Part 12

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.”

In a hazy, stupefied manner the young man obeyed.

“Mrs. Harrison,” said the solicitor, “allow me to present my friend Mr. Northcote. I feel sure you will find a friend in him too.”

The advocate grew aware that a weak, nerveless hand was resting in his, but his eyes were still riveted on the face of the ghoul.

“Say something, you fool, and play up a bit,” said the solicitor’s calm voice in his ear.

“Er--a nice day, Mrs. Harrison,” said the young man, without knowing a word he was uttering.

“Yes,” said a hesitating voice, which by no possibility could have proceeded from the tightly closed lips of the creature whom his gaze was devouring.

The words broke the illusion at a blow. The brutalized countenance under whose dominion he had fallen was that of the female warder. The person with whom the solicitor had been conversing with such cheerful volubility, to whom he was now himself speaking, was the poisoner, the cold-blooded denizen of the curb and the gutter. He drew his hand away quickly, with an involuntary emotion, from those hot, flabby, and damp fingers that he still detained.

“I know, I know,” the woman seemed to breathe, as though she were interpreting an unspoken thought.

“I may tell you, Mrs. Harrison,” said the solicitor, with his well-fed chuckle, “that if your knowledge can compare with that of this gentleman, you are one of the wisest persons in the world. He will tell you so himself.”

So crude a gibe had the happy effect of restoring to Northcote his self-possession.

“My name is not known, Mrs. Harrison,” he said, with his fibres stiffening, and his voice growing deeper and falling under control, “but you can trust me to eke out my inexperience with a determination to serve you to the utmost of my power.”

Northcote saw that two luminous orbs were being defined slowly in the centre of the gloom. For an instant no reply was made to his words, and then he was conscious that a faint voice was whispering, “If your friend would go right away with the warder--right away to the end of the room, then perhaps we could speak with one another here where it is so dark.”

“Whitcomb,” said Northcote, in a low tone, “please take the warder right up to the window at the other end, where you can see to read, and read the _Law Journal_ to her.”

“How d’ye do, ma’am,” said the solicitor, turning to the ghoul in his promptest, blandest, and most musical manner. “I think it has been my privilege to meet you before, although you may not remember me. Is that boy of yours prospering in the police force?”

“I haven’t got a boy in the police force,” said the sibyl, in a loud, strident tone.

“Then which of your blood relations is it, may I ask, who is connected with the police force? I am sure you have some one.”

“I have an uncle.”

“Ah, to be sure, an uncle! But it is so easy to make a mistake on a point of official nepotism. Come along this way, ma’am, and tell me all about your uncle.”

XX

THE INTERVIEW

Prisoner and advocate were left together amid recesses of impenetrable gloom in the darkest corner of the large apartment. It seemed to enfold them, and to render the pallor of their faces almost invisible. The eyes alone encountered those of each other, and even these could embody no phase of meaning. A strange continence, as sharp and clean as that of a hero of fable, had begun to cleanse the veins of the advocate. In the presence of this stealthy thing his nature had never seemed so fine, so valiant, so full of subtle penetration; nor had it ever felt so girt with mastery, so completely enamored of its own security.

“I shall know what words to speak to-morrow,” he said, in a hoarse undertone.

“Will they not be spoken for yourself?” whispered the dismal low voice.

“How? In what manner?”

“You will speak to make a name.”

“Also for the salvation of yours.”

“Mine does not matter; it is not my own.”

“You trust me, do you not?”

“I trust you; yet you drew your hand away so quickly when you knew it was not the warder who was the murderess. Give it to me again.”

There was something so curious in the prisoner’s fragility, something so strange in her cowed air, that it seemed to pervade the advocate with the stealth of a drug. But the emotion of disgust with which he had withdrawn his hand when first he grew conscious that he touched her was no longer present when he offered it again. The second time she clasped her fingers round it so that their pressure seemed to sear his skin. It had the heat of a live coal.

In releasing his hand she let her fingers yield it so imperceptibly that he did not know the precise point at which it had ceased to be held; and he was afraid to make a motion of withdrawal, lest it should be interpreted as a repetition of that which had dealt her a wound. He tried to see her face, but in the darkness there was no lineament to decipher.

“This is my deliverer,” he heard her breathe.

