into the eyes of our advocate to know what it is and where it dwells.”
“He is quite entitled to keep one, of course, but it is not usual to
take it into society. I sometimes think I may have a bit of a genie
myself, but I do what I can to keep it a profound secret from the
world.”
“Should a man venture to compliment himself, Witty, upon the score of
his reticence?”
“Would you not say,” inquired Northcote, “that all our reticences had
their roots in our cowardice?”
“I would love to say it if I dared. And I would love to say of our
advocate that his genie enables him to fear nothing.”
“Yes,” said Northcote, “you shall say that.”
“A man must have fear of some kind,” said the solicitor, “if he is to
succeed against enormous odds.”
“There may be a place for it in his reflections, but never in his
resolves. Hence you will discern how our reticence has its basis in our
cowardice.”
“Subtle brute,” said Mr. Whitcomb, giving his mustache a tug of
perplexity. “He is entering upon his special function of turning black
into white.”
“Nay,” said Northcote, “the subtlety is not mine, but Francis Bacon’s.”
“Good, O Advocate!” said the lady, as she rewarded him with bright
eyes. “You do well to confute the Philistine with a learned name.”
Again the young man carried the jewelled hand to his lips. He felt the
lithe fingers respond with a sweet and secret motion.
“Rogue!” said the solicitor, laughing. “George Sand and De
Musset--Polly Whitcomb and the greengrocer at the back door. Well,
Mischief, as you have entered into a compact with this fellow to get
him his way, play us another bit of a tune, he shall keep his brief,
and we will go to bed.”
“I knew we should force him to capitulate,” said Northcote to the
siren, as he arranged the stool before the piano.
“What must I play?” she said, looking down at her hands.
“Play me a bit of Beethoven, so that I may take him out with me into
the darkness of the streets.”
She played three movements of a symphony, and all his senses were
submerged in the colors of romance. These fragrant hues which had a
delicate aroma and pungency the imagination alone can impart were of
no time or country. There was nothing that the mind could render as
belonging to itself; the faculties which embody the technical were
overcome by the tumultuous surgings with which they were oppressed.
He seemed to be transfigured with the sense of joy, to be overpowered
with the knowledge that he was a living man, able to breathe and to
perform. The room had grown small and heavy. He was consumed with an
overmastering desire for the spacious streets, for the largeness of the
universe.
“There is a bed for you here,” said the beautiful player, almost before
the last phrase had ceased to vibrate under her touch. “We could not
think of turning you out at this hour.”
“I have not the least intention of staying,” said Northcote. “The
hospitality you have given me already has been too profuse. I feel that
I must roam for the rest of the night in the open streets, a Flying
Dutchman of the London slush. Perhaps I shall fancy myself to be the
mad music-maker of Leipsic, who walked at night on the ramparts to
weave his harmonies.”
“We cannot consent to your leaving us in this manner,” said the
hostess. “As for roaming through the night, it will not be good for
you. Nor is there the least necessity why you should.”
“You forget his genie,” laughed the solicitor. “The infernal thing will
drive him all over the suburbs of south London and send him home _via_
the Crystal Palace and Blackfriars Bridge.”
“He must not go to-night,” said the lady. “It will be a perfectly
horrid walk, and I believe the sleet has turned into rain. It will
be awfully cold and unpleasant. Besides, if anything happens to our
advocate he will not be able to deliver this unfortunate creature from
her doom.”
“It is useless to argue with a man who has got a genie,” said the
solicitor. “I have tried the experiment and therefore am in a position
to give evidence. What will overtake him in the way of adventures I
dare not conjecture; but of one thing I am assured--no earthly power
will cause him to alter his determination.”
“Alas! I know it,” said the lady, sighing. “He has a face that will
yield to nothing.”
This diagnosis proved to be correct, at least as applied to this
instance, as in spite of the humane entreaties of the lady, supported
by a banter which Mr. Whitcomb did not attempt to dissemble, Northcote
insisted on faring from their roof at a quarter-past three. He bade
them adieu with a cordiality that was eloquent of a deep sense of
friendship.
