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The Bird of Paradise

Chapter IV. Collecting Affidavits. Silas P. Grinder, The American Commissioner, on a Cotton Plantation

Chapter IV. Collecting Affidavits. Silas P. Grinder, The American Commissioner, on a Cotton Plantation.

The following morning in the middle of a torrential downpour of rain Eugene and the industrious junior partner set out for Galveston, the assiduous lawyer, who had now thoroughly launched out into the sea of work before him, losing no time on board the steamer, sketching out drafts of affidavits in the terms that Eugene suggested as likely to find favour with the individuals to whom he intended to broach the subject of the coming lawsuit. Had the affidavits of his own relations and Guinevere been considered by the lawyer an adequate supply, the case might have been fairly decided upon them alone; but this not being the opinion of Davitt they drove about in a waggonette from one place to another, sometimes compiling affidavits in little unassuming cottages, sometimes in lordly mansions, and sometimes with the stump of a lead-pencil upon cart-horses' backs in the vicinity of the Great Rocky ranges of North America.

The fastidious junior partner, who was a perfect gourmet, affected to stay at the grandest caravanserai in the town—The Thirteen Bells—and even suggested that they should spend a few days at the seaside at Whitworth's expense. Whithersoever they wandered, the commissioner followed close upon their heels in another waggonette which he had all to himself, as Davitt was ashamed to be seen in his company in the public streets. The ambrosial affidavit-monger kept close on the trail of Davitt. Upon receiving the signal from the junior partner standing at the front door of the house in which an affidavit was ready to be sworn, after popping quick sticks in and out of a few hotels across the road, he would approach, fish out the yellow-backed bible and administer the solemn oath. After two days' stay in Galveston the fifteen affidavits obtained were considered sufficient by page 285Davitt for one place, and, after the doctor had settled the hotel bill for three they went back again by steamer to the city of New Orleans.

On the following day the Sabine River was selected as the seat of operations, and they arrived there in the midst of flood-threatening torrents very early in the morning. Here the lawyer found himself in a garden of the Hesperides with glorious phantasies and a clover-field of affidavits galore. There was scarcely a house in the district but what the doctor had at some time or other attended in cases of sickness or in the superintendence of the birth of the new generation. One and all, planter and vigneron, lady and domestic servant—especially Martha Wax, who burst again into a gust of indignation at Marvel's discovery of the heterogeneous collection in the bag—rich and poor gladly acquiesced in the contents of the cut-and-dried affidavits, and signed them boldly without a demur. The trade of the commissioner had received a most prodigious impetus, but his practice under the circumjacent circumstances was a hard one to work. The houses lay at some considerable distance from one another, some of them scarcely within rifle-shot of the little town and as there were only four beer-fountains in the district, all huddled close together, it gave Silas P. little time and few opportunities to quench his thirst for swipes. He was snubbed by Davitt for urging that in such a droughty country as the Sabine district three dollars a dozen were too little. Consequently he announced his immovable intention of calling himself out on strike at twelve o'clock every night.

A telegram was received by Anthony Davitt from his chief, summoning him back to the city before the clover on the Sabine River was consumed. Handing over a supply of the blue sheets to the doctor, he informed him that he could draw the affidavits himself just as well as any lawyer and arranged to return to the city in the hopes that there was more money in the prospective case than, good as it was, there lay in the case of Whitworth versus the bird of Paradise. Thus the doctor was left to work out his own salvation with Silas P. Grinder alone for company. This new arrangement met with the unqualified approval of the commissioner. Silas P. had come to the conclusion that Davitt was a hard task-master and a slave-driver, who had no compassion on a poor working man with his pot of beer and his tongue clinging to the roof of his mouth that dry he could scarcely spit.

One old friend of the doctor residing about ten miles out of the township in the homestead of a cotton-plantation was a lady of some pretentions and reputation, from whom he was particularly anxious to obtain a good affidavit. Accordingly a pair of half-starved horses and a buggy were engaged at the local livery stable, and a start was made late at night for the savannahs of Kincumboo demesne, where the lady resided.

