Argosy, Vol. 123, No. 1 — page 132: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

122 And yet, though things had indeed gone ill for Nils at the inquest, I did not at once carry out my expressed intention and sub- stitute myself for him as defendant. I didn’t wish to die, nor spend years in prison. I wanted to live and have a de- cent, straight, pleasant future ahead, such as I had been brought up to expect as a right. It seemed to me that just one way lay open. Though Nils was now entirely at my mercy, only his untrammeled ac- quittal would give me the moral freedom to keep silent. For that a first-class law- yer was a sine qua non. Berquist was practically penniless, and the Barbour exchequer in not much better State. Here again, however, friendship came to the fore in a curiously impressive manner. For the sake of an old acquain- tance and some ancient friendly claim that my father had on him, none other than Helidore Marx took Berquist’s case. I mean Helidore Marx, of Marx, Marx & Orlow, who could have termed himself Marx, the famous and not lied. I remember my first interview with him after dad had—to me almost incredibly— persuaded him into alliance. My first im- pression was of a mild-looking, smallish man, with a scrubby mustache. He had hurt the top of his bald head in some way, so that it was crossed with a fair-sized hil- lock of adhesive plaster. I thought that added to his insignificant appearance; but he had the brightest, softly brown eyes I have ever seen, and after the first few min- utes I was afraid of him. I was afraid that I woule tell him too much. My confidence, See proved not the easily uprooted kind of a common criminal, and for Nils the acquisition of this famous, insignificant looking lawyer gave me the only real hope of assurance I had through those bad days. “Your friend,” Marx had said to me, “is a rather wonderful young man, Bar- bour. I can’t blame you for being trou- bled. He has the kind of intelligence that would make a legal genius of him, if he had turned his efforts in that direction. A wonderful intelligence—and all lost in a maze of impractical theorizing and the sort THE ARGOSY. of dreams that can’t come true so long as men are men, and women are women, God help us all! He shan’t go to the chair, nor prison, either. He’s my man, my case, and—yes, I’ll say my friend, though I don’t run to sudden enthusiasms. Leave Ber- quist to me!” Evidently, Marx’s consultations with his “case” had not been kept within strictly professienal ‘bounds. I smiled invelun- tarily. I could picture that long dark face of Nils lighting to alert interest as he dis- covered that Marx was not merely the lawyer who might save him from martyr- dem, but also a thinking man. He must have brought out a side of the little man that was kept carefully submerged at ordi- nary times. Iam sure that few people had seen Helidore Marx inclined to dilatory wanderings in philosophy, such as Nils joved. But I went out with a lighter heart and more optimism than I had carried in some time. Marx, with his ‘‘my man, my case —my friend!’’ had instilled a confidence which remained with me all that day. I had returned to the bank, for though I walked in the Valley of the Shadow, while I conld walk I must work. So Mr. Terne had me back again, and it was a very good thing that I had Mr. Terne to go back to. Not many men would have put up with the abstracted at- tention my work received, nor patiently picked up the slack of details I let go by me. : His patience had a characteristic reason behind it, which I’ was sure of from the minute he told me about poor Van. The latter, it seemed, had really gone the step too far with his father in the affair of Mr. Terne’s four hundred. Vansittart, Sr., would let no one speak of his son to him after that day. Everyone in the bank, however, knew that he had quarreled with him, disowned him, and that Van, in a fit of temper, had refused the offer of a last money settlement—a couple of thousand only, it was said—flung out of the Colos- sus, and walked off, leaving the gray road- ster forlorn by the curb. No one knew where Van had gone after that. He had simply vanished, saying no comiclboool C@