Jenny crept out, and, as laudable females sometimes do, listened at Simon’s key-hole.

“Lack-a-daisy, Sall, such a groaning and moaning; p’raps he’s a-dying:  put on your cap again, and tell Jonathan to go and see.”

Sarah did as she was bid, and Jonathan did as he was bid; and there was Mr. Jennings on the floor, blue in the face, with a halter round his neck.

The house was soon informed of the interesting event, and the bailiff was nursed as tenderly as if he had been a sucking babe; fomentations, applications, hot potations:  but he soon came to again, without any hope or wish to repeat the dread attempt:  he was kept in bed, closely watched, and Stephen Cramp, together with his rival, Eager, remained continually in alternate attendance:  until a day or two recovered him as strong as ever.  I told you, Simon Jennings, that your time was not yet come.

CHAPTER XLIV.

THE TRIAL.

THE trial now came on, and Roger Acton stood arraigned of robbery and murder.  I must hasten over lengthy legal technicalities, which would only serve to swell this volume, without adding one iota to its interest or usefulness.  Nothing could be easier, nothing more worth while, as a matter of mere book-making, than to tear a few pages out of some musty record of Criminal Court Practice or other Newgate Calendar-piece of authorship, and wade wearily through the length and breadth of indictments, speeches, examinations, and all the other learned clatter of six hours in the judgment-halls of law.  If the reader wishes for all this, let him pore over those unhealthy-looking books, whose exterior is dove-coloured as the kirtle of innocence, but their inwards black as the conscience of guilt; whitened sepulchres, all spotless without; but within them are enshrined the quibbling knavery, the distorted ingenuity, the mystifying learnedness, the warped and warping views of truth, the lying, slandering, bad-excusing, good-condemning principles and practices of those who cater for their custom at the guiltiest felon’s cell, and would glory in defending Lucifer himself.

In the case of sheer innocence, indeed, as Roger’s was—­or in one of much doubt and secresy, where the client denies all guilt, and the counsel sees reason to believe him—­let the advocate manfully battle out his cause:  but where crime has poured out his confessions in a counsellor’s ear—­is not this man bought by gold to be a partaker and abettor in his sins, when he strives with all his might to clear the guilty, and not seldom throws the hideous charge on innocence?  If the advocate has no wish to entrap his own conscience, nor to damage the tissue of his honour, let him reject the client criminal who confesses, and only plead for those from whom he has had no assurance of their guilt; or, better far, whose innocence he heartily believes in.