The aldermanic, globular-stomached commissioner seated himself in the buggy beside Eugene, and expatiated disjointedly and at immeasurable length upon the wonderful manner in which the weather was behaving itself, the beauty of the starlit sky, the paucity of hotel accommodation and page 286the grandeur of the trees in the night as black as Erebus. Silas P. in nautical phraseology was three or rather thirty-three sheets in the wind. Having during his lax undress conversation dropped the remark that he had taken a solemn oath to make it his practice in future never to take an affidavit for Anthony Davitt or any other man as long as he lived for the period of twenty-four hours, counting from twelve o'clock on Saturday night, Eugene shook up the lagging livery horses and scuttled through the darkness and the splashing slush to increase the speed of the atrocious funereal mokes, as they passed the little hamlet of Grassmere and approached a grim black avenue formed by the interlocking arms of ash, maple and pine trees. In the avenue through the forest, black as a well at midnight, he knew from former excursions with Frederick there were always lying on the ground logs of fallen pine trees, and protruding many an ungrubbed stump. Still he rattled along over logs and ruts, skidding the wheels of the buggy against scores of bumping stumps, while all he heard, smothering all other sounds, were the creakings and joltings of the buggy, the rhythmical thuds of the padding hoofs, the vituperative anathemas and the groans of Silas P. It was a quarter past eleven as they passed through the wild avenue and the homestead cottage of Kincumboo demesne was now in sight, its lights still burning dimly in the front rooms. Reaching the rustic slip-panelled entrance, the commissioner of the holy book swore at the rocky roads, the trouble of getting out to take down the slip-rails, and the reckless driving of the doctor as if instead of his avocation he were an Arcadian Aristophanes in command of a team and a vast vernacular of full-blooded maledictions. He registered a mighty oath, feeling in his pocket for the bible, that he would never set foot in that buggy again, that he would walk the rest of the way to the house and foot it back to the "Hark up to Nudger" hotel, if he had to live on bread and water all the way.

The indispensable book he could not find, as carefully as he searched in the deeps of his coat, the inaccessible fob of his trousers, his waistcoat pockets or his hat. He surmised that he had left it at the "Hark up to Nudger" in the township. The impatient doctor remarked that Mrs. Houldsworth would be certain to have a bible—a big Doré Bible if he liked, as they were very devout and church-going people, and that if he would follow behind he could administer the oath in the house to himself, about not going back in the buggy; further, that if he hurried they could get the affidavit sworn before midnight, and he could walk back immediately afterwards, so as to lose no time on the field in the morning. He graciously consented to walk behind the buggy to the house without further badinage, and when they arrived they were shown by one of the sons into the diningroom, where the clock said it was twenty-six minutes to twelve.

Explaining as quickly as he could the cause of their unannounced visit, Eugene drew out a lengthy affidavit for Mrs. Houldsworth to sign. This the lady with an air of much bien-venu readily and courteously page 287did, and when the doctor asked her to accommodate the commissioner with a bible he was frowned at by the affidavit man himself, who said that although he had left one behind in the private room of his office at the "Hark up to Nudger," he always carried two and had the second ready for the lady to kiss and swear her oath upon, in the orthodox manner. No other bible would answer the purpose and that one had been blessed by the judges. Producing the holy bible from the lining of his vest through a hole which he cut with a penknife, he mumbled out the oath, as if it was one long polysyllable, and laying the emergency bible upon the table he took up the pen to affix his own signature, knocked over the ink on the table cover, and dribbled a little beer on the paper, but after a great exordium he licked it up with his tongue and smudged it away with one sweep of his sleeve. The signature of Silas P. Grinder appeared at the bottom of a map-shaped puddle of eructated bile and beer.

Struck by the small size of the bible that had done duty in the case of other affidavits, the doctor was thunderstruck by the sight of the miniature volume that now took up the running in the case of the country lady. It was bound in green cloth, the green at the edges turning, he thought, through years of lascivious life, into a whitey-green and on the middle of the surface to gold. Wondering how small the print of the holy scriptures would be in such an infinitesimal book, the doctor picked it up when the commissioner was not looking. It was "The Art of Ventriloquism!" The name of the landlord of the "Hark up to Nudger" was written in pencil on the cover of the title page. It was quite a dolly little book. Pearly could have read it through in five minutes. It was about the size of four dominoes stacked together. Its adopted habitude was the commissioner's waistcoat pocket, or the fold of the leather inside the old chimney-pot hat.

After sitting for a while in the diningroom, the hideous grimaces and the awful utterances of the Louisiana commissioner—who had been hospitably entertained with several glasses of whisky as a refection to the inundation of beer which his enlarged stomach contained, and the plish-plash succussion of which in his inside produced borborighms and sounds suggestive of frogs living and croaking therein — became a source of much hilarity to the eldest son and the stern disapproval of his mother. Noticing this, Silas P. Grinder, who had by this time replaced the "art of ventriloquism" in his waistcoat pocket, withdrew to the outside of the front door. Although he was asked several times by the lady and importuned by her son to go to bed in a spare bedroom, he surlily rejected their offers, and persisted in sitting all night in the fresh air on the step of the door. Once, however, with murder in his eye, he returned to the room, ran three times around the long dining-table frantically declaring three Bengal tigers were in pursuit of him, fixed his glaring eye-ball and swept it backwards and forwards, pointing to the son, the lady and the doctor in turns, like a Nordenfeldt gun sweeping the enemy's lines, page 288although in appearance that night it was more like the red end of a little barrel of beer stuck into the head of a Cyclops.

