“Upon my soul, I have a great mind to go through the lot,” he said, livid with fury.
“Pray do so, by all means, dear boy,” said Mr. Whitcomb, with that unction which never forsook him, “and you will find your art-loving countrymen will avenge this outrage upon the private and peculiar form of their culture by one day insisting that your own effigy is placed on these historic shelves.”
XIX
THE ACCUSED
Renewed assaults upon these interesting objets d’art were averted by sounds outside in the corridor. Northcote imposed a superhuman control on all his faculties that his agitation might be restrained, when the door opened and two shadowy figures, barely visible at first, crept silently into the darkness of the room.
The two figures were those of women. By the time Northcote had evoked a sufficient force of will to meet their outline, the one that first encountered his glance was so brutalized and repulsive that his eyes were detained with a fascinated sense of horror. It belonged to a creature that was degraded, squat, coarse, insensitive. He felt almost the same reluctance in approaching it as he would a cobra.
She, however, was not the one whom Mr. Whitcomb, with all the polished readiness of the thoroughgoing man of the world, had advanced to meet, and to whom he had held out his hand. The young man heard with stupefaction, while his own gaze remained riveted to the features of the sibyl, the bland and courtier-like tones of the solicitor caressing and paying homage to a figure in the background, a figure which was still and silent, which he could not see.
This person, however, had no interest for Northcote; she was so obviously the female warder who had accompanied the murderess. One so characterless, so formless, could not be said to exist in the presence of this detaining horror, whose personality thickened, as with pestilence, the noisome air of the room. And it was this obscene life that he had pledged himself to save!
Strangely, this blunt fact did not dominate his consciousness in the manner it must have done one of a less alert perception. For with a perversity that transcended the will, at this moment his thoughts were overspread by the comedy that was being enacted by the suave lips of the solicitor. The harmonious stream of mellow commonplaces that Mr. Whitcomb was pouring into the ear of the shrinking official nonentity who kept in the background accosted his sense of the comic with a kind of lugubrious irony. With a critical detachment which even startled himself, he seemed to awake to the fact that he was standing outside his milieu, that he was witnessing a drama within a drama; and he found himself in possession of the singular reflection that here was a robust yet delicate adumbration of the farcical which would make the fortune of a writer for the stage. For there was something indescribably ludicrous in the rich voice of the solicitor enunciating his own private opinions upon the weather, the state of trade, the inconvenience of winter and its bearing upon the perennial problem of the unemployed, when the grotesque horror which dominated the room was at his elbow, emitting the glances of a venomous snake.
Suddenly Northcote heard Mr. Whitcomb call his name.
“Come here, Mr. Northcote; I want to introduce you.”