THE AMATEUR ROBBERY.
If there is anything more than another of which civilisation has reason to be proud, it is the amelioration that has been effected in punishment for crimes. Nor is it yet very long since we began to get quit of the shame of our folly and inhumanity, if we have not traces of these yet, coming out like sympathetic ink dried by the choler of self-perfection and a false philosophy, as in such writings as the latter-day pamphlets. How a man who loves his species, and has a heart, will hang his head abashed as he turns his vision back no further than the sixteenth century, and sees the writhing creatures—often aged unhappy women—under the pilniewinkies, caschielaws, turkases, thumbikens, and other instruments of torture, frantically bursting out with the demanded confession that was to fit them for the stake or the rope! And even after these things in the curiosity shop of Nemesis were got rid of, the abettors of the law rushed with full swing into the operation of hanging, scarcely allowing a crime to escape, from cold-blooded murder down to the act of the famished wretch who snatched a roll from a baker's basket. However insensible these strange lawgivers may have been to so much cruelty, however blind to the perversity, prejudices, and weaknesses incident to human testimony, however ignorant of the total inefficacy of their remedy to deter from crime, one might have imagined that they could not but have known, if they ever looked inwardly into their own hearts, how obscure are human motives, and especially those that instigate to breaches of the law; and yet their consistent rule was, to make the corpus delicti prove the intention. These considerations have been suggested to me by the recollection of a wild adventure of some young men in Edinburgh, the circumstances of which, not belonging to fiction, will show better than a learned dissertation how easy it was for these Dracos to catch the fact and miss the motive.
The skeleton names—now, alas! the only representatives of skeleton bodies—Andrew W——pe, Henry S——k, and Charles S——th, may recall to the memory of some people in Edinburgh still, three young men, who, with good education, fair talents, and graces from nature, might have played a respectable rôle in the drama of life, had it not been for a tendency to "fastness," a disease which seems to increase with civilisation. In their instance the old adage of Aristotle, simile gaudet simili, was exemplified to the letter; and the union confirmed in each a mind which, originally impatient of authority, fretted itself against the frame of society, simply because that frame was the result of order. They were never happy except when they went up to the palisades, struck upon them with their lath-blades, and when some orderly indweller looked over atop, ran away laughing. No doubt they had strong passions to gratify too; but, as is usual with this peculiar race of beings, the gratification was the keener the more it owed to a rebellion against decorum. If they ever differed, it was only in their rivalry of success; or when they did not go a spree-hunting together, they recounted their exploits at their nightly meetings, and then the result was an increase of moral inflammation.
Sometimes, for a change, they would take strolls into the country, where they could extract as tribute the admiration or wrath of clodhoppers without being troubled with any fears of the police; not that on any of these occasions they perpetrated any great infringements on the law, for, like the rest of their kind, if they could make themselves objects of observation, they were regardless whether their bizarreries were paid with admiration or only anger or fear, though, if they could produce by any means a causeless panic, the very height of their ambition was attained. In regard to this last effect of their escapades, they were, in the instance I am about to record, more than satisfied. They had gone, on a fine, clear, winter day, along the coast of the Firth of Forth towards Cramond; and, to diversify their amusements, they took with them a gun, which was carried by S——th, with the intention of having a shot at any wild bird or barn-door fowl that might come conveniently within his range. Of this kind of game they had fewer chances, and the stroll would doubtless have appeared a very monotonous affair to a person fond of rational conversation. Nor was there much even to themselves of diversification till they got into a small change-house at Davidson's Mains, where, with a rampant authority, they contrived to get served up to them a kind of dinner, intending to make up for the want of better edibles by potations of whisky toddy.
If facts, as Quinctilian says, are the bones of conversation, opinions are certainly its sinews; and we might add, that whisky toddy is its nervous fluid. These youths, though unwilling to acquire solid information, could wrangle even to quarrelling; but such were their affinities, that they adhered again in a short time, and were as firm friends as ever. They had raised a subject—no other than the question whether highwaymen are necessarily or generally possessed of true courage. Very absurd, no doubt, but as good for a wrangle as any other that can be divided into affirmative and negative by the refracting medium of feeling or prejudice. S——th declared them all to be cowards.
"What say you to Cartouche?" said S——k; "was he a coward?"
"Not sure but he was," said S——th; "he kept a band of blackguards and received their pay, but he was seldom seen in the wild mélee himself. He was fond of the name of terror he bore; but then, as he listened to the wonderful things the Parisian blanchisseuses and chiffonniers and gamins said of him, he knew he was not recognisable, for the very reason that he kept out of sight."
"Oh yes," said W——pe, who joined S——k; "and so he was like Wallace, who kept out of the sight of the English, and yet delighted in Dundee to hear himself spoken of by the crowds who collected in these troublesome times to discuss public affairs. S——th, you know Wallace was a coward, don't you?"
"A thorough poltroon," cried S——th, laughing; "ay, and all the people in Scotland are wrong about him. Didn't he run off, after stabbing the governor's son? and he was always skulking about the Cartland Crags. Then, didn't he flee at the battle of Falkirk; and was he not a robber when Scotland belonged to Longshanks? No doubt the fellow had a big body, strong bones, and good thews; but that he had the real pluck that nerved the little bodies of such men as Nelson, or Suwarrow, ay, or of Napoleon, I deny." Then he began a ludicrous singing, see-saw recitation of the English doggrel—
"The noble wight,
The Wallace dight,
Who slew the knight
On Beltane night,
And ran for fright
Of English might,
And English fight,
And English right;"
and so on in drunken ribaldry.
