“Yes; it is ‘Indian hemp.’ ”
“Is there an infusion of cannabis indica to be obtained?”
“I do not think there is,” said the other. “I can probably enlighten you because I see now the trend of your examination. I once told Frank Merrill, many years ago, when I was very enthusiastic, that an infusion of cannabis indica, combined with tincture of opium and hyocine, produced certain effects.”
“It is inclined to sap the will power of a man or a woman who is constantly absorbing this poison in small doses?” suggested the counsel.
“That is so.”
The counsel now switched off on a new tack.
“Do you know the East of London?”
“Yes, slightly.”
“Do you know Silvers Rents?”
“Yes.”
“Do you ever go to Silvers Rents?”
“Yes; I go there very regularly.”
The readiness of the reply astonished both Frank and the girl. She had been feeling more and more uncomfortable as the cross-examination continued, and had a feeling that she had in some way betrayed Jasper Cole’s confidence. She had listened to the cross-examination which revealed Jasper as a scientist with something approaching amazement. She had known of the laboratory, but had associated the place with those entertaining experiments that an idle dabbler in chemistry might undertake.
For a moment she doubted, and searched her mind for some occasion when he had practiced his medical knowledge. Dimly she realized that there had been some such occasion, and then she remembered that it had always been Jasper Cole who had concocted the strange drafts which had so relieved the headache to which, when she was a little younger, she had been something of a martyr. Could he—She struggled hard to dismiss the thought as being unworthy of her; and now, when the object of his visits to Silvers Rents was under examination, she found her curiosity growing.
“Why did you go to Silvers Rents?”
There was no answer.
“I will repeat my question: With what object did you go to Silvers Rents?”
“I decline to answer that question,” said the man in the box coolly. “I merely tell you that I went there frequently.”
“And you refuse to say why?”
“I refuse to say why,” repeated the witness.
The judge on the bench made a little note.
“I put it to you,” said counsel, speaking impressively, “that it was in Silvers Rents that you took on another identity.”
“That is probably true,” said the other, and the girl gasped; he was so cool, so self-possessed, so sure of himself.
“I suggest to you,” the counsel went on, “that in those Rents Jasper Cole became Rex Holland.”
There was a buzz of excitement, a sudden soft clamor of voices through which the usher’s harsh demand for silence cut like a knife.
“Your suggestion is an absurd one,” said Jasper, without heat, “and I presume that you are going to produce evidence to support so infamous a statement.”
“What evidence I produce,” said counsel, with asperity, “is a matter for me to decide.”
“It is also a matter for the witness,” interposed the soft voice of the judge. “As you have suggested that Holland was a party to the murder, and as you are inferring that Rex Holland is Jasper Cole, it is presumed that you will call evidence to support so serious a charge.”
“I am not prepared to call evidence, my lord, and if your lordship thinks the question should not have been put I am willing to withdraw it.”
The judge nodded and turned his head to the jury.
“You will consider that question as not having been put, gentlemen,” he said. “Doubtless counsel is trying to establish the fact that one person might just as easily have been Rex Holland as another. There is no suggestion that Mr. Cole went to Silvers Rents—which I understand is in a very poor neighborhood—with any illegal intent, or that he was committing any crime or behaving in any way improperly by paying such frequent visits. There may be something in the witness’s life associated with that poor house which has no bearing on the case and which he does not desire should be ventilated in this court. It happens to many of us,” the judge went on, “that we have associations which it would embarrass us to reveal.”
This little incident closed that portion of the cross-examination, and counsel went on to the night of the murder.
“When did you come to the house?” he asked.
“I came to the house soon after dark.”
“Had you been in London?”
“Yes; I walked from Bexhill.”
“It was dark when you arrived?”
“Yes, nearly dark.”
“The servants had all gone out?”
“Yes.”
“Was Mr. Minute pleased to see you?”
“Yes; he had expected me earlier in the day.”
“Did he tell you that his nephew was coming to see him?”
“I knew that.”
“You say he suggested that you should make yourself scarce?”
“Yes.”
“And as you had a headache, you went upstairs and lay down on your bed?”
“Yes.”
“What were you doing in Bexhill?”
“I came down from town and got into the wrong portion of the train.”
A junior leaned over and whispered quickly to his leader.
“I see, I see,” said the counsel petulantly. “Your ticket was found at Bexhill. Have you ever seen Mr. Rex Holland?” he asked.
“Never.”
“You have never met any person of that name?”
“Never.”
In this tame way the cross-examination closed, as cross-examinations have a habit of doing.
By the time the final addresses of counsel had ended, and the judge had finished a masterly summing-up, there was no doubt whatever in the mind of any person in the court as to what the verdict would be. The jury was absent from the box for twenty minutes and returned a verdict of “Not guilty!”
The judge discharged Frank Merrill without comment, and he left the court a free but ruined man.
XIII
The Man Who Came to Montreux
It was two months after the great trial, on a warm day in October, when Frank Merrill stepped ashore from the big white paddle boat which had carried him across Lake Leman from Lausanne, and, handing his bag to a porter, made his way to the hotel omnibus. He looked at his watch. It pointed
