Henry Northcote

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.”