ENTER SHAGARACH.
"Meyer Shagarach, Attorney-at-Law."
The shingle could not have been more commonplace, the office stairs more
dingy. A Jewish boy opened the door at Emily's knock and a young man of
the same persuasion arose from his desk and bustled forward to inquire
her business.
"Meester Shagarach is in. Did you wish to see him?"
After a moment a second door was opened and Emily was motioned into the
inner office.
"This way, madam."
The man writing at the table barely glanced up at first, but, seeing who
his visitor was, he rose and placed a seat for her. There was courtesy
but no geniality in the gesture. Shagarach did not smile. It was said
that he never smiled.
From the beginning Emily felt that she was in the presence of a man of
destiny. Before sitting down her intuitions had determined her to enlist
this force on Robert's side at any cost. Shagarach's body was small, his
clothing mean and crinkled all over, as if its owner spent many hours
daily crouched in a chair. But the face drew one's gaze and absorbed it.
With care it might have been handsome, though the dead-black beard grew
wild and the hair, tossed carelessly to one side, fell back at
intervals, requiring to be brushed in place by the owner's hand. Under
the smooth, bony brow that marks the Hebrew shone two eyes of
extraordinary splendor, the largest, Emily thought, she had ever seen,
and set the widest apart--brown and melting as a dog's, but glowing, as
no dog's ever did, with profundities of human intelligence. Wide open at
all times, they cast penetrating glances, never sidelong, always
full--the eyes of a soul-searcher, a student of those characters,
legible but elusive; which the spirit writes upon its outer garment.
Their physical dimensions lent a large power to the face, as if more of
the visible world could be comprehended within those magnificent organs
than the glances of ordinary men compass. But the mouth below seemed
rigid as granite, even during the play of speech.
"My name is Miss Barlow," said Emily.
"Come to engage my services for Floyd?" he inquired. It was his habit to
cut into the heart of a problem at the first stroke and Emily felt
grateful on the whole that the preliminaries were shortened.
"Mr. Floyd is innocent and I want you to save him."
"Why did he not employ an advocate?"
"The judge----"
"Pursued the only course open to him. The evidence was damaging. What
have you learned since yesterday?"
"Ellen Greeley----"
"Is dead. The dog's instincts were right then. There was some one
inside. Aronson."
The young man answered this peremptory call.
"My Evening Beacon."
It was brought at once.
"The newspapers are correct in their surmise. Ellen Greeley went
upstairs, as Bertha testified. The day was hot. She lay upon the bed in
her own room, and fell asleep. The barking of Sire did not wake her.
Her room was in the rear, two flights up. The shouting of the crowd did
not wake her. The fire may have waked her too late and her shrieks
escaped notice in the uproar; or she may have been suffocated during her
nap."
Shagarach spoke in a clear, loud voice that expressed and carried
conviction. Emily wondered at his familiarity, far surpassing her own,
with the details of the case.
"You see the improvement in our cause at once?"
Emily tried hard to think.
"Of course it proved Ellen could not have been a confederate," she
suggested, modestly.
"Ellen Greeley sleeping in the attic chamber, who slammed the door?"
Shagarach's eyes shone like carbuncles. "It was not Floyd. He was not in
the habit of slamming doors. And no man seeking to escape does that
which will attract attention--unless"--he dwelt on the word
significantly--"unless he is fleeing in haste."
"Then you believe, Mr. Shagarach----"
"It was the back door which slammed. They failed to confuse Bertha on
that. It slammed after Floyd had gone out. Did Floyd go out the back
door?"
"Miss Wesner, the young lady who lives opposite, saw him coming down the
front steps."
"When?"
"Four or five minutes before the fire."
"Ellen did not go out the back door. Floyd did not go out the back door.
Some one else did."
"And you will take the case, Mr. Shagarach?" Emily awaited his answer as
breathlessly as if Robert's life or death hung in a trembling balance
which Shagarach's finger could tip to one side or the other.
"It interests me. Have you a photograph of the accused with you?"
"No," answered Emily, thinking the request somewhat strange.
Shagarach began gazing at her with extraordinary intensity. The great
will inclosed in his little body seemed to bear down hard upon her so as
really to hurt. But she felt no resentment, only a kind of satisfied
acquiescence, as if all were for the best. Yet, among ordinary people
Emily was an individuality rare and fragrant, asserting herself
forcefully, without being in the least self-assertive.
"Have you anything else?" asked the lawyer. Emily did not know how long
the interim was.
"There is the strange peddler," she ventured to say. This time his
answer was an interrogative look.
"Miss Wesner spoke of him today--a vegetable vender, who has been coming
to the Arnold's for the last few weeks----"
"How many?"
"Three or four, I think."
"Since the will was made, then?"
"And dealing with Ellen. About the will----"
"Let us finish with the peddler."
