Part 8

“That such a talent should have taken service with an outworn formula is a great public danger. For just as our common humanity is able to assure us that the acts of the most wicked are not always wrong, so those of the finest integrity would not bear dissection at the hands of a cold and scientific cynicism. Our every act has two faces. One is presented to belief, the other to unbelief; one is presented to truth, the other to error. And as this penal code of ours, which we traverse constantly with searchings of heart, is itself a survival of a time of gross darkness, called into being by unbelief and fostered by error, the acts of the best and worthiest among us are liable to be visited by the sword of the avenger, in other words by justice. I am convinced that if any one of you gentlemen, or any private citizen, was called upon to rebut the most awful charge that can be levelled against him, innocent as you might be, innocent as he might be, it would be found immensely difficult, I will not say impossible, to combat the deadly array of inferences which would be marshalled against you in the interests of this penal code by one of the most talented of its servants. The mere fact that you had come to stand your trial in this noisome chamber, itself stained with a thousand crimes committed in the name of justice, and that a cruel chain of events had forced you to vindicate your kinship with the divine will in the precincts of this charnel-house--it is well, gentlemen, that the windows are kept so close, for who would have this foulness mingle with the air of London?”

For the best part of an hour in that raw winter morning, with a drizzling rain falling incessantly, did Northcote continue to rehearse his address to the jury. The amused intolerance of his hearers yielded to an intense interest. They had been present in court on many occasions and had heard these things for themselves, but never had they listened to a voice of such dominion, of such volume and majesty, a voice capable of such burning appeal. They stood merely at the threshold of the argument, it was true; but the art of the orator unfolded it, made it clear. His natural magic, his incommunicable gift, rendered it with the harmony of music, so that before the end these oxlike custodians of the peace, far from growing weary of their situation, began to view with emotion the injury that threatened an outcast from society.

“Go on, sir,” said Z9 humbly; “you’ve the gift and no mistake. They’ll not be able to hang her if you talk to ’em that way.”

“This is not quite the form it will take, you know,” said Northcote, whose exertions had been so great that he was breathing heavily and dripping with perspiration. “It is only a sort of opening roughly blocked out. It will have to be rendered a bit finer, so that it pins them like a fly on a card.”

“You’ll pin them to-morrow, sir,” said Z9; “you’ll get your verdict, see if you don’t!”

Z9 spoke with the proud consciousness of one who can respond to an intellectual pleasure. X012, with a mental organization of less delicacy, although impressed by so rare a personality, yet retained the reverence for facts of the honest Englishman.

“He’ve a gift right enough, Bill,” said X012 magisterially, “but the law is the law to my mind; and black’s black an’ white’s white. If this woman done the crime--I don’t say she did, mind--the law will ’ang her. An’ rightly, too. This gentleman is a book-learned man and a horator,--I know that because I heard Gladstone on Blackheath,--but the law is the law and horatory ain’t a-going to alter it.”

“I am obliged to you both for your courtesy,” said Northcote, with a perfect gravity, “and my obligation is even the deeper for the opinions you have been good enough to express. You are prototypes of the twelve honest men I am going to sway; and I take it that if my address were to be launched in its present immature shape, you, sir, would record your vote for an acquittal, and you, sir, for the severity of the law?”

“The law is the law I say,” said X012, inflating his chest before the honor of this direct canvass of his intelligence, “an’ words is words, although, mind you, sir, I respec’s you, because I heard Gladstone on Blackheath.”

“I assume,” said Northcote, “that although you admired Gladstone’s oratory, you did not allow it to influence your judgment?”

“That’s ’is pig-headedness, sir,” said Z9. “That’s just like a Tory; great horators can talk till all’s blue, and then they can’t get daylight into a Tory. ‘The law is the law,’ says he; an’ if it come to, he’d hang his own fayther.”

“I take it, policeman, that you try to keep an open mind, a mind accessible to new impressions?”

