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The Bird of Paradise

Chapter XIII. Every Man his Own Lawyer. "Beds a Quarter-Dollar; Ten Cents Standin' Up."

Chapter XIII. Every Man his Own Lawyer. "Beds a Quarter-Dollar; Ten Cents Standin' Up."

Calm and intrinsically resourceful, Eugene began to draw together the skeins of the concatenation of circumstances in the entangled theme in one firm far reaching grasp; revolving scheme after scheme, oblivious of the fact that he was essaying the impracticable task of making bricks without straw. He had the spirit but he lacked the sinews of war. All day long in the little front parlour of Lily Cottage, where he had learned his lessons as a school-boy, and out of which he had carried in his arms his dying brother to his death-bed, the system of defence in the ensuing trial was devised with whatever resources he could find within his own grip of the law, in spite of the embargo laid upon him by the judge. All the old affidavits were compiled in categorical order, and in cases where appendices were feasible the additions to the former evidence were obtained by him during the evenings and engrossed in regular sequence accordingly.

The very fact of his doing his own legal work had, in the eyes of the rostrum, an incriminatory and prejudicial tendency. His poverty here became a crime. Some of his friends warned him that his method of taking statements from the witnesses with his own hand would tell against page 398him at the time of the trial, but they knew not the difficulties and the financial straits from which he suffered, and most of them were of that class ever ready to side with financially the strongest party. By dire necessity, which knows no laws, he was compelled to perform the irksome task himself, or else let the case go by default of opposition. He was simply acting as his own amanuensis and managing clerk.

On the evening on which his old servant had promised to write out a short compendium of her experiences in his house, he visited the private house of the woman who had employed her, near the shore of the bay. The foliowing morning he transcribed the statement in a more perceptible form and sent the manuscript back for the girl's inspection and perusal. His mother, who had taken the message, brought it back saying that Lillie had no alterations to make and that it was quite correct.

The occupant of the dilapidated villa, he was informed by Brosie, had a most unenviable notoriety in Galveston. The establishment was considered by the police as shady in character. She had been mixed up in a trial for a wholesale tobacco robbery. Two young girls had been arrested in her domicile. She was instrumental in obtaining the conviction of a woman sentenced to two years' hard labour for obtaining money under false pretences. In appearance she was wicked, cold-blooded, and designing. She was prematurely grey and extraordinarily adipose. Shepicked up a kitten that night and knocked its brains out on the door-step. Her voice was a close imitation of the sounds produced by peacocks. Her little beadlike shifty eyes were always turned away from anyone she addressed, partly owing to a divergent lop-eyed squint. All the time she intoned her sweet voice she seemed to be addressing the wall or the people outside in the street from the window, through which she had an inveterate habit of casting her eyes slantindicularly.

When Eugene heard from his brother the reputed character of Margery Moon, to whom his old servant had become engaged, he wrote a note to her mother advising her to come to Galveston and take her daughter away home. In consequence of which her mother came in a few days and departed with Lillie, who had absent-mindedly and owlishly left her belongings behind in Galveston.

It was hard labour for thedoctor to arrange the mass of materials before him —the manual labour of engrossing the documents absorbed all his time and energies for weeks. The private detectives interviewed him shortly before his labours were ended and revived the old inquiries about the missing skeleton. He told the detectives that Adam Quain at one time had exhumed what he thought were the remains of an Apache Indian, but that as they were of no anatomical use to him he had thrown them away years before; that he knew nothing of the missing bones of Laban Jarves; that the old man had never mentioned any name whatever to him, and that he had felt convinced himself that the bones removed that night were not the bones of an American subject. Apparently impressed with the disavowal by Eugene of any connection he might have been supposed to have with the mystery page 399concerning the father of Sukey Bubtitt, they withdrew from Lily Cottage.

It indeed appeared at the time that they were acting in an unofficial capacity, as the funds for the furtherance of their researches were probably withdrawn from the office of Hallam, Brassy and Hoare and transferred to the more important works in the office of Craig, Clack, Carrick and Clark. This busy firm thought it not worth their while to pursue an unprofitable inquiry—a wild-goose chase in a matter of no great consequence to anybody. They shepherded all their forces for the all-engrossing work of divorcing Marvel, and the custodianship of Pearly and Vallie.

