The speech of the first was as consummate a piece of special pleading, as ever was drawn up in ancient or modern days. On the evidence against himself, he commented with the utmost acuteness; and pointed out that there was no direct proof that he had ever been in the house of the unhappy man who had been murdered, except that afforded by the declaration of the young man, Walter Harrison, whose acknowledgement of participation in the crime, and evident desire to escape the punishment, by laying the whole of it upon other people, he trusted that the jury would remember and consider, before they attached any weight to his testimony. Mr. Beauchamp, he continued, had never seen him in the house, or near the house. At least, though he threw out a suspicion, yet he had not attempted to swear that he had beheld him there; and although William Small--an acknowledged smuggler--had declared that he came to his cottage in the boat with Mr. Beauchamp and the rest, yet he did not state whether he was there as a voluntary agent or as under compulsion. In regard to the footmarks in the house, he argued, that they could not be held as proving anything; for, in the number of men who might be supposed to commit such a crime as that, how many would be found with a foot of nearly the same size as his? Had his clothes been found bloody? he asked. Had any of the implements of robbery and housebreaking been found upon him? No! And the whole case against him, he contended, rested alone upon the very doubtful testimony of the young sailor, and the fact of his having paid the freight of the cutter with a note which had been in the possession of Mr. Tims.
He now paused for a moment; and, after having taken breath, and eyed the jury to see what effect his oratory had produced, he went on, in a solemn and serious manner:--"Gentlemen of the jury--having now commented upon the evidence against me, and stripped it of all those magnifying circumstances with which human malice is ever too prone to swell the charge against a person once suspected--having shown upon how slender a foundation rests the case in respect to myself--I will proceed to explain to you fully and honestly every circumstance that appears at all doubtful in my conduct, trusting that the confession of some errors which I deeply regret, will not prejudice you against me in the consideration of the present accusation. When I came down to Emberton with Mr. Beauchamp--against whom I do not pretend to say a word, although he was somewhat imaginative in his ways of acting and thinking--I had frequent occasion to go on his business to the house of the unhappy man who has been so cruelly murdered; and where I was always received with a degree of kindness, which certainly would never have prompted the base return which I am accused of having made. I there became acquainted with the young woman at the bar; an attachment grew up between us; and having--upon some speculative principles of general utility, which I now acknowledge to have been foolish and wrong--taken up a prejudice against marriage, I obtained her promise to elope with me without any ceremony of the church. In one service or another I had amassed a considerable sum, and her wages also were long in arrear. She with difficulty obtained payment from her master; and it was determined that we should go off together. Our plans, however, were hurried by Mr. Beauchamp's sudden departure from Emberton; and, hearing that there was a French vessel on the coast, we resolved to set off that ill-starred night. Just as I was about to proceed to Ryebury to meet her at the appointed hour, I found her in the streets of Emberton, whether she had been sent by her master to Lawyer Johnstone's for some stamps, and we were returning to Ryebury in order to procure her clothes, when we met three men dragging along Mr. Beauchamp, apparently dead. I did not well know what to do; and, in a scuffle with the men, I was of course overpowered. They treated me humanely, however, I must say, and told me that they neither wished to hurt me nor the gentleman they had got; and if I chose to go quietly along with them till they were safe in France, whither they were going, they would then set me at liberty; but they vowed with many imprecations, that they would not leave any one behind who could give information against them. I learned from this that they had committed some crime; but the impossibility of resistance, the desire of getting to France, and the hope of doing some good to my master, all induced me to yield quietly; and I accordingly got into the boat with them, and we went off. By the time we had reached the smuggler's cottage, however, I had learned enough to show me the horrid crime that had been committed; and, before I had been there quarter of an hour, this young man beside me, whom I have reason to believe was the principal actor in the Ryebury tragedy, whispered to me that I was in for it, as he termed it, and that, fair weather or foul, I must sail out the voyage with him and his companions. I asked him what he meant, and he then showed me that if I went back to London, or peached, as he called it, I should certainly be suspected as accessory to what had happened. I was overcome with the horror of my situation; and, on my remonstrating and begging him to allow me to depart, he threatened if I said another word to make it out so, that I should appear the principal in the murder. My courage and my resolution failed; and, weakly consenting to go with them, I suffered myself to be led on blindly, and do what they liked. The freight of the ship even I was compelled to pay, which I did with a pound note that Sarah there, had received from her poor master the night before, and had given me to keep. After our arrival in France, I gave myself up to despair; my hopes and prospects seemed utterly ruined, and, to keep away thought, I gambled deeply. Fortune, however, favoured me, and I won large sums. Suddenly the news that Bow Street officers were pursuing us in Paris, added new anxieties to my mind, and often I thought to give myself up, and tell all I knew. The apprehension that I would do so, it seems, induced the other prisoner beside me, to be beforehand with me; and, on the night that I was taken, when I heard his voice without, and saw Mr. Beauchamp enter the room, I certainly made a desperate defence, having no hope of being able to establish my innocence against the conspiracy that was evidently got up to make me the scapegoat. This, gentlemen, is the plain, straightforward story of what really happened. You must all see that I have had no time to make up such a tale, as I knew not what evidence would be produced against me. There stands the only witness I could bring forward to prove the truth of my story; but she, included in the same false charge, is prevented from giving evidence in my favour.
"It is all true! It is all true!" cried the unhappy girl, weeping bitterly; and Harding proceeded, "I have little more to add, gentlemen. Mr. Beauchamp's evidence is generally correct, though he was mistaken in one or two particulars; but I trust that you will allow the good character that he has himself given me, to counterbalance the assertions that he has erroneously made. In conclusion, I have only to say, that my very heart and soul revolts at the thought of the crime with which I am charged; and although I have been culpable in some things, let me trust that my sins have been sufficiently punished already by their consequences, and that a jury of my countrymen will not incur the awful responsibility of condemning an innocent man for a crime that never entered his thoughts."
