Chapter V: Part 5

“Why could you not, Mrs. Brown? It was no part of your duties to provide a home for a stalwart and able-bodied young man who was living in idleness, when you had your five little, orphan grandchildren to consider.”

“I did not look at it in that light, sir.”

“Surely it was very wrong of you to fail to do so. One would think a reasonable, right-minded person would hardly need to have it pointed out.”

“Well, sir,” said the old woman nervously, “I beg your pardon, I’m sure; but even if I had seen it in that way I might not have acted upon it.”

“Then I grieve to say, Mrs. Brown, that you appear to have no very exact standard of probity.”

“I--I--I’m sure, sir, I always try to do what is right.”

The charwoman had become the prey of a deep confusion.

“But,” said Northcote, sternly, “I have just had your own assurance that you do not. You would not, it seems, scruple to rob your poor grandchildren to gratify a whim; indeed, it may be said you have robbed them to gratify one. If I had to prosecute you before a jury of twelve of your honest countrymen, I could easily get you put into prison.”

“Well, sir,” said the old charwoman, beginning to tremble violently before this grim realism, “I--I am sure I have always tried to do my duty.”

“On the contrary, Mrs. Brown, you can scarcely be said to have a conception of what is your duty. At least the best that can be said for that conception is that it is arbitrary, perverse, contradictory. Expedience is the only duty known to the laws which regulate all forms of nature. The man called Jesus, the chief exponent of the contrary doctrine which appears to have had some kind of attraction for you, received a somewhat severe handling when He ventured to show Himself upon the platform; and you who in your dumb and vague and invertebrate manner have been seeking to imitate Him in one or two minor particulars, owe it to the generous forbearance of the recipient of your charity that you do not find yourself in prison. If the Crown in its expansive vindictiveness were to instruct me to prosecute you in what it is pleased to call a ‘court of justice,’ woe would betide you.”

The old woman grew as pale as ashes when confronted with the stern eyes of this advocate who turned white into black so easily.

“Why--why, sir,” she stammered, “you--you will make me think I have committed a murder if you go on!”

“I think I might do that without much difficulty. It would be quite simple to indicate to you in a very few words in what manner the Almighty has already seen fit to mark the sense of His personal displeasure. Is it not your own conduct, do you not suppose, which has provoked Him to strike down your innocent little grandchild with diphtheria? And if the child dies, which we will pray it will not, what would be easier than to render you responsible for its death? You see that is the worst of evil, it is so cumulative in its effect. Once it has begun its dread courses, who shall predict their end? A good action is self-contained and stops where it began; a bad one fructifies with immortal seed and practically goes on for ever--_vide_ the poet Shakespeare. Why, you are eating nothing. I am afraid I am spoiling your breakfast.”

“Oh, sir, I didn’t know I was so wicked,” said the charwoman, with tears in her eyes.

“Opinions are easily formed. As for reputations, they can be made and unmade and made again in an hour. But might I suggest, Mrs. Brown, that if one happens to be righteous in one’s own eyes, it does not very greatly matter if one goes to jail to expiate so pious an opinion. Do I make myself clear?”

“I--I don’t say I am good, sir, but--I hope I am not a downright bad one.”

“Well, to relieve your feelings, we will take it that you are a nebulous half-and-half and somewhat unsatisfactory sort of person who blindly follows a bundle of instincts she knows less than nothing about, just like a dog or a cat or a rabbit. And is not that what this elaborate moral code of ours throws back to if we take the trouble to examine it? And is not one entitled to say that a dog is a good dog, a cat a good cat, a rabbit a good rabbit, just as faithfully as it follows the instincts under its fur, whatever they happen to be? I have taken this excursus, Mrs. Brown, and have ventured to theorize a little, quite unprofitably, I grant, and at the risk of causing you some ill-founded alarm, because to-morrow I have to exercise all the talents with which the good God has endowed me in the cause of an extremely wicked woman who has committed a murder. Her crime is of a vulgar and calculating kind, perpetrated in cold blood; there is not a rag of evidence to save her from the gallows; but Providence has called upon me to attempt to save her from the fate she so richly merits. And there is an instinct within me, her advocate, for which I am at a loss to account by the rules of reason and logic, which calls on its possessor to save this abandoned creature at all hazard. If I obey that instinct I shall be a good advocate and a bad citizen; if I disobey it I shall be a good citizen but a bad advocate. Yet if I obey it I shall have fulfilled to the best of my ability the legal contract into which I have entered, and in so doing I shall be called on to commit a serious misdemeanor against human nature. On the other hand, if I disobey it I shall be causing human nature to be vindicated in a becoming manner, yet shall be guilty of an equally serious misdemeanor against myself; and further, I shall be false to the interests of my unfortunate client whose money I have taken, and render myself indictable for the offence of entering into a contract which I have wilfully refrained from carrying out. Please have another cup of tea, and kindly pass the marmalade.”

Northcote having shifted the ground of his reasoning from the personal to the abstract, the old woman regained sufficient confidence to pour out the tea without spilling it.

“Now,” said Northcote, “if you were in my position, would you try to enable one whom you knew to be a murderess to escape the gallows?”

“If I might say so, sir, I would try to have nothing to do with her at all.”

