Chapter VII: Part 7

In the meantime the bushmen, whose advance had been, and still was, very slow and cautious, as if they dreaded an ambuscade, had approached to within seventy yards of the house. Thinking them yet too distant to make sure of them, we allowed them to come nearer. They did so; but they had now assumed a stealthy step, walking lightly, as if they feared that their footfalls should be heard. They were led on by one of their number; at least there was one man considerably in advance of his fellows. He was armed with a sword, as we saw it flashing in the moonlight.

The party, handling their guns in readiness to fire, on the slightest alarm, at any living object that might present itself, were now within thirty or forty yards of the house, and had halted to reconnoitre; when the sergeant, who had been on his knees for several minutes before, with his piece at his eye, said softly, "Now," and fired. Whether he had aimed at the foremost man of the gang, I do not know; but if so, he had missed him, for he still stood firm. At this person, however, I now levelled, fired, and down he came. In the next instant the shots were rapping thick and fast from the different windows of the house.

The bushrangers, taken by surprise, paused for an instant, returned two or three straggling shots, and then fled in the utmost consternation and disorder. We kept pelting after them for a few minutes, and then, quitting the house, gave them chase, with a whooping and hallooing that must have added in no small degree to their terror. In this chase we overtook two that had been severely wounded, and came upon a third near the skirt of the wood, who, after running so far, had dropped down dead. The others, who had fled, some of whom, we had no doubt, were also wounded, escaped by getting into the forest, where it was no use looking for them. The two wounded men we made prisoners, and carried back to the house. As we were returning, we came upon the man whom I had brought down. Being extended motionless on the ground at full length, we thought him dead, and were about to pass on, intending to leave him where he lay till the morning, when I thought I heard him breathing. I knelt down beside him, looked narrowly into his face, and found that he was still living. On discovering this, we had the unfortunate man carried to the house; and having placed him on a mattress, staunched the bleeding of his wound, which was on the right breast, and administered a little brandy and water, which almost immediately revived him. He opened his eyes, began to breathe more freely, and in a short time was so far recovered as to be able to speak, although with difficulty.

The excitement of the fray over, if the late affair could be so called, my heart bled within me for the unhappy wretch who had been reduced by my hand to the deplorable condition in which he now lay before me. My conscience rose up against me, and would not be laid by any suggestions of the necessity that prompted the deed. In my anxiety to make what reparation I could for what now seemed to me my cruelty, I sat by the miserable sufferer, ready and eager to supply any want he might express, and to administer what comfort I could do him in his dying moments; for that he was dying, notwithstanding the temporary revival alluded to, was but too evident from his ghastly look and rapidly glazing eye.

It was while I thus sat by the unhappy man, and while silently contemplating his pallid countenance, by the faint light of a lamp that hung against the wall of the apartment, that I suddenly thought I perceived in that countenance some traces of features that I had seen before. Whose they were, or where I had seen them, I did not at first recollect. But the idea having once presented itself, I kept hunting it through all the recesses of my memory. At length Digby occurred to me. But no, Digby it could not be. Impossible.

I looked on the countenance of the sufferer again. It was slightly distorted with pain, and all trace of the resemblance I had fancied was gone. An interval of ease succeeded. The real or imagined resemblance returned. Again I lost sight of it, and again I caught it; for it was only in some points of view I could detect it at all. At length, after marking for some time longer, with intense interest, the features of the sufferer, my conviction becoming every moment stronger and stronger, and my agitation in consequence extreme, I bent my head close to the dying man, and, taking his cold and clammy hand in mine, asked him, in a whisper, if his name was not Digby. His eyes were closed at the moment, but I saw he was not sleeping. On my putting the question, he opened them wide, and stared wildly upon me, but without saying a word. He seemed to be endeavouring to recognise me, but apparently in vain. I repeated the question. This time he answered. Still gazing earnestly at me, he said, and it was all he did say, "It is."

"Don't you know me?" I inquired.

He shook his head.

"My name is Lorimer," said I.

"Thank God," he exclaimed solemnly. "For one, at least, of my crimes it is permitted me to make some reparation. Haste, haste, get witnesses and hear my dying declaration. There's no time to lose, for I feel I am fast going!"

Without a moment's delay--- for I felt the importance of obtaining the declaration, which I had no doubt would establish my innocence--I ran for my father and Sergeant Lindsay, and, to make assurance doubly sure, brought two of the privates also along with me. It was a striking scene of retributive justice,

On our entering the apartment where Digby lay, the wretched man raised himself upon his elbow. I ran and placed two pillows beneath him to support him. He thanked me. Then raising his hand impressively, and directing it towards me--

"That young man there," he said, "David Lorimer, is, as I declare on the word of a dying man, innocent of the crime for which he was banished to this country. I, and no other, am the guilty person. It was I who robbed my master, Mr. Wallscourt, of the silver plate for which this young man was blamed; and it was I who put the silver spoon in his pocket, in order to substantiate the charge I subsequently brought against him, and in which I was but too successful."

