The red-headed girl had not realized how tired she was until she heard
Ben Potts’s voice. He stood there as straight as ever, but where were
the clear bugle tones that summoned the good burghers of Redfield
morning after morning? A faint, a lamentable, echo of his impressive
“Hear ye! Hear ye!” rang out feebly, and the red-headed girl slumped
back dispiritedly in her chair, consumed with fatigue as with a fever.
“Sleep well?” inquired the reporter with amiable anxiety.
The red-headed girl turned on him eyes heavy with scorn. “Sleep?” she
repeated acidly. “What’s that?”
Judge Carver looked as weary as Ben Potts sounded, and the
indefatigable Mr. Farr looked blanched and bitten to the bone with
something deeper than fatigue. Only Mr. Lambert looked haler and
heartier than he had for several interminable days; and the faces of
Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives were as pale, as controlled, and as
tranquil as ever.
Judge Carver let his gavel fall heavily. “The Court has given careful
consideration as to the advisability of admitting the evidence in
question last night, and has decided that it may be admitted. Mr.
Lambert!” Mr. Lambert bounded joyfully forward. “Is the Court correct
in understanding that Mr. Phipps is your witness?”
“Quite correct, Your Honour.”
“Let him be called.”
“Mr. Randolph Phipps!”
The principal of Eastern High School was a tall man; there was dignity
in the way he held his head and moved his long, loose limbs, but all
the dignity in the world could not still the nervous tremor of his
hands or school the too sensitive mouth to rigidity. Under straight,
heavy brows, the eyes of a dreamer startled from deep sleep looked out
in amazement at a strange world; the sweep of dark hair above the wide
brow came perilously close to being Byronic; only the height of his
cheek bones and the width of his mouth saved him from suggesting a
matinée idol of some previous era. He might have been thirty-five, or
forty, or forty-five. His eyes were eighteen.
“Mr. Phipps, it is the understanding of this court that you have a
communication to make of peculiar importance. You understand that in
making that statement you will, of course, be subject to the usual
course of direct and cross-examination?”
“I understand that—yes.”
“Very well. You may proceed with the examination, Mr. Lambert.”
“Mr. Phipps, where were you on the night of the nineteenth of June?”
“On the night of the nineteenth of June,” said Mr. Phipps, in the
clear, carrying voice of one not unaccustomed to public speaking, “I
spent about three hours on the Thorne estate at Orchards. Some things
occurred during that time that I feel it my duty to make known to the
jury in this case.”
“What were you doing on the Thorne place?”
“I suppose that I was doing what is technically known as trespassing.
It did not occur to me at the time that it was a very serious offense,
as I knew the place to be uninhabited—still, I suppose that I was
perfectly aware that I had no business there.”
“You had no especial purpose in going there?”
“Oh, yes; I went there because I had selected it as a pleasant place
for a picnic supper.”
“You were alone?”
“No—no, I was not alone.” Mr. Phipps suddenly looked forty-five and
very tired.
“Other people were accompanying you on this—this excursion?”
“One other person.”
“Who was this other person?”
“A friend of mine—a young lady.”
“What was the name of this young woman?”
“Is it necessary to give her name? I hope—I hope with all my
heart—that that will not be necessary.” The low, urgent, unhappy voice
stumbled in its intensity. “My companion was quite a young girl. We
both realize now that we committed a grave indiscretion, but I shall
never forgive myself if my criminal stupidity has involved her.”
“I am afraid that we shall have to have her name.”
“I am a married man,” said Mr. Phipps, in a clear voice that did not
stumble. “I am placing this information before the Court at no small
sacrifice to myself. It seems to me to place too heavy a penalty on my
decision to come forward at this moment if you ask me to involve
another by so doing. The girl who was with me that evening was one of
my pupils; she is at present engaged to a young man to whom she is
entirely devoted; publicity of the type that this means is in every
way abhorrent to her. I request most urgently that she shall not be
exposed to it.”
“Mr. Phipps,” said Judge Carver gravely, “you have been permitted to
take the stand at your own request. It is highly desirable that any
information, of the importance that you have implied that in your
possession to be, should be as fully corroborated as possible. It is
therefore essential that we should have the name of this young woman.”
“Her name is Sally Dunne,” said Mr. Phipps.
“Is she also prepared to take the stand?”
“She is prepared to do whatever is essential to prevent a miscarriage
of justice. She is naturally extremely reluctant to take the stand.”
“Is she in court?”
“She is.”
“Miss Dunne will be good enough not to leave the courtroom without the
Court’s permission. You may proceed, Mr. Phipps.”
“We arrived at Orchards at a little after eight,” said Mr. Phipps.
“Miss Dunne took the half-past-seven bus from Rosemont, left it a
short distance beyond Orchards, and walked back to the spot where I
had arranged to meet her, just inside the gate. We did not arrive
together, as I was apprehensive that it might cause a certain amount
of gossip if we were seen together.”
“How had you come to choose Orchards, Mr. Phipps?”
“Miss Dunne had on several occasions commented on the beauty of the
place and expressed a desire to see it more thoroughly, and it was in
order to gratify that desire that the party was planned. As I say, we
met at the gate and walked on up the drive past the lodge and the
little driveway that leads to the gardener’s cottage to a small
summerhouse, about five hundred feet beyond the cottage itself. It
contained a little furniture—a table and some chairs and benches—and
it was there that we decided to have our supper. Miss Dunne had
brought a luncheon box with her containing fruit and sandwiches, and
we spread it on the table and began to eat. Neither of us was
particularly hungry, however, and we decided to keep what remained of
the food—about half the contents of the box, I think—in case we wanted
it later, and to do some reading before it got too dark to see. I had
brought with me the _Idylls of the King_, with the intention of
reading it aloud.”
“The book is of no importance, Mr. Phipps.”
“No,” said Mr. Phipps, in a tone of slight surprise. “No, I suppose
not. You are probably quite right. Well, in any case, we read for
quite a while, until it began to get too dark to see, and after that
we sat there conversing.”
The fluent voice with its slightly meticulous pronunciation paused,
and Lambert moved impatiently. “And then, Mr. Phipps?”
“Yes. I was trying to recollect precisely what it was that caused us
to move from the summerhouse. I think that it was Miss Dunne who
suggested that it was rather close and stuffy there, because of the
fact that the structure was smothered in vines; she asked if there
wasn’t somewhere cooler that we could go to sit. I said: ‘There’s the
gardener’s cottage. We might try the veranda there.’ You could just
see the roof of it through the trees. I pointed it out to her, and we
started——”
“You were familiar with the layout of the estate?”
“Oh, quite. That was one of the principal reasons why we had gone
there. I had once done some tutoring in Latin and physics with Mr.
Thorne’s younger son Charles—the one who was killed in the war. We had
been in the habit of using the summerhouse, which was his old
playhouse, as a schoolroom.”
“That was some time ago?”
“About fifteen years ago—sixteen perhaps. I had just graduated from
college myself, and Charles Thorne was going to Princeton that fall.”
“But you still remembered your way about?”
“Oh, perfectly. I was about to say that we did not approach it from
the main drive, but cut across the lawns, pushed through the shrubbery
at the back and came up to it from the rear. We had just reached the
little dirt drive back of the cottage, and were perhaps a hundred feet
away from the house itself, when we heard voices, and Miss Dunne
exclaimed: ‘There’s someone in the cottage. Look, the side window is
lighted.’ I was considerably startled, as I had made inquiries about
the gardener and knew that he was in Italy.
“I stood still for a moment, debating what to do next, when one of the
voices in the cottage was suddenly raised, and a woman said quite
clearly, ‘You wouldn’t dare to touch me—you wouldn’t dare!’ Someone
laughed and there was a little scuffling sound, and a second or so
after that a scream—a short, sharp scream—and the sound of something
falling with quite a clatter, as though a chair or a table had been
overturned.
“I was in rather a nervous and overwrought state of mind myself that
evening, and before I thought what I was doing I laughed, quite
loudly. Miss Dunne whispered, ‘Be careful! They’ll hear you.’ Just as
she spoke, the light went out in the cottage and I said, ‘Well, Sally,
evidently we aren’t the only indiscreet people around here this
evening. I’d better get you out of this.’
“Just as I was speaking I heard steps on the main driveway and the
sound of someone whistling. The whistling kept coming closer every
second, and I whispered, ‘Someone’s coming in here. We’d better stand
back in those bushes by the house.’ There were some very tall lilacs
at the side of the house under the windows, and we tiptoed over and
pushed back into them. After a minute or so, we heard someone go up
the steps, and then a bell rang inside the house. There wasn’t any
sound at all for a minute; then we could hear the steps coming down
the porch stairs again, and a moment later heard them on the gravel,
and a moment later still they had died away.
“I said, ‘That was a close call—too many people around here entirely.
Let’s make it two less.’ We tiptoed out past the cottage to the main
road and started back toward the lodge gates, walking along the grass
beside the road in order not to make any noise. We were almost back to
the gates when Miss Dunne stopped me.”
“Do you know what time it was, Mr. Phipps?”
“I am not sure of the time. I looked at my watch last when it began to
get too dark to read—shortly before nine. We did not start for the
cottage until a few minutes later, and it is my impression that it
must have been between quarter to ten and ten. We had been walking
very slowly, but even at that pace it should not take more than twenty
minutes.”
“It was dark then?”
“Oh, yes; it had been quite dark for some time, though it was possible
to distinguish the outline of objects. It was a very beautiful
starlight night.”
“Quite so. What caused Miss Dunne to stop you?”
“She exclaimed suddenly, ‘Oh, good heavens, I haven’t got my lunch
box! I must have left it in the bushes by the cottage.’ I said,
‘Perhaps you left it in the summerhouse,’ but she was quite sure that
she hadn’t, as she remembered distinctly thinking just before we
reached the cottage that it was a nuisance lugging it about. She was
very much worried, as it had her initial stenciled on it in rather a
distinctive way, and she was afraid that someone that she knew might
possibly find it and recognize it, and that if they returned it, her
parents might learn that she had been at Orchards that night.”
“Her parents were not aware of this expedition?”
“They were not, sir. They had both gone to New Hampshire to attend the
funeral of Mr. Dunne’s mother.”
“Proceed, Mr. Phipps.”
“Miss Dunne seemed so upset over the loss of the box that I finally
agreed to go back with her to look for it, though there seemed to me a
very slight chance of anyone identifying it, and I did not
particularly care to risk arousing anyone who still might be in the
cottage. I had a flashlight, however, and we decided to make a hurried
search as quietly as possible; so we started back, retracing our steps
and keeping a sharp lookout for the box.
“When we got to the dirt cut-off leading to the cottage from the main
driveway, we took it and approached as quietly as possible, standing
for a moment just at the foot of the steps where the lilac bushes
began and listening to see whether we could hear anything within. Miss
Dunne said, ‘There’s not a sound, and no light either. I don’t believe
there’s a soul around.’