“In other words, you would rather starve than take her money?”

“Yes, sir, I think I would.”

“And cause _you_ to rob your poor little grandchildren?”

“I--I--don’t say that, sir.”

“Let us be as logical as we can. Again, would it not cause me to rob my poor old mother who has contributed her all towards my education, which I put to no useful end?”

“You would be honest, sir.”

“Honest, do you say! Do you call it honest to pervert and misapply the money my mother has lavished on my education?”

“Might you not use your education, sir, in some other way?”

“You would have me till the fields or be a clerk in an insurance office. Would that be honest in the sight of God, who has placed an instinct in me which I disobey? Surely one would say the truly dishonest man is he who is unfaithful to his nature. Had we not agreed upon that? If a man knows that he was designed by God to be an advocate, is he not called to practise? Why have the gift to prove that white is black and black is white if that gift is not to be carried to its appointed issue? If I do not barter it for a means of livelihood by proving the guilty to be innocent, how am I to discharge the higher function of proving the innocent to be not guilty? If, in my cowardice, I decline to go into court lest I save those who ought not to be saved, think of the innocent persons who will perish for the lack of a true advocate.”

“If we could only get to the real intention, sir,” said the charwoman solemnly, “of Him who winds up the watch and who is Himself the key, perhaps these things might not worry us. But God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform.”

“Yes,” said Northcote, rising from the breakfast-table, “there we have the fruit of all that our curiosity can yield to us. The power may be given to us to show that blue is green, but what does it stand for in the presence of the dread materialism of our religions?”

The advocate took three sovereigns from his pocket, three sovereigns which he had yet to earn, and placed them in the palm of the old charwoman.

“Mrs. Brown,” he said, “in the bleak and uncomfortable eyes of science your virtue will not bear inquiry; but if it were possible to take a plebiscite of the opinions of your fellows as hastily as possible upon the bare facts, before a professional advocate had a chance to pervert them, I do not doubt that you would be voted to a position among the elect. I believe myself that there is a greater amount of purely disinterested nobility among all sections of society than is generally known. Fifteen shillings I owe you for services rendered; twenty-five for your timely contribution towards my rent; and here is a pound with which to pay the kind doctor who is going to thwart the Almighty in His intention of causing your small grandchild to die. One of these days, as I say, Mrs. Brown, I hope you may meet my mother, for I would like to render to you the homage that all men desire to be allowed to render to good women.”

He seized the blackened, shrivelled, and not particularly clean hand and carried it to his lips.

XVII

MESSRS. WHITCOMB AND WHITCOMB

After the old woman had cleared the table of the breakfast things and she had gone away, Northcote sat nearly two hours in his easy chair at the fire, whose grate had never been allowed to consume so much fuel since it had been in his occupation, and with the aid of his brief proceeded to rehearse all the points of the case as they presented themselves to him. Warmth, food, and rest had overthrown his weariness, and his mind which in its operations was habitually so energetic began to shape and docket every conceivable aspect of the matter that could be of the slightest service to the accused. His reasoning was so amazingly copious that he foresaw and proceeded immediately to guard against a very real danger.

He might easily overdo it. The jury would not be men of education to whom fine points would appeal. Most probably they would be petty tradesmen whom it would be impossible to touch through the mind at all. He must take aim at their emotions. “I must use,” he said to himself in his mental analysis, “not a word beyond three syllables, and I must keep to the language of the Bible as well as I can. All my little pieces of embroidery, all my little bravura passages must bear that singularly excellent model in mind; its power of touching the commonest clay is so unfailing. Happily, in the course of my somewhat eclectic studies it has not been neglected. But beyond all I must try to get my address quite fine and close. One word too much and the whole thing fizzles out in a haze of perplexity. For that reason I am afraid I must reject some of my choicest and neatest thrusts at the moral code, which ought to tickle to death all minds with a gleam of humor. No, I must deny myself those bright excursions in which the cloven hoof of the artist betrays itself, and put my faith in a few common tricks performed with mastery. They at least should set up the honest English grocer on his hind legs and make him purr like anything.”

Before the ingenuity of this keen intelligence those obstacles which were bristling everywhere in the case, which to the average mind would have appeared insurmountable, began rapidly to melt away. It was with an ill-concealed joy that he shed the lime-light of paradox on each point that presented itself. That array of facts which a judge and jury of his countrymen would hug to their bosoms as so many pearls they could positively hold in their hands he would disperse with a touch of his wand. In the ripeness of his talent he foresaw that it would cost him no labor to demolish the evidence, to turn it inside out.

The world is full of great masterpieces that have been created out of nothing, haunting and beautiful things which have been spun by genius out of the air. And are not feats like these more wonderful than the exercise of the natural alchemy of change by which fairness is turned into ugliness, poetry into lunacy, good into evil, truth into error? The constructive faculty is rare and consummate; when it appears it leaves a track of light in the heavens; but the faculty of the demolisher is at work every day. Northcote was conscious that he was a born demolisher of “evidence,” of those trite dogmas, those brutalized formulas of the average sensual mind. When he looked for truth he sought it at the bottom of the well. On the morrow for the first time he would give free play to his dangerous faculty.

