"Who broke the glasses?" urged his relentless inquisitor. "One at your plate, one at Carmel's, and one at the head of the board where sat your sister Adelaide?"
"God! Must I tell these things?" He had started to his feet and his hand, violent in all it did, struck his forehead impulsively, as he uttered this exclamation. "Have it, then! Heaven knows I think of it enough not to be afraid to speak it out in words. Adelaide"—the name came with passion, but once uttered, produced its own calming effect, so that he went on with more restraint—"Adelaide never had much patience with me. She was a girl who only saw one way. 'The right! the right!' was what she dinned into my ears from the time I was a small boy and didn't know but that all youngsters were brought up by sisters. I grew to hate what she called 'the right,' I wanted pleasure, a free time, and a good drink whenever the fancy took me. You know what I am, Dr. Perry, and everybody in town knows; but the impulse which has always ruled me was not a downright evil one; or if it was, I called it natural independence, and let it go at that. But Adelaide suffered. I didn't understand it and I didn't care a fig for it, but she did suffer. God forgive me!"
He stopped and mopped his forehead. Sweetwater moved a trifle on his seat, but the others—men who had passed the meridian of life, who had known temptations, possibly had succumbed to them, from time to time—sat like two statues, one in full light and the other in as dark a shadow as he could find.
"That afternoon," young Cumberland presently resumed, "she was keyed up more than usual. She loved Ranelagh,—damn him!—and he had played or was playing her false. She watched him with eyes that madden me, now, when I think of them. She saw him look at Carmel, and she saw Carmel look at him. Then her eyes fell on me. I was angry; angry at them all, and I wanted a drink. It was not her habit to have wine on the table; but sometimes, when Ranelagh was there, she did. She was a slave to Ranelagh, and he could make her do whatever he wished, just as he can make you and everybody else."
Here he shot insolent glances at his two interlocutors, one of whom changed colour—which, happily, he did not see. "'Ring the bell,' I ordered, 'and have in the champagne. I want to drink to your marriage and the happy days in prospect for us all,' It was brutal and I knew it; but I was reckless and wild for the wine. So, I guess, was Ranelagh, for he smiled at her, and she rang for the champagne. When the glasses had been set beside each plate, she turned towards Carmel. 'We will all drink,' she said, 'to my coming marriage,' This made Carmel turn pale; for Adelaide had never been known to drink a drop of liquor in her life. I felt a little queer, myself; and not one of us spoke till the glasses were filled and the maid had left the dining-room and shut the door.
"Then Adelaide rose. 'We will drink standing,' said she, and never had I seen her look as she did then. I thought of my evil life when I should have been watching Ranelagh; and when she lifted the glass to her lips and looked at me, almost as earnestly as she did at Ranelagh,—but it was a different kind of earnestness,—I felt like—like—well, like the wretch I was and always had been; possibly, always will be. She drank;—we wouldn't call it drinking, for she just touched the wine with her lips; but to her it was debauch. Then she stood waiting, with the strangest gleam in her eyes, while Ranelagh drained his glass and I drained mine. Ranelagh thought she wanted some sentiment, and started to say something appropriate; but his eye fell on Carmel, who had tried to drink and couldn't, and he bungled over his words and at last came to a pause under the steady stare of Adelaide's eyes.
"'Never mind, Elwood,' she said; 'I know what you would like to say. But that's not what I am thinking of now. I am thinking of my brother, the boy who will soon be left to find his way through life without even the unwelcome restraint of my presence. I want him to remember this day. I want him to remember me as I stand here before him with this glass in my hand. You see wine in it, Arthur; but I see poison—poison—nothing else, for one like you who cannot refuse a friend, cannot refuse your own longing. Never from this day on shall another bottle be opened under my roof. Carmel, you have grieved as well as I over what has passed for pleasure in this house. Do as I do, and may Arthur see and remember.'
"Her fingers opened; the glass fell from her hand, and lay in broken fragments beside her plate. Carmel followed suit, and, before I knew it, my own fingers had opened, and my own glass lay in pieces on the table-cloth beneath me. Only Ranelagh's hand remained steady. He did not choose to please her, or he was planning his perfidy and had not caught her words or understood her action. She held her breath, watching that hand; and I can hear the gasp yet with which she saw him set his glass down quietly on the board. That's the story of those three broken glasses. If she had not died that night, I should be laughing at them now; but she did die and I don't laugh! I curse—curse her recreant lover, and sometimes myself! Do you want anything more of me? I'm eager to be gone, if you don't."
The district attorney sought out and lifted a paper from the others lying on the desk before him. It was the first movement he had made since Cumberland began his tale.
"I'm sorry," said he, with a rapid examination of the paper in his hand, "but I shall have to detain you a few minutes longer. What happened after the dinner? Where did you go from the table?"
"I went to my room to smoke. I was upset and thirsty as a fish."
"Have you liquor in your room?"
"Sometimes."
"Did you have any that night?"
"Not a drop. I didn't dare. I wanted that champagne bottle, but Adelaide had been too quick for me. It was thrown out—wasted—I do believe, wasted."
"So you did not drink? You only smoked in your room?"
"Smoked one cigar. That was all. Then I went down town."
His tone had grown sulky, the emotion which had buoyed him up till now, seemed suddenly to have left him. With it went the fire from his eye, the quiver from his lip, and it is necessary to add, everything else calculated to awaken sympathy. He was simply sullen now.
"May I ask by which door you left the house?"
"The side door—the one I always take."
"What overcoat did you wear?"
"I don't remember. The first one I came to, I suppose."
"But you can surely tell what hat?"
They expected a violent reply, and they got it.
"No, I can't. What has my hat got to do with the guilt of Elwood
Ranelagh?"
"Nothing, we hope," was the imperturbable answer. "But we find it necessary to establish absolutely just what overcoat and what hat you wore down street that night."
"I've told you that I don't remember." The young man's colour was rising.
"Are not these the ones?" queried the district attorney, making a sign to Sweetwater, who immediately stepped forward, with a shabby old ulster over his arm, and a battered derby in his hand.
The young man started, rose, then sat again, shouting out with angry emphasis:
"No!"
"Yet you recognise these?"
"Why shouldn't I? They're mine. Only I don't wear them any more. They're done for. You must have rooted them out from some closet."
"We did; perhaps you can tell us what closet."
"I? No. What do I know about my old clothes? I leave that to the women."
The slight faltering observable in the latter word conveyed nothing to these men.
"Mr. Cumberland,"—the district attorney was very serious,—"this hat and this coat, old as they are, were worn into town from your house that night. This we know, absolutely. We can even trace them to the club-house."