He then added, that in case his declaration should not be deemed sufficient to clear me of the guilt imputed to me, we should endeavour to find out a person of the name of Nareby--Thomas Nareby--who, he said, was in the colony under sentence of transportation for life for housebreaking; and that this person, who had been, at the time of the robbery for which I suffered, a receiver of stolen goods, and with whom he, Digby, had deposited Mr. Wallscourt's plate, would acknowledge--at least he hoped so--this transaction, and thus add to the weight of his dying testimony to my innocence.

Digby having concluded, I immediately committed what he had just said to writing, and having read it over to him, obtained his approval of it. He then, of his own accord, offered to subscribe the declaration, and with some difficulty accomplished the task. The signature was hardly legible, but it was quite sufficient when attested, as it was, by the signatures of all present excepting myself. Exhausted with the effort he had made, Digby now sank back on his pillow, and in less than three minutes after expired.

We now learned from the unhappy man's two wounded companions, who, the reader will recollect, were our prisoners, that, soon after my trial and condemnation, he, Digby, had left Mr. Wallscourt's service, not under any suspicion of the robbery of the plate, but with no very good general character; that he had the betaken himself entirely to live with the abandoned characters whose acquaintance he had formed, and to subsist by swindling and robbery; that he had proceeded from crime to crime, until he at length fell into the hands of justice; and his banishment to the colony where he had arrived about six months before, was the result; that he had not been more than a month in the country when he and several other convicts ran away from the master to whom they had been assigned, and took to the bush. Such was the brief but dismal history of this wretched man.

On the following day we buried his remains in a lonely spot in the forest, at the distance of about half a mile from the house, and thereafter proceeded with our prisoners to Liverpool. On arriving there, I accompanied my father to the magistrate on whom he had waited on a former occasion, and having stated to this gentleman the extraordinary circumstance which had taken place--meaning Digby's declaration--he advised an immediate application to the governor, setting forth the circumstances of the case. This I lost no time in doing, enclosing within my memorial Digby's attested declaration, and pointing out Nareby as a person likely to confirm its tenor. The singularity and apparent hardship of the case, combined with the favourable knowledge of me previously existing, attracted the attention of the governor in a special manner, and excited in him so lively an interest, that he instantly had Nareby subjected to a judicial examination, the result of which was a full admission on the part of that person of the transaction to which Digby alluded.

Satisfied now of my innocence, and of the injustice which had been unwittingly done me, the governor not only immediately transmitted me a full and free pardon but offered me, by way of compensation, a lucrative government appointment. This appointment I accepted, and held for thirty years, I trust with credit to myself, and satisfaction to my superiors. At the end of this period, feeling my health giving way, my father and mother having both, in the meantime, died, and having all that time scraped together a competency, I returned to my native land, and have written these little memoirs in one of the pleasantest little retirements on the banks of the Tweed.

I have only now to add, that I had frequent opportunities of seeing both Lindsay and his wife after the establishment of my innocence, and that no persons would more sincerely rejoice in that event than they did. My poor mother, whom my father had made aware of my situation soon after my arrival, and who had borne the intelligence much better than we expected, it put nearly distracted with joy.

"My puir laddie," she exclaimed, "I aye kent to be innocent. But noo the world 'll ken it too, and I can die happy."

THE AMATEUR ROBBERY.

If there is anything more than another of which civilisation has reason to be proud, it is the amelioration that has been effected in punishment for crimes. Nor is it yet very long since we began to get quit of the shame of our folly and inhumanity, if we have not traces of these yet, coming out like sympathetic ink dried by the choler of self-perfection and a false philosophy, as in such writings as the latter-day pamphlets. How a man who loves his species, and has a heart, will hang his head abashed as he turns his vision back no further than the sixteenth century, and sees the writhing creatures--often aged unhappy women--under the pilniewinkies, caschielaws, turkases, thumbikens, and other instruments of torture, frantically bursting out with the demanded confession that was to fit them for the stake or the rope! And even after these things in the curiosity shop of Nemesis were got rid of, the abettors of the law rushed with full swing into the operation of hanging, scarcely allowing a crime to escape, from cold-blooded murder down to the act of the famished wretch who snatched a roll from a baker's basket. However insensible these strange lawgivers may have been to so much cruelty, however blind to the perversity, prejudices, and weaknesses incident to human testimony, however ignorant of the total inefficacy of their remedy to deter from crime, one might have imagined that they could not but have known, if they ever looked inwardly into their own hearts, how obscure are human motives, and especially those that instigate to breaches of the law; and yet their consistent rule was, to make the _corpus delicti_ prove the intention. These considerations have been suggested to me by the recollection of a wild adventure of some young men in Edinburgh, the circumstances of which, not belonging to fiction, will show better than a learned dissertation how easy it was for these Dracos to catch the fact and miss the motive.