When he had blocked out and brought into harmony the main lines of his address to the jury, it occurred to him that his powers might receive an additional stimulus if he saw the accused, exchanged a few words with her, brought himself into intimate relation with her outlook. Up to this point she had been no more than an academic figure, around whom he had woven detached, somewhat Socratic arguments. He felt that to see and to know her would be to place yet another weapon in his hands, wherewith he would be enabled to dig another pit for those whom he had already come to look on as his, no less than her, deadly adversaries.

Already he was a little amused by his own complacency, the conviction of his own success. There was that curious quality within him that forbade his evoking the possibility of failure in so great an enterprise. He was so grotesquely sure of his own power to triumph over arbitrary material facts. Such a sense of personal infallibility could only spring from the profoundest ignorance, or from talent in its most virile and concentrated form. For what was more likely than that on inspection the accused would present one of the most abandoned figures of her calling? Was it not highly probable that nature, who takes such infinite precaution to safeguard her creatures, had caused this woman to assume the shape of a hag, a harpy, a thing of loathsome, terrible abasement? In that case, how would he dispose of evidence in its most salient form? How would he dispose of that immutable instinct, that deep conviction which is conferred by personality?

On the other hand, if the accused, by the aid of one of those miracles of which the world is so full, were to present the outlines of actual personal beauty, through whose agency common sensual minds are appealed to so easily, how slight would his difficulties be! In that event, so far as her advocate was concerned, the gilt would be off the gingerbread, his achievement would cease to be astonishing. Indeed, so finely tempered was his arrogance that to undertake the defence of one of this kind would be distasteful to it, so small would be the field afforded for personal glory. Rather than have to deal with one who could be trusted to be her own most efficient advocate, he would prefer that a veritable harpy out of a sewer should be placed in the dock. Could he have been allowed the privilege of choosing a theme for his powers, he believed that he should best consult the dictates of his talent by asking for a commonplace, unillumined woman of forty to be put up.

Deciding at last to seek an interview with the accused, he set forth to the offices of his client in Chancery Lane. On his way thither he occupied himself with drawing the portrait of the ideal subject as his mind conceived her. She would be forty, with her hair turning gray. She would be a plain, drab, slightly elusive figure, cowed a little by life, the privations she had undergone, and the ignominy and terror of her situation. The positive, the actual would be to seek in her; she would offer no target for too facile sympathies. Her inaccessibility to all suggestions of romance or of picturesqueness would lend to her predicament that extreme peril which it would be her advocate’s chief glory to surmount. All the same, he desired no ghoul, but a human being. She might be visibly stained, buffeted, common, broken, devoid of a meaning to eyes that were unacquainted with the poetry of misfortune, the irony of blunt truths; yet let a few rags of her sex remain, let her be capable of humiliation, of being rendered in piteous fear.

At the offices of Messrs. Whitcomb and Whitcomb in Chancery Lane he was informed that the senior partner was anxiously awaiting him.

“Ah, here you are at last!” exclaimed the solicitor, rising to receive him. “I thought you would have been round before.”

“I suppose you only honor a silk gown with a consultation in his own chambers?” said Northcote.

“Chambers, you call them! Well, did we not hold it last night?”

“One cannot very well hold a consultation with one’s client before one receives one’s brief.”

“What dignity!”

“Is it not at least half the stock in trade of mediocrity?”

“What modesty! Do I take it that the rather formidable ’Ercles vein of last night is really no more?”

“You may not. It is waxing higher and higher.”

“Defend us, gentle heaven and pious gods!”

“A truce to these pleasantries. Put on your hat and take me to the jail to see the accused.”

“You are going a little fast, my young friend, are you not? Is it wholly necessary that you should see the accused? Is it wholly to her interest or to yours?”

“Wholly, I assure you.”

“Well, before we get as far as that, I am particularly curious to know what line you have decided to take. Is it too much to ask that you have decided not to adhere to the acquittal? Speaking for myself, I must confess that the more consideration I give to the question, the less do I like that idea. Tobin would certainly have taken the line of insanity.”

“Last night you were good enough to inform me of that.”

“Well, my young friend, what is good enough for Tobin should be good enough for you.”

“That also you were good enough to inform me of last evening. But, my dear fellow, pray do not let us go over this ground again. Unfortunately Tobin and myself do not inhabit quite the same intellectual plane.”

“Unfortunately that appears to be the case,” said the solicitor.

“Tobin’s is the lower,” said the young man blandly.

“Tobin will be glad to know that.”

“I hope he may. After to-morrow he will be the first to admit it. But once more I crave to be allowed to conduct this case in my own way. I can listen to none; so be a good fellow, put on your hat, and come along to see the lady.”

“Well, I must say that for a youngster who is asked for the first time to conduct the defence in a capital charge you don’t lack confidence in yourself.”

“If I did I should not be holding the brief.”

“There is something in that. And in any case you will have to have your way now. It is too late in the day to stand up against you.”

Mr. Whitcomb pressed his bell and a clerk appeared.

“I want permission to interview Emma Harrison. Will you ring up the prison and see if you can get the governor to give it?”

The clerk withdrew.

“They are not likely to refuse it?” said Northcote.

