Hand and Ring

It was the suggestion of a just man, and Mr. Byrd looked to see the witness grasp with all the energy of despair at the prospect of release it held out. But Mr. Hildreth either felt his cause beyond the reach of any such assistance, or his understanding was so dulled by misery he could not see the advantage of acknowledging the presence of a third party in the cottage. Giving a dreary shake of the head, he slowly answered:

"There may have been somebody else in the house, I don't know; but if so, I didn't hear him or see him. I thought we were alone."

The frankness with which he made the admission was in his favor, but the quick and overpowering flush that rose to his face the moment he had given utterance to it, betrayed so unmistakable a consciousness of what the admission implied that the effect was immediately reversed. Seeing that he had lost rather than gained in the opinions of the merciless inquisitors about him, he went back to his old bravado, and haughtily lifted his head.

"One question more," resumed the coroner. "You have said that Mrs. Clemmens was a spirited woman. Now, what made you think so? Any expression of annoyance on her part at the interruption in her work which your errand had caused her, or merely the expression of her face and the general way she had of speaking?"

"The latter, I think, though she did use a harsh word or two when she showed me the door."

"And raised her voice?"

"Yes, yes."

"Mr. Hildreth," intimated the coroner, rising, "will you be kind enough to step with me into the adjoining room?"

With a look of wonder not unmixed with alarm, the young man prepared to comply.

"I should like the attention of the jury," Dr. Tredwell signified as he passed through the door.

There was no need to give them this hint. Not a man of them but was already on his feet in eager curiosity as to what their presiding officer was about to do.

"I wish you to tell me now," the coroner demanded of Mr. Hildreth, as they paused in the centre of the sitting-room, "where it was you stood during your interview with Mrs. Clemmens, and, if possible, take the very position now which you held at that time."

"There are too many persons here," the witness objected, visibly rebelling at a request of which he could not guess the full significance.

"The people present will step back," declared the coroner; "you will have no trouble in taking your stand on the spot you occupied the other day."

"Here, then!" exclaimed the young man, taking a position near the centre of the room.

"And the widow?"

"Stood there."

"Facing you?"

"Yes."

"I see," intimated the coroner, pointing toward the windows. "Her back was to the yard while you stood with your face toward it." Then with a quick motion, summoning the witness back into the other room, asked, amid the breathless attention of the crowd, whom this bit of by-play had wrought up to expectation: "Did you observe any one go around to the back door while you stood there, and go away again without attempting to knock?"

Mr. Hildreth knitted his brow and seemed to think.

"Answer," persisted the coroner; "it is not a question that requires thought."

"Well, then, I did not," cried the witness, looking the other directly in the eye, with the first gleam of real manly feeling which he had yet displayed.

"You did not see a tramp come into the yard, walk around to the kitchen door, wait a moment as if hesitating whether he would rap, and then turn and come back again without doing so?"

"No, sir."

The coroner drew a piece of paper before him and began figuring on it. Earnestly, almost wildly, the young man watched him, drawing a deep breath and turning quite pale as the other paused and looked up.

"Yet," affirmed the coroner, as if no delay had occurred since he received his last answer, "such a person did approach the house while you were in it, and if you had stood where you say, you must have seen him."

It was a vital thrust, a relentless presentation of fact, and as such shook the witness out of his lately acquired composure. Glancing hastily about, he sought the assistance of some one both capable and willing to advise him in this crisis, but seeing no one, he made a vigorous effort and called together his own faculties.

"Sir," he protested, a tremor of undisguised anxiety finding way into his voice, "I do not see how you make that all out. What proof have you that this tramp of which you speak came to the house while I was in it? Could he not have come before? Or, what was better, could he not have come after?"

The ringing tone with which the last question was put startled everybody. No such sounds had issued from his lips before. Had he caught a glimpse of hope, or was he driven to an extremity in his defence that forced him to assert himself? The eyes of Miss Firman and of a few other women began to soften, and even the face of Mr. Byrd betrayed that a change was on the verge of taking place in his feelings.

But the coroner's look and tone dashed cold water on this young and tender growth of sympathy. Passing over to the witness the paper on which he had been scribbling, he explained with dry significance:

"It is only a matter of subtraction and addition, Mr. Hildreth. You have said that upon quitting this house you went directly to the depot, where you arrived barely in time to jump on the train as it was leaving the station. Now, to walk from this place to the depot at any pace you would be likely to use, would occupy – well, let us say seven minutes. At two minutes before twelve, then, you were still in this house. Well!" he ejaculated, interrupting himself as the other opened his lips, "have you any thing to say?"

"No," was the dejected and hesitating reply.

The coroner at once resumed:

"But at five minutes before twelve, Mr. Hildreth, the tramp walked into the widow's yard. Now, allowing only two minutes for your interview with that lady, the conclusion remains that you were in the house when he came up to it. Yet you declare that, although you stood in full view of the yard, you did not see him."

