"Why, I heard them talking in court to-day; and last night,--I didn"t mean to,--I overheard you and Mr. Dingley as you came out of the study."
Father looked grim. "It is with those stories they will try to convict him." He took a few more strides before he added, "If they can prove that Montgomery wanted to cut out Rood they"ll have a bad case against him." He didn"t speak again until he put me in the carriage. Then he said, "I hope that you will get this matter out of your mind. I hate to have you think about it."
I said I would try. Indeed, after that last remark of father"s about Montgomery wanting to cut out Rood it seemed to me that, if I didn"t quickly get something else into my mind, I should go crazy. So while the carriage bounded over the cobblestones, I was busy planning--the menu for dinner to-morrow, where to leave my ear-rings to be mended, how to do over my blue silk gown, and where had been the error in the butcher"s bill. My thoughts rushed from one little thing to another, afraid for an instant to let go.
Upon arriving home, Abby hanging over the banisters, wanted to hear about the court proceedings; but I called out to her that my testimony hadn"t been required--and would she please get out the apricots, and after luncheon I would make that sauce she had been after me to do for the last week.
She seemed astonished, but gratified, at my unwonted energy. I had been an absolutely useless creature about the house for so long. Now I hurried through luncheon, and attacked the apricots as if my life were staked on getting them halved, stoned, and boiling.
"Good Heavens, child, how you rush!" Abby protested. "There"s no such great haste." But she did not know that I was trying to run away from an idea.
In the intervals of preserving I dived into the cellar and brought up my rose and lilac plants; and the afternoon was spent in running hot-cheeked from the stove to the garden, digging, carefully sprinkling, while Abby lowered the roots; then packing the earth and patting with all my might; darting back to the kitchen again to ladle out the steaming stuff into jars and strenuously to screw on their covers.
But for all my wearing of myself out, through the steam of the cooking pots, between the leaves of the rose-bushes, the pursuing idea would lift its head. The picture of the Spanish Woman as she stood in the witness room, the golden glimmer of her hair, her wonderful white waxy face, and the way her eyes had sparkled at me through her lashes, returned to my memory, powerful as the odor of her flower. I compared her with that flower--luxurious and perfect looking, as if she had grown in a hothouse; and with that strange overwhelming characteristic which drew, in spite of all disliking. It was useless to cry, "I do not like you and I will not believe in you." There were two things I had to acknowledge--her will, and her power of seduction. Hadn"t I felt the light of it as she had stood looking at me?
Finally, when wearied out, I lay in bed that night, the idea I had been fleeing overtook me; and I gave up and looked it in the face. "Well, yes, and suppose he does love her? Should that surprise me so much?
How should he help it? She is so beautiful!"
Still that admission had been forced out of me in a moment of weakness, between my pillow and the dark; and I was determined it should not get hold of me with its swarm of attendant tormenting thoughts. I was resolved to go into court, thinking of nothing but just that small measure of evidence which was mine to give; and to come away again, turning my back upon the whole matter, and taking up again the round of my daily employments.
This heroic resolution was knocked on the head the next morning by father"s announcing that I was not summoned for the opening of the court,--and he added parenthetically Lord knew when!--but might be called for any time that afternoon, so I was to hold myself in readiness. This left me in a miserable state of uncertainty, which was not improved by seeing my name in the _Alta_, as witness, just above an exhortation to the people of San Francisco to see that justice was done, even if the law failed in its work.
The best course seemed to be the immolation of myself in the long neglected house work. A vigorous sweeping of my room, the preparation of an elaborate luncheon salad, and the total rearrangement of the parlor furniture might help to get rid of that heart-beating expectation--soothing, and bulwarking me around with domesticity. But the excitement of the city kept invading my retreat, as if it were so full of that great matter that it had to spill over even into houses where it wasn"t wanted. The first ripple had been the sight of my name in the paper that morning; but the wave went quite over me when, just before luncheon, Hallie rushed in. She had been at the trial all the morning, and had only just seen the _Alta_ with my name.