“They ought not to be,” said Mr. Whitcomb, “but when you are confronted with Mr. Bumble in any shape or form, your motto must always be, ‘You never can tell.’”

“Arbitrary brute,” said the young man with vehemence, “I hate him altogether.”

“I also; but one should always do him the justice of conceding that he has arduous duties to perform.”

“Presumably that is the reason why he aggravates difficulties of those who are called to help him in performing them.”

“Is not that what we agree to call ‘human nature’? But really I think it is the duty of every citizen to think of him tenderly. He means well. He is not a bad fellow at bottom.”

“I have no patience,” said the young man truculently. “Mean well!--not a bad fellow at bottom! Why, he and his satellites are the custodians of the life and liberties of the whole population. One wonders how many innocent lives have been sworn away by this fat-witted blunderer who is barely able to write his own name.”

“You are too strong, my son. His responsibilities are immense; the wonder is that he plays up to them in the manner that he does.”

“You are all members of the same great and far-reaching society; you have all sworn allegiance to one another. Mediocrity arm in arm with Mediocrity; Law and Order arm in arm with Law and Order.”

“Insolent dog!”

“Better the insolence of the dog than the blind ineptitude of the donkey. The barking of a dog can frighten a rogue, but the braying of the ass fills every fool with courage. If _he_ is allowed to lift up his voice, why not _I_? is what Mediocrity is ever asking of itself. And up goes your own private and personal bray. The other ass says, ‘Good Lord, what a clear and beautiful note! Upon my word, I have never heard anything to compare with it.’ And you reply modestly, ‘My dear fellow, if you could only hear your own clarion tones, you would not say that. My own are modelled upon them, I assure you.’ ‘Well, my dear friend,’ the other ass eagerly rejoins, ‘if that is _really_ the case, you are eligible for election to our Academy.’ ‘Oh, my dear sir,’ say you, with your hand on your heart and tears in your voice, ‘you overwhelm me with honor. This is the proudest moment of my existence.’ ‘Not at all, my dear fellow, tut! tut!’ says the other ass; ‘great privilege to have you among us. And there is only one rule, you know, to which you have to subscribe.’ ‘Ah!’ you exclaim, in an awed whisper. ‘The rule is quite simple,’ says the other ass, putting his great flabby lips to your long furry ear. ‘It is merely that every member of our distinguished brotherhood shall unite in extolling his confrères.’”

Happily the clerk reappeared at this moment, just as the solicitor, chuckling furiously, was preparing to launch a veritable thunderbolt.

“Well?” he said to the clerk, and suddenly whisking away his head to laugh.

“Sir Robert Hickman’s compliments, sir, and Harrison’s legal advisers may see her in consultation at any time.”

“There, what do you say to that!” said the solicitor, casting a merry glance at the young advocate.

“Courteous fellow,” said Northcote; “one R. A. to another R. A.; it is perfectly charming. I trust that in accordance with latter-day practice you keep a reporter on the premises, in order that these high-toned amenities may be communicated to the press.”

“My dear boy, you are perfectly incorrigible,” said the solicitor, sticking his hat on the back of his head and insinuating his portly form within the folds of his imposing outer garment. “But one of these days you will know better.”

“When I am old enough to be eligible for election, I dare say; in the meantime let me rejoice that I am not yet brought to heel.”

Laughing at the vagaries of each other, advocate and client went out together, called a cab, and drove to the prison.

XVIII

TO THE PRISON

No sooner had Northcote entered the vehicle than his mood underwent a curious transformation. His heart began to beat rapidly, his hands to shake, his knees to tremble. His brain grew so hot that a vapor was thrown in front of his eyes. Extraordinary emotions overcame him to such a degree that he could not discern any of the faces in the street.

“You are very quiet,” said the solicitor, after awhile.

“Yes, I dare say,” said the young man, in a voice which in his own ears sounded thin and high-strung.

“Why not talk? That is your _métier_. You were much more amusing last night on the way to Norbiton.”

“Somehow I don’t feel as though I have anything to say. My head is so full of this affair.”

“Don’t think about it too much or it may get you down,” said Mr. Whitcomb, puffing quietly at his cigar; “although to-morrow you are certain to be in a horrible funk, as it is the first job of the kind you have ever had to tackle. Nor will it make it the easier for you when you reflect that the line you have decided to take will add immensely to your difficulties.”

Mr. Whitcomb spoke with the quiet incisiveness of one whom experience has rendered callous. From the leisurely candor and nonchalance of his manner a trial for murder was made to appear of rather less moment than the obtaining of a judgment in a county court. Such coolness contrasted so oddly with the young man’s own perturbation that he was thrown completely out of conceit with himself.

“I suppose you played cricket, Whitcomb, at that highly fashionable seminary of yours?” said Northcote abruptly.

“I was a ‘wet bob’ myself,” the solicitor rejoined; “but I think I know why you ask the question.”

“It is like sitting with your pads on waiting for the fall of the next wicket when you are playing for your ‘colors.’”

“I agree,” said the solicitor, “that there are few things so disagreeable as that. But you are bound to have a wretched time until the case is over. It is for that reason that I continue to urge you to heed the counsels of experience.”

“Well, I will see her first,” said Northcote tenaciously.

