“You, Alfred Cartwright,” said Maxell, and again looked him straight in the eye, “will be kept in penal servitude for twenty years.”
Cartwright swallowed something. Then he leaned across the edge of the dock.
“You swine!” he said huskily, and then the warders dragged him away.
Two days later there was a new sensation. The newspapers announced that Mr. Justice Maxell had been compelled, on account of ill-health, to resign from the Bench, and that His Majesty had been pleased to confer a baronetcy of the United Kingdom upon the ex-Judge.
CHAPTER VIII
SOME nine years after the events detailed in the last chapter, a fairly clever young actress who had drifted into the cinematograph business, faced one of the many disappointments which had made up her life. In many ways the disappointment was more bitter than any she had previously experienced, because she had banked so heavily upon success.
If there was any satisfaction to be had out of the new tragedy it was to be found in the fact that the fault was not entirely hers. An impartial critic might, indeed, absolve her from all responsibility.
In this particular instance she regarded herself in the light of a martyr to indifferent literature—not without reason.
When the Westminster Art Film Company was tottering on its last legs, Mr. Willie Ellsberger, chairman and chief victim, decided on one big throw for fortune. The play decided upon does not matter, because it was written by Willie himself, with the assistance of his advertising man, but it contained all the stunts that had ever got by in all the photo plays that had ever been produced, and in and out of every breathless situation flashed Sadie O’Grady, the most amazing, the most charming, the most romantic, the highest salaried artiste that filmland had ever known.
Sadie O’Grady had come to London from Honolulu, after she had inherited her father’s considerable fortune. She came, a curious visitor, to the studios, merely as a spectator, and had laughingly refused Mr. Ellsberger’s first offer, that gentleman having been attracted by her perfect face and the grace of her movements; but at last, after extraordinary persuasion, she had agreed to star in that stupendous production, “The Soul of Babylon,” for a fee of £25,000, which was to be distributed amongst certain Honolulu charities in which she was interested.