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The Bird of Paradise

Chapter XIV. The National Court of Louisiana. Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Jurisdiction. The Empanelled Quartette

Chapter XIV. The National Court of Louisiana. Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Jurisdiction. The Empanelled Quartette.

The bells of the town-hall tower chimed their falsetto quarters; the ponderous hammer struck out in measured and solemn chords the morning hour of nine, and the automatic machinery in the belfry played the air of "Abide with me, fast falls the even-tide," alternating with the melody of "Home sweet home," as slowly Eugene, the sanguine lawyer, and the message-boy paced along the flag-stones of Chancery Square on their first visit to the national court together to engage upon the long-pending matrimonial battle.

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At intervals during the early morning rain had fallen, bat on the whole the day, though cloudy at times, was fine—quite fine enough for a divorce case. Mobs of idle stragglers loitered around the outer doors and about the passages of the building. Around the court hovered the unmoving shadows of the broad palmate leaves of the aloe and the sombre darkgreen of Eastern palms, while an avenue of palms adorned the sides of the marble colonnade and the stairs. As the trio entered the great building by a more private and secluded entrance, Wilmington paved the way by parting the crowd inside like the bow of a steamer turning aside the waters, and they passed over the quadrangle, through seven sets of folding doors, and through the spacious corridors of the immense institution, to the national court, where the present sittings of the court constituted for the month of April jurisdiction in causes of a divorce and matrimonial character were to take place.

Entering by a side door they found the whole of the court space filled to overflowing. Every available seat on the ground floor was packed tight with barristers, solicitors, witnesses, and on-lookers. Many stood upon the flowered crimson carpet in the aisles, and still the fight went on between two stalwart policemen at the side door and the crowd surging outside for admission.

The glass doors in the rear of the court had been locked. Flattened against the panes could be seen a composite poppy-show of all the varieties of noses under the sun—rétrousse, aquiline, Roman, Græo-Roman, Wellington; one-storey, two-storey, three-storey; door-knocker, hawk'sbill, kinked, egg-shaped, flat, bell-shaped, boil-shaped, potato-shaped; waxy, suety, bottle-green, brandy-blossom, creamy, bronzed, navy-blue, crimson. Bottle-noses had the majority, while some of them were ornamented with nodosities and conical horns, and others smeared the glass with the exudation of cancerous ulcers.

The galleries, full to the brim, were put to the full test of their weight carrying powers, while "the gods" leaned over with their chins on their arms across the railing, or stretched their dirty necks for a view of the doctor and his bird of Paradise.

There she sat posing in severe state—the Bird of Paradise, Heaven, the Air and the Sun, among the barristers and solicitors of the hydra-beaded firm, glorious as her prototype and resplendent in scintillating brocade lined with serpent-green satin, and trimmed with clusters of shaded roses over a gown of peacock blue, embroidered in cinnamon, gold and blue-green sequins; the bodice being arranged with a large vandyke-pointed yellow lace collar1. In the front seats sat a cordon of exquisite bucks ogling the bird of Paradise. She looked full in the face the gaping crowd and smiled at them with sublime complaisance as if she were a heroine like Grace Darling and deserved the gratitude and admiration of the world. She played to great advantage her fire-flashing coal-black eyes, the opaline gleam of which was rarely forgotten by those on whom it had glinted either in love or in war. Stooping now and then to whisper something into the private ear of each page 412of her foul-mouthed, rhetorical triplet, she would pat on her most impressive half-cynical smile and chortle a little chuckle as a sequel to some evil thought which she had just communicated to her lawyers, again reclining well back against the seat and staring at the open-mouthed crowd with an expression signifying—"Don't you all know me? I am the lustrous Bird of the Air—the famous Bird of Paradise, of the Sun, and of Heaven itself. My feathers are all of the purest ray serene, each one finer than all the others, and I mention this without any pride whatever: how d'ye do?"

After coiling its convolutions around her neck, a large tri-coloured fur boa lay in fantastic vermiculations on the table, and it occurred to her husband, as he followed his lawyer to the front seat below the desk of the judge's associate, that the boa constrictor was a perfectly appropriate emblem for Marvel.

Seated, he was introduced to the newly-fledged barrister by lawyer Wilmington. After being wished success by the newly-fledged barrister, who re-assured him that he had no doubt about easily winning the day, the bright blue eyes of the learned young gentleman seemed to Eugene to be an index of a powerful brain behind. He felt inexpressibly pleased that he should have been enabled to obtain the assistance of such an able-looking man. He was a mildly-mannered man, with a peculiar tint of chestnut hair, a long flowing light moustache, and a changing rich complexion; while on his face Nature had placed almost as kind an expression as that which adorned the face of the sweet and the fair Guinevere. His face had an exceedingly benign appearance, and contrasted to great advantage with the sour expressions on those whom the doctor had first interviewed in his embarrassment. He had evidently not read to his satisfaction the bundle of papers sent by his senior from the pile which Eugene had compiled and brought with him from Lily Cottage, for he straightway proceeded to dive into them and worry through as much as he could in the time, while the respondent fixed his attention on the tactics of the enemy and scanned the faces of the eligible jurymen.

