Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/185

 *cote; she was so obviously the female warder who had accompanied the murderess. One so characterless, so formless, could not be said to exist in the presence of this detaining horror, whose personality thickened, as with pestilence, the noisome air of the room. And it was this obscene life that he had pledged himself to save!

Strangely, this blunt fact did not dominate his consciousness in the manner it must have done one of a less alert perception. For with a perversity that transcended the will, at this moment his thoughts were overspread by the comedy that was being enacted by the suave lips of the solicitor. The harmonious stream of mellow commonplaces that Mr. Whitcomb was pouring into the ear of the shrinking official nonentity who kept in the background accosted his sense of the comic with a kind of lugubrious irony. With a critical detachment which even startled himself, he seemed to awake to the fact that he was standing outside his milieu, that he was witnessing a drama within a drama; and he found himself in possession of the singular reflection that here was a robust yet delicate adumbration of the farcical which would make the fortune of a writer for the stage. For there was something indescribably ludicrous in the rich voice of the solicitor enunciating his own private opinions upon the weather, the state of trade, the inconvenience of winter and its bearing upon the perennial problem of the unemployed, when the grotesque horror which dominated the room was at his elbow, emitting the glances of a venomous snake.