Part 17

There is an odd family likeness between the personalia of lawyers and of actors. The fellows, out of court, stripped of their melodramatic trappings, can’t raise a laugh which would tickle any one less than a bishop. They are obsessed with the idea of their own importance. Much self-inflation has killed in them all sense of proportion. They prove themselves, the truth is, dull dogs on revision.

The law is not so exhausting a study as it appears on first sight to a layman. Given an understanding of its main principle, which is syllogism, and there you are already in its Holy of Holies. As, for instance, I call a man a beast: a cheetah is a beast: I have called the man a cheater—ergo, he can proceed against me for defamation. There is its rubric in a nutshell—perfectly simple.

However, _exceptis excipiendis_, there were Curran, and Erskine, and some others. There was also Brindley, the great Crown Prosecutor, whose eloquence was of such persuasiveness that it was said the very Bench _hung upon his word_. I had the chance to meet him once, in such a place and on such a night as I began by describing. It was in the “Maid’s Head” at Norwich, and my experience is at your service.

It had, I knew, been a full list and a varied; yet the great man, it seemed, had found nothing in it all to stimulate his humorous faculties. The liveliness was all supplied by a pert Deputy Clerk of the Peace, whose bump of reverence was as insignificant as his effrontery was tremendous. The Bar began by tolerating him; went on to humour his sallies; chilled presently over his presumption; grew patronizing, impatient, and at last rude. He didn’t care; nor I, certainly. His readiness was the only relief from a congested boredom.

The talk drifted, in the course of the evening, upon legal _posers_—circumstantial evidence, ex-statutory cases, and so forth. There were some dull examples proffered, and I observed, incidentally, that the Law, when it couldn’t hark back to precedent, was wont to grow a little hazy and befogged. Many solemn conundrums were propounded; but the Deputy Clerk, as usual, pushed himself to the front with an impertinence—

“If I slink out of the company of a bore, am I guilty of stealing from his person?”

“Pooh, pooh!” said Brindley, with contempt. “Don’t be flippant, sir.”

The Deputy Clerk was not a whit abashed.

“Sir, to you,” he said. “If that isn’t liked, I’ll propose another. If a woman is divorced from her husband, and a child is born to her before the decree is made absolute, is that child, lawfully begot, legitimate or illegitimate?”

They were glad to take this seriously. I forget what the decision was—that, given the necessary interval between the decree and its confirmation, I think, the situation was virtually impossible.

“Very well,” said the Deputy Clerk. “But perhaps one can conceive such a question rising. Let it pass, however; and answer me this, gentlemen: If one is imprisoned unjustly—that is to say, for a crime one has not committed—and, breaking out of prison, gives proof of one’s innocence, can one be indicted for prison-breaking?”

This, at least, was a fair poser, and discussion on it grew actually warm.

“Bosh!” said a fierce gentleman. “You ain’t going to justify your defiance of the law by arguing that the law is liable to make an occasional mistake—don’t tell me!”

Here a very young barrister dared the revolutionary sentiment that the law, being responsible in the first instance to itself, might be treated, if caught-stumbling _in flagranti delicto_, as drastically as any burglar with a pistol in his hand. He was called, almost shouted, down. The suggestion cut at the very root of jurisprudence. The law, like the king who typified it, could do no wrong; witness its time-honoured right to _pardon_ the innocent victims of its own errors.

“It may detain and incarcerate one for being only a suspected person,” said Brindley. “That its suspicions may prove unfounded, is nothing. It must be _cum privilegio_, or the constitution goes. A nice thing if the Crown could be put on its defence for an error in judgment.”

“A very nice thing,” said the Deputy Clerk.

Brindley snorted at him. “Perhaps,” said he sarcastically, “the gentleman will state a case.”

The gentleman desired nothing better. I would have backed him to hold his own, anyhow; but, in this instance, I was gratified to gather from his manner that he had a real story to tell. And he had.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “it occurred within my father’s memory; but my own is good enough to reproduce it literally. It made a rare stir in the Norwich of his day, and quite fluttered, I assure you, the dovecots of the profession.