She hugged me a number of times, with exclamations of how awful but fascinating it must be, to be a witness, and what was it I knew--why hadn"t I told her--she would never have divulged one word of it--though of course if I was under oath! Still, couldn"t I tell her all about it now?
I believe that Hallie"s respect for me had taken a leap with the news of my position, and when I explained that I was still under oath, and couldn"t tell anybody anything until I told it from the witness-stand, she looked at me with positive awe.
She stayed to luncheon, and it was a trying but most exciting meal.
Alas for my elaborate salad! We might have been eating india-rubber for all we knew or cared. For Hallie poured forth all the history of the trial, from the time I left the court room, and I would not have stopped her had it been possible to do so.
It seemed that the afternoon of the opening day a man who was a waiter at the Poodle Dog was put on the stand. This was the new witness Mr.
Dingley had spoken of. He told how Mr. Rood had been at supper in the restaurant at about midnight, how Mr. Montgomery had come in with another gentleman, and gone up to the table where Rood was sitting.
While he did so the other gentleman sat at a table near the door. Mr.
Rood and Mr. Montgomery did not have supper together, the waiter said; did not even drink together. They talked only for a few minutes, and he thought they were disagreeing because, though their voices were not loud, they sounded angry. Then Mr. Rood got up suddenly, overturning his chair, and said, "I won"t hear anything from you," and though he had not finished supper, paid his bill and went out of the restaurant.
Mr. Montgomery had waited a few moments before he followed him. The gentleman who had sat near the door had been the last to leave the restaurant.
"And then," said Hallie, warming to her narrative, "they called the man who had come into the Poodle Dog with Johnny, and what do you think! it was Willie Felton."
"Not the one who went to dancing-school with us, and had such red cheeks?" I wondered.
"His cheeks aren"t red now," said Hallie; "and he has wrinkles all around his eyes, just like an old man. He has been awfully dissipated.
And, oh Ellie, you should have seen him sitting up there looking at Mr.
Dingley and looking at Mr. Jackson, and biting his nails, and never daring to look at Johnny Montgomery. He said he had met Johnny about twelve o"clock that night, by chance on Montgomery Street. They had walked a little way together, and Johnny had said, "I am going away to-morrow," and Willie Felton asked was he going to the races. Johnny laughed and said, "No. I am going to some place I"ve never seen before, and I"m not coming back until everybody has forgotten me." He behaved queerly, seemed to be very much excited; although, Willie said, he was sure he hadn"t been drinking.
"As they came to the Poodle Dog Johnny said, "There is some one here I want to speak to." And after they were inside he said, "Excuse me a moment," so Willie Felton took a table near the door, saw Johnny talk with Rood, saw Rood upset his chair as he went out, and Johnny follow him out of the door. When he himself got outside, he said that Rood was nowhere in sight and that Johnny was standing looking up Montgomery Street. He seemed to be very angry. Willie said, "Where are you going?" and Johnny turned on him and said, "I"ll tell you where I"m going--I am going about my business!" and then he walked quickly away up the street in the same direction that Rood had taken.
"While he was telling about it," Hallie went on, "Mr. Jackson kept interrupting, saying, "Object, your Honor," and making it awfully hard to follow the testimony. Then another young man was called, and he didn"t tell any story. They had a hard time even making him answer questions. But he did tell that he knew the quarrel between Rood and Johnny began three years ago at the time of the California Bank shortage, when Johnny said that Rood had lied himself out of prison and an innocent man in.
"Oh," I cried, "I"m so glad!"
Hallie looked as if she thought I was crazy; but I explained that what I really was glad of was that the quarrel had been Rood"s, and not Johnny"s fault; indeed that it had shown Johnny to be in the right, at least that once.
"Well," Hallie declared, "he does need a good word, I must say!"
This morning, she informed me, had been awfully stupid,--just cross-examining, and interrupting; but finally they did call some one new--a Mexican woman. And she testified that for two years Carlotta Valencia"s friends had known her as Mrs. Rood. "And then mother wouldn"t let me stay any longer," Hallie lamented, "because she said the woman wasn"t a proper person. But I wanted awfully to hear what else she said!"
