When Sturges sat down the jury was told to rise. The judge stood under one of the lamps and read them his charge. He explained that unless they could find the prisoner guilty of murder in the first degree—of deliberate premeditated murder—they must acquit her. As the final quarrel had taken place an hour before the killing it was obviously impossible that she could have dropped the morphine in a moment of excitement; and a verdict of self-defence would be equally absurd. He also charged them that they were to consider the law in the case and nothing but the law,—that human sympathy must have no place in their verdict.
Bourke was too able a lawyer not to have the last word. As the judge sat down, he arose with several sheets of manuscript, and for twenty minutes asked the judge to charge the jury so and so, practically recapitulating all the strong points of the defence. The judge answered mechanically, “I so charge,” and at last the patient jury was conducted out of the court room and locked up. Bourke was surrounded at once.
As Tarbox, with Patience on his arm, left the court house and its crowd behind him, he exclaimed, “By God, that was a great speech of Bourke’s! There never has been a summing up like that in my time before, not even by him. But he’s the smartest man in Westchester County! Hanged if I don’t think he’s the smartest man in the State of New York. He’ll be in the United States Senate yet.”
XVIII
After dinner Patience went back to the court room to remain until ten o’clock, at which time the jury, if it had not come to a decision, would be locked up for the night. She sat surrounded by her counsel and the lawyers that had taken so deep an interest in the case. Bourke sat very close to her, and once or twice as she met his eyes she forgot the terrible moment to come. Few people were in the court house. No one expected a verdict that night.
It was exactly at half-past nine that the jury filed solemnly in. Patience’s knees jerked suddenly upward. She lost her breath for a moment. Bourke leaned over her and took her hand, regardless of the curious people surrounding them.
“Be brave. Be brave,” he said hurriedly. “Now is the time for all your pride and disdain.”
When she was ordered to stand up and face the jury, she did so with an air so collected and so haughty that even Simms murmured: “By Jove, she is a thoroughbred.”
There was a moment of horrible and vibrating silence, during which Patience’s brain reiterated hilariously: “Twelve little Jurymen all in a row. Twelve little heads all in a row.” Then the foreman was asked for the verdict. He cleared his throat, and without moving a muscle of his face, remarked,—
“Guilty.”