That night Orlean faced the most serious period in her life. She was a weak woman and her weakness had been the cause of it all. The trial was approaching—and the result was up to her. Her father's freedom, his continuance in the pulpit, his vindication of the action he had taken depended upon her, and her strength.
And that strength—for on that day she would have to be strong,—depended upon a lie.
CHAPTER XIV
THE TRIAL—THE LIE—"AS GUILTY AS HELL!"
"N OT guilty, your honor!"
The court room was silent for a time before any one stirred. It had been apparent that the decision would be so; because there were several reasons why the jury was constrained to render such a verdict.
Among the reasons, chiefly, was the fact that the plaintiff had failed to produce sufficient evidence to justify a verdict in his favor. His grandmother, his corroborating witness, had answered her last call just before she was to start for Chicago to give hers, the most incriminating testimony. The doctor who had attended his wife during her confinement was indisposed, and was represented only by an affidavit. But what had gone harder than anything against the plaintiff was his wife's testimony. Under the most severe examination, and cross examinations, she had stood on her statements. She had never loved her husband, and had not been, therefore, actuated by her father's influence into leaving him. She had instructed her father in all he had done, and that he was in no wise guilty as accused.
No jury could have rendered a verdict to the contrary under such circumstances, and no one—not even the plaintiff, had expected or even hoped that they would.
But in the minds of every man and woman in the crowded court room, N.J. McCarthy stood a guilty man. Not even the faintest semblance of doubt as to this lingered in their minds. It was merely a case of insufficient evidence to convict. And while the people filed out into the air at the conclusion, every one had a vision of that arch hypocrite in his evil perpetuation. In their ears would always ring the story Jean Baptiste had told. Told without a tremor, he had recited the evils from the day he had married her up until the day she had sold her birthright for a mess of pottage. So vivid did he make it all that the court was held in a thraldom. For an hour and a half he detailed the evil of his enemy, his sinister purpose and action, his lordly deceit, and his artful cunningness, and brought women to tears by the sorrow in his face, his apparent grief and external mortification.