Part 34

“I will trust all to you—I may not live to see it, but I will leave you to do what is best for my poor old father,” she said, weeping freely. “I only suspected something of the truth when you came here first and said there had been a robbery. I had noticed something strange about my father for a day or two, and when he told me that at last he was to get the money that was to take me abroad and make me strong, it was said in such a queer way, that I didn’t know whether to cry or be glad. I fretted over the horrid thought for a whole night, and then I spoke to him about it. I saw by his face that he had done it—that he had become a criminal for me. I was horrified, but could I be angry? It was his love for me—it was to save my life he had risked his whole life, and reputation, and immortality. Who could be angry at being so loved? Then he told me all he had done. The Arthurlies used to keep a man-servant, but he was put away for drunkenness and dishonesty. I have seen him once or twice. His name is David Denham. This man met father one day and asked for me, and was sorry to hear that father could not get the money to send me abroad. Then he said that _he_ could get the money, and would get it if father would just lend him the keys of the Freelands for one night. Father would not hear of it at first, but the other kept tempting him, and saying how cruel it was of him to let his only daughter die, and at last he gave in. The keys were only out of his keeping for one night, and Denham knew where the keys of the safe were kept, and so got at the silver plate and carried it all off. It was sent to Glasgow to some one who had agreed to buy it, and Denham brought the money to father after dark. I could not bear to look at it or touch it. I seemed to see in it the thing that was to part me and my father for ever, instead of letting us spend eternity in heaven, with neither poverty nor suffering. I bundled it up and wrote the note which you would get with it. I felt so happy when it was gone, and I made Marjory send it in a way that would not give you a chance to find out the sender. But you did find it out, and I have done more harm than good. It would have been better for my poor father if I had had no conscience troubling me.”

I soothed and cheered her as well as I could, and then went after Denham. I found he had gone to Glasgow, and, by sending off a telegram, had him neatly nipped up at the station by Johnny Farrel. Denham was thoroughly taken by surprise, and in his amazement did a rash thing. He had had some disagreement with the fence about the plunder, and had gone through to settle that, but only to find himself nipped up at the station. What could be clearer? He had been betrayed by the swindling fence. Would it not be a fair retaliation to betray the fence in turn? He thought it would, and did so; which greatly rejoiced our hearts, for it enabled us to recover a deal of the plunder before it went into the melting-pot.

Jeanie Abercorn declined rapidly after her statement to me, and in a week had passed to her long rest. Her last message was to her father in prison, telling him that she was only going out of his sight for a time; that God would forgive him, whether men did or no, knowing that it was his great love for her that tempted him to the crime. The old gardener received the message in a stupefied state. He had never appeared the same man since the arrest. He was told that he would be accepted as a witness against Denham, and agreed in a dull, listless manner to tell all he knew, which he did, with the result that Denham was convicted and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. When the trial was over, the old gardener was told that he might go.

“What have I to gang to?” was his reply, as he wrung his hands and tottered out. “What have I to gang to?”

In a month or two the poor old man had drifted away to join Jeanie in the Great Unknown, beyond earth and sky.

A WOLF IN SHEEP’S CLOTHING.

“Once a criminal, always a criminal,” is a pretty safe maxim. When a man—and more especially one of education—is degraded into a thief and a liar, who would believe him if he expressed a wish for a better life? Nay, if he actually did change, and became a very anchorite or saint, would not the whole world howl out “Hypocrite?”

In the present case there was neither the profession of repentance nor the desire for a different life. The “Rev. Alfred Johnston,” already alluded to in “A Lift on the Road,” [See page 218, _ante_] on being released from prison, was in bad health, bodily as well as mentally. Some of the wages of sin had been paid out to him during the last year in prison, and he went out into the world a mere wreck, the shadow of his former self. He cursed me as a cause, and the whole world besides—and he even at times, I suspect, cursed himself—but he had no power to retaliate or avenge his fancied wrongs.

The glory of man is strength, and when that is gone, the best bed and blanket are the grave and a green turf. There was still the genteel begging left to him, but somehow the returns were now poor compared with his former gains, and Johnston was impatient for a chance which should allow him to leave this country for the Cape with a good pocketful of money at his command. During his seclusion his consort had drifted out to that colony as a barmaid—his real wife had been laid in the grave years before by his brutality and dissipation—and the moment he learned the truth he conceived the plan of following and joining her there. The climate was just such a one as he needed to restore his health, and a bold rogue, he thought, might in that place realise a fortune in a very short time. He had been landed in Edinburgh, as being the scene of his capture and conviction, and so it was around on the Edinburgh citizens that he now cast his eyes with a view to his own welfare. What is really one’s welfare none can decide for himself, and Fate often steps in and with inexorable hand fixes that for him. I daresay Johnston had often, in his better days, preached that truth, but he had either ceased to believe it, or allowed it to become buried in his mind, for at the strange turn events were to take none could have been more surprised than himself.

