HENRY NORTHCOTE

Henry Northcote

By
JOHN COLLIS SNAITH
Author of “Broke of Covenden,” “Miss Dorothy
Marvin,” etc.

Boston
HERBERT B. TURNER & CO.
1906

Copyright, 1906
By John Collis Snaith
Entered at Stationers’ Hall
London
Published September, 1906
Second Edition, October 1, 1906
COLONIAL PRESS
Electrotyped and Printed by C. H. Simonds & Co.
Boston, U. S. A.

CONTENTS

I
SHEPHERD’S INN, FLEET STREET

Northcote sat in his chambers in Shepherd’s Inn. Down below was Fleet Street, in the thrall of a bitter December twilight. A heavy and pervasive thaw pressed its mantle upon the gaslit air; a driving sleet numbed the skin and stung the eyes of all who had to face it. Pools of slush, composed in equal parts of ice, water, and mud, impeded the pavements. They invaded the stoutest boots, submerged those less resolute, and imposed not a little inconvenience upon that section of the population which, unaddicted to the wearing of boots, had dispensed with them altogether.

The room in which Northcote kept was no more than a large and draughty garret, which abutted from the northern end of a crazy rectangular building on this curious byway of the world’s affairs. Only a few decrepit tiles, a handful of rotten laths, and a layer of cracked plaster intervened between him and the night. The grate had no fire in it; there was no carpet to the floor. A table and two chairs were the sole furniture, and in a corner could be heard the stealthy drip of icy water as it percolated through the roof.

The occupant of the room sat in a threadbare overcoat with the collar turned up to his ears. His hands, encased in a pair of woollen gloves, which were full of holes, were pressed upon his knees; a pipe was between his teeth; and while he sucked at it with the devout patience of one to whom it has to serve for everything that the physical side of his nature craved, he stared into the fireless grate with an intensity which can impart a heat and a life of its own.

Now and again after some particularly violent demonstration on the part of the weather he would give a little stoical shudder, fix the pipe in the opposite corner of his mouth, and huddle away involuntarily from the draught that came from under the door.

Northcote was a man of thirty who found himself face to face with starvation. He had been six years at the bar. Friendless, without influence, abjectly poor, he had chosen the common law side. Occasionally he had been able to pick up an odd guinea in the police-courts, but at no time had he earned enough to meet his few needs. He was now contemplating the removal of the roof from over his head. Its modest rental was no longer forthcoming; and there was nothing remaining among his worldly possessions which would induce the pawnbroker, the friend of the poor, to advance it.

“I wonder how those poor devils get on who live in the gutter,” he muttered, grimly, as he shuddered again. “You will soon be able to find an answer to that question,” he added, as he stamped his frozen toes on the hearthstone and beat his fingers against his knees.

Quite suddenly he was lifted out of the abyss of his reflection by the sound of a footfall in the room. Jerking up his head, he peered through the darkness towards the door whence the sound had come, but the shadows were so thick that he could see nothing.

“Hullo!” he called.

“Hullo!” came back a wholly unexpected response.

“Who are you? What do you want?” cried Northcote, with a thrill in his voice.

The young man rose to his feet to summon the commoner faculties. For a voice to have invaded his garret at this hour and in this fashion seemed to presage a new epoch to his life.

“Who are you?” he demanded again, having received no reply to the former demand.

“Nobody much,” said the voice, which sounded unlike anything he had ever heard before.

“I’ll strike a match before I get a blow from a bludgeon.”

“Pray do so,” said the voice, quietly.

Northcote began to fumble for the matches and found them on the mantelpiece. He obtained a light and applied it to the wick of the lamp which was on the table, and was then able to read his visitor.

The flicker of the lamp declared him to be a man of forty, of pale and attenuated figure, clad in rags.

“To what am I indebted for the honor of this visit?” said Northcote, with slightly overemphasized politeness.

“Curiosity, curiosity,” muttered his visitor, with the quietness of one who is acquainted with its value.

Northcote turned up the lamp to its highest point and resumed his scrutiny. The voice and manner were those of a man of education; and although the garb was that of a scarecrow, and the face was wan with hunger and slightly debased by suffering, a strange refinement was underlying it.

“This is all very mysterious,” said the young advocate; and indeed the wretched figure that confronted him appeared to have no credentials to present. “May I ask who and what you are?”

“How race reveals itself!” said the visitor, with a faint air of disappointment. “Even the higher types among us cannot cast their shackles away. When we go down into Hades, we are at once surrounded by the damned souls of our countrymen, clamoring to know who and what we are.”

“Well, who are you, at any rate?” said Northcote, oppressed with an acute sense of mystery.

“My name is Iggs,” said the scarecrow.

“Well, Mr. Iggs, I am sorry to say that to me your name conveys nothing.”

“No?”

“No!”

For an instant the scarecrow peered in a strange and concentrated manner into the face of the advocate. He then sighed deeply and rose from his chair.

“With all the learning we acquire so painfully,” he whispered, “we cannot enjoy a perfect immunity from error. Good night, sir. I offer my apologies for having invaded your privacy.”

With a bow of grave deference the strange figure proceeded to glide from the room in the noiseless manner in which it had entered it.

By the time his visitor had reached the door, Northcote called after him hastily: “Come back, Mr. Iggs. I have not expressed myself—not expressed myself adequately. Come back.”

His visitor, with the same air of deference and the same noiselessness of movement, returned to the chair. Northcote fixed two eyes of a devouring curiosity upon his bloodless face. They recoiled with a shock of encounter; two orbs flaming out of it in all their sunken brilliancy had looked within them. Also he beheld a mouth whose lips were curved with the divine mobility of a passion. The advocate clasped his hands to his sides to repress a fierce emotion of pain.

“Perhaps, Mr. Iggs,” he said, “you have been down into the depths of the sea?”

His visitor brushed the green canopy of his mutilated bowler hat slowly and delicately upon the threadbare sleeve of his coat.

“That is true,” he said; “but I would have you not forget that I have also walked upon the peaks of the highest mountains.”

The roar of Fleet Street, the sough of the icy wind through the telegraph wires, the driving of the sleet against the window, and the drip drip of the water through the ceiling seemed to blend with the rich and full tones enveloping these words. A sensation of awe began to surmount the pity and the patronage that the outer semblance of his visitor had first aroused in the breast of the young man.

“With your permission, sir,” he said, “I will go back to my original question, and I will frame it with a deeper sincerity: To what does Henry Northcote owe the honor of this visit?”

“This visit is paid to you, my friend, because for some inscrutable reason Nature mixed blood and fire with your brains. You, too, will go down into the depths of the sea and ascend also into the mountain places.”

“You cannot know that,” said Northcote, with his heart beginning to beat violently.

“Reflect a moment,” said his visitor. “Do you not know as well as I that it is the privilege of us to know everything?”

“True, true! But in what manner has one so obscure as myself been brought to your notice?”

