Chapter 1

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
_pro_secution which, indeed, he could not help remarking bore more the
appearance of a _per_secution.

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.