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in a lower voice, which seemed at once sympathetic and creepy:
"Did you see it distinctly?"
Sir Wilson Seymour, however moved, had his excellent brains
in full working-order. "Very distinctly as regards its outline,
but quite indistinctly, indeed not at all, as regards the details
inside the outline. The passage is of such length that anyone in
the middle of it appears quite black against the light at the other end."
The witness lowered his steady eyes once more and added:
"I had noticed the fact before, when Captain Cutler first entered it."
There was another silence, and the judge leaned forward and made a note.
"Well," said Sir Walter patiently, "what was the outline like?
Was it, for instance, like the figure of the murdered woman?"
"Not in the least," answered Seymour quietly.
"What did it look like to you?"
"It looked to me," replied the witness, "like a tall man."
Everyone in court kept his eyes riveted on his pen,
or his umbrella-handle, or his book, or his boots or whatever
he happened to be looking at. They seemed to be holding their eyes
away from the prisoner by main force; but they felt his figure in the dock,
and they felt it as gigantic. Tall as Bruno was to the eye,
he seemed to swell taller and taller when an eyes had been
torn away from him.
Cowdray was resuming his seat with his solemn face,
smoothing his black silk robes, and white silk whiskers.
Sir Wilson was leaving the witness-box, after a few final particulars
to which there were many other witnesses, when the counsel for the defence
sprang up and stopped him.
"I shall only detain you a moment," said Mr Butler,
who was a rustic-looking person with red eyebrows and an expression
of partial slumber. "Will you tell his lordship how you knew
it was a man?"
A faint, refined smile seemed to pass over Seymour's features.
"I'm afraid it is the vulgar test of trousers," he said.
"When I saw daylight between the long legs I was sure it was a man,
after all."
Butler's sleepy eyes opened as suddenly as some silent explosion.
"After all!" he repeated slowly. "So you did think at first
it was a woman?"
Seymour looked troubled for the first time. "It is hardly
a point of fact," he said, "but if his lordship would like me
to answer for my impression, of course I shall do so. There was something
about the thing that was not exactly a woman and yet was not quite a man;
somehow the curves were different. And it had something that looked like
long hair."
"Thank you," said Mr Butler, K.C., and sat down suddenly,
as if he had got what he wanted.
Captain Cutler was a far less plausible and composed witness
than Sir Wilson, but his account of the opening incidents was
solidly the same. He described the return of Bruno to his dressing-room,
the dispatching of himself to buy a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley,
his return to the upper end of the passage, the thing he saw
in the passage, his suspicion of Seymour, and his struggle with Bruno.
But he could give little artistic assistance about the black figure
that he and Seymour had seen. Asked about its outline, he said he
was no art critic--with a somewhat too obvious sneer at Seymour.
Asked if it was a man or a woman, he said it looked more like a beast--
with a too obvious snarl at the prisoner. But the man was plainly shaken
with sorrow and sincere anger, and Cowdray quickly excused him
from confirming facts that were already fairly clear.
The defending counsel also was again brief in his cross-examination;
although (as was his custom) even in being brief, he seemed to take
a long time about it. "You used a rather remarkable expression," he said,
looking at Cutler sleepily. "What do you mean by saying that
it looked more like a beast than a man or a woman?"
Cutler seemed seriously agitated. "Perhaps I oughtn't to have
said that," he said; "but when the brute has huge humped shoulders
like a chimpanzee, and bristles sticking out of its head like a pig--"
Mr Butler cut short his curious impatience in the middle.
"Never mind whether its hair was like a pig's," he said,
"was it like a woman's?"
"A woman's!" cried the soldier. "Great Scott, no!"
"The last witness said it was," commented the counsel,
with unscrupulous swiftness. "And did the figure have any of those
serpentine and semi-feminine curves to which eloquent allusion
has been made? No? No feminine curves? The figure, if I understand you,
was rather heavy and square than otherwise?"
"He may have been bending forward," said Cutler, in a hoarse
and rather faint voice.
"Or again, he may not," said Mr Butler, and sat down suddenly
for the second time.
The third, witness called by Sir Walter Cowdray was
the little Catholic clergyman, so little, compared with the others,
that his head seemed hardly to come above the box, so that it was like
cross-examining a child. But unfortunately Sir Walter had somehow
got it into his head (mostly by some ramifications of his family's religion)
that Father Brown was on the side of the prisoner, because the prisoner
was wicked and foreign and even partly black. Therefore he
took Father Brown up sharply whenever that proud pontiff tried
to explain anything; and told him to answer yes or no, and tell
the plain facts without any jesuitry. When Father Brown began, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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