Part 21

What was there to deplore? His triumph had been so patent as to win the applause of the world. For the first time in his life money was in his pocket. That woman of courage who had striven so heroically for his welfare would meet with her reward. She would be enabled to end her days at ease. In those somewhat unilluminated eyes Money had always seemed to divide the place of honor with Duty. She would go to her grave, this upright and courageous one, with a p an upon her lips, because her son, her one talent, had in her old age been increased to her tenfold. Those worn hands would need to toil no more.

After all, this success, which to an honest nature was so embittering, had a curious virtue of its own if it could fulfil such an office. And it was hardly for the like of himself to be troubled with these intimations. Morality, like other privileges, was for those who could afford to enjoy it; it was for those who had a snug little annuity in the funds. Those who had shivered in penury, who had known the look of want, had purchased their right to walk unfearingly by the light of their necessity. And he had only parted with his dreams after all; he had only transmuted airy nothings into explicit gold of the state. Let the visionary who nourished his heart upon the unattainable despise Crœsus as before, but let the well-fed and valiant materialist render due homage to that lusty and pagan old fellow. You could not keep your cake and eat it; you could not resign your ideals and yet hope to inhabit your castle in Spain.

It always came back to the question of the Choice. Was it not a sign-post that headed every path; did it not denote the convergence and the parting of every road? It was his own will which had selected the broad and muddy highway of the many, instead of the narrow and precipitous mountain ascent which was only for the feet of the few. In a choice of this kind there might be an affront to his nature, but once having embraced it, it was weakness to repine. He must shed this ferocious arrogance of his. He was now of the common herd, no longer of the sacred few.

The strangeness of his position held his thoughts all day. That which he had purchased had been obtained at a cost beyond rubies; it was not worth one-half he had paid for it, but as he could never recover his outlay he was bound to go on. It remained for him now to play the part of the cynic and philosopher. It was not the highest style of the hypersensitive man on the defensive, but the patchwork target would have to serve until he found the cunning to provide himself with a more efficient cover for his wounds. Yet when all was said the shaft had sunk to a cruel depth in that quivering nature. Heart and mind were lacerated.

At the table at the aerated breadshop at which he took his lunch, two middle-aged clerks from a city counting-house, musty, cowed, and solemn men, were discussing the trial wherein the morning journals with their unerring instinct had discovered the element of sensation.

“----so she got off?”

“Yes, they brought in a verdict of not guilty. My father-in-law was on the jury. He says it was her lawyer’s speech that saved her. He says there wasn’t a dry eye in the court, and the poor old judge cried just like a child.”

“No!”

“Yes! He says he never heard a speech like that before in his life, and he says if he lives to be a hundred years old he will never forget it.”

“Who was her lawyer? Sir Somebody, K. C., M. P.?”

“My father-in-law says not. He says he was quite a young chap without any reputation. But such a voice--he says it just went through you and made you shiver.”

“Something like Irving?”

“My father-in-law says he must have been acting, yet there didn’t seem to be a bit of the actor about him. That’s where he was so wonderful; struck no attitudes; never even raised his voice. Every word seemed to come straight out of him, as though he just couldn’t help it, and yet at first all the jury thought she was a thorough bad one.”

“So she was, I expect.”

“I dare say; but after what her lawyer had said they never thought of bringing in a verdict of guilty. My father-in-law says he was a wonderfully read young fellow, and he must have known the Bible almost by heart from the way in which he used it in his speech. And such an eye as he had too! My father-in-law says it looked like that of an eagle; and when the jury retired to consider the verdict the foreman, who had got a weak heart, had to have brandy or he would have fainted dead away.”

“It was very strange that the judge should have died suddenly.”

“Excitement killed him, they do say.”

“You would think that a judge would be so used to that sort of thing that it wouldn’t affect him.”

“Well, my father-in-law has been many times on the common jury, but he says this young lawyer beat all he had ever heard. He says it doesn’t matter how clever the ordinary lawyer may be, you can always tell when he’s putting it on. But this young chap was so quiet and solemn that he simply made you shiver.”

“Just a trick.”

“They all knew that, yet he made them so that they couldn’t help their feelings. My father-in-law says as soon as they retired to the jury-room to find their verdict, old Bill Oaks--you know the old prize-fighter what keeps the Blue Swan at Hackney--who was on the jury, he just spat in the corner and wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and he says, ‘Well, mateys, I’d reckon we’d ’ang no more women.’”

