By Advice of Counsel Part 13

"I was to the trial."

"Do you think he ought to have been let off?" asked Mr. Tutt whimsically.

"I don't know," returned the child. "I guess you did right not to call me as a witness."

Mr. Tutt wrinkled his brows.

"Eh? What? You weren't a witness, were you?"

"Of course I was!" laughed George. "I was here behind the screen. I saw the whole thing. I saw Kasheed Ha.s.soun come in and speak to Sardi Babu, and I saw Sardi draw his revolver, and I saw Kasheed tear it out of his hand and strangle him."

Mr. Tutt turned cold.

"You saw that?" he challenged.

"Sure."

"How many other people were there in the restaurant?" inquired Mr. Tutt.

"n.o.body at all," answered George in a matter-of-fact tone. "Only Kasheed and Sardi. n.o.body else was in the restaurant."

Contempt of Court

The court can't determine what is honor.--Chief Baron Bowes, 1743.

I know what my code of honor is, my lord, and I intend to adhere to it.--John O'Conner, M.P., in Parnell Commission's Proceedings, 103d Day; Times Rep. pt. 28, pp. 19 _ff_.

Well, honor is the subject of my story.--Julius Caesar, Act I, Sc 2.

"What has become of Katie--the second waitress?" asked Miss Althea Beekman of Dawkins, her housekeeper, as she sat at her satinwood desk after breakfast. "I didn't see her either last night or this morning."

Dawkins, who was a mid-Victorian, flushed awkwardly.

"I really had to let the girl go, ma'am!" she explained with an outraged air. "I hardly know how to tell you--such a thing in this house! I couldn't possibly have her round. I was afraid she might corrupt the other girls, ma'am--and they are such a self-respecting lot--almost quite ladylike, ma'am. So I simply paid her and told her to take herself off."

Miss Beekman looked pained.

"You shouldn't have turned her out into the street like that, Dawkins!"

she expostulated. "Where has she gone?"

Dawkins gazed at her large feet in embarra.s.sment.

"I don't know, ma'am," she admitted. "I didn't suppose you'd want her here so I sent her away. It was quite inconvenient, too--with the servant problem what it is. But I'm hoping to get another this afternoon from Miss Healey's."

Miss Beekman was genuinely annoyed.

"I am seriously displeased with you, Dawkins!" she returned severely.

"Of course, I am shocked at any girl in my household misbehaving herself, but--I--wouldn't want her to be sent away--under such circ.u.mstances. It would be quite heartless. Yes, I am very much disturbed!"

"I'm sorry, ma'am," answered the housekeeper penitently. "But I was only thinking of the other girls."

"Well, it's too late to do anything about it now," repeated her mistress. "But I'm sorry, Dawkins; very sorry, indeed. We have responsibilities toward these people! However--this is Thursday, isn't it?--we'll have veal for lunch as usual--and she was so pretty!" she added inconsequently.

"H'm. That was the trouble!" sniffed the housekeeper. "We're well rid of her. You'd think a girl would have some consideration for her employer--if nothing else. In a sense she is a guest in the house and should behave herself as such!"

"Yes, that is quite true!" agreed her employer. "Still--yes, Brown Betty is very well for dessert. That will do, Dawkins."

Behind the curtain of this casual conversation had been enacted a melodrama as intensely vital and elemental as any of Shakespeare's tragedies, for the day Dawkins had fired Katie O'Connell--"for reasons,"

as she said--and told her to go back where she came from or anywhere she liked for that matter, so long as she got out of her sight, Katie's brother Shane in the back room of McMa.n.u.s' gin palace gave Red McGurk--for the same "reasons"--a certain option and, the latter having scornfully declined to avail himself of it, had then and there put a bullet through his neck. But this, naturally, Miss Beekman did not know.

As may have been already surmised Miss Althea was a gracious, gentle and tender-hearted lady who never knowingly would have done a wrong to anybody and who did not believe that simply because G.o.d had been pleased to call her into a state of life at least three stories higher than her kitchen she was thereby relieved from her duty toward those who occupied it. Nevertheless, from the alt.i.tude of those three stories she viewed them as essentially different from herself, for she came of what is known as "a long line of ancestors." As, however, Katie O'Connell and Althea Beekman were practically contemporaries, it is somewhat difficult to understand how one of them could have had a succession of ancestors that was any longer than that of the other. Indeed, Miss Beekman's friend, Prof. Abelard Samothrace, of Columbia University, probably would have admitted that just as the two had lived in the same house--albeit at different levels--on Fifth Avenue, so their forebears at some prehistoric period had, likely as not, occupied the same cave and had in company waded on frosty mornings the ice-skimmed swamps of Mittel Europa in pursuit of the cave bear, the mastodon and the woolly rhinoceros, and for afternoon relaxation had made up twosomes for hunting wives with stone clubs instead of mashies in their hairy prehensile hands.

It would seem, therefore, that--whatever of tradition might have originated in the epoch in question--glimmerings of sportsmanship, of personal pride, of tribal duty or of conscience ought to have been the common heritage of them both. For it was a.s.suredly true that while Miss Katie's historic ancestors had been Celtiberians, clad on occasion only in a thin coating of blue paint, Miss Althea's had dwelt in the dank marshes of the Elbe and had been unmistakably Teutonic, though this curse had been largely removed by racial intermarriage during subsequent thousands of years. Indeed, it may well have been that in the dimmer past some Beekman serf on bended knee had handed a gilded harp to some King O'Connell on his throne. If the O'Connells were foreigners the Beekmans, from the point of view of the aboriginal American, were no less so simply because they had preceded them by a couple of hundred years.