"All very well for you who are a Shamite, Shmite, Shmith, Smith," said W——pe. "We happen to be Japhetites. Then what say you to Rob Roy?"
"That, in the first place," replied S——th, "he was a Shemite; for Gathelus, the first Scottish monarch, was a grandson of Nimrod, and, what is worse, he married Scota, the daughter of an Egyptian queen, so there was a spice of Ham in Rob; and as all the Hamites were robbers, Rob was a robber too;—as to whose cowardice there is no doubt whatever; for a man who steals another man's cattle in the dark must be a coward. Did you ever hear one single example of Rob attacking when in good daylight, and fighting for them in the sun?"
"Ingenious, S——th, at any rate," roared S——k; "but I don't agree with you. A robber on the highway, must, in the general case, have courage. He braves public opinion, he laughs at the gallows, and he throws himself right against a man in bold competition, without knowing often whether he is a giant or a dwarf."
"All the elements of a batter pudding," cried S——th, "without the battering principle. Ay, you forget the head-battering bludgeon, the instantaneous pistol, or the cunning knife; none of all which would a man with a spark of courage in him use against an unarmed, defenceless traveller. Another thing you forget, the robber acts upon surprises. He produces confusion by his very presentation, fear by his demand of life or money; and when the poor devil's head is running round, he runs away with his watch or his purse, perhaps both. 'Tis all selfishness, pure unadulterated selfishness; and will you tell me that a man without a particle of honesty or generosity can have courage?"
"Not moral courage, perhaps; but he may have physical."
"All the same, no difference," continued the doughty S——th. "Who ever heard of a bodily feeling except as something coming through the body? There are only two physical feelings: pain in being wounded or starved, and pleasure in being relieved from pain, or fed when hungry or thirsty. I know none other; all the others are moral feelings."
"You may be bold through drink acting on the stomach and head."
"Ay, but the boldness, though the effect of a physical cause, is itself a moral entity."
"Whoever thought that S——th was such a metaphysician!" said W——pe, a little agoggled in his drunken eyes.
"But the same may be said of every feeling," rejoined S——k, somewhat roused to ambition by W——pe's remark.
"And so it may, my little Aristotle," continued the clever asserter of his original proposition. "Why, man, look ye, what takes you into Miss F——'s shop in Princes Street for snuff, when you never produce a physical titillation in your nose by a single pinch? Why, it's something you call love, a terribly moral thing, though personified by a little fellow with pinions. Yes, wondrously moral; and sometimes, as in your case, immoral. Well, what is it produced by? The face of the said Miss F—— painted as a sun picture in the camera at the back of your eye, where there is a membrane without a particle of nitrate of silver in its composition, and which yet receives the image. Well, what is love but just the titillation produced by this image imprinted on your flesh, just as the pleasure of a pinch is the effect of a titillation of the nerves in the nose? Yet we don't say that snuff pleasure is a moral thing, but merely nasal or bodily. What makes the difference?"
"How S——th is coming it!" said W——pe, still more amazed. "Where the devil has he got all this?"
"Why, the difference lies here. You know, by manipulation and blowing it, that you have a nose; but you don't wipe the retina at the back of your eye when you are weeping for love—only the outside, where the puling tears are. In short, you know you have a nose, but you don't know you have a retina. D'ye catch me, my small Stagyrite, my petit Peripatetic, my comical Academician, eh? Take your toddy, and let's have a touch of moral drunkenness."
"You ray-ther have me on the hip, S——th."
"Ay, just so; and if I should kick you there, you would not say the pain was a moral thing. All through the same. It's just where and when we don't know the medium we say things are moral and spiritual, and poetical and rational, and all the rest of the humbug."
"But though you say all highwaymen are cowards, you won't try that trick with your foot," said S——k, boiling up a little under the fire of the toddy.
"Don't intend; though, if you were to produce moral courage in me by pinching my nose, I think I could, after making up my mind and putting you upon your guard with a stick in your hand if you chose. Eh! my Peripatetic." And S——th was clearly getting drunk too.
"D——n the fellow, his metaphysics are making him [Transcriber's Note: missing part of this word] dent," cried W——pe.
"Why, you don't see where they hit," said S——th drawlingly. "Somewhere about the pineal; and therefore we say impudence is moral, sometimes immoral, as just now when you damned me. No more of your old junk, I say, sitting here in my cathedra, which by the way is spring-bottomed, which may account for my moral elasticity that a highwayman is a coward."
"Well," cried S——k, starting up. "I'll deposit a pound with W——pe, on a bet that you'll not take sixpence from the first bumpkin we meet on the road, by the old watchword, 'Stand and deliver;' and you'll have the gun to boot."
"Ay, that's a physical bribe," cried W——pe; and, after pausing a little, "The fellow flinches."
"And surely the reverse must hold," added S——k, "that, being a coward, he must be a highwayman."
