He got out and went into the house, the gloomy sordid house where the brother lived who would sell his blood for a price!

* * * * *

Three or four days later we met again, but to my amaze Oscar had not changed his mind.  To talk of him as cast down is the precise truth; he seemed to me as one who had fallen from a great height and lay half conscious, stunned on the ground.  The moment you moved him, even to raise his head, it gave him pain and he cried out to be left alone.  There he lay prone, and no one could help him.  It was painful to witness his dumb misery:  his mind even, his sunny bright intelligence, seemed to have deserted him.

Once again he came out with me to lunch.  Afterwards we drove through Regent’s Park as the quietest way to Hampstead and had a talk.  The air and swift motion did him good.  The beauty of the view from the heath seemed to revive him.  I tried to cheer him up.

“You must know,” I said, “that you can win if you want to.  You can not only bring the jury to doubt, but you can make the judge doubt as well.  I was convinced of your innocence in spite of all the witnesses, and I knew more about you than they did.  In the trial before Mr. Justice Charles, the thing that saved you was that you spoke of the love of David and Jonathan and the sweet affection which the common world is determined not to understand.  There is another point against you which you have not touched on yet:  Gill asked you what you had in common with those serving-men and stable boys.  You have not explained that.  You have explained that you love youth, the brightness and the gaiety of it, but you have not explained what seems inexplicable to most men, that you should go about with servants and strappers.”

“Difficult to explain, Frank, isn’t it, without the truth?” Evidently his mind was not working.

“No,” I replied, “easy, simple.  Think of Shakespeare.  How did he know Dogberry and Pistol, Bardolph and Doll Tearsheet?  He must have gone about with them.  You don’t go about with public school boys of your own class, for you know them; you have nothing to learn from them:  they can teach you nothing.  But the stable boy and servant you cannot sketch in your plays without knowing him, and you can’t know him without getting on his level, and letting him call you ‘Oscar’ and calling him ‘Charlie.’  If you rub this in, the judge will see that he is face to face with the artist in you and will admit at least that your explanation is plausible.  He will hesitate to condemn you, and once he hesitates you’ll win.

“You fought badly because you did not show your own nature sufficiently; you did not use your brains in the witness box and alas—­” I did not continue; the truth was I was filled with fear; for I suddenly realised that he had shown more courage and self-possession in the Queensberry trial than in the trial before Mr. Justice Charles when so much more was at stake; and I felt that in the next trial he would be more depressed still, and less inclined to take the initiative than ever.  I had already learned too that I could not help him; that he would not be lifted out of that “sweet way of despair,” which so attracts the artist spirit.  But still I would do my best.