CHAPTER LVIII.MOTHER AND SON.
When Mrs. Laurence heard this wild cry from her boy, she turned suddenly and held out her arms. The poor little fellow rushed into them, and clung to her, trembling under a fierce effort to be brave and choke back the tears that rushed, hot and painful, to his eyes.
Up to this moment the old woman had been too indignant for sorrow. The grey of her eyes shone out hard and cold as steel; but now a mist stole over them and her whole frame shook visibly.
“James! James! there, there, hush! These men must not see you cry. You have done nothing. I have done nothing. Be brave then, as your mother is.”
James drew his head back, and looked in the old woman’s face, shaking the tears away from his own vision that he might comfort her with an effort to obey and be strong. But the sight of that pale, shocked countenance brought them back with a rush.
“Oh, mother! mother! what will they do to you?”
“How can we tell, my child?”
“And the girls, Ruthy and Eva, will they bring them too?”
The old woman shook her head.
“I don’t know. How can I?”
“Where are they—oh! where are they, mother?” cried the boy, startled with a new fear.
“At home. I left them safe—don’t, don’t tremble so, Jimmy.”
“Did I tremble? Mother, don’t mind, I didn’t mean to; only I was so frightened about the girls. Do they mean to kill us all?”
“Come, come, little chap. Don’t you see that we’re waiting? A little of this sort of thing is well enough; but you’re wanted up yonder, you know.”
The policeman who said this took James by the arm, not altogether unkindly, and moved toward a flight of stairs that led into the front of the most gloomy building that civilization ever invented.
Through dark corridors, narrow passages, and sparsely furnished rooms, the officers led mother and son, who, quite unconscious of crime, felt all the shame and bitter humiliation of guilt. Through those vast Egyptian pillars that seemed strong enough to bear up mountains, and whose very shadows lay like overthrown granite upon the paved floor, they went, growing more and more heavy-hearted into that stone wilderness, till, at last, they stood in a square room, with a desk running across one end, and some wooden benches along the opposite side.
The woman and her son sat down on the nearest bench, while the officer leaned his back against the wall and waited.
The widow looked around with a vague feeling of curiosity. The bare room, in another place, would hardly have challenged notice; but here, in the heart of that gloomyprison, thoughts of crime and its gloomy train of sorrows made the place desolate indeed. The Judge, who sat wearily on his bench, scarcely looked that way when the door opened to admit these two prisoners. He had become so accustomed to human suffering, so familiar with every aspect of crime, that both had ceased to shock him.
After a little, he beckoned to the officer, who came forward and answered a brief question put to him.
“It is,” said he, “an old woman and her son, charged with a heavy crime, the boy with grand larceny, the woman with receiving the goods he had stolen, probably at her own suggestion.”
The Judge cast a severe glance at the woman, and went on with some business that had occupied him before the officer’s entrance.
But few persons were in the court-room, for scenes like this were commonplace affairs, and men had scarcely the curiosity to look twice, when the mother and son seated themselves on the same bench with some half dozen other persons, gloomy, hardened and evil-looking, who awaited examination.
After awhile, the Judge leaned back in his leathern chair, and the officer was ordered to come forward with his charge. He spoke kindly to the old woman, who arose, tall, rigid and tearless, to obey. This woman knew herself to be innocent, and felt the wrong that had dragged her before that tribunal with bitter, even fierce resentment. When her hand clutched the railing before the Judge, it was with a grasp of iron, and the eyes she bent upon him burned with smouldering fire which he took for defiance.
When the judge called Mrs. Laurence by name, the lad clung to her dress, and followed her up to the bar, with some wild idea of protecting her from the harm that threatened them both.
But there was nothing for him to do. He understoodthat some wrong was intended, but had no idea of the form in which it was to come upon them. Thus he stood close to his mother, pale and bewildered.
They had given him no chance to speak to his mother, nor did he know of what she was accused. All was gloom and distrust around him; his proud young heart swelled with a sense of infinite degradation, which seemed to close in his life with sudden darkness. He turned his eyes upon the judge with thrills of dread, then lifted them to his mother, from whose face they fell away, heavy with tears.
As the mother and her boy stood before this, to them mysterious tribunal, two men came into the court-room, and James gave a start as he saw them, and uttered a faint cry, which drew his mother’s attention.
The first man who presented himself was Jared Boyce, who came forward with a studied swagger, though his usually florid face was almost ashen pale, and his cowardly eyes wandered away from any look fixed upon them.
The other man was Smith; he too was pale and greatly agitated; he only cast one glance at the lad, whose face brightened at the sight of him, and turned utterly away from the woman, who searched his countenance keenly with her eyes.