There, before Marvel at the barristers' table sat three of the most unscrupulous-looking bullies he had ever seen covered in a wig and gown. Busiest among the three was a snarling, snapping, biting sort of bully of the Scotch-terrier stamp. He was an American of Scotch parentage and reared in the hot-bed of New York. His expression as he threw his restless steel-grey eyes about the table, as if he were in search of something to chew, would by force of old habits change quickly into a gamut of acid, cynical, sarcastic, and sardonic twitches of his upper lip, on which there flourished a hoary moustache, chopped squarely through like a clothes-brush. Every alternate tooth seemed to be missing — either denied him by Nature to preserve the canine breed, or haply removed at the dental emporium of the New York Odontological Institute. His prevailing expression that morning was that of a man who was, like Costall, a martyr to the belly-ache and the drastic exasperating influences of jalap2, bitter aloes, or, more likely, areca nut3. He was Clack. Clack was an old friend page 413of "the great and mighty." He had known Gould in Wales, where for some years Clack was a managing clerk.

Next to this agreeable and pleasant exponent of fee law sat a huge champion of the bully gang, with a black moustache, almost as bushy as the tail of the St. Bernard at Lily Cottage. His heavy tripe-like lips and his big ugly mouth, of which the moustache seemed to be ashamed, lay concealed and screened by the Highland sporran on his upper lip. Picking his nose with his finger and thumb, he leaned over a mound of papers ten times the size of the doctor's consignment, and he embellished his grimaces with giggles, sniggers and snorts.

Third in the tuneful choir sat Lord Dundreary, with the brick-dust complexion, the watery-blue eyes, and the Irish-setter or liver-red hair— the barrister who had appeared in the earlier stages of the celebrated intestine war, and was now a member of the firm of Hallam, Brassy Bros. and Hoare. Lord Dundreary was an Irishman—a product from Sligo—from the bogs of Sligo, and a compatriot of Patrick Flynn. The shirts he had worn before were not good enough for the climax of the war in which he was to play such an important part. In order to do full justice to his princely person, he had put on a new one with shimmering milk-white cuffs and emerald solitaires as large as two Coromandel4 oysters. They were a present from Marvel for his former defeats. If the wool-merchant cried ahoo, the jackanapes cried ahaw. Every silly, pygmy idea that he imagined from the perusal of the papers which his bile-shot eyes had traversed over and over again for three months, and every paltry incident that occurred in the court, evoked from this ornamental disciple of Lycurgus5 a great guffaw-ahaw-ahaw and a blowing of his boil-shaped nose in the most finished fin de siécle style; while the ubiquitous Brassy himself was busily employed like an "armourer accomplishing the knights."6

The hands of the wooden polyagonal clock pointed to the time of half past nine and the patriarchal crier silenced the hubbub of the court. The cedar door in the far corner of the rostrum had moved. His Honour Judge Justin Grant—otherwise styled Grant J.—was coming—the man who held in the hollow of his hand the fate of the impending melodrama in the lives of a man and a woman and two children.

In he walked as if with Chinese sandals over the Turkey-carpeted dais, which was swathed in wool to deaden the tread of his sacred footsteps. Curtseying before the amassed spectators and barristers as they all stood erect to receive him and acknowledge his oriental politeness by bobbing down their heads in return, stood before his throne for a few seconds his Honour Grant J. He sat, did Grant J., stolid as a sphinx —a mingling of august arbitrament and puissant authority, a mixture of modish bearing and awe and law. Grant J. was a man of transcendent ability and unsurpassed by any of his contemporaries in knowledge of the law. The present case, however, contained questions of fact rather than questions of law. His intellect was of a penetrative type. His rounded, page 414dimpled, shaved and shining chin stood at a more forward position than the full oval cheeks on a face of a broad and massive mould, while every lank hair hung down as straight as a little plummet. There was a fortune for Brosie in his mouth if only he could advertise his trade-mark on the fronts of the mineral set worn by the beetle-browed old judge, and, assisting the sight of his weak eyes, he wore a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez tucked into the little folds on the sides of his nose. He was a hump-backed man over average height, though not half the weight of the champion bully. From the barristers' table, however, all that could be seen of the noble learned judge on a higher level than the desk at which he began to write was his amorous benevolent pitying face, a few locks of his tawny hair befringing the bob-wig, the beetle-brows and the pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez. He was considered one of the most brilliant pleaders, when at the bar, in the whole of America, was Grant J.

"Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Jurisdiction: Whitworth versus Whitworth," called out the associate, who was the son of solicitor Craig. He —the associate—also wore a pair of gold-rimmed pince-nez, and shaved his chin in flattering imitation of the judge to whom he professionally belonged. He then called out in alphabetical order the names of the twelve jurymen, who were all sitting here and there about the court, each one praying to God to be one of the chosen few. Four of them sat ominously close to Marvel and the complex firm of lawyers. Eugene wondered if it could be possible that the little clique had been "squared" to side with Marvel and give a wide berth to himself or boycott him all through the piece.

The list was then bandied about from one bully or another to the belligerent Marvel, and four good names struck out by the counsel for the petitioner. Mutilated, it was then battledored by the bullies over to the counsel for the respondent and shuttlecocked back again after further amputation by Wilmington. The names of the remaining four apostles were then called out by the associate again, and as each apostle answered to his name they were drafted like a batch of sheep into the pound for the jury; while the separated goats looked quite chagrined. Three of the sheep were Marvel's erstwhile neighbours. All eyes were turned upon the chosen few who were about to sacrifice their valuable time, their bodies and their souls to the service of the court and their country, constituted as thus they were the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana in its divorce and matrimonial jurisdiction. When the weeded list again came under the notice of Eugene he read the names of those empanelled in the jurybox, namely:—Nathaniel Huggins, Obadiah Slocum, Ernest Cuddle, Jesse Pogson.

