The Incendiary: A Story of Mystery

by William Augustine Leahy

  CHAPTER VI.

  AND IS FOUND WANTING.

  After the noon recess Bertha was called to finish her testimony, withthe promise that she would not be detained long.

  "A description of the study, Miss Lund, when you were dusting."

  "Everything was left just as it was when the professor fell dead on thethreshold Tuesday evening."

  "Did you notice any foreign substance--any accumulation of what mightafford fuel for a fire?"

  "No, sir."

  "Any odor?"

  "Only that the room was close from being shut up."

  "Describe the contents of the room."

  "Well, it was full of books, on shelves that ran all around."

  "Yes?"

  "Two windows; a cage before one, the nearest to the door, and a writingdesk before the one in the farthest corner."

  "Well?"

  "A safe partly built in the wall beside the door."

  "How high from the ground?"

  "About up to my waist."

  "Did you notice anything underneath it?"

  "Yes, there was the gunpowder box Mr. Robert put there."

  "A box full of gunpowder placed there by Floyd?"

  "Yes, sir."

  This statement made a profound impression, but Badger did not push thesubject further. The prisoner almost smiled.

  "Well?" Badger said.

  "Oh, everything else was just as the professor left it. His slippersunder his chair, his dressing-gown over the back of it, his spectacleson the desk, his bible laid down open. He was going to meet a caller,you know, when he was taken with the stitch."

  "Very well. Perhaps we have had enough of the professor," said Badger.But the accused did not find these minutiae trivial. For the first timehis proud face broke and he hid the tears with his hand. The mention ofthe bible, slippers and the other personal mementos had called up thedearest picture he ever knew.

  All the grand life, equally compounded of whims and principles, passedbefore him at Bertha's mention of the empty chair.

  But the sympathy of the spectators was short-lived. While Robert wept astrain of sad music stole into the court-room. Faint at first, it rosein volume as the players approached, but still with a muted sound, as iftheir instruments were muffled. The drum-beats were rare andunobtrusive, and the burden of the melody, if melody it were, was borneby proud bugles and quivering oboes. Its cadences were old andmysterious, like some Gregorian chant intoned in cloisters before organand orchestra had trained our ears to the chords of harmony. No wonderthe court-room was hushed until it died away in the distance.

  It was the Masonic dead march, for on this day the funerals of the deadwhom Robert Floyd was accused of murdering were being held. OscarSchubert, as a member of the mystic order, was buried with all the pompof its ceremonies, and it was his cortege, proceeding to the sepulcher,whose passage occasioned this pause in the trial.

  The revulsion of sympathy was instant. Every man in the court-room sawthe wife and two children, sitting behind drawn curtains in the carriageof the chief mourners, and beyond this picture the bodies of sixvictims, four of them young girls, done to death at the prompting ofavarice. The prisoner himself seemed to understand, for he shut histeeth, though his bold eyes still dared the multitude. But they restedmore and more upon the lovely face which was his one point ofconsolation in that unfriendly assemblage. Badger's indifferent voiceshowed no quiver when he asked Miss Lund to step down and called forRobert Floyd. It was a brusque opening.

  "What was contained in the safe in your uncle's study?"

  "I never opened it."

  "You knew, however?"

  "What he had told me."

  "Was his will there?"

  "I have reason to believe so."

  "Did you believe so on Saturday, while you were in the room with MissLund?"

  "I did not give the matter any thought at that time." Floyd spoke asthough the spirit burned hot within him. "And I will add----"

  "Nothing," said Badger. But the judge looked up.

  "This is a court, not a court-martial," he said, quietly, a pale,studious man. "The witness has a right to modify his answers."

  "I have only this to say," continued Floyd, "to hasten as much aspossible this preposterous trial, that I indorse every word of MissLund's testimony, and accept it and proffer it as my own upon the pointswhich it covers."

  "We prefer----" But the district attorney interrupted his assistant."Are you aware, Mr. Floyd, of the gravity of the position in which MissLund's testimony involves you? Sole opportunity is almost the major headamong those which the government is required to prove."

  "I accept it in toto, subject to the privilege of volunteering astatement if my examination is incomplete or misleading."

