Henry Northcote

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.”