ould
not see what sort of impression I was making. Once the judge who was
generally asleep woke up and began to scratch furiously with his quill;
once three of the assessors--the men in short wigs--began an animated
conversation; one man with a thin, dark face laughed noiselessly,
showing teeth like a white waterfall. A man in the body of the court on
my left had an enormous swelling, blood-red, and looking as if a touch
must burst it, under his chin; at one time he winked his eyes furiously
for a long time on end. It seemed to me that something in the evidence
must be affecting all these people. The turnkey beside me said to his
mate, "Twig old Justice Best making notes in his stud-calendar," and
suddenly the conviction forced itself upon me that the whole thing, the
long weary trial, the evidence, the parade of fairness, was being gone
through in a spirit of mockery, as a mere formality; that the judges and
the assessors, and the man with the goitre took no interest whatever in
my case. It was a foregone conclusion.

A tiny, fair man, with pale hair oiled and rather long for those days,
and with green and red signet rings on fingers that he was forever
running through that hair, came mincingly into the witness-box. He
held for a long time what seemed to be an amiable conversation with Sir
Robert Gifford, a tall, portentous-looking man, who had black beetling
brows, like tufts of black horsehair sticking in the crannies of a
cliff. The conversation went like this:

"You are the Hon. Thomas Oldham?"

"Yes, yes."

"You know Kingston, Jamaica, very well?"

"I was there four years--two as the secretary to the cabinet of his
Grace the Duke of Manchester, two as civil secretary to the admiral on
the station."

"You saw the prisoner?"

"Yes, three times."

I drew an immense breath; I thought for a moment that they had delivered
themselves into my hands. The thing must prove of itself that I had been
in Jamaica, not in Rio Medio, through those two years. My heart began
to thump like a great solemn drum, like Paul's bell when the king
died--solemn, insistent, dominating everything. The little man was
giving an account of the "'bawminable" state of confusion into which
the island's trade was thrown by the misdeeds of a pirate called Nikola
el Demonio.

"I assure you, my luds," he squeaked, turning suddenly to the judges,
"the island was wrought up into a pitch of... ah... almost disloyalty.
The... ah... planters wer