"'Tis too late to make up for the harm ye've done!" His coal-black eyes
reached into her shrinking body as if to tear out her heart.
"I!" she gasped. "I--do harm! What do you mean?"
"Did not my sister Katie work for yez?" he asked, and his words leaped
and curled about her like hissing flames. "Did you see after her or
watch her comings and goings, as she saw after you--she a mere lass of
sixteen? Arrah! No!"
With a sensation of horror Miss Althea realized that at last she was in
a murder case in spite of herself! This lad, the brother of Katie, the
waitress whom she had discharged! How curious! And how unfortunate! His
charge was preposterous; nevertheless a faint blush stole to her cheek
and she looked away.
"How ridiculous!" she managed to say. "It was no part of my obligation
to look after her! How could I?"
His hawk's eyes watched her every tremor.
"Did ye not lock her out the night of the ball when she went wid
McGurk?"
"I--how absurd!"
Suddenly she faltered. An indistinct accusing recollection turned her
faint--of the housekeeper having told her that one of the girls insisted
on going to a dance on an evening not hers by arrangement, and how she
had given orders that the house should be closed the same as usual at
ten o'clock for the night. If the girl couldn't abide by the rules of
the Beekman ménage she could sleep somewhere else. What of it? Supposing
she had done so? She could not be held responsible for remote,
unreasonable and discreditable consequences!
And then by chance Shane O'Connell made use of a phrase that indirectly
saved his life, a phrase curiously like the one used on a former
occasion by Dawkins to Miss Althea:
"Katie was a member of your household; ye might have had a bit of
thought for her!" he asserted bitterly.
Dawkins had said: "You'd think a girl would have some consideration for
her employer, if nothing else. In a sense she is a guest in the house
and should behave herself as such."
There was no sense in it! There was no parallel, no analogy. There was
no obligation to treat the girl as a guest, even though the girl should
have acted like one. Miss Beekman knew it. And yet there was--something!
Didn't she owe some sort of duty at any rate toward those in her
employment--those who slept under her roof?
"'Twould have been better to have been kind to her then than to be kind
to me now!" said he with sad conviction.
The proud Miss Althea Beekman, the dignified descendant of a long line
of ancestors, turned red. Heretofore serenely confident of her own
personal virtue and her own artificial standards of democracy, she now
found herself humiliated and chagrined before this rough young criminal.
"You--are--quite right!" she confessed, her eyes smarting with sudden
tears. "My position is quite--quite illogical. But of course I had no
idea! Please, please let me try to help you--if I can--and Katie,
too--if it isn't too late."
Shane O'Connell experienced contrition. After all it was not seemly that
the likes of him should be dictating to the likes of her. And he could
never abide seeing a woman--particularly a pretty woman--cry.
"Forgive me, madam!" he begged, lowering his head.
"You were quite justified in all you said!" she assured him. "Please
tell me everything that has happened. I have influence with the district
attorney and--in other places. No doubt I can be of assistance to you.
Of course, you can absolutely trust me!"
Shane O'Connell, looking into her honest gray eyes, knew that he could
trust her. Slowly--brokenly--tensely, he told her how he had killed Red
McGurk, and why.
The corridors were full of shadows when Althea Beekman put her hands on
Shane O'Connell's shoulders and bade him good night. Though she
abominated his crime and loathed him for having committed it she felt in
some way partially responsible, and she also perceived that, by the code
of the O'Connells, Shane had done what he believed to be right. He had
taken the law into his own hands and he was ready to pay the necessary
penalty. He would have done the same thing all over again. To this
extent at least he had her respect.
She found Mr. Tutt waiting for her on the bench by the warden's office.
"Well?" he asked with a smile, rising to greet her and tossing away his
stogy.
"I haven't very good news for you," she answered regretfully. "He's
confessed to me--told me everything--why he shot him and where he bought
the pistol. He's a brave boy, though! It's a sad case! But what can you
do with people who believe themselves justified in doing things like
that?"
She did not notice Detective Eddie Conroy, of the D.A.'s office,
standing behind an adjacent pillar, ostentatiously lighting a cigar; nor
see him smile as he slowly walked away.
