The Berkeleys and their neighbors

by Molly Elliot Seawell

Olivia Berkeley’s heart was touched with pity for the unfortunate negro. His ailing wife came every day to tell the same rambling and piteous story. Besides, Cave had been at work with her—and he had great power with young imaginations. Pembroke felt a certain anxiety about the case. It was one of those which gave room for the sympathetic oratory which in the country districts in the South yet obtains. He felt at first that if he could make the jury weep, his success as a lawyer would be assured and immediate. But if he failed it would mean long years of toil at his profession to gain that which by a happy inspiration he could win at a single coup. He worked hard, and prepared himself—not solely for oratory, because the Hibbses had not only engaged a formidable array of local talent, but had got one, if not two great men from afar, and the attorney-general himself, to help the state. Pembroke went to Cave despondent and nervous about this.

“It is the best thing in the world for you,” answered Cave. “Don’t you see, the prosecution has taken the form of a persecution? And the bringing in of outside talent is the greatest luck I ever heard of. The jury, if I know anything of human nature, will not try the prisoner according to the law and the evidence. They will try you and the lawyers from elsewhere—with a strong predisposition in favor of their own county man. It will go hard with them if they can’t find some way to discount the outsiders. Of course, I don’t say that this feeling will be immediately developed, but it will come out just as certainly as arithmetical progression.”

“I hope so,” Pembroke answered devoutly.

The day of the trial came—a sunshiny one in midwinter. Every man in the county turned out. Nothing delights a rural Virginian so much as a forensic argument. He will ride twenty miles to hear it, and sit it out, in cold, or heat, or wet, or misery, or anything. Then, besides the interest naturally attaching to the case, was the curiosity to see and hear Pembroke. He had not added to his popularity by his absence after the war—and Madame Koller had been a millstone around his neck latterly. His father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather had been great lawyers before him—indeed there was no tradition or history which went back to the time when there had not been a Pembroke practicing successfully at the bar in the county. So while there was a current of disapproval against him, there was a strong undercurrent of local sympathy in his favor also.

Pembroke appeared early on the ground that morning, with Miles. It was his first opportunity except at the Campdown races to meet the county people of all classes generally. He went about among them cool, affable, and smiling.

“Oyez, oyez, oyez!” the sheriff’s loud voice rang out from the court house steps—and the crowd poured into the old brick building, and Pembroke, slipping in by another way entered upon the strain which lasted for five days and nights.

Great as the crowd was at first, it increased every day. Within two hours of the swearing in of the jury, just what Cave had predicted came to pass. The prosecution saw that the jury was on the side of a Pembroke—the Pembrokes had always been prime favorites with juries in that county, and the present one was no exception. Naturally, this nettled the attorney-general and the other great men who appeared for the State. It was certainly an exasperating thing to come so far to find twelve men obstinately bent on seeing things from the point of view of a handsome, plausible young advocate. The court, however, was all that could be desired. The attorney-general expressed his belief to his colleagues that if French Pembroke relied upon an eloquent speech, and the precedent of a Pembroke always carrying the winning colors in a jury trial, he would be mistaken—because Judge Randolph, silent and grim, looked keenly after the law. It was, as Pembroke knew, no easy undertaking to face the array of lawyers before him. Like them, he was shrewd enough to see that it would be a poor triumph to obtain a verdict that would not stand. Bob Henry became to him merely an incident. He looked day after day, during the trial, at the negro’s ashy, scared face in the prisoner’s dock, and sometimes felt a kind of wonder that a creature so ignorant and so inconsequential could be of such tremendous importance to any human being. For Bob Henry took up Pembroke’s mind, his soul, his nights, his days. He worked all day for him, the tension never weakening from the time he entered the court room in the morning, until by the light of sputtering candles he saw Bob Henry walked off in the sheriff’s custody at night. Then Pembroke would go to his little office, and lighting his lamp, begin work on his books and his notes. Even Cave and Miles were unwelcome then. He was engaged in a fierce intellectual struggle that he must fight out for himself. He had meant in the beginning to keep himself in condition, but he found out that it was one of the times when the soul triumphs over the body. He would throw himself on the lounge in his office toward daylight and snatch three or four hours of heavy and dreamless sleep, and then wake up with his faculties as keen and tireless as if he had slept for a week. He did not grow haggard and wild-eyed as men sometimes do under these excitements. He was pale, but singularly self-possessed and alert, and looked invariably trim and composed. He forgot everything in those days but the negro he was trying to save from the gallows. The lawyers who opposed him pounded him unmercifully. They too, caught the infection of enthusiasm. It would be scandalous to be beaten by an untried hand in such a case as that, with such admirable fighting ground as they had.

One afternoon, when the court adjourned early on account of a slight illness of one of the jurors, Pembroke mounted his horse and rode off far into the woodlands. When he was out of sight of the village he put spurs to his horse and dashed along the country road. It did him good. He felt already as if he had gained strength enough to last him even at the rate he was using it up if the trial should last two weeks more. Presently he brought his horse down to a walk, and enjoyed the strange restfulness and strength he felt possessing him. Suddenly he came face to face with Olivia Berkeley, riding quietly along the same road.

It would be no exaggeration to say he had forgotten her existence. He had not thought once of her or of Madame Koller, or Ahlberg, anybody but Bob Henry. It had not been ten days since he had seen her, but he felt as if it had been ten years. She looked very pretty and Amazon-like on her light-built black, in her close habit.

“Papa tells me great things of you,” she said, after the first greeting. “He is up, storming and swearing for breakfast by sunrise, so as to be at the court-house by nine o’clock. I never expected to see him so happy again in dear old Virginia. It is some excitement for him. As for Jane, she is beginning to think Bob Henry a martyr and a hero combined.”