Delaware; or, The Ruined Family. Vol. 3James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
General
Delaware; or, The Ruined Family. Vol. 3
James, G. P. R. (George Payne Rainsford)
Fiction
Harding, who was beyond doubt a handsome man, first advanced to the
bar. He was dressed with scrupulous care; and, with his neck wrapped
in a thick black cravat, his double-breasted waistcoat buttoned up to
his chin, and his dark frock-coat thrown back from his chest, he
looked very much like the private secretary of a German prince. His
cool and tranquil air, and easy carriage, might have been construed
into the expression of conscious innocence, but for a slight, very
slight sneer, that curled the corner of his lip, entirely different
from the indignant expansion of the nostril, with which innocence
sometimes meets a false accusation. He gazed for a single instant
round the court, and then withdrew his eyes, while all the reporters
scribbled rapidly in their note-books, preparing to make him a
newspaper wonder, and hand him down to posterity as one of the heroes
of the gallows. The next that came up was the well-known Tony
Smithson, who, though he had confronted more than one court of justice
on previous occasions, now, from the magnitude of the offence, and the
certainty that his conviction would follow, had lost all self-command,
and approached the bar, pale, trembling, and agitated. Next appeared
Sarah Ings, with the most persevering of all human passions, vanity,
still uppermost. Dressed forth in all the gay and vulgar smartness of
the Rue de Vivienne and the Palais Royal, with a touch or two of rouge
upon her cheeks to hide the ravages of apprehension, she presented
herself before the court that was to try her, and the judge who might
have to doom her to death, with a simpering and coquetish smile,
thinking fully as much of the impression of her charms and her finery
upon the spectators, as of her awful situation and its probable
result.
Last appeared Walter Harrison, with a bold, firm step, a bright red
spot in each of his pale cheeks, and his eye sparkling from feverish
excitement. He leaned his hand upon the bar, and after gazing rapidly
and boldly round the court, fixed his eyes upon the clerk of the
arraigns, as he proceeded to read the indictment.
That document was conceived in the usual tenor, and comprised all the
various acts which the prisoners could or might have committed in the
perpetration of their crime, with all the legal terms and expressions
necessary to prevent dubiety.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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