* * * * *
"Talk about luck!" exulted O'Brien, the yellow dog of the district
attorney's office, an hour later to his chief. "What do you think, boss?
Eddie Conroy heard Miss Beekman telling old man Tutt over in the Tombs
that O'Connell had confessed to her! Say, how's that? Some
evidence--what?"
"What good will that do us?" asked Peckham, glancing up with a scowl
from his desk. "She won't testify for us."
"But she'll have to testify if we call her, won't she?" demanded his
assistant.
The district attorney drummed on the polished surface before him.
"We--ell, I suppose so," he admitted hesitatingly. "But you can't just
subpoena a woman like that without any warning and put her on the stand
and make her testify. It would be too rough!"
"It's the only way to do it!" retorted O'Brien with a sly grin. "If she
knew in advance that we were thinking of calling her she'd beat it out
of town."
"That's true," agreed his chief. "That's as far as she'd go, too, in
defying the law. But I don't much like it. Those Beekmans have a lot of
influence, and if she got sore she could make us a heap of trouble!
Besides it's sort of a scaly trick making her give up on him like that."
O'Brien raised his brows.
"Scaly trick! He's a murderer, isn't he? And he'll get off if we don't
call her. It's a matter of duty, as I see it."
"All the same, my son, your suggestion has a rotten smell to it. We may
have to do it--I don't say we won't--but it's risky business!" replied
Peckham dubiously.
"It's a good deal less risky than not doing it, so far as your candidacy
next autumn is concerned!" retorted his assistant. "We won't let her
suspect what we're goin' to do; and the last minute I'll call her to the
stand and cinch the case! She won't even know who called her! Perhaps I
can arrange with Judge Babson to call her on some other point and then
pretend to sort of stumble onto the fact of the confession and examine
her himself. That would let us out. I can smear it over somehow."
"You'd better," commented Peckham, "unless you want a howl from the
papers! It would make quite a story if Miss Althea Beekman got on the
rampage. She could have your scalp, my boy, if she wanted it!"
"And McGurk could have yours!" retorted O'Brien with the impudence born
of knowledge.
The prosecution of Shane O'Connell, which otherwise might have slowly
languished and languishing died, took on new life owing to the evidence
thus innocently delivered into the hands of the district attorney; in
fact it became a _cause célèbre_. The essential elements to convict were
now all there--the _corpus delicti_, evidence of threats on the part of
the defendant, of motive, of opportunity, and--his confession. The law
which provides that the statement of an accused "is not sufficient to
warrant his conviction without additional proof that the crime charged
has been committed" would be abundantly satisfied--though without his
confession there would have been no proof whatever that the crime
charged had been committed by him.
Thus, without her knowing it, Miss Beekman was an essential witness and,
in fact, the pivot upon which the entire case turned.
The day of the great sporting event came. With it arrived in full
panoply the McGurks, their relatives and followers. All Cherry Hill
seemed to have packed itself into Part I of the Supreme Court. There was
an atmosphere somehow suggestive of the races or a prize fight. But it
was a sporting event which savored of a sure thing--really more like a
hanging. They were there to make holiday over the law's revenge for the
killing of the darling of the Pearl Button Kids. Peckham personally
assured McGurk that everything was copper-fastened.
"He's halfway up the river already!" he said jocularly.
And McGurk, swelling with importance and emotion, pulled a couple of
cigars from his pocket and the two smoked the pipe of peace.
But the reader is not particularly concerned with the progress of the
trial, for he has already attended many. It is enough to say that a jury
with undershot jaws, who had proved by previous experience their
indifference to capital punishment and to all human sympathy, were
finally selected and that the witnesses were duly called, and testified
to the usual facts, while the Pearl Button Kids and the rest, spitting
surreptitiously beneath the benches, eagerly drank in every word. There
was nothing for Mr. Tutt to do; nothing for him to deny. The case built
itself up, brick by brick. And Shane O'Connell sat there unemotionally,
hardly listening. There was nothing in the evidence to reflect in any
way upon the honor of the O'Connells in general or in particular. He had
done that which that honor demanded and he was ready to pay the
penalty--if the law could get him. He assumed that it would get him. So
did the Tutts.
