Читать книгу Westover of Wanalah - George Cary Eggleston - Страница 7

On a corner of Grace Street in that part of it which Westover had twice traversed on the evening before, stood a very spacious dwelling house, used at that time as a "Select Educational Establishment for Young Ladies." That was what the proprietor, Monsieur Le Voiser, called it in his circulars and the like; everybody else called it "Le Voiser's School."

There young women, mostly the daughters of the well to do planters, were "finished" after the most approved fashion. The training they had received at the hands of their governesses and tutors was supplemented by certain refinements of education which were deemed necessary to the perfection of their minds and manners. They had already learned to strum on the piano; here they were taught how to do so with ease and grace and with the air of accomplished pianistes. Instead of Stephen C. Foster's melodious but idiotically sentimental songs, which they loved, they were trained to screech "Hear me Norma," and other "operatic pieces," which they loathed. More important than all, they were taught French until they could dream in that language—bad dreams probably, if they were in harmony with the French in which they were cast.

Boyd Westover was acquainted with a dozen or more of Monsieur Le Voiser's pupils, they being the daughters of his neighbors and friends. He knew the place also, having delivered a brief course of lectures there during the preceding year.

About half past twelve o'clock on the night on which he had stopped under a street lamp to read a paper in the rain, there was an alarm in Le Voiser's school. There were shriekings that might have been heard a block away; there were a few faintings, and there was a general muster of scantily robed young women headed by the matron of the establishment, who was madly bent upon marching them into the garden in spite of the pouring rain.

The alarm had gone forth that there was "a man in the house." One girl had imprudently asked, "Is it a burglar?" only to bring down the matron's wrath upon her head.

"What does that matter to you, Mademoiselle? As a properly brought up young lady it is enough for you to know that he's a man. You should be ashamed to need more than that to alarm you."

It was Monsieur Le Voiser's proud boast that "French is the language of the establishment, and no young lady attending it is permitted to employ any other tongue." It is perhaps an illustration of the untrustworthiness of educational veneering, that in this time of excitement nobody spoke a word of French, until the intruder, who had been hiding behind a door, slipped from his place of concealment and made a dash for the verandah through the French window by which he had entered. As he did so the light of three or four bedroom candles held high in air fell full upon him, and half a dozen of the girls shouted in chorus:

"Regardez him! It's Mr. Boyd Westover!"

The consternation which fell upon the excited group at this announcement seemed to afford a sufficient occasion for several interesting attacks of hysteria, in the execution of which one damsel made the startling announcement:

"He came to kidnap me!" repeating it several times. When she grew a little calmer so that she might be questioned as to her meaning she declared that Boyd Westover was madly in love with her. Then, having set the inventive machinery of her creative imagination going, she told a romantic story interesting to hear and perfectly delicious to tell.

In it she figured as a heroine of romance, beset by the passionate entreaties of a lover to whom she found it impossible to give her love in return, and so forth to the end of as pretty a story of love and coldness, persuasion and pleading, as any that Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz or Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth ever manufactured for the delectation of languishing Lydias.

The girl's ambition to win interest in her own behalf somewhat overreached itself. The other girls were jealous of her romantic distinction and, when they grew calm while she got herself carried to bed, they flatly refused to believe her story.

But there was no room for doubt that the intruder was Boyd Westover, or that he had forced the fastenings of a bolted window in gaining entrance. One girl, whose father was a lawyer, explained that this forcing of fastenings, however frail they might have been, constituted the crime of burglary.

Then somebody remembered that the intruder had escaped and some one else ventured the suggestion that steps ought to be taken to apprehend him. To that end Monsieur Le Voiser was summoned from his private residence in the next street. After all the girls who personally knew Boyd Westover, and all those who had attended his course of lectures had borne witness that the intruder was unmistakably he, Monsieur proceeded to set the machinery of the law in motion, with the results already set forth.

When Boyd, with Jack Towns as his counsel, presented himself before the magistrate, there was a group of Monsieur Le Voiser's pupils there, whom Jack Towns, borrowing his text from the circus posters, called "A bevy of beauty and galaxy of grace." They were there under command of their matron to testify to the facts of the burglary and the identity of the burglar, which they one and all did with so much confidence that Jack Towns found it impossible to shake their beliefs in the smallest degree.

Sam Anderson was there too, very reluctantly indeed and under compulsion of a subpœna. The Commonwealth's Attorney had somehow learned of his encounter with Westover near the scene of the burglary under what appeared to be suspicious circumstances. The hotel clerk was present to testify concerning the hour and circumstances of Westover's return to the hotel on the night before.

To meet all this array of testimony, Boyd Westover had no single witness of any kind. And if there had been any such Jack Towns would not have put him on the stand. It was clear that the accused young man must be committed in any case to await the action of the Grand Jury, and Jack Towns was much too shrewd a lawyer to waste strength—if he had had any strength—in this preliminary hearing. He devoted himself instead to the task of getting the bail fixed at as low a sum as possible. When he pleaded that his client was well known to be a gentleman of the best family connections and the most scrupulous honor, a man to whom the commission of such a crime was utterly impossible, the magistrate reminded him that the witnesses were young gentlewomen of equally good families, in whom perjury was not even conceivable; that their number was too great and their testimony too positive to leave room for the theory of possible mistake; and finally that the very fact of Boyd Westover's high place in life rendered any crime on his part especially heinous. He felt bound, he said, to fix bail at five thousand dollars—a very great sum in those days.

