“Whereas,” ran the advertisement, “Bernard Macartney, Captain in her Majesty’s forces, stands charged with the wilful murder of James Douglas, Duke of Hamilton, in Hyde Park on the 15th of this present month, a reward of two hundred pounds is hereby offered to any person or persons who shall discover and apprehend, or cause to be discovered or apprehended, the said Captain Bernard Macartney, to be paid by the Lords Commissioners of her Majesty’s Treasury upon his being apprehended and lodged in any one of her Majesty’s gaols.”
The traveller rose from his perusal with a grin.
“And so they bell the cat,” said he. “Now, if I were this Macartney—I say if I were—methinks I should feign to be one of my own pursuers lusting to gain the reward. There’s no disguise for some men like honesty, nor, in certain cases, no self-help like self-sacrifice.”
He remounted and pushed leisurely on his way, cutting across the high-road, and taking the track for Byfleet, which ran herefrom over Cobham Heath, a lonely and near treeless waste. Naturally, as he rode, his mind was busy over the event which had produced the proclamation—the recent fatal duel, that is to say, between the Lords Hamilton and Mohun. The sensation the affair had caused was due as much to the reputed foul play which had characterised it as to the exalted rank of its principals and its tragic termination. The meeting—ostensibly the result of a dispute concerning some family property—had taken place at seven in the morning near the Ring in Hyde Park—that fashionable “dusty mill-horse drive” which lay off Tyburn Lane, about mid-way between the Tyburn and Hyde Park Gate turnpikes—and there were six concerned in it, three of a side. The provocation, given and accepted, had been, it was rumoured rightly or wrongly, a mere blind to a premeditated murder. His Grace of Hamilton—then on the eve of his departure for Paris as the Queen’s Ambassador, and the holder of a watching brief, as it were, on behalf of St. Germains—was notoriously obnoxious to Marlborough and the Whigs, and the quarrel, the whisper went, had been thrust upon him at the hands of a creature of the Duke’s, a discredited brute and libertine, whose challenge, under the circumstances, he might very well have ignored. But his Grace had an invincible spirit, and the desire, perhaps, to rid the world of an intolerable ruffian; and so the meeting had occurred. At its outset, without any feint of punctilio, the two had rushed at one another more like hyenas than men, a world of long-smothered exasperation, no doubt, nerving their hands; and, amidst the rain of stabs and blows that followed, Mohun had been the first to fall. And while he had lain on the ground, gasping out his life, the other, also sorely wounded, leaning above him, Macartney, it was said, had run up behind and, giving the Duke his death-blow, had escaped with his surviving companion in iniquity. The Duke had been helped towards the Cake-house—that little, pretty rustic lodge, with its green trees and pond, whither fashion was used to resort for its syllabubs and “pigeon-pie puff”—but had died on the grass before he could reach it. And so the matter had ended for all but the absconding seconds.
“And those,” thought the traveller, “can spell out proclamations, no doubt, with the best of their pursuers. I put my money on Macartney.”
He was a spare, small-boned man, with a delicate, invalidish face and an expression on it of impudent temerity. His voice cracked when he raised it, and he was prone to spasms of laughter which hurt his chest. His hat, his heavy surtout, his great jack-boots seemed all too large for him, like a preposterous shell to a very little tortoise; but he rode with spirit, making small account of his trappings and the lonely road and sinister weather. In fact, as with many sickly constitutions, his elasticity and muscular strength were, relatively, abnormal.
The heath, desolation manifest, rolled on before him in brown, wind-shivered billows; the sky was like a slab of grey stone, roofing a dead world. There was a wolfish snarl in the air, a threat of coming snow.
Suddenly, without a note of warning, a burst and ring of hoofs sounded in the road close behind him. Wheeling on the instant, he observed a stranger, the noise of whose approach had evidently fallen deadened on the spongy turf-side by which he had ridden.
“How now!” demanded the traveller, in his quick little voice: “what the devil do you, springing upon me like this?”
“Pardon, pardon,” cried the stranger. He rode up, breathing as if winded. “I am a timid man, sir, and the prospect looked wicked, and, seeing you going before, I ventured to push on to crave your company. This place hath a dreary notorious reputation, I am told, and I am very nervous.”