HENRY NORTHCOTE

Henry Northcote

By
JOHN COLLIS SNAITH
Author of “Broke of Covenden,” “Miss Dorothy
Marvin,” etc.

Boston
HERBERT B. TURNER & CO.
1906

Copyright, 1906
By John Collis Snaith
Entered at Stationers’ Hall
London
Published September, 1906
Second Edition, October 1, 1906
COLONIAL PRESS
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, U. S. A.

CONTENTS

I
SHEPHERD’S INN, FLEET STREET

Northcote sat in his chambers in Shepherd’s Inn. Down below was Fleet Street, in the thrall of a bitter December twilight. A heavy and pervasive thaw pressed its mantle upon the gaslit air; a driving sleet numbed the skin and stung the eyes of all who had to face it. Pools of slush, composed in equal parts of ice, water, and mud, impeded the pavements. They invaded the stoutest boots, submerged those less resolute, and imposed not a little inconvenience upon that section of the population which, unaddicted to the wearing of boots, had dispensed with them altogether.

The room in which Northcote kept was no more than a large and draughty garret, which abutted from the northern end of a crazy rectangular building on this curious byway of the world’s affairs. Only a few decrepit tiles, a handful of rotten laths, and a layer of cracked plaster intervened between him and the night. The grate had no fire in it; there was no carpet to the floor. A table and two chairs were the sole furniture, and in a corner could be heard the stealthy drip of icy water as it percolated through the roof.

The occupant of the room sat in a threadbare overcoat with the collar turned up to his ears. His hands, encased in a pair of woollen gloves, which were full of holes, were pressed upon his knees; a pipe was between his teeth; and while he sucked at it with the devout patience of one to whom it has to serve for everything that the physical side of his nature craved, he stared into the fireless grate with an intensity which can impart a heat and a life of its own.

Now and again after some particularly violent demonstration on the part of the weather he would give a little stoical shudder, fix the pipe in the opposite corner of his mouth, and huddle away involuntarily from the draught that came from under the door.

Northcote was a man of thirty who found himself face to face with starvation. He had been six years at the bar. Friendless, without influence, abjectly poor, he had chosen the common law side. Occasionally he had been able to pick up an odd guinea in the police-courts, but at no time had he earned enough to meet his few needs. He was now contemplating the removal of the roof from over his head. Its modest rental was no longer forthcoming; and there was nothing remaining among his worldly possessions which would induce the pawnbroker, the friend of the poor, to advance it.

“I wonder how those poor devils get on who live in the gutter,” he muttered, grimly, as he shuddered again. “You will soon be able to find an answer to that question,” he added, as he stamped his frozen toes on the hearthstone and beat his fingers against his knees.

Quite suddenly he was lifted out of the abyss of his reflection by the sound of a footfall in the room. Jerking up his head, he peered through the darkness towards the door whence the sound had come, but the shadows were so thick that he could see nothing.

“Hullo!” he called.

“Hullo!” came back a wholly unexpected response.

“Who are you? What do you want?” cried Northcote, with a thrill in his voice.

The young man rose to his feet to summon the commoner faculties. For a voice to have invaded his garret at this hour and in this fashion seemed to presage a new epoch to his life.

“Who are you?” he demanded again, having received no reply to the former demand.

“Nobody much,” said the voice, which sounded unlike anything he had ever heard before.

“I’ll strike a match before I get a blow from a bludgeon.”

“Pray do so,” said the voice, quietly.

Northcote began to fumble for the matches and found them on the mantelpiece. He obtained a light and applied it to the wick of the lamp which was on the table, and was then able to read his visitor.

The flicker of the lamp declared him to be a man of forty, of pale and attenuated figure, clad in rags.

“To what am I indebted for the honor of this visit?” said Northcote, with slightly overemphasized politeness.

“Curiosity, curiosity,” muttered his visitor, with the quietness of one who is acquainted with its value.

Northcote turned up the lamp to its highest point and resumed his scrutiny. The voice and manner were those of a man of education; and although the garb was that of a scarecrow, and the face was wan with hunger and slightly debased by suffering, a strange refinement was underlying it.

“This is all very mysterious,” said the young advocate; and indeed the wretched figure that confronted him appeared to have no credentials to present. “May I ask who and what you are?”

“How race reveals itself!” said the visitor, with a faint air of disappointment. “Even the higher types among us cannot cast their shackles away. When we go down into Hades, we are at once surrounded by the damned souls of our countrymen, clamoring to know who and what we are.”

“Well, who are you, at any rate?” said Northcote, oppressed with an acute sense of mystery.

“My name is Iggs,” said the scarecrow.

“Well, Mr. Iggs, I am sorry to say that to me your name conveys nothing.”

“No?”

“No!”

For an instant the scarecrow peered in a strange and concentrated manner into the face of the advocate. He then sighed deeply and rose from his chair.

“With all the learning we acquire so painfully,” he whispered, “we cannot enjoy a perfect immunity from error. Good night, sir. I offer my apologies for having invaded your privacy.”

With a bow of grave deference the strange figure proceeded to glide from the room in the noiseless manner in which it had entered it.

By the time his visitor had reached the door, Northcote called after him hastily: “Come back, Mr. Iggs. I have not expressed myself—not expressed myself adequately. Come back.”

His visitor, with the same air of deference and the same noiselessness of movement, returned to the chair. Northcote fixed two eyes of a devouring curiosity upon his bloodless face. They recoiled with a shock of encounter; two orbs flaming out of it in all their sunken brilliancy had looked within them. Also he beheld a mouth whose lips were curved with the divine mobility of a passion. The advocate clasped his hands to his sides to repress a fierce emotion of pain.

“Perhaps, Mr. Iggs,” he said, “you have been down into the depths of the sea?”

His visitor brushed the green canopy of his mutilated bowler hat slowly and delicately upon the threadbare sleeve of his coat.

“That is true,” he said; “but I would have you not forget that I have also walked upon the peaks of the highest mountains.”

The roar of Fleet Street, the sough of the icy wind through the telegraph wires, the driving of the sleet against the window, and the drip drip of the water through the ceiling seemed to blend with the rich and full tones enveloping these words. A sensation of awe began to surmount the pity and the patronage that the outer semblance of his visitor had first aroused in the breast of the young man.

“With your permission, sir,” he said, “I will go back to my original question, and I will frame it with a deeper sincerity: To what does Henry Northcote owe the honor of this visit?”

“This visit is paid to you, my friend, because for some inscrutable reason Nature mixed blood and fire with your brains. You, too, will go down into the depths of the sea and ascend also into the mountain places.”

“You cannot know that,” said Northcote, with his heart beginning to beat violently.

“Reflect a moment,” said his visitor. “Do you not know as well as I that it is the privilege of us to know everything?”

“True, true! But in what manner has one so obscure as myself been brought to your notice?”

“Every Sunday afternoon for a year past I have been a member of the audience your oratory has enchanted in Hyde Park.”

“How comes it, sir, that one of your condition can bring himself to listen to a mob orator?”

“How comes it that one of a like condition can bring himself to preach to the mob?”

“Primarily, I suppose, that my powers may develop. One day I shall hope to turn them—that is, if it is given to me to survive the present snap of cold weather—to higher things and larger issues.”

“And I, my friend,” said his visitor, “who by no human possibility can survive the present snap of cold weather, I come to tell the young Demosthenes that he can seek no higher thing, no larger issue than to preach to the mob. All the great movements the world ever saw began from below. The power of the sea lies in its depths. Jesus was able to invent a religion by preaching to the mob.”

“There are some who think,” said the young man, “that for one who was ambitious the career of Jesus was a partial failure.”

“The age is crying out for another such failure,” said his visitor.

“Because the old has betrayed them?” said the young man, with fear in his voice.

His visitor left the question unanswered.

“They await the advent,” he said, after a silence in which both breathed close, “of a second Failure to save them from themselves. Only that can prevent them dashing out their brains against the blank wall that has come to stand before them.”

“I believe you to be right, sir,” said the advocate, slowly, as his eyes traversed the chaste delicacy of the face which was framed in shadows.

“The Great Renunciator who first reduces this failure to terms,” said the scarecrow, “will have a sterner task than Jesus had.”

“Yet, sir, you come to one who is almost fainting by the bleak wayside.”

“Have I not listened to your oratory? Do I not discern you to stand at the parting of the ways?”

“Yes, at the parting of the ways,” said the young man heavily. “The hour is at hand when one whose poverty is bitter must make his choice.”

“I have prayed for you,” said his visitor, with such a perfect simplicity that it filled the eyes of the young advocate with tears. “Your ordeal is terrible, for I discern you to be a man of great power.”

“Poverty is a deadly evil,” said Northcote.

“Yet I would have you beware of riches,” said his visitor. “Think of the cruel treachery with which they use so many. See how they have betrayed our own fair land. And it is one such as you, in his virgin immunity, who is called upon to release her from their false embraces.”

“I, sir!” exclaimed the young man, with wild eyes and his heart beating violently. “I, without clothes to my skin, without food in my belly, and who to-morrow will have no roof under which to rest his head!”

The wan smile of the scarecrow embraced his own mutilated hat, broken boots, and ragged condition.

“You may or you may not be the emancipator,” said the scarecrow, peering at him earnestly, “yet the veritable great one whom I see configured before me is some such man as you. I have listened many weeks to your oratory, and you have a strange power. Your voice is noble, and speaks words of authority. Even if you are not the demigod for whom the age is asking,—and, my dear friend, far be it from me to say you are not,—you were yet formed by Nature to do a momentous work for your country.”

“In its casual wards,” said the young man, with an outburst of bitterness.

“The elect upon whom Nature confers true power are generally safeguarded in this wise manner. The ambitions of the market-place are set beyond their reach. I lie down to-night with a p an of thanksgiving upon my lips. May the hour dawn when you also may consign your bones to the snow. But in the meantime you have a great work to do in the world. Nature has filled you with speech; therefore you have the burden of immense responsibilities, for speech is the most signal of her gifts. You may or you may not be the great renunciator whom millions of your countrymen await with fevered looks; but it lies within your province, as it lies within that of every mariner, to array yourself among those of humble prophecy who read the meaning of the star in the east. At least, my friend, all who allow themselves to anticipate a divine appearance are the servants of truth.”

With these words the scarecrow rose from his chair, and, bowing to the young man with an austere but kind dignity, left the room as suddenly and noiselessly as he had entered it.

II
RETROSPECTION

Left alone in the coldness of his garret, Northcote felt a stupefaction steal upon him. The phase of his own circumstances had lent force to this bizarre incident. Spectral as this apparition was, however, the gestures, the tones, the mean garb were those of a living man.

The coming of such a mariner who had been down into the depths of the sea appeared for a moment to turn his eyes inwards. Seated again before the empty grate with his hands on his knees, he saw his life and its surroundings with a sharpness of vision which hunger had seemed to render more definite. He saw himself as the full-blooded turbulent man, tormented by desires, thwarted by fortune, yet yearning to express a complete, moral, intellectual, and physical life. He was so strong, yet so impotent; so expansive, yet so circumscribed; loving all the colors of the sun and the bright face of heaven, yet condemned to a prison, and perhaps the more dreadful darkness of the lazar-house. He saw himself as the wholesome, simple-hearted citizen, yet as the man of imagination also, the poet and the dreamer formed to walk upon the heights, who, oppressed by the duality of his nature, was in danger of succumbing to weariness, disillusion, and a remorseless material need.

He saw himself as a boy roaming the fields, casting up the soft loam with his feet, spending long days in dreams of the miraculous future, and evenings in conversation with his mother,—that wonderful mother whose mind was so secure, whose conceptions of the heavy duties that wait upon the gift of life were so odd, yet so exact. He recalled her as a gaunt, strong, and tall woman, with a red face, rather coarse hands, and a shabby black hat tied in a frayed velvet bow under her chin.

He could never remember to have heard her complain of life and fortune. She wore the same clothes year after year; sought no amelioration from her wearisome and unremitting labors; never seemed to vary in her sturdiness of health and temper; and always maintained plain, robust, material opinions. Her life had been a sordid and continuous struggle for the acquisition of money, a pound here and a pound there, but there was no trace of avarice in her character. She had educated him wholly beyond her means, but permitted herself no romance about it. She believed that being her son, and the son of the man she had married,—whom life had cut off in an arbitrary manner before he had had a chance to display his gifts,—he would be a man of sound abilities. She had decided in her own mind three months before he was born that to have a fair field for his talents he must go to the bar.

“I have a little imagination, but not enough,” she would say to him, as he sat with her an hour after supper in the winter evenings. “Your father was a man of good imagination, and used to read the best authors to me. My mental limitations did not permit me to understand their truth, but I always felt their power. Your father was a brilliant man in some ways, but the clock of his intellect was always set a little too fast. If he had not decided early in life to be a bishop, I think he would have been a writer of books. Even as it was, he wanted sometimes to write them. However, I managed to dissuade him. ‘No, Henry,’ I said, ‘stick to your trade. You cannot combine the two. To write books you would have to look at things so closely that it would unfit you for your calling.’ All the same, your father was a man of remarkable natural force. He would have succeeded in anything he had undertaken.”

Northcote never recalled his mother—and it was seldom that a day passed in his life unless he did recall her in one shape or another—that this speech, and a hundred that were similar, did not fill his ears, his memory, and his imagination. As he sat now with his hands and feet growing colder, the pool on the floor growing larger, his vitality becoming less and with despair advancing upon him silently like the army of shadows that pressed every minute more strongly upon the feeble lamp, he saw that dauntless countenance, the firm lips, the gray eyes which darkened a little in the evenings as though accompanied by thought; the precise but inharmonious voice came into his ears; the vigorous intelligence was spread before him, calm but unbeautiful, full of massive courage, but deficient in the finer shades of life.

At those seasons when the young advocate sat in his isolation and despair, that arch-enemy of high natures crept into his veins like a drug; he would seek the antidote in that courageous life. This penniless widow of a clergyman in a small village in a remote part of the world had fitted her son for the only sphere in which she looked for distinction for him, by many years of Spartan hardihood in thought and deed. The few pounds the Reverend Henry Northcote had laid by from his pittance, wherewith to provide an education for his son, had been lost in a building society within three months of his own departure from the world. From the date of the disaster his widow had restricted the hours she spent in bed to five out of the twenty-four; had renounced the eating of meat and the most commonplace luxuries; and had practised a thousand and one petty economies in order that her husband’s son should not lack the educational advantages of those with whom he would have to compete. She had maintained him at a public school, and afterwards, for a short period, at the university, by translating classics out of foreign languages for scholastic publishers, and by conveying the rudiments of knowledge to the young children of the landholders who lived in her neighborhood.

This stalwart figure formed a wonderful background to his youth. He was filled with awe by a simplicity that was so unconquerable, a self-reliance that was so majestic. All the subtle implements of his nature could not resolve such a potency as that. He himself was so much less and so much more.

Strange homage was paid to this unlovely but august woman by the privy council which sat in eternal session in his intellect. The favorite guise in which she was presented to it was as the mother of Napoleon, that “Madame Mère” who in the trenches conceived the Man of Destiny, and walked to church an hour before she gave him to the world. Her martial bearing, large bones, strong country speech, clothed the idea with the flesh of the hard fact; her consciousness of purpose, power of will, ennobled and quickened it with the hues of poetry.

Homer must have had some such woman for a mother, in whose womb the Iliads were born prenatally. All that sped, flew, or swam in the a rial kingdom of the Idea must first have had its pinions fixed and pointed by some inarticulate goddess who laid upon herself the humblest functions, the meanest offices, in order that nature might not lack lusty and shrewd servants in the time to be. The teeming millions of creatures who spawned in the darkness, who lifted their scaled eyes to where the light might be found, according to those who had skill in prophecy, yet who themselves were so uncertain of its presence that, when it shone straight before them through the fissures in their cave, they passed it by as a chimera, or the iridescence of some bird, reptile, piece of coal, or winged snake,—these cried out continually for some true-born Child of the Sun to lead them out of that gross night into the molten plains of beauty which ran down to the sea. And it was given to some stalwart creature with a red face and coarse hands and a shabby black hat tied in a bow under the chin, who herself was purblind, yet with knees ever pressed to the flags of the temple, to dream of the light in her prayers, and presently, out of her own strong, rustic body, to furnish forth to her kind a guide, a prophet, and a leader.

As hunger, that exquisite, but cruel, sensation, grew upon Northcote, and caused fierce little shivers to run through his bones, he awoke to the fact that all the tobacco in his pipe had been consumed, and further, that there was not a grain left in his pouch. In this extremity he had recourse to his evening meal. It was contained in a confectioner’s paper, and consisted of a large Bath bun, embellished with currants. He plucked out the currants carefully, and laid them apart as dessert. After half an hour’s deliberate munching a little of the well-being of the nourished man returned.

He opened a drawer in the table, and took out a handful of foolscap pages covered with writing in a small and not very visible hand. These were but a few among some two thousand others, which embodied “A Note towards an Essay on Optimism,” the fruit of the leisure of six years. It had had the honor of being rejected, promptly and uncompromisingly, by the publishers of London. Only one among this autocracy had condescended to supply a reason. It was brief but ample: “Philosophy does not pay.”

As Northcote held these pages beneath the uncertain rays of the lamp, and for the thousand and first time their quality was revealed to his gaze, a profound excitement spread through his being. What had the degradation of his poverty enabled him to compass for mankind? These magic pages were so quick with authenticity that he was forced to regard them as the gage of one who was about to offer a universal sanction to the human heart.

After awhile he returned these papers to the drawer and addressed himself to one of the dusty manuals of jurisprudence that adorned his table. But strange shapes were in his mind to-night; and these would not be harnessed to the dead letter of the law. A torrent had been unloosed which bore his thoughts in every direction save that in which he would have them go. After a time the lamp burned so low that it was no longer necessary to make a pretence at reading. Therefore he closed the book and lifted up his ears to the night. The faint, consistent drip drip of the water from the ceiling to the pool it had formed on the floor stole upon him with a sense of the uncanny. The room itself was draughty and decrepit, and in common with others in that neighborhood, particularly on the waterside, was inhabited by rats. He could hear them now in the crevices behind the wainscot. He took from the table a piece of lead which he used as a paper-weight, and waited grimly for one to appear.

Crouching upon the hearth with this deadly instrument in his hand, his thoughts strayed again to the country, again to his mother, and from her to the young girl whom he had hoped to make his wife. This slender and straight and joyous creature, with the supple limbs of a fawn and complexion of a dairymaid, had the seemliness and purity which was so essential in one who would be called to the function of completing his life. She was as sweet and choice as a lily, for her only gift was the serenity which has its seat in superb physical health and freedom from the penalties that wait upon intelligence.

She had seen nothing, knew nothing; there was nothing for her to see or to know. Her simplicity was so naïve that it was a perennial delight to a sophisticated nature. He never summoned her image except to cherish it. In his direst mood, in his straitest hour, when life blew barb after barb into his skin, he felt that to possess her was to keep a talisman in his spirit which could unweave the knots in the conspiracies of fate. Those lines in her shape, those curves which were so arch, so free, yet qualified so finely, seemed to bring healing and refinement to him; while those eyes, soft and luminous, yet lacking in expression, seemed to chasten his power without impairing it.

At this moment a sound for which he had been listening broke his reverie. An enormous she-rat, heavy with young, entered the room. He watched it waddle out of a dark corner and emerge slowly towards him along the floor. As it came near he could discern the gleam of its red eyes, its nose, its wide-spreading whiskers. They filled him with an indescribable ferocity. He poised the piece of lead in his hand, and took aim with close-breathing and deliberate care. Suddenly he hurled it with the strength of a giant, the creature was struck in the flank and lay dead before it knew that anything had occurred.

With a grunt of satisfaction amounting almost to joy he picked up the animal by the tail. “What a beauty!” he muttered, “and what a shot! I might try that a thousand times and not bring it off.” He opened the window, flung out the carcass, and heard it drop in a puddle of water in the middle of the traffic.

The perfectly successful accomplishment of this callous feat seemed to give his senses the exhilaration of strong wine; and the effect was heightened by a blast of icy air which was dashed on to his face when he opened the window. The mighty engines of his imagination were set in motion. He leaned out of the window and snuffed the brutal weather; and through the fierce sleet which stung his eyes and froze on his lips he looked down into London with its lights, its vehicles, and its chaos; unknowing, unheeding, and unseeing, yet in itself magnetic and so mysterious. He felt like an eagle who peers out of his eyrie in the cliffs in the midst of winter to witness the fury of the sea, dashing itself to pieces upon his paternal rocks, and is himself assaulted by the eternal ferocity of nature.

