The Rogue's March Part 1

THE ROGUE'S MARCH

Part I

THE OLD COUNTRY

CHAPTER I

"SUDDEN DEATH"

In the year 1837, and on a warm, moist April morning, there knocked at a modest lodging-house in Rolls Buildings, Fetter Lane, a recent lodger who could no longer afford even the attic’s trifling rent. So now he made his bed in the parks of the metropolis, or in the damp green fields outside. And for all he professed to care, the damp was welcome to kill him, if only it would kill outright.

The man was very fair and spare, but of a medium height. His hands and feet were notably small, the wrists and arms a little deceptive. These looked lean, but were made of muscle, and quickened with hot, keen blood.

He was very young; but though, as a fact, not five-and-twenty, the thin, sardonic, reckless face looked half as old again. An abiding bitterness had curled the full nostrils, deepening the lines thence to the sensitive red lips, and drawing the latter too habitually apart upon ​set teeth or a sneer. Nor was the bitterness of the kind sown in proud hearts by capricious circumstance and crushing but not dishonourable defeat. It was rather the Dead Sea fruit of wilful riot and a contemptible, impenitent remorse. And yet in the full brown eye and lifted chin, as in the ill-clad, well-carried figure, there was a lingering something that was gallant and fine and debonair; as if the makings of angel or of devil still lurked beneath that crumpled kerseymere waistcoat and those faded blue swallow-tails.

To this lost youth the door in Rolls Buildings was opened by a grey-haired woman who nodded knowingly in response to an inquiry for letters, and handed one over with an invitation to enter and read it within. But the kindly words fell on inattentive ears. Looking fondly and yet fearfully at the superscription—to Thomas Erichsen, Esquire, and the rest—the needy owner of that name suddenly pocketed his letter with unbroken seals. He was turning as abruptly away when the blank face of his former landlady led him to pause a moment.

"No; bless you, no! it's not from him," said Erichsen, grimly. "This is from a friend I met yesterday, who would insist on having my address. What was I to do? I thought you wouldn't mind, so I gave my last.”

"Mind! It is your address, and might be your 'ome if you wasn’t that 'igh and 'aughty. Dear, dear, dear! so you’ve not heard from that villain yet?"

"Not a line."

"Nor of him?"

"Not a word. Give me time. If I don't root him out by this day month—well, then he's fled the country—like a sensible man."

​“But what if you do?” demanded the landlady, who was herself directly interested in the event.

“What if I do, Mrs. Adcock? Well, I shall probably half murder him, to begin with; he has wholly ruined me. Yes, it will be my money—and your money—or his life! He knows it, too, if he’s got my letters. Feel the weight of that!”

And he put in her hands a heavy ash stick, green and sinewy, with the knob still creamy from the knife.

“Lord save us!” cried the woman. “Is this the rod in pickle for him?”

“That’s the rod in pickle. Nice and heavy, isn’t it?”

“Too ’eavy, Mr. Erichsen! Too ’eavy by ’alf. I’d show no mercy to thieves and swindlers, but I should be very careful what I did with that. I wouldn’t take the law into my own hands, if I were you!”

“You wouldn’t?” cried he. “Not if you’d been cleaned out as I have, by as blackguardly a dodge? By the Lord that made him, I’d break every bone in his infernal body; and will, too, if I find him and he won’t pay up. I’ll pay him! I grant you it was my own cursed fault in the beginning; but what about that last thirty pounds? Who got that? Why am I rotting and starving here? Who threw me on the mercy of kind good folks like you—yes, and made a sponge of me in my turn? Whose doing is it that I’ve got to pawn the clothes off my back, or beg my meals; to tramp the streets all day, to lie all night in the fields—”

“Your own!” exclaimed the woman, coming hastily down from the step upon which she had been standing all this time. “It’s your own fault, is that, however! You know well it isn’t mine. Our attic has been empty ever since you went; you’re welcome to it until it’s ​wanted again, if only you’ll come back. Nay, sir, I do assure you I’d rather have you for nothing than most of them that pays. Come back to-night, or I’m sure I sha’n’t sleep a wink for thinking of you; come in now, and I’ll get you some nice ’ot breakfast. You look as if you hadn’t ’ad any yet, I’m sure you do. So in you come!”

Erichsen held out his hand.

“No, no,” said he. “I owe you quite enough already, Mrs. Adcock; besides, I’m as strong as a horse, and doing much better than you think. But the world is full of kindness, after all! and God bless you for yours!”

And his dark eyes, that but now had flashed and burnt with bitter fires—that were the more striking always for a shock of almost flaxen hair—stood full of tears. He could say no more, but only wring the dry, chapped hand in his. Then he was gone; and might have been seen, a little later, hurrying with bent head towards Temple Bar; or, later yet, spread at full length in that green asylum of his homeless days, the southwest corner of St. James’s Park.—

And here he read the letter from his friend. It began on one side of the large white paper, and ended on the next. The girlish handwriting was pitifully tremulous, but yet instinct with a self-reliance then uncommon in young English ladies. The letter ran:—

“Avenue Lodge,
“Regent's Park.
“April 26th.

“Darling,—What does it mean? I was picturing you in Calcutta when I saw you this afternoon in Piccadilly! I had been thinking about you just then—I always am—and there you were! Oh, my darling, what can it mean? Tell me quickly, or I shall ​go mad with anxiety, as I nearly did on the spot this afternoon. Come here, as you love me, and tell me all!

“Darling, what can it be that has kept you here, and so silent all this time; or did you go out and come straight back? No, there has not been time. The Jumna sailed on the last day of September, and I have prayed for her safety all these months. I was so sure my love was on board!

“Oh, if only I dare have stopped to speak to you a few more seconds. The groom was so close behind. But, Tom, you seemed not to want to give me your address? I would not have left you without it; and now I shall come to you there unless you come to me. You looked so sad and ill, my sweetheart! I can see his poor face still!

“Come and tell me all, and let me help you, or my heart will break. You are in trouble. I know it, and must help you—it is my right. We are in the new Avenue Road; you will easily find it. The house is far the largest on the right-hand side as you come from town. There are fields behind, and our garden goes the farthest back; that is, we have a field of our own walled in with it, and there is a green gate in the wall. It is kept locked, but I will be there at nine o’clock tomorrow (Thursday) night; and so must you. Be there for my sake, and tell me all.

“I have written the moment I got in. I will post it myself. Dear Tom, do not be hard on this girl if you think her over-bold; for she loves you! she loves you! and would give her life to make yours happy.

“Your own true
“Claire.

“Twenty-eight mortal hours to wait. I shall hear my heart beating—as I hear it now—as I have heard it ever since I saw that sad, sad face—until I see it again!”

When Thomas Erichsen came to the end of this passionate, pure love-letter, he buried his face in the sweet spring grass, and lay immovable with a grief too great for tears. The sounds of London (louder then than now) boomed and rattled in his ears; the racket of unmuffled ​wheels upon street beyond street of cobbles; a coachman’s horn in Whitehall; a roll of drums from the barracks across Birdcage Walk; elsewhere a hurdy-gurdy; near at hand an altercation between two other hiveless drones; and in the middle-distance an errand-boy whistling “All Round My Hat.” Such were the sounds heard that April morning by Tom Erichsen’s outward ears; to those of his soul, a brave soft voice was whispering the last God-speed, while his own, the more broken of the two, was vowing not only eternal constancy, but eternal goodness and an honest life for her sake.

He could see the steady grey eyes filled with tears that never fell, and shining into his with the love that knew no shame; he must never look in them again, nor ever more defile with his the brave lips that had trembled, truly, but yet spoken comfortable words up to the end.

And here he lay, in culpable poverty and dishonourable rags; fallen already to an ultimate deep. So now, too late, as through the gates of hell, must come this message of angelic love!

He read it again, tore off the clean half-sheet, and, sitting cross-legged, wrote as follows in pencil upon his knee:—

“It means that I am a blackguard, and no longer worthy to be even your friend.

“The Jumna was ten days behind her advertised time of sailing, and I was miserable. You might have pitied me then; I neither ask nor deserve any pity now. I had vile thoughts. Even if I made my fortune your father would hate my father’s son for ever—and I him—so it could never be. You would marry in due course. How could you help yourself? Those were my thoughts. And then I made a friend!

“He showed me the town. He helped me to forget. He won most of my money, and took the rest by fraud. I never even ​booked my passage. And now I only live to spill the fellow’s blood.

“But that’s all he did. He didn’t disgrace me. I disgraced myself, and broke all my promises to the noble girl of whom I never was worthy; and must therefore see her no more. It would be no good. Why should I insult you too? I have done so enough in coming to this. Simply forget me, for I am not worth your scorn. Forget me utterly. I am too ashamed to sign my name.”

This he folded up, addressed with his pencil, and sealed (in a fashion) with the wafers which had been used already: her lips had touched them before his! Then he sat where he was, and noted the other moral corpses stretched upon that daily battle-field, and wondered if any of them had wrecked their lives as wilfully as he his. And then he thought of his father’s white hairs, and thanked God they had won to the grave without this to bring them there.

Then he lay down again, and wrestled with hunger and anguish alternately and both together. It was evening when he left the park, heavy-laden with a fact remembered on the way. He lacked the price of a two-penny stamp! Not a farthing had he left, nor a thing to pawn, save his long silk purse so ignobly emptied, and that had been his father’s before him. It should not go, even for this; yet the letter must; then how?

He sat down again on a bench; for he was weak for want of food; and in his weakness came a temptation, that was indeed more like an inspiration, so luminous was its flash. He might take his letter and leave it himself in the key-hole of the garden-gate. Why not? Then she would get it at once—that evening.

Why not? He had already given the reasons in the letter itself. And see her he would—he must—if once ​he got as far as that garden-gate. So the reasons in the letter held very good indeed; and how weak to be himself the first to fly in their face! But then weakness was his present portion, whereas the temptation grew stronger and stronger: only to see her face once more; only to hear her voice, although it lashed him with the reproaches he so richly deserved! Yet he did not give in without a kind of struggle. He had become a gambler, and a gambler’s compromise occurred to him now.

This was when the yellow London sun was setting, a little after seven o’clock; about twenty minutes past, several of the better-favoured pedestrians in Pall Mall were accosted by a timid ragamuffin with a ghastly face, who begged the loan of a penny, and was rightly treated to deaf ears. But at length a dapper young man, in a long bottle-green coat, wheeled round with an oath and a twinkling eye.

“Lend you one!” cried he. “I like that! What d’ye mean by it, eh?”

“What I say. I ask the loan of the smallest coin you’ve got—and your pardon for the liberty.”

“Pray when shall I see it again?”

“In half a minute.”

“Half a what? Well, you’re a rum ’un, you are; here’s your brown.”

“Thank you,” said Erichsen, and balanced it on his right thumbnail. “Now you stand by and see fair play. Heads I go and tails I don’t; sudden death; let it fall clear!”

His beggar’s manners (such as these were) had been forgotten on the instant. The coin rang upon the paving-stone with his words.

“Heads it is!” cried the owner, on his haunches, with his fine long coat in the dust.

​“Then I’m unspeakably obliged to you,” replied the fervent beggar, returning the penny. “I wish you goodnight, sir, with a thousand thanks!”

“No, no; hang it all! I’m a sportsman myself; you’re a man of my kidney, and you hadn’t even a brown to toss with! Oblige me by taking this yellow-boy; no, curse it, I beg your pardon—I might have seen! At least, sir, you will join me at the tavern, to show there’s no ill-feeling? A cut off the joint, I think, and a tankard of stout; what say you? I feel peckish myself. Come, come, or you’ll offend me!”

But the eyes which his miseries had left dry were dim again at the kindness of the world; and Tom Erichsen had not spoken because he could not. “May I live to repay this!” he muttered now. “It will be my first bite since yesterday.”

And in another hour it was a new man who was pushing forward, with such brisk steps, upon the high road to Avenue Lodge and his appointed fate.

Moreover, the currents of other lives than his had been deflected, for good or evil, by the spin of that borrowed coin.

 CHAPTER 2

THE OTHER LIVES

The household at Avenue Lodge consisted at this period of Nicholas Harding, M. P., J. P. (also of Fish Street Hill, E. C., and Winwood Hall, Suffolk); his five daughters; his men-servants and maid-servants, and a certain stranger within his gates

​Nicholas Harding was fifty years of age, and a widower for the second time. He was a big, blond, jovial, loud, overbearing man, without a grey hair in his massive, reddish head, or a sign of sorrow upon his healthy, pink, domineering face. Yet private bereavement was not the only misfortune that had fallen to a lot otherwise enviable enough: since the last General Election, a little charge of flagrant bribery had found its way even to an assize court, where it had indeed broken down, but not in a fashion wholly satisfactory to the accused.

An important witness had refused to open his mouth, as some said because he was well paid by Mr. Harding to keep it shut and endure the penalty; in any event, the charge was not permitted to be withdrawn, but the action merely dismissed, to allow of a new trial of which nothing had been heard up to the present time. But a naked sword thus dangled over Nicholas Harding’s ruddy, hard head, whose true temper the situation served to prove. So far from resigning his seat, he returned to the House with a shrug and a half-smile; and in the whole matter continued to bear himself with such modest gallantry as to remove the prejudices of many who had at first sided with the enemy.

Among his own Suffolk constituents the popular sympathy had been his from the beginning; and in London itself the feeling gained ground that a judgment which neither convicted nor exonerated was a judgment to be repudiated by all fair-minded persons. Ex-Ministers said or wrote as much to Mr. Harding (who belonged to the fashionable Opposition) in as many words. Cockaded coachmen were once more directed to drive to his house. Invitations were received which were worth receiving; and thus encouraged, Mr. Harding sent out invitations in ​return. He had deemed it inexpedient to entertain much of late; and even now it was a very judicious selection of his friends that was bidden to quite a small dinner party on the last Wednesday in April; while his sister, Lady Starkie, was called up from Bath to play hostess for the occasion.

“On any other,” wrote her brother, “Claire would do very well. But the enemy may blaspheme the less if you are here. I want you to see Claire. She is greatly improved since you were with us last.”

“It is the enemy that hath done this thing,” replied Lady Starkie; “those wicked Radicals, how I should like to transport the whole crew! Of course I will come. Why isn’t Claire married? She must be getting on in years.”

She was not yet twenty-one. The only child of his first wife, Claire had never occupied the place of younger ones in her father’s affections; had been consistently repressed in childhood; but had since contrived to please that critic by her clever management of an enlarged establishment. Indeed, the girl had come home from school very capable and shrewd and self-possessed, with an admirable drawing-room manner, and even better qualities of which Mr. Harding would have thought less; so they were carefully hidden from his view; for Claire had also her faults, and was both secretive and politic in the home circle, as a result of that early repression and injustice. Given that cause and this effect, and some clandestine folly may be counted upon in nine cases out of ten, and Claire’s was not the tenth.

It came about at Winwood Hall, the Suffolk shooting-box where the family had spent the last three autumns. Nicholas Harding had begun there in characteristic ​fashion by quarrelling with the gentle, white-haired parson (who would yet be neither domineered nor overborne by an interloping Londoner), and by forbidding his daughters the church, glebe, rectory, or any communication with its inmates from that day forth. A week or two later he came full upon Claire and the rector’s idle son comparing notes in the lane; and a pretty scene ensued. Mr. Harding shook his stick at the lad, who snatched it from him and snapped it across his knee. Claire was imprisoned under lock and key for four-and-twenty hours, and young Erichsen shinned up the waterspout and sat on her window-sill while the rest were at dinner. But this and succeeding incidents never came to the ears of Nicholas Harding. And partly in revenge for the indignity to which she had been subjected, and partly by reason of those adventitious traits already touched upon, the motherless and then all but friendless Claire disobeyed and intrigued thenceforward without a qualm.

The callow pair had enough in common: the girl had suffered from a step-mother, the lad was suffering from one then. In his old age Mr. Erichsen had married a managing woman thirty years his junior; and the blackness by her embedded in Tom Erichsen’s heart had known no relief till Claire Harding lit up his life. Claire understood; she sympathised, she soothed, she softened. And though so stealthily employed, her influence was all for good. Tom put his soul in her keeping, and made a great effort to run straight at college for her sake; but was nevertheless rusticated in the spring; and was absent, penitently reading, all the autumn following, when they never met. A year later the rector was in his own churchyard, and Tom a broken-hearted lodger ​in the village. Mrs. Erichsen had gone her way; and Tom was going his, to India, where through her unlooked-for interest a berth had been obtained for him in a Calcutta counting-house. A hundred guineas for outfit and passage-money was his only picking from the good old man’s estate; and it was a loan.

Tom said his long good-bye to Winwood just three days after the Hardings arrived. But in those three days Claire and he made many noble vows, and parted in a storm of tears. And there ended the first chapter of their secret history.

The single page known to Nicholas Harding was a thing of the past in his mind. He never thought of it now, and for the best of reasons. He firmly believed that Claire intended to marry an entirely different person, of whom he himself most cordially approved; and it made him for the first time as cordially approve of Claire.

And Claire on a sudden divined it all, and saw (also for the first time) the false position in which she had placed herself; and yet never regretted it, but rather gloried in having the least little thing to suffer for Tom’s sake.

Now, the other man in her mind, and in Nicholas Harding’s too, was the Stranger within their Gates.

James Edward William, Sir Emilius Daintree’s son, and heir to the baronetcy and entailed estates, was a melancholy, brooding bachelor little worse than thirty years of age. Unlike Mr. Harding, however, he looked much older, with his swarthy, saturnine countenance, and the white threads in the coal-black whiskers that curled beneath his deep-set chin. His lines had fallen ​in very different places from those of Mr. Harding; he had spent most of his restless life abroad. His soul had been burdened with a very different temperament; he had that of a poet; and his manhood had been poisoned at the fount by one of those wretched family quarrels which redound to nobody’s credit, and of which the outside world never get the rights. It was only known that Sir Emilius and his son had not been on speaking terms for years.

Such sympathy as is felt in these matters was entirely on the side of the son. The present baronet was not a popular man. His character was eccentric, and his morals so notorious that in many quarters the quarrel was from the first considered creditable to young Daintree. When, however, after an absence of eight years, the latter came home on leave from New South Wales, where he was a magistrate and a man of some importance and more promise in the young colony; and when the old savage, his father, not only still refused a reconciliation, but publicly cut his son on every possible occasion, then—well, the indignation might have been greater had James Daintree been himself a more popular man. But the truth was, he had come home a morbid, sensitive misanthropist; and this treatment made him ten times worse. He was seldom seen by his old friends anywhere; but he happened to make a stanch new one in the person of Nicholas Harding, whose house, indeed, became the wanderer’s home.

Claire’s attitude will be readily apprehended. Daintree opened his bruised heart to her, and she considered his father the most abominable old man alive. It was at Avenue Lodge that a parcel of faded flowers arrived for Daintree, and drove him almost crazy with rage and ​grief. He had placed them a day or two before upon his mother’s grave. He burst into a storm of oaths and tears before the girl, who thought the worse of him for neither. Lady Daintree had died the year before; in fact it was her death that had brought the outcast home, for the reconciliation for which he pleaded in vain.

He had the sympathy of all who knew him; that of Claire was spontaneous and heartfelt and frank; but it never blinded her to Daintree’s faults, which were those of a warped, egotistical, but yet an ardent nature. She cured him of one or two. But he was a man with a weight upon his soul, and she could not cure him of that. She was not told enough. After all, too, her head and her heart were full of another. And thus she was slower to detect the new lover in the new friend than would or could have been the case in normal circumstances.

Indeed it might never have dawned upon her until he spoke, but for the calling in of Lady Starkie to lend her distinguished countenance to the first dinner-party given by Nicholas Harding after his late ordeal. Lady Starkie was a lieutenant-general’s widow, and at all events a shrewd woman of the world.

“My dear,” said she, after luncheon, “that young man never took his eyes off you once, and you never once looked him in the face. You are in love at last!—you both are!”

“Aunt Emily!” cried Claire, aghast but scarlet.

“Hoity-toity!” exclaimed the old lady; “nothing escapes me. My dear, you will do very well; a very interesting face and an admirable family, malgré that atrocious Sir Emilius, who won’t live for ever. No, no, he can’t keep that pace up much longer at his age; and then every mortal thing will be this young man’s and yours!”

​“But—aunt! indeed you are mistaken. I—I don’t love him one atom! Such a thing has never entered my head.”

“Then may I ask what kept you awake all night?” was the bland inquiry. “My dear, you have a tell-tale face! I remarked it instantly: you cannot have slept a wink till morning!”

It was true; she had not; but then she had seen Tom Erichsen near Hyde Park Corner when she pictured him in Calcutta. And that was not all. She had pressed him for his address, and then written him a letter which had made her feel hot or cold ever since. The glow was from conscious pride in her own full, free, selfless love; the shiver from a new-born doubt of his, begotten by haunting memories of his face. And the more Claire thought of it the less could she fathom his still being in London, and so shabby. And she had thought of it all night long.

“I had things on my mind,” she now confessed; “but Mr. Daintree wasn’t one of them.”

“Then it’s somebody else,” reflected Lady Starkie, with half-shut eyes upon the girl’s dry lips and burning cheeks. “Who is this Captain Blaydes I hear so much about?” she asked aloud.

“Another friend of papa’s.”

“Another new friend?”

“Newer than Mr. Daintree. He comes to see papa on business. But I have had him a good deal on my hands; too much, for my taste.”

“You don’t like him, then?”

“Hate him!” said the girl, with sudden vehemence, her mind for once detaching itself from Tom. “There, it’s out: I never said it to anybody else, but it’s what I ​feel. Last week when Mr. Daintree wasn’t with us, Captain Blaydes was, and had his room. Aunt Emily, I want you to know about him; he was a horrid guest— insolent to the servants—forward with me—and more presuming with papa than any man I have ever seen. Yet papa vowed he was the best of fellows—and looked miserable all the week! And I was told to be civil to him or to leave the house myself. I want to know what it all means: no good, I’ll be bound. What should you say, Aunt Emily? We have had trouble enough lately; heaven knows, we want no more. And yet I had the strongest instinct about this man— that he was here for no good!”

“He is not coming to-night, I hope?”

“Yes, he is; but luckily not until after dinner. He could not get here in time. The Bury St. Edmunds coach—”

“He is coming from there!” cried Lady Starkie. “Then, my dear, you may be sure he has had some hand in that wretched election business! It is not over yet, Claire; you must endure such people until it is. But why have him to-night?”

“You may well ask! Papa expects him.”

“Well, it is a pity. Indeed, in my opinion, this dinner-party is a little premature— considering everything. However, let us only make it a success!”

CHAPTER III

THE NEW LOVER

A success it proved to be—the dinner-party—but it was neither Claire nor yet Lady Starkie who made it one. It was Nicholas Harding himself. His laugh was louder and more infectious than ever, his face an even healthier pink, and his little jokes were both felicitous and incessant, even when he was busy carving the haunch. He cracked several at the expense of Ministers, and two or three at his own.

“I only hope one thing,” said he, pausing in those obsolete labours. “I only hope they send me to Botany Bay! My friend Daintree has promised to give me another chance there as chief butler in his establishment. And so I may hope—ha! ha! —to carve my way back to decent society—ha! ha! ha!”

The spirit of such jests made up for the letter. The party had been so carefully chosen that nothing offended or fell flat, and the general good-humour never flagged. Even Claire had light-hearted moments during dinner. Daintree had taken her in, and he talked to her so much about his lovely, lonely home on Port Jackson’s shores (once the subject was started) that he quite forgot to carve the fowls which had been placed in front of him, and a reprimand from the head of the table set everybody laughing. Daintree joined in with what grace he might; he was too self-conscious to enter into the spirit of such chaff, and very soon he was once more edifying Claire by talking entirely about himself in his deep, confidential, serious voice. The girl struck him as less sym​pathetic than he had ever known her. Of course, her wits were all at nine o’clock and the meadow gate. But Daintree put his own construction upon her altered manner, and tore his nails beneath the table-cloth, and made up his sombre mind to a bold, immediate course.

So when Claire had left a drawing-roomful of ladies under her aunt’s providential wing, and had set a first trembling foot upon the lawn behind the house, a long swift stride overtook her, and there was Daintree at her side—with the night’s wine-bibbing but just begun.

“Mr. Daintree!” she exclaimed aghast.

“Yes! I also have escaped,” he said. “I made my excuses. The room was hot, but your father understood. I wanted to talk to you.”

“To me? Why, you have been talking to me for the last two hours!”

And, emboldened by very nervousness, she looked up at him with a shake of her ringlets unwittingly coquettish; and he down on her with all the devouring desire of his gloomy, passionate soul. Upon the lawn there was no light save that from a dozen of brilliant windows; and Claire’s face was to it, and Daintree’s back. Yet it might have been the other way about, for her emotion he never saw, while his was but too apparent to her keener woman’s eye.

“You came out for a breath of air,” said he. “Let me come with you.”

“I was going to the arbour,” she replied. “I left a book there this afternoon.”

It was true enough; but the arbour was on the way to the paddock gate; she had left her book there for a cunning excuse against some such need as this. And now ​he was coming with her; she could not prevent it; and Tom already at the gate!

They walked in silence across the smooth damp grass. It was a summer night come a month too soon, and with the greater fragrance from the porous earth. The stars were white and bright, and the air so mild and sweet that the Southern Cross might have twinkled with the rest. Daintree stood aside at the arbour steps, then followed Claire and filled the doorway with his powerful frame.

“I wanted to speak to you,” he repeated pointedly, as she found her book. “I say your father understood. I had spoken to him already. Claire—Claire—will you be my wife?”

The book dropped.

“Mr. Daintree!” she gasped, and took a terrified step towards the obstructed doorway.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, entering immediately. “There, you are free to run away. Yet I think you will hear me out. Your attention, at all events, I may claim without presumption!”

“Oh, yes,” said Claire. “I will listen—I will listen.” She knew that touchy tone of his so well; but it was dropped now in a moment.

“God bless you for that,” he broke out, hoarsely—“even for that! Only listen to me; that is all I ask. I know I am not a likely sort of man for a young girl like you. I am years older than you are. I look older still—I’m a hundred at heart—but you would make a new man of me. I should be born again. Oh, listen, for pity’s sake, and let me speak my heart! It has been bursting with love of you so long! Whatever your answer, you must hear me out. Claire, I am not a bad ​man—I really am not; but I have never been myself all these years. My life has been all bitterness, my very soul is steeped in it. Everything has been disappointment, disillusion, disgust, and distrust! You know the sort of life I have led—a wanderer, an exile like Byron, an outcast from my own home. It has spoiled me. I know that well enough. I have never had a chance; but you would give me one. You would make the man I might have been before this. I have talent—perhaps something more—I may say so freely to you. I spoke of Byron. I am nearer him than any man alive. There are those who do not put me second. But all my powers have been wasted, like my life; how that had been wasted I never knew until I met you. Claire—my darling!—you have made a new man of me as it is. I am no longer the bitter fellow I was when first God brought you into my life. You have changed me; you have changed all life and all the world. You are the one thing left in either that is all good, all pure, all noble; and I want you, I want you, I want you with all my heart and soul and being! Come to me, and by your help I may still leave the world the better and the richer for my presence; leave me lonely, and I am lost and ruined both here and in the world to come!”

He ceased; and Claire heard him shaking all over in a palsy of passionate desire. His passion frightened her, and yet won somewhat of her respect without for a moment blinding her to its glaring egotism. It was none the less genuine on that account; on the contrary, there was a convincing honesty in the utter absence of altruistic pretensions; and, for the rest, Claire did feel herself the possessor of a certain power for good over this man. But that power could only go out from her with her love. ​And that love belonged already to a spirit as wild as Daintree’s, but lighter, brighter, and if not incomparably braver and manlier, then changed indeed.

She rose and laid a hand upon the trembling arm, and very gently said: “You have paid me the greatest compliment, Mr. Daintree, which they say a man can pay a woman. You know that I like you. Indeed there is no one for whom I feel a heartier sympathy. But love you I do not—it is best to be perfectly frank.”

“You do not!” he only said.

“And I never can.”

“Why never?” he cried irritably. “What do you mean by saying that? Is my family not good enough for you? Am I not clever enough?” In the midst of his love-making he had lost his temper, but Claire was at once too proud and too kind to rebuke this ebullition; and presently he continued in a merely injured tone, “It isn’t as if I was obliged to go back to New South Wales. Why should I? It would be a wretched place for you, and I am sick of it. I thought I could never bear this cruel old country again; but I could—I can—with you!” He would not see that he had got his answer. An overweening vanity was among his salient faults.

“It can never be,” repeated Claire, decidedly.

“But why never? That’s what I can’t fathom. There is no one else, is there?”

“There—is.”

In an instant he dropped the hand which he had just taken, and which she had not the heart to withdraw. His trembling ceased. She heard him breathing hard and through his teeth.

​“I might have known it!” he said bitterly at length; and that was all.

“You could not—” she was beginning penitently, but he cut her short.

“I could!” he cried. “It has been so all my life; disappointment has been my daily bread. No doubt it was ordained and is all for the best! Anything else might turn my brain!”

“I am very sorry,” murmured poor Claire. “I am more sorry than I can ever say.”

“You may be,” was the quick retort. “You had this and that to gain.”

The girl’s blood was up at last; her lips parted and her eyes flashed; but she could not condescend to his weapons. “I am going back to the house,” was all she said, as she caught up her rustling skirts. “Excuse me, Mr. Daintree.”