“That is so, sir,” said Z9. “I say with you, sir, that although the law is the law, human natur’ is human natur’. And although Bill ’Arper is just a common p’liceman with on’y one stripe, an’ not a lawyer like you, sir, nor a beak, nor a judge, ’e never goes into court and a-takes off ’is ’elmet but what ’e feels ’igh-minded.”

“Then, policeman, regarding you in the light of a juryman, it is most probable that you would want mercy to be extended to the prisoner, in spite of the law, if you happened to be in your present frame of mind?”

“Yes, sir, I should in my present frame o’ mind.”

“More shame to you, Bill,” said X012; “you are a nice bloke to be a copper, an’ no mistake.”

“Close it, ’Orrice,” said Z9, with a restrained enthusiasm; “you bloomin’ Tories are so thick’eaded you don’t know nothing.”

“Well, gentlemen,” interposed the advocate, brushing the water from his brief, “as I observe you to be on the brink of an altercation, I will hasten to discharge you with my best thanks for your kind attention in order that you may have it out. For the subject will engage your powers worthily; pursue it, and it will take you into strange places. But before I leave you to do so, may I ask where I am?”

“Bottom o’ Sydenham ’ill, sir,” chimed both constables as one.

“Good morning, my friends. I must leave you to ponder this subject or I shall not get home to breakfast.”

The two myrmidons of the law stepped together into the middle of the road to watch this astonishing figure ascend out of their ken.

“Well, if ’e don’t beat all as ever I ’eard!” was the comment of Z9.

“’E’s not got ’er off yet, and ’e won’t nuther,” rejoined X012. “She’s a wrong un; an’ if they let ’er off, it won’t be fair to peace.”

“Well, ’e can talk. ’E kind of got ’old of me. I could ha’ stood there all day.”

“’E kind o’ did me too, but I should shake him off in court. You’ll see the beak will put a muzzle on ’im. He warn’t talkin’ law, and you’re no good in court unless you talk law. The old bloke and them K. C.’s will not stand that sort o’ lip, see if they does.”

“Well, ’ere’s the sergeant comin’. But just to show there’s no ill-feelin’, I’ll ’ave ’arf a pint with you, mate, that ’e gets her off.”

“Make it a pint, matey. A pint seems more legal.”

XV

TRUTH’S CHAMPION

Northcote had only a hazy notion of his whereabouts. He had never been in these high latitudes before. He had a dim idea that London lay “over there;” but upon ascending the steep hill that lay before him, he found that “over there” was merged in the dark and enormous bulk of the Crystal Palace.

“Whitcomb was right in his topography,” he laughed. “This is the route he predicted I should take; therefore it is a perfectly fair inference to regard it as the wrong one.”

He hailed yet another minion of the law, who no less than his brethren was communicative.

“You are going away from London as fast as your legs will take you,” said Z201, and proceeded to set a course which in itself was so intricate that the young man by no means pledged himself to follow it.

The terrific central energy still driving him, the wayfarer strode forth through the rain with an undiminished vigor. By now his clothes were saturated and lay upon him heavily. But nothing could abate the force of these concentrated fires which bore him so lightly mile after mile. Not only did they burn with splendor, but also with a vital clarity. His lips moved with the phrases that sprang upon them; the sense of dull power, of unused native force, which had oppressed him like a nightmare during many nights and days, had been fused all at once into an immense fecundity of expression. Each minute blood-vessel that formed a web round the ball of crystallized energy that was his brain was big with its own peculiar, original, and special idea. The strangest vistas had opened before his eyes. His faculties in the first flush of their self-consciousness had grown insolent and overbearing.