The skeleton names--now, alas! the only representatives of skeleton bodies--Andrew W----pe, Henry S----k, and Charles S----th, may recall to the memory of some people in Edinburgh still, three young men, who, with good education, fair talents, and graces from nature, might have played a respectable _rôle_ in the drama of life, had it not been for a tendency to "fastness," a disease which seems to increase with civilisation. In their instance the old adage of Aristotle, _simile gaudet simili_, was exemplified to the letter; and the union confirmed in each a mind which, originally impatient of authority, fretted itself against the frame of society, simply because that frame was the result of order. They were never happy except when they went up to the palisades, struck upon them with their lath-blades, and when some orderly indweller looked over atop, ran away laughing. No doubt they had strong passions to gratify too; but, as is usual with this peculiar race of beings, the gratification was the keener the more it owed to a rebellion against decorum. If they ever differed, it was only in their rivalry of success; or when they did not go a spree-hunting together, they recounted their exploits at their nightly meetings, and then the result was an increase of moral inflammation.

Sometimes, for a change, they would take strolls into the country, where they could extract as tribute the admiration or wrath of clodhoppers without being troubled with any fears of the police; not that on any of these occasions they perpetrated any great infringements on the law, for, like the rest of their kind, if they could make themselves objects of observation, they were regardless whether their bizarreries were paid with admiration or only anger or fear, though, if they could produce by any means a causeless panic, the very height of their ambition was attained. In regard to this last effect of their escapades, they were, in the instance I am about to record, more than satisfied. They had gone, on a fine, clear, winter day, along the coast of the Firth of Forth towards Cramond; and, to diversify their amusements, they took with them a gun, which was carried by S----th, with the intention of having a shot at any wild bird or barn-door fowl that might come conveniently within his range. Of this kind of game they had fewer chances, and the stroll would doubtless have appeared a very monotonous affair to a person fond of rational conversation. Nor was there much even to themselves of diversification till they got into a small change-house at Davidson's Mains, where, with a rampant authority, they contrived to get served up to them a kind of dinner, intending to make up for the want of better edibles by potations of whisky toddy.

If facts, as Quinctilian says, are the bones of conversation, opinions are certainly its sinews; and we might add, that whisky toddy is its nervous fluid. These youths, though unwilling to acquire solid information, could wrangle even to quarrelling; but such were their affinities, that they adhered again in a short time, and were as firm friends as ever. They had raised a subject--no other than the question whether highwaymen are necessarily or generally possessed of true courage. Very absurd, no doubt, but as good for a wrangle as any other that can be divided into affirmative and negative by the refracting medium of feeling or prejudice. S----th declared them all to be cowards.

"What say you to Cartouche?" said S----k; "was he a coward?"

"Not sure but he was," said S----th; "he kept a band of blackguards and received their pay, but he was seldom seen in the wild _mélee_ himself. He was fond of the name of terror he bore; but then, as he listened to the wonderful things the Parisian _blanchisseuses_ and _chiffonniers_ and _gamins_ said of him, he knew he was not recognisable, for the very reason that he kept out of sight."

"Oh yes," said W----pe, who joined S----k; "and so he was like Wallace, who kept out of the sight of the English, and yet delighted in Dundee to hear himself spoken of by the crowds who collected in these troublesome times to discuss public affairs. S----th, you know Wallace was a coward, don't you?"

"A thorough poltroon," cried S----th, laughing; "ay, and all the people in Scotland are wrong about him. Didn't he run off, after stabbing the governor's son? and he was always skulking about the Cartland Crags. Then, didn't he flee at the battle of Falkirk; and was he not a robber when Scotland belonged to Longshanks? No doubt the fellow had a big body, strong bones, and good thews; but that he had the real pluck that nerved the little bodies of such men as Nelson, or Suwarrow, ay, or of Napoleon, I deny." Then he began a ludicrous singing, see-saw recitation of the English doggrel--

"The noble wight,
The Wallace dight,
Who slew the knight
On Beltane night,
And ran for fright
Of English might,
And English fight,
And English right;"

and so on in drunken ribaldry.

"All very well for you who are a Shamite, Shmite, Shmith, Smith," said W----pe. "We happen to be Japhetites. Then what say you to Rob Roy?"

"That, in the first place," replied S----th, "he was a Shemite; for Gathelus, the first Scottish monarch, was a grandson of Nimrod, and, what is worse, he married Scota, the daughter of an Egyptian queen, so there was a spice of Ham in Rob; and as all the Hamites were robbers, Rob was a robber too;--as to whose cowardice there is no doubt whatever; for a man who steals another man's cattle in the dark must be a coward. Did you ever hear one single example of Rob attacking when in good daylight, and fighting for them in the sun?"

"Ingenious, S----th, at any rate," roared S----k; "but I don't agree with you. A robber on the highway, must, in the general case, have courage. He braves public opinion, he laughs at the gallows, and he throws himself right against a man in bold competition, without knowing often whether he is a giant or a dwarf."

"All the elements of a batter pudding," cried S----th, "without the battering principle. Ay, you forget the head-battering bludgeon, the instantaneous pistol, or the cunning knife; none of all which would a man with a spark of courage in him use against an unarmed, defenceless traveller. Another thing you forget, the robber acts upon surprises. He produces confusion by his very presentation, fear by his demand of life or money; and when the poor devil's head is running round, he runs away with his watch or his purse, perhaps both. 'Tis all selfishness, pure unadulterated selfishness; and will you tell me that a man without a particle of honesty or generosity can have courage?"

"Not moral courage, perhaps; but he may have physical."

