A DISTRESSED FATHER.
Henry Newberry, a lad, only thirteen years old, and Edward Chidley, aged seventeen, were full committed for trial, charged with stealing a silver tea-pot from the house of a gentleman, in Grosvenor Place. There was nothing extraordinary in the circumstances of the robbery.—Young Newberry was observed to go down into the area of the house, whilst his companion kept watch, and they were caught endeavouring to conceal the tea-pot under some rubbish in the Five-fields, Chelsea; but the case was made peculiarly interesting by the unsophisticated distress of Newberry's father.
The poor old man, who it seems had been a soldier, and was at this time a journeyman paviour, refused at first to believe that his son had committed the crime imputed to him, and was very clamorous against the witnesses; but as their evidence proceeded, he himself appeared to become gradually convinced. He listened with intense anxiety to the various details; and when they were finished, he fixed his eyes in silence, for a second or two, upon his son, and turning to the magistrate, with his eyes swimming in tears, he exclaimed—
"I have carried him many a score miles on my knapsack, your honour!"
There was something so deeply pathetic in the tone with which this fond reminiscence was uttered by the old soldier, that every person present, even the very gaoler himself, was affected by it. "I have carried him many score miles on my knapsack, your honour," repeated the poor fellow, whilst he brushed away the tears from his cheek with his rough unwashed hand, "but it's all over now!—He has done—and—so have I!"
The magistrate asked him something of his story. He said he had formerly driven a stage-coach, in the north of Ireland, and had a small share in the proprietorship of the coach. In this time of his prosperity he married a young woman with a little property, but he failed in business, and, after enduring many troubles, he enlisted as a private soldier in the 18th, or Royal Irish Regiment of Foot, and went on foreign service, taking with him his wife and four children—Henry (the prisoner) being his second son, and his "darling pride." At the end of nine years he was discharged, in this country, without a pension, or a friend in the world; and coming to London, he, with some trouble, got employed as a paviour, by "the gentlemen who manage the streets at Mary-la-bonne." "Two years ago, your honour," he continued, "my poor wife was wearied out with the world, and she deceased from me, and I was left alone with the children; and every night after I had done work I washed their faces, and put them to bed, and washed their little bits o'things, and hanged them o' the line to dry, myself—for I'd no money, your honour, and so I could not have a housekeeper to do for them, you know. But, your honour, I was as happy as I well could be, considering my wife was deceased from me, till some bad people came to live at the back of us; and they were always striving to get Henry amongst them, and I was terribly afraid something bad would come of it, as it was but poorly I could do for him; and so I'd made up my mind to take all my children to Ireland.—If he had only held up another week, your honour, we should have gone, and he would have been saved. But now!——"
A DISTRESSED FATHER.
Here the poor man looked at his boy again, and wept; and when the magistrate endeavoured to console him by observing that his son would sail for Botany Bay, and probably do well there; he replied somewhat impatiently,—"Aye, it's fine talking, your worship; I pray to the great God he may never sail any where, unless he sails with me to Ireland?" and then, after a moment's thought, he asked, in the humblest tone imaginable, "Doesn't your honour think a little bit of a petition might help him?"
The magistrate replied, it possibly might; and added, "If you attend his trial at the Old Bailey, and plead for him as eloquently in word and action as you have done here, I think it would help him still more."
"Aye, but then you won't be there, I suppose, will you?" asked the poor fellow, with that familiarity which is in some degree sanctioned by extreme distress; and when his worship replied that he certainly should not be present, he immediately rejoined, "Then—what's the use of it! There will be nobody there who knows me; and what strangers will listen to a poor old broken-hearted fellow, who can't speak for crying?"
The prisoners were now removed from the bar to be conducted to prison, and his son, who had wept incessantly all the time, called wildly to him, "Father! Father!" as if he expected that his father could snatch him out of the iron grasp of the law. But the old man remained rivetted, as it were, to the spot on which he stood with his eyes fixed on the lad until the door had closed upon him; and then putting on his hat, unconscious where he was, and crushing it down over his brows, he began wandering round the room in a state of stupor. The officers in waiting reminded him that he should not wear his hat in the presence of the magistrate, and he instantly removed it; but he still seemed lost to every thing around him, and, though one or two gentlemen present put money into his bands, he heeded it not, but slowly sauntered out of the office, apparently reckless of every thing[29].