SIR HOWARD. I shall meet it, I trust, as becomes an innocent man and an upright judge. What do you charge against me?
BRASSBOUND. I charge you with the death of my mother and the theft of my inheritance.
SIR HOWARD. As to your inheritance, sir, it was yours whenever you came forward to claim it. Three minutes ago I did not know of your existence. I affirm that most solemnly. I never knew--never dreamt--that my brother Miles left a son. As to your mother, her case was a hard one--perhaps the hardest that has come within even my experience. I mentioned it, as such, to Mr. Rankin, the missionary, the evening we met you. As to her death, you know--you MUST know--that she died in her native country, years after our last meeting. Perhaps you were too young to know that she could hardly have expected to live long.
SIR HOWARD. I did not say so. I do not think she was always accountable for what she did.
BRASSBOUND. Yes: she was mad too; and whether drink drove her to madness or madness drove her to drink matters little. The question is, who drove her to both?
SIR HOWARD. I presume the dishonest agent who seized her estate did. I repeat, it was a hard case--a frightful injustice. But it could not be remedied.
BRASSBOUND. You told her so. When she would not take that false answer you drove her from your doors. When she exposed you in the street and threatened to take with her own hands the redress the law denied her, you had her imprisoned, and forced her to write you an apology and leave the country to regain her liberty and save herself from a lunatic asylum. And when she was gone, and dead, and forgotten, you found for yourself the remedy you could not find for her. You recovered the estate easily enough then, robber and rascal that you are. Did he tell the missionary that, Lady Cicely, eh?
LADY CICELY (sympathetically). Poor woman! (To Sir Howard) Couldn't you have helped her, Howard?
SIR HOWARD. No. This man may be ignorant enough to suppose that when I was a struggling barrister I could do everything I did when I was Attorney General. You know better. There is some excuse for his mother. She was an uneducated Brazilian, knowing nothing of English society, and driven mad by injustice.