"Why, you see, gents," said S——th coolly, "I don't mind a very great deal, you know, though I do take said sixpence from said bumpkin; but I won't do it, you know, on compulsion."
"If there's no compulsion, there's no robbery," said S——k.
"Oh, I mean your compulsion. As for mine, exercised on said bumpkin, let me alone for that part of the small affair; but none of your compulsion, if you love me. I can do anything, but not upon compulsion, you know."
"Done then!"
"Why, ye-e-s," drawled S——th, "done; I may say, gents, done; but I say with Sir John, don't misunderstand me, not upon compulsion, you know."
"Your own free will," shouted both the others, now pretty well to do in the world of dithyrambics. "Here's your instrument for extorting the sixpence by force or fear."
And this young man, half inebriated—with, we may here say parenthetically, a mother living in a garret in James' Square, with one son and an only daughter of a respectable though poor man, and who trusted to her son for being the means of her support—qualified, as we have seen, by high parts to extort from society respect, and we may add, though that has not appeared, to conciliate love and admiration—took willingly into his hand the old rusty "Innes," to perpetrate upon the highway a robbery. And would he do it? You had only to look upon his face for an instant to be certain that he would; for he had all the lineaments of a young man of indomitable courage and resolution—the steady eye, the firm lip, all under the high brows of intellect, nor unmixed with the beauty that belongs to these moral expressions which in the playfulness of the social hour he had been reducing to materialism, well knowing all the while that he was arguing for effect and applause from those who only gave him the return of stultified petulance. What if that mother and sister, who loved him, and wept day and night over the wild follies that consumed his energies and demoralized his heart, had seen him now!
The bill was paid by S——k, who happened to have money, and who gave it on the implied condition of a similar one for all on another occasion. They went, or, as the phrase is often, sallied forth. The night had now come down with her black shadows. There was no moon. She was dispensing her favours among savages in another hemisphere, who, savages though they were, might have their devotions to their strange gods, resident with her up yonder, where no robbery is, save that of light from the pure fountain of heat and life. Yes, the darkness was auspicious to folly, as it often is to vice; and there was quietness too—no winds abroad to speak voices through rustling leaves, to terrify the criminal from his wild rebellion against the peace of nature. No night could have suited them better. Yes, all was favourable but God; and Him these wild youths had offended, as disobedient sons of poor parents, who had educated them well—as rebellious citizens among a society which would have hailed them as ornaments—as despisers of God's temple, where grace was held out to them and spurned.
They were now upon the low road leading parallel to the beach, and towards the end of Inverleith Row. Nor had the devil left them with the deserted toddy-bowl. There was still pride for S——th, and for the others the rankling sense of inferiority in talent and of injury from scorching irony. Nor had they proceeded two miles, till the fatal opportunity loomed in the dark, in the form of a figure coming up from Leith or Edinburgh.
Now, S——th;
Now, the cowardly Cartouche;
Now, the poltroon Rob Roy;
Now, the braggart Wallace!
But S——th did not need the taunts, nor, though many a patriotic cause wanted such a youth, was he left for other work, that night of devil-worship. The figure approached. Alas! the work so easy. S——th was right; how easy and cowardly, where the stranger was, in the confidence of his own heart, unprepared, unweaponed! Yet those who urged him on leapt a dyke.
"Stand and deliver!" said S——th, with a handkerchief over his face.
"God help me!" cried the man, in a fit of newborn fear. "I'm a father, have wife and bairns; but I canna spare my life to a highwayman. Here, here, here."
And fumbling nervously in his pocket, and shaking all over, not at all like the old object of similitude, but rather like a branch of a tree driven by the wind, he thrust something into S——th's hand, and rushing past him, was off on the road homewards. Nor was it a quick walk under fear, but a run, as if he thought he was or would be pursued for his life, or brought down by the long range of the gun he had seen in the hands of the robber.
Yes, it was easily done, and it was done; but how to be undone at a time when the craving maw of the noose dangled from the post, in obedience to the Procrustes of the time!
And S——th felt it was done. His hand still held what the man had pushed into it, but by-and-by it was as fire. His brain reeled; he staggered, and would have fallen, but for S——k, who, leaping the dyke, came behind him.
"What luck?"
"This," said S——th,—"the price of my life," throwing on the ground the paper roll.
"Pound-notes," cried S——k, taking them up. "One, two, three, four, five; more than sixpence."
"Where is the man?" cried S——th, as, seizing the notes from the hands of S——k, he turned round. Then, throwing down the gun, he set off after his victim; but the latter was now ahead, though his pursuer heard the clatter of his heavy shoes on the metal road.
"Ho, there! stop! 'twas a joke—a bet."
No answer, and couldn't be. The man naturally thought the halloo was for further compulsion, under the idea that he had more to give, and on he sped with increased celerity and terror; nor is it supposed that he stopt till he got to his own house, a mile beyond Davidson's Mains.
Smith gave up the pursuit, and with the notes in his hand, ready to be cast away at every exacerbation of his fear, returned to his cowardly companions with hanging head and, if they had seen, with eyes rolling, as if he did not know where to look or what to do.
"What is to be done?" he cried; and his fears shook the others.
"Yes, what is to be done? You urged me on. Try to help me out. Let us go back and seek out this man. To-morrow it may be too late, when the police have had this robbery in their hands as a thing intended."