“No, I shall not excuse you!” he answered, barring her way. “It is you who must excuse me first. God forgive me, I never meant to say such things! I hardly know what I am saying. I am wild and mad for love of you, Claire. And I shall win you yet—I shall win you yet—even if I have to wait a lifetime! You were made for me. I refuse to do without you. He shall not have you, whoever he is! And you must forgive me for that, too,” he added, with sudden humility, and he stood aside. “But it is none the less a fact!” he hissed as suddenly through his teeth.

They were his last words; she did not heed them, but gave him her warm soft hand in the kindest manner imaginable.

“We will forgive each other,” she said gently, “as we pray to be forgiven ourselves!”

​And so she left him on the arbour steps—a pillar of vain and gloomy passion— indistinct in the starlight, but quivering again—all six feet and fifteen stone of him—with the grievous burden of his stubborn love.

CHAPTER IV

THE OLD LOVE

The garden was the ordinary narrow one, but with top-heavy additions beyond and behind its neighbour on either side. And the arbour was (so to speak) in the bottle’s neck: there was no getting to the meadow without passing within a yard or two of its rustic portal.

There was, however, a shallow shrubbery down either wall of the original garden; and when Daintree had been alone about a minute, the laurels on his left began a risky rustle in the still evening air. Luckily, he was already in too deep a contemplation of his last and angriest wound to hear aught but the girl’s voice and his own still ringing through the arbour. But as for Claire, one moment she held her breath in horrid certainty that he had heard; in another she was satisfied that he had not; and had forgotten his existence the next. Indeed, by the time she looked upon the meadow, asleep beneath its soft grey coverlet of dew, the wide world contained but one live man, and he was at the gate upon the farther side.

Yet was he? Round the meadow ran a gravel path, upon which she thought her feet pattered loud enough for all the world to hear. Then she dropped the key in reaching it from its accustomed crevice and it rang upon ​the gravel, and in her nervousness she was an age fumbling at the lock. Yet no sound of hers brought a word of greeting from the other side. He had not come! As she pulled the gate open she felt certain of it; and then beheld and heard him, advancing shyly through the sibilant grass, with some white thing in his hand, and a young moon just risen over Primrose Hill.

“Tom!” she cried softly. “You are come! Oh, thank God! I have kept you—”

The words failed upon her parted lips. He stood askance before her, shamefaced and never noticing her tremulous, outstretched hands. His own held out to her a folded note.

“Read that,” he said hoarsely. “I am only here because I had not money for the stamp!”

A great chill struck to the girl’s loyal heart. It was the doubt that had kept her awake; now a doubt no more. Her trembling ceased; she turned her back on Erichsen, and read by the moonlight the candid words that he had written in St. James’s Park.

He watched her with scarce a breath. His eyes lived upon her while they might. Her face had been turned away before he had the courage to raise his; but there was the white neck tapering to the nut-brown hair, the little ears half-hidden by ringlets, the thoughtful poise of the lithe, light body, all just as he had them by heart. The white arms struck him as a little thin, but then he had never before seen her in full evening dress. She was wearing pink crépe over white satin, high Venetian sleeves, and feathery fringes of pink and white satin rouleau; it was one more picture of her, and he thought the sweetest of all, to hang with the many already in his mind.

Meanwhile she had never turned her head; but now it ​drooped a little; and those snowy shoulders were heaving with suppressed sobs.

In an instant he was at her side; the next, she had turned to him with shining eyes and yearning arms.

“My own poor boy!” she whispered through her tears. “Oh, thank heaven you had no money for those stamps!”

“Claire!” he gasped, falling back; “do not speak to me like that. I am not worthy—you don’t understand. You should go your way and never think of me again.”

“There is somebody else,” said the girl, calmly.

“That I love? No, indeed!”

“You are not married?”

“God forbid.”

“Then you have changed your mind. Well, if it makes you happier, dear, I can bear that too. I love you well enough—”

“Hush!” he said hoarsely, “it is not that. I love you, too, my darling—ah! God knows how truly now! Yet I have come to contemptible grief; I have been everything that’s bad. What value can there be in such a love?”

“I don’t know—still less care! It is all the love I want—it’s good enough for me!” she whispered; and with a deep, sweet sigh she hid her face against his shabby shoulder. He touched the dainty head with his hand, but not his lips. His eyes were fixed upon the moon, that was like a golden curl astray in night’s tresses; and his handsome, haggard face was discoloured and deformed with this the quintessence of his discreditable woes.

“Good enough for you—of all women!” he bitterly repeated. “My love for you! Didn’t I tell you I was no longer worthy of even your friendship? That was the ​truth; every word in my letter is the literal truth. I have never looked at anybody else—to love them—but oh! oh! my love for you has been a poor thing. It didn’t prevent me from going to the bad. You loved me; and yet I came to this!”

He groaned again. She said nothing, but caught his hand and pressed it. The pressure he returned.

“Oh, Claire,” he cried, “it was madness, I think! I was mad at leaving you and Old England, perhaps for ever. And the ship wouldn’t sail, Claire, the ship wouldn’t sail! When I went to the office, thinking I had about three days, they told me she would be three weeks. I walked out of that office swearing I’d find some other; but all I found was the road to the bad. Drink and dice and cards! You asked me to tell you all. I tell you all I can. I tell it you to set you against me and make you hate me for ever. That is the kindest thing.... Claire, Claire, why don’t you strike me? Why don’t you scorn me and leave me to my fate? Oh, oh, I could bear it better than this!”

Her warm arms were about him. They clasped him tight. He could hear her heart and his own beating close together.

Suddenly she stood apart from him, with small clenched fists glittering with rings. He held his breath.

“The man who is at the bottom of all this,” said she: “who is he? How was it? You speak of him in your letter: tell me more.”

Tom shrugged his shoulders.

“What is the use? The thing is done; it’s past mending; and it was my own miserable fault. Most of my money went in fair play and—riot! He only relieved me of the residue. Yet I tell you, Claire” (with sudden ​fury), “I’d go contentedly to my account if I could only kick him along in front of me the whole way! Yes, I’d hang for the hound, and think the satisfaction cheap at the price!”

“What is his name?” demanded Claire.

“Blaydes!” said Tom; “B-l-a-y-d-e-s. Captain Blaydes, forsooth, on half-pay! Blaydes of the Guards, who disgraced themselves for all time by not—”

He broke off and stood looking at the girl.

“By not what?” whispered Claire, who had glanced involuntarily through the gate towards the distant lighted windows, and who was now trembling again, with a new and dreadful agitation.

“By not cashiering your friend Captain Blaydes!”

“He is no friend of mine.”

“But I see you know him.”

“Yes —I just know him.”

“He is at your house to-night!” cried Erichsen, with uncontrolled excitement.

“No—he is not. We have had a dinner-party, but he was not there. I slipped out afterwards—I dare not stay long.” This to explain that incriminating backward glance.

“Then give me his address!”

“Tom —I cannot.”

“You cannot? You who said you would do anything in your power to help me? And this is all I ask—this villain’s address! Oh, Claire, he is not fit for you to speak to! Tell me where you met him—what you think of him—and then I will tell you what I know. Oh, if I had him here!”

Claire answered with deliberate reservations. Her duty was clear as the stars. Tom and Blaydes must be kept ​apart—that night at all events. Then many things must be done, but quietly, and with due forethought. Above all, no fresh fuel must be added to the vindictive fires now smouldering in her lover’s speaking eyes. So Claire decided to keep to herself her own opinion of Captain Blaydes.

She had noticed without comment the heavy stick lying in the grass; she turned faint at the thought of her fiery Tom encountering the Captain so armed and so aggrieved. But she insisted on his telling her of his wrong; at first he refused.

“Very well,” he said at last, “I’ll tell you, so that you may see how I have been cheated; then I think you won’t refuse to help me lay hands upon the cheat. It’s a long story, but I’ll cut it as short as I can. He had rooked me down to the last five-pound note. With that I had a little luck. I had won back five-and-thirty before we stopped playing, and Blaydes had lost more to the others than to me. He paid them in ready money. He said they were only acquaintances—his confederates!—while I was his friend. So we went back to our lodgings, and he wrote me a cheque for thirty-five pounds, with which I could have gone out to India after all, quite as comfortably as I deserved. But in the morning he had bad news, and had to go into the country, and he begged me not to cash the cheque till the end of the month; he was hard up himself. And I was loyal to the blackguard; and I needn’t tell you what happened when time was up. His cheque was a dummy; he had never had a penny in the bank it was drawn on! So I wrote to his club again and again, and used to go there and watch for him, till the porters had me moved on by the police. The month was last October. I have heard ​and seen nothing of him from that day to this. And to think he is in London, and you know both him and his address! You’ll give it to me now, Claire, I know!”

She steadfastly refused, and gave her reasons; then he promised not to seek an interview with Blaydes for two clear days, and not to harm him then; and on this understanding she at last confessed that the Captain had taken rooms for the summer in the village of West End—a bare mile from where they stood.

But first she wanted him to give her the flash cheque, and let her fight his battle with Blaydes; and this she still intended to do—that very night.

They had finished with Blaydes, however, and were beginning to say good-bye, when Claire started, and vowed she heard a rustle at the gate. At that instant there came a breath of wind; the gate shut with a clean metallic click; she was locked out, for on this side there was only the key-hole, and the key was within.

“What shall I do?” she cried. “Oh, what shall I do?”

“Have courage,” he answered, “and a little patience.”

He was over the wall and back at her side within the minute. She was trembling terribly. All her nerve seemed gone. She must fly—she must fly—but he would come again the next evening? And again she was looking up divinely in his eyes, his right hand clasped in both of hers; and again the burden of past weakness bowed him down; but this time there was a counterpoise of hope and high resolve, a vision of atonement and self-respect regained, that gave to his voice a clearer, manlier note, and to Claire, in the thin moonlight, a first and last glimpse of the Tom Erichsen of Winwood uplands and red autumn afternoons. But it was now her turn to be refused.

​“No, Claire,” he said, “I am coming back no more. You have put it in my power not only to have my little own again, but to redeem the past, and I must set to work at once. If I don’t get that thirty-five pounds now, you may hear of me next in Horsemonger Lane! If I do, there’s an Indiaman—the Jean—sailing on Monday; and I sail in her if there’s a steerage berth still going. At all events my debts here will be paid and done with; there may even be a few pounds over to make me decent when I land; and if that firm won’t have me now, some other may. You shall hear of me from there. There are not going to be two false starts. And one day, Claire, I am coming back a better man than I go away; and it will all be thanks to you! Oh, thank you for your noble letter! It has saved me on the brink, little as I deserved it. I shall never stoop or sink —like this—again. That I promise you. But you should think no more of me! I was never worthy of you—I never can be that! It is best to forget me, dear; you must not spoil your life by waiting for a man—”

Her palm sealed his lips.

“For the only man I want,” she whispered through her tears. “Darling I could wait for ever!”

“I will write and tell you about the thirty-five pounds,” he continued, regaining control of his voice. “It will be all your doing, my own brave Claire. No! no! not my own! never that any more!”

“For ever, darling! For ever, and ever, and ever!”

“No! no! Only be happy yourself, and forgive me for all I made you suffer. I shall never forgive myself. Good-bye, beloved. Oh, good-bye, good-bye!”

He strained her to his breast, but left no kiss upon ​those pleading, praying, upturned lips. He was not worthy to touch them with his. He remembered this up to the end.

She leaned against the cold wall as he darted from her. The last thing she saw him do was to pick up the thick stick she had noticed lying in the grass; and that sinister final act struck a chill to her heart that was felt at the time, not afterwards imagined. That he could think of such a thing in such an hour! And she locked the gate and hurried down the gravel walks with eyes suddenly dried and a heart already at war with its own warmth. But when she came in sight of the arbour, and had to skulk once more behind the leaves, all in a moment she sounded the depth of her love and found it fathomless; for since the last like manœuvre the thought of Daintree had never once crossed her mind. Indeed he was recalled now chiefly by the smell of a particular cheroot which he smoked incessantly. He was smoking one at this moment in the arbour, where he had remained ever since she left him.

The other gentlemen were still at their wine—in those days they would sit over it till midnight—and Claire went first to her own room, which she gained unobserved. Here she changed her slippers for a precisely similar pair; also her stockings, which were wet to the ankles. Then she rang for her maid.

A pallid young woman, with black eyes set close together beneath a stunted brow, knocked promptly at the door, and entered with a downcast glance which swept straight to her mistress’s feet.

“Has Captain Blaydes arrived?”

The black eyes gleamed. “I haven’t heard, miss; shall I see?”

​“Be so good, Hannah.”

In a minute Hannah returned.

“No, miss, he has not.”

“Thank you, Hannah, that will do.”

And Claire returned to the drawing-room after a truant hour, which, however, Daintree’s simultaneous absence from the dining-table explained satisfactorily enough to Lady Starkie and Mr. Harding. On her way Claire met the latter face to face in the hall. He was stark sober; indeed, his fresh face had lost colour, which was never the case in his cups.

“Seen anything of Blaydes?” he cried out to Claire, who started at the question, and then at her father’s face.

“Nothing, papa: indeed, I hear he has not come.”

“So do I. That’s just it; that’s just it!” repeated Mr. Harding, looking at his watch; and his hand was as unsteady as his voice was clear.

“I think he cannot be coming at all,” remarked Claire, innocently; and she never knew why her father turned so abruptly upon his heel; but his face was still ghastly when he rejoined his gentlemen, and the bumper of port which he tossed off left it ghastlier yet.

It was twenty minutes past ten by the ormolu clock upon the chimney-piece when Claire Harding re-entered the drawing-room.

It was twenty minutes past ten by Captain Blaydes’s gold repeater when through the window of a hackney-coach, creeping all too slowly along the Finchley Road, the Captain recognised a wayfarer who also recognised him, and thrust his iron-grey head through the opposite window to curse the coachman and bid him drive faster.

​As he pulled it in again Tom Erichsen scrambled into the coach upon the other side, an unpleasant smile upon his set face and his thick stick in his hand. He had not promised to avoid Blaydes if chance threw them together, and chance had done so, for Tom was on his way to make his bed once more in the fields.

“You infernal ruffian,” roared the Captain. “Hi! coachman, the police!”

“You miserable swindler,” retorted Tom, “if you don’t stop the coach at once and step outside with me you’re a ruined man. I’ll go on to the Hardings with you and expose you—”

“The Hardings!”

“Yes; you see, I know all your little plans.”

“Little plans!!”

The Captain gasped and stopped the coach.

CHAPTER V

A BLOODLESS VICTORY

The half-pay officer was a thick-set, youngish man, with a smooth, sly, yellow face, and hair like spun steel. He walked with a chronic limp and a stout, gold-headed cane, and was seldom without the genial, flattering smile that had tempted Tom Erichsen, and other young flies before him, into a parlour from which no pocket returned intact.

But since then Tom fancied Blaydes had found a richer dupe; he looked a much more prosperous scamp. The coach-lamps struck sparks from a very brilliant pin​in his high satin stock. The coachman must have been handsomely paid off, to depart as he did, with benedictions. And the Captain himself had evidently recovered a temper notoriously serene; for a soft hand fell like a feather upon Tom’s square shoulder; and he heard once more the soothing accents of the gentlest rascal of his time.

“Come now, my good fellow,” said his normal voice, “what the deuce is all this? You have treated me very cavalierly, and I you very obligingly, I think, for the elder man. What is it you want, Mr.—Mr.—upon my soul I’ve forgotten your name!”

“You’re a liar, Blaydes,” replied Tom, as quietly. “You always were one; but it won’t do you much good to-night!”

“You trade upon our different stations,” murmured the other. “I have shot a man for less than that; but you are only a boy. Have the goodness to say what you want.”

“My thirty-five pounds!”

“Your thirty-five pounds? Yours? Look here, I begin to remember you. Your name is Eric—Eric something or other. And I was fool enough to play with you, Eric. I remember that too. You were going off to the Cape, or somewhere; you begin to take shape in my mind; but thirty-five pounds! I recall nothing of the kind. My impression was that we settled up and parted friends.”

“We did,” said Tom. He had allowed the other to lead him along the turnpike road, back towards the city. The moon sailed high on their left, and the sky was full of stars. On either hand the hedgerows were dusted with pale, bursting buds, like spray; and no figure but ​these two broke the long, still parallels, or blotted the white road between.

“You admit it?” cried Blaydes, stopping in his walk. “Then why on earth come to me?”

“You know why! You settled with a cheque not worth the paper it was written on. Your name was unknown at the bank! It was a cheque for thirty-five pounds, and I want the money.”

“Have you got that cheque?”

“It is in my pocket.”

“I should like to see it.”

“No doubt you would!”

“You distrust me,” observed Blaydes, calmly. “I see now that you have some reason to do so. At least you won’t mind telling me whether it was drawn on Stuckey’s Bank?”

“It was.”

“Exactly!” cried the Captain. “It’s as plain as a pikestaff now. My dear young fellow, I apologise from the very bottom of my heart, for it has been my mistake after all. What do you think I did? Wrote out my cheque in Dick Vale’s cheque-book—you recollect Dick Vale? He banks at Stuckey’s. That’s it, of course; and no wonder you thought me a thundering rogue! Now I’ll be frank with you, Erichsen. Of course I knew you well enough; but I wasn’t over-anxious to renew acquaintance with the man who had written threatening letters to my club. Especially as I couldn’t understand ’em! But I do now, and ’pon my soul I’m sorry; here’s my hand!”

“I prefer your money.”

“What! you dare to doubt my word?”

“Until I see your money—most certainly.”

​“Well, you shall see it tomorrow. I don’t carry thirty-five pounds about in my evening clothes.”

“Then suppose we turn back to your rooms, and you pay me there and now!”

“And where are my rooms, pray?”—

“In the village of West End.”

Blaydes swore a puzzled oath, and thumped his cane upon the ground. “You know a lot!” he snarled. “What you don’t know is when to leave well alone. I have told you I am sorry about that mistake. I have told you I can let you have the money tomorrow; yet you have the insolence to doubt my word! Very well—have your way; I shall waste no more time upon you. I am going. You know where to find me when you come to your senses!”

“Better still, I know where you’re going, and I’m coming too. I don’t lose sight of you to-night!”

“We shall see about that.”

“We shall!”

And they stepped out with no more words, though Blaydes ground his teeth and gripped his cane and tried his best to drop a foot or two behind. But Tom’s eye was on him. So he stopped at a stile; whereupon Tom stopped too; and, as they stood, there passed a labourer who stared and wished them good-night.

“See here, Erichsen!” exclaimed the Captain. “I object to discussing private matters on a turnpike road. Here’s a path that’s a short cut back into town; suppose I come a part of the way with you, and talk this thing over without fear of being heard? What do you say?”

“As you like; your way is mine.”

Blaydes shrugged his broad shoulders, tucked his cane under one arm, and laboriously crossed the stile. Tom ​then followed him into a sloping field, with a beaten right-of-way running uphill through the dewy grass. They climbed this path with the young moon in their eyes, but not a word upon their lips, and Tom’s thick stick grasped tight by the knob. The ascent brought them to a second hedge, backed by a row of horse-chestnuts all hazy with tiny leaves, and to a hollow beech beside the second stile. Here the Captain dropped his cane in the grass, and limping pitiably, begged the other to pick it up. But Tom merely shifted it with his foot, keeping a strange eye on Blaydes as he did so. The cane in the grass had no gold knob, and the Captain’s right hand was tucked inside his cloak.

“Very prettily planned,” said Tom, with a sneer; “but I should like to see the rest of that sword-stick!”

The other laughed.

“I only drew it in case of need—you are such a violent young blood! Ah! you will have it, will you? There, then—and there—and there!”

The yard of thin, tempered steel had been casually produced, and Tom had instantly struck at it with his stick. Next moment the point was within an inch of his body, but Tom retreated nimbly, hitting high up the blade with all his might. It snapped at the third blow, whizzed in the air, and came down sticking in the grass. Only the gold head and three inches of blade were left in the Captain’s tingling hand.

“Chuck it away,” said Tom, “and I drop my stick. That’s better; now about that money. You didn’t bring me up here to run me through the body, of course! What was your object?”

“To settle with you—fairly,” said Blaydes, with a lurch in his low voice. “I am overdue elsewhere, as you ​have found out—the Lord knows how! If I had the money on me, it should be yours this minute. As I haven’t it, I propose this compromise: wait till tomorrow and I’ll make it fifty—and give you an I O U on the spot!”

“No, no, Blaydes. Once bit—once bit! Very sorry, but it can’t be done.”

Blaydes muttered an oath as he took out his watch, pressed the spring, and it struck ten, and then the three-quarters, like fairy bells. He did not put the watch away again, but stood with it in his hands and presently detached the chain from his waistcoat. He had already turned his face to the moon, and he now glanced over his shoulder and beckoned to Tom.

“Just have a look at this,” said he. “No, take it in your hands and examine it properly.”

The watch was a repeater of a type even then old-fashioned. It was very handsome and heavy and fat, with a yellow dial and a back like a golden saucer. Tom turned it over, and the moon shone on the Captain’s monogram.

“Well, but what have I got to do with this?”

“Pawn it!”

“Pawn your watch?”

“And send me the ticket, and never pester me again! It won’t be the first time it’s been in. I’ve had forty pounds for it before to-day, and never less than thirty. You may get what you can; all I want is the pawn-ticket, and your undertaking to leave me alone from this day on!”

“Leave you alone! I shall get a berth of some sort aboard an Indiaman that sails on Monday. Do you mean it, Blaydes? Do you mean what you say?”

​“Mean it? Of course I mean it; put the watch in your pocket, and give me a pencil.”

“And the chain?”

“And the chain.”

It was made of long gold links and short silver ones, with a huge bunch of seals at one end. Tom pocketed the lot without compunction, and then produced his stump of lead-pencil.

“Here you are.”

“Got any paper?”

“Not a scrap.”

“Well, well, then we must make this do;” and Blaydes produced a small sheaf of blue paper tied with pink tape, leant upon the stile, and, without untying the tape, wrote for a little on the outside sheet, moistening the pencil with his tongue.

“Sign that,” said he, and handed the packet to Tom, who held it to the light and read as follows:—

“Received from J. Montgomery Blaydes (late Captain Coldstream Guards), his watch and chain, etc., in settlement of all claims, and in consideration of which I undertake to return pawn-ticket for same to said J. M. Blaydes, Ivy Cottage, West End, within three days from this date.—(Signed),———, April 27th, 1837.”

Tom read this terse deed twice through; looked again at the watch and chain; weighed them in his hand; took a third look at the paper, and signed his name in the blank space without a word.

“Good!” said Blaydes, pocketing the roll. “Now I think you’ll have no objection to giving me back that worthless cheque? Come, perhaps it wasn’t such a pure accident after all. But I was cursedly hard up at the time. And I honestly regret it—I do indeed.”

​Still without a word, Tom handed him the cheque, whereupon Blaydes twisted it up, struck a lucifer, and ignited the paper at one end. And as it burnt he picked off and powdered the charred bits between finger and thumb, while the yellow flame made his smooth face yellower than ever. When the last particle was demolished, he snapped his burnt fingers and turned to Tom.

“You will now, I think, allow me to proceed on my way alone? If you stick to this right-of-way, it will take you to Haverstock Hill, which is the straightest way back to the City from this. Good-bye, Erichsen. I have been a bad friend to you—I know it. Yet I have always liked you, and never better than for your grit and nerve to-night. Get all you can for the old warming-pan. I needn’t remind you to send on the ticket, for you were always as straight as a die. So was I once, Erichsen! Even now I’m not as bad as you think me; and upon my soul, it was only your infernal bludgeon that made me draw cold steel. Give me your hand, boy; we may never meet again; but if we do—I’m thinking of marrying— and you shall find me another man, so help me God!”

Refusal was impossible. Their hands met across the stile. And as Tom saw it last, by clean moonlight, there was a certain wistfulness in the yellow, sapless face, drained and stained though it was by a hateful life; a sort of pathos in the glistening white head, from which the low-crowned hat was lifted, as if the creature’s prayer had been indeed sincere.

CHAPTER VI

A KIND WORLD

The other pushed on with a light step and a swimming brain. The sudden change in his poor little fortunes seemed too good to be true. Thirty-five pounds is not a mint of money, but to Erichsen it was something like one; at least it was his all, for he had no right to another penny in the world. The sum represented his full capital, as well as his last chance in life. And he had it safe in his pocket in the shape of Blaydes’s watch and chain.

And then—and then—Claire loved him still! The tears started to his eyes; tears of hot shame and bitter self-reproach. Yet at least he had been punished. He was thankful for that. Nor could his punishment be over yet But what remained he would bear like a man, ay, and glory in every pang. And he would write and tell her so, and of his immediate but accidental meeting with Blaydes; and of the interview which flesh and blood could not then resist.

He would tell her, too, that Blaydes was not after all as bad as he had seemed. Yet was he not? Tom thought of the sword-stick, and was torn between duty and magnanimity. It was right that the Hardings should have intimate warning as to the manner of man who went to their house. On the other hand, even Blaydes was entitled to fair play. And for some reason, Tom now chiefly pictured him in his last and best moment, with the dawn of remorse in his eyes, and the light of the moon upon that grey, uncovered head.

​The moon was hidden now. Tom had difficulty in seeing and following the beaten path; and was unduly startled by a fellow-waif, who suddenly stood before him in the darkness.

“Got the time about yer, guv’nor?” said a high, hoarse voice.

“No, I—I don’t possess a watch,” stammered Tom, taken as much aback by the question as by the questioner. And he grasped the repeater in one pocket, and doubled the other fist.

“Ha! I see you don’t,” rejoined the other, as the moon shone forth at that moment. “No ’arm done, I ’ope. We can’t all be real swells, can we?”

And Tom was left shuddering from a single moonlight glimpse of a horrible face horribly disfigured: disease had razed the nose to the level of the stubbly, shrunken cheeks; the very eyes were more prominent, but wolfish, unsteady, and little better to see. His own required the lotion of long star-gazing when the man had gone his way. But the sight would have remained longer in an emptier mind; that of the youth was full of the final kindness of the world, of the instinct for better things in even a Blaydes, and the divine possibilities of human nature as exemplified by the deep, full, true and tender love of a girl like Claire for a scapegrace like himself. And so he came back to his own unworthiness, and made as many honest resolutions as there were stars in the sky, and felt strength and virtue leaping in his warm and humble heart. Yet all this time was but twenty minutes at most; and he was still in the fields between the Finchley Road and Haverstock Hill, though descending now and in sight of the latter thoroughfare.

​His plans for the night were as yet unmade. He thought of his old lodgings off Fetter Lane; but only for a moment. He could not be there before one o’clock in the morning; they were early people, and he had traded enough upon their good-nature. One more night in the open would not hurt him; and could there be a better place than in these very fields? Tom looked about him and espied a promising thicket not thirty paces from the path. And here, being tired out, he did actually lie down, after first kneeling, as he had not knelt for months, and thanking the Maker of All Good Things for having made the world so kind, and his love so true and so forgiving.

But he never quite fell asleep; he was near it when a sound of slipshod feet, running downhill through the grass, passed close by the thicket, and left him wide awake and wondering. It was hopeless after that. And two o’clock struck upon his ears with the sound of his own footsteps trudging down Haverstock Hill to no immediate goal.

Yet still the world was kind. A waggon came creaking at his heels, slowly overhauling him, and unexpectedly stopping when it did so. It was green mountains high with country vegetables, smelling notably in the clean night air; and with this sweet whiff of home and the past there came a hearty, elderly voice evidently hailing Tom.

“Now then, young man! If you want a lift, joomp oop!”

Tom was not sure what he wanted; but his feet were sore, the voice liked him, and up he jumped. And between darkness and dawn—the quiet foot of the sleeping hill and the half-awakened but already noisy ​purlieus of Tottenham Court Road—the lucky, attractive fellow made another friend.

The waggoner was a red-faced, red-whiskered, freckle-handed fellow, with a genial, broad, communicative tongue. Jonathan Butterfield was his name, and he was a Yorkshireman only recently come south, as he said with a sigh which left him silent. Whereupon Tom became communicative in his turn, and remarked that he too meditated a move—to India.

“There’s the good ship Jean advertised to sail on Monday and I’m on my way to the office to see if they’ve a bunk left. If there isn’t, I shall go on to the docks and try my luck on the ship herself. I might work my passage out; if not, I’ll stow away.”

“You’re that anxious to leave old England!”

“I am anxious to make my way.”

“Ah, well!” sighed the waggoner. “I’ve got a lad o’ my own as far away as you are going; he writes us canny letters, but dear knows what we’d give to see him back!”

Tom said no more; he was wondering who but Claire would give a thank-you to see him back. But to Claire he must only return as a successful man of substance; and had he it in him so to succeed? The practical issue presented itself with dawn; and Tom’s little night of romance and exaltation was at an end long ere they got to Bow Street, raucous with wheels and oaths, and blocked with costermongers’ shallows, among which the waggon stood wedged till broad daylight.

But there was no end to the good-will of the Yorkshireman, who not only insisted on paying for hot coffee at an early stall, but flatly refused to go about his business until Tom promised to accompany him to breakfast ​at its conclusion. The promise was made with some reluctance, but not a little relief at the prospect of an hour or two beneath a roof; while the interim in the market was in itself was an entertainment for one to whom the scene was new. Tom never forgot the sweet smell of the early, costly peas, the picturesque groups of market-women busy shelling them in the shade, the red-stained pottles of premature strawberries, or the thousand flower-pots gay and odorous with the flowers of spring, which occupied his attention in the waggoners absence. Nor was his interest greater than his personal satisfaction in the scene; it made a wonderfully happy ending to an unworthy phase of his existence, a wonderfully stimulating prelude to the new life begun with this day. Indeed, his heart rose steadily with the sun, and was singing with brave resolve when at length the waggoner returned.

