Priam’s Refusal

“Leek in the box.”

This legend got itself on to the telegraph wires and the placards within a few minutes of Priam’s taking the oath.  It sent a shiver of anticipation throughout the country.  Three days had passed since the opening of the case (for actors engaged at a hundred a day for the run of the piece do not crack whips behind experts engaged at ten or twenty a day; the pace had therefore been dignified), and England wanted a fillip.

Nobody except Alice knew what to expect from Priam.  Alice knew.  She knew that Priam was in an extremely peculiar state which might lead to extremely peculiar results; and she knew also that there was nothing to be done with him!  She herself had made one little effort to bathe him in the light of reason; the effort had not succeeded.  She saw the danger of renewing it.  Pennington, K.C., by the way, insisted that she should leave the court during Priam’s evidence.

Priam’s attitude towards the whole case was one of bitter resentment, a resentment now hot, now cold.  He had the strongest possible objection to the entire affair.  He hated Witt as keenly as he hated Oxford.  All that he demanded from the world was peace and quietness, and the world would not grant him these inexpensive commodities.  He had not asked to be buried in Westminster Abbey; his interment had been forced upon him.  And if he chose to call himself by another name, why should he not do so?  If he chose to marry a simple woman, and live in a suburb and paint pictures at ten pounds each, why should he not do so?  Why should he be dragged out of his tranquillity because two persons in whom he felt no interest whatever, had quarrelled over his pictures?  Why should his life have been made unbearable in Putney by the extravagant curiosity of a mob of journalists?  And then, why should he be compelled, by means of a piece of blue paper, to go through the frightful ordeal and flame of publicity in a witness-box?  That was the crowning unmerited torture, the unthinkable horror which had broken his sleep for many nights.

In the box he certainly had all the appearance of a trapped criminal, with his nervous movements, his restless lowered eyes, and his faint, hard voice that he could scarcely fetch up from his throat.  Nervousness lined with resentment forms excellent material for the plastic art of a cross-examining counsel, and Pennington, K.C., itched to be at work.  Crepitude, K.C., Oxford’s counsel, was in less joyous mood.  Priam was Crepitude’s own witness, and yet a horrible witness, a witness who had consistently and ferociously declined to open his mouth until he was in the box.  Assuredly he had nodded, in response to the whispered question of the solicitor’s clerk, but he had not confirmed the nod, nor breathed a word of assistance during the three days of the trial.  He had merely sat there, blazing in silence.

“Your name is Priam Farll?” began Crepitude.