The Bellamy Trial (American Mystery Classics)

by Frances Noyes Hart

  June 19, 1926, and May 8, 1916. . . . A boy came running down the aisle with a basketful of sandwiches and chewing gum; there was another one with pink editions of the evening papers; it was exactly like a ball game or a circus. . . . Where was he? Wasn’t he coming back at all? . . . Outside the snow was falling; you could see it white against the black windowpanes, and all the lights in the courtroom were blazing. . . . Well, but where was he?

  A voice from somewhere just behind her said ominously, “Can’t bear me, can’t she? I’ll learn her!”

  The red-headed girl screwed around in her seat. He was leaning over the back of the chair next to her with a curious expression on his not unagreeable countenance.

  The red-headed girl said in a small, abject voice that shocked her profoundly, “Don’t go away—don’t go away again.”

  The reporter, looking startlingly pale under the glaring lights, remarked casually, “I don’t believe that I’ll marry you after all.”

  The red-headed girl could feel herself go first very white and then very red and then very white again. She could hear her heart pounding just behind her ears. In a voice even more casual than the reporter’s she inquired, “After all what?”

  “After all your nonsense,” said the reporter severely.

  The red-headed girl said in a voice so small and abject that it was practically inaudible, “Please do!”

  “What are we doing in here?” inquired the reporter in a loud clear voice. “What are we doing in a courtroom at a murder trial, with two hundred and fifty-four people watching us? Where’s a beach? Where’s an apple orchard? Where’s a moonlit garden with a nightingale? You get up and put your things on and come out of this place.”

  The red-headed girl rose docilely to her feet. After all, what were they doing there? What was a murder trial or verdict or a newspaper story compared to— She halted, riveted with amazement.

  Suddenly, mysteriously, incredibly, the courtroom was all in motion. No one had crossed a threshold, no one had raised a voice; but as surely as though they had been tossed out of their seats by some gigantic hand, the crowd was in flight. One stampede toward the door from the occupants of the seats, another stampede from the occupants of the seats toward the door, a hundred voices calling, regardless of law and order.

  “Keep that ’phone line open!”

  “They’re coming!”

  “Dorothy! Dorothy!”

  “Have Stan take the board!”

  “Where’s Larry? Larry!”

  “Get Red—get Red, for God’s sake!”

  “That’s my chair—snap out of it, will you?”

  “Watch for that flash—Bill’s going to signal.”

  “Dorothy!”

  “Get to that door!”

  And silence as sudden as the tumult. Through the left-hand door were coming two quiet, familiar figures, and through the right-hand door one robed in black. The clock over the courthouse door stood at a quarter to seven.

  “Is there an officer at that door?” Judge Carver’s voice was harsh with anger. “Officer, take that door. No one out of it or in it until the verdict has been delivered.”

  Despairing eyes exchanged frantic glances. Well, but what about the last edition? They’re holding the presses until seven. What about the last edition? Hurry, hurry!

  But the ambassador of the majestic law was quite unhurried. “I have a few words to say to the occupants of this courtroom. If at the conclusion of the verdict there is a demonstration of any kind whatsoever, the offenders will be brought before me and promptly dealt with as being in contempt of court. Officers, hold the doors.”

  And through another door—the little one behind the seat of justice—twelve tired men were filing, gaunt, solemn eyed, awkward—the farmers, merchants, and salesmen who held in their awkward hands the terrible power of life and death. The red-headed girl clutched the solid, tweed-covered arm beside her as though she were drowning.

  There they stood in a neat semicircle under the merciless glare of the lights, their upturned faces white and spent.

  “Gentlemen of the jury, have you agreed on a verdict?”

  A deep-voiced chorus answered solemnly, “We have.”

  “Prisoner, look upon the jury. Jury, look upon the prisoners.”

  Unflinching and inscrutable, the white faces obeyed the grave voice.

  “Foreman, how do you find as to Stephen Bellamy, guilty or not guilty?”

  “Not guilty.”

  A tremor went through the court and was stilled.

  “How do you find as to Susan Ives?”

  “Not guilty.”

