Romance

box facing the jury. He bowed nervously in several directions, and laughed gently; then he looked at me and scowled. The Attorney-General cleared his throat pleasantly...

'Mr. Edward Sadler, you were, on May 25th, chief mate of the good ship Victoria....'

The fair man with the beard told his story, the old story of the ship with its cargo of coffee and dye-wood; its good passage past the Gran Caymanos; the becalming off the Cuban shore in latitude so and so, and the boarding of a black schooner, calling itself a Mexican privateer. I could see all that.

'The prisoner at the bar came alongside in a boat, with seventeen Spaniards,' he said, in a clear, expressionless voice, looking me full in the face.

I called out to the old judge, 'My Lord... I protest. This is perjury. I was not the man. It Was Nichols, a Nova Scotian.'

Mr. Baron Garrow roared, 'Silence,' his face suffused with blood.

Old Lord Stowell quavered, 'You must respect the procedure....'

'Am I to hear my life sworn away without a word?' I asked.

He drew himself frostily into his robes. 'God forbid,' he said; 'but at the proper time you can cross-examine, if you think fit.'

The Attorney-General smiled at the jury-box and addressed himself to Sadler, with an air of patience very much tried:

'You swear the prisoner is the man?'

The fair man turned his sharp eyes upon me. I called, 'For God's sake, don't perjure yourself. You are a decent man.'

'No, I won't swear,' he said slowly. 'I think he was. He had his face blacked then, of course. When I had sight of him at the Thames Court I thought he was; and seeing the Spanish evidence, I don't see where's the room....'

'The Spanish evidence is part of the plot,' I said.

The Attorney-General snickered. 'Go on, Mr. Sadler,' he said. 'Let's have the rest of the plot unfolded.'

A juryman laughed suddenly, and resumed an abashed sudden silence. Sadler went on to tell the old story.... I saw it all as he spoke; only gaunt, shiny-faced, yellow Nichols was chewing and hitching his trousers in place of my Tomas, with his sanguine oaths and jerked gestures. And there was Nichol's wanton, aimless ferocity.

'He had two pistols, which he fired twice each, while we were hoisting the studding-sails by his order, to keep up with the schooner. He fired twice into the crew. One of the men hit died afterwards....'

Later, another vessel, an American, had appeared in the offing, and the pirates had gone in chase of her. He finished, and Lord Stowell moved one of his ancient hands. It was as if a gray lizard had moved on his desk, a little toward me.

'Now, prisoner,' he said.

I drew a deep breath. I thought for a minute that, after all, there was a little fair play in the game—that I had a decent, fair, blue-eyed man in front of me. He looked hard at me; I hard at him; it was as if we were going to wrestle for a belt. The young girl on the bench had her lips parted and leant forward, her head a little on one side.

I said, 'You won't swear I was the man... Nikola el Escoces?'

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.