Chapter XI: Part 11

“Well, that is sensible, my boy; a saving of money.”

“What a large room this must be altogether!” said the girl, with a sudden growth of her curiosity.

“I can see neither of you will rest until you have penetrated into the heart of all my mysteries,” said Northcote, laughing loudly, as he interposed himself between the entrance to his chamber and his mother, who, full of inquiry, was plucking at the curtain.

“Why, Henry,” cried the girl, with a thrill of consternation in her voice, “you have not had your breakfast!”

“Why should I? This is not Chittingdon, you know. Eleven o’clock is the fashionable hour in town. It wants ten minutes yet.”

“Bad habits,” said Mrs. Northcote solemnly. “My dearest, eleven o’clock is wrong.”

“When one is in Rome you must do like the Romans, you know.”

“I have never agreed with that proverb,” said Mrs. Northcote. “I consider it weak. When in Rome one should make the Romans do as one does.”

“Imagine me knocking at the gates of Buckingham Palace at a quarter to seven.”

“I am quite sure, my dear boy, the royal family is addicted to good habits. I am quite sure you would not find the king having his breakfast at eleven o’clock.”

“Oh, this dear dogmatic old woman of mine,” said Northcote, tapping her cheek in tender remonstrance. “A fixed rule and a definite opinion for everything under the sun.”

“You must have fixed rules and definite opinions if you are to succeed, my dear boy. Those who have their doubts always end by failing miserably.”

“So they do, old woman, so they do!” cried Northcote fervently, in spite of being stabbed by consternation. Yet he never conversed with his mother on the most trivial topics without feeling that her simplicity rendered her invulnerable.

“I see your table is laid for two, Henry,” said the girl. “Are you expecting a friend?”

“If he comes, he comes,” said Northcote, with a clever assumption of carelessness, “and if he don’t he stops away. Do you understand, Miss Inquisitive? I generally have an extra knife and fork, you know, in case a friend should happen to drop in.”

“He will have a wretched breakfast this morning if he comes,” said the girl, taking off her gloves gaily, and fishing out the fork and the bacon from among the ashes. “I must say, Henry, whoever your friends may be, they cannot be very nice about their cookery.”

“Consecrated by the cook, don’t you see, Miss Impertinence. That bacon is toasted by mine own fair hands.”

“Really, my boy,” said his mother, “you have grown most Bohemian in your ways.”

She took off a pair of shabby and much-mended gloves with that air of resolution she imparted to her lightest action, and insisted on being allowed to make the tea. She measured two spoonfuls of tea from the caddy with great care.

“I allow myself three spoonfuls now I live in London,” said her son.

“Three is extravagance, Henry, three is not necessary,” said his mother quietly. “One for each person and one for the pot is correct.”

“Suppose a friend turns up?”

“More can be made. I fear you have formed very bad habits in London.”

“We have a surprise for you, Henry,” said the girl gaily.

She left the room to fetch a basket she had left at the top of the stairs.

“Guess what we have brought for you,” she cried as she produced it.

“Butter and eggs.”

“How awfully clever that you should have guessed them at once,” she said, with her eagerness sinking into disappointment.

“I am afraid I never had any tact worth mentioning,” said Northcote. “It was very stupid of me to have guessed butter and eggs.”

“But we have brought you some holly as well,” said Margaret, a little mollified. “Christmas will soon be here.”

“I am so glad I was not clever enough to guess holly,” said Northcote.

The contents of the basket were unpacked and laid along the books on the writing-table. He had to submit, not without a passage of arms, to having an egg cooked for his immediate delectation. His mother also insisted on being allowed to toast him a slice of bread.

“You are spoiling me completely,” said Northcote, being forced at last into making a pretence of eating after his own half-hearted offers of hospitality had been uncompromisingly repelled.

By an effort of the will that seemed superhuman to himself he forced himself to swallow a few mouthfuls, yet as he did so he followed the smallest movements of his guests. One eye never left the curtain that ran across the room. Whenever one or the other of his too curious visitors was seen to approach it incautiously he made ready to spring to his feet.

The only alleviation to the bareness of the walls was several photographic groups of football-players, over which velvet caps decorated with tassels were suspended.

“See that group in the middle?” said Northcote. “Look at it well. That is the finest pack that ever turned out for England. We walloped Wales twenty-nine points to three. Pushed ’em all over the shop. Notice that little chap sitting between my legs. He was a half if you like. Cunning as a trout and quicker than a hare.”

“I think, my dear boy, this is perfectly uninteresting,” said his mother, fixing her spectacles and examining the photograph sternly. “This is a stupid pursuit, not only a waste of time, but also a waste of money. It has been the ruin of many young men. One of these days it might even prove to be the ruin of England.”

“All work and no play, my dear,” said her son, “makes Jack a dull boy, you know. Personally I would suggest that a game like football is a rare training for the character.”

