Part 17

“The terrible miscarriage of justice which occurred a year ago in this court, for which I alone can accept responsibility, for which to this present hour I have not ceased to mourn, would not have taken place had the defence been in a position to present its testimony, and to marshal its facts with a skill equal to that enjoyed by the prosecution. The most material issue in the case was never presented at all. Its existence was not even revealed. Neither the prosecuting counsel nor the presiding judge was aware that the defence had this implement in its possession until long after this miscarriage had been consummated. Do not misunderstand me, gentlemen; I hold no brief for myself; I accept the whole of the responsibility for what took place. It was my duty to unveil that which was hidden, and to present it adequately to the jury. I failed in that duty, because from the beginning of the case the defence was overshadowed. The actual murderer himself was called in evidence by the Crown; it was upon his unshaken testimony that the verdict was rendered; but as was only learned when too late, had one obscure question been pressed home in cross-examination to this murderer who had perjured himself to conceal his guilt, his testimony could not have lived five minutes in any impartial mind, and a lamentable, a grievous miscarriage of justice would not have stained the annals of this English justice of which very rightly and properly we are so proud.”

Again a profound silence had descended upon the court. The painful and close-breathing intensity with which all in that crowded assembly had followed the prisoner’s advocate through the devious courses of his address was now extended to the judge. There was nothing in the words he used to call forth this hush of excited expectation, but the emotion with which they were invested seemed to furnish them with life and magnetism.

“All his life,” whispered the fat barrister to his friend, in a tone of curious tenderness, “he has been a blusterer and a blunderer, overanxious, pedantic, weak-willed, easily led, but--but his end is glorious. This is a note he has never touched before.”

“This state defence of prisoners is so much mischievous nonsense,” said the other almost angrily. “Where does he suppose it will land the country? A judge has no right to advance such an opinion from the bench.”

“Bill,” said the fat barrister, with a solemnity for which none of his friends would have been prepared, “when you have been one of His Majesty’s judges for twenty-five years you may not hold quite such definite opinions. Dear old Bow-wow; all the world knows that underneath his armor he has kept the kindest heart that ever beat, but this is the first time he has made me feel that I wanted to blub.”

“’Pon my word, Jumbo,” said his friend, impatiently, “don’t you begin. We have had enough mawkishness this afternoon to last us for the rest of our lives. I expect Weekes will be falling on the neck of Topott soon, and the clerk will be kissing the sheriff.”

“Dear old Bow-wow, dear old boy, how old he is getting. They say this John Davis affair has cut him up dreadfully. There is not a judge on the bench who would feel it more.”

“Probably the weakest judge who ever took his seat on the bench. What is he maundering about now? Ah, at last he’s got to the summing-up.”

The hour was advancing, and happily the judge’s speech was not of the length which at one time it had threatened to be. The summing-up was short but indecisive. It was plain that the prisoner’s advocate had done his work with the judge as well as with the jury. There was nothing in the judge’s presentment of the evidence, which at one time had looked so damning, to compare with the resolution and conviction of Northcote. The magnetic splendor and brilliancy which had overcome, one by one, the twelve good men and true in the box, had fastened also upon this old man. His confidence was shaken, and the definite line the counsel for the Crown had so confidently expected him to take was far to seek.

“This is doing us no good,” grunted Mr. Weekes to his junior. By now the leader for the Crown was in a very bad temper. His afternoon had been wasted, he was going to be late for his dinner, and he was about to lose a verdict upon which he had counted with certainty. “My dear Bow-wow, you are positively maudlin. Why the deuce don’t you leave the doubt alone and confine yourself to the evidence? There is no doubt. There is not a leg for them to stand on.”

“There was not half a leg for them to stand on at the beginning,” said Mr. Topott, with scrupulous modesty, “but now as the end approaches, they appear to be standing upon two thoroughly sound ones. I think I said at lunch I was frightened to death of that fellow.”

“Much good that did the case,” snapped Mr. Weekes.

“You were so sanguine, my dear fellow,” said Mr. Topott, with his modesty taking an almost angelic note. He was a young man, able and ambitious; and his private opinion of his leader was of a nature that wild horses would not have caused him to expose. “You pooh-poohed everybody and everything at lunch. The case was as dead as mutton; their man was a beginner; you and Bow-wow were going to take care that he did no harm.”

“Well, Topott, I must say you never lose an opportunity of rubbing things in.”

“Perhaps that is so,” said Mr. Topott, dreamily. “Perhaps I am rather good at rubbing things in. Perhaps that is my _métier_.”

“Then perhaps you will provide yourself with another. To my mind this one is not at all amusing.”