On full view and in profile the constituted Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana looked a motley set of dispensers of justice: a mixture of two old rascals and two amative types of Adonis and Lothario; two of them deaf as two beetles; one very short-sighted; one looking very bilious and generally unwell—all agog with the prospect of a good haul in page 415their nets from the spoil of the home of the paradisal Marvel, and the halo of glory for taking it in their adopted country's cause. After shaking hands with themselves for joy over the bonanza of so much found money, they held their heads knocking together for a few minutes—a replica of the conspiracy scene in "Giroflé Girofla,"7 and Obadiah Slocum portentously moved up to the right end of the form, as shown by the crier, to sit at his post as foreman. He was a colporteur—an itinerant banana merchant. For years he had peddled his huckstering rickshaw up and down Lynching Lane. He was one of those who afforded shelter to benighted single men if they were content to stand up all night for ten cents.

The constituted and empanelled beauties at first blush produced a feeling of grave disappointment in the minds of the spectators, who wanted to see some intelligence displayed by at least one of the chosen few put in charge of such an important question. There was not one man amongst them who came up to ordinary expectations. They were all denizens of the proletariat whose judgment could be easily warped. Stupid, illiterate, wooden-headed, obtuse men they looked as if they could be easily led by the nose, showing not a grain of force of character in their frontispieces, not a spark of spirit or backbone in their organizations. Three of them were ascetical Shakers of the angelic life, repudiating the earthly order of marriage, and propagandists of the doctrine of matrimonial separation. Bewildered, like fish out of water, they sat gaping at the old crier, whom they thought was the judge and the most august and important personage in the court, and at the judge, whom they thought was the précis-writer.

The associate then proclaimed that the members of the jury-list not empanelled were dismissed from their obligations to attend; that their fees had been left in the court by the solicitors of the party who had called them together, viz., Craig, Clack, Carrick and Clark, and that they would be paid their wages for the day by calling at the office of the State sheriff. Whereat the discarded jurymen left the court en masse, making a great disturbance in spite of the fiat of the crier that they should all maintain silence, and the combatants well and truly laid down their guns on the barristers' table, which was literally littered with papers. After pocketing their fees for doing nothing they one and all returned, having each prearranged with the friend who sat next to him to keep his seat warm la the meanwhile. They sat the case out to the bitter end as sedulously as the ones who had been paid to sit in the jury-box.

The crier of the court then crossed over and stood in front of the jury box, ordering Obadiah Slocum to stand up with the holy bible in his hand and kiss it, after he had charged the jury in monotone as follows:— "Obadiah Slocum, you shall diligently inquire and true presentment make on behalf of the President of the American Republic into the issues pending between the parties in this cause and a true verdict give according to the evidence: so help you God." Then commanding the others to stand, he barrel-organed:—"Such oath as the foreman in this cause hath for his part taken, you and each of you shall well and truly observe and page 416keep on your parts respectively, so help you God: kiss the book." They all did as they were told to do and nervously resumed their seats in sheepishness and vacancy, greatly impressed with the venerable, polished and brilliant head of the old crier.

Then stood up on his hind legs the Scotch terrier bully, Clack. Licking his lips with his tongue and sticking his hands into his pockets he smiled his sickly smile and began to strew the flowers of his professional rhetoric as follows:—

