Round the Block Part 43

WHAT PAPER, TYPES, AND INK CAN DO.

When Marcus and his counsel, accompanied by the faithful lieutenant of police, arrived in a close carriage at the scene of the inquest, at the hour of adjournment next morning, they saw a convincing ill.u.s.tration of the power of paper, types, and ink.

The morning journals, with whole leaded pages of evidence, and new diagrams of the house and fatal room; and the enterprising ill.u.s.trated weekly, with portraits of the deceased, the prisoner, his counsel, Tiffles, Patching (great hat and all), Patty Minford, the coroner, the foreman of the jury, a full-page design of the murder, as it was supposed to have taken place, representing the infuriate Wilkeson, club in hand, standing over the prostrate body of the inventor, from whose forehead the gore was pouring in torrents--all these delightful, provocatives of sensation had done their full and perfect work.

At that moment, Marcus Wilkeson was known to the world of readers in New York and the whole country round about, as the murderer of Eliphalet Minford.

On the second morning of the inquest an immense crowd of people were a.s.sembled in front of the house. They had been collecting since five A.M., when a party of six Jerseymen, having sold off their stock of nocturnal cabbages at Was.h.i.+ngton Market, had taken position of vantage before the house, from which they and their wagons were afterward dislodged with great effort by a squad of police. Some butcher boys, also returning from their night's work at market, were next on the ground, and selected adjacent awning posts and trees, as good points of observation. Mechanics and shop girls, going to their labor, recklessly postponed the duties of the day, and stopped to stare, awestricken, at the house.

A knot of people in a street, is like a drift of wood in a river. It chokes up the stream, and catches all the other wood that is floating down.

The police had in vain tried to clear out this human throng. They had waged the following contests with their fellow citizens, since six o'clock A.M.:--first, they had driven the Jersey market wagons to the street corner below; second, they had tumbled the butcher boys out of the trees, where they hung like a strange species of fruit; third, they had cleared a s.p.a.ce of ten feet square in front of the house. Having done thus much, the police paused from exhaustion, and endured the jokes of the populace with philosophic disdain.

Three policemen guarded the door, within which no one was admitted but the coroner, the jury, witnesses, a few political friends of the coroner, who exhibited pa.s.ses from him, and about twenty-five reporters, fifteen of whom really belonged to newspapers, and the remainder had a general connection with the press, which could never be clearly defined and established. To the magic word "reporter," accompanied by the flourish of a pencil and a roll of paper, the three policemen smiled obsequiously, and unbarred the way. Seeing how well this plan worked, two gentlemen of inelegant leisure, and at least one pickpocket, provided themselves with rolls of paper and pencils, and, giving the pa.s.sword, were admitted.

As the carriage rolled round the corner of the street, bringing Marcus in full view of these acres of men, women, and children--all waiting for him--the little courage which he had plucked up failed him, as plucked-up courage generally does. The sound of mingled laughter, jokes, oaths, and exclamations of impatience reached his ears.

"Great heavens!" he cried; "and I am to face all these people!" If his features could have been seen, at that instant, by some person who thought himself skilled in physiognomy, he would have been unhesitatingly p.r.o.nounced guilty of several murders. Marcus sat in the rear part of the coach, and he leaned back to avoid observation.

As the carriage entered the outskirts of the throng, they became aware that it contained the man of their desires. Five small boys, who had run all the way from the station house, had brought the exciting intelligence. The vehicle was at once surrounded by clamorous people.

"Say, Mister, wich is the murderer, hey?" asked a red-s.h.i.+rted fellow of Matthew Maltboy, whose corpulent figure squeezed the thin form of Fayette Overtop into a corner of the front seat.

Maltboy was not quick at thinking; but, on this occasion, a brave thought came into his head before he could turn to the speaker. "I am the prisoner," said he.

"I knowed you wos," was the red-s.h.i.+rted reply, "by your--ugly face."

"Thank you," said Matthew, meekly.

"That's the chap that killed the old man--him with the big chops," said the red-s.h.i.+rted individual to his numerous red and other s.h.i.+rted friends about.

"What! that fat cuss with the pig eyes?"

"Zackly!"

"He's the puffick image of his portrait in the--Weekly, isn't he?"

"Like as two peas."

There was truth in this; for the artist who sketched the portraits, had inadvertently placed Marcus's name under Matthew's portrait, and _vice versa_.

"Well," said another man, an expert in human nature, "I'd convict that fellow of murder any time, on the strength of his looks. Never were the worst pa.s.sions of our nature more prominently shown than in that bad face." Having said which, the speaker looked about for somebody to contradict him, and was disappointed in finding no one.

Marcus Wilkeson said: "Here, Matt, none of that generous nonsense, if you please. I am the prisoner, my good people." As Marcus spoke, he stretched forward, and exhibited his face to the gaze of the red-s.h.i.+rted querist and his companions.

"No, you don't!" said that fiery leader. "This blubbery chap is the one.

We knows him by his picter."

"No use disputing them, Mark," said Maltboy, with his indomitable smile.

The friendly struggle was soon terminated by their arrival at the house.

Here the human jam was tremendous; but the police, under the direction of the lieutenant, succeeded in getting their convoy safe within the entry. The door was then closed, and five st.u.r.dy policemen stood outside to guard it.