III
SUMMONING THE GENIE

The passion of Lear when on the heath he bares his head to the storm mounted in his veins. Leaning far out of the window of his garret to confront the rage of heaven, with the unbridled insolence of his youth he called upon the elements to wreak themselves upon him. Let them stab his eyes with tears, let them curdle the breath upon his lips. Nature had charged his being with that dynamic force which makes the world vibrate, only to withhold the master-key without whose aid his quality could not announce itself. All—all was furnished in the armory of the spirit. He asked no more than one brief occasion, and clad in his demonic power he would shake the pillars of society with that passion which was preying now upon his flesh and blood.

Such occasions were not denied to those who did not comprehend their use. How often with scornful eyes was he to watch in the courts of justice mediocrity, primed with privilege and favor, misconducting itself amid the purlieus of the law. Every week he was affronted with the spectacle of this hydra-headed monster toying with the life and liberty of the subject. At the worst it was no more than another “miscarriage of justice;” some other unseemly wretch offered upon the altars of incompetence.

Many times of a night when alone and hungry had he conjured up a vision of the judge calling from the bench for a tyro to undertake the defence of one too poor to purchase an advocate. “You, sir—will you undertake the defence of this unfortunate woman?” And over and over again had he broken the silence of his room with a carefully modulated, “It will give me great pleasure, m’lud, it will give me great pleasure.”

However, no judge had made the call. How narrowly had some old and obtuse public servant escaped unlocking the lips of a Milton, mute and inglorious, who sat in a shiver of hope awaiting the summons. To be sure, no judge had known of so strange a presence, but had one of these venerable guardians been aware of it, in the public interest he would still have passed him by. For what is more contemptible than elevation of any kind when it seeks a platform on which to declare itself?

Suppose the call came to-night! The suggestion was conveyed in the rages of the wind buffeting the cheeks of the unhappy man. Gasping, drenched, and excited almost beyond the verge of reason, he withdrew his face from the elements and closed the window. The lamp on the table had gone out, the few ashes in the grate gave a mere feeble spark. In spite of the overcoat and thick gloves which he wore, the coldness of the room oppressed him like a sepulchre. His feet were frozen; he had no tobacco; the clock at the Law Courts was chiming nine. Yet suppose it came! Why not? Why not demand it with all the fervor of his nature, like others who had sought their opportunity had done so often?

He could not understand this fever which had stretched him upon the rack. It might be that the lack of the meanest necessaries had told too severely upon his frame. Indeed, he was starving by degrees. His limbs—huge, knotted things—had withered until he was ashamed. His skin was so pale, his cheeks so wasted, that when his eyes flamed out in all their cadaverous lustre the prosperous shrank from him as though he were a ghost or a leper.

However, he did not covet the heritage of others. Sharp as his belly was to-night, ragged as was his back, he must not purchase the cuisine and raiment of princes at the price that was asked. Were he to inhabit the body of Crœsus, he would have also to inhabit his soul. Throned amid pomp, he would have dined that evening to the strains of Beethoven under the shadows of Velasquez and Raphael. He would have eaten the manna of the wilderness served upon gold plate; have drunk the fabulous Falernian, with pearls from the Orient dissolved in it to heighten the bouquet. Gorgeous houris, whose eyes and jewels were jealous of one another, whose breaths were perfumed, whose lips were laden with music, would have been on his right hand and on his left. Yet he would neither have seen, nor heard, nor felt, nor tasted; for those who partook of such a feast could neither know nor understand.

He must not barter his hunger for a feast such as that. No ray of meaning ever invaded this crapulous Barmecide. All that he saw was that the color of money was yellow; all that he knew was that its possession oiled the wheels of life. The starving man crouched upon his knees and buried his burning face in the dust of the table. He must make his apology to Nature for having reviled her. Nothing was more imperfect than this handmaid; yet how patient, how obedient was this Unanswering One! She did not deserve to be abused. For all at once, with a prophetic shudder of his doom, he recognized that he had only to make his demand of her to receive all that he asked.

If his nature craved the material, let him seek it and it should be given. He need not starve in his garret; his prayers would be heard. If Success with all her penalties must be his, let him prostrate himself before her; was she not a courtezan that none need to woo in vain? But crouching thus in wretchedness, his frame shivering and burning by turns, the price of such a triumph was before his eyes, written in garish letters upon the dismal walls. He was hungry to the point of death almost, yet if he satisfied that hunger with a mess of pottage he would be destroyed.

How unhappy is he who becomes the witness of his own dread passions determining an issue on the battle-ground of his nature! If the mere act of volition was still to remain with him, the choice must be made; yet if he made that which had grown so imminent he would lose whatever status or sanction he derived from the elevation of his aims. This bundle of forces within him, to whom after all he held the master-key did he but dare to use it, was driving him pitilessly. Already he seemed to be losing his fineness of perception. The point at issue was already half-erased. Those immensely powerful engines which drove the blood so furiously through his veins were in revolt. Let him find employment for them; let them fulfil their appointed ends, or woe betide him.

He had only to press his eyes to the table to summon the genie. Occasion would wait upon him if he sank to his knees. Let him harness his will to his common needs and the power would be rendered to him to achieve them. His imagination had no trammels; it was burning with a volcanic activity; by its light he could enter any kingdom in the material world. Let him ask, and all should be given.

He had fallen into a kind of trance in which immediate sensations of place and time were suspended. The cold room, now wrapped in an almost complete darkness in which rats were scratching and scuttling; the drip drip of the water to the floor; the rattle of the windows against the rising gale; the roar of the traffic in the street—all had become submerged, had lost their form, had been blended into a strange yet not inharmonious something else. A pageant was passing before his mind. He was powerless to identify himself with it, to fix its colors, to catch the expressions of the fleeting faces of those who mingled in it, yet despite the suspension of the functions of the will, he was conscious of what was taking place.

He was not in a dream, because his eyes were open, he knew where he was, and he was in possession of the sense of hearing. But he had surrendered the control of the will; and although he was on his knees with his face pressed to a dusty table before a dead fire, the mind was become divorced from the body and was cast into the vortex of indescribable scenes. It drifted about among them helplessly. It bore no relation to actors or events. All was the weirdest panorama, crammed with hurry and wild inconsequence; and yet the spectator was filled with an exhilaration which was as remote from the province of reality as a drunkard’s delirium.

He began to make frantic efforts to fix and locate this phantasmagoria. He stretched every nerve to catch the import of the word that was spoken; he craned his whole being to wrest a single incident from this wild confusion. He strove as fiercely for a thread of meaning as though he were fighting against the operations of an anæsthetic, but he could reclaim nothing from the chaos in which he was enveloped. He was like a drowning man with the heavy yet not unpleasant rush of water in his ears.

Suddenly his mind was invaded by a distinct sound. It had the dull sense of finality of a blow on the head. The door of the room had been flung open. And then came a voice through the shadows which encompassed the last feeble gutterings of the lamp:

“Anybody at home?”

Northcote rose from his knees in a wild and startled manner.

“Who—who is that?” he cried, in a hollow tone.

“Is that Mr. Northcote?” said the obscure presence which had entered the room.

IV
ENTER MR. WHITCOMB

For the second time that evening Northcote peered through the gloom of his chamber with a thrill of curious expectancy. The visit of the scarecrow had been forgotten in the torments of his passion, but the sound of his own name on the lips of the unknown resummoned that phantom to his mind. But in the room of one so frail was a robust and spreading presence.

“To whom do I owe a welcome?” muttered Northcote, and as he rose from his knees his words seemed to be lost in the vibrations of his heart.

“Mr. Northcote it is,” said the round and full tones of the invader.

The advocate, trembling in every limb, was conscious of a powerful and confident grasp of the hand. And then as his eyes encountered the outlines of his visitor, he was seized with a pang of disappointment, for he had looked to see something different.

“Don’t you know me, Mr. Northcote?” said the voice—the conventional voice which had already smote the starving man with a sense of the intolerable.

“I am afraid I do not,” he said, heavily.

“Well, I thought Samuel Whitcomb was known to every member of the bar.”

Mr. Whitcomb’s whimsical air strove to cloak a wound to his professional feelings.

“Ah, yes, of course, Mr. Whitcomb; of course,” said the young man, with a deeper disappointment fixing its talons upon him. “Of course—Mr. Whitcomb, the solicitor,” he added, hastily, as through the haze of the unreal which still enveloped his amazed and stupefied senses he caught a familiar aspect and a tone that he recalled.

“The same.”

“Excuse this inhospitable darkness,” said Northcote. “Here is a chair; and try, if you please, to keep your patience while I put some oil in the lamp and seek a piece of coal for the fire.”

“No elaborate scheme of welcome, I beg. Your client is not a prince of the blood, but a common lawyer.”

A well-fed and highly sagacious chuckle accompanied this sally on the part of the solicitor.

Still in the throes of his stupefaction, Northcote addressed himself to the oil-can and the coal-box, that as far as the circumstances would permit a reception might be accorded to this unexpected guest, whose common and prosaic quality had already jarred upon every fibre of his being. And these preparations, diffidently conducted, kindled again the well-fed chuckle of the solicitor; and so ingratiating was it that it seemed to banish all appearance of constraint by imparting an air of equality to everything in the world.

The lamp flared up under the influence of the dregs of fuel that had been added to it, and revealed the pale and wasted features of the garret’s inhabitant. The solicitor, with the quickness of the trained observer, pursed up his lips in a suppressed whistle. A kind of pity softened the relentless composure of his eyes as they beheld the haggard and unkempt bearing of the man before them. “Poor devil,” he muttered; “literally starving.” It was in this succinct yet compendious manner that Mr. Whitcomb filed for reference all facts which are sufficiently obvious to stand as knowledge.

“Do you know,” said Northcote, suddenly, “I was half-expecting somebody to-night.”

“Sitting in state to receive him, evidently,” the solicitor muttered, as he sniffed the temperature of the garret and glanced oddly from the fireless grate to the gloves and overcoat that Northcote was wearing.

“Dining out together, were you?”

“To speak the truth,” said the advocate, with an odd laugh, “I had hardly got so far as to consider the personage I was half-expecting in such a grossly material aspect.”

“Personage, eh?” said the solicitor. “They’re out of my line. I only have to do with persons, quite ordinary people, who are mightily interested in their meals.”

“Well, you see,” said Northcote, “I had hardly got so far as to formulate my expected visitant in actual terms of flesh and blood.”

“You deal in spooks!” said the solicitor. “A likely pitch for them, too.” Mr. Whitcomb began to stroke his moustache pensively, his invariable habit when confronted by the danger of going beyond his limit. “A creepy hole, by God!” he said, in another of his asides, for the simplicity and matter-of-fact of the advocate had a little discomposed him.

“I was half-expecting a genie,” said the advocate.

“A genie!” said the solicitor, with a laugh of embarrassment, for his surroundings oppressed him, and his vitality was impaired by not having yet had his dinner. “I never heard of a genie except in the ‘Arabian Nights.’”

“They abound in London,” said the advocate. “They are all about us.”

“You are right, I dare say,” said the solicitor, with a puzzled air. “The latest discovery of science, is it? They have found such marvellous things lately, even in the water we drink and the air we breathe. But if you will just stick on your hat, and do me the honor of eating a bite of supper,—I have had a deplorable day, which has ended by robbing me of my dinner,—I will talk to you of the business that has brought me here at such an odd sort of hour.”

“A bite of supper!” These magic words caused the advocate to enfold his visitor in a melancholy smile.

“Upon my soul,” said he, “you are the genie.”

The solicitor gave a laugh as ponderous as Gargantua’s.

“Have it your own way,” he said; “but for the love of heaven put on your hat and let us heed the intimations of Nature. Perhaps if we pet her a little she may do us well in this somewhat remarkable affair. Come, let us away.”

That robustness of bearing which made half the stock in trade of the first criminal lawyer in London had already an effect upon the advocate. Those luscious tones had dispelled his comatose condition. And who should say, after all, that this was not the genie; at least, here was the living embodiment of success, that jovial and gigantic swaggerer. What a smugness and sagacity were in the heavy inflections of this prosperous man! “A fellow is not fit to pare his own nails when he’s sharp-set, and I had my chop at a quarter-past one,” he chuckled, as he watched the advocate grappling with his boots. “Now, on with your hat, and we’ll take a cab to I know where.”

“As you will,” said the young man, reaching for his hat.

A reaction was stealing along his veins. Already his passionate despair had begun to cower. It looked like wizardry that one so famous should have been borne in person, dinnerless, at ten o’clock at night, up flight after flight of dark stairs, to the crazy fifth floor of that decrepit building in quest of one so poor and so obscure.

“I am sure you are the genie,” said Northcote, carrying the lamp to the door to light the distinguished visitor to the head of the rickety stairs. “Strike a match, sir, if you respect your neck.”

Northcote turned the key of his door, and Mr. Whitcomb descended, step by step, in a gingerly fashion.

“If there is the slightest fear,” said Northcote, pressing on behind the solicitor, “of burning your fingers with that match, I shall urge you not to stop to examine the array of old masters that line this perfectly damnable staircase of mine.”

“Is that an ‘Adoration of the Magi’ above me on the right?” said Mr. Whitcomb, with his jovial air.

“No; only a crack in the plaster and a cobweb. And that weird splotch to the left, which, at this distance, might stand for ‘Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis,’ is the damp striking through the wall.”

When at last they had crept down these noisome stairways into the street, they found that the sleet had yielded to a light, murky rain. The solicitor summoned imperiously a passing hansom, and sent a thrill through the heart of his starving companion by naming for the cabman’s guidance one of the most luxurious restaurants in the world.

V
AN ARISTOCRAT OF ARISTOCRATS

A swift journey of a thousand yards in this enchanted vehicle along slushy and dangerous pavements into the West End, that magic region and golden home of the marvelous, saw the bewildered young man and his companion, a veritable prince who had stepped out of some fairy romance, deposited before the portals of a palace raised by a wizard in the centre of the streets of London. A master-stroke of malice had placed this temple of choice and rarity in the midst of acres of disease, penury, and polluted air. The faces of the ghostly denizens of these regions broke through the shadows with dumb malevolence as the solicitor and the advocate leaped to the portico. Hardly had they reached it when they were assailed by light and color, glittering liveries, gorgeous women. A stealthy and perfumed warmth had even invaded the outer atmosphere. The starving man opened his lips and nostrils, and flung wide all the doors of the senses in order to drink the sheen and scents, the hues and odors. Like a poet of the Latin races he sought to feed upon animal sensations. Here in these bright saloons was the reverse of the medal, of which in his garret that evening he had dreamed. By no more than the wave of a wand he had been transported into the plaisances of success.

As he entered this domain he was enchanted with everything,—the tread of the carpets, the hang of the curtains, the clothes of the people, the sounds of the music, the mien of the waiters. Ali Baba did not illicitly enter the Cave of the Forty Robbers with a more profound bewilderment, a sharper curiosity.

Northcote followed his companion into one of the smaller and quieter but not the less gilded and luxurious rooms. Mr. Whitcomb, who even in his own person did not disdain the panoply of fashion, had the unconquerable nonchalance of bearing which is the first credential to the public respect.

“I want Jools,” he said to the first waiter he met.

The waiter bowed low and said ingratiatingly, “Yes, sare.” He darted away in quest of that personage without an attempt to maintain the few rags of dignity that attend his calling. There was, indeed, a strain of the magician in this wonderful Mr. Whitcomb. It would not have occurred to Northcote to use the formula “I want Jools,” any more than it did to Ali Baba to cry “Open Sesame!” at the portals of the cave of the Forty Robbers.

Jools was the head waiter, a man of the first distinction, with a small imperial, the envy and the proud despair of all the compatriots who shared his exile in an alien country. It had the choice perfection which art is sometimes able to superimpose upon nature. Jools was of slight, even mean, physique, but he had the ease of bearing which comes of having been somebody for several generations. He held the key to the finest cellar in London, as his father before him had held the key to the finest cellar of Paris, and his grandfather of that of Vienna. Jools was an aristocrat of aristocrats, and one versed in the ways of his order would almost have divined it from the amiable humility with which he came forward to receive one of other clay.

“How do, Jools?” said Northcote’s companion, with his inimitable gift of manner. “Nasty night. Let us have a quart of your Château Margaux. What was that you gave me before?”

Jools screwed up his furtive brown eyes in deep contemplation. “Et would be a seventy-one, sare,” he said, rubbing softly a forefinger along his chin.

“I don’t know what it was,” said Mr. Whitcomb, royally, “and I don’t care, so long as it is the best you have in the place.”

An air of magnificence which prosperity had conferred upon the solicitor touched a chord in the proud soul of Jools.

“I haf a seventy-three, sare,” said this aristocrat, with a not too ductile absence of condescension, which he reserved for the society of his equals.

“That sounds all right,” said the solicitor. “We still number you among the few eminent Christians we have in London at the present time.”

Jools bowed and smiled softly, but an expression of sorrow was seen to overspread his mat complexion.

“Ef I had known before, sare, I would haf had it decanted.”

“We must all abase ourselves before the despotism of necessity,” said the solicitor’s hollow-eyed companion, who was already under the stimulus of an intense anticipation. “She has reverence for nothing. Even your Château Margaux ’73, which no doubt is divine, must forego the rights and trappings of its royalty.”

“You must forgive him, Jools,” said the solicitor, enjoying the effect upon the waiter of these deep tones. “He is talking prose, although, unlike your immortal compatriot, I am afraid he knows it.”

Jools summoned one of another mould to receive the baser order of a thick soup and a cut from the saddle, while he himself, beaming with pleasure and shrugging his shoulders furiously, went forth accompanied by an awe-stricken satellite personally to select one of those royal wines, which lent a touch of romantic grace to the exile of this artist in a foreign country.

Seated on cushions in the cosiest of all imaginable corners, with spotless lawn and bright silver before him, the starving man enveloped his nostrils in the delicious fumes that arose from his plate. These aromatic vapors seemed to pervade his being like some intoxicating hashish, or a pungent but subtle Arabian tobacco. He toyed with the pepper and salt, and crumbled his bread with a devouring eagerness, which he kept in check sufficiently to refuse at first to swallow a spoonful of the magic food, in order that he might obtain this sense of inebriation to the full. His companion, whose perfectly normal and healthy hunger permitted no such refinements as these, had already tasted and enjoyed.

“Excellent soup,” he said. “It’s got quite a bouquet to it. I’m almost glad I missed my dinner. One of these days I shall do it again.”

The satisfaction which in these circumstances consumes the average sensual person grew so acute, that by the time he had swallowed half of his plateful, he cried out to the nearest waiter: “Hi! you, Alphonse—have the goodness to tell the chef to step this way, will you?”

Northcote placed the first spoonful on his tongue, and indescribable pangs seemed to mount to his brain. A fierce desire overpowered him. He devoured another spoonful, and then another. Suddenly he was overcome by a strange fury of greed. His plate was empty, and his palate had lost its original fineness, before he was able to impose a check upon his passion.

Great, however, as his expedition had been in its later stages, it had scarcely surpassed that of Mr. Whitcomb, who from the first had been devouring steadily. No sooner had that gentleman eaten his final mouthful than he ordered both plates to be replenished.

At this moment, by one of those significant coöperations of events which form the basis of the drama, a large, fat, frock-coated, and pomatumed gentleman appeared, a little sheath of quiet smiles twinkling all over his person, as though the playful god of love was in hiding behind his ample shirt-front and slyly tickling his bosom with feathers.

“Hommage, monsieur le chef, hommage!” cried Mr. Whitcomb. “Cette consommé est délicieuse. Vous êtes un vrai ruban bleu.”

The chef emitted a loud purr of satisfaction like an unusually large Persian cat. And then by a still more exquisite coöperation of events than that which had already preceded this incident, who should appear but Jools, behind whom his attendant satellite was mincing with a warmed decanter of wine.

“Two more glasses, Jools, if you please,” said the solicitor. “Monsieur le chef and your worthy self will honor us, I hope. The first product of your country will not prove unworthy of two of its most distinguished sons.”

A look of rapture sprang to the proud eyes of Jools, and he measured four glasses of wine with an agitation that was more dignified than perfect composure.

“To l’Entente Cordiale, messieurs,” said Mr. Whitcomb, raising his glass.

“L’Entente Cordiale!” chimed the others.

“It is part of my religion,” said Mr. Whitcomb, “never to encounter the artistic temperament without rendering my homage. If we had only a trace of it in this country to fuse and rarefy our other manifold gifts and blessings, I believe we should become the most perfect nation upon the earth.”

