Geoffrey Hampstead: A Novel

As the constable half supported him to the box, he was still a pitiable object, in spite of the champagne the fellows had made him swallow. As his bodily strength had come back under stimulant, his intellect had returned also with proportional strength, which of course was not great. His ideas as to what was going on were of the vaguest kind. He looked surprised to see Geoffrey in custody, but smiled across the room to him and nodded.

After he was sworn, Rankin asked him:

"You went away last Wednesday on a schooner called the North Star?"

"Yes."

"Did any person tell you to go in this way, instead of by steamer or railway?"

"I think it was Geoffrey's suggestion at first. I had to go away on private business. I think we arranged the manner of my going together."

"Did any person tell you to take your valises to the yacht club early on Wednesday morning?"

"I think it was Hampstead's idea originally, and I thought it was a good one."

"You wished to go away secretly?"

"Well, we discussed that point. I was going by rail, but Hampstead thought the schooner was best."

"You evidently did everything he told you?"

"Certainly, I did," said Jack, as he smiled across to Geoffrey. "Hampstead has the best head for management I know of."

"Quite so. No doubt about that! Now, since the accident to the boats in the lake some bills were found upon you. Are those your bills?" (producing them).

"Yes, they look like my bills. The seven one-hundred dollars I got myself, and the two for one thousand each I got – " Jack stopped here and looked troubled. He looked across at Geoffrey and remained silent. It came to him for the first time that Hampstead was being charged with something that had gone wrong in the bank about this money.

The magistrate said sharply "I wish to know where you got that money. You will be good enough to answer without delay."

Jack looked worried. "My money was all in smallish bills, and either Geoffrey or I (I forget which) suggested that I had better take these two American one-thousand-dollar bills, as they would be smaller in my pocket. He slipped these two out of a package of bills which I imagine were all of the same denomination."

Rankin evidently was wishing to spin out the time, for he glanced at the side door whenever it was opened.

He went on asking questions and showing that Geoffrey had been at the bottom of everything, and in the mean time three men appeared in the room, and one of them handed Rankin a parcel.

"During your trial this morning I think I heard you say that the bills you saw on Hampstead's desk were all dark-green colored?"

"I think they were all the same color as these two. He ran his finger over them as he drew these two out."

"I have some money here," said Rankin. "Does this package look anything like the one you then saw?"

"I could not swear to it. It looks like it."

Even the magistrate was excited now. The news had flown through the business part of the city that Geoffrey Hampstead had been arrested and was on trial for stealing the fifty thousand dollars. The news stirred men as if the post-office had been blown up with dynamite. The court-room was jammed. When word had been passed outside that things looked bad for Hampstead, as much as five dollars was paid by a broker for standing room in the court. It had also become known that Maurice Rankin had caused the arrest to be made himself, and that nobody but he knew what could be proved. People thought at first that the bank authorities were forcing the prosecution, and wondered that they had not employed an older man. The fact that this young sprig, professionally unknown, had assumed the entire responsibility himself, gave a greater interest to the proceedings.

The magistrate leaned over his desk and asked quietly:

"What money is that you have there, Mr. Rankin?"

Maurice's naturally incisive voice sounded like a bell in the death-like stillness of the court-room.

"These," he said, "are what I will prove to be the forty-eight thousand-dollar bills stolen from the bank."

The pent-up excitement could be restrained no longer. A sound, half cheer and half yell, filled the room.

Rankin had not been idle after he left Mrs. Priest that day. He first went in a cab to Jack, and simply asked him if Geoffrey had worn the large-patterned waistcoat on the day he went away. Jack remembered hearing Sappy talking about his wearing it. Rankin then drove to the Montreal Telegraph clerk, who identified the wrapper. Then he had the warrant issued for Hampstead's arrest, and also subpœnas, which were handed to different policemen for service, with instructions to bring the witnesses with them if possible. The Priests, mother and son, he secured by having a constable bring them in a cab. He then requested the magistrate to hear the case at once.

