This man was an attached and respectable servant; and his duties, in

addition to those ordinarily imposed upon valets, but which Barton’s

independent habits generally dispensed with, were to attend carefully to

the simple precautions by means of which his master hoped to exclude the

dreaded intrusion of the “Watcher.” And, in addition to attending to

those arrangements, which amounted merely to guarding against the

possibility of his master’s being, through any unscreened window or open

door, exposed to the dreaded influence, the valet was never to suffer

him to be alone—total solitude, even for a minute, had become to him

now almost as intolerable as the idea of going abroad into the public

ways—it was an instinctive anticipation of what was coming.

CHAPTER IX.

REQUIESCAT.

It is needless to say, that under these circumstances, no steps were

taken toward the fulfilment of that engagement into which he had

entered. There was quite disparity enough in point of years, and indeed

of habits, between the young lady and Captain Barton, to have precluded

anything like very vehement or romantic attachment on her part. Though

grieved and anxious, therefore, she was very far from being

heart-broken.

Miss Montague, however, devoted much of her time to the patient but

fruitless attempt to cheer the unhappy invalid. She read for him, and

conversed with him; but it was apparent that whatever exertions he made,

the endeavour to escape from the one ever waking fear that preyed upon

him, was utterly and miserably unavailing.

Young ladies are much given to the cultivation of pets; and among those

who shared the favour of Miss Montague was a fine old owl, which the

gardener, who caught him napping among the ivy of a ruined stable, had

dutifully presented to that young lady.

The caprice which regulates such preferences was manifested in the

extravagant favour with which this grim and ill-favoured bird was at

once distinguished by his mistress; and, trifling as this whimsical

circumstance may seem, I am forced to mention it, inasmuch as it is

connected, oddly enough, with the concluding scene of the story.

Barton, so far from sharing in this liking for the new favourite,

regarded it from the first with an antipathy as violent as it was

utterly unaccountable. Its very vicinity was unsupportable to him. He

seemed to hate and dread it with a vehemence absolutely laughable, and

which to those who have never witnessed the exhibition of antipathies of

this kind, would seem all but incredible.

With these few words of preliminary explanation, I shall proceed to

state the particulars of the last scene in this strange series of

incidents. It was almost two o’clock one winter’s night, and Barton was,

as usual at that hour, in his bed; the servant we have mentioned

occupied a smaller bed in the same room, and a light was burning. The

man was on a sudden aroused by his master, who said—

“I can’t get it out of my head that that accursed bird has got out

somehow, and is lurking in some corner of the room. I have been dreaming

about him. Get up, Smith, and look about; search for him. Such hateful

dreams!”

The servant rose, and examined the chamber, and while engaged in so

doing, he heard the well-known sound, more like a long-drawn gasp than a

hiss, with which these birds from their secret haunts affright the quiet

of the night.

This ghostly indication of its proximity—for the sound proceeded from

the passage upon which Barton’s chamber-door opened—determined the

search of the servant, who, opening the door, proceeded a step or two

forward for the purpose of driving the bird away. He had however, hardly

entered the lobby, when the door behind him slowly swung to under the

impulse, as it seemed, of some gentle current of air; but as

immediately over the door there was a kind of window, intended in the

day time to aid in lighting the passage, and through which at present

the rays of the candle were issuing, the valet could see quite enough

for his purpose.

