Chapter VIThe reporter looked from the clock to the red-headed girl and back again, with an expression in which consternation and irritation were neatly blended. The red-headed girl’s hat was well over one eye, her nose was undeniably pink, she had a fluff of hair over her ear, a fiery spot burning in either cheek and two or more in her eyes. The clock said ten-thirty-five.“Well, you’re a fine one,” said the reporter in tones that belied the statement. He removed an overcoat, a woolly scarf, a portable typewriter, seven tabloid newspapers, and a gray felt hat from the seat next to him and waited virtuously for appropriate expressions of gratitude. None were forthcoming. The red-headed girl scrambled unceremoniously over his feet, sank into the seat, and abandoned herself to a series of minute but audible pants varied by an occasional subdued sniff.“What in the world—” began the reporter.“Don’t speak to me!” said the red-headed girl in a small fierce voice, and added even more fiercely: “What’s happened?”“That’s what I want to know!” remarked the reporter with some emphasis. “What in the world was that perfectly ungodly racket going on outside in the hall?”“Me,” said the red-headed girl. “Who’s been on the stand?”“You? For the Lord’s sake, what were you doing?”“Screaming,” said the red-headed girl. “Who’s been on the stand?”“Just a guy from a prison out West to prove that Orsini had served a jail sentence for robbery. What were you screaming about?”“Because they wouldn’t let me in. . . . Who’s on now?”“That red-headed fellow, Leo Fox, from the gas station. He’s through with his direct, and Farr has him now. . . . Why wouldn’t they let you in?”“Because—— No, I can’t tell you all that now. Later—at lunch. Listen, won’t you——”“It was Saturday night, wasn’t it, Mr. Fox?”“Sure it was Saturday night.”Mr. Fox, who was lavishly decorated with freckles, whose coat was about three inches too tight for him, and whose tie was about three shades too green, shifted his chewing gum dexterously to the other cheek and kept a wary eye on Mr. Farr.“There were a good many cars getting gas at your station on fine Saturday nights in June, weren’t there?”“Sure there were.”“Yet this car and its occupants are indelibly stamped on your memory?”“If you mean do I remember the both of them, sure I do. They wasn’t just getting gas; the dame—the lady—she wanted a drink of water, and it was me who got it for her. That was what made me remember them, see?”“And all you know is that it was some time after nine, because you didn’t come on duty until nine?”“That’s right. I don’t never come on until then; and sometimes I’m a couple of minutes late, at that.”“But it might have been two minutes past nine instead of twenty-five minutes past, as Mrs. Ives claims?”“No, sir, it couldn’t have been nothing of the kind. People don’t get eight gallons of gas, and pay for it, and get change, and ask for glasses of water and get them, and drink them and get away all in two minutes. It must have been more than ten minutes past, no matter if they were the first ones to come along after I checked in.”Mr. Farr contemplated him with marked disfavour. “I didn’t ask you for a speech, Mr. Fox. The only fact you are able to state to us positively as to the time is that you came on duty at nine o’clock, and that Mrs. Ives and Mr. Bellamy appeared after you had arrived.”“That’s right.”“Then that will be all. You may stand down.”“Call Mr. Patrick Ives,” said Mr. Lambert.“Mr. Patrick Ives!”From the corner by the window where he had sat, hour after hour and day after day, with his mother’s small gloved hand resting lightly and reassuringly on his knee, Patrick Ives rose and moved slowly forward toward the witness box.How tall he was, thought the red-headed girl—how tall and young, for all the haggard misery and bitterness of that white and reckless face. He stood staring about him for a moment, his black head towering inches above those about him; then, with one swift stride, he was in his place.“Mr. Ives, will you be good enough to tell us as concisely as possible just what happened on the night of June 19, 1926, from the time that you arrived at your home to the time that you retired for the night?”“Oh,” said Patrick Ives indifferently, “I doubt whether I could do anything along that line at all. I have a notoriously bad memory, and I’d simply be faking a lot of stuff that wouldn’t do either of us any good. Besides, most of that ground has been gone over by other witnesses, hasn’t it?”The casual insolence of the conversational tone had had the effect of literally hypnotizing Mr. Lambert, Mr. Farr, and the redoubtable Carver himself into a state of stupefied inaction. As the voice ceased, however, all three emerged from coma into violent energy. It was difficult to tell which of the three was the more profoundly moved, though Mr. Lambert’s protestations were the most piercing. Fortified by his gavel, however, Judge Carver managed to batter the rest into silence.“Let that answer be stricken from the record! It is totally improper, Mr. Ives. This is not a debating society. You will kindly refrain from expressing your opinions on any subject whatsoever, and will confine yourself to the briefest replies possible.”“If Mr. Lambert will put a definite question to me I’ll see whether I can give him a definite answer,” replied Mr. Ives, looking entirely unchastened and remotely diverted.“Very well,” said Lambert, choking with ill-concealed wrath. “Will you be so kind as to tell us whether anything out of the ordinary occurred during that evening, Mr. Ives?”“No.”“Before dinner?”“No.”“After dinner?”“No.”Mr. Ives flung him the monosyllables like so many very bare bones tossed at a large, hungry, snapping dog.“Miss Page testified that she met you at the nursery door with a ship model in your hand at about eight o’clock. Is that correct?”“Yes.”“When did you see her again?”“About a quarter of an hour later.”“Was her testimony as to what followed correct?”“Oh, it was correct enough as far as it went.”“It went further than she told us?”“Considerably,” said Mr. Ives, a grimly reminiscent smile flitting across his haggard young face.“In what direction?”“In the direction of violent hysterics and general lunacy,” said Mr. Ives unfeelingly.“What was the cause of these—er—manifestations?”“Miss Page,” said Mr. Ives with great clarity and precision, “is a high-strung, unbalanced, hysterical little idiot Mrs. Ives had——”“Does Your Honour consider that a responsive reply?” inquired Mr. Farr with mild interest.“The Court has already warned the witness to keep strictly to the question. It repeats that warning. As for the reply, it may be stricken from the record.”“I consider it an absolutely responsive reply,” cried Mr. Lambert with some heat. “Mr. Ives was explaining why Miss Page——”“You may take your exception and put the question again, Mr. Lambert. The Court has ruled on the reply.”“What caused the hysteria you speak of?” inquired Mr. Lambert through gritted teeth.“The fact that Mrs. Ives had told her that her services were no longer required, and that she had better make her preparations to leave on Monday. Miss Page wished me to intervene in her behalf, as I had already done on two occasions.”“Did you acquiesce?”“On the contrary,” said Pat Ives—and at the tone of chilled steel in his voice the red-headed girl felt a flash of something like pity for her pet detestation, the flower-faced Miss Page—“I told her that in my opinion Sunday was a better day than Monday, and that I’d send Roberts to help with the packing.”“Why was Miss Page so anxious to stay, Mr. Ives?”“How should I know?” inquired Mr. Ives. “She probably realized that it was a very excellent job that she was losing.”“That is the only explanation that occurs to you?”“It is the only explanation that it occurs to me to give you,” said Mr. Ives gently, a small, dangerous smile playing about the corner of his mouth.Mr. Lambert eyed him indecisively for a moment, and prudently decided on another tack. “Did that conclude your conversation?”“Oh, no,” replied Mr. Ives, the smile deepening. “That started it.”“Will you give us the rest of it, please?”“I’m afraid I can’t. As I told you, I have a bad memory. If it doesn’t betray me, however, I believe that it was largely an elaboration of the two original themes.”“What themes?”“The themes of her departure and my intervention.”“Miss Page said nothing about a note?”“A note?” There was a look of genuine surprise in the lifted brows.“She did not mention having intercepted a note from Mrs. Stephen Bellamy—having abstracted it from a book in the library?”“I see,” said Mr. Ives, the brows relaxing, the smile returning, a little deeper and more dangerous. “No, I don’t believe that she mentioned that. It would probably have made an impression on me if she had.”“Had you any reason to believe that Miss Page was jealous of Mrs. Bellamy, Mr. Ives?”“Jealous of Mrs. Bellamy? Why should Miss Page have been jealous of Mrs. Bellamy?”“I thought that possibly you might be able to tell us.”“You were in error,” said Mr. Ives, leaning a little forward in his chair. “I am totally unable to tell you.”He did not lift his voice, but Mr. Lambert moved back a step somewhat precipitately.“Yes—exactly. Now, Mr. Ives, Melanie Cordier has testified that you told her that you had not found the note she claims to have placed there. Was that correct?”“That is what I told her, certainly.”“And it was an accurate statement on your part?”Mr. Farr rose leisurely to his feet. “Just one moment, please. I’m becoming a little confused from time to time as to whether this is direct or cross-examination. It looks as though Mr. Lambert were going to leave me very little to do. Possibly I’m in error, but it certainly sounds to me as though he were impeaching the veracity of his own witness.”“The Court is inclined to agree with you. Do you object to the question?”“I don’t particularly object to the question, but it strikes me as totally out of place.”“Very well. You need not reply to that question, Mr. Ives.”“Thanks—with Your Honour’s permission, I prefer to. I’m sure that Mr. Lambert will be glad to know that my reply to Melanie Cordier was entirely accurate.”“How many of these notes had you received previously?” inquired Mr. Lambert, and the expression that inflamed his countenance was not one of gratitude.“Six or eight, possibly.”“Over what period?”“Over a period of about two months.”“Are you aware that Miss Cordier testified that she had placed possibly twenty there over a much more extended period?”“Well, if she testified that,” said Patrick Ives indifferently, “she lied.”“What was the tenor of these notes?”“They were largely suggesting appointments at the cottage.”“How often were these appointments carried through?”“Twice.”“Only twice?”At the flat incredulity of Lambert’s face something flared in Patrick Ives’s heavy blue eyes.“Twice, I said—twice.”“Will you give us the dates?”“I’m afraid I can’t—once in the latter part of May, again about a week before the murder. That’s about the best that I can do.”“Mr. Ives, there has been some talk here of this knife, State Exhibit 6. Miss Page has identified it as belonging to you. Is that correct?”“Quite.”“Will you tell us when you last saw it?”“The last time that I remember seeing it before it was produced here in court was on the afternoon of my wife’s arrest—Monday the twenty-first.”“Have you any idea where it was on the night of June nineteenth at half-past nine?”“I have a very definite and distinct idea,” said Patrick Ives, and for the first time since he had mounted the stand the haggard restlessness of his face relaxed to something curiously approaching gaiety. “It was in my right-hand trousers pocket.”Mr. Lambert’s exultant countenance was turned squarely to the jury. “How did it come to be there?”“It was there because that’s where I stuck it when I took the boat upstairs to Pete at eight o’clock that evening, and it stayed there until I put it back on the desk Sunday morning after breakfast.”“No chance of an error on that?”“Not a chance.”“No possibility of its being in the possession of Mrs. Ives at any time that evening?”“Not a possibility.”“Mr. Ives, where were you that evening at nine-thirty o’clock?”The careless gaiety departed abruptly from Patrick Ives’s face. For a long moment he sat staring at Lambert, coolly and speculatively. His eyes, still speculating, shifted briefly to the hundreds of eager countenances straining toward his, and at the sight of their frantic attention his mouth twisted somewhat mirthlessly. “Unkind, isn’t it,” mocked his eyes, “to keep you waiting!”“I was at home,” said Patrick Ives.“What were you doing?”“Smoking a pipe and looking through a magazine, I think, though I shouldn’t like to swear to the exact time. I wasn’t using a stop watch.”“In what room?”“Well, I’m afraid that I can’t help you there much either. I moved about from one room to another, you see. I did a little more work on the boat, smoked, read—I didn’t follow any set programme. I wasn’t aware at the time that it would have been judicious to do so.”“You are aware now, however, that Melanie Cordier said that you were not in any of the lower rooms when she made her rounds at ten?”“Then I must have been in one of the upper rooms,” said Patrick Ives gently.“You are also aware that Mrs. Daniel Ives has told us that you didn’t bring her her fruit that night because you were not in the house?”“Well,” said Pat Ives gently still, “this is probably the first time in her life that she was ever mistaken. I was in the house.”“What caused you to change your mind as to attending the poker party, Mr. Ives?”“Circumstances arose that made it impossible.” The inscrutability of Mr. Ives’s countenance suggested that he would be a formidable addition to any poker party.“What circumstances?”“Circumstances,” said Mr. Ives, “that I shouldn’t dream of discussing either here or elsewhere. I am able to assure you, however, that they were not even remotely connected with the murder.”