In the course of one objection he was commanded by the Bench to sit down. He protested. The Recorder declined to listen to him further, reiterating the order that he be seated. Then with the air and manner of a little boy sent for misbehavior from the room, Orr half turned, hesitated, turned back, and through the exercise of guile unique and his own, succeeded in reengaging the Court in conversation, protesting his respect, denying his contumacy and presently he was continuing the very objection because of which he had been told to sit down. He did sit down, but long after, when he was ready, when he had succeeded in having his say and his way. Then when at last he did sit down it was with an air of mastery that would have become Napoleon at Marengo. At the moment he was not a lawyer merely, he was an actor, quasi-Shakespearian, a compound of irony and good humor, Falstaff and Mercutio in one.
All this, however, was, to vary the metaphor, but the preliminary canter. That Loftus had been killed was shown and admitted. But it had not been shown nor was it admitted that the defendant was the man. This defect a star witness was to repair. The star was Harris.
Yet, though a star, he looked ghastly. Whether ill or not, he was at least ill at ease. The smug, household-servant air had gone. He seemed to have come from turmoils in Tatterdemalia. He was bruised, dirty, unshorn. But the story which he had brought to the Chronicle he repeated, with embellishments at that. After retailing the tale, precising the motive and elaborating on it, he declared that the love of the defendant’s wife for Loftus was common talk—evidence which, though hearsay, Orr indifferently let pass.
Then, after identifying a pistol as the property of Annandale—an exhibit marked A which Peacock had already tried but, held up by Orr, had not wholly succeeded in fitting to the crime—Harris swore that on the night of the murder, at five minutes after twelve, in the room which he occupied at the top of Annandale’s house and which overlooked Gramercy Park, he heard a shot; that going to the window he looked out, that he could distinguish nothing, but that going then to the hall he heard someone coming in the house and looking down saw the defendant enter.
“Ha!” said Orr, taking him in hand, or rather, by the throat. For he made no attempt at ordinary amenities. He questioned him ferociously, with an air of personal hatred, with an air of saying, “Damn you, I have got it in for you now.”
“What is your name?” he asked.
“Richard Harris, sir.”
Orr pounded on the table in front of him. “Your name! Your name! I want your name, not something that you have made up like the rest of your rubbish. How many times have you been in jail? You were once employed in Hill Street, Berkeley Square, by the Duchess of Kincardine. When you absconded from there, where was it that the police caught you? Answer me.”
From behind the rail objections exploded like shell. But through the running fire of them Orr held his own, sandbagging the man with one charge after another, charge of theft, charge of forgery, but particularly of boasting the week before, in a Sixth Avenue saloon where grooms and footmen congregate, that he could testify to anything that he was paid for.
From ghastly Harris turned vermilion. The flush retreating left him livid. Had the fluted columns with their fabulous beasts fallen on him he could not have been more limp. At one question he swayed like an animal hit on the head. At another he hissed like a snake. There were times when he tried to hide from view. It was a curious example of the biter bit.
“That’s all,” said Orr with tigerish cheerfulness at last.
He had done him. He had given him the medicine. He had more in reserve. Peacock meanwhile had once jumped at Orr, his fist raised. Once he gave him the lie direct. Once he accused him of suborning. But Orr in sandbagging the witness with one hand, had another free for the prosecution. He was gluttonish, giving as good as was sent, very often better.
The Recorder, dismayed at the slugging, protested. “A human being is on trial for his life. I cannot try a case where only counsel are heard.”
Immediately Orr supplied him with a diversion. One after another witness for the defense scaled the stand, sleuths from overseas, experts and servants.
In his corner before them Orr prowled. At the witnesses for the prosecution he had roared, sometimes he had bounded at the Bar, sometimes when a move of his succeeded he raised his right hand and looked at it as though surprised that it was not blood red. But now with his own witnesses he was serene, entirely calm, refreshingly civil.
That civility awoke in Peacock the hyena. The first witness Orr produced, a man who, as it afterward appeared, had had a rough and tumble with Harris that morning in the corridor, he partly devoured. What was left of him he sent to the Tombs. As fast as witnesses could be produced he ate them up. It was terrific. You could not help feeling that there are safer places than the witness stand in a murder trial, that you ran the risk of being killed yourself, talked to death if nothing worse.
“Don’t go at him like a common scold,” Orr engagingly pleaded at one stage of the game. “Why browbeat and bully a witness as you do?” he expostulated at another. “That’s all, my friend,” he said to one witness, “and let me apologize for the District Attorney’s remarks.” From his tone and manner never in the world would you have thought him the man who, but a little before, had so thoroughly sandbagged Harris.
Meanwhile questions coarse as oaths, answers frank as sword thrusts, clashed and