“Is it not, sir, the absence of it that makes you English so perfect?” said the chef, who had all the alert intelligence of his race.

“That is not a thrust, monsieur?”

“Ah, no. As a citizen of the world I make it my duty never to wound the English. I respect your country; there are seasons when I adore it.”

“Ees it not the land of justice, order, and liberty?” said Jools.

“Justice we have for those who can afford to pay for it,” said the solicitor; “that is to say, the poor man is quite unable to purchase it, and even the rich finds it costs a great deal of money. Order we have; it is the birthright of us all—an adumbration of our exaggerated reverence for mud, and stones, and bricks, and mortar. Liberty, Jools, I regret to say, we have not. We are all base slaves—”

“Of the External,” said Northcote, with a lustre in his eyes that the wine had kindled. “There is no slave like a Saxon. In his scheme of sense the eye takes precedence. Even his religion is Money.”

“Ah, no,” said the chef, with much amiability, “you English have no avarice like we have in my native Normandy.”

“An Englishman’s avarice is not of the heart, but of the spirit,” said Northcote, with the melancholy calmness of one who knows everything.

“You haf your Shakespeare, your Milton,” said Jools.

“I think sometimes we could afford to exchange them both for your Honoré Balzac,” said Northcote.

“You would be unwise to do so,” said the chef. “Your Shakespeare is among the first order of mankind. He is greater than Molière; my faith! he is as great as Napoleon.”

“Perhaps you are right, but your Honoré Balzac showed the bourgeoisie its every form and feature.”

“Truly,” said the chef, with a sly laugh; “but you have ceased to be bourgeois in your England nowadays.”

“Since when, sir?” said the young advocate, with a flame in his eyes. “Since we have learned the trick of calling our mean ambitions by high-sounding names?”

The solicitor filled up the glasses of Northcote and the chef.

“You speak well, my friends,” he said, with his richest chuckle; “although myself being a middle-class Englishman, I am sorry to say your discourse is over my head. But if it is to be my privilege to maintain the talk upon this extremely high level, it will cost me, Jools—”

“It will cost him, Jools,” interrupted Northcote, with a truculent glance at the waiter.

“It will cost me, Jools,” said the solicitor, with an imperturbable smile, “an extra quart at least of your Château Margaux.”

At the moment this order fell on deaf ears, for the lips of Jools were trembling with speech like those of Socrates.

“We will give you our Honoré de Balzac, sare,” he said, with a heavy sigh, “ef you will part wiz your Shikspeare.”

“Also our Voltaire,” said the chef, with a leer at his melancholy compatriot, “if they will part with their Shakespeare.”

“Your Honoré Balzac is only just coming into his own,” said Northcote, with immense solemnity.

“That is to say, sir,” said the chef, “a reputation must be established at least a hundred years in the arts before the world can be decorated with the radiance that proceeds from the enormous fire it holds in its bowels.”

“True, monsieur,” said Northcote. “It is like a new-born planet. It has to be allowed to cool a little before it can assume a shape, and the wonderful vegetation begins to appear upon it. It cannot be approached at first; it is a mere ball of fire in the heavens, without form and without meaning to the human eyes.”

“Or it ees like a young wine, sare; it must be allowed time to mature,” said Jools.

“It is the worst feature, Jools,” said the solicitor, “of this claret of yours, that it always unlocks the door for these pleasantries. And this British skull of mine is so packed with business, that with our shopkeeping instinct of transacting a little of it whenever and wherever we can, before we fall upon the latest theories in regard to the composition of matter, with every reluctance, I shall ask you and your distinguished compatriot to withdraw for the space of one hour.”

“Personally,” said Northcote, “I believe the universe is not made up of matter at all.”

“In other words, sir,” said the chef, “matter is—”

“I ask your pardon, my friends,” said the solicitor; “but with true Britannic effrontery, this business of mine even seeks to take precedence of the mystery of the universe.”

“There is no such thing as the universe,” said Northcote, draining his glass with great decision. “The whole of it is contained within ourselves.”

“Peace, peace!” said the solicitor. “We will resume our speculations, with the permission of our good friends, in the space of one hour.”

Filled with every fraternal and complacent feeling, Jools and his distinguished compatriot bowed smilingly, and with a profound regard for the solicitor and the advocate, retired, in opposite directions, to those spheres of activity in which there was none to dispute their supremacy.

VI
A PROPHECY

“And now,” said the solicitor, “as the decks are clear, let me say this is a rather odd affair which has sent me hungry about the streets of London at an unpleasant hour.”

“Am I not surprisingly cool about it?” said Northcote, with a flushed face, balancing his empty wine-glass on the handle of a knife, “considering that this business of yours is destined to mark the turning-point in my career.”

“When a man begins to talk of his career,” said the solicitor, “it is safe to infer that he has taken the wrong quantity of liquor. Waiter!”

“Sare?”

“Tell Jools we want another pint of this filthy stuff—this what-do-you-call-it?—with which he is poisoning us. And, Alphonse, have a couple of Welsh rarebits ready by the time we want them.”

The waiter withdrew, walking delicately; and the solicitor bent across the table towards his companion in a manner of confidential gravity.

“Correct me if I am wrong,” said he, “but you have done no circuit work?”

“Hitherto I have not soared beyond a police-court,” said the young man, with perfect frankness. “And even there I have only made a public display of my incapacity on half a dozen occasions.”

“A beginner one might say, yet an ambitious one.”

“Where do you get the ambition from?”

“It is in the color of your eyes. Besides, have you not a habit of turning your phrases?”

“If I did not know you to be a connoisseur in men of promise I should not be convinced.”

“That’s my foible, right enough,” said the solicitor, with a laugh. “A connoisseur in men of promise. Samuel Whitcomb owes his own reputation to that, and he is proud to believe that the reputations of half a score of those who are in every way his superiors are to be traced to that source.”

“Laying aside the question of superiority, all the world knows it.”

“I gave Finnemore Jones his first brief,” said the solicitor, immodestly. “I provided Cooper, Howard, and Harrington with the opportunities that made them famous.”

“And above all,” said the young advocate, measuring with a stealthy eye the man before him, “are you not the discoverer of Michael Tobin?”

“Ha!” cried the solicitor, as he brought his fist upon the table with an air of unmistakable triumph, “I was holding that back.”

“As the crown of your achievement?”

“Yes; Michael Tobin is almost here. But how do you come to suspect it, when at present his quality is only known to the few?”

“I am one of them,” said Northcote, looking his companion imperturbably in the eyes.

Such a cool affirmation seemed to delight the solicitor.

“Well, I should not be surprised if you were,” he said, with a violent chuckle. “If I had not had some such suspicion I might not have climbed up all those dark stairs at a quarter-past ten of a winter’s night.”

“Without your dinner.”

“Without my dinner. Why, if that fellow hasn’t forgotten the black currant jelly. But here he comes with his poisonous claret.”

“Tobin is a brilliant man,” said Northcote, poising his glass after having replenished it. “Irish to the bone; a real discovery; ought to go far. But far as he ought to go and will go, there is one name in your list that will surpass him.”

“That is where I cannot agree with you, my son,” said the solicitor, with confidential and parental bonhomie, for this subject lay at the source of his intellectual pride. “You must know somewhat to have found out about Tobin; but when you name his superior you betray your youth.”

“I concede it is quite impossible for me to name Tobin’s superior without betraying my youth.”

“Go to,” said the solicitor, with an air of indulgence that he reserved for the young and promising. “Don’t labor the point. It wants experience to detect greatness in the shell. Michael Tobin will easily be the first upon my list.”

“There is one who will surpass Michael Tobin,” said the young man.

“Not among those I have mentioned.”

“True. As is usual with the prophet, you don’t dare to affirm the authentic name.”

“Upon my word I can’t think who you mean!”

“One Henry Northcote.”

The solicitor broke forth in a suppressed shout of laughter.

“Good!” he said; “you’ll do. Fill up your glass and we’ll get to work. And I’m glad your talent is so remarkable, because I’ve got some business here that is likely to tax it.”

“It is increasingly clear to me that you are the genie,” said the young advocate in a low voice, and fetching a deep breath.

VII
THE OFFER OF A BRIEF

The solicitor drew from an inner pocket of his coat a bundle of papers tied with red tape. He placed them on the table at the side of his plate.

“At the eleventh hour,” he said, speaking coolly and distinctly, “I am going to ask you to undertake the defence in a trial for murder.”

Northcote was conscious of no more than a slight sharp throb of the pulses as he met the shrewd, even cunning, eyes of the man who sat opposite.

“Yes, that’s a chance for Henry Northcote,” were his first words, uttered under the breath.

“The fee is not much,” said the solicitor, with the precision of the man of affairs entering his fat voice. “You will not be briefed at more than twenty guineas.”

“To-night I think I would sell my soul for half that sum,” said the young man, with an excited laugh.

“Is not that a somewhat damaging admission for you to make?” said the solicitor.

“I agree, I agree,” said the young man; “but the truth is never discreet.”

“There’s no money in this case,” said the solicitor, “and I’m afraid there is no kudos. It is one of those disagreeable cases which are not only irreclaimably sordid, but also as dead as mutton. In order to obtain a small sum of money, a woman of the ‘unfortunate’ class has poisoned a man with whom she lived. She is one of those cold-blooded persons who are born for the gallows. There is enough evidence to hang her ten times. We shall be forced to submit to the inevitable.”

“You disappoint me,” said Northcote. “I was thinking of a real fighting case.”

The solicitor smiled, with a faint suggestion of patronage.

“I beg your pardon, I’m sure,” said the young man, quickly. “Had there been any life in the case you would not have carried it to one so obscure. Even as it is, I ought to be grateful to you—and I am grateful indeed—for putting it in my way.”

“The circumstances of this case are somewhat peculiar,” said the solicitor. “We are under rather severe pressure in the matter of time. The case will be called on the day after to-morrow at the Central Criminal Court.”

“That hardly explains away your kindness towards myself. Even at this short notice you could have got plenty of men to have consented to a verdict.”

“I am aware of it, but then it is not quite the method of Whitcomb and Whitcomb. We like ‘Thorough’ to be our motto. If we accept a client, we feel we owe it to ourselves to leave no stone unturned, irrespective of position or emolument.”

“But I understand this case is too dead to be fought?”

“Ah, we are now about to approach the first of the ‘peculiar’ circumstances. At five o’clock this evening Tobin himself was holding this brief, but at that hour his bicycle had the misfortune to collide with a motor-car, and the poor fellow now lies in hospital with a compound fracture of the right thigh.”

“Poor fellow, poor fellow!”

“I think you and I are agreed that Tobin is without a rival in a case of this nature.”

“You must forgive me if I express surprise that Tobin should have accepted the brief.”

“That is easily explained. Tobin is the generous-hearted Irishman who is never weary of affirming that Whitcomb and Whitcomb gave him his start. He never refuses us, and I am afraid we, in the interests of a client, trade occasionally on his good nature.”

“Then the practitioners of law are sometimes more disinterested than they seem.”

“My dear fellow, among a considerable body of men must there not be a leaven of human nature? And my own experience is that human nature is so much more disinterested than the young and cynical like to consider it.”

“That is well said,” replied Northcote, feeling the rebuke to be merited.

“And so you see,” said the solicitor, “in regard to this wretched woman whom we had undertaken to defend, we were in the position of being able to brief a first-rate man for a third-rate fee.”

“Yet a third-rate man would have served your purpose equally well, if one is allowed to hazard the remark.”

“No; for this reason: the woman has long been of intemperate habits. Prior to the commission of the crime she was known to be drinking heavily, and Tobin, who is a real fighting man, if ever there was one, had decided to take the line of insanity.”

“As the only possible means of saving her neck?”

“There is no other. And even in the hands of such a man as Tobin, the chance is remote. He has his witnesses to call, of course, in support of his plea, but they cannot be considered as entirely satisfactory. And, unfortunately, their evidence will be rebutted by that of the prison doctors, who are against us.”

“Then, after all,” said the young man, with a sunken eagerness appearing in his eyes, “there will be opportunities for advocacy.”

“Pretty considerable opportunities, if we are to save her neck.”

“Then forgive me if again I put the question, Why did you come to a tyro with a case of this nature?”

“How can you ask,” said the solicitor, with an arch smile, “when the tyro happens to be one Henry Northcote?”

“Upon your own admission that is a name that has no particular significance for you.”

“Nay, you go too fast, my friend. It must be left to the future to place the name of Henry Northcote, but let me confess that in the meantime the bearer of it has not wholly escaped my vigilance.”

“In your capacity as a connoisseur in young men of promise?”

“Precisely.”

“Upon what data have you built, when you have never seen him in open court?”

“My dear fellow, you are as curious as a woman.”

“Every comprehensive mind is partly feminine.”

“No mind can be in any sense feminine. It is a contradiction in terms.”

“Well, well! From what data have you derived the courage to entrust an untried man with the defence in a trial for murder?”

“To be perfectly frank, it was Tobin who found the courage for me.”

“Tobin!”

“No less.”

“Why, Tobin doesn’t know me from Adam.”

“Not so fast, my friend; don’t come to conclusions so abruptly. Tobin has his eyes about him.”

“Well, yes, that is an attribute that is common to all who become first-rate in anything.”

“Let me tell you exactly what occurred. I was on the point of leaving Chancery Lane about six, and beginning to think about my dinner, when I received poor Tobin’s telegram to say he was tucked up in hospital with a broken thigh, and would I come to him at once. Of course I went; and there the poor fellow was in a devilish uncomfortable attitude, as white as the sheets, face drawn with pain, but himself as cool as ice.

“‘We shall have to apply for a postponement,’ were his first words.

“‘In any case, old boy,’ said I, ‘I shall relieve you of further responsibility.’

“‘Not much!’ said he. ‘Get a postponement until next sessions; I am going to save the poor beggar’s neck.’

“‘Why, old boy,’ I said, fixing him up with a cigarette, ‘you will be lying here in your little bed until next sessions.’

“‘Not for me,’ he said; ‘not for Michael. I shall be in court on two sticks a-saving the poor beggar’s neck.’

“‘Now, look here, old son,’ said I, ‘just let the whole thing go, and we’ll put up somebody else.’

“‘If you do,’ said he, ‘as sure as a gun she’s a gonner.’

“‘I am afraid I agree,’ said I; ‘but if our fair client is not a fit subject for the rope, upon my soul there’s no need to hang anybody.’

“Well, the next thing I saw was that his eyes were full of tears.

“‘Oh, damn it all!’ he said, ‘I can’t stand this hanging of women.’

“‘She’s an out-and-outer,’ said I.

“‘That doesn’t alter her sex,’ said the Irishman.

“‘Well,’ said I, ‘who can you suggest to put up in your stead with your plea of insanity? The difficulty is the brief is only marked twenty guineas, and you can’t get much for that money with you fellows.’

“‘You can’t,’ said he; ‘besides, this is a case for Michael. Unless it is handled in a certain way she is certain to hang. Apply for a postponement.’

“‘Why, you old sentimentalist, I don’t think we could get one,’ said I, having pretty well made up my mind that we could not.

“‘Who is the judge?’ said he.

“‘Bow-wow Brudenell,’ said I, ‘the most pedantic and cantankerous old man on the bench. And Weekes is leading for the Crown. There will not be much in the way of accommodation in that quarter.’

“‘Oh, come, old Bow-wow is not such a bad old sportsman,’ said the Irishman. ‘Tell him just how it is; tell him I’m suddenly laid by the wing, and it will be all right.’

“‘But,’ said I, ‘even if we get a postponement, we shall be none the better for it. It can’t be extended indefinitely; and I am afraid, old boy, this is going to be a long business of yours. I think I shall hand the brief over to Harris.’

“At first I was afraid the wild Irishman was going to jump out of his plaster of Paris.

“‘Harris!’ said he. ‘My aunt! I wouldn’t brief Harris to defend a fox-terrier for worrying a tortoise-shell kitten.’

“‘I’ll admit,’ said I, ‘that Christopher is not a genius, but at least he will get our unfortunate client hanged like a Christian and a gentleman.’

“I spent nearly an hour arguing the point with the poor old fellow. ‘I don’t hold with dumb animals performing on the stage, and I don’t hold with the hanging of women,’ he kept saying, in that odd way of his which one doesn’t know exactly how to take.

“‘Look here, old son,’ I said at last, growing impatient, ‘this will have to be fixed up with Harris to-night; and if I can’t get Harris, I shall get Westby.’

“‘She can hand in her checks if you get either,’ said he. ‘She’ll be hanged by the neck without even a run for her money.’

“‘Well, you can’t get “silk” for twenty guineas,’ said I; ‘and you can’t get a really useful junior.’

“Now, here follows another of the ‘peculiar’ circumstances. Suddenly the wild Irishman lifted himself in his bed, and again there was that odd look in his eyes.

“‘I’ll tell you who you can get,’ said he; ‘he’s come to me in a flash. Get that fellow Northcote.’

“‘Northcote?’ said I; ‘never heard of him.’

“‘Never mind, get him,’ said the wild Irishman. ‘He’s young, and they say he’s mad, but he might bring us luck.’

“‘For a chap with as brilliant a set of brains as are to be found in London,’ said I, ‘you do come out with some of the oddest suggestions. How did you come to think of this fellow Northcote, when you won’t allow Harris and Westby to be good enough?’

“‘Oh,’ said he, ‘he’s one of my inspirations,’

“‘Inspiration my foot!’ said I. ‘I’m off to Christopher Harris.’

“Well, as I was about to go, poor Tobin raised himself again, and those queer eyes came at me in a way I don’t like.

“‘Look here, Whitcomb,’ he said; ‘you were a pal to me when I had hardly a boot to my foot, but if you go to Harris I’ll never speak to you again.’

“‘Lie down, you damned Celt, and go to sleep,’ I said, ‘and I’ll come and talk to you another day.’

“‘I won’t lie down until you promise to go to Northcote at No. 3 Shepherd’s Inn.’

“‘King’s Bench Walk,’ I assured him, ‘will be far better. If I can’t have a reckless fellow like you, I mean to play for safety.’

“‘All the safety in the world,’ said he, ‘won’t save the poor beggar’s neck.’

“‘That’s all very well,’ said I, ‘but an inexperienced man might come a dreadful cropper in a case of this kind. I believe myself in a moderate amount of speculation, but not in a capital charge.’

“‘It’s her only chance,’ said the Irishman.

“‘I am afraid,’ said I, ‘her attorneys are not willing to provide her with it at the risk of decency.’

“‘There’s your Saxon,’ said he. ‘Even when they hang a woman, they insist on decency. Praise be to the saints, we haven’t got any decency in our dirty old island.’

“‘No,’ said I; ‘but you’ve got a good deal of superstition. Whatever put this fellow Northcote into your wild head? I never remember to have heard of him in court.’

“‘I don’t care what you’ve heard of him,’ said the Irishman, ‘this is where he gets his chance. He’ll bring us luck.’

“‘Luck!’ said I. ‘A lawyer’s luck is based on common sense and the capacity to see into the future.’

“‘We crack-brained Celts possess that capacity,’ said Tobin. ‘You can come and tell me on Monday whether I’ve been wrong.’

“‘Is Northcote an Irishman, too?’ I asked, feeling myself beginning to waver; and I don’t mind confessing that I have never been able to withstand Michael Tobin from the first hour I met him.

“‘I’ve only seen the man twice,’ said he; ‘but if he doesn’t carry a drop of the Celt under his waistcoat, Cork was not my birthplace.’

“‘Have you seen him in court?’

“‘Not I. The first time I saw him he was addressing a few well-chosen remarks, quoting the pagan philosophers, to a select gathering of the unemployed in Hyde Park. M’Murdo was with me. “My hat,” said he, “that’s a fellow called Northcote; he’s at the bar. A nice place for a barrister, isn’t it?” “Personally,” said I, “I don’t care a curse about the place, but I’d give ten years of my life to have his voice.” There the thing was booming like an organ, and we stayed half an hour listening to rhetoric that might have come out of Burke.’

“‘And the second time?’

“‘I have only the haziest recollection of the occasion. Where it was I can’t recall, but the mob orator was paraphrasing “Hamlet” to gain facility of expression. But I remember thinking, “My son, you will be bursting upon an astonished world one of these fine afternoons, and then we shall all be complaining about your luck for being born so gifted.”’

“And so, my dear Northcote, to round up a long story, thus it was I came to stand in your chambers, dinnerless, at a quarter-past ten of a winter’s night.”

As is not uncommon with those who possess mental energy, the solicitor, under the stimulus of wine and events, had an immense volubility. During this recital the claret had circulated freely between his companion and himself. Both their faces were flushed, and, moreover, the emotions which had been excited in the young advocate had filled him with a kind of vertigo.