"All the same, no difference," continued the doughty S----th. "Who ever heard of a bodily feeling except as something coming through the body? There are only two physical feelings: pain in being wounded or starved, and pleasure in being relieved from pain, or fed when hungry or thirsty. I know none other; all the others are moral feelings."

"You may be bold through drink acting on the stomach and head."

"Ay, but the boldness, though the effect of a physical cause, is itself a moral entity."

"Whoever thought that S----th was such a metaphysician!" said W----pe, a little agoggled in his drunken eyes.

"But the same may be said of every feeling," rejoined S----k, somewhat roused to ambition by W----pe's remark.

"And so it may, my little Aristotle," continued the clever asserter of his original proposition. "Why, man, look ye, what takes you into Miss F----'s shop in Princes Street for snuff, when you never produce a physical titillation in your nose by a single pinch? Why, it's something you call love, a terribly moral thing, though personified by a little fellow with pinions. Yes, wondrously moral; and sometimes, as in your case, immoral. Well, what is it produced by? The face of the said Miss F---- painted as a sun picture in the camera at the back of your eye, where there is a membrane without a particle of nitrate of silver in its composition, and which yet receives the image. Well, what is love but just the titillation produced by this image imprinted on your flesh, just as the pleasure of a pinch is the effect of a titillation of the nerves in the nose? Yet we don't say that snuff pleasure is a moral thing, but merely nasal or bodily. What makes the difference?"

"How S----th is coming it!" said W----pe, still more amazed. "Where the devil has he got all this?"

"Why, the difference lies here. You know, by manipulation and blowing it, that you have a nose; but you don't wipe the retina at the back of your eye when you are weeping for love--only the outside, where the puling tears are. In short, you know you have a nose, but you don't know you have a retina. D'ye catch me, my small Stagyrite, my petit Peripatetic, my comical Academician, eh? Take your toddy, and let's have a touch of moral drunkenness."

"You ray-ther have me on the hip, S----th."

"Ay, just so; and if I should kick you there, you would not say the pain was a moral thing. All through the same. It's just where and when we don't know the medium we say things are moral and spiritual, and poetical and rational, and all the rest of the humbug."

"But though you say all highwaymen are cowards, you won't try that trick with your foot," said S----k, boiling up a little under the fire of the toddy.

"Don't intend; though, if you were to produce moral courage in me by pinching my nose, I think I could, after making up my mind and putting you upon your guard with a stick in your hand if you chose. Eh! my Peripatetic." And S----th was clearly getting drunk too.

"D----n the fellow, his metaphysics are making him [Transcriber's Note: missing part of this word] dent," cried W----pe.

"Why, you don't see where they hit," said S----th drawlingly. "Somewhere about the pineal; and therefore we say impudence is moral, sometimes immoral, as just now when you damned me. No more of your old junk, I say, sitting here in my cathedra, which by the way is spring-bottomed, which may account for my moral elasticity that a highwayman is a coward."

"Well," cried S----k, starting up. "I'll deposit a pound with W----pe, on a bet that you'll not take sixpence from the first bumpkin we meet on the road, by the old watchword, 'Stand and deliver;' and you'll have the gun to boot."

"Ay, that's a physical bribe," cried W----pe; and, after pausing a little, "The fellow flinches."

"And surely the reverse must hold," added S----k, "that, being a coward, he must be a highwayman."

"Why, you see, gents," said S----th coolly, "I don't mind a very great deal, you know, though I do take said sixpence from said bumpkin; but I won't do it, you know, on compulsion."

"If there's no compulsion, there's no robbery," said S----k.

"Oh, I mean _your_ compulsion. As for mine, exercised on said bumpkin, let me alone for that part of the small affair; but none of your compulsion, if you love me. I can do anything, but not upon compulsion, you know."

"Done then!"

"Why, ye-e-s," drawled S----th, "done; I may say, gents, done; but I say with Sir John, don't misunderstand me, not upon compulsion, you know."

"Your own free will," shouted both the others, now pretty well to do in the world of dithyrambics. "Here's your instrument for extorting the sixpence by force or fear."

And this young man, half inebriated--with, we may here say parenthetically, a mother living in a garret in James' Square, with one son and an only daughter of a respectable though poor man, and who trusted to her son for being the means of her support--qualified, as we have seen, by high parts to extort from society respect, and we may add, though that has not appeared, to conciliate love and admiration--took willingly into his hand the old rusty "Innes," to perpetrate upon the highway a robbery. And would he do it? You had only to look upon his face for an instant to be certain that he would; for he had all the lineaments of a young man of indomitable courage and resolution--the steady eye, the firm lip, all under the high brows of intellect, nor unmixed with the beauty that belongs to these moral expressions which in the playfulness of the social hour he had been reducing to materialism, well knowing all the while that he was arguing for effect and applause from those who only gave him the return of stultified petulance. What if that mother and sister, who loved him, and wept day and night over the wild follies that consumed his energies and demoralized his heart, had seen him now!

