CHAPTER LV.
The Escape over the Houses.—Many Perils.—Gray’s Great Sufferings.—The Guide Rope.
Gray was silent for some moments, then, with, a deep groan, he dropped his head upon his hands, and gave himself up to a bitterness of anguish that must have both alarmed and melted any heart but the stubborn one of the man who now had him in his power.
“All I have struggled for,” thought Gray—“all that I have dipped my hands in blood for is about to be wrested from me for the mere doubtful boon of existence.”
At that awful moment of misery he did indeed feel that he had chosen the wrong path in life, and the gaudy flowers which had lured him from the right road of virtue to the intricate one of crime and deep iniquity, were but delusion, and had vanished, now leaving him a wanderer in a region of dissolution and gaunt despair. Oh, what would he have not given in that awful moment, when busy memory conjured up all his crimes before him in frightful array, to have been the veriest beggar that ever crept for alms from door to door, so that he could have said, “I am innocent of great wrong—I have shed no man’s blood!”
It might be that the evident mortal agony of Jacob Gray really had some effect even upon the hardened and obdurate heart of his companion, for it was several minutes before he spoke, and then when he did, his voice was scarcely so harshly tuned as before, and it is probable he meant to offer something very consolatory when he said,—
“Snivelling be bothered, I have cracked never so many cribs, and I never gaved up to the enemy yet. Keep up your heart, old ’un, you’ll light on your feet yet, like a cat as is shied out o’ a attic window.”
Gray only groaned and shook his head.
“Now, I tell you what I’ll do for you,” continued the man, “you shall go into partnership with me, and we’ll do a lot o’ work together. You’ve got a good sneaking sort o’ face that’ll gammon the flats. You can poke about and insinuate where family plate and such like things is kept, and then I’ll go and crack the cribs. Don’t be groaning here.”
The robber then gave Gray another encouraging blow upon the back, which effectually prevented him from groaning for some minutes, by leaving him no breath to groan with. Gray then looked up, and, glancing in the face of the man he said,—
“I will own to you that I have about me a larger sum than I at first named.”
“I know’d it,” cried the man, “I know’d—you white-mugged fellers always has larger sums than they names.”
“In one word,” said Gray, “I have two hundred pounds. Will you take one hundred and leave me at liberty to go from here when the ardour of pursuit has abated?”
“Without the search?”
“Yes. Without the search. You talk of your honour—why not rely upon mine?”
“’Cos I’m a known gentleman, and you isn’t,” replied the fellow. “My word’s respected all through the profession. If I say I’ll crack that crib, I goes and cracks it.”
“Exactly. You will agree to my terms?”
“Why, you see, I’m rather awkwardly situated just now. It isn’t safe for you to go out by the way you came in. You may think it is, but I can tell you it isn’t. The people down stairs have had a cool hundred offered for nabbing you, and ain’t they on the look-out?”
“A hundred?”
“Yes. You see that’s all you offer me. Now there’s Bill’s attic to pay for, and Bill’s young woman.”
Gray replied by a groan.
“There you go, now, groaning away. It’s well for you that you’ve fell among people with fine feelings, and all that sort o’ thing. Some folks now, as know’d as much as, I’m pretty sure, I know, would put a knife in your guts.”
“What—what—do—you know?” stammered Gray, shivering at the very idea of such a process.
“What do I know? Why, I know you are trying to deceive a gentleman. You’ve got more money then you’ll own to, you know you have.”
“You wrong me. Indeed you do.”
“Well, well, I’ll take Bill’s opinion. He’s better nor all the lawyers in London, is Bill. If he says as it’s all right and we are to take the hundred only, I consents. Now, my covey, I’ll trouble you to come with me to Bill’s attic.”
“But can we go without danger? The people down stairs, you say, are on the watch.”
“Let ’em watch—we ain’t a-going down stairs. The window’s the thing for us.”
“Is it the next house?”
“No, it isn’t—nor the next arter that either—but it’s all the safer for that. You’ve got a few roofs to get over, but I know ’em if well as I know my own pocket.”
The man then opened the small latticed window of the room and looked out for a moment. Then, with a satisfied tone, he said,—
“It’s a regular dark night. There ain’t a shadow o’ fear.”
“You think I shall escape?”
“I know it. I’ve said it. Think o’ my honour.”
He then took from an old chest a coil of very thick rope, in one end of which he busied himself in making a noose, which, when he had completed, he advanced with it to Gray, saying,—
“Just pop your head through.”
“Gracious Heavens!” cried Gray, starting up. “What do you mean?”
“Mean? Why to take care of you to be sure; I know the way over the roofs, but you don’t. You’ll smash yourself in some of the courts without a guide rope, you will.”
“A guide rope?”
“Yes. Don’t be making those faces. Do you think I’m going to hang you?”
“Oh no—no,” said Gray, with a nervous smile. “No—certainly.”
“I wouldn’t do such a ungentlemanly thing. Poke your head through.”
The man accompanied these words by seizing Gray by the hair and thrusting his head into the noose, which then he passed over his shoulder down to his waist.