"May it please your Honour! Gentlemen of the jury: you have been called here to-day by our client to enter upon what I am afraid will prove to be a protracted and a wearisome task. I pray that you may have strength enough to withstand that protracted and wearisome task, in order that you may be enabled to pay close attention to the mass of evidence which I will bring before you; which mass of evidence, enough to hang any man, gentlemen of the jury, I have not had more than three months to peruse (apish smile); but still a mass of evidence, gentlemen, which will convince you that this desperate villain whom you see before you sitting there to-day smiling in all his jocund beauty now, this low worthless animal and besotted city loafer, is no more fit to have a wife than he is to even carry guts to a bear8. This arrant, dastardly swallower of hog-wash from the tubs of filthy bars, who has solely for the sake of his beastly vices neglected the grave duties which nature called him to perform in a profession to which he is a disgrace, sits before you to-day, gentlemen of the jury, looking a perfect pattern of teetotallism. Brushed up this muck-rake has been by my learned friend and furbished by my learned friend's clerks for the purpose of deceiving you, gentlemen of the jury, constituted as you are the Supreme Court of this great State of Louisiana—to deceive you, I say, with the impression that he is not what I can prove up to the very hilt he is, and that is, a low beast of a drunkard fairly walking with the mullock9 of unpardonable sins, gross derelictions, and misdemeanours of all sorts. This beautiful creature (baboon grin), who has the effrontery to sit there deceiving you gentlemen, has grovelled for the last ten years in the mire of utter disgrace. He would spend every dollar his poor wife possesses on drink and debauchery. For the last ten years he has lain in the pig-sty of his loathsome vices. It is not that he is merely encrusted with vice; he is a very amalgamation of a rake-hell and a sot, and he is thoroughly hide-bound in crime. Not satisfied with breaking the heart and ruining irretrievably the health of his fair and charming young wife (satyr-like leer at Marvel) by his infamous and degraded habits he has—and, gentlemen of the jury, I say it with bated breath—he has tried to murder her by running her through, as she will tell you herself, with the sword of a cavalry corps, a great blood thirsty weapon like the yataghan of a Turk with a great thick blade like a butcher's cleaver. To that corps d'armée he has been ever since he was allowed to join it a nuisance and a disgrace. In his pocket too he carries a sort of snicker-snee and a thing shaped like a bill-hook, while at one time he wore a great knuckle-duster to knock her down. In his possession page 417were crowbars and other sedatives, besides great bludgeons more terrible than those of the slaughterman in the shambles. His children he has left to starve and to run wild in the streets, while he filled his filthy stomach with intoxicating slops. Anear and afar his patients, wherever he had any, have all complained of the havoc which he has made in their families by his egregious blunders and his clumsy treatment. Further, gentlemen of the jury, he has enticed into his house, to associate with his children, two underlings, one of whom is a woman of ill repute and a notorious and wicked character. At one time in her career it will be seen that she made an attempt to escape from the brutal clutches of that criminal that ought to be flogged and sentenced to hard labour and penal servitude for the rest of his days. In broad daylight she ran from her bedroom out of the house, but he ran after her and criminally dragged her inside again (great guffaw from Lord Dundreary). Gentlemen, you have seen and no doubt enjoyed the high-class acting of a well-known figure—a gentleman who has enthralled vast audiences in this city for months together. This fearful scoundrel followed that unoffending gentleman one night into the bar of an hotel and gave utterance to such filthy and vituperative language as would make you blush to hear, until he was given in custody to the police for his uproarious drunkenness and violent behaviour. Gentlemen, look at that humble and pitiable picture (leering at Marvel, who smiled sweetly at Ernest Cuddle and vice versâ). This young lady is unfortunately that repulsive brute's wedded wife, chained by the bonds of holy (guffaw from Lord Dundreary) holy matrimony and condemned to live with the greatest blackguard that ever was born. Look at the scars of carking care and long-suffering upon that young and tender countenance; look at the haggard appearance on her pale face (cammeline colour). See what a grace is seated on her brow! what sweet resignation she has shown in the martyrdom of her wifely constancy and devotion to that scoundrel of a century, who is not fit to associate with the off-scourings and the scrapings of the streets; clinging too to her little children with the pertinacity of a lobster. For years in sorrow and anguish that fair young girl-wife has on her bended knees implored the mercy which it was not in that demon's nature to yield. She has wept in silence over his cowardly blows; she has borne in patience the stürm-bad10 of his foul-mouthed abuse; she has subjected herself to the worst humiliations which a man can visit upon his wife, and has time after time lain in agony at death's door, after his brutal assaults, in meekness and submission praying over her sick children that for his own sake he would reform. He has no desire to reform, gentlemen: it's a way he always had and always will have. On the very day when he was married to that young and innocent treasure sitting there, he was beastly drunk at the altar, and, though that was nine years ago, he has been drunk ever since. (Lord Dundreary nearly choked, and 'Silence' roars the crier). He is not, gentlemen, one of those who follow the multitude to do evil11: the multitude may follow him, for he is a very prince of drunkards and evil-doers. If it had not been for the anxiety and worry about the treatment by that fiend of his daughter, the page 418late Mr. Julian Jasper Gould would still be alive, for undoubtedly he was the sole cause of his untimely death. His gentle and loving mother-in-law has earnestly entreated and encouraged with money that fearful monster to abandon his fell purposes. She has endeavoured to make his home happy and peaceable, but in return she has been rewarded with opprobrium and the vengeance of a dog. Every one of his wife's relations, immediate and remote, including the wife of the distinguished manager of the savings' bank—I refer to a gentleman whom I shall call as a witness—have ingratiated themselves into the favour of this despicable hound in order that they might bring peace and plenty into his home. He has hurled at all their overtures the poisoned arrows and spears of his scorn. The kindnesses of his wife's relations have been returned with ingratitude: the love and lowly subjection of his paradisal wife with kicks and curses and blows. ('Clap on more sail,' from Lord Dundreary). I have before me, gentlemen of the jury, a vast quantity of evidence which I shall in due course elicit from the innumerable and reputable witnesses whom I shall have the honour to call before you as to his drunken and depraved habits, from the time he left the university— and I have a witness who will also establish the charge that he was a hopeless drunkard even there as a student. I have on the evidence of his truthful, innocent, and God-fearing wife irrefutable proofs of recriminatory language used towards her, and proofs of blood-thirsty assaults which nobody can gainsay, and I have, on the evidence of a worthy and chaste lady, whose moral standing ranks with that of the wife of the President, irrefragable12 evidence of adultery enough to shame a man-of-war.13" The loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind of Lord Dundreary put the finishing touch on the salvo, and the billingsgate14 of the blatant Scotch terrier bully from Wales having become exhausted, he retired from the dog-fight for a while, when the Titanic bully, Carrick, arose in all his might, twirled his flowing moustache, chewing the few bristles which he had bitten off it, and gave orders to the crier to call Sebastian Cadwallader Tiptoe Littlejohn. Thereupon a ferret-like creature, a consequential but insignificant object, poking its head out like a turtle through an enormous encasing fustian overcoat, to which a billycock15 hat was fastened with a bit of elastic—a canker-worm in the artichoke line—the greengrocer of Augusta with a potato flower in his coat—a prying pimp whom Patrick Flynn had bundled and cuffed out of the hospital stable, now one of the "leisure classes," ascended the witness-box.

"How long have you been acquainted with this drunkard?" said the bully.

"From the fourth of March, 1845, till the eleventh of July, 1845," murmured the insect, when the crier told him to raise his voice.

"How often have you seen him beastly dead drunk?"

"Three times—once on the fifth of March, once on the twenty-fourth of May, and once on the fourth of July: when I saw him rolling drunk was on the twenty-fourth of May. He was at the races and I was there, although I don't believe in hoss-racin'. He was shouting for drinks for a page 419crowd of spongers at the public booth, and he would not pay for the drinks."

Cross-examined by lawyer Wilmington, the witness admitted that he had been refused admittance into the doctor's racing stable when Moss Rose was there, and that Dr. Whitworth had ordered him off the grounds of the hospital after he left the committee, and told him that he would not allow him to drink any of the hospital porter or take away the nurses' materials.

