THE CASE FOR THE CROWN
It was years since there had been a promise of such sensation at the Old
Bailey, and never, perhaps, was competition keener for the very few
seats available in that antique theatre of justice. Nor, indeed, could
the most enterprising of modern managers, with the star of all the
stages at his beck for the shortest of seasons, have done more to spread
the lady's fame, or to excite a passionate curiosity in the public mind,
than was done for Rachel Minchin by her official enemies of the
Metropolitan Police.
Whether these gentry had their case even more complete than they
pretended, when the prisoner was finally committed for trial, or whether
the last discoveries were really made in the ensuing fortnight, is now
of small account--though the point provided more than one excuse for
acrimony on the part of defending counsel during the hearing of the
case. It is certain, however, that shortly after the committal it became
known that much new evidence was to be forthcoming at the trial; that
the case against the prisoner would be found even blacker than before;
and that the witnesses were so many in number, and their testimony so
entirely circumstantial, that the proceedings were expected to occupy a
week.
Sure enough, the case was accorded first place in the November Sessions,
with a fair start on a Monday morning toward the latter end of the
month. In the purlieus of the mean, historic court, it was a morning not
to be forgotten, and only to be compared with those which followed
throughout the week. The prisoner's sex, her youth, her high bearing,
and the peculiar isolation of her position, without a friend to stand by
her in her need, all appealed to the popular imagination, and produced a
fascination which was only intensified by the equally general feeling
that no one else could have committed the crime. From the judge
downward, all connected with the case were pestered for days beforehand
with more or less unwarrantable applications for admission. And when the
time came, the successful suppliant had to elbow every yard of his way
from Newgate Street or Ludgate Hill; to pass three separate barriers
held by a suspicious constabulary; to obtain the good offices of the
Under Sheriff, through those of his liveried lackeys; and finally to
occupy the least space, on the narrowest of seats, in a varnished stall
filled with curiously familiar faces, within a few feet of the heavily
veiled prisoner in the dock, and not many more from the red-robed judge
upon the bench.
The first to take all this trouble on the Monday morning, and the last
to escape from the foul air (shot by biting draughts) when the court
adjourned, was a white-headed gentleman of striking appearance and
stamina to match; for, undeterred by the experience, he was in like
manner first and last upon each subsequent day. Behind him came and went
the well-known faces, the authors and the actors with a
semi-professional interest in the case; but they were not well known to
the gentleman with the white head. He heard no more than he could help
of their constant whisperings, and, if he knew not at whom he more than
once had occasion to turn and frown, he certainly did not look the man
to care. He had a well-preserved reddish face, with a small mouth of
extraordinary strength, a canine jaw, and singularly noble forehead; but
his most obvious distinction was his full head of snowy hair. The only
hair upon his face, a pair of bushy eyebrows, was so much darker as to
suggest a dye; but the eyes themselves were black as midnight, with a
glint of midnight stars, and of such a subtle inscrutability that a
certain sweetness of expression came only as the last surprise in a face
full of contrast and contradiction.
No one in court had ever seen this man before; no one but the Under
Sheriff learnt his name during the week; but by the third day his
identity was a subject of discussion, both by the professional students
of the human countenance, who sat behind him (balked of their study by
the prisoner's veil), and among the various functionaries who had
already found him as free with a sovereign as most gentlemen are with a
piece of silver. So every day he was ushered with ceremony to the same
place, at the inner end of the lowest row; there he would sit watching
the prisoner, a trifle nearer her than those beside or behind him; and
only once was his attentive serenity broken for an instant by a change
of expression due to any development of the case.
It was not when the prisoner pleaded clearly through her veil, in the
first breathless minutes of all; it was not a little later, when the
urbane counsel for the prosecution, wagging his pince-nez at the jury,
thrilled every other hearer with a mellifluous forecast of the new
evidence to be laid before them. The missing watch and chain had been
found; they would presently be produced, and the jury would have an
opportunity of examining them, together with a plan of the chimney of
the room in which the murder had been committed; for it was there that
they had been discovered upon a second search instituted since the
proceedings before the magistrates. The effect of this announcement may
be conceived; it was the sensation of the opening day. The whole case of
the prosecution rested on the assumption that there had been, on the
part of some inmate of the house, who alone (it was held) could have
committed the murder, a deliberate attempt to give it the appearance of
the work of thieves. Thus far this theory rested on the bare facts that
the glass of the broken window had been found outside, instead of
within; that no other mark of foot or hand had been made or left by the
supposititious burglars; whereas a brace of revolvers had been
discovered in the dead man's bureau, both loaded with such bullets as
the one which had caused his death, while one of them had clearly been
discharged since the last cleaning. The discovery of the missing watch
and chain, in the very chimney of the same room, was a piece of ideal
evidence of the confirmatory kind. But it was not the point that made an
impression on the man with the white hair; it did not increase his
attention, for that would have been impossible; he was perhaps the one
spectator who was not, if only for the moment, perceptibly thrilled.