He supposed, rightly enough, that Hampstead, on becoming aware that the numbers of the stolen bills were all known would be afraid to pass any of them, and would still have the money somewhere in his possession. So he had three detectives sent with a search warrant to break in Geoffrey's door and search for it. He thought it was by no means certain that they would find the money, and he was anxious on this point, but he knew that, even if he failed to secure a conviction against Hampstead, he had at least sufficient evidence to render Jack's conviction doubtful. In the case against Hampstead, Jack's evidence would be heard in full, and Rankin felt satisfied that in some way it would explain away the terribly damaging case that had been made out against him in the morning.

The sudden shout in the court had been so full of sympathy for Jack and admiration for Rankin's cleverness that for the first time in his magisterial existence "His Worship" forgot to check it, and the call to order by the police was of the weakest kind. All the bank-clerks of the city were jammed into that room, and for a moment Jack's friends were wild.

A few more questions were put to Jack, but only to improve his position before the public as to the charge against himself.

"Are you aware that you have been made a victim of in a matter where the Victoria Bank was robbed of fifty thousand dollars?"

"No," said Jack, looking dazed. "I am not."

"Are you aware that you were tried this morning for stealing that money?"

"I seemed at times to know that something was wrong. Once I knew I was charged with stealing something or other, but I did not know or care. I must have been unconscious after the collision in the lake. The first thing I knew of, they said we were at Port Dalhousie. We must have sailed there with nothing drawing but the forward canvas, and that must have taken a good while."

Jack was now allowed to stand down, but he was not removed from the court-room.

To clear up Jack's record thoroughly, Rankin called Detective Dearborn and, before the magistrate stopped the examination as being irrelevant, he succeeded in showing that Jack had been delirious for twelve hours after his arrest. The fact that Dearborn had not mentioned these circumstances placed him in a rather bad light with the audience, while it showed once again what a common habit it is with the police to suppress and even distort facts in order to secure a conviction.

The telegraph clerk identified the recovered forty-eight bills, and the receiving teller, gave the same evidence as in the Cresswell case, and then the detective who found the money in Hampstead's room was called.

As soon as he heard his first words, Geoffrey knew what was coming and rose to his feet and addressed the magistrate:

"I suppose, Your Worship, that it is not too late to withdraw my plea of not guilty and at this late hour plead guilty. This will be my only opportunity to cast a full light on this case, and, if I may be permitted, I will do so."

The magistrate nodded. Geoffrey continued:

"Of course, it is perfectly clear that Cresswell is quite innocent. For private reasons, in a matter that was entirely honorable to himself, Cresswell wished to leave Canada. He was going through the States to California, and did not intend to return, and would have resisted being brought back to Canada. There was no law existing by which he could be extradited. He could only be brought back by his own consent. From the way I sent him on the schooner, his arrest before arriving in the United States was in the highest degree improbable. If he had afterward been arrested in the States I could have at once arranged to be sent by the bank to persuade him to return. I had it all planned that he never should return. He would have done as I told him. Even if he insisted on coming back I then would be safe in the States. Of course, I did not know that identification could be made of the bills – which could not have been foreseen – and my object in giving him two of them was that suspicion would rest temporarily on him, which might be necessary to give me time to escape. As it turned out, if Cresswell had insisted on returning to Canada he would be returning to certain conviction – part of the identified money being found on him.

"So far I speak only of my intentions at the time of the theft. But I hope no one will think I would allow my old friend Jack Cresswell to go to jail under sentence for my misdeeds. To-night I intended to cross the lake in a small boat and then telegraph to the bank where to find all the money at my chambers. This, with a letter of explanation, would have acquitted Jack. I had to save him – also myself, from imprisonment; but there was another matter worth far more than the money to me which I hoped to be able to eventually make right. If I had got away to-night the bank would have had its money to-morrow.

"On the day before the theft I had lost all my twelve years' earnings and profits in speculation. If I had been able to hold my stocks until the evening of the theft I would have made over seventy-five thousand dollars. For weeks during the excitement preceding my loss I had been drinking a great deal, and when the chance came to recoup myself from the bank I seemed to take the money almost as a matter of right."

