HENRY NORTHCOTE
Henry Northcote
_By_
JOHN COLLIS SNAITH
_Author of “Broke of Covenden,” “Miss Dorothy
Marvin,” etc._
[Illustration]
Boston
HERBERT B. TURNER & CO.
1906
COPYRIGHT, 1906
BY JOHN COLLIS SNAITH
_Entered at Stationers’ Hall
London_
PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER, 1906
Second Edition, October 1, 1906
_COLONIAL PRESS_
_Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, U. S. A._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. SHEPHERD’S INN, FLEET STREET 5
II. RETROSPECTION 14
III. SUMMONING THE GENIE 23
IV. ENTER MR. WHITCOMB 29
V. AN ARISTOCRAT OF ARISTOCRATS 35
VI. A PROPHECY 44
VII. THE OFFER OF A BRIEF 48
VIII. EQUITY A FRUIT OF THE GODS 59
IX. THE BRIEF WITHDRAWN 65
X. THE RIDE TO NORBITON 75
XI. MR. WHITCOMB’S FOIBLES 91
XII. THE FAITH OF A SIREN 104
XIII. BE BOLD, WARY, FEAR NOT 110
XIV. A JURY OF TWO 116
XV. TRUTH’S CHAMPION 128
XVI. A JURY OF ONE 140
XVII. MESSRS. WHITCOMB AND WHITCOMB 154
XVIII. TO THE PRISON 164
XIX. THE ACCUSED 176
XX. THE INTERVIEW 181
XXI. THE TALISMAN WHICH TRANSCENDS EXPERIENCE 185
XXII. LIFE OR DEATH 190
XXIII. PREPARATION 200
XXIV. THE TRIAL 209
XXV. MR. WEEKES, K. C. 231
XXVI. THE PLEA 238
XXVII. THE PERORATION 259
XXVIII. THE SUMMING-UP 268
XXIX. THE VERDICT 278
XXX. SIR JOSEPH BRUDENELL 285
XXXI. MEDIOCRITY VERSUS GENIUS 297
XXXII. MEDIOCRITY ASPIRING TO VIRTUE 306
XXXIII. THE HIGHWAY OF THE MANY 313
XXXIV. MAGDALENE OR DELILAH 320
XXXV. DELILAH 341
XXXVI. THE HONORABLE SECRETARY 351
XXXVII. INDELIBLE EVIDENCE 363
XXXVIII. CLEANSING FIRE 368
XXXIX. WITHOUT FEAR AND WITHOUT STAIN 380
I
SHEPHERD’S INN, FLEET STREET
Northcote sat in his chambers in Shepherd’s Inn. Down below was Fleet
Street, in the thrall of a bitter December twilight. A heavy and
pervasive thaw pressed its mantle upon the gaslit air; a driving sleet
numbed the skin and stung the eyes of all who had to face it. Pools
of slush, composed in equal parts of ice, water, and mud, impeded
the pavements. They invaded the stoutest boots, submerged those less
resolute, and imposed not a little inconvenience upon that section of
the population which, unaddicted to the wearing of boots, had dispensed
with them altogether.
The room in which Northcote kept was no more than a large and draughty
garret, which abutted from the northern end of a crazy rectangular
building on this curious byway of the world’s affairs. Only a few
decrepit tiles, a handful of rotten laths, and a layer of cracked
plaster intervened between him and the night. The grate had no fire in
it; there was no carpet to the floor. A table and two chairs were the
sole furniture, and in a corner could be heard the stealthy drip of icy
water as it percolated through the roof.
The occupant of the room sat in a threadbare overcoat with the collar
turned up to his ears. His hands, encased in a pair of woollen gloves,
which were full of holes, were pressed upon his knees; a pipe was
between his teeth; and while he sucked at it with the devout patience
of one to whom it has to serve for everything that the physical side of
his nature craved, he stared into the fireless grate with an intensity
which can impart a heat and a life of its own.
Now and again after some particularly violent demonstration on the part
of the weather he would give a little stoical shudder, fix the pipe in
the opposite corner of his mouth, and huddle away involuntarily from
the draught that came from under the door.
Northcote was a man of thirty who found himself face to face with
starvation. He had been six years at the bar. Friendless, without
influence, abjectly poor, he had chosen the common law side.
Occasionally he had been able to pick up an odd guinea in the
police-courts, but at no time had he earned enough to meet his few
needs. He was now contemplating the removal of the roof from over
his head. Its modest rental was no longer forthcoming; and there was
nothing remaining among his worldly possessions which would induce the
pawnbroker, the friend of the poor, to advance it.
“I wonder how those poor devils get on who live in the gutter,” he
muttered, grimly, as he shuddered again. “You will soon be able to find
an answer to that question,” he added, as he stamped his frozen toes on
the hearthstone and beat his fingers against his knees.
Quite suddenly he was lifted out of the abyss of his reflection by the
sound of a footfall in the room. Jerking up his head, he peered through
the darkness towards the door whence the sound had come, but the
shadows were so thick that he could see nothing.
“Hullo!” he called.
“Hullo!” came back a wholly unexpected response.
“Who are you? What do you want?” cried Northcote, with a thrill in his
voice.
The young man rose to his feet to summon the commoner faculties. For
a voice to have invaded his garret at this hour and in this fashion
seemed to presage a new epoch to his life.
“Who are you?” he demanded again, having received no reply to the
former demand.