Soon after this freak he subsided into an oblivious narcotism on the door-step, drunk as David's sow, under the melanite canopy of the skies, greatly to the relief of the hostess, who had been informed by the doctor that the commissioner was the man who had stabbed the Mexican president. All night long without intermission came snore upon snore, roar upon roar, like wave upon wave. He had been all day floating in beer and whisky; next morning he rose somewhat later than the lark but gay and blithe as he and as fresh as the early dew on the daisies after a corpse-reviver of a draught of whisky and milk. It is a melancholy fact that he discarded the oath which he had taken the previous night, and after a large breakfast the old chawbacon condescended to be driven in the buggy back to the "Hark up to Nudger" Hotel. Most of his leisure time he spent there or at "The Four Ashes" and the "Old Number One." He was afraid of Daniel Carter.

The third day of their sojourn in the neighbourhood of the Sabine River was employed, as the others had been, in the drafting, engrossing, making and taking of affidavits, and the blood-thirsty beer-barrel automaton when on duty followed the doctor into every house he visited. Meeting an old friend—the manager of the Bank of New York—a suggestion was offered to Eugene by the said manager for a scheme of making money by tying a rope around the neck of Silas P. Grinder, and leading him around the country as a long-bearded gorilla, while the reverend pillar of the Primitive Methodist Church thought it would be much simpler and cheaper to apply for a warrant de lunatico inquirendo for the arrest of the bird of Paradise and her committal to an asylum for the insane.

With forty-one affidavits bagged, Eugene and the gorilla returned to New Orleans, and with the assistance of a lumbering van they duly lodged the impedimenta in the little den of the junior partner in the office on the third floor flat. Davitt thought it as well to accept them as they stood, and facetiously offered to take the drawer into the employ of the firm as an affidavit clerk; while Costall reminded him that they would all be charged for, in order to establish their legal validity, When they were folded together he branded the outside page of each with the imprimatur of Warne, Costall and Davitt, with the object of giving them tone. After an hour had been fixed for the meeting and circuit of the city on the following day, Eugene left the office and bent his steps in the direction of his consulting-rooms in Fifth Avenue.

Passing the office of Hallam, Brassy and Hoare in the same avenue, he espied, sitting in a cab outside their front door, his mother-in-law, his wife's relative, Sukey Bubtitt, the knock-kneed congener henchman Simon, and the bird of Paradise herself. The fatigued old cab horse held his head down; he could hold it up no longer, and blew steam in misty clouds out of his nostrils at the rate of about a thousand respirations per minute, while his loins were puckered and rapidly drawn and withdrawn into and out of the barrel of page 289his ribs, giving him on the whole the appearance of an enormous greyhound that had just won a Plumpton cup after forty heats. It was plain the enemy had not been letting the grass grow under their feet. They had been as busy as dredges that day scraping up all the mud they could in the city amongst those who once had a conscience, now seared away with hot irons; those who had it but were not in the habit of wearing it always: those who could at a moment's notice sing it a lullaby to sleep; those who ignored the existence of such a monstrosity; those who all their lives had been doggedly callous to the qualms; and those who had never heard of such a thing at all. They were all jesters at scars who never felt a wound. Marvel saw him as he was passing under the gas-lamps, and when he turned his head and looked back after walking to the intersection of the streets, he caught the star-like gleam of her bright black eyes staring after him still.

He waited for an hour in the city surgery, but not a patient came to see him, so he went home by the omnibus to Summer Hill. When he drew near his picturesqe home, the culinary music-halls were all lighted and an impromptu concert in full swing, with the addition of a new artist, who had been found in Frederick. Approaching the front door he stood and listened to the vociferous applause bestowed upon Frederick and the uproarious rendering of the chorus of "John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave (lento): John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave" They had all, they said, been having "rorty" times, the groom especially, who had nothing to do but feed the mare; while the warbling Lollie also had nothing to do but dance and sing and dance and sing, and send away the patients.

Some had gone there from his consulting-rooms in the city. His medical practice after a long cycle of incubation was now in the invasion period of a wasting, corroding disease; but his hand was to the plough, and once on it he never looked back. Till the small hours of the morning in the city he would sit alone where a year before the works of pornographic fiction and intrigues with Marvel were carried out by his treacherous partner, drafting affidavits which be intended to submit to the perusal of the lawyer and the supporters of his cause the following day. Some time too was occupied in the suburban home, drafting the statements of the groom and the girls. Both Lillie and Lollie had such bundles of charges and strings of peccadilloes to recite against their exiguous mistress that he felt almost ashamed to present them to Davitt, who, however, declared that her little domestic idiosyncracies were the most invaluable evidences of all. They gave most diffuse accounts, pregnant with suspicion, insinuation and illogical inferences: how that when the doctor was out she had brought into the house strange men, to be handy, she said, in case the house caught fire, and how she had clandestinely secreted herself in the surgery with Dr. Jonas Peck, hatching the conspiracies of her desertion and his dissolution of the partnership.

