Mr. M'Clelland could not take his farewell of the case without expressing his full concurrence in the opinion expressed by the Court regarding his learned friends opposite, whose ability during the contest was only to be equalled by the integrity with which they guided their conduct when defence had become worse than hopeless.
The defence of this remarkable suit will cost Mr. Curtis, it is said, upwards of seven thousand pounds.
A very few words will now complete this history. Let him who writes them be permitted to derive them from the public journals of the time, since it is no longer without deep humiliation he can venture to speak of himself. Alas and alas! too true is it, the penalties of crime are as stigmatizing as crime itself! The stripes upon the back, the brand upon the brow, are more enduring than the other memories of vice. Be innocent of all offence, appeal to your own heart with conscious rectitude, yet say, if the chain has galled your ankle, and the iron bar has divided the sunlight that streamed into your cell,—say, if you can, that self-esteem came out intact and unwounded, after such indignity.
I speak this with no malice to my fellow-men—I bear no grudge against those who sentenced me; too deeply conscious am I of my many offences against the world to assume even to myself the pretension of martyr; but I do assert that vindication of character, restitution to fair fame, comes late when once the terrible ordeal of public condemnation has been passed. The very pity men extend to you humiliates—their compassion savors of mercy; and mercy is the attribute of One alone!
The “Morning Advertiser” informed its readers, amidst its paragraphs of events, “That, on Wednesday last, Paul Gervois, the celebrated claimant to the estates of the late Walter Carew, was forwarded to Cork, previous to embarking on board the transport-ship 'Craven Castle,' in pursuance of the sentence passed upon him last assizes, of banishment beyond the seas for the term of his natural life. The wretched man, who since the discovery that marked the concluding scene of his trial, has scarcely uttered a word, declined all defence, and while obstinately rejecting any assistance from counsel, still persisted in pleading not guilty, to the last.
“It is asserted, we know not with what authority, that the eminent leader of the Western Circuit is fully persuaded not only of Gervois' innocence, but actually of his right to the vast property to which he pretended to be the heir; and had it not been for a severe attack of gout, Mr. Hanchett would have defended him on his late trial.”
Amidst the fashionable intelligence of the same day, we read that “a very large and brilliant company are passing the Easter holidays at the hospitable seat of Joseph Curtis, Castle Carew, amongst whom we recognized Lord and Lady Ogletown, Sir Massy Digby, the Right Hon. Francis Malone, Major-General Count Ysaffich, Knight of various orders, and Augustus Clifford, etc.”
I was on board of a convict hulk in Cork harbor from March till the latter end of November, not knowing, nor indeed caring, why my sentence of transportation had not been carried out. The shock under which I had fallen still stunned me. Life was become a dreary, monotonous dream, but I had no wish to awake from it; on the contrary, the only acute suffering I can trace to that period was, when the unhappy fate which attached to me excited sentiments of either compassion or curiosity in others. Prison discipline had not, at the time I speak of, received the development it has since attained; greater freedom of action was permitted to those in charge of prisoners, who, provided that their safety was assured, were suffered to treat them with any degree of severity or harshness that they fancied.
The extraordinary features of the trial in which I had figured—the “outrageous daring of my pretensions,” as the newspapers styled it—attracted towards me some of that half-morbid interest which, somehow, attaches to any remarkable crime. Scarcely a week passed without some visitor or other desiring to see me; and I was ordered to come up on deck, or to “walk aft on the poop,” to be stared at and surveyed, as though I had been some newly discovered animal of the woods.
These were very mortifying moments to me, and as I well knew that their humiliation formed no part of my sentence, I felt disposed to rebel against this infliction. The resolution required more energy, however, than I possessed, nor was it till after long and painful endurance that I resolved finally to resist. As I could not refuse to walk up on deck when ordered, the only resistance in my power was to maintain silence, and not reply to a single question of those whose vulgar and heartless curiosity prompted them to make an amusement of my suffering.