“I said, ‘Someone has closed the windows and pulled down the shades in
this front room. It was open when we were here before.’ Sally said,
‘Well, never mind—let’s look quickly and get away from here. I think
it’s a horrid place.’ I turned on the flashlight and said, ‘We were
much farther back than this.’ She said, ‘Yes; we were beyond these
windows. Look! what’s this?’
“Something was glittering in the grass at the side of the steps, and I
bent down and picked it up. It was a small object of silver and black
enamel. I turned the light on it, and Miss Dunne said, ‘It’s one of
those cigarette lighters. Look, there is something written on it. It
says, _Elliot from Mimi, Christmas_.’
“Just then I heard a sound that made me look up. I said, ‘Listen,
that’s a car.’ And I no more than had the words out of my mouth when I
saw its headlights coming around the corner of the cut-off. I
whispered, ‘Stand still—don’t move!’ because I could see that the
headlights wouldn’t catch us, as we were standing far back from the
road; but Miss Dunne had already pushed back into the shrubbery about
the house. I stood stock-still, staring at the car, which had drawn up
at the steps. It was a small car—a runabout, I think you call it——”
“Could you identify the make, Mr. Phipps?”
“No, sir; I am not familiar with automobiles. Just a small dark,
ordinary-looking car. Two people got out of it—a man and a woman. They
stood there for a moment on the steps, and when I saw who they were I
came very close to letting out an exclamation of amazement. They went
up the steps toward the front door.”
“Were they conversing?”
“Yes, but in low voices. I couldn’t hear anything until he said quite
clearly, ‘No, it’s open—that’s queer.’ They went in, and I whispered
to Miss Dunne, ‘Do you know who that was? That was Stephen Bellamy,
with Mrs. Patrick Ives.’ Just as I spoke I saw a light go on in the
hall, and a second or so later it disappeared and one sprang up behind
the parlour shades. I was just starting over toward Miss Dunne when
there was a crash from the parlour—a metallic kind of a crash, like
breaking glass, and the light went out. I whispered, ‘Come on Sally;
I’m going to get out of this!’ She started to come toward me, and
someone inside screamed—a most appalling sound, as though the person
were in mortal terror. I assure you that it froze me to the spot,
though it was only the briefest interval before I again heard voices
on the porch.”
“Could you see the speakers, Mr. Phipps?”
“No; not until they were getting into the car. I was at this time
standing just around the corner of the house, and so could not see the
porch.”
“Could you distinguish what they were saying?”
“Not at first; they were both speaking together, and it was very
confusing. It wasn’t until they appeared again in the circle of the
automobile lights that I actually distinguished anything more than a
few fragmentary words. Mr. Bellamy had his hand on Mrs. Ives’s wrist
and he was saying——”
Mr. Farr was on his feet, but much of the tiger had gone out of his
spring. “Does the Court hold that what this witness claims that he
heard one person say to another person is admissible evidence?”
“Of course it is admissible evidence!” Lambert’s voice was frantic
with anxiety. “Words spoken on the scene of the crime, within a few
minutes of the crime——What about the rule of _res gestæ_?”
Mr. Farr made an unpleasant little noise. “A few minutes? That’s what
you call three quarters of an hour? When ejaculations made within two
minutes have been ruled out after _res gestæ_ has been invoked?”
“It has been interpreted to admit whole sentences at a much——”
“Gentlemen”—Judge Carver’s gavel fell with an imperious crash—“you
will be good enough to address the Court. Am I correct in
understanding that what you desire is a ruling on the admissibility of
this evidence, Mr. Farr?”
“That is all that I have requested, Your Honour.”
“Very well. In view of the gravity of this situation and the very
unusual character of the testimony, the Court desires to show as great
a latitude as possible in respect to this evidence. It therefore rules
that it may be admitted. Is there any objection?”
“No objection,” said Mr. Farr, with commendable promptness, rallying a
voice that sounded curiously flat. “It has been the object—and the
sole object—of the state throughout this case to get at the truth. It
is entirely willing to waive technicalities wherever possible in order
that that end may be obtained. . . . No objection.”
“You may proceed, Mr. Phipps.”
“Mr. Bellamy was saying, ‘It makes no difference how innocent we are.
If it were ever known that we were in that room tonight, you couldn’t
get one person in the world to believe that we weren’t guilty, much
less twelve. I’ve got to get you home. Get into the car.’ And they got
into the car and drove off.”
“And then, Mr. Phipps?”
“And then, sir, I said to Miss Dunne, ‘Sally, that sounds like the
voice of prophecy to me. If no one would believe that they were
innocent, no one would believe that we are. Never mind the lunch box;
I’m going to get you home too.’”
“You were aware that a murder had been committed?”
“A murder? Oh, not for one moment!” The quiet voice was suddenly
vehement in its protest. “Not for one single moment! I thought simply
that for some inexplicable reason Mr. Bellamy and Mrs. Ives had been
almost suicidally indiscreet and had fortunately become aware of it at
the last moment. It brought my own most culpable indiscretion all too
vividly home to me, and I therefore proceeded to escort Miss Dunne
back to her home, where I left her.”
“Yes—exactly. Now, Mr. Phipps, just one or two questions more. On your
first visit to the cottage, when you heard the woman’s voice cry,
‘Don’t dare to touch me,’ both the front and the rear of the cottage
were under your observation, were they not?”
“At different times—yes.”
“Would it have been possible for an automobile to be at any spot near
the cottage while you were there without your attention being drawn to
the fact?”
“It would have been absolutely impossible.”
“It could not have stood there without your seeing it?”
“Not possibly.”
“Nor have left without your hearing it?”
“Not possibly.”
“Did you hear or see such a car on that visit to the cottage, Mr.
Phipps?”
“I saw no car and heard none.”
“Thank you, Mr. Phipps; that will be all.”
“Well, not quite all,” said Mr. Farr gently. Mr. Phipps shifted in his
chair, his eyes under their dark brows luminous with apprehension.
“Mr. Phipps, at what time did you reach your home on the night of the
nineteenth of June?”
“I did not return to my home. It was closed, as my family—my wife and
my two little girls—were staying at a little place on the Jersey coast
called Blue Bay. I had taken a room at the Y. M. C. A.”
“At what time did you return to the Y. M. C. A.?”
“I did not return there,” said Mr. Phipps, in a voice so low that it
was barely audible.
“You did not return to the Y. M. C. A.?”
“No. By the time that I had left Miss Dunne at her home I decided that
it was too late to return to the Y. M. C. A. without rendering myself
extremely conspicuous, and as I was not in the least sleepy, I decided
that I would take a good walk, get a bite to eat at one of the
hand-out places in the vicinity of the station, and catch the first
train—the four-forty-five—to New York, where I could get a boat to
Blue Bay and spend Sunday with my family.”
“You mean that you did not intend to go to bed at all?”
“I did not.”
“And you carried out this plan?”
“I did.”
“What time did you leave Miss Dunne at her home, Mr. Phipps?”
“At about quarter to one.”
“What time did you start from the Orchards for home?”
“We started from the lodge gates at a little before eleven.”
“How far is it from there to Miss Dunne’s home in Rosemont?”
“Just short of four miles.”
“It took you an hour and three-quarters to traverse four miles?”
“Yes. The last bus from Perrytown to Rosemont goes by Orchards at
about quarter to eleven. We missed it by five or six minutes and were
obliged to walk.”
“It took you over an hour and three quarters to walk less than four
miles?”
“We walked slowly,” said Mr. Phipps.
“So it would seem. Now, did anyone see you leave Miss Dunne at her
door, Mr. Phipps?”
“No one.”
“You simply said good-night and left her there?”
“I said good-night,” said Mr. Phipps, “and left her at her door.”
“You did not go inside at all?”
Mr. Phipps met the suave challenge with unflinching eyes. “I did not
set my foot inside her house that night.”
“Your Honour,” asked Mr. Lambert, in a voice shaken with righteous
wrath, “may I ask where these questions are leading?”
“The Court was about to ask the same thing. . . . Well, Mr. Farr?”
“I respectfully submit that it is highly essential to test the
accuracy of Mr. Phipps’ memory as to the rest of the events on the
night which he apparently remembers in such vivid detail,” said Mr.
Farr smoothly. “And I assume that he is open to as rigorous an
inspection as to credibility as the defense has seen fit to lavish on
the state’s various witnesses. If I am in error, Your Honour will
correct me.”
“The Court wishes to hamper you as little as possible,” said Judge
Carver wearily. “But it fails to see what is to be gained by pressing
the question further.”
“I yield to Your Honour’s judgment. Did anyone that you know see you
after you left Miss Dunne that night, Mr. Phipps?”
“Unfortunately, no,” said Mr. Phipps, in that low, painful voice. “I
saw no one until I reached my wife in Blue Bay at about eleven o’clock
the following morning.”
“Did you tell your wife of the events of the night?”
“No. I told my wife that I had spent the night in New York with an old
classmate and gone to the theatre.”
“That was not the truth, was it, Mr. Phipps?” inquired the prosecutor
regretfully.
“That was a falsehood,” said Mr. Phipps, his eyes on his locked hands.
Mr. Farr waited a moment to permit this indubitable fact to sink in.
When he spoke again, his voice was brisker than it had been in some
time. “How did you recognize Mr. Bellamy and Mrs. Ives, Mr. Phipps?”
“They were standing in the circle of light cast by their headlights. I
could see them very distinctly.”
“No, I mean where had you seen them before.”
“Oh, I had seen them quite frequently before. Mrs. Ives I saw often
when she was Miss Thorne and I was tutoring at Orchards, and I had
seen her several times since as well. Indeed, I had been in her own
house on two occasions in regard to some welfare work that the school
was backing.”
“You were aware then that Mrs. Ives was a very wealthy woman?”
Mr. Phipps looked at him wonderingly. “Aware? I knew of course that——”
“Your Honour, I object to that question as totally improper.”
“Objection sustained,” said Judge Carver, eyeing the prosecutor with
some austerity.
“And as to Mr. Bellamy?” inquired that gentleman blandly.
“Mr. Bellamy was a director of our school board,” said Mr. Phipps. “I
was in the habit of seeing him almost weekly, so I naturally
recognized him.”
“Oh, you knew Mr. Bellamy, too, did you?” Mr. Farr’s voice was
encouragement itself.
“I knew him—not intimately, you understand, but well enough to admire
him as deeply as did all who came in contact with him.”
“He was deeply admired by all the members of the board?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“It will do you no damage with the board, then, when they learn of
your testimony in this case?”
“Your Honour——”
“Please,” said Mr. Phipps quietly, “I should like to answer that.
Whether it would do me damage or not is slightly academic, as I have
already handed in my resignation as principal of the Eastern High
School. I do not intend to return to Rosemont; my wife, my children,
and I are leaving for Ohio to-morrow.”
“You have resigned your position? When?”
