There we were, three earnest, ambitious young men, enthusiastic for all that was good and noble. I about to wed a pure-souled woman, who thought me an angel of goodness, and about to fly with my plunder and bride to Mexico. My two companions were returning to London to continue carrying out a giant scheme of fraud against a great moneyed institution, but there we were, with $100,000 in plunder at our feet, sitting under the stars, listening to the dash of the waves, and talking not at all like pirates and robbers, but much more like crusaders setting out on a crusade, or like pilgrims going on a pilgrimage.
I told my friends I should go to the City of Mexico for a year or two, and then meet them somewhere in America where we would unite our wealth to inaugurate some scheme that would benefit thousands in our own generation and millions in the generations to come. We would hedge ourselves about with kindly deeds, so live as to win the respect of all, and when under the sod live in the eyes and mouths of men.
Too soon the whistle sounded, and we had to say good-bye, which we did in an enthusiasm that told how deeply we felt. We were walking in the Primrose Way, its flowers and songs were sweet, and we thought their perfume and melody eternal.
I again arrived in Paris at daylight, but early as it was, my sweetheart, escorted by my servant, was waiting my arrival. It was our wedding morning. During our drive to the hotel, radiant with joy, she told me the separation had been a cruel one, and she was so happy to know we should never be separated again!
At 4 o'clock that afternoon we were married at the American Embassy.
I had told every one I was going to leave the next day for Havre, to embark for New York. Our baggage was all packed and placed in a van, which I accompanied to the Havre station, and had stored there. Sunday I purchased one ticket to Bayonne, one for Madrid and one to Burgos, each from different agencies. On Sunday morning I took a van to the Havre station, and transferring our baggage to the road into Spain, checked all of it to Madrid.
My purpose was to sail by the Lopez & Co. steamer El Rey Felipe from Cadiz to Mexico, which was advertised to sail ten days later.
We were married very quietly on Friday, and our friends, wisely recognizing the fact that young married people like to be alone, the next day said good-bye and returned to Normandy. We spent a quiet and happy Saturday and Sunday, and on Sunday night we left—my wife, servant and self—for Cadiz, via Madrid. My wife, like all English people, knew little of geography, and had such hazy notions of America that she thought it quite the thing to go to such an outlandish and far off quarter of the globe as America via a Spanish port. Columbus, she knew, had gone that way, and why should not we?
We had an all-night ride to Bayonne in one of those antiquated compartments used in railway carriages all over Europe, but the ride was not tedious, nor was the night long. This little earth had no happier couple, and, talking of the happy years that lay before us, the night rushed by like a fairy dream.
Where was my conscience? Why, my dear reader, I had sung it such a song that it was delighted with the music, and had, I was going to say, gone to sleep, but it had not. It was wide awake, and we were good chums. We both—conscience and I—had persuaded ourselves it was a virtuous deed to do evil that good might come. My conscience was perhaps as old as the sun, but I myself was young and too inexperienced to see the fallacy of the argument, since I myself was the doer of the wrong; but, of course, I should have hotly denounced any other such philosopher as a villain and rogue.