“I doubt I’ve been a long time,” said Butterfield. “It’ll be very near six o’clock.”

“Ten past,” said Tom whipping out the golden nucleus of his future fortunes, which he had even then been hugging in his pocket.

“Mercy on us!” cried the other.

“You thought it earlier?”

“Ay, I did; by gum, though, that’s a fine watch you’ve gotten!”

And Tom felt a new light beating on his shabby clothes, and himself flushing painfully under a scrutiny which began with round-eyed wonder and ended in a series of approving nods.

“I see—I see,” added simple Butterfield, in quite a reverent voice; “you’d rather starve than part with you. I’m jealous it belonged some one else before you; ​but there’s not many would ha’ gone hungry with a watch like that about them. However, t’ waggon’s ready, an’ we’ll take good care you don’t go hungry today.”

Tom’s only answer was a sudden attempt to back out of the breakfast, and it failed. He tried again as they drove past Fetter Lane—he could pay his way in Rolls Buildings now—but this time the waggoner whipped up his horse and refused to listen.

“No, no,” said he; “a promise is a promise, and I warrant they’ll be proud to see you.”

“You mean your wife and family?” said Tom.

“Nay,” said Butterfield, “I doubt you’ll not see them there.”

“Not at your house?” cried Tom.

“It isn’t mine,” confessed the other; “it’s my wife’s brother’s. He drives a hackney-coach, and I use his stable every other morning. Me an’ my missus live out at Hendon, and I come in three nights a week.”

“But you mustn’t saddle these people with me. Let me get down at once!”

“Mustn’t I?” chuckled the waggoner. “I’ll take the blame then. We’re very near there; and dashed if that isn’t Jim on his way home to breakfast. Jim! Jim!”

And a hackney-coach, crawling leisurely along in front, was pulled up as the coachman turned round and recognised Butterfield.

“Well, Jonathan, how are you?”

“How’s yourself, Jim? Early and late, as usual, eh? This is a young gent who has ridden in with me. He’s waiting till t’ offices open, and I thought you’d give us both a bit of breakfast.”

“Always glad to oblige a gen’leman,” said the coach​man, looking hard but nodding genially at Tom; nor would he either listen to a single protest or apology from the youth, who found himself at breakfast, scarce ten minutes later, in a cosy kitchen close to Blackfriars Bridge.

The hackney-coachman was a burly old soldier, a jolly ruffian with a good brown eye; his wife was small and spruce, watchful and quiet, and perhaps Tom liked her less. She was kind enough, however; indeed, the sympathetic interest shown by all in an unknown vagabond was a circumstance that touched Tom deeply, though of a piece with all his most recent experiences, and but another proof of the world’s kindness.

The old soldier had served in India himself. He was full of practical advice for Tom, who listened gratefully, but yawned twice, when it came out he had not slept for some thirty hours. Instantly the household was on its feet. It appeared that Jonathan Butterfield had a snooze there each morning after his night journey with the vegetables, and Tom must and should lie down beside him.

Tom consented—for an hour—and fell asleep wondering where he had seen the good Jim before. When he awoke, the waggoner was gone and the light different. He went downstairs in his socks and asked Jim’s wife the time.

“Time?” said she. “Haven’t you a watch?”

“Not I.”

“Jonathan told me you’d a gold repeater!”

Tom remembered the repeater, for the first time since awaking; but the woman was looking at him queerly, and he had no intention of entering into explanations with her. So he simply asked whether Jonathan had gone.

​“Many an hour ago; it’s five o clock.”

“Five!”

“And after.”

Tom burst into apologies, in the midst of which the woman put on a shawl and went out. He was still standing irresolute in his socks, dazed by his long sleep, when there came a rattle of wheels outside, and in rushed Jim with his whip and an evening newspaper.

“Glad to find you still here, sir!” cried he. “I want somebody as can read to read me a slice out of this ’ere Globe. It’s awful, sir—awful! The wery gen’leman I drove last night! I’ve come straight from Scotland Yard!”

Tom suddenly remembered when and where he had seen the other before; it was overnight on the box of Blaydes’s hackney-coach.

“Who is the gentleman?”

“Blaydes it seems his name is; or rather was!”

“Was?”

“He’s dead—”

“Dead!”

“Stone dead—murdered—by a man I saw as close as I see you now, but never looked twice at! It’s all in the Globe, they tell me; read it out, sir, read it out.”

CHAPTER VII

A GUILTY INNOCENT

Tom Erichsen held out a steady hand for the Globe. His blood ran too cold for present tremors. The hackney-coachman had drawn a chair to the table, planted his elbows in the middle of the printed cotton cloth, and his hot, flushed face between his coarse, strong hands. Tom sat down at the other end. He found the paragraph, ran his eye from head-line to finish, and then read it slowly aloud:—

SHOCKING MURDER AT HAMPSTEAD

An atrocious murder was committed late last night, or early this morning, in the neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath. A mechanic, on his way to work at an early hour this morning, and having occasion to traverse the right-of-way connecting the Finchley Road with the upper portion of Haverstock Hill, noticed a stout staff upon the grass, near the second stile from the former thoroughfare. On picking it up, the staff, or rather cudgel, was found to be crusted with blood, and near it was discovered a drawn sword-stick, broken near the hilt. Continuing his alarming investigations, the mechanic made his crowning and most horrible discovery in a hollow tree close beside the stile, in which lay the body of a gentleman in full evening dress. He was quite dead; indeed, life had probably been extinct some hours. The corpse was covered with blood, and the head terribly disfigured, as if by repeated blows from some blunt instrument. There can be no doubt that the crime was committed with the cudgel above mentioned (at present the only clue to the assassin), nor that the sword-stick was vainly used in self-defence by the unfortunate gentleman. The police were summoned with commendable despatch, and the body removed to the Marylebone mortuary to await inquest.

Meanwhile, in the course of the morning, much information has ​been forthcoming, and we are sorry to state that the victim has been identified as Captain J. Montgomery Blaydes, late of his Majesty’s Coldstream Guards, but for some years past on the halfpay list. No letters or papers of any sort were discovered upon his person—

Here Tom stopped reading.

“Go on, sir.”

“I will. But that’s extraordinary!”

“Not it. He’s been robbed as well. That’s what I want to get at. That there stick’s no clue; we want the things he took.”

Tom moistened his lips and harked back:—

No letters or papers of any sort were discovered upon his person, and it is only through the marking of his linen that the identity of the deceased has been so promptly established. It now transpires that the hapless Captain had been lately residing in the village of West End (not a mile from the scene of the murder), and that he left his lodgings shortly after ten o’clock last night, in order to attend an evening party, in a hackney-coach. The police hope that the coachman will come forward—

“He has!” said Jim. “You may leave out that bit.”

“And you couldn’t describe the man?”

“Not too well. I could only swear he was neither short nor tall, and looked to be wearing a pair of nankeen trousers.” (Tom’s legs were underneath the table.) “No,” continued Jim, “I’m afraid they won’t lay hands on him through me. But they may through the things he took. Go on to that!”

“There was a diamond pin.”

“I seen it! What else?”

“All his money.”

“Ah! he paid like a gen’leman. Anything else?”

“A—gold—watch.”

​The words would hardly come. Jim thumped the table with heavy fist.

“That’ll do!” he cried. “That’ll hang him, you mark my words! What sort of a watch?”

But this time the words would not come at all, for Jim’s wife stood in the doorway behind Jim’s chair, and her eyes and Tom’s—the terrified and the guilty—were locked together in a long, dread stare.

“What’s that about a watch?” she said in a sort of whisper, advancing unsteadily, and leaning a hand upon her husband’s shoulder. “Whose watch?”

“One belonging a murdered man,” replied Jim. “I’m asking what kind of a one. I say it ought to hang the chap what did it.”

“It will,” said she hoarsely in his ear. “It’s a repeater, and him that has it sits in front of you in that chair!”

There followed a silence so profound that Tom could hear the watch itself ticking in his pocket. The coachman then rose, and slowly leaned across the table, resting one hand upon it; the other was half-way to Tom’s throat when he started to his feet, and in so doing pressed his thigh against the table’s edge. Instantly there rang from his pocket a sweet and tiny ting! ting! ting! ting! ting!

It was the saving of him from Jim the coachman and his wife.

Both shrank back as Tom darted to an inner door, and so up the stairs which he had descended half-asleep.

Ere he reached the top there was a crash below; for an instant he thought the man had fallen in a fit; but a volley of oaths proved it only a slip, as Tom slammed ​and locked the door of the room in which he had slept away the day if not his life. His shoes were still where he had kicked them off. He slipped into them, and, exerting all his strength, pulled the large iron bedstead from its place and wedged it between wall and door. Then he crouched and listened. The man was for taking him single-handed; the woman evidently restraining him by main force.

“Let me go! Let me go, damn ye!” Tom heard him cry.

“Never till I drop! Police! police! He sha’n’t murder my Jim too.”

“So help me, but I’ll strike ye if ye don’t let go!”

“Strike away. Police! police! police! If you go, I go too.”

Her cries were not loud; they were smothered in the struggle, which was still continued—now at the foot of the stairs, now on the stairs themselves, and at last on the landing outside the barricaded door. Meanwhile the bird had flown.

No sooner had Tom realised what was taking place below than he threw up the bedroom window. It overlooked a small and filthy backyard, into which Tom quietly dropped while the pair were still struggling on the stairs. To find his way through the house, through the kitchen itself, and out into the narrow street, was the work of very few moments. The last Tom heard was the belabouring of the locked, blocked door by honest Jim. Nor did his presence of mind desert him yet. He walked out of the narrow side-street, only running when he came to the main thoroughfare, and after a perilous hesitation as to whether he should strike into the City or over Blackfriars Bridge.

​He chose the City, and having chosen, lost his head and ran for his life.

He darted across the street and plunged into the busy alleys filling the delta between the bridge and St. Paul’s. Here he slackened a little, for the stony, many-windowed ravines were so narrow and so crowded that it was impossible to continue running. But he threw up his heels the instant he emerged on Ludgate Hill, tearing helter-skelter in the middle of the road. He was nearly run over by a van coming out of Paternoster Row, and cursed to the skies by the driver. Faces stopped and turned upon the pavements. He knew the folly of it, and yet ran on with a fiend in either heel.

“Ba—nk—ba—nk—’ere you are, sir, ’ere you are!”

Tom was almost up to the omnibus before he realised that this was meant for him; instinctively he waved and nodded, and his mad pace was explained. The omnibus stopped; he jumped in gasping.

“Thought you was after me,” said the cad, with a grin.

Tom had no breath to reply. A rubicund old gentleman made a well-meant remark upon the eagerness of youth, and was favoured with a glassy stare. The newcomer sat panting in a corner, the perspiration trickling from his nose.

But his head was cooler; he saw the needlessness as well as the indiscretion of conspicuous flight. He had slipped through the only hands that were as yet against him; he had eluded the only eyes he need avoid that night. For the hackney-coachman might take his new tale straight to Scotland Yard, but it could hardly be given to the world before morning.

Tom’s heart leapt as he discovered the temporary ​strength of his position; next moment it sank, for the cad was collecting the fares, and his single asset was the watch. His bankrupt state had occurred to Tom as he ran for the omnibus, but not again; it was so small a thing compared with the charge now lying at his door. Yet he had just thought of it—his little fraud was so far deliberate—but he had neither the face nor the foolhardiness to sit there and confess his fault. And—situated like the wanted felon he now felt himself to be—it was wonderful and horrible how a felon’s resources came unbidden to his fingers’ ends. He began feeling in pocket after pocket, with a face that lengthened under the frown of the cad, the raised eyebrows of the rubicund gentleman, and the fixed attention of all.

“I’m afraid I—I don’t seem to have a coin in my pocket!”

“Oh, you ’aven’t, ’aven’t you?”

“No—I have not! I’m very sorry—I—”

“You may be! Never mind no tales; you can keep them for the beak, as’ll ’ave a word to say to you to-morrer mornin’!” And the cad winked at the other passengers, stopped the omnibus, and called a policeman from the curb.

Tom could have burst into tears. To be wrongly wanted for a crime so terrible, and justly taken for a thing so small! He looked forlornly at his fellow-passengers, with a wild idea that one might come to his rescue; the sole response was a withering frown from the ruddy old gentleman, who also commended the cad, and loudly trusted an example would be made of the case. The desperate Tom began ransacking his pockets in earnest for some overlooked coin, but he had done this so often of late that he felt the futility now. The per​spiration froze upon his face; yet even with the policeman’s tall hat poked inside the omnibus, his twitching fingers continued their spasmodic, hopeless search.

“The flash young spark!” whispered the cad. “Just you frighten ’im, Sir Robert.”

“Now then, come along!” said the officer.

“Good God!” cried Tom.

“You’ll get all the more for swearing; now, out you come afore you’re made.”

“Not just yet,” returned the culprit, and handed the conductor one of two halfcrowns found that very moment in a scrap of crumpled paper. “I’m sorry I couldn’t find it before. Kindly give me change.”

“Where to?” growled the cad, as the constable stepped down.

Tom did not hear.

“Can’t you answer? Where to?”

“Oh, as far as you go!”

Tom’s eyes were on the crumpled scrap, and filled to overflowing by half-a-dozen ill-written words.

CHAPTER 8

HUE AND CRY

“Wishin good luk, yours respeckfull, J. Butterfield.”

Those were the words that made full the warm heart and speaking eyes of Thomas Erichsen. He pictured the furtive waggoner slipping the halfcrowns into the waistcoat pocket where he had found them, while he himself lay serenely prone, with the long arm of the law already ​feeling for him, and nimble pressmen even then indicting paragraphs that should hound him to the gibbet. His new extremity made him the more appreciate this touching tribute. He could not understand why so many persons were so strangely kind to him. He was not aware that there was a something generous in himself which excited the generosity of others possessing that quality. He only knew that of all his like experiences he ranked this first. And then he began wondering what the waggoner would give to recall his crown and his kindness when he came to know the apparent truth.

It was so apparent that from the first he despaired of ever disproving it, and felt his only chance to lie in flight. To fly and hide was not only his first instinct, but his comparatively mature judgment in the matter. His stick had been used. He had told people that he intended so to use it himself. He would never be believed about the watch; the paper that alone could prove his word had been stolen with everything else from the dead man’s pocket. Even supposing he had started with a case, he must have spoilt it by his incriminating conduct at the hackney-coachman’s. Yet flight had been and was still his only chance. Innocent as the dead in the grave, as the child in the womb, he was still compelled to choose between a guilty hiding and a surrender tantamount to certain death.

These thoughts did not all come together, nor in this order. They were interspersed with white-hot memories of poor Blaydes as last seen in the moonlight; of that touch of dignity and of regret that read now as a premonition of his immediate end; and these in their turn were interrupted by visions of a repulsive face, and by the unseen flight of headlong, shambling feet. Perhaps ​there was no connection between any of these things; it was more than likely there was not. But the fugitive’s heated brain, susceptible enough to sharp and deep impressions, was as yet quite incapable of consecutive thought; besides, he was always wondering whether the footstep behind him conveyed a hand that would close next instant upon his collar; and every minute there were many such in the crowded City streets.

Towards dusk his eye was taken by a common barber’s pole. Hitherto the desired sign had been that of the three gilt globes, and he had paused at one or two, peering through the windows without daring to enter. The barber was a new idea. Tom felt his chin, looked at it in the window, and found it thinly yellowed over to the depth of half an inch; his fair hair was also very long. He entered, and asked to have it cut and his face shaved. It was quite a small shop, near Finsbury Circus, whither Tom had drifted from the Bank.

“Another nice murder!” remarked the barber, reluctantly throwing aside the Courier for his scissors.

“Whereabouts?” said Tom, who had guessed from his face what the man was reading.

“London again!—’Am’sted ’Eath way this time.”

“Ah, that! Yes, I’ve heard of it. I’ll have my hair quite short, please.”

But the man would talk.

“Worse than Greenacre, I say.”

“How so?”

“Done for robbery; that there watch and diamond pin!”

“Ah!”

“On the other ’and, Greenacre, ’e cut ’er up. You don’t ’appen to be goin’ to the ’anging on Tuesday? ​That ought to be prime. I mean to be there if I stand all night for my place! Not fond of an execootion, sir?”

“I never saw one.”

“Never saw one! Well, that’s funny; and I ’aven’t missed one these fifteen years!”

Tom looked from his own ghastly visage in the mirror to the low, gloating face puckered with sly smiles at ghoulish memories. He went elsewhere for his shave. And slowly but at last the grateful night closed in; the busy City streets became empty, echoing chasms; and Tom, feeling more than ever the guilty cynosure, drifted westward with the ebbing tide of innocent, free men.

His great dread was of the hackney-coachman. His friend Jim was perhaps the one man in the streets of London who could at present identify him at sight. He squandered fivepence on the latest Globe. It contained no fresh particulars. His name had not yet transpired, so Jim was still his chiefest terror. He tarried in narrow alleys where four wheels could not follow him. In one of these a second-hand bookseller, smoking a churchwarden on his doorstep, stared at Tom critically. Thereupon he slunk into the nearest street. It was Newgate Street. He stood before the sombre walls of the prison itself, and continued so to stand, impersonally fascinated, with a sudden end to all sense of danger, as though a nerve were killed.

There was no moon, but the wide clear space above the prison walls was pricked with the brightest stars Tom had ever seen. He wondered whether it was in mercy or in mockery that the stars shone their best over that monument of gloom and horror; then his speculations took a more practical direction. How thick were those grimy walls? Where was Greenacre? What was ​he doing? Where would he be hanged? But this he thought he knew, and turning into the Old Bailey, he stood opposite the place.

The Old Bailey was all but deserted. Tom stood unseen, and peopled it with the vile crowd he had often read of in those newspaper descriptions which it was easy to condemn but more difficult to skip. He found himself mentally in the midst of that ruthless ritual, just as he was bodily upon its scene. He heard the lewd cheering of throats athirst for blood, the screaming of bruised and trampled women, the clink of wineglasses in the twenty-guinea windows behind and above him. On every face he found the bestial relish that the mirror had shown him at the barber’s shop. And as then he saw his own sickly mask as well, but a long way off now—above the felon’s gate—with the rope round his neck and dangling from the beam. And with that final vision returned the sense of deadly danger, in tenfold force and with sickening poignancy, as the vividness leapt from the inner to the outward eye, and he saw and realised what was then and there taking place.

A police-officer had emerged from a narrow door in the great grimy walls; his white trousers shone across the street; so did the fluttering paper in his hand. He carried a paste-pot and a brush, and stopping at a point where a black board clung to the black stones, he pasted his paper upon it. Before he began there was a little crowd about him; when he finished it stretched half across the street. And there was Tom still cowering under the windows opposite.

The first word he heard was his own name bandied from mouth to mouth.

“Herichsen,” said one. “It’s as good a name as ​Greenacre. They allus do have good names. Look at Fauntleroy and—”

“A hundred pounds reward!”

“Long, fair hair—slight growth on chin—”

“Medium height—dark brown eyes—”

Tom heard no more; sidling warily to the left, he squeezed round the corner into Fleet Lane, while every eye was turned the other way. Out of Fleet Lane there ran another to the right; as Tom dived into it, his shaking hand went to his smooth-shaven chin and short-cut hair; and his quivering lips muttered a new blessing on Jonathan Butterfield and his seed for ever.

He had spent sixteen pence, which left exactly three-and-eight. Further disguise he must have, and though he tried more than once to pawn the watch, his nerve always failed him on the threshold of the shop. The aimlessness of his proceedings now came home to him, and yet what was he to do? He had heard that London was the best hiding-place in the world, and indeed it had never struck him to break for the country. Nor did it now. But he would try some other end of the town; not the docks, however; he had told everybody he was going there, and could not, therefore, go too far in the opposite direction.

The Paddington omnibus was passing as he emerged from Skinner Street. Tom got in, and paid his sixpence, leaving three-and-two.

So his name had come out already. He had time to think of things in the omnibus, which was half empty, and he soon saw that Jim the coachman could not have supplied the police with the name; he did not know it himself. Other witnesses must have stepped forward already. Who were they? But it mattered very little ​after all. Not Claire, at any rate; and yet the thought of her brought with it the keenest torture he had suffered yet.

She would think him guilty; after what had passed between them she could not do otherwise; then guilty let him be, in every earthly eye, and the sooner it was all over the better for him and for her. He had no wish to live if the one sweet judge whose judgment he respected held him worthy of death. And she would—she could not help herself; then what must she think of his love for her? And the thought of her thoughts was worse than that of shameful death before a howling mob.

He tore up her letter that he had meant to treasure till his death, so that when he was taken no slur should rest upon his beloved; and he distributed the minute fragments at long intervals that night before looking for a place to lay his head. In the end he hit upon an empty house overlooking the then green enclosure of Westbourne Park; an unfastened window caught his eye; he waited till the road was clear, and then entered like an expert, fastening the window behind him.

Here he destroyed and hid away his hat, a battered beaver bought in the days of poor Blaydes. In its stead he had obtained from a pawn-shop, and for eighteen pence, an old-fashioned peak-and-tassel cap. But he had not dared to offer the watch in pledge, although he had entered that shop for the purpose.

It ticked so loud in the empty house that in the dead of night he leapt up in a frenzy and smashed in the works with his heel.

Before he could lie down again there came a deafening double-knock at the street-door.

CHAPTER IX

A GOOD SAMARITAN

To run no risk of observation through the dirty, bare windows, as well as to secure equidistance from all possible points of approach or escape, the hunted youth had lain him down in the hall, with the bottom stair for his pillow. He was rewarded with the full shock of this ear-splitting tattoo. Yet it shook him less than the insolent, maddening solo of the dead man’s watch; and the hollow house was still resounding like a drum as Tom groped his way on tip-toe to the garden door, and stealthily withdrew the bolts. The door was one-half coloured glass, showing a pink moon in a purple sky, and a neglected garden which by daylight would have been sky-blue with a ruby margin; but now it merely gave another coat to night; and Tom was outside and half-way down the flight of stone steps before he saw that which made the iron balustrade grow colder in his hand. The chimney-pot hat, white trousers and drawn staff of one of the new police awaited him at the bottom.

“Come along,” said this officer; “it’s no use turning back—hear that!”

As he spoke the noise of breaking glass came through the open door; and Tom’s mind was made up. Suddenly crouching, with knees and elbows at acute angles, he sprang clean on top of the police-officer, who collapsed beneath him like a house of cards. The fall was bad enough for Tom; his nose was bleeding when he picked himself up; but the other lay motionless on his back, and Tom bent over him in horror. His eyes opened that ​instant, and he made a grab at Tom, who turned and darted down the garden just as there was a clatter of fresh feet upon the stone stairs behind.

The garden wall was mercifully low. Tom vaulted it, and all but landed in a cucumber-frame upon the other side. He found himself in a nursery-garden, with avenues of crystal roofs shining to the moon in long low parallels. Down one such causeway sped Tom at top speed, getting into another by turning left and right at the first gap. Just then he heard a welcome crash at the cucumber-frame fifty yards back. But now the frontage wall loomed ahead, cutting the stars at an uncomfortable height; and on dashing up to it Tom saw the mistake he had make by changing avenues. He had to turn back to the right to make the gate; and the officers, who had run straight ahead, and thus gained a score of yards, were upon him in full cry.

The gate was a high wooden one, luckily without spikes; the runaway straddled the top just as the pursuers reached the bottom, and left a shoe in their hands, ere he threw himself down upon the other side, and kicked its fellow to the winds.

A stretch of fair road ran right and left between temporary fences and open ground laid out for building. Tom headed to the left, scampering like a mouse in his stocking-soles, with the constables again clattering at his heels. One of the latter seemed to be running lame; and both breathed the music of short wind to Tom’s ears. He was himself lean and hard from little food and much fresh air. With a clear course, he had perfect confidence in his pace and staying powers; and this was then comparatively open country; and the time was between three and four in the morning.

​Lightly and rhythmically fell his feet upon the roadside; those of his pursuers rang fainter by degrees; but when at length he glanced over his shoulder, it cost him yards from sheer admiration. Of the four white legs flying after him in the moonlight, one was as if dipped in red from thigh to ankle; yet the limping man led; and Tom, remembering the crash at the cucumber-frame, felt a parenthetic pang at being pitted by fate against this hero.

But now a broad road crossed and ended this one, and Tom tore round to the right. Hardly had he done so when he became aware that the pursuit had suffered a sudden interruption. He heard the blowing of a whistle farther and farther behind him, and guessed that the wounded man had dropped from loss of blood, and was in too bad a case to be left. His heart smote him; he seemed cast for blood-guiltiness after all; still, here was his chance, and he must make the most of it or surely die.

He ran swiftly on, and presently overhauled a cart lumbering westward along the middle of the road. He was passing it at a less suspicious pace when he made a discovery. The driver was bent double and fast asleep.

Tom dropped behind again and peeped in over the back. It was a hay-cart, and the load had been left in town; all that remained was the tarpaulin lying in a crumpled heap. He looked back along the road, but saw nobody. Then he boarded the cart—silently enough in his ragged socks—and curled himself up beneath the tarpaulin.

He had not been there many minutes when the double patter of two pairs of boots came to his ears above the creaking of the cart-wheels and the horse’s ​sober stride. Louder it grew and louder yet, until once more Tom heard the laboured breath of untrained runners: he heard them pass the cart, one each side; and then, just as he himself had stopped on overhauling it, so did they.

“I see nothing of your man,” said one. “Let’s ask this chap if he has.”

“We might do worse. Hey, driver! Wake up there, will you?”

“What’s the row?”

“You’re asleep!”

“What’s that to you?”

“Everything—when you’re in charge of a horse and cart.”

The man promptly denied having been asleep at all; was asked if he had seen the fugitive; and wanted to know what he was like.

Tom heard himself most inaccurately described. “And I ought to know, because I’ve chased him for a mile already; and only lost him because my comrade was wounded and couldn’t run,” added the ingenious officer.

“Well, what if I did see him?”

“We’re just at the fork; you must have seen which way he went, and you’ve got to tell us.”

“And what if I refuse?”

“Refuse! Why, he’s a desperate burglar, who’s about done for two of us already! Refuse away—but you come along with us.”

“Oh, all right, I did see him,” declared the carter, to Tom’s momentary horror; “but I call it wery ’ard, makin’ one pore chap split on another.”

“And which way did he go when he came to the fork just ahead here?”

​“Which way? Why, he kep’ on straight along the Uxbridge Road, and that’s the truth.”

The carter was cautioned, threatened, but finally allowed to proceed upon his way. In a minute or two Tom heard him burst into a laugh, and whip up the draught-horse to an elephantine trot. Meanwhile the police-officers had run out of ear-shot along the Uxbridge Road; and the hay-cart was well upon its way to Turnham Green and Kew.

At the latter place the carter stopped for his breakfast, and Thomas Erichsen made good his escape, not a little encouraged by the fact that his late pursuers had manifestly not known who it was they were pursuing.

Tom had his breakfast in the beautiful early sunshine beside the river’s brim.

Overnight he had avoided the tavern, but not the pastry-cook’s shop; so he had made his supper in the empty house, and was provisioned still; moreover, his pocket was still weighted by poor Blaydes’s broken watch, nor could he make up his mind to pitch into the river his only asset, and one to which he was so justly entitled. He was clear of London now; the early sun gave him confidence and pluck. He would pawn the watch in one of these Thames Valley towns, and then get back to London and the docks by river and in new habiliments. It was Saturday morning; he would wait until that best of times, Saturday night; but first he must find a place to hide his head in during the day.

He found one in the boat-house of a small, new, white-brick villa, with a narrow garden leading down to the river’s edge. The boat-house had an open window. Hardened by his extremity into incredible alacrity in ​such enterprises, Tom was through it in a twinkling, and well pleased with his discovery. The boat was still hibernating keel upwards on trestles. It would be a very strange thing if that day, of all others, were chosen for launching her for the summer. Determined, at any rate, to risk it, the runaway climbed into a little loft which might have been made for him, and settled down for the day; he rolled himself up in several folds of strawberry-netting, and made another quaint pillow of the box of a mowing-machine, whereon he slept soundly for several hours.

So the morning went; but the livelong afternoon he lay awake beneath the strawberry-nets; and these were his worst hours yet. They gave him pause for thought, and what thoughts were his! The almost inevitable end of this wild-goose flight—that was one. The quite inevitable fate of one standing his ground in circumstances so damning—that was another. The two together led him in circles, so that his brain reeled. The upshot was that he had taken the wrong, and yet the only course. Nor was that the worst, for brooding over all there was the thought of Claire, believing him guilty till her dying day, and never forgiving her own warm heart that had gone out in fearless loving-kindness to the bloody and deceitful man. To have loved one who ended on the gallows! What a memory to take through life! And the poor fellow’s love so quickened his insight that he shed tears for her, but regarded his own case with a growing stoicism.

Yet all the time the changed face of Blaydes at the moonlit stile, and that other foul one seen so shortly after, looked down on him side by side from the boathouse roof; and now he knew them for the faces of ​murdered man and murderer; but anon he gave it up, and shrugged his cramped shoulders, and left all that on the knees of the gods.

