Henry Northcote

This irrational proceeding served to liberate Northcote from his thrall. Even as he felt his mother’s lips and witnessed her ridiculous flight, he was able to divine the nature of the impulse. It was the expression of that unconquerable instinct by which her sex affirms itself.

He walked to the window which commanded a view of the pavements below. He watched the two figures mingle in all their rustic quaintness with the heterogeneous streams of persons and traffic which defiled before his gaze. It followed their every deviation among this ruthless swarm of Londoners until they were swallowed by the mist of the December morning. The last detail he was able to discern, which served to emphasize their slightly ridiculous character as seen from this altitude, was the large empty basket bobbing about in the hand of the girl. Their rusticity in combination with the wild hurry of their flight marked them out as almost grotesque among the spruce and purposeful crowd through which they made their way. With a pang he remembered that neither of them had ever seen the metropolis before. Whither were they flying? How would they spend their day? What would be the end of their ill-starred adventure?

He continued to strain his eyes after them until they grew dark with the effort. He then left the window and turned round to find that his visitor was standing in front of the fire. She was yawning.

“A facer for the old Methodist,” she said, with a short, nonchalant laugh.

Northcote clenched his hands. An almost ungovernable fury caused his ears to sing.

“I know what is in your mind,” said the woman calmly. “Get it done.”

“I hope you will go,” said Northcote in a low tone.

“Get it done,” said the woman. “Tear my head from my body and I shall respect you.”

Northcote was barely able to point to the door. The woman looked at him with supreme effrontery. She was utterly divested of fear. Her nostrils seemed to be dilated in scorn, and her dark eyes were full of mockery.

“I never saw anything half so funny,” she said, “as the worthy old widow of the clergyman running back shamefaced to kiss her saint and hero. The three of you made a picture for an almanac, as my dear father would have said. You reminded me of nothing so much as a stuck pig. The dear old hymnologist and psalm-singer, who had spoken such brave nonsense, looked just like a poor silly old cow with a red face; and that stupid little baby-face sticking up the holly, well, she was just like one of those silly dolls with wax cheeks, which has a button which you press and it changes its color.”

Northcote was faint already with the dreadful struggle he was waging. Suddenly, as if touched by inspiration, he turned in the direction of the door. Yet the woman was too quick for him. She leaped before him and barred his course.

“I am asking you to pluck my throat out with your great hands,” she cried with fury. “Don’t you understand, you fool? Don’t you understand, I say? I cannot, I will not go back to the gutter; yet I cannot go anywhere else. Why don’t you do as you are told?”

“Do go!” he cried weakly, piteously. The veins were swelling in his neck.

He strove to thrust her aside, but she resisted him; and when he tried again she fixed her strong teeth in his hand ferociously.

“Do it now!” she cried, watching his eyes with the baleful hunger of a she-wolf.

“You are not worth it,” said Northcote, recovering possession of himself.

She spat in his face.

Northcote began to realize that he had to deal with a mad woman.

She plucked a knife from the table. By this time, however, the man had all his wits about him, and the movement was anticipated. He had seized her before she could make use of it.

He knew immediately that he had entered upon a terrible struggle. He possessed immense physical power, but the creature upon whom he had to exercise it was extremely supple and vigorous, and, above all, was now a maniac. She fought with the fury of a lioness. Her unbridled rage seemed to make her more than a match for him. Screaming foul oaths, and resorting to devices that a wild beast would not have employed, the issue hung in the balance. Inch by inch, however, he obtained a stronger purchase on her body, and it writhed under his great hands like that of a huge snake. He grunted under the Titanic exertion of forcing her to the ground. He shifted his hands to her throat, and once he felt it yield to their gripe, his own pent-up fury broke forth in an uncontrollable manner. Hardly conscious of what he did, he shook her with the passion of a wounded bear. She gave a low moan, and a spray of blood came on to her lips.

It fell upon him with a shock of surprise that her struggles had ceased. She had fallen stiff under his hands. When he relaxed his grip she fell to the ground, measuring her length with dull heaviness like a sack of flour. In an instant a revolting idea stifled the dreadful frenzy of the demoniac. She was dead. Those enormous hands of his had pressed out her life without knowing it.

Overcome with horror, Northcote sank to his knees beside the body. It was stark, and already a little cold. He rolled the corpse over, so that its face was exposed; he felt for the beating of the heart. There was not a movement of any sort to enkindle his touch. The face was convulsed, tinged with purple, mottled with gray. The eyes were glazed, and even more hideous than when he looked into them last. In his anguish, he gave a little cry, and rose from his knees, and pressed his hands to his head.

His first thought was for himself. By this irrevocable act he was destroyed. His dreams had come to a brutally abrupt termination. That high destiny which was to shake the world had petered out in a shameful public ignominy.

