The scamp, however, followed the Dysons with a fiendish malignity. When threatening to blow out Mrs. Dyson’s brains, Peace had the effrontery to ask a bystander to “bear him witness that she had struck him with a life-preserver.” This idea was a pure myth.
The preserver existed only in the foul imagination of the criminal, and the struggle with Mr. Dyson on the 29th November, 1876, a still bolder fiction. It is possible that the crime was unpremeditated, and that annoyance rather than murder was intended. But a man who makes a revolver the instrument of annoyance cannot guard against the most dreaded contingencies.
Mr. Campbell Foster was justly enough precluded from making any reference to Peace’s attempted escape from the railway train. But it is not difficult to understand the motives under which the desperate leap was taken.
If Peace had possessed any confidence in his ability to support the plea set up in his behalf, there would have been no attempt to escape. But he was awnre of what awaited him.
He knew enough of Mrs. Dyson to fear that her testimony was not likely to be shaken. Every incidence in her career, so far as it was known to counsel, was reproduced for the purpose of disconcerting and discrediting her. Nevertheless, she left the witness-box with her evidence unshaken.
Thus has Charles Peace been condemned. Hunted down while not yet fifty, there is in every feature of his forbidding face evidence that such a career is as unprofitable as it is criminal.
It is difficult to conceive what this malefactor might have been under other and brighter auspices. But, dedicated to crime from his youth upward, as years passed away, conscience, which in his case was never tender, became “seared as with a hot iron.”
When the final stage in his trial was reached, and Peace was asked if he had anything to say, he whimpered out, “Is there any use of saying anything now?”
But in his cell the convict collapses, and his courage proves melodramatic.