So these black hours wore slowly on, and they were the blacker in that they contained no new alarm to lift his mind from the ultimate. On the contrary, he felt safe enough for the day, for a steady rain had started while he slept, and never a footstep had mingled with its music on the garden paths; a relief, perhaps, but one that brought its own depression.

However, the rain ceased with the day, and when Tom deemed it dark enough for a judicious exit, the wet earth was as fragrant as a flower. He sniffed it joyously through the open window by which he had entered. The garden path was washed very yellow, and bordered by twin canals. There was more light than he had thought when in the loft; still, not a soul was in view, and it had been lighter yet when he arrived. It was necessary, however, to get out of the window legs first, and backwards, and when Tom had done so and turned round, he beheld, standing on the yellow path between the two canals, and quizzically regarding him, the quaintest and the tiniest old gentleman he had ever encountered.

He was certainly not more than five feet high, but he carried himself superbly, and fixed the intruder with a steady, jocular, light-blue eye which inspired respect before fear. He seemed, indeed, the essence of contemplative geniality; but it was his powdered hair, black knee-breeches, and white silk stockings that gave him the picture-book appearance at which even Tom found time to marvel. But he marvelled more when the old gentleman made him a courtly bow, and said in high, chirping tones:—

​“I am delighted to see you, sir! I fear my boat-house will have afforded you but indifferent shelter on so vile a day; such as it has been, however, you are welcome to it indeed.”

“Welcome!” exclaimed Tom.

“And why not?” chirruped the other. “Surely we who have must give to you who have not, be it roof or boot? I am sorry, however, to see you bare-footed, for you will permit me to observe that such stockings as you have on are worse than none. If you will have the goodness to come with me, you shall be shod afresh, and join me in a glass of negus before you go.”

“But, sir—”

“Tut! I know what you would say: you have trespassed already, and have no wish to trespass further. Very well, sir, so be it; you shall have your way, and pay the penalty. I condemn you to a glass of negus and a new pair of shoes.”

And with the utmost bonhomie the tiny gentleman drove Tom before him to the house, and through open French windows to a basement room where a lamp and a fire were burning, and a kettle singing on the hob.

“Hungry?” he chirped, giving Tom a playful push in the ribs.

“I had provisions in my pocket,” stammered the youth, in deep embarrassment; “I shall do very well. Indeed, your kindness—”

“Tut, sir, tut! You will please me best by saying no more about that. You are hungry, and I shall order you something upstairs. But here’s the sherry and there’s the boiling water; you can brew your own negus while I am gone; and this is today’s Advertiser. Make your​self at home, I beg!” And with twinkling eyes and brisk gestures the little old gentleman departed, of all Tom’s good Samaritans, assuredly the prince and king.

No sooner was he alone than Tom caught up the Advertiser and found half a column about the murder; and, yes! there was his name. The Adcocks had volunteered it, together with a full description, whose accuracy tempted Tom not to wait for his supper, but to rush through the open window and swim the river in his clothes. Yet there was more that must be read. The case against him was stronger than ever. The threatening letters had been found among the dead man’s effects. The hackney-coachman had told his story, and here it was. But one name was gratefully absent; that of Harding did not occur in the closely printed half-column, which so strangely fascinated Tom that his quaint Samaritan was back before he had put the paper down.

“What! Feeding the mind before the body? Well, well, to be sure!”

“I hadn’t seen to-day’s paper,” said Tom, feebly.

“Aha! I know what you were reading, too.” The old gentleman chuckled as he poured sherry into two tumblers. “I know—I know!”

“What?” asked Tom, hoarsely.

“My eyes are good—my eyes are excellent. You were reading the Hampstead murder.” Tom held his breath. “I never read such things myself,” pursued the other; “but I did when I was young. Oh, Lord, yes! Blood was my negus then.”

And with his childlike laugh he handed Tom one steaming tumbler, mixed another for himself, and insisted on clinking glasses before they drank. Tom spilt ​some of his portion upon the floor, but his kind host never noticed it. He was next invited to take a pinch from a silver-mounted horn snuff-box. This he refused as politely as his state of mind would permit. He trembled to know whether the old gentleman had really eschewed all accounts of the murder. To make certain he hazarded a leading question.

“It seems to be a queer affair, sir. Do you think they’ll ever catch him?”

“My good fellow, I haven’t read the case.”

Tom drew a deep breath and tossed off his negus at a gulp. At that moment there came a knock at the door, and a small maid entered.

“Ready, Mary?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then come this way, my dear young gentleman,” the old one said, with his most benevolent smile. “Upstairs—follow the maid—I will follow you.”

Tom hesitated, but gave in without a word. He was, indeed, as hungry as he was grateful, and he followed the servant upstairs, with the jolly old fellow chatting pleasantly at his heels.

“The shoes you shall have immediately. What, would you shake my hand? Ah, my good fellow, I fear it’s but meagre entertainment that I can offer you. Well, well, if you insist! But that’s the door; pray walk in. He! he! he! he!”

And ere the chirruping laugh had ended, Tom’s flight was over, and he was in the hands of two policemen, who had securely pinned him by either arm. Resistance was useless. But from the officers’ faces a last hope flickered in his breast.

“What do you want me for?” he cried.

​“What is the charge, sir?” asked one of the constables, sotto voce, of the master of the house.

“Can’t you see?” piped that triumphant humourist. “It’s the Hampstead murderer! I knew the fellow with half an eye!”

CHAPTER X

AT AVENUE LODGE

On the night of the dinner-party, and when the last guest was gone, Lady Starkie took her brother by both hands, and openly congratulated him in front of Daintree and Claire.

“A perfect triumph!” she warmly declared. “I only wish the enemy had been here to see; but there, Nicholas, you need bother your head no more about them! You know now the feeling of your friends; rest assured that it is the feeling also of all sensible persons throughout the community. Everybody knows that the charge against you was neither more nor less than an odious Radical conspiracy; they know it themselves, and have let it drop like a hot coal, you mark my words! Think no more of it, my dear Nicholas. It has done you more good than harm. They know that too, and will never be such fools as to rake it up again.”

Mr. Harding received these well-meant assurances with forced laughter and a twitching face; they were supplemented by a duly florid little speech from Daintree, who had rejoined the gentlemen after all, and was now a brighter man. But his eyes still followed Claire, and his soul was in his eyes, as always when she was by. ​She was now shutting her piano, and putting away music with a white face which she feared to show.

“I ought to return thanks to you both, upon my word I ought,” cried Mr. Harding, with the falsest note yet in his noisy laugh. “But the fact is”—with a sudden pallid candour—“I’ve been waiting all the evening for that fellow Blaydes. I can’t conceive what has happened to him!”

Claire let the open top of the grand piano slip through her fingers with a resounding bang. Daintree watched her with a new expression, lost, however, upon the other two, who had glanced towards her themselves. Claire apologised for her clumsiness without turning round.

“Was it on—business—that you wished to see Captain Blaydes?” inquired Lady Starkie, with eyebrows a little raised.

“Partly; a rather important matter.”

“A very awkward time!”

“That couldn’t be helped; the point is, what has happened to him? The coach was due in hours ago; we have had excellent weather; the roads must be excellent too. Then what has kept him away? I cannot think! I cannot think!” cried Mr. Harding, as at last his alarm broke bounds, and rattled in his voice as plainly as it twitched upon his face. “Not for the life of me,” he added; “but, upon my word, I’ve a good mind to walk straight over to his rooms—”

“Oh, do! do! for pity’s sake—now, at once!” And there was Claire, trembling before them, with lifted hands and broken voice; her pale face luminous with the white light of a breathless anxiety, an excruciating fear. So for an instant stood father and daughter, dumbly regarding each other, and half in surprise; for ​the emotion of each was expressed in the look of the other.

Then Claire broke down and fled, sobbing, from the room.

Lady Starkie followed her.

“Now I know,” said Daintree. “Now I know!”

Mr. Harding shut the door. “I’m glad to hear it,” said he, sardonically. “I confess myself puzzled. What is your interpretation?”

“She is in love with Blaydes!”

“Blaydes? Nonsense; you mean yourself; it’s you if anybody.”

Daintree told the story of his declaration in the arbour. He told it in gasps, with sudden beads upon his face. “But I’ll have her yet!” he finished through his teeth.

Mr. Harding’s indignation scarcely met the case. The match would have been of his making. He had given much more than his consent to Daintree’s suit, and for some time past had regarded him as a certain son-in-law. Indignant he was, but more puzzled, and most distrait. After a little wild speaking in his daughter’s name, he suddenly said—

“But, look here, if your notion is correct, that’s all the more reason why I should see this fellow Blaydes at once. I couldn’t think why the beggar migrated to West End; now I can; and I shall forbid him my house this very night. There’s a little transaction between us that shall be settled, and then I wash my hands of him. Will you come? It’s only about a mile along the road. And I must know whether the fellow got back to town to-night, and if so, why on earth I haven’t seen him. I must know that before I sleep!”

​Daintree got his hat with alacrity, and together the gentlemen let themselves quietly out by the front door; nevertheless Claire heard them in her room, though her aunt, who was still with her, did not.

They walked between the same budding hedgerows and moonlit fields which Tom Erichsen and the wretched Blaydes had looked on earlier in the night. They passed within two hundred paces of the spot where the Captain’s body was even then lying dead and undiscovered. They woke a sleeping hamlet, and were sharply informed through an angrily opened window that Captain Blaydes had come home, but had dressed and left again in a hackney-coach, shortly after ten.

“Did he say where he was going?”

“No; but I heard him tell the coachman it was only a mile.”

The window was shut down. The pair returned. They had spoken little on their way to West End; not one word did they exchange on the way back; but Nicholas Harding shook a little at the knees, and his companion watched him shrewdly.

As they pushed open the gate, a light vanished from an upper window, to reappear in the hall. Daintree took the other by the arm, and whispered, “That’s Miss Harding! Now you will see if I was wrong.”

And, indeed, the door was open before they reached it, and Claire on the step, candle in hand, the tallow streaming in the draught, and dashing unheeded against the pink crape and the white satin which she had never taken off. Her face looked grey and old, with young eyes burning out of place.

“Well?”

​Even the monosyllable was scarcely articulate.

“He is not there,” said Mr. Harding.

“He never came back to London!”

“Yes —he did. That’s just the point. He started to come to us about ten o’clock, and has never been heard of since.”

Claire stood mute before them, her face pale as ashes in the light of the candle, which she carried quite steadily now. She had trembled in her fear; she stood like a statue in its realisation; then, with a single moan, she turned away, and her candle passed steadily through the hall, and slowly and steadily up the stairs.

Mr. Harding seemed lost in his own reflections, when Daintree clutched him by the arm.

“What did I tell you as we came up to the house?”

Harding thought a little. “You said it was Blaydes. Well, if so, she shall never have him. But I only wish I knew where he was!”

“So do I,” said Daintree, viciously; and he held out his hand as they entered the hall; but Mr. Harding would not hear of his going to bed.

“For pity’s sake don’t desert me yet! There is no sleep for me this night. What can have happened to the fellow—between West End and this? What can have happened?”

“I neither know nor care.”

“Nor I—nor I—but a man can’t help his forebodings!”

And Harding shuddered as he shut the library door, and lit the fire with his own hands, though the night was so warm; and cowered over it till daylight, a ghostly satire on the loud, flamboyant, cocksure head of last night’s dinner-table.

​The eye of the guest was on him till it dropped with weariness; and at sunrise they both retired.

Claire in her room had never closed an eye. She did not come down to breakfast, and her aunt presided in her stead.

Lady Starkie thought her brother and his guest a pair of wrecks, and did not wonder at it when they told her to what hour they had sat up. But that was all they did tell her; and the lieutenant-general’s widow departed for Bath in the forenoon, little dreaming what a storm was to burst within the hour.

When she was gone Mr. Harding ordered his coach for another expedition to West End. Daintree again accompanied him, and looking back as they drove away, saw a white face vanish from the window whence the light had disappeared on their return from the earlier pilgrimage overnight. He gnashed his teeth, but said nothing; and they drove on in a common preoccupation.

The fields were dazzling green in the sweet, hot sunshine; the hedgerows sparkled with a million emeralds; and up the hill to the right, beneath a row of horse-chestnuts clouded over with young leaves, the white trousers and shiny hats of a body of police caught without riveting Mr. Harding’s roving eye. The sun shone brilliantly upon the cool green spot where they stood; but yet another constable, with a tall companion in plain clothes, was descending the right-of-way, and reached the road-side stile as the coach passed.

“There seems to be something astir there,” observed Daintree, pointing to the group up above.

Mr. Harding glanced in the direction indicated, and then sat looking straight in front of him until the red roofs of West End rose above the hedge to the left.

​At the cottage where Blaydes had lodged nothing had been heard as yet. The good wife was strenuously civil, as if to make up for any asperity in the night; but the gentlemen learned no more now than then. As they turned away, however, the wicket clicked, and they stood face to face with a police-officer and a dingy, tall civilian.

“The men we saw just now!” cried Daintree, as Nicholas Harding clutched his arm. “Do you know anything of Captain Blaydes, my man?”

“Was you looking for him?”

“Yes, we were; or, rather, this gentleman was.”

“Then you’ll never find him, sir, in this world.”

“What?” shrieked Harding; and he was more shaken by the truth than even the dead man’s landlady, who brought a chair from the kitchen, upon which Mr. Harding sat shaking in the sun, with his full-blooded face turned to purple, and the great jaw sunk upon his stock.

“He was a friend of my friend,” explained Daintree, below his breath; but Harding heard.

“A friend?” said he. “Heaven knows about that; but I expected him at my house last night—expected him every hour!”

The personage in plain clothes declared himself a detective from Scotland Yard, and told the landlady that he should require a few words with her alone. The pair then withdrew into the house; but the policeman remained outside, and sold his tongue for half a guinea. The two gentlemen thus learnt before mid-day all that appeared in that evening’s papers, with one addition and one exception. The addition was a confident assurance that the police were on the perpetrator’s track already. The exception was merely a description of the dead ​man’s stolen property, which was then being obtained within.

“Now, in such cases,” said Mr. Harding, feeling for another coin, “what is done with the dead man’s papers?”

“Well, first you’ve got to find ’em,” replied the constable, with a grin.

“But in this case you have obviously found something; or how would you know who he was?”

“We found no papers, however.”

“No papers!”

“Not a scrap; but his linen was marked; and then we knew all about our gentleman. I’m sorry to say we’ve known all about him for some time. It was only the shocking state his head—”

“That will do,” said Daintree, bending over Mr. Harding’s chair. “You are ill, sir,” he whispered. “Let me take you home at once.”

Harding yielded, and tottered to his carriage, muttering, “I waited for him hour after hour; and this was why; and this was why!”

Claire was still upstairs on their return, and Mr. Harding nerved himself with a glass of brandy before going to her with the news. But it shook her less than it had shaken him. Her first question was the last to be expected by one as completely in the dark as Nicholas Harding. She wanted to know with what kind of weapon the crime had been committed. He told her (what the constable had told him) with a heavy ash stick, whereupon she nodded singularly, as much as to say that was what she expected. In fact she had divined the worst from the very beginning. But her apathy blinded him to everything else: he asked her ​how she could faint at a vague fear, and yet hear the terrible truth unmoved.

“You will know soon enough,” was Claire’s reply.

“But you seemed in such a state about poor Blaydes?”

“I was.”

“I made sure he must be the one you cared for.”

“He? Poor fellow! Never for an instant.”

“Then who is it, Claire? Daintree has told me the answer you were foolish enough to give him; and now I insist on knowing who it is!”

“You must not insist now; you will know soon enough,” said she again. And not another word.

Mr. Harding was nonplussed; there was some new mystery here, and until he should find its key he decided to discuss Claire no further with the suitor on whose success his heart was still set. Indeed, he saw little more of Daintree that day, but drove into the City after luncheon, and was not back for dinner. Hearing this, Claire dressed hastily, and braved the guest across a solemn board, protected from familiar converse by the continual presence of a man-servant behind either chair. Yet Daintree could not avoid the tragic topic.

“I fancy that Mr. Harding must be making inquiries at headquarters,” said he. “Have you seen an evening paper?”

“No.”

“I have the Globe. It gives a pretty full account.”

“Do they know who did it?”

“Not yet.”

“Not his name?”

“No.”

“Nor his appearance? Nor anything at all about him?”

​“No, absolutely nothing as yet; but it is only a question of time.”

Claire sat without eating a bite, while her fixed eyes slowly filled. “Poor fellow— poor fellow—poor fellow!” she suddenly cried out. “I cannot believe—” and as suddenly she curbed her tongue.

“Well, what?” said her companion.

“That—he—is dead!”

Daintree darkened.

“So you were thinking of Blaydes!” he said bitterly. “I might have known—I might have known!”

CHAPTER XI

COALS OF FIRE

All this time there came no word from the master of the house, nor had the coach returned; but between nine and ten it did, and Mr. Harding was out and up the steps before it stopped.

In the hall he inquired for his daughter; she had gone upstairs; he rushed up instantly. Claire was waiting for him at her bedroom door. He thundered in and shut it behind him.

“They have got him!” cried Claire, with both hands to her heart.

“Got whom?” said her father, sharply. “Got whom, eh?”

Her face fell beneath the angry glitter in his eyes.

“The man—they want—for this frightful business,” said she lamely, and sank down upon a chair.

​"And pray who is he? You seem to know!"

No answer, save twitching fingers, rocked body, lowered lids.

"If you were to hear it was that young Erichsen—would it surprise you very much? No, it would not!" It had only stilled her. "And now I intend to know why not! You have thrown sand enough in my eyes; but your manner this morning told me something, and I am determined to know all there is to know—before—I—leave—this—room."

And with no less emphatic deliberation the father strode to the door, locked it and pocketed the key; but was met on his return with such wild eyes and suppliant hands that even his harsh heart melted at the sight.

"Only tell me whether they have captured him," she said, "and I faithfully promise to tell you all."

"Well, then, they have not; but they precious soon will. Now keep your promise."

It was kept to the letter. She had been very wicked, she had deceived and disobeyed her father for months and years; but now she had her reward. She had been lonely at Winwood, so had Tom. They had just made friends when the fathers quarrelled; it was too hard for them to have to quarrel too; and Claire confessed that rough treatment had always stirred up rebellion within her, though never before to such purpose as then. So the friendship had continued, but had never been anything more until two years later, when Tom Erichsen was on the eve of sailing; and then—and then—

"I understand," said Mr. Harding, sarcastically; "that's quite enough. But why didn't he sail? How did you know he hadn't? And what was his connection with Blaydes?"

​Claire told him of the chance meeting near the Park; of her letter, and the secret interview that was all her doing; of Blaydes’s perfidy to Tom, and of the latter’s quick discovery that his enemy was their friend; of her first refusal to give him the address, but her ultimate and fatal surrender of the same. All this she told without fear or further hesitation, extenuating nothing in her own defence, but as much as she could in defence of Tom. A true woman, she had her theory of the crime already, and was quite convinced it was correct. Tom had indeed killed his man—of that even she had never a moment’s doubt; but he had not killed him intentionally, or struck a blow until Blaydes had drawn his deadlier weapon. She simply did not believe that Tom had touched either his watch or his pin; somebody else had done that—very likely the man who found the body.

Mr. Harding quietly disabused her on these points. He had spent some time at Scotland Yard, as a friend of the deceased who could give information; but he had contrived to gain more. He had thus kept his lead of the town regarding the facts of the case; and Claire was struck dumb with horror when she heard of the guilty flight from the coachman’s house, and of the undoubted possession by Tom of the dead man’s watch and chain. The father put it plainly, but without unnecessary brutality; nor did he belabour her with reproaches now that he knew all. On the contrary, he spoke of the suspected murderer with none of the vituperative bitterness which she had often heard him lavish on the detested parson’s good-for-nothing son.

“But you see,” said he, “what has come of your folly! You have entangled yourself with a young fellow whose fate, if he be caught, one would rather not ​contemplate; you may even be called as a witness against him!”

“Against him!”

“You certainly would be if last night’s interview leaked out.”

“It never shall.”

“And if you told a jury all you have told me, about the address and all that, I am afraid it would hang him if nothing else did.”

“Hang Tom!”

“Well, Claire, it looks to me very like a hanging matter; it would need a very clever, and probably a very costly defence, to give him the ghost of a chance of having it brought in anything less.”

“Then he must have it!” cried Claire. “Oh, he never could have done it—wilfully! He must have the very best defence that can be got; but, oh! who will pay for it?”

“I am thinking of doing so myself,” replied Mr. Harding, quietly. “I don’t say I will, but I may.”

“You!”

And the girl was sobbing upon his breast, with her arms about his thick red neck, as they had not been for many a year now. He removed them, but almost gently, and told her not to jump at conclusions, as he had by no means made up his mind: indeed, let them first catch their man. But as the lad’s father had been his constituent as well as his enemy, on whom he had perhaps been a little hard, he thought that on the whole it might prove the right and proper thing to do. Claire was overwhelmed, not only with gratitude for a first gleam of comfort, but also with shame. All these years she had misjudged that magnanimous man, her own father; and ​what coals of fire was he heaping on her undutiful head! She cried herself to sleep with shame and hope; and that was when Tom Erichsen was flying south from Westbourne Park, with the police in full cry at his heels.

Next day was the Saturday, and Claire was almost herself again, to the outward eye. She was early afoot, and met the newspaper boy in the road; she had thus first sight of the Times; but it told her little that she had not learnt from Mr. Harding overnight. Tom was still at large, that was the chief thing; but to-day there was a full description of him, and its accuracy sickened the brave heart which beat and trembled for him every minute of every hour.

This day was complicated by the return from school of the elder children of the second family. Two were still in the nursery; but two were weekly boarders at a luxurious seminary at Gunnersbury, and the tragic fate of Captain Blaydes was ordered to be kept from their young ears. This was difficult. The children were in evidence from the Saturday afternoon until the Monday morning. Then they were very fond of Claire, in whom they discerned a difference, and she would not tell them what it was. But on the Sunday morning, when they were all ready for church, and only waiting for Mr. Harding, in he came at the gate with a newspaper in his hand; and Claire ran forward to meet him; and she did not go to church with them after all.

Thomas Erichsen had been apprehended at Kew on the Saturday evening, and lodged for that night in the local lockup. The bare fact was read by Mr. Harding in next day’s Dispatch, and by Claire in her father’s face, before she heard it from his lips at twenty minutes ​to eleven in the morning. The girl created no scene before the children, and thus made a still firmer friend of her father for the time being; but her mental torture admitted of no further surprise at his amazing attitude; she was grateful to him, but that was all. On the Sunday night he came to tell her that he had made inquiries, and that the prisoner had been removed to the cells at the Marylebone police-office, where he would come before the magistrate next day. On the Monday morning she gave him his breakfast early and alone; and he then assured her that he was going to see what could be done.

“But not a word of this to anybody,” he added, as the coach came around. “If I do anything, it may be best to do it secretly after all. But I shall first consult my lawyer. I don’t want Daintree, for instance, to know anything at all about it; he might misconstrue our interest in so near a neighbour; and I have already told him that we hardly ever saw and never spoke to young Erichsen in our lives. Do you hear me, Claire? You are to back me up in this, or I wash my hands of the whole affair. I have forgiven you freely for what is past; you must promise me to keep it rigorously to yourself, not only now, but hereafter always!” Claire promised.

Mr. Harding did not consult his own lawyer at all. But he went on foot to the purlieus of the Old Bailey, and there mounted to a noisome den, with his shoulders up and his hat well over his eyes. He departed as furtively some minutes later; and was followed down the breakneck stairs by an unclean vulture of a man, with snuffy beak and grimy talons, who skipped into a cabriolet and was driven at speed to the Marylebone office.

​There was a dense crowd outside, but with the free use of his own elbows and Mr. Harding’s money, the Old Bailey lawyer fought and bought his way in. He was in time to witness the formal remand of Thomas Erichsen, and to draw his own conclusion from the bold fixed eyes and tremulously scornful lips behind the iron railing of the dock. That look was less for the magistrate than for the opera-glasses of the noble lord whom the magistrate had allowed upon the bench. But the Old Bailey lawyer read it his own way: here was a glaringly guilty man putting a face of brass upon a heart of putty: the very type with which he was best accustomed and most competent to deal. So the vulture took a pinch of snuff that resounded through the court, and, on the prisoner’s removal, squeezed out himself to make inquiries. It was as he expected. The prisoner would be conveyed immediately to the new prison at Clerkenwell. But the attorney managed to get away first through the swelling crowd now on tip-toe for the prison van; and in a neighbouring tavern he had his heartiest meal that year, also with Mr. Harding’s money.

Between three and four he presented himself, well primed, at Clerkenwell, and sent in a greasy card to the prisoner.

“He is much obliged, but he doesn’t want to see you,” said the turnkey, on his reappearance.

“Tell him I am commissioned by his friends to get up his defence. No expense to be spared. Tell him that.”

The turnkey was gone longer, but came back shaking his head.

“He says it is impossible. He has no friends. And you mention no name.”

​“That is true; but my client’s name is the one thing my client will not give.”

This did it; the ambassador returned beckoning, and conducted the visitor to a narrow dark cell, at the end of which glowered the prisoner on his bed. Two more turnkeys joined them at the door.

“Do you want to be alone with him?” said they.

“It is absolutely necessary.”

“Very well. We wait outside.”

And the three officials withdrew across the corridor, and chatted a little, but kept an eye on the open door. They saw the lawyer seat himself upon the chair, at a gesture from the prisoner, who restrained him with another as he edged it nearer and nearer the bed. They heard the lawyer’s whisper, low and rapid, and saw his dirty gesticulating fingers; but not his face; only that of the prisoner, very calm and cold. Suddenly it flared up; and next instant the visitor was hurled through the open door, and Thomas Erichsen stood with the empty chair poised a moment, before dashing it after him with a yell of rage.

Two of the turnkeys rushed in and secured this caged tiger, while the third knelt over the Old Bailey lawyer, who lay moaning outside.

“It’ll be a strait-waistcoat for you, my beauty, after this.”

“You’ve half killed him!”

“Half killed him?” roared Tom. “Only let in another of them, to insult and threaten me, and I’ll kill him quite, and deserve all I get!”

And he tore away from them, and flung himself, unstrung and sobbing, upon the bed.

CHAPTER XII

WHEEL WITHIN WHEEL

Mr. Harding drove home in a dull fury, and was met by Claire upon the steps. Her heart sank at his face. He passed her without a word. She followed him into his library, and there besought him to tell her what had happened now.

“Oh, nothing. I wash my hands of a young demon; that’s all.”

“Tom Erichsen?”

“Yes.”

“You have changed your mind!”

“I have.”

And he told her how the prisoner had treated the attorney he had sent him that very afternoon; committing a brutal and unprovoked assault upon the very man who was there to save his life, if that had been possible. It was not. The villain would hang, and rightly too. But there was gratitude! There was a young tiger in human shape!

Claire kept her head, and gradually Mr. Harding cooled down. Then she asked questions, and discovered that it was not the family lawyer who had been so grossly handled, but one whose name was new to her.

“Hattersley never touches criminal work,” said her father; “besides, I should have been ashamed to ask him. No; I went to the very man for the job; and this is all the thanks I get!”

“Did he know it was you?”

“No; I sent word I would give any money, but not my name.”

​“That message was delivered?”

“It was.”

“Something more must have been said!”

“Hardly a word; my man was proceeding to business, when this maniac sprang upon him and flung him out of the cell.”

Claire shook her head.

“I cannot think that’s all that passed,” said she.

“It was, though; you ask the warders. There were three of them outside the open door, and they’ve put him in a strait-waistcoat for it, at any rate! So you see how he has made use of the chance I gave him. Don’t ask me to give him another, that’s all.”

“No, no,” said Claire, sadly; “it was only too noble of you to give him one at all, and I shall never, never, never forget all this—your forgiveness— everything! Papa, dear, you may not have me with you very long; how can one go on living after such a thing? I loved him, and I long to die. But until I do, I promise one thing. I may deceive others, but never again will I deceive or disobey my own dear father!”

She spoke with the sad fortitude of sheer despair; and she left Nicholas Harding in an icy exhalation, with one tingling spot, where she had stooped and kissed his face.

Claire had hardly reached her room, when there was a knock at the door, and in came Hannah with a neat sealed packet.

“Oh, please, miss, Mr. Daintree said I was to give you this.”

“Mr. Daintree!”

She had seen him during the day; then what could he have to say to her which would not bear plain verbal ​utterance? Claire opened the packet when the maid was gone, and found a smaller packet and a letter inside. The letter ran,—

“Dear Miss Harding,—Think what you will of me for slandering the dead; I can bear it better than to see you mourning one who was never worthy to touch the hem of your garment. The enclosed will give you a true insight into the character of the late Captain Blaydes; but I make a separate packet of it, so that you may destroy it unread, if you prefer not to know, and to think me the liar.

“You may remember telling me that Captain Blaydes had the room that I have now, when he was here and I was not. That was the week before last. The weather has been so warm, the fire has not been alight since my return; and today, quite by chance, I discovered, torn up in the grate, the fragments which I have put together and now enclose. I will not tell you the word that caught my eye and irresistibly impelled me to put the letter together and read it through. Nor will I seek to defend an action that will no doubt condemn me in your eyes for ever. It was dishonourable. I admit it. But I am a believer in instinct. My instinct always told me that that man was a bad man; and my instinct told me then that I was within reach of proving its own unerring truth, and the measure of a villain’s villainy. I have done both, as you will soon see, if you can nerve yourself to know the truth; if not, condemn me with a glance, or with words as bitter as you please, and I leave this house to-night and for ever. I shall never regret what I have done. You mourn a traitor; and I had rather forfeit your respect—nay, and my own honour to boot—than let one so divine waste another sigh on one so devilish!