As he advanced he heard his master—who, lying in a well-curtained bed,

had not, as it seemed, perceived his exit from the room—call him by

name, and direct him to place the candle on the table by his bed. The

servant, who was now some way in the long passage, and not liking to

raise his voice for the purpose of replying, lest he should startle the

sleeping inmates of the house, began to walk hurriedly and softly back

again, when, to his amazement, he heard a voice in the interior of the

chamber answering calmly, and actually saw, through the window which

over-topped the door, that the light was slowly shifting, as if carried

across the room in answer to his master’s call. Palsied by a feeling

akin to terror, yet not unmingled with curiosity, he stood breathless

and listening at the threshold, unable to summon resolution to push open

the door and enter. Then came a rustling of the curtains, and a sound

like that of one who in a low voice hushes a child to rest, in the midst

of which he heard Barton say, in a tone of stifled horror—“Oh, God—oh,

my God!” and repeat the same exclamation several times. Then ensued a

silence, which again was broken by the same strange soothing sound; and

at last there burst forth, in one swelling peal, a yell of agony so

appalling and hideous, that, under some impulse of ungovernable horror,

the man rushed to the door, and with his whole strength strove to force

it open. Whether it was that, in his agitation, he had himself but

imperfectly turned the handle, or that the door was really secured upon

the inside, he failed to effect an entrance; and as he tugged and

pushed, yell after yell rang louder and wilder through the chamber,

accompanied all the while by the same hushed sounds. Actually freezing

with terror, and scarce knowing what he did, the man turned and ran down

the passage, wringing his hands in the extremity of horror and

irresolution. At the stair-head he was encountered by General Montague,

scared and eager, and just as they met the fearful sounds had ceased.

“What is it? Who—where is your master?” said Montague with the

incoherence of extreme agitation. “Has anything—for God’s sake is

anything wrong?”

“Lord have mercy on us, it’s all over,” said the man staring wildly

towards his master’s chamber. “He’s dead, sir, I’m sure he’s dead.”

Without waiting for inquiry or explanation, Montague, closely followed

by the servant, hurried to the chamber-door, turned the handle, and

pushed it open. As the door yielded to his pressure, the ill-omened bird

of which the servant had been in search, uttering its spectral warning,

started suddenly from the far side of the bed, and flying through the

doorway close over their heads, and extinguishing, in his passage, the

candle which Montague carried, crashed through the skylight that

overlooked the lobby, and sailed away into the darkness of the outer

space.

“There it is, God bless us,” whispered the man, after a breathless

pause.

“Curse that bird,” muttered the General, startled by the suddenness of

the apparition, and unable to conceal his discomposure.

“The candle is moved,” said the man, after another breathless pause,

pointing to the candle that still burned in the room; “see, they put it

by the bed.”

“Draw the curtains, fellow, and don’t stand gaping there,” whispered

Montague, sternly.

The man hesitated.

“Hold this, then,” said Montague, impatiently thrusting the candlestick

into the servant’s hand, and himself advancing to the bedside, he drew

the curtains apart. The light of the candle, which was still burning at

the bedside, fell upon a figure huddled together, and half upright, at

the head of the bed. It seemed as though it had slunk back as far as the

solid panelling would allow, and the hands were still clutched in the

bed-clothes.

“Barton, Barton, _Barton_!” cried the General, with a strange mixture of

awe and vehemence. He took the candle, and held it so that it shone full

upon the face. The features were fixed, stern, and white; the jaw was

fallen; and the sightless eyes, still open, gazed vacantly forward

toward the front of the bed. “God Almighty! he’s dead,” muttered the

General, as he looked upon this fearful spectacle. They both continued

to gaze upon it in silence for a minute or more. “And cold, too,”

whispered Montague, withdrawing his hand from that of the dead man.

“And see, see—may I never have life, sir,” added the man, after a

another pause, with a shudder, “but there was something else on the bed

with him. Look there—look there—see that, sir.”

As the man thus spoke, he pointed to a deep indenture, as if caused by a

heavy pressure, near the foot of the bed.

Montague was silent.

“Come, sir, come away, for God’s sake,” whispered the man, drawing close

up to him, and holding fast by his arm, while he glanced fearfully

round; “what good can be done here now—come away, for God’s sake!”

At this moment they heard the steps of more than one approaching, and

Montague, hastily desiring the servant to arrest their progress,

endeavoured to loose the rigid gripe with which the fingers of the dead

man were clutched in the bed-clothes, and drew, as well as he was able,

the awful figure into a reclining posture; then closing the curtains

carefully upon it, he hastened himself to meet those persons that were

approaching.

* * * * *

It is needless to follow the personages so slightly connected with this

narrative, into the events of their after life; it is enough to say,

that no clue to the solution of these mysterious occurrences was ever

after discovered; and so long an interval having now passed since the

event which I have just described concluded this strange history, it is

scarcely to be expected that time can throw any new lights upon its dark

and inexplicable outline. Until the secrets of the earth shall be no

longer hidden, therefore, these transactions must remain shrouded in

their original obscurity.

