CHAPTER III
_Lewis Pyneweck_
In the meantime the footman dispatched in pursuit of Mr. Peters speedily overtook that feeble gentleman. The old man stopped when he heard the sound of pursuing steps, but any alarms that may have crossed his mind seemed to disappear on his recognizing the livery. He very gratefully accepted the proffered a.s.sistance, and placed his tremulous arm within the servant"s for support. They had not gone far, however, when the old man stopped suddenly, saying,
"Dear me! as I live, I have dropped it. You heard it fall. My eyes, I fear, won"t serve me, and I"m unable to stoop low enough; but if _you_ will look, you shall have half the find. It is a guinea; I carried it in my glove."
The street was silent and deserted. The footman had hardly descended to what he termed his "hunkers," and begun to search the pavement about the spot which the old man indicated, when Mr. Peters, who seemed very much exhausted, and breathed with difficulty, struck him a violent blow, from above, over the back of the head with a heavy instrument, and then another; and leaving him bleeding and senseless in the gutter, ran like a lamplighter down a lane to the right, and was gone.
When an hour later, the watchman brought the man in livery home, still stupid and covered with blood, Judge Harbottle cursed his servant roundly, swore he was drunk, threatened him with an indictment for taking bribes to betray his master, and cheered him with a perspective of the broad street leading from the Old Bailey to Tyburn, the cart"s tail, and the hangman"s lash.
Notwithstanding this demonstration, the Judge was pleased. It was a disguised "affidavit man," or footpad, no doubt, who had been employed to frighten him. The trick had fallen through.
A "court of appeal," such as the false Hugh Peters had indicated, with a.s.sa.s.sination for its sanction, would be an uncomfortable inst.i.tution for a "hanging judge" like the Honourable Justice Harbottle. That sarcastic and ferocious administrator of the criminal code of England, at that time a rather pharisaical, b.l.o.o.d.y and heinous system of justice, had reasons of his own for choosing to try that very Lewis Pyneweck, on whose behalf this audacious trick was devised. Try him he would. No man living should take that morsel out of his mouth.
Of Lewis Pyneweck, of course, so far as the outer world could see, he knew nothing. He would try him after his fashion, without fear, favour, or affection.
But did he not remember a certain thin man, dressed in mourning, in whose house, in Shrewsbury, the Judge"s lodgings used to be, until a scandal of ill-treating his wife came suddenly to light? A grocer with a demure look, a soft step, and a lean face as dark as mahogany, with a nose sharp and long, standing ever so little awry, and a pair of dark steady brown eyes under thinly-traced black brows--a man whose thin lips wore always a faint unpleasant smile.
Had not that scoundrel an account to settle with the Judge? had he not been troublesome lately? and was not his name Lewis Pyneweck, some time grocer in Shrewsbury, and now prisoner in the jail of that town?
The reader may take it, if he pleases, as a sign that Judge Harbottle was a good Christian, that he suffered nothing ever from remorse. That was undoubtedly true. He had, nevertheless, done this grocer, forger, what you will, some five or six years before, a grievous wrong; but it was not that, but a possible scandal, and possible complications, that troubled the learned Judge now.
Did he not, as a lawyer, know, that to bring a man from his shop to the dock, the chances must be at least ninety-nine out of a hundred that he is guilty?
A weak man like his learned brother Withershins was not a judge to keep the high-roads safe, and make crime tremble. Old Judge Harbottle was the man to make the evil-disposed quiver, and to refresh the world with showers of wicked blood, and thus save the innocent, to the refrain of the ancient saw he loved to quote:
Foolish pity Ruins a city.
In hanging that fellow he could not be wrong. The eye of a man accustomed to look upon the dock could not fail to read "villain"
written sharp and clear in his plotting face. Of course he would try him, and no one else should.
A saucy-looking woman, still handsome, in a mob-cap gay with blue ribbons, in a saque of flowered silk, with lace and rings on, much too fine for the Judge"s housekeeper, which nevertheless she was, peeped into his study next morning, and, seeing the Judge alone, stepped in.
"Here"s another letter from him, come by the post this morning. Can"t you do nothing for him?" she said wheedlingly, with her arm over his neck, and her delicate finger and thumb fiddling with the lobe of his purple ear.
"I"ll try," said Judge Harbottle, not raising his eyes from the paper he was reading.
"I knew you"d do what I asked you," she said.
The Judge clapt his gouty claw over his heart, and made her an ironical bow.
"What," she asked, "will you do?"
"Hang him," said the Judge with a chuckle.
