“Bourke’s there, and I never saw him looking better,” he said, rubbing his hands. “Oh, he’ll pull you through. Don’t you worry.”
Patience was very nervous, but her years of self-repression and her experience at Peele Manor had forged a key with which she could at times lock nerve and muscle into subjection. As she entered the sheriff’s office she smiled upon Mr. Bourke as graciously as any young and beautiful woman would be expected to smile upon a great lawyer enlisted in her service.
Bourke came forward with the same ballast, although the red was in his face.
“It was better for you to come down here,” he said. “There could be no privacy in your cell, and we must have absolute privacy for these meetings. Of course you know that we are going to rehearse you. Mrs. Peele, this is my assistant, Mr. Lansing.” He indicated a good-looking well-dressed young fellow, with boyish blue eyes and a tilted nose. She liked him at once and gave him her hand. Mr. Simms had risen as she entered, and they had nodded distantly.
“Take this chair, Mrs. Peele,” continued Bourke. “Yes. This is the first of many rehearsals. We shall keep them up until the trial. You will imagine yourself on the witness stand. Mr. Simms, whom, fortunately, you don’t like, is the district attorney, Lansing is the judge, I am the counsel for the defence. I shall make the direct examination, and then Mr. Simms will cross-examine you with all the subtlety, the venom, and the irritating minutiæ of a district attorney determined to make himself immortal. I think we have outlined with reasonable completeness all that will or can be asked you, so that you can hardly be taken off your guard: you must be prepared to give direct answers without suspicious promptness, and avoid saying anything that could be misconstrued.”
“Must I go on the stand?” asked Patience, fearfully. “I thought one was not obliged to, and I shall be so nervous.”
Bourke shook his head emphatically. “The judge might reiterate a hundred times to the jury that your failure to go on the witness stand should not be counted against you, and still it would count—more than anything. It is something a jury never overlooks. These rehearsals are to keep you from being nervous, as much as anything else.”
“Do you believe I am innocent?” asked Patience, giving way to an uncontrollable impulse.
“I do—both personally and professionally.”
Simms laughed. “Bourke is so enthusiastic,” he said, “that if he had made up his professional mind that you were innocent, the personal would follow suit.”