“Do you really regard these people as experts?” Peacock with pitying contempt asked of Orr. Then at once in rebuttal were other experts, equally pleased with themselves, humorously disposing of psychical epilepsy, affecting to regard it as a medicolegal myth. Among the spectators the usual jest circulated. The mendacious were subdivided into liars, damned liars, expert witnesses. Yet there you were. But not Orr. Tortuously he involved the deponents in helpful contradictions, smiling at them, at Peacock and the jury, smiling with an air of saying “You see what confounded idiots these imbeciles are.”
But the session was closing. One more witness remained to be called.
“Miss Waldron, will you take the stand?”
With the charming manner of the thoroughbred New York girl Sylvia circled the room. It was refreshing to see her, refreshing to hear the way in which she corroborated what Annandale had said.
“But,” objected Peacock, “you had just gone from his house; what did he go to yours for?”
“To restore a string of pearls.”
“Did he repeat to you anything that he had said to his wife?”
“Had he attempted to I should have refused to listen.”
“Was he drunk?”
“I cannot say. I have never seen anyone in that condition.”
“Did he make any threats regarding Loftus?”
“A gentleman does not make threats.”
“Miss Waldron, I will thank you to answer me directly. Did he or did he not?”
“He did not.”
“You swear to that?”
“I do.”
It was perjury, of course. Yet if a girl may not perjure herself like a lady for the man she loves things have come to a pretty pass. That idea apparently struck Peacock.
“Prior to the defendant’s marriage you were engaged to him, were you not?”
“I was.”
“Are you engaged to him now?”
Very prettily and gracefully, without embarrassment, rather with pride, Sylvia answered: “I am.”
“That’s all,” said Peacock. “The State rests.” But as he said it he looked at the jury and sighed, sighed audibly, much as were he adding, “You may judge the value of her testimony from that.”
The resting, however, was but figurative. In a moment the summing up began, a summing which, at first passionless as algebra, dealt with technical points.
“Gentlemen,” said Peacock turning again to the jury, “the evidence in this case is of the kind known to you perhaps as circumstantial. Evidence of this nature can lead and often does lead to a conclusion more satisfactory than direct evidence can produce. Circumstances cannot lie any more than facts can. Unless we resort to them it is in vain that we attempt to detect and to punish crime. Crime shuns the light of day. It seeks darkness. It courts secrecy. The assassin moves stealthily. He calls no witness to see him shoot his victim down. If you wait for an eyewitness you grant impunity to crime. It is true, and probably you will be so told by counsel for the defense, that there are cases in which the innocent have been convicted. Yet if men have been erroneously convicted on circumstantial evidence, so have they been convicted on direct testimony also. That is not, though, a reason for declining to accept such testimony. The possibility of error exists alike. But because men may err do they refuse to act? Because wheat may be blighted does the farmer refuse to sow? No, gentlemen. Until we have means of knowledge beyond our present faculties we must accept this kind of evidence or grant practical immunity to crime.”
The exordium concluded, Peacock warmed to his work. What he said he seemed to literally tear from his mouth. It was an arraignment not delivered but hurled, headlong, with the force and rush of a cavalry charge. Before it Orr’s points sank overwhelmed. To replace them with others of his own Peacock made new ones, evolving them with a fire and lucidity that was pyrotechnic. They were like bombs exploding before the jury’s eyes. He arraigned the defendant, arraigned the defense, stampeded their tactics, denounced Annandale’s manner, which he declared to be that of a hardened criminal, and pictured him as a jealous husband who, in accordance with a plot long premeditated, had first lured his victim to his house, then following him thence had murdered him in the darkness, but who now swore that he was drunk and remembered nothing. “Assuming that he was drunk,” Peacock shouted, “his intoxication was a feigned disguise, assumed for the purpose and legally an aggravation of his dastard crime.”
Beneath, in the unlovely street, an organ was tossing a jig. The jolts of it mounted to the court, fusing with Peacock’s voice, adding their vulgarity to his own, and it was to the wretchedness of them that he said at last: “My duty is done.”
He had scored points by the dozen. In as many seconds Orr had their heads off by half.
“Harris, gentlemen, is the rock of the People’s case. His hand fashioned it. Without him it crumbles. Let me array for you Harris against Harris.”
Leisurely Orr began, showing the man’s hand for what it was, not dirty and disreputable merely, but discredited.
“Apart from that hand where is the promised evidence? Where is it? Where is that evidence? Gentlemen, not a bit of evidence have you had, not a molecule, not a minim, not a mite. At best or at worst any evidence producible against this defendant would be circumstantial. In telling you the value of such testimony the District Attorney has been good enough to leave it to me to explain that testimony of this character must, to be conclusive, exclude every other reasonable hypothesis. The District Attorney has further told you that circumstances cannot lie. Of all his statements that one and that one alone is correct. Circumstances cannot lie. But witnesses can. It is from them that circumstances are obtained. And though they furnish a million circumstances, what are these circumstances worth if they themselves are unsound? How unsound that reptile Harris is, you have, I believe, been enabled to judge. But even otherwise,
