‘So, so!’ began Mr Botheram, putting on a pair of remarkably large spectacles, wherewith he truculently regarded the witness, – ‘so, so, Mr Mac Grawler, – is that your name, eh? Ah, it is, is it? A very very respectable name it is too, I warrant. Well, sir, look at me. Now, on your oath, remember, were you ever the editor of a certain thing published every Wednesday, and called the Attenæum, or the Asinæum, or some such name?’
Commencing with this insidious and self-damnatory question, the learned counsel then proceeded, as artfully as he was able, through a series of interrogatories, calculated to injure the character, the respectable character, of Mac Grawler, and weaken his testimony in the eyes of the jury. He succeeded in exciting in the audience that feeling of merriment, wherewith the vulgar are always so delighted to intersperse the dull seriousness of hanging a human being. But though the jury themselves grinned, they were not convinced. The Scotsman retired from the witness-box, ‘scotched,’ perhaps, in reputation, but not ‘killed’ as to testimony. It was just before this witness concluded, that Lord Mauleverer caused to be handed to the judge a small slip of paper, containing merely these words in pencil:–
Dear Brandon,
A dinner waits you at Mauleverer Park, only three miles hence. Lord — and the Bishop of — meet you. Plenty of news from London, and a letter about you, which I will show to no one till we meet. Make haste and hang this poor fellow, that I may see you the sooner; and it is bad for both of us to wait long for a regular meal like dinner. I can’t stay longer, it is so hot, and my nerves were always susceptible.
Yours,
Mauleverer
If you will come, give me a nod. You know my hour – it is always the same.
The judge glancing over the note, inclined his head gravely to the earl, who withdrew; and in one minute afterwards, a heavy and breathless silence fell over the whole court. The prisoner was called upon for his defence: it was singular what a different sensation to that existing in their breasts the moment before, crept thrillingly through the audience. Hushed was every whisper – vanished was every smile that the late cross-examination had excited; a sudden and chilling sense of the dread importance of the tribunal made itself abruptly felt in the minds of everyone present.
Perhaps, as in the gloomy satire of Hogarth (the moral Mephistopheles of painters), the close neighbourhood of pain to mirth made the former come with the homelier shock to the heart; – be that as it may, a freezing anxiety numbing the pulse, and stirring through the air, made every man in that various crowd feel a sympathy of awe with his neighbour, excepting only the hardened judge and the hackneyed lawyers, and one spectator, an idiot who had thrust himself in with the general press, and stood, within a few paces of the prisoner, grinning unconsciously, and every now and then winking with a glassy eye at someone at a distance, whose vigilance he had probably eluded.
The face and aspect, even the attitude of the prisoner, were well fitted to heighten the effect which would naturally have been created by any man under the same fearful doom. He stood at the very front of the bar, and his tall and noble figure was drawn up to its full height; a glow of excitement spread itself gradually over features at all times striking, and lighted an eye naturally eloquent, and to which various emotions at that time gave a more than commonly deep and impressive expression. He began thus: –
‘My lord, I have little to say, and I may at once relieve the anxiety of my counsel, who now looks wistfully upon me, and add, that that little will scarcely embrace the object of defence. Why should I defend myself? Why should I endeavour to protract a life that a few days, more or less, will terminate, according to the ordinary calculations of chance? Such as it is, and has been, my life is vowed to the law, and the law will have the offering. Could I escape from this indictment, I know that seven others await me, and that by one or the other of these my conviction and my sentence must come. Life may be sweet to all of us, my lord; and were it possible that mine could be spared yet awhile, that continued life might make a better atonement for past actions than a death which, abrupt and premature, calls for repentance while it forbids redress.
‘But, when the dark side of things is our only choice, it is useless to regard the bright; idle to fix our eyes upon life, when death is at hand; useless to speak of contrition, when we are denied its proof. It is the usual policy of prisoners in my situation to address the feelings and flatter the prejudices of the jury; to descant on the excellence of our laws, while they endeavour to disarm them; to praise justice, yet demand mercy; to talk of expecting acquittal, yet boast of submitting without a murmur to condemnation. For me, to whom all earthly interests are dead, this policy is idle and superfluous. I hesitate not to tell you, my lord judge – to proclaim to you, gentlemen of the jury, that the laws which I have broken through my life I despise in death! Your laws are but of two classes; the one makes criminals, the other punishes them. I have suffered by the one – I am about to perish by the other.