The newspapers by this time had once or twice drawn the attention of the public to the prospective matrimonial war. Looking through the columns of the New York Herald, in the space devoted to its own correspondent at New Orleans he saw one morning as he sat in the little parlour the notice of a reported application made by Craig, Clack, Carrick and Clark, to the judge in chambers of the Supreme Court, New Orleans, for permission to further amend the original petition which had been put into his hands at Myamyn, and to which the charge of assaulting his old servant had been duly annexed in legal appendix, by adding a further ground for divorce. This application was based upon an allegation made by the tenant of the villa where Lillie Delaine had been employed, and from whose house he had been instrumental in getting her removed. The application had been referred to the new judge sitting on circuit adjudication at Galveston, and Judge Winterbourne had, it appeared, felt himself bound to grant the request as a matter of form, but had remarked that it was an unfair proceeding to bring these fresh charges so late in the day, and dilated upon the mean treachery of stabbing a man in the dark. It was soon discovered that the questionable character of the villa in Galveston had been enlisted in the services and the pay of Hallam, Brassy, Hoare, Craig, Clack, Carrick and Clark. This woman was frequently seen waddling about the town with Marvel, who, had she not some selfish motive in keeping her company, would just as soon have walked down the Fifth Avenue with a modern Jack Ketch1. The paradisal bird also visited her house, and together with her mother—with whom she boarded at the Orion Hotel— they frisked around the town in a sprightly fly, in chase of some person with whom at some time in his life the doctor had been seen to take a drink.

The chronic broncho-asthmatical case, now as old as sin and through long illness very decrepid, proved a very hard case for Eugene. Since the paradisal wedding the abject and grovelling auntie had kept herself hermetically sealed from cold, maundering and pottering about the kitchen for the sake of a little gentle exercise to keep her old joints from becoming altogether rusty; but she now girded up her loins and carried the crutch about the town in the hopes that some clue might bob up serenely during the taking of a long breath. Turning on the hand she had licked and beslavered after smearing him all over with compliments as with a trowel, although she had hunted with the hounds, she was running now with the page 400hare2. The hypocrite may alter her face, but the mask fails in extremis, and with Eugene she was now at daggers drawn. She had forgotten the sunny days when she had wooed him with her meretricious sophistries on behalf of Marvel, and was at this juncture one of his most implacable and deadliest enemies. Her field of operations was the purlieus of the hospital, near which she still resided in Sunnyside.

One of Marvel's informants was a negro—a black, jet-black, nigger from North Carolina. He, the jet-black nigger from North Carolina, opened oysters in Galveston. Notwithstanding the oysters, he put up the shutters one October morning in deference to an appointment which he had made with Marvel for a drive around the town during the busiest part of the day and through the principal streets of Galveston, sporting a brand-new calico suit shot with peacock-blue, and a great Prince of Wales' feather flower in his hat. The old buck nigger and the paradisal bird looked quite sweet upon the seat of the hansom cab built for two. Salamander Sam during the day's outing alighted with the paradisal bird from the hansom in the centre of the pier and introduced her to all his pals and the "wharf rats," each with a chaw of tobacco in his mouth, hiding here and there among the bales of wool. He revealed to them the piping-hot secret of his bosom, and declared that Marvel was a "dooth-ed fine bird of Paradithe;" that he was going to help her to get a "ditholution" and, when she got it, he wouldn't mind marrying her himself. Salamander Sam had seen Brosie carrying the girl's box, and thought it was the doctor; but he subsequently showed the white feather in the prosecution of his attentions to the bird of Paradise and wrote her the following letter:— "Deer Bird of Paradice—

"Doant kum to see me noa moar—not four a wile ennyway in case of haccidence. One of my pals come hear to nite and he sez I'd be lagged four purgee and he made me quiet skeered. The roase is red the voilets bloo and so r yu.—Ever thin S. S."

The legionary forces of the two legal firms which had coalesced and entered the lists together were as busy as bees collating evidence; not pressing their witnesses into the service at sweating prices but persuading them with sound and substantial metallic arguments. The activity of the office of Hallam, Brassy and Hoare, playing second-fiddle to the legionary office in the Fourth Avenue, in which seventeen clerks were kept busily and constantly employed copying and engrossing documents in connection with the great case of Whitworth versus Whitworth, was further augmented by a little private enterprise on the part of the synergist3 Sukey and Simon. The chinchilla-billygoat-bearded midwife by a little favoritism in the head office, brought about by the member of the legislature, had been exonerated from his burdensome duties for a month so that he might throw his whole heart and soul into the prosecution of inquiries damaging to Eugene and join the gang in full cry after him. His pawky lumbering wife too—she with the freckled face and the oil-and-whitening nose—also helped, for every mortal thing helps in divorce cases, to weigh down the scale of justice. She page 401left her brood of dusky pugwuggies in charge of the cook to hunt up all the evidence she could at Mobile, while Marvel, her mother and the old auntie kept their noser well on the trail at Galveston, Augusta, and the city of New Orleans, salving the consciences of the "leisure classes" at ten dollars a head and the hopes of distinction through being concerned in a cause célèbre.