“But if you forgive me, oh, let me hear it from your own sweet lips; and I will move heaven and earth to atone for what present misery this may inflict. One day you will thank me: meanwhile, if you do not spurn, command me, and your lightest word shall be my law. If only I could do something for you! My one remaining chance of happiness is in serving her I may not love.

“Humbly and sincerely always,
“James E. W. Daintree.”

​

Claire arrived at the last paragraph with a mind made up. She perceived with amazement the writer’s theory regarding the wretched Blaydes and herself; it had never struck her that her every agitation might be thus misconstrued; and her first impulse was to set Daintree right upon the point. She would then return the incriminating enclosure unopened: that would be a sufficient rebuke for an action as it were so honestly dishonourable; and at these decisions her nimble mind had arrived before she came to the last paragraph.

This she read over more than once, with a puckered forehead and a changeful eye, as eagerness, reluctance, hesitation and decision, shame and pride, whipped across her face like shadows and sunbeams on a gusty day. And suddenly she tore open the enclosure, and felt as mean as Daintree from that moment, though she barely glanced at what she found.

It was an obviously genuine letter, addressed to Blaydes by some poor woman, but that was all Claire allowed herself to discover. A feeling of incredible meanness made her hot all over, and she turned the letter upside down to examine the method of reconstruction. With abominable ingenuity Daintree had pasted the scraps upon a sheet; a few were missing; many were black from the coals. Claire shuddered, and glanced at her own fireplace; it was laid and all ready for lighting. A moment later it was lit, and the dead man’s letter was blazing in its midst. Then Claire breathed again, and took another look at Daintree’s warning before burning it too.

“An interesting revelation of character,” said she, when this was done. “I shall never think the same of him again; nor of myself either; but what does that matter, since I can never think the same of Tom? ​Nothing matters, except saving his life! And here is a man who says he’ll do anything for me. Will he? We shall see!”

She had a word with Daintree before dinner. “Forgive you? I thank you with all my heart!” said she. And great was the change in her this evening. It was no time for gaiety, but Claire was animated; her eyes sparkled; she conversed freely on the topic of the hour; and when Mr. Harding was moved after all to give Daintree a judicious version of his attempt to provide fair play for a dastardly constitutent, with the result, the girl took her father’s breath away by looking hard at their guest, and declaring that she would finance the defence herself if she had the money.

“What on earth did you mean by saying that?” asked Mr. Harding afterwards. “Have you forgotten your word of honour, that nobody should ever suspect what had existed between you and Erichsen?”

This was when the girl had said good-night. Mr. Harding followed her upstairs. It was his first chance of speaking to her, for Claire and Daintree had been together in the garden all the evening.

“No, papa,” she replied; “I have forgotten nothing that I said to you. Mr. Daintree, at any rate, suspects nothing at all.”

“You said enough to make him!”

“I don’t think I did.”

“Not when you said you’d pay for a defence if you had the money? Are you aware that he thinks you were in love with the murdered man?”

“He thinks I was, but that something has since caused a complete revulsion of feeling—as to which I may as well explain everything.” And she told the incident ​of the letters without hiding a thing. “So he thinks it quite natural that I should fly to the other extreme, and want no human creature to hang for one so base. You see,” said Claire shrewdly, “he is a man of extremes himself.”

“Then, instead of undeceiving him, you have literally fooled him to the top of his bent?”

Claire blushed hotly. “I cannot help that. I may make up for it some day. Any woman would do the same.”

Mr. Harding was slow to understand.

“That he should never know what I know,” said he, “is right enough; but why carry the thing so far? Why pretend this revulsion?”

Claire hung her head.

“Come, come!” he cried. “You promised to hide nothing more from me. You are hiding your chief motive. What is it?”

“I would rather not say.”

“And I insist on knowing.”

“Very well, then; it is to give Tom Erichsen another chance.”

Harding turned livid.

“That young—”

“Oh, don’t be angry! You know you thought of it yourself. And I loved him; could I leave a stone unturned?”

“But what can Daintree do?”

“What you thought of doing yourself.”

“He has never consented?”

“Eagerly. He is going to have a solicitor at Marylebone tomorrow morning.”

Mr. Harding glared at the girl, who flung back her ringlets and met his look, unafraid and unashamed.

​“And suppose I put my oar in?” said he, savagely.

“Then you would have to tell him the truth.”

“Oh, curse your infernal woman’s wit!” cried he. “Are you not ashamed of yourself, that you can stand there looking me in the face?”

“No, I am not ashamed to try to save this life by hook or crook. It is the life of the man I loved.”

“Loved! So you don’t love him now? Like everybody else, you believe him guilty? Well, well, that’s something!”

“Not of murder,” she said. “That I’ll never believe. The other struck first; that is what we want the best man at the Bar to prove!”

He supplemented his cruel irony by laughing aloud at her notions of criminal law. She reminded him it was himself who had put them into her head; her view tonight was only his of the night before.

Harding changed his ground. “If you get him off with his neck—what then?”

“I shall be grateful to Mr. Daintree all my life.”

“I daresay, but I want more than that. You said something about making up to him for this. Will you marry him if he asks you when it’s all over?”

Claire turned very pale. “I pray God he never may,” she whispered.

Mr. Harding looked her through and through. “Well! I may or may not interfere,” said he. “I make no promise either way.” And at last she was left in peace.

She fell upon her knees, and prayed more fervently than ever in her life before.

“Oh, God,” cried this loving heart, “forgive me, and save poor Tom! Thou knowest these sins I have ​committed for his sake; forgive them, Lord, for the sake of Him whose Love passed the love of us poor women. Or let me never be forgiven, but save poor Tom from the most terrible death a man can die. Save him, O Lord; and forgive him too. And in Thy mercy, give me strength and time to atone to whomsoever I have wronged and deceived; then take me quickly, for my poor love’s sake. Amen.”

CHAPTER XIII

A FORLORN HOPE

About a quarter to eleven next morning, before the adjourned examination had been many minutes in progress, a smart, slight gentleman was seen to shoulder his way into the well of the Marylebone police-office and touch the prosecuting barrister on the arm. The capable face, now a trifle flushed, was well known in that court, and at sight of it the learned counsel shrugged his shoulders and sat down. Thereupon the interloper bowed briskly to his worship, who had already recognised him with a sigh.

“Well, Mr. Bassett?”

“I must apologise to your worship for being late; but, in point of fact, I have just this minute been instructed for the defence.”

“Do I understand that you have not yet seen the prisoner with reference to the charge I am now hearing against him?”

“There has been no opportunity, your worship. Up ​to ten o’clock this morning I had received no communication upon the matter.”

“Dear me! dear me! Then I suppose you want to confer with him here in court?”

“With your worship’s leave—”

“And mine!” said a hollow voice heard for the first time by every ear; it was that of the prisoner in the dock.

The effect was instantaneous; a volley of eyes hit the accused as one pair; but his own remained unshaken upon the raised eyebrows and creased forehead of the smart young solicitor secured by Daintree that morning.

“Do you object to being defended?” inquired this mercenary.

“Certainly; until I know by whom.”

“Indeed! Well, my name is Bassett. I am tolerably well known in this court—”

“That’s not what I mean, sir,” said Tom, respectfully. “Who has instructed you? That is what I want to know.”

“One who has taken your case and your interests to heart.”

“An anonymous friend?” And the prisoner’s voice trembled.

“Exactly.”

“Then I’ll take nothing from him. I know that friend! I know him!”

A policeman whispered to Bassett, who approached the dock and said in a lower and a friendlier voice, “You are quite mistaken. This is another gentleman altogether. He wishes you to have fair play.”

“Then let him give his name.”

​Bassett turned and ran a keen eye over the crowded court. At the same moment a slip of paper was passed across the sea of heads, and put into his hand. “Ah! Here it is, I make no doubt,” said he. It was not, however, and his eyebrows showed it; but he handed the paper to the accused without comment.

And Tom read—

“Solicitor instructed by one who believes you innocent, and will save you if he can. For God’s sake let us try.”

The words danced beneath his eyes, and these were swimming when he raised them behind the iron railing of the dock.

“I accept with gratitude!” said he, searching pitifully among the faces for that of his unknown ally; and he placed the slip of paper in an inside pocket, with expressive deliberation and a touching smile.

“Then if your worship will grant us a few minutes?”

And as the magistrate bowed, the dead silence, which had prevailed ever since the prisoner opened his lips, ended as suddenly; it was like the upsetting of a slumbering hive.

“They’ve been telling you about yesterday,” said Tom, nervously, through the rails. “The fellow took it for granted I was guilty—among other things. Do you?”

The smart solicitor shook his head, and said they had no time to waste. What he wished to hear was the prisoner’s version of his last interview with Blaydes, from its origin to its end, and the prisoner would please be brief, and speak in a whisper.

Tom was brevity itself; indeed, he had his story almost suspiciously pat, for he had already made up his mind as to the one fact which he intended to sup​press. This was the source of his information as to Blaydes’s latest whereabouts. He owned to no such information at all. The meeting was a chance meeting, that was to be his solitary lie.

He told it and it passed unchallenged; but when he came to the transaction of the watch, the solicitor’s eyebrows shot to such an involuntary height, that the glib flow froze that instant.

“Go on, go on.”

“You don’t believe a word I say!”

“Nonsense, my good fellow. I believe every word. Come, come, they’re getting impatient. You gave him a receipt—and then?”

Tom finished with a leaden heart and tongue. To his surprise, however, Mr. Bassett was all smiles when he had done; then he put a few questions; and the lamer the answer, the sprightlier the solicitor’s nod. The latter, in fact, foresaw a defence about as weak as one could be, but a case even more sensational than he had supposed. And sensation happened to be this brisk practitioner’s professional loadstar.

Proceedings were resumed at two minutes past eleven, when the witness Adcock, recalled, identified a pair of dilapidated shoes, and the mutilated elements of a beaver, as having belonged to the accused. Bassett had no idea what point the prosecution designed to make, but at once he gave a taste of his quality. He pressed the witness, and shook her as to the hat; but to the shoes she stood firm; she had cleaned them oft enough, so she ought to know. Then she cleaned the lodgers’ boots herself? Well, not all; and an adroit question or two revealed the fact that Erichsen had been her pet, and “one it was a pleasure to do for,” against whom she had ​appeared with profound reluctance. Indeed, she left the box, and rejoined the husband who had brought her there, in tears; and so the defence made a first meretricious point.

Nor was it the last. Jonathan Butterfield, unlike his relatives, had not been called at the previous examination; but he was now; and his feelings were worked upon in the same deft fashion. As, however, there was no jury to be simultaneously touched, all this was wasted dexterity; but it looked neat in the newspapers; and (what was better, but unintentional) imposed upon poor Tom, and gave him momentary heart.

Meanwhile the shoes and hat had done real damage; and this evidence was the more deleterious from being new to all. Guilty flight and ultimate capture had been fully dealt with on the previous occasion; but the equally incriminating interim was only now filled in, by the officers who had chased and lost a desperate housebreaker in the small hours of Saturday, but only afterwards connected him with the Hampstead murderer. The connection was established by the beaver hidden but discovered in the empty house, and by the shoes left on either side of the nursery-garden gate. Only two officers appeared; the third was in hospital, and one of the two had a bandaged head.

The medical evidence had been taken on the Monday morning; so had that of the crafty householder of Kew; yet his powdered head was again in court, and his humorous, sly smile looked as benevolent as ever, only broader and more subtly droll. Tom heard this public benefactor taking snuff in every pause.

The other new witness was one Richard Vale, who brought a whiff of cognac into the crowded court. His ​words ran into one another, but his evidence was all too clear. Witness described himself as a very old friend of the deceased. He swore that deceased had frequently told him he went in fear of the prisoner, who had repeatedly threatened him by letter, and to whom, in fact, the deceased owed a sum of money. The letters were now put in. They all related to a worthless cheque for £35—the sum in question—and without a blush witness explained about the cheque. The cheque-book was an old one of his own; he remembered the deceased telling him he had made use of it in the manner alleged in the letters; but he could not himself describe the incident, as, to the best of his belief, he was intoxicated on that occasion. And the witness stood down, having supplied the motive of revenge to a case strong enough, in all conscience, as it was.

Bassett hurried to the dock.

“I suppose you lost that cheque?” he whispered.

“No; I gave it him back with the receipt.”

Bassett turned abruptly and stated that the prisoner reserved his defence; a minute later he stood formally committed for trial at the next sessions of the Central Criminal Court.

“I’ll see you down below,” said Bassett, nodding airily to trembling Tom; but the latter pulled himself together on his blessed release from the public gaze; and the subsequent interview, in the bowels of the police-office, was business-like on both sides.

“When are the sessions?” asked Tom.

“They begin next Monday. No time to be lost!”

“Five days more. Well, it’s better than waiting. So you won’t give me my benefactor’s name?”

“I am pledged not to reveal it to a soul.”

​“Do I know him?”

“No.”

“Does he know me?”

“No.”

“Yet he thinks me innocent! God bless him!—God bless him! He must be an eccentric man, though, to help the helpless like that?”

“Somewhat,” said the solicitor, so dryly that Tom winced.

“You think I haven’t the ghost of a chance?”

“I never said so. Nor do I think it. But you made a mistake in destroying that cheque.”

“He destroyed it when I gave it him back.”

“There would have been less possible motive with the cheque in your possession; you could have taken proceedings on that alone.”

“Ay, but I meant to take them with my own hands!”

Tom would have recalled the words next instant. He saw even the hardened and alert police-court attorney shrink away as he said them. Bassett took a handful of silver from his pocket, counted a sovereign’s-worth, and handed it to Tom.

“There,” said he coldly, “I had that for you with my instructions, and you will need it at Newgate if you want to be comfortable. Use it freely. See you there tomorrow.” And he was gone with repulsion ill-concealed. Half-way to his office in Clipstone Street, he overhauled Daintree crossing Portland Place.

“Well? well?” cried Daintree. “I didn’t want to be seen waiting for you; but what do you make of it?”

“You’ll be throwing your money away—that’s a guilty man.”

“You think so?”

​"Think?" said Bassett. "Why, he's as good as confessed to me already! But that doesn't matter; if you still wish it I'll do my best."

"I do wish it, sir," replied Daintree, sternly. "Either the best you ever did in your life, or nothing more. Which do you say, sir?"

"Oh, I'll do all I know; that I promise you," said the solicitor. "I was thinking of you entirely. Why, the case fits me like a coat of paint!"

CHAPTER XIV

OLD NEWGATE

Tom Erichsen was committed for trial about four in the afternoon, by which hour the High Street of Marylebone was thronged by would-be witnesses of his removal in the prison van. But a recent experience, when a posse of police had to accompany the van with drawn staves, had taught the officers a lesson; and their prisoner was spirited away by the side entrance and a hackney coach, while the crowd were watching the gateway for that live man's hearse. The coach started westward down Paddington Street, but was on its course in a couple of minutes, without a solitary follower.

The two police-officers congratulated themselves and each other, but never took an eye off Tom, though they had him handcuffed and held by one arm. Tom, however, paid no heed to them. It was the third of May. The sun was as high as at a winter’s noon; it blazed in the bright shop-windows; it rimmed the cobble-stones ​with tiny bands of gold; for there had been a heavy shower during the day, that had purged the London air, and cleansed and sweetened the whole of London town. Tom looked out wistfully, and inhaled all he could, but it was not to be borne beyond a minute. The beautiful streets, full of happy people, were as a knife twisted round in his heart; he buried his face in his manacled hands, and could look no more.

By half-past four they were at Newgate.

Tom stepped through the sunlight into a forbidding vestibule—a very porch of despair—where a dimly burning lamp avowed eternal gloom. Here the newcomer was entered in a book, relieved of his handcuffs, and forthwith led through humid passages and nail-studded doors into the black heart of this horrible place.

In one corridor a large cell was being swabbed out as they passed. A horrid intuition chilled Tom’s blood.

“Whose cell is that?”

“Nobody’s now.”

“It was Greenacre’s! I had forgotten him; did he—die game?”

“Game? Not he; like a cur.”

Tom set his chattering teeth; but suddenly his eyes blinked: they were out again in the sun, in a yard some fifteen paces long, and half as broad as its length. A parallelogram of brilliant blue sky smiled cruelly overhead, cut on all sides by the high dark walls, and showing from the wet flags as the mouth of a well seen from its base.

“You’re consigned to Chapel Yard,” said Tom’s guide, “and this is it. I’m just looking for a wardsman, and then I’m done with ’ee. Ah, here he comes!”

A great, gross being, with an irregular walk and a face ​of solidified beer, tacked towards them as the turnkey spoke.

“Now, wot’s all this?” inquired a voice to scale. “Wot for are you a-bringin’ noo boys here for? Recepshun ward’s the place for them; they’ve got no business ‘ere.”

“Well, them’s the orders, and this is a special case. It’s Erichsen!”

The wardsman opened his half-shut eyes, and blinked incredulity.

“Gerrout!” said he. “That kid? Pitch us another.”

“It’s right,” said the turnkey. “Committed this afternoon.”

“Well, I’m darned: you wouldn’t think it of ’im, now would yer?” asked the fuddled connoisseur, half-sobered by surprise. A slow, dim admiration glimmered in the clouded face like a rush-light in a yellow fog. “Why, Master Erichsen,” he continued, “I’m proud to have ye in my ward. We know all about you ’ere, and this is a proud day for Number Twelve. I’ll do my best to make ye at home.”

“An’ it all rests with he,” whispered the turnkey, taking his leave. “Pay you his dues, and you’ll do well.”

Tom had already glanced down the yard, and noted two prisoners playing pitch-and-toss at the far end; another sitting on a wet flag, back to wall, knees up, chin down, an abject picture; and a third, in tatters, drawing near, open-mouthed. He now turned abruptly to the wardsman.

“What’s this about dues?”

“On’y a little weekly trifle for the pore wardsman; nothing to hurt, Master Erichsen—”

“I double it if I don’t hear that name again!”

The man stared. “You are a noo boy, no error!” ​cried he. “It’s very clear you don’t know Noogit, let alone Chapel Yard, where all the best men comes to, like yourself. Why, they’ll give you the ’artiest welcome ever you ’ad; you’ve done it big, sir, that you ’ave; and you that young! Come away to Number Ten, I’ll introduce ye, and ye’ll see. Number Ten’s where they’ve all got to, as you can ’ear for yourself.” Along the yard were, indeed, three open doors, and through the farthest of these came oaths and laughter, snatches of song, the ring of money and the rattle of dice.

Tom clutched the wardsman’s sleeve.

“Didn’t you understand? I don’t want them to know who I am—I double your dues if they don’t.”

“But know they must; they’ll soon find it out.”

“It’s half-a-crown a day until they do! Here’s the first shilling, and the rest to-night.”

“Well, as you like. It’ll be ’alf-a-crown a week for use of knives, forks, kittles an’ saucep’ns.”

“Here it is.”

“Thank’ee, master. I never forgit the blokes wot pays in advance. I sha’n’t forgit Thomas Erichsen!”

Tom was blazing. The man with the open mouth was within three yards of them. He rolled his light-blue eyes, and laughed high up in his head as Tom pointed to him in his rage.

“Oh, ’e don’t count,” said the wardsman. “’E’s stark starin’ mad.”

“What! you keep madmen here as well?”

“All sorts—mad—bad—glad an’ sad. See that poor devil against the wall! Now come and I’ll show you Number Twelve.”

The ward was a fair-sized room, with mats hung round the walls, for the prisoners’ beds at night. One such ​mat was in use thus early, whereon a human lump lay snorting in a drunken sleep beneath a couple of rugs; otherwise the ward was empty. Tom noticed the vestiges of a gaming-board chalked upon the deal table, and at the other end a pile of newspapers, in which, no doubt, his fortunes had been daily followed. After Clerkenwell, where the separate system even then obtained, Newgate was a revelation, or rather a succession of them, with the most amazing yet to come.

The wardsman opened a cupboard, invited Tom to have a glass of beer, and drank three glasses with him. The whole place stank of beer; its stains were on everything; there seemed to be an unlimited supply. Tom took his glass, and soon saw that he was being treated with a view to business. He was offered a flock-bed, instead of the mat, at an extra half-crown a week. This he declined; whereupon the wardsman, now fast returning to intoxication, offered to draw up his brief for a pound. He professed an unrivalled experience; was the recognised brief-drawer for the yard, under sanction of the governor himself; and had drawn up twenty-three last sessions, of which more than half led to acquittals. The boys reckoned him worth a waggon-load of lawyers any day in the week; he would do his very best for a pound.

Tom looked at the great sot sprawling over the table, and shook his head with a civil word.

“Fifteen bob, then.”

“Thank you, no.”

“Well, I don’t want to be ’ard on a gent on trial for his life. Say ’alf a couter!”

“No, thanks; the fact is—”

“Oh, if you’re that ’ard up, let’s make it five and be done with it.”

​Five shillings happened to be his regulation price.

“No,” said Tom. “The fact is a solicitor is engaging counsel—”

“Then why the hell couldn’t you say so at first?” roared the other, in a drunken fury. “But lemme tell you five couters wouldn’t draw the brief as’d save your neck; no, nor yet five ’underd; nor all the lousy lawyers in the country. An’ I’ll trouble you for twopence for that glass o’ beer!”

Tom threw the coppers on the table and went out, followed by his own name hurled after him in loud derision; but the wardsman’s articulation was no longer intelligible, and the brute himself stopped where he was, and lay down upon the one bed in the room, which was his own.

This man was himself a prisoner, under sentence of two years for criminal conspiracy. Newgate contained no wretch more mercenary or more debauched. Yet the regulations of the time set such a one in authority, countenanced his iniquitous emoluments, and allowed him to spend them upon unlimited beer!

The madman was still wandering in the yard, crooning to himself in a high falsetto. His blue eye, happy and vacant as the clear evening sky, fixed Tom as he emerged, and set him envying the man who came to Newgate but left his wits outside. The pitch-and-toss pair had disappeared; in Number Ten the sounds of revelry were louder and more continuous than before; but that dejected figure, with the bent knees and the fallen chin, still sat outside in the damp. Tom’s compassion was aroused. He approached, and found a stripling with a white, damp skin, bony wrists, and fleshless knees.

​“You oughtn’t to be sitting out here,” said Tom. “Why not get up and go inside?”

“Why should I?” rejoined the youth, raising eyes deep-sunken in a mass of skin and bone.

“Because if you don’t you may catch your death.”

“All the better! That’s my lay. I’m cold an’ wet, but it’s no use goin’ in there; there ain’t no fire when you do. I want to go straight to hell.”

Tom shuddered, but stooped down.

“Come, come,” said he; “I’ll give you an arm.”

“You’re a rum cove,” replied the other, looking carelessly up; “but I bet you ain’t kissed this ’ere clink afore, or you wouldn’t say that! Nice spot, ain’t it? But this is a sight better than the Middle Yard. I’ve bin ’ere afore, you see; this makes the fourth time; thank Gawd it’ll be the larst!”

He suffered Tom to help him to his feet, the shrunken shadow of a man, dressed, however, very respectably, in black clothes eloquently loose. On Tom’s arm he was promptly seized with a fit of coughing that sounded as if his bag of bones must split asunder; but he mastered it, wiped his hollow eyes with prominent knuckles, and said: “That’s better! One or two more like that’ll do my business.” Tom’s gorge rose to hear him; yet he understood the feeling. It had come to himself in the soaking, inhospitable fields; only now, with the shadow of death lengthening hourly towards him, he knew how little he had ever wished to die.

“You ought to be in the infirmary,” he said; “it’s a scandal to find you here.”

“No it ain’t!” coughed the youth. “It’s my own doings; Macmurdo ain’t to blame. I on’y come in larst night, and dodged ’im on ’is round this mornin’, ’cause I ​wanted to be with my old pals; and roast me if they ’aven’t served me out by winnin’ my last chinker!”

Tom wanted to lend him a little. The other refused, but with a gleaming eye. Presently he said he felt stronger, and would take Tom’s advice. So he quitted his arm and went into Number Ten.

Deterred by the din of oaths and laughter, Tom lingered without; but curiosity at length conquered aversion, and he entered a den of gamblers who never looked at him, so intent were they upon their petty play. Crowded round the table, upon which lighted candles had now been stuck in their own grease, were some thirty men of every age and type, save that the latter was in most cases one of obvious criminality. Lust of gain was on every face, the scum of every soul had risen to the surface. And in the forefront facing Tom, lean elbows like tent-poles in their sleeves, wet white hands, and the face of the consumptive like a painted corpse. A little heap of silver lay before him on the board; each minute left it less; and this was he who had declared to Tom that his friends had won his last coin.

Instinctively Tom’s hand felt in the pocket in which he had carried his pound of silver loose. Not a sixpence remained.

His fist doubled, but relaxed at sight of the hectic pickpocket and his pale, perspiring hands; the hair clung rank to his low forehead; the eyeballs burnt in their receding sockets; and even as Tom watched, his own last sixpence was lost before his eyes.

“So it ain’t done you that much good, arter all,” said the man who won it.

“Stop a bit!” cried the pickpocket. “I forked the ​flat’s wipe as well. I’ll put it on for a brown!” And he spat blood on it for luck.

“My handkerchief,” said Tom, calmly, from the rear.

“Is that the flat?”

“That’s him,” said the pickpocket, laughing hysterically; but Tom’s grudge was not against the thief.

“Shame on you,” said he, “to rook that dying man and bring him to this! Are you Englishmen or what? You ought to be nursing him among you, instead of exciting him to his death.”

A roar of laughter greeted these words; at an instructive interval, however; and eight or ten eyes looked down.

“A proper flat!” cried one.

“Parson come to rake in the churchyard deserter!”

“The Ordinary’ll give him a job. What the blazes did he do to get here?”

Suggestions followed, beast capping beast with bestial humour. Tom’s eyes, filled with pity, never travelled from the pickpocket’s poor face. Suddenly a new voice chimed in, “You’re all wrong, boys; it’s Erichsen himself!”—

The handkerchief was marked, and one had read the name.

The effect of its announcement was something incredible: all rose, save the pickpocket, who was unable. A hushed awe fell, but it was the awe inspired by sudden contact with a master hand. Tom shrank before their vile, admiring looks; they admired him all the more; the tainted air hummed with compliments, condolences, criticisms and cross-questions. One or two said he deserved to die for a clumsy workman. A thick-set young fellow, with a sleek face and his hair in his ​eyes, elbowed his way to the front and wanted to shake hands because they were in the same boat.

“Sling us your mauley, old cock!” cried he.

Tom declined the honour.

“Then double them, you cuckoo!”

Tom declined again; a ring was formed, but he refused to enter it, and turned a deaf ear to their taunts. It was notable, however, that only the tongues interfered with him; not a single hand; and the shrewder men saw it was not cowardice. Tom’s sad eyes would not leave the dying thief, who was now sprawling across the table, with his death’s head on one skinny arm, fast asleep.

To keep an eye on this poor fellow, Tom remained in Number Ten Ward, arranging the matter with the new wardsman, who seemed a well-disposed, weak vessel. At supper-time there came the turnkey who had conducted him to the yard, to whisper that a hot meal had been sent in from outside by his friends, and he might have it in the Bread Room if he liked to make it worth a man’s while. “Friends!” thought Tom. “It is my one true friend, who doesn’t disbelieve in me, and whose very name I don’t know.”

He noted the impression that he was one who could pay for things, and its effect upon the small official fry. But he said he would take his supper where he was. When it came he put it before the sleeping consumptive, gently woke him, saw him finish every morsel, and himself supped on gruel from a pail. He was directly annoyed no more that evening, but his challenger talked at him after locking-up time, when they were all upon their mats. And this was in other ways an odious interval.

Tom had never been too particular among his own associates in the little matter of his conversation. At ​school, at college, in the stable-yard at home, his language had been more than free at times, and never studiously considered. This is stated as a fact, not a merit. Tom was not without refinement, but his spiritual armour was full of joints, or this his ruin had never come about. To-night, however, he first tossed on his mat—then clenched his fists and sprang up in the dark—but lay down again, recollecting his own footing in that foul place—and finally dug his thumbs in his ears and remained supine and ashamed. Hitherto he had held that he knew everything and could stand much. He altered his opinion in Number Ten Ward of the Chapel Yard at Newgate.

At last they tired of their talk and began to snore. Tom was himself dropping off when the poor fellow at his side woke up groaning.

“The sweat!—the sweat!” he whimpered. “Now I’ll have to lie in it, cold, till morning.”

“That you won’t,” said Tom, cheerily. He bad taken the next mat to the pickpocket’s from no unmixed sense of duty. The tragedy of this poor ebbing life had come with incredibly grateful effect between his own mind and his own woes. Besides, there was a fellow-feeling: they were both unquestionably cast for death; the only question was as to which would go first. So Tom was glad to have this comrade in hopeless case; he was thankful for the very glow it gave him to do what he could.

He stripped his companion, he stripped himself, and, by a moon-ray breaking obliquely through grimy glass and iron bars, he got the sufferer into his own dry things. Tom then lay down, half-naked, between the rugs supplied with each mat; having first tucked up his charge with all the care and gentleness he could command. ​And the pickpocket said hardly a word; but in the succeeding stillness Tom felt the feeble clasp of a clammy hand; and that was all.

