The audience would have given him any verdict he asked. Old Jessamine wept with certainty of his triumph. It was sublime to be the theme of such a rhapsody, and when the old man heard his rights proclaimed and his wrongs denounced by Stentor himself, he felt himself an injured god.
For five hours Webster—well, there was hardly a verb for what he did. Patty said that Webster just “websted.” Her word was as good as any. Then the court adjourned for the day and the spectators went out to breathe the common air.
The exhausted orator was led into the Governor’s Room in the City Hall, where wine was brought him in quantity. He was soon refreshed enough to receive congratulations on his achievement. But he shook his head and groaned, “I was very uncomfortable. I felt as if I were addressing a packed jury.”
The moan from the sick lion threw a great fear into old Jessamine’s heart, and he listened with terror next day to the long argument of the counselor who spoke for the city to a much diminished audience.
Waiting for the court to reach a verdict was worse than the trial. And the verdict was doom—doom with damages. An almost unanimous decision condemned Jessamine to poverty and decreed that he had no claim against the city.
Patty ran to her father’s side and upheld him, while her mother knelt and wept at his other elbow. But he was inconsolable.
He had counted on triumphing through the streets where he had shuffled. He had spent magnificently the money he was going to get. They hurried him home in a closed carriage, but he could not endure the calls of old friends and enemies who came to express their sympathy. He collapsed like the tall chimney the lightning had struck at Tuliptree.
It was Patty of all people who begged RoBards to take him and her and her mother to the farm. Even she longed for obscurity, for she also had squandered royally that money that never arrived.
They left the children at home with Teen, and set out as on a long funeral ride, with their dreams in the hearse. The journey by train was too public and the railroad was a new-fangled, nerve-wrecking toy. It was dangerous, too—almost as dangerous as the steamboats that were blowing up, burning up, and sinking on all the seas and rivers, dragging their passengers to triple deaths. People were forgetting how many people had been killed by horses. They seemed to think that death itself was a modern invention.
Old Jessamine had to endure a hired carriage with a shabby driver who talked and spat incessantly. When they reached at last the farm, the senile wretch was racked of body and soul and they put him to bed, a white-haired, whimpering infant.