CHAPTER XIII.
Justice Nods.
Jack Wolvert did not put in an appearance at dinner and Mrs. Atterbury explained that he was suffering from one of his severe headaches and had taken an opiate. Her manner gave no indication that she possessed an inkling of the truth, but Betty's apprehensions were not lulled into a false security. That Wolvert had not immediately betrayed her in blind rage argued that he was biding his own time for a personal revenge all the more complete and she realized that when the hour came she could expect no mercy.
Madame Cimmino's dull eyes glowered at her in undiminished animosity and suspicion, but she forced herself to a show of civility in the presence of her hostess; and in the greater danger which menaced her Betty gave little heed to the woman who looked upon her as a rival.
The following day, however, Wolvert reappeared, his debonair, ironic spirit of raillery unquenched. There was an unaccustomed pallor on his dark face and it was noticeable that he held one arm stiffly, but to Madame Cimmino's solicitous queries he responded only with a petulant shrug.
Throughout the morning meal he kept up a running fire of facetious comment directed with suave impertinence at Betty and she seized the first opportunity to retire to her work in the library. She had anticipated this attitude on his part but her nerves were beginning to play her false and she wondered despairingly how long the crisis would be delayed. For the first time she felt a doubt of herself; not that her resolution should falter but lest her strength fail under the strain and at the crucial moment sheer weakness rob her purpose of its fulfillment.
Mrs. Atterbury followed her into the library as she seated herself before the desk.
"Not that this morning, my dear." She shook her head with a slow smile. "The letters must wait. Have you ever been in a courtroom, Betty?"
"No." The girl turned to her, wonderingly. "There is a county court house at home, but I have never been inside it. Do people go here—women, I mean—unless——?"
She faltered and Mrs. Atterbury completed the question for her.
"Unless they are prisoners or witnesses, you mean? Indeed, yes! There are seats apportioned off for spectators and a particularly grewsome and revolting murder trial will bring out as many feminine auditors as a fashionable divorce. As you know, I personally avoid all horrors, but there is a case now before the Bar which presents some very interesting features to a student of human nature. A poor wretch named Huston is on trial for the murder of his wife, who by all accounts richly deserved to be done away with. Would you mind running down there for an hour this morning, my dear? Do you think you could venture into the presence of a murderer without succumbing to hysterics?"
"I think so," the girl responded quietly. "In all probability I may have been in the presence of one before this, without knowing it."
"What a strange thought!" Mrs. Atterbury eyed her keenly. "You have an odd philosophy all your own, as I have discovered; but what put such an idea into your head, Betty!"
"The very people one passes in the street may have murder in their hearts or upon their consciences. Who can tell?" Betty paused and drew a deep breath. "Consider the number of murder mysteries which are never solved; this Breckinridge case, for instance."
"What do you mean?" Mrs. Atterbury shifted her gaze to the window.
"Haven't you been reading about it in the papers?" persisted the girl, inwardly quaking at her own temerity, but determined to discover if the woman before her would betray any knowledge of what had taken place beneath her roof. "They call it the greatest sensation of years."
"I remember the name, but I carefully avoided the details." Her employer observed coolly. "That sort of thing repels me and it is not from any interest in this present trial that I am sending you there this morning. There will be a man in the courtroom who has a message for me and for certain reasons, as on the other occasions when you have acted for me, it is inadvisable for me to appear personally in the transaction. I have tested you, my dear, and I feel that you are to be trusted, at least as far as is compatible with my oath. We are all members of a powerful secret organization working for broad humanitarian ends. I need not assure you that there is nothing unlawful about it, for you can realize that I would not lend my name or influence to any purpose no matter how charitable, the methods of which could be questioned. It is necessary, however, for diplomatic and political considerations, that the work shall proceed as quietly as possible until the strained relations which exist between certain European powers shall have been adjusted. That is all I am at liberty to tell you now, but later everything will be made plain to you, and you will never regret the slight services you have rendered."
"I am sure that I shall not," Betty remarked quietly. "It is good of you to take me into your confidence, Mrs. Atterbury, and you know that I will respect it, but it was unnecessary as far as I am concerned. It is enough for me that you wished me to go upon these errands."
