stiffening, and his voice growing deeper and falling under control,
“but you can trust me to eke out my inexperience with a determination
to serve you to the utmost of my power.”
Northcote saw that two luminous orbs were being defined slowly in the
centre of the gloom. For an instant no reply was made to his words,
and then he was conscious that a faint voice was whispering, “If your
friend would go right away with the warder--right away to the end of
the room, then perhaps we could speak with one another here where it is
so dark.”
“Whitcomb,” said Northcote, in a low tone, “please take the warder
right up to the window at the other end, where you can see to read, and
read the _Law Journal_ to her.”
“How d’ye do, ma’am,” said the solicitor, turning to the ghoul in his
promptest, blandest, and most musical manner. “I think it has been my
privilege to meet you before, although you may not remember me. Is that
boy of yours prospering in the police force?”
“I haven’t got a boy in the police force,” said the sibyl, in a loud,
strident tone.
“Then which of your blood relations is it, may I ask, who is connected
with the police force? I am sure you have some one.”
“I have an uncle.”
“Ah, to be sure, an uncle! But it is so easy to make a mistake on a
point of official nepotism. Come along this way, ma’am, and tell me all
about your uncle.”
XX
THE INTERVIEW
Prisoner and advocate were left together amid recesses of impenetrable
gloom in the darkest corner of the large apartment. It seemed to enfold
them, and to render the pallor of their faces almost invisible. The
eyes alone encountered those of each other, and even these could embody
no phase of meaning. A strange continence, as sharp and clean as that
of a hero of fable, had begun to cleanse the veins of the advocate.
In the presence of this stealthy thing his nature had never seemed so
fine, so valiant, so full of subtle penetration; nor had it ever felt
so girt with mastery, so completely enamored of its own security.
“I shall know what words to speak to-morrow,” he said, in a hoarse
undertone.
“Will they not be spoken for yourself?” whispered the dismal low voice.
“How? In what manner?”
“You will speak to make a name.”
“Also for the salvation of yours.”
“Mine does not matter; it is not my own.”
“You trust me, do you not?”
“I trust you; yet you drew your hand away so quickly when you knew it
was not the warder who was the murderess. Give it to me again.”
There was something so curious in the prisoner’s fragility, something
so strange in her cowed air, that it seemed to pervade the advocate
with the stealth of a drug. But the emotion of disgust with which he
had withdrawn his hand when first he grew conscious that he touched her
was no longer present when he offered it again. The second time she
clasped her fingers round it so that their pressure seemed to sear his
skin. It had the heat of a live coal.
In releasing his hand she let her fingers yield it so imperceptibly
that he did not know the precise point at which it had ceased to be
held; and he was afraid to make a motion of withdrawal, lest it should
be interpreted as a repetition of that which had dealt her a wound. He
tried to see her face, but in the darkness there was no lineament to
decipher.
“This is my deliverer,” he heard her breathe.
“How have you come to know it?” The advocate was devoured by an
intolerable curiosity.
“Your hands--your hands, they are so powerful; are you not so strong?”
There was nothing in these words that the advocate had expected; the
voice, the manner of their utterance, their apparent irrelevance, made
a strange effect in his ears.
“They will not do me to death,” she said, in a tone he could hardly
hear. “I never tasted life until I was brought into prison. And you
cannot think how sweet it is to me. Everything has become so beautiful:
the birds, the trees, and the sky, and the crowds of people and the mud
of the great city.”
She clutched the hand of the young advocate with a convulsive shudder.
“Your quietness tells me that you understand.” Her voice was touched
with ecstasy. “You do not answer or seek to console me. You are the one
I have dreamed of in prison. Where is your hand?”
Again Northcote yielded to her entreaty, this time without a sense of
repulsion.
“Yes, this is the hand that has been around me in the darkness, when I
have shuddered in my dreams.”
“It is wonderful,” said Northcote, “that you should know that you will
be able to lean upon me.”
“I know what your voice is like also, although it is so vague and
distant to me now. I know the words it will speak to-morrow, when it
asks them to be merciful. I know that all I have seen in my dreams will
take place.”