"You figure closer than an astronomer calculating an eclipse," burst from the young man's lips in a flash of that resolution which had for the last few minutes animated him. "How do you know your witnesses have been so exact to a second when they say this and that of the goings and comings you are pleased to put into an arithmetical problem. A minute or two one way or the other would make a sad discrepancy in your calculations, Mr. Coroner."

"I know it," assented Dr. Tredwell, quietly ignoring the other's heat; "but if the jury will remember, there were four witnesses, at least, who testified to the striking of the town clock just as the tramp finally issued from the lane, and one witness, of well-known accuracy in matters of detail, who declared on oath that she had just dropped her eyes from that same clock when she observed the tramp go into the widow's gate, and that it was five minutes to twelve exactly. But, lest I do seem too nice in my calculations," the coroner inexorably pursued, "I will take the trouble of putting it another way. At what time did you leave the hotel, Mr. Hildreth?"

"I don't know," was the testy response.

"Well, I can tell you," the coroner assured him. "It was about twenty minutes to twelve, or possibly earlier, but no later. My reason for saying this," he went on, drawing once more before him the fatal sheet of paper, "is that Mrs. Dayton's children next door were out playing in front of this house for some few minutes previous to the time the tramp came into the lane. As you did not see them you must have arrived here before they began their game, and that, at the least calculation, would make the time as early as a quarter to twelve."

"Well," the fierce looks of the other seemed to say, "and what if it was?"

"Mr. Hildreth," continued the coroner, "if you were in this house at a quarter to twelve and did not leave it till two minutes before, and the interview was as you say a mere interchange of a dozen words or so, that could not possibly have occupied more than three minutes; where were you during all the rest of the time that must have elapsed after you finished your interview and the moment you left the house?"

It was a knock-down question. This aristocratic-looking young gentleman who had hitherto held himself erect before them, notwithstanding the humiliating nature of the inquiries which had been propounded to him, cringed visibly and bowed his head as if a stroke of vital force had descended upon it. Bringing his fist down on the table near which he stood, he seemed to utter a muttered curse, while the veins swelled on his forehead so powerfully that more than one person present dropped their eyes from a spectacle which bore so distinctly the stamp of guilt.

"You have not answered," intimated the coroner, after a moment of silent waiting.

"No!" was the loud reply, uttered with a force that startled all present, and made the more timid gaze with some apprehension at his suddenly antagonistic attitude. "It is not pleasant for a gentleman" – he emphasized the word bitterly – "for a gentleman to acknowledge himself caught at a time like this in a decided equivocation. But you have cornered me fairly and squarely, and I am bound to tell the truth. Gentlemen, I did not leave the widow's house as immediately as I said. I stayed for fully five minutes or so alone in the small hall that leads to the front door. In all probability I was there when the tramp passed by on his way to the kitchen-door, and there when he came back again." And Mr. Hildreth fixed his eyes on the coroner as if he dared him to push him further.

But Dr. Tredwell had been in his present seat before. Merely confronting the other with that cold official gaze which seems to act like a wall of ice between a witness and the coroner, he said the two words: "What doing?"

The effect was satisfactory. Paling suddenly, Mr. Hildreth dropped his eyes and replied humbly, though with equal laconism, "I was thinking." But scarcely had the words left his lips, than a fresh flame of feeling started up within him, and looking from juryman to juryman he passionately exclaimed: "You consider that acknowledgment suspicious. You wonder why a man should give a few minutes to thought after the conclusion of an interview that terminated all hope. I wonder at it now myself. I wonder I did not go straight out of the house and rush headlong into any danger that promised an immediate extinction of my life."

No language could have more forcibly betrayed the real desperation of his mind at the critical moment when the widow's life hung in the balance. He saw this, perhaps, when it was too late, for the sweat started on his brow, and he drew himself up like a man nerving himself to meet a blow he no longer hoped to avert. One further remark, however, left his lips.

"Whatever I did or of whatever I was thinking, one thing I here declare to be true, and that is, that I did not see the widow again after she left my side and went back to her kitchen in the rear of the house. The hand that struck her may have been lifted while I stood in the hall, but if so, I did not know it, nor can I tell you now who it was that killed her."

It was the first attempt at direct disavowal which he had made, and it had its effect. The coroner softened a trifle of his austerity, and the jurymen glanced at each other relieved. But the weight of suspicion against this young man was too heavy, and his manner had been too unfortunate, for this effect to last long. Gladly as many would have been to credit this denial, if only for the name he bore and a certain fine aspect of gentlemanhood that surrounded him in spite of his present humiliation, it was no longer possible to do so without question, and he seemed to feel this and do his best to accept the situation with patience.

An inquiry which was put to him at this time by a juryman showed the existent state of feeling against him.