When the doctor-lawyer had compiled and codified his work at Lily Cottage, flattering himself that his papers were all in chronological order, he sat in the little parlour surveying the mass of white paper on the table, when his father entered the room. Throwing down the pen, which had been in his hands sixteen hours out of the twenty-four for several weeks, he said—"I can't for the life of me see what possible chance Marvel has for a divorce. I believe after all this is only a work of supererogation."

"I don't know so much about that," said the old man with an eerie prescience of evil, after leisurely mooning over the litigation in the stable, "you see they have been cunning enough to ask for a jury, and to offer to pay the jury out of their own pockets. Any ordinary juryman will, under any circumstances, sympathise more with a woman than he will with a man, as the saying is; he will believe her too when she shows a few maudlin tears, and it's my firm belief, as the saying is, although I never heard of her crying, she will feign to do so to gain a point. The money is what I am afraid of, and it is in the hands of a sharp firm of lawyers. That money can procure as much false evidence as they want. Why, bless my soul, since that tin-mine bubble burst there are hundreds of men and women in this and the neighbouring States who before were well to do now going about starving, as the saying is, and plenty of them will swear a man's life away for a few dollars. I'm not afraid of anything but that and the jury. If it were not for that jury I should think there was no call for one-quarter of that heap of papers. My idea is that if you had a little money, as the saying is, to put it into the hands of a first-class lawyer nothing could stop you from winning the case and laughing at them, in a manner of speaking—that is if it's worth winning. For my part I would let her go; she never was anything but a millstone around your neck, as the saying is, and that she'll be as long as she lives."

He put on his hat and walked out with his father to the stable, where, for the first time since he had been living at Lily Cottage, he saw again the old chestnut mare, and there came back to his mind the halcyon day when she had carried the then paradisal Marvel in ecstasy by his side to the home of the old coal-king, and all the subsequent changing scenes.

Only three days now were left before the trial. The words of his father fixed themselves like bolts in his brain, and he determined upon making some attempt at obtaining the services of a barrister to conduct his case in the court. The small sum which his father, in charge of the nominal commissariat, had been able to lend him was all required for travelling expenses. Brosie was doing well, but his money was all invested, and he found it hard to recover his debts: while page 402the wages of Dolly were a mere bagatelle, and the interest charged by Glue-pot Ike, the next door neighbour, and one of those who "putteth out his money to usury," was too exorbitant without unimpeachable security. The utmost he could do was to call upon some of the men at the bar in the city who had been fellow-students with him at the university. One or two barristers whom he saw on his arrival for this purpose in the city, and even the junior counsel who had been handsomely rewarded for his professional services and successes in the original application for habeas and the custody of the children, in a very business-like way point-blank refused to take charge of the case unless it came first-hand from the office of a solicitor upon whose financial stability they could rely for their fees. They did not know the client directly, they said, although the doctor had often helped them out of their embarrassments at the university. They impressed upon him the rule that they were employed by the orthodox solicitor, and to him they looked for payment of their fees in advance if they had any doubts of his reliability.

Disappointed at his failures to find one of his old mates chivalrous and noble enough to stand by him in the hour of need, but on the other hand making all sorts of excuses and subterfuges to get rid of him, he made up his mind to run the risk of the disapproval of the interdicting rostrum and to fight the case out himself as best he could.

