THE ENTRANCE OF THE PRISONERS--THE EVIDENCE LED.

What must serve as the sensation of the day, if the trial dragged on for more than a few hours, was the entrance of the prisoners into the court, ushered by a turnkey and warder. Jack Prior came first, and Bennet clutched at the edge of the bench before her to help her to bear the sudden surging of the solid earth around her. Her heart leapt up again with a bound to see how manly and composed Jack, in his ordinary morning suit, looked as an innocent man should look, amidst the most compromising surroundings. There was a shade of youthful scorn and defiance in the manliness, but there could be no question that the self-control and calmness were genuine attributes of the lad’s bearing, any more than there could be two opinions on the fact that he had inherited his father’s plainness. Still, the look of John Prior of Redcot did his son no harm in the eyes of those present who knew the elder man. He was an unfortunate man, who had not prospered, who was understood to be disappointed and soured by the course life had taken with him. He had reached the climax of his misfortunes in the strange lot for a man in his station, of being the father of the two prisoners at the bar, but any thought of personal dishonour in connection with him was to this day singularly inadmissible.

In Bennet Gray’s eyes Jack Prior was all that he should have been. She could not have wished him to look like an Apollo, or to carry himself differently by a hair’s breadth. It was a happiness to her even at this moment that his face brightened inexpressibly when their eyes met, although he turned away immediately and bent his head. She could conceive why. She thought she could realise what he must feel at her seeing him thus, just as she imagined she understood what made him bend his head still lower, and even hide his face with his hand for a moment, when a little stir served to indicate that Susie was coming to take her place beside him.

‘What an ugly, down-looking young man!’ Miss Hopkins was remarking emphatically. ‘I don’t like to be uncharitable, but these beetle-brows and that Tartar nose and negro mouth are remarkably like what one would meet in Whitechapel, or see in Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors.’

‘How dare you say such things, Miss Hopkins?’ Bennet was galled into a fierce whisper. Happily Miss Hopkins was not listening, she rarely listened when she could talk. ‘I must say,’ she went on dogmatically, ‘that repulsive-looking lad is a strange graft from the criminal classes into a highly respectable county family. I was told the Priors were of good standing when my nephew Lambert married among them, and Mat confirmed the statement when he wrote the other day, and summoned me to stand by them. But really I could believe anything of that lad--I wonder if there is a possibility of his having been changed at nurse? Such things do happen occasionally, you know, in real life as well as in novels. Ah! there is Mrs. Lambert. How prettily and modestly dressed she is, and how like a nice, innocent gentlewoman she looks! One would not be ashamed to own her on the scaffold,’ declared Miss Hopkins enthusiastically, ‘and Lambert is with her, too; how proper and devoted of him! Don’t you see her brother cannot look her in the face? Depend upon it, he was the culprit--though it is dreadful to think of it in a man of his antecedents, and she is here because she has shielded him.’

‘It is she who ought not to be able to look him in the face. It is all the other way,’ groaned Bennet desperately, for it was possible the voice of Miss Hopkins might be the voice of the public--that blundering British public as represented in Crowminster. For the very reason of the public’s over-stolid honesty, its resounding faith in the sacredness of its domestic institutions, and its hasty boisterous impulses, it was liable to blunder. It had a fine tableau presented for it to dwell upon in the little family group which, preceded by a female warder, entered the court and filed into the dock beside Jack.

Susie was there in the character of an injured sufferer. She had never appeared to better advantage than in that simple black silk and cashmere frock, with the little bonnet to match, the only point of colour about her being the dove-coloured bow which formed the sole trimming to the bonnet, and the dove-coloured strings which tied it demurely under her chin. She looked lovely, patient, and pensive, a little flurried, but that was only to be expected. She glanced up and caught the eye of one of the lawyers who had dined at her table in Newton the last time the Assize was held at Crowminster, and made him a hesitating, deprecating bow. It was done with such a timid, disarming air, as if she would have said, ‘I do not know the etiquette of this place--how should I? Forgive me if I do wrong. Perhaps a prisoner ought not to bow, and my friends may not care to acknowledge me under this dreadful cloud; but I can only act according to my own gently-bred, womanly instincts.’

There were many persons present who had not seen Mrs. Crabtree since the night of the volunteer ball. They thought her even more fascinating in the shade, drooping under the cruel stigma attached to her, than she had been in the light, in her season of triumph.

