donkey. The barking of a dog can frighten a rogue, but the braying of
the ass fills every fool with courage. If _he_ is allowed to lift up
his voice, why not _I_? is what Mediocrity is ever asking of itself.
And up goes your own private and personal bray. The other ass says,
‘Good Lord, what a clear and beautiful note! Upon my word, I have
never heard anything to compare with it.’ And you reply modestly, ‘My
dear fellow, if you could only hear your own clarion tones, you would
not say that. My own are modelled upon them, I assure you.’ ‘Well, my
dear friend,’ the other ass eagerly rejoins, ‘if that is _really_ the
case, you are eligible for election to our Academy.’ ‘Oh, my dear sir,’
say you, with your hand on your heart and tears in your voice, ‘you
overwhelm me with honor. This is the proudest moment of my existence.’
‘Not at all, my dear fellow, tut! tut!’ says the other ass; ‘great
privilege to have you among us. And there is only one rule, you know,
to which you have to subscribe.’ ‘Ah!’ you exclaim, in an awed whisper.
‘The rule is quite simple,’ says the other ass, putting his great
flabby lips to your long furry ear. ‘It is merely that every member of
our distinguished brotherhood shall unite in extolling his confrères.’”
Happily the clerk reappeared at this moment, just as the solicitor,
chuckling furiously, was preparing to launch a veritable thunderbolt.
“Well?” he said to the clerk, and suddenly whisking away his head to
laugh.
“Sir Robert Hickman’s compliments, sir, and Harrison’s legal advisers
may see her in consultation at any time.”
“There, what do you say to that!” said the solicitor, casting a merry
glance at the young advocate.
“Courteous fellow,” said Northcote; “one R. A. to another R. A.; it is
perfectly charming. I trust that in accordance with latter-day practice
you keep a reporter on the premises, in order that these high-toned
amenities may be communicated to the press.”
“My dear boy, you are perfectly incorrigible,” said the solicitor,
sticking his hat on the back of his head and insinuating his portly
form within the folds of his imposing outer garment. “But one of these
days you will know better.”
“When I am old enough to be eligible for election, I dare say; in the
meantime let me rejoice that I am not yet brought to heel.”
Laughing at the vagaries of each other, advocate and client went out
together, called a cab, and drove to the prison.
XVIII
TO THE PRISON
No sooner had Northcote entered the vehicle than his mood underwent a
curious transformation. His heart began to beat rapidly, his hands to
shake, his knees to tremble. His brain grew so hot that a vapor was
thrown in front of his eyes. Extraordinary emotions overcame him to
such a degree that he could not discern any of the faces in the street.
“You are very quiet,” said the solicitor, after awhile.
“Yes, I dare say,” said the young man, in a voice which in his own ears
sounded thin and high-strung.
“Why not talk? That is your _métier_. You were much more amusing last
night on the way to Norbiton.”
“Somehow I don’t feel as though I have anything to say. My head is so
full of this affair.”
“Don’t think about it too much or it may get you down,” said Mr.
Whitcomb, puffing quietly at his cigar; “although to-morrow you are
certain to be in a horrible funk, as it is the first job of the kind
you have ever had to tackle. Nor will it make it the easier for you
when you reflect that the line you have decided to take will add
immensely to your difficulties.”
Mr. Whitcomb spoke with the quiet incisiveness of one whom experience
has rendered callous. From the leisurely candor and nonchalance of his
manner a trial for murder was made to appear of rather less moment than
the obtaining of a judgment in a county court. Such coolness contrasted
so oddly with the young man’s own perturbation that he was thrown
completely out of conceit with himself.
“I suppose you played cricket, Whitcomb, at that highly fashionable
seminary of yours?” said Northcote abruptly.
“I was a ‘wet bob’ myself,” the solicitor rejoined; “but I think I know
why you ask the question.”
“It is like sitting with your pads on waiting for the fall of the next
wicket when you are playing for your ‘colors.’”
“I agree,” said the solicitor, “that there are few things so
disagreeable as that. But you are bound to have a wretched time until
the case is over. It is for that reason that I continue to urge you to
heed the counsels of experience.”
“Well, I will see her first,” said Northcote tenaciously.
