Henry Northcote

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.

“’E’s not got ’er off yet, and ’e won’t nuther,” rejoined X012. “She’s a wrong un; an’ if they let ’er off, it won’t be fair to peace.”

“Well, ’e can talk. ’E kind of got ’old of me. I could ha’ stood there all day.”

“’E kind o’ did me too, but I should shake him off in court. You’ll see the beak will put a muzzle on ’im. He warn’t talkin’ law, and you’re no good in court unless you talk law. The old bloke and them K. C.’s will not stand that sort o’ lip, see if they does.”

“Well, ’ere’s the sergeant comin’. But just to show there’s no ill-feelin’, I’ll ’ave ’arf a pint with you, mate, that ’e gets her off.”

“Make it a pint, matey. A pint seems more legal.”