“I think football is a fine and manly game, Henry,” said the girl, with a little air of defiance. “I shall never forget seeing you come home with your twisted knee.”

“The doctor’s bill was thirty pounds,” said Mrs. Northcote simply.

These words, spoken in a manner that was almost childlike, came upon Northcote with the force of a blow. He was perfectly accustomed to his mother’s voice and manner, that voice and manner which were so direct and so unqualified. But for the first time they had driven a deep flush of shame to his cheek. This dauntless unimaginative creature, who measured spoonfuls of tea, who counted pennies, whose staff of life was hard facts, what had she not performed at the call of her religion? What lions had she not removed from the path of this one ewe lamb of hers, in order that one day he should win his way to the kingdom she had designed for him? Night and day, year after year, had she labored with this object in view. He was her only son, and material greatness was to be his destiny. He recalled the unflinching figure of this woman tramping over the moors in the depth of winter, through rain and wind, through frost and snow, to earn a pittance by her tutelage; he recalled the resolution with which she performed the meanest household duties in order that money might be saved; he recalled her sitting beneath the insufficient light of a lamp through the midnight hours, transcribing, for the sake of a few miserable sovereigns, foreign masterpieces out of their native French, German, and Italian into trite, colorless, and rather wearisome English prose. All in an instant Northcote seemed to be fascinated, overcome, by the sudden revelation of the pathetic beauty of the commonplace.

“I won’t have you think I have become idle and extravagant,” he said, rising from the table and placing both his hands on her shoulders. “You see I have had to fight my battle, and a long, a stern, a lonely one it has been. What was I in the midst of six millions of fighters, most of them as sturdy, as fierce, and, in many cases, far better equipped than I was myself? But I must tell you, my dear, I believe I have conquered at last. I think I have got the turn of the tide. If health and strength remain to me, and never in my life have I been physically more robust than I am at present, I am about to make an income at the bar which, to frugal people like you and me, mammy, will seem fabulous wealth. For I ought to tell you I won my first big case the day before yesterday, and I think I am entitled to say I made an impression.”

“I know that you saved that poor woman, my dearest boy,” said his mother, with a tenderness that was almost grim.

“Tell me, by what means did you learn that?”

“I walked over to the Hall and borrowed the _Age_ of Sir John.”

“The _Age_!” said her son, in a tone that had a thrill of horror in it. “Why walk all that distance to the Hall to get a look at the _Age_ when Parson Nugent would have been only too pleased to lend you his _Banner_?”

“The reason is this, my dear boy,” said his mother impressively. “All my life I have been accustomed to look upon the _Age_ as the first English newspaper.”

“I expect you are right, you dear old Amazon,” said her son, strangling a groan.

“No, Henry, I am not right. I am prepared to believe there was a time when the _Age_ was the first English newspaper, but in my opinion it is so no longer. I shall never place my trust in the _Age_ again.”

“A heavy blow for Printing Press Square,” said Northcote, laughing to restrain his tears.

“I consider that leading article it had about the trial, and the terms in which it referred to you, my boy, to be a disgrace to English journalism. In fact, I wrote to the editor to say so.”

“What did you find to say to the editor?” asked Northcote feebly.

“I said it was contemptible that a newspaper of such a widespread influence as the _Age_ should lend itself to a faction whose aim was to suppress young men of talent.”

“And what had the editor to say to that?”

“Very wisely he did not reply. Perhaps I was somewhat severe in my letter, but I felt very strongly upon the point and I do not regret that I expressed myself at length.”

“In the name of wonder, what else did you say to the editor?”

“I said this faction of which I complained had been very mischievous in its influence in this country, but in the end it had always failed in its object, as in the end, Henry, everything that is merely negative and destructive and retardatory must fail. I cited the cases of Benjamin Disraeli and the poet Keats.”

“I suppose,” said Northcote, with a dull sense of agony overspreading his veins, “it could not occur to you, old woman, that by any possibility the _Age_ was justified in the course it took?”

“It could not, Henry,” said his mother.

Her air of finality bewildered him. Yet involuntarily he raised his eyes to her face, and, for the first time in his life as he looked at it, he was able to penetrate through its heroic commonness. The features were harsh and aggressive and scarcely lit by the mind, but the rigidity of such a nature in the teeth of public opinion had appeared to shed over them a little of the bloom that proceeds from the elevation of the intellect. It was a kind of apotheosis of the power of faith. Her eyes were deep blue, strangely unfearing and clear, wide-lidded, steady in their gaze. It was little enough that they had the capacity to see, but whatever they lacked in range derived compensation from mere force of vision. They were inaccessible to the changes which are wrought by influences from without. Whatever they had looked on once could never be modified by external causes.

Northcote carried the toil-stained hand to his lips with a reverence that was more profound than any he had ever felt for it before.

