Henry Northcote

by J. C. Snaith

Before the ingenuity of this keen intelligence those obstacles which were bristling everywhere in the case, which to the average mind would have appeared insurmountable, began rapidly to melt away. It was with an ill-concealed joy that he shed the lime-light of paradox on each point that presented itself. That array of facts which a judge and jury of his countrymen would hug to their bosoms as so many pearls they could positively hold in their hands he would disperse with a touch of his wand. In the ripeness of his talent he foresaw that it would cost him no labor to demolish the evidence, to turn it inside out.

The world is full of great masterpieces that have been created out of nothing, haunting and beautiful things which have been spun by genius out of the air. And are not feats like these more wonderful than the exercise of the natural alchemy of change by which fairness is turned into ugliness, poetry into lunacy, good into evil, truth into error? The constructive faculty is rare and consummate; when it appears it leaves a track of light in the heavens; but the faculty of the demolisher is at work every day. Northcote was conscious that he was a born demolisher of “evidence,” of those trite dogmas, those brutalized formulas of the average sensual mind. When he looked for truth he sought it at the bottom of the well. On the morrow for the first time he would give free play to his dangerous faculty.

When he had blocked out and brought into harmony the main lines of his address to the jury, it occurred to him that his powers might receive an additional stimulus if he saw the accused, exchanged a few words with her, brought himself into intimate relation with her outlook. Up to this point she had been no more than an academic figure, around whom he had woven detached, somewhat Socratic arguments. He felt that to see and to know her would be to place yet another weapon in his hands, wherewith he would be enabled to dig another pit for those whom he had already come to look on as his, no less than her, deadly adversaries.

Already he was a little amused by his own complacency, the conviction of his own success. There was that curious quality within him that forbade his evoking the possibility of failure in so great an enterprise. He was so grotesquely sure of his own power to triumph over arbitrary material facts. Such a sense of personal infallibility could only spring from the profoundest ignorance, or from talent in its most virile and concentrated form. For what was more likely than that on inspection the accused would present one of the most abandoned figures of her calling? Was it not highly probable that nature, who takes such infinite precaution to safeguard her creatures, had caused this woman to assume the shape of a hag, a harpy, a thing of loathsome, terrible abasement? In that case, how would he dispose of evidence in its most salient form? How would he dispose of that immutable instinct, that deep conviction which is conferred by personality?

On the other hand, if the accused, by the aid of one of those miracles of which the world is so full, were to present the outlines of actual personal beauty, through whose agency common sensual minds are appealed to so easily, how slight would his difficulties be! In that event, so far as her advocate was concerned, the gilt would be off the gingerbread, his achievement would cease to be astonishing. Indeed, so finely tempered was his arrogance that to undertake the defence of one of this kind would be distasteful to it, so small would be the field afforded for personal glory. Rather than have to deal with one who could be trusted to be her own most efficient advocate, he would prefer that a veritable harpy out of a sewer should be placed in the dock. Could he have been allowed the privilege of choosing a theme for his powers, he believed that he should best consult the dictates of his talent by asking for a commonplace, unillumined woman of forty to be put up.

Deciding at last to seek an interview with the accused, he set forth to the offices of his client in Chancery Lane. On his way thither he occupied himself with drawing the portrait of the ideal subject as his mind conceived her. She would be forty, with her hair turning gray. She would be a plain, drab, slightly elusive figure, cowed a little by life, the privations she had undergone, and the ignominy and terror of her situation. The positive, the actual would be to seek in her; she would offer no target for too facile sympathies. Her inaccessibility to all suggestions of romance or of picturesqueness would lend to her predicament that extreme peril which it would be her advocate’s chief glory to surmount. All the same, he desired no ghoul, but a human being. She might be visibly stained, buffeted, common, broken, devoid of a meaning to eyes that were unacquainted with the poetry of misfortune, the irony of blunt truths; yet let a few rags of her sex remain, let her be capable of humiliation, of being rendered in piteous fear.

At the offices of Messrs. Whitcomb and Whitcomb in Chancery Lane he was informed that the senior partner was anxiously awaiting him.

“Ah, here you are at last!” exclaimed the solicitor, rising to receive him. “I thought you would have been round before.”

“I suppose you only honor a silk gown with a consultation in his own chambers?” said Northcote.

“Chambers, you call them! Well, did we not hold it last night?”