The reigning belle

by Ann S. Stephens

The woman and her son sat down on the nearest bench, while the officer leaned his back against the wall and waited.

The widow looked around with a vague feeling of curiosity. The bare room, in another place, would hardly have challenged notice; but here, in the heart of that gloomy prison, thoughts of crime and its gloomy train of sorrows made the place desolate indeed. The Judge, who sat wearily on his bench, scarcely looked that way when the door opened to admit these two prisoners. He had become so accustomed to human suffering, so familiar with every aspect of crime, that both had ceased to shock him.

After a little, he beckoned to the officer, who came forward and answered a brief question put to him.

“It is,” said he, “an old woman and her son, charged with a heavy crime, the boy with grand larceny, the woman with receiving the goods he had stolen, probably at her own suggestion.”

The Judge cast a severe glance at the woman, and went on with some business that had occupied him before the officer’s entrance.

But few persons were in the court-room, for scenes like this were commonplace affairs, and men had scarcely the curiosity to look twice, when the mother and son seated themselves on the same bench with some half dozen other persons, gloomy, hardened and evil-looking, who awaited examination.

After awhile, the Judge leaned back in his leathern chair, and the officer was ordered to come forward with his charge. He spoke kindly to the old woman, who arose, tall, rigid and tearless, to obey. This woman knew herself to be innocent, and felt the wrong that had dragged her before that tribunal with bitter, even fierce resentment. When her hand clutched the railing before the Judge, it was with a grasp of iron, and the eyes she bent upon him burned with smouldering fire which he took for defiance.

When the judge called Mrs. Laurence by name, the lad clung to her dress, and followed her up to the bar, with some wild idea of protecting her from the harm that threatened them both.

But there was nothing for him to do. He understood that some wrong was intended, but had no idea of the form in which it was to come upon them. Thus he stood close to his mother, pale and bewildered.

They had given him no chance to speak to his mother, nor did he know of what she was accused. All was gloom and distrust around him; his proud young heart swelled with a sense of infinite degradation, which seemed to close in his life with sudden darkness. He turned his eyes upon the judge with thrills of dread, then lifted them to his mother, from whose face they fell away, heavy with tears.