|
particularly well from whence came their continued position and authority,
they were duly grateful.
Chapter XL
When Cowperwood came into the crowded courtroom with his father and
Steger, quite fresh and jaunty (looking the part of the shrewd financier, the
man of affairs), every one stared. It was really too much to expect, most of
them thought, that a man like this would be convicted. He was, no doubt,
guilty; but, also, no doubt, he had ways and means of evading the law. His
lawyer, Harper Steger, looked very shrewd and canny to them. It was very
cold, and both men wore long, dark, bluish-gray overcoats, cut in the latest
mode. Cowperwood was given to small boutonnieres in fair weather, but to-
day he wore none. His tie, however, was of heavy, impressive silk, of
lavender hue, set with a large, clear, green emerald. He wore only the
thinnest of watch-chains, and no other ornament of any kind. He always
looked jaunty and yet reserved, good-natured, and yet capable and self-
sufficient. Never had he looked more so than he did to-day.
He at once took in the nature of the scene, which had a peculiar interest for
him. Before him was the as yet empty judge's rostrum, and at its right the
empty jury-box, between which, and to the judge's left, as he sat facing the
audience, stood the witness-chair where he must presently sit and testify.
Behind it, already awaiting the arrival of the court, stood a fat bailiff, one
John Sparkheaver whose business it was to present the aged, greasy Bible
to be touched by the witnesses in making oath, and to say, "Step this way,"
when the testimony was over. There were other bailiffs—one at the gate
giving into the railed space before the judge's desk, where prisoners were
arraigned, lawyers sat or pleaded, the defendant had a chair, and so on;
another in the aisle leading to the jury-room, and still another guarding the
door by which the public entered. Cowperwood surveyed Stener, who was
one of the witnesses, and who now, in his helpless fright over his own fate,
was without malice toward any one. He had really never borne any. He
wished if anything now that he had followed Cowperwood's advice, seeing
where he now was, though he still had faith that Mollenhauer and the
political powers represented by him would do something for him with the
governor, once he was sentenced. He was very pale and comparatively thin.
Already he had lost that ruddy bulk which had been added during the days
of his prosperity. He wore a new gray suit and a brown tie, and was clean-
shaven. When his eye caught Cowperwood's steady beam, it faltered and
drooped. He rubbed his ear foolishly. Cowperwood nodded.
"You know," he said to Steger, "I feel sorry for George. He's such a fool. Still I
did all I could."
Cowperwood also watched Mrs. Stener out of the tail of his eye—an
undersized, peaked, and sallow little woman, whose clothes fitted her
abominably. It was just like Stener to marry a woman like that, he thought.
The scrubby matches of the socially unelect or unfit always interested,
though they did not always amuse, him. Mrs. Stener had no affection for
Cowperwood, of course, looking on him, as she did, as the unscrupulous
cause of her husband's downfall. They were now quite poor again, about to
move from their big house into cheaper quarters; and this was not pleasing
for her to contemplate.
Judge Payderson came in after a time, accompanied by his undersized but
stout court attendant, who looked more like a pouter-pigeon than a human
being; and as they came, Bailiff Sparkheaver rapped on the judge's desk,
beside which he had been slumbering, and mumbled, "Please rise!" The
audience arose, as is the rule of all courts. Judge Payderson stirred among a
number of briefs that were lying on his desk, and asked, briskly, "What's the
first case, Mr. Protus?" He was speaking to his clerk.
During the long and tedious arrangement of the day's docket and while the
various minor motions of lawyers were being considered, this courtroom
scene still retained interest for Cowperwood. He was so eager to win, so
incensed at the outcome of untoward events which had brought him here.
He was always intensely irritated, though he did not show it, by the whole
process of footing delays and queries and quibbles, by which legally the
affairs of men were too often hampered. Law, if you had asked him, and he
had accurately expressed himself, was a mist formed out of the moods and
the mistakes of men, which befogged the sea of life and prevented plain
sailing for the little commercial and social barques of men; it was a miasma
of misinterpretation where the ills of life festered, and also a place where the
accidentally wounded were ground between the upper and the nether
millstones of force or chance; it was a strange, weird, interesting, and yet
futile battle of wits where the ignorant and the incompetent and the shrewd
and the angry and the weak were made pawns and shuttlecocks for men—
lawyers, who were playing upon their moods, their vanities, their desires,
and their necessities. It was an unholy and unsatisfactory disrupting and
delaying spectacle, a painful commentary on the frailties of life, and men, a
trick, a snare, a pit and gin. In the hands of the strong, like himself when he
was at his best, the law was a sword and a shield, a trap to place before the
feet of the unwary; a pit to dig in the path of those who might pursue. It was
anything you might choose to make of it—a door to illegal opportunity; a
cloud of dust to be cast in the eyes of those who might choose, and
rightfully, to see; a veil to be dropped arbitrarily between truth and its
execution, justice and its judgment, crime and punishment. Lawyers in the
main were intellectual mercenaries to be bought and sold in any cause. It
amused him to hear the ethical and emotional platitudes of lawyers, to see
how readily they would lie, steal, prevaricate, misrepresent in almost any
cause and for any purpose. Great lawyers were merely great unscrupulous
subtleties, like himself, sitting back in dark, close-woven lairs like spiders
and awaiting the approach of unwary human flies. Life was at best a dark,
inhuman, unkind, unsympathetic struggle built of cruelties and the law,
and its lawyers were the most despicable representatives of the whole
unsatisfactory mess. Still he used law as he would use any other trap or
weapon to rid him of a human ill; and as for lawyers, he picked them up as
he would any club or knife wherewith to defend himself. He had no
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