He went to sleep with tears in his eyes, and dreamt of Claire at Winwood, on a bluff October day, with the wind in her ringlets, its glow on her cheek, but her little hand so white and innocent that he wasted all the time in longing to take it in his, but not daring for very shame. And from this sweet delusion he woke with a howl of pain. One had tied a cord to his toe, and was pulling it so hard that his very body had budged some inches. He had the cord between his fingers next instant, when it was at once let go at the other end.

But Tom was implacable when his blood was up, and it was boiling now. Trembling with rage, he found and struck a lucifer, and espied a rug shaking across the floor. He sprang up and dealt the carcase beneath as heavy a kick as naked foot could give; then snatched off the rug and caught one glimpse, as the match burnt his fingers, of the sleek, low, infuriate face of his fellow-prisoner on a capital charge.

“You little beast!” said Tom. “Yes, I’ll fight you now!”

The fellow had him by the legs that instant, and head over heels they went, upon men lying so close together they trod upon two at once. These started up, screaming blasphemies, while on the pair went struggling, the brute’s teeth in Tom’s leg, and Tom’s thumbs at his windpipe: until the place was in an uproar, lights struck, and the belligerents at last torn asunder.

Every man was awake and cursing—some in a passion, some with glee.

“Bedad, boys,” yelled the wildest voice of all, “it’s ​the Kilkhinny cats; let ’em chaw each other up, for the love av God!”

“That’s it. A ring—a ring!”

“They’ll save Jack Ketch his trouble.”

“A bonny brace!”

And that they were—Tom stripped to the waist, his nankeen trousers flecked with blood—his enemy foaming at the mouth, and struggling still in half-a-dozen brawny hands. Dips were lighted, the ring formed. Silence was then called, and something like it obtained, save for the innocent laughter of the lunatic in his corner, and the plaintive voice of the consumptive shut out on his mat.

“Let me see,” it quavered. “That’s no flat. That’s the best man above earth. Lend a mauley, old pals, and let a beggar see!”

So they dragged him out upon his mat, and made room for it and him, because he was too weak to rise. Ant in what ensued, his recumbent figure was the one that ought to have been watched, with eyeballs starting from their sunken sockets, and livid lips that tried so hard to cheer—when Tom spilt his man in the first round—and that failed so pitiably. But only Tom kept an eye on him; and so had it blacked through dropping his hands and darting to the pickpocket, who had fallen forward with the blood gushing from his mouth.

Tom got him in his arms, and pillowed the deathly head upon his naked chest. “Stand aside, lads,” cried. “The excitement—he’s going! Let the wardsman fetch help of some kind.”

The wardsman had been a weakly protesting part all that had happened; he was glad to get away.

The shrieking pandemonium was now silent as ​church. The worst man there looked on in awe at Tom with his closing eye and tender hands, and the gasping white face upon his bosom. Unheeded in his corner, the lunatic still chuckled at intervals; there was but one other sound. ...

A brief rally preceded the end; and a thing happened that might have chilled the coldest heart. Five nerveless white fingers, all skin and knuckles, were seen to steal into the pocket of him in whose arms the poor soul lay dying; and the member, but not the mind, following its vile trade to the end, so he died in the unconscious act.

The grey May morning came creeping through the prison bars. One in the background broke down in sudden sobs. The bell of St. Sepulchre’s tolled four; and as Tom laid his burden gently down, he awoke to his own bitter case, and longed for even that hideous night to begin again.

CHAPTER XV

INTERIM

Claire Harding had now adventured upon a narrow ledge. On the one hand she was bound to show a proper appreciation of Daintree’s exertions, which she herself had inspired; on the other, to feign a purely impersonal or benevolent interest in the unhappy youth on whose behalf those exertions were being made. So all day long she must be ready with a smile as false as any other summer’s, even though she spent the night in prayer for Tom and for her own forgiveness. Yet praying did ​not bring her peace of mind. She could not convince herself that she was in the right, that even her great end justified means of downright hypocrisy and deceit. There were two ways of looking at her conduct, and Claire, with a breadth of view which was her bane, saw it both ways from the beginning. She was acting a lie to save a life: that was one side of the matter. She was screening the guilty at the expense of the innocent: that was the other side. And if Claire was in any respect singular among women, it was in this inherent and not invariably convenient faculty of seeing the other side whether she would or no.

All her love could not blind her to the terrible strength of the case against Tom, and all her prayers could not unsay what Tom had said to her about the murdered man on the very night of the murder. “I’d hang for the hound, and think the satisfaction cheap at the price!” Those had been his actual words; they were for ever tolling, tolling in her ears; and strong though the case was, would they not have strengthened it still more? And good reason as all the world had to think him guilty, had not she, God help her, better reason than any living man or woman? But oh! she could not and she never would believe it of him; not murder; and even with that cry in her heart she did believe it, but fought to deceive herself a little longer. Her first theory, however, that of self-defence, was virtually shattered by his reported wholesale denials. Then what more was to be said for the desperate hero of a guilty flight, taken at last with the dead man’s possessions upon his person?

Claire could not imagine, but a clever barrister might; nay, would; and she set her teeth, and vowed that Tom should have the finest brain at the Bar to defend him, ​guilty or not guilty, and though she perjured her soul for the price. But this was not necessary; it was only necessary to act the lie; and Claire scorned herself for the slight comfort that mean distinction gave her against her will. The honest lie was unnecessary because she was dealing with a man of extremes, who neglected many things but did nothing by halves, and whom every passing breath left cold or burning. A breath from Claire could have but one effect, and Daintree was already white-hot for the defence. He had caught fire at a word, and from that moment made it the business of his life to rescue that of an obscure homicide. He could talk of nothing else; his passionate zeal chilled Claire with the thought of what it might turn to should he learn the truth.

Within twenty-four hours of the committal he came in brimful of news and self-importance. Claire was discovered in the garden, and informed who had been retained for the defence in a meaning voice which conveyed no special meaning to her; the name was a big one, but the girl was not a great reader of the newspaper, and she had never heard it before. She looked grateful therefore, but not grateful enough for Daintree, whose greed for her admiration was such that in the next breath he must needs tell her with what figure the big man’s brief had been marked. And then he beamed, for the girl stood thunder-struck at his words.

“Five hundred guineas!” she repeated, slowly. “You are never going to find five—hundred—guineas?”

“And why not?” said he, with ready pique. “Do you think that that colossal sum is beyond my means?”

“For a man of whom you know nothing—who has no claim upon you? Yes, I do!”

​“Pardon me,” replied Daintree in his most elaborate manner. “I know at least as much of the young man as does Miss Harding; his case has already excited her sympathy; he has therefore the very strongest claim upon mine.”

“Oh, but you must not do it!” cried Claire, impulsively. “It is too much for you to dream of doing! I am sorry I ever said a word about it! You are too noble, too generous, too good!”

He hung his head a moment, and then exclaimed, with the extraordinary passion of the man, that there was nothing he would not do to win such words from her lips; that she had repaid him already a hundred-fold.

“And remember, it is all for you,” he added, suddenly, as though he had caught her candour. “Let there be no mistake about that between you and me. Whatever I may do is not done for yonder prisoner, but for you and you alone!”

“For me!” whispered Claire; and she could say no more, thinking her voice had already bewrayed her.

“Yes; every bit for you!”

“But how can that be? He is nothing to us either. We did not know the family—you heard of the quarrel? And the young man was very seldom there, never once in our house.” So she still swerved instinctively at the lie direct, and despised herself more than if she had told a dozen. The situation was intolerable to her. She was on the brink of a rash confession, and such an appeal to Daintree’s magnanimity as should move a stone, when he took the last word and left her time to think.

“Miss Harding,” said he, earnestly, “I care not a jot what you may think of this case on mature consideration. I know how it appealed to you the other night, before ​your great heart pulled you two ways, as it is doing now. But that’s not the point. No, the point is that you asked something of me, and I mean you to know that what you ask of me that you shall receive, if it is in the power of mortal man to give. If I do not rescue this young fellow from the rope, then it is not in the power of mortal man to do so. But I shall, never fear; and then you will perhaps see that your lightest whim is more to me than the commands of God or man! And that’s all the reward I ask.”

She knew his flowery speeches, and what to allow for his habitual rhetoric; on this occasion, however, he rang only too true. Yet as she looked at him pensively, his eyes fell, as they had sometimes fallen before; it was as though, with all his passion for her, there was a something sinister and dishonest underneath, and he felt it when he looked long enough in her eyes. Claire did not connect honesty with herself at present, nor did she view the question at all from this point; but she found herself speculating upon the origin of the quarrel between Daintree and his people; and she thought of the flowers that had come back to him from his mother’s grave.

Later in the evening she worked out her own position, shuddered at the passing impulse to confess (which had long since passed), put Tom’s life before her self-respect and determined to act better from that hour. So the play went on before an audience of one, who had been taken behind the scenes, but who now looked on with eyes that saw not, so absorbing were his own affairs. In very truth, however, there was an audience of two; and but little was lost upon the unseen onlooker.

Daintree meanwhile spent hours every day with Mr. Bassett, the solicitor, or in waiting for him at his office; ​in the evening he would return to Avenue Lodge with the latest news of the prisoner Erichsen.

One day he had been removed to the prison infirmary; not that there was much the matter with him, but the surgeon was credited with a desire to reward Erichsen’s humanity towards a fellow-prisoner, who was said to have died in his arms.

But another fellow-prisoner he had fought tooth-and-nail the night before; and Mr. Bassett had a shrewd suspicion that the real object of the removal was to isolate a desperate man.

However that might be, he was doing pretty well in the infirmary; was said to be depressed, but not unable to eat or sleep. Daintree reminded Claire that the prisoner was having all his meals sent in from a neighbouring chop-house, and who it was that had ordered them. It was himself.

Erichsen was inundated with letters. Most were from religious strangers, who took his guilt for granted, and indicated several only ways to that mercy in another world which was neither to be expected nor desired in is. But the one that had given him the greatest annoyance was thought to have come from a near relative, for it was very long and he had torn it in many pieces, and then retorted in three lines and given it to the surgeon to post.

Claire knew who the relative was. She had gone the length of calling at Avenue Lodge, on her flight through town to the Continent, and her chief lament was not that murder had been committed, presumably by Tom, but that her name had been disgraced, her trust abused, her money spent in riot, and her life rendered unendurable in her native land. The lady was Tom’s step-mother.

​There was another letter which he seemed to expect every day, and yet not to expect, and it never came, but they thought he must be in love. Claire considered it unlikely; how could a lover have done such a thing? And had he ever written to any girl? Daintree said he would inquire.

No friends had been to see him, no relations; but a noble lord, the same who had encumbered the bench at the Marylebone office, brought a party of friends, and received payment in kind for his insolent questions. The prisoner was reported to have asked him if there were no hospitals where his lordship could see the legs and arms cut off and listen to the screams; to have recommended bodily tortures, as likely to provide better sport than a poor dull devil like himself, and suggested the nearest slaughter-house if all else failed. His lordship had raised his cane and been cuttingly invited to lay it on, as he might not have such a chance every day. Whereupon the party retreated, highly amused, all but their leader, who was said to have marched straight across the street to book a window for the execution.

When Claire heard this story, she showed her feelings in a rather perilous manner. “Well done!” she cried, and clapped her hands. “So they have not taken all the spirit out of him yet! Let us be thankful, Mr. Daintree,” she added in an instant, “that it is at least a man of spirit whose cause you have espoused. Next to an innocent man, a spirited man has the best claim on one’s sympathy. It would be dreadful if he were neither the one nor the other!”

“But you know that I believe him to be both.”

“I have heard you say so. Yet you never go near him yourself.”

​Daintree admitted his repugnance to personal contact with the prisoner. “I certainly prefer to draw the line at that,” said he, “especially as it could do no good. No, it was bad enough seeing him at Marylebone. I would give something to forget his face.”

“And why?” cried Claire. “Because in your heart, like all the rest of the world, you know him to be guilty! You may be sensitive, but you wouldn’t be as sensitive as all that if you honestly believed in his innocence. You do not. Yet you go on spending your money, throwing it away to gratify a passing impulse of mine! It’s madness, Mr. Daintree, it is indeed.”

The tears stood in her eyes as she spoke. But he had turned away as if unable to deny his latent unbelief; otherwise her face might have betrayed her even then. She felt that it must do so in the end; it was but another question of time. Such interviews left her spirit prostrate, her heart worn out with beating, and yet she sought them herself. The craving for news of Tom only deepened with the sense of his guilt. When Daintree was absent, the girl counted the hours till his return; when he returned, if she was not there to meet him, it was in order that he might think her less eager to hear than he to tell. And once when he not only thought so, but told her what he thought in his touchiest manner, it was a great moment for the actress, who was ceasing to feel ashamed of her part, what with custom and the dire necessity of it.

For now, more than ever, did Claire trust to the genius of the great magician retained for the defence; that vague power was the one hope left for her to cling to, and cling she did with all the might of aching heart and tortured mind. Claire’s notions of a trial were exceed​ingly simple, although her father had stood his within the year. On the other hand, her belief in the efficacy of counsel was unbounded, because Mr. Harding had been defended by a former officer of the Crown, and the charge had fallen to the ground, and everybody vowed it was the fine defence (combined with innocence); at least, everybody whose opinion Claire was in the way of hearing. Mr. Serjeant Culliford had not been Solicitor-General, but Claire was told that in a criminal case his rival did not exist. One night she heard that Culliford had accepted the brief; the next that he had probably earned his fee already, though Bassett would admit nothing of the kind, but complained instead of his own treatment at the barrister’s hands.

The fact was that Tom ought to have made a statement before the magistrate; then the defence would have had something to work upon at the trial. As it was they had nothing, until the learned serjeant devised a means of obtaining a statement at the eleventh hour. He went to Newgate, made Tom give him his version of the interview with Blaydes and of his subsequent proceedings; disbelieved every word, but kept nodding so encouragingly with his ugly, inscrutable, attentive face that Tom received the very opposite impression, and told his tale with some spirit and a gleam of hope. The great man heard him out, then glared at Bassett (who had given him a certain look), and addressed the prisoner in a kindly undertone.

“That’s all very well,” said he; “the only pity is that we didn’t have it at Marylebone; for you see your tongue will be tied at the Old Bailey. No, no, you couldn’t know. You may thank your solicitor. It was his duty to advise—”

​“Excuse me, sir,” interrupted that gentleman, “but I really must protest! I never supposed we should be unable to call a single witness for the defence, and I did not think the story—”

“Think!” snapped Culliford. “Who wants you to think? There’s a class of man, sir, that is most dangerous when it thinks; you appear to belong to it. Be good enough not to interrupt me again; we must have that statement by hook or crook to work upon, and there is only one way now of getting it as evidence. Tell a turnkey or a wardsman what you have told me, Erichsen, and the other side are pretty safe to put him in the box. Then I shall cross-examine him, and have something to talk to the jury about. Do I think we have a leg to stand upon? Two, sir, two, and better ones than they suppose; only tell the turnkeys exactly what you have told me; and good-day to you. Come, Mr. Bassett; I’ve something more to say to you.”

And so Tom had his eyes opened to the little ways of great lawyers, but his impression of his champion was by no means an unfavourable one; for the glib, spruce Bassett he disliked; but this rough tongue and rugged face filled him with confidence, and so redoubled his gratitude towards his unknown ally, who heard that he had spoken of him with tears in his eyes, and who did not fail to let Claire hear it too.

Upon her, meanwhile, the strain was beginning to tell; more than once she was within an ace of breaking down at a tell-tale moment. And just when her nerves were at their highest pitch, and the situation hardly to be borne, there came the new development which well-nigh turned her brain.

It began with a comparatively small matter, the un​provoked insolence of Claire’s maid; but this was the growth of days, not a sudden thing; though it was only when her jangled nerves could endure it no longer that Claire whipped out her purse, put a months wages on the dressing-table, and bade the woman begone.

Hannah the maid put her thin, strong arms akimbo, and burst out laughing in her mistress’s face.

“This instant, eh? And you think you’ll get rid of me for two-pound-five? That you won’t then—nor yet for twenty guineas. So now you know.”

“We shall see,” said Claire, moving over to the bell.

“I wouldn’t ring, miss, if I were you.”

“Then will you go? You have been insolent beyond words; force me to do it, and I shall send for a policeman to turn you out.”

“I wouldn’t do that, miss, either; or I may tell the policeman something you won’t like.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I say; but I don’t mind saying it plainer to oblige. I shall tell him who you were with on the night of a certain murder, and what he said to you, and what you could tell against him in the witness-box if they like to put you there! That’s all, Miss Harding. You look faint. I wouldn’t ring just yet if I were you; here’s a glass of water in the meanwhile.”

Claire had indeed turned white as paper. Instinctively she took the glass, but it slipped through her fingers and fell into the fender with a crash. The room seemed full of pale faces, low brows and venomous black eyes set close together, all spinning round her in nauseous whirligig like demons dancing. She sank into a chair and hid her face; but started and recoiled from the touch of cool fingers, wet with rose-water, upon her temples.

​“Keep away from, me!” she cried faintly. “Do not dare to touch me again. So it was you at the gate that night? I remember now!”

“It was me, miss.”

“You shut it?”

“I did.”

“And pray how do you know who he was?” and her voice was stronger. “You never were at Winwood in your life!”

“Perhaps not; but I can put two and two together as well as most: besides, I’m not that hard of hearing! Come, let’s be plain; you’ve confessed to the master, miss, and you’ve confessed to me.”

There was a pause for proper comprehension; then said the young lady, with ineffable scorn, “And to how many more—through your lips?”

“Never a soul! That was too good a one not to keep. No, I just seen him first, and then set to work to find out who he was. But I never said I seen him to a soul.”

“And why not to me until today?”

“Why, because I wanted to know your game. And it wasn’t that easy to find out; you see, miss, you’re a pretty deep one yourself!”

Claire sat still in her chair. She was now perfectly calm, and even experiencing an odd sense of relief in facing an overt crisis after so many secret tremors and hidden shocks. “And what is your object, Hannah?” said she at last. “Suppose they put me in the witness-box, what would you gain by it? You probably think I would do anything to avoid the exposure; on the contrary, I would tell everything to the whole world if I thought it could do any good. But the case is so black already that, on the other hand, it could do very ​little harm. Your threat is less terrible than you imagine.”

“Is that so?” with an evil smile. “Hey-day! but it’s an artful one. Suppose I told that there Daintree, instead of the police? What then?”

Claire had suspected this. Yet it took her breath away when it came. “So you are a professional spy!” she gasped. “I might have known it all along, you vile woman, from your face!” To be sure she might have known it then; for the sallow face turned a deeper yellow; the black eyes came as close together as the nozzles of a double-barrelled gun, to blaze as though both triggers had been pulled at once.

“Ah, yes! We don’t all show it in our faces, do we?” hissed the woman. “And which is the worst, I wonder—them that does or them that doesn’t? Is it worse to cheat the man that’s fond of you, like you’ve done, or to tell him, as I mean to do, that he’s being cheated? You think you’ve found me out; he shall find you out! To make one lover pay for the other lover’s defence—a pretty game—and five hundred golden guineas—a pretty price! But he hasn’t paid them yet; no, and he never shall; you may take your oath to that!”

“He must,” said Claire, in a whisper. “The trial begins the day after to-morrow. He has gone too far to draw back now.”

“Not he, when I tell him all I know. He’d pay another five hundred to get your fellow hung! You know him, and you know that, too, as well as I do.”

“I don’t know it,” said Claire, with a last brave effort. “I know that I have been more than once on the verge of telling him myself. But if you tell him—now—after all these dreadful days, well”— with a sob—“it ​will kill me, and there’s an end of it! Oh, I am no match for a woman like you. Tell me what you want, and it is yours if I have it. Money? You shall have all I’ve got!”

“Which don’t amount to much,” laughed the other. “No, but I’m glad to see you come to reason. Bothered if I don’t admire your game too much not to want to see it out now it’s got so far. Maybe I can lend a hand; but not for money. Here’s your jewel-box; you’ve got to make your faithful maid a few small presents.”

“Oh, take your choice; only hold your tongue.”

So trinkets rang like sovereigns in their tray, as this vulture picked and chose among them, and clawed first a sapphire ring.

“I’ve had my eye on this ever since I came!”

“Then take it.”

“This coral brooch is another of my favourites.”

“Take it, too.”

“These here earrings that you never wear; you’ll never miss them.”

“Take anything you like.”

“All right, then. Just to finish up, I’ll have the diamond pendant—”

“No! That you must leave.”

“You said I was to take anything I liked.”

“Well, it’s true I hope never to have to wear it again. I shall not want it in my grave, and that’s where I hope to go. Oh! oh! the sooner the better!” And the poor girl broke down completely.

“Stuff and nonsense, miss! And see here,” generously; “all you’ve got to do when you want to wear them is to ask me, and I’ll lend you any one of ’em you ​like, and welcome! Now, then; what do you think of me now?”

And Claire, looking up through her tears, saw the woman decked out already, rings in her ears and on her finger, the brooch and pendant gleaming and glittering on her black stuff dress, and a quiet smile upon her wicked face. Claire could almost have smiled herself.

“And for these you’ll hold your tongue until after the trial?”

“Till all’s blue, you mean! I should think I would—and do anything you like, miss, to lend a hand.”

Her mistress leapt to her feet, a living flame.

“Then put those things in your pocket and be out of my sight! Now—now—before I sacrifice him for a fiend like you!”

And this was how Claire was followed along her narrow ledge, by one who might push her from it at any moment: so that she had now not only her own feet to watch, but the treacherous hand behind her back as well.

CHAPTER XVI

THE TRIAL OPENS

A day or two before the trial, when Bassett called at the prison, Tom handed him a little, broken-backed card; and the speaking eye, that had been dull and dumb for six long days, was once more eloquent with light and life. Bassett took the card gingerly between an effeminate finger and thumb, and examined it with a critical brow. It was a pawn-ticket for a suit of clothes.

​“Well, my good fellow, and what have I to do with this?”

“Show it to my friend, and pray him, in pity’s name, to add to all his other noble kindnesses by redeeming me those things. It will be the greatest kindness of all!”

“What! To find you a change of clothes?”

“No; to help me look a gentleman at my trial. For months and months I haven’t cared a rush what I looked. But once I did; and I do now. It came back to me last night, when I found that pawn-ticket in this old waistcoat-pocket. I could hardly sleep for thinking what a sight I should be in court as I am. Oh, sir, you despair of saving me; I have seen it in your face all along; then save my self-respect, and I shall be as grateful as if it were my life.” It was his self-respect that had come back to him in the night.

The clothes arrived next morning: a brown frock-coat with three-inch lapels, velvet waistcoat, and Cossack trousers with straps. Tom spread them out with unforeseen misgivings.

“They are smarter than I thought,” said he, dubiously. “I wanted to look a gentleman, but not a dandy. I had rather remain a sight than come out jaunty in the dock.”

But he wore them after all; and round his neck a new black stock from the unknown open hand that he so longed to clasp in his; and in his eyes (though one was still discoloured) a spirited light that filled some hearts, and silenced every tongue, when the prisoner was brought into court. And so much for Thomas Erichsen’s desire to look a gentleman at his trial; it had made a man of him, which was better still. His appearance excited an almost palpable thrill of pity for one so gallant, so guilty, and so young. But we may pity and still condemn; and ​in all that crowded court there were but two persons who had not condemned Tom Erichsen before the trial began.

His own impressions may be noted. They were very intense, and very irrelevant. The court was much smaller than he had supposed; the judge and he were scarce twenty feet apart; that was Culliford’s wig almost under his nose; and there was a certain homeliness in such proximity, as also in the easy conversational tone with which the barristers presently got to work. The judge was a depressing old gentleman with a permanently pained expression; one of the first things Tom noticed about him was that the scarlet of his robes and that of the judgment seat were a violently bad match. As for the jury, their twelve hats were piled on the window-sill behind their heads; and Tom found himself more interested in the different sizes, shapes and qualities than in the faces of the men who were to decide his fate. Then the jury-box reminded him of the churchwardens’ pew in his father’s church, and he saw with dim eyes until a strident formula made him start, whereupon he pleaded “Not guilty” with a catch in his voice which so vexed him that he repeated his plea with emphasis, and glanced defiantly right and left. On his right were spectators and reporters in descending rows as at a theatre; but because the court was so much smaller than he had pictured it, there were also fewer spectators than he had been prepared to face. He was some hours in discovering that as many more were gloating upon the hair of his head and the tips of his ears from the public galleries behind his back.

The swearing-in of the jury again reminded him of Winwood days; the functionary employed had just such an intonation as a neighbouring curate there, and was ​equally indistinct; for though he repeated his formula twelve times, “well and truly try” were the only words Tom ever caught. Then at the further end of the front row of wigs and gowns, there arose a somewhat diffident gentleman, who proceeded to open the case in a somewhat hesitating manner, which set Tom’s heart beating, for this was the senior counsel for the Crown. He did not seem at all a formidable person; his sentences had occasionally no middle, quite frequently no end; and his gentlemanly, mild face was in striking contrast to the powerful, rude visage of Mr. Serjeant Culliford, who sat trimming a quill, with half a smile upon his long, thin lips, the personification of confident superiority. Tom looked from the one to the other, and his beating heart leapt: it was a weak man with a strong case against a strong man with a weak case; there was a chance for him yet.

The first witness was the mechanic who had discovered the body. His testimony was very short. He had run straight for the police, leaving the blood-stained cudgel precisely where he had found it in the grass. This witness was not cross-examined, and the police-officer whom he had summoned soon replaced him in the box.

Matters here became a little technical. The position of the body was elaborately gone into, judge and jury examining a prepared plan of the scene which seemed to demand a deal of explanation. Either the witness was obscure or the jury dense; the dejected judge stood up himself to make things plain to them; and for several minutes the chief sounds in court were the judicial undertones and a continuous crinkling of tracing-paper. Tom wondered at the waste of time upon an infinitesimal point; he had never been at a trial before; and ​the extreme deliberation of the whole tribunal was another revelation to a lay mind thus mercifully distracted from the vital issues at stake. It must be remembered, however, that this was not a guilty man; he had the open mind of innocence, the outside point of view; there were whole moments when he almost forgot who it was that was being tried. And, perhaps, in the ceaseless self-consciousness of guilt, Tom Erichsen was spared a keener heart-ache than any that even he had yet endured.

When the finding of the body and its exact position when found had been duly demonstrated to the satisfaction of the court, and counsel for the defence had put a couple of questions, counsel for the Crown informed his lordship that he proposed to take the medical evidence later; he would now trace the prisoner’s connection with the crime, adducing in the first place what he conceived to be an adequate motive for its commission. Mr. Richard Vale was thereupon called, but added little to the evidence which he had given at Marylebone as already described. The only difference was a cross-examination more rough than telling, in which disgraceful admissions were accompanied with a dissipated smirk, but which elicited no essential point in the prisoner’s favour.

On the other hand, this witness was again the peg upon which were hung the threatening letters; the letters were once more undisputed; and a passage in one of them caused the first “sensation” of the trial. “I warn you,” ran the text, “that I would rather hang than starve. Unless you pay me I shall do one or the other; and don’t you rely on dodging me much longer, for I am hunting you day and night, and will do till I drop.” The dead man’s landlady and a club porter gave supplementary ​evidence; the latter had forwarded the letters to deceased, and had caused the police to put a stop to prisoner’s loitering near the club.

Now came a working man whose face Tom had quite forgotten; but he swore to the prisoner as one of the two men to whom he had said good-night as he passed them at the stile in the Finchley Road, on the night of Thursday, the 27th ult., about half-past ten; and it seemed that at the inquest he had sworn to deceased as the other. Prosecuting counsel had hardly resumed his seat when Culliford was on his legs.

“You say it was about half-past ten. Do you carry a watch?”

“No, sir.”

“Then how could you tell the hour?”

“Well, sir, no sooner had I left them two gents than I was sorry I hadn’t arst ’em the time; but next moment I met another, and arst him; and he told me it had just gone the ’alf-hour.”

“And could you identify that gentleman, too?”

Dead silence and a puzzled grin.

“Come, come, my man,” cried Culliford. “Could you identify the gentleman who told you the time if you were to see him again? Can you tell me anything at all about him? Could you pick him out if he were in this court at the present moment?”

Witness caused a thrill by taking the question literally and scanning several faces before he would reply; then he shook his head; his recollection of the third gentleman was confessedly indistinct.

“And yet you could swear to the other two!” said Culliford significantly. And he sat down with his first real point ably made.

​A similar admission was obtained from Tom’s old friend and enemy, the hackney-coachman, who first swore to the prisoner as the man who had stopped his coach overnight, and was then examined as to the entertainment of prisoner in his house next morning, and his ultimate flight therefrom. Tom saw his counsel’s eyelids twitching before he rose, and he anticipated one at least of the three successive points now scored in his favour.

“When the prisoner sat at your breakfast-table,” began Culliford, “did you then, or at any subsequent moment, notice anything in the nature of a blood-stain upon his clothes or person?”

“No, sir, I can’t say that I did.”

“Can you say that you did not?”

Witness hesitated but told the truth.

“No,” said he, “I saw no signs of blood upon him, either then or afterwards.”

“You saw no signs of blood upon the prisoner either then or afterwards. You are quite positive, however, that the man who waylaid your fare in the Finchley Road was the prisoner in the dock?”

“Quite positive.”

“Then didn’t you recognise him in the morning when your brother-in-law brought him to your house?”

“No, sir, I did not.”