When Mr. Whitcomb returned to the drawing-room after having shown the
young man over the threshold of his residence, he faced the lady with a
half-smile of bewilderment.
“Extraordinary chap,” he said. “He frightens me, takes me out of my
depth. There is such a bee buzzing about in his bonnet that he might
come wofully to grief on Friday. If he does, there will be none but
myself to blame, for he is wholly without experience.”
“I think you may trust him,” said the woman softly.
“Well, you are a mass of instincts, Miss Pussy. And you counsel me to
stick to your advocate?”
“I do, Witty; closer than a brother. I think he is perfectly amazing. I
think he will make the fortunes of all who are connected with him.”
“Another Michael Tobin, would you say?”
“What a dunce it is,” said the lady, with an indulgent sigh. “Michael
and this man don’t inhabit the same hemisphere. Michael is a dear
fellow, brilliant, clever, but only surface deep; this is an ogre of
a creature, a monster, deep as the sea, of the proportions of the
universe.”
“Come, I say, Mrs. Noodle; they don’t call that sort to the bar. They
might find the purlieus of the law too confining.”
“If you have not yet learned to scorn my advice, Witty, take care never
to have this man against you. If you have him on your side every time
you go into court, you will not have many lost causes to record.”
“He is clever, I grant you, but the worst of it is he knows it.”
“He is arrogant with power, Witty, which is somewhat different,
although it sounds the same. I think he is a perfectly terrible man,
and he looks so big and great and deadly. Did you notice his enormous
hands? Did you observe his chest? And that voice as soft as a flute yet
as deep as an organ?”
“You are completely conquered, Featherhead. Yet you would not call this
phenomenon precisely beautiful?”
“Strength is more beautiful than symmetry, I think; although I grant
you that huge square jowl verges upon the horrible. It is far worse
than yours, my dear, although the poor hansom cabmen are constantly
mistaking it for that of an eminent pugilist.”
“Well, little gal,” said the solicitor, “I shall heed you once more,
since your luck is proverbial. I am prepared to back our latest
discovery pretty heavily, although I must confess that when in cold
blood I catch myself thinking of his infernal genie he frightens me to
death.”
XIV
A JURY OF TWO
In the meantime the subject of these speculations had entered the
night. Food and wine in unaccustomed quantities, the romance of
events, the spells cast by music and by a woman of signal beauty and
accomplishment, had provoked his energies to an insurgency that had
rendered them overbearing. He walked like a whirlwind, up one street
and down another, in the chill wet darkness, not knowing whither he was
bound. Soft yet wild strains of melody which still floated through his
brain mingled with a swarm of ideas which were whirling about in it
like so many atoms in a protoplasm. He moved so fast in the endeavor to
keep abreast of his thoughts that at times he broke into a run.
The seductive, amiable, and brilliant woman, who had so nearly
succeeded in casting over him a delicious spell, began to fade from
his consciousness like the intangible occupant of a dream. She had no
appeal for him now. The feast at the restaurant, that phase of color,
warmth, and splendor in which for an hour the squalor of his existence
had been dispelled; the struggle to retain the treasure which had been
entrusted to his keeping by a supernatural agent; the bizarre incident
of the hansom cabman; and the personality of the genial god out of the
machine had now ceased to have significance.
Indeed one thing alone merged his faculties in his overstimulated
thoughts. It was the packet which he could feel in the breast-pocket of
his coat, towards which his hands were straying constantly. These pages
of foolscap bound with red tape, were they not his magic talisman? By
that occult presence had not his thwarted bleak and empty life been
changed into an electrical existence crowded with glory?