The only occurrence in Captain Barton’s former life to which reference

was ever made, as having any possible connexion with the sufferings with

which his existence closed, and which he himself seemed to regard as

working out a retribution for some grievous sin of his past life, was a

circumstance which not for several years after his death was brought to

light. The nature of this disclosure was painful to his relatives, and

discreditable to his memory.

It appeared that some six years before Captain Barton’s final return to

Dublin, he had formed, in the town of Plymouth, a guilty attachment, the

object of which was the daughter of one of the ship’s crew under his

command. The father had visited the frailty of his unhappy child with

extreme harshness, and even brutality, and it was said that she had

died heart-broken. Presuming upon Barton’s implication in her guilt,

this man had conducted himself toward him with marked insolence, and

Barton retaliated this, and what he resented with still more exasperated

bitterness—his treatment of the unfortunate girl—by a systematic

exercise of those terrible and arbitrary severities which the

regulations of the navy placed at the command of those who are

responsible for its discipline. The man had at length made his escape,

while the vessel was in port at Naples, but died, as it was said, in an

hospital in that town, of the wounds inflicted in one of his recent and

sanguinary punishments.

Whether these circumstances in reality bear, or not, upon the

occurrences of Barton’s after life, it is, of course, impossible to say.

It seems, however more than probable that they were at least, in his own

mind, closely associated with them. But however the truth may be, as to

the origin and motives of this mysterious persecution, there can be no

doubt that, with respect to the agencies by which it was accomplished,

absolute and impenetrable mystery is like to prevail until the day of

doom.

POSTSCRIPT BY THE EDITOR.

The preceding narrative is given in the _ipsissima verba_ of the good

old clergyman, under whose hand it was delivered to Doctor Hesselius.

Notwithstanding the occasional stiffness and redundancy of his

sentences, I thought it better to reserve to myself the power of

assuring the reader, that in handing to the printer, the M.S. of a

statement so marvellous, the Editor has not altered one letter of the

original text.—[_Ed. Papers of Dr. Hesselius._]

MR. JUSTICE HARBOTTLE.

PROLOGUE.

On this case, Doctor Hesselius has inscribed nothing more than the

words, “Harman’s Report,” and a simple reference to his own

extraordinary Essay on “the Interior Sense, and the Conditions of the

opening thereof.”

The reference is to Vol. I. Section 317, Note Z^a. The note to which

reference is thus made, simply says: “There are two accounts of the

remarkable case of the Honourable Mr. Justice Harbottle, one furnished

to me by Mrs. Trimmer of Tunbridge Wells (June, 1805); the other at a

much later date, by Anthony Harman, Esq. I much prefer the former; in

the first place, because it is minute and detailed, and written, it

seems to me, with more caution and knowledge; and in the next, because

the letters from Doctor Hedstone, which are embodied in it, furnish

matter of the highest value to a right apprehension of the nature of the

case. It was one of the best declared cases of an opening of the

interior sense, which I have met with. It was affected, too, by the

phenomenon, which occurs so frequently as to indicate a law of these

eccentric conditions; that is to say, it exhibited, what I may term, the

contagious character of this sort of intrusion of the spirit-world upon

the proper domain of matter. So soon as the spirit-action has

established itself in the case of one patient, its developed energy

begins to radiate, more or less effectually, upon others. The interior

vision of the child was opened; as was, also, that of its mother, Mrs.

Pyneweck; and both the interior vision and hearing of the scullery-maid,

were opened on the same occasion. After-appearances are the result of

the law explained in Vol. II. Section 17 to 49. The common centre of

association, simultaneously recalled, unites, or _re_unites, as the case

may be, for a period measured, as we see, in Section 37. The _maximum_

will extend to days, the _minimum_ is little more than a second. We see

the operation of this principle perfectly displayed, in certain cases of

lunacy, of epilepsy, of catalepsy, and of mania, of a peculiar and

painful character, though unattended by incapacity of business.”

The memorandum of the case of Judge Harbottle, which was written by Mrs.

