“My ever-dearest Robert,—It is only after enduring the sickening disappointment that has attended my last three letters sent to the old address, that I venture to write to your private abode, in the fervent hope that this my desperate appeal to your oft-tried generosity may fall into no other hands but your own.
“I cannot think that my boy’s father can have grown cold towards her whose whole life is devoted to him, who fled from home and friends, and took up her abode in a foreign land and amongst strangers, that her darling might not be troubled,—that his home might be peace. Alas! what is my home? But I will not upbraid you. Were I alone, I would be content to die rather than cause you a single pang of uneasiness; but, as my dear Robert knows, I am not alone. God still spares our boy to me, though I much fear that the doctor’s prediction that he would get the better of his ailments when he had turned the age of ten will not be verified. Sometimes as I sit of nights—long, weary, thoughtful nights—watching my sick darling, and thinking of those old times of brief bitter sweetness, I wish that you could see him, so like your own dear self; but the thought is at once hushed, when I reflect on the pain it would cause you to contemplate our poor fatherless boy. I am almost tempted to thank God that he cannot remain much longer on earth; but it is hard, cruelly hard, to see him suffer from want as well as from his painful malady. Do, for the sake of the old times, send me a little money, though only a few pounds. There is no other resource for us but the workhouse. At any rate, pray send me an answer to this, and relieve the dreadful suspense that haunts me.
“P.S. As I have been, from reasons too painful to disclose to you, compelled to quit the lodgings in V.-street, please direct Post-office, —. Yours, ever true and faithful,
Elizabeth —.”
As it happened, the gentleman to whom this villanous epistle was addressed had, till within a few years of his demise, resided in a far-away quarter of the globe, and under such conditions as rendered a ten-years-ago intimacy with any English Elizabeth utterly impossible; but unfortunately his survivors were content to treat the attempted imposture with silent contempt, and a likely opportunity of bringing to proper punishment one of a gang of the most pestiferous order of swindlers it is possible to conceive was lost. It was probably only the very peculiar and exceptionally conclusive evidence that the letter could not apply to Mr. Robert —, that saved his friends from painful anxiety, and perhaps robbery. It is so much less troublesome to hush-up such a matter than to investigate it. To be sure, no one would have for a moment suspected, from the precise and proper behaviour of the man dead and gone, that he could ever have been guilty of such wickedness and folly; but it is so hard to read the human heart. Such things have happened; and now that one calls to mind—
That is the most poisonous part of it,—“now that one calls to mind!” What is easier than to call to mind, out of the ten thousand remembrances of a man whose society we have shared for twenty years or more, one or two acts that at the time were regarded as “strange whims,” but now, regarded in the light that the damnable letter sheds on them, appear as parts of the very business so unexpectedly brought to light? Perhaps the man was privately charitable, and in benevolent objects expended a portion of his income, without making mention of how, when, and where, or keeping any sort of ledger account. How his means so mysteriously dwindled in his hands was a puzzle even to his most intimate friends—now it is apparent where the money went! But there, it is no use discussing that now; he has gone to answer for all his sins, and it is to be devoutly wished that God, in the infinite stretch of His mercy, will forgive him even this enormous sin. Meanwhile it will never do to have this base creature coming as a tramping beggar, perhaps with her boy, and knocking at the door, desperately determined on being cared for by the man who was the cause of her ruin and her banishment. Better to send her ten pounds, with a brief note to the effect that Mr. — is now dead, and it will be useless her troubling again. This is what did not happen in the case quoted, and for the reasons given; but it might, and in very many cases it doubtless has happened; and it would be worth a whole year’s catch of common begging-letter impostors if the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity could trap a member of the “Dead-lurk” gang, and hand him over to the tender mercies of the law.
CHAPTER XIV.
BEGGING “DODGES.”
The Variety and Quality of the Imposture—Superior Accomplishments of the Modern Practitioner—The Recipe for Success—The Power of “Cheek”—“Chanting” and the “Shallow Lay”—Estimates of their Paying Value—The Art of touching Women’s Hearts—The Half-resentful Trick—The London “Cadger”—The Height of “The Famine Season.”
The “dodges” to which an individual resolved on a vagrant life will resort are almost past reckoning; and, as a natural consequence, the quality of the imposture in modern practice is superior to that which served to delude our grandfathers.
It can be no other. As civilisation advances, and our machinery for the suppression and detection of fraud improves, so, if he would live at all, must the professional impostor exert all the skill and cunning he is endowed with to adjust the balance at his end of the beam. It is with vagrancy as with thieving. If our present system of police had no more formidable adversaries to deal with than lived and robbed in the days of those famous fellows, Richard Turpin and Master Blueskin, Newgate might, in the course of a few years, be converted into a temperance hotel, and our various convict establishments into vast industrial homes for the helplessly indigent. So, if the well-trained staff under the captaincy of that shrewd scenter of make-believe and humbug—Mr. Horsford—was called on to rout an old-fashioned army of sham blindness, and cripples whose stumps were fictitious; and of clumsy whining cadgers, who made filthy rags do duty for poverty, who painted horrid sores on their arms and legs, and employed a mild sort of whitewash to represent on their impudent faces the bloodless pallor of consumption,—we might reasonably hope to be rid of the whole community in a month.
It is scarcely too much to say, that the active and intelligent opposition brought to bear of late years against beggars has caused the trade to be taken up by a class of persons of quite superior accomplishments. I well recollect, on the memorable occasion of my passing a night in the society of tramps and beggars, hearing the matter discussed seriously and at length, and that by persons who, from their position in life, undoubtedly were those to whose opinion considerable weight attached. The conversation began by one young fellow, as he reclined on his hay-bed and puffed complacently at his short pipe, relating how he had “kidded” the workhouse authorities into the belief that he had not applied for relief at that casual-ward for at least a month previously, whereas he had been there for three successive nights. Of course this was a joke mightily enjoyed by his audience; and a friend, wagging his head in high admiration, expressed his wonder as to how the feat could be successfully accomplished. “How!” replied the audacious one; “why, with cheek, to be sure. Anything can be done if you’ve only got cheek enough. It’s no use puttin’ on a spurt of it, and knocking under soon as you’re tackled. Go in for it up to the heads of your — soul bolts. Put it on your face so gallus thick that the devil himself won’t see through it. Put it into your eyes and set the tears a-rollin’. Swear God’s truth; stop at nothing. They’re bound to believe you. There ain’t nothing else left for ’em. They think that there’s an end somewhere to lyin’ and cheekin’, and they’re — fools enough to think that they can tell when that end shows itself. Don’t let your cheek have any end to it. That’s where you’re right, my lads.”
I have, at the risk of shocking the reader of delicate sensibilities, quoted at full the terms in which my ruffianly “casual” chamber-fellow delivered himself of his opinion as to the power of “cheek” illimitable, because from the same experienced source presently proceeded as handsome a tribute to the efficiency of the officers of the Mendicity Society as they could desire.
“What shall you do with yerself to-morrow?” one asked of another, who, weary of song and anecdote and blasphemy, preparatory to curling down for the night was yawning curses on the parochial authorities for supplying him with no warmer rug. “It ain’t much you can do anyhows atween the time when you finish at the crank and go out, till when you wants to come in agin. It feels like frost; if it is, I shall do a bit of chanting, I think.” (“Chanting” is vagrant phraseology for street singing.)