It was now for me to introduce the evidence on the part of the defense, and I did so in the order which reason at once suggests as the most natural and direct. First, of the marriage, which was not denied; then of the wife’s inheritance, which Andrews had received, and of which the proof was too full to be questioned; and then, as part of the _res gestæ_, letters written by Andrews at different periods, and in times of temporary absence, breathing confidence and love, and twice alluding to the suspicions which the idle gossip of his enemies had planted in the breast of his wife, and branding them as the offspring of an unfounded malice.
As I passed the papers to the clerk, I turned and looked upon Mr. Cornelius. His hands rested, clenched, upon his knees, but his eyes still reached for the gold which was fast receding in the distance. My client had, from the first, put off all womanly fear, and listened to the argument and watched the testimony with a clear brow, pale from resolution. Once, when the junior counsel in his opening speech, hinted at concubinage—a crime too frequent, too much bred into the customs of the city not to gain an easy credence—the blood mounted, suffused her temples, bathed her whole face in the ruddy light of a golden sunset, and then flowed back not to return again. Now, she was cool enough.
I next read letters from the mother, dated both before and after the daughter’s marriage. They were written with great elegance and simplicity, and all started from the same point, and all came back to it again—a mother’s care and unceasing anxiety for her daughter’s physical health, for her mental improvement, for her moral purity. The court was touched; a manly sorrow sat, veiled, upon the hard features of the jury; the miser shook, like an aspen-leaf, through every limb. I paused—and then took up another, the last, written but a few days prior to the mother’s death, the last words of that mother to her child, in life. Its manner, the solemn cadence of the periods, the matter, fell slowly and heavily upon the ear, like the thick breathings of one with whom the world has little more to do. The shadow rested upon the hand as it wrote. It was crowded with the griefs of many years. It spoke darkly of wrongs received; of a stern resolve; of labors endured, and endured joyously for the offspring of a love struck-down, and changed to very hate, even in the first hour of its young life; of one whose name her daughter’s lips had never syllabled; of one living, prosperous in the world, the daughter’s father and her husband. Wait, yet a little while, and she should know the blood which had begotten her, and claim her own—a rich inheritance equal with the noblest in the land. Alas! that waiting was to be too long! Death had sealed the mother’s lips, and there sat the daughter, hunted, hunted like a hare by the hounds of the law.