Henry Northcote

“Waiter!” called the solicitor at this point. “More coffee, if you please. Let it be hot and strong.” Turning to Northcote, he added: “Our minds have grown so subtle with that claret we’ve got to find out where we are.”

“Narcotics are not usually the friends of truth,” said his companion.

“My worthy Samuel Taylor,” laughed the solicitor, “I hope you will not forget I want to get to Norbiton to-night.”

“There is one other point,” said the young man imperturbably, “on which I wish to render myself clear.”

Mr. Whitcomb permitted himself a shrug of unmistakable expostulation.

“What, another!” he muttered under his breath. “This fellow is the devil!”

“I do not propose to take the line of insanity.”

Northcote spoke with a quietness which seemed to deepen the reverberation of Mr. Whitcomb’s subsequent exclamation.

“Then you hang her!”

“On the contrary,” said Northcote, “I promise an acquittal.”

For a moment the solicitor was robbed of speech by this extraordinary announcement.

“Upon my word,” he exclaimed, with a more manifest impatience than any he had yet shown, “you can hardly have read your brief. There is nothing to extenuate the crime; and the evidence of it is overwhelming.”

“Circumstantial, apparently.”

“You must know that in a capital charge the prosecution relies almost invariably upon circumstantial evidence.”

“So much the worse for it in this particular instance.”

“I am at a loss to understand.” The solicitor spoke in accents of alarm. “There is not a man living who could overthrow the present evidence.”

The young man smiled darkly. The symptoms of his inebriation had yielded to the clarifying influence of a liqueur and two cups of strong black coffee. His calmness was now forming a memorable contrast to the marked excitement of the older man.

“My dear Mr. Whitcomb,” he said, “I suggest, as you wish to get to Norbiton, that we adjourn this discussion until Friday evening, by which time Emma Harrison, alias Cox, alias Marshall, will be restored to society.”

“Such an undertaking is entirely reckless,” said the solicitor bluntly. “Quite the last thing that Tobin himself would attempt would be to upset the theory of the prosecution. The chain of evidence could not be more complete. Even he, in the opinion of many the most brilliant common law man we have at the present moment at the bar, would be content to urge extenuating circumstances, and call witnesses in their support.”

“Since you have seen fit to entrust the conduct of this case to me,” said Northcote, “I shall beg to be conceded as free a hand as would have been conceded to Michael Tobin.”

“Is your request quite reasonable?” said the solicitor. “Tobin has years of experience and success behind him.”

“You can trust me not to attempt more than I can perform,” said Northcote.

“Really, sir,” said Mr. Whitcomb, genuinely alarmed by such an obduracy, “I cannot admit your right, in the circumstances in which you stand at present, to overstep the bounds that are so clearly indicated by persons of experience.”

“I take this brief into court free of all restriction,” was the young man’s rejoinder.

“That one can hardly consent to,” said the solicitor. “Would you say it is quite legitimate to make such a stipulation? We have our witnesses on the line of insanity, and we must ask to have them called.”

“But do you not see,” said Northcote, “that if we call those witnesses we admit the theory of the prosecution, and cut the ground from under our own feet?”

“Certainly, certainly. One would have thought that so much would be self-evident.”

“Yet you sought me out in the capacity of a fighter. I take it that had you not desired to fight you would have gone straightway to Harris.”

“I can only admit the possibilities of a fight within limits. The woman’s guilt is established beyond question; our only concern is to mitigate its degree.”

“For my own part,” said the advocate, “I am not prepared to accept your proposition. To my mind, so far is the woman’s guilt from being already established, that I am prepared to give an undertaking that it never will be established.”

The solicitor drummed his fingers on the table-cloth.

“I should like Tobin to hear you say that. I wish you had been at the police-court when the case came before the magistrate. There is enough evidence to hang an archdeacon.”

“Very likely. But we shall be getting back to those abstract principles for entertaining which I have already suffered reproof.”

The solicitor gave an uneasy eye to his watch.