"He had blue eyes and drove a cart painted green. Nobody had ever seen
him in the neighborhood before, till he came selling vegetables and
potted plants. His last visit was made on Friday."
"Not Saturday, the day of the fire?"
"Miss Wesner, who is very observing, has not seen him since Friday."
"Not as a peddler," said Shagarach, sotto voce. "Now as to the will. You
wish to say that Floyd has told you of his uncle's desire to make him
sole heir and his own aversion to the responsibilities of so large a
property."
"Does he practice clairvoyance?" asked Emily of herself.
"Robert is no lover of money," she said. "To allege avarice against him
as a motive is monstrous."
"Avarice, Miss Barlow? To love money is not avarice. Men grow to their
opportunities. Without opportunities they wither and without money today
there is no opportunity."
"The artist--does his genius gain or lose when it is gilded?" replied
Emily, who felt a match even for Shagarach in the defense of her lover.
"The artist--ah, he is not of the world! Gold might well be to him an
incumbrance. But to the worker among men it is the key to a thousand
coffers."
There was deep feeling in these words of the criminal lawyer. Emily
wondered if there might not have been a past of poverty, perhaps of
spiritual aspiration and disappointment in his life, all subdued to the
present indomitable aim at fortune and reputation.
"The refusal was a folly, a stripling's fatal blunder--yet a blunder of
which not three men in our city are capable. Let us leave the will. It
may reappear in its proper sequence. No suspicious character was seen
loitering about or leaving the house on Saturday?"
"My inquiries have been limited to Miss Wesner."
"Aronson!"
The young man reappeared as before.
"Make thorough inquiry this evening in the neighborhood of the Arnold
house, rear and front, for a stranger seen loitering about the premises
or issuing from them on Saturday afternoon."
"Yes, Miss Barlow, I have a theory," resumed Shagarach, turning to Emily
again. He folded his arms and looked at her steadfastly, yet as though
his gaze were fixed on something beyond.
"I see your lover's photograph in your eyes--mild blue eyes, but
touchstones of integrity, hard to deceive. He impresses me well. His
story, moreover, bears a somewhat uncommon voucher. It is true because
of its improbability. How improbable that any man would refuse a gift of
$10,000,000! How improbable that any man, not a sleep-walker, would
wander through the streets of a city without any record of his sensuous
impressions!"
"But----"
"The improbability of the story demonstrates its truth. Men lie, women
lie, children lie. Have you watched a band of girls playing at the
imitation of school? How cunningly the teacher feigns anger, the pupils
naughtiness and sad repentance. Have you observed the plausibility in
the inventions of toddling babes to escape imminent chastisement?
Falsehood is a normal faculty and equipped with its protective armor,
plausibility. Your friend's story is too preposterous to be untrue."
Emily was bewildered by these rapid paradoxes.
"I congratulate you upon your friendship with so unusual a specimen of
our kind, the man who cannot or will not lie. But I should not like to
present his defense on such grounds to twelve of his fellow-creatures,
normal in that respect. Fortunately we are not driven to that extreme
refuge.
"The material for a theory is meager; the chain shows many gaps. But I
find no evidence that Floyd attempted to get rid of the servant, Bertha.
A child, meditating this crime, would not have neglected so obvious a
precaution. Her continued absence was only an opportune accident. Her
re-entrance would have resulted in his discovery. The point is pivotal.
"I find that a favorite house dog was left in the room to be
sacrificed--a needless cruelty if the incendiary were his master, a
necessary precaution if he were a stranger whose actions the animal
would have understood and whom he would have followed to the street."
"But would Sire have allowed a stranger even to enter the study?"
"True; but between strangers and friends there is a middle category
consisting of persons whom we may call acquaintances. Into these three
degrees we are divided by dogkind. It was not a stranger or he would
have been attacked. He had no friends left but Bertha, Ellen and Floyd.
The dog was drowsing on the mat. The man who entered was an
acquaintance.
"Who was this man? We have a few items of his description. Some one
known to the dog, familiar with the premises and interested in the
destruction of the document of which that house, that room and that safe
were the triple-barred shrine. An expert criminal could have destroyed
the safe without detection, but the incendiary was an amateur, and such
an act would require time. There was no time, not an instant. The
executor was to arrive that afternoon. McCausland started right. The
Harmon building was destroyed and seven lives sacrificed in order that
Benjamin Arnold's will might be irrevocably canceled. Who benefited by
its destruction?
"The professor had desired to make Robert Floyd his sole heir, in other
words, to disinherit Harry Arnold!"
Shagarach's monologue had reached its climax. The name of the other
cousin came out like the ring of a hammer. He waited, as if yielding
Emily an opportunity to object, but as she sat passive and expectant, he
went on, his arms still folded, and his glowing eyes evincing deep
absorption in the problem he was elucidating.
