part i.
chapter i.
i first see joshua pilbrow.
when i was a very little boy my mother died. i was too young to feel her loss long, though i missed her badly at first; but the compensation was that it brought my father nearer to me. he was a barrister, a prodigal love of a man, dear bless him! and he felt his bereavement so cruelly that for a time he seemed incapable of rallying from the blow. but presently he plucked up heart, and went, for my sake, to his business again.
he was more liked than lucky, i believe. i had evidence enough, at least of the former; for after my mother’s death, not bearing that we should be parted, he carried me with him on the last circuit he was ever to go. those were the days when bench and bar dined well, and sat up late telling tales. sometimes my father would slip me into his pocket, so to speak, and from its shelter—when, to be candid, i had been much better in bed—i heard fine stories related by the gentlemen who put off gravity with the horsehair they wore all day. they were a merry and irresponsible lot, rather like a strolling company of actors; and, indeed, it was no less their business to play many parts. there were types among them which i came to associate with certain qualities: such as the lean vivacious ones, who ate and drank hungrily, and presently grew incoherent and quarrelsome; such as the rosy bald-headed ones, who always seemed to make most laughter; such as the large, heavy-browed ones, who sulked when they were bettered in argument. but my friend amongst them all, next to my father, was mr. quayle, q.c.
i fancied i had discovered, after much consideration, why he was called q.c. he was a little man, quite bald and round all over his head and face except for a tuft of hair on his chin, and there was the q; and he wore a pouter-pigeon ruff under his chin like this, q/c, and there was the q.c. i may have been wrong; but anyhow i had precedent to justify me, for many of these jolly souls bore such characteristic nicknames. there was plain john, for instance, who had so christened himself for ever during a dispute about the uses or abuses of multiple titles. “plain john” had been enough for him, he had said. again, there was blind fogle, so called from his favourite cross-examination phrase. “i don’t quite see.” they were all boys together when off duty, chaffing and horse-playing, and my father was the merriest and most irrepressible of the crew.
there was one treat, however, of which he was persistent in baulking me. pray him as i might, he would never let me see or hear him in his character of counsel. the court where he would be working by day was forbidden ground to me, and for that very reason i longed, like bluebeard’s wife, to peep into it. this was not right, even in thought, for i knew his wishes. but worse is to be confessed. i once took an opportunity, which ought never to have been given me, to disobey him; and dreadful were the consequences, as you shall hear.
we were travelling on what is called the home circuit, and one day we came to ipswich, a town to mark itself red in the annals of my young life. on the second morning after our arrival i was playing at horses with george, my father’s man, when mr. quayle looked in at our hotel, and, dismissing george, took and sat me upon his knee.
“dad gone to court?” said he.
“yes,” i answered; “just.”
he grunted, and rubbed his bald head, with a look half comical, half aggravated. his eyes were rather blinky and red, and he seemed confused in manner and at a loss for words.
“dicky,” he said, suddenly, “did you live very well, very rich-like, when mamma was alive?”
“yes,” i answered; “’cept when mamma said we must retrench, and cried; and by’m-by papa laughed, and threw the rice pudding into the fire, and took us to dine at a palace.”
“and that was—very long before—hey?”
“it was a very little while before mamma went away for good,” i murmured, and hung my head, inclined to whimper.
mr. quayle twitched at me compunctious.
“o, come!” he said, “we must all bear our losses like men. they teach us the best in the world to stand square on our own toeses. there! shall i tell you a story—hey?”
i brightened at once. he knew some good ones. “yes, please,” i said.
“o, lud!” he exclaimed, rubbing his nose with his eye-glasses. “i am committed! judex damnatur. dicky, i sat up late last night, devouring briefs, and they’ve given me an indigestion. never sit up late, dicky, or you’ll have to pay for it!”
he said the last words with an odd emphasis, giving me a little shake.
“is that the beginning of the story?” i asked, with reserve.
“o, the story!” he said. “h’m! ha! dear take my fuddled caput! well, here goes:
“there were once two old twin brothers, booksellers, name of pilbrow, who kept shop together in a town, as it might be ipswich. now books, young gentleman, should engender an atmosphere of reason and sympathy, inasmuch as we talk of the republic of letters, which signifies a sort of a family tie between a, b, and c. but these fellows, though twins, were so far from being united that they were always quarrelling. if joshua bought a book of a stranger, abel would say he had given more than its worth, and sell it at his own valuation; and if abel attended a sale, there was joshua to bid against him. naturally, under these conditions, the business didn’t flourish. the brothers got poorer and poorer, and the more they lost the worse they snapped and snarled, till they took to threatening one another in public with dear knows what reprisals. well, one day, at an auction, after bidding each against t’other thremenjus for a packet of old manuscripts and book rubbish—which abel ended by getting, by-the-by—they fastened together like tom-cats, and had to be separated. the people laughed and applauded; but the end was more serious than was expected. abel disappeared from the business, and a few days later the shop took fire, and was burned to the ground.