  For a moment no one moved, no one stirred, no one breathed. And then, abruptly, the members of the fourth estate forgot the majesty of law and remembered the majesty of the press. Three minutes to seven—three minutes to make the last edition! The mad rush for the doors was stoutly halted by the zealous guardians, who clung devoutly to their posts, and the air was rent with stentorian shouts: “Sit down there!” “Keep quiet!” “Order! Order!” “Take your hands off of me!”—and the thunder of Judge Carver’s gavel.

  And caught once more between the thunder of the press and the law, two stood oblivious of it. Stephen Bellamy’s haunted face was turned steadfastly toward the little door beyond which lay freedom, but Susan Ives had turned away from it. Her eyes were on a black head bent low in the corner by the window, and at the look in them, so fearless, so valiant, and so eager, the red-headed girl found suddenly that she was weeping, shamelessly and desperately, into something that smelt of tweed—and tobacco—and heaven. . . . The clock over the door said seven. The Bellamy trial was over.

  The judge came into the little room that served him as office in the courthouse with a step lighter than had crossed its threshold for many days. It was a good room; the dark panelling went straight up to the ceiling; there were two wide windows and two deep chairs and a great shining desk piled high with books and papers. Against the walls rose row upon row of warm, pleasant-colored books, and over the door hung a great engraving of Justice in her flowing robes of white, smiling gravely down at the bandage in her hands that man has seen fit to place over her eyes. Across the room from her, between the two windows, his robes flowing black, sat John Marshall, that great gentleman, his dark eyes eternally fixed on hers, as though they shared some secret understanding.

  Judge Carver looked from one to the other a little anxiously as he came in, and they smiled back at him reassuringly. For thirty years the three of them had been old friends.

  He crossed to the desk with a suddenly quickened step. The lamps were lighted, and reflected in its top as in a mirror he could see the short, stubby, nut-colored pipe, the huge brass bowl into which a giant might have spilled his ashes, the capacious box of matches yawning agreeably in his tired face. The black robes were heavy on his shoulders, and he lifted an impatient hand to them, when he paused, arrested by the sight of the central stack of papers.

  “Gentlemen of the jury, the long and anxious inquiry in which we have been engaged____”

  Now just what was it that he’d said to them about a principal and an accessory before the fact being one and the same in a murder case? Of course, as a practical matter, that was quite accurate. Still—He ran through the papers with skilled fingers—there! “An accessory after the fact is one who____”

  There was a knock on the door and he lifted an irritated voice: “Come in!”

  The door opened cautiously, and under the smiling Justice in her flowing robes a little boy was standing, freckle-faced, blue-eyed, black-haired, in the rusty green of the messenger’s uniform. Behind him the judge could see the worried face of old Martin, the clerk of the court.

  “I couldn’t do anything with him at all, Your Honor. I told him you were busy, and I told him you were engaged, and I told him you’d given positive orders not to be disturbed, and all he’d say was, ‘I swore I’d give it into his hands, and into his hands it goes, if I stay in this place until the moon goes
down and the sun comes up.’____”

  “And that’s what I promised,” said the small creature at the door in a squeak of terrified obstinacy. “And that’s what I’ll do. No matter what____”

  “All right, all right, put it down there and be off.” The judge’s voice was not too long-suffering.

  “Into his hands is what I said, and into his hands____”

  The judge stretched out one fine lean hand with a smile that warmed his cold face like a fire. The other hand went to his pocket. “Here, if you keep on being an honorable nuisance, you may have a career ahead of you. Good-night, Martin; show the young gentleman to the door. If any one else disturbs me to-night, he’s fired.”

  “Oh, by all means, Your Honor. Good-night, Your Honor.”

  The door closed reverently, and His Honor stood staring absently down at the letter in his hand, the smile still in his eyes. A fat, a plethoric, an apoplectic letter; three red seals on the flap of the envelope flaunted themselves at him importantly. He turned it over carelessly. The clear, delicate, vigorous writing greeted him like a challenge:

  “Judge Carver.

  “To be delivered to him personally without fail.”

