Thus saying, the earl, with a proud and dignified wave of the hand, pointed to the door. Mr. Tims would fain have added a few words more; but Lord Ashborough waved him forth again; and there was also a cloud lowering upon Henry Beauchamp's brow, which boded no very pleasant results from farther insolence; so that, upon second thoughts, Mr. Tims judged it best to make his exit tranquilly. This he was suffered to do; and the door closed upon him for ever.
CHAPTER X.
We must now for a time leave Henry Beauchamp and the Earl of Ashborough, and turn to the small neat country town of ----, in the jail of which place, Harding, Smithson, and Sarah Ings, were at length safely lodged, within a few days after Beauchamp's return to his native country. Walter Harrison, skilfully treated and carefully attended, was soon able to undertake the journey to England; and as the fixed determination he had shown to farther the ends of justice, at all risks, left no doubt of his sincerity, he was permitted to act without restraint, and proceeded steadily towards his destination--indeed more rapidly than his feeble state properly admitted. Presenting himself uncalled before the magistrates of the town, he informed them at once of his name, required them to receive his voluntary confession, and in consequence to commit him to prison. The first part of his demand was of course acceded to; but it was intimated to him that, in consequence of his firm and determined conduct, throughout at least the latter part of the dark business in which he had unfortunately been engaged, he would not be deprived of his liberty.
To the surprise of the magistrates, however, he replied that he knew nothing of their forms and manner of proceeding in these matters, but that he had made up his mind to the line of conduct he was to pursue. On no consideration whatever, he said, would he be king's evidence--a term for which he seemed to entertain the most extraordinary aversion. His confession, he said, was clear and ample, made without any promises of pardon or favour, demanded or given; he would therefore go to prison like the others, and be brought to trial like them; but as he was guilty, he would plead guilty in regard to the robbery, though not in regard to the murder. This he said was his firm determination, though he would be found ready at any time to give every sort of information that might be required to make out the case against his accomplices and himself.
As the jail delivery was to be held in a few days, the penance of imprisonment which he thus imposed on himself, was not great; but even the short period of confinement to which he thus voluntarily subjected himself, seemed greatly to affect his health and spirits. In vain the governor of the prison, under the idea that apprehensions in regard to his ultimate fate were prying upon his mind, assured him that the King's pardon, promised by proclamation to any but the actual murderers, secured him from all danger. He replied, that he feared nothing but his own thoughts; for that, since he had come back to the country and the county in which the terrible crime wherein he had participated had been perpetrated, a heavy cloud had seemed to come over him, which he could not shake off. His bold, daring, and impetuous manner, was now all gone, and in its place there appeared a deep silent sternness, somewhat impatient of contradiction, but determined rather than violent. The great loss of blood he had sustained, had rendered him as pale as ashes, and anxiety and suffering had bowed his powerful frame, and left him merely the shadow of what he formerly was. Some apprehensions, indeed, appeared to be entertained by those who watched, lest he should become so ill as to be unable to undergo the business of the trial; but in this they were deceived; and his strength, on the contrary, appeared greater, and his energies more alive, on the day before that appointed for the assizes.
At length the day arrived; and all the usual formalities having taken place, the heavy list of crimes was adverted to, and lamented by the judge; the grand jury was exhorted and sworn, and proceeded to its functions. As every one expected, the first bill brought before them, which was that against Captain William Delaware, for the murder of Mr. Tims at Ryebury, was at once thrown out. Not so, however, that against Harding and his accomplices, which, being found a true bill, was immediately proceeded on.
All our readers are most probably acquainted with the solemn array of a court of justice, though an interesting, always a painful scene. On the present occasion, of course, from the blackness of the crime committed, and the many extraordinary circumstances that accompanied and followed it, the excitement produced was great, and the court crowed in every part. The preliminaries having been gone through, the four prisoners were put to the bar, and a good deal of confusion ensued, from the endeavour of the various spectators to obtain a full view of the accused--the class of women who frequent criminal courts, struggling forward to see the culprits with more than masculine boldness.
Harding, who was beyond doubt a handsome man, first advanced to the bar. He was dressed with scrupulous care; and, with his neck wrapped in a thick black cravat, his double-breasted waistcoat buttoned up to his chin, and his dark frock-coat thrown back from his chest, he looked very much like the private secretary of a German prince. His cool and tranquil air, and easy carriage, might have been construed into the expression of conscious innocence, but for a slight, very slight sneer, that curled the corner of his lip, entirely different from the indignant expansion of the nostril, with which innocence sometimes meets a false accusation. He gazed for a single instant round the court, and then withdrew his eyes, while all the reporters scribbled rapidly in their note-books, preparing to make him a newspaper wonder, and hand him down to posterity as one of the heroes of the gallows. The next that came up was the well-known Tony Smithson, who, though he had confronted more than one court of justice on previous occasions, now, from the magnitude of the offence, and the certainty that his conviction would follow, had lost all self-command, and approached the bar, pale, trembling, and agitated. Next appeared Sarah Ings, with the most persevering of all human passions, vanity, still uppermost. Dressed forth in all the gay and vulgar smartness of the Rue de Vivienne and the Palais Royal, with a touch or two of rouge upon her cheeks to hide the ravages of apprehension, she presented herself before the court that was to try her, and the judge who might have to doom her to death, with a simpering and coquetish smile, thinking fully as much of the impression of her charms and her finery upon the spectators, as of her awful situation and its probable result.
Last appeared Walter Harrison, with a bold, firm step, a bright red spot in each of his pale cheeks, and his eye sparkling from feverish excitement. He leaned his hand upon the bar, and after gazing rapidly and boldly round the court, fixed his eyes upon the clerk of the arraigns, as he proceeded to read the indictment.
That document was conceived in the usual tenor, and comprised all the various acts which the prisoners could or might have committed in the perpetration of their crime, with all the legal terms and expressions necessary to prevent dubiety.