“After all,” said he, resting his forehead on his hand and staring into vacancy, “it is most probably Tobin who is the genie.”

“Set a thief to catch a thief,” laughed the solicitor. “Michael Tobin and yourself are well matched—a pair of deuced odd fellows.”

“In any case,” persisted Northcote, “if a genie you are, you would say you are a genie in spite of yourself.”

“I say nothing at all when it comes to genies,” said the solicitor with emphasis. “I don’t know anything about them; they are not in my line. They don’t trouble the common lawyer in the pursuit of his bread. What does trouble him is time, for time is money.”

The solicitor took out his watch, a thing of value.

“Twenty past eleven,” he said. “There’s a fortune awaiting the fellow who invents an automatic brake to slip on old Father Time. I’ve got to get out to Norbiton to-night,—I promised my little girl, and she will be sitting up. But before I go I wish you would cast your eyes over your brief, and tell me precisely what you think about it.”

The solicitor handed to Northcote the document tied with red tape, and called again for the waiter.

“You’ll have a liqueur?—they’ve got some white curaçao that might be worse. And perhaps some coffee might help us at this stage. Fortunately, this is the one place in London where they know how it’s made. And, Alphonse, you might bring some of those fireworks that you call cigars.”

VIII
EQUITY A FRUIT OF THE GODS

By the time the waiter had returned, the young advocate was addressing himself to the bundle of papers with a remarkable energy. Already a fierce mental excitement had stirred him. His senses, overstimulated by a wine of great potency, and by a too sudden reaction from a state of actual bodily starvation, a fever had been kindled in his frame. And those high ambitions which had reconciled him to existence through so long a period of the most abject penury, yet whose only home had been his wild dreams, had suddenly, at the touch of the magic wand of the enchanter, acquired a name and a local habitation.

It was no wonder that to the eyes of the solicitor, that cool, mature, and rather cynical man of the world, this young man, in whom strong and deep emotions had been let loose, soon became an object of scientific interest. Mr. Whitcomb felt himself to be even a little disconcerted by the feverish manner in which the young advocate tossed about the pages of his brief. As he came to note the vivid pallor of the face before him, the burning of the eyes, the twitching of the lips, he felt a qualm of uneasiness. Perchance it had been neither wise nor kind to be so lavish of the Château Margaux. Blood which had been deteriorated by a course of insufficient food was only too likely to be over-charged by an unaccustomed accession of heat. Already it had seemed to be waxing too high.

“Here is your liqueur,” said Mr. Whitcomb, with a slight perturbation, “and here’s a cigar I’ve chosen for you. And here’s a nice black coffee that may steady you a bit.”

“Thanks, thanks,” muttered Northcote, nodding his head in a mechanical manner.

The solicitor gulped his liqueur, and cut off the end of his cigar.

“Well, old boy,” he said, letting a somewhat whimsical gaze fall upon the man who sat opposite, “do you feel like giving us a bit of a run for our money at the hour of ten-thirty at the Central Criminal Court on Friday morning next, or would you prefer that the chance should be offered to Harris?”

The advocate swallowed his coffee.

“You will have a run for your money all right,” said he, “on Friday morning next. Upon my soul, I believe you have given me a start with the most fascinating case in the world.”

The solicitor pursed up his lips in an expression of genial contradiction.

“If you find fascination in a thing like that,” he said, “you must look very deep. The whole business is sordid, atrocious, bestial. The crime is brutal and perfectly commonplace.”

“Is it not a mere question,” said the advocate, “of the fashion in which one uses one’s eyes, of the plane over which one permits them to stray?”

“There is only one plane, my friend,” said the solicitor, “over which an attorney permits his eyes to stray. That is the obvious diurnal one of matter-of-fact common sense.”

“Yet it may happen,” Northcote rejoined, “that the plane of matter-of-fact common sense may not be identical in the eyes of attorney and advocate.”

“Is not the hour somewhat advanced for a Socratic dialogue?” said the solicitor.

“Also,” persisted Northcote, “the plane of matter-of-fact common sense, in whatever it may consist, may not prove identical in the eyes of the jury and the judge; also in the eyes of the person who committed the crime, and the person who was the victim of it.”

“We are not here to traverse the moral code,” said the solicitor, “or to enter the domain of abstract reason. The English penal law is perfectly explicit upon the point at issue, as I think you will find on Friday.”

Of a sudden Northcote struck the table a violent blow.

“This unhappy woman has been deeply wronged by circumstance,” he said, with a vehemence that was totally unexpected.

“It will do your case no harm to show that to the jury,” said the solicitor, sucking quietly at his cigar. “There is not a scrap of evidence to support such a contention, but it might be of service if it could be upheld.”

“Is it not here that we enter on the higher function of the advocate’s art?” said the young man. “Does it not consist in the evocation of that which lies outside the obvious?”

“You must have it entirely your own way, my dear fellow,” said the solicitor warily. “I don’t propose to play the rôle of Adeimantus at this hour of the night. But I don’t mind remarking that you will have to evoke that which is very far outside the obvious to secure the acquittal of my client on Friday.”

“That is viewing the subject from the plane of matter-of-fact common sense which you are content to inhabit?”

“That is so; I can view it from no other. But may I remark in parenthesis that you are also likely to find the judge and jury inhabiting that plane on Friday.”

“You permit yourself a greater definiteness than I dare to employ,” said Northcote. “But the point I would like to fix is this: Assuming that I am able to evoke that which in your view lies so far outside the obvious as to be non-existent, will you countenance my so doing in the prisoner’s interest?”

The solicitor gave a short nervous jerk to his mustache.

“That is a rather extraordinary proposition to advance,” he said disconcertedly; “and as you are a young man, a beginner, perhaps you will forgive my saying that I consider you hardly wise to advance it.”

“Because we cannot contrive to keep our corns out of the way, eh? We would look upon equity as a sort of fruit of the gods, which mankind may eat of, but may not analyze.”

“I shall not attempt to follow you. But what I would like to say is this,—and I hope, my dear fellow, you, as an advocate, will not consider this as a breach of etiquette on the part of your client,—I don’t like your question at all. In a word, speaking with twenty years’ experience behind me, I hardly think it ought to have been put.”

The accession of somewhat strenuous solemnity to a manner which a minute ago had been grossly, carelessly genial, filled Northcote with a heavy mocking laughter.

“I don’t like it at all; oughtn’t to have been put,” Mr. Whitcomb reaffirmed, with a curious admixture of nervousness and sternness.

“I wonder if I shall ever acquire the most valuable of all the arts,” said the young man, with an arch smile; “the art of knowing where not to look.”

“That art comprises the first law of success,” said the solicitor sententiously.

“I omitted to append a rather important corollary to that extraordinary proposition of mine,” said Northcote, with a mischievous air. “It is this: Is the advocate entitled to evoke what is non-existent in the eyes of his client, providing it has an existence in his own?”

“I hope to be spared anything further upon the subject,” said the solicitor. “I don’t aspire to be a casuist; I’m a common lawyer. But I feel I am entitled to say this: use this subtlety of yours on Friday to a full advantage, and you will have no cause to regret having done so.”

“Yes, it’s the voice of the genie, right enough,” said the young man, in a hollow voice, as he toyed with an empty wine-glass.

“And I feel I am also entitled to say,” said the solicitor, with emphasis, “since your mind appears to be exercised by the question, that when an advocate accepts a brief, his whole duty is to his client.”

“And in the case of this unfortunate woman, will serve the interests of his client by securing her acquittal?”

“Unquestionably.”

“If the ends of justice are thereby defeated?”

“Well, since you force one to say it, the interests of the prisoner’s attorney may not always be coincident with those of justice.”

“My dear Adeimantus, that is well said,” the young man exclaimed. “Yet I have your assurance that the interests of client and advocate should be always identical?”

“Yes, I think you are entitled to say that,” said the solicitor; “although understand, if you please, I speak entirely in my capacity as an attorney.”

“From which I gather that as a unit of mankind, as a subscriber to the common equity, you reserve to yourself the right to appease your private gods subsequently in your own private fashion?”

“I suppose one does.”

“And in the meantime, you and I, attorney and advocate, must compass the liberation of this foul murderess, must, if we can, give her back to society?”

“Personally, I shall be content if we enable her to escape the extreme penalty.”

“You balk my question.”

“Pray have it as you choose. Thank God, I am only a common lawyer!”

“My dear Samuel Whitcomb,” said the young man, peering at him with gaunt eyes, “you would do well to get down here and now on your knees, and thank Him for a dispensation of that kind.”

IX
THE BRIEF WITHDRAWN

“Waiter!” called the solicitor at this point. “More coffee, if you please. Let it be hot and strong.” Turning to Northcote, he added: “Our minds have grown so subtle with that claret we’ve got to find out where we are.”

“Narcotics are not usually the friends of truth,” said his companion.

“My worthy Samuel Taylor,” laughed the solicitor, “I hope you will not forget I want to get to Norbiton to-night.”

“There is one other point,” said the young man imperturbably, “on which I wish to render myself clear.”

Mr. Whitcomb permitted himself a shrug of unmistakable expostulation.

“What, another!” he muttered under his breath. “This fellow is the devil!”

“I do not propose to take the line of insanity.”

Northcote spoke with a quietness which seemed to deepen the reverberation of Mr. Whitcomb’s subsequent exclamation.

“Then you hang her!”

“On the contrary,” said Northcote, “I promise an acquittal.”

For a moment the solicitor was robbed of speech by this extraordinary announcement.

“Upon my word,” he exclaimed, with a more manifest impatience than any he had yet shown, “you can hardly have read your brief. There is nothing to extenuate the crime; and the evidence of it is overwhelming.”

“Circumstantial, apparently.”

“You must know that in a capital charge the prosecution relies almost invariably upon circumstantial evidence.”

“So much the worse for it in this particular instance.”

“I am at a loss to understand.” The solicitor spoke in accents of alarm. “There is not a man living who could overthrow the present evidence.”

The young man smiled darkly. The symptoms of his inebriation had yielded to the clarifying influence of a liqueur and two cups of strong black coffee. His calmness was now forming a memorable contrast to the marked excitement of the older man.

“My dear Mr. Whitcomb,” he said, “I suggest, as you wish to get to Norbiton, that we adjourn this discussion until Friday evening, by which time Emma Harrison, alias Cox, alias Marshall, will be restored to society.”

“Such an undertaking is entirely reckless,” said the solicitor bluntly. “Quite the last thing that Tobin himself would attempt would be to upset the theory of the prosecution. The chain of evidence could not be more complete. Even he, in the opinion of many the most brilliant common law man we have at the present moment at the bar, would be content to urge extenuating circumstances, and call witnesses in their support.”

“Since you have seen fit to entrust the conduct of this case to me,” said Northcote, “I shall beg to be conceded as free a hand as would have been conceded to Michael Tobin.”

“Is your request quite reasonable?” said the solicitor. “Tobin has years of experience and success behind him.”

“You can trust me not to attempt more than I can perform,” said Northcote.

“Really, sir,” said Mr. Whitcomb, genuinely alarmed by such an obduracy, “I cannot admit your right, in the circumstances in which you stand at present, to overstep the bounds that are so clearly indicated by persons of experience.”

“I take this brief into court free of all restriction,” was the young man’s rejoinder.

“That one can hardly consent to,” said the solicitor. “Would you say it is quite legitimate to make such a stipulation? We have our witnesses on the line of insanity, and we must ask to have them called.”

“But do you not see,” said Northcote, “that if we call those witnesses we admit the theory of the prosecution, and cut the ground from under our own feet?”

“Certainly, certainly. One would have thought that so much would be self-evident.”

“Yet you sought me out in the capacity of a fighter. I take it that had you not desired to fight you would have gone straightway to Harris.”

“I can only admit the possibilities of a fight within limits. The woman’s guilt is established beyond question; our only concern is to mitigate its degree.”

“For my own part,” said the advocate, “I am not prepared to accept your proposition. To my mind, so far is the woman’s guilt from being already established, that I am prepared to give an undertaking that it never will be established.”

The solicitor drummed his fingers on the table-cloth.

“I should like Tobin to hear you say that. I wish you had been at the police-court when the case came before the magistrate. There is enough evidence to hang an archdeacon.”

“Very likely. But we shall be getting back to those abstract principles for entertaining which I have already suffered reproof.”

The solicitor gave an uneasy eye to his watch.

“You force me to deliver an ultimatum,” said he, in an uncompromising tone. “Please have the goodness to give an undertaking to conduct the defence on the lines indicated by Tobin, or return the brief.”

A wave of blood surged through the brain of the young advocate. A dismal sickness overspread his veins. Tantalus was about to pluck away that which he had fasted and prayed for before he could take it in his grasp.

“You have entrusted it to me already,” he said, in a dull, dry voice.

“In a case of this magnitude,” said the solicitor, with an almost brutal precision, “I reserve to myself the right to alter my mind. You have forced me to issue an ultimatum. Accept or reject it, whichever you choose.”

The solicitor called for his bill in a hectoring manner, and threw a bank-note on the waiter’s salver.

The young advocate, in the meantime, buttoned the brief in the breast-pocket of his somewhat threadbare black coat.

“What is your decision?” said the solicitor, regarding the young man with an insolent coolness.

“You can’t have back your brief,” said Northcote. “You gave it to me.”

“It can only be held conditionally,” said Mr. Whitcomb, “and the conditions are perfectly easy to accept.”

“The brief was delivered unconditionally into my keeping,” said Northcote, in an arid voice. “And,” he added, with a sudden gleam of the eyes as an overpowering recollection of his destiny came back to him, “you will have no reason to regret your act.”

Before the solicitor had framed a reply the waiter had returned with the receipted bill.

“Keep the change,” said the solicitor, “and call a hansom.”

The waiter withdrew.

“Do I take it,” said the solicitor, with an incisive drawl in his speech as he turned to Northcote, “that you have said no?”

“I have said no in the first place to your restrictions,” said Northcote, looking him full in the eyes, “and in the second to your ultimatum.”

“Then with all possible reluctance I must ask you to have the goodness to return the brief.”

“With an equal reluctance I feel I must decline to do so,” said Northcote, speaking through tight lips.

For a moment the solicitor was taken aback by this pointblank refusal.

“But—but—” he stammered, “surely this is most unprofessional. Such a thing has never happened to me in all my twenty years of practice.”

“And I don’t suppose,” rejoined the young advocate, “it will ever happen to you again. But suppose we leave the plane of our professionalism, step down from our platform, and approach the prejudices of each other in a rational spirit.”

“No more argument, I beseech you,” said the solicitor sternly; “I’ve got to get to Norbiton. Return the brief, and we will say no more. You are not the man for this case. You have a bee in your bonnet; you have too many brains. I think none the worse of you, mind; I respect you; you have your ideas; one day they may prove valuable, but not in common law. You have mistaken your métier, that is all. We will say you are above your work; at any rate, with all deference to Michael Tobin, I shall prefer to see Harris holding briefs of ours before a common-sense English jury and a matter-of-fact English judge when it comes to the capital charge.”

“If you are present in court on Friday,” said Northcote, “you will find that I, not Harris, will still be holding the brief you entrusted to my care.”

“Upon my word,” muttered the solicitor to himself, “this fellow is a madman, a lunatic. I dare say he’s been starving so long that a square meal has turned his brain.”

Involuntarily his eyes began to traverse the face of the man who sat bolt upright with arms folded at the other side of the table. It was excessively pale, flushed with wine and conversation, and strangely, exquisitely mobile. It had a kind of gaunt delicacy, but the obvious traces of suffering were permeated by a remarkable power. The features were irregular yet not unpleasing, the nose was straight and incisive, the eyes deep and luminous, the mouth large and full-lipped. The general expression was sombre, because it was so bluntly dominating, yet it was rendered memorable by many subtle qualities. Clearly it was one of those faces which to see was never to forget.

Mr. Whitcomb, in spite of his desire to get to Norbiton, and the severe tests to which his constitutional arrogance as an immensely successful man of the world had been subjected, owed too much to his trained powers of observation to lay them aside at a moment so remarkable.

“This fellow is cut to a big pattern,” was his mental comment. “That is a splendid mask for an advocate. Upon my soul, if he were not so mad I think I should be inclined to back him heavily. Yet I believe he is literally starving.”

The solicitor rose abruptly from the table to dispel his reverie.

“Rather than you should feel you have ground for complaint,” said he abruptly, as if touched by compassion, “I shall ask you to allow me to advance half of your fee; and to-morrow I will send you some other sort of work.”

Mr. Whitcomb unrolled a note for ten pounds and gave it to Northcote.

“Now,” he said, “kindly return the brief and I will go.”

Northcote crumpled up the note and thrust it in his pocket.

“I accept half my fee,” said he, “not as a bribe, but as a retainer. By this means I pledge myself to conduct the case to its appointed issue.”

“Pray do not let us misunderstand one another,” said the solicitor, with a sense of being trapped. “This brief is withdrawn definitely; I ask you to return it to me. I give you ten pounds as a solatium for losing your fee.”

“I cannot construe the situation in that fashion,” said the young man calmly.

“This is not a question of construction,” said the solicitor, with his anger beginning to announce itself; “it is a question of hard fact. Your brief is withdrawn.”

“And I,” said Northcote, with expansive bluntness, “do not submit to its withdrawal.”

Before this impasse which had presented itself in a manner so definite, the solicitor, whose patience had been strained beyond the breaking-point, could only take refuge in a series of imprecations.

“Fellow’s drunk,” he muttered. “Shall have to see him first thing to-morrow. But it is most irritating that he should refuse to give up the papers when time is so short. It looks like an application for a postponement after all.”

The solicitor turned for the last time to the advocate.

“It is a quarter-past twelve,” he said brusquely, “and I am going home. And I would like to urge you to gain reflection by the aid of a few hours’ sleep, because I shall look for that brief to be delivered at my offices at a quarter-past ten to-morrow morning. Good night.”

He held out his hand; Northcote ignored it.

“You appear to impugn my sobriety,” said the latter, “and that is a pity, because in all my life I have never felt my mind to be quite so clear as it is to-night. Perhaps it is not fair to expect you to appreciate the point at which I have arrived, and why it is impossible for me to restore your brief.” He pressed his hands over the bundle of papers in his coat. “You see your brief is my destiny.”

A final expression of somewhat forcible disapproval escaped Mr. Whitcomb, and he moved away to the room in which he had deposited his hat and coat.

As an attendant was assisting to envelop the solicitor’s portliness in these articles, it annoyed him to find that Northcote had followed him.

“Why not spare one this trouble to which you are putting one?” he said reproachfully. “Why not be moderately reasonable about it?”

“Ah, you see,” said Northcote with a smile, as he presented the ticket for his own extremely time-worn hat and coat, “even a thing so primitive as ‘the moderately reasonable’ must submit itself to the peculiarly elusive mental plane one is doomed to inhabit.”

“Peace! peace!” said the solicitor. “No more of that!”

“Attorney and advocate, judge and jury,” said the young man, as he rummaged in vain among his pockets to find a tip for the attendant, “justice and equity, the prisoner at the bar and the victim of circumstance,—one and all are to be poised upon the same arbitrary moral elevation, to submit to the mandates of a tribunal which is the creation of that egregiously warped and time-serving thing upon which we bestow the name of The Majority.”

“Peace! peace!” said the solicitor, unable in spite of himself to repress a laugh at the amazed face of the cloak-room attendant, and moving to where his hansom awaited him; “give up those papers here and now like a good fellow, and save me a great deal of time and worry. If Harris doesn’t see them first thing to-morrow it means a postponement, and we don’t want that.”

“There is need for neither,” said Northcote, buttoning up his threadbare overcoat. “But, ye gods and little fishes! what is the name for the total blindness, the pathetic obtuseness, which has eclipsed the faculties of this connoisseur, this expert? Here is one who has been angling for years for a real authentic fish from the sea, yet when one plumps into his net, being accustomed to nothing but the sight of minnows, he doesn’t even guess at his travaille.”

By this time the solicitor had fled precipitately through the vestibule of the restaurant, and stood in the portico awaiting his hansom.

X
THE RIDE TO NORBITON

As he was entering the vehicle Northcote came to his side.

“Good night,” said Mr. Whitcomb. “In the morning, perhaps, when you see things a bit clearer you will think better of this. In fact I am sure of it; and I hope you will not forget to send round the brief.”

Before he could close the door of the hansom, the young man had joined him in its interior.

“I hope you don’t mind my coming with you,” he said, entirely at his ease. “This matter is far too momentous for all concerned to be left in the unsatisfactory stage at which it has now arrived.”