But when toward the end of the third day nothing had yet been brought
forward to connect him with the crime Tutt leaned over and whispered to
Mr. Tutt, "D'ye know, I'm beginning to have a hunch there isn't any
case!"
Mr. Tutt made an imperceptible gesture of assent.
"Looks that way," he answered out of the corner of his mouth. "Probably
they'll spring the connecting evidence at the end and give us the _coup
de grâce_."
At that moment a police witness was released from the stand and O'Brien
stepped to the bench and whispered something to the judge, who glanced
at the clock and nodded. It was twenty minutes of four, and the jury
were already getting restless, for the trial had developed into a
humdrum, cut-and-dried affair.
Miss Beekman sitting far back in the rear of the court room suddenly
heard O'Brien call her name, and a quiver of apprehension passed through
her body. She had never testified in any legal proceeding, and the idea
of getting up before such a crowd of people and answering questions
filled her with dismay. It was so public! Still, if it was going to help
O'Connell--
"Althea Beekman," bellowed Cap. Phelan, "to the witness chair!"
Althea Beekman! The gentle lady felt as if she had been rudely stripped
of all her protective clothing. Althea! Did not the law do her the
courtesy of calling her even "Miss"? Nerving herself to the performance
of her duty she falteringly made her way between the crowded benches,
past the reporters' table, and round back of the jury box. The judge,
apparently a pleasant-faced, rather elderly man, bowed gravely to her,
indicated where she should sit and administered the oath to her himself,
subtly dwelling upon the phrase "the whole truth," and raising his eyes
heavenward as he solemnly pronounced the words "so help you God!"
"I do!" declared Miss Beekman primly but decidedly.
Behind her upon the court-room wall towered in its flowing draperies the
majestic figure of the Goddess of the Law, blindfolded and holding aloft
the scales of justice. Beside her sat in the silken robes of his sacred
office a judge who cleverly administered that law to advance his own
interests and those of his political associates. In front of her,
treacherously smiling, stood the cynical, bullet-headed O'Brien. At a
great distance Mr. Tutt leaned on his elbows at a table beside Shane
O'Connell. To them she directed her gaze and faintly smiled.
"Miss Beekman," began O'Brien as courteously as he knew how, "you
reside, do you not, at Number 1000 Fifth Avenue, in this city and
county?"
"I do," she answered with resolution.
"Your family have always lived in New York, have they not?"
"Since 1630," she replied deprecatingly and with more confidence.
"You are prominent in various philanthropic, religious and civic
activities?"
"Not prominent; interested," she corrected him.
"And you make a practise of visiting prisoners in the Tombs?"
She hesitated. What could this be leading to?
"Occasionally," she admitted.
"Do you know this defendant, Shane O'Connell?"
"Yes."
"Did you see him on the twenty-third day of last month?"
"I think so--if that was the day."
"What day do you refer to?"
"The day I had the talk with him."
"Oh, you had a talk with him?"
"Yes."
"Where did you have that talk with him?"
"In the counsel room of the Tombs."
O'Brien paused. Even his miserable soul revolted at what he was about to
do.
"What did he say?" he asked, nervously looking away.
Something in his hangdog look warned Miss Beekman that she was being
betrayed, but before she could answer Mr. Tutt was on his feet.
"One moment!" he cried. "May I ask a preliminary question?"
The court signified acquiescence.
"Was that conversation which you had with the defendant a confidential
one?"
"I object to the question!" snapped O'Brien. "The law recognizes no
confidential communications as privileged except those made to a priest,
a physician or an attorney. The witness is none of these. The question
is immaterial and irrelevant."
"That is the law," announced the judge, "but under all the circumstances
I will permit the witness to answer."
Miss Beekman paused.
"Why," she began, "of course it was confidential, Mr. Tutt. O'Connell
wouldn't have told me anything if he had supposed for one moment I was
going to repeat what he said. Besides, I suggested that I might be able
to help him. Yes, certainly our talk was confidential."
"I am sorry," gloated O'Brien, "but I shall have to ask you what it
was."
"That is not a question," said Mr. Tutt calmly.
"What did the defendant say to you in the counsel room of the Tombs on
the twenty-third of last month?" cautiously revised O'Brien.