“Last night. My wife agreed with me that my usefulness here would
probably be seriously impaired after I had testified.”
“You are a wealthy man, Mr. Phipps?”
“On the contrary, I am a poor man.”
“Yet you are able to resign your position and go West as a man of
independent means?”
“Are you asking me whether I have been bribed, Mr. Farr?” asked Mr.
Phipps gravely.
“I am asking you nothing of the kind. I am simply——”
“Your Honour! Your Honour!”
“Because if you are,” continued Mr. Phipps clearly over the imperious
thunder of the gavel, “I should like to ask you what sum you yourself
would consider sufficient to reimburse you for the loss of your
private happiness, your personal reputation, and your public career?”
“I ask that that reply be stricken from the record, Your Honour!”
The white savagery of Mr. Farr’s face was not an agreeable sight.
“Both your question and the witness’s reply may be so stricken,” said
Judge Carver sternly. “They were equally improper. You may proceed,
Mr. Farr.”
Mr. Farr, by a truly Herculean effort, managed to reduce both voice
and countenance to a semblance better suited to so ardent a seeker for
truth. “You wish us to believe then, Mr. Phipps, that on the night of
the nineteenth of June, for the first time in over ten years, you went
to the gardener’s cottage at Orchards at the precise moment that
enabled you to recognize Susan Ives and Stephen Bellamy standing in
the circle of their automobile lights?”
“That is exactly what I wish you to believe,” said Mr. Phipps
steadily. “It is the truth.”
Mr. Farr bestowed on him a long look in which irony, skepticism, and
contemptuous pity were neatly blended. “No further questions,” he said
briefly. “Call Miss Dunne.”
“Miss Sally Dunne!”
Miss Sally Dunne came quickly, so tall, so brave, so young and pale in
her blue serge dress with its neat little white collar and cuffs, that
more than one person in the dark courtroom caught themselves wondering
with a catch at the heart how long it had been since she had coiled
those smooth brown braids over her ears and smoothed the hair ribbons
out for the last time. She was not pretty. She had a sad little
heart-shaped face and widely spaced hazel eyes, candid and trustful.
These she turned on Mr. Lambert, and steadied her lips, which were
trembling.
“Miss Dunne, I just want you to tell us one or two things. You heard
Mr. Phipps’ testimony?”
“Yes, sir.” A child’s voice, clear as water, troubled and innocent.
“You were with him on the night of June nineteenth from eight until
one or thereabouts?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was his testimony as to what happened accurate?”
“Oh, yes, indeed, sir. Mr. Phipps,” said the little voice proudly,
“has a very wonderful memory.”
“You were with him on his first visit to the cottage?”
“I was with him every minute of the evening.”
“You saw no car near the cottage?”
“There wasn’t any car there,” said Miss Dunne.
“You saw Mr. Bellamy and Mrs. Ives on your second visit to the
cottage, some time after ten o’clock?”
“Just when they came out,” said Miss Dunne conscientiously. “I didn’t
see their faces when they went in.”
“Did you hear them speak?”
“I heard Mr. Bellamy say, ‘Sue, no matter how innocent we are, we’ll
never get one person to believe that we aren’t guilty if they know
that we were in that room, much less twelve. I’ve got to get you
home.’”
“Yes. Are you engaged to be married, Miss Dunne?”
“I don’t know,” said Miss Dunne simply. “I was engaged, but my—my
fiancé didn’t want me to testify in this case. You see, he’s studying
for the ministry. I think perhaps that he doesn’t consider that he’s
engaged any longer.”
“Were you yourself anxious to testify?”
“I was anxious to do what Mr. Phipps thought was right for us to do,”
said Miss Dunne. “But I am afraid that I was not very brave about
wanting to testify.”
“Were you in the habit of going on these—these picnic expeditions with
Mr. Phipps?”
“Oh, no, sir. We had taken only two or three quite short little
walks—after school, you know. He was helping me with my English
literature because I wanted to be a writer. The party that night was a
farewell party.”
“A farewell party?”
“Yes. School had closed on Friday, and we—Mr. Phipps thought that
perhaps it would be better if we didn’t see each other any more. It
was my fault that we went to Orchards that night. It was all my
fault,” explained Miss Dunne carefully in her small, clear voice.
“Your fault?”
“Yes. You see, Mr. Phipps thought that I was very romantic indeed, and
that I was getting too fond of him, so that we had better stop seeing
each other. I am very romantic,” said Sally Dunne gravely, “and I was
getting too fond of him.”
“How often have you seen Mr. Phipps since that evening, Miss Dunne?”
“Twice; once on the Tuesday following the—the murder—only for about
five minutes in the park. I begged him not to say anything about our
having been there unless it was absolutely necessary. And again last
night when he said that it was necessary.”
“Yes, exactly. Thank you, Miss Dunne; that will be all.
Cross-examine.”
“It was not the state that is responsible for the pitiless publicity
to which this unfortunate young girl has been exposed,” said Mr. Farr,
looking so virtuous that one sought apprehensively for the halo. “And
it is not the state that proposes to prolong it. I ask no question.”
Judge Carver said, in answer to the look of blank bewilderment in the
clear eyes, “That will be all. You may step down, Miss Dunne.”
The red-headed girl, who thought that nothing in the world could
surprise her any more, felt herself engulfed in amazement.
“Well, but what did he let her go for?”
“He let her go,” explained the reporter judicially, “because he’s the
wiliest old fox in Bellechester County. He knows perfectly well that
while he has a fair sporting chance of instilling the suspicion in the
twelve essential heads that Mr. Phipps is a libertine and a bribe
taker and a perjurer, he hasn’t the chance of the proverbial snowball
to make them believe that Sally Dunne could speak anything but the
truth to save her life or her soul. That child could make the tales of
Munchausen sound like the eternal verities. The quicker he can get her
off the stand, the more chance he has of saving his case.”
“Save it? How can he save it?”
“Well, that’s probably what he’d like to know. As the prosecutor is
supposed to be a seeker after truth, rather than a blood-hound after
blood, he has rather a tough row to hoe. And here’s where he starts
hoeing it.”
“The state has no comment to make on the testimony that you have just
heard,” Mr. Farr was saying to the twelve jurors with an expression of
truly exalted detachment, “other than to ask you to remember that,
after all, these two last witnesses are no more than human beings,
subject to the errors, the frailties, and the weaknesses of other
human beings. If you will bear that in mind in weighing their
evidence, I do not feel that it will be necessary to add one other
word.”
Judge Carver eyed him thoughtfully for a moment over the glasses that
he had adjusted to his fine nose. Then, with a perfunctory rap of his
gavel, he turned to the papers in his hand.
“Gentlemen of the jury, the long and anxious inquiry in which we have
been engaged is drawing to a close, and it now becomes my duty to
address you. It has been, however painful, of a most absorbing
interest, and it has undoubtedly engaged the closest attention of
every one of you. You will not regret the strain that that attention
has placed upon you when it shortly becomes your task to weigh the
evidence that has been put before you.
“At the very outset of my charge I desire to make several things quite
clear. You and you alone are the sole judges of fact. Any comment that
the Court may make as to the weight or value of any features of the
evidence is merely his way of suggestion, and is in no possible way
binding on the jury. Nor do statements made by counsel as to the
innocence or guilt of the defendants, or as to any other conclusions
or inferences drawn by them, prove anything whatever or have any
effect as evidence.
“It is not necessary for any person accused in a court in this county
to prove that he is not guilty. It devolves on the state to prove that
he is. If you have a reasonable doubt as to whether the state has
proved his guilt, it is your duty to return a verdict of not guilty.
That is the law of the land.
“Now, having a reasonable doubt does not mean that by some far-fetched
and fantastic hypothesis you can arrive at the conclusion of not
guilty because any other conclusion is painful and distasteful and
abhorrent to you. There is hardly anything that an ingenious mind
cannot bring itself to doubt, granted sufficient industry and
application. A reasonable doubt is not one that you would conjure up
in the middle of a dark, sleepless, and troubled night, but one that
would lead you to say naturally when you went about your business in
clear daylight, ‘Well, I can’t quite make up my mind about the real
facts behind that proposition.’ Not beyond any possible doubt—beyond a
reasonable doubt—bear that in mind.
“To convict either of the defendants under this indictment, the state
must prove to your satisfaction beyond reasonable doubt:
“First, that Madeleine Bellamy is dead and was murdered.
“Second, that this murder took place in Bellechester County.
“And third, that such defendant either committed that murder by
actually perpetrating the killing or by participating therein as a
principal.
“That Madeleine Bellamy is dead is perfectly clear. That she was
murdered has not been controverted by either the state or the defense.
That the murder took place in Bellechester County is not in dispute.
The only actual problem that confronts you is the third one: Did Mrs.
Ives and Mr. Bellamy participate in the murder of this unfortunate
girl?
“The state tells you that they did, and in support of that statement
they advance the following facts:
“They claim that on Saturday the nineteenth of June, 1926, at about
five o’clock in the afternoon, Mrs. Ives received information from Mr.
Elliot Farwell as to relations between Mr. Ives and Mrs. Bellamy that
affected her so violently and painfully that she thereupon——”
“I can’t stand hearing it all over again,” remarked the red-headed
girl in a small ominous whisper. “I can’t stand it, I tell you! If he
starts telling us again that Sue Ives went home and called up Stephen
Bellamy, I’ll stand up and scream so that they’ll hear me in
Philadelphia. I’ll——”
“Look here, you’d better get out of here,” said the reporter in tones
of unfeigned alarm. “Tell you what you do. You crawl out very quietly
to that side door where the fat officer with the sandy moustache is
standing. He’s a good guy, and you tell him that I told you that he’d
let you out before you fainted all over the place. You can sit on the
stairs leading to the third floor; I’ll get word to you when he’s
through with the evidence, and you can crawl back the same way.”
“All right,” said the red-headed girl feebly.
The reporter glanced cautiously about. “It’ll help if you can go both
ways on four paws; the judge doesn’t like to think that he’s boring
any member of the press, and if he sees one of us escaping, he’s
liable to call out the machine guns. Take long, deep breaths and
pretend that it’s day after tomorrow.”
The red-headed girl gave him a look of dazed scorn and moved toward
the left-hand door at a gait that came as close to being on four paws
as was compatible with the dignity of the press. The fat officer gave
one alarmed look at her small, wan face and hastily opened the door.
She crawled through it, discovered the stairs, mounted them obediently
and sank somewhat precipitately to rest on the sixth one from the top.
Down below, she could hear the mob outside of the great centre doors,
shuffling and grunting and yapping—— Ugh! Ugh! She shuddered and
propped up her elbows on her knees and her head on her hands, and
closed her eyes and closed her ears and breathed deeply and fervently.