As Geoffrey continued he was looking up out of the window, evidently oblivious of the crowd about him, thinking the thing out, as if confessing to himself.

"I know that without the liquor I never would have stolen, and that with it I became – "

His face grew bitter as he thought of his thieving Tartar uncle and his mother who could not be prevented from stealing. But he pulled himself together and continued: "It would have been open to me to call men from this gathering to give evidence as to my previous character, and I have no hesitation in leaving this point in your hands if it will do anything to shorten my sentence. On this ground only am I entitled to ask for your consideration, and you will be doing a kindness if you will pass sentence at once."

As Hampstead said these words he looked abstractedly around for the last time upon the scores of former friends who now averted their faces. There was no bravado in his appearance. He held himself erect, as he always did, and his face was impenetrable. His eyes claimed acquaintance with none who met his glance. Some smiled faintly, impressed as they were with his bearing, but he seemed to look into them and past them, as if saying to himself: "There's Brown, and there's Jones, and there's Robinson, I wonder when I will ever see them again?"

There were men in that throng who knew, when Hampstead spoke of the effects of the liquor on him, exactly what was meant, who knew from personal experience that, if there is any devilish tendency in a man or any hereditary predisposition to any kind of wrong-doing, alcohol will bring it out, and these men could not refrain from some sympathy with him who had partly explained his fall, and somehow there were none who thought after Geoffrey's statement that he would have sacrificed Jack to imprisonment under sentence.

The magistrate addressed him:

"Geoffrey Hampstead, I do not think there has been anything against your character since you came to Toronto. That an intelligence such as yours should have been prostituted to the uses to which you have put it is one of the most melancholy things that ever came to my knowledge. I can not think you belong to the criminal classes, and I would be glad to be out of this matter altogether, because I feel how unable one may be to deal for the best with a case like yours. It may be that if you were liberated you would never risk your ruin again. I do not think you would; but, in that case, this court might as well be closed and the police disbanded. I am compelled to make your case exemplary, and I sentence you to six years in the Kingston Penitentiary."

A dead silence followed, and then his former friends and acquaintances began to go away. They went away quietly, not looking at each other. There was something in the proceedings of the day that silenced them. They had lost faith in one honest man and had found it again; and another, on whom some nobility was stamped, they had seen condemned as a convict. As they took their last look at the man whom they had often envied and admired, they wished to escape observation. So many of them were thinking how, at such a time in their lives, if things had not luckily turned out as they did, they, too, might have fallen under some kind of temptation, and they knew the sympathy that comes from secret consciousness of what their own possibilities in guilt might have been.

Geoffrey received his sentence looking out of the window toward the blue sky and the swallows that flew past. Every word that the magistrate had said had in it the tone of a friend, which made it harder to bear. While he heard it all vividly, he strained to keep his attention on the flying swallows in order that he might not break down. Outside of that window, and just in that direction, Margaret, the wife that never would be, was waiting for him. The man's face was like ashes. Oh, the relief to have dashed himself upon the floor when he thought of Margaret!

Yet he held out. He felt it would be better for him to be dead; but he met his fate bravely, and now sought relief in another way. He caught Rankin's eye, and motioned to him to come near.

With a face that was afraid to relax its tension, he said, with an effort at something like his ordinary speech:

"Rankin, you forsook me sadly to-day, did you not? But I can still count on you to do me a good turn – if only in return for to-day."

"Go on, Geoffrey. Yes, I have disliked you from the first. But now I don't. You make people like you, no matter what you do. You take it like a man. What do you want?"

Rankin could not command his countenance as Geoffrey could. Now that he had accomplished the work of convicting him, it seemed terrible that one who, with all his faults, appeared so manly a man, and so brave, should be on his way to six years' darkness.