“Bill Oaks said that?”

“Those were his words. And it just shows the power that young chap must have had to make a common fellow like old Bill Oaks say a thing like that.”

“Some men are born lucky. With a mind of that sort he will have made a fortune in no time. In a year or so he will be keeping his yacht and driving his motor-car. It is a funny world when you come to think about it. Here is a chap like me, been a clerk in the Providential for thirty-five years. My hours are nine-thirty till five; I have never once been late, nor had a day off for illness; and my salary per week is thirty-eight and a tizzey, with a pound a week pension at sixty provided I keep up my payments to the fund. I have never done a wrong action as far as I know; I go to church once on Sunday; I teach in the Sunday school; I give five shillings to the poor every Christmas; I have brought up five children well and decently; I always acted the part of the gentleman to my wife while she was alive, and now she is dead I always keep fresh flowers on her grave summer and winter; I’ve paid my rates and taxes regular; the landlord has never had to ask me twice for the rent; and what’s it all amount to? Why, I leave off just where I began. Yet I consider myself a cut above this young man, with all his gifts, who will make a fortune by saving murderers from the gallows.”

The speaker, a sallow, stunted little fellow, uttered his words in a quiet, yet dogged staccato, as though he were issuing a challenge which he knew could not be taken up. His sharp, quaint cockney speech was almost musical in its incisive energy.

“Happiness don’t depend on money,” said his friend.

“You have got to have money, though, before you can believe it.”

Northcote overheard this conversation while he munched a sandwich. It afforded him the keenest interest. He moved out into the eager crowd which thronged the Strand. Yet again his old passion for perambulating the streets came upon him. There was a sense of adventure in dodging the traffic at a breakneck pace, and in elbowing his way through the press. Until the evening he wandered about in the mud and the December mists. He was sick and weary; the conflict within him gave him no rest; yet there was a fierce joy to be gained in mingling with the virile, many-sided life that was about him everywhere.

Thoroughly tired out at last, he took a frugal dinner at a restaurant, and accompanied it with a bottle of inexpensive wine. He lingered over his meal and made an attempt to read an evening paper, but found he could not do so. The vortex in which his nature had been plunged absorbed the whole of his thoughts.

XXXIV

MAGDALENE OR DELILAH

About nine he returned to his lodging. He lit the lamp, drew the curtains across the window, and built up a good fire. He set himself to do three hours’ reading before he turned into bed. However, that power of will it was his wont to exert to its fullest capacity was for once insubordinate. There were not two consecutive sentences upon any of the pages which he tried that displayed a meaning. He had never known this impotence before.

In the midst of these futile attempts to fix his mind on the task before it, he thought he heard the creaking of the stairs. He listened acutely. Late as was the hour, the clerk of some attorney might be bringing him more briefs. A moment later his door was softly tried and opened as softly as some one entered the room.

To the profound astonishment of the young man he saw that it was the figure of a woman. She was tall and pale and clad sombrely in close black draperies. Her entrance was somewhat stealthy, yet it had neither reluctance nor timidity. Unhesitatingly she approached the chair in which the advocate sat with a book on his knee. He rose to greet her with an air of bewilderment.

“I knew you were a great student,” said his visitor in a low voice, letting two large and dark eyes fall upon the page of the book.

“I beg your pardon,” said Northcote, “I am afraid I don’t know you.”

“You do not know me?” said his visitor in a tone that entered his blood. “I will give you a moment to think.”

Northcote seemed to recoil with a half-born pang of recollection which refused to take shape.

“I have not the faintest knowledge of having met you before,” he said, feeling how vain was the effort to fix his thought.

“Think,” said his visitor.

“It is in vain.”

“I should not have expected you to have so short a memory,” said the woman. “You saw me yesterday and you saw me the day before that.”

“I do not recognize you at all,” said Northcote faintly.

“Should I have remembered that you were a busy man who was unable to spare a thought outside of his profession?”

There was something curiously stealthy in the fall of the voice which startled the advocate.

“That is a voice I seem to recall,” he said, with an air almost of distress.

“A voice you seem to recall,” said his visitor, with a sombre laughter which made his heart beat violently. “How strange it is that you should recall it! You only heard it once, and that was in the stifling darkness of a prison!”

Northcote gave a cry of stupefaction.

“Impossible, impossible!” he said weakly. “You--you cannot be the woman Emma Harrison!”