“What circumstances?” repeated Mr. Lambert, with passionate insistence.“Now, what,” asked Mr. Farr with languid pathos, “I again inquire, is my distinguished adversary leaving for a mere prosecutor to do?”“Mr. Lambert,” said Judge Carver austerely, “it strikes the Court that you are most certainly pressing the witness unduly in view of the fact that this is direct examination, and you are therefore bound to abide by his answer. The Court——”“He has refused to give me an answer,” replied Mr. Lambert, with some degree of justice and a larger degree of heat. “I may state to Your Honour that I regard the witness’s manner as distinctly hostile and——”“The Court fails to see wherein he has proved hostile,” remarked Judge Carver critically, “and it therefore requests you to bear in mind henceforth that you are dealing with your own witness. You may proceed with the examination.”Mr. Lambert turned his richly suffused countenance back to his own witness, avoiding Sue Ives’s eye, which for the last half hour had not once wavered from the look of passionate indignation that she had directed toward him at the outset of his manœuvres.“Mr. Ives,” said Mr. Lambert, “you heard Miss Roberts testify that she believed that it was your voice that she heard as she tried the door to the day nursery, did you not?”“Yes, I heard her testify to that effect.”“Was she mistaken?”“No,” said Patrick Ives, spacing his words with cool deliberation, “she was not mistaken.”“Was she mistaken in believing that the door was locked?”“No, she was not mistaken.”“Which of you locked the door, Mr. Ives?”“If you will tell me what that has to do with the murder of Mimi Bellamy,” said Mr. Ives with even greater deliberation, “I will tell you who locked the door.”“You refuse to answer my question?”“Most assuredly I refuse to answer your question.”“Your Honour——” choked the frenzied Lambert.“The Court also fails to see what the question has to do with the case,” said Judge Carver, in a tone by no means propitiatory. “It is excluded. Proceed.”“It is being made practically impossible for me to proceed in any direction,” remarked Lambert, in a voice unsteady with indignation. “Impossible! Mr. Ives, all that any occupant of that room had to do in order to get out of the house was to unlock that door and go, wasn’t it?”“Absolutely all,” acquiesced the hostile witness cordially.“No one would have been likely to see either one or the other or both depart, would they?”“I think it highly unlikely.”“No one saw either you or Miss Page in the house between nine and ten, did they?”“Not a soul—not a single solitary soul,” said Mr. Ives, and his voice was almost blithe.“How long would it take to get from your house to the cottage at Orchards?”“On foot?”“On foot, yes.”“Oh, ten-fifteen minutes, perhaps. There’s a short cut across the fields behind the house that comes out close to there.”“The one that Miss Page used to take the children to the playhouse?”“That’s the one, yes.”“She knew of this path?”“Well, obviously.” The grim smile flashed for a moment to open mockery.“And you knew of it?”“And I knew of it.”“How?”“My mother had told me that Miss Page was taking the children there, and I’d requested her not to do so as I knew Sue’s feeling about the place.”“Mr. Ives, were your relations with your wife happy?”For a moment Patrick Ives sat perfectly still, fighting back the surge of crimson that flooded his pale mockery. When he spoke, his voice, for all its clearness, sounded as though it had travelled back from a great distance.“Yes,” he said, “they were happy.”“In so far as you know, she was unaware that you had ceased to care for her?”“She could hardly have been aware of it,” said Patrick Ives. “From the moment that I first saw her I have loved her passionately—and devotedly—and entirely.”After a long, astounded silence, Lambert’s voice asked heavily, “You expect us to believe, in the face of the evidence that has been presented to us here, that you have been faithful to Mrs. Ives?”“It’s a matter of supreme indifference to me what you believe,” said Patrick Ives. “I don’t regard fidelity to Sue as particularly creditable. The fool of the world would have enough sense for that.”“You are saying that you never ceased to love her?”“I am saying that since I met her I’ve never given another woman two thoughts except to wish to God that she was somewhere else.”“That was why you went to meet Madeleine Bellamy at the gardener’s cottage?”“That,” said Mr. Ives imperturbably, “is precisely why I went to meet Madeleine Bellamy at the gardener’s cottage.”Before the cool indifference of his eye the ugly sneer on Lambert’s countenance wavered for a moment, deepened. “You deny that you wrote these letters?”Pat Ives bent on the small packet flourished beneath his eye a careless glance. “Not for a moment.”“Were they or were they not written after rendezvous had taken place between you and Mrs. Bellamy?”“Two of them were written after what you are pleased to describe as rendezvous had taken place—one before.”“And where, Mr. Ives, was your wife at the time of these meetings—on June eighth, June ninth and May twenty-second?”“I don’t know.”“She was in New York, wasn’t she?”“I haven’t the faintest idea. I’d never met her, you see.”Lambert goggled at him above his sagging jaw. “You’d never met her?”The courtroom throng blinked, shivered, stared wildly into one another’s eyes. No, no, that wasn’t what he had said—that couldn’t be what he had said. Or perhaps he was going mad before their eyes, sitting there with those reckless eyes dark in his white face. . . .“No; those letters were written in 1916. I didn’t meet Sue until the spring of 1919.”“Ha!” exhaled Lambert in a great breath of contemptuous relief. “Written in 1916, eh? And may I ask why Mrs. Bellamy was carrying them around in her bag in 1926?”“You may ask,” Pat Ives assured him, “and what’s more, I’ll tell you. She was selling them to me.”“Selling them to you? What for?”“For a hundred thousand dollars,” said Patrick Ives.Over the stupefied silence of the courtroom soared Lambert’s incredulous voice: “You expect us to believe that?”“I wish to the Lord you’d stop asking me that,” said his witness with undisguised irritation. “It’s not my business to decide what you’ll believe or what you won’t believe. What I’m telling you is the truth.”“It is your contention that these letters of yours, which you now claim were written in 1916, were being used for purposes of blackmail by Mrs. Bellamy?”“You choose your own words,” said Pat Ives. “Personally, I’d chose prettier ones. Mimi undoubtedly considered that I would be getting value received in the letters. She was right. She also may have considered that I owed her something. She was right again.”“You owed her something?”“I owed her a great deal for not having married me,” said Pat Ives. “As she didn’t, I owe her more happiness than most men even dream of.”Lambert made a sound that strongly suggested a snort. “Very pretty—very pretty indeed. What it comes down to, however, is that you accuse this dead girl, who is not here to defend herself, of deliberately stooping to blackmailing the man she loved for a colossal sum of money—that’s it, isn’t it?”“Well, hardly. She didn’t love me, of course—she never loved anyone in her life but Steve. She told me that she wanted the money because she thought that he was sick; that he was working himself to death and getting nothing out of it. She was going to persuade him that an aunt in Cheyenne had left her the money, and that she wasn’t happy here, and that they ought to start out again in a place that she’d heard of in California. She had it all worked out very nicely.”“One moment, Mr. Ives.” Judge Carver lifted an arresting hand. “As it is after twelve, the Court will at this time take its customary recess for luncheon. We will reconvene at one-fifteen.”The reporter viewed the recessional through the doors behind the witness box with an expression of unfeigned diversion. “Watch Uncle Dudley,” he adjured the red-headed girl. “He’s not going to have any luncheon; he’s going to stay right here where nobody can get at him to give him any unwelcome instructions before he gets through with Mr. Patrick Ives. There, what did I tell you?”Mr. Lambert, who had followed somewhat perfunctorily in the wake of his clients, now wheeled about briskly and returned to his well-laden desk, where he proceeded to plunge into a large stack of papers before him with virtuous abandon. He apparently found them of the most absorbing interest, although from time to time he permitted himself a slightly apprehensive glance at the closed door.Finally it opened, and one of the amiable and harassed-looking young men who shared the desk with him entered purposefully. An animated though inaudible colloquy ensued, punctuated by much emphatic head wagging by Lambert. Finally the young man departed more precipitately than he had come, Mr. Lambert returned to his studies, and the reporter and the red-headed girl emerged from the fascinated hush in which they had been contemplating this silent drama.“Ten to one she doesn’t get in a syllable to him before he gets through with Ives,” said the reporter.“Who doesn’t?” The red-headed girl’s tone was a trifle abstracted. She was wondering if her nose was still pink, and if the young man beside her was one of the young men who consider face powder more immoral than tooth powder.“Sue Ives, goose! What were you screaming about?”“I was screaming,” said the red-headed girl, memory lighting a reminiscent glitter in her eye, “because they wouldn’t let me in, and I thought that if I made enough noise they might.”“Why wouldn’t they let you in?”“Because a fat fiend made a snatch at my ticket and tore it in two and I had only half a one to show them.” She relinquished the powder box regretfully and exhibited a blue scrap about two inches square. “Next time,” she remarked with grim pride, “they’ll know whom this ticket belongs to. Two policemen snatched at me, and I told them if they laid one finger on me, I’d have them up for assault and battery. So they didn’t lay a finger on me.”“It will probably be a life work—and an uphill job, at that—to eliminate a marked lack of emotional control that is your distinguishing characteristic,” said the reporter meditatively. “However, did you enjoy the picnic?”“I adored it!” said the emotionally uncontrolled young woman beside him.“It was a fair picnic,” conceded the reporter. “And for a person whose height should be measured in inches rather than feet, you’re a very fair hiker. Too bad there’s only one Sunday to a trial. You have rather a knack with bacon sandwiches too. How are you with scrambled eggs?”“Marvellous!” said the red-headed girl frankly.“Though, if things keep up the way they’ve been going this morning, we’re liable to have another trial started before this one is over. The people versus Patrick Ives! I can see it coming.”“You don’t think he did it, do you?” inquired the red-headed girl anxiously.“Oh, when it comes to murder trials, I don’t think. But I’ll tell you this: If Steve Bellamy didn’t do it, he thinks that Pat Ives did. And if Pat didn’t he thinks that Sue did. And I don’t envy any of them their thoughts these days. . . . Ah, here we are again!”“Mr. Ives, do I understand that you were perfectly willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for two or three letters that you protest are perfectly innocent?”“I don’t protest anything of the kind. I think they’re damned incriminating letters—just exactly the kind of stuff that a sickening, infatuated, fatuous young fool would write. And you’re flattering me when you say that I was perfectly willing. It took me about two months to get even moderately resigned to the situation, and at that, I didn’t regard it with marked favour.”“Still, you were willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars to keep the letters out of your wife’s hands?”“Five hundred thousand dollars, if I could put my hands on it, to keep pain and sorrow and ugliness out of her way.”“You were not convinced, then, that she would accept your story as to when the letters were written?”“I didn’t want her to know that they had ever been written. I’d never told her of the degree of—intimacy that had existed between Mimi and myself.”“Exactly. Now Miss Cordier had told us that the notes from Mrs. Bellamy had been increasing in frequency at the time of the murder. Is that true?”“Yes; I’d have about three in ten days.”“Her demands were becoming more insistent?”“Considerably.” Again that small grim smile, curiously unsuggestive of mirth.“So that it had become essential for you to do something at once if you were to prevent these letters from reaching your wife?”“It was necessary for me to produce the money at once, if that is what you mean.”“Don’t trouble to analyze my meanings, if you please. Just answer my question.”Patrick Ives’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Your question was ambiguous,” he commented without emphasis.“I asked you if it was not imperative for you to act promptly in order to prevent these letters from reaching your wife?”“It’s still ambiguous. As I said before, however, it was necessary to pay for the letters pretty promptly, and I brought out the money on the night of the nineteenth with that end in view.”“Oh!” said Lambert, in a heavily disconcerted voice. “You brought it out, did you? In what form?”“I got it out of my safety box at noon—eighty-five thousand in Liberty Bonds and fifteen in municipal bonds.”“Did anyone know that you were doing this?”“Naturally not.”“Where did you place this sum on your return, Mr. Ives?”“Well, I put it first in the back of the desk drawer in my study just before dinner. I intended to put it upstairs in a wall safe behind a panel in my dressing room, but while I was looking through it in the study to make sure that it was all there, Sue called to me from the hall that our guests were going, and I went out on the porch to say good-bye to them. We didn’t go upstairs before dinner, so that I didn’t get a chance to transfer them until later in the evening.”