"I object!" thundered Mr. Tutt, his form towering until seemingly it
matched that of the blind goddess in height. "I object to the answer as
requiring a breach of confidence which the law could not tolerate."
Judge Babson turned politely to Miss Beekman.
"I regret very much that I shall be obliged to ask you to state what
the defendant said to you. You will recall that you yourself volunteered
the information that you had had the talk in question. Otherwise"--he
coughed and put up his hand--"we might possibly never have learned of
it. A defendant cannot deprive the people of the right to prove what he
may have divulged respecting his offense merely by claiming that it was
in confidence. Public policy could never allow that. It may be
unpleasant for you to answer the question but I must ask you to do so."
"But," she protested, "you certainly cannot expect me to betray a
confidence! I asked O'Connell to tell me what he had done so that I
could help him--and he trusted me!"
"But you are not responsible for the law! He took his chance!"
admonished the judge.
Slowly Miss Althea's indignation rose as she perceived the dastardly
trick which O'Brien had played upon her. Already she suspected that the
judge was only masquerading in the clothing of a gentleman. With a white
face she turned to Mr. Tutt.
"Does the law require me to answer, Mr. Tutt?" she inquired.
"Do not ask questions--answer them," ordered Babson brusquely, feeling
the change in her manner. "You are a witness for the people--not the
defendant."
"I am not a witness against O'Connell!" she declared. "This
man"--indicating O'Brien scornfully--"has in some way found out that
I--Oh, surely the law doesn't demand anything so base as that!"
There was silence. The wheels of justice hung on a dead center.
"Answer the question," remarked His Honor tartly.
All Miss Beekman's long line of ancestors turned in their graves. In her
Beekman blood the chief justice, the ambassador, the great editor, the
signer of the Declaration of Independence, stirred, awoke, rubbed their
eyes and sternly reared themselves. And that blood--blue though it was
instead of scarlet like the O'Connells'--boiled in her veins and burned
through the delicate tissue of her cheeks.
"My conscience will not permit me to betray a confidence!" she cried
angrily.
"I direct you to answer!" ordered the judge.
"I object to the court's threatening the witness!" interjected Mr. Tutt.
"I wish it to appear upon the record that the manner of the court is
most unjudicial and damaging to the defendant."
"Take your seat, sir!" barked Babson, his features swelling with anger.
"Your language is contemptuous!"
The jury were leaning forward intently. Trained militiamen of the
gibbet, they nevertheless admired this little woman's fearlessness and
the old lawyer's pugnacity. On the rear wall the yellow face of the old
self-regulating clock, that had gayly ticked so many men into the
electric chair, leered shamelessly across at the blind goddess.
"Answer the question, madam! If, as you claim, you are a patriotic
citizen of this commonwealth, having due respect for its institutions
and for the statutes, you will not set up your own ideas of what the law
ought to be in defiance of the law as it stands. I order you to answer!
If you do not I shall be obliged to take steps to compel you to do so."
In the dead silence that followed, the stones in the edifice of Miss
Beekman's inherited complacency, with each beat of the clock, fell one
by one to the ground until it was entirely demolished. Vainly she
struggled to test her conscience by her loyalty to her country's laws.
But the task was beyond her.
Tightly compressing her lips she sat silent in the chair, while the
delighted reporters scribbled furious messages to their city editors
that Miss Althea Beekman, one of the Four Hundred, was defying Judge
Babson, and to rush up a camera man right off in a taxi, and to look her
up in the morgue for a front-page story. O'Brien glanced uneasily at
Babson. Possible defiance on the part of this usually unassuming lady
had not entered into his calculations. The judge took a new tack.
"You probably do not fully understand the situation in which you are
placed," he explained. "You are not responsible for the law. Neither are
you responsible in any way for the consequences to this defendant,
whatever they may be. The matter is entirely out of your hands. You are
compelled to do as the court orders. As a law-abiding citizen you have
no choice in the matter."
Miss Althea's modest intellect reeled, but she stood her ground, the
ghost of the Signer at her elbow.
"I am sorry," she replied, "but my own self-respect will not allow me to
answer."
"In that case," declared Babson, playing his trump card, "it will be my
unpleasant duty to commit you for contempt."
There was a bustle of excitement about the reporters' table. Here was a
story!