Geoffrey pulled him closer and whispered in his ear: "Go to Margaret – at once – before she can read anything! Take a cab. Tell her all. Break it to her. You can put it gently. Go to her now – let her know, fairly, before you come away, that all my chances are gone – that she is released – that I am nothing – now – but a dead man."

His head went down as the words were finished with a wild effort, and his great frame shook convulsively for a moment. The thought of Margaret killed him.

During the day, before his arrest, he had seen that he would have to return at least part of the money to corroborate his story and to save Jack. And he could not abscond with the balance, because that would mean the loss of Margaret. By returning the money and saving himself from imprisonment, he had hoped that eventually she would forgive him. And now —

Maurice could not stand it. He said, hurriedly: "All right. I'll see you to-morrow." And then he dashed off, out a side door, and into a cab. And on the way to Margaret he wept like a child behind the carriage curtains for the fate of the man whom he had convicted.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Yea, it becomes a manTo cherish memory, where he had delight,For kindness is the natural birth of kindness.Whose soul records not the great debt of joy,Is stamped forever an ignoble man.Sophocles (Ajax).

As Rankin broke the news to Margaret – by degrees and very quietly – she showed but little sign of feeling. Her face whitened and she moved stiffly to the open window, where she could sit in the draught. As she made Rankin tell her the whole story she simply grew stony, while she sat with bloodless hands clinched together, as if she thus clutched at her soul to save it from the madness of a terrible grief.

Suddenly she interrupted him.

"Dismiss your cab," she said. "I will walk back with you part of the way."

When she turned toward him, the strained face was so white and the eyes so wide and expressionless that he became afraid.

"Perhaps you would rather be alone," said he, doubtful about letting her go into the street.

She seemed to divine what was in his mind, for she made him feel more at ease by a gentler tone:

"Alone? No, no! Anything but that! The walk will do me good."

The cab was dismissed while she put on her hat, and as they walked through the quiet streets toward the heart of the city, he went on with all the particulars, which she seemed determined to hear. Several times they met people who knew her and knew of her engagement to Hampstead, and they were surprised to see her walking with – of all men – Maurice Rankin. But she saw no one, gazing before her with the look which means madness if the mind be not diverted. Suddenly, as they had to cross one of the main arteries of the city, a sound fell upon Margaret's ear that made her stop and grasp Rankin by the arm. Then the cry came again – from a boy running toward them along the street:

"Special edition of the Evening News! All about Geoffrey Hampstead, the bank robber!"

For a moment her grasp came near tearing a piece out of Rankin's arm. But this was only when the blow struck her. She stopped the boy and bought a paper. She gave him half a dollar and walked on.

"This will do to give them at home," she said simply. "I could not tell them myself."

But the blow was too much for her. To hear the name of the man she worshiped yelled through the streets as a bank robber's was more than she felt able to bear. She must get home now. Another experience of this kind, and something would happen.

"Good-by!" she said, as she stopped abruptly at the corner of a street. Not a vestige of a tear had been seen in her eyes. "I will go home now. You have been very kind. I forgive you for – "

She turned quickly, and Rankin stood and watched her as she passed rapidly away.

No. 173 Tremaine Buildings had become slightly better furnished since the opening of this story. Between the time when he made the cruise in the Ideal and the events recorded in the preceding chapters, Rankin had contributed somewhat to his comforts in an inexpensive way. In order to buy his coal, which he did now with much satisfaction, he had still to practice the strictest economy. But he took some pleasure in his solitary existence. From time to time he bought different kinds of preserves sold in pressed-glass goblets and jugs of various sizes. After the jam was consumed the prize in glassware would be washed by Mrs. Priest and added to his collection, and there was a keen sense of humor in him when he added each terrible utensil to his stock. "A poor thing – but mine own!" he would quote, as he bowed to an imaginary audience and pointed with apologetic pride to a hideous pressed-glass butter-bolt.

In buying packages of dusty, doctored, and detestable tea he acquired therewith a collection of gift-spoons of different sizes, and also knives, forks, and plates, which, if not tending to develop a taste for high art, were useful. At a certain "seven-cent store" he procured, for the prevailing price, articles in tinware, the utility of which was out of all proportion to the cost.