How could a body of common citizens hope to stand against the battery that would be directed upon them! All the subtleties of the sophists, all the enthusiasms of the creeds would be as naught in the presence of such an overweening personal force. How could such insignificant fragments as these, the mere excrescences of the universal scheme, who could not make a mind among them, hope to retain the all-too-precarious standard of their probity when touched by the wand of the magician? He laughed aloud to the rain when his thoughts reverted to the two perplexed constables he had left at the bottom of Sydenham Hill; and how, in spite of the tentativeness of the effort, as his talent had mounted in him, so that presently its irresistible force had seemed even to surprise himself, these two stolid, unemotional Englishmen had nodded their heads in approval, and had hung breathless upon his words. Only one of God’s great advocates could hope to perform that miracle under a gas-lamp in the wind-swept streets on a wet and chill winter’s morning. The old mystics, delivering with a divine _naïveté_ their surprising message to mankind, could never have accomplished a feat more wonderful.

His eyes veiled in darkness, his head high-poised yet thrust forward, his mouth and nostrils filled with cold and deep draughts of air, his whole being was surrendered to an orgy of freedom and power. For the first time since he had come to maturity he had found an occupation for his ferocious energies. It was no unworthy task by which they were confronted. Thirty was usually the age at which genius elected to give to the world its first masterpiece. And was it not as seemly that an advocate should rejoice in a theme as the statesman, the musician, or the poet? This first essay should be as complete, as audacious, and as worthy of the sanction of the best minds of the time, as the _chefs-d’œuvres_ of other representative spirits. It should stand as a landmark in an art as little understood as that of truth itself.

Old men on the Woolsack, the most reverend seigniors of the law, advocates who had received the homage the age is accustomed to lavish on a scanty pretext, should stand aghast before an alarming iconoclasm of which he would be the pioneer. His ideas should prove so revolutionary that these practitioners, complacently drawing their emoluments, should foregather to turn this magnificent ruffler out of his inn. The scathing criticisms which the elect of all ages launch against a Jesus, a Galileo, or a Wagner, before the world has grown accustomed to their strangeness, he would be called upon to support; for would not he alone be the true advocate, the heaven-born, immortal one, while they would remain, as always, complacent performers of tricks which they mistook for the operations of their specific talent, subscribers to conventions that were shallow and nonsensical and in open enmity to the idea of justice for which they stood as the self-satisfied expression.

As he raced along in the company of these wonderful thoughts through the south of London, he recognized in himself all the signs that declare Truth’s authentic champion. It would be his to deliver more than one rueful blow upon the close-locked portals of pedantry. “The purblind old man who dares to occupy the seat of judgment, his authority shall be traversed, it shall be rent in pieces. As for that amazing creature who will dare to stand up for the Crown, who will propose to do to death a human being with that bleak and irascible voice, and the operations of that arrested growth he calls his intellect, an awful example will have to be made of him.”

There was no end to the succession of deserted streets. Water swam in shallow pools along the black pavements which seemed to reflect the color of the sky. The numerous lamps, picked out as so many dull, yellow balls in the surrounding blackness, suffused their oppressive rays along the long, flat surfaces so that they appeared to shine without giving forth a radiance.

How vague and vast seemed these early hours before the dawn! They did not contain a living soul. The sky, the streets, the dark houses, the bare trees in the gardens and at the sides of the roads were soundless, empty, destitute of life. A quietness so profound appeared uncanny on the outskirts of pandemonium. But astonishing, desolating as it was, it seemed to aid the furious brain that was borne so fast in its midst. There was only the echo of the advocate’s own feet, which came weirdly from across the way, and the high and labored breathing of his own body.

By the time the hour of seven chimed out from the half-dozen neighboring steeples of a population that was beginning to cluster much closer together, he divined that he was pressing nearer to the heart of the metropolis. He did not stay to inquire of the occasional wayfarer who was abroad in these regions, but set his face into the ruck of the streets, where the dark forms of the houses rose like an impenetrable and endless forest. No fears assailed him as to whether he would reach his home--the coldest, most inhospitable home that was ever called upon to harbor a spirit with such widespread, space-cleaving pinions.