“If ever I go to a murder trial again—— What happens to you when you
don’t sleep for a week? . . . If ever—I—go——”
Someone was saying, “Hey!” It was a small, freckled boy in a
messenger’s cap, and he had evidently been saying it for some time, as
his voice had a distinctly crescendo quality. He extended one of the
familiar telegraph blanks and vanished. The red-headed girl read it
solemnly, trying to look very wide awake and intelligent, as is the
wont of those abruptly wakened.
The telegram said: “Come home. All is forgiven, and he’s through with
the evidence. It’s going to the jury in a split second. Hurry!”
She hurried. Quite suddenly she felt extraordinarily wide awake and
amazingly alert and frantically excited. She was a reporter—she was at
a murder trial—they were going to consider the verdict. She flew down
the white marble stairs and around the first corner and through the
crack of the door proffered by the startled guard. There were wings at
her heels and vine leaves in her hair. She felt like a giant
refreshed—that was it, a giant. . . .
The reporter eyed her with his mouth open. “Well, for heaven’s sake,
what’s happened to you?”
“Everything’s all right, isn’t it?” she demanded feverishly. “They
won’t be out long, will they? There’s nothing——” A familiar voice fell
ominously on her ears and she jerked incredulous eyes toward the
throne of justice. “Oh, he’s still talking! You said he was
through—you did! You said——”
“I said through with the evidence, and so he is. This is just a back
fire. If you’ll keep quiet a minute you’ll see.”
“I wish simply, therefore, to remind you,” the weary voice was saying,
“that however unusual, arresting and dramatic the circumstances
surrounding the testimony of these last two witnesses may have been,
you should approach this evidence in precisely the same spirit that
you approach all the other evidence that has been placed before you.
It should be submitted to exactly the same tests of credibility that
you apply to every word that has been uttered before you—no more and
no less.
“One more word and I have done. The degrees of murder I have defined
for you. You will govern your verdict accordingly. The sentence is not
your concern; that lies with the Court. It is your duty, and your sole
duty, to decide whether Susan Ives and Stephen Bellamy are either or
both of them guilty of the murder of Madeleine Bellamy. I am convinced
that you will perform that duty faithfully. Gentlemen, you may
consider your verdict.”
Slowly and stiffly the twelve men rose to their feet and stood staring
about them uncertainly, as though loath to be about their business.
“If you desire further instruction as to any point that is not quite
clear to you,” said Judge Carver gravely, “I may be reached in my room
here. Any of the exhibits that you desire to see will be put at your
disposal. You may retire, gentlemen.”
They shuffled solemnly out through the little door to the right of the
witness, the small, beady-eyed bailiff with the mutton-chop whiskers
and the anxious frown trotting close at their heels. The door closed
behind them with a gentle, ominous finality, and someone in the
courtroom sighed—loudly, uncontrollably—a prophecy of the coming
intolerable suspense.
The red-headed girl wrung her hands together in a despairing effort to
warm them. Twelve men—twelve ordinary, everyday men, whose faces
looked heavy and stupid with strain and fatigue . . . She pressed her
hands together harder and turned a pale face toward the other door.
Susan Ives and Stephen Bellamy had just reached it; they lingered
there for a moment to smile gravely and reassuringly at the hovering
Lambert, and then were gone, as quietly as though they were about to
walk down the steps to waiting cars instead of to a black hell of
uncertainty and suspense.
Those in the courtroom still sat breathlessly silent, held in check by
Judge Carver’s stern eye. After a moment he, too, rose; for a moment,
it seemed that all the room was filled with the rustle of his black
silk robes, and then he, too, was gone, with decorum following hard on
his heels.
In less than thirty seconds, the quiet, orderly room was transformed
into something rather less sedate than the careless excitement of a
Saturday-afternoon crowd at a ball park—psychologically they were
reduced to shirt sleeves and straw hats tilted well back on their
heads. The red-headed girl stared at them with round, appalled eyes.
Just behind her they were forming a pool. Someone with a squeaky voice
was betting that they would be back in twenty minutes; someone with an
Oxford accent was betting that they’d take two hours; a girl’s
pleasant tones offered five to one that it would be a hung jury. Large
red apples were materializing, the smoke of a hundred cigarettes
filled the air, and rumour’s voice was loud in the land:
“Listen, did you hear about Melanie Cordier? Someone telephoned that
she’d collapsed at the inn in Rosemont and confessed that Platz had
done it, and about one o’clock this morning every taxicab in Redfield
was skidding around corners to get there first. And she hadn’t been
there since last Friday, let alone collapsed!”
“Well, you wouldn’t get me out of my bed at one in the morning to hear
Cal Coolidge say he’d done it.”
“Did you hear the row that Irish landlady was setting up about a state
witness taking her seat? Oh, boy, what an eye that lady’s got! It sure
would tame a wildcat!”
“Anyone want to bet ten to one that they’ll be out all night?”
The voice of an officer of the court said loudly and authoritatively,
“No smoking in here! No smoking, please!”
There was a temporary lull, and a perfunctory and irritable tapping of
cigarettes against chair arms. The clock over the courtroom door said
four.
“Have some chocolate?” inquired the reporter solicitously. The
red-headed girl shuddered. “Well, but, my good child, you haven’t had
a mouthful of lunch, and if you aren’t careful you won’t have a
mouthful of dinner either. Lord knows how long that crew will be in
there.”
“How long?” inquired the red-headed girl fiercely. “Why, for heaven’s
sake, should they be long? Why, for heaven’s sake, can’t they come out
of there now and say, ‘Not guilty’?”
“Well, there’s a good old-fashioned custom that they’re supposed to
weigh the evidence; they may be celebrating that.”
“What have they to weigh? They heard Mr. Phipps, didn’t they?”
“They did indeed. And what they may well spend the next twenty-four
hours debating is whether they consider Mr. Phipps a long-suffering
martyr or a well-paid liar.”
“Oh, go away—go away! I can’t bear you!”
“You can’t bear me?” inquired the reporter incredulously. “Me?”
“No—yes—never mind. Go away; you say perfectly horrible things.”
“Not as horrible as you do,” said the reporter. “Can’t bear me,
indeed! I didn’t say that I thought that Phipps was a liar. As a
matter of fact, I thought he was as nice a guy as I ever saw in my
life, poor devil, even if he did read the _Idylls of the King_
aloud. . . . Can’t bear me!”
“I can’t bear anything,” said the red-headed girl despairingly. “Go
away!”
After he had gone, she had a sudden overwhelming impulse to
dash after him and beg him to take her with him, anywhere he
went—everywhere—always. She was still contemplating the impulse with
horrified amazement when the girl from the Louisville paper who sat
three seats down from her leaned forward. She was a nice, cynical,
sensible-looking girl, but for the moment she was a little pale.
“There’s not a possibility that they could return a verdict of guilty,
is there?” she inquired in a carefully detached voice.
“Oh, juries!” said the red-headed girl drearily. “They can do
anything. They’re just plain, average, everyday, walking-around
people, and average, everyday people can do anything in the world.
That’s why we have murders and murder trials.”
The girl from the Louisville paper stood up abruptly. “I think I’ll
get a little air,” she said, and added in a somewhat apologetic voice,
“It’s my first murder trial.”
“It’s my last,” said the red-headed girl grimly.
The officer of the court had disappeared, and all about her there were
rising once more the little blue coils of smoke—incense on the altars
of relaxation. Why didn’t he come back. . . . The clock over the
courtroom door said five.
On the courtroom floor there was a mounting tide of newspapers,
telegraph blanks, leaves from notebooks and ruled pads—many nervous
hands had made light work, tearing, crumpling, and crushing their
destructive way through the implements of their trade. There was an
empty pop bottle just by the rail, apple cores and banana skins were
everywhere, clouds of smoke, fragments of buns, a high, nervous murmur
of voices; a picnic ground on the fifth of July would have presented a
more appetizing appearance. Over all was a steady roar of voices, and
one higher than the rest, lamenting: “Over two hours—that’s a hung
jury as sure as shooting! I might just as well kiss that ten dollars
good-bye here and now. Got a light, Larry?”
The door to the left of the witness box opened abruptly, and for a
moment Judge Carver stood framed in it, tall and stern in his black
robes. Under his accusing eye, apples and cigarettes were suddenly as
unobtrusive as the skin on a chameleon, and voices fell to silence. He
stood staring at them fixedly for a moment and then withdrew as
abruptly as he had come. While you could have counted ten, silence
hung heavy; then once more the smoke and the voices rose and
fell. . . . The clock over the courtroom door said six.
The red-headed girl moved an aimless pencil across an empty pad
with unsteady fingers. There were quite a lot of empty seats.
What were those twelve men doing now? Weighing the evidence?
Well, but how did you weigh evidence? What was important and
what wasn’t? . . . And suddenly she was back in the only courtroom
that she could remember clearly—the one in Alice in Wonderland,
and the King was saying proudly, “Well, that’s very important.”
“Unimportant, Your Majesty means.” And she could hear the poor
little King trying it over to himself to see which sounded
the best. “Important—unimportant—important——” There was the
lamp—and the date on the letters—and the note that nobody had
found—unimportant—important. . . . There was a juryman called Bill the
Lizard. She remembered that he had dipped his tail in ink and had
written down all the hours and dates in the case on his slate,
industriously adding them up and reducing the grand total to pounds,
shillings, and pence. Perhaps that was the safest way, after all.
June 19, 1926, and May 8, 1916. . . . A boy came running down the
aisle with a basketful of sandwiches and chewing gum; there was
another one with pink editions of the evening papers; it was exactly
like a ball game or a circus. . . . Where was he? Wasn’t he coming
back at all? . . . Outside the snow was falling; you could see it
white against the black windowpanes, and all the lights in the
courtroom were blazing. . . . Well, but where was he?
A voice from somewhere just behind her said ominously, “Can’t bear me,
can’t she? I’ll learn her!”
The red-headed girl screwed around in her seat. He was leaning over
the back of the chair next to her with a curious expression on his not
unagreeable countenance.
The red-headed girl said in a small, abject voice that shocked her
profoundly, “Don’t go away—don’t go away again.”
The reporter, looking startlingly pale under the glaring lights,
remarked casually, “I don’t believe that I’ll marry you after all.”
The red-headed girl could feel herself go first very white and then
very red and then very white again. She could hear her heart pounding
just behind her ears. In a voice even more casual than the reporter’s
she inquired, “After all what?”
“After all your nonsense,” said the reporter severely.
The red-headed girl said in a voice so small and abject that it was
practically inaudible, “Please do!”
“What are we doing in here?” inquired the reporter in a loud clear
voice. “What are we doing in a courtroom at a murder trial, with two
hundred and fifty-four people watching us? Where’s a beach? Where’s an
apple orchard? Where’s a moonlit garden with a nightingale? You get up
and put your things on and come out of this place.”
The red-headed girl rose docilely to her feet. After all, what were
they doing there? What was a murder trial or verdict or a newspaper
story compared to—— She halted, riveted with amazement.
