A HOST OF WITNESSES.
Mr. Martindale, State's Attorney, opened the case for the prosecution
with a few brief but very severe remarks upon the baseness of the crime
with which the prisoner stood charged, and then called his first
witness--
"The Reverend Adam Borden."
Mr. Borden took the stand and testified to having performed the marriage
ceremony between Alden Lytton and Mary Grey on the morning of the
fifteenth of the preceding September, at his own parish church, in the
city of Philadelphia.
He was strictly cross-examined by Mr. Berners, but his testimony only
came out the clearer from the ordeal.
John Martin, sexton of the church, and Sarah Martin, his daughter, were
successively examined, and testified to having witnessed the marriage
ceremony between the parties in question.
They also were cross-examined by Mr. Berners, without detriment to their
testimony.
"Mrs. Mary Lytton" was then called upon to come forward for
identification.
And Mary Grey, dressed in deep mourning and closely veiled, came up,
leaning heavily on the arm of Mr. Philip Desmond, assistant counsel for
the prosecution.
At the request of counsel she drew aside her veil, revealing a face so
ghastly pale that all who gazed upon it shuddered.
Alden Lytton turned to look at her, in order to catch her eyes, but they
were fixed upon the ground, and never once raised.
Even he, so deeply injured by her diabolical arts, turned away from her
with shuddering pity.
"The woman is at once going mad and dying," he said to himself.
Mary Grey was then fully identified by the three witnesses as the woman
who was, at the time and place specified, married to Mr. Alden Lytton.
But she had scarcely stood long enough to be sworn to, when her white
face turned blue and she fell swooning into the arms of Philip Desmond.
She was borne out into the sheriff's room, amid the sympathetic murmurs
of the audience.
Mr. Martindale then produced and read the marriage certificate, and
recalled the Rev. Mr. Borden, who acknowledged it as his own document,
presented to "Mrs. Mary Lytton" immediately after the marriage ceremony
had been concluded.
The State's Attorney next produced certain letters, purporting to have
been written by Mr. Alden Lytton to Mrs. Mary Grey during the period of
his courtship.
These letters, he said, were important as corroborative evidence, and he
begged leave to read them to the jury.
He then commenced with the correspondence from the earliest date.
And there in open court he read aloud, one after the other, all those
fond, foolish, impassioned letters that the love-sick lad, Alden Lytton,
had written to the artful woman who had beguiled him in the earliest
days of their acquaintance, and before he had discovered her deep
depravity.
This was the severest ordeal Alden Lytton had to bear. For he knew he
had written these foolish letters in his romantic boyhood, and in his
manhood he felt heartily ashamed of them. Under _any_ circumstances he
would have been heartily ashamed of them. His ears tingled and his face
burned to hear them read aloud to judge, jury and gaping crowd.
And then and there he registered a vow never, never, never to write
another gushing love-letter so long as he should live in this world; no,
not even to his own dear wife.
When the last terrible letter was finished he felt as much relieved as
if he had been unbound from the rack.
But his relief was soon superseded by the utmost astonishment when Mr.
Martindale took up another parcel, saying:
"The letters that I have just read, your honor, and gentlemen of the
jury, were, as you have heard, written from the University of
Charlottesville some years ago. Those that I am about to read to you
were written from Wendover last year, in the few weeks preceding the
marriage of the prisoner with Mary Grey."
And so saying, the State's Attorney proceeded to read, one after the
other, all those forged letters which had been executed with inimitable
skill by Mary Grey herself and mailed from Wendover by her unconscious
confederate, Craven Kyte.
These counterfeits were even fonder, more foolish and more impassioned
than the real ones, and every letter pressed speedy marriage, until the
last one, which actually arranged the mode and manner of proceeding.
During the reading of the final letter Mr. Alden Lytton beckoned his
counsel, who approached him.
"I acknowledge the first batch of folly written from Charlottesville,
when I was a boy of eighteen or nineteen," said Alden, between a laugh
and a blush.
"Every man has been a boy, and a fool, at least once in his life. I know
I have; and I would much rather be hanged than have my letters read,"
laughingly replied Mr. Berners.