The bill was paid by S----k, who happened to have money, and who gave it on the implied condition of a similar one for all on another occasion. They went, or, as the phrase is often, sallied forth. The night had now come down with her black shadows. There was no moon. She was dispensing her favours among savages in another hemisphere, who, savages though they were, might have their devotions to their strange gods, resident with her up yonder, where no robbery is, save that of light from the pure fountain of heat and life. Yes, the darkness was auspicious to folly, as it often is to vice; and there was quietness too--no winds abroad to speak voices through rustling leaves, to terrify the criminal from his wild rebellion against the peace of nature. No night could have suited them better. Yes, all was favourable but God; and Him these wild youths had offended, as disobedient sons of poor parents, who had educated them well--as rebellious citizens among a society which would have hailed them as ornaments--as despisers of God's temple, where grace was held out to them and spurned.

They were now upon the low road leading parallel to the beach, and towards the end of Inverleith Row. Nor had the devil left them with the deserted toddy-bowl. There was still pride for S----th, and for the others the rankling sense of inferiority in talent and of injury from scorching irony. Nor had they proceeded two miles, till the fatal opportunity loomed in the dark, in the form of a figure coming up from Leith or Edinburgh.

Now, S----th;
Now, the cowardly Cartouche;
Now, the poltroon Rob Roy;
Now, the braggart Wallace!

But S----th did not need the taunts, nor, though many a patriotic cause wanted such a youth, was he left for other work, that night of devil-worship. The figure approached. Alas! the work so easy. S----th was right; how easy and cowardly, where the stranger was, in the confidence of his own heart, unprepared, unweaponed! Yet those who urged him on leapt a dyke.

"Stand and deliver!" said S----th, with a handkerchief over his face.

"God help me!" cried the man, in a fit of newborn fear. "I'm a father, have wife and bairns; but I canna spare my life to a highwayman. Here, here, here."

And fumbling nervously in his pocket, and shaking all over, not at all like the old object of similitude, but rather like a branch of a tree driven by the wind, he thrust something into S----th's hand, and rushing past him, was off on the road homewards. Nor was it a quick walk under fear, but a run, as if he thought he was or would be pursued for his life, or brought down by the long range of the gun he had seen in the hands of the robber.

Yes, it was easily done, and it was done; but how to be undone at a time when the craving maw of the noose dangled from the post, in obedience to the Procrustes of the time!

And S----th felt it was done. His hand still held what the man had pushed into it, but by-and-by it was as fire. His brain reeled; he staggered, and would have fallen, but for S----k, who, leaping the dyke, came behind him.

"What luck?"

"This," said S----th,--"the price of my life," throwing on the ground the paper roll.

"Pound-notes," cried S----k, taking them up. "One, two, three, four, five; more than sixpence."

"Where is the man?" cried S----th, as, seizing the notes from the hands of S----k, he turned round. Then, throwing down the gun, he set off after his victim; but the latter was now ahead, though his pursuer heard the clatter of his heavy shoes on the metal road.

"Ho, there! stop! 'twas a joke--a bet."

No answer, and couldn't be. The man naturally thought the halloo was for further compulsion, under the idea that he had more to give, and on he sped with increased celerity and terror; nor is it supposed that he stopt till he got to his own house, a mile beyond Davidson's Mains.

Smith gave up the pursuit, and with the notes in his hand, ready to be cast away at every exacerbation of his fear, returned to his cowardly companions with hanging head and, if they had seen, with eyes rolling, as if he did not know where to look or what to do.

"What is to be done?" he cried; and his fears shook the others.

"Yes, what is to be done? You urged me on. Try to help me out. Let us go back and seek out this man. To-morrow it may be too late, when the police have had this robbery in their hands as a thing intended."

"We could not find the man though we went back," said S----k. And his companions agreed.

But W----pe, who had some acquaintanceship with the police Captain Stewart, proposed that they should proceed homewards, go to him, give him the money, and tell the story out.

"That, I fear, would be putting one's hand in the mouth of the hyaena at the moment he is laughing with hunger, as they say he does."