Within the hour, however, Boyd's friends and those who had been friends of his father, rallied about him, ready and eager to furnish bonds for any amount. Not one of them knew aught of the merits of the case, and not one of them asked a question concerning it. They simply did not believe that Boyd Westover had broken by night into a girls' school for any purpose whatever, and they were determined that he should not go to jail while awaiting indictment and trial on so absurd a charge.

"Now come with me," said Jack Towns as soon as the matter of the bail bonds was settled. "We'll go to my house, not to my office, to avoid interruptions. I must get at the very marrow of this matter before a word is said about it. Come."

When the two were seated in an untidy room of Jack Towns's untidy bachelor establishment, and Jack had locked the front door for the first time within his recollection, he turned to his friend, saying:

"I want you to tell me every thing you did last night—the unimportant things even more than the important. Don't be afraid of boring me with details, and relate everything in the order in which it occurred. Then I'll cross-examine you as rigidly as if you were a witness concealing something. Perhaps we may discover something to shed light upon what seems the most perplexing mystery I ever knew. Go on."

Boyd told the story in minute detail, ending it by saying:

"I can make oath to all that and swear that nothing else of any kind occurred."

"No, you can't," said Jack Towns. "The court won't let you swear to any of it."

"Can I not make a statement of facts in a case that involves my liberty, my reputation, and everything else that I care for?"

"No. The law of Virginia does not permit an accused person to testify in his own behalf. That is the Common Law rule, and Virginia is under the Common Law. Don't tell me the thing is absurd, unjust, cruel, barbaric, and all that; for I know it already. It is the law, and you and I cannot change it. Let us go on with our inquiry instead. Do you know approximately at what hour you passed Le Voiser's school on your return from your visit to Milhauser?"

"I know exactly. It was precisely half-past twelve. I saw lights carried about in the school and, wondering at the fact, looked at my watch to see the hour."

"And you left Milhauser's house at what time?"

"Half-past ten."

"Why did it take you so long to get back to the hotel?"

"Milhauser's house, as you know, is away out of town—beyond Richmond College. There's a horse car which runs at irregular intervals between the college and the Broad Street end of the Fredericksburg Railroad, using the track of that railroad when no train is due. When I got to the college gate it was raining heavily and I took shelter under a sort of shed opposite the gates to wait for the car. It didn't come, and at last I decided to walk on."

"Why did you turn south and into Grace Street, instead of coming on down Broad?"

"Because it was raining and muddy, and the sidewalks are better in Grace Street. Besides, as my hotel is in Main Street I had to turn south at some point on the journey."

"Yes, of course."

After a period of silent thinking to no purpose, Jack Towns said:

"It's a queer case. All those girls swear you were in the school a little after twelve. Milhauser, if questioned, would have to swear that you left his house at half-past ten. You saw nobody else after that, who could even suggest an alibi. You got to the hotel drenched and dripping, at precisely the time you would have got there if you had been chased out of the school at the time the intruder was. You admit that you passed the school at the time of the disturbance. The case is so clearly made out against you, both by the positive testimony of eyewitnesses, and by all the circumstances, that any jury ever empanelled would have to convict you. Why, I'd feel bound to convict you myself—"

"Do you mean that you have the remotest shadow of doubt as to my innocence of this charge?" sternly demanded Westover, rising.

"Certainly not. Don't be an idiot. Sit down. But as the case stands we haven't a straw to cling to. We can't impeach the testimony of a dozen high-bred young women, every one of whom swears positively that she knows you well and that she saw you make your escape from the invaded precincts. There is no way in which we can so much as cast a doubt upon your guilt. With the case presented as it stands, any juror who should hesitate to pronounce you guilty would be a perjurer. The only hope is that we may find some way out before the case comes to trial."

"When will that be?" asked Boyd Westover, in a tone so stoically calm that Jack Towns looked at him to see what had happened to him.

"Are you ill?" he asked.

"No, not at all. It is only that I see the utter hopelessness of the case. I am a man condemned to worse than death. But I am a man and must face even such calamity without flinching. When the trial is over, I shall be a convicted felon. It will do no good to assert my innocence. Nobody will believe it—nobody can, in face of the testimony. My life is ruined, my reputation blasted, my doom sealed. But I shall neither whine nor whimper. Now tell me when the blow is to fall? When will the trial occur?"

"The court is in session now. The indictment will be found to-morrow, but I shall secure a postponement of the trial until the next term."

"Do nothing of the kind. Let the trial come on at once—the sooner the better. Delay will do no sort of good. I believe every accused person is entitled to 'a speedy trial.' Demand that for me, and secure it."

Towns argued and pleaded, but to no purpose. He could offer no suggestion of advantage in delay, except by saying:

"I have always found it worth while to trust to the unexpected. If we have time, something may happen that we don't anticipate."

"And I, in the meantime?" answered Boyd. "No. Bring the thing to a head at once. How soon can you make it?"

"Within forty-eight hours," answered the lawyer. "I advise against it, but—"

"I quite understand. The responsibility rests upon me. Go on and make an end of the horrible thing."