“I suspect that is so. But now this case has gone to pot, I hope you will not be angry, Weekes, if I inform you that the fault is not yours. You have simply been knocked out in a fair and square battle. But I hope you will not repine; because there is not a man in England to-day who could have stood up against that fellow. He chose extraordinary weapons, but they were those he knew how to use. No disgrace attaches to you; you have taken the knock quite honestly; and if the attorney had been here he would have had to take it too.”

“Thank you, Topott,” said Mr. Weekes, tartly; “I wish I could have your testimonial in writing.”

“By all means,” said Mr. Topott.

“Just listen to that old fool,” said Mr. Weekes, petulantly. “Whoever heard such rubbish as he is talking? It is time he resigned. Nobody actually saw her put the poison in. Absence of motive. Prisoner entitled to every doubt that may arise. Every link must be forged in the chain of all evidence that is purely circumstantial. No credence can be given to the testimony of half the witnesses for the Crown. My dear Bow-wow, I really never heard such nonsense in my life.”

“An hour ago you never heard such blasphemy.”

“I would to God the attorney had held this brief!” said Mr. Weekes, desperately.

“You may count on one thing,” said Mr. Topott; “he will never let you hear the last of this. Won’t he chuckle? He will pull your leg about it for the next ten years.”

“I hope you will tell him, Topott,” said Mr. Weekes anxiously, “that he would have done no better.”

“Oh, I don’t say he would have done no better,” said the impartial Mr. Topott. “He would have done better. He would never have let that chap get as far as he did, even if he had had to ascend the bench and take poor old Bow-wow by the tippet. But I do say he also would have had to take his gruel, and he would have lost his verdict.”

“Oh, we have not lost it yet.”

“We shall have lost it in another quarter of an hour.”

XXIX

THE VERDICT

It was a quarter-past seven by the time Mr. Justice Brudenell had concluded his summing-up. Long before he had reached the end, a prediction of the result had formed in every mind. This case which in the beginning had been as clear and strong as the sun at noon had become so vitiated by contact with these legal wits, that by now even its most salient points had become obscure. No jury in the frame of mind of this present one, each component of which had been played upon like the strings of a harp by the hand of a master performer, was in the least likely to convict. There were those who even inclined to the belief that they would not leave the box.

This, however, proved to be an extreme view. They did leave the box, but in exactly nine minutes had returned into court. As slowly they defiled back again into the court with their verdict, the excitement depicted in their looks was painful to observe. Their drawn faces were livid and perspiring; they kept down their heads without glancing to the right or to the left. The foreman, a coal dealer in a small way of business in the Commercial Road, was seized with a violent twitching of the body.

“Are you agreed upon your verdict, gentlemen?” whispered the Clerk of the Arraigns.

“We are,” said the foreman of the jury, in a voice that could hardly be heard.

“What is your verdict, gentlemen?”

“We return a verdict of--of--”

The conclusion of the sentence seemed to die in the foreman’s throat.

“Will you please speak in such a manner that his lordship may hear you?” said the clerk.

“We return a verdict of not guilty,” said the foreman, with his eyes fixed on the rail before him. To the horror of many who observed him, he appeared to trace some words upon it with his finger.

The demonstration which followed the verdict had been anticipated, and accordingly on this occasion the officers of the court were able in some measure to control it.

No sooner had the judge uttered a few words, which in the clamor were inaudible, than he rose hastily from his seat. In the same instant Northcote rose also, and that voice and presence which for so many hours had exercised such an unquestioned sway at once detained those who were thronging eagerly through the doors into the raw December darkness.

“Before the court rises,” said Northcote, “I crave your lordship’s indulgence for a brief moment.”

The judge bowed courteously and resumed his seat, a little unsteadily as was thought by those who were near to him.

“I desire to offer to your lordship,” said the young advocate, with a humility that was affecting, “in a public manner, an ample and an unreserved apology for an allusion which had the misfortune to fall from my lips. I gave utterance to it in a moment of great mental excitement, and at that moment I did not realize, so completely was I under the domination of the end I had in view, that in a sense such an allusion was an indictment of your lordship and of that high office upon which, during a quarter of a century past, your lordship has conferred honor. I beg to be allowed to crave your lordship’s forgiveness. Had these words not been spoken at a time when I was overcome by the heat of advocacy, they would never have been spoken at all.”

“Thank you, Mr. Northcote,” said the judge in a low but distinct voice. “I understand perfectly well the circumstances in which these words were spoken. They gave me pain, but I do not hold you blameworthy. I viewed with keen sympathy the position in which you were placed; and I accept without reservation the apology which with an equal absence of reservation you have conceived it your duty to tender to me. I don’t know whether I can be permitted to offer a suggestion in a matter of this kind, but if, Mr. Northcote, you could see your way towards the inclusion of your friend Mr. Weekes in this extremely honorable _amende_--”

“I will, my lord--I do!” cried the impetuous young man, turning towards the place of the senior counsel for the Treasury.

