The Bondboy Page 30

  On that afternoon memorable for Joe Newbolt, and all who gathered at the court-house to hear him, Uncle John learned of the death of Isom Chase. The manner of his death was not revealed to him in the printed slips of board, and Uncle John did not ask, very likely accepting it as an event which comes to all men, and for which he, himself, had long been prepared.

  After that fact had been imparted to the blind preacher, the lawyer placed under his eager fingers a slip which read:

  “Did you ever witness Isom Chase’s will?”

  Uncle John took his slate and wrote:

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Thirty or forty years ago,” wrote Uncle John–what was a decade more or less to him? “When he joined the Order.”

  Uncle John wrote this with his face bright in the joy of being able to hold intelligent communication once more.

  More questioning brought out the information that it was a rule of the secret brotherhood which Isom had joined in those far days, for each candidate for initiation to make his will before the administration of the rites.

  “What a sturdy old goat that must have been!” thought the lawyer.

  “Do you remember to whom Isom left his property in that will?” read the pasteboard under the old man’s hands.

  Uncle John smiled, reminiscently, and nodded.

  “To his son,” he wrote. “Isom was the name.”

  “Do you know when and where that son was born?”

  Uncle John’s smile was broader, and of purely humorous cast, as he bent over the slate and began to write carefully, in smaller hand than usual, as if he had a great deal to say.

  “He never was born,” he wrote, “not up to the time that I lost the world. Isom was a man of Belial all his days that I knew him. He was set on a son from his wedding day.

  “The last time I saw him I joked him about that will, and told him he would have to change it. He said no, it would stand that way. He said he would get a son yet. Abraham was a hundred when Isaac was born, he reminded me. Did Isom get him?”

  “No,” was the word that Uncle John’s fingers found. He shook his head, sadly.

  “He worked and saved for him all his life,” the old man wrote. “He set his hope of that son above the Lord.”

  Uncle John was given to understand the importance of his information, and that he might be called upon to give it over again in court.

  He was greatly pleased with the prospect of publicly displaying his new accomplishment. The lawyer gave him a printed good-bye, shook him by the hand warmly, and left him poring over his ponderous book, his dumb lips moving as his fingers spelled out the words.

  They were near the end and the quieting of all this flurry that had risen over the property of old Isom Chase, said the lawyer to himself as he rode back to town to acquaint his client with her good fortune. There was nothing in the way of her succession to the property now. The probate court would, without question or doubt, throw out that ridiculous document through which old Judge Little hoped to grease his long wallet.

  With Isom’s will would disappear from the public notice the one testimony of his only tender sentiment, his only human softness; a sentiment and a softness which had been born of a desire and fostered by a dream.

  Strange that the hard old man should have held to that dream so stubbornly and so long, striving to gain for it, hoarding to enrich it, growing bitterer for its long coming, year by year. And at last he had gone out in a flash, leaving this one speaking piece of evidence of feeling and tenderness behind.

  Perhaps Isom Chase would have been different, reflected the lawyer, if fate had yielded him his desire and given him a son; perhaps it would have softened his hand and mellowed his heart in his dealings with those whom he touched; perhaps it would have lifted him above the narrow strivings which had atrophied his virtues, and let the sunlight into the dark places of his soul.

  So communing with himself, he arrived in town. The people were coming out of the court-house, the lowering gray clouds were settling mistily. But it was a clearing day for his client; he hastened on to tell her of the turn fortune had made in her behalf.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XX

  “THE PENALTY IS DEATH!”

  When court convened the following morning for the last act in the prolonged drama of Joe Newbolt’s trial, the room was crowded even beyond the congestion of the previous day.

  People felt that Sam Lucas was not through with the accused lad yet; they wanted to be present for the final and complete crucifixion. It was generally believed that, under the strain of Lucas’s bombardment, Joe would break down that day.

  The interference of Alice Price, unwarranted and beyond reason, the public said, had given the accused a respite, but nothing more. Whatever mistaken notion she had in doing it was beyond them, for it was inconceivable that she could be wiser than another, and discover virtues in the accused that older and wiser heads had overlooked. Well, after the rebuke that Judge Maxwell had given her, she wouldn’t meddle again soon. It was more than anybody expected to see her in court again. No, indeed, they said; that would just about settle her.

  Such a fine girl, too, and such a blow to her father. It was a piece of forwardness that went beyond the imagination of anybody in the town. Could it be that Alice Price had become tainted with socialism or woman’s rights, or any of those wild theories which roared around the wide world outside Shelbyville and created such commotion and unrest? Maybe some of those German doctrines had got into her head, such as that young Professor Gobel, whom the regents discharged from the college faculty last winter, used to teach.

  It was too bad; nearly everybody regretted it, for it took a girl a long time to live down a thing like that in Shelbyville. But the greatest shock and disappointment of all was, although nobody would admit it, that she had shut Joe’s mouth on the very thing that the public ear was itching to hear. She had cheated the public of its due, and taken the food out of its mouth when it was ravenous. That was past forgiveness.

