The Bellamy Trial quotes

“No,” replied the reporter hastily. “Yes—or how shall I put it? Yes and no, let’s say.”

“It’s because it’s real,” said the redheaded girl, with a sudden startling gravity.

“It’s the only thing that’s absolutely real in the world, I think. Something that makes you reckless enough not to care a tinker’s dam for your own life or another’s—that’s something to think about, isn’t it?”

… that it shocks me any amount that a scrap of a thing like you, with all that perfectly good red hair and a rather nice arrangement in dimples, should be practically climbing over that rail in your frenzy to find out what it’s all about.”

“I think that men are the most amusing race in the world,” murmured the redheaded girl.

“And I think that it’s awfully appealing of you to be shocked.

“Sure,” said the reporter grimly. “With the quarry waiting, bound and shackled and gagged till they catch up with him and tear him to pieces—it’s a great hunt all right, all right!”

“It’s not a human being that they’re hunting, idiot⁠—it’s truth.”

“Truth!” The reporter’s laugh was loud and long and free enough to cause a dozen heads to turn. “Oh, what you’re going to learn before you get out of here! A hunt for truth, is it? Well, now, you get this straight:

“Oh, by all manner of means. Twenty years ago he was caddie master at the Rosemont Country Club; five years before that he was a caddie there.

America, my child, is the land of opportunity.

He’s magnificent when he gets started on the idle rich; it’s all right to be rich if you’re not idle—or wellborn. If you’re one of those wellborn society devils, you might just as well go and jump in the lake, if you ask Mr. Farr.”

It was small, shabby, in poor repair—no tennis court, no gardens, a cheap portable garage, a meagre half acre of land inadequately surrounded by a rickety fence.

Everything is comparative in this world.

To the dwellers in tenements and slums, that house would have been a little palace. To the dweller in the stone palaces that line the Hudson, it would be a slum.

‘Beauty’ is a much cheapened and battered word; in murder trials it is loosely applied to either the victim or the murderess if either of them happened to be under fifty and not actually deformed. I am not referring to that type of beauty.

Mimi Bellamy’s beauty was of the type that in Trojan days launched a thousand ships and in these days launches a musical comedy.

Hers was beauty that is a disastrous gift—not the commonplace prettiness of a small-town belle, though such, it seems, was the role in which fate had cast her.

“A very pretty, honourable, decent thing to do in your opinion?”

“Oh,” said Miss Page, with her most disarming smile, “I don’t pretend not to be human.”

“Well, that’s very reassuring. Can you tell us why Mrs. Ives didn’t hear you outside on the porch, Miss Page?”

“I don’t know what you call between us,” said Miss. Biggs, and the pretty, common, swollen face was suddenly invested with dignity and beauty.

“I loved her better than anyone I knew. She was the only best friend I ever had⁠—ever.”

And swept by the hunger in that quiet and humble voice, the courtroom was suddenly empty of everyone but two little girls, warm cheeked, bright eyed, gingham clad—a sleek pigtailed head and a froth of bright curls locked together over an inkstained desk.

“Showing thereby that you were not entirely in his confidence, Mrs. Ives?”

“Or showing perhaps that there was nothing to confide,” said Mrs. Daniel Ives gently.

The prosecutor jerked his head irritably. “The state is in possession of an abundance of material to prove that there was everything to confide, I assure you, Mrs. Ives.

It was foolish of me not to tell the truth, perhaps, but I had a great distaste for pity.” She smiled again, graciously, at the prosecutor.

“False pride was about the only luxury that I indulged in, in those days.”

“You say that you were supporting both your son and yourself?”

“I thought—” For the first time the clear voice faltered, broke. She forced it back to steadiness relentlessly.

“I thought that they were the happiest people that ever lived,” said Patrick Ives’s mother.

“Thank you, Mrs. Ives,” said Mr. Lambert gently. “That will be all.”

“You were simply staying there in order to spy on Mrs. Ives, weren’t you?”

“I could not help see Mrs. Ives unless I close’ my eyes.”

Mr. Lambert was obliged to swallow twice before he was able to continue:

Once more Miss Cordier raised eloquent shoulders.

“Because, monsieur, I am not stupid. I look out, he is standing by the hat stand; I go back, I hear a door close, I look out once more, and he is not there. But that is of the most elementary.”

“You should be a detective instead of wasting your time waiting on tables,” commented her courtly interrogator. “The plain truth is, isn’t it, that anyone in the house might have gone out and closed that door while Mr.

“And furthermore, Miss Cordier, it comes down to the fact that we have only your word for it that the note was ever placed in the book at all, doesn’t it?”

“Monsieur does not find that sufficient?”

Monsieur ignored the question, but his countenance testified eloquently that such was indeed the case.

“Anything in particular call your attention to her?”