“Every Sunday afternoon for a year past I have been a member of the audience your oratory has enchanted in Hyde Park.”

“How comes it, sir, that one of your condition can bring himself to listen to a mob orator?”

“How comes it that one of a like condition can bring himself to preach to the mob?”

“Primarily, I suppose, that my powers may develop. One day I shall hope to turn them—that is, if it is given to me to survive the present snap of cold weather—to higher things and larger issues.”

“And I, my friend,” said his visitor, “who by no human possibility can survive the present snap of cold weather, I come to tell the young Demosthenes that he can seek no higher thing, no larger issue than to preach to the mob. All the great movements the world ever saw began from below. The power of the sea lies in its depths. Jesus was able to invent a religion by preaching to the mob.”

“There are some who think,” said the young man, “that for one who was ambitious the career of Jesus was a partial failure.”

“The age is crying out for another such failure,” said his visitor.

“Because the old has betrayed them?” said the young man, with fear in his voice.

His visitor left the question unanswered.

“They await the advent,” he said, after a silence in which both breathed close, “of a second Failure to save them from themselves. Only that can prevent them dashing out their brains against the blank wall that has come to stand before them.”

“I believe you to be right, sir,” said the advocate, slowly, as his eyes traversed the chaste delicacy of the face which was framed in shadows.

“The Great Renunciator who first reduces this failure to terms,” said the scarecrow, “will have a sterner task than Jesus had.”

“Yet, sir, you come to one who is almost fainting by the bleak wayside.”

“Have I not listened to your oratory? Do I not discern you to stand at the parting of the ways?”

“Yes, at the parting of the ways,” said the young man heavily. “The hour is at hand when one whose poverty is bitter must make his choice.”

“I have prayed for you,” said his visitor, with such a perfect simplicity that it filled the eyes of the young advocate with tears. “Your ordeal is terrible, for I discern you to be a man of great power.”

“Poverty is a deadly evil,” said Northcote.

“Yet I would have you beware of riches,” said his visitor. “Think of the cruel treachery with which they use so many. See how they have betrayed our own fair land. And it is one such as you, in his virgin immunity, who is called upon to release her from their false embraces.”

“I, sir!” exclaimed the young man, with wild eyes and his heart beating violently. “I, without clothes to my skin, without food in my belly, and who to-morrow will have no roof under which to rest his head!”

The wan smile of the scarecrow embraced his own mutilated hat, broken boots, and ragged condition.

“You may or you may not be the emancipator,” said the scarecrow, peering at him earnestly, “yet the veritable great one whom I see configured before me is some such man as you. I have listened many weeks to your oratory, and you have a strange power. Your voice is noble, and speaks words of authority. Even if you are not the demigod for whom the age is asking,—and, my dear friend, far be it from me to say you are not,—you were yet formed by Nature to do a momentous work for your country.”

“In its casual wards,” said the young man, with an outburst of bitterness.

“The elect upon whom Nature confers true power are generally safeguarded in this wise manner. The ambitions of the market-place are set beyond their reach. I lie down to-night with a p an of thanksgiving upon my lips. May the hour dawn when you also may consign your bones to the snow. But in the meantime you have a great work to do in the world. Nature has filled you with speech; therefore you have the burden of immense responsibilities, for speech is the most signal of her gifts. You may or you may not be the great renunciator whom millions of your countrymen await with fevered looks; but it lies within your province, as it lies within that of every mariner, to array yourself among those of humble prophecy who read the meaning of the star in the east. At least, my friend, all who allow themselves to anticipate a divine appearance are the servants of truth.”

With these words the scarecrow rose from his chair, and, bowing to the young man with an austere but kind dignity, left the room as suddenly and noiselessly as he had entered it.

II
RETROSPECTION

Left alone in the coldness of his garret, Northcote felt a stupefaction steal upon him. The phase of his own circumstances had lent force to this bizarre incident. Spectral as this apparition was, however, the gestures, the tones, the mean garb were those of a living man.

The coming of such a mariner who had been down into the depths of the sea appeared for a moment to turn his eyes inwards. Seated again before the empty grate with his hands on his knees, he saw his life and its surroundings with a sharpness of vision which hunger had seemed to render more definite. He saw himself as the full-blooded turbulent man, tormented by desires, thwarted by fortune, yet yearning to express a complete, moral, intellectual, and physical life. He was so strong, yet so impotent; so expansive, yet so circumscribed; loving all the colors of the sun and the bright face of heaven, yet condemned to a prison, and perhaps the more dreadful darkness of the lazar-house. He saw himself as the wholesome, simple-hearted citizen, yet as the man of imagination also, the poet and the dreamer formed to walk upon the heights, who, oppressed by the duality of his nature, was in danger of succumbing to weariness, disillusion, and a remorseless material need.

He saw himself as a boy roaming the fields, casting up the soft loam with his feet, spending long days in dreams of the miraculous future, and evenings in conversation with his mother,—that wonderful mother whose mind was so secure, whose conceptions of the heavy duties that wait upon the gift of life were so odd, yet so exact. He recalled her as a gaunt, strong, and tall woman, with a red face, rather coarse hands, and a shabby black hat tied in a frayed velvet bow under her chin.

He could never remember to have heard her complain of life and fortune. She wore the same clothes year after year; sought no amelioration from her wearisome and unremitting labors; never seemed to vary in her sturdiness of health and temper; and always maintained plain, robust, material opinions. Her life had been a sordid and continuous struggle for the acquisition of money, a pound here and a pound there, but there was no trace of avarice in her character. She had educated him wholly beyond her means, but permitted herself no romance about it. She believed that being her son, and the son of the man she had married,—whom life had cut off in an arbitrary manner before he had had a chance to display his gifts,—he would be a man of sound abilities. She had decided in her own mind three months before he was born that to have a fair field for his talents he must go to the bar.

“I have a little imagination, but not enough,” she would say to him, as he sat with her an hour after supper in the winter evenings. “Your father was a man of good imagination, and used to read the best authors to me. My mental limitations did not permit me to understand their truth, but I always felt their power. Your father was a brilliant man in some ways, but the clock of his intellect was always set a little too fast. If he had not decided early in life to be a bishop, I think he would have been a writer of books. Even as it was, he wanted sometimes to write them. However, I managed to dissuade him. ‘No, Henry,’ I said, ‘stick to your trade. You cannot combine the two. To write books you would have to look at things so closely that it would unfit you for your calling.’ All the same, your father was a man of remarkable natural force. He would have succeeded in anything he had undertaken.”

Northcote never recalled his mother—and it was seldom that a day passed in his life unless he did recall her in one shape or another—that this speech, and a hundred that were similar, did not fill his ears, his memory, and his imagination. As he sat now with his hands and feet growing colder, the pool on the floor growing larger, his vitality becoming less and with despair advancing upon him silently like the army of shadows that pressed every minute more strongly upon the feeble lamp, he saw that dauntless countenance, the firm lips, the gray eyes which darkened a little in the evenings as though accompanied by thought; the precise but inharmonious voice came into his ears; the vigorous intelligence was spread before him, calm but unbeautiful, full of massive courage, but deficient in the finer shades of life.