There was not much to be said for Lambert Crabtree’s looks. He appeared big, red, and goggle-eyed as ever--confident and hectoring as before. There was not even much to be said for the character of the bankrupt banker. His ways of doing business and of living had never, at the outset, recommended themselves to men of integrity. His sudden break-up, with its ruin to hundreds of his fellow-creatures, following hard on a long course of reckless expenditure, was only the biggest blot in a generally spotted and tarnished reputation. There was no other quality than that of doggedness shown in the manner in which he stalked after his wife. But when it was taken into consideration that he was a beaten man condemned to pay the penalty of his folly in having made ducks and drakes of a handsome inheritance; still more, that he was there in the prisoner’s dock, in a public court, of his own choice--in fact, it was by favour that he, who was under no arrest and no accusation, was permitted to occupy a chair on the other side of that which had been granted to his wife’s weakness--the British heart softened and warmed to the man. He was there in the fulfilment of his conjugal vows, though he could have had little idea when he uttered them where they would lead him, or what they would exact from him.

There were some dissentient voices where this theory was concerned. There were sceptics--where are there not sceptics?--who alleged that Lambert Crabtree was not in the court of his own accord and to back his wife--at least not entirely so. These scorners had it that the Crown authorities had given Mr. Lambert Crabtree a quiet hint that they could not dispense with his company; they might want his presence before long. It was a mixture of insolent braggadocio and cunning policy on his part to put the best face on his compulsory attendance in court, and make it appear that it was in the interest of Mrs. Crabtree. As for the prosecution, the lawyers suffered him to give what colour he liked to the proceedings, and did not choose to show their cards before the time, while Mrs. Crabtree’s counsel of course turned the incident to her advantage.

But the main body of the audience was not of this mind. The British public has its vein of sentiment, genuine enough, if somewhat stereotyped and sugary. Lambert Crabtree was there as a proof of his trust in his wife, who had her brother on her other side, but that was not sufficient--he was her fellow-prisoner. It was for her husband, a free, unassailed man, to lend her his countenance still, to support his wife and the mother of his children, if he had a grain of affection for her or a spark of faith in her left. The man could not be a thorough-paced bad fellow who fully confessed the obligation; and to judge by the manner in which Susie leant her light weight on her husband’s broad shoulder, and glanced up with her starry eyes in his red face, the tie between the couple must be of the tenderest kind.

The spectacle moved many a susceptible, worthy heart. There was in truth no great need for what Bennet in her bitterness told herself was the sole element wanting to overcome the common sense of a gushing and gullible multitude, in the addition of one of ‘the pledges’ of Lambert and Susie Crabtree’s ‘wedded love’ to make the tableau complete. After all, perhaps the presence of poor Molly and Piers, with their ungainly resemblance to their father, and their tiresome unruliness, was better in fancy than in fact.

The jury were sworn. The prisoners pleaded not guilty. The Crown prosecutor opened the case in a speech distinguished by its brevity and moderation. Evidence was led of the state in which Mr. Parsons and the junior clerks had found the bank when they opened it on the 20th of last June. The main-door of the bank and the door of communication between it and the Bank House were locked as usual, and presented their ordinary appearance; so did the managing partners’ and clerks’ desks. But on going to the safe it was found open, every separate lock had been unfastened and remained with the keys in them or lying as they had been thrown down and left on the floor. On further examination it was discovered that a private desk of Mr. Lambert Crabtree’s had also been opened and stood with the key in the lock. It was in this desk he had been in the habit of keeping the various keys of the safe. He had not been accustomed to distribute them among several responsible clerks, according to the practice of many bankers. Mr. Parsons had a key, which had not been out of his possession, to the desk that usually contained the keys of the safe. The key found in the desk was either Mr. Lambert Crabtree’s, or one similar to it.

The safe was not empty. It had the amount of gold entered in the bank books, and a quantity of the Crabtree Bank notes. But there had been taken from it a sum of 7000_l._ in Bank of England notes, which Mr. Parsons deposed to have seen in its place the day before. The sum was above the average amount kept by a country bank which issued its own notes, but Mr. Lambert Crabtree was careful to provide against contingencies.

Mr. Parsons was asked whether there was not a particular parcel of bonds belonging to a client of the bank’s which had been kept among papers of a similar description in a compartment of the safe.

At the mere mention of the bonds, a close observer, posted up in the evidence as Bennet was, believed she detected an alarmed flicker of Lambert Crabtree’s heavy eyelids and an impatient rustle of Susie’s dress, while Jack sat wholly unmoved.

