eleventh hour of the unwarrantable estimate he had formed of himself
rendered it imperative that he should change his plans. The opinion
of others, acknowledged masters of the profession in which he was so
humble a tyro, was incontrovertible. Evidence in support of a perfectly
rational plea was provided for him, would be ready in court. His client
had demanded that it should be used. To disregard that demand would be
to rebuff his only friend, one of great influence who had been sent to
his aid in his direst hour. And it was for nothing better than a whim
that he was prepared to yield his all. No principle was at stake, no
sacrifice of dignity was involved. That which his patron had asked of
him was so natural, so admirably humane, that the mere act of refusal
would be rendered unpardonable unless it were vindicated by complete
success. No other justification was possible, not only in the eyes of
himself and in those of his client, but no less was exacted of him by
the hapless creature whose life was in his keeping.
Stating it baldly, let him fail in the superhuman feat which had been
imposed upon him by a disease which he called ambition, and this
wretched woman would expiate his failure upon the gallows. Had any
human being a right to incur such a penalty, a right to pay such a
price in the pursuit of his own personal and private aims? The middle
course was provided for him. It would deliver the accused and himself
from this intolerable peril; it opened up a path of safety for them
both.
Already he could observe with a scarifying clearness, that here and
now, at the eleventh hour, he must defer to the irresistible impact of
the circumstances. The risk was too grave; he was thrusting too cruel a
responsibility upon his flesh and blood. He must hasten to make terms
with that grossly material world of the hard fact which he scorned
so much. He must submit to one of those pitiful compromises which he
yearned to defy; and in so doing he must betray a talent which had
inflicted indescribable torments upon him.
His address to the jury of his countrymen, that surprising impromptu
prepared at leisure, must be given up. Not a word could be used of this
demand for an acquittal which was to mark an epoch in English justice.
He must begin again on a lower note.
Just before reaching the archway through which he had to pass to
reach his own door, he turned into a post-office, and despatched to
his mother two sovereigns out of the ten he had received from the
solicitor. Enclosing a scrap of paper with the order, he wrote these
words upon it: “My first great case is called to-morrow. Life or death
for Prisoner and Advocate--which?” Having posted the letter he ascended
the stairs to his garret.
He groped his way up to it. Shuddering with despair he unlocked the
door and flung it open. An impenetrable darkness covered the room. He
stood on the threshold searching his damp clothes for a match. He found
a solitary one sequestered in a corner of a pocket; but all attempts to
strike it failed. He then proceeded to grope his way forward through
the room, reached the table, and after knocking down several articles
was able to place his hand upon that which he sought. He kindled a
light, and the lamp having been replenished with oil that morning was
able to maintain it. The fire had burned out long ago; all the coal had
been used, and the fresh quantity he had purchased had not arrived. His
overcoat was soaked with rain, his trousers were damp, and the room had
already become cold. He rummaged out an old sweater that had stood him
in good stead in his football days, from a box beneath the bed, removed
his wet overcoat and pulled this garment over his jacket. He then
filled his pipe and sat down beside the lamp.
XXIII
PREPARATION
He had taken his new resolve outside in the rain; and it behoved him
now to utilize these few remaining hours in putting it into shape.
Rejecting the demand for the liberty of this wretched woman he must
consent to the verdict being given against her, and place his hope in
the clemency of the court.
For two inexpressibly weary hours he strove with clenched lips to piece
together and elaborate this new line; but in spite of all his efforts
it was so dull and lifeless that the task seemed beyond him. Whatever
talent he possessed it was only too clear that so vacillating a method
of defence was quite out of harmony with its workings. This way and
that he twisted each listless uninspired suggestion, but at each
laborious attempt it grew less possible to breathe upon their dry bones
and create them into living flesh. These maimed and halting emendations
were as far removed from the swift and audacious repleteness of the
original as to express the difference between light and dark.