“Every man needs to have known one truly good woman,” he said, strengthening his grasp of the roughened fingers, “before he can even begin his own education.”

It darkened his eyes to see the muscles of the harsh face relax as they yielded to the slight softness of an infrequent emotion.

“Your father was constantly making speeches like these,” she said, with that simplicity which was so formidable. “I was never able to understand them.”

XXXVII

INDELIBLE EVIDENCE

For some time Northcote stood holding her hand and looking down into her eyes. A sense of deep wonder was percolating slowly to every part of his being. What a haven was here to embrace when the frail bark of his nature had been flung, like the cockle-shell that it was, upon the crest of tempestuous and multitudinous seas. How blind and undeveloped he had been not to have understood this before! From what ignominy could this anchorage have saved him! It would not have been necessary to founder upon the shoals had he been aware of this harbor that would have been so willing to embrace him. He was already broken into pieces; and those tears which appeared to suffuse his eyes with such facility and to suffuse hers with such a painful reluctance were falling from him.

“You must ignore that unmannerly attack in the _Age_,” she said in a stern voice which yet was full of redress. “The enemies of the friendless have no kingdom into which they can enter. A few years hence, when you are a rich and honored man, you will forgive them for having once stabbed you.”

The silence which followed her words was broken by the hard and intense breathing of the figure that clasped her.

“There is one thing I shall ask of you,” said Northcote at last. “I shall ask you to give me the pledge from your own lips that you will always believe in me as completely as you do at this moment, whatever doubts, charges, or suspicion the future hurls against me.”

“It is not necessary for me to give this assurance, but, since you demand it, I give it.”

“It is part of my weakness to demand it,” said her son, “although none is so well aware as am I that there is no need to give expression to your faith.”

“As you say, there is no need. But I remember your father saying to me shortly before that illness which was fatal to him, the greater the gifts the greater the lenity to be meted out to their unhappy possessors. On that account I have always treated you with more indulgence than otherwise I should have done.”

“Had you been more Spartan you might have strangled the genie at its birth.”

“I might.”

“And yet made of its possessor a more upright and God-fearing citizen.”

“That is impossible.”

“You never could conceive of his being other than you see him now?”

“I could not.”

“Even if the indelible evidence were laid before you?”

“Evidence is never indelible to us. So-called facts have no worth in our eyes. We believe or we do not believe. Nothing changes our emotions; they are what we understand by religion.”

“You speak for wise and great women.”

“I speak for the humblest of wives and mothers who cannot accept credit for blind obedience to an instinct which alone gives her life.”

“I begin to understand why even the most imperious natures, which are as ruthless as volcanoes in action, cannot live without your aid. It is not that you enslave and fetter them; your function is to cleanse, renew, rehabilitate.”

As Northcote spoke a feeling of profound joy overspread the humiliation whose penalties had been far more grievous to him than those of despair. Hardly had he tasted it, however, than the nightmare at the back of his thoughts assumed a visible shape. Of a sudden there came a sharp screech from the curtain. Margaret, who throughout the conversation with his mother had been engaged in fixing pieces of holly over the photographs on the wall, was still employed in this decoration. It was not she who was responsible for the sudden shrieking of the brass rings along the curtain pole.

With a single comprehensive movement the curtain had been flung back and the bed revealed. Seated upon it, half-dressed, with her hair hanging loose, and her bare arms exposed by her chemise, was his visitor of the previous night. Half a dozen hairpins were stuck in a row in her mouth. In the cold grayness of the December morning, which seemed to envelop her malignity in a bald realism, her features appeared blunt, pale, and hideous. The almost incredibly bitter and mocking glance was not directed upon the man, but upon the elderly, unprepossessing, and countrified figure in the shabby clothes and antique hat whom he was holding by the hand.

Northcote let the hand fall, and recoiled from his mother with a gasp of fear mixed with passion.

The young girl, whom life had done nothing to enlighten, stood in dumb amazement upon the chair on which she was poised.

There was a moment in which the older woman quivered with terror. The brutal eyes of the prostitute, fixed upon her face with a blunt contempt, seemed to change her into stone. Observing her to be petrified like a bird in the presence of a serpent, the woman seated upon the bed picked the row of hairpins from between her teeth with the circumspection of an actress who, upon the stage, is notorious for her power, and who, having a stupendous scene to enact, prepares her audience for it by a display of quietude. She proceeded to coil up her hair with a deliberation that had value as drama.

“Vice-president of the Great Trades’ Union,” she said, removing the last hairpin from her mouth.

The elder woman stood looking helplessly away. Those indomitable eyes were cowed for the first time in their history. For the first time they had come upon something upon which they had no opinion to deliver. She had barely the strength to carry her gaze to her son, who stood ten paces from her as pale and rigid as a statue.

“Better go--better take Peggy,” he whispered in a voice that she did not know to be his.