By studying carefully the subscription lists of the various local charities, and making diligent inquiries, Johnston decided upon a Mr Samuel Cooper, a retired merchant, living at Bonnington, as the likeliest man to make an easy victim. Mr Cooper was old, and benevolent as well as wealthy, and what was more important, he did not read the newspapers much, and so was not likely to know of Johnston’s past misdeeds. He was indeed a quiet, modest, feeling-hearted man, and the greatest tribute to his goodness was this very selection of him as a victim by the shrewd and unscrupulous Johnston. For a wide radius around his home, and more especially among the poor of Leith, this good man had raised up to his name a hedge of blessings and prayers; and who knows but these were now to be his protection in the hour of need?

The appearance of Johnston at this time was interesting. He had been a good-looking man, and the strict prison life and diet had removed the bloated look from his features, while his cough, and weak chest, and gasping for breath, only served to make him a pitiable object for charity and help. His clothing was the same wretched garb in which I had taken him more than four years before, but that too helped to excite commiseration.

This was the spectacle which greeted Mr Cooper one afternoon at his own home, when he had been told that a visitor, in the person of the Rev. Alfred Johnston, wished to speak with him, and awaited him in the adjoining room. Instead of a gentleman in blacks, he saw before him a ragged outcast, coughing painfully and looking ready to drop into the grave, and he started and looked round the room in wonderment.

“I am the Rev. Alfred Johnston,” said the outcast, reading aright the expression of Mr Cooper’s face. “I am really a clergyman, reduced to this state by my own folly and the wicked persecution of others. I have heard of your goodness—of your great heart, and your truly Christ-like compassion, and therefore I have crawled here to implore your help. Christ did not turn away the greatest sinner, and if I have sinned you can see I have also suffered. Ah, sir! if my life were but given me to begin again, how different would be my condition!”

“But how do you come to be thus reduced?” cried the benevolent old man, exceedingly sceptical of the truth of the statement. “Surely you have friends to whom you could appeal before a stranger like me?”

“Friends!” echoed Johnston, in a choking voice, and with a bitterness which was not exactly assumed; “when did a friend cling to one in adversity? No, sir! Give me the cold, callous world—the most unfeeling stranger—before the dearest friend. But I do not ask you to trust to my statements being true. Write to some of the deacons of my former church—with all their prejudice and ill-will they will at least bear testimony to the truthfulness of my statements;” and at random he named a small town in the west, the furthest away he could think of on the spur of the moment.

“Give me their names,” gravely returned Mr Cooper. “I may write, and I may not, but it can do no harm to leave the address. One is so liable to be imposed upon,” he soothingly added, afraid that he might have hurt the feelings of an unfortunate and injured man.

Thus cornered, Johnston gave two names, assuring Mr Cooper that the town was small, and that no other address was necessary to find these prominent deacons. He then launched out into a history of himself, partly real and partly imaginative. He had been unfortunate—exceedingly—in his congregation, and had roused opposition and animosity by his very bluntness and truthfulness. At length he had been forced to resign, and supported himself by tuition and other means till reduced to the verge of starvation. Then a wicked woman got up a plot against him, and, because he refused to marry her, lodged information with the police and had him arrested on a false charge. This charge she supported with gross perjury, and Johnston had been sent to prison a martyr to his own resolute goodness. The confession regarding the prison experience was thrown out merely in case the good man to whom he appealed might know something of it already. It would be quite impossible to convey in writing any idea of the plausible manner in which his story was concocted and narrated. As a preacher Johnston had been eloquent and persuasive; and now, when so much depended upon the exercise of these gifts, he carried all before him. It was not all false, and the hardships he had endured were not all imaginative. Several times Mr Cooper was moved to tears; and when Johnston concluded by saying he did not want money, but merely some decent clothing and his passage paid to the Cape, the good old man was on the point of giving him what he wished without a word of inquiry. Prudence prevailed, and in the end Johnston was delighted to hear him say—

“If all you have told me is true, I shall see that you are helped as you desire. I shall interest several members of our own church, and perhaps the pastor as well, in your unhappy circumstances, and possibly they may be disposed to give you help as well.”

“Excuse me, sir,” interposed Johnston, getting alarmed at the proposal; “spare a sensitive if a fallen man the degradation of having his sins and sufferings paraded before others. I had rather want their help than have to appear before these gentlemen and answer their questions. Let me creep out of the country unseen and unknown, to begin in a far-off land a nobler life, fearless alike of recognition and of censure.”