His brain bursting with ideas, he began to run faster and faster
through the maze of endless streets, lined with high garden walls,
portentously respectable dwelling-houses, lamps, shops, and secretive
silent-footed policemen. These frequently flashed their lanterns upon
him, for the manner of his progress had an illegal air. Even at the
height of this orgy of freedom, the question shaped itself with the
oddest definiteness as to whether it would not be expedient to curb
his paces, since if he were stopped, he feared lest he should be able
to render an account of himself that would be sufficiently lucid to
commend itself to the myrmidons of the law.
When at last his exertions had thrown him out of breath, and his frame
did not respond with quite the same unanimity to his passion, he
stopped under a lamp in the middle of a street on the side of a steep
hill, took out the precious document he carried, and began to peruse
it for sheer human pleasure. He even pressed his lips to this prosaic
thing, with no less of fervor, indeed with more abandonment than he had
saluted the hand of the sorceress who had been the means of restoring
it to his care.
“I must make her my saint, I must burn candles to her,” he muttered,
recalling her image with a sense of rapture.
As he stood under the lamp, a very large and slow-footed policeman
waddled up towards him, trying doors and casting the light of his
lantern down the areas he passed. As he went by, keenly scrutinizing
the figure of the young man, yet pretending not to notice it, Northcote
hailed him.
“Where might I be, policeman? I am strange to these parts.”
“Well,” said the policeman slowly and with effort, “you might be in
Balham, but you ain’t. Likewise, you might be at Charing Cross, but you
are not there, nuther.”
“I observe, policeman, that you have graduated in the school of
judicial humor,” said Northcote, delighted by the suavity of outline of
X012. “If every man had his rights, which of course it is utopian to
expect, you would be adding lustre to the bench. Your mental gifts fit
you equally to be a judge, a recorder, or a stipendiary magistrate.”
Such an exaggerated view of his merits produced a deep-founded
suspicion in the honest breast of X012.
“If every man had ’is rights,” said the custodian of the peace,
speaking slowly and with effort, and eying Northcote with the solemnity
of a horse, “you’d be took up on suspicion, young feller, and charged
with loitering with intent.”
Northcote dispelled the suburban quietude with a guffaw.
“Being unwilling,” said he, “to impale myself upon that spiked railing
which calls itself the law, I ought to be extremely careful to
refrain in its presence from the vexed and overmuch discussed question
of whether the badinage of its minions is wit, wisdom, humor, or a
veritable cesspool of human inanity.”
X012 was so much astonished by these words and the forcible mode
of their delivery that he pulled his whistle out of his coat, and
proceeded to toy with it in an irresolute fashion. Before he had
decided to summon aid by blowing it, there appeared round the corner of
an adjacent street a second constable, in all essentials of bearing,
physique, and mental energy the perfect replica of himself.
“I’m glad you’ve come, Bill,” said X012. “I’ve got a rum one ’ere.
I don’t know what he’s been drinking, but you should just hear his
languidge. Here he was under this lamp, a-purtendin’ to read a
newspaper at twenty past four by the mornin’.”
“Noticed his mug?” said his confrère Z9. “Bob Capper, the ’ousebreaker,
who just done in ’is last seven stretch an’ was let out on license last
Tuesday.”
“Got it in one!” said X012, not without enthusiasm. “We ’ad better take
him to the station and have ’im searched.”
“This is the result of a misplaced jocularity in the presence of
professional wits,” said Northcote, with an amiability that was viewed
with considerable disfavor by both constables. “I hope you will forgive
me, my friends. The only excuse I can urge for impinging upon the
prerogative of the legal supernumerary, if I may so express myself, is
that as one day I am certain to be a judge, I feel it to be due to the
lofty elevation I shall be called to occupy, and of which I intend to
be so signal an ornament, to neglect no opportunity of acquiring these
cardinal principles of humor, dangerous, double-edged implement though
it be, which can only be done by association with those past-masters
who as the crowning glory of our admirable legal system inhabit it in
choice perfection in all its branches. I hope, my friends, I have made
myself perfectly clear.”
“Clear as mud,” said Z9.
“Impidence!” exclaimed X012; “downright impidence! Certin to be a
judge! Why, Lord love me, young feller, if ever they ax you to be the
judge of a pair o’ pullets at a poultry show you’ll be lucky.”
