Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/209

 against injustice packed away at the back of his brain. This would mark the end of the ambition that had nourished the fires of his heart through full many a weary winter's day.

The new words would not glow; they were so much sound without meaning. Yet the new words were the true words. They embodied the actual; they stood for the established fact in its impartial fearlessness; they were the servants of justice. That the accused had committed the crime was clear to the meanest intelligence. It only remained for her advocate to announce her guilt and to pray for mercy. Yet the phrases in which he shaped this bald proposition crept to his lips as false, devious, and dishonorable.

The old words conceived in sophistry were burning things, brilliant with the blood and flame of their emotion. Beneath them paradox itself stood forth as but a subtler knowledge. The accent of conviction made these words resonant, these words whose design was to pervert and mislead. They were breaking in constantly upon the dull and tortured phrases which he was striving to weave, the insensitive phrases whose function it was to embody immaculate truth. The commonest platitudes were not so stale as these. At last with a cry of rage he spurned them vehemently from his mind.

Indeed, the only purpose that was served by these endeavors was to prove to the unhappy advocate that his nature must be allowed to obey its instincts. He must fulfil his destiny. To that acute intelligence it had come to seem that truth and untruth were identical. It would seem to be born for iconoclasm, for demolition; let it leave to less sophis