Henry Northcote

by J. C. Snaith

His own grotesque words caused him to laugh. That surprising genie, that had been destined to conquer a stupidly material world, enabled him to present himself to himself in his amazing predicament. He could hardly preserve his gravity before a spectacle so astonishing.

“The genie is deriding me,” he said.

That mute and distorted face that was looking up at him with an insane leer had no message of its own. It was only significant to the advocate as the price of all that he was about to give up. Yet suddenly he remembered this strange creature he had broken with his hands as he had first encountered her in the prison. In no animate thing could the desire for life have been more intensely strong. Overmastering as was his own desire at this moment, hers, at that time, had been no less so. She must have life; she must see the sun and the clouds and the trees. The common earth had acquired fresh symbols for that debauched vision. And how nearly she had come to possess this strange new thing that she craved. One heaven-born man had all but given it to her. He had so nearly done so, that for one brief instant she had been able to taste it with those blood-stained lips. And when she had discovered that strong and shining as this one man was, his was not the divine valiance of those early mystics who roamed the hills in the childhood of the world, that he had not the simplicity to provide her with that which she craved, she insisted on receiving death at his hands in lieu of the life he could not give her.

It was then, that he took a little compassion. It was a loathsome and terrible destiny to which this human being had been called. By what subtle twist or abrogation of her noble faculties had she come to live her days on such lines as these. This avowed and ruthless enemy of society had been of no common or spurious clay. It was not a small nature that had taken a revenge so bitter. A little more and it had been how much? Another grain of courage, another ounce of power, and she, too, poor maimed and twisted thing of beauty, would have been numbered among the valiant.

It added a sharp touch to her slayer’s compassion, that, in regarding her mutilated image, she became the mirror of his own. He saw the parallel between the living and the dead. Every point in this analogy was so perfect that a mental fascination lurked in its rendering. Did the texture of his own fate admit of any more lenient inquiry? He also would have entered his kingdom had he but possessed the little more that meant so much. Were they not both in the beginning the victims of a fine and original talent, for she whom he had slain had been the offspring of a man of the first genius. Her thoughts were his thoughts; her desires were his desires; the tragedy of each had been that their fineness had been immolated upon the altar of its base surroundings; both had failed to scale those precipitous mountain-places from which alone it was possible to stand in true perspective to their own characters.

As he pressed home this analogy with that curious grim subtlety that was always one of his chief pleasures to employ, he began to feel in his own veins that intense desire of hers to live the life that nature had appointed, to discover an ampler, a truer self-expression. How was it possible to arrest those functions that had not had an opportunity to fulfil themselves? There was a ravishing vigor in his blood; he must not perish as a felon, he to whom all things were so full of meaning.

The overwhelming force of these thoughts translated them into action. It had already come to him that to obey his overmastering desire he must conceal his deed. He raised the heavy corpse in his arms; yet powerful as he was it proved too much for him to bear. Therefore he dragged it across the room, and with herculean labor contrived to hoist it on to the bed. He then drew the curtain across to hide it from the view of those who should chance to enter the room. Afterwards he proceeded to ponder the evolution of a means to ensure his own personal security.

He was still engrossed with this occupation when the old charwoman entered his room. She had brought him some clean linen. It was contained in a basket which it was her custom to deposit on a chair behind the curtain at the foot of his bed.

“You can leave it here, Mrs. Brown,” said Northcote, indicating with his finger a place on the floor.

“I had better take it out of the way, sir,” said the old woman. “Besides, I have not made the bed.”