That air of self-confidence which had tried the patience of the solicitor so extremely had vanished altogether from the manner of his youthful companion; for to Northcote’s horror, every phase of the defence which, with so much elaboration, he had already prepared, every word of the memorable speech to the jury which had been packed away sentence by sentence had passed away out of his consciousness so completely that it might never have been in it. Pressing through the crowded traffic with a vertigo assailing his eyes and his ears, and a paralysis upon his limbs, his mind was a blank which might never have been written upon. Pray heaven this would not be his condition when he rose to-morrow in the court; for what is comparable to the despair that overtakes an imperious nature when it is publicly abased by a physical failure? In imagination he was already sharing the sufferings of the young Demosthenes when derided by the populace.

At last came the dread incident of the hansom stopping before the gateway of the prison. The portals rose mournfully through the twilight of the December morning. While the hansom stood waiting for them to revolve, a little company of loafers and errand-boys collected about the vehicle, and regarded its occupants with curiosity not unmingled with awe.

“Lawyers,” said a denizen of the curb to a companion, whose world like his own was cut into two halves by the huge wall of the prison.

“Ugly----!” said his friend, spitting with extraordinary vehemence upon the wheel of the vehicle.

The huge door, studded with brass nails, swung back soundlessly upon its invisible hinges, and the hansom passed over cobbles under an archway that seemed to reverberate so much with the sound of its progress, that Northcote felt his brain to be shattered. He was unable to witness the little drama that was enacted behind him, of the great door shutting out the row of solemn faces, standing upon the dim threshold of the outer world to peer into the gloomy precincts of oblivion.

The courtyard seemed to consist of low doorways with gas lamps burning within them, endless expanses of wall, windows heavily barred, and extremely official-looking police-constables. The little daylight of the streets through which they had passed had diminished sensibly.

Mr. Whitcomb led the way out of the hansom as it stopped at a doorway at the end of the courtyard, slightly less insignificant than the rest.

A policeman without his helmet, but with three stripes on the sleeve of his tunic, and whose hair, glossy with grease, fell over his low forehead in the form of a fringe, came out of the semi-darkness to receive them.

“If you will take my card to the governor I shall be obliged to you,” said Mr. Whitcomb.

“Yessir,” said the constable, with a deferential alacrity touched with a slightly abject humility. “Will you please to step this way, sir, and mind your ’at, sir, against the top of the door?”

They followed the policeman along a gaslit passage which seemed endless. Their boots echoed and reëchoed from its stone flags up to and along the low, white-washed ceiling. Ascending a flight of steps they were shown into a room through the iron bars of whose window a few irregular beams of daylight struggled painfully, and arrived in such an exhausted condition that they appeared to be quite at a loss to know what to do when they had entered. The room was small, warm, and so full of bad air that Northcote found the act of respiration difficult. Three or four massive chairs, covered in brown leather, were disposed in the corners, while the middle was in the occupation of a table, upon which was a bottle filled with water with a glass fitting over the top of it.

“The atmosphere of this place makes one feel ill,” said Northcote, when the constable had borne away Mr. Whitcomb’s card.

“They have another apartment which will make you feel a lot worse than this,” said that gentleman cheerfully, unbuttoning his coat and providing himself with a chair. “Take a seat and make yourself quite at home. It will take our polite friend with the hair at least three-quarters of an hour to penetrate through morasses of red tape and officialdom in its most concentrated form into the governor’s parlor and then to get back again to us. I have known him take an hour.”

“Good Lord,” said Northcote, “I shall be dead long before that.”

“Pretend you are Dante, and try to think out the first canto of your ‘Inferno,’” said Mr. Whitcomb, taking a crumpled copy of the _Law Journal_ out of his coat, fixing his glass, and proceeding to peruse it with admirable spirit and amiability.

Northcote remained standing. He was too completely the victim of the emotions that had been excited in him to simulate composure. He walked up and down the room in nervous agitation, and examined the bare walls and the grated window.

“I see they have revived this flatulent controversy in regard to the value of circumstantial evidence in the capital charge,” said Mr. Whitcomb.

“One would certainly say it ought always to be admitted under the greatest reserve,” said Northcote.

“It would be impossible to work without it in almost every trial for murder.”

“Well, I shall tell the jury to-morrow, overwhelming as in this case it may seem, to reject it altogether.”

“And what do you suppose the judge will tell them, may I ask?” said Mr. Whitcomb.

“I am expecting a bit of a duel between us,” Northcote replied. “But if he can undo the work I have set myself to accomplish, he is a better man than I take him to be, that is all.”

The solicitor did not frame his reply immediately, but a rush of blood to his complexion announced what its nature would have been. The fellow was really like a child in some things! How could he suppose that these outworn pleas that long ago had been worn threadbare by every country attorney could carry the least weight with men who bore sound heads on their shoulders? If he had nothing better on which to base his defence than the inadmissibility of circumstantial evidence, there was no need for him to go into court at all. He was declining to call the witnesses who would attempt to prove insanity; he was rejecting the one natural and reasonable line, which had the sanction of those who were older, wiser, altogether more capable than himself, in favor of a single desperate throw with the dice--and here was what that throw amounted to!