His feet seemed to devour the pavements. His stride was great, elastic, and unflagging; it was propelled by the lungs, heart, and muscles of the athlete. In the swing of the arms, the lunge of the limbs, the lissom sway of the body, there was fine physical power, and the seething engines that presided over this massive yet elastic framework were like the boilers of a locomotive which eat up the miles without fatigue. When excited into action on the football field the feeling was always upon him that no puny human agent could stay his course. The feeling was upon him now in an intensified degree. With will and muscle coöperating to overstride the darkness, he longed for opposition to declare itself that he might trample it down.

Near eight o’clock he recognized Waterloo Bridge and the cold Thames below stealing like a felon through the vapors of the dawn. With a stupefied surprise he awoke to the sensation of being launched once more into the sharp and too-definite business of the time. The pavements were now swarming with people, the roads with omnibuses, cabs, and vans. Traffic was belching out of every street; clerks and seamstresses were scurrying to their employments, masticating their breakfasts as they went. Vendors of newspapers and hawkers of food were tearing the gray air to pieces with their cries. He emerged from the orgy of his passion to find that he was up to the throat and being stifled in pandemonium, even before he was aware that his feet had entered it.

The lines of palaces across the river, towering tier upon tier above the embankment, with their majestic bulks half-thrust through the curtain of December mist which the first streaks of day had seemed to thicken, fell upon the imagination of the wayfarer, who had slackened his pace all at once to a footsore limp as he crossed the bridge and crept towards them. At a distance they stood insolent, aloof, and cynical. He could hardly believe that in one of these wonderful caravanserais he, the starving, the friendless, and the solitary, had eaten and drunk only a few hours before. It was not feasible that such palaces as these could touch a life so obscure at any point. Penniless, friendless, lacking even life’s common necessaries, in the midst of six millions of people, who contended rudely with the first weapons that came to their hands to enforce their claims, how could he, whose coat was in holes, whose pockets were empty, have penetrated to the Mecca of their gods?

Limping into the Strand as the clock at the Law Courts chimed the hour of eight, his imagination was assailed, not with their unmeaning mass of architecture, but with that unseen and grisly bulk which only the eye of his inner consciousness could apprehend. A shudder convulsed his veins. Less than thirty short hours hence the gladiator would be called into the arena. He would have to face the lions with no defence for his nakedness except a small shield in the use of which he had had no practice, and a sharp but untried spear.

Climbing up the steep stairs to his garret, his nostrils were affronted as they had been on so many other occasions by the foulness of the heavy and noisome air. What a labor it was to reach the locked door at the top of the highest, the darkest, the most unpleasant story! His fibres had grown strangely slack, his breathing was no longer joyous and free. The mighty engines of his mind had ceased suddenly to vibrate; those pulses which had been so overweening in their insolence could only flutter now. He had fallen without a warning from his eminence. His whole being was enveloped in a despicable flaccidity, a despicable weakness, as he turned the key in the lock and entered his garret.

He recoiled from the dismal scene that met his eyes with the shudder that one gives in plunging into icy water. As he stood on the threshold all the phantoms of his previous despair sprang upon him from the walls of his chamber and seemed to throw him down. There was the cold grate with the gray ashes in it still; there the lamp that had left him in the darkness. The table was there with its pile of law-books that he had conned with the sickening patience which tortured him so keenly. Strewn over them were fragments of the writings which had eaten away the flower of his intelligence without bringing him a shilling to fill his belly or to pay his rent. Enveloped within them was the piece of lead by whose aid and with a skill so ferocious he had destroyed the rat. The confectioner’s paper was there that had contained his dinner; also the crumbs which remained to testify to its nature. On the mantelpiece was the burned and dirty old pipe which he had cherished so much, the only friend of his adversity; on the floor was the pouch that had not a grain of tobacco in it. The pool of water was still in the corner, underneath the discoloration of the plaster in the low sloping roof.

How cold it was! Everything in this horrible apartment seemed to be rendered icier, more dismal, by the callous gray beams that stole through the grimy windows with a sullenness that hardly merited the name of light. Ah, that window with its outlook on oblivion! It all came back to him with the indescribable pangs of the knife, that the night before he had leaned out of it, bareheaded, open-mouthed, his eyes and nostrils cut by blasts of sleet, and had cried his haughty challenge to a world that grovelled so far below him in the mire.