“No one knew they were in the house?”“Not so far as I know?”“What did you do with them subsequently?”“I returned them to my safety-deposit box on Monday at noon.”“Anyone know of that transaction?”“Not a soul.”“So you are the only person able to attest that you ever had any intention of paying that money to Mrs. Bellamy?”“Well, whom do you want better?” inquired Pat Ives agreeably.Mr. Lambert bestowed on him an enigmatic smile that was far from agreeable. “Did this sum represent a substantial portion of your capital?”“It certainly would be no exaggeration to say that it made a large dent in it.”“You say that it had taken you a long time to decide to pay it?”“A moderately long time—two months.”“Why didn’t you take it to Mrs. Bellamy that evening, Mr. Ives?”“I had no appointment with her. She was to let me know if she was able to get away, and at what time.”“It didn’t occur to you to look in the book to see whether there was a note?”“It most assuredly did occur to me. I went in for that specific purpose at the time that Sue called me from the hall.”“So that you didn’t look?”“Oh, yes, I did look when I came back five minutes later. There was no note.”“Aha!” said Mr. Lambert, and the red-headed girl, watching with horrified eyes the reckless progress of young Mr. Ives across the spread nets, made a mechanical note that never except in a book had she heard a human being say “Aha” before. “So you looked in the book, did you? And there was no note, was there?”“Right both times,” said Mr. Ives.“Now that’s very interesting,” beamed Mr. Lambert—“very interesting, indeed. But if there had been a note in that book, you’d have found it, wouldn’t you?”“Well, not being a blithering idiot, that’s a fairly safe proposition.”“And if you had found it, you would have gone to the rendezvous, wouldn’t you?”“I’d certainly have made every effort to.”“Cancelling your poker engagement?”“Presumably.”“Taking the short cut across the fields?”“I don’t know how I’d have gone. It’s slightly academic, isn’t it?”“And in that gardener’s cottage you would have found waiting for you the unfortunate girl with those letters that it was so vitally necessary for you to obtain?”“Why don’t you ask him whether he would still have had the knife in his pocket?” inquired Mr. Farr gently. “And why don’t you ask him what he would have done with it? You don’t want to leave anything like that out.”Lambert, thus rudely checked in his exultant career, turned bulging eyes and a howl of outraged protest in the direction of Judge Carver’s unresponsive countenance.“Your Honour, in a somewhat protracted career at the bar, I have yet to encounter as flagrant a breach——”Judge Carver cut sharply across these strident objurgations: “And in a somewhat protracted career at the bar, Mr. Lambert, this Court has yet to encounter as extraordinary a conduct of an examination as you have permitted yourself, and as the Court, in the absence of protests from either the witness or the prosecution, has permitted you. Mr. Farr’s objection was not put in a proper form, but is otherwise quite legitimate. The questions that you are putting to the witness involve a purely supposititious case, and as such, the witness is entirely at liberty to refuse to answer them. You may proceed.”“I’ll answer it,” said Pat Ives. “If I’d found the note, I’d have gone to the cottage, given Mimi the money, got the letters, and none of us would have spent these last weeks thinking what a nice pleasant place hell would be for a change. I wish to God I’d found it. Is that what you wanted to know?”It was very far indeed from what Mr. Lambert wanted to know. However, he turned a wary eye on the jury, who were contemplating soberly and not too sympathetically the bitter, insolent face of the young gentleman in the witness box. Flippancy was obviously an evil stench in their nostrils. Mr. Lambert rattled the letters still clenched in his hand reminiscently.“There are two or three things in these letters that I’d like to have you reconcile with the statement that they were written in 1916. First, what does it mean, Mr. Ives, when you say: ‘I keep telling myself that we’re mad—that there’s black trouble ahead of us—that I haven’t any right in the world to let you do this’—do what, Mr. Ives?”“Carry on the highly indiscreet affair that we were indulging in,” said Pat Ives, his white face a shade whiter. “We’d both completely lost our heads. She wasn’t willing to marry me because she was afraid that I hadn’t it in me to make good. There was a lot of ugly gossip going on, and it had upset her.”“Quite so,” smiled Mr. Lambert dreadfully; “oh, quite so. Now in the one that begins: ‘Mimi darling, darling, darling, it’s after four o’clock and——’ ”“Are you going through those letters again?” inquired Patrick Ives, his hands clenched on the edge of the box.“Just one or two little things that I’d like cleared up, and I’m sure that these gentlemen would too. It goes on: ‘Dawn—I always thought that was the worst word in the English language and here I am on my knees waiting for it, and ranting like——’ ”“You needn’t go on,” said Patrick Ives, “if what you’re really after is when they were written. The sun that rose at 4:30 that morning in June in 1916 would have kept me waiting exactly one hour and six minutes longer in 1926. You and Mimi and I had forgotten just one thing, Mr. Lambert—we’d forgotten that in 1916 there was no such thing as daylight saving.”And through the staggered silence that invaded some three hundred-odd people who had forgotten precisely the same thing, there rose a little laugh—a gay, excited, triumphant little laugh, as though somewhere a small girl had suddenly received a beautiful and unexpected present. It came from just behind Mr. Lambert’s sagging shoulders—it came from—— The startled eyes of those in the courtroom jerked in that direction, staring unbelievingly at the quiet figure, so quiet, so cool, so gravely aloof. But the red-headed girl felt idiotic tears sting swiftly beneath her lids. Under the lowered barrier of Sue Ives’s lashes there still danced the echo of that joyous truant, shameless and unafraid. It was she who had laughed, after all.Mr. Lambert was not laughing. “You are a little late in recalling this,” he remarked heavily.“Oh, a good deal late,” agreed Patrick Ives. “But, you see, I hadn’t been going in for watching the sun rise for some time previous to the murder. Since then I have. And when I heard that letter read in court the other day, something clicked in my head. Not five o’clock, and the sun was up! Something wrong there. I went back to New York and looked it up in the public library. On Friday, June 9, 1916, the sun rose at four twenty-two A. M. On Wednesday, June 9, 1926, the sun rose at five twenty-eight. So that’s that.”“Have you a certified statement to that effect?” inquired Lambert, forlornly pompous.“No,” said Mr. Ives. “But I can lend you a World Almanac.”“You seem to find a trial for murder a very amusing affair,” remarked Lambert heavily, his eyes once more on the jury.“You’re wrong,” said Patrick Ives briefly. “I don’t.”“I do not believe that your attitude makes further examination desirable,” commented Lambert judicially. “Cross-examine.”Farr rose casually from his chair, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked a trifle to one side. “Mr. Ives,” he said leisurely, “I’m going to ask you the one question that Mr. Lambert didn’t. Did you murder Madeleine Bellamy?”After a pause that seemed interminable, Pat Ives lifted his eyes from their scrutiny of his hands, locked at the edge of the witness box. “No,” he said tonelessly.“No further questions,” remarked Mr. Farr, still more leisurely resuming his seat.Lambert glared—swallowed—glared again, and turned on his heel. “Mrs. Ives, will you be good enough to take the stand?”She was on her feet before the words were off his lips, brushing by him with her light, swift step and a look of contemptuous anger that was bright and terrible as a sword.“Looks as though his precious Sue was going to give Uncle Dudley a bad half hour,” murmured the reporter exultantly.“Why?” whispered the red-headed girl. “Why did she look like that?”“Because I rather fancy that Lambert has just a scrap exceeded his authority in his efforts to speed Pat Ives to the gallows. The old walrus made out a fairly damaging case against him, even if he did snort himself purple. If——”“Mrs. Ives, I’m going to ask you to tell us in your own words just what occurred on the evening of the nineteenth of June, from the time that Mr. Farwell spoke to you at the club. I won’t interrupt unless I feel that something is not quite clear. At what time did the conversation with Mr. Farwell take place?”She looked so small, sitting there—so small and young and fearless, with her dark, bright eyes and her lifted chin and the pale gold wings of her hair folded under the curve of the little russet hat. She had no colour at all—not in her cheeks, not in her lips.“It was a little after five,” said Sue Ives, and the red-headed girl gave a sigh of sheer delight. Once or twice in a lifetime a voice like that falls on our lucky ears—a voice clear and fresh as running water, alive and beautiful and effortless. The girl in the box did not have to lift it a half tone to have it penetrate to the farthest corner of the gallery. “We got in from the links just at five, and Elliot came up and asked me if he could bring me something to drink. I said yes, and when he came back he suggested that we go over and sit on the steps, as he had a splitting headache, and everyone was making a good deal of a racket. We hadn’t been there more than five minutes before he told me.”“Before he told you what?” prompted Lambert helpfully.“Before he told me that Pat was having an affair with Mimi Bellamy.” She did not vouchsafe him even a glance, but kept the clear, stern little face turned squarely to the twelve attentive ones lifted to hers. “At first I thought that it was simply preposterous nonsense—I told him so. Everyone knew that Elliot was absolutely out of his head over Mimi, and I thought that he really was going a little mad. I could see that he’d been drinking, of course, and I wasn’t even as angry as I ought to have been, because he was so unhappy—dreadfully unhappy. And then he said that he’d spied on them—that he’d seen them go to the cottage together. Well, that—that was different. That didn’t sound like the kind of thing that you’d invent or imagine, no matter how unbalanced you were.”“You believed it?”“No, not at first—not quite. But it bothered me dreadfully all the way home from the club—all the time that we were standing around in our living room waiting for the cocktails. I couldn’t get it out of my head. And then Pat came in.”She paused, frowning a little at the memory of that sick perplexity.“You say that Mr. Ives came in?”“Yes. He was looking dreadfully tired and—excited. No, that’s not the word. Keyed up—different. Or perhaps it was just that I expected him to look different. I don’t know. Anyway, Elliot started to go then, and I went into the hall after him, because he’d been drinking a good deal more, and I was afraid that he’d talk as indiscreetly to someone else as he had to me. I couldn’t think very clearly yet, but I was quite sure that that ought to be stopped. So I asked him to be careful, and he said that he would.”“Did you notice Melanie Cordier in the library?”“No. I was watching Elliot. He looked so wretchedly unhappy that I was really worried about him. Well, anyway, he went off without even saying good-bye, and I went back toward the living room. Just as I came up to it I heard George Dallas say, ‘We can count on you for the poker party to-night, can’t we?’ And Pat said, ‘I’ll surely try to make it, but don’t count on me.’ Something inside my head went click, and all the pieces in the puzzle fell into place. I walked straight into the room and up to where he was standing. He’d gone over to the table and was pouring out another of those new cocktails. Everyone was making a dreadful racket, laughing and talking. I said, ‘Nell Conroy wanted us to go to the movies to-night. Don’t you think that it would be rather fun?’ And he said, ‘Sorry, but I told George that I’d run over for a poker game. Tell Nell that you’ll go, and then I won’t worry about you being lonely.’ I said, ‘That’s a good idea.’ And Pat said, ‘Be back in a minute. I have some papers I want to get rid of.’“He went across the hall; I could hear his steps. I felt just exactly as though I’d taken poison and I stood there waiting for it to begin to work. Someone came up to me to say good-bye—I think it was the Conroys, and then everyone else began to go, too, the way they always do. I started to go out to the porch with them, and while I was passing through the hall I saw Pat standing by the desk. He was looking at some papers in his hand. I went on toward the porch, calling back over my shoulder that everyone was leaving. In a minute, he came out too. I looked to see whether he still had the papers in his hand, but he hadn’t. While we were both standing there watching them drive off, Melanie came out, announced dinner, and we went in. Pat stopped behind in the study for a moment, but he didn’t go near the desk drawer—I could see it from my place at the table.”“Could you have seen him take a book from the corner shelf?”“No—the screen between the rooms cut off that corner.”“Nothing unusual occurred at dinner?”“No. That made it worse. Nothing unusual occurred at all. Pat talked and laughed a good deal, but that’s what he always did.”“And after dinner?”