“Of Stephen Bellamy I will say only this: If I had a daughter I would ask nothing more of destiny than that such a man should seek her for his wife—and you may make the most of that too.
“On this subject I will not touch again, I promise. It is not part and parcel of the speech of counsel for the defense to the jury in a murder trial to touch on his feeling toward his clients. I am grateful for the indulgence of both the Court and the prosecution in permitting me to dwell on them at some length. During the course of Mrs. Ives’s examination something as to our relation was inadvertently disclosed. In any case, I should have considered it my duty to inform you of it, as well as of every other fact in this case. I have now done so.
“A few days ago I said to you that Susan Ives was rich in many things. When I said that I was not thinking of money; I was referring to things that are the treasured possessions, the precious heritage, of many a humble and modest soul. Love, peace, beauty, security, serenity, health—these the least of us may have. As I have said, I am pretty close to being an old man now, and in my time I have heard much talk of class feeling and class hatred. I have even been told that it is difficult to get justice for the rich from the poor or mercy for the poor from the rich. I believe both these statements to be equally vile and baseless slanders.
“In this great country of which you and I are proud and privileged citizens, we are all rich—rich in opportunity and in liberty—and there is no room in our hearts for grudging envy, for warped malice. We do not say, ‘This woman is rich; she has breeding; she has intelligence and culture and position, therefore she is guilty.’ We do not say, ‘This man is a graduate of one of our greatest universities. Five generations of his ancestors have owned land in this country, and have lived on it honorably and decently, gentlefolk of repute and power in their communities; he is the possessor of a distinguished name and a distinguished record, therefore he is a murderer!’ We do not say that. No; you and I and the man in the street say, ‘It is impossible that two people with this life behind them and a richer and finer one before them should stoop to so low and foul a weapon as an assassin’s knife and a coward’s blow in the dark.’
“But even in the strictly material sense of wealth, Mrs. Ives is not a wealthy woman. I should like, in the simple interests of truth, to dispel the legends of a marble heart moving through marble halls that has been growing about her. She has lived for several happy years in what you have heard described to you as a farm house—a simple, unpretentious place that she made lovely with bright hangings and open fires and books and prints and flowers. If you had rung her doorbell before that fatal day in June, no powdered flunky would have opened it to you. It might have been opened by Mrs. Ives herself, or by Mr. Ives’s mother, or by a little maid in a neat dark frock and a white apron. Whoever had opened it to you, you would have found within a charming and friendly simplicity that might well cause you a little legitimate envy; you would have found nothing more.
“Sue Ives had what all your wives have, I hope—flowers in her garden, babies in her nursery, sunshine in her windows. With these any woman is rich, and so was she. As for Stephen Bellamy, he had no more than any good clerk or mechanic—a little house, a little car, a little maid of all work to help his pretty wife. That much for the legend of pride and pomp and power and uncounted millions that has grown up about these two. In the public press this legend has flourished extravagantly; it is of little concern to you or to any of us, save in so far as the preservation of truth is the concern of every one of us.
“The story that you have heard from the lips of Mrs. Ives and Mr. Bellamy is a refutation of every charge that has been brought against them. It is a fearless, straightforward, circumstantial and coherent account of their every action on the evening of that terrible and momentous night. Granted that every witness produced by the state here in order to confound and confuse them has spoken the absolute and exact truth—a somewhat extravagant claim, some of you may feel—granted even that, however, still you will find not one word of their testimony that is not perfectly consistent with the explanation of their actions that evening offered you by the defendants.
“Not only does the state’s testimony not conflict with ours—it corroborates it. The overheard telephone conversation, the knife from the study, the stained flannel coat, the visit to Stephen Bellamy’s house, the tire tracks in the mud outside the cottage, the fingerprints on the lamp within—there is the state’s case, and there also, gentlemen, is ours. These sinister facts, impressive and terrible weapons in the state’s hands, under the clear white light of truth become a very simple, reasonable and inevitable set of circumstances, fully explained and fully accounted for. The more squarely you look at them, the more harmless they become. I ask you to subject them to the most careful and severe scrutiny, entirely confident as to the result.
“The state will tell you, undoubtedly, that in spite of what you have heard, the fact remains that Susan Ives and Stephen Bellamy had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to commit this crime. It is our contention that they had nothing of the kind. No weapon has been traced to either of them; it would have been to all intents and purposes physically impossible for them to reach the gardener’s cottage, execute this murder and return to Stephen Bellamy’s house between the time that the gasoline vender saw them leave Lakedale and the time that Orsini saw them arrive at Mr. Bellamy’s home—a scant forty minutes, according to the outside figures of their own witnesses; not quite twenty-five according to ours.