Mr. Parsons, in answer to questions, declared that he was aware of the existence of the Mexican 3 per Cents. and the Peruvian Bonds, and that they had been lodged in the safe. But he had not thought of them or missed them on the morning of the robbery. When his attention was called to them he was prepared to swear that to the best of his belief the bonds must have been withdrawn from the safe some time before. It was not necessary that he should receive any communication with regard to their withdrawal, and he had not received any. But he had been told by Mr. Lambert Crabtree to make a fresh list of documents of the kind in the possession of the bank about three months previous to the robbery, and it was his opinion that these Mexican and Peruvian bonds were not then in the safe. He would swear they were there six months before, when he had gone over them in helping to make up a statement of his yearly accounts for Major Coplestone, the owner of the bonds.

Mr. Parsons’ disclosure with regard to the bonds excited some surprise in the court. His opinion was extracted from him not without difficulty--for he was a diffident, painfully-conscientious, elderly man--but no cross-questioning caused him to contradict himself on any material point. While this witness was under examination, Lambert Crabtree’s eyelids fell farther, and he was guilty of the slightest possible shuffle of his feet, which was masked by a second baffled irritable movement from Susie.

The police gave evidence of having been called to the bank at the instance of the banker’s wife, in the absence of her husband. She went with them and showed them the safe and Mr. Lambert Crabtree’s desk, which they found in the condition described by the clerks. There were no signs of violence within the bank or the Bank House, and externally none on the street side.

Mrs. Lambert Crabtree had volunteered a statement, which the head officer took down. Then followed the story with which Susie had made everybody she had come across familiar. She had been awakened by unwonted and suspicious noises. She had risen in terror, and stolen out to the corridor into which her bedroom opened, when her fright and delicate health had got the better of her, and she had not been conscious of what was happening for a time. On her recovery, as she found all was still she had crept back to her room and bed, and slept till her usual hour of rising next morning.

In addition, Mrs. Lambert Crabtree had requested the police to accompany her to the garden. She had pointed out to them that the garden door was still locked and bolted, but that there was a ladder leaning against the lowest portion of the wall dividing the garden from that of the Rev. Edmund Ward--the vicar of the parish, whose garden door was often not bolted at night even during the fruit season. This piece of carelessness did a great deal to neutralise the precautions taken with regard to the outer wall of the Bank House garden. This had been purposely heightened for the security of the bank.

Mrs. Lambert Crabtree had also called the police’s attention to the circumstance that the front windows of the Bank House, if one supposed negligence on the part of the servants as to shutters and bars, could be entered from without. She had farther reminded the guardians of the public, whom she had done her best to help in the discharge of their duty, that the Bank House had been recently in the hands of house painters, who, in the course of their work, had been all over the premises.

This part of the evidence, apart from its being shaped into questions and answers, was only got in jerky fragments, in consequence of the line pursued by Mrs. Lambert Crabtree’s counsel, who tried hard to stop every second sentence as ‘hearsay,’ ‘not admissible,’ ‘a breach of precedent,’ &c., &c.

Susie, with all her blandness, was not grateful to her lawyer for his fidelity to her cause. She looked provoked and bored when she was thus not allowed to claim, even by proxy, the Court’s sympathy in return for her courage, her sufferings, her seeking to put the police on the scent.

Susie grew very pale, however, and gave a startled, scared gasp. She ceased to rest on her husband; she sat bolt upright and listened with tingling ears as the imperturbable police officer went on with his evidence. He had examined the ladder, which was a very light one--light enough for a woman to lift to the spot on which it was planted. The spot was a garden-bed, newly dug and raked over, on which rain had fallen the previous night. The ends of the ladder merely rested on the earth, whereas if so much as a child’s foot had pressed the rungs, the ends must have sunk half-an-inch in the soil, in the state in which it lay.

Thomas Wilkes, the gardener, was called to corroborate the policeman’s testimony. He looked anywhere rather than at his mistress, when he said that the bed on which the ladder had been resting was one he had prepared for young ‘plants.’ The ladder was the same he had used the previous afternoon for thinning the peaches on the end wall He had put the ladder in the garden tool-house when he had done work the evening before that of the robbery, and he swore he had locked the door and taken away the key. He had only reopened the door the following morning before breakfast, when he returned to his work finding both the tool-house door and the garden door locked as usual. When he left for breakfast he had not relocked the door, as it was not locked during the day. On his return immediately after breakfast, he had been too busy seeking to frighten the sparrows from the peas to notice that the ladder was removed; in fact, he had not gone near the tool-house. He had come back before nine, and he had remarked Mrs. Crabtree leaving the garden and running up the flight of steps which led from the garden to the house. He remembered the incident because it had made an impression on him at the time. It was not her custom to be in the garden so early, and it had occurred to him she might have gone to look at some fuchsias she had wished taken into her _jardinière_, which he had not been able to attend to the day before. A little later he had left off work in order to go into the town to attend a sale of ironmongery, at which he expected to get some garden tools at reduced prices. Before starting he had locked the garden door on account of the new paint, though it was not customary to keep the door locked during the day, and left it in the condition in which it was found by the police.