“so far, so plain; and now, mr. dickycumbob, d’ye know what’s meant by insurance?”
“no, sir?”
“well, look here. if i want to provide against my house, and the goods in it, being lost to me by fire, i go to a gentleman, with a gold watch-chain like a little ship’s cable to recommend him, and says i:—‘if i give you so much pocket-money a year, will you undertake to build up my house again for me in case it happens to be burned down?’ and the gentleman smiles, and says ‘certainly.’ then i say, ‘if i double your pocket-money will you undertake to give me a thousand pounds for the value of the goods in that house supposing they are burned too?’ and the gentleman says, ‘certainly; in case their value really is a thousand pounds at the time.’ so i go away, and presently, strange to say, my house is actually burned to the ground. then i ask the gentleman to fulfil his promise; but he says, ‘not at all. the house i will rebuild as before, and for the goods i will pay you; but not a thousand pounds, because i am given to believe that they were worth nothing like that sum at the time of the fire?’ now, what am i to do? well, i will tell you what this joshua did. he insisted upon having the whole thousand pounds, and the gentleman answered by saying that he believed joshua had purposely set fire to his own house in order to secure a thousand pounds for a lot of old rubbish in it that wasn’t worth twopence ha’penny. d’yunderstand?”
“yes, i think so.”
“very well, then, and listen to this. if the gentleman spoke true, joshua had fallen in scyllam cupiens vitare charybdim, which means that he had jumped out of the frying-pan into the fire, or, in other words had, in trying to catch the insurance gentleman, been nabbed himself by the law. for arson is arson, and fraud fraud, and the gentleman with the watch-chain isn’t to be caught with a pinch of salt on his tail. but that was not the worst. human bones had been found among the débris of the building, and ugly rumours got about that these bones were abel’s bones—the bones of an unhappy victim of joshua’s murderous hate. the man had disappeared, the brothers’ deadly quarrel was recalled; it was whispered that the fire might owe itself to a double motive—that, in short, joshua had designed, at one blow, to secure the thousand pounds and destroy the evidences of a great crime. joshua, sir, was arrested and put upon his trial for murder and arson.”
i was listening with all my eyes and ears.
“who defended him?” i whispered, gulping; for i knew something of the legal terms.
the answer took me like a smack.
“your father, sir.”
“o!” i exclaimed, thrilling. and then, after a pause, with a pride of loyalty: “he got him off, didn’t he?”
mr. quayle put me down, and yawned dyspeptically.
“what!” he said. “if any man can, papa will. i ask your pardon, master dicky, i really do, for palming off fact instead of fiction on you. but my poor brain wasn’t equal. the case is actually sub judice—being tried at this moment. yesterday began it, and to-day will end. if you whisper to me to-night, i’ll whisper back the result.”
the delay seemed insupportable. he had read and worked me up to the last chapter of the story, and now proposed to leave me agonising for the end. it was the first time i had ever been brought so close to the living romance of the law, and my blood was on fire with the excitement of it.
“o, i wish——” i began.
the barrister looked down at me oddly, and shook his head.
“ah, you little rogue!” he chuckled.
i felt too guilty to speak. he knew all that was in my mind. suddenly he took my hand.
“come along, then,” he said, “and let’s have a peep. papa needn’t know.”
he shouldn’t have tempted me, nor should i have succumbed. a murder romance was no book for a child, though my father figured in it as a paladin championing the wronged and oppressed.
i hung back a moment, but the creature cooed and whistled to me. “come and see joshua,” he said, “with his back to the wall, and papa in front daring ’em all to come on.”
the picture was irresistible. i let myself be persuaded and run out, tingling all over.
it was a dingy november morning. the old town seemed dull and uneasy, and a tallow-faced clock on a church dawdled behind time, as if it had stopped to let something unpleasant go by. that might have been a posse of melancholy javelin-men, who, with a ludicrous little strutting creature at their head—a sort of pocket drum-major, in sword and cocked hat and with a long staff in his hand—went splashing past at the moment. the court-house, what with the fog and drip, met us like the mouth of a sewer, and i was half-inclined to cry off so disenchanting an adventure, when my companion tossed me up in his arms and carried me within. through halls and passages, smelling of cold, trodden mud, we were passed with deference, and suddenly were swung and shut into a room where there were lights and a great foggy hush.