On entering the room, everybody and everything were found just as they had been the day before--a day that seemed to Marcus a month ago. The jury were idling over the newspapers, or lazily turning their quids. The coroner, who looked a little the worse for his dinner of the day before, was bandying jokes with the facetious reporters. The other reporters were sharpening their pencils and laying out their note books. Some--the younger ones--were listening with a species of reverence, which they would soon outgrow, to the official jesting of the coroner. Others were squabbling over the right and t.i.tle to certain chairs which possessed the extraordinary advantage of being a foot or two nearer the coroner than the other chairs. This is a grave cause of dispute among the reporters, and has been known to give rise to a great many hard words, and threats of subsequent chastis.e.m.e.nts, which are always indefinitely postponed.

The coroner nodded, and said "good morning" to the comers, and a.s.sumed a temporary official dignity, by taking down his right leg from the arm of the chair over which it gracefully depended. He also fortified himself, by thrusting a sizable chew into a corner of his mouth, as if he were carefully loading a pistol.

But neither the coroner, nor the jury, nor the reporters, nor the few private citizens who had obtained entrance by special dispensation, and sat gaping about the room, attracted the attention of the prisoner.

Before him was one in whose presence all other persons faded into nothingness--the fair disturber of his peaceful life--the arbitress of his fate--Patty Minford.

CHAPTER VII.

PET AS A WITNESS.

Little Pet sat on the low stool which she had always occupied, and which Marcus, in his strange sentimentality, had always considered sacred to her. She was veiled; but, through the thick gauze, he could see that her beautiful face was deathly pale. Her slender frame shook with little convulsions, that made the chair rattle.

"Be calm, my dear child," said a stout, self-possessed woman who sat by her side, and held a bottle of salts conspicuously in her hand.

"Remember, you have only to tell the trewth, and let the consekences fall where they may. Tell the trewth, as the old sayin' is, and shame the de--you know who."

Mrs. Crull--for she it was--checked herself with a neat cough. Her three months' private education seemed to have been lost upon her. She could never speak correctly out of Miss Pillbody's sight. Fortunately, her heart needed no education. She had taken the poor orphan girl to her home, and been a mother to her. In that phrase there is an horizonless world of love.

The deep, manly voice of Mrs. Crull carried a.s.surance to the sinking heart of Patty. She took the extended hand, and pressed it, deriving strength from the contact of that strong, positive nature.

"If you please, Mr. Cronner," said Mrs. Crull, "I think you'd better go ahead with her examination at once. Quickest said, soonest mended, you know."

The prisoner and his counsel having taken their seats, the coroner having involuntarily thrown his right leg into the old, easy position, the jury having p.r.i.c.ked up their ears, the reporters having cleared s.p.a.ces for their elbows, the young girl proceeded to give her testimony.

She was too nervous to make a clear, connected statement. Sometimes terror, sometimes tears, would choke her voice; but the cheering words and the smelling bottle of Mrs. Crull invariably "brought her round in no time," in the words of that estimable lady.

Pet told the story of her return home on the fatal night, of her finding Mr. Wilkeson and her father in angry conversation; of her retiring to bed very much fatigued; of more conversation, growing angrier and angrier, which she overheard; of her marvellous vision in the night; of her waking next morning to find her vision true, and her father dead on the floor. All these facts, with which the reader is already familiar, the poor child made known to the jury in a fragmentary, roundabout way, as they were elicited by questions from the coroner, the jury, and occasionally the prisoner's counsel. The narrative of the vivid dream, or vision, produced a startling effect on the coroner, who was a firm believer in every species of supernaturalism winch is most at variance with human experience and reason.

In his interrogatories to the witness, the coroner took the truth of the vision for granted. When she testified to the blows which (in her dream) she saw her father and the prisoner exchange, and the battered appearance of Mr. Wilkeson's face, the coroner looked at the prisoner, and was evidently disappointed to observe no traces of a bruise upon his pale brow or cheeks, nor the lightest discoloration about his eyes. But the absence of this corroboration did not, in the coroner's opinion, throw the least discredit on the dream.

But the foreman of the jury, who had been listening with an affrighted look to the marvellous story, and believing it, had his faith sadly shaken by this discrepancy. Having been fireman ten years, and foreman of a hose company six years, he knew by large experience how long it took to tone down a black eye or reduce a puffed cheek. The foreman looked at the smooth, clear face of the prisoner, smiled incredulously, and shook his head at his a.s.sociates.

Fayette Overtop here acted his part with a skill worthy of a veteran.

Instead of making a great ado over this weak point of the dream, he shrugged his shoulders, and smiled faintly at the jury. The jurors, who had been inclined, up to this time, to accept the dream as evidence, without question, now decided that it was nonsense.

Marcus Wilkeson sat and listened, as if the scene and all the actors in it, himself included, were only a dream too. The young girl's evidence, of which he had not an inkling before, would have astounded him, if anything could. But he had reached that point of reaction in the emotions, where a stolid and complete apathy happily takes the place of high nervous excitement. He somehow felt certain of his acquittal, but was strangely benumbed to his fate.

He looked at the witness--the holy idol of all his romantic and tender thoughts in days gone by--with unruffled composure. The marked stoicism of his demeanor was not lost on the reporters, and they noticed it in paragraphs to the effect that the prisoner exhibited a hardened indifference during the most thrilling portion of the evidence.

QUESTION BY THE CORONER (_after thinking it over a bit_). "Who do you say struck the fust blow, miss? Remember, now, you're on oath."

ANSWER. "My father, sir--or rather, I dreamed so."

The coroner was disappointed again, for he hoped that the witness would, on second thought, fix the commencement of the actual a.s.sault on the prisoner. "Your father, being old and kind o' feeble, struck a light blow, I s'pose."