“But take the absolute substantiated forty-minute limit—from 9:15 to 9:55. You are asked to believe that in that time they hurled themselves in a small rickety car over ten miles, possibly more, of unfamiliar roads in total darkness, took a rough dirt cut-off, groped their way through the back gates of the Thorne place to the little road that led to the cottage, got out, entered the cottage, became involved in a bitter and violent scene with Mimi Bellamy which culminated in her death by murder; remained there long enough to map out a campaign which involved removing her jewels from her dead body, while fabricating an elaborate alibi—and also long enough to permit Mr. Thorne, who has arrived on the piazza, ample time to get well on his way; came out, got back into the invisible automobile and arrived at Mr. Bellamy’s house, three miles away, at five minutes to ten. Gentlemen, does this seem to you credible? I confess that it seems to me so incredible—so fantastically, so grotesquely incredible—that I am greatly inclined to offer you an apology for going into it at such length. So much for the means, so much for the opportunity; now for the motive.
“There, I think, we touch the weakest point in the state’s case against these two. That the state itself fully grasps its weakness, I submit, is adduced from the fact that not one witness they have put on the stand has been asked a single question that would tend to establish either of the motives ascribed to them by the state—widely differing motives, alike only in their monstrous absurdity. It is the state’s contention, if it still cleaves to the theory originally advanced, that Madeleine Bellamy was murdered by Susan Ives because she feared poverty, and that she was aided and abetted by Stephen Bellamy in this bloody business because he was crazed by jealousy.
“I ask you to consider these two propositions with more gravity and concentration than they actually merit, because on your acceptance or rejection of them depends your acceptance or rejection of the guilt of these two. You cannot dismiss them as too absurd for any earthly consideration. You cannot say, ‘Oh, of course that wasn’t the reason they killed her, but that’s not our concern; there may have been another reason that we don’t know anything about.’ No, fortunately for us, you cannot do that.
“These, preposterous as they are, are the only motives suggested; they are the least preposterous ones that the state could find to submit to you. If you are not able to accept them the state’s case crumbles to pieces before your eyes. If you look at it attentively for as much as thirty seconds, I believe that you will see it crumbling. What you are asked to
believe is this: That for the most sordid, base, mercenary and calculating motives—the desire to protect her financial future from possible hazard—Susan Ives committed a cruel, wicked, and bloody murder.
“For two hours you listened to Susan Ives speaking to you from that witness box. If you can believe that she is sordid, base, calculating, mercenary, cruel, and bloody, I congratulate you. Such power of credulity emerges from the ranks of mere talent into those of sheer genius.
“Stephen Bellamy, you are told, was her accomplice—driven stark, staring, raving mad by the most bestial, despicable, and cowardly form of jealousy. You have heard Stephen Bellamy, too, from that witness box, telling you of the anguish of despair that filled him when he thought that harm had befallen his beloved—if you can believe that he is despicable, cowardly, bestial, and mad, then undoubtedly you are still able to believe in a world tenanted by giants and fairies and ogres and witches and dragons. Not one of them would be so strange a phenomenon as the transformation of this adoring, chivalrous, and restrained gentleman into the base villain that you are asked to accept.
“The state’s case, gentlemen! It crumbles, does it not? It crumbles before your eyes. Means, motives, opportunity—look at them steadily and clearly and they vanish into thin air.
“If means, motives, and opportunity constitute a basis for an accusation of murder, this trial might well end in several arrests that would be as fully justified as the arrests of Susan Ives and Stephen Bellamy. I make no such accusations; I am strong and sure and safe enough in the proved innocence of these two to feel no need of summoning others to the bar of justice. That is neither my duty nor my desire, but it would be incompatible with the desire for abstract truth not to point out that far stronger hypothetical cases might be made out against several whose paths also have crossed the path of the ill-starred girl who died in that cottage.
“We come as close to establishing as perfect an alibi as it is likely that innocent people, little suspecting that one will be called for, would be able to establish. What alibi had practically anyone who has appeared against these two for that night? The knife that Dr. Stanley described to you might have been one of various types—such a knife as might have been well discovered in a tool chest, in a kitchen drawer, in the equipment of a sportsman.
“You have analyzed the motives ascribed to the defendants. I submit that, taken at random, three somewhat solider motives might be robbery or blackmail or drunken jealousy. When one possible witness removes himself to Canada, when another takes his life—they are safely out of reach of our jurisdiction, but not beyond the scope of our speculations. I submit that these specifications are at least fruitful of interest. Abandoning them, however, I suggest to you that that girl, young, beautiful, fragile, and unprotected in that isolated cottage with jewels at her throat and on her fingers, was the natural prey of any nameless beast roving in the neighborhood—one who had possibly stalked her from the time that she left her house, one who had possibly been prowling through the grounds of this deserted estate on some business, sinister or harmless. Ostensibly this was a case of murder for robbery; it remains still the simplest and most natural explanation—too simple and too natural by half for a brilliant prosecutor, an ambitious police force, and frenzied public, all clamoring for a victim.
“Well, they have had their victims; I hope that they do not sleep worse at night for the rest of their lives when they think of the victims that they selected.
“Two things the state has made no attempt to explain—who it was that stole the note from Patrick Ives’s study and who it was that laughed when Madeleine Bellamy screamed. Whoever took the note, it was not Susan Ives. She had no possible motive in denying having taken it; she freely admitted that she searched the study for some proof of her husband’s duplicity, and she also admitted that Elliot Farwell had informed her that he believed her husband was meeting Madeleine Bellamy at the cottage that very night. The note, which we presume was making a rendezvous, would in no way have added to her previous information. Any one of six or eight servants or six or eight guests may have intercepted it; whoever did so knew when and where Madeleine Bellamy was to be found that night.