Margaret, still holding the holly, had come down from the chair, and like a child had come to stand at the side of her natural protectress. She was visibly afraid; and she had clutched the holly so tightly that blood was trickling from the wounds in her soft fingers.

The spectacle of her childishness restored to the elder woman that capacity for action which she was never without.

“Get your coat and gloves, child,” she said in her harsh tones. “Where’s the basket?”

She herself took up the basket, and, without venturing to look at her son or her who sat upon the bed, neither of whom had changed their postures nor spoken again, she led the way out with resolute steps to the top of the stairs. The young girl followed in her wake with a timid obedience, pulling on her cotton gloves over her bleeding fingers as she went.

At the head of the stairs this new resolution of the elder woman’s appeared to fail her.

“Go down, child; take the basket. I will follow you in a minute,” she said, handing the basket to the girl.

She turned suddenly and went back into the room. Her son was still standing in the attitude in which she had left him. There was a curious glare in his eyes. Advancing to him she placed her hands on his shoulders, pressed her lips against his forehead, and then, in a kind of headlong flight, darted away like a rabbit out of the room and down the stairs.

XXXVIII

CLEANSING FIRE

This irrational proceeding served to liberate Northcote from his thrall. Even as he felt his mother’s lips and witnessed her ridiculous flight, he was able to divine the nature of the impulse. It was the expression of that unconquerable instinct by which her sex affirms itself.

He walked to the window which commanded a view of the pavements below. He watched the two figures mingle in all their rustic quaintness with the heterogeneous streams of persons and traffic which defiled before his gaze. It followed their every deviation among this ruthless swarm of Londoners until they were swallowed by the mist of the December morning. The last detail he was able to discern, which served to emphasize their slightly ridiculous character as seen from this altitude, was the large empty basket bobbing about in the hand of the girl. Their rusticity in combination with the wild hurry of their flight marked them out as almost grotesque among the spruce and purposeful crowd through which they made their way. With a pang he remembered that neither of them had ever seen the metropolis before. Whither were they flying? How would they spend their day? What would be the end of their ill-starred adventure?

He continued to strain his eyes after them until they grew dark with the effort. He then left the window and turned round to find that his visitor was standing in front of the fire. She was yawning.

“A facer for the old Methodist,” she said, with a short, nonchalant laugh.

Northcote clenched his hands. An almost ungovernable fury caused his ears to sing.

“I know what is in your mind,” said the woman calmly. “Get it done.”

“I hope you will go,” said Northcote in a low tone.

“Get it done,” said the woman. “Tear my head from my body and I shall respect you.”

Northcote was barely able to point to the door. The woman looked at him with supreme effrontery. She was utterly divested of fear. Her nostrils seemed to be dilated in scorn, and her dark eyes were full of mockery.

“I never saw anything half so funny,” she said, “as the worthy old widow of the clergyman running back shamefaced to kiss her saint and hero. The three of you made a picture for an almanac, as my dear father would have said. You reminded me of nothing so much as a stuck pig. The dear old hymnologist and psalm-singer, who had spoken such brave nonsense, looked just like a poor silly old cow with a red face; and that stupid little baby-face sticking up the holly, well, she was just like one of those silly dolls with wax cheeks, which has a button which you press and it changes its color.”

Northcote was faint already with the dreadful struggle he was waging. Suddenly, as if touched by inspiration, he turned in the direction of the door. Yet the woman was too quick for him. She leaped before him and barred his course.

“I am asking you to pluck my throat out with your great hands,” she cried with fury. “Don’t you understand, you fool? Don’t you understand, I say? I cannot, I will not go back to the gutter; yet I cannot go anywhere else. Why don’t you do as you are told?”

“Do go!” he cried weakly, piteously. The veins were swelling in his neck.

He strove to thrust her aside, but she resisted him; and when he tried again she fixed her strong teeth in his hand ferociously.

“Do it now!” she cried, watching his eyes with the baleful hunger of a she-wolf.

“You are not worth it,” said Northcote, recovering possession of himself.

She spat in his face.

Northcote began to realize that he had to deal with a mad woman.

She plucked a knife from the table. By this time, however, the man had all his wits about him, and the movement was anticipated. He had seized her before she could make use of it.

He knew immediately that he had entered upon a terrible struggle. He possessed immense physical power, but the creature upon whom he had to exercise it was extremely supple and vigorous, and, above all, was now a maniac. She fought with the fury of a lioness. Her unbridled rage seemed to make her more than a match for him. Screaming foul oaths, and resorting to devices that a wild beast would not have employed, the issue hung in the balance. Inch by inch, however, he obtained a stronger purchase on her body, and it writhed under his great hands like that of a huge snake. He grunted under the Titanic exertion of forcing her to the ground. He shifted his hands to her throat, and once he felt it yield to their gripe, his own pent-up fury broke forth in an uncontrollable manner. Hardly conscious of what he did, he shook her with the passion of a wounded bear. She gave a low moan, and a spray of blood came on to her lips.

