Criminals -- Fiction; Social problems -- Fiction; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918 -- Fiction
Dalrymple, the assistant district attorney, was a good-looking young man
with a smooth-shaven, regular face that might have been pleasant, but,
because of his new importance, it now wore a stern and forbidding
aspect. He was dressed in new spring clothes; the trousers were rolled
up at the bottoms, showing the low tan shoes which just then had come
again into vogue. He wore a pink flannel shirt of exquisite texture; on
this flannel shirt was a white linen collar. This combination produced
an effect which was thought to give him the final touch of aristocracy
and refinement. When he was not talking to Wilkison or to Fallen, he
was striding about the court-room with his hands in his trousers
pockets. Once he stopped, drew a silver case from his pocket and
lighted a cigarette made with his monogram on the paper.
Marriott turned from Dalrymple with disgust; he looked beyond the
railing, and there, on the walnut benches, sat Gibbs, with a retinue
that made Marriott smile. They must have come in when Marriott was
preoccupied, for he was surprised to see them. Gibbs sat on the end of
one bench, as uncomfortable and ill at ease as he would have been in a
pew at church. He was shaved to a pinkness, his hair was combed smooth,
and he was very solemn. Marriott could easily see that the atmosphere
of the court-room oppressed and cowed him; he had lost his native
bearing, and had suddenly grown meek, humble and afraid. Marriott knew
none of the others; there were half a dozen men, none of them dressed as
well as Gibbs, with strange visages, marked by crime and suffering, all
the more touching because they were so evidently unconscious of these
effects. The heads ranged along the bench were of strange shapes,
startlingly individual in one sense, very much alike in another. They
were all solemn, afraid to speak, bearing themselves self-consciously,
like children suddenly set out before the public. On one bench sat a
young girl, and something unmistakable in her eyes, in her mouth, in the
clothes she wore--she had piled on herself all the finery she had--told
what she was. Her toilet, on which she had spent such enormous pains,
produced the very effect the womanhood left in her had striven to avoid.
Marriott smiled, until he detected the deep concern which Gibbs was
trying to hide; then his heart was touched, as the toilet of the girl
had touched it. Marriott knew that these people were the witnesses by
whom Gibbs expected to establish an alibi for Dillon and Squeak and
Mandell; the sight of them did not reassure him; he had again that
disheartening conviction of the utter lack of weight their appearance
would carry with any court; he did not credit them himself, and he began
to feel a shame for offering such witnesses. He was half decided,
indeed, not to put them forward. But his greater concern came with the
thought of Mason, whom he believed to be innocent; where, he suddenly
wondered, was the reporter Wales?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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