A Ruined Life.
It was the saddest, saddest face I ever saw.
She stood before the stove in my front office, on that dark December day, and the steam from her wet, heated garments almost concealed her from my sight. Yet the first glimpse I caught of her, through the partition door, excited my interest to an unusual degree; and, though I saw her not again for a half hour, that one glance fixed her features in my memory as indelibly as they are printed there to-day.
It was term time, and the second return-day of the term. For ten days my eyes and brain had both been crowded with all that varied detail of business which sessions aggregate upon the hands and conscience of a rising lawyer; and the musty retinue of assumpsit, ejectment, and scire-facias had nearly vexed and worn out the little life I had at the beginning. But the criminal week, which was my peculiar sphere, was close at hand, and I looked to its exciting, riskful cases as a relief from the dull, dreary current of civil forms and practice.
The little room I dignified with the name of "front office" was filled, as far as seats went, with rough backwoodsmen, witnesses on behalf of a gentleman who occupied with me the snugly carpeted "sanctum" in the rear. While we discussed together the points of strength or weakness to be tested at the impending trial, the voices of the rude laborers reached us brokenly, and more than once words fell upon my ear which made me tremble for the sensibilities of the lonely woman who was with them. They meant no harm, those bluff, hearty men. A tear from her drooping eyes would have unmanned them. But they were not well-bred, nor tender to the weakness of the other sex. My poor client, as she afterward became, stood while they sat, kept silence while they laughed and jeered each other. It was not their fault that they never minded her. They were not hypocrites, that's all.
At length I had the happiness to see the door close on the last of them, and, after arranging the maps and diagrams which would be needed on the morrow, I called to the stranger to come in. She obeyed, hesitatingly, and then, for the first time, I saw that she belonged to that most forlorn and pitiable of all the many classes who throng around our mining districts, the recent Irish emigrant. The very clothes she wore were the same with which she dressed herself in the green isle far away, and her voice and manner had not yet caught that flippancy and pertness which pass among the longer landed for tokens of American independence and equality. She was certainly very poor, or the rough, wintry winds would not have been permitted to toss her long, black hair in tangled masses around her shoulders, or drop their melting snowflakes on her uncovered head. My chivalric interest died without time to groan, and whatever thought of profit or romance in assisting her I might have had, at the first sight of her, perished at the same instant. But I saw poverty and sorrow, and I determined in my heart, before she told her errand, that my life of legal labor should embrace at least one act done thoroughly and for nothing.
Her story was a short one. Her husband and herself had lived in a neighboring village. Others of their own people dwelt around them, and among these was an old woman and her son. No difficulty, that she knew of, had ever risen between her family and theirs. But, a few days before, as her husband was gathering fuel by the roadside, these two had rushed out on him, and in cold blood murdered him. The son had fled, and the murderer's mother, with barred doors and windows, forbade the vicinage of friend or foe. The broken-hearted wife, urged on to take such vengeance as the law afforded, had come to me and asked my counsel and assistance.
It was of little use to question her. Like most of her peculiar class, her mind could entertain but one idea, and that, in some form or other, recurred in answer to every inquiry I could make. Satisfying myself, however, that a murder had really been committed, and taking down such names and dates as were necessary for the initial steps of prosecution, I sent her home, with the assurance that justice should be done her, and her dead husband's ghost avenged.
The warrant was issued, the arrest made, the indictment found, the trial finished. There was no doubt of guilt. The murder was committed in the broad light of day, and many eyes had seen it. The counsel for the defence had felt the untenability of his position before a tithe of the evidence was in, and slipped down from innocence to justifiability, until his last hope for the prisoner was in the allegation of insanity, late suggested and faintly urged. It was useless. The twelve inexorable men brought in their verdict of "wilful murder," and Bridget Davanagh was sentenced to be hanged by the neck till she was dead.