George Cary Eggleston - Westover of Wanalah (George Cary Eggleston) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

There young women, mostly the daughters of the well to do planters, were "finished" after the most approved fashion. The training they had received at the hands of their governesses and tutors was supplemented by certain refinements of education which were deemed necessary to the perfection of their minds and manners. They had already learned to strum on the piano; here they were taught how to do so with ease and grace and with the air of accomplished pianistes. Instead of Stephen C. Foster's melodious but idiotically sentimental songs, which they loved, they were trained to screech "Hear me Norma," and other "operatic pieces," which they loathed. More important than all, they were taught French until they could dream in that language—bad dreams probably, if they were in harmony with the French in which they were cast.

Boyd Westover was acquainted with a dozen or more of Monsieur Le Voiser's pupils, they being the daughters of his neighbors and friends. He knew the place also, having delivered a brief course of lectures there during the preceding year.

About half past twelve o'clock on the night on which he had stopped under a street lamp to read a paper in the rain, there was an alarm in Le Voiser's school. There were shriekings that might have been heard a block away; there were a few faintings, and there was a general muster of scantily robed young women headed by the matron of the establishment, who was madly bent upon marching them into the garden in spite of the pouring rain.

The alarm had gone forth that there was "a man in the house." One girl had imprudently asked, "Is it a burglar?" only to bring down the matron's wrath upon her head.

"What does that matter to you, Mademoiselle? As a properly brought up young lady it is enough for you to know that he's a man. You should be ashamed to need more than that to alarm you."

It was Monsieur Le Voiser's proud boast that "French is the language of the establishment, and no young lady attending it is permitted to employ any other tongue." It is perhaps an illustration of the untrustworthiness of educational veneering, that in this time of excitement nobody spoke a word of French, until the intruder, who had been hiding behind a door, slipped from his place of concealment and made a dash for the verandah through the French window by which he had entered. As he did so the light of three or four bedroom candles held high in air fell full upon him, and half a dozen of the girls shouted in chorus:

"Regardez him! It's Mr. Boyd Westover!"

The consternation which fell upon the excited group at this announcement seemed to afford a sufficient occasion for several interesting attacks of hysteria, in the execution of which one damsel made the startling announcement:

"He came to kidnap me!" repeating it several times. When she grew a little calmer so that she might be questioned as to her meaning she declared that Boyd Westover was madly in love with her. Then, having set the inventive machinery of her creative imagination going, she told a romantic story interesting to hear and perfectly delicious to tell.

In it she figured as a heroine of romance, beset by the passionate entreaties of a lover to whom she found it impossible to give her love in return, and so forth to the end of as pretty a story of love and coldness, persuasion and pleading, as any that Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz or Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth ever manufactured for the delectation of languishing Lydias.

The girl's ambition to win interest in her own behalf somewhat overreached itself. The other girls were jealous of her romantic distinction and, when they grew calm while she got herself carried to bed, they flatly refused to believe her story.

But there was no room for doubt that the intruder was Boyd Westover, or that he had forced the fastenings of a bolted window in gaining entrance. One girl, whose father was a lawyer, explained that this forcing of fastenings, however frail they might have been, constituted the crime of burglary.

Then somebody remembered that the intruder had escaped and some one else ventured the suggestion that steps ought to be taken to apprehend him. To that end Monsieur Le Voiser was summoned from his private residence in the next street. After all the girls who personally knew Boyd Westover, and all those who had attended his course of lectures had borne witness that the intruder was unmistakably he, Monsieur proceeded to set the machinery of the law in motion, with the results already set forth.

When Boyd, with Jack Towns as his counsel, presented himself before the magistrate, there was a group of Monsieur Le Voiser's pupils there, whom Jack Towns, borrowing his text from the circus posters, called "A bevy of beauty and galaxy of grace." They were there under command of their matron to testify to the facts of the burglary and the identity of the burglar, which they one and all did with so much confidence that Jack Towns found it impossible to shake their beliefs in the smallest degree.

Sam Anderson was there too, very reluctantly indeed and under compulsion of a subpœna. The Commonwealth's Attorney had somehow learned of his encounter with Westover near the scene of the burglary under what appeared to be suspicious circumstances. The hotel clerk was present to testify concerning the hour and circumstances of Westover's return to the hotel on the night before.

To meet all this array of testimony, Boyd Westover had no single witness of any kind. And if there had been any such Jack Towns would not have put him on the stand. It was clear that the accused young man must be committed in any case to await the action of the Grand Jury, and Jack Towns was much too shrewd a lawyer to waste strength—if he had had any strength—in this preliminary hearing. He devoted himself instead to the task of getting the bail fixed at as low a sum as possible. When he pleaded that his client was well known to be a gentleman of the best family connections and the most scrupulous honor, a man to whom the commission of such a crime was utterly impossible, the magistrate reminded him that the witnesses were young gentlewomen of equally good families, in whom perjury was not even conceivable; that their number was too great and their testimony too positive to leave room for the theory of possible mistake; and finally that the very fact of Boyd Westover's high place in life rendered any crime on his part especially heinous. He felt bound, he said, to fix bail at five thousand dollars—a very great sum in those days.

Within the hour, however, Boyd's friends and those who had been friends of his father, rallied about him, ready and eager to furnish bonds for any amount. Not one of them knew aught of the merits of the case, and not one of them asked a question concerning it. They simply did not believe that Boyd Westover had broken by night into a girls' school for any purpose whatever, and they were determined that he should not go to jail while awaiting indictment and trial on so absurd a charge.

"Now come with me," said Jack Towns as soon as the matter of the bail bonds was settled. "We'll go to my house, not to my office, to avoid interruptions. I must get at the very marrow of this matter before a word is said about it. Come."

When the two were seated in an untidy room of Jack Towns's untidy bachelor establishment, and Jack had locked the front door for the first time within his recollection, he turned to his friend, saying:

"I want you to tell me every thing you did last night—the unimportant things even more than the important. Don't be afraid of boring me with details, and relate everything in the order in which it occurred. Then I'll cross-examine you as rigidly as if you were a witness concealing something. Perhaps we may discover something to shed light upon what seems the most perplexing mystery I ever knew. Go on."