As he spoke Patience’s blood congealed. The woman he depicted was enough to inspire any jury with horror. It was herself and not herself, a Galatea manufactured by a clever lawyer.
But it was Mr. Bourke’s privilege to give the Galatea a soul. Despite the older man’s greater legal experience, his superior wariness and subtlety, he was forced to admit that his son was a fool; that his son’s wife was a woman of brilliant intellect driven to desperation at being tied down to a fool; that so long as she had lived with him she had done her duty; that when she had returned as his nurse she had fulfilled her part of the contract to the letter; that never had she given her husband cause for real jealousy; that the witness himself had made a companion of her, and that he had been bitterly disappointed in his son.
The terrible facts could not be stricken out, but Mr. Peele, nevertheless, was made to pass the most uncomfortable hours of his life. “And in spite of these threats,” exclaimed Bourke, with the accentuation of one addressing an idiot at large, “in spite of the precision with which you remembered them, you permitted your family to implore her to return and become your son’s nurse; you permitted her to sleep in a room communicating with his, where, in a fit of passion—if she is the woman you profess to believe her to be—she could have murdered him in the dead of night with a carving knife or a hatchet, before any one—even the lightly sleeping Miss Mairs—could have flown to the rescue; you permitted her—” he turned suddenly and faced the jury, then wheeled about and regarded Mr. Peele with scornful inquiry—“you permitted her to drop morphine for your son, and to have unrestrained access to the drug, knowing that he in his agony would swallow whatever she gave him without question. Will you kindly explain to the jury whether this mode of proceeding was ingenuousness on your part, or criminal connivance?”
Mr. Peele’s under lip pressed the upper almost to the septum of his nose. His eyes half closed and glittered unpleasantly; but he controlled himself and answered,—
“I paid no attention to her threats at the time.”
“Ah! You did not believe in them? You admit that?”
“I classed them with the usual hysterical ravings of women. That was my error.”
“State, if you please, your specific reasons for your change of mind. You will hardly, as a lawyer, claim to have been converted to the defendant’s capacity for crime by the mere fact that your son died of an overdose of morphine?”
And throughout the long day Mr. Bourke hectored him, fighting him, point by point, smashing to bits his testimony relative to the events of the day preceding the death, evidence to which he was not an eye-witness, which he had received at second hand from his wife and son. The “cruel letter written to a dying man” was disposed of in a similar manner.
“You believed your son to be in a precarious condition when you counselled them to send for your son’s wife?”