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Read Ebook: Changeling and Other Stories by Byrne Donn
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Ebook has 2269 lines and 97341 words, and 46 pages
Changeling
The Barnacle Goose
Belfasters
The Keeper of the Bridge
In Praise of Lady Margery Kyteler
Reynardine
Dramatis Personae
Wisdom Buildeth Her House
The Parliament at Thebes
Delilah, Now It Was Dusk
A Quatrain Of Ling Tai Fu's
"Irish"
CHANGELING AND OTHER STORIES
CHANGELING
To outward appearance the whole of the courtroom scene was drab, ordinary. There was the stuffy rectangle of a room, half dark in the January dusk, for all that the electric lights glowed with meager incandescence. There was the judge, in his robe, at the desk of the court. There were the jurymen, solemn as in church. There the court stenographers, bald, active as ants. There the men of the daily journals, more aloof, more judicial than the judge. There the press of morbid spectators, leaning forward like runners on the mark. There the policemen, court attendants, whatnot, relaxed of body, concentrated of eye, jealous of the dignity of the court as a house-dog of its master's home. Through the windows of the court could be seen the bulk of the Tombs, heavy, hopeless, horrible as the things whence it takes its chilly name.
The district attorney, youngish, slim, lithe, a little sinister--the impression of a hunting-dog all over him--was examining a witness, a rat-faced man who had something of the old-time bartender or private detective about him.
"It was your business, as attendant at the Oriental Garden, to see that order was kept?"
"Yes, sir."
"There was no semblance of disorder at all until you heard the shot fired?"
"No, sir."
"Mr. De Vries was at a table with a party?"
"Yes, sir."
"You heard the shot and you saw Mr. De Vries fall forward?"
"Yes, sir. Crumpled up, sort of."
"Then you ran to him?"
"Yes, sir."
"You saw the woman Janssen back of the hall with a revolver?"
"Yes, sir."
"What was she doing?"
"She was laughing."
"Was she drunk?"
"The laugh sounded drunk."
"Was she very much under the influence of liquor?"
"She could n't have been, else she would n't have got away."
"You are certain that it was the prisoner?"
All eyes in the court-room were turned to the prisoner in the dock. And there was in the sordid trial chamber a sense of great disturbance in the air, though, from the minds and personalities of all gathered there, there rose in gray tendrils a haze of doubt, of disbelief, of mystery.
She sat in the dock, in the sordid court-room, among the unseemly officers and the public, as a statue in some public square might stand above the rabble. Mature, magnificent, the prisoner seemed almost like some goddess from a Norse mythology.
First, her strange coloring made all catch their breath. Her face was tanned to an absolutely golden hue, and out of this work of delicate bronze there looked, calm and confident, two eyes that were blue as sea-water. Her eyebrows, her hair, were bleached by the sun until her eyebrows were two half-moons of silver, until her hair was the pale, beautiful gold of honey in dark lights and like vivid strands of live silver when the light fell on it. She had the strange, exotic appearance of the women of Saba Isle, the ancient colony of Holland sailors and Carib Indian belles, a small dot in the West Indies where there is a town on the top of a mountain, and life is as in the garden of the Hesperides.
It was not alone her coloring, her splendid face. From her there came such an aura of health, of spiritual strength, it seemed impossible that this woman was the chorus girl Janssen who had been the cast-off mistress of the rake and spendthrift De Vries, who had been drunk, who attended cabarets with wine-merchants and Broadway belles. This woman! Impossible! In her own calm eyes there seemed also a look that said more: "This is ridiculous. I can't have done this. Why am I here? Why don't they get up and let me go?"
Even the rat-faced witness was perturbed.
"The prisoner in the dock?" he said with a sense of puzzled wonder. "The prisoner in the dock?"
"Well, don't mind the prisoner in the dock, then. It was the woman Janssen you saw."
"I am sure of that."
"You were well acquainted with her appearance. You couldn't have been mistaken?"
"No, sir, I could not have been mistaken. She was often at the Oriental with Mr. De Vries. Sometimes every night for a week. I could not have been mistaken. It was she shot Mr. De Vries."
The district attorney sat down, with a gesture of his hand toward Howard Donegan, the prisoner's counsel. With his massive body, with his massive head, with his cruel jurist's face, Howard Donegan was as much a part of the attraction for the public as was the prisoner, the notoriety of the ten-year-old case, the romantic capture of Annette Janssen. The great Irish-American was the foremost criminal lawyer of his day, all but invincible when defending a man or a woman with the slightest chance of escape, and right on his side. As a cross-examiner he was dreaded as the plague. The public would get the thrill of seeing a superbly cruel and magnificent performance when Donegan arose. Even now the rat-faced witness shook as with ague as Donegan turned casually toward him, with hooded eyes. But Donegan shook his head. He did not wish to cross-examine.
Even the judge was surprised.
"Did I hear aright?" He leaned forward, his fine mystic's face in lines of doubt and worry. "The counsel for the prisoner does not wish to cross-examine?"
"Your Honor heard aright. I will not cross-examine."
Through the big chamber there was a buzz of comment, of doubt, of all but horror. Was there nothing to be done for this woman? Even if she did kill De Vries, give her a sporting chance for her life! "What is Donegan doing?" the public, the attendants, the newspaper reporters asked themselves with mistrust. Was he throwing her down?
There was a tensing in court, a tightening, as of drama. Already there was a sense in every one's chilled veins of the horrible harness of the electric chair. But Donegan only drowsed.
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