"We could not find the man though we went back," said S——k. And his companions agreed.
But W——pe, who had some acquaintanceship with the police Captain Stewart, proposed that they should proceed homewards, go to him, give him the money, and tell the story out.
"That, I fear, would be putting one's hand in the mouth of the hyaena at the moment he is laughing with hunger, as they say he does."
An opinion which S——th feared was too well founded. Nearly at their wits' end, they stood all three for a little quite silent, till the sound of a horse's clattering feet sounded as if coming from Davidson's Mains. All under the conviction of crime, they became alarmed; and as the rider approached, they concealed themselves behind the dyke, which ran by the side of the road. At that moment a man came as if from Edinburgh, and they could hear the rider, who did not, from his voice, appear to be the man who had been robbed, inquiring if he had met a young man with a gun in his hand. The man answered no, and off set the rider towards town at the rate of a hard trot. The few hopeful moments when anything could have been done effectually as a palinode and expiation were past; and S——th, releaping the dyke, was again upon the road in the depth of despair, and his companions scarcely less so. All his and their escapades had hitherto been at least within the bounds of the law; and though his heart had often misgiven him, when called upon for the nourishment of his wild humours, as he thought of his widowed mother at home, without the comfort of the son she loved in spite of his errors, he had not ever yet felt the pangs of deep regret as they came preluding amendment. A terrible influx of feelings, which had been accumulating almost unknown to him during months and months—for his father had been dead only for a year and a half—pushed up against all the strainings of a wild natural temperament, and seemed ready to choke him, depriving him of utterance, and making him appear the very coward he had been depicting so sharply an hour before. A deep gloom fell over him; nor was this rendered less inspissated by the recollection that came quick as lightning, that he was the only one known to the mistress of the inn. And now, worse and worse—for the same power that sent him that conviction threw a suspicion over his mind which made him strike his forehead with an energy alarming to his companions—no other—"O, merciful God!" he muttered—than that the man he had robbed was his maternal uncle; the only man among the friends of either his father or his mother who had shown any sympathy to the bereaved family, who had fed them and kept them from starvation, and by whom he had been himself nourished. He had no power to speak this: it was one of those thoughts that scathe the nerves that serve the tongue, and which flit and burn, and will not ameliorate their fierceness by the common means given to man in mercy. It now appeared to him as something miraculous why he did not recognise him; but the occasion was one of hurry and confusion, and so completely oblivious had he been in the agony which came on him in an instant, that he even thought that at the very moment he knew him, looking darkly, as he did, through the handkerchief over his eyes. In his despair, he meditated hurrying to Leith, and with the five pounds getting a passage over the sea somewhere, it signified nothing where, if away from the scene of his crime and ingratitude; and this resolution was confirmed by the additional thought that Mr. Henderson, however good and generous, was a stern man—so stern, that he had ten years before given up a beloved son into the hands of justice for stealing; yea, stern ex corde as Cato, if generous ex crumena as Codrus.
This resolution for a time brought back his love of freedom and adventure. He would go to Hudson's Bay, and shoot bears or set traps for wild silver-foxes, that would bring him gold; or to Buenos Ayres, and catch the wild horse with the lasso; or to Lima, and become a soldier of fortune, and slay men with the sword. The gleam of wild hope was shortlived—his triumph over his present ill a temporary hallucination. The laurel is the only tree which burns and crackles when green. The intention fled, as once more the thought of his mother came, with that vigour which was only of half an hour's birth, and begotten by young conscience on old neglect. They had been trailing their legs along till they came to Inverleith Row, where he behoved to have left his companions, if his resolution lasted; for the road there goes straight on to Leith Harbour. He hesitated, and made an effort; but S——k, who knew him, and fancied from the wild look of his eye that he meditated throwing himself into the deep harbour of Leith, took him by an arm, motioning to W——pe to take the other, and thus by a very small effort—for really his resolution had departed, and his mind, so far as his intention went, was gone—they half forced him up the long row. When they arrived at Canonmills, here is the rider again, hurrying on: he had executed his commission, whatever it was, and was galloping home. But the moment he came forward, he pulled up. He had, by a glance under the light of a lamp, caught a sight of the gun in the hands of S——k, who had carried it when he took S——th's arm. The man shouted to a policeman,
"Seize that robber!"
"Which of them?"
"Him with the gun."
And in an instant the cowardly dog who had done the whole business was laid hold of.
"The gun is mine," cried S——th. "It is I who am answerable for whatever was done by him who carried that weapon. Take me, and let the innocent off. I say this young man is innocent."
"Very gallant and noble," said the man; "but when we go to the hills, we like the deer that bears the horns."
"We are up to them tricks," said the policeman. And S——k is borne along, with courage, if he ever had any, gone, and his eye looking terror.
S——th wanted to go along with him; but W——pe seized him by the arm again and dragged him up by the east side of Huntly Street, whereby they could get easily to James' Square.
