CHAPTER LIX.THE EXAMINATION COMPLETED.
Then Smith the grocer took the stand. There was human feeling in this man, and he bitterly repented the step he had taken after his wife learned of it, and put in her passionateprotest. But compunction came too late. His charge had been made; the case was taken out of his hands. He would gladly have softened, or withheld his own evidence; but the oath enforced upon him was a sacred obligation to speak the truth, and against his own will Smith gave in his evidence honestly.
While he was speaking a gentleman came into the court-room, and quietly drew toward Mrs. Laurence and her son, who caught him by the hand and whispered,
“Oh, take her home! don’t let her stand here to be looked at so! Feel her hands; they are cold as stones! Let them take me. I am a man, and can bear it; but a night in one of those cells would kill any woman! Please, oh, please! We haven’t another friend on earth but Mrs. Smith and you, since he has turned against us.”
Here James cast a look full of mournful reproach on Smith, whose voice began to falter, and once more he besought permission to withdraw the charge and let these two helpless creatures go. Guilty as they were, he did not like to see them punished.
Then the old woman advanced toward the judge and spoke. It was the first time she had uttered anything but dry, hard monosyllables, since her entrance into the court-room.
“If you are to decide this,” she said, firmly; but still with respect, “I ask that this man shall show us no mercy that can leave a suspicion of wrong on me, or on my boy. If you are a just judge, search out the truth, find the guilty persons; first and foremost wring the perjury from that young man’s soul, for heisperjured.”
Boyce tried to evade the long, steady finger which the woman pointed at him; but there was a force and weird fascination in her look which held him motionless. He grew coldly white to the lips, and the ruddy hair rose upon his temples like meadow-grass lifted by the wind.
“That—that is libelous,” he faltered at last. “I only come to do my duty, and because Mr. Smith wanted me to.”
“Well, I just wish I hadn’t; that’s all,” said Smith, wiping his moist forehead. “I’d rather have lost twice the money, than go through with all this again; to say nothing of the awful muss at home, where I don’t know as my own wife will speak to me.”
“Oh, you never fear that—they always do!” said Boyce, with an uneasy attempting to shake off the impression which Mrs. Laurence had left upon him. “Shouldn’t wonder if she forgives you one of these days, hard as she takes it; women are, naturally—well, suppose we say, soft.”
“Silence!” said the judge, on whom the young man was fastening a vague suspicion of treachery. “Come forward, Mrs. Laurence, and make your own statement.”
Mrs. Laurence laid her hand on the railing before her, looked the judge steadily in the face, and answered that she had nothing to say, except that, up to the time of her arrest she had never heard of the robbery, or known that her son was suspected.
“But some of the goods were found on your premises. How do you account for that?” said the judge.
“I do not account for a thing of which I have no knowledge. If stolen property was found there, neither I nor this child had anything to do with it.”
“Then you deny all knowledge of the stolen goods found in the out-house on your premises?”
“I do!”
“And the boy? Step down. He may be able to tell us something. James Laurence!”
James came forward, pale and frightened; but in no way downcast; his eyes clear, honest, and limpid with truth, were lifted almost with confidence to the judge, whose face softened with an irresistible feeling of compassion as he bent it toward him.
“Tell me what you know of this,” he said, very kindly; “but first let me caution you. If you are the guilty boy this witness makes you out, I have no power or right to make you accuse yourself. Be careful what you say; innocent or guilty, you shall have a fair trial.”
“I will answer everything, only please tell me what is it you want to know?”
“You have heard the charge. You know what this young man has been saying. Is it true?”
“Yes, sir, I heard every word he said. Some of it was true, and some wasn’t,” answered the boy, lifting his honest eyes to the magistrate’s face.
“How much of it, then, was true?”
“He did give me the store key, sir, and I was left home to take care of things.”
Here the boy faltered a little, and his eyes fell, his manly little heart refused to own that he was left in care of a girl baby before all those people.
“Well, what did you do after that?”
“I tried to fasten the door inside, but the bar was gone, so I left it as it was, locked but not barred, and went up stairs.”
“Who was with you then?”
“No one, that is, no one but Jerusha Maria. Kate Gorman had gone out with Jared Boyce, and we two were locked in till our folks came home from the party.”
“And who is Jerusha Maria? Is she here?”
James glanced at Mrs. Smith, and answered, with hesitation, that Jerusha Maria was Mrs. Smith’s little girl, and couldn’t come to a place like that, not being old enough.
“But being that bright,” broke in the mother, “that if she was here, she would cry ready to break her heart.”
The magistrate smiled, but went on questioning James.
“Well, what did you do after that?”
“I sat down by Jerusha Maria, and tried to coax her to go to sleep,” faltered the lad, blushing crimson.
“Well, what next?”
“She wouldn’t do it, sir.”
“Being good as gold, but obstinate, taking after her father in that respect,” broke in Mrs. Smith, with a last dash of scorn at her husband.
“They had kept up a racket before going out,” said James; “and that left her wide awake. It wasn’t her fault.”
“I’ll be bound it wasn’t!” exclaimed the mother, with tears in her eyes.
“Well?” said the judge, silencing Mrs. Smith with a gesture of the hand.
“Well, sir, I—I sat down by her and rocked the cradle till she fell asleep.”
The poor boy confessed this with a glow of burning shame in his eyes and cheeks; it was the only thing in his young life that he shrank from making known; the great cross taken up to save his mother and sisters from starvation.
“Well, when the child was asleep—what next?”
“I drank a glass of root beer that tasted of paregoric, and went to sleep myself. It was wrong, but I could not help it.”
“But you woke up again?” said the magistrate.
“Not till the folks came home.”
“And this is all?”
“That is all I can remember about.”
The magistrate hesitated; there was something so straightforward and honest in the two persons brought before him, that some intuitive feeling made him suspicious of the evidence that seemed to condemn them. But there was, in fact, nothing to contradict it; nothing that could justify him in setting the prisoners free. While he hesitated, there arose a slight disturbance at the door of the court-room.