“Nobody much,” said the voice, which sounded unlike anything he had
ever heard before.
“I’ll strike a match before I get a blow from a bludgeon.”
“Pray do so,” said the voice, quietly.
Northcote began to fumble for the matches and found them on the
mantelpiece. He obtained a light and applied it to the wick of the lamp
which was on the table, and was then able to read his visitor.
The flicker of the lamp declared him to be a man of forty, of pale and
attenuated figure, clad in rags.
“To what am I indebted for the honor of this visit?” said Northcote,
with slightly overemphasized politeness.
“Curiosity, curiosity,” muttered his visitor, with the quietness of one
who is acquainted with its value.
Northcote turned up the lamp to its highest point and resumed his
scrutiny. The voice and manner were those of a man of education; and
although the garb was that of a scarecrow, and the face was wan with
hunger and slightly debased by suffering, a strange refinement was
underlying it.
“This is all very mysterious,” said the young advocate; and indeed the
wretched figure that confronted him appeared to have no credentials to
present. “May I ask who and what you are?”
“How race reveals itself!” said the visitor, with a faint air of
disappointment. “Even the higher types among us cannot cast their
shackles away. When we go down into Hades, we are at once surrounded by
the damned souls of our countrymen, clamoring to know _who_ and _what_
we are.”
“Well, who are _you_, at any rate?” said Northcote, oppressed with an
acute sense of mystery.
“My name is Iggs,” said the scarecrow.
“Well, Mr. Iggs, I am sorry to say that to me your name conveys
nothing.”
“No?”
“No!”
For an instant the scarecrow peered in a strange and concentrated
manner into the face of the advocate. He then sighed deeply and rose
from his chair.
“With all the learning we acquire so painfully,” he whispered, “we
cannot enjoy a perfect immunity from error. Good night, sir. I offer my
apologies for having invaded your privacy.”
With a bow of grave deference the strange figure proceeded to glide
from the room in the noiseless manner in which it had entered it.
By the time his visitor had reached the door, Northcote called after
him hastily: “Come back, Mr. Iggs. I have not expressed myself--not
expressed myself adequately. Come back.”
His visitor, with the same air of deference and the same noiselessness
of movement, returned to the chair. Northcote fixed two eyes of a
devouring curiosity upon his bloodless face. They recoiled with a shock
of encounter; two orbs flaming out of it in all their sunken brilliancy
had looked within them. Also he beheld a mouth whose lips were curved
with the divine mobility of a passion. The advocate clasped his hands
to his sides to repress a fierce emotion of pain.
“Perhaps, Mr. Iggs,” he said, “you have been down into the depths of
the sea?”
His visitor brushed the green canopy of his mutilated bowler hat slowly
and delicately upon the threadbare sleeve of his coat.
“That is true,” he said; “but I would have you not forget that I have
also walked upon the peaks of the highest mountains.”
The roar of Fleet Street, the sough of the icy wind through the
telegraph wires, the driving of the sleet against the window, and the
drip drip of the water through the ceiling seemed to blend with the
rich and full tones enveloping these words. A sensation of awe began
to surmount the pity and the patronage that the outer semblance of his
visitor had first aroused in the breast of the young man.
“With your permission, sir,” he said, “I will go back to my original
question, and I will frame it with a deeper sincerity: To what does
Henry Northcote owe the honor of this visit?”
“This visit is paid to you, my friend, because for some inscrutable
reason Nature mixed blood and fire with your brains. You, too, will
go down into the depths of the sea and ascend also into the mountain
places.”
“You cannot know that,” said Northcote, with his heart beginning to
beat violently.
“Reflect a moment,” said his visitor. “Do you not know as well as I
that it is the privilege of us to know everything?”
“True, true! But in what manner has one so obscure as myself been
brought to your notice?”
“Every Sunday afternoon for a year past I have been a member of the
audience your oratory has enchanted in Hyde Park.”
“How comes it, sir, that one of your condition can bring himself to
listen to a mob orator?”
“How comes it that one of a like condition can bring himself to preach
to the mob?”
“Primarily, I suppose, that my powers may develop. One day I shall hope
to turn them--that is, if it is given to me to survive the present snap
of cold weather--to higher things and larger issues.”
“And I, my friend,” said his visitor, “who by no human possibility can
survive the present snap of cold weather, I come to tell the young
Demosthenes that he can seek no higher thing, no larger issue than to
preach to the mob. All the great movements the world ever saw began
from below. The power of the sea lies in its depths. Jesus was able to
invent a religion by preaching to the mob.”
“There are some who think,” said the young man, “that for one who was
ambitious the career of Jesus was a partial failure.”
“The age is crying out for another such failure,” said his visitor.
“Because the old has betrayed them?” said the young man, with fear in
his voice.
His visitor left the question unanswered.
“They await the advent,” he said, after a silence in which both
breathed close, “of a second Failure to save them from themselves. Only
that can prevent them dashing out their brains against the blank wall
that has come to stand before them.”
“I believe you to be right, sir,” said the advocate, slowly, as his
eyes traversed the chaste delicacy of the face which was framed in
shadows.
“The Great Renunciator who first reduces this failure to terms,” said
the scarecrow, “will have a sterner task than Jesus had.”
“Yet, sir, you come to one who is almost fainting by the bleak wayside.”
“Have I not listened to your oratory? Do I not discern you to stand at
the parting of the ways?”