“After dinner Mother Ives went out into the garden, and Pat asked me to come into the study to look at the clipper ship that he’d been making for Pete. All the time that I was supposed to be looking at it, I couldn’t take my eyes off the desk, wondering what he’d done with those papers—wondering what they were. There had been quite a little pile of them. After a while I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I said, ‘If you want to say good-night to Pete and Polly, you’ll have to hurry. They ought to be asleep by now.’ He said, ‘Lord, that’s true!’ He snatched up the boat and started for the door, and I called after him, ‘I’m not coming. I kissed them good-night before dinner.’ I waited until I heard his footsteps on the stairs——”She paused for a moment, pushing the bright hair back from her brow as though she found it suddenly heavy.“And then, Mrs. Ives?”“Then,” said Sue Ives steadily, “I did something disgusting. I searched the desk. I pushed the door to, so that none of the servants could see me if they passed through the hall, and I hurried like mad. I don’t know exactly what I expected to find, but I thought that maybe those papers were letters from Mimi, and then I knew that Pat kept his check book there, too, and I thought that there might be entries of some kind that would tell me something; I could bear anything but not knowing. It was like a—like a frenzy. Oh, it was worse! The top drawer on the left-hand side of the desk was locked.”She paused again for a moment, staring down as curiously and intently at the upturned faces below her as they stared up at her; then, with a quick, impatient shake of her head she went on: “But that didn’t make any difference, because I knew where the key was. I used the top right-hand drawer myself for my household accounts and bills and loose silver, and I kept it locked because, whenever Pat brought home gold pieces from his directors’ meetings, we used to put them there. We saved them up until we had enough to get a present for the house, something beautiful and—— No, that doesn’t make any difference. We called the drawer the bank, and Pat showed me where he kept the key so that I could always get into it.”“Where did he keep this key?”“In a tobacco jar on top of the bookcase. I found it and opened the drawer, and there were the papers, quite a thick packet of them, pushed way back in the drawer. They were bonds—eighty-five thousand Liberty, fifteen thousand municipal. I counted them twice to make sure.” For the first time since she had mounted the stand she turned her dark and shining eyes on the perturbed Lambert. “You were very anxious to know whether anyone but Pat had seen that money, weren’t you? Well, I saw it. And I was just as sure that Pat had taken it out of our safe-deposit box in order to run away with Mimi Bellamy as I was that I was standing there counting it—just as sure as that. I put it back and locked the drawer and dropped the key back into the tobacco jar and went to the flower room to telephone to Stephen Bellamy. The clock in the hall said five minutes past eight. I hadn’t been in the study for more than ten minutes.” Once more she lifted her hands to that bright hair. “Do you want me to repeat the telephone conversation?”“Was it substantially the same as Miss Page gave it?”“Exactly the same, word for word.”“Then I hardly think that that will be necessary. Just tell us what you did after you finished telephoning.”“I went to the foot of the nursery stairs and called up to ask Pat if he had absolutely decided to go to the poker game. He called back yes, and asked if he couldn’t drop me at the Conroys’. I told him that I’d rather walk. I got that flannel coat out of the closet and started off for the gate at the back of the house that led to the back road. I was almost running.”“Had you planned any course of action?”“No, I hadn’t any definite plan, but I knew that I had to get to Stephen and make him stop Mimi, and that every minute was precious. Just as I got to the gate, I noticed that a wind had sprung up—quite a cold wind—and I remembered that Mother Ives had told me at dinner that Polly’s ear had been hurting her, and that she slept right by the window where that wind would blow on her, so I turned back to the house to tell Miss Page to be sure to put a screen around the head of her crib. I saw Mother Ives at the far end of the rose garden, but I thought that it would take as long to call her and explain as it would to do it myself. So I ran on to the house, and I was halfway up the nursery stairs before I heard Pat’s voice. I thought he was talking to the babies, and I hurried up the last few steps. I was almost at the nursery door when I heard another voice—Kathleen Page’s. It wasn’t coming from the nursery; it was coming from her room. She was saying, ‘Don’t let her send me away from you—don’t, don’t! All I want——’ ”“Your Honour——”Farr’s warning voice was hardly swifter than Judge Carver’s: “I am afraid that you cannot tell us what you heard, Mrs. Ives.”“I cannot tell you what I heard Kathleen Page saying?”The wonder in the clear, incredulous voice penetrated the farthest corner of the courtroom.“No. Simply confine yourself to what you did.”“Did? I did nothing whatever. I could no more have moved a step nearer to the door than if I had been nailed to the floor. She was crying dreadfully, in horrid little pants and gasps. It was absolutely sickening. Pat said, ‘Keep quiet, you little lunatic. Do you want——’ ”“Mrs. Ives, the Court has already warned you that you are not able to tell us what was said.”“Why am I not able to tell you what was said? I told you what we said downstairs.”Judge Carver leaned toward her, his black sleeves flowing majestically over the edge of the rail. “No objection was raised as to that conversation. Mr. Farr objects to this and the Court sustains him. For your own sake, the Court requests you to conform promptly to its rulings.”For a moment the two pairs of dark eyes met in an exchange of glances more eloquent than words; a look of grave warning and one of fearless rebellion.“I do not understand your rules. What am I permitted to tell of the things that I am asked to explain?”“Simply tell us what you did after you heard the voices in the room.”“Very well; I will try again. I stood there for a moment, staring at the door to the day nursery. The key was on the outside so that the babies couldn’t lock themselves in. I don’t remember moving, but I must have moved, because suddenly I had the door knob in my hand. I jerked it toward me and slammed the door so hard that it nearly threw me off my feet. The key——”“Yes, yes,” cut in Lambert, his face suffused with a sudden and terrifying premonition. “We needn’t go too much into all these details, you know. We want to stick to our story as closely as possible. You didn’t say anything, did you?”“No.”“Just went on downstairs to meet Stephen Bellamy, didn’t you?”“No.”“You did not?” Mr. Lambert’s blank query was enough to wring commiseration from a stone. Sue Ives did not look particularly merciful, however. She had turned in her chair so that she faced her devoted adversary squarely. She leaned forward a little now, her lovely mouth schooled to disdain, her eyes under their level brows bright with anger.“No, not then. I was telling you what I did. I turned the key in the lock and put it in my pocket. You didn’t want me to say that, did you, Uncle Dudley? You wanted everyone to believe that it was Pat who murdered Mimi, didn’t you?”“Mrs. Ives—Mrs. Ives——”“Silence! Silence!”“Mrs. Ives!”Over the outraged clamour of the law, her voice rose, clear and triumphant: “He didn’t murder her, because he was locked in those rooms until quarter to eleven that night, and I had the key in my pocket. Now, you can all strike that out of the record!”“Mrs. Ives!” Over the last crash of the gavel, Judge Carver’s voice was shaken with something deeper than anger. “Mrs. Ives, if you are not immediately silent, the Court will be obliged to have you removed.”“Removed?” She was on her feet in an instant, poised and light. “You wish me to go?”“I wish you to get yourself in hand immediately. You are doing yourself untold injury by pursuing this line of conduct. The rules that you are refusing to obey were made largely for your own protection.”“I don’t want to be protected. I want to tell the truth. Apparently no one wants to hear it.”“On the contrary, you are permitted to take the stand for that express purpose.”“For that purpose? To tell the truth?” The scorn in her voice was almost gay.“Precisely. The limits that are imposed are for your benefit, and you are injuring your co-defendant as well as yourself by refusing to abide by them.”“Stephen?” She paused at that, considering gravely. “I don’t want to do that, of course. Very well, I will try to go on.” She turned back to her chair, and a long sigh of incredulous relief trembled through the courtroom.“I have forgotten where I stopped.”“You were about to tell us what you did after you came down the nursery stairs?” Lambert’s shaken voice was hardly audible.“Yes. Well, then—then we did exactly what Stephen said we did. We drove through the back road to the River Road, where we turned to the left and went into Lakedale in order to get more gasoline. I distinctly remember the time, because we had been discussing whether the movies would be out by the time that we got back. It was twenty-five minutes past nine. After that we retraced our steps—down the River Road to the back road, down to the place in the back road where I had met Stephen, past our house into the main street of the village, past the movie house, which was dark, and up the main street, which runs into the Perrytown Highway—up the Perrytown Highway to the Bellamy house.“I was absolutely sure that I saw a light over the garage, but it certainly wasn’t there a minute or so afterwards, and I decided that I might as well go in anyway. I was beyond bothering much about any minor conventions, and I thought that if Mimi were actually there, it would be a heavenly relief to put all the cards on the table and have it out with her once and forever. Mimi wasn’t there, of course; it was then that Steve called up the Conroys. When he found that she wasn’t there, I was really terrified at his condition. He was as quiet as usual, but he didn’t seem to understand anything at all that was said to him. He didn’t even bother to listen. He had some kind of a chill, and he just sat there shivering, while I reassured and argued and explained.“I could have saved my breath. He didn’t even hear me. He did finally rouse himself to telephone the police and the hospital; the rest of the time he just sat there staring and shivering. He wanted me to call up Pat and the Dallases, and of course I knew that that wouldn’t do any good—Pat was locked up two stories away from a telephone. Finally I asked, ‘Did you see what direction she was going in when she left?’ He shook his head. I said, ‘But she told you that she was going toward the Conroys’?’ He nodded. I said, ‘Well, maybe she turned her ankle and fainted somewhere along the side of the road—she always wears such dreadfully high heels. We might take the car and turn the headlights along the edge of the road and see if we can get any trace of her. Come on!’“I knew that that was perfect nonsense, but I was desperate, and I thought that there was just a chance that it might rouse him. It did. It was exactly as though you’d put a galvanic shock through him. He jerked out of his chair. He was out in the hall without even waiting to look back at me, and I had to run to get to the car before he started it.“We got off with such a jerk that it nearly threw me out of the car, and I was really afraid that he was going to dash us against one of the gateposts. I said, ‘If we’re going to find Mimi, Steve, we must go slowly, mustn’t we? We must look carefully.’ He said, ‘That’s right!’ And after that we literally crept, all the way to the Conroys’.”“How far was that?”“Oh, not far—not half a mile—just a little way. It wasn’t until after we got past their entrance that we decided that——” She paused for a moment, her eyes dilated strangely in her small pale face; then she wrung her hands together more closely as though in that hard contact she found comfort, and continued steadily in her low voice. “We decided that we might as well go on.”Lambert, paler than she, said just as steadily, “Might as well go on where, Mrs. Ives?”“Go on to the gardener’s cottage at Orchards,” said Susan Ives.In the gray light of the courtroom, the faces of the occupants looked gray, too—sharpened, fearful, full of an ominous unease. More than one of them glanced swiftly over a hunched shoulder at the blue-coated guardians of the door, and then back again, with somewhat pinched and rueful countenance, at the slight occupant of the witness box. The figure sat so quietly there in the gathering shadows; to many who watched it seemed that there slanted across her lifted face another shadow still—the shadow of the block, of the gallows, of the chair. . . .“Is she confessing?” asked the red-headed girl in a small colourless voice.“Wait!” said the reporter. “God knows what she’s doing.”Judge Carver leaned suddenly toward Lambert.“Mr. Lambert, it is already considerably past four. Is this testimony likely to continue for some time?”“For some time, Your Honour.”“In that case,” said Judge Carver gravely, “the Court considers it advisable to adjourn until ten to-morrow. Court is dismissed.”The small figure moved lightly down from the witness stand into the deeper shadows—deeper still—she was gone. The sixth day of the Bellamy trial was over.
The reporter looked from the clock to the red-headed girl and back again, with an expression in which consternation and irritation were neatly blended. The red-headed girl’s hat was well over one eye, her nose was undeniably pink, she had a fluff of hair over her ear, a fiery spot burning in either cheek and two or more in her eyes. The clock said ten-thirty-five.
