The child was laying on its fat little naked back, kicking its feet at me, when the father came upstairs.
"Please, sir," said I, "what is the news?"
"The inquest says drowning or blows on the head administered by a party or parties unknown," he answered gravely. "John Chalmers, the husband, acts like a heeled snake--violent and sinuous by turns. His lawyer has waived all preliminary proceedings and, as luck will have it, we have a clear docket to go to trial with a jury."
By afternoon the town was filled with reporters who had come up on the midday train. From the back windows you could see them walking along the banks of the river and talking with a man in a red shirt. And later I learned he was the one who had gone out in a rowboat and found the poor woman"s silly hat, that, with its wet yellow roses and lavender veil, had floated around amongst a clump of rushes. With night the city papers came, full of accounts of the actress and how she had played in melodramas, until finally she had played her farewell in a tragedy of real life. One said her husband was going to prove an _alibi_; another said he had no memory whatever of where he had been or what he had done that evening; and still another paper said the woman had been seen to quarrel with him and join a mysterious stranger, who was described as being a hunchback of terrible ugliness. All three of those I saw said the mystery might never be solved, but that new developments were expected every minute by both the state police and the chief of the local department.
"Margaret," said the Judge that evening at supper, as I was waiting on him, "you must not be talking of this murder with any one. Remember that you are employed in my home. Furthermore, I have old-fashioned notions, and so, from now on, I have stopped the "Morning Chronicle" from coming to the house and I don"t want any newspapers brought in until the trial is over."
"And when will that be?" I asked.
"Soon, I hope," he answered. "The district attorney, I understand, has conferred with the police again this afternoon, and believes he has enough evidence to hang Chalmers and that no more can be gathered. For some reason the defense is equally satisfied. Do you understand now?"
"Yes, sir," I said. "There won"t be much delay."
"Not much delay," he repeated over after me, and his voice shook as I never heard it shake before that minute.
"The beast!" I said.
"Hush," said he. "He must be found guilty first. But if he is--"
He stopped there, but I saw the light in his eyes and his long, tight-clenched fingers turning white under the pressure, and I knew, if he pa.s.sed sentence on John Chalmers, what it would be.
That was the last word I ever heard from him before the trial was over, and I had to be running over to the neighbors for all the news I got. A reporter came to ask me one day if I had seen a strange man loafing in the meadows the evening the thing happened. He was a red-haired, freckled young man who kept pushing his hat, first to one side of his head and then the other, and talking first to one side and then the other of a pencil held in his teeth, so I could hardly hear a word he said. But he told me that, following the case from the beginning, he had been the one who had discovered that two weeks before the murder the man had insured his wife"s life in his own favor and that before he had met and married her he had had a different name,--Mortimer Cross,--and been a runner for a hotel in Bermuda, and lost the place because, in a fit of anger, he had tried to knife a porter.
"The police haven"t half covered this case," he said, with his green eyes snapping. "I"ve got more evidence for my paper than they can get for the State"s case. I haven"t slept four hours in forty-eight."
"Young man," said I, "how much do you get a week?"
He grinned.
"Twenty dollars," he said.
"You work like that for twenty dollars?" I asked.
"For twenty dollars!" said he. "What"s the twenty dollars?"
"Well, then--" said I.
"It"s the game!" he said. "But you don"t understand."
"Don"t I, though!" said I. And for days the old desire for adventure, for all the crooked ways, came back to me and made me as restless as a volcanic island, as Madame Welstoke used to say.
It was then I used to begin to hate the baby at times. I could have loved one of my own, and the feeling that this one belonged to some one else, and that I probably never would have the touch of hands that belonged to me, haunted me like a gray worm crawling through my head.
Many a time as I would be dipping little Julianna into her bath, these thoughts would come to my wicked mind, and, drying her, I"d dust the powder over the pink body till the room looked like a flour-mill. I wished the trial would hurry to come and go, so Mrs. Colfax, who was writing such pathetic, patient letters about her baby, could return, and I laid many a curse on the fat doctor for making so much fuss about her nervous condition and for sending her away.
I could not go to the court and I had to pick up what I could of the trial, as it went on, from gossip and reading of papers in my own room after I had gone to bed. Sometimes I"d wheel Julianna down the street to the court-house, and then I"d see men with fingers raised as if they were all barristers, or imitating barristers, standing on the court-house steps and whispering and talking and laughing, and the sheriff, with a blue coat and mixed trousers and gray side whiskers, sitting on a campstool under the big elm tree, like a man at an old soldiers" home, and factory-girl witnesses, giggling as they went up and disappeared into the dark corridors, and the drone of voices coming out of the open windows, and perhaps the jury walking in pairs and acting very important, with a deputy sheriff taking them over to the Lenox Cafe for their lunch. The murder mystery had brought up a lot of curious people from the city, and I remember one--a woman with folds of skin under her chin and plenty of diamond rings--who wiped her eyes, pretending there were tears in them.
