Geoffrey Hamstead Part 44

The pent-up excitement could be restrained no longer. A sound, half cheer and half yell, filled the room.

Rankin had not been idle after he left Mrs. Priest that day. He first went in a cab to Jack, and simply asked him if Geoffrey had worn the large-patterned waistcoat on the day he went away. Jack remembered hearing Sappy talking about his wearing it. Rankin then drove to the Montreal Telegraph clerk, who identified the wrapper. Then he had the warrant issued for Hampstead's arrest, and also subpoenas, which were handed to different policemen for service, with instructions to bring the witnesses with them if possible. The Priests, mother and son, he secured by having a constable bring them in a cab. He then requested the magistrate to hear the case at once.

He supposed, rightly enough, that Hampstead, on becoming aware that the numbers of the stolen bills were all known would be afraid to pa.s.s any of them, and would still have the money somewhere in his possession. So he had three detectives sent with a search warrant to break in Geoffrey's door and search for it. He thought it was by no means certain that they would find the money, and he was anxious on this point, but he knew that, even if he failed to secure a conviction against Hampstead, he had at least sufficient evidence to render Jack's conviction doubtful. In the case against Hampstead, Jack's evidence would be heard in full, and Rankin felt satisfied that in some way it would explain away the terribly damaging case that had been made out against him in the morning.

The sudden shout in the court had been so full of sympathy for Jack and admiration for Rankin's cleverness that for the first time in his magisterial existence "His Worship" forgot to check it, and the call to order by the police was of the weakest kind. All the bank-clerks of the city were jammed into that room, and for a moment Jack's friends were wild.

A few more questions were put to Jack, but only to improve his position before the public as to the charge against himself.

"Are you aware that you have been made a victim of in a matter where the Victoria Bank was robbed of fifty thousand dollars?"

"No," said Jack, looking dazed. "I am not."

"Are you aware that you were tried this morning for stealing that money?"

"I seemed at times to know that something was wrong. Once I knew I was charged with stealing something or other, but I did not know or care. I must have been unconscious after the collision in the lake. The first thing I knew of, they said we were at Port Dalhousie. We must have sailed there with nothing drawing but the forward canvas, and that must have taken a good while."

Jack was now allowed to stand down, but he was not removed from the court-room.

To clear up Jack's record thoroughly, Rankin called Detective Dearborn and, before the magistrate stopped the examination as being irrelevant, he succeeded in showing that Jack had been delirious for twelve hours after his arrest. The fact that Dearborn had not mentioned these circ.u.mstances placed him in a rather bad light with the audience, while it showed once again what a common habit it is with the police to suppress and even distort facts in order to secure a conviction.

The telegraph clerk identified the recovered forty-eight bills, and the receiving teller, gave the same evidence as in the Cresswell case, and then the detective who found the money in Hampstead's room was called.

As soon as he heard his first words, Geoffrey knew what was coming and rose to his feet and addressed the magistrate:

"I suppose, Your Worship, that it is not too late to withdraw my plea of not guilty and at this late hour plead guilty. This will be my only opportunity to cast a full light on this case, and, if I may be permitted, I will do so."

The magistrate nodded. Geoffrey continued:

"Of course, it is perfectly clear that Cresswell is quite innocent. For private reasons, in a matter that was entirely honorable to himself, Cresswell wished to leave Canada. He was going through the States to California, and did not intend to return, and would have resisted being brought back to Canada. There was no law existing by which he could be extradited. He could only be brought back by his own consent. From the way I sent him on the schooner, his arrest before arriving in the United States was in the highest degree improbable. If he had afterward been arrested in the States I could have at once arranged to be sent by the bank to persuade him to return. I had it all planned that he never should return. He would have done as I told him. Even if he insisted on coming back I then would be safe in the States. Of course, I did not know that identification could be made of the bills--which could not have been foreseen--and my object in giving him two of them was that suspicion would rest temporarily on him, which might be necessary to give me time to escape. As it turned out, if Cresswell had insisted on returning to Canada he would be returning to certain conviction--part of the identified money being found on him.

"So far I speak only of my intentions at the time of the theft. But I hope no one will think I would allow my old friend Jack Cresswell to go to jail under sentence for my misdeeds. To-night I intended to cross the lake in a small boat and then telegraph to the bank where to find all the money at my chambers. This, with a letter of explanation, would have acquitted Jack. I had to save him--also myself, from imprisonment; but there was another matter worth far more than the money to me which I hoped to be able to eventually make right. If I had got away to-night the bank would have had its money to-morrow.

"On the day before the theft I had lost all my twelve years' earnings and profits in speculation. If I had been able to hold my stocks until the evening of the theft I would have made over seventy-five thousand dollars. For weeks during the excitement preceding my loss I had been drinking a great deal, and when the chance came to recoup myself from the bank I seemed to take the money almost as a matter of right."

As Geoffrey continued he was looking up out of the window, evidently oblivious of the crowd about him, thinking the thing out, as if confessing to himself.

"I know that without the liquor I never would have stolen, and that with it I became--"

His face grew bitter as he thought of his thieving Tartar uncle and his mother who could not be prevented from stealing. But he pulled himself together and continued: "It would have been open to me to call men from this gathering to give evidence as to my previous character, and I have no hesitation in leaving this point in your hands if it will do anything to shorten my sentence. On this ground only am I ent.i.tled to ask for your consideration, and you will be doing a kindness if you will pa.s.s sentence at once."