Trimmer of Tunbridge Wells, which Doctor Hesselius thought the better of

the two, I have been unable to discover among his papers. I found in

his escritoire a note to the effect that he had lent the Report of Judge

Harbottle’s case, written by Mrs. Trimmer to Doctor F. Heyne. To that

learned and able gentleman accordingly I wrote, and received from him,

in his reply, which was full of alarms and regrets on account of the

uncertain safety of that “valuable MS.,” a line written long since by

Doctor Hesselius, which completely exonerated him, inasmuch as it

acknowledged the safe return of the papers. The Narrative of Mr. Harman,

is, therefore, the only one available for this collection. The late Dr.

Hesselius, in another passage of the note that I have cited, says, “As

to the facts (non-medical) of the case, the narrative of Mr. Harman

exactly tallies with that furnished by Mrs. Trimmer.” The strictly

scientific view of the case would scarcely interest the popular reader;

and, possibly, for the purposes of this selection, I should, even had I

both papers to choose between, have preferred that of Mr. Harman, which

is given, in full, in the following pages.

CHAPTER I.

THE JUDGE’S HOUSE.

Thirty years ago, an elderly man, to whom I paid quarterly a small

annuity charged on some property of mine, came on the quarter-day to

receive it. He was a dry, sad, quiet man, who had known better days, and

had always maintained an unexceptionable character. No better authority

could be imagined for a ghost story.

He told me one, though with a manifest reluctance; he was drawn into the

narration by his choosing to explain what I should not have remarked,

that he had called two days earlier than that week after the strict day

of payment, which he had usually allowed to elapse. His reason was a

sudden determination to change his lodgings, and the consequent

necessity of paying his rent a little before it was due.

He lodged in a dark street in Westminster, in a spacious old house, very

warm, being wainscoted from top to bottom, and furnished with no undue

abundance of windows, and those fitted with thick sashes and small

panes.

This house was, as the bills upon the windows testified, offered to be

sold or let. But no one seemed to care to look at it.

A thin matron, in rusty black silk, very taciturn, with large, steady,

alarmed eyes, that seemed to look in your face, to read what you might

have seen in the dark rooms and passages through which you had passed,

was in charge of it, with a solitary ‘maid-of-all-work’ under her

command. My poor friend had taken lodgings in this house, on account of

their extraordinary cheapness. He had occupied them for nearly a year

without the slightest disturbance, and was the only tenant, under rent,

in the house. He had two rooms; a sitting-room, and a bedroom with a

closet opening from it, in which he kept his books and papers locked up.

He had gone to his bed, having also locked the outer door. Unable to

sleep, he had lighted a candle, and after having read for a time, had

laid the book beside him. He heard the old clock at the stair-head

strike one; and very shortly after, to his alarm, he saw the

closet-door, which he thought he had locked, open stealthily, and a

slight dark man, particularly sinister, and somewhere about fifty,

dressed in mourning of a very antique fashion, such a suit as we see in

Hogarth, entered the room on tip-toe. He was followed by an elder man,

stout, and blotched with scurvy, and whose features, fixed as a

corpse’s, were stamped with dreadful force with a character of

sensuality and villany.

This old man wore a flowered-silk dressing-gown and ruffles, and he

remarked a gold ring on his finger, and on his head a cap of velvet,

such as, in the days of perukes, gentlemen wore in undress.

This direful old man carried in his ringed and ruffled hand a coil of

rope; and these two figures crossed the floor diagonally, passing the

foot of his bed, from the closet-door at the farther end of the room, at

the left, near the window, to the door opening upon the lobby, close to

the bed’s head, at his right.

He did not attempt to describe his sensations as these figures passed so

near him. He merely said, that so far from sleeping in that room again,

no consideration the world could offer would induce him so much as to

enter it again alone, even in the daylight. He found both doors, that of

the closet, and that of the room opening upon the lobby, in the morning

fast locked, as he had left them before going to bed.

In answer to a question of mine, he said that neither appeared the least

conscious of his presence. They did not seem to glide, but walked as

living men do, but without any sound, and he felt a vibration on the

floor as they crossed it. He so obviously suffered from speaking about

the apparitions, that I asked him no more questions.