Next morning he joined the gorilla and Anthony Davitt, who relegated page 290Silas P. to a four-wheeled cab and ordered the driver to bring the animal along behind a hansom, into which he stepped with the doctor. They called upon some of the priests who had been so well acquainted with the marriage relations of Eugene and Marvel at Bendemeer. They all spoke in glowing terms of the treatment of Marvel by her husband, and offered to mediate between the hospitable doctor and the paradisal bird themselves; but Davitt, on recalling the history of the case from first to last, strongly discountenanced and rejected their kindly proposal. He had nailed his colours to the mast and there they would hang until the cry of victory was heard. It would have been a miracle if Marvel had acquiesced in the proposal herself. A further difficulty arose in connection with Silas P. Grinder. They one and all knew him, and Davitt chewed the cud of regret when he reflected that the Mexican president, although he was not of the Roman creed, had been a patron and a strong supporter of St. Augustine's orphanage. Anthony Davitt himself was open to grave suspicion, as he was an Orangeman of the Purple Arch, and his father, who was a member of the legislature, had written articles defamatory of their religious doctrines and the fiats and encyclicals from the Vatican of His Holiness Pope Pius IX. He arranged with the priests for the attendance after vespers of a special commissioner in the presbytery, while Grinder got drunk in the opposite bar of the Rock and Heifer, and the cabman gave him up for the day and the deuce altogether.

The little millinery establishment of Eugene's old friend, Mrs. Down-ward, where she had ever since eked out a scanty subsistence, the treasury, the crown lands' offices, the education department, the schools of science and the military head-quarters in the barracks, were all visited during the next few days, and a large assortment of affidavits obtained–nough, macrophonically speaking, to sink an argosy. Madame Pompadour composed gratuitously a most elaborate effusion and sent it by post, but Davitt discarded it as ungrammatical, irrelevant and informal; while Jules Léroche sent a letter stating that "Madame zee dogdair vaz no bedder as a vipere."

The spoil was carried to the office on the third floor flat above the bazaar, and the gorilla, docked half-a-dollar a dozen by Davitt for loss of time and getting drunk, was paid the sum of fifteen dollars for his thirteen days' work, while all the other travelling expenses were defrayed by the doctor. The proud commissioner with all the pomp of an archdeacon and his archidiaconal functions, you know, gathered up the windfall of coins, and gratefully though beerfully accepted them as payment in full.

Each affidavit requiring to be set out in two copies, and the original filed in the office of the prothonotary of the law courts, ten supernumerary caligraphic artists were detailed for the former duties, and the urchin who cleaned out the offices was despatched on the errand of such paramount, importance–the filing of the affidavits in the office of the prothonotary, their filing necessitating the disbursement of a half-dollar each for duty-stamps. The doctor returned to the music-hall at Summer page 291Hill, while the lawyer manœuvred about the main streets of the city, in compliance with his appointment to meet a young lady on the trail of her husband, he said, for desertion, and all the engrossing clerks stayed up all night on the third floor flat, struggling with the heart-breaking perplexities of Davitt's conundrums in hand-writing.

The morning for the return of the summons came with the triumphant march of the garish sun over the hydra-mouthed Mississippi, and in all its halcyon glory over the haunts of the "busy hums of men" in the city, as Eugene slowly walked up to the law courts, where the red columns of the pines, the aloes and palms took him back in old memories to the thrice - blessed days in the purlieus of the palm-fringed quadrangle of the old university. Arrangements had been made amongst the judges to hear the case of Whitworth versus Whitworth in chambers. "In chambers" signified a semi-private court. It was supposed to be more sacred to the legal fraternity and more exempt from the intrusion of disinterested strangers than the open public courts. "In chambers" was a large court in the architectural skies, as it was on the topmost floor of the enormous building–four flights of stairs requiring ascension before "in chambers" could be reached. Four white fluted Tuscan pilasters and a deep heavy cornice, over whose magnificence the eye of an architect would have loved to linger, supported the white scrolled ceiling, while luxurious furniture lay on a crimson-flowered carpet that covered the dais and all but the tesselated borders of the floor.

There sat the barristers whom Davitt had entrusted with the case for the doctor awaiting the pleasure of the judge The one a middle-aged, tall, sapient-looking, highly intellectual man, who had read and had well stored in the strong chambers of his brain all the lore and law points from cartloads of law books and journals; the other on his left looked up to as his senior counsel. The junior counsel, a highly-polished, progressive young barrister, who had defended the action for damages after the collision at Sabinnia, sat bewigged and begowned with a pile of books before him as high as the monument on the old coal-king, and with a slip of paper inserted between the leaves of each for expeditious reference to a case in point.

In the same line and on the same leather-upholstered form leaning over the barrister's table, sat one of the most eminent lawyers of the time, who all his life had consistently refused promotion to the dignity of the judicial throne. Acting as his junior counsel was a younger brother of Brassy. Behind the counsel for Marvel sat the dolorous, lathy, silver-bearded sheik with an elongated expression, the wool-merchant ex officio as executor–the man who had adorned his elocution in the delivery of the great man's will with the Greek chorus refrain, the dirge 'aboo–I can't–ahoo.'