It was the difference between life and death. The one was informed with
the living breath, a vital and a surprising piece of art; the other
was cold and heavy, a confection of wormwood and ditch-water. A bitter
chagrin overcame him when he saw all that his resolve implied. He would
be sent into court dumb, tongue-tied--he with a philippic against
injustice packed away at the back of his brain. This would mark the end
of the ambition that had nourished the fires of his heart through full
many a weary winter’s day.
The new words would not glow; they were so much sound without meaning.
Yet the new words were the true words. They embodied the actual; they
stood for the established fact in its impartial fearlessness; they were
the servants of justice. That the accused had committed the crime was
clear to the meanest intelligence. It only remained for her advocate to
announce her guilt and to pray for mercy. Yet the phrases in which he
shaped this bald proposition crept to his lips as false, devious, and
dishonorable.
The old words conceived in sophistry were burning things, brilliant
with the blood and flame of their emotion. Beneath them paradox itself
stood forth as but a subtler knowledge. The accent of conviction made
these words resonant, these words whose design was to pervert and
mislead. They were breaking in constantly upon the dull and tortured
phrases which he was striving to weave, the insensitive phrases whose
function it was to embody immaculate truth. The commonest platitudes
were not so stale as these. At last with a cry of rage he spurned them
vehemently from his mind.
Indeed, the only purpose that was served by these endeavors was to
prove to the unhappy advocate that his nature must be allowed to obey
its instincts. He must fulfil his destiny. To that acute intelligence
it had come to seem that truth and untruth were identical. It would
seem to be born for iconoclasm, for demolition; let it leave to less
sophisticated minds the championship of outworn ideas. In this
whirlpool of doubt in which he was engulfed, his ideals, his instincts,
all those mental resources which garnish with dignity the most protean
character, seemed to break from their moorings; and in the very frenzy
of this wreck of his stability, there returned upon him in the guise of
one of those paradoxes which had become so fatal, a newer, a franker, a
more vital conception of his power.
There returned in its train the arrogance of his quality. It was not
for one of the blood royal to submit to dictation from the mediocrity
it despised. Its right was inalienable to obey the forces within
itself. He had felt from the first that it was in his power to save
this woman; the attorney’s doubts had intervened and for a time had
overthrown his faith; but now he had come to believe it again. The
thing called “experience,” that eternal standby of the vulgar, was a
mere tawdry substitute for intuition in the inferior orders. A great
talent incorporated experience within itself. He must suffer no qualm
on the score of his youth, his absence of laurels. After all, this
brief had been evoked by the exercise of an imperious will in a magic
hour; had he not an immemorial right to use it as he chose? Let him
obey the divine faculty that had carried him so far, and then if fail
he must, at least his failure would be worthy of himself. It was proper
for common minds, destitute of all force and originality, to subscribe
to the conventions which they set up to protect themselves. Custom,
usage, the accretions of centuries may even hallow and exalt them until
they assume the guise of religions, but these simulations have nothing
to say to the royal among their kind.
This powerful impulse, whose impact upon the mind of the advocate was
almost terrible, merged the surroundings in itself. Time and place
were obliterated; the evening was imperceptibly eaten away. The clocks
of the neighborhood gave out the hour of midnight just as Northcote,
gasping, with all the breath driven out of his body, emerged from the
vortex to grasp his final decision. For six hours he had not been
sufficiently accessible to the external to heed the hours as they
struck. But now, as the long-drawn strokes announced a new day, a
thrill of excitement convulsed his being. The day of all days was at
hand. He was standing on the very threshold of the issue. The dread
future was about to roll back its veil. Such an emotion was cast upon
him that he began to tremble as violently as when he had driven with
Mr. Whitcomb to the prison.
He supposed that the chime of these clocks would penetrate the walls
behind which the unhappy woman was lying awake. She also must be
trembling violently. Doubtless the poisoner and prostitute was dreaming
again of her deliverer. The idea overcame him with a curious poignancy
which, horrible as it was, was yet touched with ecstasy.
