The Fortunate Island, and Other Stories

by Charles Heber Clark

As two of the jurymen happened to be Irishmen, and one of them was a member of the Odd Fellows’ Society, Mr. Porter did not neglect to allude to the circumstance that Mr. Weems’s great-grandfather was born in Ireland; and the learned counsel took occasion to speak with indignant warmth of the wrongs that have been endured by Ireland, and to express his deep sympathy with her unfortunate and suffering people.

Of the noble aims and splendid achievements of the Odd Fellows’ Society, it was hardly necessary for Mr. Porter to speak at length. He could never hope to command language of sufficient force to explain his appreciation of the services rendered to Society by this invaluable organization; but the fact that both he and his client had for years belonged to the sacred brotherhood, to which they gave their energies and their devotion, was a sufficient guarantee of the strength of their affection for it.

In concluding, Mr. Porter merely desired to direct the attention of the gentlemen of the jury to the fact that if designing women were to be permitted to decoy unsuspecting men into contracts of marriage merely for the purpose of securing by artful means repudiation of the contract, so that the ground would be laid for a demand for money, then no man was safe, and no one could tell at what moment he might fall into a snare laid for him by an unprincipled adventuress. Mr. Porter then expressed his entire confidence in the intention of the jury to give a verdict for his client, and he sat down with a feeling that he had discharged his duty in an effective manner.

Mr. Shreek, in reply, observed that he should begin with the assertion that in two particulars this was one of the most remarkable cases that it had ever been his fortune to try. In the first place, he was unable to refer to an occasion, during more than twenty years’ experience at the bar, when he had had the honor of addressing a jury so intelligent and so worthy of being entrusted with interests of the very highest character as this one was; and never had he felt so much confidence as he now felt when he came before these highly-cultivated, keenly sagacious, and thoroughly representative gentlemen to ask for justice, simple justice, for an unhappy woman. In the second place, while it had fallen to his lot to witness more than one painful and repulsive scene, more than one example of the capacity of human beings for reaching the deepest depths of degradation, in their efforts to rob Justice of her own, and to make her very name a by-word and a reproach among the wise and the good, he had never yet received so violent a shock as that which came to him to-day, when, with mortification and grief, he had heard a member of the bar, sworn to seek to uphold the sanctity of the law and the honor of a proud profession, not only misrepresent the truth most villanously, but so far forget his manhood as to stoop to insult, to revile, to smite with a ribald and envenomed tongue, a fair and noble woman, who already bent beneath an awful load of domestic sorrow, and whose only fault was that she had come here to seek redress for an injury the depth of which no tongue could tell, the agony of which the imagination of him who has not fathomed all the mystery of a woman’s love could never hope to realize. He would only say, in dismissing this most distressing and humiliating portion of the subject, that he left the offender to the punishment of a conscience which, hardened and seared though it was, still must have in store for him pangs of remorse of which he, Mr. Shreek, trembled to think.

The learned counsel for the plaintiff asked the gentlemen of the jury to review with him the facts of the case, as presented to them by the evidence.

Already they knew something of the trustfulness and confidence of woman’s nature; their experience within the sacred privacy of the domestic circle had taught them that when a woman gave her affection, she gave it wholly, never doubting, never suspecting, that the object of it might be unworthy to wear so priceless a jewel. Such a creature,—the peerless being of whom the poet had eloquently said, that Earth was a Desert, Eden was a Wild, Man was a Savage, until Woman smiled—was peculiarly exposed to the wiles of artful and unscrupulous men, who, urged by those Satanic impulses which appear in some men as unquestionable proof of the truthfulness of the Scriptural theory of demoniac possession, should attempt to gain the prize only to trample it ruthlessly in the dust.

In this instance the destroyer came to find a pure and beautiful love, with its tendrils ready to cling fondly to some dear object. By honeyed phrases, by whispered vows so soon to be falsified, by tender glances from eyes which revealed none of the desperate wickedness of the soul within, by all the arts and devices employed upon such occasions, the defendant had persuaded those tendrils to cling to him, to entwine about him. Artless, unsophisticated, unlearned in the ways of the sinful world, the beautiful plaintiff had listened and believed; and for a few short weeks she was happy in the fond belief that this reptile who had crawled across the threshold of her maiden’s heart was a prince of men, an idol whom she might worship with unstinted adoration.

But she was soon to be undeceived. Choosing the moment when her natural defender was absent, when his coward’s deed could be done without the infliction of condign punishment from him who loved this his only child far better than his life, the defendant, scoffing at the holiest of the emotions, despising the precious treasure confided to his keeping, and gloating over the misery inflicted wantonly and savagely by his too brutal hand, cast off her love, closed his ears to her sighs, observed unmoved the anguish of her soul, and flung her aside, heart-broken and despairing, while he passed coldly on to seek new hearts to break, new lives to blast and ruin, new victims to dupe and decoy with his false tongue and his vile hypocrisy.

In support of his assertions, Mr. Shreek proposed to read to the jury some of the letters addressed by the defendant to the plaintiff, while still he maintained an appearance of fidelity to her; and the jury would perceive more clearly than ever the blackness of the infamy which characterized the defendant’s conduct, when at last he showed himself in his true colors.

Mr. Shreek then produced a bundle of letters, which had been placed in evidence; and when he did so, the newspaper reporters sharpened their pencils, the somnolent juryman awoke, the judge laid down his pen to listen. Leonie again wiped her eyes, and the crowd of spectators made a buzz, which indicated their expectation that they were going to hear something of an uncommonly interesting nature.