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To this the king replied that he had never intended to call them traitors; and that when they would recall their declarations and votes stigmatizing those who adhered to him as traitors, he would recall his proclamations. Thus messages passed back and forth two or three times, each party criminating the other, and neither willing to make the concessions which the other required.
He observed how the testimony of the other deponents confirmed that of Houseman; and then, touching on the contradictory parts of the latter, he made them understand, how natural, how inevitable was some such contradiction in a witness who had not only to give evidence against another, but to refrain from criminating himself.
"I am afraid, ma'am," says I, "that you have not hit on any little criminating discovery in the lodger's room?" She shook her head and sighed. It was a soft, languid, fluttering sigh and, upon my life, it quite upset me. For the moment I forgot business, and burned with envy of Mr. Yatman. "Don't despair, ma'am," I said, with an insinuating mildness which seemed to touch her.
As a supplement to reasoning comes recrimination: the pleasure of proving that you are right is surely incomplete till you have proved that your adversary is wrong; this might have been a secondary, let it now become a primary object with you; rest your own defence on it for further security: you are no longer to consider yourself as obliged either to deny, palliate, argue, or declaim, but simply to justify yourself by criminating another; all merit, you know, is judged of by comparison.
Some of my Baltimore friends would fain have persuaded me that, in the utter absence of criminating evidence, I should not be detained long; I forbore to argue, but my opinion remained always the same. I had heard how tenacious was the grasp of Federal officials, unless loosened by more golden oil than I could then command.
Has the blight of suspicion fallen upon me, too; and have you come to accuse me in my own house " "Miss Leavenworth," I entreated; "calm yourself. I accuse you of nothing. I only desire you to enlighten me as to your cousin's probable motive for this criminating silence. You cannot be ignorant of it.
"Don't wink, Dan'l McCoy," said Sally, in a voice which was meant to be very stern, but was laughably sweet. "P'ease, Missis, Toc's vinkin' too." Thus had Dan learned to express Thursday's name by his initials. There was a touch of McCoy senior in this barefaced attempt to divert attention from himself by criminating another.
These directions were for her first to destroy my letter by burning it, next to take in her hand the packet I was careful to enclose, swallow the powder accompanying it, and go to bed. The powder was a deadly dose of poison and the packet was, as you know, a forged confession falsely criminating Henry Clavering.
It is sufficiently remarkable, that notwithstanding the court must have seen the necessity of gaining over the party now in power, no vestige of any attempt of this kind has been discovered; and every criminating negotiation is ascribed to the dead, the absent, or the insignificant.
The story was not only plausible in itself, but accurately tallied with what before had seemed like the criminating evidence of the maid; tallied, moreover, precisely as to time, which would hardly have been the case had the story been an invention. As to the waistcoat which had figured so conspicuously in all the rumors, it appeared that suspicion had monstrously exaggerated the facts.
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