In the course of Thomas Wilkes’s examination Mrs. Lambert Crabtree recovered her composure. She did not flinch more than any woman unaccustomed to hear herself referred to in public, and constrained to listen to an unfavourable implication attached to her actions, might be excused for doing. On the contrary, she smiled faintly, and gave a slight shake of her head, as of one who would say how little even respectable old servants are to be relied on! How their rank imaginations run away with the foolish, ignorant dreamers, and they talk themselves into the belief of the most improbable scenes which never occurred; especially if these scenes point to some grave offence on the part of the poor masters and mistresses.

The servants of the Bank House were called in turn. Most of them gave their evidence with uneasy earnestness, much as the bank clerks had given theirs, under the daunting sense of the burden of suspicion which rested alike on clerks and servants, till the robbery was brought home to the real culprit.

Roger, the man, had slept out of the house in his rooms above the stables, and had very little to say, except in sundry small details which confirmed the narrative of his fellow-servants.

The women had slept in their rooms at the top of the house, and had heard nothing during the night. They had been first aroused by the arrival of a washerwoman who was accustomed to come on each Wednesday morning as early as between four and five o’clock to assist the laundress. She was in the habit of ringing the hall-door bell, because Roger took away the key of the area door that he might let in his boy to scour the knives before he went to school, the family not being astir on other mornings much sooner than eight o’clock. On the morning when the bank robbery was discovered the servants had been sleeping soundly. They had been kept late out of bed the night before by work connected with the volunteer ball, over which Mrs. Crabtree had presided. They had not heard the ringing of the washerwoman, until she had tried flinging up a handful of gravel, which had hit the window of one of the maids’ rooms. The maid who descended to let in the applicant had been put about by finding that the key of the hall-door was not on the nail where it usually hung. She had sought for it in vain, and had summoned her fellow-servants to help her in the search without effect. In the end she and another maid-servant owned to having admitted the washerwoman by the window of the laundry, which was on the ground-floor. But they solemnly swore, as did an older and more confidential servant, that to their knowledge this window and every other window in the house had been closed and the shutters fastened over night, and that after the admission of the washerwoman the window was again shut, with the shutters bolted, and was only reopened late in the morning.

Ann Smith, the washerwoman, was in Newton Infirmary labouring under congestion of the lungs, and could not appear in court; but she had been able to make a declaration which corresponded in every important particular with the statement of the servants.

The housemaid gave evidence that Mr. John Prior had slept in the walnut-wood bedroom for two nights--having arrived late on the evening before the volunteer ball, and staying till the morning after it, which was also the morning after the bank robbery. During the interval he had scarcely quitted the house. He had not attended the ball, and on the following morning he had left so early that he had gone without his breakfast. He had come into the dining-room before the servant was done cleaning it, and had given her a couple of half-crowns and a verbal message to her mistress, to be delivered when Mrs. Crabtree got up, that he was gone to Oxford. Sarah Roberts had offered to prepare breakfast for him, but he had declined to wait for it. He had seemed restless and eager to set out. He was just gone when Mrs. Crabtree came into the room--much before her ordinary time--and expressed surprise that her brother had left so early, but added that he had no doubt expected her to sleep late on the morning after a ball. Three hours later, after the robbery at the bank had been discovered and the police were in the house, the same girl went to ‘do’ the room in which Mr. John Prior had slept. When she was moving the dressing-glass in order to dust it, she found beneath the stand, as if it had been thrust in there and forgotten, the missing key of the hall door and another key which she did not know so well--but she was told--no, she must not repeat anything she had been told. She took the keys to a fellow-servant, and finally they were given up to the police.

An officer of the force spoke to receiving the keys from the servants, and proved that the one key was that of the hall-door, and the other the key of the door of communication between the bank and the Bank House.

At the announcement of the keys found pushed out of sight in the room that Jack Prior had occupied, which produced a manifest sensation in the court, Bennet Gray half rose to her feet regardless of all around her, and bent forward to look at Jack with a last piteous appeal.

But he would not meet her eye, his face was set more desperately than her own, with a hopeless obduracy which seemed the only feeling that was left in him.