"Call detective Stalkingham." said the examining bully, when a clownish minion of the detective police appeared, and led off by treating the court to a sample of his deglutition16 and grunting abilities as a sort of preamble: his heart maybe was in his mouth. He was for years a furious if not a ferocious teetotaller and a man with a non-rooted conscience.

"How many times has this scoundrel been found drunk in the gutter?" asked the bully.

"I don't know," said the magnanimous moucher in a way that implied that it was quite true that he had been found drunk in the gutter.

"How often have you seen him drunk?" asked the bully.

"I have often heard that he was," replied the one-sided man, "and one morning at daybreak I saw him walking about on the roof of his house. He must have been dead drunk then."

"How long have you known the beast?" asked the bully.

"Six years," replied the candid man, giving the jury the idea that he quite approved of the lawyer's epithets, and that the respondent was a beast and a drunkard for six years.

Cross-examined by lawyer Wilmington, the disingenuous witness agreed that he had been dismissed from the secret police force for fraudulent insolvency, and for that reason he was now working as a private spy: that he detested alcohol in every shape and form, and that though he had been inside the respondent's house he had never drunk anything. He was a staunch advocate of temperance principles. Alcohol disagreed with him, and for that reason he wore a white ribbon, which he believed was a valuable charm against public-houses.

Other spring-heeled-jacks17 and scouts, thick as the bees of Hymettus18, were then placed in the witness-box. They related how they had 'nabbed' the doctor by 'foxing' him, the methods by which they had succeeded in discovering him drinking whisky at different hotels by sometimes joining in a drink with him themselves. Two of them swore that they had seen him every night for four weeks—it might be five weeks—once when they were in company with Mr. Brassy and the masked petitioner, meet under the tell-tale moon among the copper beeches at Mobile a girl known as Lillie Delaine. Two more swore that he was seen by them one moonless night at the gate of a private house near the Galveston wharf in company with the same notorious woman. The mad scene on the verandah page 420was also introduced by the mercenaries, who felt quite certain that the girl was drunk for two days at that time. They could smell it across the street.

When cross-examined, they described how they had jumped about the garden at Myamyn at night like so many grasshoppers; how they bad when all in the house were asleep bored holes in the walls of Myamyn, and broken windows to spy into whatever was going on inside the night after when the gas was lit; and how they had spent hours at night with their big ears glued to the key-holes; but they admitted under extreme pressure that they saw or heard nothing incriminatory, and that their emolument was to be ten dollars a day under any circumstances. In the event of the bird of Paradise winning the case they were to get a douceur of a hundred dollars apiece.

The weird, prosaic and rancid old asthmatical auntie—the caryatid doddering on a brass-handled crutch—piled on the agony so thick with her long-drawn breaths and laggardly, dragging speech that her agonising disquisitions had the effect of a mental emetic on the judge, and owing to her outrageously overstating the case everything she said was disbelieved; it stuck even in the gizzard of Augustus.

The grim and saturnine Jean Gould, looking as if it cost her a considerable effort to look at all pleasant, but with a legally inspired good-natured inflection in her manner and peacock tone, without waiting for any allocution from the barristers apostrophized the court by thus addressing the old crier:— "Hoots mon! ma Birdie was unco fut for a laird, an' he's nae mair nor a fechless mon hissel'. It's maist as if I wad greet tae see this vara day, an' it's nae sae lang sin' she was a wee bit lassie wi' a glint in her e'e bonnier than a', an' loupin' and liltin' wi' the lassies o' the gowan by the byrne; an' I maun gang ahint her an' draggit her hame by the haun, saft as the doon o' the doo, an' skelpit her ben her faither's auld hoose for bein' tae fachious whiles. Ah! weel-a-weel she was aye rin-rinnin' aifter thae dochther an' nae speerin' aucht o' her auld milher ava. Weel what o't? Wha's richt an' wha's wrang the noo? A kent fine it wad be a hantle o' nonsense, but maisther hissel', wha's gane tae the land o' the leal, was owre muckle fond o' her hisban', for he was aye spaein' sae kin'ly an' bonnilie o' Birdie. A hae kent thae twa thegither sittin' and switherin' o' nichts an' aye sortin' and jawin' gills o' whusky doon their drouthy thrapples; an' they keepit the bottle till ae dram spunkit oot o't, for maisther hissel' was aye ta'en wi' a bit joke. Whiles thae dochther pickit her up, an' naethin'd dae her but she loupit an' quit her faither's hame tae getten merrit, wi' thae bells a-ringin' i' the kirk an' the hale toon in a bizz wi' pittin' up flags by the dizzen o' the lums, an' hingin' bits o' green claith an' flingin' barley pickles i' the kerritch frae the winnocks. The Lord be thankit she's owre weel aff the noo wi' a fine fu' stockin', as they ca' it, an' I needna tell ye she's hunners o' siller forbye. Weel-a-weel, the Lord be praised for His maircy on a' puir awheen hunger't souls an weans wha canna getten nae mair na a cannikin o' brose an' a wee bit cookie page 421bannock; but mony's the day I wrocht wi' the last drap o' bluid and scrapit in sair need yon time tae pit a bit braw frock on Birdie, wi' a hale siller saxpence and twa'three sweeties i' the pocket, forbye bein' tae saft-heyarted an' conthie an kin' tae ma gndeman gangin' tae an' comin' frae his wark. Thae dochther chiel was aye unco daft o'er naggies an' thae puir dumb craturs, an' he thocht nae eneuch o' his guid wifey ava; forbye he fylit hee's poseetion wi' whusky like ilk ither puir bedoited crackit-heid gayan gaberlunzie fuil wha disna ken what he's daein', and hiz nae but a gleg e'e tae the guid o' hissel' an disna conseeder hee's ways. That cowes a': A'll no deny it isna ae clout or ae grup she's gotten ava, but A-seed her lik skart an' sittin' whiles wi' her een in a lowe an' croonin' o' the waeful mirk o' the grave. It's nae muckle A ken but twa'three things sin' the first sax months they was merrit an' I canna in coanscience say for A'm nae owre taen wi' a braw glib-gabbit: forbye I winna spak' lees an' I telt hersel' I wadna spak' lees for onybidy. She can tell ye a' thing an' plainty hersel' for she was aye clash-carryin' an' fechtin' wi' an' glunchin' an' flytin' at her hisban'. Ah! weel-a-weel, gin she's getten permeesion frae the jedge she'll mebbe bide wi' the childer, for ane's a wee bit bonnie lassie and t'ither's a blue-e'ed birkie wha's baith gash an' guid, an' her hisban' 'll gang his wa; but it's a sair peety they wadna bide awhilie a'thegither, for there's a saft sten or twa in his heyart ye ken, an' mebbe he'll sprachle up the brae."

