The Argosy — page 129: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

116 The Sapphire Cross. to satisfy Pietro Siccoli’s curiosity, and corroborated later by Lucia to save her accused lover? All this and much more did the Public Prosecutor say, in his dry, monotonous tones, with his placid, steely glance; and as he spoke hope and enthusiasm dropped away, truth itself was dwarfed, and nothing stood erect but the bare and pitiless array of damning facts. When the cold voice ceased at last and the accuser sat down, Lucia’s face resembled a mask of marble despair, and old Baroni had dropped his head upon his folded arms and was sobbing like a child. It was the turn now of Guido’s counsel, Signor Lorenzo Bigatti, or Signor Renzo, as, with Italian love of abbreviation, he was generally called. He was very clever, but he was young, and an older lawyer than he might have been excused for feeling some nervousness on such an occasion. For Signor Renzo had been engaged for the defence at the very last moment, and scant time had been accorded him in which to con- sider all the facts.) He was a generous youth, with a fiery and brilliant imagination, and later became celebrated as an impassioned special pleader. But though remarkable for flashes of insight, he did not excel in the passionless dissection and subtle arrangement of evidence. With the instinct of his particular superiority, he con- tented himself with hammering at the weakest point of the prosecu- tion, viz., the total disappearance of all the articles supposed to have been stolen, except the sapphire cross. Pointing out forcibly how much this one circumstance lent colouring and probability to Lucia’s story, he passed to what was really a glowing defence of her It was evident that the girl’s purity and ardent devotion had seized hold of Signor Renzo’s chivalrous fancy. ‘The fervour with which he rebutted every doubt that had been cast upon the nature of her relations with the painter did at last revive some faint flame of belief in his hearers ; but unfortunately the audience were suffering from the reaction of their own late enthusiasm. ‘The young lawyer’s appeal stirred them but feebly after all, and he sat down at last with a mortifying sense of failure. In an atmosphere so unelectrical there was but a small chance of the jury catching the infection of pity. The right of speaking last belonged to the Public Prosecutor. He observed that the disappearance of most of the abstracted jewels was a fact which would have been more significant were it not so common. There probably never was a thief yet who had not friends or accom- plices to whom he could confide his spoils, and who escaped detection. The accused man’s counsel had pertinently remarked that if the prisoner had indeed stolen the jewels and then given them to an accomplice he was very unlikely to have kept back the sapphire cross. But this the Public Prosecutor regarded as a mere accident. ‘The prisoner had evidently seized the whole glittering contents of the porcelain tray, and had doubtless stuffed them pell-mell into his COPMIECMOOOKS COL)