An opinion which S----th feared was too well founded. Nearly at their wits' end, they stood all three for a little quite silent, till the sound of a horse's clattering feet sounded as if coming from Davidson's Mains. All under the conviction of crime, they became alarmed; and as the rider approached, they concealed themselves behind the dyke, which ran by the side of the road. At that moment a man came as if from Edinburgh, and they could hear the rider, who did not, from his voice, appear to be the man who had been robbed, inquiring if he had met a young man with a gun in his hand. The man answered no, and off set the rider towards town at the rate of a hard trot. The few hopeful moments when anything could have been done effectually as a palinode and expiation were past; and S----th, releaping the dyke, was again upon the road in the depth of despair, and his companions scarcely less so. All his and their escapades had hitherto been at least within the bounds of the law; and though his heart had often misgiven him, when called upon for the nourishment of his wild humours, as he thought of his widowed mother at home, without the comfort of the son she loved in spite of his errors, he had not ever yet felt the pangs of deep regret as they came preluding amendment. A terrible influx of feelings, which had been accumulating almost unknown to him during months and months--for his father had been dead only for a year and a half--pushed up against all the strainings of a wild natural temperament, and seemed ready to choke him, depriving him of utterance, and making him appear the very coward he had been depicting so sharply an hour before. A deep gloom fell over him; nor was this rendered less inspissated by the recollection that came quick as lightning, that he was the only one known to the mistress of the inn. And now, worse and worse--for the same power that sent him that conviction threw a suspicion over his mind which made him strike his forehead with an energy alarming to his companions--no other--"O, merciful God!" he muttered--than that the man he had robbed was his maternal uncle; the only man among the friends of either his father or his mother who had shown any sympathy to the bereaved family, who had fed them and kept them from starvation, and by whom he had been himself nourished. He had no power to speak this: it was one of those thoughts that scathe the nerves that serve the tongue, and which flit and burn, and will not ameliorate their fierceness by the common means given to man in mercy. It now appeared to him as something miraculous why he did not recognise him; but the occasion was one of hurry and confusion, and so completely oblivious had he been in the agony which came on him in an instant, that he even thought that at the very moment he knew him, looking darkly, as he did, through the handkerchief over his eyes. In his despair, he meditated hurrying to Leith, and with the five pounds getting a passage over the sea somewhere, it signified nothing where, if away from the scene of his crime and ingratitude; and this resolution was confirmed by the additional thought that Mr. Henderson, however good and generous, was a stern man--so stern, that he had ten years before given up a beloved son into the hands of justice for stealing; yea, stern _ex corde_ as Cato, if generous _ex crumena_ as Codrus.

This resolution for a time brought back his love of freedom and adventure. He would go to Hudson's Bay, and shoot bears or set traps for wild silver-foxes, that would bring him gold; or to Buenos Ayres, and catch the wild horse with the lasso; or to Lima, and become a soldier of fortune, and slay men with the sword. The gleam of wild hope was shortlived--his triumph over his present ill a temporary hallucination. The laurel is the only tree which burns and crackles when green. The intention fled, as once more the thought of his mother came, with that vigour which was only of half an hour's birth, and begotten by young conscience on old neglect. They had been trailing their legs along till they came to Inverleith Row, where he behoved to have left his companions, if his resolution lasted; for the road there goes straight on to Leith Harbour. He hesitated, and made an effort; but S----k, who knew him, and fancied from the wild look of his eye that he meditated throwing himself into the deep harbour of Leith, took him by an arm, motioning to W----pe to take the other, and thus by a very small effort--for really his resolution had departed, and his mind, so far as his intention went, was gone--they half forced him up the long row. When they arrived at Canonmills, here is the rider again, hurrying on: he had executed his commission, whatever it was, and was galloping home. But the moment he came forward, he pulled up. He had, by a glance under the light of a lamp, caught a sight of the gun in the hands of S----k, who had carried it when he took S----th's arm. The man shouted to a policeman,

"Seize that robber!"

"Which of them?"

"Him with the gun."

And in an instant the cowardly dog who had done the whole business was laid hold of.

"The gun is mine," cried S----th. "It is I who am answerable for whatever was done by him who carried that weapon. Take me, and let the innocent off. I say this young man is innocent."

"Very gallant and noble," said the man; "but when we go to the hills, we like the deer that bears the horns."

"We are up to them tricks," said the policeman. And S----k is borne along, with courage, if he ever had any, gone, and his eye looking terror.

S----th wanted to go along with him; but W----pe seized him by the arm again and dragged him up by the east side of Huntly Street, whereby they could get easily to James' Square.

In a few minutes more S----th was at his mother's door with the burning five pounds in his pocket. He had meditated throwing it away, but the hurrying concourse of thoughts had prevented the insufficient remedy from being carried into effect. When he opened the door he found his mother alone. The sister had not yet come from the warehouse where she earned five shillings a week, almost the only source of her and the mother's living; for the money which S----th earned as a mere copying clerk in a writer's office, went mostly in some other direction. The mother soon observed, as she cast her eye over him, that there was something more than ordinary out of even his irregular way. He was pale, woe-worn, haggard; nor did he seem able to stand, but hurried to a chair and flung himself down, uttering confusedly, "Something to drink, mother----whisky."

"I hae nane, Charlie, lad," said she. "Never hae I passed a day like this since your father died. I have na e'en got the bit meat that a' get that are under God's protection. But what ails ye, dear Charlie?"

"Never mind me," replied the youth in choking accents. "I am better. Starving, starving! O God! and my doing. Yes, I am better--a bitter cure--starving," he again muttered; and searching his pockets, and throwing the five pounds on the table--"There, there, there," he added.

The mother took up the notes, and counted them slowly; for she had been inured to grief, and was always calm, even when her heart beat fast with the throbs of anguish.

"And whaur fae, laddie?" she said, as she turned her grey eye and scanned deeply the pale face of her son.

Silent, even dogged! Where now his metaphysics, his gibes on the physicalities, the moralities, the spiritualities?--all bundled up in a vibrating chord.

"Whaur fae, Charlie," had she repeated, still looking at him.

"The devil!" cried he, stung by her searching look, which brought back a gleam of the old rebellion.