Margery Moon, with the expression of a little wizened slant-eyed sorceress, related that she had found the doctor and the servant standing together at her front gate late at night, the doctor having come there at a time when the servant knew she would be out. Under cross-examination, she admitted that sometimes she took a glass herself; that her reward was to be fifty dollars if the petitioner succeeded. She acquiesced in the sundry aspersions on her character, and the lawyer ordered her to leave the box. Looking as hideous as old Sicorax19 herself, she was relegated to the place from whence she came, and soon after followed the manes of old Adam Quain to that place where the wicked cease from troubling.

The bumble-footed Miss E. Powell, being sworn, vouchsafed the information that she had heard the doctor address Lillie Delaine in very familiar terms, and once had heard him call her "my dear girl;" he said she was the girl for his money. She had also seen the old servant enter and leave the bedroom when he was lying asleep in the mornings, on the pretext of getting the children's clothes.

Cross-examined, she admitted that the doctor had discharged her on the strength of the report of her negligence by Lillie Delaine, and that she expected to be paid fifty dollars by one of the detectives for her testimony.

The architect Cosgrove, the old friend of Eugene, gave evidence of the card-playing at the Seven Stars, carefully explaining that Eugene had stayed away all night from his home, and other irrelevant information in favour of the petitioner. Et tu Brute!

Phineas Mustard, a man with a permanently green moustache, a green page 422beard and green hair, caused by his work among the fine dust of copper oxide at a copper works, had seen the respondent and Lillie Delaine walking down the old Kent road at Galveston hand in hand together, and he expected twenty dollars for his evidence. Phineas was not a green horn, for he made the bird of Paradise pay through the nose for that bit of evidence; there was not any green in his eye.

Water-police Sergeant Duncan Tipwell had seen the respondent drinking at the "Old House at Home" in Mobile, and had once or twice seen him the worse for liquor. He recited the fact that for months his house known as "Myamyn" was under surveillance by the police at his wife's request, and that he had frequently heard the respondent quarrelling with his wife some time after she came to Mobile; he had not seen the petitioner drunk. In this respect Marvel Imogen seemed to be a striking contrast to the real birds of Paradise, which migrate from the isles around New Guinea to India and become so intoxicated with the scent of the spices in the nutmeg season that they fall dead drunk to the earth.

"Those golden birds that, in the spice-time, drop
About the gardens, drunk with that sweet food
Whose scent hath lured them o'er the summer flood."20

"The evidence you shall give in this cause on behalf of the President of the American Republic shall be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth: so help you God, "and the gorgeous bird of Paradise, the regions of Heaven, the Air and the Sun kissed the dirty old divorce court bible.

O Me Miserum 21! Encircled in an aureole of pharisaic22 paradisal euphemisms and with a lump in her throat, she began to tell in grandiose periphrase and a mincing manner of accentuation her excruciatingly affecting and terrible legend of woe—a story so free from dissimulation, so sublime in its simplicity, its candour and vraisemblance that the whole court was imbued with the notion that if ever a shining saffron-winged angel from the invisible hosts of the highest heavens had alighted on this sublunary sphere, to meekly subject herself to brutalities and tortures in her ministrations to an emperor among cut-throats here below, that pure and empyreal being, that white-robed messenger, that sweet and immaculate martyr, that passive instrument in the hands of a demon, was present before them in the quintessence of her divine purity, present in the national court of the State of Louisiana sitting in the witness-box on a three-legged stool and piping her eye to fetch Obadiah Slocum. Herself rose-colour, dissolved in tears, she painted in deep black monochrome all the glaring vices of her husband and showed how, in return for showers of gentleness and kindnesses, soft as the breezes of Spring, he had formed odious attachments in order to alienate her affection for him; how she had silently suffered her griefs and carried her sorrows, and how piously she bad borne everything—insults heaved at her like brick-bats23, neglect, starvation, worries from his unfathomable duplicity and depravities, the direst tribulation and most merciless cruelty, and all for the sake of the creature she had loved with page 423such a sea of constancy and devotion—the brute she had longed in vain to redeem. Ah me! the horrors of the cockatrice' den and the awful fate of Andromeda chained to a rock in the sea while a fearful approaching monster ever threatened to crunch her in his devouring jaws were as nothing, comparatively nothing, to the ungodly sufferings of the unsullied Bird of Paradise at the hands of that demoniacal monster without one redeeming quality or one saving grace. The torments of the rack or the fate of one of the Danaids condemned to the life-long task of pouring water into a jar with a hole in it24 were mere pastime compared to the unceasing toils of the spotless bird of the Sun, whose patience had been pushed beyond the extreme of toleration, to instil principles of virtue into the heart of a satyr and to yield a mine of unfailing love to an incorrigible and infernal scoundrel with a devotion lasting till all was blue. Woeful dispensation of Providence! Diabolical blackguard!

