Emily fixed her glowing eyes on Margaret, catching hers.
“It’s no good questioning Margaret,” said the Aunt morosely; “but it ought to be perfectly clear to you what has happened.”
“Then I am afraid I must,” said Mr. Mathias. “Another time, perhaps.”
Mrs. Thornton had for some while been frowning and pursing her lips, to stop him.
“Another time would be much better,” she said: and Mr. Mathias turned the examination back to the capture of the Clorinda .
But they seemed to have been strangely unobservant of what went on around them, he found.
V
When the others had all gone, Mathias offered Thornton, whom he liked, a cigar: and the two sat together for a while over the fire.
“Well,” said Thornton, “did the interview go as you had expected?”
“Pretty much.”
“I noticed you questioned them chiefly about the Clorinda . But you have got all the information you need on that score, surely?”
“Naturally I did. Anything they affirmed I could check exactly by Marpole’s detailed affidavit. I wanted to test their reliability.”
“And you found?”
“What I have always known. That I would rather have to extract information from the devil himself than from a child.”
“But what information, exactly, do you want?”
“Everything. The whole story.”
“You know it.”
Mathias spoke with a dash of exasperation:
“Do you realize, Thornton, that without considerable help from them we may even fail to get a conviction?”
“What is the difficulty?” asked Thornton in a peculiar, restrained tone.
“We could get a conviction for piracy, of course. But since ’37, piracy has ceased to be a hanging offense unless it is accompanied by murder.”
“And is the killing of one small boy insufficient to count as murder?” asked Thornton in the same cold voice.
Mathias looked at him curiously.
“We can guess at the probabilities of what happened,” he said. “The boy was undoubtedly taken onto the schooner; and now he can’t be found. But, strictly speaking, we have no proof that he is dead.”
“He may, of course, have swum across the Gulf of Mexico and landed at New Orleans.”
Thornton’s cigar, as he finished speaking, snapped in two.
“I know this is…” began Mathias with professional gentleness, then had the sense to check himself. “I am afraid there is no doubt that we can personally entertain that the lad is dead: but there is a legal doubt: and where there is a legal doubt a jury might well refuse to convict.”
“Unless they were carried away by an attack of common sense.”
Mathias paused for a moment before asking:
“And the other children have dropped, as yet, no hint as to what precisely did happen to him?”
“None.”
“Their mother has questioned them?”
“Exhaustively.”
“Yet they must surely know.”
“It is a great pity,” said Thornton, deliberately, “that when the pirates decided to kill the child, they did not invite in his sisters to watch.”
Mathias was ready to make allowances. He merely shifted his position and cleared his voice.
“Unless we can get definite evidence of murder, either of your boy or the Dutch captain, I am afraid there is a very real danger of these men escaping with their lives: though they would of course be transported. — It’s all highly unsatisfactory, Thornton,” he went on confidentially. “We do not, as lawyers, like aiming at a conviction for piracy alone. It is too vague. The most eminent jurists have not even yet decided on a satisfactory definition of piracy. I doubt, now, if they ever will. One school holds that it is any felony committed on the High Seas. But that does little except render a separate term otiose. Moreover, it is not accepted by other schools of thought.”
“To the layman, at least, it would seem to be a queer sort of piracy to commit suicide in one’s cabin, or perform an illegal operation on the captain’s daughter!”
“Well, you see the difficulties. Consequently we always prefer to make use of it simply as a make-weight with another more serious charge. Captain Kidd, for instance, was not, strictly speaking, hanged for piracy. The first count in his indictment, on which he was condemned, sets forth that he feloniously, intentionally, and with malice aforethought hit his own gunner on the head with a wooden bucket value eightpence. That is something definite. What we need is something definite. We have not got it. Take the second case, the piracy of the Dutch steamer. We are in the same difficulty there: a man is taken on board the schooner, he disappears. What happened? We can only surmise.”
“Isn’t there such a thing as turning King’s Evidence?”
“Another most unsatisfactory proceeding, to which I should be loath to have recourse. No, the natural and proper witnesses are the children. There is a kind of beauty in making them, who have suffered so much at these men’s hands, the instruments of justice upon them.”
Mathias paused, and looked at Thornton narrowly.
“You haven’t been able, in all these weeks, to get the smallest hint from them with regard to the death of Captain Vandervoort either?”
“None.”
“Well, is it your impression that they do truly know nothing, or that they have been terrorized into hiding something?”
Thornton gave a gentle sigh, almost of relief.
“No,” he said, “I don’t think they have been terrorized. But I do think they may know something they won’t tell.”
“But why?”
“Because, during the time they were on the schooner, it is plain they got very fond of this man Jonsen, and of his lieutenant, the man called Otto.”
Mathias was incredulous.
“Is it possible for children to be mistaken in a man’s whole nature like that?”
The look of irony on Thornton’s face attained an intensity that was almost diabolical.
“I think it is possible,” he said, “even for children to make such a mistake.”
“But this…affection: it is highly improbable.”
“It is a fact.”
Mathias shrugged. After all, a criminal lawyer is not concerned with facts. He is concerned with probabilities. It is the novelist who is concerned with facts, whose job it is to say what a particular man did do on a particular occasion: the lawyer does not, cannot be expected to go further than to show what the ordinary man would be most likely to do under presumed circumstances.
Mathias, as he conned these paradoxes, smiled to himself a little grimly. It would never do to give utterance to them.
“I think if they know anything I shall be able to find it out,” was all he said.
“D’you mean to put them in the box?” Thornton asked suddenly.
“Not all of them, certainly: Heaven forbid! But we shall have to produce one of them at least, I am afraid.”
“Which?”
“Well. We had intended it to be the Fernandez girl. But she seems…unsatisfactory?”
“Exactly.” Then Thornton added, with a characteristic forward jerk: “She was sane enough when she left Jamaica. — Though always a bit of a fool.”
“Her aunt tells me that she seems to have lost her memory: or a great part of it. No, if I call her it will simply be to exhibit her condition.”
“Then?”
“I think I shall call your Emily.”
Thornton stood up.
“Well,” he said, “you’ll have to settle with her yourself what she’s to say. Write it out, and make her learn it by heart.”
“Certainly,” said Mathias, looking at his finger-nails. “I am not in the habit of going into court unprepared. — It’s bad enough having a child in the box anyway,” he went on. Thornton paused at the door.