“What! Not when he was sitting at your own breakfast-table?”

“I did not.”

“Nor yet when you gave him the newspaper, and he read you an account of the very crime with which he stands indicted? You suspected nothing, saw nothing suspicious in his manner, nothing familiar in his face?”

​“No—not then I didn’t.”

“You suspected nothing and did not recognise him then; yet at a word from your wife you identified the prisoner with the man who stopped your coach, and you have so identified him ever since?”

Witness made the necessary admission, but attempted to explain matters, whereupon Culliford cut him short, and having gained the advantage which Tom had foreseen, passed on to one that was less apparent.

“To return to your fare,” said counsel; “did you notice any valuables upon his outer person? A watch-chain? Rings? A breast-pin in the stock?”

“I did,” was the rather sullen reply.

“Oh, you did; all three?”

“No; a watch-chain and a pin.”

“A watch-chain and a pin. What kind of a pin, now, should you say that it was?”

“A diamond pin.”

“A diamond pin; you can swear it was a diamond, can you?”

“Yes, I can, for I seen it glittering in the light of my near coach-lamp.”

“You saw the diamond glittering in the light of your lamp,” repeated Mr. Serjeant Culliford in his cool, ringing voice; and he sat down unexpectedly, but with an expression so satisfied that Tom lost much of the next evidence (that of the coachman’s wife) in endeavouring to account for it. He had not succeeded when the court adjourned for luncheon, for the hour of acute perceptions was over and had left him dazed, so that the venerable turnkey who had charge of him in the dock had to take him by the arm to make him leave it. Then it was that Tom discovered the public galleries behind ​the dock, and faced a firmament of eyes gleaming and straining for a first glimpse of his countenance. It flushed and fell—he was so taken aback—and he went down the stairs with a sob in his throat.

“Come, come!” said his custodian; “you’re doing much better than I expected. You’ve got the best of it in counsel, anyway; he’s made three or four good points already.”

Tom brightened a little. “But I didn’t quite see the force of that last one,” said he; “what was he driving at there?”

“Why, have you forgotten the only two questions he put the officer who described the position of the body?” asked the other; and he answered his own question while Tom was trying to remember. “The body was lying face down; he wanted to know whether they could see the stock as it lay, and whether there was a pin in the stock when they turned him over. Now don’t you see? That pin’s still missing, and they may prove it was better worth taking than the watch itself!”

Under the turnkey’s supervision, the prisoner was sitting down to eat in a cell beneath the court; but at these words he dropped knife and fork and looked up with hope’s fitful fever on his cheeks and in his eyes.

“I see! I see!” he cried. “Oh, what a magnificent man to defend a poor fellow like me! He’ll save me yet—he’ll save me, I do believe!”

“We’ll hope for the best,” said the turnkey; “but there’s no denying that’s a goodish point. You see,” confidentially, “we know what you done with the watch, but there’s none on us knows what you done with the pin!”

Tom started, stricken to the quick.

​“So you think—”

But words failed him, and he said no more.

That hour of respite was the longest of the day.

Tom was thankful to be back in court.

The principal witnesses of the afternoon were Mrs. Adcock, Jonathan Butterfield and the diminutive householder of Kew. Thus the trio who had made the world seem so kind a fortnight before, now typified its cruelty; for the evidence of the first two was reluctant but damning, and that of the last was supplementary in matter, but given with the officious venom and the transparent exultation of a personal foe.

But his old landlady shed tears as she described her last interview with the prisoner at the bar. It was with difficulty that things which Tom had said on that occasion, and to which she had already sworn at Marylebone, could be wrung a second time from her unwilling lips. “I’ll pay him” and “I’ll break every bone in his infernal body” were not the worst of the words which were extracted by degrees. Then the stick was produced in court; and the knob that had been so clean and creamy was now clotted over with a scaly, russet skin, like a coat of glue, at sight of which the witness turned as white as her hair and was given a glass of water in the box. The stick was then duly identified; the jury informed that the prisoner had described it to witness as “a rod in pickle” for the deceased; and the witness allowed to stand down, after a brief but painful cross-examination, in which the good soul’s fondness for Tom was betrayed by signs that touched him as deeply as anything could just then. His brain was reeling under the dread weight of her evidence against him; he felt its ​influence upon judge and jury as a palpable force; its very reluctance only heightened its mortal effect.

Jonathan Butterfield exhibited a like demeanour with a like result: it only showed that the prisoner had not lacked those common attributes of the worst rascals, an engaging manner and the power of imposing on the simple-minded. This witness, however, swore very positively that there were no marks of blood upon the prisoner when they were together. And though his sly successor as positively swore that such a stain upon the kerseymere waistcoat had first aroused his suspicions in the garden at Kew, and though this was afterwards proved in the medical evidence to be a blood-stain, it was eventually established that the blood was not that of the murdered man. The point was finally gained in cross-examination of the police-officer upon whom Tom had jumped bodily in his escape from the empty house. Witness admitted having opened his eyes to find the prisoner leaning over him with a bloody nose. And the defence had scored once more, but this after an interval so prolific of incriminating matter that Mr. Serjeant Culliford sat down with a sigh instead of a smile, and the prisoner at the bar longed incontinently for the end.

About this time Tom recognised a forgotten face. The sporting youth who had lent him a copper to toss with, and afterwards treated his starving body to a generous meal, was seated immediately above the clock in the central gallery at the back of the court. Turning in very weariness to see the time, Tom had a glimpse of bottle-green shoulders and a pair of twinkling eyes, set now, however, in a very solemn face, which it took him some seconds to remember. He looked round no more when he had done so, but fell to thinking bitterly of all that ​had befallen him through the spin of that borrowed penny. It had brought him here. It would bring him to the gallows in due time. And here in the gallery sat the last of those who had been kind to him in his extremity; since he could not bear witness against him, he had come to gloat over his trial, and would doubtless attend his execution next! Thus did injustice make a normally fair mind unfair and unjust; but the stolid expression of the man above the clock had rubbed salt in his wounds; especially as the same glance had shown him quite a ragged man, who buried his face in a dirty handkerchief as Tom looked up.

The long, tense day wore slowly to a close, but the prisoner’s interest was at an end before it: he had lost all hope. No more points were scored in his favour; his very counsel never glanced his way; he was fighting a losing battle with tenacity, but without conviction, and Tom scoured the court for a single face that should look to believe in him. There was none. The plain old judge looked more and more worried and depressed; his raised eyebrows meeting his wig as he leant forward to make a note of some peculiarly damning circumstance. The last witness of the day was the medical man who had certified death and conducted the autopsy. This was a stout gentleman with white whiskers and a benevolent voice, but Tom could only see the light shining on his bald head, as evening fell through the tall windows on that side of the court. Tom had counted the panes, still filled with a soiled, bluish sky, and was beginning to count the sparrows upon a smoke-charred wall without, when he was once more taken by the arm: the court had adjourned in the middle of the medical evidence, of which he had not listened to one word.

​As he turned to descend, there arose in the sloping seats behind the barristers a flushed face that gave the wretched Erichsen a new thought for the night: he thought, but could hardly believe, that it was the face of his old enemy, Nicholas Harding.

CHAPTER XVII

END OP THE TRIAL

It was!

Tom had entered the dock with his eyes on those sloping seats; it was Nicholas Harding sure enough, in the very same place, and there in good time, yet ashamed of being there at all, or why did he duck his great head the instant Tom appeared? There were more pressing questions than that, however. Why had he come? What did he know? Had Claire told him all, and sent him to see the end?

The prisoner’s heart began to beat as no witness and neither counsel had set it beating yet. A new and fierce desire for life and liberty ran like wildfire through his sluggish blood. Get off he must; his innocence must and should be proved, if only to baulk that vindictive snob come to glory in his destruction. His soul railed and sickened to think it was Claire’s father.

But a new light played in his eyes; a new fire flamed in his face; and, to complete the transformation, he leant across the bulwark of the dock, and the gaze that had been so errant and so apathetic was eagerly concentrated upon the white-whiskered doctor in the witness-box. Spectators of the day before looked on and marvelled ​at a change so marked. And Nicholas Harding was among the number, for, once satisfied that it was he, Tom had not deigned to look a second time in his direction.

The cross-examination of the medical man was longer and more persistent than that of any preceding witness. But nothing came of it. The object was also unusually patent and direct: it was to prove that death must have been all but instantaneous, and that it could not have occurred before the small hours of the fatal night. But this stepping-stone to an alibi was one whereon the witness could be neither led nor driven to set a foot. The upshot of much questioning and some ghastly details was merely to show the impossibility of fixing the time of death to an hour. The later period was not inconceivable, but more than that the witness would not say; whereupon Culliford was rude to him, and Tom sighed, for he felt instinctively that the doctor would have helped him if he could.

“One moment, Dr. Westmacott,” said the opposing leader, rising to re-examine as Culliford sat down. “You have told the jury that it is not absolutely impossible for this murder to have taken place as late as two o’clock in the morning; will you kindly tell them whether such a fact would be at variance with your experience as a medical man?”

“It would.”

Culliford shifted angrily in his place.

“May we not take it,” pursued the other, “that in your professional—”

Culliford sprang to his feet.

“You may not!” cried he. “My lord, I must protest against this form of question. My friend is leading. ​He shall not lead! This is a matter of life or death—I say life or death, for my friend’s instruction. He need not think that he is going to make it the latter by fair means or by foul!”

This righteous outburst was justified by the incidental letter, but certainly not by the essential spirit of the prosecution, which had struck the very prisoner as a miracle of restraint and moderation. The case against him had never been unduly pressed; all the pressing and browbeating had been upon his own side; and again Tom deplored what struck him as almost prejudicial ungraciousness on his counsel’s part. And it did no good; the question was put afresh, with a blush, but in an admissible form; and Dr. Westmacott stood down, having given it as his professional opinion that there was every probability of the crime having been committed before midnight rather than after.

Counsel for the prosecution, with the colour still in his face, then called his last witness, a Newgate wardsman, with the pointed observation that the jury were at length in possession of the facts; they should now hear the incredible story with which the prisoner sought to explain those facts away.

Up came Culliford on the instant, to object to the word “incredible,” which his own asperity had provoked.

“Is my friend going to make two speeches?” said he, sarcastically. “Let him keep his comments until he addresses the jury once and for all; it is for them to say what is incredible and what is not.”

Tom’s heart sank, for he had a depressing intuition that all this rancour was the sign of a losing side. But he was not in a position to gauge its effect upon the open mind of the average hearer.

​“That fellow will save him yet,” said one to another in the sloping seats to the right. “He is fighting splendidly—taking every chance.”

“Yes, yes; he has earned his money; may he succeed!”

The other made no reply.

“Have you no sympathy with him—you, of all men?” asked the last speaker in an indignant whisper.

Nicholas Harding lowered his head. “Hush! hush! He is looking this way. I don’t think he has seen me yet; he mustn’t know that I am here.”

And now the full, true, but improbable particulars of the prisoner’s last interview with the murdered man were laid before the jury by a hostile witness; and the great Culliford smiled again. Bassett had furnished him with a circumstantial statement of what the prisoner had said, whereby those of the witness were checked, amended and supplemented in cross-examination. The great man’s artifice had been entirely unforeseen; his “friend” sat aghast, while the infirmary wardsman perspired for twenty minutes under Culliford’s fire. Here he had exaggerated; there forgotten and filled in with a fancy detail; and “On your oath, sir!” thundered through the court with thrilling iteration. With the release of this varlet, the case for the prosecution closed upon an anti-climax. Culliford then stated that he should call no witnesses for the defence, in the tone of a man who could call twenty if he chose; and sat down with the most confident air, having thus secured the last word.

Counsel for the Crown proceeded to address the jury upon the whole case, beginning nervously but warming to his work. Stung by Culliford’s tactics and irritated ​by his manner, this mild gentleman abandoned for the nonce that becoming restraint which is still the accepted note of a criminal prosecution, and described murder and murderer in no measured terms. If the former had been brought home to the prisoner at the bar—if the prisoner were held to stand duly and fairly identified with the latter—then the heaviest punishment known to the law would be light in comparison with his crime. The defence he characterised as “indubitably brilliant”; yet he was afraid that the fireworks of his learned friend but served to illuminate the weakness of his case. For he had browbeaten witnesses as to minutiæ of time and place; but what had he disproved? The grievance? The threats? The fact that the prisoner and the deceased were seen together near the spot where the murder was committed, about the time of its commission? No, there had been a gallant attempt to disprove that, but it remained as much a certainty as the ownership of the lethal weapon, the black facts of the prisoner’s flight, and that possession of the dead man’s watch and chain which even counsel’s learned friend had not attempted to explain away. To be sure, he had elicited to the full, instead of attempting to disallow, the extraordinary story with which the accused had sought since his incarceration to account for those stubborn facts. The prisoner said he had given a receipt for the watch and chain! Then where was the receipt? And was that a credible or an incredible tale? Counsel had been reminded that this was for gentlemen of the jury to decide. Then let them do so; and if they found that story credible, then their duty was clear, and they would unhesitatingly acquit the prisoner at the bar; but if incredible, then their duty was no less clear, and they would discharge ​that duty like brave men and true, and so keep the oath which they had sworn to Almighty God. Counsel resumed his seat after a speech of astonishing power, and the court adjourned for luncheon.

Tom neither bit nor supped. “There’s still Culliford,” he kept saying to himself, “and compared with the other, he’s a giant to a dwarf. But what can he find to say to all that? Oh, what can he find to say for me now?” And the elderly turnkey’s pitying glances were a bitterer thing than his involuntary insult of the day before.

Culliford’s great speech may be dismissed in the shortest space, since only a verbatim report could do justice to the passionate eloquence and artistic force of an oration which held the court entranced for close upon two hours. And even then you would lose the dramatic pauses, the fine use of emphasis, the infinite variety of tone, now passionate, now persuasive, now sweetly reasonable; the slow movements and the quick—in a word, the masterly manipulation, by this born advocate, of every note in the oratorical gamut.

The speech opened with wholesale denunciations of a “virulent prosecution,” its “witnesses corrupt with prejudice” and their “back-handed identifications,” but especially of “that miserable gang of petty cheats—that school of sharks—of whom the witness Vale was a pretty specimen, and the dead man Blaydes the acknowledged ringleader.” Was such a man likely to have but one enemy swearing vengeance upon his discreetly hidden head? More probably a hundred, any one of whom might have committed this crime, and any one of whom might have pleaded unparalleled extenuation into the bargain. Why, the man carried a sword-stick—even to an evening party—to protect his ​miserable life! And counsel drew a true and vivid picture of the last encounter and the last parting between Blaydes and Erichsen; but here assumed his most matter-of-fact tone and air, because the matter really sounded less like a fact than any with which he had to deal. The receipt? Nothing more natural; the watch was to be pawned, not kept, and the ticket returned to the owner. Its disappearance? Nothing simpler; had not everything disappeared from the dead man’s pockets? The receipt had found its way into that of the real murderer; so had the diamond pin.

That diamond pin was the one strong point of the defence, and Culliford treated it beautifully; he treated it from every possible point of view. It was of greater value than the watch; a minor witness, the dead man’s landlady, had told them what the dead man had told her, that he had accepted the pin as payment for a debt of seventy guineas; and that statement bore a double significance now. On the one hand, it showed a partiality in the deceased for such transactions as he had afterwards entered into with the prisoner; on the other hand, it proved that if the prisoner had robbed and murdered the deceased, then either he had omitted robbing him of his most valuable possession, or else he had concealed it so skilfully that it had never since been seen or heard of. Surely the one explanation was as unlikely as the other! But the pin was not only the more valuable article, it was the more negotiable; and this capital point was driven home with an irresistible force that lightened every heart in court, that of the prisoner at the bar included. Here was the best argument yet. It left its mark upon every face. Even the judge looked less despondent; but the jury glanced towards the dock as ​one man; and there was a visible glow upon their cheeks, a visible gladness in their eyes, as though they could look a fellow-creature in the face once more. Then came the defence of the guilty flight, and in a moment there were twelve averted faces in the jury-box, and a very pale one in the dock. Culliford, however, was of all men the man for such a moment; he did not allow an unnecessary second for dwelling upon the great weakness of his case, but plunged therefrom into that final appeal for justice and the benefit of the doubt, in which the youth, position and gallantry of the prisoner were effective allusions, but no part of the plea.

“Do not mistake me, gentlemen,” cried Culliford in conclusion. “I am not craving mercy for a gentleman. I am demanding justice for a man. A young man, gentlemen —perhaps a younger man than any one of us here present—with all his faults and follies thick upon him—with all his life of serious effort and sober work and honest enterprise—ay, and of human happiness, too!—still shining and still smiling in front of him, but so smiling and so shining, gentlemen, across a gulf that you alone can bridge! And yet you must not bridge it on account of the fact of his youth, but simply and singly on account of the possibility of his innocence. Gentlemen, I pray you to remember that the possibility is enough. If a reasonable doubt remains in your mind, if the shadow of a doubt darkens your vision, remember that the benefit of that doubt is the prisoner’s by right; and may God in His mercy direct you to a right and just and generous finding!”

Culliford looked around him grandly, glanced at the clock, and sat down.

​Tom wrote “God bless you!” in unsteady characters on a slip of paper, and had it handed down to him by Bassett.

Culliford read it without moving a muscle of his face.

The judge then summed up. Of that depressed and depressing, but perfectly able discourse, there is but one word to be said. It was against the prisoner; and the jury retired to consider their verdict at 5.15.

As Tom turned to leave the dock he noticed a ragged creature with a dirty pocket-handkerchief before his face in the forefront of the central gallery. He remembered the same man similarly affected (as he supposed) the day before. It put him in mind of the one who had lent the coin, but he was not there to-day; and Tom thought of neither any more, nor yet of Nicholas Harding himself, as he went below to await his fate.

Refreshments were offered him, but he could neither eat nor sit down. He could only walk to and fro in the torture-chamber while the turnkeys talked of Culliford’s speech. One vowed it was enough to save any man; but Tom saw the look he gave his companion with the words. It was a relief when Bassett appeared, fresh and dapper as ever, and in the best possible spirits.

“You know,” said he to Tom, “if the worst comes to the worst, we can always get up a petition. There’s nothing like being prepared, and my plans are already laid. My good fellow, you shall make such a stir as no man in your shoes ever made before! All London shall have a chance of signing, for I mean to work it on the house-to-house system. I shall engage a special staff for the purpose! My word, yes, our petition will be the talk of the town—if things go wrong.”

​“So you want them to,” said Tom, bluntly.

“I—want them to?” cried Bassett, blushing.

Tom had no heart to push the punishment. “No, no,” said he, with a wan smile, “I was only joking. Good time for a joke, eh? Ha, ha, ha! Look at those turnkeys; they thought I hadn’t a laugh left in me. How goes the time? Six already? I say, do you think that Serjeant Culliford would come down and let me shake his hand? I would like to do that—especially before I know.”

“Culliford! He’ll have nothing to do with the petition, you know.”

“Hang the petition! I want to thank him for his speech.”

Bassett said he would see. He was away but a minute, and he came back alone.

“Culliford is rather tired,” said he. “He asks you to excuse him, but he sincerely wishes you good luck.”

Tom nodded. He could not speak.

So the hero of that noble, touching, magnificent speech drew the line at shaking him by the hand!

It was the worst thing yet; nothing else compared with it; but it had this merit, that it anticipated the great sting to come, and made the poor wretch smart so terribly in semi-private that his capacity for present anguish was exhausted before his reappearance in the dock. And, besides, it finally prepared him for the worst; for if his very advocate found him guilty in his heart, and for all his beautiful words, what other verdict could he look for from the jury?

Nevertheless, they deliberated until 6.50. Then a sudden hush upstairs emphasised the returning tramp of four-and-twenty feet. And, in a hushed and twilit court, ​Tom heard the fate which was now no surprise to him, and bore it accordingly as such verdicts are seldom borne. His fine eyes and fresh young face were radiant and serene with the divine light of innocence and valour; consequently the judge felt called upon publicly to lament “a demeanour both callous and defiant”; and so sincere was the lamentation that his voice broke, his lips trembled, and the concluding remarks of his lordship were perfectly unintelligible from emotion. But here ended the judge’s duty in those days, and the court adjourned for yet another night.

In the morning Thomas Erichsen was brought up for the last time, and condemned to death in thoroughly cold blood by the Recorder of the City of London.

Meanwhile one noteworthy circumstance had occurred. Mr. Harding and his companion, Daintree, had been among the first to leave the court. They thus escaped a scene of some confusion in one of the public galleries, the occupants of which were called to order and made to go out row by row. But so great was the crowd already in the street that to get out at all was a difficulty; to reach one’s coach another and a worse. Mr. Harding eventually found his waiting on Ludgate Hill, and directed the coachman to go by Chancery Lane before getting in after Daintree. Just then a man emerged from the seething crowd in the Old Bailey, and waited an instant at the corner; then the carriage drove down Fleet Street with the man after it at a discreet distance.

Harding and Daintree scarcely spoke a word; they were followed up Chancery Lane and across Holborn by the man, a dilapidated creature with a dreadfully disfigured face.

​It was now nearly eight o’clock, and in the dusk the man grew bold. The old-fashioned coach had a footboard, seldom used, and the runner coolly sat himself upon it in the region of Russell Square. And he actually kept his seat until, on the outskirts of Regent’s Park, a street Arab shrilly informed the coachman; whereupon the man jumped off, and rushed at the boy with lean arms whirling like windmills, and ragged tails flying in the breeze.

The boy shinned up a lamp-post, and the man stood cursing him from below, with one eye upon the receding coach.

“If I’d the time to waste upon you, I’d break you in two, you blessed little nose!” cried the man, meaning an informer.

“Don’t you talk about noses,” retorted the boy, meaning the literal organ. “You wait till you’ve got one yourself, you blessed old nightmare!”

At this taunt the man’s mutilated face flared diabolically in the dusk, and with a sudden leap he caught the boy by an ankle and brought him headlong to the pavement; then knelt over him, and dashed his head repeatedly upon the flags, with the insensate fury of a criminal lunatic. When the boy lay still, he sprang to his feet, gnashing his teeth, and looking in vain for the coach. He was instantly seized by a gentleman who had seen this dastardly assault from the balcony of his house.

The gentleman was accompanied by his son, and between them they secured the monster, while servants flew in different directions for the police and a doctor.

The boy had a broken head and broken bones; but he escaped with his life, thus saving that of the man, ​who was duly committed, and became an ornament of Chapel Yard while Tom Erichsen lay under sentence of death in another part of Newgate.

And neither occupant of the coach ever heard or read a word about the matter.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE RECORDER'S REPORT

Tom was thrust into a condemned cell measuring but nine-and-a-half by six feet, and in height a foot less than its length. Yet even this hole he was to share with a comrade in like calamity. And in a dribble of summer twilight, as the massive door clanged behind him, he found himself shut up with none other than his tigerish young antagonist of the ward in Chapel Yard.

The recognition was mutual, and Tom held out his hand.

“I refused yours once before,” said he. “Come, I apologise. We can afford to forgive each other now.”

His hand was taken with an evil grace; in a little, however, the other loosened a not unfriendly tongue, but one so blasphemous and so foul that Tom half regretted his advance. He could not regret it altogether. The vilest conversation was better just then than none at all; that of Tom’s whilom enemy was vile enough, with its horrid levity, its coarse swagger and a forced but bloodcurdling contempt of death. Still it was something to listen to; something new to think about and shudder over; and the creature (having been alone at night ​since his conviction on the opening day of the sessions) hardly paused till the small hours of the morning.

His name was Creasey. He had been convicted of stabbing his wife (he was twenty years of age), but had never done it; ’twas a pack of lies. But he boasted to Tom of many a thing he had done in his short life; and they were such things as Tom never forgot in his. He lay listening and shuddering upon his bed. Yet when the other seemed to have talked himself out, his own torments only began, and he was grateful when the brute broke out afresh. So the night wore on until one or two in the morning. Then there was a long, unbroken silence; then a sobbing and a shaking, and a burst of frantic prayer from Creasey’s bed; then quiet, then snoring, and the bell of St. Sepulchre’s marking the weary mile-stones of the night.

Tom never slept a wink.

Next morning, in the bottom day-room, which the condemned prisoners had the use of during the day, he rubbed shoulders with a third convict under recent sentence of death; but this was a heavy, sullen, middle-aged man of the name of Carter, who sat all day with his huge head between his cruel hands, and spoke to nobody; nor did either youth venture to speak to him.

Overhead there was another day-room, and eleven more prisoners under sentence nominally capital; but these were morally certain of reprieve; and could be heard playing leap-frog and larking and singing from morning till night.

“I wish we were up there,” said Creasey, mournfully. “But wait a bit: the yard’s for us the same as for them, when it’s exercise time, and then there’ll be a bit o’ fun for us all!”

​The bit of fun essayed by Creasey was openly to incite the eleven jovial spirits from upstairs to badger Tom and put him in a rage. But by this time Erichsen’s reputation in Newgate was such that the plot fell through for want of supporters. Tom shrugged his shoulders at the petty treachery, and was treated by Creasey with a sly servility when they were locked up together once more. Meanwhile the burden of the day had been lightened by several visitors and as many private interviews.

Mr. Macmurdo, the surgeon, and Mr. Cotton, the Ordinary of Newgate, had both shown Tom the kindest attentions; he could see, however, that each regarded him as a man only too justly sentenced to death. The surgeon offered to use his influence in the matter of a separate cell at nights. Tom would not hear of it.

“No, no,” said he; “it would be a poor kindness, though I thank you with all my heart for the thought. The greatest ruffian in the gaol would be a better friend to me than my own reflections. Ah! I see what you think!” cried Tom, as a queer light glimmered in the surgeon’s eyes. “Well, I have done protesting my innocence; but don’t let them leave me by myself, that’s all I ask.”

Mr. Cotton entered into spiritual matters, to which Tom listened courteously, though chiefly out of loving respect for his dear father’s memory: for where was the God who would permit an innocent man to suffer death for another’s crime? When, however, the good chaplain closed his books, he referred discreetly, as he rose, to certain efforts already being made to obtain a reprieve, adding that he would himself do what he could to further them, as a matter of course

​“Why should you, sir,” asked Tom, deferentially, “when you are quite convinced of my guilt?”

The chaplain coloured.

“I never said I was convinced,” he cried. “It is no part of my duty to be convinced in such matters either way. No, my poor fellow, your guilt or your innocence is a matter between your own heart and God Almighty. I, His servant, am only concerned with your immortal soul, and the longer you live the more time will be yours for repentance—of all your sins—and the greater your chances of immortal life. But build upon nothing of the kind.” And with a parting exhortation the Ordinary went his way.

Bassett was the last visitor. He was in a tremendous hurry. The petition was already receiving support and signatures on every hand; the newspapers were full of it. And he who had furnished the sinews of defence was now working heart and soul for the respite, for which there was still every reason to hope; so said Bassett in a breath, and was gone next minute.

It was the last piece of news that heartened Tom most: the news that the Noble Unknown believed in him still, against judge and jury, and was still heroically striving to save his miserable life. Who could he be? Some friend of Claire’s? The thought came for the first time; it never came again. Claire was with the judge, the jury, and the world: she had not written him one word.

Tom was now in prison dress, a gaunt, dread figure; but they had let him keep a slip of paper that he had often taken out of a pocket in his own clothes, to pore over and to dream upon. He produced it now. It was the slip of paper Daintree had handed down to him during the proceedings at Marylebone, and he had never ​seen the writer’s face. But he had made a face unto himself; had built up a character from those few scribbled words; and both face and character were the sweetest, the kindest and the best that had existed upon earth during the last eighteen hundred years.

So, when his last visitor had departed, the condemned man was not ashamed to kiss that flurried scrawl with his lips, nor afterwards to find it smudged with his tears.

Those were the days when the capital convict was first found guilty, next brought up for sentence, and next “reported to the King.” The two latter functions rested with the Recorder of London; the last having its origin in the number of offences for which a man might be condemned to death without the least risk of being executed. The Recorder would wait upon his Majesty in Council, and make his report of the prisoners lying in Newgate under sentence of death; whereupon the King would be graciously pleased to respite (say) all but the wilful murderers. The amended report was straightway despatched to the prison, and his final fate broken to each man without a moment’s unnecessary delay.

It was the 18th of May and a Thursday night near the stroke of twelve. All was silent in the condemned cells, for even Creasey’s voluble tongue had ceased to wag, and Tom lay thinking on his bed. His companion was a trashy hound, ever cursing God or entreating Him with shrieks and tears: unburdening his sordid soul to Tom half the night, venting covert spite and enmity upon him day after day. To-night he had been alternately protesting his innocence, abusing his dead wife, and mocking heaven and hell by the hour together. ​Tom lay awaiting the reaction which would follow as surely as the morning, and to-night it was before its time. The silence had been dead indeed, but not long so, when the creature leapt from his pallet with a scream. Next instant he was kneeling by its neighbour, fawning over Tom with trembling arms and twitching fingers.

“I done it! I done it!” he whispered hoarsely. “There—I had to tell somebody, and I have! I’d got to tell or burst. I feel better now.... No, no!” he was yelling next moment. “What have I said? I was joking, you flat—joking, I tell yer! Ha, ha, ha! It’s you that done yours; I never done mine at all!”

And he was strutting up and down the cell, trembling from head to foot, and laughing horribly through his chattering teeth.

But a worse sound yet cut his laughter short: it was the sound of voices and the rattling of keys.

Creasey inclined his bullet head one moment, then stumbled to the door, and fell heavily upon his knees.