"But, by all my hopes of heaven, I never wrote one of those infernal
letters of the last parcel!" added Mr. Lytton.
"I never supposed you did. It will, no doubt, be possible to prove them
to be forgeries. If we can do that the whole prosecution breaks down,"
replied Mr. Berners.
"They _are_ forgeries!" said Alden Lytton, indignantly.
But that was more easily said than established.
A score of witnesses, one after the other, were called, and swore to the
hand writing of Mr. Alden Lytton in those letters.
Other witnesses of less importance followed--waiters and chambermaids
from the Blank House, Philadelphia, who swore to the fact that Mr.
Lytton and Mrs. Grey had taken rooms together at that house on the
fourteenth of September and had left it on the afternoon of the
fifteenth.
The prosecuting attorney said that he might call other witnesses who had
seen the parties meet as by appointment at the railway station at
Forestville and proceed thence to Richmond, and others again who had
seen them together in the Richmond and Washington steamer; but he would
forbear, for he felt convinced that the overwhelming amount of testimony
already given was more than sufficient to establish the first marriage.
The second and felonious marriage was a notorious fact; but for form's
sake it must be proved before the jury.
And then, to their extreme disgust, the Rev. Stephen Lyle, Joseph Brent
and John Lytton were successively called to testify that they had all
been present and witnessed the marriage of the accused, Alden Lytton and
Emma Angela Cavendish, on the fifteenth of the last February, at Blue
Cliff Hall, in this county and State.
John Lytton, who was the last of the three put upon the stand, came very
near being committed for contempt of court by saying:
"Yes, he had witnessed his nephew's, Mr. Alden Lytton's marriage with
Miss Cavendish, which he had a perfect right to marry her, never having
been married before. None of the Lyttonses were capable of any such
burglarious, bigamarious conduct as they accused his nephew of.
Everybody knew the Lyttonses. The Lyttonses were none of your upstart
judges"--this was aimed directly at the bench. "The Lyttonses was as old
as the flood, for that matter!" and so forth, and so forth.
The witness was not committed for this offense, but merely reminded that
all this was very irrelevant to the matter in question, and ordered to
sit down.
He obeyed, growling at the indignities heaped upon the "Lyttonses" by
"upstarts."
State's Attorney Martindale then arose in his place and opened his
argument for the prosecution in a very able review of the evidence that
had been given by the witnesses examined and the documents presented.
It was while he was still speaking that a little disturbance was heard
at the lower end of the court-room.
All who heard it looked around to see what the matter was.
Presently a bailiff was seen pushing his way up through the crowd.
He came up to the counsel for the accused and handed a card to Mr.
Denham.
That gentleman took it, looked at it, stared at it, changed color, and,
without a word of explanation, abruptly rose and left his seat, and
followed the note-bearer through the crowd and out of the court-room.
Mr. Berners and Mr. Lytton looked after him in surprise and curiosity.
State's Attorney Martindale, meanwhile, went on with his argument.
After an absence of about fifteen minutes Mr. Denham returned and
resumed his seat beside his senior colleague, Mr. Berners.
He gave no explanation of his abrupt departure and absence, but sat
there listening attentively to the speech of the prosecuting attorney
and smiling to himself as in silent triumph.
Neither his senior colleague, Mr. Berners, nor his client, Mr. Lytton,
interrupted his reflections, considering that it fell to his duty to
follow Mr. Martindale's speech with an opening address for the defense.
At length Mr. Martindale brought his argument to a conclusion by a very
brilliant peroration, and sat down, saying that there the prosecution
would rest the case.
Mr. Denham, giving his client a reassuring pressure of the hand, and
wearing the same strange smile of secret mirth and triumph on his face,
arose for the defense. He began by saying:
"Your honor and gentlemen of the jury: The prosecution has favored us
with some able speeches, and has produced a host of witnesses to prove
the truth of a false and malicious charge brought against our client. We
of the defense have no speech to make, and only one witness to call. Let
Craven Kyte be put upon the stand and sworn."