“Balmy,” said Z9, tapping his forehead with an air of Christian pity.
“You are very probably right,” said Northcote. “I suspect there is
a basis of truth in this scientific opinion which you have embodied
in so expressive an idiom. But at the same time I would ask you, is
it not a somewhat extreme view to take of the mental condition of a
barrister-at-law who has been nominated to appear at the court of the
Old Bailey to-morrow morning at the hour of ten-thirty to defend one
Emma Harrison, who at that time and in that place will stand her trial
for wilful murder?”
“A-going to defend Emma Harrison!” exclaimed the constables. “Why, what
will he be saying next?”
“I do say that, my friends,” said Northcote, with a note of
imperiousness in his voice that was not without its effect on these
astonished minions of the law. “And I want you both to stand back a
yard or two against the railings, while I advance to the curb; and
further, I want you for a few minutes to imagine that you are the jury,
and I will rehearse the opening of my speech for the defence. I shall
begin something like this.”
“Oh, will you now?” muttered Z9 to his companion. “Well, if this don’t
beat cock-fighting!”
Both these constables, overawed already by the authentic manner of the
advocate, were now devoured by curiosity.
“Listen,” said he. “I rise in my place with this bundle of papers
in my hand, which I shall not consult, but shall cling to to gain
confidence, and I shall say: May it please your lordship and gentlemen
of the jury, this is a dreadful issue you are sworn to try. Indeed it
would be difficult for the human conscience to conceive an ordeal more
repugnant to the moral nature of man, one in sharper antagonism to
those principles that are his priceless inheritance, than is revealed
to you by the situation in which you stand. It is not by your own
choice that you come to take your places in this assembly. It is not
in obedience to your own instincts that you have left your toil to
subscribe to a law which is not of your own making. I venture to affirm
this without fear, for is not this ordeal into which you are thrown in
deadly conflict with the behests of that unfearing spirit who, nineteen
centuries ago, discovered the only possible faith for His kind?
“It is as the inheritors, gentlemen, of an inimitable tradition, not
as administrators of a penal code, that I venture to address to you
these words. And let me tell you why I venture to address you in this
fashion. It is because the life of a fellow creature is at stake; it
is because sitting here in conclave in this place you are enmeshed in
the most grievous ordeal that the fruit of human imperfection is able,
at this time of day, to impose upon you. For that reason, gentlemen,
I conceive that you are entitled to take your stand upon a lofty and
secure platform to survey this issue, a platform which has been raised
for the oppressed, the unhappy, and those who are doubtful of their
way, by the travail of the choicest spirit in the annals of human
nature.
“Gentlemen, you are called upon to adjudicate upon the life of a woman.
You are called upon to do so at the bidding of a formula, whose hideous
and obsolete enactments are the fruit of an imperfect culture of a
partial and unsympathetic interpretation of those laws to which every
civilized community owes its name. Gentlemen, you are called upon to
adjudicate upon the life of a woman; you rate-payers of London, you
gentle and devout citizens, you to whom life has given as the crown
of your endeavor, as the consecration of your painful daily labor,
mothers, wives, and daughters of your own.
“Yes, gentlemen, we must indeed ascend the loftiest and most secure
platform known to us, to survey the ordeal that our own imperfection
has presented to us.
“You have heard the words that have fallen from the lips of my learned
friend, the counsel for the Crown. You have examined the facts which
he has marshalled before you. You have noted the inferences which he
has not been afraid to draw. You have been thrilled by the union of a
consummate skill with a consummate learning. All that is base, sordid,
and unworthy in the human heart has been stripped naked before your
eyes. The smallest acts of this unfortunate woman have been shown to
you as vile; even the aspirations which are allowed to ennoble her
sex have been rendered abominable. Every kind of mental and moral
degradation has been made to defile before you; for verily there is no
limit to the talent of this accomplished gentleman.
“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.