‘My lord, it was the turn of a straw which made me what I am. Seven years ago I was sent to the house of correction for an offence which I did not commit; I went thither, a boy who had never infringed a single law – I came forth, in a few weeks, a man who was prepared to break all laws! Whence was this change? – Was it my fault, or that of my condemners? You had first wronged me by a punishment which I did not deserve – you wronged me yet more deeply, when (even had I been guilty of the first offence) I was sentenced to herd with hardened offenders, and graduates in vice and vice’s methods of support. The laws themselves caused me to break the laws: first, by implanting within me the goading sense of injustice; secondly, by submitting me to the corruption of example. Thus, I repeat – and I trust my words will sink solemnly into the hearts of all present – your legislation made me what I am! And it now destroys me, as it has destroyed thousands, for being what it made me! But for this the first aggression on me, I might have been what the world terms honest, – I might have advanced to old age and a peaceful grave, through the harmless cheateries of trade, or the honoured falsehoods of a profession. Nay, I might have supported the laws which I have now braved; like the counsel opposed to me, I might have grown sleek on the vices of others, and advanced to honour by my ingenuity in hanging my fellow creatures! The canting and prejudging part of the press has affected to set before you the merits of “honest ability,” or “laborious trade,” in opposition to my offences. What, I beseech you, are the props of your “honest” exertion – the profits of “trade?” Are there no bribes to menials? Is there no adulteration of goods? Are the rich never duped in the price they pay? – Are the poor never wronged in the quality they receive? Is there honesty in the bread you eat, in a single necessity which clothes, or feeds, or warms you? Let those whom the law protects consider it a protector: when did it ever protect me? When did it ever protect the poor man? The government of a state, the institutions of law, profess to provide for all those who “obey.” Mark! A man hungers – do you feed him? He is naked – do you clothe him? If not, you break your covenant, you drive him back to the first law of nature, and you hang him, not because he is guilty, but because you have left him naked and starving!’ – A murmur spread among the mob below, which was with great difficulty silenced. ‘One thing only I will add, and that not to move your mercy. No, nor to invest my fate with an idle and momentary interest; but because there are some persons in this world who have not known me as the criminal who stands before you, and whom the tidings of my fate may hereafter reach; and I would not have those persons view me in blacker colours than I deserve. Among all the rumours, gentlemen, that have reached you, through all the tales and fables kindled from my unhappy notoriety and my approaching doom, I put it to you, if you have heard that I have committed one sanguinary action, or one ruinous and deliberate fraud? You have heard that I have lived by the plunder of the rich – I do not deny the charge. From the grinding of the poor, the habitual overreaching, or the systematic pilfering of my neighbours, my conscience is as fr
ee as it is from the charge of cruelty and bloodshed. Those errors I leave to honest mediocrity or virtuous exertion! You may perhaps find, too, that my life has not passed through a career of outrage without scattering some few benefits on the road. In destroying me, it is true that you will have the consolation to think, that among the benefits you derive from my sentence, will be the salutary encouragement you give to other offenders to offend to the last degree, and to divest outrage of no single aggravation! But if this does not seem to you any very powerful inducement, you may pause before you cut off from all amendment a man who seems neither wholly hardened nor utterly beyond atonement. My lord, my counsel would have wished to summon witnesses, – some to bear testimony to redeeming points in my own character, others to invalidate the oath of the witness against me – a man whom I saved from destruction in order that he might destroy me. I do not think either necessary. The public press has already said of me what little good does not shock the truth; and had I not possessed something of those qualities which society does not disesteem, you would not have beheld me here at this hour! If I had saved myself as well as my companions, I should have left this country, perhaps for ever, and commenced a very different career abroad. I committed offences; I eluded you; I committed what, in my case, was an act of duty: I am seized, and I perish. But the weakness of my body destroys me, not the strength of your malice. Had I’ – and as the prisoner spake, the haughty and rapid motion, the enlarging of the form, produced by the passion of the moment, made impressively conspicuous to all the remarkable power of his frame – ‘had I but my wonted health, my wonted command over these limbs and these veins, I would have asked no friend, no ally, to favour my escape. I tell you, engines and guardians of the law, that I would have mocked your chains, and defied your walls, as ye know that I have mocked and defied them before. But my blood creeps now only in drops through its courses; and the heart that I had of old stirs feebly and heavily within me.’ The prisoner paused a moment, and resumed in an altered tone: – ‘Leaving, then, my own character to the ordeal of report, I cannot perhaps do better than leave to the same criterion that of the witness against me. I will candidly own that, under other circumstances, it might have been otherwise. I will candidly avow that I might have then used such means as your law awards me to procure an acquittal and to prolong my existence, – though in a new scene: as it is, what matters the cause in which I receive my sentence? Nay, it is even better to suffer by the first than to linger to the last. It is some consolation not again to stand where I now stand; to go through the humbling solemnities which I have this day endured; to see the smile of some, and retort the frown of others; to wrestle with the anxiety of the heart, and to depend on the caprice of the excited nerves. It is something to feel one part of the drama of disgrace is over, and that I may wait unmolested in my den until, for one time only, I am again the butt of the unthinking and the monster of the crowd. My lord, I have now done! To you, whom the law deems the prisoner’s counsel, – to you, gentlemen of the jury, to whom it has delegated his fate, I leave the chances of my life.’
The prisoner ceased; but the same heavy silence which, save when broken by one solitary murmur, had lain over the court during his speech, still continued even for several moments after that deep and firm voice had died on the ear. So different had been the defence of the prisoner from that which had been expected; so assuredly did the more hackneyed part of the audience, even as he had proceeded, imagine that, by some artful turn, he would at length wind into the usual courses of defence, that when his unfaltering and almost stern accents paused, men were not prepared to feel that his speech was finished, and the pause involuntarily jarred on them, as untimeous and abrupt. At length, when each of the audience slowly awoke to the conviction that the prisoner had indeed concluded his harangue, a movement, eloquent of feelings released from a suspense which had been perhaps the more earnest and the more blended with awe, from the boldness and novelty of the words on which it hung, circled round the court. The jurors looked confusedly at each other, but not one of them spoke even by a whisper; their feelings, which had been aroused by the speech of the prisoner, had not, from its shortness, its singularity, and the haughty impolicy of its tone, been so far guided by its course, as to settle into any state of mind clearly favourable to him, or the reverse; so that each man waited for his neighbour to speak first, in order that he might find, as it were, in another, a kind of clue to the indistinct and excited feelings which wanted utterance in himself.
The judge, who had been from the first attracted by the air and aspect of the prisoner, had perhaps, notwithstanding the hardness of his mind, more approvingly than anyone present, listened to the defence; for in the scorn of the hollow institutions, and the mock honesty of social life, so defyingly manifested by the prisoner, Brandon recognized elements of mind remarkably congenial to his own; and this sympathy was heightened by the hardihood of physical nerve and moral intrepidity displayed by the prisoner; qualities which, among men of a similar mould, often form the strongest motive of esteem, and sometimes (as we read of in the Imperial Corsican and his chiefs) the only point of attraction! Brandon was, however, soon recalled to his cold self by a murmur of vague applause circling throughout the common crowd, among whom the general impulse always manifests itself first, and to whom the opinions of the prisoner, though but imperfectly understood, came more immediately home than they did to the better and richer classes of the audience. Ever alive to the decorums of form, Brandon instantly ordered silence in the court; and when it was again restored, and it was fully understood that the prisoner’s defence had closed, the judge proceeded to sum up.
It is worthy of remark, that many of the qualities of mind which seem most unamiable in private life often conduce with a singular felicity to the ends of public; and thus the stony firmness characteristic of Brandon was a main cause which made him admirable as a judge. For men in office err no less from their feelings than their interests.