It fell upon him with a shock of surprise that her struggles had ceased. She had fallen stiff under his hands. When he relaxed his grip she fell to the ground, measuring her length with dull heaviness like a sack of flour. In an instant a revolting idea stifled the dreadful frenzy of the demoniac. She was dead. Those enormous hands of his had pressed out her life without knowing it.

Overcome with horror, Northcote sank to his knees beside the body. It was stark, and already a little cold. He rolled the corpse over, so that its face was exposed; he felt for the beating of the heart. There was not a movement of any sort to enkindle his touch. The face was convulsed, tinged with purple, mottled with gray. The eyes were glazed, and even more hideous than when he looked into them last. In his anguish, he gave a little cry, and rose from his knees, and pressed his hands to his head.

His first thought was for himself. By this irrevocable act he was destroyed. His dreams had come to a brutally abrupt termination. That high destiny which was to shake the world had petered out in a shameful public ignominy.

In a pitiable state of terror he fell on his knees again. There was a sort of morbid reflex action within him that seemed to draw him back to the body, to force him to pass his hands across the corpse. It was now cold. A stinging fury made him writhe. Was it for this foul, uncanny monster that he must forfeit one of the most precious jewels that had ever been devised by nature? He was a young man; life was before him; there was the magic talisman in his spirit that could bend the whole world to his purposes. He gnashed his teeth with impotent fury, and rose biting at his nails.

“This is a dreadful tragedy,” he muttered. “This is a dreadful tragedy. Think of such a one as myself being lost to mankind.”

His own grotesque words caused him to laugh. That surprising genie, that had been destined to conquer a stupidly material world, enabled him to present himself to himself in his amazing predicament. He could hardly preserve his gravity before a spectacle so astonishing.

“The genie is deriding me,” he said.

That mute and distorted face that was looking up at him with an insane leer had no message of its own. It was only significant to the advocate as the price of all that he was about to give up. Yet suddenly he remembered this strange creature he had broken with his hands as he had first encountered her in the prison. In no animate thing could the desire for life have been more intensely strong. Overmastering as was his own desire at this moment, hers, at that time, had been no less so. She must have life; she must see the sun and the clouds and the trees. The common earth had acquired fresh symbols for that debauched vision. And how nearly she had come to possess this strange new thing that she craved. One heaven-born man had all but given it to her. He had so nearly done so, that for one brief instant she had been able to taste it with those blood-stained lips. And when she had discovered that strong and shining as this one man was, his was not the divine valiance of those early mystics who roamed the hills in the childhood of the world, that he had not the simplicity to provide her with that which she craved, she insisted on receiving death at his hands in lieu of the life he could not give her.

It was then, that he took a little compassion. It was a loathsome and terrible destiny to which this human being had been called. By what subtle twist or abrogation of her noble faculties had she come to live her days on such lines as these. This avowed and ruthless enemy of society had been of no common or spurious clay. It was not a small nature that had taken a revenge so bitter. A little more and it had been how much? Another grain of courage, another ounce of power, and she, too, poor maimed and twisted thing of beauty, would have been numbered among the valiant.

It added a sharp touch to her slayer’s compassion, that, in regarding her mutilated image, she became the mirror of his own. He saw the parallel between the living and the dead. Every point in this analogy was so perfect that a mental fascination lurked in its rendering. Did the texture of his own fate admit of any more lenient inquiry? He also would have entered his kingdom had he but possessed the little more that meant so much. Were they not both in the beginning the victims of a fine and original talent, for she whom he had slain had been the offspring of a man of the first genius. Her thoughts were his thoughts; her desires were his desires; the tragedy of each had been that their fineness had been immolated upon the altar of its base surroundings; both had failed to scale those precipitous mountain-places from which alone it was possible to stand in true perspective to their own characters.

As he pressed home this analogy with that curious grim subtlety that was always one of his chief pleasures to employ, he began to feel in his own veins that intense desire of hers to live the life that nature had appointed, to discover an ampler, a truer self-expression. How was it possible to arrest those functions that had not had an opportunity to fulfil themselves? There was a ravishing vigor in his blood; he must not perish as a felon, he to whom all things were so full of meaning.

The overwhelming force of these thoughts translated them into action. It had already come to him that to obey his overmastering desire he must conceal his deed. He raised the heavy corpse in his arms; yet powerful as he was it proved too much for him to bear. Therefore he dragged it across the room, and with herculean labor contrived to hoist it on to the bed. He then drew the curtain across to hide it from the view of those who should chance to enter the room. Afterwards he proceeded to ponder the evolution of a means to ensure his own personal security.