"You don"t mean to; no, you don"t, my little man," said she, surveying herself in a mirror on the wall.
"I"m d----d but I think you"re falling in love with your husband at last!" said Judge Harbottle.
"I"m blest but I think you"re growing jealous of him," replied the lady with a laugh. "But no; he was always a bad one to me; I"ve done with him long ago."
"And he with you, by George! When he took your fortune, and your spoons, and your ear-rings, he had all he wanted of you. He drove you from his house; and when he discovered you had made yourself comfortable, and found a good situation, he"d have taken your guineas, and your silver, and your ear-rings over again, and then allowed you half-a-dozen years more to make a new harvest for his mill. You don"t wish him good; if you say you do, you lie."
She laughed a wicked, saucy laugh, and gave the terrible Rhadamanthus a playful tap on the chops.
"He wants me to send him money to fee a counsellor," she said, while her eyes wandered over the pictures on the wall, and back again to the looking-gla.s.s; and certainly she did not look as if his jeopardy troubled her very much.
"Confound his impudence, the _scoundrel_!" thundered the old Judge, throwing himself back in his chair, as he used to do _in furore_ on the bench, and the lines of his mouth looked brutal, and his eyes ready to leap from their sockets. "If you answer his letter from my house to please yourself, you"ll write your next from somebody else"s to please me. You understand, my pretty witch, I"ll not be pestered. Come, no pouting; whimpering won"t do. You don"t care a bra.s.s farthing for the villain, body or soul. You came here but to make a row. You are one of Mother Carey"s chickens; and where you come, the storm is up. Get you gone, baggage! get you _gone_!" he repeated, with a stamp; for a knock at the hall-door made her instantaneous disappearance indispensable.
I need hardly say that the venerable Hugh Peters did not appear again.
The Judge never mentioned him. But oddly enough, considering how he laughed to scorn the weak invention which he had blown into dust at the very first puff, his white-wigged visitor and the conference in the dark front parlour were often in his memory.
His shrewd eye told him that allowing for change of tints and such disguises as the playhouse affords every night, the features of this false old man, who had turned out too hard for his tall footman, were identical with those of Lewis Pyneweck.
Judge Harbottle made his registrar call upon the crown solicitor, and tell him that there was a man in town who bore a wonderful resemblance to a prisoner in Shrewsbury jail named Lewis Pyneweck, and to make inquiry through the post forthwith whether any one was personating Pyneweck in prison and whether he had thus or otherwise made his escape.
The prisoner was safe, however, and no question as to his ident.i.ty.
CHAPTER IV
_Interruption in Court_
In due time Judge Harbottle went circuit; and in due time the judges were in Shrewsbury. News travelled slowly in those days, and newspapers, like the wagons and stage coaches, took matters easily. Mrs. Pyneweck, in the Judge"s house, with a diminished household--the greater part of the Judge"s servants having gone with him, for he had given up riding circuit, and travelled in his coach in state--kept house rather solitarily at home.
In spite of quarrels, in spite of mutual injuries--some of them, inflicted by herself, enormous--in spite of a married life of spited bickerings--a life in which there seemed no love or liking or forbearance, for years--now that Pyneweck stood in near danger of death, something like remorse came suddenly upon her. She knew that in Shrewsbury were transacting the scenes which were to determine his fate.
She knew she did not love him; but she could not have supposed, even a fortnight before, that the hour of suspense could have affected her so powerfully.
She knew the day on which the trial was expected to take place. She could not get it out of her head for a minute; she felt faint as it drew towards evening.
Two or three days pa.s.sed; and then she knew that the trial must be over by this time. There were floods between London and Shrewsbury, and news was long delayed. She wished the floods would last forever. It was dreadful waiting to hear; dreadful to know that the event was over, and that she could not hear till self-willed rivers subsided; dreadful to know that they must subside and the news come at last.
She had some vague trust in the Judge"s good nature, and much in the resources of chance and accident. She had contrived to send the money he wanted. He would not be without legal advice and energetic and skilled support.
At last the news did come--a long arrear all in a gush: a letter from a female friend in Shrewsbury; a return of the sentences, sent up for the Judge; and most important, because most easily got at, being told with great aplomb and brevity, the long-deferred intelligence of the Shrewsbury a.s.sizes in the _Morning Advertiser_. Like an impatient reader of a novel, who reads the last page first, she read with dizzy eyes the list of the executions.
Two were respited, seven were hanged; and in that capital catalogue was this line:
"Lewis Pyneweck--forgery."