Plays : Second Series eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 184 pages of information about Plays .

Plays : Second Series eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 184 pages of information about Plays .
his criminality and the suffering he has undergone.  The latter is ten times heavier already.  He has lain in prison under this charge for more than two months.  Is he likely ever to forget that?  Imagine the anguish of his mind during that time.  He has had his punishment, gentlemen, you may depend.  The rolling of the chariot-wheels of Justice over this boy began when it was decided to prosecute him.  We are now already at the second stage.  If you permit it to go on to the third I would not give—­that for him.

     He holds up finger and thumb in the form of a circle, drops his
     hand, and sits dozen.

The jury stir, and consult each other’s faces; then they turn towards the counsel for the Crown, who rises, and, fixing his eyes on a spot that seems to give him satisfaction, slides them every now and then towards the jury.

Cleaver.  May it please your lordship—­[Rising on his toes] Gentlemen of the Jury,—­The facts in this case are not disputed, and the defence, if my friend will allow me to say so, is so thin that I don’t propose to waste the time of the Court by taking you over the evidence.  The plea is one of temporary insanity.  Well, gentlemen, I daresay it is clearer to me than it is to you why this rather—­what shall we call it?—­bizarre defence has been set up.  The alternative would have been to plead guilty.  Now, gentlemen, if the prisoner had pleaded guilty my friend would have had to rely on a simple appeal to his lordship.  Instead of that, he has gone into the byways and hedges and found this—­er—­peculiar plea, which has enabled him to show you the proverbial woman, to put her in the box—­to give, in fact, a romantic glow to this affair.  I compliment my friend; I think it highly ingenious of him.  By these means, he has—­to a certain extent—­got round the Law.  He has brought the whole story of motive and stress out in court, at first hand, in a way that he would not otherwise have been able to do.  But when you have once grasped that fact, gentlemen, you have grasped everything. [With good-humoured contempt] For look at this plea of insanity; we can’t put it lower than that.  You have heard the woman.  She has every reason to favour the prisoner, but what did she say?  She said that the prisoner was not insane when she left him in the morning.  If he were going out of his mind through distress, that was obviously the moment when insanity would have shown itself.  You have heard the managing clerk, another witness for the defence.  With some difficulty I elicited from him the admission that the prisoner, though jumpy [a word that he seemed to think you would understand, gentlemen, and I’m sure I hope you do], was not mad when the cheque was handed to Davis.  I agree with my friend that it’s unfortunate that we have not got Davis here, but the prisoner has told you the words with which Davis in turn handed him the cheque; he obviously, therefore, was not mad when he received it, or he would

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Plays : Second Series from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.