At those seasons when the young advocate sat in his isolation and despair, that arch-enemy of high natures crept into his veins like a drug; he would seek the antidote in that courageous life. This penniless widow of a clergyman in a small village in a remote part of the world had fitted her son for the only sphere in which she looked for distinction for him, by many years of Spartan hardihood in thought and deed. The few pounds the Reverend Henry Northcote had laid by from his pittance, wherewith to provide an education for his son, had been lost in a building society within three months of his own departure from the world. From the date of the disaster his widow had restricted the hours she spent in bed to five out of the twenty-four; had renounced the eating of meat and the most commonplace luxuries; and had practised a thousand and one petty economies in order that her husband’s son should not lack the educational advantages of those with whom he would have to compete. She had maintained him at a public school, and afterwards, for a short period, at the university, by translating classics out of foreign languages for scholastic publishers, and by conveying the rudiments of knowledge to the young children of the landholders who lived in her neighborhood.

This stalwart figure formed a wonderful background to his youth. He was filled with awe by a simplicity that was so unconquerable, a self-reliance that was so majestic. All the subtle implements of his nature could not resolve such a potency as that. He himself was so much less and so much more.

Strange homage was paid to this unlovely but august woman by the privy council which sat in eternal session in his intellect. The favorite guise in which she was presented to it was as the mother of Napoleon, that “Madame Mère” who in the trenches conceived the Man of Destiny, and walked to church an hour before she gave him to the world. Her martial bearing, large bones, strong country speech, clothed the idea with the flesh of the hard fact; her consciousness of purpose, power of will, ennobled and quickened it with the hues of poetry.

Homer must have had some such woman for a mother, in whose womb the Iliads were born prenatally. All that sped, flew, or swam in the a rial kingdom of the Idea must first have had its pinions fixed and pointed by some inarticulate goddess who laid upon herself the humblest functions, the meanest offices, in order that nature might not lack lusty and shrewd servants in the time to be. The teeming millions of creatures who spawned in the darkness, who lifted their scaled eyes to where the light might be found, according to those who had skill in prophecy, yet who themselves were so uncertain of its presence that, when it shone straight before them through the fissures in their cave, they passed it by as a chimera, or the iridescence of some bird, reptile, piece of coal, or winged snake,—these cried out continually for some true-born Child of the Sun to lead them out of that gross night into the molten plains of beauty which ran down to the sea. And it was given to some stalwart creature with a red face and coarse hands and a shabby black hat tied in a bow under the chin, who herself was purblind, yet with knees ever pressed to the flags of the temple, to dream of the light in her prayers, and presently, out of her own strong, rustic body, to furnish forth to her kind a guide, a prophet, and a leader.

As hunger, that exquisite, but cruel, sensation, grew upon Northcote, and caused fierce little shivers to run through his bones, he awoke to the fact that all the tobacco in his pipe had been consumed, and further, that there was not a grain left in his pouch. In this extremity he had recourse to his evening meal. It was contained in a confectioner’s paper, and consisted of a large Bath bun, embellished with currants. He plucked out the currants carefully, and laid them apart as dessert. After half an hour’s deliberate munching a little of the well-being of the nourished man returned.

He opened a drawer in the table, and took out a handful of foolscap pages covered with writing in a small and not very visible hand. These were but a few among some two thousand others, which embodied “A Note towards an Essay on Optimism,” the fruit of the leisure of six years. It had had the honor of being rejected, promptly and uncompromisingly, by the publishers of London. Only one among this autocracy had condescended to supply a reason. It was brief but ample: “Philosophy does not pay.”

As Northcote held these pages beneath the uncertain rays of the lamp, and for the thousand and first time their quality was revealed to his gaze, a profound excitement spread through his being. What had the degradation of his poverty enabled him to compass for mankind? These magic pages were so quick with authenticity that he was forced to regard them as the gage of one who was about to offer a universal sanction to the human heart.

After awhile he returned these papers to the drawer and addressed himself to one of the dusty manuals of jurisprudence that adorned his table. But strange shapes were in his mind to-night; and these would not be harnessed to the dead letter of the law. A torrent had been unloosed which bore his thoughts in every direction save that in which he would have them go. After a time the lamp burned so low that it was no longer necessary to make a pretence at reading. Therefore he closed the book and lifted up his ears to the night. The faint, consistent drip drip of the water from the ceiling to the pool it had formed on the floor stole upon him with a sense of the uncanny. The room itself was draughty and decrepit, and in common with others in that neighborhood, particularly on the waterside, was inhabited by rats. He could hear them now in the crevices behind the wainscot. He took from the table a piece of lead which he used as a paper-weight, and waited grimly for one to appear.

Crouching upon the hearth with this deadly instrument in his hand, his thoughts strayed again to the country, again to his mother, and from her to the young girl whom he had hoped to make his wife. This slender and straight and joyous creature, with the supple limbs of a fawn and complexion of a dairymaid, had the seemliness and purity which was so essential in one who would be called to the function of completing his life. She was as sweet and choice as a lily, for her only gift was the serenity which has its seat in superb physical health and freedom from the penalties that wait upon intelligence.

She had seen nothing, knew nothing; there was nothing for her to see or to know. Her simplicity was so naïve that it was a perennial delight to a sophisticated nature. He never summoned her image except to cherish it. In his direst mood, in his straitest hour, when life blew barb after barb into his skin, he felt that to possess her was to keep a talisman in his spirit which could unweave the knots in the conspiracies of fate. Those lines in her shape, those curves which were so arch, so free, yet qualified so finely, seemed to bring healing and refinement to him; while those eyes, soft and luminous, yet lacking in expression, seemed to chasten his power without impairing it.

At this moment a sound for which he had been listening broke his reverie. An enormous she-rat, heavy with young, entered the room. He watched it waddle out of a dark corner and emerge slowly towards him along the floor. As it came near he could discern the gleam of its red eyes, its nose, its wide-spreading whiskers. They filled him with an indescribable ferocity. He poised the piece of lead in his hand, and took aim with close-breathing and deliberate care. Suddenly he hurled it with the strength of a giant, the creature was struck in the flank and lay dead before it knew that anything had occurred.

With a grunt of satisfaction amounting almost to joy he picked up the animal by the tail. “What a beauty!” he muttered, “and what a shot! I might try that a thousand times and not bring it off.” He opened the window, flung out the carcass, and heard it drop in a puddle of water in the middle of the traffic.