With a fine person and graceful action, Harding delivered this address with so much effect, that a murmur of approbation filled the court when he concluded; and it was evident that the opinion of the jury was strongly affected by what he had said.
The gentlemen of the bar, however, whispered together with a significant smile, and one then remarked to another--"He brought in the girl devilish neatly. The fellow must have some good in him for that."
"Poo!" replied the more experienced counsel to whom he spoke. "He could not have made up his own story without it."
The judge now repressed the noise in the court, and the young sailor came nearer to the bar to address the jury.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I can't make you a fine speech like this man Harding, who, I begin to think, is the devil himself; for none but the father of lies could have got up such a string of them, do ye see! I told the whole truth in my declaration before the magistrates; and as you all know well enough, if what he has said were true, and I had wanted to betray him to screen myself, I might have been king's evidence as the folks wanted me. My lord the judge knows that, and every one else; and so I should have saved my life to a certainty, and pocketed the reward. No--no! I had no such thought in my head, do you see; and now, gentlemen, I will tell you truly how it all happened. It makes little odds to me whether you hang me or not; for I shall not live three months if you don't; and death is just as bitter to-morrow as to-day--though I never feared him much, somehow. The thing is this, gentlemen. I have a poor mother, a widow, living at Emberton; and to see her next to starving always has been a sore heart to me. Well, there were only three people in all the world that ever were very kind to me. The first was my mother, who forgave me all my faults, and loved me notwithstanding all the sorrows I brought her. The next was Captain William Delaware, who, when I got into a scrape about poaching, and might have been sent to the hulks, took me aboard his own ship, treated me as kindly as possible, and sent me back with a better character than ever I had before. The next was Mr. Henry Beauchamp--though I always took his name to be Burrel. He saved my life at the risk of his own; had me doctored and tended; was kind to me and my mother; gave me advice and encouragement which would have been a blessing if I had remembered it, and promised me help if I behaved well. But I did not behave well; for that cursed villain, his servant, Harding there, did me more harm than all his master could say did me good. He was always at me about what he called the unequal distribution of property; and it was very natural to get from thinking that other folks had no right to their property, to thinking that one should take it from them the best way one could; and so it turned out. I have told all about the robbery in my declaration; but I never could tell, gentlemen, what a turn it gave me, when I found they had murdered the old man. Ay, when first they came down, with their hands all bloody: I shall never forget it, sleeping or waking. However, that I got over, though it was always like a red-hot coal lying at my heart; but then I thought, that sometime it would go out of my head; till one day I went into a shop in Paris, to sell some of the things for them, that they had stolen, when they set fire to the lady's house upon the hill, and there I took up an English newspaper, and I saw all about the murder. That was bad enough; but when I found out that a set of rogues and fools had laid the blame of what we had done, upon the noblest gentleman in all the country, who would not hurt a fly, if it were not when he is alongside an enemy;--when I saw that, and thought how it would break his gallant heart, and that of his good father, and poor Miss Blanche's too; and remembered what Captain Delaware had done for me, and what his father and Miss Blanche had done for my poor mother--why, gentlemen, I thought I should have gone mad. Well, I believe I was mad; till, as good luck would have it, I found out Mr. Beauchamp, and told him all about it, and offered, if he would not take odds against the two fellows, but would go with me and face them singly--I offered, I say, to give them up, and myself too. Well, he told me of the king's proclamation, and promise of pardon, and all that; but I told him I would be tried too, like the rest; and away we went, and took them, though I got shot in the shoulder, and Mr. Beauchamp in the face. Now, gentlemen, you all know that I was left behind in Paris, and came over here of my own accord, and gave myself up without any one telling me; and so you may believe the rest of my story or not, as you like. All I want, is to clear Captain Delaware; for he is a noble gentleman, and a good officer, and a kind-hearted man--God bless him for ever!"
Harding had been really eloquent; for from the adaption of his story to the evidence produced immediately before, it was beyond doubt that he had poured forth his long address upon the spur of the occasion. Walter Harrison, however, was not eloquent; and, if there had been anything like eloquence in his speech, it was the eloquence of passionate sincerity. Still his tale produced the deep impression; Harding's alone the transient one. In the case of the latter, the jury and the spectators had felt that the account was plausible, and might be true; but; when Walter Harrison concluded his rough oration, there was not a man in all the court that doubted his assertions. There was a momentary pause, and then more than one person murmured, "Poor fellow!"
At length the judge summed up the evidence, with that clear, straightforward, noble impartiality, that dignified and equitable firmness, which is so universally characteristic of an English judge. He noticed Harding's defence, and gave him the full credit of every probability that existed in favour of the story he had told, but he noticed also the singular conduct of Walter Harrison, pointed out the minute resemblance between the declaration he had made in Paris, and that which he had made in England, and the harmony of the whole of it with both his conduct towards Beauchamp and the conversation he had held with the smuggler. Nevertheless, he said, there was a peculiar feature in the case which greatly affected it, and he begged the jury to give the prisoners the advantage of any doubt that might thence arise in their minds. This peculiar feature was, that Walter Harrison having refused to become king's evidence, the prisoners had not had an opportunity of cross-examining him, as they might have done to any other witness. At the same time, his declaration could not fail to have a considerable effect upon the minds of the jury in regard to the other prisoners, as well as to himself, and therefore it was to be received cautiously from the peculiarity adverted to.