The trial occupied three days. After the first of the three, my
respected brother-in-law preferred, as he said, not to prejudice the
case against the prisoner by appearing in court again. He did not
even allude to the little matter of the ten per cent commission
further than to say at dinner that evening that all men were bound
to protect their own interests--as secretaries or as principals.
This I took for forgiveness; and I continued diligently to attend
the trial, and watch the case in my employer's interest.
The defence was ingenious, even if somewhat halting. It consisted
simply of an attempt to prove throughout that Charles and I had made
our prisoner the victim of a mistaken identity. Finglemore put into
the box the ingenuous original of the little curate--the Reverend
Septimus Porkington, as it turned out, a friend of his family; and
he showed that it was the Reverend Septimus himself who had sat to
a photographer in Baker Street for the portrait which Charles too
hastily identified as that of Colonel Clay in his personification of
Mr. Richard Brabazon. He further elicited the fact that the portrait
of the Count von Lebenstein was really taken from Dr. Julius Keppel,
a Tyrolese music-master, residing at Balham, whom he put into the
box, and who was well known, as it chanced, to the foreman of the
jury.
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