In a few minutes more S——th was at his mother's door with the burning five pounds in his pocket. He had meditated throwing it away, but the hurrying concourse of thoughts had prevented the insufficient remedy from being carried into effect. When he opened the door he found his mother alone. The sister had not yet come from the warehouse where she earned five shillings a week, almost the only source of her and the mother's living; for the money which S——th earned as a mere copying clerk in a writer's office, went mostly in some other direction. The mother soon observed, as she cast her eye over him, that there was something more than ordinary out of even his irregular way. He was pale, woe-worn, haggard; nor did he seem able to stand, but hurried to a chair and flung himself down, uttering confusedly, "Something to drink, mother——whisky."
"I hae nane, Charlie, lad," said she. "Never hae I passed a day like this since your father died. I have na e'en got the bit meat that a' get that are under God's protection. But what ails ye, dear Charlie?"
"Never mind me," replied the youth in choking accents. "I am better. Starving, starving! O God! and my doing. Yes, I am better—a bitter cure—starving," he again muttered; and searching his pockets, and throwing the five pounds on the table—"There, there, there," he added.
The mother took up the notes, and counted them slowly; for she had been inured to grief, and was always calm, even when her heart beat fast with the throbs of anguish.
"And whaur fae, laddie?" she said, as she turned her grey eye and scanned deeply the pale face of her son.
Silent, even dogged! Where now his metaphysics, his gibes on the physicalities, the moralities, the spiritualities?—all bundled up in a vibrating chord.
"Whaur fae, Charlie," had she repeated, still looking at him.
"The devil!" cried he, stung by her searching look, which brought back a gleam of the old rebellion.
"A gude paymaster to his servants," she said; "but I'm no ane o' them yet; and may the Lord, wham I serve, even while his chastening hand is heavy upon me, preserve me frae his bribes!" And laying down the notes, she added, not lightly, as it might seem, but seriously, yet quietly,
"Nae wonder they're warm."
The notes had carried the heat of his burning hand.
"The auld story—billiards," said she again; "for they are the devil's cue and balls."
No answer; and the mother seating herself again, looked stedfastly and suspiciously at him; but she could not catch the eye of her son, who sat doggedly determined not to reveal his secret, and as determined also to elude her looks, searching as they were, and sufficient to enter his very soul. Yet she loved him too well to objurgate where she was only as yet suspicious; and in the quietness of the hour, she fell for a moment into her widowed habit of speaking as if none were present but herself.
"Wharfor bore I him—wharfor toiled and wrought for him for sae mony years, since the time he sat on my knee smiling in my face, as if he said, I will comfort you when you are old, and will be your stay and support? Was that smile then a lee, put there by the devil, wha has gi'en him the money to deceive me again?"
Then she paused.
"And how could that be? Love is not a cheat; and did ever bairn love a mither as he loved me? or did ever mither love her bairn as I hae loved him? Lord, deliver him frae his enemies, and mak him what he was in thae bygone days—sae innocent, sae cheerful, sae obedient; and I will meekly suffer a' Thou canst lay upon me."
The words reached the ears of the son, and the audible sobs seemed to startle the solemn spirit of the hour and the place. "What would she say," he thought, "if she heard me declare I had robbed my uncle?"
At that moment the door opened, and in rushed little Jeanie S——th,—her face pale, and her blue eyes lighted with fear, and the thin delicate nostril distended, and hissing with her quick breathings,—
"Oh mither, there's twa officers on the stair seeking Charlie!"
And the quick creature, darting her eye on the table where the notes lay, snatched them up, and secreted them in her bosom; and, what was more extraordinary, just as if she had divined something more from her brother's looks, which told her that that money would be sought for by these officers, she darted off like a bird with a crumb in its bill, which it has picked up from beneath your eyes; but not before depositing, as she passed, a paper on a chair near the door.
"That creature is a spirit," said the mother. "She sees the evil in the dark before it comes, and wards it off like a guardian angel; but oh! she has little in her power to be an angel."
And rising, she took up the paper. It was only some bread and cheese, which the girl, knowing the privations of her mother, had bought with a part of her five shillings a week.
Thereafter, just as little Jeannie had intimated, came in two officers, with the usual looks of duty appearing through their professional sorrow.
"We want your son, good woman."
"He is there," said she; "but what want ye him for?"
"Not for going to church," said the man, forgetting said professional sorrow in his love of a joke, "but for robbery on the highway; and we must search the house for five pounds in British Linen Company notes."
And the men proceeded to search, even putting their hands in the mother's pockets, besides rifling those of the son. They of course found nothing except the powder and shot, which had still remained there, and a handkerchief.
"That is something, anyhow," said one of the men, "and a great deal too. The one who is up in the office says true; he was not the man."
"No more he was," said Charles. "I am the man you ought to take; and take me."
"Sae, sae; just as I suspected," muttered the mother. "Lord, Lord! the cup runs over. It was e'en lipping when John died; but I will bear yet." And she seemed to grasp firmly the back of a chair, and compressed her lips—an attitude she maintained like a statue all the time occupied by the departure of her son. The door closed—he was gone; and she still stood, the vivum cadaver—the image of a petrified creature of misery.
Yet, overcome as her very calmness was, and enchanted for the moment into voicelessness and utter inaction, she was not that kind of women who sit and bear the stripes without an effort to ward them off. If Jeannie was as quick as lightning, she was sure as that which follows the flash. She thought for a moment, "God does not absolutely and for ever leave his servants." Some thought had struck her. She put on her bonnet and cloak deliberately, even looking into the glass to see if she was tidy enough for where she intended going, and for whom she intended to see.