“Well, you’re a fine one,” said the reporter in tones that belied the statement. He removed an overcoat, a woolly scarf, a portable typewriter, seven tabloid newspapers, and a gray felt hat from the seat next to him and waited virtuously for appropriate expressions of gratitude. None were forthcoming. The red-headed girl scrambled unceremoniously over his feet, sank into the seat, and abandoned herself to a series of minute but audible pants varied by an occasional subdued sniff.
“What in the world—” began the reporter.
“Don’t speak to me!” said the red-headed girl in a small fierce voice, and added even more fiercely: “What’s happened?”
“That’s what I want to know!” remarked the reporter with some emphasis. “What in the world was that perfectly ungodly racket going on outside in the hall?”
“Me,” said the red-headed girl. “Who’s been on the stand?”
“You? For the Lord’s sake, what were you doing?”
“Screaming,” said the red-headed girl. “Who’s been on the stand?”
“Just a guy from a prison out West to prove that Orsini had served a jail sentence for robbery. What were you screaming about?”
“Because they wouldn’t let me in. . . . Who’s on now?”
“That red-headed fellow, Leo Fox, from the gas station. He’s through with his direct, and Farr has him now. . . . Why wouldn’t they let you in?”
“Because—— No, I can’t tell you all that now. Later—at lunch. Listen, won’t you——”
“It was Saturday night, wasn’t it, Mr. Fox?”
“Sure it was Saturday night.”
Mr. Fox, who was lavishly decorated with freckles, whose coat was about three inches too tight for him, and whose tie was about three shades too green, shifted his chewing gum dexterously to the other cheek and kept a wary eye on Mr. Farr.
“There were a good many cars getting gas at your station on fine Saturday nights in June, weren’t there?”
“Sure there were.”
“Yet this car and its occupants are indelibly stamped on your memory?”
“If you mean do I remember the both of them, sure I do. They wasn’t just getting gas; the dame—the lady—she wanted a drink of water, and it was me who got it for her. That was what made me remember them, see?”
“And all you know is that it was some time after nine, because you didn’t come on duty until nine?”
“That’s right. I don’t never come on until then; and sometimes I’m a couple of minutes late, at that.”
“But it might have been two minutes past nine instead of twenty-five minutes past, as Mrs. Ives claims?”
“No, sir, it couldn’t have been nothing of the kind. People don’t get eight gallons of gas, and pay for it, and get change, and ask for glasses of water and get them, and drink them and get away all in two minutes. It must have been more than ten minutes past, no matter if they were the first ones to come along after I checked in.”
Mr. Farr contemplated him with marked disfavour. “I didn’t ask you for a speech, Mr. Fox. The only fact you are able to state to us positively as to the time is that you came on duty at nine o’clock, and that Mrs. Ives and Mr. Bellamy appeared after you had arrived.”
“That’s right.”
“Then that will be all. You may stand down.”
“Call Mr. Patrick Ives,” said Mr. Lambert.
“Mr. Patrick Ives!”
From the corner by the window where he had sat, hour after hour and day after day, with his mother’s small gloved hand resting lightly and reassuringly on his knee, Patrick Ives rose and moved slowly forward toward the witness box.
How tall he was, thought the red-headed girl—how tall and young, for all the haggard misery and bitterness of that white and reckless face. He stood staring about him for a moment, his black head towering inches above those about him; then, with one swift stride, he was in his place.
“Mr. Ives, will you be good enough to tell us as concisely as possible just what happened on the night of June 19, 1926, from the time that you arrived at your home to the time that you retired for the night?”
“Oh,” said Patrick Ives indifferently, “I doubt whether I could do anything along that line at all. I have a notoriously bad memory, and I’d simply be faking a lot of stuff that wouldn’t do either of us any good. Besides, most of that ground has been gone over by other witnesses, hasn’t it?”
The casual insolence of the conversational tone had had the effect of literally hypnotizing Mr. Lambert, Mr. Farr, and the redoubtable Carver himself into a state of stupefied inaction. As the voice ceased, however, all three emerged from coma into violent energy. It was difficult to tell which of the three was the more profoundly moved, though Mr. Lambert’s protestations were the most piercing. Fortified by his gavel, however, Judge Carver managed to batter the rest into silence.
“Let that answer be stricken from the record! It is totally improper, Mr. Ives. This is not a debating society. You will kindly refrain from expressing your opinions on any subject whatsoever, and will confine yourself to the briefest replies possible.”
“If Mr. Lambert will put a definite question to me I’ll see whether I can give him a definite answer,” replied Mr. Ives, looking entirely unchastened and remotely diverted.
“Very well,” said Lambert, choking with ill-concealed wrath. “Will you be so kind as to tell us whether anything out of the ordinary occurred during that evening, Mr. Ives?”
“No.”
“Before dinner?”
“No.”
“After dinner?”
“No.”
Mr. Ives flung him the monosyllables like so many very bare bones tossed at a large, hungry, snapping dog.
“Miss Page testified that she met you at the nursery door with a ship model in your hand at about eight o’clock. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“When did you see her again?”
“About a quarter of an hour later.”
“Was her testimony as to what followed correct?”
“Oh, it was correct enough as far as it went.”
“It went further than she told us?”
“Considerably,” said Mr. Ives, a grimly reminiscent smile flitting across his haggard young face.
“In what direction?”
“In the direction of violent hysterics and general lunacy,” said Mr. Ives unfeelingly.
“What was the cause of these—er—manifestations?”
“Miss Page,” said Mr. Ives with great clarity and precision, “is a high-strung, unbalanced, hysterical little idiot Mrs. Ives had——”
“Does Your Honour consider that a responsive reply?” inquired Mr. Farr with mild interest.
“The Court has already warned the witness to keep strictly to the question. It repeats that warning. As for the reply, it may be stricken from the record.”
“I consider it an absolutely responsive reply,” cried Mr. Lambert with some heat. “Mr. Ives was explaining why Miss Page——”
“You may take your exception and put the question again, Mr. Lambert. The Court has ruled on the reply.”
“What caused the hysteria you speak of?” inquired Mr. Lambert through gritted teeth.
“The fact that Mrs. Ives had told her that her services were no longer required, and that she had better make her preparations to leave on Monday. Miss Page wished me to intervene in her behalf, as I had already done on two occasions.”
“Did you acquiesce?”
“On the contrary,” said Pat Ives—and at the tone of chilled steel in his voice the red-headed girl felt a flash of something like pity for her pet detestation, the flower-faced Miss Page—“I told her that in my opinion Sunday was a better day than Monday, and that I’d send Roberts to help with the packing.”
“Why was Miss Page so anxious to stay, Mr. Ives?”
“How should I know?” inquired Mr. Ives. “She probably realized that it was a very excellent job that she was losing.”
“That is the only explanation that occurs to you?”
“It is the only explanation that it occurs to me to give you,” said Mr. Ives gently, a small, dangerous smile playing about the corner of his mouth.
Mr. Lambert eyed him indecisively for a moment, and prudently decided on another tack. “Did that conclude your conversation?”
“Oh, no,” replied Mr. Ives, the smile deepening. “That started it.”
“Will you give us the rest of it, please?”
“I’m afraid I can’t. As I told you, I have a bad memory. If it doesn’t betray me, however, I believe that it was largely an elaboration of the two original themes.”
“What themes?”
“The themes of her departure and my intervention.”
“Miss Page said nothing about a note?”
“A note?” There was a look of genuine surprise in the lifted brows.
“She did not mention having intercepted a note from Mrs. Stephen Bellamy—having abstracted it from a book in the library?”
“I see,” said Mr. Ives, the brows relaxing, the smile returning, a little deeper and more dangerous. “No, I don’t believe that she mentioned that. It would probably have made an impression on me if she had.”
“Had you any reason to believe that Miss Page was jealous of Mrs. Bellamy, Mr. Ives?”
“Jealous of Mrs. Bellamy? Why should Miss Page have been jealous of Mrs. Bellamy?”
“I thought that possibly you might be able to tell us.”
“You were in error,” said Mr. Ives, leaning a little forward in his chair. “I am totally unable to tell you.”
He did not lift his voice, but Mr. Lambert moved back a step somewhat precipitately.
“Yes—exactly. Now, Mr. Ives, Melanie Cordier has testified that you told her that you had not found the note she claims to have placed there. Was that correct?”
“That is what I told her, certainly.”
“And it was an accurate statement on your part?”
Mr. Farr rose leisurely to his feet. “Just one moment, please. I’m becoming a little confused from time to time as to whether this is direct or cross-examination. It looks as though Mr. Lambert were going to leave me very little to do. Possibly I’m in error, but it certainly sounds to me as though he were impeaching the veracity of his own witness.”
“The Court is inclined to agree with you. Do you object to the question?”
“I don’t particularly object to the question, but it strikes me as totally out of place.”
“Very well. You need not reply to that question, Mr. Ives.”
“Thanks—with Your Honour’s permission, I prefer to. I’m sure that Mr. Lambert will be glad to know that my reply to Melanie Cordier was entirely accurate.”
“How many of these notes had you received previously?” inquired Mr. Lambert, and the expression that inflamed his countenance was not one of gratitude.
“Six or eight, possibly.”
“Over what period?”
“Over a period of about two months.”
“Are you aware that Miss Cordier testified that she had placed possibly twenty there over a much more extended period?”
“Well, if she testified that,” said Patrick Ives indifferently, “she lied.”
“What was the tenor of these notes?”
“They were largely suggesting appointments at the cottage.”
“How often were these appointments carried through?”
“Twice.”
“Only twice?”
At the flat incredulity of Lambert’s face something flared in Patrick Ives’s heavy blue eyes.
“Twice, I said—twice.”
“Will you give us the dates?”
“I’m afraid I can’t—once in the latter part of May, again about a week before the murder. That’s about the best that I can do.”
“Mr. Ives, there has been some talk here of this knife, State Exhibit 6. Miss Page has identified it as belonging to you. Is that correct?”
“Quite.”
“Will you tell us when you last saw it?”
“The last time that I remember seeing it before it was produced here in court was on the afternoon of my wife’s arrest—Monday the twenty-first.”
“Have you any idea where it was on the night of June nineteenth at half-past nine?”
“I have a very definite and distinct idea,” said Patrick Ives, and for the first time since he had mounted the stand the haggard restlessness of his face relaxed to something curiously approaching gaiety. “It was in my right-hand trousers pocket.”
Mr. Lambert’s exultant countenance was turned squarely to the jury. “How did it come to be there?”
“It was there because that’s where I stuck it when I took the boat upstairs to Pete at eight o’clock that evening, and it stayed there until I put it back on the desk Sunday morning after breakfast.”
“No chance of an error on that?”
“Not a chance.”
“No possibility of its being in the possession of Mrs. Ives at any time that evening?”
“Not a possibility.”
“Mr. Ives, where were you that evening at nine-thirty o’clock?”
The careless gaiety departed abruptly from Patrick Ives’s face. For a long moment he sat staring at Lambert, coolly and speculatively. His eyes, still speculating, shifted briefly to the hundreds of eager countenances straining toward his, and at the sight of their frantic attention his mouth twisted somewhat mirthlessly. “Unkind, isn’t it,” mocked his eyes, “to keep you waiting!”
“I was at home,” said Patrick Ives.
“What were you doing?”
“Smoking a pipe and looking through a magazine, I think, though I shouldn’t like to swear to the exact time. I wasn’t using a stop watch.”
“In what room?”
“Well, I’m afraid that I can’t help you there much either. I moved about from one room to another, you see. I did a little more work on the boat, smoked, read—I didn’t follow any set programme. I wasn’t aware at the time that it would have been judicious to do so.”
“You are aware now, however, that Melanie Cordier said that you were not in any of the lower rooms when she made her rounds at ten?”
“Then I must have been in one of the upper rooms,” said Patrick Ives gently.
“You are also aware that Mrs. Daniel Ives has told us that you didn’t bring her her fruit that night because you were not in the house?”
“Well,” said Pat Ives gently still, “this is probably the first time in her life that she was ever mistaken. I was in the house.”
“What caused you to change your mind as to attending the poker party, Mr. Ives?”