“Yes, at the parting of the ways,” said the young man heavily. “The
hour is at hand when one whose poverty is bitter must make his choice.”
“I have prayed for you,” said his visitor, with such a perfect
simplicity that it filled the eyes of the young advocate with tears.
“Your ordeal is terrible, for I discern you to be a man of great power.”
“Poverty is a deadly evil,” said Northcote.
“Yet I would have you beware of riches,” said his visitor. “Think of
the cruel treachery with which they use so many. See how they have
betrayed our own fair land. And it is one such as you, in his virgin
immunity, who is called upon to release her from their false embraces.”
“I, sir!” exclaimed the young man, with wild eyes and his heart beating
violently. “I, without clothes to my skin, without food in my belly,
and who to-morrow will have no roof under which to rest his head!”
The wan smile of the scarecrow embraced his own mutilated hat, broken
boots, and ragged condition.
“You may or you may not be the emancipator,” said the scarecrow,
peering at him earnestly, “yet the veritable great one whom I see
configured before me is some such man as you. I have listened many
weeks to your oratory, and you have a strange power. Your voice is
noble, and speaks words of authority. Even if you are not the demigod
for whom the age is asking,--and, my dear friend, far be it from me to
say you are not,--you were yet formed by Nature to do a momentous work
for your country.”
“In its casual wards,” said the young man, with an outburst of
bitterness.
“The elect upon whom Nature confers true power are generally
safeguarded in this wise manner. The ambitions of the market-place are
set beyond their reach. I lie down to-night with a p an of thanksgiving
upon my lips. May the hour dawn when you also may consign your bones to
the snow. But in the meantime you have a great work to do in the world.
Nature has filled you with speech; therefore you have the burden of
immense responsibilities, for speech is the most signal of her gifts.
You may or you may not be the great renunciator whom millions of your
countrymen await with fevered looks; but it lies within your province,
as it lies within that of every mariner, to array yourself among those
of humble prophecy who read the meaning of the star in the east. At
least, my friend, all who allow themselves to anticipate a divine
appearance are the servants of truth.”
With these words the scarecrow rose from his chair, and, bowing to the
young man with an austere but kind dignity, left the room as suddenly
and noiselessly as he had entered it.
II
RETROSPECTION
Left alone in the coldness of his garret, Northcote felt a stupefaction
steal upon him. The phase of his own circumstances had lent force to
this bizarre incident. Spectral as this apparition was, however, the
gestures, the tones, the mean garb were those of a living man.
The coming of such a mariner who had been down into the depths of the
sea appeared for a moment to turn his eyes inwards. Seated again before
the empty grate with his hands on his knees, he saw his life and its
surroundings with a sharpness of vision which hunger had seemed to
render more definite. He saw himself as the full-blooded turbulent man,
tormented by desires, thwarted by fortune, yet yearning to express a
complete, moral, intellectual, and physical life. He was so strong,
yet so impotent; so expansive, yet so circumscribed; loving all the
colors of the sun and the bright face of heaven, yet condemned to a
prison, and perhaps the more dreadful darkness of the lazar-house. He
saw himself as the wholesome, simple-hearted citizen, yet as the man
of imagination also, the poet and the dreamer formed to walk upon the
heights, who, oppressed by the duality of his nature, was in danger of
succumbing to weariness, disillusion, and a remorseless material need.
He saw himself as a boy roaming the fields, casting up the soft loam
with his feet, spending long days in dreams of the miraculous future,
and evenings in conversation with his mother,--that wonderful mother
whose mind was so secure, whose conceptions of the heavy duties that
wait upon the gift of life were so odd, yet so exact. He recalled her
as a gaunt, strong, and tall woman, with a red face, rather coarse
hands, and a shabby black hat tied in a frayed velvet bow under her
chin.
He could never remember to have heard her complain of life and fortune.
She wore the same clothes year after year; sought no amelioration
from her wearisome and unremitting labors; never seemed to vary in
her sturdiness of health and temper; and always maintained plain,
robust, material opinions. Her life had been a sordid and continuous
struggle for the acquisition of money, a pound here and a pound there,
but there was no trace of avarice in her character. She had educated
him wholly beyond her means, but permitted herself no romance about
it. She believed that being her son, and the son of the man she had
married,--whom life had cut off in an arbitrary manner before he
had had a chance to display his gifts,--he would be a man of sound
abilities. She had decided in her own mind three months before he was
born that to have a fair field for his talents he must go to the bar.
“I have a little imagination, but not enough,” she would say to him,
as he sat with her an hour after supper in the winter evenings. “Your
father was a man of good imagination, and used to read the best authors
to me. My mental limitations did not permit me to understand their
truth, but I always felt their power. Your father was a brilliant
man in some ways, but the clock of his intellect was always set a
little too fast. If he had not decided early in life to be a bishop, I
think he would have been a writer of books. Even as it was, he wanted
sometimes to write them. However, I managed to dissuade him. ‘No,
Henry,’ I said, ‘stick to your trade. You cannot combine the two. To
write books you would have to look at things so closely that it would
unfit you for your calling.’ All the same, your father was a man of
remarkable natural force. He would have succeeded in anything he had
undertaken.”