“You force me to deliver an ultimatum,” said he, in an uncompromising tone. “Please have the goodness to give an undertaking to conduct the defence on the lines indicated by Tobin, or return the brief.”

A wave of blood surged through the brain of the young advocate. A dismal sickness overspread his veins. Tantalus was about to pluck away that which he had fasted and prayed for before he could take it in his grasp.

“You have entrusted it to me already,” he said, in a dull, dry voice.

“In a case of this magnitude,” said the solicitor, with an almost brutal precision, “I reserve to myself the right to alter my mind. You have forced me to issue an ultimatum. Accept or reject it, whichever you choose.”

The solicitor called for his bill in a hectoring manner, and threw a bank-note on the waiter’s salver.

The young advocate, in the meantime, buttoned the brief in the breast-pocket of his somewhat threadbare black coat.

“What is your decision?” said the solicitor, regarding the young man with an insolent coolness.

“You can’t have back your brief,” said Northcote. “You gave it to me.”

“It can only be held conditionally,” said Mr. Whitcomb, “and the conditions are perfectly easy to accept.”

“The brief was delivered unconditionally into my keeping,” said Northcote, in an arid voice. “And,” he added, with a sudden gleam of the eyes as an overpowering recollection of his destiny came back to him, “you will have no reason to regret your act.”

Before the solicitor had framed a reply the waiter had returned with the receipted bill.

“Keep the change,” said the solicitor, “and call a hansom.”

The waiter withdrew.

“Do I take it,” said the solicitor, with an incisive drawl in his speech as he turned to Northcote, “that you have said no?”

“I have said no in the first place to your restrictions,” said Northcote, looking him full in the eyes, “and in the second to your ultimatum.”

“Then with all possible reluctance I must ask you to have the goodness to return the brief.”

“With an equal reluctance I feel I must decline to do so,” said Northcote, speaking through tight lips.

For a moment the solicitor was taken aback by this pointblank refusal.

“But—but—” he stammered, “surely this is most unprofessional. Such a thing has never happened to me in all my twenty years of practice.”

“And I don’t suppose,” rejoined the young advocate, “it will ever happen to you again. But suppose we leave the plane of our professionalism, step down from our platform, and approach the prejudices of each other in a rational spirit.”

“No more argument, I beseech you,” said the solicitor sternly; “I’ve got to get to Norbiton. Return the brief, and we will say no more. You are not the man for this case. You have a bee in your bonnet; you have too many brains. I think none the worse of you, mind; I respect you; you have your ideas; one day they may prove valuable, but not in common law. You have mistaken your métier, that is all. We will say you are above your work; at any rate, with all deference to Michael Tobin, I shall prefer to see Harris holding briefs of ours before a common-sense English jury and a matter-of-fact English judge when it comes to the capital charge.”

“If you are present in court on Friday,” said Northcote, “you will find that I, not Harris, will still be holding the brief you entrusted to my care.”

“Upon my word,” muttered the solicitor to himself, “this fellow is a madman, a lunatic. I dare say he’s been starving so long that a square meal has turned his brain.”

Involuntarily his eyes began to traverse the face of the man who sat bolt upright with arms folded at the other side of the table. It was excessively pale, flushed with wine and conversation, and strangely, exquisitely mobile. It had a kind of gaunt delicacy, but the obvious traces of suffering were permeated by a remarkable power. The features were irregular yet not unpleasing, the nose was straight and incisive, the eyes deep and luminous, the mouth large and full-lipped. The general expression was sombre, because it was so bluntly dominating, yet it was rendered memorable by many subtle qualities. Clearly it was one of those faces which to see was never to forget.

Mr. Whitcomb, in spite of his desire to get to Norbiton, and the severe tests to which his constitutional arrogance as an immensely successful man of the world had been subjected, owed too much to his trained powers of observation to lay them aside at a moment so remarkable.

“This fellow is cut to a big pattern,” was his mental comment. “That is a splendid mask for an advocate. Upon my soul, if he were not so mad I think I should be inclined to back him heavily. Yet I believe he is literally starving.”

