Now arose literally a cloud of witnesses, who came forward from some
of the back seats, and occupied the benches hitherto held by the
plaintiffs and witnesses in the preceding cases. They were of all
shades of blackness, and of both sexes and divers ages, and they
were there in their solemn best clothes, with their faces full of a
decorous if superficial seriousness. I must except from this sweeping
assertion, however, the lady who was the defendant in the case: she
was a young person, with a great deal of what is called style about
her, and I had seen her going and coming throughout the morning in a
high excitement, which she seemed to enjoy. It is difficult for a lady
whose lips have such a generous breadth and such a fine outward roll
to keep from smiling, perhaps, under any circumstances; and it may
have been light-heartedness rather than light-mindedness that enabled
her to support so gayly a responsibility that weighed down all the
other parties concerned. She wore a tight-skirted black walking-dress,
with a waist of perhaps caricatured smallness; her hat was full of red
and yellow flowers; on her hands, which were in drawing with her lips
rather than her waist, were a pair of white kid gloves. As she advanced
to take her place inside the prisoner’s bar she gave in charge to a
very mournful-looking elder of her race a little girl, two or three
years of age, as fashionably dressed as herself, and tottering upon
little high-heeled boots. The old man lifted the child in his arms, and
funereally took his seat among the witnesses, while the culprit turned
her full-blown smile upon the judge, and confidently pleaded not guilty
to the clerk’s reading of the indictment, in which she was charged with
threatening the person and life of the plaintiff. At the same moment a
sort of pleased expectation lighted up all those dull countenances in
the court-room, which had been growing more and more jaded under the
process of the accusations and condemnations. The soddenest _habitué_
of the place brightened; the lawyers and policemen eased themselves in
their chairs, and I fancied that the judge himself relaxed. I could
not refuse my sympathy to the general content; I took another respite
from the thought of my poor thief, and I too lent myself to the hope of
enjoyment from this Laughable After-piece.
The accuser also wore black, but her fashionableness, as compared
with that of the defendant, was as the fashionableness of Boston to
that of New York; she had studied a subdued elegance, and she wore a
crape veil instead of flowers on her hat. She was of a sort of dusky
pallor, and her features had not the Congoish fullness nor her skin the
brilliancy of the defendant’s. Her taste in kid gloves was a decorous
black.
She testified that she was employed as second-girl in a respectable
family, and that the day before she had received a visit at the door
from the defendant, who had invited her to come down the street to a
certain point, and be beaten within an inch of her life. On her failure
to appear, the defendant came again, and notified her that she should
hold the beating in store for her, and bestow it whenever she caught
her out-of-doors. These visits and threats had terrified the plaintiff,
and annoyed the respectable family with which she lived, and she had
invoked the law.
During the delivery of her complaint, the defendant had been lifting
and lowering herself by the bar at which she stood, in anticipation of
the judge’s permission to question the plaintiff. At a nod from him she
now flung herself half across it.
“What’d I say I’d whip you _for_?”
_The Plaintiff_, thoughtfully: “What’d you say you’d whip me for?”
_The Defendant_, beating the railing with her hand: “Yes, that’s what I
ast you: what _for_?”
_The Plaintiff_, with dignity: “I don’t know as you told me what for.”
_The Defendant_: “Now, now, none o’ that! You just answer my question.”
_The Judge_: “She has answered it.”
_The Defendant_, after a moment of surprise: “Well, then, I’ll ast her
another question. Didn’t I tell you if I ever caught you goin’ to a
ball with my husband ag’in I’d”--
_The Plaintiff_: “I didn’t go to no ball with your husband!”
_The Defendant_: “You didn’t go with him! Ah”--
_The Plaintiff_: “I went with the crowd. I didn’t know who I went with.”
_The Defendant_: “Well, I know who paid fifty cents for your ticket!
Why don’t he give me any of his money? Hain’t spent fifty cents on me
or his child, there, since it was born. An’ he goes with you all the
time,--to church, and everywhere.”