This was a creature who must expect no mercy from the Pharisee; yet
the living woman had a power within herself to arouse a desire for it
in one who pretended to no exalted sympathy with his species. In their
interview in the prison he had discerned nothing of vileness about her.
And he was fain to believe that she had dreamed in sober verity of her
advocate the previous night. Conjuring up this memorable interview,
which yet remained so colorless that it seemed to have happened only to
the soul, the haunting low tones began to speak through the silence of
his room; and with an impulse of joy that banished the horror of their
insistency he responded to the accents of their truth.
A living voice had entered the room. It was the same voice, and yet so
much more resonant than the one he had heard in the prison. The senses
of the advocate were strung to a point so perilous that the luminous
figure of a woman appeared before them. This was she who had huddled
away into the shadows of the jail. The lamp on the table, which with
so much difficulty melted the gloom within the area of its influence,
framed her contour with a kind of weird delicacy. Her figure was veiled
in a soft plasticity; it was that of one who was in despair; yet it had
all the simple trust of her sex, which it exhibits at those supreme
moments when nothing is left to it save to kneel and to embrace its
faith. It was a figure such as this that rolled away the stone from the
mouth of the cave and discovered that the body of Jesus was not there.
During the interview the young advocate had known and understood
little, but now, under the spell of his passion, an ampler knowledge
enfolded him in its mantle. It is not until we look down upon them
from the altitude of some momentous phase, that those moments which
are destined to assume a permanence in our lives become crystallized
into our mental history. The terror and the reticence of this pitiable
creature had pierced him like a sword, yet it was not until this remote
hour that Northcote understood the miracle they had wrought in his
nature.
She must once have been fair under the eyes of the sun; once slender,
gracious, inhabited by chastity. Her voice proclaimed a history that
must have been inexpressibly grievous. Yet the desire for life was in
her still. She was not prepared to yield her interest in the mystery.
Her words were memorable: she had never understood anything until
she was brought into prison. Was it not meet that this daughter of a
hundred inhumanities should now call to be released from the doom her
fellows had prepared for her. “I know you will save me, my deliverer,”
were the words he still heard; and they came upon his ear with more of
authenticity than when they first fell from those indescribable lips.
He rose from the chair in which he had been immersed so many hours. He
was shuddering in every vein. His fingers and limbs were petrified with
the coldness of the room; his damp trousers were inflicting his ankles
with rheumatic pains. So stiff were his limbs through remaining in one
position for so long, that it cost him labor to cross the room and open
the window.
He thrust out his head and a rush of icy air saluted his temples.
The rain had ceased; the clouds had dispersed; the heavens, charged
with a keen frost, were studded thickly with little dark blue stars.
Peering towards them eagerly Northcote tried to decipher the names and
positions of these meaningless heads, until at last he came upon one
which was larger and brighter than the rest. He was convinced that
its locality would render it plainly visible from the windows of the
prison. He fixed his gaze upon it with great intensity; he knew the
occupant of the prison had climbed up to peer at it through the bars of
her cell.
Although he had spent the previous night without entering a bed,
nothing would have enabled his thoughts to seek sanctuary in sleep.
The incandescent fervor of his mind would not allow him to repose; and
although a few hours hence he would have to draw upon every spark of
physical energy he possessed, he had no fear of his bodily limitations.
He had the immense vitality of those demigods among their kind, for
whom no ascent is too precipitous. He spent some time in vigorous
gymnastic exercises to drive the congealed blood through his veins; and
this accomplished, he felt his strength return.
He passed the remaining portion of the night in pacing his room, with
a pipe fixed in his teeth and his hands thrust beneath his white
jersey into the pockets of his trousers. Occasionally he ceased these
peregrinations for a few minutes at a time, in order to write down some
of the sentences as they took shape in his mind. He desired to give
himself the æsthetic pleasure of seeing how they looked on paper. Yet
he did not propose to bestow a literal preparation on this address,
since he had sufficient confidence in his fecundity of expression to
speak extempore and yet expect adequately to traverse the scheme he had
planned. Words charged with emotion springing fresh and tingling from
the mist would increase their appeal by being thrown off in the actual
impulse by which they were created.
