The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an AttorneyWarren, Samuel
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The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney
Warren, Samuel
Detective and mystery stories, English; Legal stories, English
I visited Jane Eccles the next day in Newgate. She was a well-grown young
woman of about two or three-and-twenty--not exactly pretty perhaps, but
very well-looking. Her brown hair was plainly worn, without a cap, and
the expression of her face was, I thought, one of sweetness and humility,
contradicted in some degree by rather harsh lines about the mouth,
denoting strong will and purpose. As a proof of the existence of this
last characteristic, I may here mention that, when her first overweening
confidence had yielded to doubt, she, although dotingly fond of her
nephew, at this time about eight years of age, firmly refused to see him,
"in order," she once said to me--and the thought brought a deadly pallor
to her face--in order that, should the worst befall, her memory might
not be involuntarily connected in his mind with images of dungeons, and
disgrace, and shame. Jane Eccles had received what is called in the
country, "a good schooling," and the books Mrs. Davies had lent her she
had eagerly perused. She was therefore to a certain extent a cultivated
person; and her speech and manners were mild, gentle, and, so to speak,
religious. I generally found, when I visited her, a Bible or prayer-book
in her hand. This, however, from my experience, comparatively slight
though it was, did not much impress me in her favor--devotional sentiment
so easily, for a brief time, assumed, being in nine such cases out of ten
a hypocritical deceit. Still she, upon the whole, made a decidedly
favorable impression on me, and I no longer so much wondered at the
bigotry of unbelief manifested by Mrs. Davies in behalf of her apparently
amiable and grateful protégée.
But beyond the moral doubt thus suggested of the prisoner's guilt, my
interviews with her utterly failed to extract anything from her in
rebutment of the charge upon which she was about to be arraigned. At
first she persisted in asserting that the prosecution was based upon
manifest error; that the impounded notes, instead of being forged, were
genuine Bank-of-England paper. It was some time before I succeeded in
convincing her that this hope, to which she so eagerly, desperately
clung, was a fallacious one. I did so at last; and either, thought I, as
I marked her varying color and faltering voice, "either you are a
consummate actress, or else the victim of some frightful delusion or
conspiracy."
"I will see you, if you please, to-morrow," she said, looking up from the
chair upon which, with her head bowed and her face covered with her
hands, she had been seated for several minutes in silence. "My thoughts
are confused now, but to-morrow I shall be more composed; better able to
decide if--to talk, I mean, of this unhappy business."
I thought it better to comply without remonstrance, and at once
took my leave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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