“The parties chiefly concerned in it were three: old Nicholas Browbody, his ward Ellen, and Mr. George Hussey, who was put on his trial for burglary and murder. Mr. George was quite a notable cracksman in his day, which was one pretty remote from ours in everything but the conservatism of the law. He was ‘housebreaker’ in the indictment; he was arrested by the Tombland patrol; and he was carried to court in a ‘chair,’ attended by a party of the City Guard.

“George, says the story, was an elegant figure of a man, and not at all regardless of the modes. Dark blue coat with brass buttons, fancy vest, black satin breeches, white silk stockings, hair full dressed and a brooch in his bosom—that was how he appeared before his judges.

“The facts were simple enough. On a night of November, a shot and a screech had been heard in Mr. Browbody’s house in Unthank, a ward of the city; an entrance had been made through a window, opportunely open, by the Watch as opportunely handy, and the housebreaker had been discovered, a warm pistol in his hand, standing over the body of old Nicholas, who lay dead on the floor with his head blown in.

“The burglar was found standing, I say, like as in a stupor; the room was old Browbody’s study; the door from it into the passage was open, and outside was discovered the body of a girl, Miss Ellen, lying, as it were, in a dead faint. There you have the situation dashed in broad; and pretty complete, you’ll agree, for circumstantial evidence.”

“Wait, my friend,” began Brindley, putting up a fat pompous hand. “Circumstantial, I think you said?”

“Yes, I said it,” answered the Deputy Clerk coolly; “and if you’ll listen, you’ll understand—perhaps. I said the girl was in a faint, _as it were_, for, as a matter of fact, _she never came out of it for seven months_.”

He leant back, thumbing the ashes into his pipe, and took no heed while the murmurs of incredulity buzzed and died down.

“Not for seven months,” he repeated, then. “They called it a cataleptic trance, induced by fright and shock upon witnessing the deed; and they postponed the trial, waiting for this material witness to recover. But when at last the doctors certified that they could put no period to a condition which might, after all, end fatally without real consciousness ever returning, they decided to try Mr. Hussey; and he was tried and condemned to be hanged.”

“What! he made no defence?” said a junior contemptuously.

“Well, sir, can you suggest one?” asked the other civilly.

“Suicide, of course.”

“With the pistol there in the burglar’s own hand?”

“Well, he made none, you say.”

“No, I don’t say it. He declared it was ridiculous attempting a defence, while he lacked his one essential witness to confirm it. He protested only that the lady would vindicate him if she could speak.”

“O, of course!”

“Yes, of course; and of course you say it. But he spoke the truth, sir, for all that, as you’ll see.

“He was lodged in Norwich Jail, biding the finish. But, before the hangman could get him—that time, at least—he managed to break out, damaging a warder by the way. The dogs of the law were let loose, naturally; but, while they were in full cry, Mr. Hussey, if you’ll believe me, walks into a local attorney’s office with Miss Ellen on his arm.”

Brindley turned in his chair, and gave a little condescending laugh.

“Incredible, ain’t it?” said the Deputy Clerk. “But listen, now, to the affidavits of the pair, and judge for yourselves. We’ll take Miss Ellen’s first, plain as I can make it:—

“‘I confess,’ says she, ‘to a romantic attachment to this same picturesque magsman, Mr. Hussey. He came my way—never mind how—and I fell in love with him. He made an assignation to visit me in my guardian’s house, and I saw that a window was left open for him to enter by. My guardian had latterly been in a very odd, depressed state. I think he was troubled about business matters. On the night of the assignation, by the irony of fate, his madness came to a head. He was of such methodical habits by nature, and so unerringly punctual in his hour for going to bed, that I had not hesitated to appoint my beau to meet me in his study, which was both remotest from his bedroom, and very accessible from without. But, to my confusion and terror, I heard him on this night, instead of retiring as usual, start pacing to and fro in the parlour underneath. I listened, helpless and aghast, expecting every moment to hear him enter his study and discover my lover, who must surely by now be awaiting me there. And at length I _did_ hear him actually cross the passage to it with hurried steps. Half demented, dreading anything and everything, I rushed down the stairs, and reached his room door just in time to see him put a pistol to his head and fire. With the flash and report, I fell as if dead, and remember nothing more till the voice of my beloved seemed to call upon me to rise from the tomb—when I opened my eyes, and saw Hussey standing above me.’

