The matter was adjusted in a small and compact court-room.
The matter was adjusted in a small and compact court-room high up in a certain vast and pillared pile—a room which differed little in size and not greatly in furnishings from an ordinary office. The court reporters and the crowd of court loungers had withdrawn; nobody remained behind save the clerk and a bailiff or two. Yet the spectre of publicity seemed hovering there; it hurled a flood of glaring light in through the high and curtainless windows, it shimmered on the staring yellow oak furnishings of bench and bar, and it searched out the darkest corner of the yawning jury-box. Abbie Brainard, standing beside her sister, peopled all this void with jargoning lawyers and callous constables and malicious witnesses and indifferent jurymen and sharp-witted reporters and trivial, time-killing spectators; and then she set her unveiled sister in that revolving witness-chair and brought to bear upon her the searching glare from the lofty windows and the more pitiless glare of the thousand-eyed crowd. She shuddered, and thanked Heaven—without going too deeply beneath the surface of things—that present conditions were so favorable.
For they involved none of the ordinary phenomena of a "trial." There was no wrangling, no eloquence, no auditory; there was no humiliation—beyond that which was inevitable. It was hardly more than a conference. The judge, with a quiet gravity, took a simple conversational tone—a keynote to which the indignation of Burt, the mortification of his sister, the sorrow of Jane Doane, and the juvenility of Freddy Pratt all came to be attuned. There was a simple recital of uncombated facts, the separation was decreed, and Mary Vibert was presently at liberty to resume her maiden name. It was considered best that she be known henceforth as Mrs. Mary Brainard. There was no report in the next day's papers, nor the next; on the third day things took a different turn.
One or two of the newspapers had sacrificed the Vibert-Doane story with considerable reluctance. They felt a certain degree of martyrdom, too, in withholding their hand from Brainard, who had been a standard subject of attack throughout the careers of all the younger writers. Nor were they at all sure that their position as guardians of the public morals justified any such suppression of the truth. They learned of the clandestine trial of the Vibert case, and that decided them. Their virtue was strengthened; the whole affair was reopened and thoroughly ventilated. The encroachments of wealth and privilege were held up before the alarmed eyes of the public; the entire episode, with everything leading up to it, was minutely rehearsed. A good many people were interviewed—a few who knew something of the circumstances, a good many who did not. Reportorial requisitions were also made on the bank and the house. Some persons contributed facts relating to the matter in hand; others, facts relating to matters whose connection was not so close; still others volunteered opinions on the method of procedure that made the trial noteworthy. "Vox Populi" and "Ruat Coelum" wrote letters "to the editor." Rough cuts from sketches and photographs made their appearance. The whole career of Brainard was reviewed with merciless detail, and the issue of one edition of a particular publication was attended with the shouting of his name through the streets. Certain sheets whose existence is unknown to the majority of reputable people and whose circulation is in accordance therewith, gave their clients a scare-head full of exclamation-points; and one pink publication, whose single connection with respectability is through the barber-shops, devoted its whole front page to the illustration of the case: the wronged girl claimed her surpliced betrayer at the altar-rail, while the equally wronged wife swooned in a front pew. There was an appropriate Gothic background, while one corner of the foreground—piquant touch of innocence—was filled in by an open-eyed choir-boy.
All these manifestations of public interest caused Ogden a keen personal distress that surprised him. He heard the names of Brainard and Vibert bawled in the streets. He became familiar, for the first time, with the salient points in Brainard's career. He heard himself referred to once or twice as a clerk in Brainard's bank. As he handled that pink sheet in the Clifton barber-shop while awaiting his turn, he half expected some acquaintance to brand him as a caller at Brainard's house. As he lay, lathered and defenceless, in his chair, he almost dreaded lest some pitiless friend might happen in and stamp him as a suitor for the hand of Brainard's daughter.... He paused and blushed under the barber's eye; he saw now the reason for his personal distress over these odious domestic entanglements. His surprise passed away, but it left behind it a distress greater still.
[XIII]
The appearance and deportment of young Frederick Pratt as a witness in the Vibert case offered several delicate shades whose noting and whose accounting for may justify a paragraph or two. His general effect, then, was in the highest degree sobered, chastened, depressed. To what was this to be attributed?
To his consciousness of the overshadowing majesty of the law? No; for the law had turned its softest and most silken side outward; the little party had taken up its informal grouping at the judge's elbow and had replied conversationally to the interrogations of the judge himself or to the prompting inquiries of Brainard's attorney. Justicia had appeared in her most sympathetic and domestic aspect.
Was the youth disappointed as to his performance of a beau rôle? There is no doubt that he had anticipated with some relish his first appearance in the witness-box. He would have been obliged, it is true, to confess himself a minor, and he might have been exposed to the humiliating necessity of declaring that he understood the nature of an oath; but after that all would have been smooth sailing. Only to be for full fifteen minutes the observed of all observers, to be able to lift up his voice and tell—all—he—knew! Yet to be balked in this called for exasperation rather than deep dejection, and deep dejection, after all, was what he chiefly showed.