Feeling that he had wasted the whole day without finding one friend willing to lend a helping hand, he wandered dolefully down towards the fourth quay, when coming away from the railway station he encountered an old friend with whom he had been on particularly intimate terms at the University of Philadelphia. He was a barrister! Of moderate means when he first entered the cloisters of the great academy, by dint of great ability and sedulous application to his legal studies he had after five years' unrelaxing exertions attained to the uncommon degree of Master in the dry-as-dust learning of the law. The diploma was a rare and much higher qualification than the great majority of the barristers possessed. It was the usual custom for barristers to relinquish abruptly their university studies as soon as they had acquired the degree of bachelor of laws, which entitled them to admission to the rostrum as practising barristers, and to all the rights and privileges of the Supreme Court. Few had the devotional power and the mental capacity for sheer hard labour in the life of laborious days possessed in his younger days by George Wilmington. Amongst the whole mailed army of barristers practising at the courts at the time of the divorce case of Whitworth v Whitworth, many of whom were known to Eugene, there were only ten who could subscribe themselves Masters of the inner temple. The profundities and interstices of the law—"deep as plummet lies"4—were the home and the play-ground of the scholarship don and consistent honourman of the Philadelphia University. The activities of the law-courts and the usurious offices in Chancery Square were the habitudes of his contemporaries. In the one little section were scholars, in the other shrewd men of business. The brawling law-courts absorbed page 403the preponderating division. The ardent devotees remained in the purliens of the law at the university among the venerable, worm-eaten journals.

When by chance he met Wilmington, the latter had just alighted from the train just arrived from an upcountry town where he had been conducting a case requiring for his client's success an abstruse, recondite and comprehensive knowledge of the perplexing and infinitely involved multiplicities of the law. George Wilmington was one of the finest general scholars in America. He was among the other lawyers a sort of book of reference, whose authoritative information was more accessible to them than the law journals in the library of the law-courts. Therein lay his métier. Ready and willing he always was to offer himself to their impositions whenever they found themselves in any difficulties or required the solution of a theorem demanding close and intricate study. Many a case which they reaped the kudos of winning was in reality won by Wilmington for them. He had a heart as big as a bullock. Cases for arbitration were frequently put into his hands—banking law, questions as to the power of judges of the Supreme Court, advice as to the merits of a case proposed for appeal to the Grand Court of the United States, together with all the minute anatomy of the delitescent5 secrets of the higher departments of his profession. All were conscientiously worked out in his office in Chancery Square, and no client could ever say that he had been misled or dishonestly advised.

In the broiling law court, in cases really not concerned with law, the mass of his learned lumber seemed to weigh down and handicap the versatility of his practical abilities. In some cases of fact versus law with which in the court he had been entrusted by his admirers, his exposition of his case had not been clearly understood by the judges, whose master in learning he was, and his clients' cases were in consequence lost, although under ordinary circumstances they might have been won.

A quick and practical application of a parallel case was what was wanted in cases where questions of fact alone arose. In such-like cases he sometimes failed, but in cases requiring a sound exposition of the law his success was unsurpassed. His strength lay in a firm grasp of the very kernel of the law, but common-sense had greater weight in carrying away the intelligence of a thick-headed jury than did all the track-loads of legal works and law-journals that George Wilmington carried in his head.

His masterly eloquence was on a par with that of Abraham Lincoln. Although he had not been born in Scotland and had never been within a mile of Edinbro' town in his life, or tasted the real mountain-dew or a drop of Coogate whisky twenty-five per cent over proof, his accent was of the manner born. He hailed from a Scotch settlement at Charleston, where his father was one of the Supreme Court judges. He was a married man, but both his children had died. In appearance, his flowing hair was very dark brown, and his face smooth-shaved. His height was fully six feet, and his spectacled eyes told of many a prolonged watch over "the mid-page 404night oil," his strong physique of his power of endurance and concentration. His age was thirty. He had been a medical student with Eugene for three years, but had surrendered his studies in medicine for a life-long devotion to the fuller's-earth6 of the law. His medical knowledge gave him a great advantage over all the other lawyers in cases of medical jurisprudence, and in this branch and intrinsic law he had a wide-spread fame. He wrote a standard digest of the law, and single-handed once he won a case of law with two witnesses, while the triplet of barristers on the other side had eighty-seven.

"My worthy old friend!" he said, shaking hands, "and how is Dr. Whitworth?"

Eugene replied that as far as bodily health was concerned he never felt better in his life, but he proceeded to draw a few verbal sketches of his critical social and financial position.

Taking Eugene by the arm, they walked together some few paces towards the city. The lawyer urged him so cordially to dine with him at his private rooms in the Colorado Hotel in one of the suburbs that Eugene began to fancy that he had not come from Galveston to New Orleans in vain. On the way to the hotel Eugene narrated to the learned lawyer the details of his domestic status as well as he could, explaining that his former solicitors, Warne, Costall and Davitt, had thrown him overboard when they had mopped up all his money. At dinner he introduced the doctor to his wife—a lady of a fine commanding presence, a classical face and an animated affability. She enjoyed some fame as a blue-stocking.