And now this quiet woman is on her way down Broughton Street at twelve o'clock of a cold winter night, which, like her own mind, had only that calmness which results from the exhaustion of sudden biting gusts from the north, and therefore right in her face. She drew her cloak round her. She had a long way to go, but her son was in danger of the gallows; and thoughtless, and as it now seemed, wicked as he was, he was yet her son. The very word is a volume of heart language—not the fitful expression of passion, but that quiet eloquence which bedews the eye and brings deep sighs with holy recollections of the child-time, and germinating hopes of future happiness up to the period when he would hang over her departing spirit. Much of all that had gone, and been replaced by dark forebodings of the future; and now there was before her the vision of an ignominious death as the termination of all these holy inspirations. But her faithful saying was always, "Wait, hope, and persevere;" and the saying was muttered a hundred times as she trudged weariedly, oh! how weariedly, for one who had scarcely tasted food for that day, and who had left untouched the gift brought by her loving daughter that night—for which, plain as it was, her heart yearned even amidst its grief, yea, though grief is said, untruly no doubt, to have no appetite. Perhaps not to those who are well fed; but nature is stronger than even grief, and she now felt the consequence of her disobedience to her behests in her shaking limbs and fainting heart. Yet she trudged and trudged on, shutting her mouth against her empty stomach to keep out the cold north wind. She is at the foot of Inverleith Row, and her face is to the west; she will now escape the desultory blasts by keeping close by the long running dyke. She passes the scene of the robbery without knowing it; else, doubtless, she would have stood and examined it by those instincts that force the spirit to such modes of satisfaction, as if the inanimate thing could calm the spiritual. She was now drawing to Davidson's Mains: a little longer, and much past midnight, she was rapping, still in her quiet way, at the door of her brother.
The family had had something else to do than to sleep. There were the sounds of tongues and high words. Mrs. S——th was surprised, as well she might; for though sometimes Mr. Henderson partook freely of the bottle when he met old friends in town, he and the whole household were peaceable, orderly, and early goers to bed. The door was opened almost upon the instant; and Mrs. S——th was presently before Mr. Henderson and two others, one of whom held in his hand a whip.
"What has brought you here, Margaret, at this hour?"
"I want to speak privately to you."
"Just here; out with it," said he. "These are my friends; and if it is more money you want, you have come at an unlucky time, for I have been robbed by a villain of five pounds, which I could ill spare."
Mrs. S——th's heart died away within her. She clenched her hands to keep her from shaking; for she recollected the old story about his own son—a story which had got him the character of being harsh and unnatural. She could not mention her errand, which was nothing else than to induce her brother to use his influence in some way to get Charles out of the hands of the law. She could not utter even the word Charles, and all she could say was—
"Robbed!"
"Ay, robbed by a villain, whom I shall hang three cubits higher than Haman."
And the stern man even laughed at the thought of retribution. Yet, withal, no man could deny his generosity and general kindliness, if, even immediately after, he did not show it by slipping a pound into the hands of his needy sister.
"There," said he; "no more at present. I will call up and see you to-morrow morning, as I go to the police office to identify the villain. Meantime, take a dram, dear Peggy, and get home to bed. The night is cold, and see that you wrap yourself well up to keep out the wind and in the spirit; it's good whisky."
Shortly afterwards she was on her way home, with more than blasted hopes of what she had travelled for.
His uncle the man he had robbed! Even with all her forced composedness, this seemed too much—ay, so much too much, that she was totally overpowered. She paused to recover strength; and, looking forward, saw a thin flying shadow coming up to her, with a shriek of delight; and immediately she was hugged rapturously and kissed all over by little Jeannie, whose movements, as they ever were—so agile, so quick, so Protean—appeared to her, now that she was stolid with despair, as the postures and gestures of a creature appearing in a dream.
"Oh, I know all," she cried; "don't speak—nay, wait now till I return."
And the creature was off like a September meteor disappearing in the west, as if to make up again to the sun, far down away behind the hills from whence it had been struck off in the height of the day.
What can the strange creature mean? But she had had experience of her, and knew the instinctive divination that got at objects and results where reason in full-grown man would syllogize into the darkness of despair.
Nor was it long before she is running back, leaping with all the abandon of a romp, crying—
"I will save dear Charlie yet; for I love him as much as I hate that old curmudgeon."
"What does the girl mean? Whaur was you, bairn?" said her mother.
"Oh mother, how cold it is for you! Wrap the cloak about you."
"But what is it that you mean, Jeannie?"
"We shall be home by-and-by; come."
And, putting an arm round her mother's waist, she impelled her forward with the strength of her wythe of an arm.
"Come, come, there are ghosts about these woods;" and then she cowered, but still impelled.
Nor did the mother press the question she had already put twice; for, as we have said, she knew the nature of the girl, who ever took her own way, and had the art to make that way either filial obedience or loving conciliation.
"Oh, I'm so frightened for these ghosts!" she continued. "You know there was a murder here once upon a time. They're so like myself—wicked, and won't answer when they're spoken to, as I would not answer you, dear mother, just now; but wait till to-morrow, and you shall see that I am your own loving Jeannie."
