“To Bumpkin?”
“No; to that there Locust; he axed un—”
“Never mind what he axed you;” said Ricochet, whose idea of humour consisted in the repetition of an illiterate observation; and he sat down—as well he might—after such an exhibition of the art of advocacy.
But on re-examination, it turned out that Mr. Locust had put several questions to Joe with a view of securing his evidence himself at a reasonable remuneration, and of contradicting Mr. Bumpkin.
This caused the jury to look at one another with grave faces and shake their heads.
Mr. Ricochet began and continued his speech in the same common-place style as his cross-examination; abusing everyone on the other side, especially that respectable solicitor, Mr. Prigg; and endeavouring to undo his own bad performance with the witness by a worse speech to the jury. What he was going to show, and what he was going to prove, was wonderful; everybody who had been called was guilty of perjury; everybody he was going to call would be a paragon of all the virtues. He expatiated upon the great common sense of the jury (as though they were fools), relied on their sound judgment and denounced the conduct of Mr. Bumpkin in the witness-box as a piece of artful acting, intended to appeal to the weakness of the jury. But all was useless. Snooks
made a sorry figure in the box. He was too emphatic, too positive, too abusive. Mr. Ricochet could not get over his own cross-examination. The ridiculous counterclaim with its pettifogging innuendoes vanished before that common sense of the jury to which Mr. Ricochet so dryly appealed. The edifice erected by the modern pleader’s subtle craftiness was unsubstantial as the icy patterns on the window-pane, which a single breath can dissipate. And yet these ingenious contrivances were sufficient to give an unimportant case an appearance of substantiality which it otherwise would not have possessed.
The jury, after a most elaborate charge from Mr. Justice Pangloss, who went through the cases of the last 900 years in the most careful manner, returned a verdict for the plaintiff with twenty-five pounds damages. The learned Judge did not give judgment, inasmuch as there were points of law to be argued. Mr. Bumpkin, although he had won his case so far as the verdict was concerned, did not look by any means triumphant. He had undergone so much anxiety and misery, that he felt more like a man who had escaped a great danger than one who had accomplished a great achievement.
Snooks’ mouth, during the badgering of the witnesses, which was intended for cross-examination was quite a study for an artist or a physiologist. When he thought a witness was going to be caught, the orifice took the form of a gothic window in a ruinous condition. When he imagined the witness had slipped out of the trap laid for him, it stretched horizontally, and resembled a baker’s oven. He was of too coarse a nature to suspect that his own counsel had damaged his case, and believed the result of the trial to have been due to the
plaintiff’s “snivelling.” He left the Court with a melancholy downcast look, and his only chance of happiness hereafter in this life seemed now to be in proportion to his power of making Mr. Bumpkin miserable. Mr. Locust was not behind in his advice on their future course; and, after joining his client in the hall, at once pointed out the utterly absurd conclusion at which the jury had arrived; declared that there must be friends of the plaintiff among them, and that Mr. Ricochet would take the earliest opportunity of moving for a new trial; a piece of information which quite lit up the coarse features of his client, as a breath of air will bring a passing glow to the mouldering embers of an ash-heap on a dark night.