Henry Northcote

After the old woman had cleared the table of the breakfast things and she had gone away, Northcote sat nearly two hours in his easy chair at the fire, whose grate had never been allowed to consume so much fuel since it had been in his occupation, and with the aid of his brief proceeded to rehearse all the points of the case as they presented themselves to him. Warmth, food, and rest had overthrown his weariness, and his mind which in its operations was habitually so energetic began to shape and docket every conceivable aspect of the matter that could be of the slightest service to the accused. His reasoning was so amazingly copious that he foresaw and proceeded immediately to guard against a very real danger.

He might easily overdo it. The jury would not be men of education to whom fine points would appeal. Most probably they would be petty tradesmen whom it would be impossible to touch through the mind at all. He must take aim at their emotions. “I must use,” he said to himself in his mental analysis, “not a word beyond three syllables, and I must keep to the language of the Bible as well as I can. All my little pieces of embroidery, all my little bravura passages must bear that singularly excellent model in mind; its power of touching the commonest clay is so unfailing. Happily, in the course of my somewhat eclectic studies it has not been neglected. But beyond all I must try to get my address quite fine and close. One word too much and the whole thing fizzles out in a haze of perplexity. For that reason I am afraid I must reject some of my choicest and neatest thrusts at the moral code, which ought to tickle to death all minds with a gleam of humor. No, I must deny myself those bright excursions in which the cloven hoof of the artist betrays itself, and put my faith in a few common tricks performed with mastery. They at least should set up the honest English grocer on his hind legs and make him purr like anything.”

Before the ingenuity of this keen intelligence those obstacles which were bristling everywhere in the case, which to the average mind would have appeared insurmountable, began rapidly to melt away. It was with an ill-concealed joy that he shed the lime-light of paradox on each point that presented itself. That array of facts which a judge and jury of his countrymen would hug to their bosoms as so many pearls they could positively hold in their hands he would disperse with a touch of his wand. In the ripeness of his talent he foresaw that it would cost him no labor to demolish the evidence, to turn it inside out.

The world is full of great masterpieces that have been created out of nothing, haunting and beautiful things which have been spun by genius out of the air. And are not feats like these more wonderful than the exercise of the natural alchemy of change by which fairness is turned into ugliness, poetry into lunacy, good into evil, truth into error? The constructive faculty is rare and consummate; when it appears it leaves a track of light in the heavens; but the faculty of the demolisher is at work every day. Northcote was conscious that he was a born demolisher of “evidence,” of those trite dogmas, those brutalized formulas of the average sensual mind. When he looked for truth he sought it at the bottom of the well. On the morrow for the first time he would give free play to his dangerous faculty.

When he had blocked out and brought into harmony the main lines of his address to the jury, it occurred to him that his powers might receive an additional stimulus if he saw the accused, exchanged a few words with her, brought himself into intimate relation with her outlook. Up to this point she had been no more than an academic figure, around whom he had woven detached, somewhat Socratic arguments. He felt that to see and to know her would be to place yet another weapon in his hands, wherewith he would be enabled to dig another pit for those whom he had already come to look on as his, no less than her, deadly adversaries.

Already he was a little amused by his own complacency, the conviction of his own success. There was that curious quality within him that forbade his evoking the possibility of failure in so great an enterprise. He was so grotesquely sure of his own power to triumph over arbitrary material facts. Such a sense of personal infallibility could only spring from the profoundest ignorance, or from talent in its most virile and concentrated form. For what was more likely than that on inspection the accused would present one of the most abandoned figures of her calling? Was it not highly probable that nature, who takes such infinite precaution to safeguard her creatures, had caused this woman to assume the shape of a hag, a harpy, a thing of loathsome, terrible abasement? In that case, how would he dispose of evidence in its most salient form? How would he dispose of that immutable instinct, that deep conviction which is conferred by personality?

On the other hand, if the accused, by the aid of one of those miracles of which the world is so full, were to present the outlines of actual personal beauty, through whose agency common sensual minds are appealed to so easily, how slight would his difficulties be! In that event, so far as her advocate was concerned, the gilt would be off the gingerbread, his achievement would cease to be astonishing. Indeed, so finely tempered was his arrogance that to undertake the defence of one of this kind would be distasteful to it, so small would be the field afforded for personal glory. Rather than have to deal with one who could be trusted to be her own most efficient advocate, he would prefer that a veritable harpy out of a sewer should be placed in the dock. Could he have been allowed the privilege of choosing a theme for his powers, he believed that he should best consult the dictates of his talent by asking for a commonplace, unillumined woman of forty to be put up.