“I must venture to say,” protested the solicitor, “you surprise one more and more. If you have nothing more original than that to show the jury, a weaker judge than Brudenell would demolish it in a few minds like a house of cards.”

“We shall see.”

“Why, my dear fellow, all the world knows there is no escape from circumstantial evidence in murder cases. Have you asked yourself the question how many verdicts could have been taken in recent years upon notorious crimes, had it been ruled out?”

“I expect to have my own way of answering the question,” said the young man.

“Yes, and Brudenell will have his.”

“Quite probably, I grant you,” said the young man, with a tenacity that his companion felt to be exasperating; “but unless one is wholly deceived in the estimate of one’s own capacity--forgive this very unprofessional candor in regard to oneself--the jury will answer it in the fashion I ask them to, not in the fashion asked of them by Mr. Justice Brudenell and Mr. Horatio Weekes.”

“Well, my young friend,” said Mr. Whitcomb, scrutinizing him with the patient wonder that is bestowed on a rare quadruped in a zoological gardens, “pray don’t think me impertinent if I confess that you are the most baffling compound I have ever encountered.”

“Notably,” said Northcote, “of self-conceit, pig-headedness, childishness, ignorance, and effrontery. I dare say you are right, for have I not committed the unpardonable offence of assuming that I am wiser than Tobin, wiser than yourself, also of considering myself the superior of the judge upon the bench?”

“You may be perfectly entitled to this self-estimate after the event,” said the solicitor, with a candor he was unable to repress; “but I would like to say that only a very complete, and even astonishing, success to-morrow can possibly justify it.”

“I recognize, I concede that,” said the young advocate, with an unexpected humility. He passed his handkerchief across his dripping forehead. “Is it not true of all who undertake to perform a miracle that nothing short of a consummate achievement will satisfy those eternally timid ones who have not even the courage to be credulous? It is the fate of all who break with custom to be derided, but was anything ever done for the world by conforming to it?”

“Custom is a useful safeguard against ridicule, at any rate,” said Mr. Whitcomb.

“Ridicule!” cried the young man. “Would you have one fear it?”

“Yes, my son,” said the solicitor, with calmness and unction, “one would have every professional man fear it like the plague.”

“God knows we are all susceptible to the fear of ridicule,” said the young man, sweating profusely, “but is it not those fearful minds that defer perpetually to custom that build their actions upon it? Where would the epoch-makers have been had they been weak enough to defer to ridicule? No movement was ever initiated but what in the beginning its progenitor was laughed out of court.”

“Do I understand, my young friend,” said Mr. Whitcomb in his suavest accent, “that you propose to elevate the hanging of Emma Harrison into a world movement?”

“You may,” said the young man, lifting up his chin, from which great beads were rolling, “for the theme is fit for a world-drama. And he who is cast for the leading rôle shall make it so.” With unsteady steps Northcote passed out of the gloomy corner in which he stood to where the daylight struggled through the grated window. He pressed his forehead against the bars. “One would have preferred Gethsemane,” he muttered; “at least there would have been space and air.”

Mr. Whitcomb readdressed himself to the study of the _Law Journal_. The conquest of that irritation which overcomes on occasion the sternest discipline had long been elevated into a mental habit by this sagacious gentleman, who felt it to be the due of the inimitable coolness with which he looked at life. Yet could he have indulged an explosion without endangering his stupendous dignity, he must have done so here. This ridiculous fellow was getting on his nerves. Whatever could have led him to entrust him with a case of this kind? Was it not an evil hour when he climbed those foul and dark stairs to hale him from the obscurity of his garret? What could be clearer than that this madman was about to make a public exhibition of himself and of his client? After all, the unearthing of this man Northcote was no more than a whim of Tobin’s formed on the spur of the occasion. Tobin, it was true, was highly successful, yet he was himself a somewhat odd, whimsical fellow, a Celt; and really his suggestion ought to have been seen at the deuce. Yet it was no good to repine; he had gone too far to draw back; time, the tyrannical determining factor of every event, allowed him no choice. This man Northcote must be Emma Harrison’s advocate or she must do without one.

In the meantime Northcote’s tense emotion had been well served by the cold iron against which his face was pressed. It seemed to possess a medicinal quality which entered his arteries. Once more his mind was able to exert its faculty. His courage, his fecundity of idea, the sense of his destiny, had seemed to return.

The discomposure of the solicitor and the nervous tension of the advocate were intruded upon at last by the constable, who had taken rather more than three-quarters of an hour to perform his mission.

“Will you come this way, gentlemen?” he said.

They were conducted along more dark and apparently interminable passages, up one flight of stone steps and down two others, until at last they found themselves in a room similar to the one they had left, except that it was larger and gloomier, smelt rather more poisonous, and looked somewhat more funereal.

Northcote’s heart was again beating violently as he stepped over its threshold, and his excitement was not in the least allayed when he discovered that there was no one in it.

“If you will kindly take a seat, gentlemen,” said their guide, “Harrison will be here in a few minutes.”

“In other words, twenty,” said Mr. Whitcomb, beginning a tour of inspection of this dismal apartment. “These small mementoes may have some slight interest for you, my friend,” he said to Northcote.