“Now for Mr. Hussey’s statement:—

“‘I had an assignation with a young lady,’ says he, ‘on the night of so-and-so. A window was to be left open for me in Unthank. I had no intent whatever to commit a felony. I came to appointment, and had only one moment entered when I heard rapid footsteps outside, and a man, with a desperate look on him, hurried into the room, snatched a pistol from a drawer, put it to his head, and, before I could stop him, fired. I swear that, so far from killing him, I tried to prevent him killing himself. I jumped, even as he fell, and tore the pistol from his hand. Simultaneous with his deed, I heard a scream outside. Still holding the weapon, I went to the door, and saw the form of her I had come to visit lying in that trance from which she has but now recovered. As I stood stupefied, the Watch entered and took me. From that time I knew that, lacking her evidence, it was hopeless to attempt to clear myself. After sentence I broke prison, rushed straight to her house, found her lying there, and called out upon her to wake and help me. She answered at once, stirring and coming out of her trance. I know no more than that she did; and there is the whole truth.’”

The Deputy Clerk stopped. No one spoke.

“Now, gentlemen,” said he, “I don’t ask you to pronounce upon those affidavits. In the upshot the law accepted them, admitting a miscarriage of justice. What I ask your verdict on is this: Could the law, after quashing its own conviction, hold the man responsible for any act committed by him during, and as the direct result of, that wrongful imprisonment?”

This started the ball, and for minutes it was tossed back and forth. Presently the tumult subsided, and Brindley spoke authoritatively for the rest—

“Certainly it could, and for any violence committed in the act. Provocation may extenuate, but it don’t justify. Prison-breaking, _per se_, is an offence against the law; so’s being found without any visible means of subsistence, though your pocket may just have been picked of its last penny. Any concessions in these respects would benefit the rogue without helping the community. I won’t say that if he hadn’t, by assaulting the warder, put himself out of court——”

“That was where he wanted to put himself,” interrupted the Deputy Clerk. It was certain that he was deplorably flippant.

Brindley waved the impertinence by.

“The offence was an offence in outlawry,” he said.

“But how could it be,” protested the Clerk, “since, by the law’s own admission, he was wrongfully convicted? If he hadn’t been, he couldn’t have hurt the warder. If you strike me first, mayn’t I hit you back? I tell you, the law acknowledged that it was in the wrong.”

“Not at all. It acknowledged that the man was in the right.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“O, my friend! I see you haven’t got the rudiments. Hussey was a prisoner; a criminal is a prisoner; _ergo_, Hussey was a criminal.”

“But he was a prisoner in error!”

“And the law might very properly pardon him that; but not his violence in asserting it.”

The Deputy Clerk shrugged his shoulders hopelessly.

“Well, it was all the same in the end,” said he; “for it hanged him for pointing out its error to it, and so spoiled a very pretty romance. The lady accompanied him to the scaffold, and afterwards died mad. _Sic itur ad astra._ I will cap your syllogism, sir. An ass has long ears; the law has long ears; _ergo_, the law is an ass.”

“Young man,” said Brindley, with more good-humour than I expected, “you have missed your vocation. Take my advice, and go to writing for the comic papers.”

“What!” cried the Deputy Clerk. “Haven’t I been a law reporter all my life!”

THE FIVE INSIDES

I’ll example you with thievery.—“Timon of Athens.”

The dear old lady was ninety, and it was always Christmas in the sweet winter of her face. With the pink in her cheeks and the white of her hair, she came straight from the eighteenth century in which she was born. They were not more at odds with nature than are the hips and the traveller’s joy in a withered hedge; and if at one time they paid to art, why it was a charitable gift to a poor dependent—nothing more, I’ll swear.

