“S'tained!” said the judge.
Beattie was satisfied. The arrow had been pulled out, but its poison remained. He made use of another of his tantalizing pauses, then:
“It was shortly afterward that Mrs. Cheever divorced her husband, was it not?”
“I 'bject,” McNiven barked.
“S'tained!” the judge growled.
“Let us get back to the night when you and Mrs. Cheever went a-motoring.” Beattie smiled. “There was a beautiful moon on that occasion, I believe.”
The jury grinned. The word “moon” meant foolishness. Beattie took Jim through the story of that ride and that sojourn at the tavern, and every question he asked condemned Jim to a choice of answers, either alternative making him out ridiculously virtuous or criminal.
Beattie rehearsed the undenied facts, but substituted for the glamour of innocence in bad luck the sickly glare of cynicism. He asked Jim if he had ever heard of the expression, “The time, the place, and the girl.” He had the jury snickering at the thought of a big rich youth like Jim being such a ninny, such a milksop and mollycoddle, as to defy an opportunity so perfect.
The public mind has its dirt as well as its grandeurs; the pool that mirrors the sky is easily roiled and muddied. It was possible for the same people to abhor Jim and Charity for being guilty and to feel that if they were not guilty with such an occasion they were still more contemptible.
Thus ridicule, which shakes down the ancient wrongs and the tyrants' pretenses, shakes down also the ancient virtues and the struggling ideals.