In a pitiable state of terror he fell on his knees again. There was a sort of morbid reflex action within him that seemed to draw him back to the body, to force him to pass his hands across the corpse. It was now cold. A stinging fury made him writhe. Was it for this foul, uncanny monster that he must forfeit one of the most precious jewels that had ever been devised by nature? He was a young man; life was before him; there was the magic talisman in his spirit that could bend the whole world to his purposes. He gnashed his teeth with impotent fury, and rose biting at his nails.

“This is a dreadful tragedy,” he muttered. “This is a dreadful tragedy. Think of such a one as myself being lost to mankind.”

His own grotesque words caused him to laugh. That surprising genie, that had been destined to conquer a stupidly material world, enabled him to present himself to himself in his amazing predicament. He could hardly preserve his gravity before a spectacle so astonishing.

“The genie is deriding me,” he said.

That mute and distorted face that was looking up at him with an insane leer had no message of its own. It was only significant to the advocate as the price of all that he was about to give up. Yet suddenly he remembered this strange creature he had broken with his hands as he had first encountered her in the prison. In no animate thing could the desire for life have been more intensely strong. Overmastering as was his own desire at this moment, hers, at that time, had been no less so. She must have life; she must see the sun and the clouds and the trees. The common earth had acquired fresh symbols for that debauched vision. And how nearly she had come to possess this strange new thing that she craved. One heaven-born man had all but given it to her. He had so nearly done so, that for one brief instant she had been able to taste it with those blood-stained lips. And when she had discovered that strong and shining as this one man was, his was not the divine valiance of those early mystics who roamed the hills in the childhood of the world, that he had not the simplicity to provide her with that which she craved, she insisted on receiving death at his hands in lieu of the life he could not give her.

It was then, that he took a little compassion. It was a loathsome and terrible destiny to which this human being had been called. By what subtle twist or abrogation of her noble faculties had she come to live her days on such lines as these. This avowed and ruthless enemy of society had been of no common or spurious clay. It was not a small nature that had taken a revenge so bitter. A little more and it had been how much? Another grain of courage, another ounce of power, and she, too, poor maimed and twisted thing of beauty, would have been numbered among the valiant.

It added a sharp touch to her slayer’s compassion, that, in regarding her mutilated image, she became the mirror of his own. He saw the parallel between the living and the dead. Every point in this analogy was so perfect that a mental fascination lurked in its rendering. Did the texture of his own fate admit of any more lenient inquiry? He also would have entered his kingdom had he but possessed the little more that meant so much. Were they not both in the beginning the victims of a fine and original talent, for she whom he had slain had been the offspring of a man of the first genius. Her thoughts were his thoughts; her desires were his desires; the tragedy of each had been that their fineness had been immolated upon the altar of its base surroundings; both had failed to scale those precipitous mountain-places from which alone it was possible to stand in true perspective to their own characters.

As he pressed home this analogy with that curious grim subtlety that was always one of his chief pleasures to employ, he began to feel in his own veins that intense desire of hers to live the life that nature had appointed, to discover an ampler, a truer self-expression. How was it possible to arrest those functions that had not had an opportunity to fulfil themselves? There was a ravishing vigor in his blood; he must not perish as a felon, he to whom all things were so full of meaning.

The overwhelming force of these thoughts translated them into action. It had already come to him that to obey his overmastering desire he must conceal his deed. He raised the heavy corpse in his arms; yet powerful as he was it proved too much for him to bear. Therefore he dragged it across the room, and with herculean labor contrived to hoist it on to the bed. He then drew the curtain across to hide it from the view of those who should chance to enter the room. Afterwards he proceeded to ponder the evolution of a means to ensure his own personal security.

He was still engrossed with this occupation when the old charwoman entered his room. She had brought him some clean linen. It was contained in a basket which it was her custom to deposit on a chair behind the curtain at the foot of his bed.

“You can leave it here, Mrs. Brown,” said Northcote, indicating with his finger a place on the floor.

“I had better take it out of the way, sir,” said the old woman. “Besides, I have not made the bed.”

“Never mind the bed,” said Northcote; “that won’t matter at all.”

“Oh, no, sir, it would never do for you not to have your bed made,” said the old woman, in a tone of quiet but determined expostulation.

“I tell you I don’t want it made,” said Northcote. “You can go.”

The tone of his voice seemed to strike the old woman. Formerly he had always been kind and gentle to her; he had never used such a tone to her before.

“Very well, sir,” she said meekly, looking at him with scared eyes.

Still, however, with a perversity which in the circumstances he could only regard as diabolical, she did not go. For suddenly she recollected that the day before she had lost her shawl, and it occurred to her now that it was not at all unlikely that she had left it beneath the bed. It was not in the least probable that she would find it there, but one of those irrational side-currents to mental activity, which science finds so baffling, had suggested to her that she might.

“What do you want now?” cried Northcote, as she moved towards the curtain.

“I want my shawl, sir.”

Her meekness exasperated him beyond endurance.

“Where is your shawl?”

“I think, sir, it might be under the bed.”