The perfectly successful accomplishment of this callous feat seemed to give his senses the exhilaration of strong wine; and the effect was heightened by a blast of icy air which was dashed on to his face when he opened the window. The mighty engines of his imagination were set in motion. He leaned out of the window and snuffed the brutal weather; and through the fierce sleet which stung his eyes and froze on his lips he looked down into London with its lights, its vehicles, and its chaos; unknowing, unheeding, and unseeing, yet in itself magnetic and so mysterious. He felt like an eagle who peers out of his eyrie in the cliffs in the midst of winter to witness the fury of the sea, dashing itself to pieces upon his paternal rocks, and is himself assaulted by the eternal ferocity of nature.

III
SUMMONING THE GENIE

The passion of Lear when on the heath he bares his head to the storm mounted in his veins. Leaning far out of the window of his garret to confront the rage of heaven, with the unbridled insolence of his youth he called upon the elements to wreak themselves upon him. Let them stab his eyes with tears, let them curdle the breath upon his lips. Nature had charged his being with that dynamic force which makes the world vibrate, only to withhold the master-key without whose aid his quality could not announce itself. All—all was furnished in the armory of the spirit. He asked no more than one brief occasion, and clad in his demonic power he would shake the pillars of society with that passion which was preying now upon his flesh and blood.

Such occasions were not denied to those who did not comprehend their use. How often with scornful eyes was he to watch in the courts of justice mediocrity, primed with privilege and favor, misconducting itself amid the purlieus of the law. Every week he was affronted with the spectacle of this hydra-headed monster toying with the life and liberty of the subject. At the worst it was no more than another “miscarriage of justice;” some other unseemly wretch offered upon the altars of incompetence.

Many times of a night when alone and hungry had he conjured up a vision of the judge calling from the bench for a tyro to undertake the defence of one too poor to purchase an advocate. “You, sir—will you undertake the defence of this unfortunate woman?” And over and over again had he broken the silence of his room with a carefully modulated, “It will give me great pleasure, m’lud, it will give me great pleasure.”

However, no judge had made the call. How narrowly had some old and obtuse public servant escaped unlocking the lips of a Milton, mute and inglorious, who sat in a shiver of hope awaiting the summons. To be sure, no judge had known of so strange a presence, but had one of these venerable guardians been aware of it, in the public interest he would still have passed him by. For what is more contemptible than elevation of any kind when it seeks a platform on which to declare itself?

Suppose the call came to-night! The suggestion was conveyed in the rages of the wind buffeting the cheeks of the unhappy man. Gasping, drenched, and excited almost beyond the verge of reason, he withdrew his face from the elements and closed the window. The lamp on the table had gone out, the few ashes in the grate gave a mere feeble spark. In spite of the overcoat and thick gloves which he wore, the coldness of the room oppressed him like a sepulchre. His feet were frozen; he had no tobacco; the clock at the Law Courts was chiming nine. Yet suppose it came! Why not? Why not demand it with all the fervor of his nature, like others who had sought their opportunity had done so often?

He could not understand this fever which had stretched him upon the rack. It might be that the lack of the meanest necessaries had told too severely upon his frame. Indeed, he was starving by degrees. His limbs—huge, knotted things—had withered until he was ashamed. His skin was so pale, his cheeks so wasted, that when his eyes flamed out in all their cadaverous lustre the prosperous shrank from him as though he were a ghost or a leper.

However, he did not covet the heritage of others. Sharp as his belly was to-night, ragged as was his back, he must not purchase the cuisine and raiment of princes at the price that was asked. Were he to inhabit the body of Crœsus, he would have also to inhabit his soul. Throned amid pomp, he would have dined that evening to the strains of Beethoven under the shadows of Velasquez and Raphael. He would have eaten the manna of the wilderness served upon gold plate; have drunk the fabulous Falernian, with pearls from the Orient dissolved in it to heighten the bouquet. Gorgeous houris, whose eyes and jewels were jealous of one another, whose breaths were perfumed, whose lips were laden with music, would have been on his right hand and on his left. Yet he would neither have seen, nor heard, nor felt, nor tasted; for those who partook of such a feast could neither know nor understand.

He must not barter his hunger for a feast such as that. No ray of meaning ever invaded this crapulous Barmecide. All that he saw was that the color of money was yellow; all that he knew was that its possession oiled the wheels of life. The starving man crouched upon his knees and buried his burning face in the dust of the table. He must make his apology to Nature for having reviled her. Nothing was more imperfect than this handmaid; yet how patient, how obedient was this Unanswering One! She did not deserve to be abused. For all at once, with a prophetic shudder of his doom, he recognized that he had only to make his demand of her to receive all that he asked.

If his nature craved the material, let him seek it and it should be given. He need not starve in his garret; his prayers would be heard. If Success with all her penalties must be his, let him prostrate himself before her; was she not a courtezan that none need to woo in vain? But crouching thus in wretchedness, his frame shivering and burning by turns, the price of such a triumph was before his eyes, written in garish letters upon the dismal walls. He was hungry to the point of death almost, yet if he satisfied that hunger with a mess of pottage he would be destroyed.

How unhappy is he who becomes the witness of his own dread passions determining an issue on the battle-ground of his nature! If the mere act of volition was still to remain with him, the choice must be made; yet if he made that which had grown so imminent he would lose whatever status or sanction he derived from the elevation of his aims. This bundle of forces within him, to whom after all he held the master-key did he but dare to use it, was driving him pitilessly. Already he seemed to be losing his fineness of perception. The point at issue was already half-erased. Those immensely powerful engines which drove the blood so furiously through his veins were in revolt. Let him find employment for them; let them fulfil their appointed ends, or woe betide him.

He had only to press his eyes to the table to summon the genie. Occasion would wait upon him if he sank to his knees. Let him harness his will to his common needs and the power would be rendered to him to achieve them. His imagination had no trammels; it was burning with a volcanic activity; by its light he could enter any kingdom in the material world. Let him ask, and all should be given.

He had fallen into a kind of trance in which immediate sensations of place and time were suspended. The cold room, now wrapped in an almost complete darkness in which rats were scratching and scuttling; the drip drip of the water to the floor; the rattle of the windows against the rising gale; the roar of the traffic in the street—all had become submerged, had lost their form, had been blended into a strange yet not inharmonious something else. A pageant was passing before his mind. He was powerless to identify himself with it, to fix its colors, to catch the expressions of the fleeting faces of those who mingled in it, yet despite the suspension of the functions of the will, he was conscious of what was taking place.

He was not in a dream, because his eyes were open, he knew where he was, and he was in possession of the sense of hearing. But he had surrendered the control of the will; and although he was on his knees with his face pressed to a dusty table before a dead fire, the mind was become divorced from the body and was cast into the vortex of indescribable scenes. It drifted about among them helplessly. It bore no relation to actors or events. All was the weirdest panorama, crammed with hurry and wild inconsequence; and yet the spectator was filled with an exhilaration which was as remote from the province of reality as a drunkard’s delirium.

