"Soh! It is for this that I have been brought here," he muttered, half to himself and half aloud, in French. "Now I understand."
Going into the taproom, he put a few questions to the men to whose talk he had been listening. Having ascertained what he wanted to know, he left the house without waiting for his breakfast, and bent his steps in the direction of the town-hall. At a quarter to ten o'clock, when the doors were thrown open, Jules Picot was one of the first to push his way forward, or to be pushed forward by those behind him, into the small penned-up space allotted in the justice-room of Cummerhays to the general public. In three minutes the place was crannied to its utmost limits.
A few minutes after ten, the magistrates entered one by one and took their seats, their clerk having preceded them by a few seconds. They were three in number, all venerable gentlemen. One was partially blind; one partially deaf; while the third, who had a very red face and took the lead in everything, was quick-tempered and aggressive in his manner. There were two cases of drunkenness and one of theft to be disposed of before the great sensation of the day would begin.
Everybody seemed relieved when they were over; and presently a flutter of intense excitement ran through the court as three men, in charge of as many constables, filed in and were placed in the dock. Then, after a brief pause, a fourth man was ushered in whose left arm was supported by a sling, and a murmur ran round that this was the alleged murderer of the German Baron. A moment later another door opened, and there glided in a female in black, closely veiled, who sat down on a chair in the background which one of the officials handed her with a bow. The prisoner with his arm in a sling was also allowed to be seated a little way from the dock in which the other men had been placed.
When the mountebank beheld Gerald Brooke, whom he still knew only by the name of "Mr. Stewart," marched in as a prisoner, and when he saw, and his quick eyes recognised, the veiled figure in black who entered immediately afterwards, he was seized with a vertigo, which caused the room, the magistrates, and the prisoners to surge up and down before his eyes as though they were being tempest-tossed at sea. "Mon Dieu! est-il possible?" he exclaimed half aloud. Then he buried his face in his hands for a time, while a cloud seemed to lift itself slowly from his brain, and much became clear to him that had been dark before.