“I regret to say, my lord,” said Mr. Topott, rising and bowing to the judge and to Northcote, “that my learned friend has already left the precincts of the court; but I feel sure I am entitled to state, that were he now present he would accept these words of Mr. Northcote in the spirit in which they are offered.”

The judge left the bench and the court emptied rapidly. Mr. Whitcomb, who had remained most of the day in Northcote’s vicinity, plucked him by the sleeve as he rose and gathered his papers.

“I know now what you mean by the genie,” said he. “I shall send a wire to Tobin at the hospital. I should like to see his face when he gets it.”

Northcote was too highly wrought to appreciate a word that was uttered by the solicitor. He could only smile and nod and wish him good night, all of which was done with incoherence and abruptness. As the young man passed out of the court, an elderly unfortunate, without any teeth, one-half of whose face had been destroyed by disease, crept from her hiding-place in a dark corner of the corridor. She grabbed the hem of Northcote’s gown and carried it to her lips.

“Gawd bless yer, guv’ner,” she mumbled, in a thick, wheezy whisper.

In the barristers’ robing-room the entrance of Northcote created a stir. Jumbo, a bencher of Northcote’s inn, and like all who are not afraid to present themselves without reserve, just as nature devised them, a man of immense popularity, hit the young advocate a blow on the shoulder.

“When can I stand you a bottle, dear boy? Fine work!”

The son of the Master of the Rolls came up.

“I say, Northcote,” he said, “you don’t remember me? I’m Hutton. I was in Foxey’s house with you at school.”

“Of course, of course,” said Northcote, hardly knowing a word that he spoke; “I remember you perfectly well. You have not altered at all.”

“You’ve not altered much, although you look awfully old and very much thinner than you used to look. I want you to mention an evening that you can come round and dine with my governor--you remember the governor I used to get ragged so tremendously for boasting about? He will be delighted to meet you. I shall tell him all about this; he is the kindest old soul.”

“Thanks, but I can’t dine with you until I’ve got my evening clothes out of pawn.”

Northcote’s schoolfellow laughed heartily.

“No, you’ve not altered,” he said. “Just the same amusing cynical old cuss you were at school--just the same cynical old cuss of whom we were so much afraid and who was so frightfully unpopular.”

“Poverty and pride were never a popular combination,” said Northcote, aroused from his preoccupation by the sympathy of one of the few who had supported him in his youth. “If I hadn’t been a bit of a football-player I don’t know what would have happened to me in those days. I used to derive pleasure, I remember, from insulting everybody.”

“Foxey used to call you Diogenes.”

“He used to say that Diogenes was considerably the pleasanter fellow of the two.”

“Poor old Foxey always feared you, I believe, just as did everybody else. You were a gloomy, dreamy sort of chap when you were not merely formidable. I remember once you were nearly superannuated. And do you remember Foxey saying there was nothing you might not do, if only you would apply your mind to it; but as it was, he was sure you would never do anything?”

“I lived in a mental fog in those days,” said Northcote, with a dreary laugh. “There was a thick vapor wrapped all round my brain. I could see and understand nothing. One fact only was borne in upon me with any sort of clearness. It was that I was vastly superior to everybody else. There never was such a colossal self-esteem.”

“Well, you certainly despised everybody in those days. And you must have gone on despising everybody to be capable of doing what you have.”

“I remember I was generally chosen to lead the scrum because I had a big voice,” said Northcote, with the light of reminiscence softening his grim mouth.

“But your voice is so much greater now than it was then, although it was always an immense booming sort of thing that seemed to come out of your boots. But your hands used to impress me more than anything else. I used to think that if I had hands like that I should break ribs for my private amusement. Do you remember standing the three-quarters on their heads? You were a hefty brute in those days.”

“I was always more or less a man of my hands, yet at the same time was always intensely interested in myself. I used to consider that ‘Cad’ Northcote--that was my name at school, although you are too polite to remind me of it--was quite the most wonderful person who had ever been born into this world or into any other. I used to lie awake all night taking myself to pieces as though I had been a watch. Sometimes I dreamed that I was Napoleon, and that it had come to pass that he had been chosen to lead the English pack while he was still at school.”

“Well, that dream came true at any rate,” said his schoolfellow, with an outburst of enthusiasm. “You were still with us when you pushed those Welshmen all over the place.”

The conversation was curtailed at this point by the appearance of the judge’s marshal.

“Mr. Northcote,” said this courteous and nicely dressed official, “Sir Joseph would be very much obliged if you would come round and see him in his room.”

“Right you are! I will be round in a minute,” said Northcote, shaking hands with his old schoolfellow and declining an invitation to dine in Eaton Square the next evening but one.