"What is your name?" with a suave smile asked the bully in charge of the examination, while the other two gave her each a beastly leer.

"Marvel Imogen Narramore Whitworth," sweetly smiled the bird.

"How long," inquired persuasively the bully, "has your husband been drinking?"

"Ever since I have known him," replied decisively the bird: "the very first time he met me he was blind drunk: when I was engaged to him he was mad drunk: when I was married to him he was that drunk that he didn't know what he was doing: all the time of the honeymoon trip and for two years after he was rolling drunk, and ever since, for nine years every night he has been dead drunk. I cannot recollect one single occasion when he was not staggering drunk" (great guffaw from Lord Dundreary and a wink from Brassy, as much as to say, "warm him up, my pippin.")

"Has your husband ever knocked you about? bird of Paradise!"

"Yes, he kicked me on the face once when he was sick and dead drunk in bed and I was trying to persuade him to take some black-currant julep and roseaniline jelly. He came home helplessly dead drunk and chased me out of the house at Galveston. I was obliged to go to my mother's house for a few weeks till he got sober. He came home mad drunk one Easter eve at Sabinnia, and drove us all out of the house; be picked up the baby when it was sick and threw it on the middle of the road in the dead of night; he brought about its death some months after by throwing it out that night. He set fire to the house in order to burn as all alive, and he tried to kill me and my daughter Pearly by driving recklessly in order to smash the buggy into a waggon at Sabinnia, and capsize us on the road. One New Year's eve he brought the whole of a band strolling the streets into the drawingroom and made it play in the middle of the night so that I could not sleep."

"Has he ever used any bad language to you? heavenly spirit!"

"Yes, once he called me a hyæna and a devil disguised as a woman and said that I had committed adultery; he also called me an incarnate fiend page 424in the hearing of two of my domestic servants, Esmeralda Knight and Gloriana Bloobumper."

"Had your husband at any time a good medical practice at these different places? sing sweet bird."

"No! never! He is a perfect type of the quack nuisance and a very Mikado and great Mogul25 of charlatans. My mother knows more about the theory and practice of medicine; he never made any money at all—he was always too dead drunk to attend to any patients; he doesn't know how to treat patients: he doesn't understand his business at all; some of his patients wherever he practised died after his butchery and while he was giving them physic. I felt bound to caution most that came to the house, from fear that he would poison them with his nostrums. I never annoyed him in any way; once when he was sick and nearly dead I made blackberry blanc mange and croutades Marie Louise and camphor julep for him with my own hands, but he kicked me on the face for bringing it to him."

The prize-fighting bully felt quite satisfied, and resigned his charge of the divine witness to lawyer Wilmington. Beginning in bland and subdued tones he would deftly bring her up with a round turn with questions trenchant though softly spoken; when every word would seem to strike and detonate with logic. Poetry, however, was the chief shaft in his quiver.

"Sweetest songster of the grove, bright messenger of Spring," said the poetically-discursive cross-examining counsel, "when you were at the ladies' college did you fly away with a married man named Butterfield and get married to him in New York and in a few days were you compelled by your father to get a divorce in Massachusetts?" A blank thunderstruck pause! There was no preface to the question, and Eugene thought his lawyer was going off at a tangent until he was told that Wilmington had discovered this fact at the matrimonial office in New Orleans. Marvel stubbornly refused to reply, and the cross-examiner continued.

"Did you ever acquaint your husband with that fact? bird of Paradise!" No answer: Marvel appeared to have received a staggering blow and stared as if she were moonstruck by the close question running on such a broad guage. The judge laid down his pen and stared; the whole court waited and stared, but the only reply was a wincing sigh and a wistful look at the opposite wall as if she did not know what to do for an answer. "Pure bird of the forest, O beautiful thing with the bosom of brass and the motionless wing! when your father died and you were left a large sum of money, did you or did you not proclaim to the world the fact that you would have no more to do with Dr. Whitworth? Answer me 'Bright wanderer—fair coquette of Heaven.'26" She quavered. Still no answer. Marvel was acting her róle extraordinarily well for a novice in the witness-box. We may call it 'snuff, or smelling-salts, or onions,' or crocodile tears, anything but the real tears, as she held down her shameless head, produced a delicate trifle of lace and cambric from among the folds of the shimmering brocade, concealed her counterfeit complexion with the pretty pocket-handkerchief and, shade of the great Sarah27! she uttered page 425sounds something like convulsive sobs, and enacting quite a clever little stagey swoon in the witness-box, she shrivelled up like a butterfly upon a hot wheel. It was all cut and dried beforehand. Red in the face. Lord Dundreary rushed to her rescue and like an old crusader he supported the fragile bird in his arms, laboriously wafting over her blanched cammeline face the perfume of old Virginia, and breathing into her quivering nostrils the refreshing odours of the quintessence of eructating brandy and soda in his stomach, while bully the second and bully the first carried the dead bird by the legs and shoulders out into the reviving air of the cool corridors.