In the hotel Eugene met another old friend; he too was a barrister, with a very large retinue of legal retainers—so great that Eugene knew it was useless to approach him. He was of average height, with a magnificent figure, and dressed in the full uniform of a captain of artillery, ready as soon as the dinner was over to go out for his weekly night-drill in the garrison hall of the city. He had often been associated in court practice with Wilmington and, on hearing the outlines of Eugene's case, he condescended to relinquish the drill for that night. Sending word to a lieutenant of his altered determination, he sat with the solicitor in the study taking notes from Eugene; not Gloriana Bloobumper notes, but a plain, unvarnished tale.

Some two hours were expended after dinner in these preliminaries, when Wilmington, after carefully listening to the account of Whitworth and reading the written judgments of the judges who had adjudicated in the earlier stages in the matrimonial campaign, unhesitatingly and at once expressed his weighty opinion that the bird of Paradise had no chance whatever of gaining the day. With or without money he then and there offered to take up the cudgels on behalf of the persecuted Eugene.

"Thora of Rimol! hide me! hide me!
Danger and shame and death betide me!
For Olaf the king is hunting me down
Through field and forest, through thorp and town!"7

page 405

Thus cried Jarl Hakon to Thora the fairest of women, and thus felt Eugene as he entered the proffered refuge of his old friend's generosity. The military barrister was of opinion that the case was so strong in Eugene's favour that he fully expected that not only would Marvel be put to flight but that the court would order the whole of the costs to be paid by the petitioner.

After they had both wished good-night to the doctor, he took his departure by one of the night colliers bound for Galveston, where he recounted to the household in Lily Cottage his experiences of the day in the city.

"Oh! him!" said Brosie: "I guess I know him: when I was partner with Batty Tuke in Fifth Avenue, city, he often reckoned me up for you: they say he is about one of the finest lawyers in creation, but that the judges have a derry on him for practising as a solicitor and that he drops easy cases on that account, but if he only gets fair play he can lick the lot:" whereas old Christopher Whitworth thought that Eugene had done a grand stroke of work by securing the services of such a capital lawyer, and especially as he had offered to take up the case without the money down—a sure and certain sign, he said, that the millennium was near at hand.

The mass of affidavits and answering affidavits', summonses in ordinary and originating summonses, orders original and orders to review, orders for habeas corpus and orders for habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, orders for maintenance and orders varying orders for maintenance; opinions of former barristers and judgments of the judges; bills of costs like autumn leaves, and all the correspondence between Whitworth and his wife, his lawyers and her lawyers; summonses and briefs in habeas corpus, summonses and briefs in habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, and summonses and briefs in application for maintenance, together with all the rest of the legal paraphernalia lying on the little round table in the parlour of the cottage, were by the whole family parcelled together and, out of curiosity, weighed, or to re-assure themselves that they would not be found wanting. The little bundle of war baggage dragged down the arrow-headed indicator of the steel-yard scales in the kitchen till it pointed to the second last mark on the brass face, and showed its nett weight to be, avoirdupois, exactly forty-seven pounds without the clothes-line!

With the impedimenta of the war under his arm or over his shoulder, not having a quarter-dollar to spare for a cab, he trudged, as the mare was lame, to the steamboat, and shipped the baggage on board early the next morning. At New Orleans, he trudged with it again to the office of Wilmington in Chancery Square. Leaving it in charge of a message boy, he commenced instituting inquiries about the fourth-rate parts of the city for the whereabouts of a bedroom affording cheap accommodation to single men.

His brother Dolly had, during the first few months of his Christy minstrel performances, resided as a boarder in a street called Lynching Lane, not very far from the quay. Lynching Lane contained a very large number page 406of working men's cottages, fishermen's homes, homes for fallen angels and wandering stars of the night, and an asssortment of suites of apartments for stevedores, stokers, lumpers, coal-heavers, and many others of the submerged tenth. Wheresoever a vacancy occurred in one of the apartments, it was duly notified to the homeless swain as he passed along the narrow footpath of Lynching Lane by the suspension from the catch of the window of a concave sun-warped card, pimpled all over with fly-spots, which was reversed when the room was engaged; while on some of the windows the information was communicated to the wayfarer whoever he might be in badly-spelt, badly daubed figures of whitening and water, in some places to the effect that beds were a quarter-dollar and standing up all night ten cents.