“How have you come to know it?” The advocate was devoured by an intolerable curiosity.

“Your hands--your hands, they are so powerful; are you not so strong?”

There was nothing in these words that the advocate had expected; the voice, the manner of their utterance, their apparent irrelevance, made a strange effect in his ears.

“They will not do me to death,” she said, in a tone he could hardly hear. “I never tasted life until I was brought into prison. And you cannot think how sweet it is to me. Everything has become so beautiful: the birds, the trees, and the sky, and the crowds of people and the mud of the great city.”

She clutched the hand of the young advocate with a convulsive shudder.

“Your quietness tells me that you understand.” Her voice was touched with ecstasy. “You do not answer or seek to console me. You are the one I have dreamed of in prison. Where is your hand?”

Again Northcote yielded to her entreaty, this time without a sense of repulsion.

“Yes, this is the hand that has been around me in the darkness, when I have shuddered in my dreams.”

“It is wonderful,” said Northcote, “that you should know that you will be able to lean upon me.”

“I know what your voice is like also, although it is so vague and distant to me now. I know the words it will speak to-morrow, when it asks them to be merciful. I know that all I have seen in my dreams will take place.”

“It must be a grievous thing to go to sleep in a prison,” said Northcote, uttering a half-formed thought without consideration of his words. “Or perhaps it is more dreadful to awaken in one.”

“The going to sleep and the awakening are not so terrible as the dreams that come. That in which I saw you first, in which I first heard your voice, in which I first touched the hand that will deliver me, was most dreadful in its nature. My weak mind fell down under it. I think I could not live through such a vision again.”

“How strange are these visitations!” said Northcote. “How awful, how mysterious! When did this dream come to you?”

“Last night about the hour of ten; the first time I had closed my eyes for three days.”

Northcote recoiled with a shudder. The precision of the voice and the power of the coincidence were overmastering.

“There is no accounting for these things,” he said, in a voice throbbing with excitement. “At the same hour I also had a strange, an almost terrible sort of vision.”

“Yes, my deliverer, you have been called into my life to save it--to save that life which never had a perfect thought until it was brought into prison. It did not know what the trees and the sky were, nor the air and the birds; never had it heard a deep voice nor touched a strong hand. You are he that leaped out of the vast multitude that mocked me in my dream, he who stood up before it, and, with a great voice that sounded like the waves of the sea, caused them all to break and run. They grew afraid of your words and your looks, and they fled in terror. Yes, my life has become so full of beauty and meaning, so full of a spacious mystery, that I cannot believe it is to be taken away.”

These words, breathed rather than spoken, sounded in the ear of Northcote as those of a transcendent sanity. Remote as they were, they yet appeared divinely appropriate to the time and place. But they left only one course for him to follow. He must detach himself from the unhappy speaker of them; he must flee her presence. Their edge was too keen. There would be no advocacy on the morrow if he yielded to the subtle enervation of this atmosphere. The voice pierced him like a passion, yet his veins had grown sluggish and heavy, as if under the influence of a drug.

XXI

THE TALISMAN WHICH TRANSCENDS EXPERIENCE

Calling the name of the solicitor, Northcote broke away abruptly from the prisoner and left the room. It had seemed to be charged with a pestilence. Mr. Whitcomb was soon at his side, and hastily they wended their way up and down various flights of stone steps, along the noisome corridors of the huge building, until daylight came in sight once more through the doorway at the end of the passage at which their cab was standing. Their relief was very real at being able to breathe again the living air, fog-laden as it was.

“I don’t know how many times,” said Mr. Whitcomb, as they drove from the portals of the jail, “on one errand and another, I have descended into this inferno, but it never loses its power to give me the blues.”

“I am regretting,” said Northcote, “that I did not take your advice. I wish I had not come near it. I cannot shake off the impression it has made. Ugh! it gets into one’s blood. I don’t know anything quite so overpowering as the nausea of locality.”

“You are too impressionable, my son,” said the solicitor, with a furtive smile. “You will never be able to get through life at this rate. It wants one of some hardihood, one who is robust in each one of his five senses, to practise law.”

“I would say,” Northcote rejoined, with a shudder, “that to be armed for this calling each particular nerve he has got in his body must be shod with iron.”