Flaming red-ochered hair was the produce of the younger Brassy's fat head, and on his pig-shaped face, with a brickdust complexion, it was hacked out in the style of Lord Dundreary, while his whole heart and soul and his watery-blue eyes as he sat with the others waiting for page 292the presence of the judge, were rivetted on the lunette-shaped rims of his finger-nails and the glistening sheen of his shirt-cuffs, polished at the Chinese laundry.

Eugene seated on a back form had a bird's-eye-view of the whole court. He surveyed every face in the building, but could not see his little children anywhere, nor catch the eye of Marvel as beneath the great panoply of a hat slanted over on her ear she sat surrounded by her officious relatives – her mother, her aunt, Sukey Bubtitt with the baubles in her ears, Simon Bubtitt and Augustus Hornblower with an ivory rooster-headed walking-stick as long as himself.

"Silence," cried the crier of the court, and the judge came upon the dais from his private chamber, through a private door leading to the judicial throne. He bowed to the standing court, who bowed again in return, and took his seat on a massive and richly upholstered in crimson mahogany chair. In a long falling wig and a flowing black gown, he sat with a pallor on his smooth-shaved face and a pensive, classical cast of countenance—the beau idéal of a lawyer and a judge. His associate was his second son, and this official announced the case Whitworth versus Whitworth. The eminent barrister for Marvel who looked down upon his colleague as a British lion might be expected to look down on some ill-bred mongrel from the slums, and who, judging by the expression on his powerful face, felt uneasy at holding his brief for the defence, was the first to rise.

"May it please your Honour," he said, "I appear for the defence. I would ask your Honour, considering the short space of time I have had to peruse the mass of affidavits before me, of which I have not been able to read one quarter, that your Honour would grant an adjournment. I have been informed that it is my client's intention to put still more before the court; if your Honour will grant an adjournment, I pray your Honour to appoint the hearing for this day fortnight."

"May it please your Honour," said the senior counsel for Eugene, "I appear for the plaintiff. The summons with the accompanying affidavit was served the day after it was issued by the prothonotary, and my client has only seen part of the affidavits which my learned friend intends to use. The defence have had more time than we have, as they have been collecting affidavits from the date of the serving of the summons; whereas we have only had the time from the serving upon us of the affidavits for the defence: If your Honour does grant an adjournment I would like your Honour to make it only till this day week for the serving of the affidavits for the defence, so that we shall have time to serve answering affidavits, and I would pray your Honour to appoint the hearing for a few days after that. I would further direct your Honour's attention to the fact that by Habeas Corpus proceedings the summons called upon the defence to produce the bodies of the children before your Honour this morning, and I am informed by my client that they are nowhere to be seen in Court."

Leaning over the desk upon the writing-table in front of his chair, his Honour animadverted on the fact that it was tantamount to contempt of page 293Court on the part of the defendant to ignore the order that she should bring the children there.

The doctor thought it was nothing to be at all surprised at, as she had shown gross contempt of him and his letters ever since her father had died; but he complaisantly listened to the ruling of the judge that the affidavits should be served upon the day suggested by the counsel for the plaintiff, and the answering affidavits on the day preceding the hearing; and further, that the application for an adjournment for a fortnight by the counsel for the defence should be granted.

The Court rose, and Eugene, disappointed at not seeing his dear little Pearly and Valentine, went sorrowfully home.

At the expiration of the first week, the congeries of affidavits which Hallam, Brassy and Hoare served upon Warne, Costall and Davitt at three minutes to four, or three minutes before the expenditure of the time allotted, showed that Marvel, her mother, her aunt, her cousin, the keeneyed relative and Augustus had not been at all idle. Private detectives, mouchards, squirming and wriggling pimps, all the ragamuffins of the various places in which the doctor had lived during his seven years of wedlock, the melancholial wife of the Methodist parson, the Mexican woman whose hand was stained with the blood of her husband's side, and last of all the unscrupulous partner who had by that time bought four thoroughbred racehorses and a racing stable with the money which he had abstracted from Eugene and had given up his profession for the pretty little pastime of horse-racing, appearing in half mufti, half military trappings on the turf, all swore to the charge with which Marvel had started off in her original affidavit—incurable and irreclaimable drunkenness. The charges of brutality and cruelty she was left to substantiate with the furnace of her own concocting imagination, although the medical general-of-division was sorely importuned to stretch a point and assist.