He drew the young man’s attention to a row of shelves placed at right angles to the window. They were raised tier upon tier to the height of the ceiling, and were crammed with crude staring objects. A close inspection revealed them to be busts made of plaster of Paris.

“Why, what are these horrible things supposed to represent?” said Northcote, with a thrill in his voice.

“These,” said Mr. Whitcomb cheerfully, “are the casts taken after death of a number of ladies and gentlemen who have had the distinction of being hanged within the precincts of this jail during the past hundred years. If you will examine them closely, you will be able to observe the indentation of the hangman’s rope, which has been duly imprinted on the throat of each individual. Also, you may discern the mark of the knot under the left ear. Interesting, are they not? The official mind is generally able to exhibit itself in quite an amiable light when it stoops to the æsthetic.”

“I call it perfectly devilish,” said Northcote, shuddering with horror.

“They must have quite a peculiar scientific interest,” said Mr. Whitcomb, “for each lady or gentleman who may chance to enter this apartment to consult his or her legal adviser. Are you able to recognize any of these persons of distinction? If I am not mistaken, the elderly gentleman on the third row on the right towards the door is no less an individual than Cuttell, who poisoned a whole family at Wandsworth. High-minded and courteous person as he undoubtedly was, I must say Cuttell certainly looks less _outré_ now he is dead, and more in harmony with his surroundings, than when he entered this room, and asked me in a mincing tone, with all the aitches misplaced, whether in my opinion any obstacle would be raised against his getting his evening clothes out of pawn, as he desired to wear them in the dock during his trial.”

“For the love of pity, spare me!” cried Northcote, pressing his fingers into his ears, “or I shall run away.”

“The gentleman with the protruding lip on the second shelf towards the window is, unless my eyes deceive me, one Bateman, who slaughtered his maiden aunt with a chopper and buried her in a drain--”

Northcote spared himself further details in the history of Mr. Bateman by laying violent hands upon his counterfeit presentment, and hurling it with terrific force against the iron window bar, whence it fell to the floor in a thousand pieces.

“Upon my soul, I have a great mind to go through the lot,” he said, livid with fury.

“Pray do so, by all means, dear boy,” said Mr. Whitcomb, with that unction which never forsook him, “and you will find your art-loving countrymen will avenge this outrage upon the private and peculiar form of their culture by one day insisting that your own effigy is placed on these historic shelves.”

XIX

THE ACCUSED

Renewed assaults upon these interesting _objets d’art_ were averted by sounds outside in the corridor. Northcote imposed a superhuman control on all his faculties that his agitation might be restrained, when the door opened and two shadowy figures, barely visible at first, crept silently into the darkness of the room.

The two figures were those of women. By the time Northcote had evoked a sufficient force of will to meet their outline, the one that first encountered his glance was so brutalized and repulsive that his eyes were detained with a fascinated sense of horror. It belonged to a creature that was degraded, squat, coarse, insensitive. He felt almost the same reluctance in approaching it as he would a cobra.

She, however, was not the one whom Mr. Whitcomb, with all the polished readiness of the thoroughgoing man of the world, had advanced to meet, and to whom he had held out his hand. The young man heard with stupefaction, while his own gaze remained riveted to the features of the sibyl, the bland and courtier-like tones of the solicitor caressing and paying homage to a figure in the background, a figure which was still and silent, which he could not see.

This person, however, had no interest for Northcote; she was so obviously the female warder who had accompanied the murderess. One so characterless, so formless, could not be said to exist in the presence of this detaining horror, whose personality thickened, as with pestilence, the noisome air of the room. And it was this obscene life that he had pledged himself to save!

Strangely, this blunt fact did not dominate his consciousness in the manner it must have done one of a less alert perception. For with a perversity that transcended the will, at this moment his thoughts were overspread by the comedy that was being enacted by the suave lips of the solicitor. The harmonious stream of mellow commonplaces that Mr. Whitcomb was pouring into the ear of the shrinking official nonentity who kept in the background accosted his sense of the comic with a kind of lugubrious irony. With a critical detachment which even startled himself, he seemed to awake to the fact that he was standing outside his _milieu_, that he was witnessing a drama within a drama; and he found himself in possession of the singular reflection that here was a robust yet delicate adumbration of the farcical which would make the fortune of a writer for the stage. For there was something indescribably ludicrous in the rich voice of the solicitor enunciating his own private opinions upon the weather, the state of trade, the inconvenience of winter and its bearing upon the perennial problem of the unemployed, when the grotesque horror which dominated the room was at his elbow, emitting the glances of a venomous snake.

Suddenly Northcote heard Mr. Whitcomb call his name.

“Come here, Mr. Northcote; I want to introduce you.”

In a hazy, stupefied manner the young man obeyed.

“Mrs. Harrison,” said the solicitor, “allow me to present my friend Mr. Northcote. I feel sure you will find a friend in him too.”

The advocate grew aware that a weak, nerveless hand was resting in his, but his eyes were still riveted on the face of the ghoul.

“Say something, you fool, and play up a bit,” said the solicitor’s calm voice in his ear.

“Er--a nice day, Mrs. Harrison,” said the young man, without knowing a word he was uttering.

“Yes,” said a hesitating voice, which by no possibility could have proceeded from the tightly closed lips of the creature whom his gaze was devouring.

