"But, by all my hopes of heaven, I never wrote one of those infernal letters of the last parcel!" added Mr. Lytton.
"I never supposed you did. It will, no doubt, be possible to prove them to be forgeries. If we can do that the whole prosecution breaks down," replied Mr. Berners.
"They are forgeries!" said Alden Lytton, indignantly.
But that was more easily said than established.
A score of witnesses, one after the other, were called, and swore to the hand writing of Mr. Alden Lytton in those letters.
Other witnesses of less importance followed—waiters and chambermaids from the Blank House, Philadelphia, who swore to the fact that Mr. Lytton and Mrs. Grey had taken rooms together at that house on the fourteenth of September and had left it on the afternoon of the fifteenth.
The prosecuting attorney said that he might call other witnesses who had seen the parties meet as by appointment at the railway station at Forestville and proceed thence to Richmond, and others again who had seen them together in the Richmond and Washington steamer; but he would forbear, for he felt convinced that the overwhelming amount of testimony already given was more than sufficient to establish the first marriage. The second and felonious marriage was a notorious fact; but for form's sake it must be proved before the jury.
And then, to their extreme disgust, the Rev. Stephen Lyle, Joseph Brent and John Lytton were successively called to testify that they had all been present and witnessed the marriage of the accused, Alden Lytton and Emma Angela Cavendish, on the fifteenth of the last February, at Blue Cliff Hall, in this county and State.
John Lytton, who was the last of the three put upon the stand, came very near being committed for contempt of court by saying:
"Yes, he had witnessed his nephew's, Mr. Alden Lytton's marriage with Miss Cavendish, which he had a perfect right to marry her, never having been married before. None of the Lyttonses were capable of any such burglarious, bigamarious conduct as they accused his nephew of. Everybody knew the Lyttonses. The Lyttonses were none of your upstart judges"—this was aimed directly at the bench. "The Lyttonses was as old as the flood, for that matter!" and so forth, and so forth.