The Empty Sack Part 46

"Of course you don't. But how could I bamboozle you?"

There was no explanation. Unable to base his distrust on any other ground than that Bob was the son of the man who had dismissed Josiah Follett from the bank, Teddy fell silent again. He could not afford to reject the least good will that came his way, and yet his spirit was too sore to accept it graciously.

Some of this young Collingham divined. He began to see that as the boy was suffering and he wasn't, it was not for him to take offense. On the contrary, he must use all his ingenuity to find the way to make his appeal effectively.

"All I could do from down there," he said, when Teddy seemed indisposed to speak again, "was to get Stenhouse or some one to take up your case.

I mean to see him in the morning and find out how far he's got along with it. But now that I'm here, can't you think of something of your own that you'd like me to do?"

Teddy raised his eyes quickly. His look was the dull look of anguish, and yet with sharpness in the glance.

"What kind of thing?"

"Any kind. Think of the thing that's most on your mind-the thing that worries you more than anything else-and-put it up to me." The somberness deepened in the lad's face, not from resentment, but from heaviness of thought. "Go ahead," Bob urged. "Cough it up. If it's something I can't tackle, I'll tell you so."

"What's most on my mind," Teddy began, slowly, gritting his teeth with the effort to get the words out, "what worries me like h.e.l.l-is ma-and the girls. They-they must be lonesome-something fierce-without me."

In his agony of controlling himself he was rubbing his palms between his knees, but Bob put out his great hand and seized him by the wrist.

"Look here, old chap! I can't comfort them for your not being there. You know that, of course. But it always helps women to have a man coming and going in the house-to take a lot of things off their hands-and keep them company-and I'll do that. If I can't be everything that you'd be-"

"You can be more than I could ever be."

"Yes-from the point of view of having a little more money-and freedom-and a car to take them out in-and all that; but if you think I could ever make up to them for you, old sport-but that isn't what you want me to do, is it? You don't want me to be you, but to be something different-only, something that'll make your mother and Jennie and your little sisters buck up again-"

Stumbling to his feet, Teddy drew the back of his hand across his eyes.

"I-I guess I'd better beat it," he muttered, unsteadily. "They-they don't like you to stay out too long."

But Bob forced him gently back into his chair again.

"Oh, cheese that, Teddy! Sit down and let's get better acquainted. I want to tell you how Jennie and I made up our minds to get married."

CHAPTER XXIV

"And yet it's one of the commonest types of the criminal mind,"

Stenhouse was explaining to Bob during the following forenoon. "Fellows perfectly normal in every respect but that of their own special brand of crime. See no harm in that whatever. Won't have a cigar?"

Having declined the cigar for the third time, Bob found a subconscious fascination in watching the lawyer's Havana travel from one corner to the other of his long, mobile, thin-lipped mouth. It was interesting, too, to get a view of Teddy's case different from Jennie's.

There was nothing about Stenhouse, unless it was his repressed histrionic intensity, to suggest the saver of lives. Outwardly, he was a lank, clean-shaven Yankee, of ill-a.s.sorted features and piercing gimlet eyes. But something about him suggested power and an immense persuasiveness. He had only to wake from the quiescent mood in which he was talking to Bob to become an actor or a demagogue. With laughter, tears, pathos, vituperation, satire, and repartee all at his command, together with an amazing knowledge of criminal law, he was born to commend himself to the average juryman. Little of this was apparent, however, except when he was in action. Just now, as he lounged in his revolving chair, his limber legs crossed, his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, and his perfecto moving as if by its own volition along the elastic lines of his mouth, he was detached, impartial, judicial, with that manner of speaking which the French describe as "from high to low"-"_de haut en bas_"-the "good mixer," with a sense of his own superiority.

The lack of the human element was to Bob the most disconcerting trait in the lawyer's frame of mind. To him the case was a case, and neither more nor less. The boy's life, so precious to himself, was of no more account to Stenhouse than that of a private soldier to his commanding officer on the day when a position must be rushed. Stenhouse was interested in the professional advantage he himself might gain from the outcome of the trial. In a less degree, he was interested in Teddy's psychology as a new slant on criminal mentality in general. But the results as they affected his client's fate concerned him not at all.

"I'm talking to you frankly," he went on, "because it's the only way we can handle the business. You're making yourself responsible in the case, and so I must tell you what I think."

"Oh, of course!"

"I quite understand your connection with this young fellow, and why you're taking the matter up, but I must treat you as if you were as aloof from it in sentiment as I am myself."