  Very impressive! He tore open the sealed flap with irreverent fingers and shook the contents out on to the desk. Good Lord, it was a three-volume novel! Page after page of that fine writing, precise and accurate as print. He lifted it curiously, and something fluttered out and lay staring up at him from the table. A piece of blue paper, flimsy, creased and soiled, the round childish writing sprawled recklessly across its battered surface:

  10 A.M., June 19th.

  Pat, I’ll catch either the eight or eight-thirty bus____

  Very slowly, very carefully, he picked it up, the smile dying in his incredulous eyes.

  Pat, I’ll catch either the eight or eight-thirty bus. That will get me to the cottage before nine, at the latest. I’ll wait there until half past. You can make any excuse that you want to Sue, but get there—and be sure that you bring what you promised. I think you realize as well as I do that there’s no use talking any more. We’re a long way beyond words, and from now on we’ll confine ourselves to deeds. It’s absurd to think that Steve will suspect anything. I can fool him absolutely, and once we settle the details to-night, we can get off any moment that we decide on. California! Oh, Pat, I can’t wait! And when you realize how happy we’re going to be, you won’t have any regrets either. You always did say that you wanted me to be happy—remember?

  MIMI.

  Judge Carver pushed the deep chair closer to the lamp and sat down in it heavily, pulling the closely written pages toward him. He looked old and tired.

  “Midnight.

  “MY DEAR JUDGE CARVER:

  “I am fully aware of the fact that I am doing a cowardly thing in writing you this letter. It is simply an attempt on my part to shift my own burden to another’s shoulders, and my shoulders should surely be sufficiently used to burdens by this time. But this one is of so strange, awkward, and terrible a shape that I must get rid of it at any cost to my pride or sense of fair play—or to your peace of mind. If the verdict to-morrow is guilty, of course, I’ll not send the letter, but simply turn the facts over to the prosecutor. I am spending to-night writing you this in case it is not guilty.

  “It was I who killed Madeleine Bellamy. It seems simply incredible to me that everyone should not have guessed it long before now.

  “Kathleen Page, Melanie Cordier, Laura Roberts, Patrick, Sue, I myself—we told you so over and over again. That singularly obnoxious and alert Mr. Farr—is it possible that he has never suspected—not even when I explained to him that at ten o’clock I was in the flower room, washing off my hands? And yet a few minutes later he was asking me if there wasn’t a sink in the pantry where my poor Sue might have cleansed her own hands of Mimi Bellamy’s blood—and every face in the court was sick with the horror of that thought.

  “We told you everything, and no one even listened.

  “Who knew about the path across the meadow to the summerhouse? I, not Sue. Who could see the study window clearly from the rose garden? I, not Sue. Who had that hour and a half between 8:30 and ten absolutely alone and unobserved? I, not Sue. Who had every motive that was ascribed to Sue multiplied ten times over? I, who had known poverty beside which Sue’s years in New York were a gay adventure; who had not only a child to fight for, but that child’s children; who, after a lifetime of grim nightmare, had found paradise; and who saw coming to thrust me out from that paradise not an angel with a flaming sword, but a little empty-headed, empty-hearted chit, cheap, mercenary, and implacable, as only the empty-headed can be.

  “I know, Judge Carver, that the burden that I am trying to shift to your shoulders should be heaviest of all with the weight of remorse; and there is in it, I can swear to you, enough remorse to bow stronger shoulders than either yours or mine—but none, none for the death of Mimi Bellamy.

  “Remorse for these past weeks has eaten me to the bone—for the shame and terror and peril that I have brought to my children, for the sorrow and menace that I have brought to that gentle soul, Stephen Bellamy—even for the death of poor Elliot Farwell; that was my doing, too, I think. I do not shirk it.

  “I am rather an old-fashioned person. I believe in hell, and I believe that I shall probably go there because I killed Mimi Bellamy and because I’m not sorry for it; but the hell that I’ve been living through every day and every night since she died is not one shadow darker because it was I who gave her the little push that sped her from one world to another.

