His lawers fought, but the judge said no,
That Jifkins hadn’t a ghost of a show,
And it ended there. Ah well!
Heigh-ho!
Jingle the court-house bell.”
The janitor finished his song and his task and departed. Silence fell on the big room, and the shadows of the waning day crept in and took, each one, its accustomed place. Darkness came, and, under its cover, ghosts of old and unnumbered tragedies, enacted through the years within the confines of the four gray walls, came out to stride back and forth across the wide spaces, up and down the enclosure for the bar, and in and out among the vacant chairs of the jury box; to ascend even to the sacred precinct of the bench, and stand grimly behind the chair from which white-robed Justice, with her bandaged eyes and well-poised scales, was supposed to listen to the cry of all who sought her aid.
CHAPTER II
AN ACT OF CHARITY
The rector of Christ Church did keep in mind, as he had said he would, the disappointed litigant in the Bradley case. He thought of her often. The picture of her crippled and mindless husband as he sat in his wheel-chair in the court-room, staring blankly into space, came not infrequently before his eyes. Nor did he, in any service in which he read the prayer, “For a Person under Affliction,” forget, while reading it, those two, who had in very truth been visited with trouble and distress. But he respected the woman’s wish. He did not call upon her, he did not seek, in any way, to cross her path. It is true that he made some inquiry concerning her, and learned something of her condition, of her grievance against society, and of her personal history. But of this last there was not much to learn. She had been a laborer’s daughter; she had become a laborer’s wife. She had lost her only child by death. She was now supporting her crippled husband and herself by the labor of her hands. She had moved, with limited activities, in a narrow world. It was not an unusual story. The only circumstance that lifted it out of the commonplace was the fact of the woman’s exceptional beauty. It was true, also, that she was possessed of unusual mentality, and an education much better than that possessed by the wife of the average day-laborer, and these things set her somewhat apart from the other women of her social class. In all other respects there was nothing to distinguish her from them, many of whom, indeed, worked harder, and suffered more severe privations, than did she.