He began to make frantic efforts to fix and locate this phantasmagoria. He stretched every nerve to catch the import of the word that was spoken; he craned his whole being to wrest a single incident from this wild confusion. He strove as fiercely for a thread of meaning as though he were fighting against the operations of an anæsthetic, but he could reclaim nothing from the chaos in which he was enveloped. He was like a drowning man with the heavy yet not unpleasant rush of water in his ears.

Suddenly his mind was invaded by a distinct sound. It had the dull sense of finality of a blow on the head. The door of the room had been flung open. And then came a voice through the shadows which encompassed the last feeble gutterings of the lamp:

“Anybody at home?”

Northcote rose from his knees in a wild and startled manner.

“Who—who is that?” he cried, in a hollow tone.

“Is that Mr. Northcote?” said the obscure presence which had entered the room.

IV
ENTER MR. WHITCOMB

For the second time that evening Northcote peered through the gloom of his chamber with a thrill of curious expectancy. The visit of the scarecrow had been forgotten in the torments of his passion, but the sound of his own name on the lips of the unknown resummoned that phantom to his mind. But in the room of one so frail was a robust and spreading presence.

“To whom do I owe a welcome?” muttered Northcote, and as he rose from his knees his words seemed to be lost in the vibrations of his heart.

“Mr. Northcote it is,” said the round and full tones of the invader.

The advocate, trembling in every limb, was conscious of a powerful and confident grasp of the hand. And then as his eyes encountered the outlines of his visitor, he was seized with a pang of disappointment, for he had looked to see something different.

“Don’t you know me, Mr. Northcote?” said the voice—the conventional voice which had already smote the starving man with a sense of the intolerable.

“I am afraid I do not,” he said, heavily.

“Well, I thought Samuel Whitcomb was known to every member of the bar.”

Mr. Whitcomb’s whimsical air strove to cloak a wound to his professional feelings.

“Ah, yes, of course, Mr. Whitcomb; of course,” said the young man, with a deeper disappointment fixing its talons upon him. “Of course—Mr. Whitcomb, the solicitor,” he added, hastily, as through the haze of the unreal which still enveloped his amazed and stupefied senses he caught a familiar aspect and a tone that he recalled.

“The same.”

“Excuse this inhospitable darkness,” said Northcote. “Here is a chair; and try, if you please, to keep your patience while I put some oil in the lamp and seek a piece of coal for the fire.”

“No elaborate scheme of welcome, I beg. Your client is not a prince of the blood, but a common lawyer.”

A well-fed and highly sagacious chuckle accompanied this sally on the part of the solicitor.

Still in the throes of his stupefaction, Northcote addressed himself to the oil-can and the coal-box, that as far as the circumstances would permit a reception might be accorded to this unexpected guest, whose common and prosaic quality had already jarred upon every fibre of his being. And these preparations, diffidently conducted, kindled again the well-fed chuckle of the solicitor; and so ingratiating was it that it seemed to banish all appearance of constraint by imparting an air of equality to everything in the world.

The lamp flared up under the influence of the dregs of fuel that had been added to it, and revealed the pale and wasted features of the garret’s inhabitant. The solicitor, with the quickness of the trained observer, pursed up his lips in a suppressed whistle. A kind of pity softened the relentless composure of his eyes as they beheld the haggard and unkempt bearing of the man before them. “Poor devil,” he muttered; “literally starving.” It was in this succinct yet compendious manner that Mr. Whitcomb filed for reference all facts which are sufficiently obvious to stand as knowledge.

“Do you know,” said Northcote, suddenly, “I was half-expecting somebody to-night.”

“Sitting in state to receive him, evidently,” the solicitor muttered, as he sniffed the temperature of the garret and glanced oddly from the fireless grate to the gloves and overcoat that Northcote was wearing.

“Dining out together, were you?”

“To speak the truth,” said the advocate, with an odd laugh, “I had hardly got so far as to consider the personage I was half-expecting in such a grossly material aspect.”

“Personage, eh?” said the solicitor. “They’re out of my line. I only have to do with persons, quite ordinary people, who are mightily interested in their meals.”

“Well, you see,” said Northcote, “I had hardly got so far as to formulate my expected visitant in actual terms of flesh and blood.”

“You deal in spooks!” said the solicitor. “A likely pitch for them, too.” Mr. Whitcomb began to stroke his moustache pensively, his invariable habit when confronted by the danger of going beyond his limit. “A creepy hole, by God!” he said, in another of his asides, for the simplicity and matter-of-fact of the advocate had a little discomposed him.

“I was half-expecting a genie,” said the advocate.

“A genie!” said the solicitor, with a laugh of embarrassment, for his surroundings oppressed him, and his vitality was impaired by not having yet had his dinner. “I never heard of a genie except in the ‘Arabian Nights.’”

“They abound in London,” said the advocate. “They are all about us.”

“You are right, I dare say,” said the solicitor, with a puzzled air. “The latest discovery of science, is it? They have found such marvellous things lately, even in the water we drink and the air we breathe. But if you will just stick on your hat, and do me the honor of eating a bite of supper,—I have had a deplorable day, which has ended by robbing me of my dinner,—I will talk to you of the business that has brought me here at such an odd sort of hour.”

“A bite of supper!” These magic words caused the advocate to enfold his visitor in a melancholy smile.

“Upon my soul,” said he, “you are the genie.”

The solicitor gave a laugh as ponderous as Gargantua’s.

“Have it your own way,” he said; “but for the love of heaven put on your hat and let us heed the intimations of Nature. Perhaps if we pet her a little she may do us well in this somewhat remarkable affair. Come, let us away.”

That robustness of bearing which made half the stock in trade of the first criminal lawyer in London had already an effect upon the advocate. Those luscious tones had dispelled his comatose condition. And who should say, after all, that this was not the genie; at least, here was the living embodiment of success, that jovial and gigantic swaggerer. What a smugness and sagacity were in the heavy inflections of this prosperous man! “A fellow is not fit to pare his own nails when he’s sharp-set, and I had my chop at a quarter-past one,” he chuckled, as he watched the advocate grappling with his boots. “Now, on with your hat, and we’ll take a cab to I know where.”

“As you will,” said the young man, reaching for his hat.

A reaction was stealing along his veins. Already his passionate despair had begun to cower. It looked like wizardry that one so famous should have been borne in person, dinnerless, at ten o’clock at night, up flight after flight of dark stairs, to the crazy fifth floor of that decrepit building in quest of one so poor and so obscure.

“I am sure you are the genie,” said Northcote, carrying the lamp to the door to light the distinguished visitor to the head of the rickety stairs. “Strike a match, sir, if you respect your neck.”

Northcote turned the key of his door, and Mr. Whitcomb descended, step by step, in a gingerly fashion.

“If there is the slightest fear,” said Northcote, pressing on behind the solicitor, “of burning your fingers with that match, I shall urge you not to stop to examine the array of old masters that line this perfectly damnable staircase of mine.”

“Is that an ‘Adoration of the Magi’ above me on the right?” said Mr. Whitcomb, with his jovial air.

