By Advice of Counsel
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 ambassador 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
trimmings 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 sanctity with the goddess 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 Constitution and those other institutions to found which it is
generally assumed the first settlers landed on the Atlantic seaboard and
self-sacrificingly accepted real estate from the wily native in return
for whisky and glass 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 institutions, 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 rectitude 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 passed 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.
For any violator of the law she had the uttermost abhorrence, and the
only weakness in her ethics arose out of her failure to discriminate
between relative importances, for she undoubtedly regarded the sale of a
glass of beer after the closing hour as being quite as reprehensible as
grand larceny or the bearing of false witness. To her every judge must
be a learned, wise and honorable man because he stood for the
enforcement of the law of the land, and she never questioned whether or
not that law was wise or otherwise, which latter often--it must be
confessed--it was not.
In a word, though there was nothing progressive about Miss Althea she
was one of those delightful, cultivated, loyal and enthusiastic female
citizens who are rightfully regarded as vertebrae in the backbone of a
country which, after it has got its back up, can undoubtedly lick any
other nation on earth. It was characteristic of her that carefully
folded inside the will drawn for her by her family solicitor was a slip
of paper addressed to her heirs and next of kin requesting that at her
funeral the national anthem should be played and that her coffin should
be draped with the American flag.
But there was a somewhat curious if not uncommon inconsistency in Miss
Beekman's attitude toward lawbreakers in that once they were in prison
they instantly became objects of her gentlest solicitude. Thus she was a
frequent visitor at the Tombs, where she brought spiritual, and more
often, it must be frankly admitted, bodily comfort to those of the
inmates who were recommended by the district attorney and prison
authorities as worthy of her attention; and Prosecutor Peckham being not
unmindful of the possible political advantage that might accrue from
being on friendly terms with so well-known a member of the distinguished
family of Beekman, lost no opportunity to ingratiate himself with her
and gave orders, to his subordinates to make her path as easy as
possible. Thus quite naturally she had heard of Tutt & Tutt, and had a
casual acquaintance with the senior partner himself.
"That O'Connell is a regular clam--won't tell me anything at all!"
remarked Mr. Tutt severely, hanging up his hat on the office tree with
one hand while he felt for a match in his waistcoat pocket with the
other, upon the afternoon of the day that Miss Beekman had had the
conversation with Dawkins with which this story opens.
"National temperament," answered Bonnie Doon, producing the desired
match. "It's just like an Irishman to refuse point-blank to talk to the
lawyer who has been assigned to defend him. He's probably afraid he'll
make some admission from which you will infer he's guilty. No Irishman
ever yet admitted that he was guilty of anything!"
"Well, I've never met a defendant of any other nationality who would,
either," replied Mr. Tutt, pulling vigorously at his stogy. "Even so,
this chap O'Connell is a puzzle to me. 'Go ahead and defend me,' said he
today, 'but don't ask me to talk about the case, because I won't.' I
give it up. He wouldn't even tell me where he was on the day of the
murder."
Bonnie grunted dubiously.
"There may be a very good reason for that!" he retorted. "If what rumor
says is true he simply hunted for McGurk until he found him and put a
lead pellet back of his ear."
"And also, if what rumor says is true," supplemented Tutt, who entered
at this moment, "a good job it was, too. McGurk was a treacherous, dirty
blackguard, the leader of a gang of criminals, even if he was, as they
all agree, a handsome rascal who had every woman in the district on
tenterhooks. Any girl in this case?"
Bonnie shrugged his shoulders.
"They claim so; only there's nothing definite. The O'Connells are well
spoken of."
"If there was, that would explain why he wouldn't talk," commented Mr.
Tutt. "That's the devil of it. You can't put in a defense under the
unwritten law without besmirching the very reputation you are trying to
protect."
The senior partner of Tutt & Tutt wheeled his swivel chair to the window
and crossing his congress boots upon the sill gazed contemplatively down
upon the shipping.
"Unwritten law!" sarcastically exclaimed Tutt from the doorway. "There
ain't no such animal in these parts!"
"You're quite wrong!" retorted his elder partner. "Most of our
law--ninety-nine per cent of it, in fact--is unwritten."
"Excuse me!" interjected Bonnie Doon, abandoning his usual flippancy.
"What is that you said, Mr. Tutt?"
"That ninety-nine per cent of the laws by which we are governed are
unwritten laws, just as binding as the printed ones upon our statute
books, which after all are only the crystallization of the sentiments
and opinions of the community based upon its traditions, manners,
customs and religious beliefs. For every statute in print there are a
hundred that have no tangible existence, based on our sense of decency,
of duty and of honor, which are equally controlling and which it has
never been found necessary to reduce to writing, since their infraction
usually brings its own penalty or infringes the more delicate domain of
private conscience where the crude processes of the criminal law cannot
follow. The laws of etiquette and fair play are just as obligatory as
legislative enactments--the Ten Commandments as efficacious as the Penal
Code."
"Don't you agree with that, Tutt?" demanded Bonnie. "Every man's
conscience is his own private unwritten law."
Tutt looked skeptical.
"Did you say every man had a conscience?" he inquired.
"And it makes a lot of trouble sometimes," continued Mr. Tutt, ignoring
him. "You remember when old Cogswell was on the bench and a man was
brought before him for breaking his umbrella over the head of a fellow
who had insulted the defendant's wife, he said to the jury: 'Gentlemen,
if this plaintiff had called my wife a name like that I'd have smashed
my umbrella over his head pretty quick. However, that's not the law!
Take the case, gentlemen!'"
"Well, I guess I was wrong," admitted Tutt. "Of course, that is
unwritten law. People don't like to punish a man for resenting a slur
upon his wife's reputation."
"But you see where that leads you?" remarked his partner. "The so-called
unwritten law is based on our inherited idea of chivalry. A lady's honor
and reputation were sacred, and her knight was prepared instantly to
defend it with the last drop of his blood. A reflection on her honesty
was almost as unbearable as one upon her virtue. Logically, the
unwritten law ought to permit women to break their contracts and do
practically anything they see fit."
"They do, don't they--the dear things!" sighed Bonnie.
"I remember," interjected Tutt brightly, "when it was the unwritten law
of Cook County, Illinois--that's Chicago, you know--that any woman could
kill her husband for the life-insurance money. Seriously!"
"There's no point of chivalry that I can see involved in that--it's
merely good business," remarked Mr. Doon, lighting another cigarette.
"All the same it's obvious that the unwritten law might be stretched a
long way. It's a great convenience, though, on occasion!"
"We should be in an awful stew if nowadays we substituted ideas of
chivalry for those of justice," declared Mr. Tutt. "Fortunately the
danger is past. As someone has said, 'The women, once our superiors,
have become our equals!'"
"We don't even give 'em our seats in the Subway," commented Tutt
complacently. "No, we needn't worry about the return of chivalry--in New
York at any rate."
"I should say not!" exclaimed Miss Wiggin, entering at that moment with
a pile of papers, as nobody rose.
"But," insisted Bonnie, "all the same there are certainly plenty of
cases where if he had to choose between them any man would obey his
conscience rather than the law."
"Of course, there are such cases," admitted Mr. Tutt. "But we ought to
discourage the idea as much as possible."
"Discourage a sense of honor?" exclaimed Miss Wiggin. "Why, Mr. Tutt!"
"It depends on what you mean by honor," he retorted. "I don't take much
stock in the kind of honor that makes an heir apparent 'perjure himself
like a gentleman' about a card game at a country house."
"Neither do I," she returned, "any more than I do in the kind of honor