Northcote never recalled his mother--and it was seldom that a
day passed in his life unless he did recall her in one shape or
another--that this speech, and a hundred that were similar, did not
fill his ears, his memory, and his imagination. As he sat now with his
hands and feet growing colder, the pool on the floor growing larger,
his vitality becoming less and with despair advancing upon him silently
like the army of shadows that pressed every minute more strongly upon
the feeble lamp, he saw that dauntless countenance, the firm lips, the
gray eyes which darkened a little in the evenings as though accompanied
by thought; the precise but inharmonious voice came into his ears; the
vigorous intelligence was spread before him, calm but unbeautiful, full
of massive courage, but deficient in the finer shades of life.
At those seasons when the young advocate sat in his isolation and
despair, that arch-enemy of high natures crept into his veins like
a drug; he would seek the antidote in that courageous life. This
penniless widow of a clergyman in a small village in a remote part
of the world had fitted her son for the only sphere in which she
looked for distinction for him, by many years of Spartan hardihood
in thought and deed. The few pounds the Reverend Henry Northcote had
laid by from his pittance, wherewith to provide an education for
his son, had been lost in a building society within three months of
his own departure from the world. From the date of the disaster his
widow had restricted the hours she spent in bed to five out of the
twenty-four; had renounced the eating of meat and the most commonplace
luxuries; and had practised a thousand and one petty economies in order
that her husband’s son should not lack the educational advantages of
those with whom he would have to compete. She had maintained him at a
public school, and afterwards, for a short period, at the university,
by translating classics out of foreign languages for scholastic
publishers, and by conveying the rudiments of knowledge to the young
children of the landholders who lived in her neighborhood.
This stalwart figure formed a wonderful background to his youth. He
was filled with awe by a simplicity that was so unconquerable, a
self-reliance that was so majestic. All the subtle implements of his
nature could not resolve such a potency as that. He himself was so much
less and so much more.
Strange homage was paid to this unlovely but august woman by the privy
council which sat in eternal session in his intellect. The favorite
guise in which she was presented to it was as the mother of Napoleon,
that “Madame Mère” who in the trenches conceived the Man of Destiny,
and walked to church an hour before she gave him to the world. Her
martial bearing, large bones, strong country speech, clothed the idea
with the flesh of the hard fact; her consciousness of purpose, power of
will, ennobled and quickened it with the hues of poetry.
Homer must have had some such woman for a mother, in whose womb the
Iliads were born prenatally. All that sped, flew, or swam in the a
rial kingdom of the Idea must first have had its pinions fixed and
pointed by some inarticulate goddess who laid upon herself the humblest
functions, the meanest offices, in order that nature might not lack
lusty and shrewd servants in the time to be. The teeming millions of
creatures who spawned in the darkness, who lifted their scaled eyes
to where the light might be found, according to those who had skill
in prophecy, yet who themselves were so uncertain of its presence
that, when it shone straight before them through the fissures in their
cave, they passed it by as a chimera, or the iridescence of some bird,
reptile, piece of coal, or winged snake,--these cried out continually
for some true-born Child of the Sun to lead them out of that gross
night into the molten plains of beauty which ran down to the sea. And
it was given to some stalwart creature with a red face and coarse
hands and a shabby black hat tied in a bow under the chin, who herself
was purblind, yet with knees ever pressed to the flags of the temple,
to dream of the light in her prayers, and presently, out of her own
strong, rustic body, to furnish forth to her kind a guide, a prophet,
and a leader.
As hunger, that exquisite, but cruel, sensation, grew upon Northcote,
and caused fierce little shivers to run through his bones, he awoke
to the fact that all the tobacco in his pipe had been consumed,
and further, that there was not a grain left in his pouch. In this
extremity he had recourse to his evening meal. It was contained in a
confectioner’s paper, and consisted of a large Bath bun, embellished
with currants. He plucked out the currants carefully, and laid them
apart as dessert. After half an hour’s deliberate munching a little of
the well-being of the nourished man returned.
He opened a drawer in the table, and took out a handful of foolscap
pages covered with writing in a small and not very visible hand. These
were but a few among some two thousand others, which embodied “A Note
towards an Essay on Optimism,” the fruit of the leisure of six years.
It had had the honor of being rejected, promptly and uncompromisingly,
by the publishers of London. Only one among this autocracy had
condescended to supply a reason. It was brief but ample: “Philosophy
does not pay.”
As Northcote held these pages beneath the uncertain rays of the lamp,
and for the thousand and first time their quality was revealed to
his gaze, a profound excitement spread through his being. What had
the degradation of his poverty enabled him to compass for mankind?
These magic pages were so quick with authenticity that he was forced
to regard them as the gage of one who was about to offer a universal
sanction to the human heart.
After awhile he returned these papers to the drawer and addressed
himself to one of the dusty manuals of jurisprudence that adorned his
table. But strange shapes were in his mind to-night; and these would
not be harnessed to the dead letter of the law. A torrent had been
unloosed which bore his thoughts in every direction save that in which
he would have them go. After a time the lamp burned so low that it was
no longer necessary to make a pretence at reading. Therefore he closed
the book and lifted up his ears to the night. The faint, consistent
drip drip of the water from the ceiling to the pool it had formed
on the floor stole upon him with a sense of the uncanny. The room
itself was draughty and decrepit, and in common with others in that
neighborhood, particularly on the waterside, was inhabited by rats. He
could hear them now in the crevices behind the wainscot. He took from
the table a piece of lead which he used as a paper-weight, and waited
grimly for one to appear.