As Hampstead said these words he looked abstractedly around for the last time upon the scores of former friends who now averted their faces.

There was no bravado in his appearance. He held himself erect, as he always did, and his face was impenetrable. His eyes claimed acquaintance with none who met his glance. Some smiled faintly, impressed as they were with his bearing, but he seemed to look into them and past them, as if saying to himself: "There's Brown, and there's Jones, and there's Robinson, I wonder when I will ever see them again?"

There were men in that throng who knew, when Hampstead spoke of the effects of the liquor on him, exactly what was meant, who knew from personal experience that, if there is any devilish tendency in a man or any hereditary predisposition to any kind of wrong-doing, alcohol will bring it out, and these men could not refrain from some sympathy with him who had partly explained his fall, and somehow there were none who thought after Geoffrey's statement that he would have sacrificed Jack to imprisonment under sentence.

The magistrate addressed him:

"Geoffrey Hampstead, I do not think there has been anything against your character since you came to Toronto. That an intelligence such as yours should have been prost.i.tuted to the uses to which you have put it is one of the most melancholy things that ever came to my knowledge. I can not think you belong to the criminal cla.s.ses, and I would be glad to be out of this matter altogether, because I feel how unable one may be to deal for the best with a case like yours. It may be that if you were liberated you would never risk your ruin again. I do not think you would; but, in that case, this court might as well be closed and the police disbanded. I am compelled to make your case exemplary, and I sentence you to six years in the Kingston Penitentiary."

A dead silence followed, and then his former friends and acquaintances began to go away. They went away quietly, not looking at each other.

There was something in the proceedings of the day that silenced them.

They had lost faith in one honest man and had found it again; and another, on whom some n.o.bility was stamped, they had seen condemned as a convict. As they took their last look at the man whom they had often envied and admired, they wished to escape observation. So many of them were thinking how, at such a time in their lives, if things had not luckily turned out as they did, they, too, might have fallen under some kind of temptation, and they knew the sympathy that comes from secret consciousness of what their own possibilities in guilt might have been.

Geoffrey received his sentence looking out of the window toward the blue sky and the swallows that flew past. Every word that the magistrate had said had in it the tone of a friend, which made it harder to bear. While he heard it all vividly, he strained to keep his attention on the flying swallows in order that he might not break down. Outside of that window, and just in that direction, Margaret, the wife that never would be, was waiting for him. The man's face was like ashes. Oh, the relief to have dashed himself upon the floor when he thought of Margaret!

Yet he held out. He felt it would be better for him to be dead; but he met his fate bravely, and now sought relief in another way. He caught Rankin's eye, and motioned to him to come near.

With a face that was afraid to relax its tension, he said, with an effort at something like his ordinary speech:

"Rankin, you forsook me sadly to-day, did you not? But I can still count on you to do me a good turn--if only in return for to-day."

"Go on, Geoffrey. Yes, I have disliked you from the first. But now I don't. You make people like you, no matter what you do. You take it like a man. What do you want?"

Rankin could not command his countenance as Geoffrey could. Now that he had accomplished the work of convicting him, it seemed terrible that one who, with all his faults, appeared so manly a man, and so brave, should be on his way to six years' darkness.

Geoffrey pulled him closer and whispered in his ear: "Go to Margaret--at once--before she can read anything! Take a cab. Tell her all. Break it to her. You can put it gently. Go to her now--let her know, fairly, before you come away, that all my chances are gone--that she is released--that I am nothing--now--but a dead man."

His head went down as the words were finished with a wild effort, and his great frame shook convulsively for a moment. The thought of Margaret killed him.

During the day, before his arrest, he had seen that he would have to return at least part of the money to corroborate his story and to save Jack. And he could not abscond with the balance, because that would mean the loss of Margaret. By returning the money and saving himself from imprisonment, he had hoped that eventually she would forgive him. And now--

Maurice could not stand it. He said, hurriedly: "All right. I'll see you to-morrow." And then he dashed off, out a side door, and into a cab. And on the way to Margaret he wept like a child behind the carriage curtains for the fate of the man whom he had convicted.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Yea, it becomes a man To cherish memory, where he had delight, For kindness is the natural birth of kindness.

Whose soul records not the great debt of joy, Is stamped forever an ign.o.ble man.

SOPHOCLES (_Ajax_).

As Rankin broke the news to Margaret--by degrees and very quietly--she showed but little sign of feeling. Her face whitened and she moved stiffly to the open window, where she could sit in the draught. As she made Rankin tell her the whole story she simply grew stony, while she sat with bloodless hands clinched together, as if she thus clutched at her soul to save it from the madness of a terrible grief.

Suddenly she interrupted him.

"Dismiss your cab," she said. "I will walk back with you part of the way."

When she turned toward him, the strained face was so white and the eyes so wide and expressionless that he became afraid.

"Perhaps you would rather be alone," said he, doubtful about letting her go into the street.

She seemed to divine what was in his mind, for she made him feel more at ease by a gentler tone:

"Alone? No, no! Anything but that! The walk will do me good."