The solicitor laughed at so palpable a discomposure.

“What did you make of the prisoner?” he asked, suddenly. “You appeared to find a great deal to say to one another.”

“Personally I hardly spoke a word to her,” said the young man, seeking to gather his recollection of that strange interview.

“She appeared to find a good deal to say to you,” said the solicitor. “In that respect you have been more fortunate than myself. I have spoken with her three times, and I don’t think I have been able to extract three words from her. Do you mind telling me what she said?”

“To the best of my remembrance she said nothing that could have the least interest for anybody.”

“Tell me, what impression of her have you brought away?”

“I hardly know whether she allowed me to form one. Our communication seemed so indirect. She kept her face in the shadow all the time; I could not discern a feature.”

“Surely you were able to gather some sort of general idea?”

“That is the strange thing--I seem to have formed no opinion about her. One would not have thought it conceivable that one should have conversed with a person, dealt at least in an actual exchange of words at close quarters, and that they should remain so null. I think I should have been better acquainted with her had I not seen her at all.”

“Come, my dear fellow, you can surely recall a word or two of what she said? She is an enigma; and she is said not to have spoken six words since she was first remanded in custody.”

“That certainly makes the volubility in which she indulged this afternoon the more astonishing.”

“Indeed it does. Would you say that she expects an acquittal?”

“Well, now you come to mention that, I would say she does.”

“It is an extraordinary thing that they are all so sanguine. It hardly ever seems to occur to any of them that by any possibility they can meet with their deserts. Indeed, one might say the bigger the criminal, the greater their confidence that they will escape.”

“I am going to ask you what opinion you have formed of her,” said Northcote.

“It follows the lines of your own. When I have come into personal contact with her, I have been able to make rather less than nothing of her. At first I thought she seemed sullen, and quite reconciled to her position, indeed, that she was too callous to care about anything; but upon seeing her to-day, I was rather struck by the fact that her attitude had undergone a change.”

“How long has she been in prison?”

“Nearly three months. She is an odd sort of creature--her former associates are agreed upon that--and doubtless some sort of change has taken place in her. I am more than ever convinced that insanity is your line; and by this time it should not be too much to hope that you are.”

“She will expect her liberty.”

“_She_ will expect! My dear boy, it is when you permit yourself to talk in this fashion that you fill one with so much distrust. Her position entitles her to expect nothing.”

“No sort of doubt overtakes you then in regard to her guilt?”

“None. I have suggested that to you over and over again. My dear fellow, it is as I feared; you have not permitted yourself a due appreciation of the overwhelming nature of the evidence. I do not see how she can hope to escape; and this is pretty plain speaking on the part of her attorney. Just look at the array of facts--her course of life, her purchase of the poison, the result of the post-mortem, the presence of motive. Again and again I have felt it to be my duty to suggest to you that Tobin would not have attempted to shake the evidence.”

“Well, you must permit me to say that, reflect upon the question as I will, it does not seem easy to reconcile the woman in that room with the cold-blooded monster who will be presented to the jury.”

“That phenomenon is by no means rare. It has been my fortune to undertake the defence of more than one finished example of moral obliquity who has presented not the least indication of such a condition. Besides, do you not admit that the impression that this woman made upon you was one of absolute nullity? Were you not unable to divine anything in regard to her?”

“Yes, that was my first feeling; but I am now confessing that after all, in some mysterious way, she has contrived to shake these preconceived ideas about her, now that from this distance I can view the room and what transpired in it. I dare not say by what means she has contrived to produce this effect; indeed, it is so subtle that I can hardly say what it amounts to, because if I begin to recall her words she seems almost to have admitted her guilt. Yet of one thing I am convinced--she presented no evidence of her depravity.”

“One can easily concede the probability of that.”

“Yes, but had it been as complete as you insist, I must have seen it.”

“Pardon me, but I am afraid it does not follow. What is easier than to hide its traces from the eyes of inexperience?”

“Have I not the talisman in my pocket which transcends experience?”

“Talisman be damned,” said Mr. Whitcomb, with a jovial brutality.

Before his companion could frame an answer to a scorn so unconciliatory, the hansom stopped before the offices of Messrs. Whitcomb and Whitcomb. They alighted together.

