Solomonson and Isaacs, however, were sharp practitioners, and one of their first proceedings was to subpoena Doctor Jolly, who had attended Susan so long as her medical adviser, and who, of course, would be a very material witness: this was in order to prevent the other side from getting hold of him; and Miss Kingscott was also favoured with a little oblong slip of paper and a guinea in order to insure her attendance to the same end.
They were sharp enough, as Mr Trump found out to his cost; for before the day fixed for the trial, the dowager’s lawyers were at their wits end how to support their case. They had got hold of Joseph Begg, who had witnessed the marriage, and the curate who solemnised it, to bear out the alleged charge of conspiracy against Markworth, but beyond that they felt they could do nothing. If Susan were placed in the witness-box, and stood her cross-examination so as to prove her sanity, the case would be all put out of court, or, as Mr Trump graphically expressed it, “it would be all up.”
Indeed, Mr Trump had such very serious thoughts about the termination of the case, after he had thoroughly gone into the evidence pro and con, that he took upon himself to advise Mrs Hartshorne to compromise the matter before it came on for trial. This was just after Tom came back from his visit to Susan and reported how happy and changed she was.
But the dowager would not hear a word of compromise. She was determined to “fight it out on that line,” as General Grant is reported to have said when besieging Richmond in the Southern States, not only “if it took all the summer,” but the winter too.
Accordingly the case of “Markworth versus Hartshorne,” was regularly put down for trial; and Sergeants Thickhyde, Q.C., and Silvertong retained for the defence. The Jew lawyers had got hold of the well-known Brassy, considered A1 at the criminal bar, and Serjeant Interpleader, to conduct their case on Markworth’s behalf.
Volume Two—Chapter Eleven.
“The Girl I Left behind me.”
“Partant pour la Syrie” should have been the proper title for this chapter, only instead of la Syrie, read l’Abysinne; but as “The girl I left behind me” is more appropriate to the matter, if not to the motive of what follows, the latter heading has been adopted in preference. “The Girl I left behind me!” That would-be jovial and yet melancholy air, with its dreary rub-a-dub-dub which the band plays when the regiment is marching out so gaily oh! with the route for foreign service. The Light Brigade played it when they started off to the Crimea; the Royals when they sailed for India, to avenge the deaths of our murdered kinswomen at Cawnpore: how many that departed so gallantly marching to the strains of that sad hackneyed tune, saw their native land again, or met the welcome of the girls they left behind them!