"Weel, weel, bairn, we will see. But, oh, I'm muckle afraid; d'ye know, Jeannie, Charlie has been robbing! And wha, think ye, was the man—wha but—"
"Hush, hush, mother, I know it all already; but let me beneath your cloak, I'm so frightened."
And the little sprite got in, keeping her head and the little cup of a bonnet protruding every moment to look round; yet if it could have been seen in the dark, with such a sly, half-humorous eye, as betokened one of those curiously-made creatures who seem to be formed for studies to the thoroughgoing decent pacers of the world's stage.
"Ah! now we're all safe, as poor Charlie will be to-morrow," she cried, as they got to the foot of the long row, and she emerged in the light of one of the lamps, so like a flash from a cloud, running before her mother to get her to walk faster and faster, as if some scheme she had in her head was loitering under the impediment of her mother's wearied, oh, wearied step.
Having at length reached home, Jeannie ran and got the fire as bright as her own eye, crying out occasionally, as she glanced about,
"Poor Charlie in a dungeon!" and again, a few minutes after, when puffing at the fire with the bellows,
"No fire for dear Charlie; all dark and dismal!"
And then, running for the little paper packet with the cheese and bread, and setting it down,
"But he'll see the sun to-morrow, and will sleep in his own bed to-morrow night too; that he shall. Now eat, mother, for you will be hungry; and see you this!" as she took from her pocket a very tiny bottle, which would hold somewhere about a glass.
"Take that," filling out a little whisky.
"Oh dear, dear bairn, where learnt ye a' that witchery?" said the mother, looking at her.
But the sly look, sometimes without a trace of laughter in her face, was the only answer.
And now they are stretched in bed in each other's arms; but it was a restless night for both. And how different the manifestations of the restlessness! The groans of the elder for the fate of her only boy, now suspended on the scales of justice—one branch of the balance to be lopt off by Nemesis, and the other left with a noose in the string whereon to hang that erring, yet still beloved son; hysterical laughs from Jeannie in her dreams, as she saw herself undo the kench, and Charlie let out, clapping his hands, and praying too, and kissing Jeannie, and other fantastic tricks of fancy in her own domain, unburdened with heavy clay which soils and presses upon her wings and binds her to earth, and to these monstrous likenesses of things, which she says are all a lying nature under the bonds of a blind fate, from where she cannot get free, even though she screams of murder and oppression and cruelty, and all the ills that earth-born flesh inherits from the first man.
Yet, for all these deductions from the sleep they needed, Jeannie was up in the morning early, infusing tea for herself and mother, muttering, as she whisked about,
"No breakfast for him made by me, who love him so dearly; but in this very house, ay, this night, he will have supper; and such a supper!"
In the midst of these scenes in the little room, a knock came to the door. It was a policeman, to say that she and her mother must be up to the office by ten.
"And shall we not?" said Jeannie, laughing; "wouldn't I have been there at any rate?"
Then, a little after, came the stern Henderson, still ignorant of who robbed him. Mrs. S—th got up trembling, and looking at him with terror, so dark he appeared.
"Where is Charles?" he said.
"We don't know," said Jeannie, turning a side-glance at her mother. It was true she hated her uncle mortally, for the reason that, though he was to an extent generous to them, he was harsh too, and left them often poorly off, when from his wealth, which he concealed, he might have made them happy; and then how could they help the conduct of the son whose earnings ought to have relieved the uncle of even his small advances?
But though Jeannie hated the curmudgeon, who was, if he could, to hang her brother—worth to her all the world and a bit of heaven—the mother saw some change in the girl's conduct towards her uncle. Though pure as snow, she flew to him and hugged him with the art of one of the denizens of rougedom, and kissed him, and all the time was acting some by-play with her nimble fingers.
"Where is your box, you naughty uncle? Doesn't my mother like her eyes opened in the morning? Ah, here it is."
And getting the box, she carried it to her mother, who was still more surprised; for she never had got a pinch from Mr. Henderson nor any one, though she sometimes, for her breathing, took a draught of a pipe at night.
"It is empty, you witch," cried Henderson.
"Ah! then, my mother will not get her eyes opened." And she returned it into his pocket with these said subtle fingers.
The mother got dressed, and took a cup of Jeannie's tea, and in a few minutes they were all on their way to the police office. They found Captain Stewart in his room, and along with him the procurator-fiscal.
"Come away, Mr. Henderson; this is a bad business," said Stewart.
"The villain!" cried Henderson; "I hope he will hang for it."
"Ay, if guilty though, only," replied the captain.
"Would you know the man?" said the fiscal.
"No, he had a napkin over his face; but I could guess something from his size and voice."
"He admits the robbery," said Stewart; "but he has an absurd qualification about a frolic, which yet, I am bound to say, is supported by his accomplices."
"Then the money, five pounds, has not been got," said the fiscal. "This is a great want; for without it, I don't see what we can make of the case."
"Money here or money there, I've lost it anyhow; and if he isn't hanged, I'll not be pleased."
"Was there any but one man engaged in the affair?"
"Just one, and plenty."
"He had a gun?"
"Yes."
"Would you know it?"
"No. I was, to say the truth, too frightened to examine the instrument that was to shoot me."