With satirical smiles on their faces, Grant J., all the spectators and the lawyers disbanded to the proroguing barrel-organ song of the crier:—"This honorable coort stands adjourned till the morning of termorrer at the hour of haff-pash nine by the clock: God save the Republic: ye'ze 'ave to get out:" whereupon the crowd dispersed in noisy discussion of their day's amusement.

Extraordinary editions of the evening newspapers were disseminated through the city, the suburbs and the country districts that evening. As soon as the parties left the court they were surrounded and pestered by newsboys offering them full accounts of the proceedings in two cent rags that immortalised their frontispieces. It was soon seen that the reporters and sketch artists were only human and had shown themselves vulnerable to the shafts of the bird-crocodile.

It was elicited from Guinevere (who had never before heard that Marvel was married to the man with whom she had flirted at school) that such a monstrosity as a bird-reptile had verily existed among other giants that peopled the earth in the Wealden28 period, the epoch marked by relics of land just preceding the age of the Chalk. About one hundred years before, she said, the remains of a huge reptile had been discovered in the Hastings sandstone, which from the resemblance in its teeth to a vegetable eating lizard, known as the Iguana, had been given by scientists the name of Iguanodon. Since the first discovery of the fossil remains numerous bones had been found by conchological explorers in the Weald of Sussex, Maidstone in Kent, and the Isle of Wight. No complete skeleton has ever been found, but in the Crystal Palace at Sydenham a model of the birdreptile had been pieced together. Although it had four feet it only walked on two, as only a bi-pedal track could be discovered entombed in natural crevasses which at one time had been a flowing river inhabited by freshwater tortoises and enamelled fishes, while white crocodiles and bird-reptiles frequented its banks. Some of the bones resembled the bones of wingless birds, such as the emu and the dinornis, while its dimensions were fifteen feet in height and thirty feet in full length. The Iguanodon, said Guinevere, was a good example of a singular class of prehistoric reptiles of the palaeolithic period, from which it was believed our modern birds were derived, and that the name for the class alluded to was the Dinosauria. There were three toes to each hind foot and the same number of joints in page 426the toes as in the genuine bird of Paradise or any other bird. The bird reptile had a very abortive lachrymal duct, so that the tears flowed at random over the surface of its ugly face.

The crocodile tears of the paradisal bird had evidently affected the jury also, and they one and all expended two cents on a copy of the "Apparatus," taking it home to read and discuss with their wives or sisters and daughters.

It really seemed as if the far-reaching gold of the great and mighty coal-king, who at the time lay long decomposed in his grave, had sufficed not only to influence the minds of the chosen quartette whose sympathies oscillated according to the solubility of Marvel but also the product of the editorial machinery of the entire staffs of the newspapers. One of Eugene's deadliest enemies was the venality of the press. It published whole paragraphs en bloc in the agony columns drawing attention to its garbled reports of the pitiable case of the bird of Paradise, and it devoted to him whole columns of denunciation, although as a general rale its utterances were confined to descriptions of the travail of cows, and its account of an attack of whooping-cough in somebody's child, and the farrowing by somebody else's old black sow of a litter of more or less than twenty-nine. In the "Apparatus" and the "Semaphore" great pains had been taken to present the petitioner in as pleasing and attractive a light as possible, by eliminating from the figment the mutine expression on her upper lip; while the cartoon of the respondent assigned him a guilty discomposure and made him look like some criminal condemned to be hanged, with the hopes of making the weathercock of public opinion veer round to the beauteous Marvel.

1 A broad lace or linen collar or neckerchief with a deeply cut edge, in imitation of the style of collar freq. depicted in portraits by Van Dyck, forming an article of fashionable dress in the 18th century. OED Online. See 'Vandyke', sense 2.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

2 A purgative drug obtained from the tuberous roots of Exogonium Purga and some other convolvulaceous plants. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

3 Nuts of a south-east Asian tree, Areca catechu. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

4 Probably referring to the Coromandel Peninsula of New Zealand's North Island.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

5 Highly sarcastic; referring to the Lycurgus who was a lawgiver and the founder of the Spartan constitution. OED Online. See 'Lycurgan', esp. etymology.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

6 Shakespeare. Henry V, IV. prologue.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

7 An opera bouffe, 1874.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

8 Slang, apparently 17th century; to peform a distasteful and/or elementary task. Implying inadequacy. Green 2005.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

9 Collection of rubbish; particularly, mining refuse from which the gold has been extracted. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

10 Uncertain; storm-?

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

11 The Bible. Exodus 23:2.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

12 Incontrovertible. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

13 Possibly referring to an inhabitant of Fleet prison, London. Green 2005.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

14 Scurrilous vituperation, violent abuse. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

15 A round low-crowned felt hat worn by (mainly) men. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

16 A round low-crowned felt hat worn by (mainly) men. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

17 A naval torpedo. Partridge 1972.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

18 A mountain of Attica famous for honey. OED Online. See 'Hymettian'.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

19 Caliban's mother in Shakespeare's The Tempest. See III.ii.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

20 From Lalla Rookh, Thomas Moore, describing birds of Paradise.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

21 Woe is me!

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

22 Self-righteous, hypocritical. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

23 Fragments of brick. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

24 As punishment for murdering their husbands on their wedding nights. Dictionary of Classical Mythology 1995.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

25 Obsolete; the heads of the Japanese and Muslim imperial dynasties respectively. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

26 Fragment: To the Moon. Percy Bysshe Shelley.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

27 Sarah Bernhardt, 1844-1923, celebrated actress (and also a noted liar). (Informal sources.)

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

28 The name of a formation or series of estuarine and freshwater deposits in the Weald in the Lower Cretaceous age. (Hence, the time at which these deposits were formed). OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]