“Circumstances arose that made it impossible.” The inscrutability of Mr. Ives’s countenance suggested that he would be a formidable addition to any poker party.
“What circumstances?”
“Circumstances,” said Mr. Ives, “that I shouldn’t dream of discussing either here or elsewhere. I am able to assure you, however, that they were not even remotely connected with the murder.”
“What circumstances?” repeated Mr. Lambert, with passionate insistence.
“Now, what,” asked Mr. Farr with languid pathos, “I again inquire, is my distinguished adversary leaving for a mere prosecutor to do?”
“Mr. Lambert,” said Judge Carver austerely, “it strikes the Court that you are most certainly pressing the witness unduly in view of the fact that this is direct examination, and you are therefore bound to abide by his answer. The Court——”
“He has refused to give me an answer,” replied Mr. Lambert, with some degree of justice and a larger degree of heat. “I may state to Your Honour that I regard the witness’s manner as distinctly hostile and——”
“The Court fails to see wherein he has proved hostile,” remarked Judge Carver critically, “and it therefore requests you to bear in mind henceforth that you are dealing with your own witness. You may proceed with the examination.”
Mr. Lambert turned his richly suffused countenance back to his own witness, avoiding Sue Ives’s eye, which for the last half hour had not once wavered from the look of passionate indignation that she had directed toward him at the outset of his manœuvres.
“Mr. Ives,” said Mr. Lambert, “you heard Miss Roberts testify that she believed that it was your voice that she heard as she tried the door to the day nursery, did you not?”
“Yes, I heard her testify to that effect.”
“Was she mistaken?”
“No,” said Patrick Ives, spacing his words with cool deliberation, “she was not mistaken.”
“Was she mistaken in believing that the door was locked?”
“No, she was not mistaken.”
“Which of you locked the door, Mr. Ives?”
“If you will tell me what that has to do with the murder of Mimi Bellamy,” said Mr. Ives with even greater deliberation, “I will tell you who locked the door.”
“You refuse to answer my question?”
“Most assuredly I refuse to answer your question.”
“Your Honour——” choked the frenzied Lambert.
“The Court also fails to see what the question has to do with the case,” said Judge Carver, in a tone by no means propitiatory. “It is excluded. Proceed.”
“It is being made practically impossible for me to proceed in any direction,” remarked Lambert, in a voice unsteady with indignation. “Impossible! Mr. Ives, all that any occupant of that room had to do in order to get out of the house was to unlock that door and go, wasn’t it?”
“Absolutely all,” acquiesced the hostile witness cordially.
“No one would have been likely to see either one or the other or both depart, would they?”
“I think it highly unlikely.”
“No one saw either you or Miss Page in the house between nine and ten, did they?”
“Not a soul—not a single solitary soul,” said Mr. Ives, and his voice was almost blithe.
“How long would it take to get from your house to the cottage at Orchards?”
“On foot?”
“On foot, yes.”
“Oh, ten-fifteen minutes, perhaps. There’s a short cut across the fields behind the house that comes out close to there.”
“The one that Miss Page used to take the children to the playhouse?”
“That’s the one, yes.”
“She knew of this path?”
“Well, obviously.” The grim smile flashed for a moment to open mockery.
“And you knew of it?”
“And I knew of it.”
“How?”
“My mother had told me that Miss Page was taking the children there, and I’d requested her not to do so as I knew Sue’s feeling about the place.”
“Mr. Ives, were your relations with your wife happy?”
For a moment Patrick Ives sat perfectly still, fighting back the surge of crimson that flooded his pale mockery. When he spoke, his voice, for all its clearness, sounded as though it had travelled back from a great distance.
“Yes,” he said, “they were happy.”
“In so far as you know, she was unaware that you had ceased to care for her?”
“She could hardly have been aware of it,” said Patrick Ives. “From the moment that I first saw her I have loved her passionately—and devotedly—and entirely.”
After a long, astounded silence, Lambert’s voice asked heavily, “You expect us to believe, in the face of the evidence that has been presented to us here, that you have been faithful to Mrs. Ives?”
“It’s a matter of supreme indifference to me what you believe,” said Patrick Ives. “I don’t regard fidelity to Sue as particularly creditable. The fool of the world would have enough sense for that.”
“You are saying that you never ceased to love her?”
“I am saying that since I met her I’ve never given another woman two thoughts except to wish to God that she was somewhere else.”
“That was why you went to meet Madeleine Bellamy at the gardener’s cottage?”
“That,” said Mr. Ives imperturbably, “is precisely why I went to meet Madeleine Bellamy at the gardener’s cottage.”
Before the cool indifference of his eye the ugly sneer on Lambert’s countenance wavered for a moment, deepened. “You deny that you wrote these letters?”
Pat Ives bent on the small packet flourished beneath his eye a careless glance. “Not for a moment.”
“Were they or were they not written after rendezvous had taken place between you and Mrs. Bellamy?”
“Two of them were written after what you are pleased to describe as rendezvous had taken place—one before.”
“And where, Mr. Ives, was your wife at the time of these meetings—on June eighth, June ninth and May twenty-second?”
“I don’t know.”
“She was in New York, wasn’t she?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. I’d never met her, you see.”
Lambert goggled at him above his sagging jaw. “You’d never met her?”
The courtroom throng blinked, shivered, stared wildly into one another’s eyes. No, no, that wasn’t what he had said—that couldn’t be what he had said. Or perhaps he was going mad before their eyes, sitting there with those reckless eyes dark in his white face. . . .
“No; those letters were written in 1916. I didn’t meet Sue until the spring of 1919.”
“Ha!” exhaled Lambert in a great breath of contemptuous relief. “Written in 1916, eh? And may I ask why Mrs. Bellamy was carrying them around in her bag in 1926?”
“You may ask,” Pat Ives assured him, “and what’s more, I’ll tell you. She was selling them to me.”
“Selling them to you? What for?”
“For a hundred thousand dollars,” said Patrick Ives.
Over the stupefied silence of the courtroom soared Lambert’s incredulous voice: “You expect us to believe that?”
“I wish to the Lord you’d stop asking me that,” said his witness with undisguised irritation. “It’s not my business to decide what you’ll believe or what you won’t believe. What I’m telling you is the truth.”
“It is your contention that these letters of yours, which you now claim were written in 1916, were being used for purposes of blackmail by Mrs. Bellamy?”
“You choose your own words,” said Pat Ives. “Personally, I’d chose prettier ones. Mimi undoubtedly considered that I would be getting value received in the letters. She was right. She also may have considered that I owed her something. She was right again.”
“You owed her something?”
“I owed her a great deal for not having married me,” said Pat Ives. “As she didn’t, I owe her more happiness than most men even dream of.”
Lambert made a sound that strongly suggested a snort. “Very pretty—very pretty indeed. What it comes down to, however, is that you accuse this dead girl, who is not here to defend herself, of deliberately stooping to blackmailing the man she loved for a colossal sum of money—that’s it, isn’t it?”
“Well, hardly. She didn’t love me, of course—she never loved anyone in her life but Steve. She told me that she wanted the money because she thought that he was sick; that he was working himself to death and getting nothing out of it. She was going to persuade him that an aunt in Cheyenne had left her the money, and that she wasn’t happy here, and that they ought to start out again in a place that she’d heard of in California. She had it all worked out very nicely.”
“One moment, Mr. Ives.” Judge Carver lifted an arresting hand. “As it is after twelve, the Court will at this time take its customary recess for luncheon. We will reconvene at one-fifteen.”
The reporter viewed the recessional through the doors behind the witness box with an expression of unfeigned diversion. “Watch Uncle Dudley,” he adjured the red-headed girl. “He’s not going to have any luncheon; he’s going to stay right here where nobody can get at him to give him any unwelcome instructions before he gets through with Mr. Patrick Ives. There, what did I tell you?”
Mr. Lambert, who had followed somewhat perfunctorily in the wake of his clients, now wheeled about briskly and returned to his well-laden desk, where he proceeded to plunge into a large stack of papers before him with virtuous abandon. He apparently found them of the most absorbing interest, although from time to time he permitted himself a slightly apprehensive glance at the closed door.
Finally it opened, and one of the amiable and harassed-looking young men who shared the desk with him entered purposefully. An animated though inaudible colloquy ensued, punctuated by much emphatic head wagging by Lambert. Finally the young man departed more precipitately than he had come, Mr. Lambert returned to his studies, and the reporter and the red-headed girl emerged from the fascinated hush in which they had been contemplating this silent drama.
“Ten to one she doesn’t get in a syllable to him before he gets through with Ives,” said the reporter.
“Who doesn’t?” The red-headed girl’s tone was a trifle abstracted. She was wondering if her nose was still pink, and if the young man beside her was one of the young men who consider face powder more immoral than tooth powder.
“Sue Ives, goose! What were you screaming about?”
“I was screaming,” said the red-headed girl, memory lighting a reminiscent glitter in her eye, “because they wouldn’t let me in, and I thought that if I made enough noise they might.”
“Why wouldn’t they let you in?”
“Because a fat fiend made a snatch at my ticket and tore it in two and I had only half a one to show them.” She relinquished the powder box regretfully and exhibited a blue scrap about two inches square. “Next time,” she remarked with grim pride, “they’ll know whom this ticket belongs to. Two policemen snatched at me, and I told them if they laid one finger on me, I’d have them up for assault and battery. So they didn’t lay a finger on me.”
“It will probably be a life work—and an uphill job, at that—to eliminate a marked lack of emotional control that is your distinguishing characteristic,” said the reporter meditatively. “However, did you enjoy the picnic?”
“I adored it!” said the emotionally uncontrolled young woman beside him.
“It was a fair picnic,” conceded the reporter. “And for a person whose height should be measured in inches rather than feet, you’re a very fair hiker. Too bad there’s only one Sunday to a trial. You have rather a knack with bacon sandwiches too. How are you with scrambled eggs?”
“Marvellous!” said the red-headed girl frankly.
“Though, if things keep up the way they’ve been going this morning, we’re liable to have another trial started before this one is over. The people versus Patrick Ives! I can see it coming.”
“You don’t think he did it, do you?” inquired the red-headed girl anxiously.
“Oh, when it comes to murder trials, I don’t think. But I’ll tell you this: If Steve Bellamy didn’t do it, he thinks that Pat Ives did. And if Pat didn’t he thinks that Sue did. And I don’t envy any of them their thoughts these days. . . . Ah, here we are again!”
“Mr. Ives, do I understand that you were perfectly willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars for two or three letters that you protest are perfectly innocent?”
“I don’t protest anything of the kind. I think they’re damned incriminating letters—just exactly the kind of stuff that a sickening, infatuated, fatuous young fool would write. And you’re flattering me when you say that I was perfectly willing. It took me about two months to get even moderately resigned to the situation, and at that, I didn’t regard it with marked favour.”
“Still, you were willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars to keep the letters out of your wife’s hands?”
“Five hundred thousand dollars, if I could put my hands on it, to keep pain and sorrow and ugliness out of her way.”
“You were not convinced, then, that she would accept your story as to when the letters were written?”
“I didn’t want her to know that they had ever been written. I’d never told her of the degree of—intimacy that had existed between Mimi and myself.”
“Exactly. Now Miss Cordier had told us that the notes from Mrs. Bellamy had been increasing in frequency at the time of the murder. Is that true?”
“Yes; I’d have about three in ten days.”
“Her demands were becoming more insistent?”
“Considerably.” Again that small grim smile, curiously unsuggestive of mirth.
“So that it had become essential for you to do something at once if you were to prevent these letters from reaching your wife?”
“It was necessary for me to produce the money at once, if that is what you mean.”
“Don’t trouble to analyze my meanings, if you please. Just answer my question.”
Patrick Ives’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Your question was ambiguous,” he commented without emphasis.
“I asked you if it was not imperative for you to act promptly in order to prevent these letters from reaching your wife?”
“It’s still ambiguous. As I said before, however, it was necessary to pay for the letters pretty promptly, and I brought out the money on the night of the nineteenth with that end in view.”
“Oh!” said Lambert, in a heavily disconcerted voice. “You brought it out, did you? In what form?”
