The Hour and the Man (1914)
09 Jan 1914 • Drama, Short • 0h 20m
Two brothers lover her, one sincerely, he was a good man; the other loved her with a love that was lust, he was not a good man. She, not knowing, not seeing, encouraged the latter. After their marriage when the child came crying, she forgot the tender tie that bound her to the man blackguard, and thought only of the little innocent child and the forgotten duty she owed it. Timidly she asked him to right the wrong. He brought her into poverty. Yes, he listened to the whispered pleadings, but this masculinity could not hear. Then it was that the woman forgot she was a human mother and remembering only that she was a mother; her soul wandered back to the primitive ages her heart was conquered and trolled by primeval forces, and her nature became animal. The animal mother protects her young, and so this mother was about to kill the man; but he dies accidentally. And then our law accused her. The judges appointed a lawyer to defend her, and the battle for a human soul was fought. In ringing terms the prosecution demanded her life as the forfeit of the life she was supposed to have taken, and the jury listened to the logic of the law. The attorney for the defense spoke of the little life that had created the sin, if, however, the woman was guilty, and the jury listened to a plea of humanity and maternity, and heard the silent voice of right. In summing up, the woman's lawyer consulted his watch. There in the watch was a portrait of the father of her child and the creation of this misery, the man she had loved and for whom she had suffered and sorrowed, the man who was but a man. The woman glanced at it, and with the hopeless cry of an anguished soul she fainted. When she regained consciousness and learned that the jury had decided not to murder two lives to vindicate one, she went to the advocate of her sorrowful justice, and confessed she had learned it was his brother whom she was accused of killing; his brother who had lived a life of disgrace and with an assumed name. She knew from the picture in the watch marked "brother." The attorney is now the judge, the thirteenth juror. But in her second defense she had another and more eloquent attorney, the new-born grain of innocence. The babe offered its mute evidence and its silent plea, and obtained a second acquittal. The masterful brother took the mother of his brother's child into his arms, and the final pardon was granted.
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None, English
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United States
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