There were in his description, however, certain coincidences so very

singular, as to induce me, by that very post, to write to a friend much

my senior, then living in a remote part of England, for the information

which I knew he could give me. He had himself more than once pointed out

that old house to my attention, and told me, though very briefly, the

strange story which I now asked him to give me in greater detail.

His answer satisfied me; and the following pages convey its substance.

Your letter (he wrote) tells me you desire some particulars about the

closing years of the life of Mr. Justice Harbottle, one of the judges of

the Court of Common Pleas. You refer, of course, to the extraordinary

occurrences that made that period of his life long after a theme for

‘winter tales’ and metaphysical speculation. I happen to know perhaps

more than any other man living of those mysterious particulars.

The old family mansion, when I revisited London, more than thirty years

ago, I examined for the last time. During the years that have passed

since then, I hear that improvement, with its preliminary demolitions,

has been doing wonders for the quarter of Westminster in which it

stood. If I were quite certain that the house had been taken down, I

should have no difficulty about naming the street in which it stood. As

what I have to tell, however, is not likely to improve its letting

value, and as I should not care to get into trouble, I prefer being

silent on that particular point.

How old the house was, I can’t tell. People said it was built by Roger

Harbottle, a Turkey merchant, in the reign of King James I. I am not a

good opinion upon such questions; but having been in it, though in its

forlorn and deserted state. I can tell you in a general way what it was

like. It was built of dark-red brick, and the door and windows were

faced with stone that had turned yellow by time. It receded some feet

from the line of the other houses in the street; and it had a florid and

fanciful rail of iron about the broad steps that invited your ascent to

the hall-door, in which were fixed, under a file of lamps, among scrolls

and twisted leaves, two immense ‘extinguishers,’ like the conical caps

of fairies, into which, in old times, the footmen used to thrust their

flambeaux when their chairs or coaches had set down their great people,

in the hall or at the steps, as the case might be. That hall is panelled

up to the ceiling, and has a large fire-place. Two or three stately old

rooms open from it at each side. The windows of these are tall, with

many small panes. Passing through the arch at the back of the hall, you

come upon the wide and heavy well-staircase. There is a back staircase

also. The mansion is large, and has not as much light, by any means, in

proportion to its extent, as modern houses enjoy. When I saw it, it had

long been untenanted, and had the gloomy reputation beside of a haunted

house. Cobwebs floated from the ceilings or spanned the corners of the

cornices, and dust lay thick over everything. The windows were stained

with the dust and rain of fifty years, and darkness had thus grown

darker.

When I made it my first visit, it was in company with my father, when I

was still a boy, in the year 1808. I was about twelve years old, and my

imagination impressible, as it always is at that age. I looked about me

with great awe. I was here in the very centre and scene of those

occurrences which I had heard recounted at the fire-side at home, with

so delightful a horror.

My father was an old bachelor of nearly sixty when he married. He had,

when a child, seen Judge Harbottle on the bench in his robes and wig a

dozen times at least before his death, which took place in 1748, and his

appearance made a powerful and unpleasant impression, not only on his

imagination, but upon his nerves.

The Judge was at that time a man of some sixty-seven years. He had a

great mulberry-coloured face, a big, carbuncled nose, fierce eyes, and a

grim and brutal mouth. My father, who was young at the time, thought it

the most formidable face he had ever seen; for there were evidences of

intellectual power in the formation and lines of the forehead. His voice

was loud and harsh, and gave effect to the sarcasm which was his

habitual weapon on the bench.

This old gentleman had the reputation of being about the wickedest man

in England. Even on the bench he now and then showed his scorn of

opinion. He had carried cases his own way, it was said, in spite of

counsel, authorities, and even of juries, by a sort of cajolery,

violence, and bamboozling, that somehow confused and overpowered

resistance. He had never actually committed himself; he was too cunning

to do that. He had the character of being, however, a dangerous and

unscrupulous judge; but his character did not trouble him. The

associates he chose for his hours of relaxation cared as little as he

did about it.

CHAPTER II.

MR. PETERS.

One night during the session of 1746 this old Judge went down in his

chair to wait in one of the rooms of the House of Lords for the result

of a division in which he and his order were interested.