Her hand was already stretched towards the curtain. Northcote was standing against his writing-table, and near his elbow was the leaden paper-weight which he used for the destruction of rats. He took it in his hand and poised it in a fashion that would enable him to hurl it with all his force at the back of the old woman’s head.

For some occult reason she withdrew her hand from the curtain, and retired without pulling it back.

“Of course I remember now,” she said. “I lent my shawl to Mary Parker while the snow was about. I have such a bad memory,” she added plaintively.

“There is one little errand I should like you to do for me,” said Northcote, looking at her calmly. “Do you mind fetching me a gallon of paraffin? You can get it at an oilman’s or an ironmonger’s. I am going to try a new kind of fire.”

He handed her half a crown.

“Very good, sir,” said the old woman.

As he listened to her descending the stairs with little toddling steps, he balanced the paper-weight thoughtfully in the palm of his hand.

“Those five grandchildren will never come much nearer to the workhouse, you perverse old woman,” he said with a whimsical laugh.

He had already formed his plan, and like all subtle minds which yearn for a finality which they so seldom obtain, the definiteness of its nature enhanced his capacity for action. He discarded his carpet slippers in favor of boots, and set his hat, gloves, and overcoat in a place where he could take them up immediately. He placed the briefs confided to him by the solicitor carefully in his pocket. There were no other portable objects of value belonging to him except a quantity of large and loose manuscript sheets, numbering some two thousand pages, the “Note towards an Essay on Optimism,” that fruit of six years’ labor. These he collected from divers drawers in the writing-table, and piled them into one upstanding heap.

He stood surveying this proud edifice with a rueful smile when the old woman returned at last, bearing a gallon of paraffin contained in a tin.

“Thank you,” he said, taking it from her. “You may keep the change. If I spoke to you rather roughly just now, I hope you will not mind it. The fact is, I have a great deal of work to get through, and it has made me rather irritable.”

The old charwoman, immensely mollified by the tone in which she was now addressed, thanked him humbly, and after standing a moment irresolutely, in which she further considered the question of how far it would be now expedient to attempt the making of the bed, a daily duty which with all her soul she yearned to perform, decided it would not be politic to reopen the subject. Therefore she retired crestfallen, because she had failed to carry out a régime which was the foremost function of her life; yet a little exalted also by the apology which had been so feelingly rendered to her by one who wore a nimbus; and above all, tremulous with excitement by reason of having ninepence in her pocket which was pure gain, a solid lump of treasure-trove.

As soon as she had gone, Northcote “sported his oak” and locked the door. It was indeed necessary that he should not be disturbed in his labors; and he took elaborate precautions to render them effectual. First he broke up all the chairs he possessed, and strewed the fragments over the corpse. He pulled down the curtains, and flung them upon the pyre. He gathered several armfuls of books of jurisprudence and philosophy, dilapidated articles which had been purchased second-hand, tore them in pieces, and strewed them about. He pulled a wooden box from under the bed, flung out the contents, consisting of old clothes, and having broken up the box into splinters, heaped those up also. Finally, he gathered in his arms that formidable bundle, the “Note towards an Essay on Optimism,” and sprinkled its two thousand leaves upon the sacrifice.

By pressing into service every combustible article the room contained, the pile that he built mounted up to the roof. Having arranged the great mass to his satisfaction, he poured the paraffin over it. He then kindled one of the splinters of the chair into a fagot, and applied the lighted end to one of the saturated blankets of the bed. He then ran to the door, catching up his hat and coat as he did so, and unlocked it. Barely had he time to do this ere the whole of the pyre, under the excitation of the oil, had burst into a sheet of flame. He changed the key, and locked the door after him.

Putting on his hat and coat and gloves he walked down the four flights of stairs, past various open doors with clerks behind them, yet in so doing betrayed neither sign of haste nor discomposure. At the bottom of the last flight he was accosted by an elderly lame man, who bore unmistakable traces of being the clerk of an attorney.

“Can you tell me if Mr. Northcote’s chambers are on the top floor, sir?” he asked courteously.

“My name is Northcote. Can I be of service to you?”

The clerk opened a small bag that he carried, and selecting an oblong piece of paper from among half a dozen similar documents lying within it, handed it to the advocate.

“Messrs. Peberdy, Ward, and Peberdy, No. 3 Shortt’s Yard, sir,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Northcote, placing it in the inner pocket of his overcoat.

At that moment a clerk from one of the upper stories came running down the stairs.

“The place is on fire,” he cried. “The top landing is so full of smoke you can’t go up to it.”

“I thought there was a smell of burning,” said Northcote. “I say, it must be my room!”

“If you are Mr. Northcote, it is certainly your room.”

The advocate turned round hastily, and proceeded to ascend the steep and rickety old stairs. He was turned back, however, as he had anticipated, by other clerks who were running down.

“The place is on fire,” they cried excitedly. “The smoke will choke you.”