“How could I ever have forgotten?” said George, aloud, as he walked home. “I remember her now as if it was yesterday.”
Memory, like much else that appertains to man, is a queer thing, and the name of Peckton had supplied the one link missing in his recollection. How, indeed, had he ever forgotten it? Can a man forget his first brief any more than his first love?—so like are they in their infinite promise, so like in their very finite results!
The picture was now complete in his mind: the little, muggy court at Peckton; old Dawkins, his wig black with age, the rest of him brown with snuff; the fussy clerk; the prosecuting counsel, son to the same fussy clerk; he himself, thrusting his first guinea into his pocket with shaking hand and beating heart (nervous before old Daw! Imagine!); the fat, peaceful policeman; the female warder, in her black straw-bonnet trimmed with dark-blue ribbons; and last of all, in the dock, a young girl, in shabby, nay, greasy, black, with pale cheeks, disordered hair, and swollen eyelids, gazing in blank terror on the majesty of the law, strangely expressed in the Recorder’s ancient person. And, beyond all doubt or imagination of a doubt, the girl was Gerald’s bride, Neaera Witt.
“I could swear to her to-day!” cried George.
She had scraped together a guinea for his fee. “I don’t know where she got it from,” the fat policeman said with professional cynicism as he gave it to George. “She pleads guilty and wants you to address the court.” So George had, with infinite trepidation, addressed the court.
The girl had a father—drunk when not starving, and starving when not drunk. Now he was starving, and she had stolen the shoes (oh! the sordidness of it all!) to pawn, and buy food—or drink. It was a case for a caution merely—and—and—and George himself, being young to the work, stammered and stuttered as much from emotion as from fright. You see the girl was pretty!
All old Daw said was, “Do you know anything about her, policeman?” and the fat policeman said her father was a bad lot, and the girl did no work, and——
“That’s enough,” said old Daw; and, leaning forward, he pronounced his sentence:
“I’ll deal lightly with you. Only”—shaking a snuffy forefinger—“take care you don’t come here again! One calendar month, with hard labour.”
And the girl, gazing back at honest old Daw, who would not have hurt a fly except from the Bench, softly murmured, “Cruel, cruel, cruel!” and was led away by the woman in the black straw bonnet.