Chapter 14

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.