“Emma Murray, alias Warden, alias Harrison,” said his visitor, whose tone of gentleness was now charged with deliberation.

“Then how and why do you dare to come here?” cried Northcote.

“I bring you my thanks,” she said, with a sudden consummate transition to humility. “I bring the gratitude of an outcast to him who has delivered her from a deeper shame than any she has suffered.”

At first the bewilderment of the advocate would not yield; the revelation of the last creature in the world he looked to see in his attic had seemed to arrest his nature. But hardly had she rendered him her homage with somewhat of the sombre dignity of one who seeks by suffering to efface her stains, than the old devouring curiosity of two evenings previously returned to him. In the prison he had not seen her face; in the dock he had not permitted his eyes once to stray towards her. She was engraved in the tablets of his imagination as a foul and sordid creature, dead to feeling, yet susceptible of the loss of freedom, horrified by the too-definite thought of a barbarous doom; yet over and above everything a denizen of the gutter, wretched, stupid, and unclean. It was amazing to see her stand before him in this frank guise.

Peering at her through the subdued flames of the fire and the lamp, he saw that she had contrived to inhabit her stains in a kind of chastity. It was a trick of her calling, perhaps; yet if trick it was, it was subtle, consummate, and complete. As far as his eyes could pierce the texture of her secrecy, her face was that of a woman of forty. It was pale and unembellished; the cheeks were wan; the features, but slightly defaced, were possessed of a certain original fineness of line, like the handiwork of some little known craftsman who had been touched by genius. There were the remains of a not inconsiderable splendor strewn about her, particularly in her dark, enfolding, and luminous eyes. Suffering was everywhere visible, even in the hair, whose natural sallow hue was peeping through its dye. In form she was large, but not massive; ample, flowing in contour, with the powerful, yet graceful, moulding of a panther.

“Had you not expected something different?” she said, standing up before a scrutiny he did not disguise, and speaking with a mournfulness that seemed to challenge him.

“You have guessed my thoughts,” said Northcote, without lowering his gaze.

“I was not always as I was,” she said, letting each syllable fall passionless. “I sank deeply, but I am risen again. I am praying that with the aid of one I may scale the heights. I even hope to reach that which in the beginning was above my stature.”

“I am glad to hear it,” Northcote muttered.

“That is cruel,” said his visitor with a shiver. “Such a phrase from your mouth wounds me like a sword.”

“I am afraid I don’t understand,” said Northcote, almost with indifference.

“This is not him whom I came to see,” said the woman. “This is not him who saved my base body; him who, if he will, may redeem my whole nature.”

“I?” cried the incredulous young advocate.

“You, my deliverer!”

“I--I don’t think I like you; I think you had better go away,” said the young man, with a brutality of which he was unconscious.

The woman replied to this speech by sinking slowly to her knees. She lifted the noble line of her chin, which intense suffering had seemed to refine, up towards him with an ineffable gesture of appeal. It almost vouchsafed to him a sense of his own degradation.

“I see you as the one whose noble strength will heal me,” she said, prostrating herself more completely, and clasping her arms about his ankles.

“Better rise, better leave me,” said Northcote, bewildered by a sense of pity for his own impotence.

“You are striking me again,” said the woman with a shudder that even to Northcote seemed terrible, “but every blow you give may help to make me whole.”

“What can heal a murderess, a prostitute?” he asked, with a candor of selection that was intended to lacerate.

“You. You who brought me out of prison--you who delivered me from a shame to which even I dared not yield.”

“Get up,” said Northcote, filled with an unaccountable pang. “Sit there, and try to compose yourself a little.”

With an indescribable impulse, which he had no means of fathoming, he raised the trembling, shuddering form by the shoulders, and let it into the chair nearest the fire. The act was wholly without premeditation, but there was nothing in it that partook of the uncouth harshness of his voice. A few scalding drops crept out of her eyes on to his hands, and when he lifted her the heat of her body communicated itself to the tips of his fingers.

“Oh, why do you not speak to me with the voice with which you terrified my judges?” she moaned.

“I cannot make up my mind about you,” said Northcote calmly. “I do not know whether you are the Magdalene, or whether you are Delilah.”

“When you pleaded for my life before my judges yesterday in the court, I looked upon you as Jesus,” said the woman, pressing the tips of her fingers against the balls of her eyes.

“At that hour I felt myself to be no less. And I believe there were those among my hearers who had that hallucination too.”