This seemed such a natural request that Mr Cooper hastily agreed, and promised strict secrecy to all in the city. He then dismissed him with a trifling sum for his immediate needs, and the request that he should come back in a day or two—as soon, indeed, as it was possible to receive answers from the deacons, whose addresses he had just taken down.

Those who do not know the boundless resources of the rogue of education will imagine that Johnston had got to the end of his tether, and would never again dare to look near the benevolent Mr Cooper, knowing that certain exposure would follow the written inquiries. Nothing of the kind. The circumstances were just such as roused Johnston to his keenest activity. From Mr Cooper’s house he went to a stationer’s and bought some notepaper and envelopes of different kinds, and, being accommodated with a pen and ink, he wrote out two polite notes, addressed to the postmaster of the town in the west he had named, in two different hands, and signed with the names he had given to Mr Cooper, requesting that any letters which might arrive for him should be re-addressed to two different addresses in Edinburgh. No one but an expert looking at these notes could have guessed that they were penned by the same man—the handwriting, the phraseology, the notepaper, and the style were entirely different. They were posted at once, and thus arrived one mail in advance of Mr Cooper’s two notes, which were at once re-addressed as directed, and duly delivered into Johnston’s hands. To write replies for the two imaginary deacons was then an easy matter; to get them duly authenticated with the post-mark of the town in question was more difficult. But during the interval, Johnston had called upon Mr Cooper, and made such rapid progress in his favour that he had not only been provided with a complete suit of clothes, but had been allowed to dine with Mr Cooper and his wife. So much familiarity implied also the gift of some money, and part of this money Johnston now hastened to use in a trip to the west. He left Edinburgh by an early train, posted the letters in the town, and took the first train back to Edinburgh, which he reached in time to take tea with the good man he had imposed upon. The same evening Mr Cooper chanced to mention that in a day or two he would have in his possession a large sum of money, out of which he intended to pay a steerage passage for Johnston to the Cape. The place where he kept his money was already known to Johnston, from the fact that a pound note had been taken from the drawer as a present to the broken-down minister. This place was a small parlour on the ground floor, easily accessible from a green behind the house. The window was fastened with an ordinary spring check, but that was no impediment to a man of Johnston’s experience; and the shutters were seldom closed, and certainly not fastened at night. A great scheme flashed upon Johnston’s brain. At first his only desire and concern had been to get clothing and a passage to the Cape; now, however, the bloodthirsty excitement of the old convict and jail-bird crept over his faculties, and goaded him on to a greater haul. He would empty the drawer the first night the money was there to take. There would be but one night in which the crime could be committed, for Mr Cooper had shown no reserve or concealment of his plans, and Johnston knew that on the following day most of the money would be paid away in quarterly accounts, &c. With part of the money given him by the benevolent man, he bought some housebreaking implements—a thin putty knife to force open the spring fastening of the window, a bracebit to cut an arm-hole in the shutters if they should happen to be closed and fastened; and lastly, a leaden-headed neddy or life-preserver with which to smash the skull of anyone who might oppose or attempt to capture him. Fate might order it that that victim should be the white-haired and warm-hearted man who had helped him in his sore plight—well, so be it; he had not the ordering of fate, and was content to risk even that. As to escaping after the crime, he trusted to his own experience and skill in disguising himself; and even if a swift flight were impossible, he knew several who would be only too glad to hide him, with such a sum in his possession, till the hue and cry were over.

Thus provided for every emergency, Johnston went down to the house at Bonnington one evening after dark, ostensibly to hear the result of Mr Cooper’s letters to the imaginary deacons, but really to ascertain if the money was in the house, and to see how the room lay for his midnight attempt. He was shown into the very parlour he was most anxious to reconnoitre, and left there so long alone that he began to get alarmed, although the interval had given him the opportunity to draw back the spring fastening of the windows and reclose the shutters as he found them, adjusting the slender hook which fastened them so lightly that a mere touch from the outside would drive them open. At length Mr Cooper appeared, looking grave and concerned, but Johnston’s alarm was speedily dispelled by hearing his benefactor say—

“You will excuse me for keeping you waiting so long, but the truth is my grandchild—the little girl you saw at the table the other night—is not very well, and we have thought it advisable to send for a doctor. I thought she had only caught a little cold, but now she has lost her voice and can only speak in a whisper, and seems, besides, to be in a state of high fever as well. Oh, if anything should happen to her, I could never get over it. She is only ten, and the last one left to us.”

Johnston offered a few commonplace words of a soothing nature, and then adroitly turned the conversation to the subject of the letters from the “deacons.”