People are fond of testing links with the past. This sound old chatelaine had played trick-track, and dined at four o’clock. She had eaten battalia pie with “Lear” sauce, and had drunk orgeat in Bond Street. She had seen Blücher, the tough old “Vorwärts,” brought to bay in Hyde Park by a flying column of Amazons, and surrendering himself to an onslaught of kisses. She had seen Mr. Consul Brummell arrested by bailiffs in the streets of Caen, on a debt of so many hundreds of francs for so many bottles of vernis de Guiton, which was nothing less than an adorable boot-polish. She had heard the demon horns of newspaper boys shrill out the Little Corporal’s escape from Elba. She had sipped Roman punch, maybe;—I trust she had never taken snuff. She had—but why multiply instances? Born in 1790, she had taken just her little share in, and drawn her full interest of, the history, social and political, of all those years, fourscore and ten, which filled the interval between then and now.

Once upon a time she had entered a hackney-coach; and, lo! before her journey was done, it was a railway coach, moving ever swifter and swifter, and its passengers succeeding one another with an ever more furious energy of hurry-scurry. Among the rest I got in, and straight fell into talk, and in love, with this traveller who had come from so far and from scenes so foreign to my knowledge. She was as sweet and instructive as an old diary brought from a bureau, smelling of rose-leaves and cedar-wood. She was merry, too, and wont to laugh at my wholly illusory attachment to an age which was already as dead as the moon when I was born. But she humoured me; though she complained that her feminine reminiscences were sweetmeats to a man.

“You should talk with William keeper,” she said. “_He_ holds on to the past by a very practical link indeed.”

It was snowy weather up at the Hall—the very moral of another winter (so I was told) when His Majesty’s frigate “Caledonia” came into Portsmouth to be paid off, and Commander Playfair sent express to his young wife up in the Hampshire hills that she might expect him early on the following morning. He did not come in the morning, nor in the afternoon, nor, indeed, until late in the evening, when—as Fortune was generous—he arrived just at the turn of the supper, when the snow outside the kitchen windows below was thawing itself, in delirious emulation of the melting processes going on within, into a rusty gravy.

“You see,” said Madam, “it was not the etiquette, when a ship was paid off, for any officer to quit the port until the pennant was struck, which the cook, as the last officer, had to see done. And the cook had gone ashore and got tipsy; and there the poor souls must bide till he could be found. Poor Henry—and poor little me! But it came right. _Tout vient à qui sait attendre_. We had woodcocks for supper. It was just such a winter as this—the snow, the sky, the very day. Will you take your gun, and get me a woodcock, sir? and we will keep the anniversary, and you shall toast, in a bottle of _the_ Madeira, the old French rhyme.”

I had this rhyme in my ears as I went off for my woodcock—

Le bécasseau est de fort bon manger, Duquel la chair resueille l’appetit. Il est oyseau passager et petit: Est par son goust fait des vins bien juger.

I had it in my ears, and more and more despairingly, as I sought the coverts and dead ferns and icy reed-wrecked pools, and flushed not the little _oyseau passager_ of my gallantry’s desires. But at last, in a silent coomb, when my feet were frozen, and my fingers like bundles of newly-pulled red radishes, William keeper came upon me, and I confided my abortive wishes and sorrows to his velveteen bosom.

He smiled, warm soul, like a grate.

“Will’ee go up to feyther’s yonder, sir,” said he; “and sit by the fire, and leave the woodcock to me? The old man’ll be proud to entertain ye.”

“I will go,” I said meanly. “But tell me first, William, what is your very practical link with the past?”

He thought the frost had got into my blood; but when I had explained, he grinned again knowingly.

“’Tain’t me my lady meant, sir,” he said. “’Tis old feyther, and his story of how the mail coach was robbed.”

The cottage hung up on the side of the coomb, leaning its back to an ash wood, and digging its toes well into the slope to keep itself from pitching into the brook below. There were kennels under the faggot stacks, a horse-shoe on the door, red light behind the windows. It looked a very cosy corner after the white austerity of the woods. William led me to it, and introducing me and my errand to his father, left the two of us together by the fire.

It was a strange old shell of a man, russet and smooth yet in the face; but his breath would sometimes rattle in him to show how dried was the kernel within. Still his brown eye was glossy, and his voice full and shrewd; and in that voice, speaking straight and clear out of the past, and in an accent yet more of the roads than of the woods, he told me presently the story of the great mail robbery.