The energies of Davitt were now put to test-strength. The affidavit war waged furiously and savagely. It aroused the belligerent junior partner's ire and vengeance, while the indignant blood boiled at the insults in Eugene's veins. Categorically each item of the charge-sheets was confuted in an answering affidavit by the doctor: all point-blank contradicted and characterised as deliberate lies and the outcome of corruption. Further affidavits were similarly treated, clause by clause, until the answering affidavit of Eugene comprised eighty-five pages and contained three hundred and thirty-seven long paragraphs. Legion after legion of sponsors as to his moral character, his social standing, his great professional skill and his high repute as a man, stood shoulder to shoulder in the cause of Eugene and his children. The passive treatment which his wife had received at his hands was contrasted with her rebellious and violent treatment of him by every one of the thirty-three servants who had served in his various homes. Men of the highest professional and social rank, together with women of marked public esteem and respect, testified to his great abilities as an operative surgeon and his gentlemanly deportment page 294in their own homes. The answering affidavits obtained during the next six days, copies of which were duly lodged in the office of Hallam, Brassy and Hoare, formed a hollow square with a cheveaux de frise which no foe could break through—a phalanx that none of the enemy's chargers could pierce.

The fourteenth day arrived, and, although it chanced to be an anniversary day, the judge condescended to forego a holiday which he had contemplated in the country, while the same barristers and interested parties assembled again in the court on the fourth floor of the law courts building. The learned judge was announced, and bowing before the bowed heads of the erect exponents of the law, he once more resumed his seat on the august mahogany throne on the bench.

No sign of Pearly and Valentine as their father seated next to his counsel cast his eyes, looking back around the room—none of his own kith and kin but the break-a-way Marvel basking in the ever-present circle of her satellites. Her little coterie by this time, and especially on this auspicious occasion, had been augmented by the addition of the wool-merchant who had sung over the will the dirge of "ahoos," and who now deserted the barristers' table for the radiant presence of the bird.

"Where are the children?" asked his Honour Judge Fosterleigh.

"May it please your Honour," said the counsel for the defence, "they are not in Court; but if your Honour wishes I can produce them at a minute's notice."

"Where are they?" demanded the counsel for Eugene.

"In the Oxford Hotel," replied the counsel for the defence.

This understanding appeared to find favour with the judge if not with the plaintiff, the doctor, who was in hopes of seeing little Pearly run up to him in the Court calling out in a silvery treble—"Pearly come back, puppa: Pearly b'ing Vallie." He contented himself, however, with the thought that their mother was afraid to let them see him, from fear of their imbuing the mind of the Court with the feeling of affection which he felt certain they were constrained by their mother from showing.

After the junior counsel for the plaintiff had requested the judge to order that the senior counsel for the defence should read over the whole of the affidavits antagonistic and favourable to his client after his learned senior had stated the case for the plaintiff, his request was granted, the judge remarking that such was the established, invariable method of proceedure; whereupon the counsel resumed his seat in front of Eugene.

Pulling the collar of his gown over his shoulders and straightening his wig, up rose the dignified, scholarly and commanding senior counsel for the plaintiff before the judge. A huge pile of affidavits lay before him, and on the top of the pile a spacious and many-leaved brief; while on his left stood a stack of books comprising Coke, Lyttleton and Blackstone's commentaries—books galore for speedy reference by his colleague.