“No; only a crack in the plaster and a cobweb. And that weird splotch to the left, which, at this distance, might stand for ‘Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis,’ is the damp striking through the wall.”

When at last they had crept down these noisome stairways into the street, they found that the sleet had yielded to a light, murky rain. The solicitor summoned imperiously a passing hansom, and sent a thrill through the heart of his starving companion by naming for the cabman’s guidance one of the most luxurious restaurants in the world.

V
AN ARISTOCRAT OF ARISTOCRATS

A swift journey of a thousand yards in this enchanted vehicle along slushy and dangerous pavements into the West End, that magic region and golden home of the marvelous, saw the bewildered young man and his companion, a veritable prince who had stepped out of some fairy romance, deposited before the portals of a palace raised by a wizard in the centre of the streets of London. A master-stroke of malice had placed this temple of choice and rarity in the midst of acres of disease, penury, and polluted air. The faces of the ghostly denizens of these regions broke through the shadows with dumb malevolence as the solicitor and the advocate leaped to the portico. Hardly had they reached it when they were assailed by light and color, glittering liveries, gorgeous women. A stealthy and perfumed warmth had even invaded the outer atmosphere. The starving man opened his lips and nostrils, and flung wide all the doors of the senses in order to drink the sheen and scents, the hues and odors. Like a poet of the Latin races he sought to feed upon animal sensations. Here in these bright saloons was the reverse of the medal, of which in his garret that evening he had dreamed. By no more than the wave of a wand he had been transported into the plaisances of success.

As he entered this domain he was enchanted with everything,—the tread of the carpets, the hang of the curtains, the clothes of the people, the sounds of the music, the mien of the waiters. Ali Baba did not illicitly enter the Cave of the Forty Robbers with a more profound bewilderment, a sharper curiosity.

Northcote followed his companion into one of the smaller and quieter but not the less gilded and luxurious rooms. Mr. Whitcomb, who even in his own person did not disdain the panoply of fashion, had the unconquerable nonchalance of bearing which is the first credential to the public respect.

“I want Jools,” he said to the first waiter he met.

The waiter bowed low and said ingratiatingly, “Yes, sare.” He darted away in quest of that personage without an attempt to maintain the few rags of dignity that attend his calling. There was, indeed, a strain of the magician in this wonderful Mr. Whitcomb. It would not have occurred to Northcote to use the formula “I want Jools,” any more than it did to Ali Baba to cry “Open Sesame!” at the portals of the cave of the Forty Robbers.

Jools was the head waiter, a man of the first distinction, with a small imperial, the envy and the proud despair of all the compatriots who shared his exile in an alien country. It had the choice perfection which art is sometimes able to superimpose upon nature. Jools was of slight, even mean, physique, but he had the ease of bearing which comes of having been somebody for several generations. He held the key to the finest cellar in London, as his father before him had held the key to the finest cellar of Paris, and his grandfather of that of Vienna. Jools was an aristocrat of aristocrats, and one versed in the ways of his order would almost have divined it from the amiable humility with which he came forward to receive one of other clay.

“How do, Jools?” said Northcote’s companion, with his inimitable gift of manner. “Nasty night. Let us have a quart of your Château Margaux. What was that you gave me before?”

Jools screwed up his furtive brown eyes in deep contemplation. “Et would be a seventy-one, sare,” he said, rubbing softly a forefinger along his chin.

“I don’t know what it was,” said Mr. Whitcomb, royally, “and I don’t care, so long as it is the best you have in the place.”

An air of magnificence which prosperity had conferred upon the solicitor touched a chord in the proud soul of Jools.

“I haf a seventy-three, sare,” said this aristocrat, with a not too ductile absence of condescension, which he reserved for the society of his equals.

“That sounds all right,” said the solicitor. “We still number you among the few eminent Christians we have in London at the present time.”

Jools bowed and smiled softly, but an expression of sorrow was seen to overspread his mat complexion.

“Ef I had known before, sare, I would haf had it decanted.”

“We must all abase ourselves before the despotism of necessity,” said the solicitor’s hollow-eyed companion, who was already under the stimulus of an intense anticipation. “She has reverence for nothing. Even your Château Margaux ’73, which no doubt is divine, must forego the rights and trappings of its royalty.”

“You must forgive him, Jools,” said the solicitor, enjoying the effect upon the waiter of these deep tones. “He is talking prose, although, unlike your immortal compatriot, I am afraid he knows it.”

Jools summoned one of another mould to receive the baser order of a thick soup and a cut from the saddle, while he himself, beaming with pleasure and shrugging his shoulders furiously, went forth accompanied by an awe-stricken satellite personally to select one of those royal wines, which lent a touch of romantic grace to the exile of this artist in a foreign country.

Seated on cushions in the cosiest of all imaginable corners, with spotless lawn and bright silver before him, the starving man enveloped his nostrils in the delicious fumes that arose from his plate. These aromatic vapors seemed to pervade his being like some intoxicating hashish, or a pungent but subtle Arabian tobacco. He toyed with the pepper and salt, and crumbled his bread with a devouring eagerness, which he kept in check sufficiently to refuse at first to swallow a spoonful of the magic food, in order that he might obtain this sense of inebriation to the full. His companion, whose perfectly normal and healthy hunger permitted no such refinements as these, had already tasted and enjoyed.

“Excellent soup,” he said. “It’s got quite a bouquet to it. I’m almost glad I missed my dinner. One of these days I shall do it again.”

The satisfaction which in these circumstances consumes the average sensual person grew so acute, that by the time he had swallowed half of his plateful, he cried out to the nearest waiter: “Hi! you, Alphonse—have the goodness to tell the chef to step this way, will you?”

Northcote placed the first spoonful on his tongue, and indescribable pangs seemed to mount to his brain. A fierce desire overpowered him. He devoured another spoonful, and then another. Suddenly he was overcome by a strange fury of greed. His plate was empty, and his palate had lost its original fineness, before he was able to impose a check upon his passion.

Great, however, as his expedition had been in its later stages, it had scarcely surpassed that of Mr. Whitcomb, who from the first had been devouring steadily. No sooner had that gentleman eaten his final mouthful than he ordered both plates to be replenished.

At this moment, by one of those significant coöperations of events which form the basis of the drama, a large, fat, frock-coated, and pomatumed gentleman appeared, a little sheath of quiet smiles twinkling all over his person, as though the playful god of love was in hiding behind his ample shirt-front and slyly tickling his bosom with feathers.

“Hommage, monsieur le chef, hommage!” cried Mr. Whitcomb. “Cette consommé est délicieuse. Vous êtes un vrai ruban bleu.”

The chef emitted a loud purr of satisfaction like an unusually large Persian cat. And then by a still more exquisite coöperation of events than that which had already preceded this incident, who should appear but Jools, behind whom his attendant satellite was mincing with a warmed decanter of wine.