“This fellow is the devil,” muttered the solicitor, suppressing a groan.

“Where, sir?” said the cabman through the hole in the roof.

“Norbiton.”

“Norbiton! Not to-night, sir; the ’oss is tired.”

“Take me to Norbiton,” said the solicitor sharply, “and never mind about your horse.”

“Very sorry, guv’nor—”

“Well, if you can afford to lose a sovereign—”

The cabman’s head disappeared immediately, and the horse started on its journey at a good round pace.

“These cabmen are the greatest robbers in Europe,” said the solicitor, settling himself in his corner. “They are a disgrace to London. One would like to see them taken over by the state.”

Although Mr. Whitcomb was ruffled by his companion’s strange pertinacity, his philosophic habit soon came to his aid.

“Have a weed?” he said, offering his cigar-case.

By the time each had lighted a cigar and ensconced himself in a measure of comfort in a corner of the vehicle, the irritation of the one and the aggressive tenacity of the other had been somewhat allayed.

“There are several points that still remain dark to me,” said Northcote, “in this odd affair. Having come in a moment of high inspiration to the attic of the obscure, having discovered its occupant to be of an uncommon faculty, having entrusted him with your business, all of a sudden, because of a singular revelation of his talent, you discard him and have recourse to an abject mediocrity.”

“You are certainly a queer fellow,” said the solicitor, amused by this piece of egotism. “A most unconventional fellow—quite the most unconventional fellow I have ever met.”

“Ah, there is my offence,” said the young man; “I have outraged the gods, I have disregarded the proprieties. Yet I would ask you, are not all conventions for the common vulgar? Are not nature’s most authentic specimens, those pioneers in every sphere of mundane activity who add the little more that means so much, are not these to walk about the earth just as nature fashioned them?”

“I am pleased to say,” said Mr. Whitcomb, emitting a soft purr of contentment, “I am a common lawyer. The whys and wherefores are not my province; I take things as they are.”

“That does not prevent all your instincts being up in arms when you encounter the unusual. How curious it is that the most deadly sin in the eyes of the average person is that shameless egotism which transacts the real business of the world.”

“If there were no rules to which one had to conform,” said the solicitor, “there would be no living in the world. Conventions to my mind are highly necessary. Of course every man has a perfect right to consider himself a tremendous fellow, but that is no reason why he should say as much to his neighbor. If he does, his neighbor will want to refute it.”

“And if he should throw down his gage, and prove to his neighbor in a perfectly logical and scientific manner that he is a tremendous fellow, his neighbor will not be content with wanting to refute him; his neighbor will want to shoot him, or hang him, or burn him, or crucify him, and it is long odds that his neighbor will succeed in so doing.”

“I am afraid I don’t follow you.”

“I am speaking of the fate that awaited upon the majority of the tremendous fellows whom we discover in the pages of history; the founders of the religions, the saints, the heroes, the discoverers, the makers of the philosophical systems.”

“One suspects,” said the solicitor, “it was because they made the world so uncomfortable while they were living in it.”

“I agree. But what a world we should have if they had not.”

“It is not at all clear to my mind,” said the solicitor, “that in the long run these fellows of whom you are speaking have not done more harm to the world than they have done good. Not only did their abnormal egotisms run am k during their own lives, but after their deaths, which as you suggest were often brutal and unnecessary, they continued in the guise of saints and martyrs, and inspired teachers to wreak iconoclasm and discomfort upon mankind.”

“One can readily believe,” said the young man, “that you, sir, in your capacity of a member of the comfortable classes, to which by fortune and education you belong, would fetter the march of ideas by every means in your power.”

“Yes,” said the solicitor, drawing peacefully at his cigar; “few things are more distasteful to me personally than ideas. Particularly those lawless ones which proceed from ill-regulated and ill-balanced natures. It seems to me that they are responsible for nine-tenths of the misery that is in the world.”

“Do I take it that, in your opinion, so far from these so-called ‘great men’ of whom we are speaking meriting esteem from their fellows, their doctrines as well as their persons should be pursued with the fire and the sword; and that means should be adopted to exterminate the growth of these ‘great’ ones from the comfortable republic which is inhabited by the average person?”

“I would suggest it. I have given little thought to this subject, but I cannot think of a single historical personage of whom I do not consider that in the long run mankind would have gained immeasurably had he never been born into its midst.”

“This is extreme doctrine,” said Northcote; “and may I pay you the compliment, sir, of saying that I find you to be one of a greater courage than I had suspected.”

“All the so-called ‘greatness’ one finds enshrined in history,” the solicitor continued, “proceeds from an abnormal egotism; and I think even a perfectly commonplace mind such as my own, which is content with the obvious, has only to take a most superficial look around to see that the abnormal is the only evil against which mankind has to contend.”

“Necessarily,” said Northcote, “since the self-consciousness of matter is the ugliest phenomenon known to natural law. But to follow the line of your reasoning, the abnormal person, whatever the sphere of his activity, is invariably the enemy of his kind?”

“That is my suggestion; the suggestion of an average mind that is content to rest on the plane of matter-of-fact common sense.”

“You would say that it would have been better for mankind had the poet Shakespeare never been given to it?”

“Unquestionably. In my view, all poetry, even in what we are pleased to call a sublime and concentrated form, is a direct emanation of morbid sensibility. It stimulates those already sufficiently irritable faculties of the mind which call for a never-ceasing vigilance to hold in check. Poetry is the chief enemy against which rational common sense has to contend.”

“Then in your view the greatest enemy of the human race of which history has taken cognizance is Jesus Christ?”

“I will not say the greatest; but He shares the opprobrium that attaches to His class. It was that type of abnormalism which developed the religious sense in man; and any sense more calculated to provoke infinite misery, any sense more completely out of harmony with the facts of existence, one cannot conceive.”

“In a word, excess of any kind is repugnant to the average person?”

“One would say so; mainly, I think, because it extorts such heavy toll of all who are brought in contact with it.”

“Then elevation of feeling, profundity of thought, subtlety of insight, austerity of morals, heroism, beauty, in short, the superlative in any guise whatever, should be eliminated from the republic of the average sensual person?”

“If the average sensual person could contrive a republic for himself, that would be its first decree.”

“Hence his hostility to those abnormal egotisms which are known as ‘greatness’?”

“As far as the average person can see, that appears to go down to the root of the matter.”

“Well, sir,” said the young advocate, “permit me to take a slight parable out of my own experience to refute this supposition.”

“Pray do so.”

The advocate selected as a preliminary a second cigar from the case of the solicitor, and resettled himself in comfort in the corner of the vehicle.

“All my life,” said Northcote, “from the farthest day to which my memory goes back, I have been persecuted with the consciousness of my own importance. In all my dealings with others, in the daily outlook upon my surroundings, not only have I been unable to detach myself from my own private entity, but I have also been obsessed with the knowledge that that entity was so much more powerful than any with which it happened to come in contact. As you will believe, a feeling of that kind spelt serious inconvenience to its possessor. At my private school I was the recipient of many cuffs in my capacity of a shy, nervous, and intensely self-centred child who detested games. It grew to be a special function of my youthful companions, and also that of every self-respecting master, to ‘knock the nonsense out of Northcote.’ However, so far from knocking it out, these disinterested efforts appeared to knock it farther in. And when in the fulness of time I ascended to the ampler region of a public school, my sufferings were materially increased. I was shunned, I was tormented, an opprobrious name was fastened upon me; and had not the fire which burned so intensely at the centre of myself kept me warm in spirit, life would have become intolerable.

“It was a consciousness of personal power haunting me day and night which caused me to scorn the gods of the little world in which I found myself, and to disregard the petty conventions which mean so much in every phase of human life. Accordingly I was marked out as an object of hatred and ridicule. However, as years went on, and I came to be endowed with the somewhat unusual physical frame which you may have observed I possess, I determined in a somewhat cynical spirit of revenge to devote myself to one of those stupid and unmeaning exercises, my contempt for which was one of the most potent causes of my unpopularity. Never before had I condescended to approach one of the usual school ‘games,’ other than in a spirit of levity; but when I awoke to the discovery that nature had somewhat ironically endowed me with a power of muscle, a suppleness of limb, and a bulk of inches which would in themselves make me the envy of every athlete in the school, I determined to turn them to account. It was in no spirit of open competition with those whom I despised that I resolved to become the most accomplished football-player who had ever appeared in the school. It was my somewhat curious method of avenging all the insults, all the barbarous forms of injustice, that had been wreaked upon me. I might have requited my assailants in other ways, but I was too proud to employ the methods of those whom I felt to be my mental, physical, and moral inferiors. Therefore I gave myself up to this mechanical exercise, and an abnormal concentration of will-power which I have always possessed, in conjunction with remarkable physical gifts, had the result for which I had prayed.

“When this new prowess was first bruited abroad it was received with derision. But in spite of an organized public opinion which in every walk of life assails the unconventional, this ability became a source of distress to the expert. ‘It comes to this,’ said the captain of the School Fifteen, after a House cup-tie in which dismay had been carried into the camp of the opposition, ‘if this sort of thing goes on, we shall have to think about playing “Cad” Northcote for the School.’ The shouts of derision with which this prophecy was received are still in my ears. However ‘this sort of thing’ continued to go on, and sure enough, to the amazement of men and gods, the day dawned on which ‘Cad’ Northcote did play for the School. He dominated the scene of action in every game in which he took part; but such was the strength of public opinion that the ruling powers withheld his ‘cap’ until the very last moment, the eve of the chief game of the year. It was the match against our great school rivals, a neighboring seminary, of which, sir, I discern by certain unfortunate tricks of manner that you are an alumnus.”

“Never mind about that,” said the solicitor; “get on with your story. It is enormously interesting. Did you play against us in the great match?”

“Yes, I played against you in the great match. The ‘fez’ of the School Fifteen, which should have been mine weeks before, was duly presented to me on the eve of ‘Waterloo,’ for although it was a dreadful crime to be ‘unpopular,’ it was yet highly necessary to ‘take on’ the French. And I recall now with some amusement the manner in which I contrived to flout the amour propre of the venerable institution into whose service I was pressed. Instead of turning out in the garish colors with which I had been honored at the eleventh hour, I appeared upon the scene in a costume of the most immaculate whiteness. As soon as the captain beheld this apparition on the field of play, he came to me and said insolently: ‘Northcote, what do you mean by getting yourself up like this? Go back at once and put on the School colors.’ I rejoined: ‘I play for the School in my own colors on my own terms. I would like you to understand that if I am with you, I am not of you.’ There was a hurried consultation among my fourteen fellow players, and although their sense of outrage was enormous, that was neither the time nor the place to indulge it.

“The French were ‘taken on’ as they had never been ‘taken on’ before. But the debacle was the work of one man. Such a game as was played on that occasion by ‘Cad’ Northcote was never seen before or afterwards. According to tradition, which to this day invests his pious memory, he spent half his time in crossing the line of his adversaries, and the other half in standing the opposing three-quarters on their heads. He felt himself to be equipped for the part of the man of destiny. I believe the rout of our hereditary rivals on that occasion came near to approaching three figures.”

“You don’t mean to say,” exclaimed the solicitor, “that you are the great Northcote, the fellow who led the English pack while he was still at school?”

“No less.”

“Why, then I saw you play at the Rectory Field sometime in the ’nineties. I remember you had those damned Welshmen over the line three times in the first five minutes. You pushed them all over the place.”

“Yes, we pushed them all over the place. You saw me at the summit of my fame. And I am now coming to the point of my parable. From those days of my inordinate success, which conferred not only lustre upon myself, but upon my school and all who were associated with me, I became not only a hero, but a figure of legend. The opprobrious title ‘Cad’ Northcote was dropped as completely as though it had never been. My lightest opinion was treasured, and heaven only can tell us how many they were on every point under the sun. I became a dictator where formerly I had suffered infinite misery and persecution. By a display of personal force criticism was laid low; yet, sir, according to this theory of yours, it must have been inimical to all who came within its sphere of influence.”

“I would say so certainly; demoralizing alike to its possessor, and to those who despised it in its growth and abased themselves before it in its flower.”

“Yet was it not with bated breath that you inquired whether I was the ‘great’ Northcote?”

“Pray do not overlook the fact, my dear fellow, that however much the average sensual mind may deplore the false gods before which it kneels, it has not the power to deliver itself from their thrall. This passion to ‘excel’ is a flaw inherent in the race.”

“It is at least pleasant to discover,” said Northcote, “that the average sensual mind is unable to banish the sentiment of admiration from its republic.”

“If it could,” said the solicitor, “there would be an end of these abnormal egotisms of which we have been speaking.”

“I do not agree,” said Northcote. “It is not a thirst for admiration from which they spring, but a thirst for power. And it is an uncomfortable reflection for those who belong to your republic that the world has been so arranged that mere power will always have its devotees. How lamentably your own practice breaks down before your theory. You have reverence for me as a player of football, and Tobin’s powers as an advocate fill you with enthusiasm.”

“True; and it is men like Tobin and yourself who forbid any reconciliation between theory and practice. A phenomenon is always inimical to the society in which it appears. It may stand forth as memorable and fascinating as you please, but it does so at the expense of balance, law, and reason. Your presence in the football match ruined the game as a game, just as I have observed that the presence of Tobin in a case has been disastrous to the cause of justice.”

“Nevertheless, you invoke the aid of Tobin on every possible occasion.”

“I do.”

“Upon what pretext, may I ask, since you deplore his gifts so deeply?”

“The answer is simple. To whatever extent I may deplore the condition of things into which, through no fault of my own, I have been projected, beyond everything I am of a comfortable and conforming disposition. Therefore I make my subscription to the things that are. I have none of the reformer’s zeal; and it is one of the things for which I am thankful.”

At this stage of the conversation the voice of the cabman was heard from the roof.

“We’re in Norbiton, sir. Which house?”

“Straight on to the end of the road,” said Mr. Whitcomb; “then first to the right, second to the left, and it is the first house you come to at the corner of Avenue Road.”

“How quickly we’ve come,” said Northcote. “One would not have thought it possible to cover the distance in this time; with a tired horse, too.”

“The sound of your own voice may have been as agreeable to you,” said the solicitor, “as it has been to me. I confess it has passed the time very well.”

Northcote deduced from the more indulgent air of his companion that this imperious personality of his, of whose possession he was so conscious and upon which he built so much, had not been without an effect. He was thinking of the victory that he felt sure would crown his tenacity, when the hansom drew up at the gate of a very comfortable-looking suburban residence. It was girt with a high stone wall, and stood in a pleasant plot of ground amid tall trees.

As they got out of the hansom, the solicitor, after searching his pockets in leisurely fashion, collected four shillings and a sixpence and handed them up to the cabman on his perch.

“Wot’s this ’ere?” said the cabman gruffly. “This ain’t no use ter me, guv’nor. Yer promised me a quid.”

“In one’s dealings with the criminal classes,” said the solicitor, “one finds that the only method of self-protection is the use of their own weapons.”

“Yer promised me a quid, guv’nor,” said the cabman, who was too excited to follow the course of this reasoning.

“May I say,” rejoined the solicitor, with great suavity, “that a promise is considered to be a thing of no particular value among the members of the criminal classes.”

“Criminal classes! Wot!” cried the cabman, in a gust of fury. “Breaks yer promises and calls yerself a toff! Not a-going to part with that quid. Well, guv’nor, we’ll just see abaht it.”

Emitting a string of foul expressions, the cabman hopped down from his perch.

“Call yerself a toff? Give me that quid or I’ll knock out yer —— eye.”

“Try,” said the solicitor, with a coolness that his companion felt to be inimitable.

Inflamed a little by drink as well as by a sense of injury, the cabman prepared to exact a summary vengeance. Breathing slaughter he came at Mr. Whitcomb with his fists in the air; and that gentleman, stepping aside coolly and nimbly, hit him with a hand ungloved for the purpose a heavy blow in the face. The cabman dropped like a log in the slush of the gutter.

“A broken nose,” said Mr. Whitcomb, turning to his companion, while they stood watching the unfortunate cabman gather himself slowly and painfully together.

“I feel for you, cabby,” said the solicitor, to his rueful assailant, “but I can assure you this is wholly in the public interest. Thieves and bullies, as well as fools, have to be taught by experience.”

“Why the ’ell didn’t yer sye so?” whimpered the cabman, as he strove in vain to stanch the blood that poured from his nose. “’Ow the ’ell should I know yer could use ’em? I piked yer fer a toff in yer ’igh ’at and yer fur coat and yer glass eye; ’ow the ’ell should I know yer could use ’em?”

“That is for you banditti to discover,” was the rejoinder of his fare. “It is perhaps my chief recreation to thrash hansom cabmen in the interests of society. I am proud to say your case is one of many.”

“Blow me tight, a prize-fighter!”

“It is not too much to say I might have aspired to that calling, if the somewhat material nature of my ambitions had not summoned me to a more lucrative if less honorable practice. Twenty years ago I was considered rather useful with the gloves.”

“Not so rusty nah, guv’nor,” said the cabman, imperfectly mollified, and stanching his nose with his sleeve. “Give us a extra bob an’ I’ll drive to the ’orspital.”

“Here is your sovereign,” said Mr. Whitcomb. “Training and education make one so punctilious in regard to one’s word, although common sense assures one that like the majority of your class you are a rogue, a liar, and a bully; in a word, a common pirate. Here is your money; and have the goodness to take yourself off as reticently as you can.”

There was not a more astonished Jehu amid the ranks of his London brethren than this unfortunate specimen, as he climbed into the seat he had left so injudiciously. Bestowing a succession of brutal strokes of the whip upon his even more unfortunate horse, he was lost immediately in the sleet and darkness of the morning, leaving Northcote, who was only slightly less astonished than his bleeding and blasphemous self, standing at the side of the solicitor against the gate of the latter’s residence.

XI
MR. WHITCOMB’S FOIBLES

“In moments of relaxation from my studies,” said Northcote, taking his companion by the arm, “I like to look upon myself as something of an amateur of the human mind. I find a great fascination in the endless nuances of the human character. Permit me to say that I have never come across a more promising subject than is offered by your own personal complexity. Why in the name of the marvellous did you batter that poor devil if you had no intention of cozening him out of his money?”

“He suffered for one of my foibles. I am convinced that a society of banded robbers is at work to blackmail, bully, and despoil the peaceable citizens of London. The law is powerless to touch them, their operations are so cunning and are ordered on so mean a scale. Therefore it would seem to behove every stalwart private individual to make war upon them openly; and I am proud to affirm that a good measure of success has attended my own puny efforts. It is quite possible that in the course of these labors I may happen upon a retired champion who chooses to eke out a well-deserved leisure in a manner so unsavory, but in the meantime I deal out a dozen broken noses a year to this banditti.”

“You are an enigma, indeed,” said the young man. “You professed just now to accept the things that are, that your last intention is to effect any sort of social reform; yet look what you do. Again, you profess to be a connoisseur in men of promise, yet with your eyes open you reject the most authentic specimen that has ever swum into your ken. Further, you deride every form of ‘greatness,’ and despise every manifestation of the force that it is your daily business to employ.”

“I am an enigma, right enough,” said the solicitor; “yet, for that matter, so are we all. Who shall explain himself? Who shall attempt it? I preach one thing in all sincerity, yet with an equal sincerity I practise another. Nature designed the lymphatic Samuel Whitcomb to be the most consistent man alive, yet see, my friend, how malleable he is, how mobile, how entirely at the mercy of the caprices that whirl about in himself. It gives me an indescribable pleasure to thrash hansom cabmen; my being craves for that form of relaxation; it is its conception of true physical and intellectual enjoyment.”

“Did I not understand you to say,” asked the astonished young man, “that these Promethean labors were undertaken in the service of society?”

“Do not believe me,” said the solicitor, with his rich laugh floating melodiously into the chill night air. “I would deceive others with that pleasant figment, but I do not impose on myself. It is a sheer animal impulse, which I am powerless to withstand, that causes me to break the noses of this banditti.”

“Well, sir,” said Northcote, “I will wish you good night. It has been a real pleasure to have met you. The enchanting complexity of your personal character will beguile me during my long walk home. As for the brief that I hold, unless a whim should cause you to obtain a postponement of the trial, you will find it in my custody at the Old Bailey on Friday morning.”

“Not so fast, my friend,” said Mr. Whitcomb, as Northcote turned on his heel. “You had better come in and have a drink before you start. It will be a dreadfully cold and wearisome tramp back to town through this slush in the small hours of the morning.”

