Chapter 22: Mr Ernest Gilbert

Miss Arnott wrote to Mr Ernest Gilbert--the famous lawyer whose name Mr Stacey had given her--asking him to make all necessary arrangements for Jim Baker’s defence. She expressed her own personal conviction in the man’s innocence, desiring him to leave no stone unturned to make it plain, and to spare no expense in doing so. In proof of her willingness to pay any costs which might be incurred she enclosed a cheque for £500, and assured him that she would at once forward any further sum which might be required. Mr Gilbert furnished himself with a copy of the depositions given before the committing justices, and also before the coroner; and, having mastered them, went down to see his client in Winchester Gaol.

He found Mr Baker in very poor plight. The gamekeeper, who probably had gipsy blood in his veins, had been accustomed from childhood to an open air life. Often in fine weather he did not resort to the shelter of a roof for either sleeping or eating. Crabbed and taciturn by constitution he loved the solitude and freedom of the woods. On a summer’s night the turf at the foot of a tree was couch enough for him, the sky sufficient roof. Had he been able to give adequate expression to his point of view, his definition of the torments of hell would have been confinement within four walls. In gaol--cribbed, cabined and confined--he seemed to slough his manhood like a skin. His nature changed. When Mr Gilbert went to see him, the dogged heart of the man had lost half its doggedness. He pined for freedom--for God’s air, and the breath of the woods--with such desperate longing that, if he could, he would have made an end of every soul in Winchester Gaol to get at it.

Mr Gilbert summed him up--or thought he did--at sight. He made it a rule in these sort of cases to leap at an instant conclusion, even though afterwards it might turn out to be erroneous. Experience had taught him that, in first interviews with clients of a certain kind, quickness of speech--and of decision--was a trick which often paid. So that the door had hardly been closed which left the pair together than--metaphorically--he sprang at Mr Baker like a bull terrier at a rat.

“Now, my man, do you want to hang?”

“Hang? me? No, I don’t. Who does?”

“Then you’ll tell me who stuck a knife into that fellow in Cooper’s Spinney.”

“Me tell you? What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean, and you know who handled that knife; and it’s only by telling me that you’ll save your neck from the gallows.”