to believe that there was a bomb purposelyplaced under this safe. That would raise it from the floor severalinches, would it not?"

  "I suppose so. I know nothing about the bomb."

  "Will you kindly explain how the locksmith could be kneeling while atwork on a safe which, according to the testimony of Miss Lund, at thehearing, was resting on a shelf as high as her waist from the ground?"

  The witness fanned herself nervously and once or twice opened her lipsto reply, but no sound came forth. A wave of frightened sympathy passedthrough the spectators in the prolonged interim of silence, like thatwhich seizes an audience when an orator falters and threatens to breakdown.

  "You do not answer, Miss Lamb?"

  "I feel faint," said the girl. A chair and a glass of water were hurriedto her aid.

  "Are you sure this is the man Aronson who visited you?" asked Shagarachwhen she had recovered.

  "Oh, yes."

  "Then we have two Aronsons in the case; Mr. Saul Aronson, my assistant,and Mr. Jacob Aronson, the piano dealer, who will testify to havingreceived the postal card copied on the blotting-pad. And this Mr.Aronson who visited you declared that he had been a locksmith, if Iunderstood your story?"

  "He said so."

  "That is not surprising. Mr. Aronson, my assistant, was formerly alocksmith. What was the date of your interview?"

  "The first part of July. I can't remember the exact day," replied thewitness, a bit nettled. The rusticity was rubbing on again in hermanner, and to Saul Aronson it actually seemed that her cheekbones werebecoming prominent, like those of her horrid aunt whom he had met onthat fateful evening. But this may have been an optical illusion. Thesympathy of the spectators trembled in the balance. She seemed so youngand dove-like. But there stood Shagarach confronting her, hostile,skeptical, uncompromising.

  "Mr. Aronson had made this alleged attempt to open a safe on Sundayevening, you said?"

  "On the evening of the Sabbath."

  Here Aronson gesticulated and whispered in Shagarach's ear. The lawyerlistened calmly.

  "When did you first become acquainted with him?"

  "I don't remember exactly. He came to our meetings for a long timebefore 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 fourmonths ago, if the district attorney reckons rightly from his periodichair-cuts. Then at the time of the visit to your house in July he musthave been a convert nearly two months?"

  "Perhaps."

  "But the will was only drawn on June 7. And Mr. Aronson, I understandyou to testify, yielded to this temptation before he was converted?"

  The witness did not answer, but looked around the court-room as if forsympathy.

  "Are we to understand that he broke into the safe before the will wasplaced there?"

  The witness fluttered her fan nervously and her lips were quivering. Shelooked down.

  "Sunday evening, you said. You are probably not aware that Prof. Arnoldread in his own library every Sunday evening up to the time of hisdeath?"

  Serena began to cry. Instantly the tension of the audience was relaxedand comments passed 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 thedecimal point."

  "Religious mania; hysterical mendacity," a doctor diagnosed it, with apompous frown.

  "Little minx had a craving for notoriety," said a woman, elderly,unmarried and plain.

  "I should say it illustrates the pernicious effect of novel reading on arustic brain," murmured a clerical personage, clearing his throat beforehe delivered himself.

  Suddenly Shagarach's insistence left him. His voice softened. With hisvery first question, the distressed look, half of reproach, half ofsympathy, toward Serena, cleared away from Aronson's face.

  "Wasn't Mr. Aronson agitated on that evening, Miss Lamb?"

  She blushed amid her tears and her answer was less defiant.

  "Extremely agitated."

  "Wasn't his story to you somewhat confused in the telling?"

  "Very confused, yes, sir."

  "And perhaps the outlines blurred still more in your memory by the lapseof time?"

  "Perhaps. I meant
to speak of that myself," answered Serena,brightening. Whereat the entire court-room brightened. Shagarach'sinflections became kind, almost genial now. One would have thought shewas his own witness, he stroked her so gently.

  "And his accent was somewhat hard to follow?"

  "Oh, very."

  "He is not perfectly familiar with our language as yet?"

  "No, he speaks it poorly."

  The court-room was all curiosity.

  "Didn't this picture of the study, which you have quoted, come in aspart of his description of a law case?"

  "Why, yes; he began talking about the Floyd case."

  "In which he was deeply interested at that time, as my assistant. That,however, he did not make clear to you?"

  "No."

  "Can you swear that this whole picture of a Sunday-night entrance andexperiment on the safe was not an imaginary one--a piece of fiction,invented and vividly told in the first person to illustrate what RobertFloyd might easily have done if he had desired to destroy the will, butwhat----"

  Shagarach inclined slightly toward the jury, "but what he evidently didnot do?"

  "Perhaps. Truly I couldn't catch half of what he was saying when hebegan to talk rapidly."

  "I myself am a locksmith. He could come and give me money. We go Sundaynight. Nobody home. House all still. I get down on my knees. File alittle. Drill. Somebody come. I go away. Come again. Try again."

  Serena smiled a smile that sent waves of sunshine through the room.Shagarach had not once descended to mimicry of his assistant's dialect.But the broken fragments of speech, the confused arrangement, seemed tocall before Serena's eye an amusing picture of her lovelorn swain'sincoherence.

  "Perhaps I was altogether mistaken," she volunteered.

  Shagarach waved her with courtesy to the nonplussed though apparentlystill obstinate district attorney. A long conference followed among theprosecuting lawyers, while Emily heaved a sigh of relief.

  Over in his front seat Ecks was gazing at Shagarach, as if trying topierce the great brow, not opened showily, but masked, as it were, bythe loose-falling hair. The marvelous skill of his tactics--first, thebreaking down of Serena's story through its intrinsic discrepancies,then the building up from her own lips of a hypothetical case in thejurors' minds--all without deviating a hair line from true courtesy anddelicacy of treatment--sank deeply into the novelist's heart. He did notreply to Wye's comment on the underplot.

  "Incarnate self-control!" he muttered to himself.

  But alas for poor Saul Aronson! It was bad enough to be compelled toflee from suspicion post haste through the gateway of public ridicule.But to realize at last that Serena was human and no angel--capable ofpique, brusqueness and tears--capable even of resisting Shagarach! Thescales of illusion fell from his eyes and he hung his head, a chastenedyouth.

  "The redirect is deferred," said Bigelow, and Serena, after returningthe fan to Emily, stepped softly out. Her footfalls barely broke thedead silence as she picked her way through the crowd.

  Aronson lifted his eyes to her face. What imperfections he noted now!The eyebrows too level, the rosebud mouth too small and the cheekbonesunmistakably present, even if barely breaking the curve. It was fatedso. Doubtless in time he would follow old Abraham Barentzen's counseland take some comely daughter of Israel to wife, well-dowered, a goodhousekeeper, and free from tittle-tattle. But never again would hisnaive heart palpitate with such virginal ecstasy as when he first gazedthrough the rose-misted spectacles of love on that sweetly imperfectgentile maiden.

  "We shall now offer a mass of evidence," said the district attorney,"tending to prove the crucial point of exclusive opportunity."

  Seven witnesses took the box, one after another, and in response toBadger's questions, swore that they were neighbors of the Arnolds, werewide-awake and observant about the time of the fire, but saw no personcoming out of the house either in front or rear. The evidence wasnegative, but cumulatively it produced its effect, leading the minds ofthe jury away from Serena Lamb and her legend to the real core of thepuzzle. By the time the last witness on this point arrived, a cordon ofwatchers, completely environing the house, had been drawn around it bythe government, and it seemed impossible that any one could have slippedthrough unobserved.