"Then we have nothing but the admission and the testimony of the accomplices, who say it was a frolic," said Stewart.
"No frolic to me," cried Henderson. "Why then didn't they return the money?"
"They say they called and ran after you, and that you would not wait to get it back."
"Then why didn't they produce it to you?" said Henderson. "The money is appropriated."
"A circumstance," said the fiscal, "in itself sufficient to rebut the frolic. Yes, the strength of the case is there."
"So I thought," growled the man.
"You wasn't in liquor?"
"No."
"Are you ever?"
"I don't deny that in town I take a glass, but seldom so much as to affect my walking; never so much as make me dream I was robbed of money, and that too money gone from my pocket."
"Where do you carry your money?"
"In my waistcoat pocket. Sometimes I have carried a valuable bill home in my snuff-mull, when it was empty by chance."
"Where had you the five pounds?"
"I am not sure, but I think in my left waistcoat pocket."
"And you gave it on demand? It was not rifled from you?"
"I thrust it into the villain's hand, and ran."
"Well, we must confront you with the supposed robber," said the captain. "But you seem to be in choler, and I caution you against a precipitate judgment. You may naturally think the admission of the young men enough, and that may make you see what perhaps may not be to be seen. I confess the admission of three to be more than the law wants or wishes; yet there are peculiarities in this case that take it out of the general rules." Stewart then nodded to an officer, who went out and returned.
"There stands the prisoner."
"Charles S——th!" ejaculated the uncle: "my own nephew! execrable villain!"
And he looked at the youth with bated breath and fiery eyes.
There was silence for a few minutes. The officials looked pitiful. The mother hung down her head; and little Jeannie leered significantly, while she took the strings of her bonnet, tied them, undid them again, and flung away the ends till they went round her neck; nay, the playful minx was utterly dead to the condition of her brother who stood there, ashamed to look any one in the face, if he was not rather like an exhumed corpse; and we would not be far out if we said that she even laughed as she saw the curmudgeon staring like an angry mastiff at the brother she loved so well. But then, was she not an eccentric thing, driven hither and thither by vagrant impulses, and with thoughts in her head which nobody could understand?
"Was this the man who robbed you, Mr. Henderson?"
"Yes, the very man; now when I recollect. Stay, was there any handkerchief found on him?"
"Yes; that," said an officer, producing a red silk handkerchief.
"Why, I gave him that," said Mr. Henderson. "It cost me 4s. 6d.; and it was that he had over his face when he robbed me of my hard-earned money!"
"It is true," said Charles; "and sorry am I for the frolic, which my companions forced me into."
"A frolic with five pounds at its credit," said Mr. Henderson. "Where is the money, sir?"
"Ah! I know, dear uncle," cried the watchful Jeannie, in a piercing treble of the clearest silver.
All eyes were turned on Jeannie.
"Then where is it, girl?"
"I saw him put it in his snuff-mull last night when he was at mother's."
"Examine your box, Mr. Henderson."
The man growled, took out the box, and there was the five pounds. He looked at Jeannie as if he would have devoured her with his nose at a single pinch.
"Was Mr. Henderson sober, Miss S——th?"
"No."
"Was he drunk?"
"No. Only he couldn't stand scarcely, though he could walk; and he called mother Jeannie, and me Peggy, and he said 'twas a shame in us to burn two candles at his expense, when one was enough."
"Saved by a pinch," cried Captain Stewart.
"Mr. Henderson," said the fiscal, "the case is done, and would never have come here if your nose had happened last night to be as itchy as your hand. The prisoner is discharged."
And no sooner had the words been uttered than Jeannie flew to her brother, hung round his neck, kissed him, blubbered and played such antics that the fiscal could not refrain searching for his handkerchief. He found it too; but just as if this article were no part of his official property, he returned it to his pocket; and then, as he saw Charles leaning on his mother's breast, and making more noise with his heart and lungs than he could have done if he had been hanged, he resolved, after due deliberation, to let the "hanging drop" have its own way in sticking on the top of his cheek, and determined not to fall for all his jerking.
"BARBADOES, 15th July 18—.
"MY DEAREST LITTLE JEANNIE,—I am at length settled the manager of a great sugar factory, with £400 a year. Tell your mother I will write her by next post; and all I can say meantime is, that Messrs. Coutts and Co. will pay her £100 a year, half-yearly, till I return to keep you, for saving me from the gallows. Accept the offer of the old man. He is worth £500 a year; and you're just the little winged spirit that will keep up a fire of life in a good heart only a little out of use.
"P.S.—Tell uncle that I will send him five pounds of snuff, by next ship, in return for the five pounds I took out of his box on that eventful night, which was the beginning of my reformation.
"Tell Mrs. S——k and Mrs. W——pe that their sons arrived at Jamaica; but, poor fellows, they are both dead.
"The same vessel that carries the snuff will convey to mother a hogshead of sugar and a puncheon of rum. So that at night, in place of the tiny phial which held a glass, and which you used to draw out of your pocket so slily when mother was weakly, you may now mix for her a tumbler of rum-punch; and if you don't take some too, I'll send you no more. But, hark ye, Jeannie, don't give uncle a drop, though he tried to give me one that, I fear, would have made my head, like yours, a little giddy. Adieu, dear little Ariel."