"You are a model!" There was unusual warmth in her tone, but her eyes, as they rested upon the girl, narrowed with a slow, amused contempt. "Unquestioning obedience is rare and you will find it a valuable asset. Now, my dear, I shall want you to be in the courtroom by eleven. Dress very plainly; your old dark cloak will do. Present this card at the door and you will be ushered into a seat which has been reserved for you. Remain until court adjourns at the end of the morning session and hang back until you are among the last of the spectators to leave. A man will approach you as before and give you a letter for me. Take no more notice of him than you did of the others, and come straight home. You must use the public conveyances, as the car is being overhauled, but I will direct you when you are ready."
The route laid down to her was even more circuitous than that of the previous Sunday and Betty followed it faithfully, keeping a sharp lookout for a possible trailing taxicab, but those which surrounded her in the mazes of traffic seemed bent solely on their own affairs and nowhere did she glimpse the kindly, keen gray eyes of Herbert Ross.
However, the idle artisan was again beneath the lamp-post at the gate and a man in overalls with a plumber's kit emerged from a house midway of the block and sauntered after her, boarding the same car. When she mounted the steps of the courthouse, after many changes of conveyance and crosstown divergencies, a man brushed against her with a swift glance at her scarred cheek. Without the kit of tools and buttoned into a greatcoat which covered him to his knees, she yet had no difficulty in recognizing in him the erstwhile plumber's assistant, and Betty's lips tightened.
Others, then, besides Ross held her under espionage, and the mysterious words of the little dressmaker, Miss Pope, flashed across her memory: "Before you know it you'll be caught, too, and you'll never be able to get free!" Had Mrs. Atterbury employed her in these errands not only for their accomplishment but to identify her secretary irrevocably with the organization of which she had spoken? Was she to be scapegoat as well as catspaw? The price she must pay for her temerity was looming more sinisterly before her with each passing hour, but her will was all the more indomitably fixed. Though she stood within the very shadow of the law she would still fight on.
Finding her way with some difficulty to the grand jury room, Betty presented her pass to the gray-haired doorman. She had received it in a sealed envelope from Mrs. Atterbury and had made no attempt to tamper with it, but as the court attendant extricated the card and read the words pencilled upon it he eyed her with amazement, in which an added respect was mingled, and without a word led her to a seat apart from the other spectators.
It was near the press rail, facing the jury box and almost on a line with the Bench, beside a narrow aisle leading to a single door. Betty seated herself and once again her mission was temporarily forgotten in absorbed interest in the scene before her.
She had no difficulty in picking out the prisoner; a mild-faced, sandy-haired little man, shrunken and bowed in his place beside his lawyers. Just back of him sat a slender woman in rusty black, whose face was hidden from Betty's gaze and whose tremulous hand reached out in pathetic tenderness to the man before her.
Betty looked again at the prisoner and the puzzled look in her eyes gave place to a flash of recognition. She leaned forward in her chair, agape with amazement and startled interest, until the consciousness of shrewd glances from the assembled representatives of the press made her draw back in belated caution.
Vaguely, almost subconsciously, she observed the stolid jury and the stern, inflexible countenance of the judge. The faces of the spectators, too, passed before her in meaningless review, not one impressing itself individually upon her agitated mind.
As the case progressed, and witness succeeded witness, it became evident that the whole defense hinged upon an alibi which the prisoner's attorneys found difficulty in proving. The testimony offered was inconclusive and the prosecutor riddled it with ease or blasted it with deftly turned ridicule.
The hideous story was gradually unfolded in all its revolting detail, and Betty's heart sank within her as the evidence, circumstantial, but damning, was heaped upon the prisoner's bowed head. The little woman behind him did not waver in her attitude of protective tenderness and something in her tremulous, almost furtive, gestures appealed to Betty as being vaguely familiar, although the face was still turned from her.
A particularly brilliant shaft of ironic wit from the prosecutor created a stir of amusement among the spectators and as the clerk of the court rapped for order, Betty's eyes again sought the judge. Beneath the huge mural painting of Justice he sat immovable, his thin lips set in a straight line, his cold, gray eyes fastened with grim intentness upon the prisoner. No mercy tempered his jurisdiction, she felt certain; no slightest benefit of a doubt would be permitted to weigh in the scales for any unfortunate mortal whose life might hang in the balance. She shuddered, her gaze once more descending to the little ignominiously isolated group below and at that instant the woman behind the prisoner turned her head and the cold light from the tall window fell full upon her face.
