At this moment three men, all of them known to the reader, entered the court; one was our old acquaintance Fullalove, another was of course Vespasian; and the third was the missing plaintiff.
A buzz announced his arrival; and expectation rose high. Mr. Colt called him with admirably feigned nonchalance; he stepped into the box, and there was a murmur of surprise and admiration at his bright countenance and manly bearing.
Of course to give his evidence would be to write “Hard Cash” over again. It is enough to say that his examination in chief lasted all that day, and an hour of the next.
Colt took him into the asylum, and made him say what he had suffered there to swell the damages. The main points his examination in chief established were his sanity during his whole life, the money settled on him, the means the doctors took to irritate him, and then sign him excited, the subserviency of his uncle to his father, the double motive his father had in getting him imprisoned; the business of the L. 14,000.
When Colt sat down at eleven o'clock on the second day, the jury looked indignant, and the judge looked very grave, and the case very black.
Mr. Saunders electrified his attorney by saying, “My advice is, don't cross-examine him.”
Heathfield implored him not to take so strange a course.
On this Saunders shrugged his shoulders, rose, and cross-examined Alfred about the vision of one Captain Dodd he had seen, and about his suspicions of his father. “Had not Richard Hardie always been a kind and liberal father?” To this he assented. “Had he not sacrificed a large fortune to his creditors?” Plaintiff believed so. “On reflection, then, did not plaintiff think he must have been under an illusion?” No; he had gone by direct evidence.
Confining himself sagaciously to this one question, and exerting all his skill and pertinacity, Saunders succeeded in convincing the court that the Hard Cash was a myth: a pure chimera. The defendant's case looked up; for there are many intelligent madmen with a single illusion.
The re-examination was of course very short, but telling; for Alfred swore that Miss Julia Dodd had helped him to carry home the phantom of her father, and that Miss Dodd had a letter from her father to say that he was about to sail with the other phantom, the L. 14,000.