The Story of Ivy · Chapter 15 (2/2)

There were women now watching her intently who had come into Court that day with the strongest prejudice against Ivy Lexton. Yet they were conquered by what appeared to be her effortless, youthful charm, as also by her evident suffering. And then her many pitiful little efforts to say the best she could say for this man who had loved her moved her own sex, in some cases, to tears.

Many a woman there told herself that the witness now in the box had once loved the prisoner in the dock, even though she had not known it then, and though she would deny it, no doubt, even to herself, now.

At last came the moment which Ivy had visualised hundreds of times in the last few days⁠—the moment, that is, when Sir Joseph Molloy rose to begin his cross-examination of the chief witness for the Crown.

The silence that there had been before was as a loud noise to the silence there was now. But, as always happens, three or four people coughed nervously, and were angrily hushed by those about them.

What was Sir Joseph going to do? One thing certainly. It would be nothing less than his bare duty to try to prove to the jury that, because she had taken everything, and given nothing, the beautiful wife of Jervis Lexton had goaded this young man, Roger Gretorex, to the frenzy which leads to crime.

Not long ago Sir Joseph had caused two juries to disagree over what, to the plain man, had been a clear case of murder. That simply because he had been able to prove that the prisoner in the dock, who was a far from prepossessing type of bucolic lover, had been rendered jealous to madness by the foolish girl whom he had killed, and this though his act had been clearly premeditated. That had been a very different case from the Lexton case, and one not nearly so exciting to those in Court. Still, there were many present today who remembered the terrible cross-examination of the poor dead girl’s mother. It had been the way Sir Joseph had dealt with the trembling woman, the admissions he had forced out of her, which had saved his client’s life.