“Well, I should think she’d have called anyone’s attention to her,” said Joe Turner gently. “Even all wrapped up like that, she was prettier than anything I ever saw in my whole life.”

And he added, more gently still: “About twenty times prettier.”

“It would have consoled you to know that she was safe in the gardener’s cottage with Patrick Ives?”

“I would have given ten years of my life to have believed that she was safe and happy anywhere in the world.”

“Your honour meant nothing to you?”

“You are saying that you never ceased to love her?”

“I am saying that since I met her I’ve never given another woman two thoughts except to wish to God that she was somewhere else.”

“That was why you went to meet Madeleine Bellamy at the gardener’s cottage?”

“You choose your own words,” said Pat Ives. “Personally, I’d chose prettier ones. Mimi undoubtedly considered that I would be getting value received in the letters. She was right. She also may have considered that I owed her something. She was right again.”

“I owed her a great deal for not having married me,” said Pat Ives. “As she didn’t, I owe her more happiness than most men even dream of.”

Lambert made a sound that strongly suggested a snort. “Very pretty—very pretty indeed.

“Still, you were willing to pay a hundred thousand dollars to keep the letters out of your wife’s hands?”

“Five hundred thousand dollars, if I could put my hands on it, to keep pain and sorrow and ugliness out of her way.”

“You were not convinced, then, that she would accept your story as to when the letters were written?”

“So you are the only person able to attest that you ever had any intention of paying that money to Mrs. Bellamy?”

“Well, whom do you want better?” inquired Pat Ives agreeably.

Mr. Lambert bestowed on him an enigmatic smile that was far from agreeable. “Did this sum represent a substantial portion of your capital?”

She was on her feet before the words were off his lips, brushing by him with her light, swift step and a look of contemptuous anger that was bright and terrible as a sword.

“Looks as though his precious Sue was going to give Uncle Dudley a bad half hour,” murmured the reporter exultantly.

“Why?” whispered the redheaded girl. “Why did she look like that?”

“It was a little after five,” said Sue Ives, and the redheaded girl gave a sigh of sheer delight.

Once or twice in a lifetime a voice like that falls on our lucky ears⁠—a voice clear and fresh as running water, alive and beautiful and effortless.

The girl in the box did not have to lift it a half tone to have it penetrate to the farthest corner of the gallery.

“I wish you to get yourself in hand immediately. You are doing yourself untold injury by pursuing this line of conduct. The rules that you are refusing to obey were made largely for your own protection.”

“I don’t want to be protected. I want to tell the truth. Apparently no one wants to hear it.”

“On the contrary, you are permitted to take the stand for that express purpose.”

“You wish us to understand that you went there on an errand of mercy?”

“I am not asking you to understand anything. I was simply telling you why we went.”

“Exactly. Now, when you got to the cottage, Mrs. Ives, you say there was no light?”

“Why should you have changed your opinion that twelve sane men could not possibly believe your story?”

“I do not know whether they will believe me or not,” said Sue Ives, her eyes, fearless and unswerving, on the twelve stolid, inscrutable countenances raised to hers. “You see, I don’t know how true truth sounds.”

“I should imagine not,” said the prosecutor, his voice cruelly smooth. “No further questions.”

“You consider that a plausible explanation?”

“Oh, no; simply a true one.”

“She was dead, wasn’t she?”

“You ask us to believe that you spent hours in momentary danger of arrest for murder because a woman who was stone dead had been afraid of the dark when she was alive?”

“No. I don’t ask you to believe anything,” said Stephen Bellamy gently. “I was simply telling you what happened.”

“You say that you didn’t touch anything else in the cottage?”

because I have watched her from those bright, joyous days to these dark and terrible ones, and never once have I found a trace of alloy in her gold.

I have found united in her the traits we seek in many different forms⁠—all the gallantry and honesty of a little boy, all the gaiety and grace of a little girl, all the loyalty and courage of a man, all the tenderness and beauty of a woman.

If you think I am prejudiced in her favour you will be right, gentlemen. And if that fact prejudices me in your eyes, make the most of it.

only the height of his cheek bones and the width of his mouth saved him from suggesting a matinée idol of some previous era. He might have been thirty-five, or forty, or forty-five.

His eyes were eighteen.

“Mr. Phipps, it is the understanding of this court that you have a communication to make of peculiar importance. You understand that in making that statement you will, of course, be subject to the usual course of direct and cross-examination?”

“There’s not a possibility that they could return a verdict of guilty, is there?” she inquired in a carefully detached voice.

“Oh, juries!” said the redheaded girl drearily. “They can do anything. They’re just plain, average, everyday, walking-around people, and average, everyday people can do anything in the world. That’s why we have murders and murder trials.”

The girl from the Louisville paper stood up abruptly. “I think I’ll get a little air,” she said, and added in a somewhat apologetic voice, “It’s my first murder trial.”