“That is not what I heard at all,” broke in the squire. “I fancy you are mistaken, sir. The truth, as I have every reason to believe, is that one of the spies of the Government—a Scotsman, by all accounts—discovered Conflans' plans, and came over to London with them. A good business too, egad! otherwise we'd soon have nothing to eat at Morpeth George Inn on market days but frogs, and would find the parley-voos overrunning the country by next Lent with their masses and mistresses, and so on. A good business for merry old England that this spy had his English ears open.”
“It may be you are right, sir,” conceded the perruquier deferentially. “Now that I remember, Sir Patrick's gentleman said something of the same kind, and that it was one of them Scotsmen brought the news. Like enough the fellow found it worth his while. It will be a pretty penny in his pocket, I'll wager. He'll be able to give up spying and start an inn.”
I have little doubt the ideal nature of retirement to an inn came to the mind of the peruke maker from the fact that at the moment we were drawing up before “The Crown” at Bawtry. Reek rose in clouds from the horses, as could be seen from the light of the doors that showed the narrow street knee-deep in snow; a pleasant smell of cooking supper and warm cordials came out to us, welcome enough it may be guessed after our long day's stage. The widow clung just a trifle too long on my arm as I gallantly helped her out of the coach; perhaps she thought my silence and my abstracted gaze at her for the last hour or two betrayed a tender interest, but I was thinking how close the squire and the wig-maker had come upon the truth, and yet made one mistake in that part of their tale that most closely affected their silent fellow passenger.
The sea-fight and the war lasted us for a topic all through England, but when we had got into Scotland on the seventh day after my departure from London, the hostlers at the various change-houses yoked fresh horses to the tune of “Daniel Risk.”
We travelled in the most tempestuous weather. Snow fell incessantly, and was cast in drifts along the road; sometimes it looked as if we were bound for days, but we carried the mails, and with gigantic toil the driver pushed us through.
The nearer we got to Edinburgh the more we learned of the notorious Daniel Risk, whom no one knew better than myself. The charge of losing his ship wilfully was, it appeared, among the oldest and least heinous of his crimes. Smuggling had engaged his talent since then, and he had murdered a cabin-boy under the most revolting circumstances. He had almost escaped the charge of scuttling the Seven Sisters, for it was not till he had been in the dock for the murder that evidence of that transaction came from the seaman Horn, who had been wrecked twice, it appeared, and far in other parts of the world between the time he was abandoned in the scuttled ship and returned to his native land, to tell how the ruffian had left two innocent men to perish.
Even in these days of wild happenings the fame of Risk exceeded that of every malefactor that season, and when we got to Edinburgh the street singers were chanting doleful ballads about him.
I would have given the wretch no thought, or very little, for my own affairs were heavy enough, had not the very day I landed in Edinburgh seen a broad-sheet published with “The Last Words and Warning” of Risk. The last words were in an extraordinarily devout spirit; the homily breathed what seemed a real repentance for a very black life. It would have moved me less if I could have learned then, as I did later, that the whole thing was the invention of some drunken lawyer's clerk in the Canongate, who had probably devised scores of such fictions for the entertainment of the world that likes to read of scaffold repentances and of wicked lives. The condition of the wretch touched me, and I made up my mind to see the condemned man who, by the accounts of the journals, was being visited daily by folks interested in his forlorn case.
With some manoeuvring I got outside the bars of his cell.
There was little change in him. The same wild aspect was there though he pretended a humility. The skellie eye still roved with little of the love of God or man in it; his iron-grey hair hung tawted about his temples. Only his face was changed and had the jail-white of the cells, for he had been nearly two months in confinement. When I entered he did not know me; indeed, he scarce looked the road I was on at first, but applied himself zealously to the study of a book wherein he pretended to be rapturously engrossed.