XXX

SIR JOSEPH BRUDENELL

In the judge’s room Northcote found its occupant seated in an armchair at the side of the fire. The light was subdued, and the face of the old man was in shadow even while he rose to receive his visitor.

“I thank you for coming to see me, Mr. Northcote,” he said, in a low voice. “I will not detain you long, but I hope you will sit down.”

Northcote accepted the seat that was indicated opposite to the judge’s armchair. His curiosity was roused in a strange fashion by the manner and tone of this old man. They were extremely kind and gentle, almost those which an aged and benevolent parent might employ when about to take leave of a favorite son.

“If you will allow an old advocate,” said the judge, leaning back in his chair and placing the tips of his fingers together, “to affirm it again, I have been impressed by your conduct of this case. My memory carries me back a long way; I have been more than fifty years at the bar and on the bench. During that period I have been brought into contact with the greatest advocates of their day, and I have been called upon to bear a part in many of the leading causes. But never, Mr. Northcote,--I emphasize the word,--has it been my privilege to witness a performance so remarkable on the part of one who is young and untried as the one given by you to-day.

“In the first place, and bearing in mind the limited character of your opportunities, I cannot pretend to know how it has been achieved. Your cross-examination of the last witness called for the Crown was, in my view, masterly. I have always held, and many will support me, I am sure, that the art of cross-examination is a searching test of an advocate. To the ordinary person even moderate skill in that supremely difficult branch only comes with years and experience. But you begin, Mr. Northcote, where many of true distinction are only able to leave off.

“I have always been proud, jealous--I might say overjealous perhaps--of my profession, to which I have given the flower of my maturity; and I have always felt that whatever degree of talent it may please God to bestow upon a man, this great profession of ours offers a field which brings it to the test. You must let me say, Mr. Northcote, that when I heard you deal with that poor woman this morning, and I heard you frame those questions which you put to her with a really beautiful sincerity which told heavily with the jury, I felt proud that so young a man could stand up so fearlessly and so collectedly in his first great criminal cause and put to so fine a use the talents that God had given to him. Had you been my own son I could not have felt prouder of you, and prouder of the traditions that you were upholding. Many of the great lights of the past came before my eyes--Pearson, now the Lord Chief Justice; Hutton, the Master of the Rolls; poor, dear Fred Markham, in many respects the most brilliant of them all, who was cut off, poor fellow, almost before he had reached his prime; the late George Stratton; Lord Ballinogue; Walker; Skeffington; and I know not how many more--but I did not hesitate to believe, although we old men are tenacious of our prejudices, that the bounty of nature had placed you already on their level, and that great and good and glorious as were all these names I have mentioned, you were starting at the point where they were content to end.”

Northcote leaned forward and lowered his head with a fierce, almost uncontrollable sensation of bewilderment, in which, however, pain was predominant. Every word that was uttered by that low, trembling, old voice appeared to spring from the heart. It was something more than an old man babbling of his youth. There was a pride, an eagerness, a solicitude, in the manner of this aged judge which seemed to clasp Northcote like the impersonal devotion of a noble woman to something more radiant but less pure and less rare than that which emanates from herself. In the keenness of his distress it was as much as Northcote could do to refrain from rushing from the room.

“Yet, Mr. Northcote,” the old man went on, “if I say this of your cross-examination, which as far as you are concerned was a thing of the moment, a mere piece of _esprit_ thrown off without premeditation, what shall I say of that address with which you conquered all who listened to it? I speak no longer as a judge, Mr. Northcote; my livery is laid by. As I sat there in court with every chord in my heart responsive to the noble music of your voice, I felt that you had brought home to me that the time had come when I had ceased to be of service to the public. I shall take my seat on the bench no more. But henceforward I shall always carry your words in my heart. They were noble words, nobly spoken; nature has been almost wantonly lavish to you in her gifts. It has been given to you, a young man, to show that the completest abasement of human nature is not in the gutter. I read the deeper and the truer meaning that was innermost, the divine message that was unfolded by the deep vibrations of your singularly beautiful voice. You revealed to one in that court, Mr. Northcote, who should have been engaged in performing his duty to the public, that no sore festers in our social life to-day like the organized degradation of the police-court, where learning, wisdom, courage, and integrity are debased to even fouler depths than the gutter by their constant traffic in human misery. Many times, Mr. Northcote, have I cowered in spirits since I have been called to my office, but it has remained for you, a young advocate, a fledgling of a newer and grander generation, which will touch this material world of ours to finer issues--it has remained for you to knock at the door of the citadel of the oldest of his Majesty’s judges, and to put questions that he cannot answer. You forced him to say to himself, ‘Tell me, Joseph Brudenell, what law you are obeying when you take your seat on these cushions, and you endeavor to fulfil the functions of the office to which you have allowed yourself to be called?’