Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/273

 long fallen upon the court. The feeble gas-jets seemed to enhance the shadows that they cast. The intense faces of the overcrowded building, bar, jury, populace all electrified, seemed to belong to so many ghosts, so pale, shining, and transfigured did they gleam. For nearly three hours had the advocate cast his spell; yet moment by moment, in the dominion of his voice and the cumulation of his effects, he had increased the hold upon his hearers. At times the tension had been so great that it had seemed that somebody must break it with a laugh; but no one had done so. One and all were swept forward by the contained impetuosity of the orator; by the restrained and gentle modulations of a power that played through every word he used; by a ferocious irony which looked like tenderness, so little did they understand its nature; and above all by the irresistible magnetism of a personal genius which rendered the most perilous obstacles of no account.

None had foreseen the cruel, terrible, yet melodramatic climax to which the advocate was leading; and when it came over the minds of those present, all of whom in the course of the speech, even the most hardened officers of the court, the ushers, the chaplain, the javelin men, and the newspaper reporters, had passed in one form or another through all the anguish of the spirit of which they were capable, pity and horror were mingled with their overwrought surprise. As the advocate stood with his huge and livid face turned upwards towards the judge, with an ineffable emotion suffusing it, and the old man, with tears dripping quickly on to his ermine, put his two fat, white hands before his eyes,