“It must be a grievous thing to go to sleep in a prison,” said
Northcote, uttering a half-formed thought without consideration of his
words. “Or perhaps it is more dreadful to awaken in one.”
“The going to sleep and the awakening are not so terrible as the dreams
that come. That in which I saw you first, in which I first heard your
voice, in which I first touched the hand that will deliver me, was most
dreadful in its nature. My weak mind fell down under it. I think I
could not live through such a vision again.”
“How strange are these visitations!” said Northcote. “How awful, how
mysterious! When did this dream come to you?”
“Last night about the hour of ten; the first time I had closed my eyes
for three days.”
Northcote recoiled with a shudder. The precision of the voice and the
power of the coincidence were overmastering.
“There is no accounting for these things,” he said, in a voice
throbbing with excitement. “At the same hour I also had a strange, an
almost terrible sort of vision.”
“Yes, my deliverer, you have been called into my life to save it--to
save that life which never had a perfect thought until it was brought
into prison. It did not know what the trees and the sky were, nor the
air and the birds; never had it heard a deep voice nor touched a strong
hand. You are he that leaped out of the vast multitude that mocked me
in my dream, he who stood up before it, and, with a great voice that
sounded like the waves of the sea, caused them all to break and run.
They grew afraid of your words and your looks, and they fled in terror.
Yes, my life has become so full of beauty and meaning, so full of a
spacious mystery, that I cannot believe it is to be taken away.”
These words, breathed rather than spoken, sounded in the ear of
Northcote as those of a transcendent sanity. Remote as they were, they
yet appeared divinely appropriate to the time and place. But they left
only one course for him to follow. He must detach himself from the
unhappy speaker of them; he must flee her presence. Their edge was too
keen. There would be no advocacy on the morrow if he yielded to the
subtle enervation of this atmosphere. The voice pierced him like a
passion, yet his veins had grown sluggish and heavy, as if under the
influence of a drug.
XXI
THE TALISMAN WHICH TRANSCENDS EXPERIENCE
Calling the name of the solicitor, Northcote broke away abruptly from
the prisoner and left the room. It had seemed to be charged with a
pestilence. Mr. Whitcomb was soon at his side, and hastily they wended
their way up and down various flights of stone steps, along the noisome
corridors of the huge building, until daylight came in sight once more
through the doorway at the end of the passage at which their cab was
standing. Their relief was very real at being able to breathe again the
living air, fog-laden as it was.
“I don’t know how many times,” said Mr. Whitcomb, as they drove from
the portals of the jail, “on one errand and another, I have descended
into this inferno, but it never loses its power to give me the blues.”
“I am regretting,” said Northcote, “that I did not take your advice. I
wish I had not come near it. I cannot shake off the impression it has
made. Ugh! it gets into one’s blood. I don’t know anything quite so
overpowering as the nausea of locality.”
“You are too impressionable, my son,” said the solicitor, with a
furtive smile. “You will never be able to get through life at this
rate. It wants one of some hardihood, one who is robust in each one of
his five senses, to practise law.”
“I would say,” Northcote rejoined, with a shudder, “that to be armed
for this calling each particular nerve he has got in his body must be
shod with iron.”
The solicitor laughed at so palpable a discomposure.
“What did you make of the prisoner?” he asked, suddenly. “You appeared
to find a great deal to say to one another.”
“Personally I hardly spoke a word to her,” said the young man, seeking
to gather his recollection of that strange interview.
“She appeared to find a good deal to say to you,” said the solicitor.
“In that respect you have been more fortunate than myself. I have
spoken with her three times, and I don’t think I have been able to
extract three words from her. Do you mind telling me what she said?”
“To the best of my remembrance she said nothing that could have the
least interest for anybody.”
“Tell me, what impression of her have you brought away?”
“I hardly know whether she allowed me to form one. Our communication
seemed so indirect. She kept her face in the shadow all the time; I
could not discern a feature.”
“Surely you were able to gather some sort of general idea?”
“That is the strange thing--I seem to have formed no opinion about
her. One would not have thought it conceivable that one should have
conversed with a person, dealt at least in an actual exchange of words
at close quarters, and that they should remain so null. I think I
should have been better acquainted with her had I not seen her at all.”
