But another Fielding presided there now. Dick received free lodging till morning, and then he was escorted to the court-room close at hand, to take his turn as one among a crowd of anxious wretches of both sexes, who stood in a railed enclosure at one side of a vacant space, before the table at which sat the grave magistrate in all the vestments and solemnity of his office. To Dick's amazement, he beheld in an opposite railed space certain faces with which he was acquainted,—those of his George Street landlady's son, the Monmouth Street shopman to whom he had sold the clothes, and the Vauxhall girl. Dick wondered what the whole business meant, and what it would lead to. At last his turn came.
The magistrate glanced at him indifferently, and addressed him coldly, in a few words whose meaning Dick did not take pains to gather. Then a clerk at the table read monotonously a long document, wherein it appeared that a number of people had sworn to certain occurrences, which, as far as Dick could see, did not concern him in the least; namely, that Moreton Charteris, gentleman, of Bloomsbury Square, had been robbed of money, valuables, and wardrobe, early in the previous February, by a highwayman who had stopped his coach near Turnham Green; that a woman who had quarrelled at Reading with one Edward Lawson, known as Captain Ted, knew the said Lawson to have been the robber of Mr. Charteris, and, on her threatening to inform against him, to have fled towards Bath in one of the stolen suits of clothes; and that Mr. Charteris's servant had, in June, recognized one of the stolen suits in a Monmouth Street shop.
And now the shopkeeper in the witness box identified that suit as the one so recognized, and Dick as the man who had sold it; and from further testimony Dick could infer that the servant's discovery had sent Bow Street runners to the shopman, who had referred them for information regarding Dick's whereabouts to the landlady's son, who in turn had sent them to the Vauxhall girl; and that through her treachery they had learned his place of lodging. In fact, that grateful creature had stood in wait with the constables at the head of Breakneck Stairs, and announced, when his first assailants' lantern had lit up his features, that he was the man the constables wanted. She had, though, kept out of his sight, from a greater sense of shame than many of her class would have shown. As for the attack by the Delahenty party, it had been as great a surprise to the waiting constables as to Dick.
And now Dick was hastily identified by two bold-looking women, as the aforesaid Edward Lawson, otherwise Captain Ted. He remembered that the whimsical gentleman met at Taunton had resembled him, and he perceived now, considering the danger of being betrayed by the woman quarrelled with, and of being far sought by the Bow Street men, why that gentleman had taken the caprice of exchanging good clothes for bad. In putting this and that together, as he stood in the dock, Dick lost track of the court's proceedings, and it came like a sudden blow when he saw Sir John Fielding gaze hard upon him, and heard Sir John Fielding commit him, as Edward Lawson, to the jail of Newgate, there to be kept in custody until he should be brought forth to stand his trial!
To Newgate, to await trial for highway robbery, the penalty of which was death by hanging; readily identified as the guilty man by those who would stick to their oath; unable to prove by any person in England that he was not that man, for all his acquaintances had been made since the exchange of clothes,—a pleasant series of thoughts to keep the adventurous Master Dick company in the hackney coach that rattled him swiftly away from the Bow Street court to the great, vile, many-chambered stone cage where such gallows-birds as Master Jack Sheppard and Monsieur Claude Duval had lodged before him! And if those thoughts were not enough, there was that of the cart-ride out Holborn to Tyburn tree, a picturesque ending for a journey over so many hills and so far away!
CHAPTER XIV.
"FAIR STOOD THE WIND FOR FRANCE."
Was it worth being saved from murder at the hands of Lord Alderby's hirelings on Breakneck Stairs, to swing a few months later at Tyburn? Dick asked himself this question in the first few hours during which he either sat listless in the dim-lit cell shared by him with a half-dozen foul-mouthed and outwardly reckless rascals, or paced the courtyard upon which his and other cells opened.
It was not so much the confinement that crushed him, though that was a terribly galling thing; he had endured closer confinement in Boston, and on the Adamant. But never had he been surrounded by so vile a herd of beings. He accustomed himself, though, in time, to their crime-stamped faces, their disgusting talk, and the sodden drunkenness they were enabled to maintain by means of the liquor smuggled to them by visitors,—for the courtyard and the cells thronged every day with visitors of either sex, and of quality similar to that of the prisoners themselves. Dick was presently able to discriminate among his jail-mates, and so he found one or two of more gentle stuff.