“M’luds and gentlemen of the jury, that finishes the Spanish evidence, which was taken on commission on the island of Cuba. We shall produce the officer of H.M.S. Elephant, to whom he was surrendered by the Spanish authorities at Havana, thus proving the prisoner to be the pirate Nikola, and no other. We come, now, to the specific instance, m’luds and gentlemen, an instance as vile …”
It was some little time before I had grasped how absolutely the Spanish evidence damned me. It was as if, once I fell into the hands of the English officer on Havana quays, the identity of Nikola could by no manner of means be shaken from round my neck. The barrister came to the facts.
A Kingston ship had been boarded … and there was the old story over again. I seemed to see the Rio Medio schooner rushing towards where I and old Cowper and old Lumsden looked back from the poop to see her come alongside; the strings of brown pirates pour in empty-handed, and out laden. Only in the case of the Victoria there were added the ferocities of “the prisoner at the bar, m’luds and gentlemen of the jury, a fiend in human shape, as we shall prove with the aid of the most respectable witnesses. …”
The man in the wig sat down, and, before I understood what was happening, a fat, rosy man—the Attorney-General—whose cheerful gills gave him a grotesque resemblance to a sucking pig, was calling “Edward Sadler,” and the name blared like sudden fire leaping up all over the court. The Attorney-General wagged his gown into a kind of bunch behind his hips, and a man, young, fair, with a reddish beard and a shiny suit of clothes, sprang into a little 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 dyewood; 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,