“Come, my dear fellow, you can surely recall a word or two of what she
said? She is an enigma; and she is said not to have spoken six words
since she was first remanded in custody.”
“That certainly makes the volubility in which she indulged this
afternoon the more astonishing.”
“Indeed it does. Would you say that she expects an acquittal?”
“Well, now you come to mention that, I would say she does.”
“It is an extraordinary thing that they are all so sanguine. It hardly
ever seems to occur to any of them that by any possibility they can
meet with their deserts. Indeed, one might say the bigger the criminal,
the greater their confidence that they will escape.”
“I am going to ask you what opinion you have formed of her,” said
Northcote.
“It follows the lines of your own. When I have come into personal
contact with her, I have been able to make rather less than nothing
of her. At first I thought she seemed sullen, and quite reconciled to
her position, indeed, that she was too callous to care about anything;
but upon seeing her to-day, I was rather struck by the fact that her
attitude had undergone a change.”
“How long has she been in prison?”
“Nearly three months. She is an odd sort of creature--her former
associates are agreed upon that--and doubtless some sort of change has
taken place in her. I am more than ever convinced that insanity is
your line; and by this time it should not be too much to hope that you
are.”
“She will expect her liberty.”
“_She_ will expect! My dear boy, it is when you permit yourself to talk
in this fashion that you fill one with so much distrust. Her position
entitles her to expect nothing.”
“No sort of doubt overtakes you then in regard to her guilt?”
“None. I have suggested that to you over and over again. My dear
fellow, it is as I feared; you have not permitted yourself a due
appreciation of the overwhelming nature of the evidence. I do not see
how she can hope to escape; and this is pretty plain speaking on the
part of her attorney. Just look at the array of facts--her course
of life, her purchase of the poison, the result of the post-mortem,
the presence of motive. Again and again I have felt it to be my duty
to suggest to you that Tobin would not have attempted to shake the
evidence.”
“Well, you must permit me to say that, reflect upon the question as I
will, it does not seem easy to reconcile the woman in that room with
the cold-blooded monster who will be presented to the jury.”
“That phenomenon is by no means rare. It has been my fortune to
undertake the defence of more than one finished example of moral
obliquity who has presented not the least indication of such a
condition. Besides, do you not admit that the impression that this
woman made upon you was one of absolute nullity? Were you not unable to
divine anything in regard to her?”
“Yes, that was my first feeling; but I am now confessing that
after all, in some mysterious way, she has contrived to shake these
preconceived ideas about her, now that from this distance I can view
the room and what transpired in it. I dare not say by what means she
has contrived to produce this effect; indeed, it is so subtle that I
can hardly say what it amounts to, because if I begin to recall her
words she seems almost to have admitted her guilt. Yet of one thing I
am convinced--she presented no evidence of her depravity.”
“One can easily concede the probability of that.”
“Yes, but had it been as complete as you insist, I must have seen it.”
“Pardon me, but I am afraid it does not follow. What is easier than to
hide its traces from the eyes of inexperience?”
“Have I not the talisman in my pocket which transcends experience?”
“Talisman be damned,” said Mr. Whitcomb, with a jovial brutality.
Before his companion could frame an answer to a scorn so
unconciliatory, the hansom stopped before the offices of Messrs.
Whitcomb and Whitcomb. They alighted together.
XXII
LIFE OR DEATH
The final consultation of Northcote and his client took place in the
open street in the heavily raining December afternoon, with their backs
against Mr. Whitcomb’s brass plate. The spot selected for their last
utterances on this momentous affair was incongruous indeed, but each
had grown so impatient of the other, that if their last words were
spoken here, the clash of their mental states was the less likely to
invite disaster than in a more formal council-chamber of four walls.
The robust common sense of the solicitor had never shown itself to be
more incisive than now as he stood with his back to his own door, under
a dripping umbrella, his hat pushed to the back of his head, and his
trousers turned up beyond his ankles. His twenty years of immensely
successful practice, his exact knowledge of human nature, his ruthless
worldliness, his reverence for the hard fact, stood forth here in
the oddest contrast with the somewhat “special” and rarefied quality
of this youthful advocate whom he had seen fit to entrust with so
important a case.
