VII.
Now arose literally a cloud of witnesses, who came forward from some of the back seats, and occupied the benches hitherto held by the plaintiffs and witnesses in the preceding cases. They were of all shades of blackness, and of both sexes and divers ages, and they were there in their solemn best clothes, with their faces full of a decorous if superficial seriousness. I must except from this sweeping assertion, however, the lady who was the defendant in the case: she was a young person, with a great deal of what is called style about her, and I had seen her going and coming throughout the morning in a high excitement, which she seemed to enjoy. It is difficult for a lady whose lips have such a generous breadth and such a fine outward roll to keep from smiling, perhaps, under any circumstances; and it may have been light-heartedness rather than light-mindedness that enabled her to support so gayly a responsibility that weighed down all the other parties concerned. She wore a tight-skirted black walking-dress, with a waist of perhaps caricatured smallness; her hat was full of red and yellow flowers; on her hands, which were in drawing with her lips rather than her waist, were a pair of white kid gloves. As she advanced to take her place inside the prisoner’s bar she gave in charge to a very mournful-looking elder of her race a little girl, two or three years of age, as fashionably dressed as herself, and tottering upon little high-heeled boots. The old man lifted the child in his arms, and funereally took his seat among the witnesses, while the culprit turned her full-blown smile upon the judge, and confidently pleaded not guilty to the clerk’s reading of the indictment, in which she was charged with threatening the person and life of the plaintiff. At the same moment a sort of pleased expectation lighted up all those dull countenances in the court-room, which had been growing more and more jaded under the process of the accusations and condemnations. The soddenest habitué of the place brightened; the lawyers and policemen eased themselves in their chairs, and I fancied that the judge himself relaxed. I could not refuse my sympathy to the general content; I took another respite from the thought of my poor thief, and I too lent myself to the hope of enjoyment from this Laughable After-piece.
The accuser also wore black, but her fashionableness, as compared with that of the defendant, was as the fashionableness of Boston to that of New York; she had studied a subdued elegance, and she wore a crape veil instead of flowers on her hat. She was of a sort of dusky pallor, and her features had not the Congoish fullness nor her skin the brilliancy of the defendant’s. Her taste in kid gloves was a decorous black.
She testified that she was employed as second-girl in a respectable family, and that the day before she had received a visit at the door from the defendant, who had invited her to come down the street to a certain point, and be beaten within an inch of her life. On her failure to appear, the defendant came again, and notified her that she should hold the beating in store for her, and bestow it whenever she caught her out-of-doors. These visits and threats had terrified the plaintiff, and annoyed the respectable family with which she lived, and she had invoked the law.
During the delivery of her complaint, the defendant had been lifting and lowering herself by the bar at which she stood, in anticipation of the judge’s permission to question the plaintiff. At a nod from him she now flung herself half across it.
“What’d I say I’d whip you for?”
The Plaintiff, thoughtfully: “What’d you say you’d whip me for?”
The Defendant, beating the railing with her hand: “Yes, that’s what I ast you: what for?”
The Plaintiff, with dignity: “I don’t know as you told me what for.”
The Defendant: “Now, now, none o’ that! You just answer my question.”
The Judge: “She has answered it.”
The Defendant, after a moment of surprise: “Well, then, I’ll ast her another question. Didn’t I tell you if I ever caught you goin’ to a ball with my husband ag’in I’d”—
The Plaintiff: “I didn’t go to no ball with your husband!”
The Defendant: “You didn’t go with him! Ah”—
The Plaintiff: “I went with the crowd. I didn’t know who I went with.”
The Defendant: “Well, I know who paid fifty cents for your ticket! Why don’t he give me any of his money? Hain’t spent fifty cents on me or his child, there, since it was born. An’ he goes with you all the time,—to church, and everywhere.”
The Judge: “That will do.”
The plaintiff, who had listened “with sick and scornful looks averse,” stepped from the stand, and a dusky gentlewoman, as she looked, took her place, and corroborated her testimony. She also wore genteel black, and she haughtily turned from the defendant’s splendors as she answered much the same questions that the latter had put to the plaintiff. She used her with the disdain that a lady who takes care of bank parlors may show to a social inferior with whom her grandson has been trapped into a distasteful marriage, and she expressed by a certain lift of the chin and a fall of the eyelids the absence of all quality in her granddaughter-in-law, as no words could have done it. I suppose it will be long before these poor creatures will cease to seem as if they were playing at our social conditions, or the prejudices and passions when painted black will seem otherwise than funny. But if this old lady had been born a duchess, or the daughter of a merchant one remove from retail trade, she could not have represented the unrelenting dowager more vividly. She bore witness to the blameless character of the plaintiff, to whom her grandson had paid only those attentions permissible from a gentleman unhappy in his marriage, and living apart from his wife,—a wife, she insinuated, unworthy both before and since the union which she had used sinister arts in forming with a family every way above her. She did not overdo the part, and she descended from the stand with the same hauteur toward the old man who succeeded her as she had shown his daughter.
The hapless sire—for this was the character he attempted—came upon the stand with his forsaken grandchild in his arms, and bore his testimony to the fact that his daughter was a good girl, and had always done what was right, and had been brought up to it. He dwelt upon her fidelity to her virtuous family training, with no apparent sense of incongruity in the facts—elicited by counsel—to the contrary; and he was an old man whose perceptions were somewhat blunted as to other things. He maundered on about his son-in-law’s neglect of his wife and child, and the expense which he had been put to on their account, and especially about the wrongs his family had suffered since his son-in-law “got to going” with the plaintiff.
“You say,” interpreted the judge, “that the plaintiff tried to seduce the affections of your daughter’s husband from her?”
The old man was brought to a long and thoughtful pause, from which he was startled by a repetition of the judge’s question. “I—I don’ know as I understand you, judge,” he faltered.
“Do you mean that the plaintiff—the person whom your daughter threatened to beat—has been trying to get your daughter’s husband’s affections away from her?”
“Why, he hain’t never showed her no affections, judge! He’s just left me to support her.”
“Very well, then. Has the plaintiff tried to get your daughter’s husband away from her?”
“I guess not, judge. He hain’t never took any notice of my daughter since he married her.”
“Well, does your son-in-law go with this person?”
“With who, judge?”
“With the plaintiff.”
“De ol’ woman. No, he don’ go wid de ol’ woman any: she’s his gran’mother.”
“Well, does he go with the young woman?”
“Oh, yes! Yes! He goes with the young woman. Goes with her all the time. That’s the one he goes with!”
He seemed to be greatly surprised and delighted to find that this point was what the judge had been trying to get at, and the audience shared his pleasure.
I really forget how the case was decided. Perhaps my train, which I began to be anxious not to lose, hurried me away before the dénoûment, as often happens with the suburban play-goer. But to one who cares rather for character than for plot it made little difference. I came away thinking that if the actors in the little drama were of another complexion how finely the situation would have served in a certain sort of intense novel: the patrician dowager, inappeasably offended by the low match her grandson has made, and willing to encourage his penchant for the lady of his own rank, whom some fortuity may yet enable him to marry; the wife, with her vulgar but strong passions, stung to madness by the neglect and disdain of her husband’s family,—it is certainly a very pretty intrigue, and I commend it to my brother (or sister) novelists who like to be praised by the reviewers for what the reviewers think profundity and power.