To Lynching Lane, after fruitless peregrinations for suitable lodgings in other parts of the city at a low price, the doctor betook himself late in the evening. After threading a labyrinth of noisome lanes, it was quite dark when he reached the corner of Lynching Lane, but a patrolman divulged to him the number of a house where, he said, it was more than likely he would be accommodated with a single bed or a double one all to himself. Armed with this information and a box of safety matches, he entered upon the task of opening the front gates, when there was a front gate, striking the matches on the side of the box, watching them one after another blown out by the wind, and eventually illuminating the doors of the houses above the knockers, when there was a knocker, and looking for number 447X before ringing the bell, when there was a bell. The numbers were not alternative, but jumbled up all ways, so that after going straight up one side and coming in a zig-zag half-way back, just as he was beginning to fancy the patrolman had given him the number of his hat by mistake, he found in the middle of Lynching Lane the right number, but he couldn't find the x. It was heart-breaking. He decided upon risking it and pulling the bell. There was no handle to the bell. There was a slight protrusion of the steel shaft, from which the handle had been wrenched off by some Christy minstrel playfully out of the socket. He caught the protrusion between his finger and his thumb. He pulled. Every dog in the neighbourhood of Lynching Lane barked vociferously all together; the seven sleepers awoke, and a woman from next door came out to have a look at him. The campanulation of that bell in the hollow-sounding house was enough to call out the fire-brigade. It was a bell fit for the belfry of St. John's. Presently he heard a clack clack-clack-clack down the bare wooden steps of the staircase and a wollop-wollop-wollop-wollop down the bare floor of the passage, while a tallow candle shone through the broken socket for the bell. Releasing the bar-chain of the door a few links, appeared one suety ear and a few corkscrew curls of a grizzly old party, who wanted to know if he was abroad.

"Can you let me have a room for a week or so?" said Eugene.

"Married or single?" said the suety-eared, grizzly old woman.

page 407

"Single," he replied, and was allowed to enter, to be scrutinized from head to foot by the grizzly old woman with the suety ear and the corkscrew curls, who thereupon proceeded to demonstrate the room—the one which they first came across. Its capacity was about two cubic yards.

"This yun," said the grizzly old woman with the corkscrew curls, the suety ear and the tallow candle, "is the best ben hoose; they yuns ben is owre sma'. Ye'll obsairve thae bags on the fluir is no belongit here: they save the cairpet and ye'll hae a clock and plainty of soap and watter. Yon ither bed I can tak' oot gin ye no want it yersel'. A'll chairge ye twa dawlers a wick for twa; but ye can hae this yun for a dawler an' ten cents. I hae ithers for heichteen cents a nicht."

The doctor, tired as he was, after his perambulations over the flagstones and hard gravelled pavements, noticing a little table, made out of a box stuck up on its end in the room, that might, he thought, perhaps prove useful if he had any writing to do there, accepted the offer of the old lady and paid her a week's rent in advance. Before the old party retired to the higher regions in the top flat, she gave the persona grata a lesson in opening the door himself from outside by pulling a string reeved through a hole in the panel of the door, and fastened through a staple inside to the latch of the draw-back lock.

Eugene looked complacently around the little sanctuary which he had got for one dollar ten cents for a week, and made a few notes at the box in the corner by kneeling on the floor from want of elbow-room on the improvised table, till it was getting very late, and he proceeded to wind up the silent and anachronistic clock. He wound up the silent and anachronistic clock, whereupon the strident and greatly alarmed clock flew into a most preposterous tantrum, and made up its mind not to lose a minute in letting the grizzly old party in the top-flat skies know what he had been up to since she went away. What right had he to wind it up? it would just unwind itself at once, and serve him right for his audacity in daring to wind it up; it would never stop unwinding its mainspring and whirring and rattling and jumping and jarring till he would be very glad to leave the room and go and wind up a clock somewhere else out of that. It was out on strike for some time, which any other fool might have known. He told it to shut up: it wouldn't shut up for him and no one like him—he could shut up himself more like: it would do like the bird of Paradise—it would alarm the police. He kept civil for a quarter of an hour. The clock took his civility into consideration and simply stared at him, when he taunted it with having heard that the Christy minstrels had broken bits off its hands for tooth-picks, pipe cleaners, finger-nail and toe-nail scrapers; whereupon the clock disdained to take any notice of his low remarks and treated them with silent contempt. He was a stranger to the clock, and it didn't want to have anything to do with him, so the best thing he could do was to go to bed and leave it alone.

