The Bellamy trial

by Frances Noyes Hart

“Your Honour, gentlemen, when my distinguished adversary rose to address you an hour or so ago, he assured you that he was about to take very little of your time. We would none of us grudge him one moment that he has subsequently taken. He is waging a grim and desperate battle, and moments and even hours seem infinitesimal weapons to interpose between those two whose defense is intrusted to him, and who stand this day in peril of their lives on the awful brink of eternity itself.

“The plea that has made to you is as eloquent and moving a one as you will hear in many a long day; it is my misfortune that the one that I am about to make must follow hard on its heels, and will necessarily be shorn of both eloquence and emotion. It will be the shorter for lack of them, but not the better. What I lack in oratory I shall endeavour to supply in facts: facts too cold, hard, and grim to make pleasant hearing—still, facts. It is my unwelcome duty to place them before you; I shall not shrink from it. It will not be necessary for me to elaborate on them. They will speak for themselves more eloquently than I could ever hope to do, and I propose to let them do so.

“Before I marshal them before you, I will dispose as briefly as possible of two or three issues that Mr. Lambert has seen fit to raise in his speech to you. First, as to the wealth of Mrs. Ives. I cannot see that the fact that she is wealthy is in any way a vital issue in this case, but Mr. Lambert evidently considered it sufficiently important to dwell on at considerable length. He managed very skilfully to place before you the picture of a modest little farmhouse with roses clambering over a cottage gate, presided over by an even more modest chatelaine. Very idyllic and utterly and absolutely misleading.

“The little farmhouse is a mansion of some twenty-odd rooms, the roses grow in a sunken garden as large as a small park; not many cottages boast a swimming pool, a tennis court, a bowling green and a garage for five cars—but Mrs. Ives’s cottage took these simple improvements as a matter of course. Mr. Lambert drew your attention to the fact that if you had rung a door-bell the lady herself might have hastened to welcome your summons, and, he implies, to welcome you in to see how simply she lived.

“I doubt profoundly whether Mrs. Ives ever opened her door in her life unless she was intending to pass through it, and I doubt even more profoundly whether you would ever have been requested to cross the threshold of her home. Mr. Lambert did admit that the bell might have been answered by a little maid, but he failed to specify which one of the five little maids it might have been. He added, in an even more lyric vein, that Susan Ives had no more than any of your wives—no more than roses in her garden, sunlight in her windows, babies in her nursery. I confess myself somewhat taken aback. Are your wives the possessors of an acre of roses, a hundred windows to let in sunshine, a day and night nursery for your babies to play in, with a governess in still a third room to supervise their play? If such is the case, you are fortunate indeed.

“As for Stephen Bellamy, Mr. Lambert has assured you that any mechanic in the land was as well off as he. Well, possibly. The mechanics that I know don’t have maids to help their pretty wives, and gardeners to sleep over their pretty garages, but perhaps the ones that you know do.

“So much for the wealth of the defendants. I said at the outset that it was a matter of no great importance, and in one sense it is not; in a deeper sense, it is of the greatest possible significance. Not that Susan Ives was, in the strictest sense of the word, a wealthy woman, but because of the alchemy that had been wrought in her by the sinister magic of what we may call the golden touch.

“You all know the legend of Midas, I am sure—the tale of that unhappy king who wished that every object that his fingers rested on might turn to gold, and whose fingers strayed one day to his little daughter’s hair and transformed her into a small statue—beautiful, shining, brilliant, but cold and hard and inhuman as metal itself. Long ago Curtiss Thorne’s fingers must have rested on his little daughter’s hair, and what he made of his child then the woman is to-day. The product of pride, of power, of privilege, of riches—Susan Ives, proud, powerful, privileged, and rich—the golden girl, a charming object of luxury in the proper surrounding, a useless encumbrance out of them.

“No one knew this better than the golden girl herself—she had had bitter cause to know it, remember; and on that fatal summer afternoon in June a drunken breath set the pedestal rocking beneath her feet. She moved swiftly down from that pedestal, with the firm intention of making it steady for all time. It is not the gold that we hold in our hands that is a menace and a curse, gentlemen—not the shining counters that we may change for joy and beauty and health and mercy—it is the cold metal that has grown into our hearts. I hold no brief against wealth itself. I hold a brief against the product of the Midas touch.

“Mr. Lambert next introduced to you most skilfully a very dangerous theme—the theme of the deep personal interest that he takes in both defendants, more especially in Susan Ives. The sincerity of his devotion to her it is impossible to doubt. I for one am very far from doubting it. He loved the little girl before the fingers of Midas had rested heavy on her hair; he sees before him still only those bright curls of childhood clustering about an untarnished brow. Many of you who have daughters felt tears sting in your eyes when he told you that he loved her as his daughter—I, who have none, felt the sting myself.