“It’s a pity, it’s a pity,” he brought himself to say at last, his
veneer falling off a little under the stress of his chagrin, and
revealing a glimpse of the baffled human animal beneath. “It is a
serious mistake to have made; but we have got to stand to it. You are
not the man for this class of work, to speak bluntly. You are either
too deep or you are not deep enough. But as I say, we have got to stand
to it now. My last words will be to urge you to put as good a face upon
it as you can.”
“In other words,” said Northcote, stiffening, “you will look to me to
do my best.”
“I don’t put it in that form exactly,” said the solicitor, midway
between exasperation and a desire to be courteous. “I want you fully to
appreciate that you are handling an extremely tough job, and I merely
want you to make the best of it, that’s all.”
“I will tell you, Mr. Whitcomb,” said Northcote, striving in vain to
avert the explosion that had been gathering for so long, “that if it
were not now the eleventh hour, if I had not pledged myself to this
thing more deeply than you know, if it were not a matter of life and
death to me as well as to your client, I would throw your brief back at
you rather than submit to this. It will be time enough for you to get
upon your platform when I have made a hash of everything.”
“Yes, I think you are entitled to say that,” said the solicitor
impartially, having made a successful effort to recapture his own
serenity. “I have no right to talk as I am doing; I have never done so
to any one else. I suspect you have got on my nerves a bit.”
“Yes, the whole matter throws back to the clash of our temperaments,”
said Northcote, unable to cloak his own irritation now that it had
walked abroad. “It is a pity that we ever attempted to work together.
Yet for one who envelops himself in the serene air of reason, you are
somewhat illogical, are you not? You enter the highways and hedges in
search of a particular talent; you have the fortune to light upon it;
and then you turn and rend its unhappy possessor for possessing it.”
“As I say, my dear boy, this particular talent of yours--or is it your
temperament?--you see I am not up in these technical names--has got on
my nerves a little.”
“And your temperament, my friend, to indulge a _tu quoque_, is covered
with a hard gritty outer coating, for which I believe the technical
name is ‘practicality,’ which positively sets one’s teeth on edge.”
“So be it; we part with mutual recriminations. But this is my last
word. Firmly as I believe I have committed an error of judgment, if
to-morrow you can prove that I have deceived myself, you will not find
me ungrateful. I can speak no fairer; and this you must take for my
apology. It is not too much to say that since I have come to know you I
have ceased to recognize myself.”
“I accept your _amende_” said Northcote, without hesitation. “I see I
have worried you, but if I might presume to address advice to the fount
of all experience, never, my dear Mr. Whitcomb, attempt to formulate a
judgment upon that which you cannot possibly understand.”
“After to-morrow there is a remote chance that I may come to heed your
advice. In the meantime we will shake hands just to show that malice is
not borne. Don’t forget that you will be the first called to-morrow, at
half-past ten. It is quite likely to last all day.”
The solicitor turned into his offices and Northcote sauntered along
Chancery Lane. The twilight which had enveloped the city all day was
now yielding to the authentic hues of evening. The dismal street-lamps
were already lit, the gusts of rain, sleet, and snow of the previous
night had been turned into a heavy downpour which had continued without
intermission since the morning. The pavements were bleached by the
action of water, but a miasma arose from the overburdened sewers, whose
contents flowed among the traffic and were churned by its wheels into
a paste of black mud. Northcote was splashed freely with this thick
slushy mixture, even as high as his face, by the countless omnibuses;
and in crossing from one pavement to another he had a narrow escape
from being knocked down by a covered van.
It was in no mood of courage that the young man pushed his way to his
lodgings through the traffic and the elbowing crowds who thronged the
narrow streets. Even the mental picture that was thrown before his eyes
of this garret which had already devoured his youth had the power to
make him feel colder than actually he was. Never had he felt such a
depression in all the long term of his privation as now in wending his
way towards it laboriously, heavily, with slow-beating pulses.
