He found in his desk the message which he had written to Lettice on the day of his crowning misfortune.
"Thank heaven I did not send it," he muttered to himself, as he tore it in pieces. "One week has made all the difference. Nothing could ever justify me in speaking to her again."
CHAPTER XXV.
MR. LARMER GIVES A BRIEF.
Mr. Larmer was not insensible to the notoriety which attached to him as solicitor for the defence in a case which was the talk of the town, and a topic of the sensational press. Not that it gave him any satisfaction to make capital out of the misfortunes of a friend; but he would have been something more than man and less than lawyer if he had despised the professional chance which had come in his way.
And in fact he did not despise it. There were one or two inexact statements in the reports of the proceedings at Bow Street—he had written to the papers and corrected them. Several caterers for the curiosity of the public hashed up as many scandals as they could find, and served them hot for the entertainment of their readers. It happened that these tales were all more or less to the discredit of Alan Walcott, and to print them before his trial was grossly unfair. Mr. Larmer wrote a few indignant words on this subject also, and, made about two in a thousand of the scandal-mongers ashamed of themselves. Not content with this he supplied a friend with one or two paragraphs relating to the case, which had the effect of stimulating the interest already aroused in it. By this plan he secured the insertion of a statement in the best of the society journals, which put the matter at issue in a fair and unprejudiced way, dwelling on such facts as the pending divorce-suit, the fining of Mrs. Walcott at Hammersmith, her molestation of her husband on various recent occasions, and her intrusion upon him in Alfred Place. This article, written with manifest knowledge of the circumstances, yet with much reserve and moderation, was a very serviceable diversion in Alan's favor, and did something to diminish the odium into which he had fallen.
Mr. Larmer would not have selected trial by ordeal in the columns of the newspapers as the best preparation for a trial before an English judge and jury; but the process was begun by others before he had a word to say in the matter, and his efforts were simply directed to making the most of the situation which had been created. A mass of prejudice had been introduced into the case by the worthy gentlemen who maintain that in these evil days the press is the one thing needful for moral and political salvation, and who never lose an opportunity of showing how easy it would be to govern a nation by leading articles, or to redeem humanity by a series of reports and interviews. Alan had given himself up for lost when he found himself in the toils of this prejudice; but Mr. Larmer saw a chance of turning it to good account both for his client and for himself, and not unnaturally took advantage of the awakened curiosity to put his friend's case clearly and vividly before the popular tribunal.
Alan nearly upset the calculation of the lawyer by his impatience of the interviewing tribe. Half-a-dozen of them found him out at different times, and would not take his no for an answer. At last worried by the pertinacity of one bolder and clumsier than all the rest, he took him by the shoulders and bundled him out of his room, and the insulted ambassador, as he called himself, wrote to his employer a particularly spiteful account of his reception, with sundry embellishments perhaps more picturesque than strictly accurate.
The next thing that Mr. Larmer had to do was to retain counsel, and he determined to secure as big a man as possible to conduct the defence. The case had assumed greater importance than would attach to an ordinary assault upon a wife by her husband. It was magnified by the surrounding circumstances, so that the interest felt in it was legitimate enough, apart from the spurious notoriety which had been added to it. Alan's literary fame had grown considerably within the last year, and his friends had been terribly shocked by the first bald statement that he had stabbed his unfortunate wife in a fit of rage.