  “When that unpleasant Mr. Farr was invoking the vengeance of heaven and earth on the fiend who had stopped forever the silver music of the dead girl’s laughter, I remembered that the last time that she laughed it had been at an old woman on her knees begging for the happiness and safety of two babies—and the world did not seem to me to have lost much when that laughter ceased. That is frightful, isn’t it? But that is true.

  “I’ll try to go back so that you can understand exactly what happened; then you can tell better, perhaps, what I should do and what you should do with me. First of all, I must go very far back, indeed—back thirty years, to a manufacturing town in northern New York.

  “Thirty-one years ago last June, my husband left me with the nineteen-year-old daughter of my Norwegian landlady. You couldn’t exactly blame him, of course. Trudie was as pretty as the girl on the cover of the most expensive candy box you ever saw, and as unscrupulous as Messalina—and I wasn’t either.

  “I was much too busy being sick and miserable and cross and sorry for myself to be anything else at all, so he walked off with Trudie and nineteen dollars and fifty cents out of the teapot and left me with a six-weeks-old baby and a gold wedding ring that wasn’t exactly gold. And my landlady wouldn’t give me even one day’s grace rent free, because she was naturally a little put out by her daughter’s unceremonious departure, and quite frankly held me to blame for it, as she said a girl who couldn’t hold her own man wasn’t likely worth her board and keep.

  “So, just like the lady in the bad melodramas, I wrapped my baby up in a shawl and started out to find work at the factory. Of course I didn’t find it. It was a slack season at the factories, and I looked like a sick little scarecrow, and I hadn’t even money for car fare. I spent the first evening of my career as a breadwinner begging for pennies on the more prominent street corners. It’s one way to get bread.

  “In the next twenty years I tried a great many other ways of getting it, including, on two occasions, stealing it. But that was only the first year; after that we always had bread, though often there wasn’t enough of it, and generally it was stale, and frequently there wasn’t anything to put on it.

  “When people talk about the fear of poverty, I wonder whether they have the remotest idea of what they’re talking about. I wasn’t rich when I married Dan; I was the daughter of a not oversuccessful lawyer, and I thought that we were quite poor, because often we w
ent through periods where pot roast instead of chicken played a prominent part in the family diet, and my best dress had to be of tarlatan instead of taffeta, and I possessed only two pairs of kid gloves that reached to my elbow, and one that reached to my shoulder.

  “I was very, very sorry for myself during those periods, and used to go around with faintly pink eyes and a strong sense of martyrdom. I wasn’t at all a noble character. I liked going to cotillions at night and staying in bed in the morning, and wringing terrified proposals from callow young men who were completely undone by the combination of moonlight and mandolin playing. Besides playing the mandolin, I could make two kinds of candy and feather-stitch quite well and dance the lancers better than anyone in town—and I knew most of Lucile by heart. Thus lavishly equipped for the exigencies of holy matrimony, I proceeded to elope with Mr. Daniel Ives.

  “I won’t bother you much with Dan. He was the leading man in a stock company that came to our town, and three weeks after he saw me sitting worshipping in the front row we decided that life without each other would be an empty farce and shook the dust of that town from our heels forever. It was very, very romantic, indeed, for the first six days—and after that it wasn’t so romantic.

  “Because I, who could feather-stitch so nicely, was a bad cook and a bad manager and a bad housewife and a bad sport—a bad wife, in short. I wasn’t precisely happy, and I thought that it was perfectly safe to be all those things, because it simply never entered my head that one human being could get so tired of another human being that he could quietly walk out and leave her to starve to death. And I was as wrong about that, as I’d been about everything else.

  “I’m telling you all this not to excuse myself, but simply to explain, so that you will understand a little, perhaps, what sent my feet hurrying across the meadow path, what brought them back to the flower room at ten o’clock that night. I think that two people went to meet Madeleine Bellamy in the cottage that night—a nice, well-behaved little white-headed lady and the wilful, spoiled, terrified girl that the nice old lady thought that she had killed thirty years ago. It’s only fair to you that I should explain that, because of what I’m going to ask you to decide. And it is only fair to myself that I should say this.