When at last the old charwoman arrived at half-past seven she was
astonished to discover Northcote walking about the room looking wild
and haggard and declaiming passages of the peroration. He sent her
out to borrow some coal; and when she returned with it and proceeded
to make a fire, he ordered as on the previous day what they both
considered to be a sumptuous breakfast. While this was preparing he
retired to fit himself for that ordeal to which he would so soon be
called.
Even now, however, a palsy was on his limbs, a fever in his blood. In
the delicate operation of shaving he was unable to conduct the razor
firmly, and cut his chin repeatedly. It was with infinite difficulty
that he could render himself presentable after the various gashes it
had undergone. After expending not less than an hour on his toilet, and
conferring as much respectability upon his person as lies within the
province of soap and water and clean linen, he sat down at the table
hungry and cold yet consumed with excitement.
“Mrs. Brown,” he said to the old woman, “I forgot to ask about that
small grandchild of yours.”
“She is dead, sir.”
“I am very sorry. When did this occur?”
“Last night, sir, about twelve. It is one mouth less to feed, as you
might say, but I think it might have been my own.”
“But then there would have been no means of feeding the others.”
“Yes, sir, it was a wrong expression,” said the old woman in her
precise manner. “It was not what I meant to have said.”
“Well, come now,” said Northcote, “suppose you try to eat some
breakfast.”
XXIV
THE TRIAL
The old woman took her seat at the table obediently, but with a
bewilderment as great as on the previous day. It was very strange that
incidents such as these should arise to embellish her servitude.
This morning, however, she was not tormented with a string of
questions. Northcote was silent, gloomy, and haggard; something
appeared to be preying on his mind. The remorse he had shown for having
failed to ask how her grandchild was seemed strange to her indeed, for
until the previous day he had always stood in her mind as a member of
the inaccessible classes. Something had appeared to happen to him by
which, in a few short hours, the tenor and current of his life had
been changed. There was a terrible excitement burning now under his
pale skin; his eyes were restless, his fingers were twitching, and he
drank cup after cup of the hot tea as though he were consumed with an
intolerable thirst.
When he had finished his breakfast he took his wig and gown out of a
cupboard, and placed them together with his brief in a small black
bag. He was on the point of starting for the court, when through the
open door he could hear footsteps on the stairs. Some one was coming
up to the fourth story, an incident so rare in the experience of its
occupant as always to be rendered memorable. In an instant the jovial
outline of the solicitor presented itself to his imagination. With
an agitation that was indescribable he foresaw that he was not to be
allowed to take the brief into court after all.
Instead of Mr. Whitcomb, however, his visitor proved to be a boy with a
telegram. He tore it out of its envelope. The contents were contained
in three words: “Life, my son.” They were from his mother.
With this omen in his heart he set forth. A welcome change had taken
place in the weather. The air had become sharp and dry; already misty
beams were stealing out from the December sun. The press in the streets
was immense, but he brushed through it with the elevating consciousness
that he was overcoming a real obstacle. In his every fibre was the
breath of contest, the joy of battle. His mother’s words, the faint
beams of the new day, the rattle of the traffic, all conspired to endow
him with a ruthless determination.
If it was to be that defeat and confusion should overtake him, at
least he would not go out to greet them half-way. Once and for all
he had put off those fears and misgivings that had tormented him. A
great commander storming an inaccessible position does not pause to
estimate the cost; he does not pause to contemplate the inevitability
of disaster. He, too, would show himself of this quality: a great
commander of his lurid and revolted imagination in the teeth of
frightful odds.