Awaking early next morning he reconnoitred the lodgings in search of a bathroom. He found the bathroom, but as it appeared to have been con-page 408verted into viler uses than lavation, he changed his mind. He calmed his troubled bosom with the prospect of plenty of good soap and water, mentioned by the landlady the night before, though judging by the pigmented condition of her skin she never used any herself. Ivy soap very likely there would be in the sanctuary; beautiful white milky soap floating on the surface of the water and with a fine creamy lather; terebene8 soap, or even the fragrant old brown Windsor9, abounding in Lily Cottage, would do instead of a shower. There wasn't even a bit of common yellow in the sanctuary! The washing-jug was full of a large bunch of withered aspen leaves, sticking through the broken bottom of the jug into a quantity of loose sandy loam in the basin, as if the old beldame had been trying to grow dead aspen, and was shading its withered stalks with the broken jug. The basin too had been broken, but stuck together again with soap and putty. One of his boots, which he had put outside the door, he found had been kicked down to the other end of the passage by some steam-boat wiper who had come home during the night. He went for it and found them both just as dirty as when he put them out, but he espied a bit of cracked soap sticking between the gratings of the sink under the tap. With it he performed over the sink his matutinal ablutions.

Passing by the old woman, to whom he said good morning but received no answer in reply, he made his toilet by combing his hair with his fingers and prepared to leave the sanctum, when the old woman came in to make the bed. She was, he thought, the ugliest old woman he ever saw in his life. She was bent almost bipartite into the shape of an architectural compass. She wore a greasy, ragged, but squarish black-beaded net on her head. One of her eyes had the appearance of having been gouged out with the scissors; what was left of it looked like a spider's coocoon and chrysalis floating in a gelatinous juice, filling the cleft of her sagging eyelids. Her mouth was like the first cut in a leg of mutton—square and extensive, giving her face the appearance of a rat-trap. She had the overlooked jaw of the bull-dog. Her face was the colour of a seaman's oilskins, roughened, blistered and corrugated with age. Her hands were like two large crabs, and altogether she was a perfect old ogre.

"Good morning: fine morning," he said, but he was not accorded any answer: so taking his little black bag that contained a few collars, handkerchiefs, shirts, neckties and socks put into it by Miriam, he wended his way to the city for breakfast.

Meeting on the way an idiotic-looking old woman she offered to polish his boots. Holding first one foot upon the boot-block for the trituration10 of the boot-black, then holding likewise the other, the half-witted old party who was well-known in the city as 'Ariadne,' was encompassed, together with Eugene, by a very rude mob of street-arabs11 who all found it a pastime to irritate the poor old woman by floating her brushes, every one of which was worn away to the handle, adown the limpid stream of the street-channel sacred to 'Ariadne.' After paying 'Ariadne,' he walked on to the city. So did 'Ariadne,' and so did the arabs. They badgered the page 409old feminine silly-billy so unmercifully that she was compelled to throw the boot-brushes, the boot-block and pieces of metal which they called 'rocks' at them to keep them from doing her some bodily injury, while the circumambient12 street-arabs picked them all up and threw them all back at the refulgescent13 'Ariadne' all the way down the street to the city.

When the doctor took a seat in the eating-house at the eight o'clock ordinary, he had for a compagnon de table a chimney-sweep with milky eyes, and after a couple of india-rubber chops and a cup of dirty water he walked away to the office of the lawyer, whom he found sedulously canvassing legal literature, some of it printed on vellum, and cudgelling his brains buried in the pile of affidavits, orders, judgments, correspondence and other documents germane to the question, all of which Eugene had brought unto him from Galveston.

"Good morning," said the doctor as he met his champion.