Glancing over his notes, the judge inclined himself to the jury, and began with that silver ringing voice which particularly distinguished Brandon’s eloquence, and carries with it in high stations so majestic and candid a tone of persuasion. He pointed out, with a clear brevity, the various points of the evidence; he dwelt for a moment on the attempt to cast disrepute upon the testimony of Mac Grawler – but called a proper attention to the fact, that the attempt had been unsupported by witnesses or proof. As he proceeded, the impression made by the prisoner on the minds of the jury slowly melted away; and perhaps, so much do men soften when they behold clearly the face of a fellow-man dependent on them for life, it acted disadvantageously on the interests of Clifford, that, during the summing up, he leant back in the dock, and prevented his countenance from being seen. When the evidence had been gone through, the judge concluded thus: –
‘The prisoner, who, in his defence (on the principles and opinions of which I now forbear to comment), certainly exhibited the signs of a superior education, and a high though perverted ability, has alluded to the reports circulated by the public press, and leant some little stress on the various anecdotes tending to his advantage, which he supposes have reached your ears. I am by no means willing that the prisoner should be deprived of whatever benefit may be derivable from such a source; but it is not in this place, nor at this moment, that it can avail him. All you have to consider is the evidence before you. All on which you have to decide is, whether the prisoner be or be not guilty of the robbery of which he is charged. You must not waste a thought on what redeems or heightens a supposed crime – you must only decide on the crime itself. Put away from your minds, I beseech you, all that interferes with the main case. Put away also from your motives of decision all forethought of other possible indictments to which the prisoner has alluded, but with which you are necessarily unacquainted. If you doubt the evidence, whether of one witness or of all, the prisoner must receive from you the benefit of that doubt. If not, you are sworn to a solemn oath, which ordains you t
o forgo all minor considerations – which compels you to watch narrowly that you be not influenced by the infirmities natural to us all, but criminal in you, to lean towards the side of a mercy that would be rendered by your oath a perjury to God, and by your duty as impartial citizens, a treason to your country. I dismiss you to the grave consideration of the important case you have heard; and I trust that He to whom all hearts are open and all secrets are known, will grant you the temper and the judgement to form a right decision!’
There was in the majestic aspect and thrilling voice of Brandon something which made the commonest form of words solemn and impressive; and the hypocrite, aware of this felicity of manner, generally, as now, added weight to his concluding words by a religious allusion or a Scriptural phraseology. He ceased; and the jury, recovering from the effect of his adjuration, consulted for a moment among themselves; the foreman then, addressing the court on behalf of his fellow-jurors, requested leave to retire for deliberation. An attendant bailiff being sworn in, we read in the journals of the day, which noted the divisions of time with that customary scrupulosity rendered terrible by the reflection how soon all time and seasons may perish for the hero of the scene, that ‘it was at twenty-five minutes to two that the jury withdrew.’
Perhaps in the whole course of a criminal trial there is no period more awful than that occupied by the deliberation of the jury. In the present case, the prisoner, as if acutely sensible of his situation, remained in the rear of the dock, and buried his face in his hands. They who stood near him observed, however, that his breast did not seem to swell with the convulsive emotion customary to persons in his state, and that not even a sigh or agitated movement escaped him. The jury had been absent about twenty minutes, when a confused noise was heard in the court. The face of the judge turned in commanding severity towards the quarter whence it proceeded. He perceived a man of a coarse garb and mean appearance endeavouring rudely and violently, to push his way through the crowd towards the bench, and at the same instant he saw one of the officers of the court approaching the disturber of its tranquillity, with no friendly intent. The man, aware of the purpose of the constable, exclaimed with great vehemence, ‘I vill give this to my lord the judge, blow me if I von’t!’ And as he spoke, he raised high above his head a soiled scrap of paper folded awkwardly in the shape of a letter. The instant Brandon’s eye caught the rugged features of the intrusive stranger, he motioned with rather less than his usual slowness of gesture to one of his official satellites. ‘Bring me that paper instantly!’ he whispered.
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