“Oh, sir! oh, Mr. Smith! what does it mean? What will they do with her?” half sobbed, half whispered the boy, who still considered Smith his friend, and drew closer to him in an agony of hope.
Smith turned away with a frown; his course was taken; justice should be done; why then should he permit himself to be disturbed by the woman’s stern glance, or the large, pleading eyes of the boy. Now and then, he glanced toward the door, as if apprehending something from that quarter. But the fixed resolve of his face did not change. He waved the poor lad back with his hand, but made no other reply to his pathetic appeal.
“Oh, mother, what can I do for you—what can I do?” cried the boy, creeping back to the old woman’s side. “Everybody turns against us.”
“Hush! be a man!” was the answer; but the old woman’s voice was broken and her mouth quivered.
“Do they mean to send us back to prison, mother?” This time the boy addressed the policeman who had all along betrayed extraordinary pity for him. But another person heard it and answered,
“Not as long as I live to say that it sha’nt be done, Jimmy dear!”
James sprang forward and caught Mrs. Smith by the gown.
“Oh, ma’am, you will take her away, you will—” Mrs. Smith interrupted him.
“Yes, I will, if it kills me I will!”
Here the good woman released her dress from the boy’s grasp and went up to the judge.
“Sir,” said she, “now may it please your honor, I have come down here all alone to see that justice is done to these two people who are innocent as milk, yes sir, as skim milk. They are my friends, neither of them ever touched the value of a pin that I didn’t give them with my own hand. They——”
The judge here interrupted an argument that would have been effective before a jury, and in its honest intensity interested him.
“Who are you, Madam? I do not understand.”
“Who am I? Yesterday I should have been proud to say I was that man’s wife, but now!”
Here poor Mrs. Smith cast a reproachful glance on her husband; burst into a passion of tears, and only answered the judge with her sobs.
“She is my wife,” said Smith, in a troubled voice, “and won’t believe in their guilt, though the goods were found inthat woman’s wood-house. Some of them was in the cellar. The officers can testify to that, but she won’t believe a word of it.”
“No, I won’t, there!” cried the woman, brushing away a fresh burst of tears, and turning upon her husband, “not if I’d seen them a doing it with my own eyes. There are things, Mr. Judge, that human nature won’t take in, and this is one of them.”
“Do you know anything about this charge of your own knowledge?” questioned the Judge kindly, for the woman’s generous recklessness had made its impression on him.
“Know, Mr. Judge. Yes, I know that it’s a shame and a disgrace that we shall never get over as long as my name is Smith. Why, sir, if you could have seen that boy tending my Jerusha Maria, his innocence would be clear as clear to you. No paid nurse was ever so careful or so handy—the way he used to hold up her two feet in them red morocco shoes for her to crow over, was a sight in itself. He steal. He rob a store—nothing but a heathen would think of it.”
Here Mrs. Smith turned upon her husband, and flashed a storm of wrathful glances on him from her yet tearful eyes.
“You’re a pretty man, ain’t you—an honor to the name of Smith, oh yes! It would make you happy to see these two innocent creatures in States Prison, with balls and chains on their ankles. I can see you now a gloating over it, and those two girls breaking their hearts. Oh, Smith! Smith! I wouldn’t have believed it of you!”
“There, there, my good lady, I can honor your feelings, but you interrupt the case. Pray step down and let me take the evidence of these persons,” said the Judge.
“But you won’t believe them, just promise that you won’t believe them, and I’ll be still enough.”
“Believe me, they shall have justice,” answered the judge, kindly.
“That is all any of us want,” said Mrs. Smith, andstepping down, she took her place by Mrs. Laurence, resolute to stand by her to the last.
“Young man, step this way.”
Jared Boyce obeyed this order from the magistrate, and mounted the step which ran in front of the judge’s seat. His face was flushed to a bricky red now, and his eyes wandered away from any one who attempted to look into them. They were turned furtively aside from the judge while Boyce told his story in a hard, cruel voice, which never faltered or softened in its tone from beginning to end. We know what that story was, and how the wicked plot to ruin this brave, innocent lad had grown and perfected itself in the craft and greed of a few base creatures, who at first thought only of throwing their own guilt on him, but afterwards broadened their plot in hopes of great future gain.
It was impossible for Boyce to keep the blood from receding now and then from his face. When that stern woman’s eyes were bent on him, he seemed to feel their searching fire, and grew deadly pale, though his glance never rested on her once. Two or three times the accused lad made a step or two forward, with his hand clenched, tempted to strike his fellow clerk for the slander he was uttering; but a touch of the old woman’s hand brought him back to her side, and the perjured wretch told his story to the end, without interruption of any kind.