Here Abby came in, and remarked that if we were going to talk all day we would better go somewhere else and give Lee a chance to clear off the table.
The garden has lovely places in which to sit, so we went out there and took the rustic bench in the shade of the cypress hedge.
"But what does Johnny Montgomery"s lawyer say?" I asked, for that was really the point of interest for me.
"Why, he claims that Rood committed suicide, because he was despondent over something--business I guess; and of course they did find a discharged revolver in the bar. The weak spot in that, father says, is that the bullet Rood was shot with is much too small for that revolver."
I knew there was a far weaker point in the defense than that, and I wondered, in the face of it, how I was ever going to drag my unwilling spirit up into the witness-box. The summons might come at any moment,--might come now, while we sat talking with our feet in the sun and the cypress shadow cool upon our foreheads.
At four o"clock father came stepping out of the conservatory, calling out, "What young person will give a tired man a cup of tea?" Then, noticing my questioning look, "No summons for us to-day," he said; so I ran in to fetch the tea-table.
Tea in the garden was a rare event. The few warm spring days gave the opportunity, and nothing was prettier than the scarlet lacquer tray with the Nankin cups set out under the heliotrope vines. I asked whether this was any special celebration, and father said yes; it was a farewell complimentary to him. He had to go out of town to-night. He hated to be away over Sunday, he explained, but there was business at Alma which he must look into sometime during the next five days; and week days for the present would be out of the question--by which I knew he meant he must stay on account of the trial. Then he stopped being sensible, and began teasing Hallie about her latest beau. He loves to do that, because she takes it all so seriously, and never sees that he is joking her. Just as she was protesting that she had no serious intentions toward the person in question, two young men came around the path from the front of the house. Hallie"s beau and Jack Tracy, who had fluttered my sentiment a short time before by asking me to marry him. But now he was too bubbling over with importance to remember to look sentimental.
Had we heard the latest sensation, they wanted to know? Montgomery had tried to break jail. Came mighty near doing it, too!
I had been holding a cup and saucer when he began speaking, and when he stopped it was on the brick path in a hundred pieces.
"Poppyc.o.c.k," father said, "the town is full of rumors."
But, no, they said, it was true enough. They had it from good authority. It seemed that the sheriff had been bribed. Just how and by whom I couldn"t make out, because every one was talking at once.
But the sheriff had been removed, "pending trial," said Jack Tracy, and the deputy was acting in his place.
"But," I said, "if it wasn"t Mr. Montgomery who bribed the sheriff, how can you tell he really wanted to escape?"
Then every one laughed, and I stooped over and began picking up the pieces of the Nankin cup, so that no one should see how I was blushing, but my hands shook so that it was all I could do to hold the pieces.
What in the world was the matter with me lately? There was no reason in my behaving like this, as if Johnny Montgomery had been an old friend. I excused myself on the pretext of having father"s bag to pack, and escaped into the house. "All the same," I said to myself, "I don"t believe he tried to get out, or even really wanted to. From the way he looked in the court I am sure he doesn"t care what happens to him."
But oh, I did wish he cared a little more; how I wished that some one could show, in his behalf, one contradictory piece of evidence; so that all the testimony wouldn"t seem to be narrowing down to one point where there would be room for but one thing I could believe him to be!
CHAPTER VI
THE SPANISH WOMAN"S HOUSE
Sunday, which found me sole mistress of the place, was beautiful, warm, and beguiling. That lovely locked-in feeling, which comes only when the streets are quiet, and no tradesmen, not even the postman, comes knocking, soothed me after the days of tension and expectancy.
Abby went off early to church, and I took a book out to the rustic seat by the heliotrope. At about half-past ten Mr. Dingley came through the conservatory; but he was used to coming in and out of the house so much that his joining me in the garden was no more of an invasion than if he had been one of the family. He said father had told him he was to be out of town, and he had come around to see how the household was getting on. We sat there very comfortably in the warm sun, aimlessly talking, hearing the sweet notes of church bells. I was just about to resume my book when Lee put his head out of the conservatory door.