“She had no parents—there’s the great mystery of her case. Never had, so far as can be discovered. A gal without parents, without fri’nds of any sort, is edicated in a foreign land, l’arns to speak foreign tongues, plays on foreign music, and comes home a’ter she’s grown up, with her pockets as full as if she’d been to Californy and met a vein; and no one can tell where it all come from!”
“Well, that won’t tell ag’in her, ne’ther,” rejoined Hicks, who had now defended the accused so much that he began to take an interest in her acquittal. “Evidence must be direct, and have a p’int, to tell ag’in man or woman. As for Californy, it’s made lawful by treaty, if Congress will only let it alone.”
“I know that as well as the best lawyer in Duke’s; but character can tell ag’in an accused, as is very likely to be shown in the Oyer and Tarminer of this day. Character counts, let me tell you, when the facts get a little confused; and this is just what I was about to say. Mary Monson has money; where does it come from?”
“Those that think her guilty say that it comes from poor Mrs. Goodwin’s stockin’,” returned Hicks, with a laugh; “but, for my part, I’ve seen that stockin’, and am satisfied it didn’t hold five hundred dollars, if it did four.”
Here the reporter out with his notes, scribbling away for some time. That evening a paragraph, a little altered to give it point and interest, appeared in an evening paper, in which the conflicting statements of Tongue and Hicks were so presented, that neither of these worthies could have recognised his own child. That paper was in Biberry next morning, and had no inconsiderable influence, ultimately, on the fortunes of the accused.
In the bar-room of Mrs. Horton, the discussion was also lively and wily on this same subject. As this was a place much frequented by the jurors, the agents of Timms and Williams were very numerous in and around that house. The reader is not to suppose that these men admitted directly to themselves even, the true character of the rascally business in which they were engaged; for their employers were much too shrewd not to cover, to a certain degree, the deformity of their own acts. One set had been told that they were favouring justice, bringing down aristocratic pride to the level of the rights of the mass, demonstrating that this was a free country, by one of the very vilest procedures that ever polluted the fountains of justice at their very source. On the other hand, the agents of Timms had been persuaded that they were working in behalf of a persecuted and injured woman, who was pressed upon by the well-known avarice of the nephew of the Goodwins, and who was in danger of becoming the victim of a chain of extraordinary occurrences that had thrown her into the meshes of the law. It is true, this reasoning was backed by liberal gifts; which, however, were made to assume the aspect of compensation fairly earned; for the biggest villain going derives a certain degree of satisfaction in persuading himself that he is acting under the influence of motives to which he is, in truth, a stranger. The homage which vice pays to virtue is on a much more extended scale than is commonly supposed.
Williams’s men had much the best of it with the mass. They addressed themselves to prejudices as wide as the dominion of man; and a certain personal zeal was mingled with their cupidity. Then they had, by far, the easiest task. He who merely aids the evil principles of our nature, provided he conceal the cloven foot, is much more sure of finding willing listeners than he who looks for support in the good. A very unusual sort of story was circulated in this bar-room at the expense of the accused, and which carried with it more credit than common, in consequence of its being so much out of the beaten track of events as to seem to set invention at defiance.
Mary Monson was said to be an heiress, well connected, and well educated—or, as these three very material circumstances were stated by the Williams’ men—“well to do herself, of friends well to do, and of excellent schooling.” She had been married to a person of equal position in society, wealth and character, but many years her senior—too many, the story went, considering her own time of life; for a great difference, when one of the parties is youthful, is apt to tax the tastes too severely—and that connection had not proved happy. It had been formed abroad, and more on foreign than on American principles; the bridegroom being a Frenchman. It was what is called a mariage de raison, made through the agency of friends and executors, rather than through the sympathies and feelings that should alone bring man and woman together in this, the closest union known to human beings. After a year of married life abroad, the unmatched couple had come to America, where the wife possessed a very ample fortune. This estate the recently enacted laws gave solely and absolutely to herself; and it soon became a source of dissension between man and wife. The husband, quite naturally, considered himself entitled to advise and direct, and, in some measure, to control, while the affluent, youthful, and pretty wife, was indisposed to yield any of the independence she so much prized, but which, in sooth, was asserted in the very teeth of one of the most salutary laws of nature. In consequence of this very different manner of viewing the marriage relation, a coolness ensued, which was shortly followed by the disappearance of the wife. This wife was Mary Monson, who had secreted herself in the retired dwelling of the Goodwins, while the hired agents of her husband were running up and down the land in search of the fugitive in places of resort. To this account, so strange, and yet in many respects so natural, it was added that a vein of occult madness existed in the lady’s family; and it was suggested that, as so much of her conduct as was out of the ordinary course might be traced to this malady, so was it also possible that the terrible incidents of the fire and the deaths were to be imputed to the same deep affliction.
We are far from saying that any rumour expressed in the terms we have used, was circulating in Mrs. Horton’s bar-room; but one that contained all their essentials was. It is one of the curious effects of the upward tendency of truth that almost every effort to conceal it altogether fails; and this at the very time when idle and heartless gossip is filling the world with lies. The tongue does a thousand times more evil than the sword; destroys more happiness, inflicts more incurable wounds, leaves deeper and more indelible scars. Truth is rarely met with unalloyed by falsehood.
“This or that unmix’d, no mortal e’er shall find”—