Suddenly, mysteriously, incredibly, the courtroom was all in motion.
No one had crossed a threshold, no one had raised a voice; but as
surely as though they had been tossed out of their seats by some
gigantic hand, the crowd was in flight. One stampede toward the door
from the occupants of the seats, another stampede from the occupants
of the seats toward the door, a hundred voices calling, regardless of
law and order.
“Keep that ’phone line open!”
“They’re coming!”
“Dorothy! Dorothy!”
“Have Stan take the board!”
“Where’s Larry? Larry!”
“Get Red—get Red, for God’s sake!”
“That’s my chair—snap out of it, will you?”
“Watch for that flash—Bill’s going to signal.”
“Dorothy!”
“Get to that door!”
And silence as sudden as the tumult. Through the left-hand door were
coming two quiet, familiar figures, and through the right-hand door
one robed in black. The clock over the courthouse door stood at a
quarter to seven.
“Is there an officer at that door?” Judge Carver’s voice was harsh
with anger. “Officer, take that door. No one out of it or in it until
the verdict has been delivered.”
Despairing eyes exchanged frantic glances. Well, but what about the
last edition? They’re holding the presses until seven. What about the
last edition? Hurry, hurry!
But the ambassador of the majestic law was quite unhurried. “I have a
few words to say to the occupants of this courtroom. If at the
conclusion of the verdict there is a demonstration of any kind
whatsoever, the offenders will be brought before me and promptly dealt
with as being in contempt of court. Officers, hold the doors.”
And through another door—the little one behind the seat of
justice—twelve tired men were filing, gaunt, solemn eyed, awkward—the
farmers, merchants, and salesmen who held in their awkward hands the
terrible power of life and death. The red-headed girl clutched the
solid, tweed-covered arm beside her as though she were drowning.
There they stood in a neat semicircle under the merciless glare of the
lights, their upturned faces white and spent.
“Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed on a verdict?”
A deep-voiced chorus answered solemnly, “We have.”
“Prisoner, look upon the jury. Jury, look upon the prisoners.”
Unflinching and inscrutable, the white faces obeyed the grave voice.
“Foreman, how do you find as to Stephen Bellamy, guilty or not
guilty?”
“Not guilty.”
A tremor went through the court and was stilled.
“How do you find as to Susan Ives?”
“Not guilty.”
For a moment no one moved, no one stirred, no one breathed. And then,
abruptly, the members of the fourth estate forgot the majesty of law
and remembered the majesty of the press. Three minutes to seven—three
minutes to make the last edition! The mad rush for the doors was
stoutly halted by the zealous guardians, who clung devoutly to their
posts, and the air was rent with stentorian shouts: “Sit down there!”
“Keep quiet!” “Order! Order!” “Take your hands off of me!”—and the
thunder of Judge Carver’s gavel.
And caught once more between the thunder of the press and the law, two
stood oblivious of it. Stephen Bellamy’s haunted face was turned
steadfastly toward the little door beyond which lay freedom, but Susan
Ives had turned away from it. Her eyes were on a black head bent low
in the corner by the window, and at the look in them, so fearless, so
valiant, and so eager, the red-headed girl found suddenly that she was
weeping, shamelessly and desperately, into something that smelt of
tweed—and tobacco—and heaven. . . . The clock over the door said
seven. The Bellamy trial was over.
The judge came into the little room that served him as office in the
courthouse with a step lighter than had crossed its threshold for many
days. It was a good room; the dark panelling went straight up to the
ceiling; there were two wide windows and two deep chairs and a great
shining desk piled high with books and papers. Against the walls rose
row upon row of warm, pleasant-coloured books, and over the door hung
a great engraving of Justice in her flowing robes of white, smiling
gravely down at the bandage in her hands that man has seen fit to
place over her eyes. Across the room from her, between the two
windows, his robes flowing black, sat John Marshall, that great
gentleman, his dark eyes eternally fixed on hers, as though they
shared some secret understanding.
Judge Carver looked from one to the other a little anxiously as he
came in, and they smiled back at him reassuringly. For thirty years
the three of them had been old friends.
He crossed to the desk with a suddenly quickened step. The lamps were
lighted, and reflected in its top as in a mirror he could see the
short, stubby, nut-coloured pipe, the huge brass bowl into which a
giant might have spilled his ashes, the capacious box of matches
yawning agreeably in his tired face. The black robes were heavy on his
shoulders, and he lifted an impatient hand to them, when he paused,
arrested by the sight of the central stack of papers.
“Gentlemen of the jury, the long and anxious inquiry in which we have
been engaged——”
Now just what was it that he’d said to them about a principal and an
accessory before the fact being one and the same in a murder case? Of
course, as a practical matter, that was quite accurate. Still—He ran
through the papers with skilled fingers—there! “An accessory after the
fact is one who——”
There was a knock on the door and he lifted an irritated voice: “Come
in!”
The door opened cautiously, and under the smiling Justice in her
flowing robes a little boy was standing, freckle-faced, blue-eyed,
black-haired, in the rusty green of the messenger’s uniform. Behind
him the judge could see the worried face of old Martin, the clerk of
the court.
“I couldn’t do anything with him at all, Your Honour. I told him you
were busy, and I told him you were engaged, and I told him you’d given
positive orders not to be disturbed, and all he’d say was, ‘I swore
I’d give it into his hands, and into his hands it goes, if I stay in
this place until the moon goes down and the sun comes up.’”
“And that’s what I promised,” said the small creature at the door in a
squeak of terrified obstinacy. “And that’s what I’ll do. No matter
what——”
“All right, all right, put it down there and be off.” The judge’s
voice was not too long-suffering.
“Into his hands is what I said, and into his hands——”
The judge stretched out one fine lean hand with a smile that warmed
his cold face like a fire. The other hand went to his pocket. “Here,
if you keep on being an honourable nuisance, you may have a career
ahead of you. Good-night, Martin; show the young gentleman to the
door. If any one else disturbs me to-night, he’s fired.”
“Oh, by all means, Your Honour. Good-night, Your Honour.”
The door closed reverently, and His Honour stood staring absently down
at the letter in his hand, the smile still in his eyes. A fat, a
plethoric, an apoplectic letter; three red seals on the flap of the
envelope flaunted themselves at him importantly. He turned it over
carelessly. The clear, delicate, vigorous writing greeted him like a
challenge:
“Judge Carver.
“To be delivered to him personally without fail.”
Very impressive! He tore open the sealed flap with irreverent fingers
and shook the contents out on to the desk. Good Lord, it was a
three-volume novel! Page after page of that fine writing, precise and
accurate as print. He lifted it curiously, and something fluttered out
and lay staring up at him from the table. A piece of blue paper,
flimsy, creased and soiled, the round childish writing sprawled
recklessly across its battered surface:
10 A. M., June 19th.
Pat, I’ll catch either the eight or eight-thirty bus——
Very slowly, very carefully, he picked it up, the smile dying in his
incredulous eyes.
Pat, I’ll catch either the eight or eight-thirty bus. That will get
me to the cottage before nine, at the latest. I’ll wait there until
half past. You can make any excuse that you want to Sue, but get
there—and be sure that you bring what you promised. I think you
realize as well as I do that there’s no use talking any more. We’re
a long way beyond words, and from now on we’ll confine ourselves to
deeds. It’s absurd to think that Steve will suspect anything. I can
fool him absolutely, and once we settle the details to-night, we can
get off any moment that we decide on. California! Oh, Pat, I can’t
wait! And when you realize how happy we’re going to be, you won’t
have any regrets either. You always did say that you wanted me to be
happy—remember?
Mimi.
Judge Carver pushed the deep chair closer to the lamp and sat down in
it heavily, pulling the closely written pages toward him. He looked
old and tired.
“Midnight.
“My dear Judge Carver:
“I am fully aware of the fact that I am doing a cowardly thing in
writing you this letter. It is simply an attempt on my part to shift
my own burden to another’s shoulders, and my shoulders should surely
be sufficiently used to burdens by this time. But this one is of so
strange, awkward, and terrible a shape that I must get rid of it at
any cost to my pride or sense of fair play—or to your peace of mind.
If the verdict to-morrow is guilty, of course, I’ll not send the
letter, but simply turn the facts over to the prosecutor. I am
spending to-night writing you this in case it is not guilty.
“It was I who killed Madeleine Bellamy. It seems simply incredible
to me that everyone should not have guessed it long before now.
“Kathleen Page, Melanie Cordier, Laura Roberts, Patrick, Sue, I
myself—we told you so over and over again. That singularly obnoxious
and alert Mr. Farr—is it possible that he has never suspected—not
even when I explained to him that at ten o’clock I was in the flower
room, washing off my hands? And yet a few minutes later he was
asking me if there wasn’t a sink in the pantry where my poor Sue
might have cleansed her own hands of Mimi Bellamy’s blood—and every
face in the court was sick with the horror of that thought.
“We told you everything, and no one even listened.
“Who knew about the path across the meadow to the summerhouse? I,
not Sue. Who could see the study window clearly from the rose
garden? I, not Sue. Who had that hour and a half between 8:30 and
ten absolutely alone and unobserved? I, not Sue. Who had every
motive that was ascribed to Sue multiplied ten times over? I, who
had known poverty beside which Sue’s years in New York were a gay
adventure; who had not only a child to fight for, but that child’s
children; who, after a lifetime of grim nightmare, had found
paradise; and who saw coming to thrust me out from that paradise not
an angel with a flaming sword, but a little empty-headed,
empty-hearted chit, cheap, mercenary, and implacable, as only the
empty-headed can be.
“I know, Judge Carver, that the burden that I am trying to shift to
your shoulders should be heaviest of all with the weight of remorse;
and there is in it, I can swear to you, enough remorse to bow
stronger shoulders than either yours or mine—but none, none for the
death of Mimi Bellamy.
“Remorse for these past weeks has eaten me to the bone—for the shame
and terror and peril that I have brought to my children, for the
sorrow and menace that I have brought to that gentle soul, Stephen
Bellamy—even for the death of poor Elliot Farwell; that was my
doing, too, I think. I do not shirk it.
“I am rather an old-fashioned person. I believe in hell, and I
believe that I shall probably go there because I killed Mimi Bellamy
and because I’m not sorry for it; but the hell that I’ve been living
through every day and every night since she died is not one shadow
darker because it was I who gave her the little push that sped her
from one world to another.
“When that unpleasant Mr. Farr was invoking the vengeance of heaven
and earth on the fiend who had stopped forever the silver music of
the dead girl’s laughter, I remembered that the last time that she
laughed it had been at an old woman on her knees begging for the
happiness and safety of two babies—and the world did not seem to me
to have lost much when that laughter ceased. That is frightful,
isn’t it? But that is true.
“I’ll try to go back so that you can understand exactly what
happened; then you can tell better, perhaps, what I should do and
what you should do with me. First of all, I must go very far back,
indeed—back thirty years, to a manufacturing town in northern New
York.