Crouching upon the hearth with this deadly instrument in his hand, his
thoughts strayed again to the country, again to his mother, and from
her to the young girl whom he had hoped to make his wife. This slender
and straight and joyous creature, with the supple limbs of a fawn and
complexion of a dairymaid, had the seemliness and purity which was so
essential in one who would be called to the function of completing his
life. She was as sweet and choice as a lily, for her only gift was the
serenity which has its seat in superb physical health and freedom from
the penalties that wait upon intelligence.
She had seen nothing, knew nothing; there was nothing for her to
see or to know. Her simplicity was so naïve that it was a perennial
delight to a sophisticated nature. He never summoned her image except
to cherish it. In his direst mood, in his straitest hour, when life
blew barb after barb into his skin, he felt that to possess her was
to keep a talisman in his spirit which could unweave the knots in the
conspiracies of fate. Those lines in her shape, those curves which were
so arch, so free, yet qualified so finely, seemed to bring healing and
refinement to him; while those eyes, soft and luminous, yet lacking in
expression, seemed to chasten his power without impairing it.
At this moment a sound for which he had been listening broke his
reverie. An enormous she-rat, heavy with young, entered the room. He
watched it waddle out of a dark corner and emerge slowly towards him
along the floor. As it came near he could discern the gleam of its red
eyes, its nose, its wide-spreading whiskers. They filled him with an
indescribable ferocity. He poised the piece of lead in his hand, and
took aim with close-breathing and deliberate care. Suddenly he hurled
it with the strength of a giant, the creature was struck in the flank
and lay dead before it knew that anything had occurred.
With a grunt of satisfaction amounting almost to joy he picked up the
animal by the tail. “What a beauty!” he muttered, “and what a shot! I
might try that a thousand times and not bring it off.” He opened the
window, flung out the carcass, and heard it drop in a puddle of water
in the middle of the traffic.
The perfectly successful accomplishment of this callous feat seemed to
give his senses the exhilaration of strong wine; and the effect was
heightened by a blast of icy air which was dashed on to his face when
he opened the window. The mighty engines of his imagination were set
in motion. He leaned out of the window and snuffed the brutal weather;
and through the fierce sleet which stung his eyes and froze on his
lips he looked down into London with its lights, its vehicles, and its
chaos; unknowing, unheeding, and unseeing, yet in itself magnetic and
so mysterious. He felt like an eagle who peers out of his eyrie in the
cliffs in the midst of winter to witness the fury of the sea, dashing
itself to pieces upon his paternal rocks, and is himself assaulted by
the eternal ferocity of nature.
III
SUMMONING THE GENIE
The passion of Lear when on the heath he bares his head to the storm
mounted in his veins. Leaning far out of the window of his garret to
confront the rage of heaven, with the unbridled insolence of his youth
he called upon the elements to wreak themselves upon him. Let them stab
his eyes with tears, let them curdle the breath upon his lips. Nature
had charged his being with that dynamic force which makes the world
vibrate, only to withhold the master-key without whose aid his quality
could not announce itself. All--all was furnished in the armory of
the spirit. He asked no more than one brief occasion, and clad in his
demonic power he would shake the pillars of society with that passion
which was preying now upon his flesh and blood.
Such occasions were not denied to those who did not comprehend their
use. How often with scornful eyes was he to watch in the courts of
justice mediocrity, primed with privilege and favor, misconducting
itself amid the purlieus of the law. Every week he was affronted
with the spectacle of this hydra-headed monster toying with the life
and liberty of the subject. At the worst it was no more than another
“miscarriage of justice;” some other unseemly wretch offered upon the
altars of incompetence.
Many times of a night when alone and hungry had he conjured up a vision
of the judge calling from the bench for a tyro to undertake the defence
of one too poor to purchase an advocate. “You, sir--will you undertake
the defence of this unfortunate woman?” And over and over again had he
broken the silence of his room with a carefully modulated, “It will
give me great pleasure, m’lud, it will give me great pleasure.”
However, no judge had made the call. How narrowly had some old and
obtuse public servant escaped unlocking the lips of a Milton, mute and
inglorious, who sat in a shiver of hope awaiting the summons. To be
sure, no judge had known of so strange a presence, but had one of these
venerable guardians been aware of it, in the public interest he would
still have passed him by. For what is more contemptible than elevation
of any kind when it seeks a platform on which to declare itself?
Suppose the call came to-night! The suggestion was conveyed in the
rages of the wind buffeting the cheeks of the unhappy man. Gasping,
drenched, and excited almost beyond the verge of reason, he withdrew
his face from the elements and closed the window. The lamp on the table
had gone out, the few ashes in the grate gave a mere feeble spark. In
spite of the overcoat and thick gloves which he wore, the coldness of
the room oppressed him like a sepulchre. His feet were frozen; he had
no tobacco; the clock at the Law Courts was chiming nine. Yet suppose
it came! Why not? Why not demand it with all the fervor of his nature,
like others who had sought their opportunity had done so often?
He could not understand this fever which had stretched him upon the
rack. It might be that the lack of the meanest necessaries had told
too severely upon his frame. Indeed, he was starving by degrees. His
limbs--huge, knotted things--had withered until he was ashamed. His
skin was so pale, his cheeks so wasted, that when his eyes flamed out
in all their cadaverous lustre the prosperous shrank from him as though
he were a ghost or a leper.