He was still engrossed with this occupation when the old charwoman entered his room. She had brought him some clean linen. It was contained in a basket which it was her custom to deposit on a chair behind the curtain at the foot of his bed.

“You can leave it here, Mrs. Brown,” said Northcote, indicating with his finger a place on the floor.

“I had better take it out of the way, sir,” said the old woman. “Besides, I have not made the bed.”

“Never mind the bed,” said Northcote; “that won’t matter at all.”

“Oh, no, sir, it would never do for you not to have your bed made,” said the old woman, in a tone of quiet but determined expostulation.

“I tell you I don’t want it made,” said Northcote. “You can go.”

The tone of his voice seemed to strike the old woman. Formerly he had always been kind and gentle to her; he had never used such a tone to her before.

“Very well, sir,” she said meekly, looking at him with scared eyes.

Still, however, with a perversity which in the circumstances he could only regard as diabolical, she did not go. For suddenly she recollected that the day before she had lost her shawl, and it occurred to her now that it was not at all unlikely that she had left it beneath the bed. It was not in the least probable that she would find it there, but one of those irrational side-currents to mental activity, which science finds so baffling, had suggested to her that she might.

“What do you want now?” cried Northcote, as she moved towards the curtain.

“I want my shawl, sir.”

Her meekness exasperated him beyond endurance.

“Where is your shawl?”

“I think, sir, it might be under the bed.”

Her hand was already stretched towards the curtain. Northcote was standing against his writing-table, and near his elbow was the leaden paper-weight which he used for the destruction of rats. He took it in his hand and poised it in a fashion that would enable him to hurl it with all his force at the back of the old woman’s head.

For some occult reason she withdrew her hand from the curtain, and retired without pulling it back.

“Of course I remember now,” she said. “I lent my shawl to Mary Parker while the snow was about. I have such a bad memory,” she added plaintively.

“There is one little errand I should like you to do for me,” said Northcote, looking at her calmly. “Do you mind fetching me a gallon of paraffin? You can get it at an oilman’s or an ironmonger’s. I am going to try a new kind of fire.”

He handed her half a crown.

“Very good, sir,” said the old woman.

As he listened to her descending the stairs with little toddling steps, he balanced the paper-weight thoughtfully in the palm of his hand.

“Those five grandchildren will never come much nearer to the workhouse, you perverse old woman,” he said with a whimsical laugh.

He had already formed his plan, and like all subtle minds which yearn for a finality which they so seldom obtain, the definiteness of its nature enhanced his capacity for action. He discarded his carpet slippers in favor of boots, and set his hat, gloves, and overcoat in a place where he could take them up immediately. He placed the briefs confided to him by the solicitor carefully in his pocket. There were no other portable objects of value belonging to him except a quantity of large and loose manuscript sheets, numbering some two thousand pages, the “Note towards an Essay on Optimism,” that fruit of six years’ labor. These he collected from divers drawers in the writing-table, and piled them into one upstanding heap.

He stood surveying this proud edifice with a rueful smile when the old woman returned at last, bearing a gallon of paraffin contained in a tin.

“Thank you,” he said, taking it from her. “You may keep the change. If I spoke to you rather roughly just now, I hope you will not mind it. The fact is, I have a great deal of work to get through, and it has made me rather irritable.”

The old charwoman, immensely mollified by the tone in which she was now addressed, thanked him humbly, and after standing a moment irresolutely, in which she further considered the question of how far it would be now expedient to attempt the making of the bed, a daily duty which with all her soul she yearned to perform, decided it would not be politic to reopen the subject. Therefore she retired crestfallen, because she had failed to carry out a régime which was the foremost function of her life; yet a little exalted also by the apology which had been so feelingly rendered to her by one who wore a nimbus; and above all, tremulous with excitement by reason of having ninepence in her pocket which was pure gain, a solid lump of treasure-trove.

As soon as she had gone, Northcote “sported his oak” and locked the door. It was indeed necessary that he should not be disturbed in his labors; and he took elaborate precautions to render them effectual. First he broke up all the chairs he possessed, and strewed the fragments over the corpse. He pulled down the curtains, and flung them upon the pyre. He gathered several armfuls of books of jurisprudence and philosophy, dilapidated articles which had been purchased second-hand, tore them in pieces, and strewed them about. He pulled a wooden box from under the bed, flung out the contents, consisting of old clothes, and having broken up the box into splinters, heaped those up also. Finally, he gathered in his arms that formidable bundle, the “Note towards an Essay on Optimism,” and sprinkled its two thousand leaves upon the sacrifice.

By pressing into service every combustible article the room contained, the pile that he built mounted up to the roof. Having arranged the great mass to his satisfaction, he poured the paraffin over it. He then kindled one of the splinters of the chair into a fagot, and applied the lighted end to one of the saturated blankets of the bed. He then ran to the door, catching up his hat and coat as he did so, and unlocked it. Barely had he time to do this ere the whole of the pyre, under the excitation of the oil, had burst into a sheet of flame. He changed the key, and locked the door after him.