It was all very hideous, yet this Titanic despair filled him with a deep sense of poetry. He realized, even as he stood now confronting it for the thousand and first time, that whatever the future might hold in her womb, never again would he be pierced to these depths whose very immensity urged the proud rage to his eyes. Yes, there in the cynical eyes of the morning lay the stained and battered old table to which the previous evening he had pressed his eyes to summon the genie. What torments of impotence, of baffled and thwarted power, must those eyes have undergone before they could prevail upon their royalty to stoop to such an act.

He took from his pocket the bank-note, half his fee, which the solicitor had given him at the restaurant, and held it up to a gaze that was as scornful as that of a young god who has not yet learned to accept as a matter of course the powers that render him immortal.

Not again would he suffer want. He had made his choice. In a tragic moment his faintness had forced him to his knees. He had summoned the mischievous imp who showers gold upon poor mortals in order that it shall stultify, poison, and corrupt them. Already he could taste success. There was a faint aroma of it in the dregs of the wine he had drained the previous night. There was a slight nausea upon his lips. There had been something beyond mere fatigue in the enervation with which he had climbed those stairs. For once the great muscles had seemed to flag. Yet not again would they know the chastening brutality of want. Indeed his despair already was beginning to seem a holy and pure condition. He foresaw, as he stood gazing upon its pinched face, crinkling as he did so the bank-note between his hands, that the future would be casting back to it perpetually as the tomb of his godhead, in which he put off those spiritual splendors in which his nature was once enveloped, those sanctified things which were native to himself, in order that he might embrace those other things that were the birthright and the measure of the meanest natures.

Through the open door came the sound of footsteps on the stairs. They were shuffling and uncertain, and belonged to an old woman, who wore a shawl and a faded black bonnet, and who crept into the room with little toddling steps.

“Hullo, Mrs. Brown,” said Northcote, turning to confront her; “rather late, aren’t you? It is a quarter-past eight.”

“Yes, sir, I am,” said the old woman, in a precise manner. “My youngest grandchild is dying.”

“How old?”

“Five and a half, sir.”

“Of what is she dying?”

“Diphtheria, sir,” said the old woman humbly.

“And if the poor little kid dies that will reduce the number of small orphans in your family to four, will it not?”

“It will, sir.”

Northcote stood looking at the old woman for a moment and then changed the subject abruptly.

“Mrs. Brown,” he said, “I have had a windfall. For the time being I am a rich man; and I may say that one of these days I expect to be very much richer. And although your poor little grandchild is dying, I think we owe it to Providence to celebrate this occasion in a fitting manner. Never mind about the fire and the water for my bath. I want you to get a basket and do some shopping, somewhat as follows: one frying-pan, one pound of the choicest Wiltshire bacon, three moderately fresh eggs if money will buy them, which I expect it will not, one pot of marmalade, one pound of the most expensive butter and a loaf of bread, a pound of tea, price half a crown, and a pint of milk. Now get along, if you please, and I will light the fire.”

The blank stupefaction on the face of Mrs. Brown conveyed to Northcote that he had forgotten to give her the money.

“I am so unaccustomed to have the handling of money,” he said, “that I have forgotten to give it to you. This is a note for ten pounds. See that no one robs you of the change.”

The stupefaction on the face of the old woman appeared to deepen as her fingers closed over this unheard-of treasure.

“I--I don’t know that I dare trust myself with it, sir, along the Strand,” she said weakly.

“Very well,” said Northcote. “Just make the fire--a real good one, mind, and you can use all the coal that is laid by, because at one fell swoop I am going to order a ton--and I will do the shopping myself. Where is that big basket in which you bring home the washing?”

“Here, sir,” said the old woman, passing behind a curtain at the far end of the room which concealed a bed.

“Good,” said Northcote. “Providence is working for us. It intends that we shall do ourselves well. And my last words to you are, don’t spare the coal.”