The words broke the illusion at a blow. The brutalized countenance under whose dominion he had fallen was that of the female warder. The person with whom the solicitor had been conversing with such cheerful volubility, to whom he was now himself speaking, was the poisoner, the cold-blooded denizen of the curb and the gutter. He drew his hand away quickly, with an involuntary emotion, from those hot, flabby, and damp fingers that he still detained.

“I know, I know,” the woman seemed to breathe, as though she were interpreting an unspoken thought.

“I may tell you, Mrs. Harrison,” said the solicitor, with his well-fed chuckle, “that if your knowledge can compare with that of this gentleman, you are one of the wisest persons in the world. He will tell you so himself.”

So crude a gibe had the happy effect of restoring to Northcote his self-possession.

“My name is not known, Mrs. Harrison,” he said, with his fibres stiffening, and his voice growing deeper and falling under control, “but you can trust me to eke out my inexperience with a determination to serve you to the utmost of my power.”

Northcote saw that two luminous orbs were being defined slowly in the centre of the gloom. For an instant no reply was made to his words, and then he was conscious that a faint voice was whispering, “If your friend would go right away with the warder--right away to the end of the room, then perhaps we could speak with one another here where it is so dark.”

“Whitcomb,” said Northcote, in a low tone, “please take the warder right up to the window at the other end, where you can see to read, and read the _Law Journal_ to her.”

“How d’ye do, ma’am,” said the solicitor, turning to the ghoul in his promptest, blandest, and most musical manner. “I think it has been my privilege to meet you before, although you may not remember me. Is that boy of yours prospering in the police force?”

“I haven’t got a boy in the police force,” said the sibyl, in a loud, strident tone.

“Then which of your blood relations is it, may I ask, who is connected with the police force? I am sure you have some one.”

“I have an uncle.”

“Ah, to be sure, an uncle! But it is so easy to make a mistake on a point of official nepotism. Come along this way, ma’am, and tell me all about your uncle.”

XX

THE INTERVIEW

Prisoner and advocate were left together amid recesses of impenetrable gloom in the darkest corner of the large apartment. It seemed to enfold them, and to render the pallor of their faces almost invisible. The eyes alone encountered those of each other, and even these could embody no phase of meaning. A strange continence, as sharp and clean as that of a hero of fable, had begun to cleanse the veins of the advocate. In the presence of this stealthy thing his nature had never seemed so fine, so valiant, so full of subtle penetration; nor had it ever felt so girt with mastery, so completely enamored of its own security.

“I shall know what words to speak to-morrow,” he said, in a hoarse undertone.

“Will they not be spoken for yourself?” whispered the dismal low voice.

“How? In what manner?”

“You will speak to make a name.”

“Also for the salvation of yours.”

“Mine does not matter; it is not my own.”

“You trust me, do you not?”

“I trust you; yet you drew your hand away so quickly when you knew it was not the warder who was the murderess. Give it to me again.”

There was something so curious in the prisoner’s fragility, something so strange in her cowed air, that it seemed to pervade the advocate with the stealth of a drug. But the emotion of disgust with which he had withdrawn his hand when first he grew conscious that he touched her was no longer present when he offered it again. The second time she clasped her fingers round it so that their pressure seemed to sear his skin. It had the heat of a live coal.

In releasing his hand she let her fingers yield it so imperceptibly that he did not know the precise point at which it had ceased to be held; and he was afraid to make a motion of withdrawal, lest it should be interpreted as a repetition of that which had dealt her a wound. He tried to see her face, but in the darkness there was no lineament to decipher.

“This is my deliverer,” he heard her breathe.

“How have you come to know it?” The advocate was devoured by an intolerable curiosity.

“Your hands--your hands, they are so powerful; are you not so strong?”

There was nothing in these words that the advocate had expected; the voice, the manner of their utterance, their apparent irrelevance, made a strange effect in his ears.

“They will not do me to death,” she said, in a tone he could hardly hear. “I never tasted life until I was brought into prison. And you cannot think how sweet it is to me. Everything has become so beautiful: the birds, the trees, and the sky, and the crowds of people and the mud of the great city.”

She clutched the hand of the young advocate with a convulsive shudder.

“Your quietness tells me that you understand.” Her voice was touched with ecstasy. “You do not answer or seek to console me. You are the one I have dreamed of in prison. Where is your hand?”

Again Northcote yielded to her entreaty, this time without a sense of repulsion.

“Yes, this is the hand that has been around me in the darkness, when I have shuddered in my dreams.”

“It is wonderful,” said Northcote, “that you should know that you will be able to lean upon me.”

“I know what your voice is like also, although it is so vague and distant to me now. I know the words it will speak to-morrow, when it asks them to be merciful. I know that all I have seen in my dreams will take place.”

“It must be a grievous thing to go to sleep in a prison,” said Northcote, uttering a half-formed thought without consideration of his words. “Or perhaps it is more dreadful to awaken in one.”

“The going to sleep and the awakening are not so terrible as the dreams that come. That in which I saw you first, in which I first heard your voice, in which I first touched the hand that will deliver me, was most dreadful in its nature. My weak mind fell down under it. I think I could not live through such a vision again.”