The Shadow of the Rope | Page 6

for, undeterred by the experience, he was in like
manner first and last upon each subsequent day. Behind him came and
went the well-known faces, the authors and the actors with a
semi-professional interest in the case; but they were not well known to
the gentleman with the white head. He heard no more than he could
help of their constant whisperings, and, if he knew not at whom he
more than once had occasion to turn and frown, he certainly did not
look the man to care. He had a well-preserved reddish face, with a
small mouth of extraordinary strength, a canine jaw, and singularly
noble forehead; but his most obvious distinction was his full head of
snowy hair. The only hair upon his face, a pair of bushy eyebrows, was
so much darker as to suggest a dye; but the eyes themselves were black
as midnight, with a glint of midnight stars, and of such a subtle
inscrutability that a certain sweetness of expression came only as the
last surprise in a face full of contrast and contradiction.
No one in court had ever seen this man before; no one but the Under
Sheriff learnt his name during the week; but by the third day his
identity was a subject of discussion, both by the professional students
of the human countenance, who sat behind him (balked of their study
by the prisoner's veil), and among the various functionaries who had
already found him as free with a sovereign as most gentlemen are with
a piece of silver. So every day he was ushered with ceremony to the
same place, at the inner end of the lowest row; there he would sit
watching the prisoner, a trifle nearer her than those beside or behind
him; and only once was his attentive serenity broken for an instant by a
change of expression due to any development of the case.

It was not when the prisoner pleaded clearly through her veil, in the
first breathless minutes of all; it was not a little later, when the urbane
counsel for the prosecution, wagging his pince-nez at the jury, thrilled
every other hearer with a mellifluous forecast of the new evidence to be
laid before them. The missing watch and chain had been found; they
would presently be produced, and the jury would have an opportunity
of examining them, together with a plan of the chimney of the room in
which the murder had been committed; for it was there that they had
been discovered upon a second search instituted since the proceedings
before the magistrates. The effect of this announcement may be
conceived; it was the sensation of the opening day. The whole case of
the prosecution rested on the assumption that there had been, on the
part of some inmate of the house, who alone (it was held) could have
committed the murder, a deliberate attempt to give it the appearance of
the work of thieves. Thus far this theory rested on the bare facts that the
glass of the broken window had been found outside, instead of within;
that no other mark of foot or hand had been made or left by the
supposititious burglars; whereas a brace of revolvers had been
discovered in the dead man's bureau, both loaded with such bullets as
the one which had caused his death, while one of them had clearly been
discharged since the last cleaning. The discovery of the missing watch
and chain, in the very chimney of the same room, was a piece of ideal
evidence of the confirmatory kind. But it was not the point that made
an impression on the man with the white hair; it did not increase his
attention, for that would have been impossible; he was perhaps the one
spectator who was not, if only for the moment, perceptibly thrilled.
Thrilling also was the earlier evidence, furnished by maid-servants and
police constables in pairs; but here there was no surprise. The maids
were examined not only as to what they had seen and heard on the
night of the murder--and they seemed to have heard everything except
the fatal shot--but upon the previous relations of their master and
mistress--of which they showed an equally extensive knowledge. The
constables were perforce confined to their own discoveries and
observations when the maids had called them in. But all four witnesses
spoke to the prisoner's behavior when shown the dead body of her
husband, and there was the utmost unanimity in their several tales. The

prisoner had exhibited little or no surprise; it was several minutes
before she had uttered a syllable; and then her first words had been to
point out that burglars alone could have committed the murder.
In cross-examination the senior counsel for the defence thus early
showed