Chapter IV: Part 4

“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.”