Thus, when he sat down of an evening and surveyed a packing-box filled with several sacks of coal, all paid for; when he viewed the collection of glassware, the "family plate," and the very desirable cutlery; when he gazed with pride upon his seven-cent treasures and his curtains of chintz at ten cents a mile; when he considered that all these were his very own, his sense of having possessions made him less communistic and more conservative. Primitively, a Conservative was a being who owned something, just as Darwin's chimpanzee in the "Zoo," who discovered how to break nuts with a stone and hid the stone, was a Tory; the other monkeys who stole it were necessarily Reformers.

About ten o'clock on the evening of the trial Rankin was sitting among his possessions sipping some "gift-spoon" tea. Around him were three evening papers and two special editions. The "startling developments" and "unexpected changes" which had "transpired" at the Victoria Bank had made the special editions sell off like cheap peaches, and Rankin was enjoying the weakness – pardonable in youth and not unknown to maturity – of reading each paper's account of himself and the trial. They spoke of his "acuteness" and "foresight," and commented on his being the sole means of recovering the forty-eight thousand dollars. One paper must have jumped at a conclusion when it called him "a well-known and promising young lawyer – one of the rising men at the bar."

"The tide has turned," he said. "Twenty cents a day is not going to cover my total expenses after this. I feel it in my bones that the money will come pouring in now." He was mechanically filling a pipe when a rap at the door recalled him from his dream. A tall Scotchman, whom Rankin recognized as the messenger of the Victoria Bank, handed him a letter and then felt around for the stairs in the darkness, and descended backward, on his hands and knees, for fear of accidents.

A pleasing letter from the manager of the Victoria Bank inclosed one of the recovered thousand-dollar bills.

Rankin sat down. "I shall never," he said, with an air of resolve, "steal any more coal! And now I'll have a cigar, three for a quarter, and blow the expense!"

Two weeks afterward there came to him a copy of a resolution passed by the bank directors, together with a notification that they had arranged with the bank solicitors, Messrs. Godlie, Lobbyer, Dertewercke, and Toylor, to have him taken in as a junior partner.

Immediately after Geoffrey was sentenced, Jack Cresswell was, of course, discharged. A dozen hands were being held out to congratulate him, when Detective Dearborn drew him through a side door into an empty room, where they had a short talk about keeping the name of Nina Lindon from the public, and then they departed together for Tremaine Buildings in a cab, while the two valises in front looked, like their owner, none the better for their vicissitudes. Dearborn felt that little could be said to mend the trouble he had caused Jack, but he did all he could, and there was certainly nothing hard-hearted in the care with which the redoubtable detective assisted his former victim to bed. Mrs. Priest was summoned, also a doctor. Jack was found to be worse than he thought, and Patsey was ordered to remain within call in the next room, where he consumed cigars at twelve dollars the hundred throughout the night.

The next day Mrs. Mackintosh and Margaret came down in a cab to Jack's lonely quarters, and insisted upon his being moved to their house during his illness. While unable to go home to his parents at Halifax he was loath to give trouble to his friends, and made excuses, until he saw that Margaret really wished him to come, and divined that his coming might be a relief to her.

It was so. In the weeks that followed, whatever these two suffered in the darkness and solitude of the nights, during the day-time they were brave. The heart of each knew its own bitterness. In a short time Jack found the comfort of speech in telling Margaret many things. Unavoidably Geoffrey's name came up, for he was entangled in both their lives. Little by little Jack's story came out, as he lay back weakly on his couch, until, warmed by Margaret's sympathy, he told her all about Nina and himself – so far as he knew the story – and in the presence of his manifold troubles, and at the thought of his suffering when he witnessed, as a captive, Nina's death, Margaret felt that she was in the presence of one who had known even greater grief than her own. This was good for her. After a while she was able to speak to Jack about Geoffrey, and this brought them more and more together.