The Imperialist (12 page)

From the first word of the case for the prosecution there was that in the leading counsel’s manner – a gravity, a kindness, an inclination to neglect the commoner methods of scoring – that suggested, with the sudden chill of unexpectedly bad news, a foregone conclusion. The reality of his feeling reference to the painful position of the defendant’s father, the sincerity of his regret, on behalf of the bank, for the deplorable exigency under which proceedings had been instituted, spread a kind of blankness through the court; men frowned thoughtfully,
and one or two ladies shed furtive tears. Even the counsel for the defence, it was afterward remembered, looked grave, sympathetic, and concerned, in response to the brief but significant and moving sentences with which his eminent opponent opened the case. It is not my duty to report the trial for any newspaper; I will therefore spare myself more than the most general references; but the facts undoubtedly were that a safe in the strong room of the bank had been opened between certain hours on a certain night and its contents abstracted; that young Ormiston, cashier of the bank, was sleeping, or supposed to be sleeping, upon the premises at this time, during the illness of the junior whose usual duty it was; and that the Crown was in possession of certain evidence which would be brought forward to prove collusion with the burglary on the part of the defendant, collusion to cover deficits for which he could be held responsible. In a strain almost apologetic, Mr. Cruickshank explained to the jury the circumstances which led the directors to the suspicion which they now believed only too regrettably well founded. These consisted in the fact that the young man was known to be living beyond his means, and so to be constantly visited by the temptation to such a crime; the special facilities which he controlled for its commission, and, in particular, the ease and confidence with which the actual operation had been carried out, arguing no fear of detection on the part of the burglars, no danger of interference from one who should have stood ready to defend with his life the property in his charge, but who would shortly be seen to have been toward it, first, a plunderer in his own person, and afterward the accomplice of plunderers to conceal his guilt. Examination showed the safe to have been opened with the dexterity that demands both time and coolness; and the ash from a pipe knocked out against the wall at the side of
the passage offered ironical testimony to the comfort in which the business had been done.

The lawyer gave these considerations their full weight, and it was in dramatic contrast with the last of them that he produced the first significant fragment of evidence against Ormiston. There had been after all some hurry of departure. It was shown by a sheet of paper bearing the mark of a dirty thumb and a hasty boot-heel, bearing also the combination formula for opening the safe.

The public was familiar with that piece of evidence, it had gone through every kind of mill of opinion; it made no special sensation. The evidence of the caretaker who found the formula and of the witnesses who established it to be in young Ormiston’s handwriting, produced little interest. Mr. Cruickshank in elaborating his theory as to why, with the formula in their hands, the depredators still found it necessary to pick the lock, offered nothing to speculations already current – the duplicate key with which they had doubtless been enabled to supply themselves was a clumsy copy and had failed them; that conclusion had been drawn commonly enough. The next scrap of paper produced by the prosecution was another matter. It was the mere torn end of a greasy sheet; upon it was written “Not less than 3,000 net,” and it had been found in the turning out of Ormiston’s dressing-table. It might have been anything – a number of people pursed their lips contemptuously – or it might have been, without doubt, the fragment of a disreputable transaction that the prosecuting counsel endeavoured to show it. Here, no doubt, was one of the pieces of evidence the prosecution was understood to have up its sleeve, and that portion of the prosecuting counsel’s garment was watched with feverish interest for further disclosures. They came rapidly enough, but we must hurry them
even more. The name of Miss Florence Belton, when it rose to the surface of the evidence, riveted every eye and ear. Miss Belton was one of those ambiguous ladies who sometimes drift out from the metropolitan vortex and circle restfully in backwaters for varying periods, appearing and disappearing irrelevantly. They dress beautifully; they are known to “paint” and thought to dye their hair. They establish no relations, being much too preoccupied, making exceptions only, as a rule, in favour of one or two young men, to whom they extend amenities based – it is the common talk – upon late hours and whisky-and-soda. They seem superior to the little prevailing conventions; they excite an unlawful interest; though nobody knows them black, nobody imagines them white; and when they appear upon Main Street in search of shoelaces or elastic, heads are turned and nods, possibly nudges, exchanged. Miss Belton had come from New York to the Barker House, Elgin, and young Ormiston’s intimacy with her was one of the things that counted against him in the general view. It was to so count more seriously in the particular instance. Witnesses were called to prove that he had spent the evening of the burglary with Miss Belton at her hotel, that he had remained with her until one o’clock, that he was in the habit of spending his evenings with Miss Belton.