"That's exactly what I want."

"Well, then, the boy's in a bad fix. It's a worse fix because he belongs to the dangerous criminal type for whom you can never get a jury's sympathy. Roughly speaking, there are two cla.s.ses of criminals-the criminals by accident and the criminals born. This boy is a criminal born."

"Oh, do you think so?"

"I know so. Yes, sir! You can't have as much to do with both lots as I've had without learning to read them at sight; and when it comes to drawing them out-why, he hadn't told me a half of his story before I could see he'd had murder on the brain for the best part of his life."

"I shouldn't have thought that."

"No, you wouldn't. Lot of it subconscious-suppressed desire, Freud, and all that. But start him talking, and it's 'G.o.d! I'd have shot that fellow if I'd had a gun!' or it's, 'If I'd had a dose of poison, they'd never have got me alive.' Mind ran on it. Yes, sir! Always thinking of doing somebody in-if not another fellow, then himself."

"I don't think he knew it."

"Of course he didn't know it. Seemed natural to him. Our own vices always do seem natural to us. If you put it up to him now, he'd say he'd never had a thought of shooting up anyone, and he wouldn't be lying out of it, either. Way it seems to him. Way it seems to every criminal of the cla.s.s. But to judges and juries it's just so much 'bull,' and tells against the accused in the end. Sure you won't have a cigar?"

Having again declined the cigar, Bob argued in favor of Teddy, but Stenhouse was fixed in his convictions.

"I'll do what I can for him, of course; only, I'm blocked by his refusal to plead guilty. Pleading guilty might-I don't say it would, but it might-incline the judge to mercy. It would get him off, too, with the second degree, only that, when his own story shows him as guilty as h.e.l.l, he keeps pulling the innocent stuff to beat a jazz band. The rascal who plumps with his confession will always get the clemency, while the fellow with a mouthful of innocence will be sent to the chair."

"But if he does feel that he's innocent-"

"Sure he feels that he's innocent! That's it! That's what I'm talking about-the ingrained criminal's lack of consciousness that his kind of crime is crime. The other fellow's-yes; but his-why, the law is a fool to be made that way and trip a good fellow up! To hear this young shaver talk, you'd think the courts should be manned by pickpockets."

"All the same, he was in a tight place-"

"What's that got to do with it? If we didn't get into tight places, there'd be no need for laws of any kind."

"I was only thinking of his motive-"

"His motive may have been all right. I'll not dispute you there, because you'll find that legally there's a difference between motive and intent.

His motive may have been to provide for his mother, just as he says.

Good! No harm in that whatever. But his intent was to rob a bank and shoot the guy that came out after him. The court won't go into his motives. It'll deal only with his intent, and with what came of it."

There was more along these lines which sent Bob away with some questioning as to himself. Being of a law-respecting nature, he was anxious not to uphold the transgressor to anything like a danger point.

And he ran that risk. Having undertaken to help Teddy on Jennie's account, his heart had gone out beyond what he expected to the boy himself. It was the first time he had ever been in contact with a prisoner, the first time he had ever come face to face with a lone individual against whom all the organized forces of the world were focused in condemnation. His impulse being to range himself on the weaker side, he had, in a measure, so ranged himself. He had told Teddy that he stood by him, and would continue to stand by him through thick and thin. But was he right? Had he shown the proper severity? Hadn't he been sloppy and sentimental, without sufficiently remembering that a man who had killed another man was not to be handled as a pet?

It was not common sense to treat the breaker of laws as if he hadn't broken them or as if his punishment had made him a sympathetic figure.

Too facile a pity might easily become a sin against the community's best standards, and by putting himself on the weaker side a man might find himself on the worse one. Even the fact that the wrongdoer was a relative ought not to blind the eyes to his being a wrongdoer. It was his duty as a citizen, Bob argued, to support the charter of the Rights of Man as set forth in the Old Testament-thou shalt not kill-thou shalt not steal-the ideal of the New Testament, "Neither was there among them any that lacked, for they had all things common," never having been called to his attention.

As to Teddy's being a criminal born, he was not sure. Perhaps he was.

Such "sports" appeared even from the most respectable stock. There was a dark tradition, never mentioned now except between Edith and himself, of a Collingham-they were not sure of the relationship-who had died in jail somewhere in the West. Of the Follett stock Bob knew nothing. Jennie was the other half of himself; but such affinities, he was sheepishly inclined to feel, dated from other worlds and other planes of existence, though finding a manifestation in this one.

But it was Jennie who gave him the lead he was in search of.