However, he did not covet the heritage of others. Sharp as his belly
was to-night, ragged as was his back, he must not purchase the cuisine
and raiment of princes at the price that was asked. Were he to inhabit
the body of Crœsus, he would have also to inhabit his soul. Throned
amid pomp, he would have dined that evening to the strains of Beethoven
under the shadows of Velasquez and Raphael. He would have eaten the
manna of the wilderness served upon gold plate; have drunk the fabulous
Falernian, with pearls from the Orient dissolved in it to heighten the
bouquet. Gorgeous houris, whose eyes and jewels were jealous of one
another, whose breaths were perfumed, whose lips were laden with music,
would have been on his right hand and on his left. Yet he would neither
have seen, nor heard, nor felt, nor tasted; for those who partook of
such a feast could neither know nor understand.
He must not barter his hunger for a feast such as that. No ray of
meaning ever invaded this crapulous Barmecide. All that he saw was
that the color of money was yellow; all that he knew was that its
possession oiled the wheels of life. The starving man crouched upon his
knees and buried his burning face in the dust of the table. He must
make his apology to Nature for having reviled her. Nothing was more
imperfect than this handmaid; yet how patient, how obedient was this
Unanswering One! She did not deserve to be abused. For all at once,
with a prophetic shudder of his doom, he recognized that he had only to
make his demand of her to receive all that he asked.
If his nature craved the material, let him seek it and it should be
given. He need not starve in his garret; his prayers would be heard. If
Success with all her penalties must be his, let him prostrate himself
before her; was she not a courtezan that none need to woo in vain?
But crouching thus in wretchedness, his frame shivering and burning
by turns, the price of such a triumph was before his eyes, written in
garish letters upon the dismal walls. He was hungry to the point of
death almost, yet if he satisfied that hunger with a mess of pottage he
would be destroyed.
How unhappy is he who becomes the witness of his own dread passions
determining an issue on the battle-ground of his nature! If the mere
act of volition was still to remain with him, the choice must be made;
yet if he made that which had grown so imminent he would lose whatever
status or sanction he derived from the elevation of his aims. This
bundle of forces within him, to whom after all he held the master-key
did he but dare to use it, was driving him pitilessly. Already he
seemed to be losing his fineness of perception. The point at issue
was already half-erased. Those immensely powerful engines which drove
the blood so furiously through his veins were in revolt. Let him find
employment for them; let them fulfil their appointed ends, or woe
betide him.
He had only to press his eyes to the table to summon the genie.
Occasion would wait upon him if he sank to his knees. Let him harness
his will to his common needs and the power would be rendered to him
to achieve them. His imagination had no trammels; it was burning with
a volcanic activity; by its light he could enter any kingdom in the
material world. Let him ask, and all should be given.
He had fallen into a kind of trance in which immediate sensations of
place and time were suspended. The cold room, now wrapped in an almost
complete darkness in which rats were scratching and scuttling; the
drip drip of the water to the floor; the rattle of the windows against
the rising gale; the roar of the traffic in the street--all had become
submerged, had lost their form, had been blended into a strange yet not
inharmonious something else. A pageant was passing before his mind. He
was powerless to identify himself with it, to fix its colors, to catch
the expressions of the fleeting faces of those who mingled in it, yet
despite the suspension of the functions of the will, he was conscious
of what was taking place.
He was not in a dream, because his eyes were open, he knew where he
was, and he was in possession of the sense of hearing. But he had
surrendered the control of the will; and although he was on his knees
with his face pressed to a dusty table before a dead fire, the mind
was become divorced from the body and was cast into the vortex of
indescribable scenes. It drifted about among them helplessly. It bore
no relation to actors or events. All was the weirdest panorama, crammed
with hurry and wild inconsequence; and yet the spectator was filled
with an exhilaration which was as remote from the province of reality
as a drunkard’s delirium.
He began to make frantic efforts to fix and locate this phantasmagoria.
He stretched every nerve to catch the import of the word that was
spoken; he craned his whole being to wrest a single incident from this
wild confusion. He strove as fiercely for a thread of meaning as though
he were fighting against the operations of an anæsthetic, but he could
reclaim nothing from the chaos in which he was enveloped. He was like
a drowning man with the heavy yet not unpleasant rush of water in his
ears.
Suddenly his mind was invaded by a distinct sound. It had the dull
sense of finality of a blow on the head. The door of the room had been
flung open. And then came a voice through the shadows which encompassed
the last feeble gutterings of the lamp:
“Anybody at home?”
Northcote rose from his knees in a wild and startled manner.
“Who--who is that?” he cried, in a hollow tone.
“Is that Mr. Northcote?” said the obscure presence which had entered
the room.
IV
ENTER MR. WHITCOMB
For the second time that evening Northcote peered through the gloom
of his chamber with a thrill of curious expectancy. The visit of the
scarecrow had been forgotten in the torments of his passion, but the
sound of his own name on the lips of the unknown resummoned that
phantom to his mind. But in the room of one so frail was a robust and
spreading presence.
“To whom do I owe a welcome?” muttered Northcote, and as he rose from
his knees his words seemed to be lost in the vibrations of his heart.
“Mr. Northcote it is,” said the round and full tones of the invader.
The advocate, trembling in every limb, was conscious of a powerful
and confident grasp of the hand. And then as his eyes encountered the
outlines of his visitor, he was seized with a pang of disappointment,
for he had looked to see something different.