“Would _he_ have cut me into pieces when I crept to him for sanctuary?”

The young man pressed his hands to his sides. An ineffable anguish had pierced him.

“No man ever felt less like that Nazarene than do I this day,” he cried, with a face that was transfigured with terror. “A holocaust has taken place in my nature. I know that I shall never take my stand with the gods any more. Henceforward I am filled with roughness, brutality, and rage; I hate myself, I hate my species.”

“Wherefore, O my prince!”

“Am I not fallen deeper than her I redeemed from her last ignominy? Have I not prostituted a supreme talent; have I not poisoned the wells of truth?”

“Can this be he who preached the Sermon upon the Mount? Can this be he who said to the woman taken in adultery, ‘Daughter, go thy ways, and sin no more’?”

Already the roughness of the advocate was melted into blood and tears. His callous rage had yielded before the figure of the Magdalene. This nondescript animal he had picked out of a sewer had proved to be a woman who had bled for abasement, and who strove for reinstatement by bleeding for it again.

“I have a curiosity about your history,” said Northcote, with a gaze that devoured her. “You see you are pictured in my imagination as the denizen of a slum.”

“I entered upon life,” said the woman, yielding to the domination of his eyes, “as the eldest daughter of an artist whose existence was a misery. He was a painter of masterpieces that no one would buy. He had not been in his grave a year when they began to realize sums that during his life would have appeared to him as fabulous. His two girls, who comprised his family, never got the benefit of the recognition that had been denied to their maker; but the dealers in pictures, who had begrudged him so much as oils and canvas, grew rich by trading upon a great name.

“My childhood was bitter, cruel, and demoralizing. Art for the sake of art was the doctrine of my poor father, and in pursuing it he took to drink. That honest and virtuous world which I have never been allowed to enter, viewed him afar off as an outcast, as an idle and dissolute vagabond, as a worthless citizen, whose nature was reflected in his calling. Perhaps he was all this; perhaps he was more. Yet he would shut himself up in a little back parlor in the squalid little house in which we lived, and there he would work in a frenzy for days together. He would emerge with his nerves in rags, his skin pale, his eyes bloodshot, his linen foul, his clothes and person in disorder, yet under his arm was a new masterpiece, twelve inches by sixteen, which he would carry round to a dealer, who would bully and browbeat him, and screw him down to the last shilling, which he already owed for the rent. He would return home worn out in mind and body by his labors; and for weeks he was unable to bear the sight of a brush or a skin of paint. It was then he would seek to assuage his morbid irritation with the aid of drink. ‘They will place a tablet over this hovel when I am dead,’ he would say, ‘but while I am alive the rope which is needed to hang me outbuys the worth of this tattered carcass.’

“My poor father, rare artist as he was, was right in this estimate of himself. As a man, as a father, as a citizen, I cannot find a word to say for him. He never brought a moment of happiness to either of his girls. He dwelt in a world of his own; a beautiful and enchanted world, the Promised Land of his art. He was a man of strange ambition; of an ambition that had something ferocious in it; of an ambition that was unfitted to cope with the sordid and material aims, by whose aid persons of not one-tenth part of his quality achieved wealth, respectability, power, and the fame of the passing hour. There was a thread of noble austerity in my poor father’s genius, which remained in it, like a vein of gold embedded in the mud of a polluted river, throughout the whole time of his degradation and his ruin. His pride seemed to grow more scornful with each year that witnessed more completely the consummation of the darkening and overthrow of his nature. I can remember his saying of a picture by the president of the Academy, ‘I would rather have my flesh pecked by daws than prostitute myself with such blasphemies as that;’ and at that time he stood upon the verge of the grave of a drunken madman.

“I have said he was not a good citizen. Nor was he a good father to his girls. He did not offer them physical violence; but it never occurred to him to shield them from the indignities thrust upon them by want and debt, and the despair which was sown in their hearts by the foulness of every breath they drew. It would need my father’s own gift to limn the picture of this beautiful talent living its appointed life in its own way, yet indifferent to the most elementary duties of a righteous parent and an honest citizen. As a young man he had been handsome, with a fine, delicate, even an entrancing beauty; it was one of his favorite sayings that the face of every true artist borrowed something from heaven. I can only recall that face in its latter days, when it was that of a petulant, arrogantly imperious, yet hideous and bloated old creature, whose body and soul had been undermined; but from the numerous pictures he painted of himself in his youth he had the divine look of a poet.