Chapter XV: The Birth of a Mystery

“The Babbington case!”

One heard those three words on the cars, in the streets, in the corridors of hotels, in parlors and dining rooms, across the breakfast table, in the lobby at the theater--everywhere one went one heard the repetition of those three words, “the Babbington case.”

One of the columns on the front page of every paper, morning and evening, was sure to be headed by those three words, or by others which conveyed precisely the same meaning.

Always the Babbington case; everywhere the Babbington case.

It was the talk of the town, and of a dozen other towns; newspapers in Europe received cabled reports of it. The reputation of it was world-wide. It was discussed in Paris and in London, as well as in New York and Newport, Lenox and Lakewood. The Babbington case absorbed the interest of the hour in all quarters, and in almost every walk of life.

Nick Carter confessed to himself that he had never before been instrumental in bringing a case to justice that received quite the amount of attention and comment that the Babbington case was getting.

Her lawyers had put in a masterly defense, and they were great lawyers, who were familiar with every quip and trick of a court trial. Nick Carter had no doubt that the woman would go free, notwithstanding the fact that he personally knew her to be as guilty of the crime as the man who had actually committed it. Therefore he was not surprised when the foreman of the jury pronounced the two words which set her free:

“Not guilty.”

There were cheers in the courtroom, and some hisses, at the pronouncement; both quickly suppressed by the court officers.

The law was guilty of no delay in its dealings with Thomas Lynne. Before Mrs. Babbington was brought to trial, Thomas Lynne had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

In her defense Mrs. Babbington admitted meeting the murderer in Scotland, and becoming engaged to him, but insisted that she had no idea that it was not J. Cephas Lynne, the father of Edythe, to whom she had become engaged, and that she believed, as others had been led to believe, that it was the valet and not the master who had died so suddenly in Switzerland.

The jury chose to credit her story rather than to believe the theory of the prosecution. That is the whole story of the crime, the trial, and the acquittal.

Such was the end of that other chapter of crime and sorrow and sudden death; and such is the beginning of the present history which we have chosen to call “The Babbington Case,” because it all came about in a measure as a consequence of that trial.

There is an old maxim in criminology: “Once a criminal, always a criminal.” We do not indorse that theory, by any means, not even in the abstract; but it is certain that we would indorse it if it were written to read: “Once a criminal, frequently a criminal again.”

Madge Babbington, as she was addressed by her intimates, was the type of woman who could never be classed with criminals, but Nick Carter, as he watched her during the trial, came to believe that she had developed traits during that interval in Scotland when the Lynne millions were the lure, and during the interval of her arrest and the weeks consumed in her trial, which, though dormant till now, would shape her whole future life.

Criminal traits are sometimes inherited, and when they appear suddenly, as in the case of the Babbington woman, inheritance is the most logical explanation of their presence; and, although they may have been dormant, and never once suspected, even by the possessor of them, for years, once inherited criminal tendencies obtain the upper hand in a character, they are there to stay.

And this was the manner in which Nick Carter read the character of Madge Babbington.

He had been at some pains, before the trial, to look up her antecedents, and he had found that Madge Morton-Hurd-Babbington had had a checkered and none too pleasant career.

Her father had once been an officer in the British army in India, where she was born. He had been handsome and skillful--more skillful with cards than with arms, as it proved. He had gone wrong; had been cashiered and dismissed from the service; had become an adventurer, traveling over Europe as a professional gambler, and had dragged with him his young daughter, then a mere child, whose mother had long ago deserted them both.

There you have it.

When Madge Morton’s father finally shot himself rather than stand trial for a forgery he had committed, the daughter had taken to singing in music halls, and from there had drifted into the “legitimate,” and her talents had quickly taken her to the top.

She became a star, and accepted a season’s engagement in New York, where she met Hurd, and married him. A divorce followed, and she married Babbington, who died very soon afterward.

But her two marriages had brought her a competence, although not wealth. But both of them had given her something that was quite as dear to her soul as money, and that was an entrance to and an assured position in the very cream of society.

And she was only twenty-five years old two months before the time the jury pronounced for her benefit those two magic words, “not guilty.”

The lawyers who had managed the affairs of J. Cephas Lynne had in their possession his last will and testament, which left everything that he died owning to his daughter Edythe; and, as she had actually been alive some months after her father’s death, she had inherited the immense wealth without being aware of it.

But she had died leaving no will, and now the lawyers were vainly trying to find an orphaned nephew of J. Cephas Lynne, of whom they had some faint knowledge, but who had long ago disappeared from sight and from the knowledge of his uncle, somewhere in the West.

And Nick Carter had been waiting only for the end of the trial of Madge Babbington to take up the search for the lost nephew for the lawyers.

It was necessary that Carleton Lynne should be found without delay, or that proof of his death also should be established, in order that the great estate of the dead millionaire might be administered, and so, when the verdict was pronounced, it being only three o’clock in the afternoon, the detective turned his steps in the direction of the lawyers’ offices, to tell them that he was ready to go ahead.

When he ascended in the elevator of the building where the lawyers were located, he noticed a young man who left it at the same floor he did, and who walked ahead of him to the same door he was seeking, and that young man announced himself, once he was inside the offices, as Carleton Lynne, from Idaho, just arrived, having seen one of the advertisements in a newspaper he had picked up by chance.

And possibly this story might better have been entitled “The Mystery of Carleton Lynne,” for at that moment when the young man announced himself began the birth of a new mystery.