“Don’t you know me, Mr. Northcote?” said the voice--the conventional
voice which had already smote the starving man with a sense of the
intolerable.
“I am afraid I do not,” he said, heavily.
“Well, I thought Samuel Whitcomb was known to every member of the bar.”
Mr. Whitcomb’s whimsical air strove to cloak a wound to his
professional feelings.
“Ah, yes, of course, Mr. Whitcomb; of course,” said the young man, with
a deeper disappointment fixing its talons upon him. “Of course--Mr.
Whitcomb, the solicitor,” he added, hastily, as through the haze of the
unreal which still enveloped his amazed and stupefied senses he caught
a familiar aspect and a tone that he recalled.
“The same.”
“Excuse this inhospitable darkness,” said Northcote. “Here is a chair;
and try, if you please, to keep your patience while I put some oil in
the lamp and seek a piece of coal for the fire.”
“No elaborate scheme of welcome, I beg. Your client is not a prince of
the blood, but a common lawyer.”
A well-fed and highly sagacious chuckle accompanied this sally on the
part of the solicitor.
Still in the throes of his stupefaction, Northcote addressed himself to
the oil-can and the coal-box, that as far as the circumstances would
permit a reception might be accorded to this unexpected guest, whose
common and prosaic quality had already jarred upon every fibre of his
being. And these preparations, diffidently conducted, kindled again the
well-fed chuckle of the solicitor; and so ingratiating was it that it
seemed to banish all appearance of constraint by imparting an air of
equality to everything in the world.
The lamp flared up under the influence of the dregs of fuel that had
been added to it, and revealed the pale and wasted features of the
garret’s inhabitant. The solicitor, with the quickness of the trained
observer, pursed up his lips in a suppressed whistle. A kind of pity
softened the relentless composure of his eyes as they beheld the
haggard and unkempt bearing of the man before them. “Poor devil,” he
muttered; “literally starving.” It was in this succinct yet compendious
manner that Mr. Whitcomb filed for reference all facts which are
sufficiently obvious to stand as knowledge.
“Do you know,” said Northcote, suddenly, “I was half-expecting somebody
to-night.”
“Sitting in state to receive him, evidently,” the solicitor muttered,
as he sniffed the temperature of the garret and glanced oddly from the
fireless grate to the gloves and overcoat that Northcote was wearing.
“Dining out together, were you?”
“To speak the truth,” said the advocate, with an odd laugh, “I had
hardly got so far as to consider the personage I was half-expecting in
such a grossly material aspect.”
“Personage, eh?” said the solicitor. “They’re out of my line. I only
have to do with persons, quite ordinary people, who are mightily
interested in their meals.”
“Well, you see,” said Northcote, “I had hardly got so far as to
formulate my expected visitant in actual terms of flesh and blood.”
“You deal in spooks!” said the solicitor. “A likely pitch for them,
too.” Mr. Whitcomb began to stroke his moustache pensively, his
invariable habit when confronted by the danger of going beyond his
limit. “A creepy hole, by God!” he said, in another of his asides,
for the simplicity and matter-of-fact of the advocate had a little
discomposed him.
“I was half-expecting a genie,” said the advocate.
“A genie!” said the solicitor, with a laugh of embarrassment, for his
surroundings oppressed him, and his vitality was impaired by not having
yet had his dinner. “I never heard of a genie except in the ‘Arabian
Nights.’”
“They abound in London,” said the advocate. “They are all about us.”
“You are right, I dare say,” said the solicitor, with a puzzled
air. “The latest discovery of science, is it? They have found such
marvellous things lately, even in the water we drink and the air we
breathe. But if you will just stick on your hat, and do me the honor of
eating a bite of supper,--I have had a deplorable day, which has ended
by robbing me of my dinner,--I will talk to you of the business that
has brought me here at such an odd sort of hour.”
“A bite of supper!” These magic words caused the advocate to enfold his
visitor in a melancholy smile.
“Upon my soul,” said he, “you are the genie.”
The solicitor gave a laugh as ponderous as Gargantua’s.
“Have it your own way,” he said; “but for the love of heaven put on
your hat and let us heed the intimations of Nature. Perhaps if we pet
her a little she may do us well in this somewhat remarkable affair.
Come, let us away.”
That robustness of bearing which made half the stock in trade of
the first criminal lawyer in London had already an effect upon the
advocate. Those luscious tones had dispelled his comatose condition.
And who should say, after all, that this was not the genie; at least,
here was the living embodiment of success, that jovial and gigantic
swaggerer. What a smugness and sagacity were in the heavy inflections
of this prosperous man! “A fellow is not fit to pare his own nails when
he’s sharp-set, and I had my chop at a quarter-past one,” he chuckled,
as he watched the advocate grappling with his boots. “Now, on with your
hat, and we’ll take a cab to I know where.”
“As you will,” said the young man, reaching for his hat.
A reaction was stealing along his veins. Already his passionate despair
had begun to cower. It looked like wizardry that one so famous should
have been borne in person, dinnerless, at ten o’clock at night, up
flight after flight of dark stairs, to the crazy fifth floor of that
decrepit building in quest of one so poor and so obscure.
“I am sure you are the genie,” said Northcote, carrying the lamp to
the door to light the distinguished visitor to the head of the rickety
stairs. “Strike a match, sir, if you respect your neck.”