“My own foible is to walk the streets at night,” said Northcote. “That is the only taste of real freedom one enjoys in a city. It is only during the middle of the night in a place like London that one can think one’s own thoughts and breathe God’s air. But as we do not appear quite to have settled this momentous business of the brief, which may mean so much more to society at large than you can imagine, I will enter your domain and drink one glass of your whiskey.”

The solicitor led the way thereto, unlocked the front door with a latch-key, and Northcote found himself in the interior of a modern dwelling-house. It was furnished with perfect taste, fitted with every luxury. The heavy mats on the floors muffled the sounds of his feet; the warmed air that assailed his nostrils was seductive and delicate after the bitter inclemency from which he had taken refuge. Numerous objects of vertu were scattered in every nook, and the walls were lined with pictures that astonished him beyond measure.

“Why, that is a Whistler—one of the two or three!” he exclaimed, as he passed in the hall an unpretentious-looking portrait.

“I got it years ago for a song, before they began to be bought,” said Mr. Whitcomb modestly.

“And what is that stuck over the stairs? From this distance it looks suspiciously like a Velasquez. But surely that is in the Prado?”

“Aren’t you confounding it with the companion picture?”

“I had no idea we had this in England.”

“We have many things in England which fortunately are not matters of common knowledge. Every year they are becoming rarer, owing to that scourge of nations, the press. If you value my regard, you will forget that you have noticed it.”

“Did you get that also before they began to be bought?”

“There is rather a strange story attaching to that picture.”

“Ah!” exclaimed Northcote, with an anticipatory eagerness; “that is where pictures are so unlike women—they are worthless if they have no history.”

“Possess your soul in patience, my friend,” said the solicitor, with his rich chuckle; “the history of the lady in the blue dress is not going to be told.”

“I must get a bit nearer,” said the young man, with shining eyes, “Eh, she’s authentic! You should be a proud man to keep that little lady under your own roof.”

“As proud,” said the solicitor, in his unctuous voice, “as any other Goth of a householder in his snug suburban residence. Conceive the feelings of the Huns when they overran Rome.”

“Or the mob,” said the young man, “when they sacked the Tuileries.”

“Is she not precious, the little girl in the blue frock?”

At the sound of soft accents, Northcote, a little startled, swung round to confront a lady. She had come upon him noiselessly, and was standing at his side.

“Hullo, Angel!” said Mr. Whitcomb, bestowing a kiss upon her; “this is late for you. Allow me to present Mr. Northcote, England’s future Lord Chancellor.”

Northcote found himself to be holding the hand of a singularly beautiful woman. All that art can devise to enhance the sure, strong, and original groundwork of nature was displayed about her, chastely yet abundantly. Diamonds were strewn in the flounces of her gown; three tight bands of pearls clasped her throat; her shoulders gleamed; her hair had the evanescent hues of the fleeciest silk—each tress was the fruit of cunning and labor. Yet through every curve of her gorgeous fairness there peeped forth an almost quaint simplicity. Her eyes were bright; her features, each of which seemed to add a personal brilliancy to her expression, had a lustre at once naïve and opulent, as becomes one who accepts greedily all the thousand and one glittering and delightful minutiæ that money adds to life; who has both hands outstretched to receive them; who carries them joyously, like a child, to her bosom; who presses them to her lips.

“His name is Northcote,” said the solicitor, patting her white arm. “From the window of his garret in Fleet Street he surveys the universe with the haughtiest eyes imaginable.”

“How clever of him,” said the lady, in a little melodious accent.

“Those eyes of his know everything,” said the solicitor. “Before them human nature unveils the whole of its mysteries. They range over the stars in their courses, and he himself is familiar with spirits. They have already promised to enable him to conquer the world.”

“He must be what they call a favorite of fortune,” said the lady, with engaging laughter. “He must be clever.”

“Yes; he confesses it.”

“He is young,” said the lady, with a tender little sigh.

She half-turned to meet the eyes of the young man, and looked straight into their sombre depths. Her own had a steadiness that was not at all imperious—they were not even faintly insolent; the candor of their inquiry was not so much as tinged with encounter. An infant staring with its ruthless curiosity into the human soul could have hardly dealt less in implication. Yet the act itself seemed to acquire for the young man the nature of a feat so meaningless, yet so charged with meaning did it appear. Only the support of a confident personal beauty rendered it possible; yet it was nothing at all, not even a comment, nor the formation of an opinion, hardly the faint awakening of an interest; all the same the blood had invaded Northcote’s ears.

“You mustn’t look at him so long,” said Mr. Whitcomb, laughing. “You are making him shy.”

“Pray look at me as long as you please,” said Northcote, who had recovered already his self-possession. “And if you do really succeed in making me shy, it may be shown to you one day as not the least of your works.”

Her laughter rang out pure and clear like the tinkling of steel.

“Yes, he is clever,” she said, “although he is so young. I am so pleased. I am sure to like you, Mr. Northcote; I like all men who are clever.”

“Is it that you have so little to fear?”

Northcote was now returning her frank look of inquiry with a gaze of equal candor.

“Yes, there is truth in that,” she said sagely.

“Are not the powerful among us the most vulnerable to your sex?” said Northcote gently.

“Yes, that is true also,” she exclaimed, in a sort of glee. “Why has it not occurred to one before?”

“If you speak much with this gentleman,” said Mr. Whitcomb, “he will tell you a large number of things that you will be surprised to think have not occurred to you before.”

“He looks like that,” said the lady, betraying a dimple. “I hope you don’t mind my looking so much at your face, Mr. Northcote. It is one of those fascinating faces that seem to give a new meaning to old ideas.”

“Yes, you are very well matched,” said Mr. Whitcomb cheerfully; “and doubtless you will find a great deal to say to one another. But it will not be to-night, madam. Are you aware it is a quarter to two? Now suppose you play us a bit of a tune while we take a much-needed drink, and then I shall send you to bed.”

The lady led the way to a drawing-room. Luxury and taste appeared there to have been carried to their highest point. Northcote, whose delicately poised sensibilities vibrated to the simplest of external things, was fain to believe that paradise itself could not have shaped a bolder contrast to that bleak squalor which he had been doomed to inhabit year after year. Somewhere apart in the sanctuary of the spirit, the home of so many complex and marvellous things, were chords responsive to the challenge of the beautiful. They could thrill before the manifestation of its power, even in that which was exterior, material, unmeaning. These cushioned enchantments, this bright bower, with so exquisite an occupant casting slim jewelled fingers across a wonderful instrument, sent a shock of intoxication into his blood. At the same instant he was conscious of a stab of shame. It was the flesh, the draperies, the trappings to which his pulses responded; it was not the magical secret which was contained in the miniatures upon the walls, in the passionate delicacy of the cadences which sobbed themselves out liquidly under the siren’s touch of this beautiful woman.

He stood in front of the cosy fire, glass in hand. A soft warmth overspread his being. His eyes glanced from the white shoulders of the enchantress to the thousand and one hues which were blended so cunningly in the carpets and tapestries. The subtle playings of light and shadow, the mellow effects of the atmosphere, the softness of the music, began to assail his senses with indescribable pangs. He feasted his eyes, his ears, his nostrils; they rewarded him with gladness. His heart beat violently.

“These rare kinds of genius, are they not barbarous?” he said, when the siren had ceased to cast her fingers.

“It is like children lisping,” she said, half-turning her head, with a smile that curved her mouth entrancingly.

“Yes,” said the young man, “poetry, romance, imagination are primitive; they belong to the childhood of nations, to the dawn of new worlds. What a divine inspiration these sweet-voiced children of nature who are bought out of due time, these unhappy Poles, Germans, and Frenchmen bring to their despair. Instead of sitting down in black coats to make their music into beef and mutton, they should be tripping through the glades piping to the birds, the trees, the bright air.”

“This is a mad fellow, my angel,” said Mr. Whitcomb indulgently, “but if you are gentle with him you may find him amusing.”

“Mr. Northcote will amuse me enormously,” said the lady, with a demure glance.

“Is it thus you rebuke his madness?” the young man asked.

“On the contrary, I don’t think I have ever seen a sanity that is quite so perfect.”

“Drop it,” said the solicitor, roguishly pinching her ear. “Beware of dangerous turnings, my son. She is quite prepared to play George Sand to anybody’s Alfred de Musset. She even does it to the greengrocer when he comes round with his barrow. I understand they discourse divinely together upon the subject of cabbages.”

“But Witty is too much the man of the world to be jealous about it,” she purred.

“If Pussy hasn’t the opportunity to sharpen her claws on a sofa or an ottoman, she doesn’t mind a wicker-work chair.”

“Witty, darling,” said the lady, “I hate to find rudeness keeping company with real distinction of mind.”

“Upon my word,” expostulated Northcote, seeking to measure her depth, “I consider that rebuke to be much prettier than the one bestowed upon me.”

“When, Mr. Northcote, did I rebuke you?”

“Did you not say I should amuse you enormously?”

“Is not that the only compliment a woman has the power to pay nowadays?”

“Yes, Noodle,” said Mr. Whitcomb, laughing; “but don’t you see how young he is, and therefore how serious? Who would call ‘enormously amusing’ a fitting compliment for one of the seven champions of Christendom? This is a devil of a fellow.”

“I can roar you like any sucking dove,” said the young man.

“How it would thrill one to hear you do it!” said the lady, enfolding him with large eyes.

“He is a man of destiny,” said Mr. Whitcomb; “he carries a genie in his pocket.”

“Oh!” said the lady, with clasped hands.

“One of these fine mornings he will stand the world on its head.”

“O-o-o-o-h!” said the lady.

“And having done that,” said Northcote, “this amazing fellow will dig a hole in the universe for to bury the moon.”

“I would that all men had ambition,” said the lady, looking down at her shoe. “If Witty had only a little of that precious salt which forms a sediment at the bottom of every fine action he would be one’s beau-ideal of a hero, a Christian, and a philosopher.”

“Minx!” exclaimed the solicitor. “If it were not for my ambition I should never rise from my bed.”

“So this wonderful Mr. Whitcomb has no ambition!” said Northcote. “You see I have found his character so complex, that in my capacity of an amateur of the human mind I am picking it out, here a little, there a little, piece by piece.”

“You must give him no marks for ambition,” said the lady. “But since when did you become acquainted with him not to have found out that?”

“Since this evening at ten.”

“Ah, then, you are absolved. He will certainly baffle you at first.”

“He is wholly incomprehensible to me. He is a man of moods who oughtn’t to have any.”

The lady clapped her hands in a little ripple of glee.

“How right,” she cried. “In a dozen little words you have shown me the nothingness of my own knowledge.”

“Of course he has, Vapid One,” said Mr. Whitcomb. “Have I not told you he carries a genie in his pocket?”

“Then that is why his eyes are so deep and bright,” said the lady, turning to peruse Northcote again with an unfathomable coquetry; “and would you not say, Witty, that the genie is in some sort responsible for his mouth?”

“Is this public laying of one another upon the dissecting-table a new parlor-game that has been brought into vogue by the long winter evenings, may I ask?” said Mr. Whitcomb, concealing a yawn.

“Pray do not be insolent, Witty. The proper study of mankind is Man.”

“In the words of Pope,” said the solicitor, turning to replenish his glass.

“You can see how Mr. Whitcomb baffles me,” said Northcote, who did not propose to lose the opportunity of following up his clue.

“Is it his attitude to hansom cabmen that makes him so dark?”

“That is contributory. But it is mainly because he has come before me in the guise of a waverer that I stand so much at fault. If one knows anything about anything one would be prepared to affirm that nature had designed Samuel Whitcomb to know his own mind.”

“He does as a rule. I have never known him waver in anything; but then, of course, it is only quite recently that he has begun to associate with dangerous persons who keep a genie.”

“Do you suggest that he is susceptible to such a thing as a genie? Would it have a malign influence upon him, do you suppose?”

“I would suggest it to be likely in the highest degree.”

“Now, look here, my young friends,” interposed the solicitor at this point, with a broad good humor, “Samuel Whitcomb does not propose to play the part of the corpse at the lecture on anatomy.”

“You will help yourself to another drink like a good boy,” said the lady severely; “and you will please to say nothing until we have dealt with your ‘case.’ Your character need not fear the lancet and bistoury of true science. Tell me, Mr. Northcote, wherein he is a waverer.”

“I am rejoiced to hear you put that question,” said the young man, with a gesture of triumph he did not try to conceal, “for now it is that I unfold my tale.”

XII
THE FAITH OF A SIREN

“At about ten o’clock this evening,” Northcote began, “as I was kneeling in front of the fire—there was not any fire, by the way, as it costs too much to afford one sometimes—in my miserable dwelling at the top of Shepherd’s Inn, the oldest and most moribund of all the buildings in Fleet Street, who should come climbing up to the topmost story of the rickety and unwholesome stairs, under which the rats have made their home for many generations, but Mr. Whitcomb. And what do you suppose was his business?”

“He wished to buy one of your pictures.”

“Ah, no, I am not a painter.”

“I thought there was a chance of it, since they say all very good painters are so poor. But perhaps you are a little too fierce, although I am told these impressionists are terrible men.”

“The painting of pictures is one of the few things I have not attempted,” said the young man, consenting to this interruption that he might sit for his own portrait.

“Well, I should not say you are a writer of fiction. They are so tame. Besides they are all nearly as rich as solicitors.”

“Why not a poet?”

“Why not? although your fierceness would make you a dramatic, not a lyric one. Still it is impossible for you to be a poet, because I am sure that Witty would never have climbed up all those stairs to your miserable garret—I feel sure it is a garret with a sloping roof with a hole in it—”

“There is a pool under the hole which has been caused by the percolation of water—”

“On to the atrocious bare boards, its occupant being much too poor to afford a carpet. Yes, Witty would never have climbed up to your garret if you had been a poet. Or stay, he might, had you been Mrs. Felicia Hemans. As you are a seeker of documentary evidence, he has been known to recite her poems, at the request of the rector of this parish, to a Sunday-school party.”

“Base woman,” said the solicitor, with an air of injury; “I claim to be an admirer of the poet Longfellow.”

“Never, Witty, in your heart; it is merely your fatal craving to be respectable in all things. But in the matter of poetry you must be content to remain outside. You would never have climbed those rickety stairs to that cold garret to see John Keats.”

“Well, now, Featherhead, did I not tell you at the first that our young friend was England’s future Lord Chancellor?”

“I will never believe that; I will never believe that his destiny is the law. His eye has amazing flashes; and is there not a beautiful eloquence burning in his mouth? I cannot think of him as rich Witty, and successful Witty, and smug Witty, like you atrocious lawyers. He is one who would be an overthrower of dynasties, a saviour of societies.”

“You are letting your tongue wag, Noodle. If you talk so much it will take the young man until daybreak to unfold his story.”

“I am an advocate,” said Northcote.

“An advocate,” said the lady softly; “yes, I think you may be that. One no more associates an advocate with the law than one associates a poet with a publisher.”

“You would say,” said Northcote, “that it is the function of an advocate to draw his sword for the truth, for progress, for justice, for every human amenity?”

“I would, indeed. Why, if one thinks about it, surely it is nobler to be an advocate than to be a poet or a soldier. One might say it was the highest calling in the world.”

“Then let us say it,” said the young man, “for I verily believe it to be so.”

“And what, pray, was Witty’s business with this advocate?”

“They are going to hang a woman; and Mr. Whitcomb, who to his infinite complexities and many-sidedness as a citizen of the world adds a leaven of the finest humanitarian principles, has undertaken to save the poor creature from a fate so pitiful.”

“To hang a woman!” said the lady, drawing in her breath with a sharp sound. “Is it still possible to hang a woman at this time of day?”

“Perfectly,” said the young man. “They do it in every Christian country.”

“Then the world has need for an advocate,” said the lady, with horror in her eyes. “It is necessary that we should have yet another champion for our sex in Christendom. Yes, this was he whom Witty came to seek in that garret at the top of all those rickety stairs.”

“He came to seek, and found no less a person,” said Northcote. “And having found this authentic champion of your sex, he gave him a mandate to plead on behalf of this unfortunate creature, the least happy of all its members.”

“What a moment of high inspiration for us and for him,” said the lady, with a glance of tenderness.

“It was even as you say. But I would have you mark what follows. Scarcely has he bestowed these high plenary powers upon one whom he has ventured to select from among all the great multitude to champion your sex in the name of humanity, than for a whim he withdraws his mandate.”

“Impossible; it would be an outrage upon us.”

“Yes; unconditionally and peremptorily he withdraws his mandate.”

“Impossible; they will do the poor creature to death.”

“Yes, they will do her to death. He who has been called to the office of averting her doom has decreed that she must walk to embrace it without a friend to plead her cause before humanity.”

“Surely this cannot be; society itself must protest.”

“One expects it; yet things are as they are.”

The beautiful creature turned to the solicitor with an almost royal air.

“What, sir, can you find to say in your defence?”

Mr. Whitcomb gave a short laugh.

“I yield,” said he.

“You restore the mandate?”

“Yes, yes, yes! My blood be on my own head, but so it must be. It is beyond flesh and blood to withstand such a pair. You, madam, are a sorceress; and this fellow is the devil.”

“I am content to be a sorceress in the cause of my unfortunate sex,” cried the lady; and turning to Northcote added gravely: “And is it not high time that we acquired a devil for our advocate?”

Northcote, who from the moment of her first appearance had foreseen a victory, took her hand to his lips impulsively, with an expression of gratitude.

“I hope this will be all right,” said the solicitor, viewing his surrender with a rueful smile. “You see it is the first time in my life that a foreboding has overtaken me in the midst of action. Whether it is the importance of the case, the obscurity of the advocate, or a certain flamboyancy in his bearing which is so repugnant to an English common lawyer, I cannot tell; but let me confess that I have already a premonition that I have been guilty of a mistake. And I will go farther,” said Mr. Whitcomb, with a wry laugh; “I even see ruin, blue ruin for all concerned, hidden in this irresolute act. Sharp little shivers go down my spine.”

“It is no more than the reaction,” said Northcote, “which attends our highest resolves. Is it not in such moments that a man truly measures himself? It must have been at the fall of the barometer that Samson was shorn of his locks.”

“Is there not always a woman in these cases?” said the lady. “This unfortunate creature whom our advocate is to deliver from the gallows, may she not be a Delilah of some kind?”

XIII
BE BOLD, WARY, FEAR NOT

At these words, lightly spoken, Northcote grew conscious of an indescribable sensation which he had never experienced before.

“If it were one’s custom,” he said, with a laugh as wry as the solicitor’s, “ever to heed the note of prophecy, one might discern it in your words. But I will not do so. Since that dark hour in which I summoned the genie, have I not adopted as my device, ‘Be bold, wary, fear not’?”

“Now you come to mention it,” said the solicitor, “it may be this talk of the genie that has filled me with these forebodings.”

“That is very foolish, Witty,” said the lady. “You have but to look into the eyes of our advocate to know what it is and where it dwells.”

“He is quite entitled to keep one, of course, but it is not usual to take it into society. I sometimes think I may have a bit of a genie myself, but I do what I can to keep it a profound secret from the world.”

“Should a man venture to compliment himself, Witty, upon the score of his reticence?”

“Would you not say,” inquired Northcote, “that all our reticences had their roots in our cowardice?”

“I would love to say it if I dared. And I would love to say of our advocate that his genie enables him to fear nothing.”

“Yes,” said Northcote, “you shall say that.”

“A man must have fear of some kind,” said the solicitor, “if he is to succeed against enormous odds.”

“There may be a place for it in his reflections, but never in his resolves. Hence you will discern how our reticence has its basis in our cowardice.”

“Subtle brute,” said Mr. Whitcomb, giving his mustache a tug of perplexity. “He is entering upon his special function of turning black into white.”

“Nay,” said Northcote, “the subtlety is not mine, but Francis Bacon’s.”

“Good, O Advocate!” said the lady, as she rewarded him with bright eyes. “You do well to confute the Philistine with a learned name.”

Again the young man carried the jewelled hand to his lips. He felt the lithe fingers respond with a sweet and secret motion.

“Rogue!” said the solicitor, laughing. “George Sand and De Musset—Polly Whitcomb and the greengrocer at the back door. Well, Mischief, as you have entered into a compact with this fellow to get him his way, play us another bit of a tune, he shall keep his brief, and we will go to bed.”

“I knew we should force him to capitulate,” said Northcote to the siren, as he arranged the stool before the piano.

“What must I play?” she said, looking down at her hands.

“Play me a bit of Beethoven, so that I may take him out with me into the darkness of the streets.”