He arrived at the Old Bailey at a quarter-past ten. He did not allow
himself to glance at its profile, nor did he permit his mind to be
distracted by one of the thousand details, common, depressing, and
of no significance in themselves, yet likely to be so ominous in
their effect on high-strung nerves. He passed from the barristers’
robing-room as soon as he could, for beyond everything he wished to
avoid contact with his kind. Yet to the majority of those within its
precincts he was not even known by name; and he felt himself to be
looked on askance by all as a solitary, queer-headed fellow.
On entering the court he used great care in selecting his seat. It was
in a situation from which he felt he could command the attention of all
present; from which the jury would lose nothing of what he presented
to it, and yet be sufficiently removed to be unable to discern the
more intimate workings of his personality. Oratory like music demands
a certain space and distance in which and at which to reveal itself.
Before taking his seat he looked all around him into every part of the
building, in order that he might familiarize himself with that which
lay about him. Every seat allotted to the public was already in its
occupation; the nature of the charge was itself sufficient to stimulate
its curiosity in the highest degree. Among the members of the bar the
interest was not so great. There was said to be no defence worthy of
the name; the crime was of a common kind, presenting neither rare nor
curious features; the absence of Tobin, the most brilliant common law
advocate among the younger men, had become known; and the case was
expected to be disposed of without difficulty. Its main interest in the
eyes of the junior bar centred around the man who had been asked to
conduct the defence. That one so obscure as Northcote should have been
chosen to fill the place of Tobin in a murder case was one of those
unexpected things which furnished a theme for the critic’s function; a
function which the majority of those in their robes on the benches felt
eminently qualified to undertake.
Many were surprised, some were a little grieved, and the ambitious were
rather disconcerted that Northcote should be entrusted with a brief
of this nature. Obscure as he was in practice, he had acquired a kind
of reputation at the bar mess as one who was singularly unsocial in
his habits. As the brief in the first instance had been marked with
a figure large enough to command the services of Tobin, the defence
could not be wholly destitute of means. It was strange that a firm so
notoriously astute as Whitcomb and Whitcomb should have handed it to
one of no experience when the extremely able counsel they had retained
originally had been compelled to throw up the case. There was quite a
number assembled in that court who were far more competent to deal with
it than this young and unknown practitioner. In the opinion of many,
this circumstance was taken as the clearest indication of all that the
case had no life in it.
Hardly had Northcote taken his seat in the court when he felt a hand on
his shoulder; it belonged to Mr. Whitcomb.
“No nonsense, now,” he said anxiously. “The witnesses are here, and we
shall expect you to call them.”
“It is quite impossible for me to alter my line at the last moment,”
said Northcote, while every nerve he had in his body seemed to be
ticking furiously. “Besides,” he added, in a hoarse whisper, “don’t
you see that if they are not called I shall get the last word with the
jury, as the attorney is not in the case?”
“Pray, what is the use of that? What will that do for you?”
“You must wait and see,” said the young man, with a red haze before his
eyes.
“My dear fellow, I must insist on your calling the witnesses.”
“It is impossible,” said the young man, in a voice the solicitor could
hardly hear.
“Really, you know, this is carrying things too far.”
“I would to God,” exclaimed the young advocate, with his voice breaking
in the middle in the queerest manner, “you had never retained me at
all!”
This outburst of petulance conferred upon the solicitor a renewed sense
of the young man’s situation.
“Well, well,” he rejoined, with a certain kindness, “I suppose you must
do as you please. A case is not over until a verdict’s brought in. But
the witnesses are here--if you change mind.”
The young advocate turned his haggard face and bloodshot eyes upon his
monitor, but his rejoinder, whatever its nature, was banished from
his lips by the entrance of the judge. Almost in the same instant
the prisoner was put up. She was called upon at once to plead to the
indictment, “for that she was accused of the wilful murder of Thomas
Henry Barron upon the 12th of September.” In a voice that was scarcely
audible she pleaded, “I am not guilty.”