"May it please your Honour," he quietly began: "I have been up nearly all night reading through the affidavits and the answering affidavits page 295in this unhappy cause between Doctor Whitworth and his wife. I may say, to begin, that I have had a long personal knowledge of Dr. Whitworth during my career at the university, where he was universally respected and esteemed and was one of the most distinguished and ripest scholars within its walls. From there he proceeded to the medical schools of Great Britain and the Continent, where he obtained some of the highest honours of the College of Surgeons and of the universities in the queen of all the professions. He was married to the defendant as a portionless girl when her father was heavily involved in big and risky speculations, and on his own saying was only a poor man. He has worked for her, has done everything a man could do to make his wife happy and agreeable with her husband. He has suffered in silence the ingratitude and the scorn of a yoke-mate who should have been the first to stand by his side in trouble. Instead of helping him, she has left no stone untarned to ruin him. She has insulted and driven away his patients. Behind his back she has sought false sympathisers with her obloquy and petty fault-finding ways, and has traduced his good name without a pang of compunction, but with a constant crescendo of bitterness wherever she found a willing recipient of her venomous malice and treachery. She has absented herself from the first-class homes which he has provided for her from time to time, and she has verged upon the ground of impropriety with his child in her arms. She has consorted with a giddy throng of pleasure-seeking and duty-ignoring nonentities, with the object of harassing and breaking the heart of the man who would have fallen to save her. How, your Honour, does the case stand now? No sooner has she suddenly become possessed of a large fortune than she proclaims to the world the fact that she will have no more to do with her lawful husband, because he has, as the best of us have sometimes done, taken more wine than was good for him. His children, for whom no father could show greater affection, she has endeavoured to steal from him and to play like cards against him in her contemptible game. She has lost no opportunity of embittering their minds and poisoning their innocent natures with a hatred and a repugnance of their father in a manner that would put an Iago to shame. She has fleered and sneered at his relations, who have always strived to place themselves at her service, and she has slammed the door in the face of his mother when she carried all the way from Galveston to Edenhall—an establishment which is more like a concert-hall than a dwelling house—some presents for his children. She despises him now that she is independent and defies him. Her's has been a fair-weather love, and there is no more fidelity in a woman like that throughout the serrations of life than there are strawberries and cream in an iceberg. She defies even the law by omitting to bring the children before your Honour. Plumed in the gaudy feathers of her vanity and conceit, she flippantly tosses her disdainful head and flouts the man who in his academical days was called an ornament of page 296the university. I will draw your Honour's attention ('get me Gascoigne v. Gascoigne Queen's Bench Division ch. xxxi'—to the junior counsel) to the following cases, where even the greatest profligates the world has ever known have been considered the rightful owners of their children, and even as against the mother with the infant at her breast. To other cases ('get me Rain versus Rain: Law Reports ch. xvi') where moral turpitude of the worse type has been no bar to the rights of the father: to another ('get me Gemmel v. Gemmell Q.B.D. ch. xxix') where Lord Coleridge ordered that the children be restored to the father in the face of evidence showing dissipation, rank blasphemy, fornication and atheism. A long list of cases I might quote to your Honour if your Honour deem it necessary, but in the meanwhile I will refer your Honour, to the following fifteen cases beginning with Rose v. Rose Q.B.D. vol. ii ('get them all ready,' and the junior handed them up to the associate). The home of the family is the foundation of society: the father is the head of the home. The history of the world has shown that it is the strong arm of the father that surrounds in lasting love the children that are his own—their champion and life-long protector, who nobly stands his ground when the fragile woman shows herself a coward and a deserter. It is the father in the hour of danger that takes the helm and saves the day, when the woman is grovelling in the throes of adversity. The captain that sticks to the last plank of the breaking-up deck, the father alone has the true courage of despair—the mother is a weakling and a broken reed. Here your Honour is a man without a merited stain on his character—one of the most promising surgeons of the day, who had at one time given way to a slight extent to the temptations of the card-room and the hotel, but who, on the evidence of the highest men in the land, for years has lived a life of moral rectitude. Where is the man amongst us without his faults? Even the mighty St. Paul acknowledged to his own shortcomings. His wife accuses him of cruelty. How is it that this false assertion is consistently and vehemently contradicted by every servant-girl and groom and every visitor that ever set foot in his house? There is no such asseveration in any one of that pile of affidavits which my learned friend will shortly have the pleasure of reading before your Honour, with the one solitary exception of his own wife's declaration. On the other hand, we have evidences of sharp and spiteful temper and pitiless acerbity on her part, and evidence of acts of violence, which my client and friend had overlooked and forgiven. The worry of this case has jeopardised his ease of mind; the scandal and loss of time which he has suffered have precluded his chances of success in the city. To take away the children from a man of good moral character and such educational attainments, to my mind would amount to nothing less than a positive subversion of justice. I will ask your Honour to make an order that his children be restored to him, and I am further requested to mention that my client is ready and willing to welcome his wife to her own home at the same time. I will now ask my learned friend to read aloud the page 297affidavits for be defence, and afterwards those in support of the plaintiff's meritorious cause."

The senior counsel for the defence, when his adversary had resumed his seat, rose in an uneasy, impatient and troublous frame of mind and, without prefacing his elocution with any remarks to the judge, he began to read through the affidavits one by one, while the two counsels for the plaintiff followed him, checking and tallying off every word in their own copies. He had not gone through one-tenth of the pile when the Court adjourned for lunch. During the interval for lunch, on every side among the on-lookers were made short comments, that Whitworth did not appear to be the sort of man he was painted by his wife, and that her vicious passions and jealousy revealed themselves in the gnashing of her teeth and her flashing black eyes.

After lunch the reading was resumed. So wearisome had the task of listening become that it seemed as if his Honour had made up his mind and gone to sleep on the straight-backed throne. Not he: every few minutes he would open his eyelids and look down upon the labouring barristers, jot down in the book before him salient points in the affidavits and the name of the sponsors for Whitworth, and close his eyes again in thought. The reading of the affidavits occupied nearly six hours, dating which time the power of mental concentration and the maudlin gravity of the vacant-visaged junior counsel for the defence and brother of Brassy would, in fits and starts, display itself in load guffaws of laughter when nobody else laughed and there was nothing to laugh at; or by knocking off the table a few of the chimney-stacks of books in front of his senior, to make the court resound again with his clumsiness and hollow inane cacchination.

The reading of the documents being concluded, every hole in the slushy morass having been in proper form waded through, and every stagnant stench well stirred up by the senior counsel for the pure paradisal Marvel, he entered in a half-hearted sort of way upon the duty of his address to the judge and his Phillipic oration against the doctor.

"This white rose," he said, with a first prize satirical smile upon his upper lip, "this white rose." as if the doctor were a black rose, "comes before your Honour with the plea that it is his love for the children which induces him to enter the Court with his claim for their custody. In my opinion, your Honour, it is no more than a roundabout way of compelling his wife to live with him again a live of misery. She is in possession of a comfortable, independent and paradisal home; her children are well provided for with everything that money can buy."

