"If there's no compulsion, there's no robbery," said S——k.
"Oh, I mean your compulsion. As for mine, exercised on said bumpkin, let me alone for that part of the small affair; but none of your compulsion, if you love me. I can do anything, but not upon compulsion, you know."
"Done then!"
"Why, ye-e-s," drawled S——th, "done; I may say, gents, done; but I say with Sir John, don't misunderstand me, not upon compulsion, you know."
"Your own free will," shouted both the others, now pretty well to do in the world of dithyrambics. "Here's your instrument for extorting the sixpence by force or fear."
And this young man, half inebriated—with, we may here say parenthetically, a mother living in a garret in James' Square, with one son and an only daughter of a respectable though poor man, and who trusted to her son for being the means of her support—qualified, as we have seen, by high parts to extort from society respect, and we may add, though that has not appeared, to conciliate love and admiration—took willingly into his hand the old rusty "Innes," to perpetrate upon the highway a robbery. And would he do it? You had only to look upon his face for an instant to be certain that he would; for he had all the lineaments of a young man of indomitable courage and resolution—the steady eye, the firm lip, all under the high brows of intellect, nor unmixed with the beauty that belongs to these moral expressions which in the playfulness of the social hour he had been reducing to materialism, well knowing all the while that he was arguing for effect and applause from those who only gave him the return of stultified petulance. What if that mother and sister, who loved him, and wept day and night over the wild follies that consumed his energies and demoralized his heart, had seen him now!
The bill was paid by S——k, who happened to have money, and who gave it on the implied condition of a similar one for all on another occasion. They went, or, as the phrase is often, sallied forth. The night had now come down with her black shadows. There was no moon. She was dispensing her favours among savages in another hemisphere, who, savages though they were, might have their devotions to their strange gods, resident with her up yonder, where no robbery is, save that of light from the pure fountain of heat and life. Yes, the darkness was auspicious to folly, as it often is to vice; and there was quietness too—no winds abroad to speak voices through rustling leaves, to terrify the criminal from his wild rebellion against the peace of nature. No night could have suited them better. Yes, all was favourable but God; and Him these wild youths had offended, as disobedient sons of poor parents, who had educated them well—as rebellious citizens among a society which would have hailed them as ornaments—as despisers of God's temple, where grace was held out to them and spurned.
They were now upon the low road leading parallel to the beach, and towards the end of Inverleith Row. Nor had the devil left them with the deserted toddy-bowl. There was still pride for S——th, and for the others the rankling sense of inferiority in talent and of injury from scorching irony. Nor had they proceeded two miles, till the fatal opportunity loomed in the dark, in the form of a figure coming up from Leith or Edinburgh.
Now, S——th;
Now, the cowardly Cartouche;
Now, the poltroon Rob Roy;
Now, the braggart Wallace!
But S——th did not need the taunts, nor, though many a patriotic cause wanted such a youth, was he left for other work, that night of devil-worship. The figure approached. Alas! the work so easy. S——th was right; how easy and cowardly, where the stranger was, in the confidence of his own heart, unprepared, unweaponed! Yet those who urged him on leapt a dyke.