“I got it out of my safety box at noon—eighty-five thousand in Liberty Bonds and fifteen in municipal bonds.”
“Did anyone know that you were doing this?”
“Naturally not.”
“Where did you place this sum on your return, Mr. Ives?”
“Well, I put it first in the back of the desk drawer in my study just before dinner. I intended to put it upstairs in a wall safe behind a panel in my dressing room, but while I was looking through it in the study to make sure that it was all there, Sue called to me from the hall that our guests were going, and I went out on the porch to say good-bye to them. We didn’t go upstairs before dinner, so that I didn’t get a chance to transfer them until later in the evening.”
“No one knew they were in the house?”
“Not so far as I know?”
“What did you do with them subsequently?”
“I returned them to my safety-deposit box on Monday at noon.”
“Anyone know of that transaction?”
“Not a soul.”
“So you are the only person able to attest that you ever had any intention of paying that money to Mrs. Bellamy?”
“Well, whom do you want better?” inquired Pat Ives agreeably.
Mr. Lambert bestowed on him an enigmatic smile that was far from agreeable. “Did this sum represent a substantial portion of your capital?”
“It certainly would be no exaggeration to say that it made a large dent in it.”
“You say that it had taken you a long time to decide to pay it?”
“A moderately long time—two months.”
“Why didn’t you take it to Mrs. Bellamy that evening, Mr. Ives?”
“I had no appointment with her. She was to let me know if she was able to get away, and at what time.”
“It didn’t occur to you to look in the book to see whether there was a note?”
“It most assuredly did occur to me. I went in for that specific purpose at the time that Sue called me from the hall.”
“So that you didn’t look?”
“Oh, yes, I did look when I came back five minutes later. There was no note.”
“Aha!” said Mr. Lambert, and the red-headed girl, watching with horrified eyes the reckless progress of young Mr. Ives across the spread nets, made a mechanical note that never except in a book had she heard a human being say “Aha” before. “So you looked in the book, did you? And there was no note, was there?”
“Right both times,” said Mr. Ives.
“Now that’s very interesting,” beamed Mr. Lambert—“very interesting, indeed. But if there had been a note in that book, you’d have found it, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, not being a blithering idiot, that’s a fairly safe proposition.”
“And if you had found it, you would have gone to the rendezvous, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d certainly have made every effort to.”
“Cancelling your poker engagement?”
“Presumably.”
“Taking the short cut across the fields?”
“I don’t know how I’d have gone. It’s slightly academic, isn’t it?”
“And in that gardener’s cottage you would have found waiting for you the unfortunate girl with those letters that it was so vitally necessary for you to obtain?”
“Why don’t you ask him whether he would still have had the knife in his pocket?” inquired Mr. Farr gently. “And why don’t you ask him what he would have done with it? You don’t want to leave anything like that out.”
Lambert, thus rudely checked in his exultant career, turned bulging eyes and a howl of outraged protest in the direction of Judge Carver’s unresponsive countenance.
“Your Honour, in a somewhat protracted career at the bar, I have yet to encounter as flagrant a breach——”
Judge Carver cut sharply across these strident objurgations: “And in a somewhat protracted career at the bar, Mr. Lambert, this Court has yet to encounter as extraordinary a conduct of an examination as you have permitted yourself, and as the Court, in the absence of protests from either the witness or the prosecution, has permitted you. Mr. Farr’s objection was not put in a proper form, but is otherwise quite legitimate. The questions that you are putting to the witness involve a purely supposititious case, and as such, the witness is entirely at liberty to refuse to answer them. You may proceed.”
“I’ll answer it,” said Pat Ives. “If I’d found the note, I’d have gone to the cottage, given Mimi the money, got the letters, and none of us would have spent these last weeks thinking what a nice pleasant place hell would be for a change. I wish to God I’d found it. Is that what you wanted to know?”
It was very far indeed from what Mr. Lambert wanted to know. However, he turned a wary eye on the jury, who were contemplating soberly and not too sympathetically the bitter, insolent face of the young gentleman in the witness box. Flippancy was obviously an evil stench in their nostrils. Mr. Lambert rattled the letters still clenched in his hand reminiscently.
“There are two or three things in these letters that I’d like to have you reconcile with the statement that they were written in 1916. First, what does it mean, Mr. Ives, when you say: ‘I keep telling myself that we’re mad—that there’s black trouble ahead of us—that I haven’t any right in the world to let you do this’—do what, Mr. Ives?”
“Carry on the highly indiscreet affair that we were indulging in,” said Pat Ives, his white face a shade whiter. “We’d both completely lost our heads. She wasn’t willing to marry me because she was afraid that I hadn’t it in me to make good. There was a lot of ugly gossip going on, and it had upset her.”
“Quite so,” smiled Mr. Lambert dreadfully; “oh, quite so. Now in the one that begins: ‘Mimi darling, darling, darling, it’s after four o’clock and——’ ”
“Are you going through those letters again?” inquired Patrick Ives, his hands clenched on the edge of the box.
“Just one or two little things that I’d like cleared up, and I’m sure that these gentlemen would too. It goes on: ‘Dawn—I always thought that was the worst word in the English language and here I am on my knees waiting for it, and ranting like——’ ”
“You needn’t go on,” said Patrick Ives, “if what you’re really after is when they were written. The sun that rose at 4:30 that morning in June in 1916 would have kept me waiting exactly one hour and six minutes longer in 1926. You and Mimi and I had forgotten just one thing, Mr. Lambert—we’d forgotten that in 1916 there was no such thing as daylight saving.”
And through the staggered silence that invaded some three hundred-odd people who had forgotten precisely the same thing, there rose a little laugh—a gay, excited, triumphant little laugh, as though somewhere a small girl had suddenly received a beautiful and unexpected present. It came from just behind Mr. Lambert’s sagging shoulders—it came from—— The startled eyes of those in the courtroom jerked in that direction, staring unbelievingly at the quiet figure, so quiet, so cool, so gravely aloof. But the red-headed girl felt idiotic tears sting swiftly beneath her lids. Under the lowered barrier of Sue Ives’s lashes there still danced the echo of that joyous truant, shameless and unafraid. It was she who had laughed, after all.
Mr. Lambert was not laughing. “You are a little late in recalling this,” he remarked heavily.
“Oh, a good deal late,” agreed Patrick Ives. “But, you see, I hadn’t been going in for watching the sun rise for some time previous to the murder. Since then I have. And when I heard that letter read in court the other day, something clicked in my head. Not five o’clock, and the sun was up! Something wrong there. I went back to New York and looked it up in the public library. On Friday, June 9, 1916, the sun rose at four twenty-two A. M. On Wednesday, June 9, 1926, the sun rose at five twenty-eight. So that’s that.”
“Have you a certified statement to that effect?” inquired Lambert, forlornly pompous.
“No,” said Mr. Ives. “But I can lend you a World Almanac.”
“You seem to find a trial for murder a very amusing affair,” remarked Lambert heavily, his eyes once more on the jury.
“You’re wrong,” said Patrick Ives briefly. “I don’t.”
“I do not believe that your attitude makes further examination desirable,” commented Lambert judicially. “Cross-examine.”
Farr rose casually from his chair, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked a trifle to one side. “Mr. Ives,” he said leisurely, “I’m going to ask you the one question that Mr. Lambert didn’t. Did you murder Madeleine Bellamy?”
After a pause that seemed interminable, Pat Ives lifted his eyes from their scrutiny of his hands, locked at the edge of the witness box. “No,” he said tonelessly.
“No further questions,” remarked Mr. Farr, still more leisurely resuming his seat.
Lambert glared—swallowed—glared again, and turned on his heel. “Mrs. Ives, will you be good enough to take the stand?”
She was on her feet before the words were off his lips, brushing by him with her light, swift step and a look of contemptuous anger that was bright and terrible as a sword.
“Looks as though his precious Sue was going to give Uncle Dudley a bad half hour,” murmured the reporter exultantly.
“Why?” whispered the red-headed girl. “Why did she look like that?”
“Because I rather fancy that Lambert has just a scrap exceeded his authority in his efforts to speed Pat Ives to the gallows. The old walrus made out a fairly damaging case against him, even if he did snort himself purple. If——”
“Mrs. Ives, I’m going to ask you to tell us in your own words just what occurred on the evening of the nineteenth of June, from the time that Mr. Farwell spoke to you at the club. I won’t interrupt unless I feel that something is not quite clear. At what time did the conversation with Mr. Farwell take place?”
She looked so small, sitting there—so small and young and fearless, with her dark, bright eyes and her lifted chin and the pale gold wings of her hair folded under the curve of the little russet hat. She had no colour at all—not in her cheeks, not in her lips.
“It was a little after five,” said Sue Ives, and the red-headed girl gave a sigh of sheer delight. Once or twice in a lifetime a voice like that falls on our lucky ears—a voice clear and fresh as running water, alive and beautiful and effortless. The girl in the box did not have to lift it a half tone to have it penetrate to the farthest corner of the gallery. “We got in from the links just at five, and Elliot came up and asked me if he could bring me something to drink. I said yes, and when he came back he suggested that we go over and sit on the steps, as he had a splitting headache, and everyone was making a good deal of a racket. We hadn’t been there more than five minutes before he told me.”
“Before he told you what?” prompted Lambert helpfully.
“Before he told me that Pat was having an affair with Mimi Bellamy.” She did not vouchsafe him even a glance, but kept the clear, stern little face turned squarely to the twelve attentive ones lifted to hers. “At first I thought that it was simply preposterous nonsense—I told him so. Everyone knew that Elliot was absolutely out of his head over Mimi, and I thought that he really was going a little mad. I could see that he’d been drinking, of course, and I wasn’t even as angry as I ought to have been, because he was so unhappy—dreadfully unhappy. And then he said that he’d spied on them—that he’d seen them go to the cottage together. Well, that—that was different. That didn’t sound like the kind of thing that you’d invent or imagine, no matter how unbalanced you were.”
“You believed it?”
“No, not at first—not quite. But it bothered me dreadfully all the way home from the club—all the time that we were standing around in our living room waiting for the cocktails. I couldn’t get it out of my head. And then Pat came in.”
She paused, frowning a little at the memory of that sick perplexity.
“You say that Mr. Ives came in?”
“Yes. He was looking dreadfully tired and—excited. No, that’s not the word. Keyed up—different. Or perhaps it was just that I expected him to look different. I don’t know. Anyway, Elliot started to go then, and I went into the hall after him, because he’d been drinking a good deal more, and I was afraid that he’d talk as indiscreetly to someone else as he had to me. I couldn’t think very clearly yet, but I was quite sure that that ought to be stopped. So I asked him to be careful, and he said that he would.”
“Did you notice Melanie Cordier in the library?”
“No. I was watching Elliot. He looked so wretchedly unhappy that I was really worried about him. Well, anyway, he went off without even saying good-bye, and I went back toward the living room. Just as I came up to it I heard George Dallas say, ‘We can count on you for the poker party to-night, can’t we?’ And Pat said, ‘I’ll surely try to make it, but don’t count on me.’ Something inside my head went click, and all the pieces in the puzzle fell into place. I walked straight into the room and up to where he was standing. He’d gone over to the table and was pouring out another of those new cocktails. Everyone was making a dreadful racket, laughing and talking. I said, ‘Nell Conroy wanted us to go to the movies to-night. Don’t you think that it would be rather fun?’ And he said, ‘Sorry, but I told George that I’d run over for a poker game. Tell Nell that you’ll go, and then I won’t worry about you being lonely.’ I said, ‘That’s a good idea.’ And Pat said, ‘Be back in a minute. I have some papers I want to get rid of.’
“He went across the hall; I could hear his steps. I felt just exactly as though I’d taken poison and I stood there waiting for it to begin to work. Someone came up to me to say good-bye—I think it was the Conroys, and then everyone else began to go, too, the way they always do. I started to go out to the porch with them, and while I was passing through the hall I saw Pat standing by the desk. He was looking at some papers in his hand. I went on toward the porch, calling back over my shoulder that everyone was leaving. In a minute, he came out too. I looked to see whether he still had the papers in his hand, but he hadn’t. While we were both standing there watching them drive off, Melanie came out, announced dinner, and we went in. Pat stopped behind in the study for a moment, but he didn’t go near the desk drawer—I could see it from my place at the table.”