"A gude paymaster to his servants," she said; "but I'm no ane o' them yet; and may the Lord, wham I serve, even while his chastening hand is heavy upon me, preserve me frae his bribes!" And laying down the notes, she added, not lightly, as it might seem, but seriously, yet quietly,

"Nae wonder they're warm."

The notes had carried the heat of his burning hand.

"The auld story--billiards," said she again; "for they are the devil's cue and balls."

No answer; and the mother seating herself again, looked stedfastly and suspiciously at him; but she could not catch the eye of her son, who sat doggedly determined not to reveal his secret, and as determined also to elude her looks, searching as they were, and sufficient to enter his very soul. Yet she loved him too well to objurgate where she was only as yet suspicious; and in the quietness of the hour, she fell for a moment into her widowed habit of speaking as if none were present but herself.

"Wharfor bore I him--wharfor toiled and wrought for him for sae mony years, since the time he sat on my knee smiling in my face, as if he said, I will comfort you when you are old, and will be your stay and support? Was that smile then a lee, put there by the devil, wha has gi'en him the money to deceive me again?"

Then she paused.

"And how could that be? Love is not a cheat; and did ever bairn love a mither as he loved me? or did ever mither love her bairn as I hae loved him? Lord, deliver him frae his enemies, and mak him what he was in thae bygone days--sae innocent, sae cheerful, sae obedient; and I will meekly suffer a' Thou canst lay upon me."

The words reached the ears of the son, and the audible sobs seemed to startle the solemn spirit of the hour and the place. "What would she say," he thought, "if she heard me declare I had robbed my uncle?"

At that moment the door opened, and in rushed little Jeanie S----th,--her face pale, and her blue eyes lighted with fear, and the thin delicate nostril distended, and hissing with her quick breathings,--

"Oh mither, there's twa officers on the stair seeking Charlie!"

And the quick creature, darting her eye on the table where the notes lay, snatched them up, and secreted them in her bosom; and, what was more extraordinary, just as if she had divined something more from her brother's looks, which told her that that money would be sought for by these officers, she darted off like a bird with a crumb in its bill, which it has picked up from beneath your eyes; but not before depositing, as she passed, a paper on a chair near the door.

"That creature is a spirit," said the mother. "She sees the evil in the dark before it comes, and wards it off like a guardian angel; but oh! she has little in her power to be an angel."

And rising, she took up the paper. It was only some bread and cheese, which the girl, knowing the privations of her mother, had bought with a part of her five shillings a week.

Thereafter, just as little Jeannie had intimated, came in two officers, with the usual looks of duty appearing through their professional sorrow.

"We want your son, good woman."

"He is there," said she; "but what want ye him for?"

"Not for going to church," said the man, forgetting said professional sorrow in his love of a joke, "but for robbery on the highway; and we must search the house for five pounds in British Linen Company notes."

And the men proceeded to search, even putting their hands in the mother's pockets, besides rifling those of the son. They of course found nothing except the powder and shot, which had still remained there, and a handkerchief.

"That is something, anyhow," said one of the men, "and a great deal too. The one who is up in the office says true; he was not the man."

"No more he was," said Charles. "I am the man you ought to take; and take me."

"Sae, sae; just as I suspected," muttered the mother. "Lord, Lord! the cup runs over. It was e'en lipping when John died; but I will bear yet." And she seemed to grasp firmly the back of a chair, and compressed her lips--an attitude she maintained like a statue all the time occupied by the departure of her son. The door closed--he was gone; and she still stood, the _vivum cadaver_--the image of a petrified creature of misery.

Yet, overcome as her very calmness was, and enchanted for the moment into voicelessness and utter inaction, she was not that kind of women who sit and bear the stripes without an effort to ward them off. If Jeannie was as quick as lightning, she was sure as that which follows the flash. She thought for a moment, "God does not absolutely and for ever leave his servants." Some thought had struck her. She put on her bonnet and cloak deliberately, even looking into the glass to see if she was tidy enough for where she intended going, and for whom she intended to see.

And now this quiet woman is on her way down Broughton Street at twelve o'clock of a cold winter night, which, like her own mind, had only that calmness which results from the exhaustion of sudden biting gusts from the north, and therefore right in her face. She drew her cloak round her. She had a long way to go, but her son was in danger of the gallows; and thoughtless, and as it now seemed, wicked as he was, he was yet her _son_. The very word is a volume of heart language--not the fitful expression of passion, but that quiet eloquence which bedews the eye and brings deep sighs with holy recollections of the child-time, and germinating hopes of future happiness up to the period when he would hang over her departing spirit. Much of all that had gone, and been replaced by dark forebodings of the future; and now there was before her the vision of an ignominious death as the termination of all these holy inspirations. But her faithful saying was always, "Wait, hope, and persevere;" and the saying was muttered a hundred times as she trudged weariedly, oh! how weariedly, for one who had scarcely tasted food for that day, and who had left untouched the gift brought by her loving daughter that night--for which, plain as it was, her heart yearned even amidst its grief, yea, though grief is said, untruly no doubt, to have no appetite. Perhaps not to those who are well fed; but nature is stronger than even grief, and she now felt the consequence of her disobedience to her behests in her shaking limbs and fainting heart. Yet she trudged and trudged on, shutting her mouth against her empty stomach to keep out the cold north wind. She is at the foot of Inverleith Row, and her face is to the west; she will now escape the desultory blasts by keeping close by the long running dyke. She passes the scene of the robbery without knowing it; else, doubtless, she would have stood and examined it by those instincts that force the spirit to such modes of satisfaction, as if the inanimate thing could calm the spiritual. She was now drawing to Davidson's Mains: a little longer, and much past midnight, she was rapping, still in her quiet way, at the door of her brother.