“Thirty-one years ago last June, my husband left me with the
nineteen-year-old daughter of my Norwegian landlady. You couldn’t
exactly blame him, of course. Trudie was as pretty as the girl on
the cover of the most expensive candy box you ever saw, and as
unscrupulous as Messalina—and I wasn’t either.
“I was much too busy being sick and miserable and cross and sorry
for myself to be anything else at all, so he walked off with Trudie
and nineteen dollars and fifty cents out of the teapot and left me
with a six-weeks-old baby and a gold wedding ring that wasn’t
exactly gold. And my landlady wouldn’t give me even one day’s grace
rent free, because she was naturally a little put out by her
daughter’s unceremonious departure, and quite frankly held me to
blame for it, as she said a girl who couldn’t hold her own man
wasn’t likely worth her board and keep.
“So, just like the lady in the bad melodramas, I wrapped my baby up
in a shawl and started out to find work at the factory. Of course I
didn’t find it. It was a slack season at the factories, and I looked
like a sick little scarecrow, and I hadn’t even money for car fare.
I spent the first evening of my career as a breadwinner begging for
pennies on the more prominent street corners. It’s one way to get
bread.
“In the next twenty years I tried a great many other ways of getting
it, including, on two occasions, stealing it. But that was only the
first year; after that we always had bread, though often there
wasn’t enough of it, and generally it was stale, and frequently
there wasn’t anything to put on it.
“When people talk about the fear of poverty, I wonder whether they
have the remotest idea of what they’re talking about. I wasn’t rich
when I married Dan; I was the daughter of a not oversuccessful
lawyer, and I thought that we were quite poor, because often we went
through periods where pot roast instead of chicken played a
prominent part in the family diet, and my best dress had to be of
tarlatan instead of taffeta, and I possessed only two pairs of kid
gloves that reached to my elbow, and one that reached to my
shoulder.
“I was very, very sorry for myself during those periods, and used to
go around with faintly pink eyes and a strong sense of martyrdom. I
wasn’t at all a noble character. I liked going to cotillions at
night and staying in bed in the morning, and wringing terrified
proposals from callow young men who were completely undone by the
combination of moonlight and mandolin playing. Besides playing the
mandolin, I could make two kinds of candy and feather-stitch quite
well and dance the lancers better than anyone in town—and I knew
most of Lucile by heart. Thus lavishly equipped for the exigencies
of holy matrimony, I proceeded to elope with Mr. Daniel Ives.
“I won’t bother you much with Dan. He was the leading man in a stock
company that came to our town, and three weeks after he saw me
sitting worshipping in the front row we decided that life without
each other would be an empty farce and shook the dust of that town
from our heels forever. It was very, very romantic, indeed, for the
first six days—and after that it wasn’t so romantic.
“Because I, who could feather-stitch so nicely, was a bad cook and a
bad manager and a bad housewife and a bad sport—a bad wife, in
short. I wasn’t precisely happy, and I thought that it was perfectly
safe to be all those things, because it simply never entered my head
that one human being could get so tired of another human being that
he could quietly walk out and leave her to starve to death. And I
was as wrong about that, as I’d been about everything else.
“I’m telling you all this not to excuse myself, but simply to
explain, so that you will understand a little, perhaps, what sent my
feet hurrying across the meadow path, what brought them back to the
flower room at ten o’clock that night. I think that two people went
to meet Madeleine Bellamy in the cottage that night—a nice,
well-behaved little white-headed lady and the wilful, spoiled,
terrified girl that the nice old lady thought that she had killed
thirty years ago. It’s only fair to you that I should explain that,
because of what I’m going to ask you to decide. And it is only fair
to myself that I should say this.
“For twenty years I was too cold, too hot, too tired and sick and
faint ever to be really comfortable for one moment. And I won’t
pretend that I looked forward with equanimity to surrendering one
single comfort or luxury that had finally come to make life
beautiful and gracious. But that wasn’t why I killed Madeleine
Bellamy. I ask you to believe that.
“The real terror of poverty isn’t that we ourselves suffer. It is
that we are absolutely and utterly powerless to lift one finger to
protect and defend those who are dearest to us in the world. Judge
Carver, when Pat was sick when he was a baby I didn’t have enough
money to get a doctor for him; I didn’t have enough money to get
medicine. When I went to work I had to leave him with people who
were vile and filthy and debased in body and soul, because they were
the only people that I could afford to leave him with.
“Once when I came home I couldn’t wake him up, and the woman who was
with him was terrified into telling me that he’d been crying so
dreadfully that she’d given him some stuff that a Hungarian woman on
the next floor said was fine for crying babies. I carried him and
the bottle with the stuff in it ten blocks to a drug store—and they
told me that it had opium in it. She’d given him half the bottle—to
my Pat. And another time the woman with him got drunk and—— But I
can’t talk about that, not even to make you understand. He never had
any toys in his life but some tin cans and empty spools and pieces
of string. He never had anything but me.
“And I swore to myself that as long as he had me he should have
everything. I would be beauty to him, and peace and gentleness and
graciousness and gaiety and strength. I wasn’t beautiful or peaceful
or gentle or gracious or gay or strong, but I made myself all those
things for him. That isn’t vanity—that’s the truth. I swore that he
should never see me shed one tear, that he should never hear me lift
my voice in anger, that he should never see me tremble before
anything that fate should hold in store for either of us. He never
did—no, truly, he never did. That was all that I could give him, but
I did give him that.
“It took me seventeen years to save up enough railway fare to get
out of that town. Then I came to Rosemont. A nice woman that I did
some sewing for in the town had a sister in Rosemont. She told me
that it was a lovely place and that she thought that there was a
good opening there for some work, and that her sister was looking
for boarders. So I took the few dollars that I’d saved and went, and
you know the rest.
“Of course there are some things that you don’t know—you don’t know
how brave and gay and gentle Pat has always been to me; you don’t
know how happy we all were in the flat in New York, after he married
Sue and the babies came. Sue helped me with the housekeeping, and
Sue did some secretarial work at the university, and Pat did
anything that turned up, and did it splendidly. We always had plenty
to eat, and it was really clean and sunny, and we were all perfectly
healthy and happy. Only, Sue never did talk about it much, because
she is a very reserved child, in any case, and in this case she was
afraid that it might seem a reflection on the Thornes that she had
to live in a little walk-up flat in the Bronx, with no servants and
pretty plain living.
“And Mr. Lambert was nervous about bringing out anything about it in
direct examination for fear that in cross-examination Mr. Farr would
twist things around to make it look as though Sue had undergone the
tortures of the damned. Of course, we didn’t have much, but we had
enough to make it seem a luxurious and care-free existence in
comparison to the one that Pat and I had lived for over fifteen
years.
“Those things you don’t know—and one other. You don’t know Polly and
Pete, do you, Judge Carver?
“They are very wonderful children. I suppose that every grandmother
thinks that her grandchildren are rather wonderful; but I don’t just
think it about them; they are. Anyone would tell you that—anyone who
had ever seen them. They’re the bravest, happiest, strongest little
things. You could be with them for weeks and never once hear them
cry. Of course, once in a very long while—if you have to scold them,
for instance—because Pete is quite sensitive; but then you almost
never have to scold them, and when Pete broke his leg last winter
and Dr. Chilton set it he said that he had never seen such courage
in a child. And when Polly was only two years old, she walked
straight out into the ocean up to her chin, and she’d have gone
farther still if her father hadn’t caught her up. She rides a pony
better than any seven-year-old child in Rosemont, too, and she isn’t
five yet—not until January—and the only time that she ever fell off
the pony she never even whimpered—not once.
“They are very beautiful children too. Pete is quite fair and Polly
is very dark, but they both have blue eyes and very dark eyelashes.
They are so brown, too, and tall. It doesn’t seem possible that
either of them could ever be sick or unhappy; but still, you have to
be careful. Polly has been threatened twice with mastoiditis, and
Pete has to have his leg massaged three times a week, because he
still limps a little.
“That’s why I killed Madeleine Bellamy.
“The first time I realized that there was anything between her and
Pat was almost a month before the murder, some time early in May, I
think. Sue had been having quite a dinner party, and I’d slipped out
to the garden as usual as soon as I could get away. I decided to
gather some lilacs, and I came back to the house to get the scissors
from the flower room. As I passed the study I saw Pat and Mimi
silhouetted against the study window; she was bending over,
pretending to look at the ship he was making, but she wasn’t looking
at it—she was looking at Pat.
“I’d always thought that she was a scatterbrained little goose, and
I had never liked her particularly; even in the old days in the
village I used to worry about her sometimes. She used too much
perfume and too much pink powder, and she had an empty little voice
and a horrid, excited little laugh. But I thought that she was
good-natured and harmless enough, when I thought about her at all,
and I was about to pass on, when she said something that riveted me
in my footsteps.
“She said, ‘Pat, listen, did you get my note?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ She
asked, ‘Are you coming?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure
that I can make it.’ She said, ‘Of course you can make it. We can’t
talk here. It doesn’t take ten minutes to get to the cottage. You’ve
got to make it.’ He said, ‘All right, I’ll be there. Look out;
someone’s coming.’ They both of them turned around, and I could hear
him calling to someone in the hall to come in and look at the ship.
“I stood there, leaning my head against the side of the house and
feeling icy cold and deathly—deathly sick. It was as though I had
heard Dan calling to me across thirty years.
“From that moment until this one I have never known one happy hour,
one happy moment, one happy second. I spent my life spying on him—on
my Pat—trying to discover how far he had gone, how far he was
prepared to go. I never caught them together again, in spite of the
fact that I fairly haunted the terrace under the study window,
thinking that some afternoon or evening they might return. They
never did. Mimi didn’t come very often to the house, as a matter of
fact.
“But on the evening of the nineteenth of June, at a little after
half-past six, someone did come to the study window, who gave me the
clew that I had been seeking so long. It was Melanie Cordier, of
course. I was just coming back from the garden, where I had been
tying up some climbing roses, when I saw her there by the corner
near the bookcase. She had a book in her hands—quite a large, thick
book in a light tan cover, and she was looking back over her
shoulder with a queer, furtive look while she put something in it.
She shoved it back onto the shelf and was starting toward the hall,
when she drew back suddenly and stood very quiet. I thought: ‘There
is someone in the hall. When Melanie goes out it will mean that the
coast is clear.’
“It wasn’t more than a minute later that she left, and I started
around to the front of the house to get to the study and see what
she had put in that book. I was hurrying so that I almost ran into
Elliot Farwell, who was coming down the front steps and not looking
any more where he was going than if he had been stone blind. He
said, ‘Beg pardon’ and brushed by me without even lowering his eyes
to see who it was, and I went on across the hall into the study,
thinking that never in my life had I seen a man look so wretchedly
and recklessly unhappy.