It was little Miss Pope! The timid, nervous, self-effacing seamstress who had warned her of danger and begged her to leave almost beneath the argus eyes of Mrs. Atterbury, and whose strange words had returned to the girl's mind within the hour, after a lapse of many eventful days. What connection could exist between her and the wretched creature at the Bar? Were Mrs. Atterbury's affairs also somehow involved in this tragic crisis?
Her employer had declared herself uninterested in the case herself and no mention had been made of Miss Pope, yet she must have known the girl would recognize her. The letter was to be delivered by a man; could it be that it would come from the prisoner himself or one of his friends? He seemed singularly alone in his trouble and sat as if hypnotized, gazing straight before him in a dull stupor of misery. Once his eyes met Betty's and the girl swiftly paled, but there was no consciousness of recognition in their fixed stare.
Until the morning session ended the girl sat tense and motionless, listening to the testimony, but only receiving a general impression of its tenor. A conflict was raging within her, and she faced the most vital problem which had ever presented itself for her decision. Heretofore her path, beset with difficulties as it was, had been plainly marked before her and her will had driven her on relentlessly over every obstacle, but now she had reached without warning an insurmountable barrier and she hesitated which course to pursue around it.
A rustle of papers and shuffling of feet in the press enclosure and a concerted movement among the spectators aroused her from her thoughts and apprised her that court had adjourned. The judge rose in all the awful majesty of his black robes and sweeping down from the Bench, came toward her along the narrow aisle. Betty noted the stern preoccupation in his averted eyes and the grim, inexorable set of his lean, shaven jaw and her vision blurred in pity for the hapless victim of circumstances whose doom seemed already sealed.
The judge passed her so closely that his robe fluttered against her knee; then he disappeared through the door which led to his private chambers. Betty, fumbling for her glove, glanced down into her lap and then sat as if petrified with her eyes fairly starting from her head.
There upon her knee, half-hidden by her muff, lay a small thick envelope, its square, blank expanse staring up at her in uncompromising self-evidence! The judge himself! Mrs. Atterbury's organization must be indeed powerful when it could command the services of an administrator of justice!
Betty slipped the envelope into the capacious pocket of her cloak and rose as if in a trance. The shock of surprise had fairly taken her breath away and she strove vainly to collect herself as she lingered in obedience to her employer's instructions until only a few stragglers remained in the courtroom. Little knots of people had gathered in the corridor outside and she was threading her way through them when a convulsive clutch fell upon her arm, and looking up hastily, she found herself face to face with Miss Pope.
The little dressmaker's eyes were reddened and sunken and she seemed to have aged many years in the brief period that had elapsed since their last meeting.
"Miss Shaw!" The name fell from her lips in a quivering whisper. "You remember me, don't you? I made those dresses for you at Mrs. Atterbury's——"
"Yes." Betty took her hand in a little sympathetic squeeze. "I remember you, of course, Miss Pope. I recognized you in the courtroom and I am so sorry that a friend of yours is in trouble."
"He is my brother, and he is innocent!" The whisper changed to a low wail, and she clung to the girl's arm as if for support. "Oh, Miss, you don't know what it means to sit there day after day and listen to them hounding him to his death, knowing all the time that a word would save him! But there's nobody to say it, and they'll send him to the chair; him that never hurt a fly, he was so tender-hearted!"
"Your brother!" Betty murmured. "But the name—?"
"My half-brother, I should say. He's fifteen years younger than me, but he's all I have in the world and I love him like a mother and sister in one. Oh, Miss, if you only knew——!"
"We cannot talk here." Betty interrupted the little woman's grief-stricken outburst and drew her aside nervously. "I have not much time, I must return almost at once, but I should so like to comfort you. You look faint and ill; isn't there a lunchroom near where we can get some coffee?"
"There's a little place just around the corner where I usually go, but I can't eat. It's just as if my heart had settled up in my throat and closed it." Her face was working piteously. "I shall go crazy if I can't talk to somebody, Miss. I feel as if each hour was the end; that I couldn't go on any longer."