_The Judge_: “That will do.”
The plaintiff, who had listened “with sick and scornful looks averse,”
stepped from the stand, and a dusky gentlewoman, as she looked, took
her place, and corroborated her testimony. She also wore genteel
black, and she haughtily turned from the defendant’s splendors as
she answered much the same questions that the latter had put to the
plaintiff. She used her with the disdain that a lady who takes care
of bank parlors may show to a social inferior with whom her grandson
has been trapped into a distasteful marriage, and she expressed by a
certain lift of the chin and a fall of the eyelids the absence of all
quality in her granddaughter-in-law, as no words could have done it. I
suppose it will be long before these poor creatures will cease to seem
as if they were playing at our social conditions, or the prejudices
and passions when painted black will seem otherwise than funny. But if
this old lady had been born a duchess, or the daughter of a merchant
one remove from retail trade, she could not have represented the
unrelenting dowager more vividly. She bore witness to the blameless
character of the plaintiff, to whom her grandson had paid only those
attentions permissible from a gentleman unhappy in his marriage, and
living apart from his wife,--a wife, she insinuated, unworthy both
before and since the union which she had used sinister arts in forming
with a family every way above her. She did not overdo the part, and she
descended from the stand with the same hauteur toward the old man who
succeeded her as she had shown his daughter.
The hapless sire--for this was the character he attempted--came upon
the stand with his forsaken grandchild in his arms, and bore his
testimony to the fact that his daughter was a good girl, and had always
done what was right, and had been brought up to it. He dwelt upon her
fidelity to her virtuous family training, with no apparent sense of
incongruity in the facts--elicited by counsel--to the contrary; and
he was an old man whose perceptions were somewhat blunted as to other
things. He maundered on about his son-in-law’s neglect of his wife
and child, and the expense which he had been put to on their account,
and especially about the wrongs his family had suffered since his
son-in-law “got to going” with the plaintiff.
“You say,” interpreted the judge, “that the plaintiff tried to seduce
the affections of your daughter’s husband from her?”
The old man was brought to a long and thoughtful pause, from which he
was startled by a repetition of the judge’s question. “I--I don’ know
as I understand you, judge,” he faltered.
“Do you mean that the plaintiff--the person whom your daughter
threatened to beat--has been trying to get your daughter’s husband’s
affections away from her?”
“Why, he hain’t never showed her no affections, judge! He’s just left
_me_ to support her.”
“Very well, then. Has the plaintiff tried to get your daughter’s
husband away from her?”
“I guess not, judge. He hain’t never took any notice of my daughter
since he married her.”
“Well, does your son-in-law go with this person?”
“With who, judge?”
“With the plaintiff.”
“De ol’ woman. No, he don’ go wid de ol’ woman any: _she’s his
gran’mother_.”
“Well, does he go with the young woman?”
“Oh, yes! _Yes!_ He goes with the _young_ woman. Goes with _her_ all
the time. That’s the _one_ he goes with!”
He seemed to be greatly surprised and delighted to find that this point
was what the judge had been trying to get at, and the audience shared
his pleasure.
I really forget how the case was decided. Perhaps my train, which
I began to be anxious not to lose, hurried me away before the
_dénoûment_, as often happens with the suburban play-goer. But to
one who cares rather for character than for plot it made little
difference. I came away thinking that if the actors in the little
drama were of another complexion how finely the situation would have
served in a certain sort of intense novel: the patrician dowager,
inappeasably offended by the low match her grandson has made, and
willing to encourage his _penchant_ for the lady of his own rank, whom
some fortuity may yet enable him to marry; the wife, with her vulgar
but strong passions, stung to madness by the neglect and disdain of
her husband’s family,--it is certainly a very pretty intrigue, and I
commend it to my brother (or sister) novelists who like to be praised
by the reviewers for what the reviewers think profundity and power.