“The Report!” he quavered. “Erichsen—the Report! It’s come—it’s come!”

CHAPTER XIX

THE ROYAL MERCY

The condemned youths heard the next cell entered, and their comrade Carter roused from his bed. A key then grated in their own door, it was flung open, and there were Mr. Cope, the Governor, and a bevy of turnkeys in the passage.

​“Out with it!” gasped Creasey, on his knees. “I’m respited, ain’t I? I never done it, sir. I never did! The King wouldn’t hang an innocent man?”

“Get up and dress yourself,” was the reply. “You will hear the Report upstairs, all of you together. You, too, Erichsen! Slip on your things.”

Tom obeyed, and then lent a hand to Creasey, who hardly knew his small-clothes from his jacket, and clung to Tom as a child to its nurse.

“I’m innocent,” he kept mumbling. “They’ll be the murderers if they let me swing. Didn’t I tell you I was innocent, Erichsen? Haven’t I said so all along? Oh, my Gawd, if they let me swing!”

“They won’t,” whispered Tom; “but if they did, why, we’ve got to die some time; it’s an easy death, and there’s an end of it.”

“But I don’t want to die!—I dursn’t die! I don’t deserve to die—don’t I keep telling yer I never done it?” And the abject thing clung blubbering to Tom’s arm, as the turnkey who was waiting at the door conducted the pair upstairs.

The upper day-room, or Cell Ward, as it was indifferently termed, was but poorly lighted with candles, whose sepulchral rays added a pallor even to the white faces of those dragged from their beds to hear their doom. The number of the latter being now complete, all fourteen were ordered to kneel, and Tom found himself between Creasey and Carter, at one end of the line. Creasey still clung to his arm. Carter knelt like a rock, with his great fingers clutched in front of him, and heavy drops falling on them from his bended brow. This was all Tom saw before the Ordinary entered in his gown and halted before him first.

​“Mr. Erichsen,” said he, with a compassionate tremor, “the Recorder has this evening made his report to the King. I am very sorry to have to inform you that it is unfavourable.”

Tom inclined his head. He had cherished no hopes.

The Ordinary approached Carter.

“I am sorry to tell you it is all against you also,” he continued. “As for you, Creasey,” and the latter tightened his grip on Tom’s arm, “I am happy to inform you that your life is spared; and I am very happy to inform all the others that by the Royal mercy their lives are spared.”

Creasey withdrew his hand from Tom’s arm, and edged further away on his knees. A deep sigh rose from a dozen breasts; then, as the chaplain was about to offer up a prayer, there came a sudden crash at Tom’s side, and the wretched Carter was floundering on the floor in convulsions. The rest were hurried back to their cells, and Creasey executed a breakdown while Tom quietly undressed.

“But that’s all right!” cried the former, stopping suddenly. “It’s no more’n I expected, ‘cause, you see, I’m an innocent man, an’ alius was; that’s why you never caught me showing the white, Erichsen, though once or twice you thought you did. Jiggered if you wouldn’t believe any think, a mug like you! Why, I used to bilk you every blooming night for fun! Not but what I’m sorry it’s all up with you, old man; though it’s a nice an’ comfy death, you told me so yourself, and you know we’ve all got to die some day! Besides, you done yours—no denying it—but I never done mine at all; so it’s fair an’ square enough, you must admit!”

The little cur was snoring in ten minutes. He was removed to the Transport side next morning. And ​Tom, left in solitude, would have given some days of the twelve remaining to have had him back.

The execution was fixed for the thirtieth. He would never see another June.

Bassett came from day to day with news of the petition; it was being signed, but not as freely as at first. Bassett’s disappointment was patent to the condemned man. The smart young fellow was in fact beginning to weary of his up-hill work, and to think about the bill.

So next day Tom asked Bassett whether the Noble Unknown had also abandoned hope and effort.

“Not he,” said Bassett in a half-disgusted tone. “He is moving heaven and earth; seeking private interviews with the Home Secretary, if not with the King himself. He’s quite capable of it. A wonderful man when he gets an idea into his head!”

“But what put this idea into his head?”

“Heaven knows!”

Tom looked the attorney through and through, and asked another question. “Did you tell him how much I should like to see him before I die—to thank him?”

“I did; but he is too busy working for you; he said that would do you more good.”

“I see,” said Tom, sadly; “another Culliford! Then why is he doing it? Culliford was paid; he paid him; but why, again? See here, you Bassett; both you and he disbelieve in me—I know it now—but you are tired of your job, and he is not. Why not? I believe you know! Then tell me, and let us part friends once and for all; you need bother your head no more about me, only tell me what you must know.”

“I know nothing.”

“Then what you suspect.”

​Bassett considered; had his private conviction (that there was a woman in it) on the tip of his tongue; but ultimately shook his shrewd, cool head. There was nothing to be gained by speaking out; a dying man’s gratitude was nothing; and there might be something to be lost. At any rate the safe side was the wise side with that bill not even properly drawn up. So Tom and his solicitor parted coldly for the last time; and Tom tore up that slip of writing which had been handed to him at Marylebone, but relented next moment, and treasured the torn pieces till the end.

And now at last his gallant spirit surrendered itself to the apathy of sheer despair; and the physical collapse which supervened was almost as complete as that of the brave but broken heart. A sudden outbreak of morbid appearances brought the surgeon in hot haste to clean the foul tongue, to regulate the irregular pulse, moisten the parched skin, and in a word, to keep his man well enough to die on the following Tuesday. The good Macmurdo would as lief have given him a draught of deadly poison, but such humanity would have sent himself to the gallows instead. So the surgeon did his best for the poor doomed body; and the chaplain did his best for an immortal soul still filled with bitter rebellion and rage; but this physician was less successful, though not less kind—praying in his chamber for the poor impenitent, but yet doing what in him lay to further such efforts as were still being made for a reprieve. Even on the last Sunday, when the stern divine furnished that incredible barbarism, the condemned sermon, the humane gentleman was upon the other tack, and in almost hourly communication with Daintree himself.

Tom could not guess at that. The last to enter, the ​first to leave the crowded chapel, he did so with the sense of his indignity heavier upon him than at either Marylebone or the Old Bailey. The very chapel had been filled with sight-seers—and he the sight! He had recognised the noble earl who had come to spy upon him before the trial, and with him ladies. And to cap all, the Ordinary had mentioned him by name in the sermon, taking the Sixth Commandment for his text, and directly addressing Tom from the pulpit. The outrage was unforgivable. When Mr. Cotton came to his cell soon after, the convict flatly refused ever to listen to him again.

“You have insulted me before men,” he cried. “You need plead for me no more before God!”

“But consider who you are—what you were,” protested the reverend gentleman. “A clergyman’s son, your poor father—”

“Not one word of him!” said Tom. “He would never have spoken as you spoke! There, sir, do not force me to say more; you have been kind to me in your own way; but the greatest kindness now is to leave me in peace until the end.”

Next day he asked for pens and paper, and spent the entire afternoon upon one letter. Turnkeys, who came continually to see how he was bearing his last hours on earth, found him always writing, writing, writing, with the tears streaming down his face, and yet the happiest look that they had seen in it yet. The turnkeys were practical experienced men. They never doubted that what Erichsen was writing was his full confession of the crime for which he was to suffer in the morning. So one brought another to spy upon him in the act of historic composition. And still he wrote; and still he wrote.

​He was done before dark, and ate his supper as he had eaten nothing for days. He seemed a happier man—that was only natural to the turnkey mind. And yet the sealed packet set in front of him on the table was not yet addressed, and when the Governor, paying him a visit in the evening, said slyly, “Is this for me?” Tom answered with quite a laugh that it was not. It was for a friend, and the last act of his unpinioned hands should be to add the address.

Later in the evening a packet was brought to Tom. It was addressed “Mr. Thos. Errixon, eskwire, Condemmed sells.” Tom was for tearing it up unread, when the turnkey acting postman interposed.

“Don’t do that,” said he. “It’s from the chap who shared this cell with you, and he was very particular that you should get it safe. He says he owes you an apology or summut, and here it is, with his last parting love.”

“All right,” said Tom; “you may thank him, and wish him luck, and say I’ve nothing to forgive, but I’ll read what he says with pleasure.” And he thought he would do so towards midnight, for they had mercifully left him his candle.

To his surprise, however, there was no letter at all, but one huge printed sheet, whence (when it was unfolded and spread out upon the table) his own name in a gigantic headline seemed to leap up and lash Erichsen across the face. The headlines ran—

LIFE, TRIAL AND AWFUL
EXECUTION
OF THOMAS ERICHSEN,
THE HAMPSTEAD MURDERER.

​

Below, there was a grotesque block, in which a colossal figure, white-capped and ready noosed, surmounted a miniature Felon’s Gate, with a Liliputian crowd in the foreground. Left and right of the picture figured a set of verses; the letterpress beneath was prose.

The former began—

VERSES

My deeds to you I now will mention,
Overcome with grief and shame;
Pray one moment give attention—
Thomas Erichsen is my name.
Reared and trained by reverend parents,
Who checked me if I done amiss;
Educated in their religion,
They little thought I’d come to this.

There were eight such stanzas, with a chorus to match, but Tom got no further than the above. He had seen such “broadsides” before. So they were ready printed for next morning’s use! He cast his eye below and read the headings: “The Murder and the Trial,” “The Verdict,” “The Judge’s Address,” “The Execution”—

The Execution! He had not realised the meaning of the word in the first staring headlines. Now he did. So they wrote of the execution before it was accomplished, did they? What if it never were accomplished? Yet here was a circumstantial account ready-made in advance. “Long before daylight this morning crowds assembled in front of the gaol at Newgate, to witness the awful yet just extreamities of the law carried out on the poor unfortunate young man—” and so forth. Printing, spelling and facts were on a par. “His behaviour in prison has been that of a gentleman and Christian, and when the shirriff arrived at six o’clock ​this morning, they found him in earnest prayer, with the rev chaplain, and as the time drew nearer, he was observed to weep a little—”

“Was he, by God!” cried Tom, through his teeth. He crushed the paper into a ball and tossed it across the cell; then looked well at door and window before putting out his candle and sitting down on his bed to think.

A full May moon shot a vivid beam through the sunken eye of the cell, and it struck the wall in a chequered square that hung like a picture low down over Tom’s pallet. He jumped into bed and lay very still as steps approached and a head was thrust in to see how he was passing the time. He had to thank his excellent behaviour ever since his first night in Newgate for so much privacy on this his last. He meant to take advantage of it now, for a cold, hard rage possessed him, with a fixed determination to cheat the gallows yet. As good as executed, was he? So accounts of the execution were in type already before the event? He could falsify these, at least; and, so far from cursing the creature that had put them in his way, Tom was grateful to him for an idea which would never have occurred to him otherwise. Prostration had left him indifferent, if not resigned, and he had Creasey to thank for the heating of every drop of blood and for the stiffening of every nerve and muscle in his body. And yet he was cool; by coolness only could he achieve his end; even so, the way was not obvious. Suicide? That was his first idea. He had the means—his braces—his prison bars. But no! If hang he must, better to step out and die as a man than as a rat in its hole. Escape? It was not possible; if only it were!

He sprang up, thrust his head and shoulders in the ​window-socket, and hung there, face to face with the moon. The window was open, for the night was warm. What was it that he heard? The lowing and bleating of frightened animals—at Smithfield, doubtless—being penned for the killing like himself! But that was not all. There was something more insistent, something nearer at hand and unceasing; nay, increasing too. The pulse of a multitude—the murmur of a mob. A street song at dead of night—to while away the hours—his last hours on earth. Street cries! “Life and trial of Thomas Erichsen,” as like as not; but they should not add “execution.” Not yet at all events. He would do something to die for first!

A tug at the bars—they yielded nothing. Another, with all his might, and his knees drawn up against the sill; not an inch, not the sixteenth part of one! The bars were hopeless. He sprang back into the cell, and stood there with the full moon laughing in his white face and blazing eyes. Very well! He would brain the next turnkey who came near him, and so at least deserve his death, even if he could not slip into the dead man’s clothes and thus away. So the hot fit had followed the cool; so madness trod upon the heels of rational thought.

The murmur of the crowd had done it; it had left him a wounded lion, and his maddened eyes were now roving round the cell in search of that with which to shed blood for blood. They lit upon the metal wash-stand fixed (like the iron candlestick) to the wall. In an instant the washstand was torn out by the roots, and poised over the cropped yellow head, while the loose tin things rang like cymbals on the floor. The clatter was slow to cease. It was followed inevitably by hurried ​footsteps in the corridor. So much the better. The time was come.

Tom raised the washstand on high in both hands, and himself on tip-toes to give the greater force to his blow as the door was flung hurriedly open; he was bringing it down upon grey hairs, when he saw their colour, and swerving, swung the apparatus with a crash against the wall.

“Lucky for you it was you!” he cried as the chaplain threw up his hands. “Unlucky for me: I’d have killed any other man in the place. Now you see what they’ve made of me! Better send them to tie me up; it’s no good your wasting your breath.”

The Ordinary wrung his hands, and gazed in the frenzied face with unspeakable anguish in his own; while louder and louder through the cell window came the clamour of the growing mob.

“Have you so utterly forgotten your God?” began the poor man, with the tears in his eyes. “He has never forgotten you!”

“He has,” said Tom, doggedly, “or He wouldn’t let me suffer for another man’s crime.”

“He has not!” shouted the chaplain, flourishing a paper from his pocket. “He has moved the hearts of those in authority over us! On your knees, sir, and give Him thanks; for your life has been spared at the eleventh hour!”

CHAPTER XX

SEALED LIPS

The good news was broken to Claire by her father in the dead of night; she had thus some hours in which to prepare for what she was resolved should be her last conversation with Daintree on the subject of Tom. And she anticipated not only the last, but the riskiest of so many risky interviews. She felt that ineffable relief might prove harder to conceal than intolerable anxiety; and so no sooner were her worse fears dissipated than new fears took their place.

For days and weeks her one absorbing anxiety had been the preservation of poor Tom’s life by hook or crook. Now that at the very last this miracle had been performed, her heart did indeed teem with praise and thanksgiving; but it also sank beneath the burden of a new solicitude, never to let Daintree dream what she had done, never to spoil his ideal of her, but to repay his disinterested generosity by all the unremitting kindness of heart, sympathy of brain, and pith and marrow of faithful friendship in her woman’s power. Claire did not now carry the last aspiration to its logical conclusion; but her gratitude to Daintree was such that it rose in great waves which drowned even the thought of Tom; and of the two men, if her heart was still with her first love, her admiration and gratitude were all for his preserver. Such was her feeling when she espied Daintree in the garden next morning early, and joined him on an impulse, without having decided upon a word to say.

“I think you are the best of men,” was what she heard ​herself saying; “and you have proved it on behalf of one of the worst!”

It was not quite sincere; it was not quite insincere. The unconsidered words themselves were a self-revelation to Claire. She would not have unsaid them; yet to feel them less she would have given her moral and material all.

Daintree, as usual, stood to his guns regarding Erichsen, whose innocence he had lately maintained with unreasonable fervour. Culliford’s speech, he declared, had convinced him; it should have convinced the jury too, he vowed, had he been one of them. But he took with greedy eyes all the good things the girl now said to him. And in his account of final matters his conceit and his pomposity bubbled out as heretofore.

“I saw Lord John,” said he. “Lord John was obliged to see me. Our name is one he cannot afford to despise; and then he knows my position in New South Wales. I told him (in confidence) how this case had interested me, and how I had spent my money upon it. Lord John was very much impressed. I argued for innocence, and (for argument’s sake) for manslaughter too. But cold-blooded murder I said it could not be. And there is not the slightest doubt that my arguments converted Lord John.”

“You still think it may have been manslaughter?”

“You know what I think,” was the reply. “As sure as I stand here, Miss Harding, we have saved an innocent man!”

Mr. Harding was coming towards them across the spangled grass. Claire held out her hand.

“At any rate,” said she, “there is some one of whom I shall always think all the more—oh! a hundredfold the more!—for what has happened. There are two others ​whose very names I want you to promise never to mention again: the one who died, and”—in a voice both wistful and bitter—“your innocent man!”

Daintree promised.

And he kept his word.

Meanwhile, a minor result of the reprieve was the speedy departure of Claire’s wicked maid. She watched a day or two, and then decided that her hold upon her mistress was gone.

The fact was that, though Claire was resolved to atone to Daintree for her long duplicity, the atonement itself came less easily than she had hoped. His mission accomplished, the man of action was sunk once more in the invertebrate poet; and the latter took such advantage of the kind ear now lent him, that Claire was wearied to distraction, and soon forgot the philanthropist in the bore. The poetry got upon her slackened nerves, and an afternoon of the poet would leave her utterly tired out. This Hannah saw: also that her lady’s heart was still in Newgate, whether she knew it or not: therefore that to open Daintree’s eyes would be to do her no very bad turn, however she might feel it at the time. In a word, this clever woman read her mistress better than her mistress read herself. She gave notice on the spot.

“And I’ll forfeit my month’s wages, miss, and go this morning—in case you change your mind about them presents!”

“I am not likely to do that,” replied Claire, dispassionately. “You held your tongue when I wanted it held: his life is saved, and that’s all I care about in this world.”

​She went for a ride with Daintree that morning, and he wearied her more than ever. It was a heavenly June day, but luscious fields and a gorgeous sky were nothing to the poetaster; his own rhymes thereon at once usurped and exhausted the subject. A volume of his verse was in the press: every sight, sound or word suggested a quotation. Claire tried hard to think of all that he had done. She found herself thinking of Tom instead; and, in sheer depression, turned early homeward, where an unforeseen temptation awaited her.

A hackney-coach stood at the door; and the entire household was discovered in the hall. Servants in a cluster at the green-baize door; Hannah in her bonnet calmly seated on her box; and Mr. Harding and a policeman in conversation in the foreground. The arrival of Claire and her companion on this animated scene was hailed with evident satisfaction, whereupon silence was enjoined by the master of the house.

“This woman,” said he to Claire, pointing to the complacent Hannah—“this woman, your maid, suddenly announces her intention of leaving my house. She declares that you knew she was going; but the first her fellow-servants hear of it is the intrusion of a hackney-coachman to bring her box downstairs. They demand to have her box examined—it would seem with excellent reason! An officer is sent for, and this is what he finds!”

Mr. Harding held up a ring, a brooch, a pair of earrings, and a diamond pendant, the former possessions of Claire.

“She says you gave them to her,” he proceeded. “What have you to say to that?”

Claire met the culprit’s glittering eyes, and read in ​them an inflexible intent; she glanced at Daintree, and her great temptation was to tell everything before them all, and so secure her future from she knew not what, but something worse than she had ever foreseen. Now was the moment—here the chance—there would never be such another. The best course—the bold course—sang in her ears as a whisper from her guardian angel’s lips. It was not shrinking from the immediate scene, but rather the dread of righteous wrath to come and be her curse for ever, that decided Claire and made her say, with but a second’s pause, “It is perfectly true! I did give the things to Hannah, and they are hers.”

“You gave your maid your diamond pendant?”

“If you come into the library, papa, I will tell you all about it.”

They were but a minute closeted; then the constable was dismissed with something for himself, the hackney-coachman called in again to take the woman’s box, and the other servants sent about their business through the green-baize door. Claire watched her spy’s departure with as much curiosity as relief. Unwonted colour tinged those pallid cheeks, and some unfathomable meaning softened the jet-black eyes as they gazed into hers for the last time. There was not only gratitude in the look, but (as it seemed to Claire) both the will and the power to show it, given the chance. As it was, she was edging near to speak, when Mr. Harding came between them, and himself hustled the woman out of the house. He then sought out Daintree and took him by the arm.

“This will show you the kind of girl Claire is,” said Nicholas Harding. “Of course, she had never given the woman a thing; but rather than have her put in prison—you see? Isn’t it incredible?”

​“Not in her!” cried Daintree, devoutly.

And he posted to the City that afternoon, returning with a beautiful brooch, which he presented to Claire with humility unalloyed.

“A diamond pendant you would not accept from me; alas, nor yet a ring!” he sighed. “But this trifle I think you will—in memory of this morning.”

For though he bored her with his poetry, he was very careful not to inflict upon her a second declaration of his love, until his cunning told him that the favourable time was ripe.

So Claire lost her chance, and sank deeper and deeper yet into the toils.

One salve her conscience demanded and obtained. She knew now what was coming better than he did. And she tried day and night to forget poor Tom, and to love the man she needs must marry in the end.

But the end was not yet; for the man had made up his mind to a long, deliberate siege; and he now set about it with all the tenacity and all the ingenuity which were central traits in his complex nature.

Those were the days of Almack’s, and of a hard-and-fast Society whose pale Nicholas Harding had never quite scaled. To give him, so to speak, a leg up, Daintree went once more among old family friends, and was actually intriguing with one of the six terrible ladies who guarded the doors of Almack’s, in order to secure tickets for one of those historic assemblies at Willis’s Rooms, when the King’s death, on June 20th, put an end to all festivities. Daintree ground his teeth at having to abandon what he had deemed a potent engine of assault. Claire had shown pleasure at the prospect; its destruction seemed a real blow to her, but was actually a relief. ​Genuine sorrow she felt, but it was all for the dead King who had spared Tom’s life while under sentence of death himself.

Daintree took a place in Scotland for the autumn. Mr. Harding had made other plans, but at Daintree’s nod he threw them to the winds. Only one thing was more remarkable than the sudden ascendency which the younger man had now obtained over the elder: this was the latter’s changed regard for his would-be son-in-law. Not that Mr. Harding had ceased to desire the marriage. His wishes in that matter were made disagreeably plain to Claire, who was only puzzled to hear him speak of Daintree with an oath in her presence, while appearing all smiles to his face. The girl was at a loss to understand this, and yet too absorbed in her own troubles to give her mind to anything else. Only she could not think when the change had come about; she had first noticed it after the trial. It was less remarkable in Scotland, where Daintree was their host; there were seldom any other guests.

“Hours of Exile” was the Byronic title of his book of verse, which was published during this visit. It was dedicated to Clarinda, which confessedly stood for Claire, and the dedicatory lines were the best in the book. The girl felt committed before the world when she read them. Clarinda’s name occurred again and again in the volume. Yet all that year he never spoke. He had done so before somewhat prematurely, to own the least, and the man of extremes must needs make trebly and quadruply sure before his lips reiterated the love which had raged in his eyes every day and every hour of all these months.

But with the New Year came ill tidings from Australia: an investment had turned out badly; his interests ​in general were suffering from his absence. The very next day James Daintree led Claire Harding into her father’s library, and, even with his face in happy flames, struck an attitude before the writing-table.

“She is mine!” he cried. “She has consented to share the poet’s bays—to divide with Esau his inheritance in the wilderness!”

It was notable that no consent was asked of Nicholas Harding. He sat back in his chair with a stifled sigh of unspeakable relief. Claire never forgot how his hand felt as he took both of hers and drew her towards him.

“But you spoke of sailing at once,” said he, cloaking eagerness with an air of extreme deprecation. “It would have to be a very hurried affair!”

The first cloud crossed Daintree’s face.

“Ah, no!” said he. “I could not take her at a moment’s notice to a house unfit for her reception. I must go and prepare it for her; that is a stern necessity. But you must bring her out to me yourself in six months’ time.”

Mr. Harding shook his head. He was a public man.

“Then Lady Starkie must.”

Mr. Harding spoke warmly and unselfishly in favour of an immediate marriage. To no purpose, however; they had indeed made up their minds, though the reason was not that which Daintree had given. Vanity forbade him to disclose the real reason. It was her solitary but firm stipulation; and so much for his brave desire to get first to Sydney on Claire’s account.

He was to sail in seven days.

Meanwhile the engagement was announced in the Morning Post of January 15th.

​On the 16th Mr. Harding found a note from Sir Emilius at his office:—

“Sir,—My ‘Morning Post’ informs me that a marriage has been arranged between your daughter and my son. If you care for the young lady’s happiness you will put a stop to this at once.

“Yours faithfully,

“Emilius Daintree.

“N.B.—I send this word of warning in duplicate, both to your City and to your private address; as I think it hardly likely that you will receive both copies if my son is still with you.”

Mr. Harding started to his feet. He had not received the copy posted to his house. Was the father a liar or the son something worse? The father’s reputation—stay!

It was the son.

He had been down before Mr. Harding that morning; the latter had found him in the dining-room when he entered, and on his own plate were such letters as he had received. Harding seized his hat; then reflected, changed colour and took a pen himself. The note which he subsequently despatched by hand was a model of firmness, tempered by tact. He demanded, however, an immediate explanation of Sir Emilius Daintree’s words, and the messenger was to wait for an answer. The messenger returned without one.

Then Mr. Harding called in person.

Sir Emilius was not at home.

But next morning there was another brief note at the office:—

“Dear Sir,—I have been thinking the matter over. You have my sympathy; but I cannot enter into details. I absolutely decline ​to do so. You know the proverb, and a word should be enough for the wise; or you may go for your explanation to my son, who will tell you it is all my spite. It is for you, as a man of the world, to believe or to disbelieve him on that point.

“I will say, however, that so far as I know, my son is not insane.

“I would to Heaven he were!

“Yours, etc.,
“Emilius Daintree.”

Mr. Harding was now a miserable man. The very sight of the betrothed pair became an hourly agony. Yet he lacked either the courage or the will to interfere. Only four days remained—he called again on Sir Emilius Daintree. But again the baronet was invisible.

This time Harding left an urgent note; and yet another perfectly civil one awaited him in the City next morning. It was to be the last, however, and said so plainly in the following terms:—

“My Dear Sir,—You must excuse my unwillingness to see you, or to correspond further, upon the little matter of my son and your daughter. You will apprehend that the subject is probably more painful to me than to you—who have your remedy. I have none. My son need never become your son-in-law; but unhappily he will always be my son.

“Your last question is, however, a fair one, and I will answer it frankly on condition it is the last. So far as I am aware, then, my son has not already, nor (to my knowledge) has he ever had, a wife. I should say he is quite capable of having half-a-dozen. However, this is not ‘it’ at all. And I must beg you as a gentleman not to question me any further upon what is in fact a family matter, and one only named to you in confidence for your own guidance.

“Upon this understanding I have the honour to remain, sir, your obedient servant,

“Emilius Daintree.”

​

What could it be? What had he done? Something terrible in his youth—but what?

Mr. Harding tried to smooth his troubled conscience. The feelings of a parent were tossing and tormenting his spirit as they had never done before. Yet the feelings of a parent were apt to lead one to extremes—to a tender over-anxiety in his own case—to a bitter and relentless requital in that of the elder Daintree. Was the latter the first father who had deemed his son’s folly a crime, and never forgiven it? “A handful of wild oats,” thought Mr. Harding; it could be nothing worse.

But he did not think so in his heart, for Sir Emilius was notoriously no squeamish moralist himself; and then there were those flowers that had not been allowed to lie a single day on Lady Daintree’s grave.

Moreover, Mr. Harding had been granted lately some gleams of independent insight into the character of the younger Daintree; and these to his cost; yet he held his tongue.

He held his tongue to the last, and James Daintree sailed away the betrothed of Claire Harding, who was to follow him to Sydney in six months.

A year earlier Mr. Harding might have been tempted to keep silence for worldly reasons, for the sake of the connection—“my daughter, Lady Daintree”—and so forth. He was not himself a man of noble blood, but he loved the nobility, and had of late very nearly cut himself off from their smile for ever. The temptation, on worldly grounds alone, would have been strong enough the year before. Yet the father’s heart would have resisted it: he would have spoken out then, and acted, too, like an honest man. Now he did neither, because his mouth was stopped and his hands were tied by ​a stronger thing than social considerations. He was gagged and bound by abject fear.

And this was why Daintree the younger was allowed to sail away betrothed to Claire, towards the latter end of January, 1838.

He arrived in Sydney some four or five months later.

It was a mild, pellucid, winter’s day. Sky and harbour wore their ancient tint of magic blue; and as the luxuriant shores unfolded before the incoming vessel, headland and inlet, inlet and headland, each with its sash of golden sand, its cord of silver foam, the homing wanderer swept the water’s edge for his own bungalow, and found it with a real thrill. He had chosen well in his adopted land; it was one of milk and honey and perpetual sunshine. But even as they dropped anchor in Sydney Cove, there came through the clear air the clank of men at work in heavy irons near the quay; and the first person to greet Daintree in the streets was a magnate who stopped his carriage and alighted with the peculiar shuffle of one who had himself worn those heavy irons in his day. Daintree shook the gnarled, bedizened hand with an inward shiver; he had forgotten that his Canaan was an Egypt—a Land of Promise and of Bondage too.

He was on his way to the club; he went instead to the council-chamber in Macquarie Street, and obtained an interview with the Principal Superintendent of Convicts.

“There was a man called Erichsen sent out last year,” said Daintree. “Transported for life; have you ever come across his name?” And he was spelling it when the other gave a whistle.

“So you’re interested in him, are you?” cried the ​Superintendent. “My dear sir, that’s one of the prettiest young villains in the Colony. If we all had our rights he’d have swung long ago.”

“I believe him to be an innocent man,” said Daintree, warmly. “I am positive he never committed the crime he was transported for.”

“I know nothing about that,” replied the Superintendent. “He’s made up for it out here, if that’s so. But you shall see his record for yourself.”

And in perhaps the ghastliest ledger ever kept, wherein every entry was a human tragedy, and that of Erichsen but one among thousands, his single champion now read the curt official version of the following facts.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.