Page:The Berkeleys and their neighbors.djvu/99

 he would be mistaken—because Judge Randolph, silent and grim, looked keenly after the law. It was, as Pembroke knew, no easy undertaking to face the array of lawyers before him. Like them, he was shrewd enough to see that it would be a poor triumph to obtain a verdict that would not stand. Bob Henry became to him merely an incident. He looked day after day, during the trial, at the negro's ashy, scared face in the prisoner's dock, and sometimes felt a kind of wonder that a creature so ignorant and so inconsequential could be of such tremendous importance to any human being. For Bob Henry took up Pembroke's mind, his soul, his nights, his days. He worked all day for him, the tension never weakening from the time he entered the court room in the morning, until by the light of sputtering candles he saw Bob Henry walked off in the sheriff's custody at night. Then Pembroke would go to his little office, and lighting his lamp, begin work on his books and his notes. Even Cave and Miles were unwelcome then. He was engaged in a fierce intellectual struggle that he must fight out for himself. He had meant in the beginning to keep himself in condition, but he found out that it was one of the times when the soul triumphs over the body. He would throw himself on the lounge in his office toward daylight and snatch three or four hours of heavy and dreamless sleep, and then wake up with his faculties as keen and tireless as if he had slept for a week. He did not grow haggard and wild-eyed as men some