The family had had something else to do than to sleep. There were the sounds of tongues and high words. Mrs. S----th was surprised, as well she might; for though sometimes Mr. Henderson partook freely of the bottle when he met old friends in town, he and the whole household were peaceable, orderly, and early goers to bed. The door was opened almost upon the instant; and Mrs. S----th was presently before Mr. Henderson and two others, one of whom held in his hand a whip.

"What has brought you here, Margaret, at this hour?"

"I want to speak privately to you."

"Just here; out with it," said he. "These are my friends; and if it is more money you want, you have come at an unlucky time, for I have been robbed by a villain of five pounds, which I could ill spare."

Mrs. S----th's heart died away within her. She clenched her hands to keep her from shaking; for she recollected the old story about his own son--a story which had got him the character of being harsh and unnatural. She could not mention her errand, which was nothing else than to induce her brother to use his influence in some way to get Charles out of the hands of the law. She could not utter even the word Charles, and all she could say was--

"Robbed!"

"Ay, robbed by a villain, whom I shall hang three cubits higher than Haman."

And the stern man even laughed at the thought of retribution. Yet, withal, no man could deny his generosity and general kindliness, if, even immediately after, he did not show it by slipping a pound into the hands of his needy sister.

"There," said he; "no more at present. I will call up and see you to-morrow morning, as I go to the police office to identify the villain. Meantime, take a dram, dear Peggy, and get home to bed. The night is cold, and see that you wrap yourself well up to keep _out_ the wind and _in_ the spirit; it's good whisky."

Shortly afterwards she was on her way home, with more than blasted hopes of what she had travelled for.

His uncle the man he had robbed! Even with all her forced composedness, this seemed too much--ay, so much too much, that she was totally overpowered. She paused to recover strength; and, looking forward, saw a thin flying shadow coming up to her, with a shriek of delight; and immediately she was hugged rapturously and kissed all over by little Jeannie, whose movements, as they ever were--so agile, so quick, so Protean--appeared to her, now that she was stolid with despair, as the postures and gestures of a creature appearing in a dream.

"Oh, I know all," she cried; "don't speak--nay, wait now till I return."

And the creature was off like a September meteor disappearing in the west, as if to make up again to the sun, far down away behind the hills from whence it had been struck off in the height of the day.

What can the strange creature mean? But she had had experience of her, and knew the instinctive divination that got at objects and results where reason in full-grown man would syllogize into the darkness of despair.

Nor was it long before she is running back, leaping with all the _abandon_ of a romp, crying--

"I will save dear Charlie yet; for I love him as much as I hate that old curmudgeon."

"What does the girl mean? Whaur was you, bairn?" said her mother.

"Oh mother, how cold it is for you! Wrap the cloak about you."

"But what _is_ it that you mean, Jeannie?"

"We shall be home by-and-by; come."

And, putting an arm round her mother's waist, she impelled her forward with the strength of her wythe of an arm.

"Come, come, there are ghosts about these woods;" and then she cowered, but still impelled.

Nor did the mother press the question she had already put twice; for, as we have said, she knew the nature of the girl, who ever took her own way, and had the art to make that way either filial obedience or loving conciliation.

"Oh, I'm so frightened for these ghosts!" she continued. "You know there was a murder here once upon a time. They're so like myself--wicked, and won't answer when they're spoken to, as I would not answer you, dear mother, just now; but wait till to-morrow, and you shall see that I am your own loving Jeannie."

"Weel, weel, bairn, we _will_ see. But, oh, I'm muckle afraid; d'ye know, Jeannie, Charlie has been robbing! And wha, think ye, was the man--wha but--"

"Hush, hush, mother, I know it all already; but let me beneath your cloak, I'm so frightened."

And the little sprite got in, keeping her head and the little cup of a bonnet protruding every moment to look round; yet if it could have been seen in the dark, with such a sly, half-humorous eye, as betokened one of those curiously-made creatures who seem to be formed for studies to the thoroughgoing decent pacers of the world's stage.

"Ah! now we're all safe, as poor Charlie will be to-morrow," she cried, as they got to the foot of the long row, and she emerged in the light of one of the lamps, so like a flash from a cloud, running before her mother to get her to walk faster and faster, as if some scheme she had in her head was loitering under the impediment of her mother's wearied, oh, wearied step.

Having at length reached home, Jeannie ran and got the fire as bright as her own eye, crying out occasionally, as she glanced about,

"Poor Charlie in a dungeon!" and again, a few minutes after, when puffing at the fire with the bellows,

"No fire for dear Charlie; all dark and dismal!"

And then, running for the little paper packet with the cheese and bread, and setting it down,