Betty led the way to the modest little restaurant and when they were seated opposite each other at the narrow, linoleum topped table and the order given, she leaned compassionately toward her sorrowful guest.
"Tell me what you can, Miss Pope. I sympathize with you deeply, more deeply than you know, and I would do anything that I could to help you in your trouble. I have not forgotten that you tried to do me a good turn, even if you could not explain, and I am grateful."
Miss Pope's faded eyes lighted with sudden interest.
"You're still there, in that house? You haven't been dismissed yet, and you are free to come and go as you please! Oh, Miss Shaw, keep your eyes open and think twice of anything you are asked to do. Don't let yourself be led into what you don't understand. I'm talking too much, I know, but I can't seem to even think straight these days." She paused, and the old look of hopeless misery dulled her eyes once more. "Since Robbie's wife was killed, and they took him away, it seems as if I'd lived in a nightmare."
"How did it all happen?" asked Betty.
"Robbie and his wife lived apart. She's dead, and the least said about her the better, but she was a disgrace to a decent man. One morning, about three months ago, they found her dead in her bed with her head beaten in. Robbie was questioned, but he didn't know anything about it, he hadn't seen her in nearly a year. He was left free then and the police went after another man, but, because they couldn't find him, they fastened on Robbie again. You heard the evidence this morning, Miss. He has a temper, for all he's so meek-looking, and he had cause enough to kill her, Heaven knows, but he never did it, never, although he had made threats, like anybody who is tried beyond endurance."
She paused in her rapid flow of words and wiped her eyes on a wisp of handkerchief while Betty sat silent, with every nerve taut.
"There was a terrible snowstorm, the biggest one of the year, on the night she was killed," Miss Pope went on. "Robbie is the chauffeur for the King family, of Hempstead; it's Mr. King who is paying for the defense. He ordered Robbie to take the car into town that night to meet some folks who were arriving from the West, but Robbie never got there; he was stalled in a snowdrift all night on a lonely part of the road. That's why he's got no alibi."
"Did no one see him or talk to him?" Betty's voice was low and strained.
"Only one person and we can't find her. She won't come forward and speak for him; most likely she forgot all about him an hour after, although we've advertised and done everything we can."
"Does he know who she is?" Betty asked, her eyes upon her plate.
"No, Miss. It was some little time before he got stalled, when he was plowing along in the storm through that string of fashionable colonies on the North Shore that run together with no beginning or end. He doesn't rightly know where he was, when somebody called out to him and he stopped to see a young lady beside the road in a little run-about car that had got stuck. The engine was frozen and Robbie offered to tow her home, although it would have been a hard job. The young lady said it wasn't necessary, she didn't mind leaving the car there all night if he would take her to where she was going; that it wasn't far. She perched herself up beside Robbie at the wheel and directed him on the way, and a couple of miles further on he set her down at a big house. He wouldn't know it again if he saw it, because the snow was driving so hard against the lights that he could only see a few feet in front of him. The young lady offered him some money but he wouldn't take it. Oh, if she'd only come forward now!"
Betty looked up slowly.
"Maybe she will. It isn't too late even now."
"We've about given up hope." Miss Pope shook her head. "Robbie was in prison waiting for his trial when I came to sew for you, but the lawyers were so sure the young lady would be found and his name cleared that I wasn't worrying, except about the disgrace of his being suspected at all."
"Does Mrs. Atterbury know of your trouble?" The question came as an afterthought.
"No. The name being different she wouldn't connect it with me, and I guess she's got enough on her own mind. Why should I have told her? There would have been no help from her, even if she could have given it. She's too careful about keeping her own skirts clean."
There was concentrated bitterness in the dreary voice, and Betty regarded her expectantly; but the little woman's thoughts had evidently reverted to her own trouble and she said no more.
The girl comforted her as well as she was able, and took leave of her at the door of the restaurant, to continue her homeward way, sunk in a horrified perplexity which deepened with each passing moment.
The story she had just heard weighed upon her spirit and she shrank from thought of the man whose life hung on an unspoken word. Her own problem had faded into insignificance in the face of this potential tragedy and had she been personally involved in it, she could not have hoped more fervently for the prisoner's acquittal, even as she realized its futility. Would the mysterious young woman speak? Betty herself wondered.