"It won't buy them a good name," put in the junior counsel for the plaintiff: an awful guffaw put in the junior counsel for the defence.

"With everything—I say everything," repeated the orator, waxing hot, "everything that money can buy, and what can it not buy short of the Kingdom of Heaven?"

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"Buy more affidavits," put in the junior counsel, who was evidently trying to ridicule the sardonically-smiling Cicero.

"I may refer your Honour," continued the senior counsel, "to the case of Shelley, the poet, whose children were taken away from him at law, and what comparison have we between 'this white rose' and the pure soul of Shelley who turned against the name of Christianity as against the badge of tyranny and torture. Without seeing its eventual good he looked upon the evil wrought in the name of the Cross. He sickened at the thought of the blood of the martyrs spilt in the name of Christ, Buddha, Mahomet and Brahma. Compare the picture of the melancholy fate of poor Shelley with the picture before us to-day. Shelley was not an irreligious man, but he shrunk from the deeds of merciless bigotry perpetrated under the light and glimmer of that gory side and that upturned face on the Cross. Atheism is a ground for interfering with the father's legal rights, in defiance of the cases quoted by my learned friend to the contrary, Let me quote the case of (get me Ruskin v Ruskin);" but the guffawing counsel did not know where Ruskin v Ruskin was to be found, and floundering through the book-fort before him, he tumbled the stack in trepidation on the floor. While the artist picked up the volumes and the paper-marks which had fallen out of them, the Court roared at Lord Dundreary and the counsel continued—"I might recite the case of Colenso, Goodenough, and many others before your Honour, to show the mistake of entrusting 'this white rose' one solitary hour with the custody of his innocent children, and I wish to inform the Court that these children in years to come, if they live, will be entitled to a large sum of money. He only wants their money to convert it into drink, horse-racing, and card-playing."

After many variegated complimentary epithets, the stock-in-trade of mud and tar of the senior counsel came to an end. He sat down with the air of one who had performed a disagreeable task and would not go through it again for double the temptation.

Sitting upright on the mahogany throne, Judge Fosterleigh in calm and quiet tones, such as gave his hearers the impression that he was talking to himself, summed up the evidence, saying—"I am afraid I am against you," to the senior counsel for Marvel: "I can find no reliable evidence of any but venial faults in Dr. Whitworth; if he has at times taken too much wine to drink, it is only what most of us at some time in our lives have done more or less. It is not a case of a woman running away from her husband on account of his cruelty, but a case of a wife who embraces the opportunity of being away from her husband with the children at a time when she suddenly comes into possession of a large sum of money and stopping away in order to gratify some petty spite against her husband. I have been referred to the case of Shelley, the poet, but Shelley deserted his wife for another, and that desertion led to his wife's suicide. If Mrs. Whitworth takes my advice—and I have had a long experience of these cases—she will quietly return to her proper home; she will give up the misguided notion that she can buy over the principle of right with her money; she page 299will refrain from damaging and blackening the good name of her husband, and from taking the unwholesome counsel of her ill-advising relatives and friends. I will not make an order for the immediate delivery of the children. That might be inconvenient and I daresay some arrangement might be made between the parties. Shall I say a month?"

"A month will do, your Honour," replied the senior counsel for the children's father, "on the condition that Mrs. Whitworth enter into her bond for twenty thousand dollars not to remove the children from the State. My learned friend cannot mount guard over them, and nobody can tell what their mother, "the wrathful dove," who has gone to such extremes already, may do in her wrath to come."

"Order," affirmed the judge, "that the children. Pearly Imogen Gould Whitworth and Valentine Gordon Whitworth be delivered into the custody and control of their father Eugene Percival Whitworth of New Orleans and Summer Hill, doctor of medicine, on the rising of the court this day. I further order that providing the defendant, their mother, enter into her bond not to remove the children from the jurisdiction of the Court in the sum of twenty thousand dollars, such order shall stay until the expiration of thirty-one days from date."

"This honourable Court stands adjourned," then shouted at the top of his voice the crier: "till the morning of the day afther termorrer in the year of our Lord wan thousand eight hundred and fifty-wan at the hour of haff-pash tin: God save the Republic!" All the parties left together, Marvel looking as if she thought and saying that she had never seen such a fool of a judge in all her born days, and the great portcullis was drawn for the day.

The feverish agitation of Eugene's brain, the nervous, careworn and worried expression now changed into a warm, mingled feeling of triumph and exultation—triumph over the gall and wormwood of his wife, joy and exultation at the thick-coming fancies of his little blossom, his pearl of a girl Pearly, and his sturdy mercurial little boy returning to romp and revel in the new summer-house of the garden with the old St. Bernard again in the coming halcyon days at Summer Hill, and at night to lie down in the same little cots by his side in the fairy-land of their bright and flowery dreams.