Tradition is not a matter of centuries but of ages. If Katie inherited some of hers from the peat bogs adjacent to Tara's Halls in that remote period when there were still snakes in Ireland, Miss Althea had vicariously acquired others from the fur-clad barbarians described by Tacitus who spent their leisure time in drinking, gambling or splitting each other's skulls with stone mallets. On this subject see Spencer's "Data of Ethics" and Lecky's "History of European Morals." But all this entirely escaped Miss Althea, who suffered from the erroneous impression that because she was a Beekman and lived in a stone mansion facing Central Park she differed fundamentally not only from the O'Connells but from the Smiths, the Pasquales, the Ivanovitches and the Ginsbergs, all of whom really come of very old families. Upon this supposed difference she prided herself.

Because she was, in fact, mistaken and because the O'Connells shared with the Beekmans and the Ginsbergs a tradition reaching back to a period when revenge was justice, and custom of kinsfolk the only law, Shane O'Connell had sought out Red McGurk and had sent him unshriven to his G.o.d. The only reason why this everyday Bowery occurrence excited any particular attention was not that Shane was an O'Connell but that McGurk was the son of a political boss of much influence and himself one of the leaders of a notorious cohort of young ruffians who when necessary could be relied upon to stuff a ballot box or otherwise to influence public opinion. As Red was a mighty man in Gideon, so his taking off was an event of moment, and he was waked with an elegance unsurpa.s.sed in the annals of Cherry Hill.

"An' if ye don't put the son-of-a----- who kilt me b'y in th' chair, ye name's mud--see?" the elder McGurk had informed District Attorney Peckham the next morning. "I've told the cops who done it. Now you do the rest--understand?"

Peckham understood very well. No one seeing the expression on McGurk's purple countenance could have failed to do so.

"We'll get him! Don't you worry!" Peckham had a.s.sured the desolated father with a manner subtly suggesting both the profoundest sympathy and the prophetic glories of a juridical revenge in which the name of McGurk would be upon every lip and the picture of the deceased, his family, and the home in which they dwelt would be featured on the front page of every journal. "We'll get him, all right!"

"See to it that ye do!" commented his visitor meaningly.

Therefore, though no one had seen him commit the crime, word was pa.s.sed along the line to pick up Shane O'Connell for the murder of Red McGurk.

It mattered not there was no evidence except the report of a muttered threat or two and the lie pa.s.sed openly the week before.

Everybody knew that Shane had done it, and why; though no one could tell how he knew it. And because everybody knew, it became a political necessity for Peckham to put him under arrest with a great fanfare of trumpets and a grandiose announcement of the celerity with which the current would be turned through his body.

The only fly in the ointment was the fact that O'Connell had walked into the district attorney's office as soon as the rumor reached him and quietly submitted to being arrested, saying merely: "I heard you wanted me. Well, here I am!"

But though they badgered him for hours, lured him by every pretext to confess, put a stool pigeon in the same cell with him, and resorted to every trick, device and expedient known to the prosecutor's office to trap him into some sort of an admission, they got nothing for their pains. It was just one of those cases where the evidence simply wasn't forthcoming. And yet Peckham was aware that unless he convicted O'Connell his name would indeed be mud--or worse. This story, however, is concerned less with the family honor of the O'Connells than with that of the Beekmans.

Miss Althea was the last surviving member of her branch of the family.

Though she would probably have regarded it as slightly vulgar to have been referred to as "one hundred per cent American" she was so nearly so--except for a reminiscent affection for "the late dear Queen"--that the phrase in her case would have been substantially correct. Her mother had been the daughter of a distinguished Revolutionary statesman who had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence, an amba.s.sador and justice of the Supreme Court as well; her father a celebrated newspaper editor.

She had been born in the Prue and I period in Gramercy Park near what is now The Players' Club, and the old colonial house with its white tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and ornamental ironwork had been the scene of many a modest gayety at a time when Emerson, Lowell, and George William Curtis were viewed less as citizens than as high priests of Culture, sharing equally in sanct.i.ty with the G.o.ddess thereof. She could just remember those benign old gentlemen, as well as the many veterans of the Civil War who dined at her father's decorous mahogany and talked of the preservation of the Const.i.tution and those other inst.i.tutions to found which it is generally a.s.sumed the first settlers landed on the Atlantic seaboard and self-sacrificingly accepted real estate from the wily native in return for whisky and gla.s.s beads. She was forty-seven years of age, a Colonial Dame, a Daughter of the American Revolution, a member of the board of directors of several charitable inst.i.tutions, and she was worth a couple of million dollars in railroad securities. On Sundays she always attended the church in Stuyvesant Square frequented by her family, and as late as 1907 did so in the famous Beekman C-spring victoria driven by an aged negro coachman.

But besides being full of rect.i.tude and good works--which of themselves so often fail of attraction--Miss Althea was possessed of a face so charming even in its slightly faded prettiness that one wondered how it was possible that she could successfully have withstood the suitors who must have crowded about her. Her house on Fifth Avenue was full of old engravings of American patriots, and the library inherited from her editorial parent was replete with volumes upon subjects which would have filled a Bolshevik with disgust. Briefly, if ever Trotzky had become Commissar of the Soviet of Manhattan, Miss Althea and those like her would have been the first candidates for a drumhead court-martial.

She prided herself equally upon her adherence to religious principle and the Acts of Congress. For the law, merely as law, she had the profoundest veneration, viewing the heterogeneous statutes pa.s.sed from time to time by desultory legislators much as if they had in some mysterious way been handed down from Mount Sinai along with the Ten Commandments.