Rawlins of the
Express
did not overdo the sensation which was caused in the court-room when the name of this lady herself was called to summon her to the witness-box. It was indeed the despair of his whole career. He thought despondingly ever after of the thrill, to which he himself was not superior, and which, if he had only been able to handle it adequately, might have led him straight up the ladder to a night editorship. Miss Belton appeared from some unsuspected seat near the door, throwing back a heavy veil, and
walking as austerely as she could, considering the colour of her hair. She took her place without emotion, and there she corroborated the evidence of the servants of the hotel. To the grave questions of the prosecution she fluently replied that the distraction of these evenings had been cards – cards played, certainly, for money, and that she, certainly, had won very considerable sums from the defendant from time to time. In Elgin the very mention of cards played for money will cause a hush of something deeper than disapproval; there was silence in the court at this. In producing several banknotes for Miss Belton’s identification Mr. Cruickshank seemed to profit by the silence. Miss Belton identified them without hesitation, as she might easily, since they had been traced to her possession. Asked to account for them, she stated, without winking, that they had been paid to her by Mr. Walter Ormiston at various times during the fortnight preceding the burglary, in satisfaction of debts at cards. She, Miss Belton, had left Elgin for Chicago the day after the burglary. Mr. Ormiston knew that she was going. He had paid her the four fifty-dollar notes actually traced, the night before she left, and said, “You won’t need to break these here, will you?” He seemed anxious that she should not, but it was the merest accident that she hadn’t. In all, she had received from Mr. Ormiston four hundred and fifty dollars. No, she had no suspicion that the young man might not be in a position to make such payments. She understood that Mr. Ormiston’s family was wealthy, and never thought twice about it.

She spoke with a hard dignity, the lady, and a great effect of doing business, a kind of assertion of the legitimate. The farmers of Fox County told each other in chapfallen appreciation that she was about as level-headed as they make them. Lawyer Cruickshank, as they called him, brought forth from
her detail after detail, and every detail fitted damningly with the last. The effect upon young Ormiston was so painful that many looked another way. His jaw was set and his features contorted to hold himself from the disgrace of tears. He was generally acknowledged to be overwhelmed by the unexpected demonstration of his guilt, but distress was so plain in him that there was not a soul in the place that was not sorry for him. In one or two resolute faces hope still glimmered, but it hardly survived the cross-examination of the Crown’s chief witness by the counsel for the defence, which, as far as it went, had a perfunctory air and contributed little to the evidence before the Court. It did not go all the way, however. The case having opened late, the defence was reserved till the following day, when proceedings would be resumed with the further cross-examination of Miss Belton.

As the defendant’s counsel went down the courthouse steps Rawlins came up to him to take note of his demeanour and anything else that might be going.

“Pretty stiff row to hoe you’ve got there, Lorne,” he said.

“Pretty stiff,” responded Lorne.

