Henry Northcote

Success had spread out both hands to Northcote, but the emotion she had aroused in him was not one of gratitude. He had spent many days of suffering, of mental darkness, during the years of his obscurity, but none had engulfed him in such humiliation as this upon which he had entered now. He had tasted coldness and hunger; he had known the stings of rage and despair; but these sensations appeared salutary in comparison with a hopelessness such as this.

How could he cherish an illusion in the matter, he who knew so much? He had made his choice deliberately under the spur of need; he had foreseen its enormous penalties; he had foreseen the degradation that was implied in the honors and emoluments that would accrue from its exercise. Yet, now these things had come upon him, he smote his breast and lifted up his voice in woe. Less than a week ago, in the freedom of his penury, in the license of his failure, he had had the power to spurn these lures. Yet in almost the next breath he had yielded to the call of his ambition; and in his first walk upon the perilous path he had elected to choose, he had shown an ease and lightness of motion that were audacious, astonishing.

What was there to deplore? His triumph had been so patent as to win the applause of the world. For the first time in his life money was in his pocket. That woman of courage who had striven so heroically for his welfare would meet with her reward. She would be enabled to end her days at ease. In those somewhat unilluminated eyes Money had always seemed to divide the place of honor with Duty. She would go to her grave, this upright and courageous one, with a p an upon her lips, because her son, her one talent, had in her old age been increased to her tenfold. Those worn hands would need to toil no more.

After all, this success, which to an honest nature was so embittering, had a curious virtue of its own if it could fulfil such an office. And it was hardly for the like of himself to be troubled with these intimations. Morality, like other privileges, was for those who could afford to enjoy it; it was for those who had a snug little annuity in the funds. Those who had shivered in penury, who had known the look of want, had purchased their right to walk unfearingly by the light of their necessity. And he had only parted with his dreams after all; he had only transmuted airy nothings into explicit gold of the state. Let the visionary who nourished his heart upon the unattainable despise Crœsus as before, but let the well-fed and valiant materialist render due homage to that lusty and pagan old fellow. You could not keep your cake and eat it; you could not resign your ideals and yet hope to inhabit your castle in Spain.

It always came back to the question of the Choice. Was it not a sign-post that headed every path; did it not denote the convergence and the parting of every road? It was his own will which had selected the broad and muddy highway of the many, instead of the narrow and precipitous mountain ascent which was only for the feet of the few. In a choice of this kind there might be an affront to his nature, but once having embraced it, it was weakness to repine. He must shed this ferocious arrogance of his. He was now of the common herd, no longer of the sacred few.

The strangeness of his position held his thoughts all day. That which he had purchased had been obtained at a cost beyond rubies; it was not worth one-half he had paid for it, but as he could never recover his outlay he was bound to go on. It remained for him now to play the part of the cynic and philosopher. It was not the highest style of the hypersensitive man on the defensive, but the patchwork target would have to serve until he found the cunning to provide himself with a more efficient cover for his wounds. Yet when all was said the shaft had sunk to a cruel depth in that quivering nature. Heart and mind were lacerated.

At the table at the aerated breadshop at which he took his lunch, two middle-aged clerks from a city counting-house, musty, cowed, and solemn men, were discussing the trial wherein the morning journals with their unerring instinct had discovered the element of sensation.

“——so she got off?”

“Yes, they brought in a verdict of not guilty. My father-in-law was on the jury. He says it was her lawyer’s speech that saved her. He says there wasn’t a dry eye in the court, and the poor old judge cried just like a child.”

“No!”

“Yes! He says he never heard a speech like that before in his life, and he says if he lives to be a hundred years old he will never forget it.”

“Who was her lawyer? Sir Somebody, K. C., M. P.?”

“My father-in-law says not. He says he was quite a young chap without any reputation. But such a voice—he says it just went through you and made you shiver.”

“Something like Irving?”

“My father-in-law says he must have been acting, yet there didn’t seem to be a bit of the actor about him. That’s where he was so wonderful; struck no attitudes; never even raised his voice. Every word seemed to come straight out of him, as though he just couldn’t help it, and yet at first all the jury thought she was a thorough bad one.”

“So she was, I expect.”

“I dare say; but after what her lawyer had said they never thought of bringing in a verdict of guilty. My father-in-law says he was a wonderfully read young fellow, and he must have known the Bible almost by heart from the way in which he used it in his speech. And such an eye as he had too! My father-in-law says it looked like that of an eagle; and when the jury retired to consider the verdict the foreman, who had got a weak heart, had to have brandy or he would have fainted dead away.”

“It was very strange that the judge should have died suddenly.”

“Excitement killed him, they do say.”

“You would think that a judge would be so used to that sort of thing that it wouldn’t affect him.”

“Well, my father-in-law has been many times on the common jury, but he says this young lawyer beat all he had ever heard. He says it doesn’t matter how clever the ordinary lawyer may be, you can always tell when he’s putting it on. But this young chap was so quiet and solemn that he simply made you shiver.”

“Just a trick.”

“They all knew that, yet he made them so that they couldn’t help their feelings. My father-in-law says as soon as they retired to the jury-room to find their verdict, old Bill Oaks—you know the old prize-fighter what keeps the Blue Swan at Hackney—who was on the jury, he just spat in the corner and wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and he says, ‘Well, mateys, I’d reckon we’d ’ang no more women.’”

“Bill Oaks said that?”

“Those were his words. And it just shows the power that young chap must have had to make a common fellow like old Bill Oaks say a thing like that.”

“Some men are born lucky. With a mind of that sort he will have made a fortune in no time. In a year or so he will be keeping his yacht and driving his motor-car. It is a funny world when you come to think about it. Here is a chap like me, been a clerk in the Providential for thirty-five years. My hours are nine-thirty till five; I have never once been late, nor had a day off for illness; and my salary per week is thirty-eight and a tizzey, with a pound a week pension at sixty provided I keep up my payments to the fund. I have never done a wrong action as far as I know; I go to church once on Sunday; I teach in the Sunday school; I give five shillings to the poor every Christmas; I have brought up five children well and decently; I always acted the part of the gentleman to my wife while she was alive, and now she is dead I always keep fresh flowers on her grave summer and winter; I’ve paid my rates and taxes regular; the landlord has never had to ask me twice for the rent; and what’s it all amount to? Why, I leave off just where I began. Yet I consider myself a cut above this young man, with all his gifts, who will make a fortune by saving murderers from the gallows.”

The speaker, a sallow, stunted little fellow, uttered his words in a quiet, yet dogged staccato, as though he were issuing a challenge which he knew could not be taken up. His sharp, quaint cockney speech was almost musical in its incisive energy.

“Happiness don’t depend on money,” said his friend.

“You have got to have money, though, before you can believe it.”

Northcote overheard this conversation while he munched a sandwich. It afforded him the keenest interest. He moved out into the eager crowd which thronged the Strand. Yet again his old passion for perambulating the streets came upon him. There was a sense of adventure in dodging the traffic at a breakneck pace, and in elbowing his way through the press. Until the evening he wandered about in the mud and the December mists. He was sick and weary; the conflict within him gave him no rest; yet there was a fierce joy to be gained in mingling with the virile, many-sided life that was about him everywhere.

Thoroughly tired out at last, he took a frugal dinner at a restaurant, and accompanied it with a bottle of inexpensive wine. He lingered over his meal and made an attempt to read an evening paper, but found he could not do so. The vortex in which his nature had been plunged absorbed the whole of his thoughts.