“There you are now,” he said, “as safe as if you was a diamond in cotton. Now, mind you, I go first, and you follow arter. You keep coming on in the line of the rope, you understand, as long as you feel me tugging at it; you are sure to be safe if you follow the rope, but so certain as you don’t down you’ll go either into some of the yards o’ the houses, or into some o’ the open courts.”
“I understand,” said Gray, who felt anything but pleasantly situated with a thick rope round his middle, by which he was to be hauled over roofs of old houses. There was, however, no alternative, and he strove to assume an air of composure and confidence, which sat but ill upon him, and the ghastly smile which he forced his face to assume, looked like some hideous contortion of the muscles produced by pain, rather than an indication that the heart was at ease within him.
The housebreaker now took the coil of rope in his hand, leaving a length between him and Jacob Gray of about three yards merely, and then he nimbly got out at the window.
“Follow,” he said to Gray, “and mind ye now, if you say anything until you are spoken to by me, I’ll let you down.”
Trembling and alarmed, Gray scrambled out at the window, and found himself standing, or rather crouching in a narrow gutter, full of slime and filth, and only protected from falling by a narrow coping, which cut and scratched his ankles as he moved.
His guide crept on slowly and cautiously, and Gray followed guided by the rope, which every now and then was pulled very tight with a jerk, that at first very nearly upset him over the parapet.
There was a cold raw air blowing over the house tops, but Gray’s fears produced a heavy perspiration upon him, and he shook excessively from sheer fright at the idea of a false step precipitating him to a great depth on to some stone pavement, where he would lay a hideous mass of broken bones.
Tug, tug, went the rope, and now Jacob Gray felt the strain come in an upward direction. He crawled on, and presently found that the rope ascended a sloping roof of slates, which at the first dim sight of it, struck him he would have the greatest difficulty in ascending. He was not, however, left long to his reflections, for a sudden tug at the rope which brought him with his face in violent contact with the sloping roof, admonished him that his guide was getting rather impatient.
With something between a curse and a groan, he commenced the slippery and difficult ascent, which, however, by the aid of the rope, he accomplished with greater ease than he had anticipated.
It happened that Gray, in the confusion of his mind, did not at all take into consideration that the sloping roof might have a side to descend as well as one to ascend, so that when he arrived at its summit, he rolled over and came down with great speed into a gutter on the other side, and partially upon the back of his guide, who, with a muttered accusation of an awful character, seized him by the throat and held down, in the gutter upon his back to the imminent risk of his strangulation.
It seemed that Gray’s fall had given some kind of alarm, for in a moment an attic window at some distance was opened with a creaking sound, and the voice of a female cried,—
“Gracious me, what’s that?”
“Hush, for your life, hush,” whispered the man in Gray’s ear.
“Well, I never did hear such a rumpus,” said the woman’s voice. “It’s those beastly cats again.”
She had no sooner uttered this suggestion, than Gray’s companion perpetrated so excellent an imitation of a cat mewing, that Gray was for a moment taken in it himself.
“Ah, there you are,” said the woman; “I only wish I was near you. Puss—puss—puss.”
This call from the woman was a hypocritical one, and evidently intended to deceive the supposed cat or cats to their serious personal detriment should they venture to the window allured by such pacific sounds.
There was a pause of some moments, then the woman exclaimed,—
“Oh, you artful wretches; I declare these cats are as knowing as Christians.”
The attic window was then shut with a very aggravated bang, and Gray’s companion took his hand from his throat as he said to him,—
“Curse you, what the devil made you come down the slope with such a run?“
“I—I didn’t know it,” said Gray.
“Come on and mind what you are about. I didn’t think you were so precious green as you are; come on, I say.”
The fellow crept on ahead, and a tug at the rope caused Gray to follow, which he did; so weak from terror and exhaustion that he could scarcely contrive to keep up with his guide, and numerous were the falls he received, as a sudden pull of the rope rebuked his tardy progress. Altogether, it was, to Jacob Gray, an awful means of safety, if safety was to be the result of it.
They proceeded along the gutter they were in until they came to the corner house of the court, to turn which was no easy matter, from the circumstance of the coping stones ceasing each way, at about a foot from the absolute corner, down to which the roof came with a point. Round this point the housebreaker stepped with ease, but to Gray, oppressed as his mind was with fears and terrors, and weakened and exhausted as he was from his recent unusual bodily exertion, it was a task of the greatest magnitude and terror.
There was, however, no time to deliberate, and it was, perhaps, better for Gray that such was the case, for his mind was not in that state to reason itself out of nervous apprehensions.
A sharp tug of the rope settled his cogitations, and clinging with his hands to the angle of the roof, he placed his leg round the corner. It was then a moment or two before he could find, with his foot, the coping stones on the other side, and those few moments seemed to him hours of intense agony. At length he gained a hold with his foot, and rubbing his very face against the roof for fear of overbalancing himself in the outer direction, he contrived to get round.
For a moment a deadly sickness came over him, when he had accomplished the, to him, difficult feat; then he felt as if he could have nothing else to fear, and a feeling of congratulation sprang up in his mind, that after all he might not only escape, but preserve the greater part of the large sum he had about him.