That air of self-confidence which had tried the patience of the
solicitor so extremely had vanished altogether from the manner of his
youthful companion; for to Northcote’s horror, every phase of the
defence which, with so much elaboration, he had already prepared,
every word of the memorable speech to the jury which had been packed
away sentence by sentence had passed away out of his consciousness so
completely that it might never have been in it. Pressing through the
crowded traffic with a vertigo assailing his eyes and his ears, and a
paralysis upon his limbs, his mind was a blank which might never have
been written upon. Pray heaven this would not be his condition when he
rose to-morrow in the court; for what is comparable to the despair that
overtakes an imperious nature when it is publicly abased by a physical
failure? In imagination he was already sharing the sufferings of the
young Demosthenes when derided by the populace.
At last came the dread incident of the hansom stopping before the
gateway of the prison. The portals rose mournfully through the twilight
of the December morning. While the hansom stood waiting for them to
revolve, a little company of loafers and errand-boys collected about
the vehicle, and regarded its occupants with curiosity not unmingled
with awe.
“Lawyers,” said a denizen of the curb to a companion, whose world like
his own was cut into two halves by the huge wall of the prison.
“Ugly----!” said his friend, spitting with extraordinary vehemence upon
the wheel of the vehicle.
The huge door, studded with brass nails, swung back soundlessly upon
its invisible hinges, and the hansom passed over cobbles under an
archway that seemed to reverberate so much with the sound of its
progress, that Northcote felt his brain to be shattered. He was unable
to witness the little drama that was enacted behind him, of the great
door shutting out the row of solemn faces, standing upon the dim
threshold of the outer world to peer into the gloomy precincts of
oblivion.
The courtyard seemed to consist of low doorways with gas lamps burning
within them, endless expanses of wall, windows heavily barred, and
extremely official-looking police-constables. The little daylight of
the streets through which they had passed had diminished sensibly.
Mr. Whitcomb led the way out of the hansom as it stopped at a doorway
at the end of the courtyard, slightly less insignificant than the rest.
A policeman without his helmet, but with three stripes on the sleeve
of his tunic, and whose hair, glossy with grease, fell over his low
forehead in the form of a fringe, came out of the semi-darkness to
receive them.
“If you will take my card to the governor I shall be obliged to you,”
said Mr. Whitcomb.
“Yessir,” said the constable, with a deferential alacrity touched with
a slightly abject humility. “Will you please to step this way, sir, and
mind your ’at, sir, against the top of the door?”
They followed the policeman along a gaslit passage which seemed
endless. Their boots echoed and reëchoed from its stone flags up to
and along the low, white-washed ceiling. Ascending a flight of steps
they were shown into a room through the iron bars of whose window a few
irregular beams of daylight struggled painfully, and arrived in such an
exhausted condition that they appeared to be quite at a loss to know
what to do when they had entered. The room was small, warm, and so full
of bad air that Northcote found the act of respiration difficult. Three
or four massive chairs, covered in brown leather, were disposed in the
corners, while the middle was in the occupation of a table, upon which
was a bottle filled with water with a glass fitting over the top of it.
“The atmosphere of this place makes one feel ill,” said Northcote, when
the constable had borne away Mr. Whitcomb’s card.
“They have another apartment which will make you feel a lot worse
than this,” said that gentleman cheerfully, unbuttoning his coat
and providing himself with a chair. “Take a seat and make yourself
quite at home. It will take our polite friend with the hair at least
three-quarters of an hour to penetrate through morasses of red tape and
officialdom in its most concentrated form into the governor’s parlor
and then to get back again to us. I have known him take an hour.”
“Good Lord,” said Northcote, “I shall be dead long before that.”
“Pretend you are Dante, and try to think out the first canto of your
‘Inferno,’” said Mr. Whitcomb, taking a crumpled copy of the _Law
Journal_ out of his coat, fixing his glass, and proceeding to peruse it
with admirable spirit and amiability.
Northcote remained standing. He was too completely the victim of the
emotions that had been excited in him to simulate composure. He walked
up and down the room in nervous agitation, and examined the bare walls
and the grated window.
“I see they have revived this flatulent controversy in regard to the
value of circumstantial evidence in the capital charge,” said Mr.
Whitcomb.
“One would certainly say it ought always to be admitted under the
greatest reserve,” said Northcote.