  "We shall endeavor to make it both adequate and fair," said the districtattorney.

  "Leaving the safe for a moment," resumed the examiner, "will you kindlyrelate your movements, Mr. Floyd, subsequent to the time when Berthaleft you to go upstairs?"

  The young man hesitated. The pause was so long as to be embarrassing.Old John Davidson coughed loudly to relieve his agitation. When thewitness spoke at last he seemed to be remembering with difficulty.

  "I remember leaving the house and walking about among the fields, in thepark, I think. Yes, I took a car for the park. In the evening I calledupon Miss Barlow."

  He looked up at the aureoled face and faintly smiled. The sight appearedto revive him. "From that point my recollections become as distinct asusual. But----" He hesitated once more and Badger left him unaided inhis distress. "The truth is, this was my first visit since his death tomy uncle's study. The executor had telegraphed and afterward written meto close and lock it. This I did. But that afternoon I was expecting avisit from him----"

  "Who is this executor?"

  "Mr. Hodgkins Hodgkins."

  "Of the firm of Hodgkins, Hodgkins & Hodgkins?"

  "I believe so. My aunt, Mrs. Arnold, had called at 3 o'clock to say thathe had arrived from New York and would take possession of the papersthat afternoon. So I unlocked the room and let the servant dust it. Thewhole meaning of my loss seemed to come over me then, when I saw theempty chair. Before that I had been calm enough. But the sight dazed andstaggered me. I went out, fled, taking no note of time or place. Ibelieve, I know, I was in the park, but until I arrived at MissBarlow's, outward occurrences made little memorable impression upon me."

  "I presume you saw or were seen by persons on the way?"

  "I do not remember any one in particular."

  "Are we to understand," said the district attorney, listening intently,"that you passed this long period in a species of reverie or trance?"

  "An intense fit of abstraction," answered Robert; but the districtattorney looked puzzled, as if an utterly new and virgin problem hadbeen put before him to solve.

  "Without food until you returned at 11 o'clock to the fire?" askedBadger.

  "Excepting a light lunch at Miss Barlow's. Her mother noticed somefatigue in me and pressed me to take refreshment."

  "Was there no mention of the fire there--a fire which was destroyingyour home?"

  "We spoke of it casually, but I did not know until later that it wasdestroying my home."

  "Was it not described in the evening papers?"

  "Not in the early editions, Badger," put in the district attorney. "Onlyin the later specials."

  "Very well. Now let us get back to the safe. Your uncle had made a will,I believe?"

  "He made a will several weeks ago."

  "What were the terms of that document?"

  "I do not know them in full."

  "As to your share?"

  "My legacy was $20,000."

  "Out of an estate valued at?"

  "I have heard $10,000,000."

  "You are an anarchist, Mr. Floyd?"

  "No, sir."

  "But a radical of some sort?"

  "I am a socialist; a developer, not a destroyer."

  "Ah!" said Bad
ger. His exclamation was icy cold. "And you differed fromyour uncle on other points, did you not?"

  "We took the liberty of honest men to differ."

  "In religion?"

  "Yes. He was a high churchman. I am--simply a Christian."

  This avowal of a creed brought titters among the spectators, whoapparently were accustomed to definitions narrower if more precise.

  "And as a result of these quarrels your uncle disinherited you?"

  "Sir?"

  For a moment the prisoner's outburst of indignation checked the currentof opinion which had been flowing swiftly against him.

  "In one sentence you have managed to outrage the dead as well as theliving--and to convey two impressions distinctly false. My uncle and Inever quarreled, never! He was a father and more than a father to me.Neither did he disinherit me. It was his wish to assign me the wholeproperty. I begged him to omit me without more than a memento orkeepsake, that I might enter life as he had done, as every man should,untrammeled--but with the advantage, I feel sure, of an example and aninspiration given to few to enjoy. The sum left me was far in excess ofmy desires."

  There was another long silence after this statement, but it expressedonly incredulity.

  "When was this very extraordinary will drawn up?"

  "Three weeks ago."

