“Nothing, save that he frequented the Abbey Wood, his object being Afy Hallijohn. I had never exchanged a word with him until that night; but I knew his name, Thorn—at least, the one he went by, and by his addressing me as Bethel, it appeared that he knew mine.”
The case for the prosecution closed. An able and ingenious speech was made for the defence, the learned counsel who offered it contending that there was still no proof of Sir Francis having been the guilty man. Neither was there any proof that the catastrophe was not the result of pure accident. A loaded gun, standing against a wall in a small room, was not a safe weapon, and he called upon the jury not rashly to convict in the uncertainty, but to give the prisoner the benefit of the doubt. He should call no witnesses, he observed, not even to character. Character! for Sir Francis Levison! The court burst into a grin; the only sober face in it being that of the judge.
The judge summed up. Certainly not in the prisoner’s favor; but, to use the expression of some amidst the audience, dead against him. Otway Bethel came in for a side shaft or two from his lordship; Richard Hare for sympathy. The jury retired about four o’clock, and the judge quitted the bench.
A very short time they were absent. Scarcely a quarter of an hour. His lordship returned into court, and the prisoner was again placed in the dock. He was the hue of marble, and, in his nervous agitation, kept incessantly throwing back his hair from his forehead—the action already spoken of. Silence was proclaimed.
“How say you, gentlemen of the jury? Guilty, or not guilty?”
“GUILTY.”
It was a silence to be felt; and the prisoner gasped once or twice convulsively.
“But,” said the foreman, “we wish to recommend him to mercy.”
“On what grounds?” inquired the judge.
“Because, my lord, we believe it was not a crime planned by the prisoner beforehand, but arose out of the bad passions of the moment, and was so committed.”