“It would be impossible to work without it in almost every trial for
murder.”
“Well, I shall tell the jury to-morrow, overwhelming as in this case it
may seem, to reject it altogether.”
“And what do you suppose the judge will tell them, may I ask?” said Mr.
Whitcomb.
“I am expecting a bit of a duel between us,” Northcote replied. “But if
he can undo the work I have set myself to accomplish, he is a better
man than I take him to be, that is all.”
The solicitor did not frame his reply immediately, but a rush of blood
to his complexion announced what its nature would have been. The fellow
was really like a child in some things! How could he suppose that these
outworn pleas that long ago had been worn threadbare by every country
attorney could carry the least weight with men who bore sound heads on
their shoulders? If he had nothing better on which to base his defence
than the inadmissibility of circumstantial evidence, there was no need
for him to go into court at all. He was declining to call the witnesses
who would attempt to prove insanity; he was rejecting the one natural
and reasonable line, which had the sanction of those who were older,
wiser, altogether more capable than himself, in favor of a single
desperate throw with the dice--and here was what that throw amounted to!
“I must venture to say,” protested the solicitor, “you surprise one
more and more. If you have nothing more original than that to show the
jury, a weaker judge than Brudenell would demolish it in a few minds
like a house of cards.”
“We shall see.”
“Why, my dear fellow, all the world knows there is no escape from
circumstantial evidence in murder cases. Have you asked yourself the
question how many verdicts could have been taken in recent years upon
notorious crimes, had it been ruled out?”
“I expect to have my own way of answering the question,” said the young
man.
“Yes, and Brudenell will have his.”
“Quite probably, I grant you,” said the young man, with a tenacity
that his companion felt to be exasperating; “but unless one is wholly
deceived in the estimate of one’s own capacity--forgive this very
unprofessional candor in regard to oneself--the jury will answer it
in the fashion I ask them to, not in the fashion asked of them by Mr.
Justice Brudenell and Mr. Horatio Weekes.”
“Well, my young friend,” said Mr. Whitcomb, scrutinizing him with the
patient wonder that is bestowed on a rare quadruped in a zoological
gardens, “pray don’t think me impertinent if I confess that you are the
most baffling compound I have ever encountered.”
“Notably,” said Northcote, “of self-conceit, pig-headedness,
childishness, ignorance, and effrontery. I dare say you are right, for
have I not committed the unpardonable offence of assuming that I am
wiser than Tobin, wiser than yourself, also of considering myself the
superior of the judge upon the bench?”
“You may be perfectly entitled to this self-estimate after the event,”
said the solicitor, with a candor he was unable to repress; “but I
would like to say that only a very complete, and even astonishing,
success to-morrow can possibly justify it.”
“I recognize, I concede that,” said the young advocate, with an
unexpected humility. He passed his handkerchief across his dripping
forehead. “Is it not true of all who undertake to perform a miracle
that nothing short of a consummate achievement will satisfy those
eternally timid ones who have not even the courage to be credulous?
It is the fate of all who break with custom to be derided, but was
anything ever done for the world by conforming to it?”
“Custom is a useful safeguard against ridicule, at any rate,” said Mr.
Whitcomb.
“Ridicule!” cried the young man. “Would you have one fear it?”
“Yes, my son,” said the solicitor, with calmness and unction, “one
would have every professional man fear it like the plague.”
“God knows we are all susceptible to the fear of ridicule,” said the
young man, sweating profusely, “but is it not those fearful minds that
defer perpetually to custom that build their actions upon it? Where
would the epoch-makers have been had they been weak enough to defer to
ridicule? No movement was ever initiated but what in the beginning its
progenitor was laughed out of court.”
“Do I understand, my young friend,” said Mr. Whitcomb in his suavest
accent, “that you propose to elevate the hanging of Emma Harrison into
a world movement?”
“You may,” said the young man, lifting up his chin, from which great
beads were rolling, “for the theme is fit for a world-drama. And he
who is cast for the leading rôle shall make it so.” With unsteady
steps Northcote passed out of the gloomy corner in which he stood to
where the daylight struggled through the grated window. He pressed his
forehead against the bars. “One would have preferred Gethsemane,” he
muttered; “at least there would have been space and air.”