"She has no chance," said the lawyer: "no chance in the wide world of getting a divorce," the very first words he spoke. "My clerk has been up to the law courts to look over the lists; he says your case is first on the list, and that it will come before Judge Grant. I don't like Grant: he never drinks anything stronger than cocoa, and will perhaps be prejudiced against a man if there is any smell of drink in the case; but he is better than Judge Laidlaw. Laidlaw is too sublime a doctrinaire and too full of cranks and crotchets. I am sure even Laidlaw would never grant a decree, although he never drank a glass of spirits in his life. Just take a seat over there and I will give you a specimen of the cross-examination which you will get in the box, so that you will not be so astonished when it comes. That man will use the lowest and most blackguardly talk ever used in a cross-examination; be will frown at you like this (awful scowl) and go ahead like this—'You filthy beast, you damnable drunkard, where did you hide the yataghan14 and the tomahawk after you tried to murder your wife—answer me you criminal born to be hanged, you ugly drivelling scapegrace. How many drinks have gone down your dirty throat to-day already? how many floors of tap-rooms have you vomited over with slops of beer? how many dens of iniquity, you stinking disgrace and nuisance to society? Answer me before that intellectual jury of four gentlemen: answer me at once, if you can, you blackguard, before those noble gentlemen who are sacrificing their time and their professions to attend here in the patriotic cause of their country, to try you for attempted murder, profligacy and fornication, you drunken pig'": while Eugene took a good hold of the chair and opened his mouth, and the clerk came in with a list of twelve names purporting to be the eligible jury. The petitioner had the right of striking out four, and the respondent had the right of striking out four afterwards. The lawyer remarked that in reference to the matter of the jury they would be at a great disadvantage, for the very same reasons that old Christopher Whitworth had given, and the fact that they had no money to spend in circumnavigating each juryman and finding out how he agreed with his wife: whether he was a rabid page 410teetotaller or a moderate drinker; a temperance advocate or an habitual swiper; an old man married or a young man single; together with all the antecedent careers of all the twelve jurymen before making a selection of the four to challenge.

The other side he had discovered were busily employing agents to make these inquiries so as to insure their position by striking out all the names they could of those whom they imagined might be biassed unfavourably to the bird of Paradise.

The barrister and solicitor himself, avowing that they would be sure to strike out all the married men and that in return he would strike out all the bachelors, sat down again to the work of wading through all the documents which he declared should have been in his hands three months before. He sorely complained of the want of time to prepare himself for the case. He had only one day, whereas the combined firm of Hallam, the two Brassys, Hoare, Craig, Clack, Carrick and Clark together with the supernumeraries inside and the spring-heeled-jacks with their masks and dominoes outside their offices had more than six months' preparation for the battle.

He suggested that he might be able to get a young briefless barrister to act with him as his junior for the sake of the kudos he would inherit from contact with the cause célère. The junior counsel would be useful in going through the papers and bearing in mind any points which the lawyer-in-chief had forgotten. He was doing nothing at the time, he said, and would be glad of the offer of speculative litigation or non-speculative litigation, or of a brief upon the same terms as Brosie had supplied the teeth to the barmaids. The idea of such a junior was welcomed by Eugene, and a short note was sent by the message-bay, asking for the attendance of the junior, who had just obtained his admission to the bar, in the national court next morning.

1 A hangman, an executioner; after a famous executioner of the 17th century. Partridge 1972.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

2 Idiomatic; to serve two opposing sides.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

3 Uncertain; possibly pharmaceutical, 'The combined activity of two drugs or other substances, when greater than the sum of the effects of each one present alone.' OED Online; or a reference to the incident of the spiked beer.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

4 Possibly Shakespeare's 'Deeper than did ever plummet sound/ I’ll drown my book.' The Tempest, V.i.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

5 Hidden, concealed. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

6 Hydrous aluminium silicate, used in cleaning cloths; also slang for gin. Green 2005. Uncertain in context.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

7 Tales of a Wayside Inn: Part 1. The Musician's Tale; The Saga of King Olaf III. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

8 A liquid obtained by the action of sulphuric acid on pinene, OED Online; or see in contemporary advertisements: Sydney Morning Herald August 1882.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

9 A favourite English soap; its ubiquity can be seen in the various articles in which its use is suggested in a'household hint'; for example Launceston Examiner September 1894.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

10 Reduction to fine particles or powder by friction; comminution, pulverization. (In context, 'polishing'?) OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

11 Urchins. Green 2005.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

12 Surrounding. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

13 Correctly 'refulgent': shining, lustrous, used in this context to mean one who causes things to be shining or lustrous. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]

14 A sword of Muslim countries, having a handle without a guard and often a double-curved blade. OED Online.

[Note added by Sara Berger as annotator]