Deciding at last to seek an interview with the accused, he set forth to the offices of his client in Chancery Lane. On his way thither he occupied himself with drawing the portrait of the ideal subject as his mind conceived her. She would be forty, with her hair turning gray. She would be a plain, drab, slightly elusive figure, cowed a little by life, the privations she had undergone, and the ignominy and terror of her situation. The positive, the actual would be to seek in her; she would offer no target for too facile sympathies. Her inaccessibility to all suggestions of romance or of picturesqueness would lend to her predicament that extreme peril which it would be her advocate’s chief glory to surmount. All the same, he desired no ghoul, but a human being. She might be visibly stained, buffeted, common, broken, devoid of a meaning to eyes that were unacquainted with the poetry of misfortune, the irony of blunt truths; yet let a few rags of her sex remain, let her be capable of humiliation, of being rendered in piteous fear.

At the offices of Messrs. Whitcomb and Whitcomb in Chancery Lane he was informed that the senior partner was anxiously awaiting him.

“Ah, here you are at last!” exclaimed the solicitor, rising to receive him. “I thought you would have been round before.”

“I suppose you only honor a silk gown with a consultation in his own chambers?” said Northcote.

“Chambers, you call them! Well, did we not hold it last night?”

“One cannot very well hold a consultation with one’s client before one receives one’s brief.”

“What dignity!”

“Is it not at least half the stock in trade of mediocrity?”

“What modesty! Do I take it that the rather formidable ’Ercles vein of last night is really no more?”

“You may not. It is waxing higher and higher.”

“Defend us, gentle heaven and pious gods!”

“A truce to these pleasantries. Put on your hat and take me to the jail to see the accused.”

“You are going a little fast, my young friend, are you not? Is it wholly necessary that you should see the accused? Is it wholly to her interest or to yours?”

“Wholly, I assure you.”

“Well, before we get as far as that, I am particularly curious to know what line you have decided to take. Is it too much to ask that you have decided not to adhere to the acquittal? Speaking for myself, I must confess that the more consideration I give to the question, the less do I like that idea. Tobin would certainly have taken the line of insanity.”

“Last night you were good enough to inform me of that.”

“Well, my young friend, what is good enough for Tobin should be good enough for you.”

“That also you were good enough to inform me of last evening. But, my dear fellow, pray do not let us go over this ground again. Unfortunately Tobin and myself do not inhabit quite the same intellectual plane.”

“Unfortunately that appears to be the case,” said the solicitor.

“Tobin’s is the lower,” said the young man blandly.

“Tobin will be glad to know that.”

“I hope he may. After to-morrow he will be the first to admit it. But once more I crave to be allowed to conduct this case in my own way. I can listen to none; so be a good fellow, put on your hat, and come along to see the lady.”

“Well, I must say that for a youngster who is asked for the first time to conduct the defence in a capital charge you don’t lack confidence in yourself.”

“If I did I should not be holding the brief.”

“There is something in that. And in any case you will have to have your way now. It is too late in the day to stand up against you.”

Mr. Whitcomb pressed his bell and a clerk appeared.

“I want permission to interview Emma Harrison. Will you ring up the prison and see if you can get the governor to give it?”

The clerk withdrew.

“They are not likely to refuse it?” said Northcote.

“They ought not to be,” said Mr. Whitcomb, “but when you are confronted with Mr. Bumble in any shape or form, your motto must always be, ‘You never can tell.’”

“Arbitrary brute,” said the young man with vehemence, “I hate him altogether.”

“I also; but one should always do him the justice of conceding that he has arduous duties to perform.”

“Presumably that is the reason why he aggravates difficulties of those who are called to help him in performing them.”

“Is not that what we agree to call ‘human nature’? But really I think it is the duty of every citizen to think of him tenderly. He means well. He is not a bad fellow at bottom.”

“I have no patience,” said the young man truculently. “Mean well!—not a bad fellow at bottom! Why, he and his satellites are the custodians of the life and liberties of the whole population. One wonders how many innocent lives have been sworn away by this fat-witted blunderer who is barely able to write his own name.”

“You are too strong, my son. His responsibilities are immense; the wonder is that he plays up to them in the manner that he does.”

“You are all members of the same great and far-reaching society; you have all sworn allegiance to one another. Mediocrity arm in arm with Mediocrity; Law and Order arm in arm with Law and Order.”

“Insolent dog!”

“Better the insolence of the dog than the blind ineptitude of the 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.