“No one was in the hall; they were all in the living room, and I
could hear them all laughing and talking—and I decided that if I
were to find what Melanie had put in the book I’d better do it
quickly, as the party might break up at any minute. I had noticed
just where the book was—on the third shelf close to the wall—but
there were three volumes just alike, and that halted me for a
minute.
“The note was in the second volume that I opened. It was addressed
to ‘Mr. Patrick Ives. Urgent—Very Urgent.’ I stood looking at that
‘Urgent—Very Urgent’ for a minute, and then I put it in the straw
bag that I carry for gardening and went out through the dining room
to the pantry to get myself a drink of water, because I felt a
little faint.
“No one was in the pantry. I let the water run for a minute so that
it would get cold, and then I drank three glasses of it, quite
slowly, until my hand stopped shaking and that queer dizzy feeling
went away. Then I started back for the hall. I got as far as the
dining room, when I saw Pat standing by the desk in the corner.
“There’s a screen between the dining-room door and the study, but it
doesn’t quite cut off the bit near the study window. I could see him
perfectly clearly. He had quite a thick little pile of white papers
in his hand, and he was counting them. They were long, narrow
papers, folded just like the bond that he’d given me for Christmas,
a year ago—just exactly like it. And while I was standing there
staring at them, Sue called to him from the hall to come out on the
porch and see his guests off, and he gave a little start and shoved
the papers into the left-hand drawer and went out toward the hall.
“I gave him a few seconds to get to the porch, before I crossed
through the study. I was terrified that if he came back and found me
there he’d know I had the note and accuse me of it—and I knew that
when he did that all the life that I’d died twenty lives to build
for us would crumble to pieces at the first word he spoke. I
couldn’t bear to have Pat know that I suspected how base he was—that
I knew that he was Dan all over again—a baser, viler Dan, since Dan
had only had me to keep him straight, and Pat had Sue. I felt strong
enough and desperate enough to face almost anything in the world
except that Pat should know that I had found him out. So I went
through the study and the hall and up the stairs to my room in the
left wing without one backward look.
“Once in my room, I locked the door and bolted it—and pushed a chair
against it, too, to make assurance triply sure. That’s the only
thing that I did that entire evening that makes me think I must have
been a little mad. Still, even a biased observer could hardly regard
that as homicidal madness.
“I went over to the chintz wing chair by the window and read the
note. The chair was placed so that even in my room I could see the
roses in the garden, and a little beyond the garden, the sand pile
under the copper beech where the children played. They weren’t there
now; I’d said good-night to them outside just a minute or so before
I finished tying up the roses. I read the note through three times.
“Of course, I completely misread it. I thought that what she was
proposing was an elopement with Pat to California. It never once
entered my head that she was referring to money that would enable
Steve and herself to live a pleasanter life in a pleasanter place,
and that her talk of hoodwinking Steve simply meant that she could
conceal the source of the money from him.
“If I had realized that, I’d never have lifted my finger to prevent
her getting it. I thought she wanted Pat. I’d have given her two
hundred thousand dollars to go away and leave him alone. The most
ghastly and ironical thing about this whole ironical and ghastly
business is that if Mimi Bellamy hadn’t been as careless and
slip-shod with her use of the word ‘we,’ as she was with everything
else in her life, she would be alive this day under blue skies.
“Of course it was stupid of me, too, and the first time that I read
it I was bewildered by the lack of endearments in it. But there was
all that about her hardly being able to wait, and how happy they
would be; and the note was obviously hastily written—and I had
always thought she had no depth of feeling. I suppose that all of us
read into a letter much what we expect to find there, and what I
expected to find was a twice-told tale. I expected to find that Pat
was so mad about this girl that he was willing to wreck not only his
own life for her but mine and Sue’s and Polly’s and Pete’s. And I
couldn’t to save my soul think of a way to stop him.
“I was reading it for the third time when Melanie knocked at the
door and announced dinner, and I put it back in my bag and pushed
back the chair and unlocked the door and went down.
“When I heard Pat and Melanie and Sue all tell you that dinner was
quite as usual that night, I wondered what strange stuff we weak
mortals are made of. When I think what Sue was thinking and what Pat
was thinking and what I was thinking, and that we could laugh and
chat and breathe as usual—no, that doesn’t seem humanly possible.
Yet that’s exactly what we did.
“Afterward, when they went into the study to look at the ship, I
decided that I might just as well go into the rose garden and finish
the work that I’d started out there. I’d noticed some dead wood on
two of the plants, so I went to the flower room and got out the
little knife that I kept with some other small tools in a drawer
there. It’s a very good one for either budding or pruning, but I
keep it carefully put away for fear that the children might cut
their fingers. Then I went out to the garden.
“For a while I didn’t try to think at all: I just worked. I saw Miss
Page coming back from the sand pile, and a minute or so later Sue
came by, running toward the back gate. She called to me that she was
going to the movies and that Pat was going to play poker. I was glad
that they were not going to be there; that made it easier to
think—and to breathe.
“As you know, she returned to the house. I don’t believe she was
there more than five minutes before she came running by again and
disappeared through the back gate. I sat down on the little bench at
the end of the rose garden and tried to think.
“I was desperately anxious to keep my head and remain cool and
collected, because one thing was perfectly clear. If something
wasn’t done immediately, it would be too late to do anything. The
question was what to do.
“I didn’t dare to go to Pat. At bottom, I must be a miserable
coward; that was the simple, straightforward, and natural thing to
do, and I simply didn’t dare to do it. Because I thought that he
would refuse me, and that fact I couldn’t face. I was the person in
all the world who should have had most trust in him, and I didn’t
trust him at all. I remember that when I lie awake in the night. I
didn’t trust him.
“I didn’t dare to go to Sue, either, because I was afraid that if
she knew the truth—or what I was pleased to consider the truth—she
would leave him, at any cost to Polly and Peter or herself. I knew
that she was possessed of high pride and fine courage; I didn’t know
that they would be chains to bind her to Pat. I didn’t trust her
either.
“It wasn’t Pat and Sue and Mimi Bellamy that I was looking at, you
see. It was Dan and I and the boarding-house keeper’s Trudie.
“I sat on the bench in the rose garden and watched the sunlight
turning into shadow and felt panic rising about me like a cold wind.
I knew that Sue hadn’t a cent; her father had left her nothing at
all, and she had refused to let Pat settle a cent on her, because
she said that she loved to ask him for money.
“And I remembered . . . I remembered that Dan had taken nineteen
dollars and fifty cents out of the tea-pot. I remembered that I had
learned only a few weeks before that I could only hope at best for
months instead of years to live. I remembered that Sue couldn’t cook
at all, and that it was I who had done up all the children’s little
dresses in those New York days because she couldn’t iron, and made
them, because she couldn’t sew—and I wouldn’t be there. I remembered
that the only relation that she had in the world was Douglas Thorne,
and that he had four children and a wife who liked jewellery and who
didn’t like Sue. I remembered that the massage for Pete’s knee cost
twenty dollars a week, and that when Polly had had trouble with her
ear last winter the bill for the nurses and the doctors and the
operation had come to seven hundred and fifty dollars. I remembered
the way Polly looked on the black pony and Pete’s voice singing in
the sand pile. . . .
“And then suddenly everything was perfectly clear. Mimi, of
course—I’d forgotten her entirely. She was waiting in the gardener’s
cottage now, probably, and if I went to her there and explained to
her all about Polly and Pete, and how frightfully important it was
that they should be taken care of until they could take care of
themselves, she would realize what she was doing. She was so young
and pretty and careless that she probably hadn’t ever given them a
thought. It wasn’t cruelty—it was just a reckless desire to be
happy. But once she knew—— I’d tell her all about Pat’s ghastly
childhood and the nightmare that my own life had been, and I’d
implore her to stop and think what she was doing. Once she had
stopped—once she had thought—she wouldn’t do it, of course. I felt
fifty years younger, and absolutely light-headed with relief.
“I looked at my little wrist watch; it said ten minutes to nine. If
I waited until nine it would be almost dark, and would still give me
plenty of time to catch her before she left. It wouldn’t take me
more than fifteen minutes to get to the cottage, and I much
preferred not to have anyone know what I was planning to do. No one
would miss me if I got back by ten; I often sat in the garden until
then, and I had a little flashlight in the straw bag that I used at
such times, and that would serve my purpose excellently coming home
across the meadows.
“I decided not to go back to the house at all, but simply to slip
out by the little gate near the sand pile and strike out on the path
that cut diagonally across the fields to the Thorne place. There
were no houses between us and Orchards, so I would be perfectly safe
from observation. By the time I had gathered up my gardening things
and looked again at my watch it was a little after nine, and I
decided that it wouldn’t be safe to wait any longer.
“It was a very pleasant walk across the fields; it was still just
light enough to see, and the clover smelled very sweet, and the tree
toads were making a comforting little noise, and I walked quite
fast, planning just what I would say to Mimi—planning just how
reasonable and gentle and persuasive and convincing I was going to
be.
“The path comes out at an opening in the hedge to the left of the
gardener’s cottage. I pushed through it and came up to the front
steps; there was a light in the right-hand window. I went straight
up the steps. The front door was open a little, and I pushed it open
farther and went in. There was a key on the inside of the door. I
hesitated for a moment, and then I closed it and turned the key and
dropped it into my bag. I was afraid that she might try to leave
before I’d finished explaining to her; I didn’t want her to do that.
“She heard me then, and called out from the other room, ‘For
heaven’s sake, what’s been the matter? I didn’t think that you were
ever coming.’
“She had her back turned as I came into the room; she was looking
into the mirror over the piano and fluffing out her hair. There
was a lamp lit on the piano and it make her hair look like
flames—she really was extraordinarily beautiful, if that
red-and-white-and-gold-and-blue type appeals to you. Trudie’d had a
mouth that curled just that way, and those same ridiculous
eyelashes. And then she saw me in the mirror and in three seconds
that radiant face turned into a mask of suspicion and cruelty and
malice. She whirled around and stood there looking me over from head
to foot.
“After a moment she said, ‘What are you doing here?’
“I said, ‘I came about Pat, Madeleine.’
“She said, ‘Oh, you did, did you? So that’s his game—hiding behind a
woman’s skirts! Well, you can go home and tell him to come out.’
“I said, ‘He doesn’t know that I’m here. I found the note.’
“Mimi said, ‘They can send you to jail for taking other people’s
letters. Spying and stealing from your own son! I should think you’d
be ashamed. And what good do you think it’s going to do you?’
“I came closer to her and said, ‘Never mind me, Madeleine, I came
here to-night to implore you to leave my son alone.’
“And she laughed at me—she laughed! ‘Well, you could have saved
yourself the walk. When he gets here, I’ll tell him what I think of
the two of you.’
“I said, ‘He’s not coming. He’s playing poker at the Dallases.’
“She went scarlet to her throat with anger, and she called out,
‘That’s a lie! He’s coming and you know it. Will you get out of
here?’
