Part 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What dignity!”

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

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

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

“Defend us, gentle heaven and pious gods!”

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

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

“Wholly, I assure you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tobin will be glad to know that.”

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

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

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

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

Mr. Whitcomb pressed his bell and a clerk appeared.

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

The clerk withdrew.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Insolent dog!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XVIII

TO THE PRISON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We shall see.”

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

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

“Yes, and Brudenell will have his.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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