“Could you have seen him take a book from the corner shelf?”
“No—the screen between the rooms cut off that corner.”
“Nothing unusual occurred at dinner?”
“No. That made it worse. Nothing unusual occurred at all. Pat talked and laughed a good deal, but that’s what he always did.”
“And after dinner?”
“After dinner Mother Ives went out into the garden, and Pat asked me to come into the study to look at the clipper ship that he’d been making for Pete. All the time that I was supposed to be looking at it, I couldn’t take my eyes off the desk, wondering what he’d done with those papers—wondering what they were. There had been quite a little pile of them. After a while I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I said, ‘If you want to say good-night to Pete and Polly, you’ll have to hurry. They ought to be asleep by now.’ He said, ‘Lord, that’s true!’ He snatched up the boat and started for the door, and I called after him, ‘I’m not coming. I kissed them good-night before dinner.’ I waited until I heard his footsteps on the stairs——”
She paused for a moment, pushing the bright hair back from her brow as though she found it suddenly heavy.
“And then, Mrs. Ives?”
“Then,” said Sue Ives steadily, “I did something disgusting. I searched the desk. I pushed the door to, so that none of the servants could see me if they passed through the hall, and I hurried like mad. I don’t know exactly what I expected to find, but I thought that maybe those papers were letters from Mimi, and then I knew that Pat kept his check book there, too, and I thought that there might be entries of some kind that would tell me something; I could bear anything but not knowing. It was like a—like a frenzy. Oh, it was worse! The top drawer on the left-hand side of the desk was locked.”
She paused again for a moment, staring down as curiously and intently at the upturned faces below her as they stared up at her; then, with a quick, impatient shake of her head she went on: “But that didn’t make any difference, because I knew where the key was. I used the top right-hand drawer myself for my household accounts and bills and loose silver, and I kept it locked because, whenever Pat brought home gold pieces from his directors’ meetings, we used to put them there. We saved them up until we had enough to get a present for the house, something beautiful and—— No, that doesn’t make any difference. We called the drawer the bank, and Pat showed me where he kept the key so that I could always get into it.”
“Where did he keep this key?”
“In a tobacco jar on top of the bookcase. I found it and opened the drawer, and there were the papers, quite a thick packet of them, pushed way back in the drawer. They were bonds—eighty-five thousand Liberty, fifteen thousand municipal. I counted them twice to make sure.” For the first time since she had mounted the stand she turned her dark and shining eyes on the perturbed Lambert. “You were very anxious to know whether anyone but Pat had seen that money, weren’t you? Well, I saw it. And I was just as sure that Pat had taken it out of our safe-deposit box in order to run away with Mimi Bellamy as I was that I was standing there counting it—just as sure as that. I put it back and locked the drawer and dropped the key back into the tobacco jar and went to the flower room to telephone to Stephen Bellamy. The clock in the hall said five minutes past eight. I hadn’t been in the study for more than ten minutes.” Once more she lifted her hands to that bright hair. “Do you want me to repeat the telephone conversation?”
“Was it substantially the same as Miss Page gave it?”
“Exactly the same, word for word.”
“Then I hardly think that that will be necessary. Just tell us what you did after you finished telephoning.”
“I went to the foot of the nursery stairs and called up to ask Pat if he had absolutely decided to go to the poker game. He called back yes, and asked if he couldn’t drop me at the Conroys’. I told him that I’d rather walk. I got that flannel coat out of the closet and started off for the gate at the back of the house that led to the back road. I was almost running.”
“Had you planned any course of action?”
“No, I hadn’t any definite plan, but I knew that I had to get to Stephen and make him stop Mimi, and that every minute was precious. Just as I got to the gate, I noticed that a wind had sprung up—quite a cold wind—and I remembered that Mother Ives had told me at dinner that Polly’s ear had been hurting her, and that she slept right by the window where that wind would blow on her, so I turned back to the house to tell Miss Page to be sure to put a screen around the head of her crib. I saw Mother Ives at the far end of the rose garden, but I thought that it would take as long to call her and explain as it would to do it myself. So I ran on to the house, and I was halfway up the nursery stairs before I heard Pat’s voice. I thought he was talking to the babies, and I hurried up the last few steps. I was almost at the nursery door when I heard another voice—Kathleen Page’s. It wasn’t coming from the nursery; it was coming from her room. She was saying, ‘Don’t let her send me away from you—don’t, don’t! All I want——’ ”
“Your Honour——”
Farr’s warning voice was hardly swifter than Judge Carver’s: “I am afraid that you cannot tell us what you heard, Mrs. Ives.”
“I cannot tell you what I heard Kathleen Page saying?”
The wonder in the clear, incredulous voice penetrated the farthest corner of the courtroom.
“No. Simply confine yourself to what you did.”
“Did? I did nothing whatever. I could no more have moved a step nearer to the door than if I had been nailed to the floor. She was crying dreadfully, in horrid little pants and gasps. It was absolutely sickening. Pat said, ‘Keep quiet, you little lunatic. Do you want——’ ”
“Mrs. Ives, the Court has already warned you that you are not able to tell us what was said.”
“Why am I not able to tell you what was said? I told you what we said downstairs.”
Judge Carver leaned toward her, his black sleeves flowing majestically over the edge of the rail. “No objection was raised as to that conversation. Mr. Farr objects to this and the Court sustains him. For your own sake, the Court requests you to conform promptly to its rulings.”
For a moment the two pairs of dark eyes met in an exchange of glances more eloquent than words; a look of grave warning and one of fearless rebellion.
“I do not understand your rules. What am I permitted to tell of the things that I am asked to explain?”
“Simply tell us what you did after you heard the voices in the room.”
“Very well; I will try again. I stood there for a moment, staring at the door to the day nursery. The key was on the outside so that the babies couldn’t lock themselves in. I don’t remember moving, but I must have moved, because suddenly I had the door knob in my hand. I jerked it toward me and slammed the door so hard that it nearly threw me off my feet. The key——”
“Yes, yes,” cut in Lambert, his face suffused with a sudden and terrifying premonition. “We needn’t go too much into all these details, you know. We want to stick to our story as closely as possible. You didn’t say anything, did you?”
“No.”
“Just went on downstairs to meet Stephen Bellamy, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“You did not?” Mr. Lambert’s blank query was enough to wring commiseration from a stone. Sue Ives did not look particularly merciful, however. She had turned in her chair so that she faced her devoted adversary squarely. She leaned forward a little now, her lovely mouth schooled to disdain, her eyes under their level brows bright with anger.
“No, not then. I was telling you what I did. I turned the key in the lock and put it in my pocket. You didn’t want me to say that, did you, Uncle Dudley? You wanted everyone to believe that it was Pat who murdered Mimi, didn’t you?”
“Mrs. Ives—Mrs. Ives——”
“Silence! Silence!”
“Mrs. Ives!”
Over the outraged clamour of the law, her voice rose, clear and triumphant: “He didn’t murder her, because he was locked in those rooms until quarter to eleven that night, and I had the key in my pocket. Now, you can all strike that out of the record!”
“Mrs. Ives!” Over the last crash of the gavel, Judge Carver’s voice was shaken with something deeper than anger. “Mrs. Ives, if you are not immediately silent, the Court will be obliged to have you removed.”
“Removed?” She was on her feet in an instant, poised and light. “You wish me to go?”
“I wish you to get yourself in hand immediately. You are doing yourself untold injury by pursuing this line of conduct. The rules that you are refusing to obey were made largely for your own protection.”
“I don’t want to be protected. I want to tell the truth. Apparently no one wants to hear it.”
“On the contrary, you are permitted to take the stand for that express purpose.”
“For that purpose? To tell the truth?” The scorn in her voice was almost gay.
“Precisely. The limits that are imposed are for your benefit, and you are injuring your co-defendant as well as yourself by refusing to abide by them.”
“Stephen?” She paused at that, considering gravely. “I don’t want to do that, of course. Very well, I will try to go on.” She turned back to her chair, and a long sigh of incredulous relief trembled through the courtroom.
“I have forgotten where I stopped.”
“You were about to tell us what you did after you came down the nursery stairs?” Lambert’s shaken voice was hardly audible.
“Yes. Well, then—then we did exactly what Stephen said we did. We drove through the back road to the River Road, where we turned to the left and went into Lakedale in order to get more gasoline. I distinctly remember the time, because we had been discussing whether the movies would be out by the time that we got back. It was twenty-five minutes past nine. After that we retraced our steps—down the River Road to the back road, down to the place in the back road where I had met Stephen, past our house into the main street of the village, past the movie house, which was dark, and up the main street, which runs into the Perrytown Highway—up the Perrytown Highway to the Bellamy house.
“I was absolutely sure that I saw a light over the garage, but it certainly wasn’t there a minute or so afterwards, and I decided that I might as well go in anyway. I was beyond bothering much about any minor conventions, and I thought that if Mimi were actually there, it would be a heavenly relief to put all the cards on the table and have it out with her once and forever. Mimi wasn’t there, of course; it was then that Steve called up the Conroys. When he found that she wasn’t there, I was really terrified at his condition. He was as quiet as usual, but he didn’t seem to understand anything at all that was said to him. He didn’t even bother to listen. He had some kind of a chill, and he just sat there shivering, while I reassured and argued and explained.
“I could have saved my breath. He didn’t even hear me. He did finally rouse himself to telephone the police and the hospital; the rest of the time he just sat there staring and shivering. He wanted me to call up Pat and the Dallases, and of course I knew that that wouldn’t do any good—Pat was locked up two stories away from a telephone. Finally I asked, ‘Did you see what direction she was going in when she left?’ He shook his head. I said, ‘But she told you that she was going toward the Conroys’?’ He nodded. I said, ‘Well, maybe she turned her ankle and fainted somewhere along the side of the road—she always wears such dreadfully high heels. We might take the car and turn the headlights along the edge of the road and see if we can get any trace of her. Come on!’
“I knew that that was perfect nonsense, but I was desperate, and I thought that there was just a chance that it might rouse him. It did. It was exactly as though you’d put a galvanic shock through him. He jerked out of his chair. He was out in the hall without even waiting to look back at me, and I had to run to get to the car before he started it.
“We got off with such a jerk that it nearly threw me out of the car, and I was really afraid that he was going to dash us against one of the gateposts. I said, ‘If we’re going to find Mimi, Steve, we must go slowly, mustn’t we? We must look carefully.’ He said, ‘That’s right!’ And after that we literally crept, all the way to the Conroys’.”
“How far was that?”
“Oh, not far—not half a mile—just a little way. It wasn’t until after we got past their entrance that we decided that——” She paused for a moment, her eyes dilated strangely in her small pale face; then she wrung her hands together more closely as though in that hard contact she found comfort, and continued steadily in her low voice. “We decided that we might as well go on.”
Lambert, paler than she, said just as steadily, “Might as well go on where, Mrs. Ives?”
“Go on to the gardener’s cottage at Orchards,” said Susan Ives.
In the gray light of the courtroom, the faces of the occupants looked gray, too—sharpened, fearful, full of an ominous unease. More than one of them glanced swiftly over a hunched shoulder at the blue-coated guardians of the door, and then back again, with somewhat pinched and rueful countenance, at the slight occupant of the witness box. The figure sat so quietly there in the gathering shadows; to many who watched it seemed that there slanted across her lifted face another shadow still—the shadow of the block, of the gallows, of the chair. . . .
“Is she confessing?” asked the red-headed girl in a small colourless voice.
“Wait!” said the reporter. “God knows what she’s doing.”
Judge Carver leaned suddenly toward Lambert.
“Mr. Lambert, it is already considerably past four. Is this testimony likely to continue for some time?”
“For some time, Your Honour.”
“In that case,” said Judge Carver gravely, “the Court considers it advisable to adjourn until ten to-morrow. Court is dismissed.”
The small figure moved lightly down from the witness stand into the deeper shadows—deeper still—she was gone. The sixth day of the Bellamy trial was over.