“Two more glasses, Jools, if you please,” said the solicitor. “Monsieur le chef and your worthy self will honor us, I hope. The first product of your country will not prove unworthy of two of its most distinguished sons.”

A look of rapture sprang to the proud eyes of Jools, and he measured four glasses of wine with an agitation that was more dignified than perfect composure.

“To l’Entente Cordiale, messieurs,” said Mr. Whitcomb, raising his glass.

“L’Entente Cordiale!” chimed the others.

“It is part of my religion,” said Mr. Whitcomb, “never to encounter the artistic temperament without rendering my homage. If we had only a trace of it in this country to fuse and rarefy our other manifold gifts and blessings, I believe we should become the most perfect nation upon the earth.”

“Is it not, sir, the absence of it that makes you English so perfect?” said the chef, who had all the alert intelligence of his race.

“That is not a thrust, monsieur?”

“Ah, no. As a citizen of the world I make it my duty never to wound the English. I respect your country; there are seasons when I adore it.”

“Ees it not the land of justice, order, and liberty?” said Jools.

“Justice we have for those who can afford to pay for it,” said the solicitor; “that is to say, the poor man is quite unable to purchase it, and even the rich finds it costs a great deal of money. Order we have; it is the birthright of us all—an adumbration of our exaggerated reverence for mud, and stones, and bricks, and mortar. Liberty, Jools, I regret to say, we have not. We are all base slaves—”

“Of the External,” said Northcote, with a lustre in his eyes that the wine had kindled. “There is no slave like a Saxon. In his scheme of sense the eye takes precedence. Even his religion is Money.”

“Ah, no,” said the chef, with much amiability, “you English have no avarice like we have in my native Normandy.”

“An Englishman’s avarice is not of the heart, but of the spirit,” said Northcote, with the melancholy calmness of one who knows everything.

“You haf your Shakespeare, your Milton,” said Jools.

“I think sometimes we could afford to exchange them both for your Honoré Balzac,” said Northcote.

“You would be unwise to do so,” said the chef. “Your Shakespeare is among the first order of mankind. He is greater than Molière; my faith! he is as great as Napoleon.”

“Perhaps you are right, but your Honoré Balzac showed the bourgeoisie its every form and feature.”

“Truly,” said the chef, with a sly laugh; “but you have ceased to be bourgeois in your England nowadays.”

“Since when, sir?” said the young advocate, with a flame in his eyes. “Since we have learned the trick of calling our mean ambitions by high-sounding names?”

The solicitor filled up the glasses of Northcote and the chef.

“You speak well, my friends,” he said, with his richest chuckle; “although myself being a middle-class Englishman, I am sorry to say your discourse is over my head. But if it is to be my privilege to maintain the talk upon this extremely high level, it will cost me, Jools—”

“It will cost him, Jools,” interrupted Northcote, with a truculent glance at the waiter.

“It will cost me, Jools,” said the solicitor, with an imperturbable smile, “an extra quart at least of your Château Margaux.”

At the moment this order fell on deaf ears, for the lips of Jools were trembling with speech like those of Socrates.

“We will give you our Honoré de Balzac, sare,” he said, with a heavy sigh, “ef you will part wiz your Shikspeare.”

“Also our Voltaire,” said the chef, with a leer at his melancholy compatriot, “if they will part with their Shakespeare.”

“Your Honoré Balzac is only just coming into his own,” said Northcote, with immense solemnity.

“That is to say, sir,” said the chef, “a reputation must be established at least a hundred years in the arts before the world can be decorated with the radiance that proceeds from the enormous fire it holds in its bowels.”

“True, monsieur,” said Northcote. “It is like a new-born planet. It has to be allowed to cool a little before it can assume a shape, and the wonderful vegetation begins to appear upon it. It cannot be approached at first; it is a mere ball of fire in the heavens, without form and without meaning to the human eyes.”

“Or it ees like a young wine, sare; it must be allowed time to mature,” said Jools.

“It is the worst feature, Jools,” said the solicitor, “of this claret of yours, that it always unlocks the door for these pleasantries. And this British skull of mine is so packed with business, that with our shopkeeping instinct of transacting a little of it whenever and wherever we can, before we fall upon the latest theories in regard to the composition of matter, with every reluctance, I shall ask you and your distinguished compatriot to withdraw for the space of one hour.”

“Personally,” said Northcote, “I believe the universe is not made up of matter at all.”

“In other words, sir,” said the chef, “matter is—”

“I ask your pardon, my friends,” said the solicitor; “but with true Britannic effrontery, this business of mine even seeks to take precedence of the mystery of the universe.”

“There is no such thing as the universe,” said Northcote, draining his glass with great decision. “The whole of it is contained within ourselves.”

“Peace, peace!” said the solicitor. “We will resume our speculations, with the permission of our good friends, in the space of one hour.”

Filled with every fraternal and complacent feeling, Jools and his distinguished compatriot bowed smilingly, and with a profound regard for the solicitor and the advocate, retired, in opposite directions, to those spheres of activity in which there was none to dispute their supremacy.

VI
A PROPHECY

“And now,” said the solicitor, “as the decks are clear, let me say this is a rather odd affair which has sent me hungry about the streets of London at an unpleasant hour.”

“Am I not surprisingly cool about it?” said Northcote, with a flushed face, balancing his empty wine-glass on the handle of a knife, “considering that this business of yours is destined to mark the turning-point in my career.”

“When a man begins to talk of his career,” said the solicitor, “it is safe to infer that he has taken the wrong quantity of liquor. Waiter!”

“Sare?”

“Tell Jools we want another pint of this filthy stuff—this what-do-you-call-it?—with which he is poisoning us. And, Alphonse, have a couple of Welsh rarebits ready by the time we want them.”

The waiter withdrew, walking delicately; and the solicitor bent across the table towards his companion in a manner of confidential gravity.

“Correct me if I am wrong,” said he, “but you have done no circuit work?”

“Hitherto I have not soared beyond a police-court,” said the young man, with perfect frankness. “And even there I have only made a public display of my incapacity on half a dozen occasions.”

“A beginner one might say, yet an ambitious one.”

“Where do you get the ambition from?”

“It is in the color of your eyes. Besides, have you not a habit of turning your phrases?”

“If I did not know you to be a connoisseur in men of promise I should not be convinced.”

“That’s my foible, right enough,” said the solicitor, with a laugh. “A connoisseur in men of promise. Samuel Whitcomb owes his own reputation to that, and he is proud to believe that the reputations of half a score of those who are in every way his superiors are to be traced to that source.”

“Laying aside the question of superiority, all the world knows it.”

“I gave Finnemore Jones his first brief,” said the solicitor, immodestly. “I provided Cooper, Howard, and Harrington with the opportunities that made them famous.”

“And above all,” said the young advocate, measuring with a stealthy eye the man before him, “are you not the discoverer of Michael Tobin?”

“Ha!” cried the solicitor, as he brought his fist upon the table with an air of unmistakable triumph, “I was holding that back.”