I
magination, one gathers, is a quality dispensed with of necessity in the practice of most professions, being that of which nature is, for some reason, most niggardly. There is no such thing as passing in imagination for any department of public usefulness, even the government of Oriental races; the list of the known qualified would be exhausted, perhaps, in getting the papers set. Yet neither poet nor philosopher enjoys it in monopoly; the chemist may have it, and the inventor must; it has been proved the mainspring of the mathematician, and I have hinted it the property of at least two of the Murchisons. Lorne was indebted to it certainly for his constructive view of his client’s situation, the view which came to him and stayed with him like a chapter in a novel, from the hour in which Ormiston had reluctantly accounted for himself upon the night of the burglary. It was a brilliant view, that perceived the young clerk the victim of the conspiracy he was charged with furthering; its justification lay back, dimly, among the intuitions about human nature which are part of the attribute I have quoted. I may shortly say that it was justi fied; another day’s attendance at the Elgin Courthouse shall
not be compulsory here, whatever it may have been there. Young Ormiston’s commercial probity is really no special concern of ours; the thing which does matter, and considerably, is the special quality which Lorne Murchison brought to the task of its vindication, the quality that made new and striking appeal, through every channel of the great occasion, to those who heard him. It was that which reinforced and comforted every friend Ormiston had in the court-room, before Lorne proceeded either to deal with the evidence of the other side, or to produce any jot or tittle of his own; and it was that which affected his distinguished opponent to the special interest which afterwards showed itself so pleasantly superior to the sting of defeat. The fact that the defence was quite as extraordinarily indebted to circumstantial evidence as the prosecution in no way detracted from the character of Lorne’s personal triumph; rather, indeed, in the popular view and Rawlins’s, enhanced it. There was in it the primitive joy of seeing a ruffian knocked down with his own illegitimate weapons, from the moment the dropped formula was proved to be an old superseded one, and unexpected indication was produced that Ormiston’s room, as well as the bank vault, had been entered the night of the robbery, to the more glorious excitement of establishing Miss Belton’s connection – not to be quoted – with a cracksman at that moment being diligently inquired for by the New York police with reference to a dramatically bigger matter. You saw the plot at once as he constructed it; the pipe ash became explicable in the seduction of Miss Belton’s charms. The cunning net unwove itself, delicately and deliberately, to tangle round the lady. There was in it that superiority in the art of legerdemain, of mere calm, astonishing manipulation, so applauded in regions where romance has not yet been quite trampled down by reason. Lorne scored; he
scored in face of probability, expectation, fact; it was the very climax and coruscation of score. He scored not only by the cards he held but by the beautiful way he played them, if one may say so. His nature came into this, his gravity and gentleness, his sympathy, his young angry irony. To mention just one thing, there was the way he held Miss Belton up, after the exposure of her arts, as the lady for whom his client had so chivalric a regard that he had for some time refused to state his whereabouts at the hour the bank was entered in the fear of compromising her. For this, no doubt, his client could have strangled him, but it operated, of course, to raise the poor fellow in the estimation of everybody, with the possible exception of his employers. When, after the unmistakable summing-up, the foreman returned in a quarter of an hour with the verdict of “Not guilty,” people noticed that the young man walked out of court behind his father with as drooping a head as if he had gone under sentence; so much so that by common consent he was allowed to slip quietly away. Miss Belton departed, followed by the detective, whose services were promptly transferred to the prosecution, and by a proportion of those who scented further entertainment in her perfumed, perjured wake. But the majority hung back, leaving their places slowly; it was Lorne the crowd wanted to shake hands with, to say just a word of congratulation to, Lorne’s triumph that they desired to enhance by a hearty sentence, or at least an admiring glance. Walter Winter was among the most genial.

“Young man,” he said, “what did I tell you? Didn’t I tell you you ought to take this case?” Mr. Winter, with his chest thrust out, plumed and strutted in justifiable pride of prophecy. “Now, I’ll tell you another thing: to-day’s event will do more for you than it has for Ormiston. Mark my words!”

They were all of that opinion, all the fine foretellers of the profit Lorne should draw from his spirited and conspicuous success; they stood about in knots discussing it; to some extent it eclipsed the main interest and issue of the day, at that moment driving out, free and disconsolate, between the snake-fences of the South Riding to Moneida Reservation. The quick and friendly sense of opportunity was abroad on Lorne Murchison’s behalf; friends and neighbours and Dr. Drummond, and people who hardly knew the fellow, ex changed wise words about what his chance would do for him. What it would immediately do was present to nobody so clearly, however, as to Mr. Henry Cruickshank, who decided that he would, after all, accept Dr. Drummond’s invitation to spend the night with him, and find out the little he didn’t know already about this young man.