Mr. Whitcomb readdressed himself to the study of the _Law Journal_. The
conquest of that irritation which overcomes on occasion the sternest
discipline had long been elevated into a mental habit by this sagacious
gentleman, who felt it to be the due of the inimitable coolness with
which he looked at life. Yet could he have indulged an explosion
without endangering his stupendous dignity, he must have done so here.
This ridiculous fellow was getting on his nerves. Whatever could have
led him to entrust him with a case of this kind? Was it not an evil
hour when he climbed those foul and dark stairs to hale him from the
obscurity of his garret? What could be clearer than that this madman
was about to make a public exhibition of himself and of his client?
After all, the unearthing of this man Northcote was no more than a whim
of Tobin’s formed on the spur of the occasion. Tobin, it was true,
was highly successful, yet he was himself a somewhat odd, whimsical
fellow, a Celt; and really his suggestion ought to have been seen at
the deuce. Yet it was no good to repine; he had gone too far to draw
back; time, the tyrannical determining factor of every event, allowed
him no choice. This man Northcote must be Emma Harrison’s advocate or
she must do without one.
In the meantime Northcote’s tense emotion had been well served by the
cold iron against which his face was pressed. It seemed to possess a
medicinal quality which entered his arteries. Once more his mind was
able to exert its faculty. His courage, his fecundity of idea, the
sense of his destiny, had seemed to return.
The discomposure of the solicitor and the nervous tension of the
advocate were intruded upon at last by the constable, who had taken
rather more than three-quarters of an hour to perform his mission.
“Will you come this way, gentlemen?” he said.
They were conducted along more dark and apparently interminable
passages, up one flight of stone steps and down two others, until at
last they found themselves in a room similar to the one they had left,
except that it was larger and gloomier, smelt rather more poisonous,
and looked somewhat more funereal.
Northcote’s heart was again beating violently as he stepped over its
threshold, and his excitement was not in the least allayed when he
discovered that there was no one in it.
“If you will kindly take a seat, gentlemen,” said their guide,
“Harrison will be here in a few minutes.”
“In other words, twenty,” said Mr. Whitcomb, beginning a tour of
inspection of this dismal apartment. “These small mementoes may have
some slight interest for you, my friend,” he said to Northcote.
He drew the young man’s attention to a row of shelves placed at right
angles to the window. They were raised tier upon tier to the height
of the ceiling, and were crammed with crude staring objects. A close
inspection revealed them to be busts made of plaster of Paris.
“Why, what are these horrible things supposed to represent?” said
Northcote, with a thrill in his voice.
“These,” said Mr. Whitcomb cheerfully, “are the casts taken after death
of a number of ladies and gentlemen who have had the distinction of
being hanged within the precincts of this jail during the past hundred
years. If you will examine them closely, you will be able to observe
the indentation of the hangman’s rope, which has been duly imprinted on
the throat of each individual. Also, you may discern the mark of the
knot under the left ear. Interesting, are they not? The official mind
is generally able to exhibit itself in quite an amiable light when it
stoops to the æsthetic.”
“I call it perfectly devilish,” said Northcote, shuddering with horror.
“They must have quite a peculiar scientific interest,” said Mr.
Whitcomb, “for each lady or gentleman who may chance to enter this
apartment to consult his or her legal adviser. Are you able to
recognize any of these persons of distinction? If I am not mistaken,
the elderly gentleman on the third row on the right towards the door
is no less an individual than Cuttell, who poisoned a whole family at
Wandsworth. High-minded and courteous person as he undoubtedly was, I
must say Cuttell certainly looks less _outré_ now he is dead, and more
in harmony with his surroundings, than when he entered this room, and
asked me in a mincing tone, with all the aitches misplaced, whether in
my opinion any obstacle would be raised against his getting his evening
clothes out of pawn, as he desired to wear them in the dock during his
trial.”
“For the love of pity, spare me!” cried Northcote, pressing his fingers
into his ears, “or I shall run away.”
“The gentleman with the protruding lip on the second shelf towards the
window is, unless my eyes deceive me, one Bateman, who slaughtered his
maiden aunt with a chopper and buried her in a drain--”
Northcote spared himself further details in the history of Mr. Bateman
by laying violent hands upon his counterfeit presentment, and hurling
it with terrific force against the iron window bar, whence it fell to
the floor in a thousand pieces.