  Dark conjectures were hatched, therefore, and scandalous hints were set traveling. Mothers said, well, they thanked their stars that she hadn’t married their sons; and fathers philosophized that you never could tell how a filly would turn out till you put the saddle on her and tried her on the road. And the public sighed and gasped and shook its head, and was comfortably shocked and satisfyingly scandalized.

  The sheriff brought the prisoner into court that morning with free hands. Joe’s face seemed almost beatific in its exalted serenity as he saluted his waiting mother with a smile. To those who had seen the gray pallor of his strained face yesterday, it appeared as if he had cast his skin during the night, and with it his harassments and haunting fears, and had come out this morning as fresh and unscarred as a child.

  Joe stood for a moment running his eyes swiftly over the room. When they found the face they sought a warm light shot into them as if he had turned up the wick of his soul. She was not so near the front as on the day before, yet she was close enough for eye to speak to eye.

  People marked the exchange of unspoken salutations between them, and nudged each other, and whispered: “There she is!” They wondered how she was going to cut up today, and whether it would not end for her by getting herself sent to jail, along with that scatter-feathered young crow whom she seemed to have taken into her heart.

  Ollie was present, although Joe had not expected to see her, he knew not why. She was sitting in the first row of benches, so near him he could have reached over and taken her hand. He bowed to her; she gave him a sickly smile, which looked on her pale face like a dim breaking of sun through wintry clouds.

  To the great surprise and greater disappointment of the public in attendance upon the trial, Sam Lucas announced, when court opened, that the state would not proceed with the cross-examination of the defendant. Hammer rose with that and stated that the defense rested. He had no more witnesses to call.

  Hammer wore a hopeful look over his f
eatures that morning, a reflection, perhaps, of his client’s unworried attitude. He had not been successful in his attempt to interview Alice Price, although he had visited her home the night before. Colonel Price had received him with the air of one who stoops to contact with an inferior, and assured him that he was delegated by Miss Price–which was true–to tell Mr. Hammer that she knew nothing favorable to his client’s cause; that her caution in his moment of stress had nothing behind it but the unaccountable impulse of a young and sympathetic girl.

  Hammer accepted that explanation with a large corner of reservation in his mind. He knew that she had visited the jail, and it was his opinion that his client had taken her behind the door of his confidence, which he had closed to his attorney. Alice Price knew something, she must know something, Hammer said. On that belief he based his intention of a motion for a new trial in case of conviction. He would advance the contention that new evidence had been discovered; he would then get Alice Price into a corner by herself somewhere and make her tell all she knew.

  That was why Hammer smiled and felt quite easy, and turned over in his mind the moving speech that he had prepared for the jury. He was glad of the opportunity which that great gathering presented. It was a plowed field waiting the grain of Hammer’s future prosperity.

  Hammer kept turning his eyes toward Alice Price, where she sat in the middle of the court-room beside the colonel. He had marked an air of uneasiness, a paleness as of suppressed anxiety in the girl’s face. Now and then he saw her look toward the door where Captain Taylor stood guard, in his G. A. R. uniform today, as if it were a gala occasion and demanded decorations.

  For whom could she be straining and watching? Hammer wondered. Ah, no doubt about it, that girl knew a great deal more of the inner-working of his client’s mind than he did. But she couldn’t keep her secret. He’d get it out of her after filing his motion for a new trial–already he was looking ahead to conviction, feeling the weakness of his case–and very likely turn the sensation of a generation loose in Shelbyville when he called her to the witness-stand. That was the manner of Hammer’s speculations as he watched her turning her eyes toward the door.

  Ollie sat beside her mother, strangely downcast for all the brightening of her affairs. Joe had passed through the fire and come out true, although he might have faltered and betrayed her if it had not been for the sharp warning of Alice Price, cast to him like a rope to a drowning man. Like Hammer, like a thousand others, she wondered why Alice had uttered that warning. What did she know? What did she suspect? It was certain, above everything else, that she knew Joe was guiltless. She knew that he was not maintaining silence on his own account.

  How did she know? Had Joe told her? Ollie struggled with the doubt and perplexity of it, and the fear which lay deep in her being made her long to cringe there, and shield her face as from fire. She could not do that, any more than she had succeeded in her desire to remain away from court that morning. There was no need for her there, her testimony was in, they were through with her. Yet she could not stay away. She must be there for the final word, for the last sight of Joe’s prison-white face.

  She must whip herself to sit there as boldly as innocence and cheat the public into accepting the blanched cheek of fear for the wearing strain of sorrow; she must sit there until the end. Then she could rise up and go her way, no matter how it turned out for Joe. She could leave there with her guilty secret in her heart and the shame of her cowardice burning like a smothered coal in her breast.

  It would hurt to know that Joe had gone to prison for her sake, even though he once had stepped into the doorway of her freedom and cut off her light. The knowledge that Alice Price loved him, and that Joe loved her, for she had read the secret in their burning eyes, would make it doubly hard. She would be cheating him of liberty and robbing him of love. Still, they would be no more than even, at that, said she, with a recurring sweep of bitterness. Had Joe not denied them both to her? All of this she turned in her mind as she sat waiting for court to open that somber morning.