Northcote turned the key of his door, and Mr. Whitcomb descended, step
by step, in a gingerly fashion.
“If there is the slightest fear,” said Northcote, pressing on behind
the solicitor, “of burning your fingers with that match, I shall urge
you not to stop to examine the array of old masters that line this
perfectly damnable staircase of mine.”
“Is that an ‘Adoration of the Magi’ above me on the right?” said Mr.
Whitcomb, with his jovial air.
“No; only a crack in the plaster and a cobweb. And that weird splotch
to the left, which, at this distance, might stand for ‘Hercules
Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis,’ is the damp striking
through the wall.”
When at last they had crept down these noisome stairways into the
street, they found that the sleet had yielded to a light, murky rain.
The solicitor summoned imperiously a passing hansom, and sent a thrill
through the heart of his starving companion by naming for the cabman’s
guidance one of the most luxurious restaurants in the world.
V
AN ARISTOCRAT OF ARISTOCRATS
A swift journey of a thousand yards in this enchanted vehicle along
slushy and dangerous pavements into the West End, that magic region
and golden home of the marvelous, saw the bewildered young man and
his companion, a veritable prince who had stepped out of some fairy
romance, deposited before the portals of a palace raised by a wizard
in the centre of the streets of London. A master-stroke of malice
had placed this temple of choice and rarity in the midst of acres of
disease, penury, and polluted air. The faces of the ghostly denizens
of these regions broke through the shadows with dumb malevolence as
the solicitor and the advocate leaped to the portico. Hardly had they
reached it when they were assailed by light and color, glittering
liveries, gorgeous women. A stealthy and perfumed warmth had even
invaded the outer atmosphere. The starving man opened his lips and
nostrils, and flung wide all the doors of the senses in order to drink
the sheen and scents, the hues and odors. Like a poet of the Latin
races he sought to feed upon animal sensations. Here in these bright
saloons was the reverse of the medal, of which in his garret that
evening he had dreamed. By no more than the wave of a wand he had been
transported into the plaisances of success.
As he entered this domain he was enchanted with everything,--the tread
of the carpets, the hang of the curtains, the clothes of the people,
the sounds of the music, the mien of the waiters. Ali Baba did not
illicitly enter the Cave of the Forty Robbers with a more profound
bewilderment, a sharper curiosity.
Northcote followed his companion into one of the smaller and quieter
but not the less gilded and luxurious rooms. Mr. Whitcomb, who even
in his own person did not disdain the panoply of fashion, had the
unconquerable nonchalance of bearing which is the first credential to
the public respect.
“I want Jools,” he said to the first waiter he met.
The waiter bowed low and said ingratiatingly, “Yes, sare.” He darted
away in quest of that personage without an attempt to maintain the few
rags of dignity that attend his calling. There was, indeed, a strain of
the magician in this wonderful Mr. Whitcomb. It would not have occurred
to Northcote to use the formula “I want Jools,” any more than it did to
Ali Baba to cry “Open Sesame!” at the portals of the cave of the Forty
Robbers.
Jools was the head waiter, a man of the first distinction, with a small
imperial, the envy and the proud despair of all the compatriots who
shared his exile in an alien country. It had the choice perfection
which art is sometimes able to superimpose upon nature. Jools was of
slight, even mean, physique, but he had the ease of bearing which comes
of having been somebody for several generations. He held the key to
the finest cellar in London, as his father before him had held the key
to the finest cellar of Paris, and his grandfather of that of Vienna.
Jools was an aristocrat of aristocrats, and one versed in the ways of
his order would almost have divined it from the amiable humility with
which he came forward to receive one of other clay.
“How do, Jools?” said Northcote’s companion, with his inimitable gift
of manner. “Nasty night. Let us have a quart of your Château Margaux.
What was that you gave me before?”
Jools screwed up his furtive brown eyes in deep contemplation. “Et
would be a seventy-one, sare,” he said, rubbing softly a forefinger
along his chin.
“I don’t know what it was,” said Mr. Whitcomb, royally, “and I don’t
care, so long as it is the best you have in the place.”
An air of magnificence which prosperity had conferred upon the
solicitor touched a chord in the proud soul of Jools.
“I haf a seventy-three, sare,” said this aristocrat, with a not too
ductile absence of condescension, which he reserved for the society of
his equals.
“That sounds all right,” said the solicitor. “We still number you among
the few eminent Christians we have in London at the present time.”
Jools bowed and smiled softly, but an expression of sorrow was seen to
overspread his mat complexion.
“Ef I had known before, sare, I would haf had it decanted.”
“We must all abase ourselves before the despotism of necessity,” said
the solicitor’s hollow-eyed companion, who was already under the
stimulus of an intense anticipation. “She has reverence for nothing.
Even your Château Margaux ’73, which no doubt is divine, must forego
the rights and trappings of its royalty.”
“You must forgive him, Jools,” said the solicitor, enjoying the effect
upon the waiter of these deep tones. “He is talking prose, although,
unlike your immortal compatriot, I am afraid he knows it.”
Jools summoned one of another mould to receive the baser order of a
thick soup and a cut from the saddle, while he himself, beaming with
pleasure and shrugging his shoulders furiously, went forth accompanied
by an awe-stricken satellite personally to select one of those royal
wines, which lent a touch of romantic grace to the exile of this artist
in a foreign country.