  "The witnesses are living, then? It is to be presumed that they, too,were not carried off by the holocaust which so reduced our populationlast Saturday." Badger's sarcasm was brutal, but it told.

  "The witnesses were three neighbors, called in. The servants could notact, as they were remembered in the document."

  "No lawyer was present?"

  "My uncle seldom employed a lawyer."

  Such a statement, relating to a man of Prof. Arnold's wealth, might haveexcited doubt if his eccentricity on this point had not been noisedabout beforehand.

  "He drew up the will himself, then? Has any one seen it except you?"

  "Not so far as I know. I myself never saw it."

  "But you knew it was in the safe?"

  "I supposed so."

  "One moment," said the district attorney, interrupting. "Once more, whydid you reopen the study on this particular day?"

  "Because I had been informed that Mr. Hodgkins was coming to remove thewill."

  "By whom were you so informed?"

  "Mrs. Arnold drove up about 3 o'clock and mentioned the fact. Indeed,she had expected to find him at the house. He was an old acquaintance ofhers, as well as of my uncle--her legal adviser, in fact."

  A stylish woman, still fair in spite of her 50 years, was sitting infront of Robert as he testified. She was the widow of Benjamin Arnold'sbrother, Henry, and her son, Henry, or Harry, had just offered a rewardof $5,000 for the incendiary--a sum which McCausland might well havehopes of securing. The inspector was still hovering about the thresholdof his ante-room, and now that Floyd's examination was concluded hecalled the district attorney to one side, apparently urging him toreserve the remainder of his evidence, which would naturally consist ofrebuttal of Floyd and corroboration of Bertha. At any rate, Mr. Badgerarose, and, announcing that the case was closed, offered a summary ofthe evidence, rapid, methodical, but unimpressive, like himself. Thenthe prisoner was asked if he desired to speak in his own behalf.

  "Your honor," he said, "this monstrous charge of having set on foot afire in the most populous section of our noble city overwhelms me sothat I am impotent to express the indignation I feel. I leave it to yourown sense of justice, your own discrimination, whether I am to bedishonored with the suspicion of an infamous crime, on evidence soflimsy that the bare denial of a veracious man should be sufficient toupset it. I read in many faces around me the hunger for blood; theunthinking call for a victim. Heed that, and my good name is taken fromme. I am irreparably wronged. Resist it, and you will prove yourselfworthy of the honorable title which you bear."

  Not a few were swayed toward the youth by his manifest emotion. But thejudge waited fully a minute before he arose and his eyeglasses weretrembling in his hand.

  "You have elected, against good counsel," he began, "to be your ownadvocate. I cannot and do not adjudge you unsuccessful, in the sense ofhaving demonstrated your guilt rather than your innocence. But that youhave failed to break the government's chain of evidence in its mostdamaging links--sole opportunity, motive and suspicious conduct,especially after the act--is plain to me, and would be plain to any mindaccustomed to weighing such evidence calmly.

  "It is true the evidence is wholly circumstantial. No eye but God's sawthis foul deed done. But since William Rufus was found dead in the NewForest, with Walter Tyrrell's arrow in his breast, men have beenconvicted of murder on circumstantial evidence, and will continue to beso convicted as long as probability remains the guide of life.

  "I am obliged, therefore, to remand you for trial, not only on thecharge of arson, but upon the graver charge of homicide involved in itunder the peculiar circumstances of the case. This is not a finalverdict. Far be it from me, one erring man, to say that the governmenthas fastened this crime upon you beyond reasonable doubt. But in theface of the evidence which has been brought forward I could not orderyour release. It becomes my unhappy duty, as the examining magistrate,to commit you to custody, to await the approaching session of the grandjury."

  When Emily Barlow awoke from her swoon she found herself in the arms ofold John Davidson. Perhaps it was as well she did not hear the jeer ofexecration which greeted the prisoner outside when he passed over thesidewalk, ironed between two stalwart officers, into the jail van.McCausland's identification with the case had affected public opinionprofoundly, for he was said never to have failed to convict a criminalwhom he had once brought into court. But possibly the outburst was dueto the circumstance that this was the neighborhood in which the Lacygirls lived and that their funeral had taken place that very morning.