“Upon my soul, I have a great mind to go through the lot,” he said,
livid with fury.
“Pray do so, by all means, dear boy,” said Mr. Whitcomb, with that
unction which never forsook him, “and you will find your art-loving
countrymen will avenge this outrage upon the private and peculiar form
of their culture by one day insisting that your own effigy is placed on
these historic shelves.”
XIX
THE ACCUSED
Renewed assaults upon these interesting _objets d’art_ were averted by
sounds outside in the corridor. Northcote imposed a superhuman control
on all his faculties that his agitation might be restrained, when the
door opened and two shadowy figures, barely visible at first, crept
silently into the darkness of the room.
The two figures were those of women. By the time Northcote had evoked
a sufficient force of will to meet their outline, the one that first
encountered his glance was so brutalized and repulsive that his eyes
were detained with a fascinated sense of horror. It belonged to a
creature that was degraded, squat, coarse, insensitive. He felt almost
the same reluctance in approaching it as he would a cobra.
She, however, was not the one whom Mr. Whitcomb, with all the polished
readiness of the thoroughgoing man of the world, had advanced to
meet, and to whom he had held out his hand. The young man heard with
stupefaction, while his own gaze remained riveted to the features of
the sibyl, the bland and courtier-like tones of the solicitor caressing
and paying homage to a figure in the background, a figure which was
still and silent, which he could not see.
This person, however, had no interest for Northcote; she was so
obviously the female warder who had accompanied the murderess. One
so characterless, so formless, could not be said to exist in the
presence of this detaining horror, whose personality thickened, as with
pestilence, the noisome air of the room. And it was this obscene life
that he had pledged himself to save!
Strangely, this blunt fact did not dominate his consciousness in the
manner it must have done one of a less alert perception. For with a
perversity that transcended the will, at this moment his thoughts
were overspread by the comedy that was being enacted by the suave
lips of the solicitor. The harmonious stream of mellow commonplaces
that Mr. Whitcomb was pouring into the ear of the shrinking official
nonentity who kept in the background accosted his sense of the comic
with a kind of lugubrious irony. With a critical detachment which even
startled himself, he seemed to awake to the fact that he was standing
outside his _milieu_, that he was witnessing a drama within a drama;
and he found himself in possession of the singular reflection that
here was a robust yet delicate adumbration of the farcical which would
make the fortune of a writer for the stage. For there was something
indescribably ludicrous in the rich voice of the solicitor enunciating
his own private opinions upon the weather, the state of trade, the
inconvenience of winter and its bearing upon the perennial problem of
the unemployed, when the grotesque horror which dominated the room was
at his elbow, emitting the glances of a venomous snake.
Suddenly Northcote heard Mr. Whitcomb call his name.
“Come here, Mr. Northcote; I want to introduce you.”
In a hazy, stupefied manner the young man obeyed.
“Mrs. Harrison,” said the solicitor, “allow me to present my friend Mr.
Northcote. I feel sure you will find a friend in him too.”
The advocate grew aware that a weak, nerveless hand was resting in his,
but his eyes were still riveted on the face of the ghoul.
“Say something, you fool, and play up a bit,” said the solicitor’s calm
voice in his ear.
“Er--a nice day, Mrs. Harrison,” said the young man, without knowing a
word he was uttering.
“Yes,” said a hesitating voice, which by no possibility could have
proceeded from the tightly closed lips of the creature whom his gaze
was devouring.
The words broke the illusion at a blow. The brutalized countenance
under whose dominion he had fallen was that of the female warder. The
person with whom the solicitor had been conversing with such cheerful
volubility, to whom he was now himself speaking, was the poisoner, the
cold-blooded denizen of the curb and the gutter. He drew his hand away
quickly, with an involuntary emotion, from those hot, flabby, and damp
fingers that he still detained.
“I know, I know,” the woman seemed to breathe, as though she were
interpreting an unspoken thought.
“I may tell you, Mrs. Harrison,” said the solicitor, with his well-fed
chuckle, “that if your knowledge can compare with that of this
gentleman, you are one of the wisest persons in the world. He will tell
you so himself.”
So crude a gibe had the happy effect of restoring to Northcote his
self-possession.