“I said, ‘Madeleine, listen to me. I swear to you that any happiness
you purchase at the price that you’re willing to pay for it will rot
in your hands, no matter how much you love him.’
“And she laughed! ‘Love him? Pat? I don’t care two snaps of my
fingers for him! But I’m going to get every cent of his that I can
put my hands on, and the quicker both of you get that straight, the
better it will be for all of us.’
“I said, ‘I believe that is the truth, but I never believed that you
would dare to say so. You can’t—you can’t realize what you are
doing. You can’t purchase your pleasure with the comfort and
security and health and joy of two little babies who have never
harmed you once in all their lives. You can’t!’
“She laughed that wicked, excited little laugh of hers again, and
said through her teeth, ‘Oh, can’t I, though? Now get this straight
too: I don’t care whether your precious little babies die in a
gutter. Now, will you get out?’
“I couldn’t breathe. I felt exactly as though I were suffocating,
but I said, ‘No. I am an old woman, Madeleine, but I will go on my
knees to you to beg you not to ruin the lives of those two babies.’
“She said, ‘Oh, I’m sick to death of you and your babies and your
melodramatics. For the last time, are you going to get out of this
house or am I going to have to put you out?’
“She came so close to me that I could smell the horrid perfume she
wore—gardenia, I think it was—something close and sweet and hateful.
I took a step back and said, ‘You wouldn’t dare to touch me—you
wouldn’t dare!’
“And then she did—she gave that dreadful, excited little laugh of
hers and put both hands on my shoulders and pushed me, quite hard—so
hard that I stumbled and went forward on my knees. I tried to catch
myself, and dropped the bag and all the things in it fell out on the
carpet. I knelt there staring down at them, with the blood roaring
in my head and singing in my ears.
“Judge Carver, what is it in our blood and bones and flesh that
rises shrieking its outrage in the weakest and meekest of us at the
touch of hands laid violently on our rebellious flesh? I could hear
it—I could hear it crying in my ears—and there on the flowered
carpet just in reach of my hand something was shining. It was the
little knife that I’d been using to cut the dead wood out so that
the live roses would grow better. I knelt there staring at it. That
story of how all their lives flash by drowning eyes—I always thought
that was an old wives’ tale—no, that’s true, I think. I could see
the rose garden with all the green leaves glossy on the big Silver
Moon. . . . I could see Pat and Sue laughing on the terrace, with
his arm across her shoulders and the sun in their eyes and the wind
in their hair. . . . I could see the children’s blue smocks through
the branches of the copper beech. . . . I stood up with the knife in
my hand. . . .
“She screamed only once—not a very loud scream, either, but she
caught at the table as she fell, and it made a dreadful crash. I
heard someone laugh outside, quite loudly, and I leaned forward and
blew out the lamp on the piano. There was someone coming up the
front steps; I stood very still. A bell rang far back in the house,
and then someone tried the door.
“I thought: ‘This is the end—they have known what has happened. If
no one answers, they will batter down the door. But not till they
batter down the door will I move one hairbreadth from where I
stand—and not then.’
“After a moment I heard the feet going down the steps, then again on
the gravel of the main drive, getting fainter and fainter. I waited
for a moment longer, because I thought that I heard something moving
in the bushes outside the window, but after a minute everything was
perfectly still, and I went over to the window and shut it and
pulled down the shade.
“I knew that I was in great danger, and that I must think very
quickly—and act quickly too. I found the little flashlight almost
immediately, and lit it, and pushed down the catch and put it beside
me on the floor. I wanted to have both hands free, and I didn’t dare
to take the time to light the lamp. I was afraid that the person who
tried the door would come back. I had realized at once, of course,
that if I took the jewels the murder would look like robbery—and I
had to make sure that she was dead.
“That took only a minute; the rings came off quite easily, but the
catch of the necklace caught, and I had to break the string. I
knotted the things all into my handkerchief and put them into the
bag, and the trowel and a ball of string that had fallen out, too,
and the note, and a little silver box of candy that I kept for the
children. There was the key to the front door too. I remembered that
I must leave it in the lock as I went out. I used the flashlight to
make sure that I wasn’t leaving anything, and I was—the knife was
still lying there beside her.
“It’s curious—of all the things that happened that night, that’s the
only one that I can’t account for. I don’t remember how it got there
at all—whether I placed it there or whether I dropped it or whether
it fell—that’s curious, don’t you think? Anyhow, I picked it up and
wiped it off very carefully on one of her white lace frills and put
it back in the bag. And then I tried to get up, but I couldn’t. I
couldn’t move. I knelt there, leaning forward against the cold steel
of the little Franklin stove, feeling so mortally, so desperately
sick that for a moment I thought I should never move again. It
wasn’t the blood; it was that perfume, like dead flowers—horribly
sweet and strong. . . . After a minute I got up and went out of the
room and out of the house and back across the meadow to the garden
gate.
“I stopped only once. I followed the hedge a little way before I
came to the path, and I stooped down and dug out two or three
trowelfuls of earth close in to the roots and shook the pearls and
the rings out of my handkerchief into the hole and covered it up and
went on. At first I thought of putting the knife there, too, and
then I decided that someone might have noticed it in the drawer and
that it would be safer to be put back where it had come from.
“How are they ever able to trace people by the weapons they have
used? It seems to me that it should be so simple to hide a little
thing no longer than your hand, with all the earth and the waters
under the earth to hide it in.
“It was the knife that I was washing in the flower room; it still
had one or two little stains near the handle, but there wasn’t any
blood on my hands at all. I’d been very careful.
“After I’d put everything away I took the note and went upstairs. At
first I thought that I’d tear it up, but then I decided that someone
might find the scraps, and that the safest thing to do would be to
keep it until the next day and burn it. And before the next day I
knew that Sue and Stephen had no actual alibi for that night, and so
I never burned the note.
“That’s all. While I lay there in the dark that night—and every
night since—I’ve tried saying it over and over to myself:
‘Murderess—murderess.’ A black and bloody and dreadful word; does it
sound as alien to the ears of all the others whose title it is as it
does to mine? Murderess! We should feel differently from the rest of
the world once we have earned that dreadful title, should we not?
Something sinister, something monstrous and dark should invest us,
surely. It seems strange that still we who bear that name should
rise to the old familiar sunlight and sleep by the old familiar
starlight; that bread should still be good to us, and flowers sweet;
that we should say good-morning and good-night in voices that no man
shudders to hear. The strangest thing of all is to feel so little
strange.
“Judge Carver, I have written to you because I do not know whether
any taint of suspicion still clings to any of those who have taken
part in this trial. If in your mind there does, I will promptly give
myself up to the proper authorities and tell them the essential
facts that I have told you.
“But if, in your opinion, suspicion rests on no man or woman, living
or dead, I would say only this: I am not afraid to die—indeed,
indeed, I am rather anxious to die. Life is no longer very dear to
me. Two physicians have told me this last year that I will not live
to see another. I can obtain from them a certificate to that effect,
if you desire. And I have already sent to my lawyers a sealed
envelope containing a full confession, marked, ‘To be sent to the
authorities in case anyone should be accused of the death of Mrs.
Stephen Bellamy, either before or after my death.’ I would not have
any human being live through such days as these have been—no, not to
save my life, or what is dearer to me than my life.
“But, Judge Carver, will the ends of justice be better served if
that boy who believes that my only creed is gentleness and kindness
and mercy, and who has learned therefore to be merciful and gentle
and kind—if that boy learns that now he must call me murderess? If
those happy, happy little children who bring every bumped head and
cut finger to me to kiss it and make it whole must live to learn to
call me murderess?
“I don’t want Polly and Pete to know—I don’t want them to know—I
don’t want them to know.
“If you could reach me without touching them I would not ask you to
show me mercy. But if no one else need suffer for my silence, I beg
of you—I beg you—forget that you are only Justice, and remember to
be merciful.
“Margaret Ives.”
For a long time the judge sat silent and motionless, staring down at
that small mountain of white pages. In his tired face his dark eyes
burned, piercing and tireless. Finally they moved, with a curious
deliberation, to that other pile of white pages that he had been
studying when the messenger boy had come knocking at the door. Yes,
there it was:
“An accessory after the fact is one who while not actually
participating in the crime, yet in any way helps the murderer to
escape trial or conviction, either by concealing him or by assisting
him to escape or by destroying material evidence or by any other means
whatever. It is a serious crime in itself, but does not make him a
principal——”
He sat motionless, his unwavering eyes fixed on the words before him
as though he would get them by heart. . . . After a long moment, he
stirred, lifted his head, and drew the little pile of papers that held
the life of Patrick Ives’s mother toward him.
The blue paper first; the torn scraps settled down on the shining
surface as lightly and inconsequently as butterflies. Then the white
ones—a little mound of snow-flakes that grew under the quick, sure
fingers to a little mountain—higher—higher—blue and white, they were
swept into that great brass bowl that had been so conveniently
designed for ashes. A match spurted, and little flames leaped gaily,
and a small spiral of smoke twisted up toward the white-robed lady
above the door. Across the room, between the windows beyond which
shone the stars, John Marshall was smiling above the dancing
flames—and she smiled back at him, gravely and wisely, as though they
shared some secret understanding.
The End
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
This transcription follows the text of the edition published by
Doubleday, Page & Company in 1927. The following changes have been
made to correct what are believed to be unambiguous printer’s errors.
* “thought there there” was changed to “thought that there”
(Chapter II).
* “nineteeth” was changed to “nineteenth” (Chapter II).
* “played around” was changed to “played a round” (Chapter III).
* “How any” was changed to “How many” (Chapter IV).
* “Pott’s” was changed to “Potts’s” (Chapter IV).
* “dissertion” was changed to “dissertation” (Chapter V).
* “paino” was changed to “piano” (Chapter V).
* “continuue” was changed to “continue” (Chapter V).
* “inobstrusive” was changed to “inobtrusive” (Chapter V).
* “indentification” was changed to “identification” (Chapter V).
* “where the switch it” was changed to “where the switch is”
(Chapter VII).
* “coutenances” was changed to “countenances” (Chapter VII).
* “staightforward” was changed to “straightforward” (Chapter VII).
* “Belamy” was changed to “Bellamy” (Chapter VII).
* “that that of” was changed to “than that of” (Chapter VII).
* “witheld” was changed to “withheld” (Chapter VII).
* “fiance” was changed to “fiancé” (Chapter VIII).
* “certicate” was changed to “certificate” (Chapter VIII).
* A comma at the end of a sentence has been corrected to a period.
* Seven occurrences of mismatched quotation marks have been repaired.
Finally, there is a passage in Chapter II that reads “and Mrs. Bellamy
said”, but in context this is impossible and it is obvious that Mrs.
Ives is the one speaking. The passage has therefore been changed to
“and Mrs. Ives said”.
All other seeming errors in the original text have been left
unchanged.