Running the Gauntlet: A Novel

Throughout the length and breadth of this London of ours there were few legal firms, no matter of how old standing, doing a better, larger ready-money business than that of Moss and Moss of Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane. Looked down upon? Well, one could hardly say that. Old Mr. Trivett, of the firm of Trivett, Coverdale, and Trivett of Bedford Row, who had the secrets of half the first families in England locked up in his dusty japanned boxes; young Mr. Markham, who, besides being nominally a solicitor, was a high-bailiff somewhere, and had chambers in the Albany, and rode a very maney and taily light chestnut cob in the Row; and a few others,--might shrug their shoulders when the names of Moss and Moss were mentioned; but that did no harm to Moss and Moss, who, on the whole, were very well respected throughout the profession. At Mrs. Edward Moss's Sunday-evening parties in the Regent's Park were to be met many people whose names were pleasantly familiar to the public. Mr. Smee, Q. C., known as "Alibi Smee" from his great success in proving that his clients never had been within fifty miles of the spot where the crime with which they were charged was committed; Mr. Sergeant Orson; Mr. Tocsin, who bullied a witness admirably, but who gave more trouble to Edward Moss than any other man at the bar, wanting perpetual cramming and suggestions, and having the face of brass and the lungs of steel and the head of wool; Mr. Replevin, the most rising junior at the O.B.; and others, amongst them. Gilks, the marine painter, some of whose choicest bits adorned Mrs. Moss's walls; Kreese, the editor of the great sporting, literary, and theatrical Sunday print, The Scourge; O'Meara of the Stock Exchange; and actors, actresses, and singers too numerous to mention. These last were invited through Mr. Marshall Moss, Edward's brother and junior partner, who was a bachelor, and who, though he gave occasional excellent Greenwich and Richmond dinners, yet had no house of his own to entertain in. Marshall Moss attended to the more convivial portion of the clients; the actors who had differed from their managers; the ladies who wanted certain settlements arranged; the sporting publicans who wanted "the screw put upon certain parties;" the fast young gents requiring defence from civil process,--were shown up to Marshall's room on the first-floor, a comfortable room with several armchairs, and a cupboard never without sherry and soda-water; a room where some of the best stories in London were from time to time told, and which was fenced off with thick double doors, to prevent the laughter caused by them penetrating to Edward's sanctum downstairs.

For Edward attended to the real clients of the house--those for whom it was originally established--those by whom its fame had been made. And these were--thieves. Yes, there is no blinking the word. If a burglar were "in trouble," if a forger had been apprehended, if some very heavy turf-robbery had come to light, Edward Moss's busy brain was at work, and Edward Moss's hours of sleep were ruthlessly curtailed. He did not care about the heaviest kind of business, though two or three murderers unquestionably owed their necks to his skill and forethought; and he refused all petty cases of magsmen, skittle-sharps, and card-swindlers. They would have longed to have him; but they knew it was impossible. He did not like their style of business, and, above all things fatal to a chance of their engaging him, he never did anything on spec. When a man was "in trouble" he knew that it was no use sending for Mr. Moss without being able to tell him that at such-and-such a tavern or lodging-house he would find a landlord willing and ready to advance the fee for the prisoner's defence. Then Mr. Moss would step into the first hansom outside the station, and hie away to St. Luke's, Cripplegate, Drury Lane, or any other locality indicated, and returning with the money in his pocket, would hear all that the prisoner had to say, and straightway--determine on the line of defence. A wonderful little man, Edward Moss! wonderful to look at! without the smallest sign of colour in his shrunken, baggy, parchmenty face, with small gray eyes under overhanging bristly brows, with a short stubbly head of gray hair, a restless twitching mouth, thin wiry figure, and dirty hands with close-bitten dubby nails. In these respects a very different man from his brother Marshall, who was a by-no-means bad-looking Hebrew, with a handsome beard and moustache, full scarlet lips, prominent brown eyes, and in face and figure showing a general liking for the flesh-pots and other good things of this life. Where Edward Moss wore dirt, Marshall Moss sported jewelry, and each brother was sufficiently vain of his display. Each knew his business perfectly, and neither interfered with the other. Marshall's clients drove up in broughams or rattled in hansoms to the front-door, went up the broad staircase to the first-floor, and either passed straight into the presence, or beguiled the necessary interval in the perusal of the daily papers handed to them by obsequious clerks. Edward's clients sneaked in through a narrow door up a side-court; had their names and business wrung from them by the most precocious and most truculent of Jew boys; were left to rub their greasy shoulders up and down the whitewashed walls of a ghastly waiting-room until "Mithter Edward" chose to listen to the recital of their distress and wishes.