Miss Hopkins was plucking at Bennet’s sleeve. ‘Did I not tell you he had done it? The hardened young scoundrel, he has not his ugly face for nothing. Poor dear Mrs. Lambert has sacrificed herself to conceal his guilt in vain. See, see! We must get to her,’ went on Miss Hopkins excitedly. ‘We must tear our way through if necessary. No judge can have the heart to prevent us. Can’t you tell she’s going to faint, the tender-hearted soul!’

And Susie did look ghastly for a second, and smelt nervously at a scent-bottle, while the full odium of the crime fell on Jack.

But Bennet clutched at Miss Hopkins’s mantle and held her down, addressing her in a manner which must have struck the elderly partisan as shockingly unfeeling. ‘Sit still, Miss Hopkins. She will not faint.’

Neither did Susie faint. She pulled herself together with steel-like tenacity, as she had done before. She went out for luncheon when she was allowed, in company with her husband and Jack, and their body guard of turnkey and warder, after the example of the judges and lawyers and those of the audience who could vacate their seats with any chance of being able to resume them.

Susie came back delicately refreshed--at least she could listen with quiet attention, and without a sign of self-consciousness, when several members of the police were brought back to describe the recovery of the Bank of England notes which had been taken from the safe. At the suggestion of the London detectives, the police had instituted a strict search over the Bank House and adjoining premises. In the course of that night and the following morning the men found one roll of the missing notes in the water-butt, and another stitched into the mattress of Mrs. Lambert Crabtree’s bed.

The last piece of information made a greater impression than any that had gone before it, but Susie heard it proclaimed without doing more than open wide her great dark eyes and close firmly her small red mouth. Jack started, and turned and gazed at her as if to demand if it were all over with her and his self-destruction was useless. Lambert Crabtree’s red face waxed purple, until one could fancy his teeth chattering with cold. Susie, the fragile, clinging creature, torn with conflicting emotion, was, nevertheless, when she chose to summon up her courage, the most indomitable spirit of the three. She did not so much as wince when the witness swore to finding silk in Mrs. Crabtree’s work-basket in her room that matched exactly the silk with which the rip in the seam of the mattress had been re-sewed.

The third roll and last of the notes had been picked up in the street, where it might have been thrown from one of the drawing-room windows of the Bank House. The little packet had been secured by an early and lucky wayfarer. His luck, however, went no farther than the necessity of carrying the treasure, within twenty-four hours, to the police station, in a panic, lest the fifty-pound notes should be discovered in the possession of the finder, and he should be taken up as accessory to the bank robbery before he could explain how he came by the compromising money.

The Court’s working day closed at this stage of the proceedings, with the case for the prosecution not completed, and with agitating rumours circulating freely. It was said that there was still more fatal evidence behind to be brought forward at the last. The desperate motive that could alone account for so daring and reckless a crime would be supplied, with proof given which would seriously implicate another person who had till now been at liberty.

Common rumour, surely, was scarcely wanted to crush hope in the hearts of the prisoners and their friends. Guilty or innocent, their case looked nearly as bad as it could be. ‘If that fine lady and her brother get off, they will have rubbed shoulders with the hulks,’ was the dictum of an old judge accustomed to use out-of-date forms of speech, and by no means distinguished for prophesying smooth things.

Bennet was to return to Redcot by herself. The holding in abeyance of her real relations with the Priors, on which she had been bent, afforded her no apology, even in the eyes of Miss Hopkins, for trying to stay over the night in Crowminster and seeking to obtain an interview with Jack. Besides, Bennet had promised to carry the news to Redcot.

Mat Crabtree could not go back with Bennet. He was remaining with Miss Hopkins in the Assize town on the plea of being ready if he were needed. He saw Bennet off, after charging her with the most hopeful messages he could manufacture for John Prior. Mat wrung her hand and looked into her downcast face with his own so careworn, it was with difficulty she could realise that it was the cheery scholar and squire of Haybridge who was speaking to her.

‘To say that I am sorry for you, Miss Gray, is superfluous, almost impertinently so, but you know it, and I have something to ask of you. Will you tell Jane that if I cannot save both her brother and sister I will make a last fight for Jack? Good Lord! the lad must be rescued, even if the choice should lie between him and Lambert,’ Mat Crabtree exclaimed sternly.

Then Bennet knew that Mat Crabtree was a righteous man--that though his own name, his own flesh and blood, were to be sacrificed, if it rested with him to make or withhold the sacrifice he would make it for truth and justice’s sake.