“As the crown of your achievement?”

“Yes; Michael Tobin is almost here. But how do you come to suspect it, when at present his quality is only known to the few?”

“I am one of them,” said Northcote, looking his companion imperturbably in the eyes.

Such a cool affirmation seemed to delight the solicitor.

“Well, I should not be surprised if you were,” he said, with a violent chuckle. “If I had not had some such suspicion I might not have climbed up all those dark stairs at a quarter-past ten of a winter’s night.”

“Without your dinner.”

“Without my dinner. Why, if that fellow hasn’t forgotten the black currant jelly. But here he comes with his poisonous claret.”

“Tobin is a brilliant man,” said Northcote, poising his glass after having replenished it. “Irish to the bone; a real discovery; ought to go far. But far as he ought to go and will go, there is one name in your list that will surpass him.”

“That is where I cannot agree with you, my son,” said the solicitor, with confidential and parental bonhomie, for this subject lay at the source of his intellectual pride. “You must know somewhat to have found out about Tobin; but when you name his superior you betray your youth.”

“I concede it is quite impossible for me to name Tobin’s superior without betraying my youth.”

“Go to,” said the solicitor, with an air of indulgence that he reserved for the young and promising. “Don’t labor the point. It wants experience to detect greatness in the shell. Michael Tobin will easily be the first upon my list.”

“There is one who will surpass Michael Tobin,” said the young man.

“Not among those I have mentioned.”

“True. As is usual with the prophet, you don’t dare to affirm the authentic name.”

“Upon my word I can’t think who you mean!”

“One Henry Northcote.”

The solicitor broke forth in a suppressed shout of laughter.

“Good!” he said; “you’ll do. Fill up your glass and we’ll get to work. And I’m glad your talent is so remarkable, because I’ve got some business here that is likely to tax it.”

“It is increasingly clear to me that you are the genie,” said the young advocate in a low voice, and fetching a deep breath.

VII
THE OFFER OF A BRIEF

The solicitor drew from an inner pocket of his coat a bundle of papers tied with red tape. He placed them on the table at the side of his plate.

“At the eleventh hour,” he said, speaking coolly and distinctly, “I am going to ask you to undertake the defence in a trial for murder.”

Northcote was conscious of no more than a slight sharp throb of the pulses as he met the shrewd, even cunning, eyes of the man who sat opposite.

“Yes, that’s a chance for Henry Northcote,” were his first words, uttered under the breath.

“The fee is not much,” said the solicitor, with the precision of the man of affairs entering his fat voice. “You will not be briefed at more than twenty guineas.”

“To-night I think I would sell my soul for half that sum,” said the young man, with an excited laugh.

“Is not that a somewhat damaging admission for you to make?” said the solicitor.

“I agree, I agree,” said the young man; “but the truth is never discreet.”

“There’s no money in this case,” said the solicitor, “and I’m afraid there is no kudos. It is one of those disagreeable cases which are not only irreclaimably sordid, but also as dead as mutton. In order to obtain a small sum of money, a woman of the ‘unfortunate’ class has poisoned a man with whom she lived. She is one of those cold-blooded persons who are born for the gallows. There is enough evidence to hang her ten times. We shall be forced to submit to the inevitable.”

“You disappoint me,” said Northcote. “I was thinking of a real fighting case.”

The solicitor smiled, with a faint suggestion of patronage.

“I beg your pardon, I’m sure,” said the young man, quickly. “Had there been any life in the case you would not have carried it to one so obscure. Even as it is, I ought to be grateful to you—and I am grateful indeed—for putting it in my way.”

“The circumstances of this case are somewhat peculiar,” said the solicitor. “We are under rather severe pressure in the matter of time. The case will be called on the day after to-morrow at the Central Criminal Court.”

“That hardly explains away your kindness towards myself. Even at this short notice you could have got plenty of men to have consented to a verdict.”

“I am aware of it, but then it is not quite the method of Whitcomb and Whitcomb. We like ‘Thorough’ to be our motto. If we accept a client, we feel we owe it to ourselves to leave no stone unturned, irrespective of position or emolument.”

“But I understand this case is too dead to be fought?”

“Ah, we are now about to approach the first of the ‘peculiar’ circumstances. At five o’clock this evening Tobin himself was holding this brief, but at that hour his bicycle had the misfortune to collide with a motor-car, and the poor fellow now lies in hospital with a compound fracture of the right thigh.”

“Poor fellow, poor fellow!”

“I think you and I are agreed that Tobin is without a rival in a case of this nature.”

“You must forgive me if I express surprise that Tobin should have accepted the brief.”

“That is easily explained. Tobin is the generous-hearted Irishman who is never weary of affirming that Whitcomb and Whitcomb gave him his start. He never refuses us, and I am afraid we, in the interests of a client, trade occasionally on his good nature.”

“Then the practitioners of law are sometimes more disinterested than they seem.”

“My dear fellow, among a considerable body of men must there not be a leaven of human nature? And my own experience is that human nature is so much more disinterested than the young and cynical like to consider it.”

“That is well said,” replied Northcote, feeling the rebuke to be merited.

“And so you see,” said the solicitor, “in regard to this wretched woman whom we had undertaken to defend, we were in the position of being able to brief a first-rate man for a third-rate fee.”

“Yet a third-rate man would have served your purpose equally well, if one is allowed to hazard the remark.”

“No; for this reason: the woman has long been of intemperate habits. Prior to the commission of the crime she was known to be drinking heavily, and Tobin, who is a real fighting man, if ever there was one, had decided to take the line of insanity.”

“As the only possible means of saving her neck?”

“There is no other. And even in the hands of such a man as Tobin, the chance is remote. He has his witnesses to call, of course, in support of his plea, but they cannot be considered as entirely satisfactory. And, unfortunately, their evidence will be rebutted by that of the prison doctors, who are against us.”

“Then, after all,” said the young man, with a sunken eagerness appearing in his eyes, “there will be opportunities for advocacy.”

“Pretty considerable opportunities, if we are to save her neck.”

“Then forgive me if again I put the question, Why did you come to a tyro with a case of this nature?”

“How can you ask,” said the solicitor, with an arch smile, “when the tyro happens to be one Henry Northcote?”

“Upon your own admission that is a name that has no particular significance for you.”

“Nay, you go too fast, my friend. It must be left to the future to place the name of Henry Northcote, but let me confess that in the meantime the bearer of it has not wholly escaped my vigilance.”

“In your capacity as a connoisseur in young men of promise?”

“Precisely.”

“Upon what data have you built, when you have never seen him in open court?”

“My dear fellow, you are as curious as a woman.”

“Every comprehensive mind is partly feminine.”

“No mind can be in any sense feminine. It is a contradiction in terms.”

“Well, well! From what data have you derived the courage to entrust an untried man with the defence in a trial for murder?”

“To be perfectly frank, it was Tobin who found the courage for me.”