Thrilling also was the earlier evidence, furnished by maid-servants and
police constables in pairs; but here there was no surprise. The maids
were examined not only as to what they had seen and heard on the night
of the murder--and they seemed to have heard everything except the fatal
shot--but upon the previous relations of their master and mistress--of
which they showed an equally extensive knowledge. The constables were
perforce confined to their own discoveries and observations when the
maids had called them in. But all four witnesses spoke to the prisoner's
behavior when shown the dead body of her husband, and there was the
utmost unanimity in their several tales. The prisoner had exhibited
little or no surprise; it was several minutes before she had uttered a
syllable; and then her first words had been to point out that burglars
alone could have committed the murder.
In cross-examination the senior counsel for the defence thus early
showed his hand; and it was not a strong one to those who knew the game.
A Queen's Counsel, like the leader for the Crown, this was an
altogether different type of lawyer; a younger man, with a more engaging
manner; a more brilliant man, who sought with doubtful wisdom to blind
the jury with his brilliance. His method was no innovation at the Old
Bailey; it was to hold up every witness in turn to the derision and
contempt of the jury and the court. So both the maids were reduced to
tears, and each policeman cleverly insulted as such. But the testimony
of all four remained unshaken; and the judge himself soothed the young
women's feelings with a fatherly word, while wigs were shaken in the
well of the court. That was no road to the soft side of a decent,
conscientious, hard-headed jury, of much the same class as these
witnesses themselves; even the actors and authors had a sound opinion on
the point, without waiting to hear one from the professional gentlemen
in the well. But the man in front with the very white hair--the man who
was always watching the prisoner at the bar--there was about as much
expression of opinion upon his firm, bare face as might be seen through
the sable thickness of her widow's veil.
It was the same next day, when, for some five hours out of a possible
five and a half, the attention of the court was concentrated upon a
point of obviously secondary significance. It was suggested by the
defence that the watch and chain found up the study chimney were not
those worn by the deceased at the time he met his death. The contention
was supported by photographs of Alexander Minchin wearing a watch-chain
that might or might not be of another pattern altogether; expert
opinions were divided on the point; and experts in chains as well as in
photography were eventually called by both sides. Interesting in the
beginning, the point was raised and raised again, and on subsequent
days, until all were weary of the sight of the huge photographic
enlargements, which were handed about the court upon each occasion. Even
the prisoner would droop in her chair when the "chain photograph" was
demanded for the twentieth time by her own unflagging counsel; even the
judge became all but inattentive on the point, before it was finally
dropped on an intimation from the jury that they had made up their minds
about the chains; but no trace of boredom had crossed the keen, alert
face of the unknown gentleman with the snowy hair.
So the case was fought for Mrs. Minchin, tooth and nail indeed, yet
perhaps with more asperity than conviction, and certainly at times upon
points which were hardly worth the fighting. Yet, on the Friday
afternoon, when her counsel at last played his masterstroke, and,
taking advantage of the then new Act, put the prisoner herself in the
witness-box, it was done with the air of a man who is throwing up his
case. The truth could be seen at a glance at the clean-cut, handsome,
but too expressive profile of the crushing cross-examiner of female
witnesses and insolent foe to the police. As it had been possible to
predict, from the mere look with which he had risen to his feet, the
kind of cross-examination in store for each witness called by the
prosecution, so it was obvious now that his own witness had come forward
from her own wilful perversity and in direct defiance of his advice.
It was a dismal afternoon, and the witness-box at the Old Bailey is so
situated that evidence is given with the back to the light; thus, though
her heavy veil was raised at last, and it could be seen that she was
very pale, it was not yet that Rachel Minchin afforded a chance to the
lightning artists of the half-penny press, or even to the students of
physiognomy behind the man with the white hair. This listener did not
lean forward an inch; the questions were answered in so clear a voice as
to render it unnecessary. Yet it was one of these questions, put by her
own counsel, which caused the white-headed man to clap a sudden hand to
his ear, and to incline that ear as though the answer could not come
without some momentary hesitation or some change of tone. Rachel had
told sadly but firmly of her final quarrel with her husband,
incidentally, but without embarrassment, revealing its cause. A neighbor
was dangerously ill, whom she had been going to nurse that night, when
her husband met her at the door and forbade her to do so.
"Was this neighbor a young man?"
"Hardly more than a boy," said Rachel, "and as friendless as ourselves."
"Was your husband jealous of him?"
"I had no idea of it until that night."
"Did you find it out then?"
"I did, indeed!"
"And where had your husband been spending the evening?"
"I had no idea of that either--until he told me he had been watching the
house--and why!"
Though the man was dead, she could not rid her voice of its scorn; and
presently, with bowed head, she was repeating his last words to her. A
cold thrill ran through the court.
"And was that the last time you saw him alive?" inquired counsel, his
face lightening in ready apprehension of the thrill, and his assurance
coming back to him on the spot, as though it were he who had insisted
on putting his client in the box.
But to this there was no immediate answer; for it was here that the
white-haired man raised his hand to his ear; and the event was exactly
as he seemed to have anticipated.
"Was that the last time you saw your husband alive?" repeated Rachel's
counsel, in the winning accents and with the reassuring face that he
could assume without an effort at his will.
"It was," said Rachel, after yet another moment's thought.
It was then that the white-headed man dropped his eyes for once; and for
once the thin, hard lines of his mouth relaxed in a smile that seemed to
epitomize all the evil that was in his face, and to give it forth in one
sudden sour quintessence.