Murder -- Fiction; San Francisco (Calif.) -- Fiction
It was a help not to have to step out of the excitement of the
proceedings. It was that which kept me up, which carried me along.
"There she is; that's the girl who saw it!" The voices whispering
behind me gave me a sad stir of feeling, but it was better than being
left to think. It spurred me; and the clatter of dishes and the crowd
which filled the restaurant, talking all at once, yet with no distinct
words audible, all helped to bridge over the chasm of the waiting. I
could see Laura Burnet sitting at a near table with her thick veil
raised only a little above her nose, just enough to let her drink a cup
of tea. Some of father's friends and one or two of the young men I
knew stopped at our table to shake hands, but very little was said, and
of the trial nothing at all. For all their trying to be easy and
natural, I could see that my presence embarrassed them. I could see
them glancing at me as if they wondered what sort of person I could
be--as though I had become something different from a girl by answering
questions in the witness-box. By two o'clock we were back in court
again; and how changed everything seemed! All that desultory feeling
of the morning was gone, and as I looked about over the faces I could
see how every one's mind was fixed on the same thing. A woman whom I
did not know, jostling at my shoulder as I went in, confided to me that
what she wanted was, "To hear Dingley tear the defense to pieces." I
wondered if the only people in the room who didn't want to hear that
were myself and the Spanish Woman.
But it was Mr. Jackson who got up first. Though I had heard all the
evidence that morning it had come out in such little bits and patches
with such disagreements of lawyers between, and I had myself been so in
the midst of it that I had no idea as to how it would sum up; and I had
been waiting anxiously to hear what this man, whom father said was such
a fine lawyer, would say.
He began with a sort of oration, all about the Montgomery family, and
what a fine family, they had been, how much they had done for the city!
Then he talked about Johnny, and he drew a very beautiful picture of
him, speaking of his great promise and fine character and then of the
blow which was being struck at his brilliant career; and it was somehow
awful to have to listen to it, for even supposing it were true, this
seemed scarcely the time for saying it. I could see Johnny's face
getting more and more set-looking and grim, as if he hated listening to
the words that were pouring over his head.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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