Putting on his hat and coat and gloves he walked down the four flights of stairs, past various open doors with clerks behind them, yet in so doing betrayed neither sign of haste nor discomposure. At the bottom of the last flight he was accosted by an elderly lame man, who bore unmistakable traces of being the clerk of an attorney.

“Can you tell me if Mr. Northcote’s chambers are on the top floor, sir?” he asked courteously.

“My name is Northcote. Can I be of service to you?”

The clerk opened a small bag that he carried, and selecting an oblong piece of paper from among half a dozen similar documents lying within it, handed it to the advocate.

“Messrs. Peberdy, Ward, and Peberdy, No. 3 Shortt’s Yard, sir,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Northcote, placing it in the inner pocket of his overcoat.

At that moment a clerk from one of the upper stories came running down the stairs.

“The place is on fire,” he cried. “The top landing is so full of smoke you can’t go up to it.”

“I thought there was a smell of burning,” said Northcote. “I say, it must be my room!”

“If you are Mr. Northcote, it is certainly your room.”

The advocate turned round hastily, and proceeded to ascend the steep and rickety old stairs. He was turned back, however, as he had anticipated, by other clerks who were running down.

“The place is on fire,” they cried excitedly. “The smoke will choke you.”

XXXIX

WITHOUT FEAR AND WITHOUT STAIN

Northcote made no further show of resistance to the inevitable, but accompanied the excited clerks into Fleet Street. The window of his room abutting on to it had already attracted the notice of the crowd that thronged its pavements. By the time he had crossed to the other side of the road and had taken up his stand with the knot of spectators that was rapidly assembling at the end of a bystreet, the smoke had increased considerably in volume.

“Not much doubt about there being a fire,” was the verdict of those around him.

The bunch of witnesses in the side street increased every instant. Persons riding on the outsides of the omnibuses stood up to look. Policemen on point-duty came out of the press of the traffic to gaze with concern and inquiry at the smoke which now was belching forth in a black mass.

“Must ha’ begun in the chimbley,” said one of Northcote’s neighbors, a man without a collar. “That’s soot.”

“It’s Pearmain’s Hotel,” said another.

“No,” said a third, “it’s Shepherd’s Inn.”

“If it’s Shepherd’s Inn it will take it all,” said a fourth. “It has been condemned by the County Council for the past two years. It is so crazy it can hardly stand up in a gale.”

“It is rotten and rat-ridden from top to bottom. It must be five hundred years old.”

“Five ’undred me leg,” said the man without a collar. “It ain’t more than two.”

“Lord Bacon lived in it, anyway.”

“Wot if he did? I tell you it ain’t more than two.”

The controversialist spat on the pavement authoritatively, and those who surrounded him, who knew he was wrong, deferred to his opinion humbly.

“There’s the flame,” said a quiet man excitedly. “Why don’t they bring the engines?”

“They want it to get a firm ’old,” said the man without a collar, “so that they can put it out in style.”

“They will have something to go at when they do come,” said a nervous man, who wore spectacles. “There it goes through the roof. Look, look, see that!”

There could be no measure of uncertainty as to the power the fire had acquired already. Smoke and flame were pouring and leaping out of the windows and through the old red tiles into the dull December sky. A stern joy held Northcote as he gazed. Every instant of delay increased his chance. It needed a holocaust to ensure his safety. He derived that thrill of impersonal satisfaction which visits a good craftsman when a work is placed before him which has been adequately planned and executed.

“The engines ought to have been round from Fenchurch Street afore now,” said one, whose mustache bristled like that of a county councillor.

“Fenchurch Street, did yer sye?” said the man without a collar. “Lord love me, they’ll send ’em round from ’Olborn.”

“They are taking a lifetime about it,” said the nervous man in a voice of intense anxiety.

However, at that moment there sounded a curious rattle of warning; policemen came running up, and immediately afterwards came the first of the engines. The crowd was now dense and the traffic was impeded. In the next few moments it had been stopped altogether and diverted into side streets. By now a large posse of constables had appeared, and they succeeded in clearing a space in which the firemen could carry out their operations. Before the hose had been placed in position two other engines had arrived.

Northcote had managed to place himself in an admirable situation among the excited throng; and although those in front of him were somewhat roughly thrust back by the police, he was able to maintain his coign of vantage. By the time the first spray of water had been flung upon the conflagration, it had not only burnt through his room into the story beneath, but also it had spread some twenty yards along the tiles.

“If it takes to burning down, it will be awkward,” said a voice near him.

“How it is spreading! They will find it difficult to keep it off the hotel.”

Northcote, in the midst of the frenzy of destruction that possessed him, now grew conscious that a hand had gripped his arm. He managed to turn his head sideways and discovered that his old schoolfellow, Hutton, was standing next to him.

“This crazy old hole has been waiting for this,” said Hutton. “It burns like tinder. If there are any poor devils who keep there, I pity them.”

“I’m one,” said Northcote quietly.

“Well, I call that really bad luck,” said his old schoolfellow fervently. “Upon my word, it will take the whole place.”

“Job’s comforter,” said Northcote.

“I say though, it is a blaze! By Jove, it has got into the hotel! It will take half Fleet Street if they don’t look out.”

“More engines,” said Northcote with satisfaction, as their hideous rattles pierced the air. “Well, they will all be wanted.”

“I say, though,” said his companion, with the growing excitement of his surroundings communicating itself to him, “this is going to be really awful. It has got down another story, and it is certainly in the hotel, and if they don’t look out it will be in the bank.”

Although half a dozen engines had arrived by this time and the supply of water was copious, the fire had spread on all sides with such alarming rapidity that the liquid sheets that were flung upon it seemed only to increase the virulence of the flames. The surrounding buildings were all more or less decrepit, while the old inn itself had not the slightest resistance to offer to the flames. The whole of its quadrangular roof, most of which lay behind, appeared, as far as the onlookers could discern, by now to be involved.

“There is something strange, fascinating, exhilarating,” said Northcote with a thrill of exaltation in his voice, “in witnessing a really great fire. The fire of London must have been the finest sight the world ever saw.”

“You don’t appear to mind very much about your rooms, I must say,” said his companion. “If I were looking on at the destruction of my goods and chattels and the roof that protects my head, I don’t think I should be able to raise much enthusiasm for the spectacle.”

“It will probably take half Fleet Street. What is my wretched little attic in comparison with that?”

“Somehow in the circumstances I don’t think I could play the philosopher myself.”

“It is all up with the hotel,” said Northcote. “It will be into a few of these newspaper offices before long. Conceive a holocaust that places the press of England in danger! Ha, ha, there goes the roof of my room!”

“Why, that is where the fire began! You don’t mean to say the fire began in your room?”

“Yes, that is where the fire began.”

“No! How did it begin? Were you in it when it started?”

“Yes, I was in it when it started.”

“No!”

“I started it myself.”

“Did you overturn a lamp? Or did it begin in the chimney?”

“Well, if you must know,” said Northcote, “you shall hear the true facts. A lady called upon me last evening, and very kindly stayed the night. But this morning when I wanted to turn her out she refused to go. And further, she showed temper and made herself distinctly objectionable. Therefore I lost patience with her, and being a man of my hands I twisted her neck. But when I had managed to do that--by Jove, it is into the bank! we shall soon be able to reckon the damage by a cool million and it has only just begun!--but when I had managed to twist her neck, the question arose how to get rid of her remains. You see to have her unvirtuous person found in my room would not help this career at the bar I am just about to begin. How could I get rid of the body, that was the question? Now mark the really fertile mind of genius. Why not burn down the whole place? And that, you see, is exactly what I have done, although I will admit the idea is a plagiary from that excellent old author, Charles Lamb. You remember his Chinaman who burnt down the house of his parents every time he wanted to eat roast pig?”

“Well, North, you have a pretty mind, I must say,” said his companion to whom this recital, in the circumstances which attended it, had afforded keen amusement. “But you were always a bit of a lunatic at school. Now if you had tried to persuade me that you had insured your furniture, and that you had fired your place to keep out an execution, I might have tried to swallow it.”

“That is mediocrity all over, my son,” said Northcote, linking his arm through that of his companion. “It is always craving for hard facts. It cries aloud for hard facts; they are the staff of its life, its daily bread, but you have only to present hard facts to it in a somewhat unconventional form--my God, look at the bank!--in a somewhat unconventional form, and it flings them back in your face and asks you what you take it for.”

“My dear old lunatic, what _are_ you talking about?”

“Merely this. Your alternative of the insurance company and the furniture is ingenious but lacking in comprehensiveness. The insurance company would, after the fashion of insurance companies, have insisted on an investigation into the cause of the disaster; they might even have preferred a charge against me to save themselves a few wretched shillings; litigation would almost certainly have ensued--there goes the roof of the hotel!--and litigation which touches myself is the last thing I should be willing to risk.”

“All this is very elaborate, North, but it is hardly convincing. Why are you so unwilling to risk litigation when your whole life--and a rather important one I expect--will be bound up in it?”

“The less my name is associated in the public mind with any shady transaction the better for my career.”

“A point of honor, North. You always had the reputation at school of being rather nice about it.”

“To be frank, it is a point of expedience, my son. Henceforward you will find the notorious ‘Cad’ Northcote without fear and without stain.”

“Why?”

“Why! Because one of these days they will make him a judge.”

THE END.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.

New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.