HELLIER’S chambers in Clifford’s Inn were a part of the past. So was the staircase that led to them.
Generations of lawyers and rats and the fogs of two hundred or so Novembers had left their traces on wall and ceiling, on floors that sagged, and stairs that groaned, and doors that jammed, and chimneys that smoked.
On windy nights one heard all sorts of quaint arguments in the chimney and behind the wainscoting. Steps of defunct lawyers sounded in the passage outside and sitting by the flickering fire-light before the lamp was lit you might, were you an imaginative man, have heard or seen pretty much anything your fancy willed.
The rooms had a smell of their own, quite peculiar to themselves and not unpleasant to an antiquarian mind.
A smell of must, or was it rats, or was it dead and gone lawyers? a faint, faint perfume, which, if one could bottle, one might label “Clifford’s Inn,” just as M. Warrick labels his productions, “Ess Bouquet,” or “New-mown Hay.”
Hellier’s sitting-room was a comfortable enough place despite the doors that would not open except when kicked, or at their own caprice, the skeleton-suggesting cupboards, the creaking floor and the sounds and scents of age.
There were plenty of books for one thing, a few good engravings, a comfortable easy chair, a hospitable-looking tobacco jar, a cigar cabinet not too big and not too small, a bright brass kettle on the hob, a canister of green tea in one of the musty-fusty smelling cupboards and a tantalus case on the table where Archbald’s Lunacy reposed from its labours of teaching under a volume of Baudelaire.
Evidently it was the room of a barrister with tastes of his own.
Hellier, since leaving Boulogne some weeks ago, with the dossier of the Lefarge case in his pocket, had spent some days in Paris.
He had gone into the case with that thoroughness which a man only exhibits when urged by either of the two great motive powers of life, ambition or love.