XXII

LIFE OR DEATH

The final consultation of Northcote and his client took place in the open street in the heavily raining December afternoon, with their backs against Mr. Whitcomb’s brass plate. The spot selected for their last utterances on this momentous affair was incongruous indeed, but each had grown so impatient of the other, that if their last words were spoken here, the clash of their mental states was the less likely to invite disaster than in a more formal council-chamber of four walls.

The robust common sense of the solicitor had never shown itself to be more incisive than now as he stood with his back to his own door, under a dripping umbrella, his hat pushed to the back of his head, and his trousers turned up beyond his ankles. His twenty years of immensely successful practice, his exact knowledge of human nature, his ruthless worldliness, his reverence for the hard fact, stood forth here in the oddest contrast with the somewhat “special” and rarefied quality of this youthful advocate whom he had seen fit to entrust with so important a case.

“It’s a pity, it’s a pity,” he brought himself to say at last, his veneer falling off a little under the stress of his chagrin, and revealing a glimpse of the baffled human animal beneath. “It is a serious mistake to have made; but we have got to stand to it. You are not the man for this class of work, to speak bluntly. You are either too deep or you are not deep enough. But as I say, we have got to stand to it now. My last words will be to urge you to put as good a face upon it as you can.”

“In other words,” said Northcote, stiffening, “you will look to me to do my best.”

“I don’t put it in that form exactly,” said the solicitor, midway between exasperation and a desire to be courteous. “I want you fully to appreciate that you are handling an extremely tough job, and I merely want you to make the best of it, that’s all.”

“I will tell you, Mr. Whitcomb,” said Northcote, striving in vain to avert the explosion that had been gathering for so long, “that if it were not now the eleventh hour, if I had not pledged myself to this thing more deeply than you know, if it were not a matter of life and death to me as well as to your client, I would throw your brief back at you rather than submit to this. It will be time enough for you to get upon your platform when I have made a hash of everything.”

“Yes, I think you are entitled to say that,” said the solicitor impartially, having made a successful effort to recapture his own serenity. “I have no right to talk as I am doing; I have never done so to any one else. I suspect you have got on my nerves a bit.”

“Yes, the whole matter throws back to the clash of our temperaments,” said Northcote, unable to cloak his own irritation now that it had walked abroad. “It is a pity that we ever attempted to work together. Yet for one who envelops himself in the serene air of reason, you are somewhat illogical, are you not? You enter the highways and hedges in search of a particular talent; you have the fortune to light upon it; and then you turn and rend its unhappy possessor for possessing it.”

“As I say, my dear boy, this particular talent of yours--or is it your temperament?--you see I am not up in these technical names--has got on my nerves a little.”

“And your temperament, my friend, to indulge a _tu quoque_, is covered with a hard gritty outer coating, for which I believe the technical name is ‘practicality,’ which positively sets one’s teeth on edge.”

“So be it; we part with mutual recriminations. But this is my last word. Firmly as I believe I have committed an error of judgment, if to-morrow you can prove that I have deceived myself, you will not find me ungrateful. I can speak no fairer; and this you must take for my apology. It is not too much to say that since I have come to know you I have ceased to recognize myself.”

“I accept your _amende_” said Northcote, without hesitation. “I see I have worried you, but if I might presume to address advice to the fount of all experience, never, my dear Mr. Whitcomb, attempt to formulate a judgment upon that which you cannot possibly understand.”

“After to-morrow there is a remote chance that I may come to heed your advice. In the meantime we will shake hands just to show that malice is not borne. Don’t forget that you will be the first called to-morrow, at half-past ten. It is quite likely to last all day.”

The solicitor turned into his offices and Northcote sauntered along Chancery Lane. The twilight which had enveloped the city all day was now yielding to the authentic hues of evening. The dismal street-lamps were already lit, the gusts of rain, sleet, and snow of the previous night had been turned into a heavy downpour which had continued without intermission since the morning. The pavements were bleached by the action of water, but a miasma arose from the overburdened sewers, whose contents flowed among the traffic and were churned by its wheels into a paste of black mud. Northcote was splashed freely with this thick slushy mixture, even as high as his face, by the countless omnibuses; and in crossing from one pavement to another he had a narrow escape from being knocked down by a covered van.