I opened the defense. I saw a new countenance upon the twelve faces
before me. There was now no pity, but distrust and a hardening of the
heart, and opinion more than half made up. I walked warily, began afar
off; called them honest—and so indeed they were—acknowledged the first
marriage, acknowledged the first wife living, in sorrow and in want;
acknowledged the plaintiff’s mortgage; claimed nothing from sympathy for
the poor, nothing from sympathy for the wronged widow, nothing from
sympathy for the orphan; alluded to the thick shadows in which time and
circumstances, and a probable wrong, had enveloped the mother’s early
life, and with which they had nothing to do; spoke of that mother’s
purity of conduct during a period of many years, of her industry, of her
accumulation of wealth, of her care for an only child, her daughter and
my client; of the daughter’s peculiar position in society; of her young
ignorance of the world; of her wide separation from Andrews’ place of
residence; of her indiscreet confidence when wooed, pardonable in one
whose own life was to her a mystery; of the hints which she had received
subsequent to her marriage, and of the suspicions which had been
aroused, suspicions well answered and well put to rest by suggestions of
the malice of her husband’s enemies, and by trust in the man she loved,
in the man into whose arms she had surrendered all—a trust most
honorable in a woman. But where was the first wife? Why had she remained
silent? Wronged, deserted, driven out, she must have been ready to give
credence to any report in disparagement of her husband. Under such
circumstances, hints and inuendoes in which the defendant could put no
faith, could not satisfy her that she had been deceived. This was the
position which we occupied; this was our defense. The evidence which I
was about to introduce said all that I said, and into its keeping I
willingly surrendered the property and the good name of the widow and
orphan, whose cause is holy in the sight of God and of men. _Cum
deceptis jura subveniunt._
It was now for me to introduce the evidence on the part of the defense,
and I did so in the order which reason at once suggests as the most
natural and direct. First, of the marriage, which was not denied; then
of the wife’s inheritance, which Andrews had received, and of which the
proof was too full to be questioned; and then, as part of the _res
gestæ_, letters written by Andrews at different periods, and in times of
temporary absence, breathing confidence and love, and twice alluding to
the suspicions which the idle gossip of his enemies had planted in the
breast of his wife, and branding them as the offspring of an unfounded
malice.
As I passed the papers to the clerk, I turned and looked upon Mr.
Cornelius. His hands rested, clenched, upon his knees, but his eyes
still reached for the gold which was fast receding in the distance. My
client had, from the first, put off all womanly fear, and listened to
the argument and watched the testimony with a clear brow, pale from
resolution. Once, when the junior counsel in his opening speech, hinted
at concubinage—a crime too frequent, too much bred into the customs of
the city not to gain an easy credence—the blood mounted, suffused her
temples, bathed her whole face in the ruddy light of a golden sunset,
and then flowed back not to return again. Now, she was cool enough.
I next read letters from the mother, dated both before and after the
daughter’s marriage. They were written with great elegance and
simplicity, and all started from the same point, and all came back to it
again—a mother’s care and unceasing anxiety for her daughter’s physical
health, for her mental improvement, for her moral purity. The court was
touched; a manly sorrow sat, veiled, upon the hard features of the jury;
the miser shook, like an aspen-leaf, through every limb. I paused—and
then took up another, the last, written but a few days prior to the
mother’s death, the last words of that mother to her child, in life. Its
manner, the solemn cadence of the periods, the matter, fell slowly and
heavily upon the ear, like the thick breathings of one with whom the
world has little more to do. The shadow rested upon the hand as it
wrote. It was crowded with the griefs of many years. It spoke darkly of
wrongs received; of a stern resolve; of labors endured, and endured
joyously for the offspring of a love struck-down, and changed to very
hate, even in the first hour of its young life; of one whose name her
daughter’s lips had never syllabled; of one living, prosperous in the
world, the daughter’s father and her husband. Wait, yet a little while,
and she should know the blood which had begotten her, and claim her
own—a rich inheritance equal with the noblest in the land. Alas! that
waiting was to be too long! Death had sealed the mother’s lips, and
there sat the daughter, hunted, hunted like a hare by the hounds of the
law.
My client covered her face with the folds of her robe.
“How does the mother sign herself?” asked the judge.
“Ann Chapman, may it please your honor.”
“Ann Chapman!” exclaimed John Cornelius springing to his feet. “Ann
Chapman! Give me the letter.”
I put it into his hands. His eyes glanced at the date, and then rested,
fixed, upon the signature. The pallor of the dead crept slowly over him;
his arms gave up their strength and fell to his side, the paper dropped
upon the floor. “Here, take it, take it,” he said, in a hollow whisper,
looking straight out upon vacuity; “it is nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Then turning to his counsel, he bid them enter a discontinue, and walked
hurriedly out of court.
“This is a strange ending!” said the judge.
“My client is mad!” said the opposite senior counsel.
“Our client is mad!” echoed his junior, bundling up his papers with a
piece of red tape.
“Mad or sane, gentlemen, it is a fit conclusion to what should never
have been begun,” said I, taking the young widow under my arm and
leading her away, much wondering at the abrupt termination of the suit.
“Do you think Mr. Cornelius has really gone mad?” she asked, looking up
into my face with a tear upon her eyelids. It was one of sorrow, not
joy; God bless her, she had forgotten her good fortune in sympathy for
her oppressor.
“If to have a conscience is to be so,” I answered; and took leave of her
at the door of her residence—at the door of the house we had battled
for—so happy, that she tried and could not say, “I thank you.”