"Harry Arnold was in disfavor, then. The drafting of the will must have
been communicated to him, but probably not its items. The mere fact,
however, was ominous. It might mean the loss of a fortune. One of the
servants was dressing 'uncommonly rich' of late. The wherewithal came to
her as payment for conveying to Harry Arnold all she could pick up about
the will. It may not have been pleasant news.
"It was from Mrs. Arnold McCausland first learned of the will. It was
Harry Arnold who hastened to advertise a reward of $5,000--McCausland's
fee if----"
"As to the fee," said Emily.
"I understand; the legacy of $20,000 amply protects me."
Emily was uncertain whether or not Shagarach meant to demand the whole
$20,000 for his services.
"I find that the flies were about the honey pot. Mrs. Arnold's carriage
drove up about 3 o'clock. The executor was to call that afternoon.
Revelation could not be long delayed. The plot was desperately formed,
favored by circumstance and executed by Harry Arnold and his
accomplices."
"But Harry Arnold has been ill, Mr. Shagarach."
"The name of his physician?"
"I believe, Dr. Whipple, the pathologist. You suspect Harry, then, of
the crime?"
"I have not studied him yet. This is only an alternative theory. You see
how easily it could have been constructed in your friend's behalf.
"Mungovan, the discharged coachman, has not yet been found. The strange
peddler may prove a confederate. You will send Bertha to me. She is the
central witness. Is Floyd in jail?"
"Yes," said Emily, sadly; "but a permit----"
"I shall not need one. I am his counsel."
Emily descended the creaking stairway and rode home with a certain new
elation, such as we sometimes feel after contact with some electric
character, some grand reservoir of human vitality. Meyer Shagarach
meanwhile began pacing up and down, occasionally speaking to himself
sotto voce.
A criminal lawyer, but with the head of an imperial chancellor.
What was known of this rare man's history? About thirty years before he
was born in a small town on the upper Nile, a descendant of those mighty
Jewish families whose expulsion impoverished Spain, while spreading her
tongue throughout the orient, even beyond the Turcoman deserts to the
unvisited cities of Khiva and Merv. Languages were his birthright, as
naturally and almost as numerously as the digits on his hands. In his
youth his father had wandered to America--refuge of all wild, strange
spirits of the earth--and died, leaving a widow and a son. The boy had
been visionary, unpractical--a white blackbird among his tribe. For
years he had struggled to support his mother, first as an attorney's
drudge, then as a scribbler. There was no market for his wares. Then by
a sudden wrench, showing the vise-like strength of his will, he had
burst the bubble of his early hopes and chosen for his profession that
of all professions which requires the most thorough subjection of the
sentiments. It was six years since he had first rented the obscure
quarters he now occupied, the same where, as a lad, he had sighed away
many hours of distasteful toil.
For the first two years Shagarach's face showed the desperation of his
fortunes. His own people shunned him as a seceder from the synagogue. To
the public he was still unknown. But one day a trivial case had matched
him against a certain eminent pleader, a Goliath in stature and in
skill. The end of the day's tourney witnessed his bulk prostrated
before the undersized scion of the house of David. From that hour the
dimensions of his fame had grown apace. Critics noticed an occasional
simplicity in everyday matters, just as a gifted foreigner who has
become eloquent in our tongue may have to ask some commonplace native
for a word now and then. Rivals questioned his technical learning, who
had little else to boast. Yet Shagarach's knowledge, practical or legal,
was always found adequate to his cause. Whether he was pedantically
profound in the law or not might be an open question. But all who knew
him at all knew him for a Titan.
The man appeared to be lonely by nature. Excepting the young assistant,
Aronson, he associated no colleague with him, carrying all the details
of his growing volume of business in his own capacious mind. Other men
made memoranda. Shagarach remembered. What he might be in himself none
knew; yet "all things to all men" was a motto he spurned. Shagarach was
Shagarach to judge or scullion, everywhere masterful, unruffled,
mysterious. Were it not for the luminous eyes he might be taken for an
abstract thinker. These orbs supplied the magnetism to rivet crowds and
suggested a seer of deep soul-secrets (unknown even to their possessor),
dormant, perhaps subdued, but not annihilated, under the exterior
equipment of the criminal lawyer.
Shagarach often colloqued with himself as he was doing now. In his
trials, though he neither badgered witnesses nor wrangled with
opponents, he was noted for sotto-voce comments, sometimes ironical,
that seemed scarcely conscious. These mannerisms might be relics of a
solitary pre-existence, in which the habit of thinking aloud had been
formed.
"Was it Arnold or Mungovan who touched the match?" He continued his
pacing in silence. "Both knew the premises, Mungovan the better of the
two."
The electric street lamp shone into his room and the footfalls of the
last tenant, receding on the stairs, had long since died to silence.
"I will study Arnold," he said, finally, buttoning his coat, as if the
problem were as good as solved.