“The laugh is more baffling and disconcerting still; the state must find it mightily so. It will be instructive to see whether they are going to ask you to believe that it was uttered by Stephen Bellamy as he saw his wife fall. In my opinion only a degenerate or a drunken monster would have chosen that moment for mirth. Possibly it is Mr. Farr’s contention that he was both. Providentially, that is for you and not for him to decide.
“The state has still another little matter to explain to your satisfaction. According to its theory, Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives arrived at the scene of the crime in a car—in Mr. Bellamy’s car. The murderer of Madeleine Bellamy did not arrive in a car—or at any rate, no car was visible two minutes later in that vicinity. There were no tire tracks in the space behind the house, and the state’s own witnesses have proved that on both Stephen Bellamy’s visits his car was left squarely in front of the cottage door. If someone left an unlighted car parked somewhere down the main drive, as the state contends, it was not he. His car would have been clearly visible to any human being who approached the cottage. It will, as I say, be instructive to see how the state disposes of this vital fact.
“I have touched on these matters because I have desired to make clear to you two or three factors that are absolutely incompatible with any theory that the state has advanced. If they are to be disposed of in the most remotely plausible fashion, some other theory must be evolved, and I believe that you will agree with me that it is rather late in the day to produce another theory. I have not touched on them—and I wish to make this perfectly clear—on the ground that they are in no way necessary to our defense. That defense is not dependent on such intriguing details as who took the note, or who laughed, or whether the murderer approached his goal on foot or in a car. The defense that I advance is simple and straightforward and independent of any other circumstances.
Of all the things that I have said to you, there is only one that I hold it essential that you carry in the very core of your memory when you leave this room on as solemn an errand as falls to the lot of any man. This only: That the sole defense that I plead for Stephen Bellamy and Susan Ives is that they are innocent—as entirely and unequivocally innocent as any man of you in whose hands rests their fate; that this foul and brutal murder was against their every wish, hope, or desire; that it is to them as ghastly, as incredible, and as mysterious as it is to you. That and that only is their defense.
“It is not my task, as you know—as in time Judge Carver will tell you—to prove them innocent. It is the state’s to prove them guilty. A heavy task they will find it, I most truly believe. But I would have you find them something more than not guilty. That is the verdict that you may render with your lips, but with your hearts I ask you to render another more generous and ungrudgingly. ‘Innocent’—a lovely, valiant, and fearless word, a word untainted by suspicion or malice. A verdict that has no place in any court, but I believe that all who hear your lips pronounce “Not guilty” will read it in your eyes. I pray that they may.
“I said to you that when you left this room you would be bound on the most solemn of all errands. I say to you now that when you return you may well be bound on the most beautiful one imaginable—you will return in order to give life to two who have stood in the shadow of death. Life!
“You cannot give back to Susan Ives something that she has lost—a golden faith and carefree security, a confidence in this world and all its works. You cannot give back to Stephen Bellamy the dead girl who was his treasure and delight, about whose bright head clustered all his dreams. You cannot give back to them much that made life sweetest, but, gentlemen, you can give them life. You can restore to them the good earth, the clean air, the laughter of children, the hands of love, starlight and firelight and sunlight and moonlight—and brightest of all, the light of home shining th
rough windows long dark. All these things you hold in your hands. All these things are yours to give. Gentlemen, I find it in my heart to envy you greatly that privilege, to covet greatly that opportunity.”
He sat down, slowly and heavily, and through the room there ran an eager murmur of confidence and ease, a swift slackening of tension, a shifting of suspense. And as though in answer to it, Farr was on his feet. He stood silent for a moment, his hands clasped over the back of the chair before him, his eyes, brilliantly inscrutable, sweeping the upturned faces before him. When he lifted his voice, the familiar clang was muted:
“Your Honor, gentlemen, when my distinguished adversary rose to address you an hour or so ago, he assured you that he was about to take very little of your time. We would none of us grudge him one moment that he has subsequently taken. He is waging a grim and desperate battle, and moments and even hours seem infinitesimal weapons to interpose between those two whose defense is intrusted to him, and who stand this day in peril of their lives on the awful brink of eternity itself.
“The plea that he has made to you is as eloquent and moving a one as you will hear in many a long day; it is my misfortune that the one that I am about to make must follow hard on its heels, and will necessarily be shorn of both eloquence and emotion. It will be the shorter for lack of them, but not the better. What I lack in oratory I shall endeavor to supply in facts: facts too cold, hard, and grim to make pleasant hearing—still, facts. It is my unwelcome duty to place them before you; I shall not shrink from it. It will not be necessary for me to elaborate on them. They will speak for themselves more eloquently than I could ever hope to do, and I propose to let them do so.
The Bellamy Trial (American Mystery Classics) Page 28