"Very well," answered Miss Beekman proudly. "Do as you see fit, and as
your own duty and conscience demand."
The judge could not conceal his annoyance. The last thing in the world
that he wished to do was to send Miss Althea to jail. But having
threatened her he must carry out his threat or forever lose face.
"I will give the witness until tomorrow morning at half after ten
o'clock to make up her mind what she will do," he announced after a
hurried conference with O'Brien. "Adjourn court!"
Miss Beekman did not go to bed at all that night. Until a late hour she
conferred in the secrecy of her Fifth Avenue library with her
gray-haired solicitor, who, in some mysterious way, merely over the
telephone, managed to induce the newspapers to omit any reference to his
client's contemptuous conduct in their morning editions.
"There's no way out of it, my dear," he said finally as he took his
leave--he was her father's cousin and very fond of her--"this judge has
the power to send you to jail if he wants to--and dares to! It's an even
chance whether he will dare to or not. It depends on whether he prefers
to stand well with the McGurks or with the general public. Of course I
respect your attitude, but really I think you are a little quixotic.
Points of honor are too ephemeral to be debated in courts of justice. To
do so would be to open the door to all kinds of abuses. Dishonest
witnesses would constantly avail themselves of the opportunity to avoid
giving evidence."
"Dishonest witnesses would probably lie in the first place!" she
quavered.
"True! I quite overlooked that!" he smiled, gazing down at her in an
avuncular manner. "But to-day the question isn't open. It is settled,
whether we like it or not. No pledge of privacy, no oath of secrecy--can
avail against demand in a court of justice. Even confessions obtained by
fraud are admissible--though we might wish otherwise."
Miss Beekman shrugged her shoulders.
"Nothing you have said seems to me to alter the situation."
"Very well," he replied. "I guess that settles it. Knowing you and the
Beekman breed! There's one thing I must say," he added as he stood in
the doorway after bidding her good night--"that old fellow Tutt has
behaved pretty well, leaving you entirely alone this way. I always had
an idea he was a sort of shyster. Most attorneys of that class would
have been sitting on your doorstep all the evening trying to persuade
you to stick to your resolution not to give their client away, and to do
the square thing. But he's done nothing of the sort. Rather decent on
the whole!"
"Perhaps he recognizes a woman of honor when he sees one!" she retorted.
"Honor!" he muttered as he closed the door. "What crimes are sometimes
committed in thy name!"
But on the steps he stopped and looked back affectionately at the
library window.
"After all, Althea's a good sport!" he remarked to himself.
* * * * *
At or about the same moment a quite dissimilar conference was being held
between Judge Babson and Assistant District Attorney O'Brien in the
café of the Passamaquoddy Club.
"She'll cave!" declared O'Brien, draining his glass. "Holy Mike! No
woman like her is going to stay in jail! Besides, if you don't commit
her everybody will say that you were scared to--yielded to influence.
You're in the right and it will be a big card for you to show that you
aren't afraid of anybody!"
Babson pulled nervously on his cigar.
"Maybe that's so," he said, "but I don't much fancy an appellate court
sustaining me on the law and at the same time roasting hell out of me as
a man!"
"Oh, they won't do that!" protested O'Brien. "How could they? All
they're interested in is the law!"
"I've known those fellows to do queer things sometimes," answered the
learned judge. "And the Beekmans are pretty powerful people."
"Well, so are the McGurks!" warned O'Brien.
* * * * *
"Now, Miss Beekman," said Judge Babson most genially the next morning,
after that lady had taken her seat in the witness chair and the jury had
answered to their names, "I hope you feel differently to-day about
giving your testimony. Don't you think that after all it would be more
fitting if you answered the question?"
Miss Althea firmly compressed her lips.
"At least let me read you some of the law on the subject," continued His
Honor patiently. "Originally many people, like yourself, had the
mistaken idea that what they called their honor should be allowed to
intervene between them and their duty. And even the courts sometimes so
held. But that was long ago--in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. To-day the law wisely recognizes no such thing. Let me read
you what Baron Hotham said, in Hill's Trial in 1777, respecting the
testimony of a witness who very properly told the court what the accused
had said to him. It is very clearly put: