Chapter VI: Part 6

“How strange are these visitations!” said Northcote. “How awful, how mysterious! When did this dream come to you?”

“Last night about the hour of ten; the first time I had closed my eyes for three days.”

Northcote recoiled with a shudder. The precision of the voice and the power of the coincidence were overmastering.

“There is no accounting for these things,” he said, in a voice throbbing with excitement. “At the same hour I also had a strange, an almost terrible sort of vision.”

“Yes, my deliverer, you have been called into my life to save it--to save that life which never had a perfect thought until it was brought into prison. It did not know what the trees and the sky were, nor the air and the birds; never had it heard a deep voice nor touched a strong hand. You are he that leaped out of the vast multitude that mocked me in my dream, he who stood up before it, and, with a great voice that sounded like the waves of the sea, caused them all to break and run. They grew afraid of your words and your looks, and they fled in terror. Yes, my life has become so full of beauty and meaning, so full of a spacious mystery, that I cannot believe it is to be taken away.”

These words, breathed rather than spoken, sounded in the ear of Northcote as those of a transcendent sanity. Remote as they were, they yet appeared divinely appropriate to the time and place. But they left only one course for him to follow. He must detach himself from the unhappy speaker of them; he must flee her presence. Their edge was too keen. There would be no advocacy on the morrow if he yielded to the subtle enervation of this atmosphere. The voice pierced him like a passion, yet his veins had grown sluggish and heavy, as if under the influence of a drug.

XXI

THE TALISMAN WHICH TRANSCENDS EXPERIENCE

Calling the name of the solicitor, Northcote broke away abruptly from the prisoner and left the room. It had seemed to be charged with a pestilence. Mr. Whitcomb was soon at his side, and hastily they wended their way up and down various flights of stone steps, along the noisome corridors of the huge building, until daylight came in sight once more through the doorway at the end of the passage at which their cab was standing. Their relief was very real at being able to breathe again the living air, fog-laden as it was.

“I don’t know how many times,” said Mr. Whitcomb, as they drove from the portals of the jail, “on one errand and another, I have descended into this inferno, but it never loses its power to give me the blues.”

“I am regretting,” said Northcote, “that I did not take your advice. I wish I had not come near it. I cannot shake off the impression it has made. Ugh! it gets into one’s blood. I don’t know anything quite so overpowering as the nausea of locality.”

“You are too impressionable, my son,” said the solicitor, with a furtive smile. “You will never be able to get through life at this rate. It wants one of some hardihood, one who is robust in each one of his five senses, to practise law.”

“I would say,” Northcote rejoined, with a shudder, “that to be armed for this calling each particular nerve he has got in his body must be shod with iron.”

The solicitor laughed at so palpable a discomposure.

“What did you make of the prisoner?” he asked, suddenly. “You appeared to find a great deal to say to one another.”

“Personally I hardly spoke a word to her,” said the young man, seeking to gather his recollection of that strange interview.

“She appeared to find a good deal to say to you,” said the solicitor. “In that respect you have been more fortunate than myself. I have spoken with her three times, and I don’t think I have been able to extract three words from her. Do you mind telling me what she said?”

“To the best of my remembrance she said nothing that could have the least interest for anybody.”

“Tell me, what impression of her have you brought away?”

“I hardly know whether she allowed me to form one. Our communication seemed so indirect. She kept her face in the shadow all the time; I could not discern a feature.”

“Surely you were able to gather some sort of general idea?”

“That is the strange thing--I seem to have formed no opinion about her. One would not have thought it conceivable that one should have conversed with a person, dealt at least in an actual exchange of words at close quarters, and that they should remain so null. I think I should have been better acquainted with her had I not seen her at all.”

“Come, my dear fellow, you can surely recall a word or two of what she said? She is an enigma; and she is said not to have spoken six words since she was first remanded in custody.”

“That certainly makes the volubility in which she indulged this afternoon the more astonishing.”

“Indeed it does. Would you say that she expects an acquittal?”

“Well, now you come to mention that, I would say she does.”

“It is an extraordinary thing that they are all so sanguine. It hardly ever seems to occur to any of them that by any possibility they can meet with their deserts. Indeed, one might say the bigger the criminal, the greater their confidence that they will escape.”

“I am going to ask you what opinion you have formed of her,” said Northcote.

“It follows the lines of your own. When I have come into personal contact with her, I have been able to make rather less than nothing of her. At first I thought she seemed sullen, and quite reconciled to her position, indeed, that she was too callous to care about anything; but upon seeing her to-day, I was rather struck by the fact that her attitude had undergone a change.”

“How long has she been in prison?”

“Nearly three months. She is an odd sort of creature--her former associates are agreed upon that--and doubtless some sort of change has taken place in her. I am more than ever convinced that insanity is your line; and by this time it should not be too much to hope that you are.”

“She will expect her liberty.”

“_She_ will expect! My dear boy, it is when you permit yourself to talk in this fashion that you fill one with so much distrust. Her position entitles her to expect nothing.”

“No sort of doubt overtakes you then in regard to her guilt?”

“None. I have suggested that to you over and over again. My dear fellow, it is as I feared; you have not permitted yourself a due appreciation of the overwhelming nature of the evidence. I do not see how she can hope to escape; and this is pretty plain speaking on the part of her attorney. Just look at the array of facts--her course of life, her purchase of the poison, the result of the post-mortem, the presence of motive. Again and again I have felt it to be my duty to suggest to you that Tobin would not have attempted to shake the evidence.”

“Well, you must permit me to say that, reflect upon the question as I will, it does not seem easy to reconcile the woman in that room with the cold-blooded monster who will be presented to the jury.”

“That phenomenon is by no means rare. It has been my fortune to undertake the defence of more than one finished example of moral obliquity who has presented not the least indication of such a condition. Besides, do you not admit that the impression that this woman made upon you was one of absolute nullity? Were you not unable to divine anything in regard to her?”

“Yes, that was my first feeling; but I am now confessing that after all, in some mysterious way, she has contrived to shake these preconceived ideas about her, now that from this distance I can view the room and what transpired in it. I dare not say by what means she has contrived to produce this effect; indeed, it is so subtle that I can hardly say what it amounts to, because if I begin to recall her words she seems almost to have admitted her guilt. Yet of one thing I am convinced--she presented no evidence of her depravity.”

“One can easily concede the probability of that.”

“Yes, but had it been as complete as you insist, I must have seen it.”

“Pardon me, but I am afraid it does not follow. What is easier than to hide its traces from the eyes of inexperience?”

“Have I not the talisman in my pocket which transcends experience?”

“Talisman be damned,” said Mr. Whitcomb, with a jovial brutality.

Before his companion could frame an answer to a scorn so unconciliatory, the hansom stopped before the offices of Messrs. Whitcomb and Whitcomb. They alighted together.

XXII

LIFE OR DEATH

The final consultation of Northcote and his client took place in the open street in the heavily raining December afternoon, with their backs against Mr. Whitcomb’s brass plate. The spot selected for their last utterances on this momentous affair was incongruous indeed, but each had grown so impatient of the other, that if their last words were spoken here, the clash of their mental states was the less likely to invite disaster than in a more formal council-chamber of four walls.

The robust common sense of the solicitor had never shown itself to be more incisive than now as he stood with his back to his own door, under a dripping umbrella, his hat pushed to the back of his head, and his trousers turned up beyond his ankles. His twenty years of immensely successful practice, his exact knowledge of human nature, his ruthless worldliness, his reverence for the hard fact, stood forth here in the oddest contrast with the somewhat “special” and rarefied quality of this youthful advocate whom he had seen fit to entrust with so important a case.

“It’s a pity, it’s a pity,” he brought himself to say at last, his veneer falling off a little under the stress of his chagrin, and revealing a glimpse of the baffled human animal beneath. “It is a serious mistake to have made; but we have got to stand to it. You are not the man for this class of work, to speak bluntly. You are either too deep or you are not deep enough. But as I say, we have got to stand to it now. My last words will be to urge you to put as good a face upon it as you can.”

“In other words,” said Northcote, stiffening, “you will look to me to do my best.”

“I don’t put it in that form exactly,” said the solicitor, midway between exasperation and a desire to be courteous. “I want you fully to appreciate that you are handling an extremely tough job, and I merely want you to make the best of it, that’s all.”

“I will tell you, Mr. Whitcomb,” said Northcote, striving in vain to avert the explosion that had been gathering for so long, “that if it were not now the eleventh hour, if I had not pledged myself to this thing more deeply than you know, if it were not a matter of life and death to me as well as to your client, I would throw your brief back at you rather than submit to this. It will be time enough for you to get upon your platform when I have made a hash of everything.”

“Yes, I think you are entitled to say that,” said the solicitor impartially, having made a successful effort to recapture his own serenity. “I have no right to talk as I am doing; I have never done so to any one else. I suspect you have got on my nerves a bit.”

“Yes, the whole matter throws back to the clash of our temperaments,” said Northcote, unable to cloak his own irritation now that it had walked abroad. “It is a pity that we ever attempted to work together. Yet for one who envelops himself in the serene air of reason, you are somewhat illogical, are you not? You enter the highways and hedges in search of a particular talent; you have the fortune to light upon it; and then you turn and rend its unhappy possessor for possessing it.”

“As I say, my dear boy, this particular talent of yours--or is it your temperament?--you see I am not up in these technical names--has got on my nerves a little.”

“And your temperament, my friend, to indulge a _tu quoque_, is covered with a hard gritty outer coating, for which I believe the technical name is ‘practicality,’ which positively sets one’s teeth on edge.”

“So be it; we part with mutual recriminations. But this is my last word. Firmly as I believe I have committed an error of judgment, if to-morrow you can prove that I have deceived myself, you will not find me ungrateful. I can speak no fairer; and this you must take for my apology. It is not too much to say that since I have come to know you I have ceased to recognize myself.”

“I accept your _amende_” said Northcote, without hesitation. “I see I have worried you, but if I might presume to address advice to the fount of all experience, never, my dear Mr. Whitcomb, attempt to formulate a judgment upon that which you cannot possibly understand.”

“After to-morrow there is a remote chance that I may come to heed your advice. In the meantime we will shake hands just to show that malice is not borne. Don’t forget that you will be the first called to-morrow, at half-past ten. It is quite likely to last all day.”

The solicitor turned into his offices and Northcote sauntered along Chancery Lane. The twilight which had enveloped the city all day was now yielding to the authentic hues of evening. The dismal street-lamps were already lit, the gusts of rain, sleet, and snow of the previous night had been turned into a heavy downpour which had continued without intermission since the morning. The pavements were bleached by the action of water, but a miasma arose from the overburdened sewers, whose contents flowed among the traffic and were churned by its wheels into a paste of black mud. Northcote was splashed freely with this thick slushy mixture, even as high as his face, by the countless omnibuses; and in crossing from one pavement to another he had a narrow escape from being knocked down by a covered van.

It was in no mood of courage that the young man pushed his way to his lodgings through the traffic and the elbowing crowds who thronged the narrow streets. Even the mental picture that was thrown before his eyes of this garret which had already devoured his youth had the power to make him feel colder than actually he was. Never had he felt such a depression in all the long term of his privation as now in wending his way towards it laboriously, heavily, with slow-beating pulses.

He was sore, disappointed, angry; his pride was wounded by the attitude of his client. His self-centred habit caused him to take himself so much for granted, that at first he could discern no reason for this _volte-face_. In his view it was inconsiderate to withhold the moral support of which at this moment he stood so much in need. Truly the lot of obscurity was hard; its penalties were of a kind to bring many a shudder to a proud and sensitive nature. The patronizing insolence of one whom he despised was beginning to fill him with a bootless rage, yet in his present state how impotent he was before it. He must suffer such things, and suffer them gladly, until that hour dawned in which his powers announced themselves.

That time was to-morrow--terrible, all-piercing, yet entrancing thought! The measure of his talent would then be proclaimed. Yet all in an instant, like a lightning-flash shooting through darkness, for the first time the true nature of his task was revealed to him. Doubt took shape, sprang into being. Its outline seemed to loom through the dismal shadows cast by the lamps in the street. Who and what was he, after all, in comparison with a task of such immensity? With startling and overwhelming force the solicitor’s meaning was suddenly unfolded to him.

He took himself for granted no more. He must be mad to have gone so far without having paused to subject himself to the self-criticism that is so salutary. How could he blame the solicitor whose eminently practical mind had resented this inaccessibility to the ordinary rules of prudence? Was he not the veriest novice in his profession, without credentials of any kind? And yet he arrogated to himself the right to embark upon a line of conduct that was in direct opposition to the promptings of a mature judgment.

How could he have been so sure of this supreme talent? It had never been brought to test. The only measure of it was his scorn of others, the scorn of the unsuccessful for those who have succeeded. The passion with which it had endowed him was nothing more, most probably, than a monomania of egotism. How consummate was the folly which could mistake the will for the deed, the vaulting ambition for the thing itself!

On the few occasions, some seven or eight in all, in which he had turned an honest guinea, mostly at the police-court, he had betrayed no surprising aptitude for his profession. There had been times, even in affairs so trivial, when his highly strung nervous organization had overpowered the will. He had not been exempt from the commission of errors; he recalled with horror that once or twice it had fallen to his lot to be put out of countenance by his adversary; while once at least he had drawn down upon himself the animadversions of the presiding deity. Surely there was nothing in this rather pitiful career to provide a motive for this overweening arrogance.

He grew the more amazed at his own hardihood as he walked along. To what fatal blindness did he owe it that from the beginning his true position had not been revealed to him? Where were the credentials that fitted him to undertake a task so stupendous? What achievement had he to his name that he should venture to launch his criticisms against those who had been through the fray and had emerged victorious? How could he have failed to appreciate that abstract theory was never able to withstand the impact of experience! It was well enough in the privacy of his garret to conceive ideas and to sustain his faculties with dreams of a future that could never be, but once in the arena, when the open-mouthed lion of the actual lay in his path, he would require arms more puissant than these.

To overcome those twin dragons Tradition and Precedent, behind which common and vulgar minds entrenched themselves so fearlessly, the sword of the sophist would not avail. It would snap in his fingers at the first contact with these impenetrable hides. His blade must be forged of thrice-welded steel if he were to have a chance on the morrow. He had decided to promulgate like a second Napoleon the doctrine of force, and for his only weapon he had chosen a dagger of lath. Well might Mr. Whitcomb smile with contempt. Where would he find himself if he dared to preach the most perilous of gospels, if he could not support it with an enormous moral and physical power?

For years he had dwelt in a castle which he had built out of air, secure in the belief that he was endowed in ample measure with attributes whose operations were so diverse yet so comprehensive, that in those rare instances in which they were united they became superhuman in their reach. An Isaiah or a Cromwell did not visit the world once in an era. How dare such a one as he fold his nakedness in the sacred mantle of the gods! It was the act of one whose folly was too rank even to allow him to pose as a charlatan. If he ventured to deliver one-half of these astonishing words he had prepared for the delectation of an honest British jury, these flatulent pretensions would be unveiled, he would be mocked openly, his ruin would be complete and irretrievable.

Never had irresolution assailed him so powerfully. This review at the eleventh hour of the unwarrantable estimate he had formed of himself rendered it imperative that he should change his plans. The opinion of others, acknowledged masters of the profession in which he was so humble a tyro, was incontrovertible. Evidence in support of a perfectly rational plea was provided for him, would be ready in court. His client had demanded that it should be used. To disregard that demand would be to rebuff his only friend, one of great influence who had been sent to his aid in his direst hour. And it was for nothing better than a whim that he was prepared to yield his all. No principle was at stake, no sacrifice of dignity was involved. That which his patron had asked of him was so natural, so admirably humane, that the mere act of refusal would be rendered unpardonable unless it were vindicated by complete success. No other justification was possible, not only in the eyes of himself and in those of his client, but no less was exacted of him by the hapless creature whose life was in his keeping.

Stating it baldly, let him fail in the superhuman feat which had been imposed upon him by a disease which he called ambition, and this wretched woman would expiate his failure upon the gallows. Had any human being a right to incur such a penalty, a right to pay such a price in the pursuit of his own personal and private aims? The middle course was provided for him. It would deliver the accused and himself from this intolerable peril; it opened up a path of safety for them both.

Already he could observe with a scarifying clearness, that here and now, at the eleventh hour, he must defer to the irresistible impact of the circumstances. The risk was too grave; he was thrusting too cruel a responsibility upon his flesh and blood. He must hasten to make terms with that grossly material world of the hard fact which he scorned so much. He must submit to one of those pitiful compromises which he yearned to defy; and in so doing he must betray a talent which had inflicted indescribable torments upon him.

His address to the jury of his countrymen, that surprising impromptu prepared at leisure, must be given up. Not a word could be used of this demand for an acquittal which was to mark an epoch in English justice. He must begin again on a lower note.

Just before reaching the archway through which he had to pass to reach his own door, he turned into a post-office, and despatched to his mother two sovereigns out of the ten he had received from the solicitor. Enclosing a scrap of paper with the order, he wrote these words upon it: “My first great case is called to-morrow. Life or death for Prisoner and Advocate--which?” Having posted the letter he ascended the stairs to his garret.

He groped his way up to it. Shuddering with despair he unlocked the door and flung it open. An impenetrable darkness covered the room. He stood on the threshold searching his damp clothes for a match. He found a solitary one sequestered in a corner of a pocket; but all attempts to strike it failed. He then proceeded to grope his way forward through the room, reached the table, and after knocking down several articles was able to place his hand upon that which he sought. He kindled a light, and the lamp having been replenished with oil that morning was able to maintain it. The fire had burned out long ago; all the coal had been used, and the fresh quantity he had purchased had not arrived. His overcoat was soaked with rain, his trousers were damp, and the room had already become cold. He rummaged out an old sweater that had stood him in good stead in his football days, from a box beneath the bed, removed his wet overcoat and pulled this garment over his jacket. He then filled his pipe and sat down beside the lamp.

XXIII

PREPARATION

He had taken his new resolve outside in the rain; and it behoved him now to utilize these few remaining hours in putting it into shape. Rejecting the demand for the liberty of this wretched woman he must consent to the verdict being given against her, and place his hope in the clemency of the court.

For two inexpressibly weary hours he strove with clenched lips to piece together and elaborate this new line; but in spite of all his efforts it was so dull and lifeless that the task seemed beyond him. Whatever talent he possessed it was only too clear that so vacillating a method of defence was quite out of harmony with its workings. This way and that he twisted each listless uninspired suggestion, but at each laborious attempt it grew less possible to breathe upon their dry bones and create them into living flesh. These maimed and halting emendations were as far removed from the swift and audacious repleteness of the original as to express the difference between light and dark.

It was the difference between life and death. The one was informed with the living breath, a vital and a surprising piece of art; the other was cold and heavy, a confection of wormwood and ditch-water. A bitter chagrin overcame him when he saw all that his resolve implied. He would be sent into court dumb, tongue-tied--he with a philippic against injustice packed away at the back of his brain. This would mark the end of the ambition that had nourished the fires of his heart through full many a weary winter’s day.

The new words would not glow; they were so much sound without meaning. Yet the new words were the true words. They embodied the actual; they stood for the established fact in its impartial fearlessness; they were the servants of justice. That the accused had committed the crime was clear to the meanest intelligence. It only remained for her advocate to announce her guilt and to pray for mercy. Yet the phrases in which he shaped this bald proposition crept to his lips as false, devious, and dishonorable.

The old words conceived in sophistry were burning things, brilliant with the blood and flame of their emotion. Beneath them paradox itself stood forth as but a subtler knowledge. The accent of conviction made these words resonant, these words whose design was to pervert and mislead. They were breaking in constantly upon the dull and tortured phrases which he was striving to weave, the insensitive phrases whose function it was to embody immaculate truth. The commonest platitudes were not so stale as these. At last with a cry of rage he spurned them vehemently from his mind.

Indeed, the only purpose that was served by these endeavors was to prove to the unhappy advocate that his nature must be allowed to obey its instincts. He must fulfil his destiny. To that acute intelligence it had come to seem that truth and untruth were identical. It would seem to be born for iconoclasm, for demolition; let it leave to less sophisticated minds the championship of outworn ideas. In this whirlpool of doubt in which he was engulfed, his ideals, his instincts, all those mental resources which garnish with dignity the most protean character, seemed to break from their moorings; and in the very frenzy of this wreck of his stability, there returned upon him in the guise of one of those paradoxes which had become so fatal, a newer, a franker, a more vital conception of his power.

There returned in its train the arrogance of his quality. It was not for one of the blood royal to submit to dictation from the mediocrity it despised. Its right was inalienable to obey the forces within itself. He had felt from the first that it was in his power to save this woman; the attorney’s doubts had intervened and for a time had overthrown his faith; but now he had come to believe it again. The thing called “experience,” that eternal standby of the vulgar, was a mere tawdry substitute for intuition in the inferior orders. A great talent incorporated experience within itself. He must suffer no qualm on the score of his youth, his absence of laurels. After all, this brief had been evoked by the exercise of an imperious will in a magic hour; had he not an immemorial right to use it as he chose? Let him obey the divine faculty that had carried him so far, and then if fail he must, at least his failure would be worthy of himself. It was proper for common minds, destitute of all force and originality, to subscribe to the conventions which they set up to protect themselves. Custom, usage, the accretions of centuries may even hallow and exalt them until they assume the guise of religions, but these simulations have nothing to say to the royal among their kind.

This powerful impulse, whose impact upon the mind of the advocate was almost terrible, merged the surroundings in itself. Time and place were obliterated; the evening was imperceptibly eaten away. The clocks of the neighborhood gave out the hour of midnight just as Northcote, gasping, with all the breath driven out of his body, emerged from the vortex to grasp his final decision. For six hours he had not been sufficiently accessible to the external to heed the hours as they struck. But now, as the long-drawn strokes announced a new day, a thrill of excitement convulsed his being. The day of all days was at hand. He was standing on the very threshold of the issue. The dread future was about to roll back its veil. Such an emotion was cast upon him that he began to tremble as violently as when he had driven with Mr. Whitcomb to the prison.

He supposed that the chime of these clocks would penetrate the walls behind which the unhappy woman was lying awake. She also must be trembling violently. Doubtless the poisoner and prostitute was dreaming again of her deliverer. The idea overcame him with a curious poignancy which, horrible as it was, was yet touched with ecstasy.

This was a creature who must expect no mercy from the Pharisee; yet the living woman had a power within herself to arouse a desire for it in one who pretended to no exalted sympathy with his species. In their interview in the prison he had discerned nothing of vileness about her. And he was fain to believe that she had dreamed in sober verity of her advocate the previous night. Conjuring up this memorable interview, which yet remained so colorless that it seemed to have happened only to the soul, the haunting low tones began to speak through the silence of his room; and with an impulse of joy that banished the horror of their insistency he responded to the accents of their truth.

A living voice had entered the room. It was the same voice, and yet so much more resonant than the one he had heard in the prison. The senses of the advocate were strung to a point so perilous that the luminous figure of a woman appeared before them. This was she who had huddled away into the shadows of the jail. The lamp on the table, which with so much difficulty melted the gloom within the area of its influence, framed her contour with a kind of weird delicacy. Her figure was veiled in a soft plasticity; it was that of one who was in despair; yet it had all the simple trust of her sex, which it exhibits at those supreme moments when nothing is left to it save to kneel and to embrace its faith. It was a figure such as this that rolled away the stone from the mouth of the cave and discovered that the body of Jesus was not there.

During the interview the young advocate had known and understood little, but now, under the spell of his passion, an ampler knowledge enfolded him in its mantle. It is not until we look down upon them from the altitude of some momentous phase, that those moments which are destined to assume a permanence in our lives become crystallized into our mental history. The terror and the reticence of this pitiable creature had pierced him like a sword, yet it was not until this remote hour that Northcote understood the miracle they had wrought in his nature.

She must once have been fair under the eyes of the sun; once slender, gracious, inhabited by chastity. Her voice proclaimed a history that must have been inexpressibly grievous. Yet the desire for life was in her still. She was not prepared to yield her interest in the mystery. Her words were memorable: she had never understood anything until she was brought into prison. Was it not meet that this daughter of a hundred inhumanities should now call to be released from the doom her fellows had prepared for her. “I know you will save me, my deliverer,” were the words he still heard; and they came upon his ear with more of authenticity than when they first fell from those indescribable lips.

He rose from the chair in which he had been immersed so many hours. He was shuddering in every vein. His fingers and limbs were petrified with the coldness of the room; his damp trousers were inflicting his ankles with rheumatic pains. So stiff were his limbs through remaining in one position for so long, that it cost him labor to cross the room and open the window.

He thrust out his head and a rush of icy air saluted his temples. The rain had ceased; the clouds had dispersed; the heavens, charged with a keen frost, were studded thickly with little dark blue stars. Peering towards them eagerly Northcote tried to decipher the names and positions of these meaningless heads, until at last he came upon one which was larger and brighter than the rest. He was convinced that its locality would render it plainly visible from the windows of the prison. He fixed his gaze upon it with great intensity; he knew the occupant of the prison had climbed up to peer at it through the bars of her cell.

Although he had spent the previous night without entering a bed, nothing would have enabled his thoughts to seek sanctuary in sleep. The incandescent fervor of his mind would not allow him to repose; and although a few hours hence he would have to draw upon every spark of physical energy he possessed, he had no fear of his bodily limitations. He had the immense vitality of those demigods among their kind, for whom no ascent is too precipitous. He spent some time in vigorous gymnastic exercises to drive the congealed blood through his veins; and this accomplished, he felt his strength return.

He passed the remaining portion of the night in pacing his room, with a pipe fixed in his teeth and his hands thrust beneath his white jersey into the pockets of his trousers. Occasionally he ceased these peregrinations for a few minutes at a time, in order to write down some of the sentences as they took shape in his mind. He desired to give himself the æsthetic pleasure of seeing how they looked on paper. Yet he did not propose to bestow a literal preparation on this address, since he had sufficient confidence in his fecundity of expression to speak extempore and yet expect adequately to traverse the scheme he had planned. Words charged with emotion springing fresh and tingling from the mist would increase their appeal by being thrown off in the actual impulse by which they were created.

When at last the old charwoman arrived at half-past seven she was astonished to discover Northcote walking about the room looking wild and haggard and declaiming passages of the peroration. He sent her out to borrow some coal; and when she returned with it and proceeded to make a fire, he ordered as on the previous day what they both considered to be a sumptuous breakfast. While this was preparing he retired to fit himself for that ordeal to which he would so soon be called.

Even now, however, a palsy was on his limbs, a fever in his blood. In the delicate operation of shaving he was unable to conduct the razor firmly, and cut his chin repeatedly. It was with infinite difficulty that he could render himself presentable after the various gashes it had undergone. After expending not less than an hour on his toilet, and conferring as much respectability upon his person as lies within the province of soap and water and clean linen, he sat down at the table hungry and cold yet consumed with excitement.

“Mrs. Brown,” he said to the old woman, “I forgot to ask about that small grandchild of yours.”

“She is dead, sir.”

“I am very sorry. When did this occur?”

“Last night, sir, about twelve. It is one mouth less to feed, as you might say, but I think it might have been my own.”

“But then there would have been no means of feeding the others.”

“Yes, sir, it was a wrong expression,” said the old woman in her precise manner. “It was not what I meant to have said.”

“Well, come now,” said Northcote, “suppose you try to eat some breakfast.”

XXIV

THE TRIAL

The old woman took her seat at the table obediently, but with a bewilderment as great as on the previous day. It was very strange that incidents such as these should arise to embellish her servitude.

This morning, however, she was not tormented with a string of questions. Northcote was silent, gloomy, and haggard; something appeared to be preying on his mind. The remorse he had shown for having failed to ask how her grandchild was seemed strange to her indeed, for until the previous day he had always stood in her mind as a member of the inaccessible classes. Something had appeared to happen to him by which, in a few short hours, the tenor and current of his life had been changed. There was a terrible excitement burning now under his pale skin; his eyes were restless, his fingers were twitching, and he drank cup after cup of the hot tea as though he were consumed with an intolerable thirst.

When he had finished his breakfast he took his wig and gown out of a cupboard, and placed them together with his brief in a small black bag. He was on the point of starting for the court, when through the open door he could hear footsteps on the stairs. Some one was coming up to the fourth story, an incident so rare in the experience of its occupant as always to be rendered memorable. In an instant the jovial outline of the solicitor presented itself to his imagination. With an agitation that was indescribable he foresaw that he was not to be allowed to take the brief into court after all.

Instead of Mr. Whitcomb, however, his visitor proved to be a boy with a telegram. He tore it out of its envelope. The contents were contained in three words: “Life, my son.” They were from his mother.

With this omen in his heart he set forth. A welcome change had taken place in the weather. The air had become sharp and dry; already misty beams were stealing out from the December sun. The press in the streets was immense, but he brushed through it with the elevating consciousness that he was overcoming a real obstacle. In his every fibre was the breath of contest, the joy of battle. His mother’s words, the faint beams of the new day, the rattle of the traffic, all conspired to endow him with a ruthless determination.

If it was to be that defeat and confusion should overtake him, at least he would not go out to greet them half-way. Once and for all he had put off those fears and misgivings that had tormented him. A great commander storming an inaccessible position does not pause to estimate the cost; he does not pause to contemplate the inevitability of disaster. He, too, would show himself of this quality: a great commander of his lurid and revolted imagination in the teeth of frightful odds.

He arrived at the Old Bailey at a quarter-past ten. He did not allow himself to glance at its profile, nor did he permit his mind to be distracted by one of the thousand details, common, depressing, and of no significance in themselves, yet likely to be so ominous in their effect on high-strung nerves. He passed from the barristers’ robing-room as soon as he could, for beyond everything he wished to avoid contact with his kind. Yet to the majority of those within its precincts he was not even known by name; and he felt himself to be looked on askance by all as a solitary, queer-headed fellow.

On entering the court he used great care in selecting his seat. It was in a situation from which he felt he could command the attention of all present; from which the jury would lose nothing of what he presented to it, and yet be sufficiently removed to be unable to discern the more intimate workings of his personality. Oratory like music demands a certain space and distance in which and at which to reveal itself. Before taking his seat he looked all around him into every part of the building, in order that he might familiarize himself with that which lay about him. Every seat allotted to the public was already in its occupation; the nature of the charge was itself sufficient to stimulate its curiosity in the highest degree. Among the members of the bar the interest was not so great. There was said to be no defence worthy of the name; the crime was of a common kind, presenting neither rare nor curious features; the absence of Tobin, the most brilliant common law advocate among the younger men, had become known; and the case was expected to be disposed of without difficulty. Its main interest in the eyes of the junior bar centred around the man who had been asked to conduct the defence. That one so obscure as Northcote should have been chosen to fill the place of Tobin in a murder case was one of those unexpected things which furnished a theme for the critic’s function; a function which the majority of those in their robes on the benches felt eminently qualified to undertake.

Many were surprised, some were a little grieved, and the ambitious were rather disconcerted that Northcote should be entrusted with a brief of this nature. Obscure as he was in practice, he had acquired a kind of reputation at the bar mess as one who was singularly unsocial in his habits. As the brief in the first instance had been marked with a figure large enough to command the services of Tobin, the defence could not be wholly destitute of means. It was strange that a firm so notoriously astute as Whitcomb and Whitcomb should have handed it to one of no experience when the extremely able counsel they had retained originally had been compelled to throw up the case. There was quite a number assembled in that court who were far more competent to deal with it than this young and unknown practitioner. In the opinion of many, this circumstance was taken as the clearest indication of all that the case had no life in it.

Hardly had Northcote taken his seat in the court when he felt a hand on his shoulder; it belonged to Mr. Whitcomb.

“No nonsense, now,” he said anxiously. “The witnesses are here, and we shall expect you to call them.”

“It is quite impossible for me to alter my line at the last moment,” said Northcote, while every nerve he had in his body seemed to be ticking furiously. “Besides,” he added, in a hoarse whisper, “don’t you see that if they are not called I shall get the last word with the jury, as the attorney is not in the case?”

“Pray, what is the use of that? What will that do for you?”

“You must wait and see,” said the young man, with a red haze before his eyes.

“My dear fellow, I must insist on your calling the witnesses.”

“It is impossible,” said the young man, in a voice the solicitor could hardly hear.

“Really, you know, this is carrying things too far.”

“I would to God,” exclaimed the young advocate, with his voice breaking in the middle in the queerest manner, “you had never retained me at all!”

This outburst of petulance conferred upon the solicitor a renewed sense of the young man’s situation.

“Well, well,” he rejoined, with a certain kindness, “I suppose you must do as you please. A case is not over until a verdict’s brought in. But the witnesses are here--if you change mind.”

The young advocate turned his haggard face and bloodshot eyes upon his monitor, but his rejoinder, whatever its nature, was banished from his lips by the entrance of the judge. Almost in the same instant the prisoner was put up. She was called upon at once to plead to the indictment, “for that she was accused of the wilful murder of Thomas Henry Barron upon the 12th of September.” In a voice that was scarcely audible she pleaded, “I am not guilty.”

The jury was sworn immediately, and justice proceeded on its course with considerable expedition. The case presented no feature that was warranted to arrest the progress of the legal mind. The woman’s guilt was indisputable; it was known that the defence had nothing material to advance; and even had it been placed more fortunately, it was unlikely to be marshalled to advantage in its present hands. The judge and the counsel for the Treasury were at one in their eagerness to press the opportunity of getting the case through, since every few minutes they could rest from the course of the public business was inexpressibly dear to their hearts. They would be able to get off to a week-end in the country by an earlier train.

Mr. Weekes, K. C., who led for the Treasury, commenced briskly and volubly without the delay of a moment. He was a small, thin man, with very straight and attenuated hair, sandy in color, and a pair of side-whiskers. A pair of gold pince-nez suspended by a cord contrived by some means to add to the quickness and irascibility of his frequent gestures. His voice was keen and piercing and somewhat metallic in sound; his language had great facility but no distinction; his delivery was rapid; but manner, diction, appearance, were equally destitute of style.

In opening the case to the jury, this expert occupied less than an hour. He unfolded the nature of the charge in easy, fluent, almost deprecating terms. It amounted to this: the accused, whose reticence in regard to her antecedents was impenetrable, and whose age appeared on the charge-sheet as thirty-nine, had for several years past cohabited with the deceased, who had followed the profession of a book-maker.

It was known that previous to this she had lived the life of the streets. It would be shown by several of her associates, who would be called in evidence--women like herself of ill-fame--that during the last year in which she had lived with this man, she had more than once been heard to express the determination “to do for him.” It would appear that the man, although said to treat her well enough at first, had latterly evinced signs of growing tired of her. Further, he was a man of intemperate habits, and on many occasions she had been heard to complain with bitterness of his violence and brutality towards her.

The accused had been aware that by the man’s will a sum of money had been left to her. She had often, when in drink particularly, to which she also was addicted, mentioned this fact boastfully to her associates; and a few days prior to the commission of the crime had asserted in the presence of three of them, “that if she did not mind what she was about she would lose it, as he was always threatening to leave her.”

On the afternoon of the tenth of September she purchased a quantity of vegetable poison of a chemist. On the evening of the eleventh the man sat up drinking heavily into the small hours of the morning; and at noon on the twelfth he expired in the presence of a doctor, who had been fetched by a maid servant, although the woman herself had done her best to prevent a doctor from being summoned. In the doctor’s opinion the symptoms pointed to death by poisoning. A post-mortem was held the same afternoon; as the result of it the woman was taken into custody, the house was searched, and a quantity of strychnine was found concealed in her bedroom. Subsequently the contents of the man’s stomach was submitted to a public analyst; and in his evidence he would testify to the presence of strychnine in sufficient quantities to cause death.

This was the case for the Crown. Evidence was called in corroboration; first the detective who had taken the woman into custody, and another who had discovered the poison. These were examined briefly by Mr. Topott, the junior counsel for the Treasury. The doctors then described the cause of death and the result of the post-mortem; and these were confirmed in their opinion by the analyst when he came to describe the result of his researches. All of these were soon disposed of, as Northcote did not attempt a word in cross-examination.

Two of the members of the junior bar, young men and critical, who were not disinclined to see a personal affront in Northcote’s preferment, were not slow to note his passiveness, and to add it to the estimate they had already formed of his incapacity.

“I never saw a fellow look in such a funk,” said the first of these gentlemen, one who had been nurtured in an atmosphere of wealth and influence, and himself a former president of the Oxford Union. “The case will be over by lunch.”

“They are not wasting much time, certainly,” said his friend, the son of the Master of the Rolls.

Two maid servants were called in evidence, and examined by Mr. Topott with the same convincing brevity as the previous witnesses. Here again Northcote refrained from cross-examination.

“Ought to do something,” whispered the ex-president in the ear of his friend. “Missing opportunities. Why don’t he ask if she saw it administered?”

The chemist’s assistant who had supplied the poison, and who had identified the portion found in the possession of the accused as part of that which had been sold to her, also escaped without a challenge. Five of her female associates were then called one after another. Their evidence was extremely damning. With the skilled aid of the junior counsel for the Crown, every rag of decency was stripped from the woman in the dock. She stood forth a veritable harpy and monster, several shades more infamous than themselves. As one after another of these witnesses was permitted to stand down without being subjected to the ordeal of cross-examination, the ex-president of the Oxford Union was moved to express his personal disappointment.

“Something might have been done with these, at any rate.”

“I think you are right,” said his friend; “but what’s the good, after all. It is a waste of time to say anything.”

“There is no defence, I am told.”

“He will call evidence to show that she was subject to violent fits of passion when in drink.”

“Ah, that is where Tobin will be missed. Really, one is surprised at Whitcomb and Whitcomb.”

“They saw the futility of fighting, and are doing it on the cheap.”

“Poor brute! But I don’t altogether agree with you. Something might have been done by a man of ability. I should like to have seen Tobin in it.”

“I don’t think Tobin would have attempted to touch their witnesses. We must wait till he calls his own to see what he is worth.”