[Beatrice by H. Rider Haggard]@TWC D-Link bookBeatrice CHAPTER XVII 5/12
Geoffrey said that so far as he was concerned he could get on alone.
He knew every point of the case, and he had got a friend to "take a note" for him while he was speaking. After some hesitation the solicitors decided not to brief fresh counsel at this stage of the case, but to leave it entirely in his hands. It would be useless to follow the details of this remarkable will suit, which lasted two days, and attracted much attention.
Geoffrey won it and won it triumphantly.
His address to the jury on the whole case was long remembered in the courts, rising as it did to a very high level of forensic eloquence.
Few who saw it ever forgot the sight of his handsome face and commanding presence as he crushed the case of his opponents like an eggshell, and then with calm and overwhelming force denounced the woman who with her lover had concocted the cruel plot that robbed her uncle of life and her cousins of their property, till at the last, pointing towards her with outstretched hand, he branded her to the jury as a murderess. Few in that crowded court have forgotten the tragic scene that followed, when the trembling woman, worn out by the long anxiety of the trial, and utterly unnerved by her accuser's brilliant invective, rose from her seat and cried: "We did it--it is true that we did it to get the money, but we did not mean to frighten him to death," and then fell fainting to the ground--or Geoffrey Bingham's quiet words as he sat down: "My lord and gentlemen of the jury, I do not think it necessary to carry my case any further." There was no applause, the occasion was too dramatically solemn, but the impression made both upon the court and the outside public, to whom such a scene is peculiarly fitted to appeal, was deep and lasting. Geoffrey himself was under little delusion about the matter.
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