They put up at an hotel with a Devonshire name in Covent Garden, and in the evening visited a music-hall where was a show called the ‘Rooshian ballet.’ They sat a little forward with their hands on their thighs, their ruddy faces, expressionless as waxworks, directed towards the stage, whereon ‘Les Sylphides’ were floating white and ethereal. When the leading danseuse was held upside down, Bowden’s mouth opened slightly. He was afterwards heard to say that she had ‘got some legs on her.’ Unable to obtain refreshment after the performance, owing to the war, they sought the large flasks in their bedroom, and slept, snoring soundly, as though to express even in their slumbers a contempt for the machinations of ‘that chap.’
VI
Though sorely tried by the ‘pernicketty’ nature of his niece, Steer had been borne up by the thought that he had only to hold on a little longer to obtain justice. How he had got her to the starting-post he really did not know, so pitiably had she ‘jibbed.’ The conviction that good solid damages would in the end be better for her than anything else had salved and soothed a conscience really affected by her nervous distress. Her pale face and reddened eyes on the way to the court disturbed him, and yet, he knew they were valuable—she was looking her best for the occasion! It would be all over—he told her—in an hour, and then she should go to the seaside—what did she say to Weston-super-Mare (with one syllable)? She said nothing, and he had entered the Law Courts with his arm through hers, and his upper lip very long. The sight of the two Bowdens seated on a bench in the corridor restored the burning in his heart. He marked his niece’s eyes slide round as they passed young Bowden. Yes! She would take him even now! He saw Ned shuffle his feet and Bowden grin, and he hurried her on—not for anything would he forego the five hundred out of that fellow’s pocket. At that moment the feud between him and his neighbour showed naked—those young people were but the catspaw of it. The custom of the court compelled them all presently to be sitting in a row, divided faction from faction by not more than the breadth of a pig. Steer’s thin face, racked by effort to follow the patter of the chap in a wig, acquired a sort of maniacal fixity; but he kept hold of his niece’s arm, squeezing it half-consciously now and again, and aware of her shrinking faint look. As for ‘those two fellers,’ there they sat, like as at an auction, giving nothing away, as if they thought—darn them—that the case must fail if they sat tight and did nothing. It seemed unjust to Steer that they should seem unmoved while his niece was wilting beside him. When she went up, trembling, into the ‘dock,’ a strong scent of camphor floated from Steer, stirred from his clothes by the heat within him. He could hardly hear her, and they kept telling her to speak up. He saw tears roll down her cheeks; and the ginger in his greying hair and beard brightened while he glared at those Bowdens, who never moved. They didn’t ask her much—not even Bowden’s counsel—afraid to, he could see! And, vaguely, through his anger and discomfort, Steer felt that, with her ‘ladylikeness,’ her tears, her shrinking, she was making a good impression on judge and jury. It enraged him to see her made to shrink and weep, but it delighted him too.
She came back to his side and sat down all shrunk into herself. Bowden’s counsel began outlining the defence, and Steer listened with his mouth a little open—an outrageous defence—for what did it amount to but a confession that the feller had played fast and loose! His client—said counsel—came into court not to defend this action but to express his regret as an honourable man for having caused the plaintiff distress, though not, he would submit, any material damage; for, now that they had seen her in the box, it would be absurd to suppose that what was called her ‘value in the marriage market’ had deteriorated. His client had come there to tell them the simple truth that, finding his feelings towards the plaintiff changed, he had considered it more honourable, wise and merciful to renounce his engagement before it was too late, sooner than enter into a union from the start doomed to an unhappiness, which, the gentlemen of the jury must remember, would, in the nature of men and things, fall far more heavily on the plaintiff than on the defendant himself. Though fully admitting his responsibility for the mistake he had made and the hastiness of which he had been guilty, the defendant believed they would give him credit for his moral courage in stopping before it was too late, and saving the plaintiff from the fiasco of a miserable marriage....
At the words ‘moral courage’ Steer had righted himself in his seat so suddenly that the Judge was seen to blink. ‘Moral courage!’ Wasn’t anybody going to tell those dodos there that the feller had been playing the rip with that cross-bred slut? Wasn’t anybody going to tell them that Bowden had put his son up to this to spite him—Steer? A sense of mystification and falsity muddled and enraged him; it was all bluff and blarney, like selling a horse....
With the robust common-sense characteristic—counsel went on—of plain and honest men, the jury would realise that one could not have things both ways in this world—however it might be in the next. The sad records of the divorce court showed what was the outcome of hasty and ill-considered marriages. They gave one to think furiously, indeed, whether these actions for breach of promise, with their threat of publicity, were not responsible for much of the work of that dismal tribunal. He would submit that where you had, as here, a young man, admitting his error and regretting it, yet manly enough to face this ordeal in order to save the plaintiff, and in less degree himself, of course, from a life of misery, that young man was entitled if not to credit, at least to just and considerate treatment at the hands of his fellow-citizens, who had themselves all been young and perhaps not always as wise as Solomon. Let them remember what young blood was—a sunny lane in that beautiful Western county, the scent of honeysuckle, a pretty girl—and then let them lay their hands on their hearts and say that they themselves might not have mistaken the emotions of a moment for a lifelong feeling.
“Don’t let us be hypocrites, gentlemen, and pretend that we always carry out that to which in moments of midsummer madness we commit ourselves. My client will tell you quite simply, for he is a simple country youth, that he just made a mistake which no one regrets more than he, and then I shall leave it in your hands—confident that, sorry as we all are for the disappointment of this charming girl, you will assess the real values of the case with the instinct of shrewd and understanding men.”
“Well, I’m darned!”
“H’sh! Silence in the court!”
The mutter which had been riven from Steer by counsel’s closing words, by no means adequately expressed feelings which grew with every monosyllable from that ‘young ruffian’ answering the cunning questions of his advocate.