He was sore, disappointed, angry; his pride was wounded by the attitude
of his client. His self-centred habit caused him to take himself so
much for granted, that at first he could discern no reason for this
_volte-face_. In his view it was inconsiderate to withhold the moral
support of which at this moment he stood so much in need. Truly the
lot of obscurity was hard; its penalties were of a kind to bring many
a shudder to a proud and sensitive nature. The patronizing insolence of
one whom he despised was beginning to fill him with a bootless rage,
yet in his present state how impotent he was before it. He must suffer
such things, and suffer them gladly, until that hour dawned in which
his powers announced themselves.
That time was to-morrow--terrible, all-piercing, yet entrancing
thought! The measure of his talent would then be proclaimed. Yet all in
an instant, like a lightning-flash shooting through darkness, for the
first time the true nature of his task was revealed to him. Doubt took
shape, sprang into being. Its outline seemed to loom through the dismal
shadows cast by the lamps in the street. Who and what was he, after
all, in comparison with a task of such immensity? With startling and
overwhelming force the solicitor’s meaning was suddenly unfolded to him.
He took himself for granted no more. He must be mad to have gone so
far without having paused to subject himself to the self-criticism
that is so salutary. How could he blame the solicitor whose eminently
practical mind had resented this inaccessibility to the ordinary rules
of prudence? Was he not the veriest novice in his profession, without
credentials of any kind? And yet he arrogated to himself the right to
embark upon a line of conduct that was in direct opposition to the
promptings of a mature judgment.
How could he have been so sure of this supreme talent? It had never
been brought to test. The only measure of it was his scorn of others,
the scorn of the unsuccessful for those who have succeeded. The
passion with which it had endowed him was nothing more, most probably,
than a monomania of egotism. How consummate was the folly which could
mistake the will for the deed, the vaulting ambition for the thing
itself!
On the few occasions, some seven or eight in all, in which he had
turned an honest guinea, mostly at the police-court, he had betrayed
no surprising aptitude for his profession. There had been times, even
in affairs so trivial, when his highly strung nervous organization had
overpowered the will. He had not been exempt from the commission of
errors; he recalled with horror that once or twice it had fallen to his
lot to be put out of countenance by his adversary; while once at least
he had drawn down upon himself the animadversions of the presiding
deity. Surely there was nothing in this rather pitiful career to
provide a motive for this overweening arrogance.
He grew the more amazed at his own hardihood as he walked along. To
what fatal blindness did he owe it that from the beginning his true
position had not been revealed to him? Where were the credentials that
fitted him to undertake a task so stupendous? What achievement had he
to his name that he should venture to launch his criticisms against
those who had been through the fray and had emerged victorious? How
could he have failed to appreciate that abstract theory was never
able to withstand the impact of experience! It was well enough in the
privacy of his garret to conceive ideas and to sustain his faculties
with dreams of a future that could never be, but once in the arena,
when the open-mouthed lion of the actual lay in his path, he would
require arms more puissant than these.
To overcome those twin dragons Tradition and Precedent, behind which
common and vulgar minds entrenched themselves so fearlessly, the sword
of the sophist would not avail. It would snap in his fingers at the
first contact with these impenetrable hides. His blade must be forged
of thrice-welded steel if he were to have a chance on the morrow. He
had decided to promulgate like a second Napoleon the doctrine of force,
and for his only weapon he had chosen a dagger of lath. Well might Mr.
Whitcomb smile with contempt. Where would he find himself if he dared
to preach the most perilous of gospels, if he could not support it with
an enormous moral and physical power?
For years he had dwelt in a castle which he had built out of air,
secure in the belief that he was endowed in ample measure with
attributes whose operations were so diverse yet so comprehensive,
that in those rare instances in which they were united they became
superhuman in their reach. An Isaiah or a Cromwell did not visit the
world once in an era. How dare such a one as he fold his nakedness in
the sacred mantle of the gods! It was the act of one whose folly was
too rank even to allow him to pose as a charlatan. If he ventured to
deliver one-half of these astonishing words he had prepared for the
delectation of an honest British jury, these flatulent pretensions
would be unveiled, he would be mocked openly, his ruin would be
complete and irretrievable.