“It ruined and it made me, sir,” said he; “for the Captain, hearing as how the company had sacked me for neglect of duty, and knowing something of my character, swore I’d been used damnably, and that he’d back his opinion by making me his gamekeeper. And he did that; and here I be, waiting confident for him to check my accounts when I jine him across the river.”

He pointed to a dusky corner. There hung on the wall an ancient key-bugle, and an old, old napless beaver hat, with a faded gold band about it.

“I was twenty-five when I put _they_ up there, and that was in the year ’14; and not me nor no one else has fingered them since. Because why? Because it was like as if my past laid in a tomb underneath, and they was the sign that I held by it without shame or desire of concealment.

“In those days I was guard to the ‘Globe’ coach, that run between London and Brighton. We made the journey in eight hours, from the ‘Bull and Mouth’ in Aldersgate to the ‘New Inn’ in North Street—or t’other way about; and we never stopped but for changes, or to put down and take up. Sich was our orders, and nothing in reason to find fault with ’em, until they come to hold us responsible to something besides time. Then the trouble began.

“Now, sir, as you may know, the coachman’s seat was over the fore boot, and, being holler underneath, was often used as a box for special parcels. So it happened that this box was hired of the owners by Messrs. Black, South, and Co., the big Brighthelmstone bankers, in order to ship their notes and cash, whenever they’d the mind to, between London and the seaside, and so escape the risks and expense of a private mail. The valiables would be slid and locked in—coachman being in his place—with a private key; and George he’d nothing to do but keep his fat calves snug to the door, till someun at the other end came with a duplicate key to unlock it and claim the property. Very well—and very well it worked till the fifteenth of December in the year eighteen hundred and thirteen, on which day our responsibility touched the handsome figure—so I was to learn—of £4000 in Brighton Union bank notes, besides cash and securities.

“It was rare cold weather, much as it is now, save that the snow was shallower by a matter of two inches, and no more bind in it than dry sand. We was advertised to start from the ‘Bull’ at nine; and there was booked six insides and five out. At ten minutes to the hour up walks a couple of Messrs. Pinnick and Waghorn’s clerks from the borough, with the cash box in whity-brown paper, looking as innocent as a babby in a Holland pinifore. George he comes out of the shades, like a jolly Corsican ghost, a viping of his mouth; the box is slung up and fastened in; coachman climbs to his perch, and the five outsides follow-my-leader arter him to theirs, where they swaddle ’emselves into their wraps strait-veskit-vise, and settin’ as miserable as if they was waitin’ to have a tooth drawed. Not much harm there, you’ll say—one box-seat, two behind, two with me in the dickey—all packed tight, and none too close for observation. Well, sir, we’ll hear about it.

“Out of the six insides, all taken, there was three already in place: a gentleman, very short and fierce, and snarling at everything; gentleman’s lady, pretty as paint, but a white timidious body; gentleman’s young gentleman, in ducks and spencer and a cap like a concertina with the spring gone. So far so good, you’ll say again, and no connexion with any other party, and leastways of all with the insides as was yet wanting, and which the fierce gentleman was blowin’ the lights out of for bein’ late.

“‘Guard,’ says he, goin’ on outrageous, while the lady and the young gentleman cuddled together scared-like in a corner, ‘who are these people who stop the whole service while they look in the shop-vinders? If you’re for starting a minute after the stroke,’ says he, ‘dash my buttons,’ he says, ‘but I’ll raise all hell to have you cashiered!’

“‘All right, sir,’ I says. ‘I knows my business better’n you can tell it me—’ and just as I spoke, a hackney kerridge come rumbling into the yard, and drew up anigh us.

“‘Globe?’ says a jolly, fat-faced man, sticking his head out of it. ‘All right, Cato—’ and down jumps a black servant, in livery, that was on the box, and opens the door.

“The fat man he tumbled out—for all the world like a sheetful of washing a wallopin’ downstairs—Cato he got in, and between them they helped from the hackney and across to the coach as rickety a old figure as ever I see. He were all shawls and wraprascal. He’d blue spectacles to his eyes, a travellin’ cap pulled down on ’em, his mouth covered in; and the only evidence of flesh to be seen in the whole of his carcass, was a nose the colour of a hyster. He shuffled painful, too, as they held him up under the arms, and he groaned and muttered to himself all the time he were changing.