University of Virginia Library

27. CHAPTER XXVII.

It is a mournful thing to turn from the last clinging
hope and defence of the accused, to the cold,
severe, exaggerating attacks of the prosecution.
Perhaps there never was a case upon a capital
offence, where the eloquence and ingenuity of the
defendant's counsel did not strike out upon the
misery of the accused some bright sparks of hope.
The mass of evidence cannot be borne in mind at
once. A perception of the truth often requires a
series of deliberate and abstruse arguments, which
the audience never discover, or fail to retain amid
the confusion of evidence and the instinct of mercy.
The sight of a criminal, too, when punishment
seems certain, softens the heart to pity, and prepares
it to magnify and dwell upon the grounds of
hope. An ingenious orator, in an artful survey of
the case, lingers with disproportionate force upon
the favourable circumstances, and leaves the more
unexplainable and condemnatory parts in the shade.
For a moment the sky of the accused brightens;
the roaring of the tempest is lulled; his half-wrecked
mind rests, as the surrounding sea of
doubt and despair closes its yawning abysses, and
he beholds again the green and sunny shore where

safety and bliss await his weary steps. Ah, delusive
calm! ah, treacherous hope! An awful
pause succeeds the words of mercy and hope.
Dreadful the task of him who has to dissolve this
vision!

The prosecution commenced their duty. As
their skilful batteries were opened against the victim,
the brightness passed from his features; one
after another his hopes melted away; the relentless
tempest darkened over his head; the mad wind
began to roar and thunder in the air; his broken
hulk once more hung on the uplifted and giant
wave; the distant shore receded from his despairing
eyes, and he felt that ruin and death again
yawned beneath his feet.

Two experienced, unfeeling, and sagacious lawyers
exhausted their powers in demonstrating the
guilt of the accused, in which they both fully and
conscientiously believed. Germain wove around
him the meshes of sophistry, and rendered it once
more a glaring certainty; and the district attorney
closed with a startling eloquence.

The orator allowed the prisoner's apparent good
character; allowed the horrid spectacle of a youth
so formed to adorn society, cut off and crushed
beneath a fate so terrible. But these considerations,
he said, severely, were not for the jury-box.
Let them deepen the interest of a poem, or embellish
the pages of a novel; but a tribunal of
justice had a sterner task than the indulgence of
feeling, however amiable. That the murder had
been committed, every circumstance proclaimed.
The ride; the disappearance; the blood-stained
handkerchief; the hat floating abandoned on the
stream; the body—as far as the testimony of credible
witnesses go—identified as that of Rosalie
Romain; the confusion of the assassin; his conduct

on the arrest; the evidence of the female domestic
respecting the demeanour of the unfortunate
victim; her clandestinely meeting the prisoner
at that suspicious hour of the morning;—every
thing, as far as human proof could, proclaimed the
dreadful act, and the deep cunning of the prisoner.
“What proof can you demand of murder? It is
a deed which the perpetrator commits alone. He
comes not in the broad streets, where positive evidence
can be produced against him. He steals,
with stealthy pace, in darkness and solitude; he
disguises his intention under smiles and the mask
of virtue; he plants the dagger in a moment unseen
by all—by all but his avenging God. Murder
rarely admits evidence stronger than that produced
against this man. If you acquit him upon
the principle of doubt, future assassins have only
to stab in solitude, and they will stab in safety.
We shall behold shameless seducers and murderers
walking among us unwhipped of justice.
Leave crime unpunished, and you open the flood-gates
through which devastation and despair rush
in upon the retreats of domestic life. The pity
which makes you tremble at inflicting a necessary
penalty, which causes you to yield to the pleadings
of compassion, and to melt at the sight of guilt
bound on the altar—to forget law, society, the
claims of the innocent, and the just indignation and
agony of the bereaved, rather than speak the word
and strike the blow to which you have pledged
your oaths, and which great justice demands—is a
weak, an idle, a pernicious feeling, full of danger
and deceit, unworthy of fathers, citizens, men.
You are the guardians of the community. To
your hands she has committed her safety; and,
with such a feeling in your bosoms, will you betray
your trust? She has placed you as sentinels
on her walls and at her gates; do not kneel and
admit the foe which you are sent to overcome.
Had the gaunt form of murder stalked in unabashed
and unintimidated amid the gayety of your own
festive board—had your startled eyes suddenly beheld
him vanish, and lo! the brightest seat at the
banquet is left vacant—had you beheld the demon
who had thus bereaved and made you desolate for
ever, stride unfearing and unabashed through the
mid-day streets, triumphing in his deed, and, perhaps,
grown bold by experience, meditating to repeat
it, because, forsooth, the shrinking sensibilities
of a too sentimental jury could not harden their
hearts to arrest his career,—you would feel as you
ought to feel on this solemn occasion. The hospitality
of friendship, the rights of society, the laws
of man and of God, have been grossly violated by
the unhappy criminal at the bar. The perpetration
of the deed has been proved, and the guilt has
been fastened upon him as far as human proof can
lead the human reason.