She played three movements of a symphony, and all his senses were submerged in the colors of romance. These fragrant hues which had a delicate aroma and pungency the imagination alone can impart were of no time or country. There was nothing that the mind could render as belonging to itself; the faculties which embody the technical were overcome by the tumultuous surgings with which they were oppressed. He seemed to be transfigured with the sense of joy, to be overpowered with the knowledge that he was a living man, able to breathe and to perform. The room had grown small and heavy. He was consumed with an overmastering desire for the spacious streets, for the largeness of the universe.

“There is a bed for you here,” said the beautiful player, almost before the last phrase had ceased to vibrate under her touch. “We could not think of turning you out at this hour.”

“I have not the least intention of staying,” said Northcote. “The hospitality you have given me already has been too profuse. I feel that I must roam for the rest of the night in the open streets, a Flying Dutchman of the London slush. Perhaps I shall fancy myself to be the mad music-maker of Leipsic, who walked at night on the ramparts to weave his harmonies.”

“We cannot consent to your leaving us in this manner,” said the hostess. “As for roaming through the night, it will not be good for you. Nor is there the least necessity why you should.”

“You forget his genie,” laughed the solicitor. “The infernal thing will drive him all over the suburbs of south London and send him home via the Crystal Palace and Blackfriars Bridge.”

“He must not go to-night,” said the lady. “It will be a perfectly horrid walk, and I believe the sleet has turned into rain. It will be awfully cold and unpleasant. Besides, if anything happens to our advocate he will not be able to deliver this unfortunate creature from her doom.”

“It is useless to argue with a man who has got a genie,” said the solicitor. “I have tried the experiment and therefore am in a position to give evidence. What will overtake him in the way of adventures I dare not conjecture; but of one thing I am assured—no earthly power will cause him to alter his determination.”

“Alas! I know it,” said the lady, sighing. “He has a face that will yield to nothing.”

This diagnosis proved to be correct, at least as applied to this instance, as in spite of the humane entreaties of the lady, supported by a banter which Mr. Whitcomb did not attempt to dissemble, Northcote insisted on faring from their roof at a quarter-past three. He bade them adieu with a cordiality that was eloquent of a deep sense of friendship.

When Mr. Whitcomb returned to the drawing-room after having shown the young man over the threshold of his residence, he faced the lady with a half-smile of bewilderment.

“Extraordinary chap,” he said. “He frightens me, takes me out of my depth. There is such a bee buzzing about in his bonnet that he might come wofully to grief on Friday. If he does, there will be none but myself to blame, for he is wholly without experience.”

“I think you may trust him,” said the woman softly.

“Well, you are a mass of instincts, Miss Pussy. And you counsel me to stick to your advocate?”

“I do, Witty; closer than a brother. I think he is perfectly amazing. I think he will make the fortunes of all who are connected with him.”

“Another Michael Tobin, would you say?”

“What a dunce it is,” said the lady, with an indulgent sigh. “Michael and this man don’t inhabit the same hemisphere. Michael is a dear fellow, brilliant, clever, but only surface deep; this is an ogre of a creature, a monster, deep as the sea, of the proportions of the universe.”

“Come, I say, Mrs. Noodle; they don’t call that sort to the bar. They might find the purlieus of the law too confining.”

“If you have not yet learned to scorn my advice, Witty, take care never to have this man against you. If you have him on your side every time you go into court, you will not have many lost causes to record.”

“He is clever, I grant you, but the worst of it is he knows it.”

“He is arrogant with power, Witty, which is somewhat different, although it sounds the same. I think he is a perfectly terrible man, and he looks so big and great and deadly. Did you notice his enormous hands? Did you observe his chest? And that voice as soft as a flute yet as deep as an organ?”

“You are completely conquered, Featherhead. Yet you would not call this phenomenon precisely beautiful?”

“Strength is more beautiful than symmetry, I think; although I grant you that huge square jowl verges upon the horrible. It is far worse than yours, my dear, although the poor hansom cabmen are constantly mistaking it for that of an eminent pugilist.”

“Well, little gal,” said the solicitor, “I shall heed you once more, since your luck is proverbial. I am prepared to back our latest discovery pretty heavily, although I must confess that when in cold blood I catch myself thinking of his infernal genie he frightens me to death.”

XIV
A JURY OF TWO

In the meantime the subject of these speculations had entered the night. Food and wine in unaccustomed quantities, the romance of events, the spells cast by music and by a woman of signal beauty and accomplishment, had provoked his energies to an insurgency that had rendered them overbearing. He walked like a whirlwind, up one street and down another, in the chill wet darkness, not knowing whither he was bound. Soft yet wild strains of melody which still floated through his brain mingled with a swarm of ideas which were whirling about in it like so many atoms in a protoplasm. He moved so fast in the endeavor to keep abreast of his thoughts that at times he broke into a run.

The seductive, amiable, and brilliant woman, who had so nearly succeeded in casting over him a delicious spell, began to fade from his consciousness like the intangible occupant of a dream. She had no appeal for him now. The feast at the restaurant, that phase of color, warmth, and splendor in which for an hour the squalor of his existence had been dispelled; the struggle to retain the treasure which had been entrusted to his keeping by a supernatural agent; the bizarre incident of the hansom cabman; and the personality of the genial god out of the machine had now ceased to have significance.

Indeed one thing alone merged his faculties in his overstimulated thoughts. It was the packet which he could feel in the breast-pocket of his coat, towards which his hands were straying constantly. These pages of foolscap bound with red tape, were they not his magic talisman? By that occult presence had not his thwarted bleak and empty life been changed into an electrical existence crowded with glory?

His brain bursting with ideas, he began to run faster and faster through the maze of endless streets, lined with high garden walls, portentously respectable dwelling-houses, lamps, shops, and secretive silent-footed policemen. These frequently flashed their lanterns upon him, for the manner of his progress had an illegal air. Even at the height of this orgy of freedom, the question shaped itself with the oddest definiteness as to whether it would not be expedient to curb his paces, since if he were stopped, he feared lest he should be able to render an account of himself that would be sufficiently lucid to commend itself to the myrmidons of the law.

When at last his exertions had thrown him out of breath, and his frame did not respond with quite the same unanimity to his passion, he stopped under a lamp in the middle of a street on the side of a steep hill, took out the precious document he carried, and began to peruse it for sheer human pleasure. He even pressed his lips to this prosaic thing, with no less of fervor, indeed with more abandonment than he had saluted the hand of the sorceress who had been the means of restoring it to his care.

“I must make her my saint, I must burn candles to her,” he muttered, recalling her image with a sense of rapture.

As he stood under the lamp, a very large and slow-footed policeman waddled up towards him, trying doors and casting the light of his lantern down the areas he passed. As he went by, keenly scrutinizing the figure of the young man, yet pretending not to notice it, Northcote hailed him.

“Where might I be, policeman? I am strange to these parts.”

“Well,” said the policeman slowly and with effort, “you might be in Balham, but you ain’t. Likewise, you might be at Charing Cross, but you are not there, nuther.”

“I observe, policeman, that you have graduated in the school of judicial humor,” said Northcote, delighted by the suavity of outline of X012. “If every man had his rights, which of course it is utopian to expect, you would be adding lustre to the bench. Your mental gifts fit you equally to be a judge, a recorder, or a stipendiary magistrate.”

Such an exaggerated view of his merits produced a deep-founded suspicion in the honest breast of X012.

“If every man had ’is rights,” said the custodian of the peace, speaking slowly and with effort, and eying Northcote with the solemnity of a horse, “you’d be took up on suspicion, young feller, and charged with loitering with intent.”

Northcote dispelled the suburban quietude with a guffaw.

“Being unwilling,” said he, “to impale myself upon that spiked railing which calls itself the law, I ought to be extremely careful to refrain in its presence from the vexed and overmuch discussed question of whether the badinage of its minions is wit, wisdom, humor, or a veritable cesspool of human inanity.”

X012 was so much astonished by these words and the forcible mode of their delivery that he pulled his whistle out of his coat, and proceeded to toy with it in an irresolute fashion. Before he had decided to summon aid by blowing it, there appeared round the corner of an adjacent street a second constable, in all essentials of bearing, physique, and mental energy the perfect replica of himself.

“I’m glad you’ve come, Bill,” said X012. “I’ve got a rum one ’ere. I don’t know what he’s been drinking, but you should just hear his languidge. Here he was under this lamp, a-purtendin’ to read a newspaper at twenty past four by the mornin’.”

“Noticed his mug?” said his confrère Z9. “Bob Capper, the ’ousebreaker, who just done in ’is last seven stretch an’ was let out on license last Tuesday.”

“Got it in one!” said X012, not without enthusiasm. “We ’ad better take him to the station and have ’im searched.”

“This is the result of a misplaced jocularity in the presence of professional wits,” said Northcote, with an amiability that was viewed with considerable disfavor by both constables. “I hope you will forgive me, my friends. The only excuse I can urge for impinging upon the prerogative of the legal supernumerary, if I may so express myself, is that as one day I am certain to be a judge, I feel it to be due to the lofty elevation I shall be called to occupy, and of which I intend to be so signal an ornament, to neglect no opportunity of acquiring these cardinal principles of humor, dangerous, double-edged implement though it be, which can only be done by association with those past-masters who as the crowning glory of our admirable legal system inhabit it in choice perfection in all its branches. I hope, my friends, I have made myself perfectly clear.”

“Clear as mud,” said Z9.

“Impidence!” exclaimed X012; “downright impidence! Certin to be a judge! Why, Lord love me, young feller, if ever they ax you to be the judge of a pair o’ pullets at a poultry show you’ll be lucky.”

“Balmy,” said Z9, tapping his forehead with an air of Christian pity.

“You are very probably right,” said Northcote. “I suspect there is a basis of truth in this scientific opinion which you have embodied in so expressive an idiom. But at the same time I would ask you, is it not a somewhat extreme view to take of the mental condition of a barrister-at-law who has been nominated to appear at the court of the Old Bailey to-morrow morning at the hour of ten-thirty to defend one Emma Harrison, who at that time and in that place will stand her trial for wilful murder?”

“A-going to defend Emma Harrison!” exclaimed the constables. “Why, what will he be saying next?”

“I do say that, my friends,” said Northcote, with a note of imperiousness in his voice that was not without its effect on these astonished minions of the law. “And I want you both to stand back a yard or two against the railings, while I advance to the curb; and further, I want you for a few minutes to imagine that you are the jury, and I will rehearse the opening of my speech for the defence. I shall begin something like this.”

“Oh, will you now?” muttered Z9 to his companion. “Well, if this don’t beat cock-fighting!”

Both these constables, overawed already by the authentic manner of the advocate, were now devoured by curiosity.

“Listen,” said he. “I rise in my place with this bundle of papers in my hand, which I shall not consult, but shall cling to to gain confidence, and I shall say: May it please your lordship and gentlemen of the jury, this is a dreadful issue you are sworn to try. Indeed it would be difficult for the human conscience to conceive an ordeal more repugnant to the moral nature of man, one in sharper antagonism to those principles that are his priceless inheritance, than is revealed to you by the situation in which you stand. It is not by your own choice that you come to take your places in this assembly. It is not in obedience to your own instincts that you have left your toil to subscribe to a law which is not of your own making. I venture to affirm this without fear, for is not this ordeal into which you are thrown in deadly conflict with the behests of that unfearing spirit who, nineteen centuries ago, discovered the only possible faith for His kind?

“It is as the inheritors, gentlemen, of an inimitable tradition, not as administrators of a penal code, that I venture to address to you these words. And let me tell you why I venture to address you in this fashion. It is because the life of a fellow creature is at stake; it is because sitting here in conclave in this place you are enmeshed in the most grievous ordeal that the fruit of human imperfection is able, at this time of day, to impose upon you. For that reason, gentlemen, I conceive that you are entitled to take your stand upon a lofty and secure platform to survey this issue, a platform which has been raised for the oppressed, the unhappy, and those who are doubtful of their way, by the travail of the choicest spirit in the annals of human nature.

“Gentlemen, you are called upon to adjudicate upon the life of a woman. You are called upon to do so at the bidding of a formula, whose hideous and obsolete enactments are the fruit of an imperfect culture of a partial and unsympathetic interpretation of those laws to which every civilized community owes its name. Gentlemen, you are called upon to adjudicate upon the life of a woman; you rate-payers of London, you gentle and devout citizens, you to whom life has given as the crown of your endeavor, as the consecration of your painful daily labor, mothers, wives, and daughters of your own.

“Yes, gentlemen, we must indeed ascend the loftiest and most secure platform known to us, to survey the ordeal that our own imperfection has presented to us.

“You have heard the words that have fallen from the lips of my learned friend, the counsel for the Crown. You have examined the facts which he has marshalled before you. You have noted the inferences which he has not been afraid to draw. You have been thrilled by the union of a consummate skill with a consummate learning. All that is base, sordid, and unworthy in the human heart has been stripped naked before your eyes. The smallest acts of this unfortunate woman have been shown to you as vile; even the aspirations which are allowed to ennoble her sex have been rendered abominable. Every kind of mental and moral degradation has been made to defile before you; for verily there is no limit to the talent of this accomplished gentleman.

“That such a talent should have taken service with an outworn formula is a great public danger. For just as our common humanity is able to assure us that the acts of the most wicked are not always wrong, so those of the finest integrity would not bear dissection at the hands of a cold and scientific cynicism. Our every act has two faces. One is presented to belief, the other to unbelief; one is presented to truth, the other to error. And as this penal code of ours, which we traverse constantly with searchings of heart, is itself a survival of a time of gross darkness, called into being by unbelief and fostered by error, the acts of the best and worthiest among us are liable to be visited by the sword of the avenger, in other words by justice. I am convinced that if any one of you gentlemen, or any private citizen, was called upon to rebut the most awful charge that can be levelled against him, innocent as you might be, innocent as he might be, it would be found immensely difficult, I will not say impossible, to combat the deadly array of inferences which would be marshalled against you in the interests of this penal code by one of the most talented of its servants. The mere fact that you had come to stand your trial in this noisome chamber, itself stained with a thousand crimes committed in the name of justice, and that a cruel chain of events had forced you to vindicate your kinship with the divine will in the precincts of this charnel-house—it is well, gentlemen, that the windows are kept so close, for who would have this foulness mingle with the air of London?”

For the best part of an hour in that raw winter morning, with a drizzling rain falling incessantly, did Northcote continue to rehearse his address to the jury. The amused intolerance of his hearers yielded to an intense interest. They had been present in court on many occasions and had heard these things for themselves, but never had they listened to a voice of such dominion, of such volume and majesty, a voice capable of such burning appeal. They stood merely at the threshold of the argument, it was true; but the art of the orator unfolded it, made it clear. His natural magic, his incommunicable gift, rendered it with the harmony of music, so that before the end these oxlike custodians of the peace, far from growing weary of their situation, began to view with emotion the injury that threatened an outcast from society.

“Go on, sir,” said Z9 humbly; “you’ve the gift and no mistake. They’ll not be able to hang her if you talk to ’em that way.”

“This is not quite the form it will take, you know,” said Northcote, whose exertions had been so great that he was breathing heavily and dripping with perspiration. “It is only a sort of opening roughly blocked out. It will have to be rendered a bit finer, so that it pins them like a fly on a card.”

“You’ll pin them to-morrow, sir,” said Z9; “you’ll get your verdict, see if you don’t!”

Z9 spoke with the proud consciousness of one who can respond to an intellectual pleasure. X012, with a mental organization of less delicacy, although impressed by so rare a personality, yet retained the reverence for facts of the honest Englishman.

“He’ve a gift right enough, Bill,” said X012 magisterially, “but the law is the law to my mind; and black’s black an’ white’s white. If this woman done the crime—I don’t say she did, mind—the law will ’ang her. An’ rightly, too. This gentleman is a book-learned man and a horator,—I know that because I heard Gladstone on Blackheath,—but the law is the law and horatory ain’t a-going to alter it.”

“I am obliged to you both for your courtesy,” said Northcote, with a perfect gravity, “and my obligation is even the deeper for the opinions you have been good enough to express. You are prototypes of the twelve honest men I am going to sway; and I take it that if my address were to be launched in its present immature shape, you, sir, would record your vote for an acquittal, and you, sir, for the severity of the law?”

“The law is the law I say,” said X012, inflating his chest before the honor of this direct canvass of his intelligence, “an’ words is words, although, mind you, sir, I respec’s you, because I heard Gladstone on Blackheath.”

“I assume,” said Northcote, “that although you admired Gladstone’s oratory, you did not allow it to influence your judgment?”

“That’s ’is pig-headedness, sir,” said Z9. “That’s just like a Tory; great horators can talk till all’s blue, and then they can’t get daylight into a Tory. ‘The law is the law,’ says he; an’ if it come to, he’d hang his own fayther.”

“I take it, policeman, that you try to keep an open mind, a mind accessible to new impressions?”

“That is so, sir,” said Z9. “I say with you, sir, that although the law is the law, human natur’ is human natur’. And although Bill ’Arper is just a common p’liceman with on’y one stripe, an’ not a lawyer like you, sir, nor a beak, nor a judge, ’e never goes into court and a-takes off ’is ’elmet but what ’e feels ’igh-minded.”

“Then, policeman, regarding you in the light of a juryman, it is most probable that you would want mercy to be extended to the prisoner, in spite of the law, if you happened to be in your present frame of mind?”

“Yes, sir, I should in my present frame o’ mind.”

“More shame to you, Bill,” said X012; “you are a nice bloke to be a copper, an’ no mistake.”

“Close it, ’Orrice,” said Z9, with a restrained enthusiasm; “you bloomin’ Tories are so thick’eaded you don’t know nothing.”

“Well, gentlemen,” interposed the advocate, brushing the water from his brief, “as I observe you to be on the brink of an altercation, I will hasten to discharge you with my best thanks for your kind attention in order that you may have it out. For the subject will engage your powers worthily; pursue it, and it will take you into strange places. But before I leave you to do so, may I ask where I am?”

“Bottom o’ Sydenham ’ill, sir,” chimed both constables as one.

“Good morning, my friends. I must leave you to ponder this subject or I shall not get home to breakfast.”

The two myrmidons of the law stepped together into the middle of the road to watch this astonishing figure ascend out of their ken.

“Well, if ’e don’t beat all as ever I ’eard!” was the comment of Z9.

“’E’s not got ’er off yet, and ’e won’t nuther,” rejoined X012. “She’s a wrong un; an’ if they let ’er off, it won’t be fair to peace.”

“Well, ’e can talk. ’E kind of got ’old of me. I could ha’ stood there all day.”

“’E kind o’ did me too, but I should shake him off in court. You’ll see the beak will put a muzzle on ’im. He warn’t talkin’ law, and you’re no good in court unless you talk law. The old bloke and them K. C.’s will not stand that sort o’ lip, see if they does.”

“Well, ’ere’s the sergeant comin’. But just to show there’s no ill-feelin’, I’ll ’ave ’arf a pint with you, mate, that ’e gets her off.”

“Make it a pint, matey. A pint seems more legal.”

XV
TRUTH’S CHAMPION

Northcote had only a hazy notion of his whereabouts. He had never been in these high latitudes before. He had a dim idea that London lay “over there;” but upon ascending the steep hill that lay before him, he found that “over there” was merged in the dark and enormous bulk of the Crystal Palace.

“Whitcomb was right in his topography,” he laughed. “This is the route he predicted I should take; therefore it is a perfectly fair inference to regard it as the wrong one.”

He hailed yet another minion of the law, who no less than his brethren was communicative.

“You are going away from London as fast as your legs will take you,” said Z201, and proceeded to set a course which in itself was so intricate that the young man by no means pledged himself to follow it.

The terrific central energy still driving him, the wayfarer strode forth through the rain with an undiminished vigor. By now his clothes were saturated and lay upon him heavily. But nothing could abate the force of these concentrated fires which bore him so lightly mile after mile. Not only did they burn with splendor, but also with a vital clarity. His lips moved with the phrases that sprang upon them; the sense of dull power, of unused native force, which had oppressed him like a nightmare during many nights and days, had been fused all at once into an immense fecundity of expression. Each minute blood-vessel that formed a web round the ball of crystallized energy that was his brain was big with its own peculiar, original, and special idea. The strangest vistas had opened before his eyes. His faculties in the first flush of their self-consciousness had grown insolent and overbearing.