  The rain in yesterday’s threat had come; it was streaking the windows gray, and the sound of the wind was in the trees, waving their bare limbs as in fantastic grief against the dull clouds. There was no comfort in youth and health and prettiness of face and form; no pride in possession of lands and money, when a hot and tortuous thing like conscience was lying so ill-concealed behind the thin wall of her breast.

  She thought bitterly of Curtis Morgan, who had failed her so completely. Never again in the march of her years would she need the support of his hand and comforting affection as she needed it then. But he had gone away and forgotten, like a careless hunter who leaves his uncovered fire after him to spring in the wind and go raging with destructive curse through the forest. He had struck the spark to warm himself a night in its pleasurable glow; the hands of ten thousand men could not quench its flame today.

  Judge Maxwell had been conferring with the lawyers in the case these few minutes, setting a limit to their periods of oration before the jury, to which both sides agreed after the usual protestations. The court-room was very quiet; expectancy sat upon the faces of all who waited when Sam Lucas, prosecuting attorney, rose and began his address to the jury.

  He began by calling attention to what he termed the “peculiar atrocity of this crime,” and the circumstances surrounding it. He pointed out that there could have been no motive of revenge behind the act, for the evidence had shown, even the testimony of the defendant himself had shown, that the relations between Chase and his bondman were friendly. Isom Chase had been kind to him; he had reposed his entire trust in him, and had gone away to serve his country as a juryman, leaving everything in his hands.

  “And he returned from that duty, gentlemen,” said he, “to meet death at the treacherous hands of the man whom he had trusted, there upon his own threshold.

  “When Isom Chase was found there by his neighbor, Sol Greening, gentlemen, this bag of money was clasped to his lifeless breast. Where did it come from? What was Isom Chase doing with it there at that hour of the night? This defendant has testified that he does not know. Did Isom Chase carry it with him when he entered the house? Not likely.

  “You have heard the testimony of the bankers of this city to the effect that he carried no deposit with any of them. Isom Chase had returned to his home that fatal night from serving on a jury in this court-house. That duty held him there until past ten o’clock, as the records show. Where did that bag of gold come from? What was it doing there? This defendant has sworn that he never saw it before, that he knows nothing at all about it. Yet he admits that ‘words’ passed between him and Isom Chase that night.

  “What those words were he has locked up in the secret darkness of his guilty breast. He has refused to tell you what they were, refused against the kindly counsel of the court, the prayers of his aged mother, the advice of his own attorney, and of his best friends. Joe Newbolt has refused to repeat those words to you, gentlemen of the jury, but I will tell you what the substance of them was.”

  The prosecutor made a dramatic pause; he flung his long, fair locks back from his forehead; he leveled his finger at Joe as if he held a weapon aimed to shoot him through the heart.

  Mrs. Newbolt looked at the prosecutor searchingly. She could not understand why the judge allowed him to say a thing like that. Joe displayed no indication of the turmoil of his heart. But the light was fading out of his face, the gray mist of pain was sweeping over it again.

  “Those words, gentlemen of the jury,” resumed the prosecutor, “were words of accusation from the lips of Isom Chase when he entered that door and saw this man, his trusted servant, making away with that bag of money, the hoarded savings of Isom Chase through many an industrious year.

  “I tell you, gentlemen of the jury, that this defendant, afraid of the consequences of his act when he found himself discovered in the theft, and was compelled to surrender the money to its lawful owner–I tell you then, in that evil moment of pa
ssion and disappointment, this defendant snatched that rifle from the wall and shot honest, hardworking old Isom Chase down like a dog!”

  “No, no!” cried Mrs. Newbolt, casting out her hands in passionate denial. “Joe didn’t do it!”

  “Your honor,” began the prosecutor, turning to the court with an expression of injury in his voice which was almost tearful, “am I to be interrupted––”

  “Madam, you must not speak again,” admonished the judge. “Mr. Sheriff, see that the order is obeyed.”

  The sheriff leaned over.

  “Ma’am, I’ll have to put you out of here if you do that agin,” said he.

  Joe placed his hand on his mother’s shoulder and whispered to her. She nodded, as if in obedience to his wish, but she sat straight and alert, her dark eyes glowing with anger as she looked at the prosecutor.

  The prosecutor was composing himself to proceed.

  “This defendant had robbed old Isom Chase of his hoarded gold, gentlemen of the jury, and that was not all. I tell you, gentlemen, Joe Newbolt had robbed that trusting old man of more than his gold. He had robbed him of his sacred honor!”

  Hammer entered vociferous objections. Nothing to maintain this charge had been proved by the state, said he. He insisted that the jury be instructed to disregard what had been said, and the prosecutor admonished by the court to confine himself to the evidence.

  The court ruled accordingly.

  “There has been ample evidence on this point,” contended the prosecutor. “The conspiracy of silence entered into between this defendant and the widow of Isom Chase–entered into and maintained throughout this trial–is sufficient to brand them guilty of this charge before the world. More; when Sol Greening’s wife arrived a few minutes after the shooting, Mrs. Chase was fully dressed, in a dress, gentlemen of the jury, that it would have taken her longer to put on––”