i saw before me the scarlet judge. i knew him well enough, but never awful like this—a shrunk ferret with piercing eyes looking out of a gray nest. i saw the wigs of the counsel; but their bobtails seemed cocked with an unfamiliar viciousness. i saw the faces of the jury, set up in two rows like ghostly ninepins; and then i saw another, a face by itself, a face like a little shrewd wicked gurgoyle, that hung yellow and alone out of the mist of the court. and that face, i knew, was the face of joshua.
the terrible silence ticked itself away, and there suddenly was my father standing up before them all, and talking in a quick impassioned voice. my skin went cold and hot. if i reaped little of the dear tones, i understood enough to know that he spoke impetuously for the prisoner, heaping scorn upon the prosecution. never, he said, in all his experience had he known calumny visit a soul so spotless as the one it was now his privilege to defend. the process would be laughably easy, it was true, and he would only dwell upon what must be to the jury a foregone conclusion—the accused’s innocence, that was to say—with the object to crush with its own vicious fallacies a prosecution which, indeed, he could not help remarking bore more the appearance of a persecution.
mr. quayle at this point laughed a little under his breath and whispered, “bravo!” in my ear, as he eased his burden by resting my feet on the back of a bench. as for me, i was burning and shooting all over with pride, as my eyes went from my father to the poor little ugly prisoner in the dock, and back again.
the accused, went on my father (in substance. i can only give the briefest abstract of his speech), would not deny that there had been differences between him and his brother. indeed, it would be useless to, in the face of some recent notorious evidence to the contrary. but did not all history teach us the folly of jumping, on the strength of an unguarded word, to fatal conclusions? had not one of our own monarchs (surnamed fitz-empress, as he need not remind the jury) suffered a lifelong regret from the false interpretation put upon a rash utterance of his? “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” he had cried, in an unthinking moment. “you shall pay for this!” had been joshua pilbrow’s threat to his brother, under a like aggravation, in the sale-room. “gentlemen,” said my father, “how deadly the seeming import, how laughable the explanation in either case. king henry cried only distractedly for some one to persuade his importunate chancellor to leave him alone. joshua pilbrow meant no more than to insist that his brother should ‘stand the whole racket’ of a purchase of which he himself had disapproved. hence, gentlemen, these tears!”
there was a little stir in court, and my companion chuckled delightedly in my ear again.
my father then proceeded triumphantly to give the true facts of the case. the packet of books had, it appeared when opened, revealed one item of unexpected value, in the profits from which joshua, as partner, insisted upon sharing. to this, however, abel, quoting his own words against him, demurred. it was his—abel’s purchase, abel contended, to do with as he chose. the dispute ran so high as to threaten litigation; when all of a sudden one night abel was found to have taken himself off with the cherished volume. joshua, at first unable to credit such perfidy, bided his time, expecting his brother to return. but when, at last, his suspicion of bereavement settled into a conviction, he grew like one demented. he could not believe in the reality of his loss; but, candle in hand, went hunting high and low amongst the litter with which the premises were choked, hoping somewhere to alight, in some forgotten corner where cupidity had concealed it, on the coveted prize. alas! it never rains but it pours. he not only failed to trace the treasure, but, in his distracted hunt for it, must accidentally have fired the stock, which, smouldering for awhile, burst out presently into flame, and committed all to ruin.
such was the outline of the story, and, for all that i understood of it, i could have clapped my father to the echo, with the tears gulping in my throat, for his noble vindication of a wronged man. there were other points he made, such as that joshua had himself escaped with the utmost difficulty from the burning building (and did that look like arson?); such as that he had instructed his lawyers, after committal, to advertise strenuously, though vainly, for his brother’s whereabouts (and did that look like murder?); such as that the bones found amongst the ruins were the bones of anatomical specimens, in which the firm was well known to have dealt. i need not insist on them, because the end was what i knew it must be if men were not base and abominable enough to close their ears wilfully to those ringing accents of truth.
the prosecution, poor thing! answered, and the judge summed up; and still mr. quayle, quite absorbed in the case, did not offer to take me away. i had my eyes on my father all the time. he had sunk back, as if exhausted, after his speech, and sat in a corner of the bench, his hand over his face. the jury gave their verdict without leaving their places. i heard the demand and the answer. the cry, “not guilty,” rang like a pæan in my ears; and still i kept my eyes on my father.
the prisoner, freed from the dock, had left the court, when suddenly some people stirred, and a whisper went round. a barrister bent over the resting figure, and arose hurriedly. in a moment there was a springing up of heads everywhere, so that the dear form was blotted from my sight. mr. quayle, looking over my shoulder, caught a word, and gave a quick little gasp.
“dicky,” he said, catching at me, “come out at once! we must get away before—before——” and he left the sentence unfinished as he hurried me into the street.