"Where is the court-house?" she said to me, just as if she could not see it. "_I_ was the woman"s most _intimate_ friend _once_."
That was the way with most everybody. They did not like the thought of the poor dead woman or the horror of it, but only the thought of being important and knowing something about it that the next one did not know.
One girl in the town--a daughter of the biggest grocer and quite a belle--could imitate the screams she had heard and did it over and over, because she was begged by her girl friends, and so she was something of a heroine and thought for still another reason to be a good person to know.
The Judge was made of different stuff, I can tell you. We did not have many criminal trials in our family, so to speak, and I think it must have eaten well into his heart, for he was very silent and grave at meals and never laughed, except when he came up to play with the baby and ride the little thing, with its lolling head and big eyes, on his knee.
It took over a week to finish the trial after they had begun it. They had wanted to trace John Chalmers"s history, but he would tell nothing of it himself, and his past was a mystery, and there was a feeling among those who discussed the case that this would be against him. In fact, every one said he was surely guilty. He had misused his wife"s life; he was a drunkard and subject to fits of violence; he had asked his wife to go rowing on the river at a season when it was still cold; she had screamed; he was a good swimmer; there were signs of blows on her head; he had rescued himself, but not her, and he had tried to run away from the town without reporting her death. To be sure, he had been able to show that he had been drinking, and evidence was brought to prove that he had lost consciousness after getting out of the water, and that when he had awakened he had asked a sleepy milkman where the police station was and had been directed to the depot by mistake. According to his own story, the boat had tipped over when the moon was behind a cloud and he had lost all trace of his wife after her first struggle in the water.
But people laughed at this story, and as for myself, I wondered who was the creature I had seen in the orchard, mixed up with the queer shadows and running from tree to tree like a frightened ape. Little knowing what was to happen, I wondered whether I should ever see John Chalmers, the accused man, before the law had made way with him.
I never doubted that the law would hesitate, till the day the Judge came home to dinner at six in the evening and told me that the case had been in the jury"s hands for three hours already. How well I remember the long rays of the sun slanting over the slope, the songs of the wild birds that had sneaked into the trees along the green back yards of our dusty street, and how it came to me then that the world was too beautiful to be befouled by the hates of little men, whose appet.i.tes were no more important than the appet.i.tes of the caterpillars eating the green foliage. But I could see the hates of men reflected in the Judge"s face.
"Surely they would not let him go, sir?" said I.
He only shook his head, and later he went out without once asking for the baby, and I knew when I heard the gate slam that things had not gone well at the court-house.
At eight o"clock that night I was on the porch when a man came tearing up to the fence, almost fell off a bicycle, vaulted the rail, and came running over the gra.s.s.
"Got a telephone?" he said.
"Yes," said I, with the answer frightened out of me.
"Gimme a match," said he. "I"ve gotter have a cigarette. Hold on, I got one."
He lit it. In the flare I saw it was the red-haired, freckled reporter and his green eyes was all alive again.
Before I could stop him, he had pushed his way ahead of me into the Judge"s study and was at the instrument.
"A line!" he gasped. "I want New York."
He was snapping at his cigarette like a wild thing, and, along with his perspiration, ashes and sparks were dropping on the rug.
"Excuse me," he said. "I lost my prey!"
"What!" said I.
"Acquittal," said he. "The Judge was too d.a.m.ned conscientious in his charge to the jury.--Come on, there, New York! Confound you, come on!
I"ve got to relay a message through to my paper."
"Acquittal?" I asked, trembling like a horse.
"Acquittal," he roared into the instrument. "This is Roddy. Five hours out. Interview with Dugan, juryman, local plumber. Says strict charge of judge did it. Prisoner gone down to River Flats with counsel. Drinking with Fred Magurk in kitchen barroom. Refuses to talk. Rest of story already gone by telegraph."
He turned around then and grinned as if it hurt him--as if he was trying to hide some pain. I had lit the lamp and you cannot begin to know how funny his white face looked under his bright red hair.
"Can I get a drink of water?" he said, choking, and then over he went face foremost into the morris chair.
I ran into the kitchen and what with the water splashing in the sink, I did not hear the Judge come in, and the first I knew about his being there was when I went back into the library. There he stood, with his tortoise-sh.e.l.l gla.s.ses in his long fingers, looking down at Mr. Roddy, sitting weak and blinking in his chair.
"Sorry, Judge, to faint away like a queen dowager in your library," said the reporter, with his everlasting American good nature. "But I came in to use the first telephone I could find. I was a little tired. My name"s Roddy."