“The gentlemen on the other side harp much on
the idea of doubt. It is doubt which is to bring
off their wretched client. Their only hope is doubt.
It is the last inevitable refuge of the defenders of a
bad cause. If they can make you doubt, if they
can entangle and cloud over, if they can envelop
in mystery, if they can bewilder you in doubt, they
fancy their triumph secure. But you must distinguish
between the just doubt arising from a deficiency
of evidence, and that confused sense of indistinctness
which only those experience whose
eyesight is failing—between the doubt of a firm
and of a foolish mind. Doubt you might conceive
on every subject. There are not wanting metaphysicians
who assert that nothing ever was, is,
or ever can be certain. You may doubt the evidence

of your eyes and ears; you may bewilder
your mind amid endless mazes and metaphysical
conjectures. You may doubt that you sit there to
judge, that I stand here to proclaim a heinous and
hideous sin. All around us may be but the phantoms
of a fever or the forms of a passing dream.
But this species of doubt, so equally applicable to
the most feeble and the most overpowering proof,
is not the doubt which becomes your manly souls.
The cunning of a persuasive tongue will not be
able to betray your matured understandings into
such childish, such fantastic vagaries. Such doubts
would dispute all law, all justice. This court
would be a mockery and an idle farce; vainly
would wronged misery apply here for redress;
justice would be but the theme of derision and
scorn. The ruffian would smile at the uplifted
sword of the goddess, which her degenerate hand
durst never wield, till men, grown once more wild
and savage, and knowing no other remedy for private
injury, will assume again the reins of affairs,
which the authorities are unworthy and unable to
hold. A Gothic spirit of revenge will displace the
mildness of civilization; youth, innocence, and defenceless
beauty, will yield their breasts to the
dagger, and the whole mass of society will be resolved
into its original elements of anarchy and
discord.

“No, gentlemen, in your characters as stern and
unyielding sentinels of the public safety, I call upon
you to speak the dreadful doom against yonder sin
ful man. He has sown, let him reap. If you
would not have your wives, sisters, mothers, and
daughters murdered before your faces, speak,
promptly, fearlessly, and solemnly, the fatal verdict.
However man may exclaim, and attempt to

affright you from your duty, remember the Almighty
himself has said, `Blood for blood!' ”

Again, as the counsel sat down, the silence was
simultaneously broken by a wide peal of applause.
From bench and floor, pedestal and column, wherever
the mighty throng of human beings had clustered
and pressed themselves densely in together, came
the murmur and the shock of approbation, too
plainly announcing the public sanction of the prisoner's
doom. Several persons were committed for
this breach of decorum.

The charge of the judge was short and lucid,
and wholly confined to the evidence. He reviewed
it calmly, and instructed the jury to find the fact
of the murder according to their opinion on the testimony,
with this reserve, that if they were “not
fully satisfied, beyond a doubt, they must find for
the prisoner.”

With the necessary formalities, the jury were
conducted into their private room; and an hour
passed, during which curiosity kept together, probably,
every individual of the vast multitude.

At length the court prepared to adjourn, and
the prisoner had been already ordered back to prison,
when it was announced that the jury had agreed
upon a verdict. There was a hum among the concourse—relaxed
attention was again suddenly and
fearfully roused. The jury entered, silent and solemn
themselves, amid the silence and solemnity of
all around. This is a moment of excruciating interest.
The most light and careless spectator feels
it drain his heart, and suspend his very being. What
must it be to him whom one moment more is to
plunge into eternity, or to give back in triumph to
life and happiness! Many an eye turned upon the
jurors to detect in their countenances, in their gait,
in some casual action, a hint of that mighty secret

locked in their bosoms. Many an eye was riveted
upon the face of the prisoner, to study how he bore
that tremendous moment, how humanity stood to
gaze amid life full on the grim and spectral features
of death.

The names of the jurymen were regularly called
amid a profound silence. Not a motion, not a
breath, disturbed the deep hush. The clerk requested
the prisoner to rise.

“Gentlemen of the jury, look upon the prisoner.
Prisoner, look upon the jury. Have you agreed
upon your verdict?”

“We have.”

“How say you, gentlemen? Do you find him
guilty or not guilty?”

There was a pause, as if the very pulse of life
stood still. It was thrilling and painful. All leaned
forward. A shuddering sound of agony, short and
checked, broke from the lips of Miss Leslie. All
eyes dilated and fastened on the foreman, except
one or two, who looked piercingly, and yet with
horror, upon the face of the prisoner. At that moment
the clock tolled three, with a heavy sweep of
sound that floated in quivering waves through the
hall. Its last vibration died away, and the foreman
spoke.

“Not guilty.”

“God—God!” cried the sister, with a shriek of
joy, while an electric shock darted through the
crowd, and broke the spell of silence. The prosecuting
counsel started up. The clerk repeated it
aloud, with surprise. Moreland clasped his hands,
with a report that echoed through the room. Mr.
Romain covered his face. Mordaunt Leslie raised
his hands and eyes to Heaven in silent prayer.

In the midst of this sudden universal jar and
lively commotion, the accused stood in the same

attitude, fixed and motionless—all eyes again centred
upon him.

“Norman!” cried the sister, with an hysteric
laugh, and springing towards him—“dear Norman,
hear! You are acquitted—you are guiltless—you
are free!”

But the youth neither stirred limb nor feature.
At length a slight tremour, a quivering, passed over
his face, a shade of ghastlier white, a faint sob, a
convulsive effort to laugh—and he fell back senseless
into his father's arms.