“Oh, I have got answers from both, and they are satisfactory in every respect,” said Mr Cooper, rousing himself a little, and producing the two letters concocted and posted in the West by Johnston himself, and frankly placing them in the hands of that arch-rogue. “You may read them for yourself, and consider it settled that I shall give you the assistance you require—a passage to the Cape. Willingly would I give twice that sum to see that poor child well and strong as usual——”

A ring at the door-bell interrupted the speech, and Mr Cooper started up and again left Johnston alone, with the words, “Ah! at last, there is the doctor.”

The intending criminal sat there and heard the doctor admitted and led to the bedroom of the sick child. Then there was a long stillness, and at last the footsteps sounded in the lobby; the doctor whispered for a time with Mr Cooper, and finally the front door closed and the carriage drove off. Some slow and feeble footsteps then came in the direction of the parlour door, and in a moment or two Mr Cooper stood before Johnston, ghastly pale, and tottering, and with the tears gathering thick in his eyes.

“Oh, my friend, the worst of news!” he at length found voice to say, as he sank feebly into a seat and covered his face with his hands. “The doctor says it is not a simple ulceration of the throat, as we imagined—the trouble is diphtheria! and—and it is so far gone that he does not believe she will recover!”

Before that awful grief and those flowing tears Johnston was stricken dumb, and he uneasily began to wish himself a mile from the spot. In broken accents the stricken old man proceeded to describe the nature of the disease—how a kind of fungus had begun to grow across the windpipe, which would shortly choke the breath out of the young body as surely as if a strangulating cord had been tightened about the neck, and how the child, though still chatting cheerily and brightly in its hoarse whispers, was actually within a few hours of death and heaven. Johnston felt more uncomfortable than ever. He started round not to see the grief-stricken face, and something heavy hit him sharply on the leg. It was the leaden-headed neddy in his coat pocket, with which he had been prepared to deal out death to any one opposing him in robbing the man before him. The blow on the leg, however, was nothing to the knocking which was at that moment going on in his heart.

“Oh, my friend! you—you are sent to me as a blessing from heaven in my hour of sore trial!” exclaimed Mr Cooper at last, starting up and clasping Johnston’s hand in his own, and welling it over with his warm tears. “Little did I dream of this when I first thought to help you. God has a purpose in everything. You will come with me to my darling child; you will pray with her and speak to her of heaven. How could I pray when my whole heart is rising in rebellion against God taking the dear child from us? Forgive me! forgive my wickedness—but she is the only one left—the only one!”

If Johnston had been asked to go up to a cannon’s mouth, that he might be blown into a thousand fragments, he would have gone more cheerfully than to the task required. His pale cheeks crimsoned—the first blush that had visited them for many a day—then he as swiftly became a ghastly white. He tried to speak, but the words choked him, and the hand which grasped that of his benefactor was nerveless and feeble, and cold as ice.

“Excuse me,” he at length managed to falter forth, “but I’d rather not. I had a girl of my own once who was taken away much in the same way, and to go through the same experience again would tear my heart open;” and he sank down in a chair and abjectly covered his face with his hands.

“Your are not in earnest—you cannot be!” cried the old man, opening his eyes in wonder. “You surely will not desert me in my hour of need? I cannot believe you are ungrateful, and your very experience in the same affliction should help you to console us. I do not care so much for myself, but my poor wife has set her whole heart upon that child. Come with me and speak to her—tell her of your own child—of all you endured, and how God blessed the calamity to your soul—come, for I fear she will go mad!”

Who could hold out against such an appeal? Johnston rose, and allowed the old man to lead him slowly to the sick chamber. He was in a dream—the present and much of the past had fallen away from him as by magic, and he was looking on a familiar little room, with a sick child and a tending mother, both of whom hung on his words with reverence and love. He saw the whole as vividly as if he had looked upon the real faces there and then, and a great cry struggled for utterance in his heart—

“My God! my God! have mercy upon me, a sinner!”

He felt some one place a book in his hand, and he opened it mechanically, and began to read part of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount; but all the words which fell, in such rich tones and eloquent accents from his lips, seemed to him to come from the mouth of his own visionary sick child. The gentle eyes seemed to flash out fire into his very soul as the words were uttered—“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast into the fire.”

Johnston was a splendid reader. To listen to him reading was to be thrilled, but the one most thrilled in that little group was himself. He seemed for the moment to have been wrenched suddenly out of his degraded life into a holier, nobler one, long since buried in the past. They told him afterwards that his conversation with the sick child seemed inspired—that the very gates of heaven seemed to open before their eyes under his eloquence, but the man himself remembered nothing of it.

He saw _those other faces_ all the time; and if his tender words seemed such as could only come from the lips of a father, it was simply because he seemed to be addressing his own child. But when his benefactor led him from the sick-room back to the little parlour the spell was broken, the vision vanished, and the stricken wretch fell on his knees and groaned out—

“I am a wretch! I am a scoundrel! Why has not God struck me dead before your eyes?”