The solicitor rose abruptly from the table to dispel his reverie.

“Rather than you should feel you have ground for complaint,” said he abruptly, as if touched by compassion, “I shall ask you to allow me to advance half of your fee; and to-morrow I will send you some other sort of work.”

Mr. Whitcomb unrolled a note for ten pounds and gave it to Northcote.

“Now,” he said, “kindly return the brief and I will go.”

Northcote crumpled up the note and thrust it in his pocket.

“I accept half my fee,” said he, “not as a bribe, but as a retainer. By this means I pledge myself to conduct the case to its appointed issue.”

“Pray do not let us misunderstand one another,” said the solicitor, with a sense of being trapped. “This brief is withdrawn definitely; I ask you to return it to me. I give you ten pounds as a solatium for losing your fee.”

“I cannot construe the situation in that fashion,” said the young man calmly.

“This is not a question of construction,” said the solicitor, with his anger beginning to announce itself; “it is a question of hard fact. Your brief is withdrawn.”

“And I,” said Northcote, with expansive bluntness, “do not submit to its withdrawal.”

Before this impasse which had presented itself in a manner so definite, the solicitor, whose patience had been strained beyond the breaking-point, could only take refuge in a series of imprecations.

“Fellow’s drunk,” he muttered. “Shall have to see him first thing to-morrow. But it is most irritating that he should refuse to give up the papers when time is so short. It looks like an application for a postponement after all.”

The solicitor turned for the last time to the advocate.

“It is a quarter-past twelve,” he said brusquely, “and I am going home. And I would like to urge you to gain reflection by the aid of a few hours’ sleep, because I shall look for that brief to be delivered at my offices at a quarter-past ten to-morrow morning. Good night.”

He held out his hand; Northcote ignored it.

“You appear to impugn my sobriety,” said the latter, “and that is a pity, because in all my life I have never felt my mind to be quite so clear as it is to-night. Perhaps it is not fair to expect you to appreciate the point at which I have arrived, and why it is impossible for me to restore your brief.” He pressed his hands over the bundle of papers in his coat. “You see your brief is my destiny.”

A final expression of somewhat forcible disapproval escaped Mr. Whitcomb, and he moved away to the room in which he had deposited his hat and coat.

As an attendant was assisting to envelop the solicitor’s portliness in these articles, it annoyed him to find that Northcote had followed him.

“Why not spare one this trouble to which you are putting one?” he said reproachfully. “Why not be moderately reasonable about it?”

“Ah, you see,” said Northcote with a smile, as he presented the ticket for his own extremely time-worn hat and coat, “even a thing so primitive as ‘the moderately reasonable’ must submit itself to the peculiarly elusive mental plane one is doomed to inhabit.”

“Peace! peace!” said the solicitor. “No more of that!”

“Attorney and advocate, judge and jury,” said the young man, as he rummaged in vain among his pockets to find a tip for the attendant, “justice and equity, the prisoner at the bar and the victim of circumstance,—one and all are to be poised upon the same arbitrary moral elevation, to submit to the mandates of a tribunal which is the creation of that egregiously warped and time-serving thing upon which we bestow the name of The Majority.”

“Peace! peace!” said the solicitor, unable in spite of himself to repress a laugh at the amazed face of the cloak-room attendant, and moving to where his hansom awaited him; “give up those papers here and now like a good fellow, and save me a great deal of time and worry. If Harris doesn’t see them first thing to-morrow it means a postponement, and we don’t want that.”

“There is need for neither,” said Northcote, buttoning up his threadbare overcoat. “But, ye gods and little fishes! what is the name for the total blindness, the pathetic obtuseness, which has eclipsed the faculties of this connoisseur, this expert? Here is one who has been angling for years for a real authentic fish from the sea, yet when one plumps into his net, being accustomed to nothing but the sight of minnows, he doesn’t even guess at his travaille.”

By this time the solicitor had fled precipitately through the vestibule of the restaurant, and stood in the portico awaiting his hansom.