How could a body of common citizens hope to stand against the battery that would be directed upon them! All the subtleties of the sophists, all the enthusiasms of the creeds would be as naught in the presence of such an overweening personal force. How could such insignificant fragments as these, the mere excrescences of the universal scheme, who could not make a mind among them, hope to retain the all-too-precarious standard of their probity when touched by the wand of the magician? He laughed aloud to the rain when his thoughts reverted to the two perplexed constables he had left at the bottom of Sydenham Hill; and how, in spite of the tentativeness of the effort, as his talent had mounted in him, so that presently its irresistible force had seemed even to surprise himself, these two stolid, unemotional Englishmen had nodded their heads in approval, and had hung breathless upon his words. Only one of God’s great advocates could hope to perform that miracle under a gas-lamp in the wind-swept streets on a wet and chill winter’s morning. The old mystics, delivering with a divine naïveté their surprising message to mankind, could never have accomplished a feat more wonderful.

His eyes veiled in darkness, his head high-poised yet thrust forward, his mouth and nostrils filled with cold and deep draughts of air, his whole being was surrendered to an orgy of freedom and power. For the first time since he had come to maturity he had found an occupation for his ferocious energies. It was no unworthy task by which they were confronted. Thirty was usually the age at which genius elected to give to the world its first masterpiece. And was it not as seemly that an advocate should rejoice in a theme as the statesman, the musician, or the poet? This first essay should be as complete, as audacious, and as worthy of the sanction of the best minds of the time, as the chefs-d’œuvres of other representative spirits. It should stand as a landmark in an art as little understood as that of truth itself.

Old men on the Woolsack, the most reverend seigniors of the law, advocates who had received the homage the age is accustomed to lavish on a scanty pretext, should stand aghast before an alarming iconoclasm of which he would be the pioneer. His ideas should prove so revolutionary that these practitioners, complacently drawing their emoluments, should foregather to turn this magnificent ruffler out of his inn. The scathing criticisms which the elect of all ages launch against a Jesus, a Galileo, or a Wagner, before the world has grown accustomed to their strangeness, he would be called upon to support; for would not he alone be the true advocate, the heaven-born, immortal one, while they would remain, as always, complacent performers of tricks which they mistook for the operations of their specific talent, subscribers to conventions that were shallow and nonsensical and in open enmity to the idea of justice for which they stood as the self-satisfied expression.

As he raced along in the company of these wonderful thoughts through the south of London, he recognized in himself all the signs that declare Truth’s authentic champion. It would be his to deliver more than one rueful blow upon the close-locked portals of pedantry. “The purblind old man who dares to occupy the seat of judgment, his authority shall be traversed, it shall be rent in pieces. As for that amazing creature who will dare to stand up for the Crown, who will propose to do to death a human being with that bleak and irascible voice, and the operations of that arrested growth he calls his intellect, an awful example will have to be made of him.”

There was no end to the succession of deserted streets. Water swam in shallow pools along the black pavements which seemed to reflect the color of the sky. The numerous lamps, picked out as so many dull, yellow balls in the surrounding blackness, suffused their oppressive rays along the long, flat surfaces so that they appeared to shine without giving forth a radiance.

How vague and vast seemed these early hours before the dawn! They did not contain a living soul. The sky, the streets, the dark houses, the bare trees in the gardens and at the sides of the roads were soundless, empty, destitute of life. A quietness so profound appeared uncanny on the outskirts of pandemonium. But astonishing, desolating as it was, it seemed to aid the furious brain that was borne so fast in its midst. There was only the echo of the advocate’s own feet, which came weirdly from across the way, and the high and labored breathing of his own body.

By the time the hour of seven chimed out from the half-dozen neighboring steeples of a population that was beginning to cluster much closer together, he divined that he was pressing nearer to the heart of the metropolis. He did not stay to inquire of the occasional wayfarer who was abroad in these regions, but set his face into the ruck of the streets, where the dark forms of the houses rose like an impenetrable and endless forest. No fears assailed him as to whether he would reach his home—the coldest, most inhospitable home that was ever called upon to harbor a spirit with such widespread, space-cleaving pinions.

His feet seemed to devour the pavements. His stride was great, elastic, and unflagging; it was propelled by the lungs, heart, and muscles of the athlete. In the swing of the arms, the lunge of the limbs, the lissom sway of the body, there was fine physical power, and the seething engines that presided over this massive yet elastic framework were like the boilers of a locomotive which eat up the miles without fatigue. When excited into action on the football field the feeling was always upon him that no puny human agent could stay his course. The feeling was upon him now in an intensified degree. With will and muscle coöperating to overstride the darkness, he longed for opposition to declare itself that he might trample it down.

Near eight o’clock he recognized Waterloo Bridge and the cold Thames below stealing like a felon through the vapors of the dawn. With a stupefied surprise he awoke to the sensation of being launched once more into the sharp and too-definite business of the time. The pavements were now swarming with people, the roads with omnibuses, cabs, and vans. Traffic was belching out of every street; clerks and seamstresses were scurrying to their employments, masticating their breakfasts as they went. Vendors of newspapers and hawkers of food were tearing the gray air to pieces with their cries. He emerged from the orgy of his passion to find that he was up to the throat and being stifled in pandemonium, even before he was aware that his feet had entered it.

The lines of palaces across the river, towering tier upon tier above the embankment, with their majestic bulks half-thrust through the curtain of December mist which the first streaks of day had seemed to thicken, fell upon the imagination of the wayfarer, who had slackened his pace all at once to a footsore limp as he crossed the bridge and crept towards them. At a distance they stood insolent, aloof, and cynical. He could hardly believe that in one of these wonderful caravanserais he, the starving, the friendless, and the solitary, had eaten and drunk only a few hours before. It was not feasible that such palaces as these could touch a life so obscure at any point. Penniless, friendless, lacking even life’s common necessaries, in the midst of six millions of people, who contended rudely with the first weapons that came to their hands to enforce their claims, how could he, whose coat was in holes, whose pockets were empty, have penetrated to the Mecca of their gods?

Limping into the Strand as the clock at the Law Courts chimed the hour of eight, his imagination was assailed, not with their unmeaning mass of architecture, but with that unseen and grisly bulk which only the eye of his inner consciousness could apprehend. A shudder convulsed his veins. Less than thirty short hours hence the gladiator would be called into the arena. He would have to face the lions with no defence for his nakedness except a small shield in the use of which he had had no practice, and a sharp but untried spear.

Climbing up the steep stairs to his garret, his nostrils were affronted as they had been on so many other occasions by the foulness of the heavy and noisome air. What a labor it was to reach the locked door at the top of the highest, the darkest, the most unpleasant story! His fibres had grown strangely slack, his breathing was no longer joyous and free. The mighty engines of his mind had ceased suddenly to vibrate; those pulses which had been so overweening in their insolence could only flutter now. He had fallen without a warning from his eminence. His whole being was enveloped in a despicable flaccidity, a despicable weakness, as he turned the key in the lock and entered his garret.

He recoiled from the dismal scene that met his eyes with the shudder that one gives in plunging into icy water. As he stood on the threshold all the phantoms of his previous despair sprang upon him from the walls of his chamber and seemed to throw him down. There was the cold grate with the gray ashes in it still; there the lamp that had left him in the darkness. The table was there with its pile of law-books that he had conned with the sickening patience which tortured him so keenly. Strewn over them were fragments of the writings which had eaten away the flower of his intelligence without bringing him a shilling to fill his belly or to pay his rent. Enveloped within them was the piece of lead by whose aid and with a skill so ferocious he had destroyed the rat. The confectioner’s paper was there that had contained his dinner; also the crumbs which remained to testify to its nature. On the mantelpiece was the burned and dirty old pipe which he had cherished so much, the only friend of his adversity; on the floor was the pouch that had not a grain of tobacco in it. The pool of water was still in the corner, underneath the discoloration of the plaster in the low sloping roof.

How cold it was! Everything in this horrible apartment seemed to be rendered icier, more dismal, by the callous gray beams that stole through the grimy windows with a sullenness that hardly merited the name of light. Ah, that window with its outlook on oblivion! It all came back to him with the indescribable pangs of the knife, that the night before he had leaned out of it, bareheaded, open-mouthed, his eyes and nostrils cut by blasts of sleet, and had cried his haughty challenge to a world that grovelled so far below him in the mire.

It was all very hideous, yet this Titanic despair filled him with a deep sense of poetry. He realized, even as he stood now confronting it for the thousand and first time, that whatever the future might hold in her womb, never again would he be pierced to these depths whose very immensity urged the proud rage to his eyes. Yes, there in the cynical eyes of the morning lay the stained and battered old table to which the previous evening he had pressed his eyes to summon the genie. What torments of impotence, of baffled and thwarted power, must those eyes have undergone before they could prevail upon their royalty to stoop to such an act.

He took from his pocket the bank-note, half his fee, which the solicitor had given him at the restaurant, and held it up to a gaze that was as scornful as that of a young god who has not yet learned to accept as a matter of course the powers that render him immortal.

Not again would he suffer want. He had made his choice. In a tragic moment his faintness had forced him to his knees. He had summoned the mischievous imp who showers gold upon poor mortals in order that it shall stultify, poison, and corrupt them. Already he could taste success. There was a faint aroma of it in the dregs of the wine he had drained the previous night. There was a slight nausea upon his lips. There had been something beyond mere fatigue in the enervation with which he had climbed those stairs. For once the great muscles had seemed to flag. Yet not again would they know the chastening brutality of want. Indeed his despair already was beginning to seem a holy and pure condition. He foresaw, as he stood gazing upon its pinched face, crinkling as he did so the bank-note between his hands, that the future would be casting back to it perpetually as the tomb of his godhead, in which he put off those spiritual splendors in which his nature was once enveloped, those sanctified things which were native to himself, in order that he might embrace those other things that were the birthright and the measure of the meanest natures.

Through the open door came the sound of footsteps on the stairs. They were shuffling and uncertain, and belonged to an old woman, who wore a shawl and a faded black bonnet, and who crept into the room with little toddling steps.

“Hullo, Mrs. Brown,” said Northcote, turning to confront her; “rather late, aren’t you? It is a quarter-past eight.”

“Yes, sir, I am,” said the old woman, in a precise manner. “My youngest grandchild is dying.”

“How old?”

“Five and a half, sir.”

“Of what is she dying?”

“Diphtheria, sir,” said the old woman humbly.

“And if the poor little kid dies that will reduce the number of small orphans in your family to four, will it not?”

“It will, sir.”

Northcote stood looking at the old woman for a moment and then changed the subject abruptly.

“Mrs. Brown,” he said, “I have had a windfall. For the time being I am a rich man; and I may say that one of these days I expect to be very much richer. And although your poor little grandchild is dying, I think we owe it to Providence to celebrate this occasion in a fitting manner. Never mind about the fire and the water for my bath. I want you to get a basket and do some shopping, somewhat as follows: one frying-pan, one pound of the choicest Wiltshire bacon, three moderately fresh eggs if money will buy them, which I expect it will not, one pot of marmalade, one pound of the most expensive butter and a loaf of bread, a pound of tea, price half a crown, and a pint of milk. Now get along, if you please, and I will light the fire.”

The blank stupefaction on the face of Mrs. Brown conveyed to Northcote that he had forgotten to give her the money.

“I am so unaccustomed to have the handling of money,” he said, “that I have forgotten to give it to you. This is a note for ten pounds. See that no one robs you of the change.”

The stupefaction on the face of the old woman appeared to deepen as her fingers closed over this unheard-of treasure.

“I—I don’t know that I dare trust myself with it, sir, along the Strand,” she said weakly.

“Very well,” said Northcote. “Just make the fire—a real good one, mind, and you can use all the coal that is laid by, because at one fell swoop I am going to order a ton—and I will do the shopping myself. Where is that big basket in which you bring home the washing?”

“Here, sir,” said the old woman, passing behind a curtain at the far end of the room which concealed a bed.

“Good,” said Northcote. “Providence is working for us. It intends that we shall do ourselves well. And my last words to you are, don’t spare the coal.”

“I will not, sir,” said the old woman, discarding her air of stupefaction in favor of her habitual preciseness.

XVI
A JURY OF ONE

When Northcote returned with the basket heavily laden in one hand, and a frying-pan, aggressively new, in the other, his dismal chamber had already been transformed, for a fire was burning bravely, a kettle was singing upon it, the pool of water in the corner had been mopped up, the floor had been visited with a brush, and books and papers, two tables, and three chairs had received wholesome discipline from a duster.

“I could have done it all as well myself,” said Northcote, surveying this transformation with grim eyes, “although I do not deny it has the efficient professional touch. But I would have you to know I am a man of my hands. I am also a man of affairs. I have purchased extensively; and I am proud to say the best goods in the cheapest markets. I have ordered a ton of coal, although where we are going to put it I don’t quite know. Now, these things I surrender to your care; and in half an hour you will have the goodness to serve up a royal breakfast for two persons. In the meantime I will have a shave and a tub.”

The young man’s operations behind the curtain were conducted on an extensive scale, to judge by the noise and splashing that accompanied them. Yet presently he emerged with a well-scraped chin, a skin glowing with cleanliness, his ragged mass of hair reduced to a semblance of order, and his person arrayed in an extremely shabby and unfashionable but perfectly dry suit of clothes. The tea was at hand to be made, the pot heated, the eggs, bacon, and toast were delightfully warm and laid before the fire. And in accordance with instructions the table was set for two persons, with the blunt knives and forks and the decrepit crockery of his establishment.

“Will you wait till the other gentleman comes, sir?” asked the old woman.

“What other gentleman, Mrs. Brown?”

“The gentleman who is coming to breakfast.”

“Well, I can’t very well, seeing that she turns out to be a lady.”

“I beg your pardon, sir.”

“You, Mrs. Brown, are that lady. You will please sit just there, as near to the fire as you can get without burning yourself. I propose to make the tea, for I am so expert in the art that I yield to none. And I shall ask you to pour it out, while I proceed to serve the eggs and bacon, which look perfectly delicious.”

The charwoman, however, betrayed no sign of assenting to this arrangement.

“I am sure, sir, it is meant in great kindness,” she said humbly, “but I could not think of such a thing. You see I have been in good service, sir, and I beg your pardon, sir, but it is never done.”

“‘Never’ is a dangerous word to employ, Mrs. Brown,” said Northcote, towering over the old woman in a formidable manner. “In fact, I allow none to employ it to me. Sit down, if you please, and pour out the tea, and just have the goodness to imagine yourself the Lady Elizabeth Who-was-it, famous alike for her breeding and her beauty, while I shall endeavor to consider myself that distinguished nobleman, the Earl of What’s-his-name.”

“The Lady Elizabeth Plumptre, sir, and the Earl of Widmerpool.”

“Very well. Now I say, ‘Betty, my gal, have an egg with your bacon?’ and you reply with a quiet ease and distinction of manner, ‘Yes, papa, if you please,’ Now then, down you get into your chair, and spare me the necessity of arguing the point. I am so apt to lose my temper if I argue the point.”

The old woman, who was too much in fear of him to risk anything of the kind, took her place at the table immediately.

“One of these days,” said Northcote, handing her an egg and some bacon on the only plate that did not happen to be cracked, “I should like you to meet my mother. She is a very notable and good woman, with a remarkably resolute conception of her duty, which all her life she has rendered bluntly and directly without ever speaking of it to a human soul. She has ordered her life in the manner that she deems necessary to the rôle of an eminent Christian. She has brought up her only son in simple and pious resolves, educated him quite beyond her means, has found him money when in order to do so she has been compelled to deny herself life’s common necessaries, yet has asked alms of none, and at Christmas time never omits to dispense charity to others.”

“I should like to see your mother, sir,” said the charwoman, folding her hands meekly and sitting very upright on her chair. “I am sure she is a very good lady.”

“One of those noble narrow women, Mrs. Brown, upon whom life bears down so heavily. Yet she carries out her programme with a greatness of spirit which is almost demoralizing to one who tries to look at things as they are. I don’t know what there is in her life that carries her on so victoriously; for one never hears her utter a complaint against the buffets she has received from fate, or against the restrictions that her dismal surroundings impose on her nature. I have never heard an impatient word upon her lips, yet every morning, summer and winter, she rises at the hour of five, performs those domestic functions that can bring no satisfaction to her, and presently goes forth to labors still more arduous and equally devoid of meaning. What there is to carry her on I don’t know. Why that inflexible spirit has not been broken these many years I cannot conjecture.”

“She has got into the habit of going on, sir, I suppose,” said the charwoman.

“The habit must be a very strange one, Mrs. Brown, when to-morrow is always the same as yesterday.”

“It is like being a clock, sir, which goes on because it has been wound up.”

“Yes, but I never found a clock that could wind up itself. Every clock must have some kind of a key.”

“It is God, sir, who is the key,” said the charwoman.

“That throws us back,” said Northcote, “to our original necessity to have a religion. To my mind, Mrs. Brown, you have indicated that need in a very lucid and practical manner. And how, Mrs. Brown, as you appear to have given some thought to these things, do you suppose this reticent mother of mine views this God who holds the key to the watch, who winds it up and keeps it going? How would you say she regards Him personally?”

“Perhaps she doesn’t think about Him much, sir. Perhaps as a girl she troubled her head about Him a bit; but when she got older and had to take heavy burdens on her shoulders, she was always too tired to think of Him, except when she said her prayers.”

“Do you suppose there have been times when in her great fatigue she has fallen asleep while she has been in the act of saying them?”

“Yes, sir, I suppose there may have been,” said the old woman.

“So, then, you would say there is nothing definite, forceful, all-compelling about this God of hers? You would say He had no particular personality to speak of?”

“Perhaps He is very real to her, sir, just as to the watch the key must be very real that winds it up and keeps it going.”

“I suppose, Mrs. Brown, you have never by any lucky chance arrived at the reason why He does wind you up and keep you going? Yet surely you have asked yourself the question why it is necessary that you should be wound up and kept going.”

“I may have done, sir, now and again. But then it has been a wicked thought.”

“It is an intensely natural thought, and the wickedness of sheer undraped nature is one of those hard doctrines I have never been able to accept. When in the depth of winter you have laid an old skirt on your bed because you did not happen to possess an extra blanket, and you have crept with your shivering limbs into the cold sheets, I suppose you have asked yourself occasionally why you who do not even perform the humble functions of a clock, since you keep no time, should yet be wound up and set going, when, as a matter of choice, you would prefer to remain in bed in the morning and be allowed to sleep on forever?”

“There are my five little grandchildren, sir, who have no mother or father.”

“They would go to the workhouse; and the state would transform them into honorable, capable, and industrious citizens with even greater efficiency than you would yourself.”

“The workhouse, sir, is a very disgraceful thing for a respectable family.”

“Ah, you impale me on another spike of your religion. Its points are fixed at a sharper angle than you are willing to allow. For I would ask you, is it not enough to enrich the state with five healthy and able-bodied citizens without being called upon to maintain them at one’s own expense?”

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said the old woman, “but when you have children of your own you may not say so.”

“I do not doubt that you are right. By exercising as keenly as possible the very inadequate number of wits with which nature has seen fit to arm me, I am able to discern that the more reasonable we become the less do we order our conduct by the light of reason. As you suggest, it is extremely probable when I become a father, if I am ever called to that beatitude, I shall rise every morning from my bed to prevent my children going to the workhouse, however strenuously reason may urge that the workhouse is their natural and appointed home. And assuming, Mrs. Brown, that I am not marked out for the honor of paternity, that crowning achievement of every citizen, why then should I rise from my bed—that is, assuming that I regard the person who presumes to wind up the watch to be a meddlesome busybody, a bore, and a nuisance?”

“If you work very hard, sir, you will have no time to think such thoughts,” said the old woman.

“It is, I suppose, the satisfaction of depriving yourself of the opportunities of thinking such thoughts that brings you here every morning of the year at a quarter to eight to tidy up the garret of a starving materialist who is bleeding to death of his ideals?”

“Yes, sir, you might say partly that and partly to help to bring up my grandchildren.”

“Well, my good woman, if it is partly to bring up your grandchildren, why, may I ask, do you continue to toil on behalf of this person, when for two months past he has paid you no wage, and may I ask also why have you lent him sums of money, when you must have been aware that it was in the highest degree unlikely that it would ever be paid to you again?”

“I have had no time to think about it like that, sir.”

“That is not a very strong answer, Mrs. Brown. I felt sure I should be able before long to impale this religion of yours upon a paradox. And I suppose that when you put this shrivelled old hand that I am holding into that ridiculous old dogskin purse of yours, which must have been an heirloom in your family in the year one, you had not time to reflect that you were robbing your poor little grandchildren? You had not time to reflect that the twenty-five shillings which you lent a weak-natured, self-indulgent sentimentalist in order that he might not be turned out into the street would keep them in boots for a year?”

“I don’t say I had not time to think about it, sir, but I could never have seen you turned out into the street without a roof above your head.”

“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.”