This over, he was about to return to his house close by, in his chair;

but the night had become so soft and fine that he changed his mind, sent

it home empty, and with two footmen, each with a flambeau, set out on

foot in preference. Gout had made him rather a slow pedestrian. It took

him some time to get through the two or three streets he had to pass

before reaching his house.

In one of those narrow streets of tall houses, perfectly silent at that

hour, he overtook, slowly as he was walking, a very singular-looking old

gentleman.

He had a bottle-green coat on, with a cape to it, and large stone

buttons, a broad-leafed low-crowned hat, from under which a big powdered

wig escaped; he stooped very much, and supported his bending knees with

the aid of a crutch-handled cane, and so shuffled and tottered along

painfully.

“I ask your pardon, sir,” said this old man in a very quavering voice,

as the burly Judge came up with him, and he extended his hand feebly

towards his arm.

Mr. Justice Harbottle saw that the man was by no means poorly dressed,

and his manner that of a gentleman.

The Judge stopped short, and said, in his harsh peremptory tones, “Well,

sir, how can I serve you?”

“Can you direct me to Judge Harbottle’s house? I have some intelligence

of the very last importance to communicate to him.”

“Can you tell it before witnesses?” asked the Judge.

“By no means; it must reach _his_ ear only,” quavered the old man

earnestly.

“If that be so, sir, you have only to accompany me a few steps farther

to reach my house, and obtain a private audience; for I am Judge

Harbottle.”

With this invitation the infirm gentleman in the white wig complied very

readily; and in another minute the stranger stood in what was then

termed the front parlour of the Judge’s house, _tête-à-tête_ with that

shrewd and dangerous functionary.

He had to sit down, being very much exhausted, and unable for a little

time to speak; and then he had a fit of coughing, and after that a fit

of gasping; and thus two or three minutes passed, during which the Judge

dropped his roquelaure on an arm-chair, and threw his cocked-hat over

that.

The venerable pedestrian in the white wig quickly recovered his voice.

With closed doors they remained together for some time.

There were guests waiting in the drawing-rooms, and the sound of men’s

voices laughing, and then of a female voice singing to a harpsichord,

were heard distinctly in the hall over the stairs; for old Judge

Harbottle had arranged one of his dubious jollifications, such as might

well make the hair of godly men’s heads stand upright, for that night.

This old gentleman in the powdered white wig, that rested on his stooped

shoulders, must have had something to say that interested the Judge very

much; for he would not have parted on easy terms with the ten minutes

and upwards which that conference filched from the sort of revelry in

which he most delighted, and in which he was the roaring king, and in

some sort the tyrant also, of his company.

The footman who showed the aged gentleman out observed that the Judge’s

mulberry-coloured face, pimples and all, were bleached to a dingy

yellow, and there was the abstraction of agitated thought in his manner,

as he bid the stranger good-night. The servant saw that the conversation

had been of serious import, and that the Judge was frightened.

Instead of stumping upstairs forthwith to his scandalous hilarities, his

profane company, and his great china bowl of punch—the identical bowl

from which a bygone Bishop of London, good easy man, had baptised this

Judge’s grandfather, now clinking round the rim with silver ladles, and

hung with scrolls of lemon-peel—instead, I say, of stumping and

clambering up the great staircase to the cavern of his Circean

enchantment, he stood with his big nose flattened against the

window-pane, watching the progress of the feeble old man, who clung

stiffly to the iron rail as he got down, step by step, to the pavement.

The hall-door had hardly closed, when the old Judge was in the hall

bawling hasty orders, with such stimulating expletives as old colonels

under excitement sometimes indulge in now-a-days, with a stamp or two of

his big foot, and a waving of his clenched fist in the air. He commanded

the footman to overtake the old gentleman in the white wig, to offer him

his protection on his way home, and in no case to show his face again

without having ascertained where he lodged, and who he was, and all

about him.

“By ——, sirrah! if you fail me in this, you doff my livery to-night!”

Forth bounced the stalwart footman, with his heavy cane under his arm,

and skipped down the steps, and looked up and down the street after the

singular figure, so easy to recognise.

What were his adventures I shall not tell you just now.

The old man, in the conference to which he had been admitted in that

stately panelled room, had just told the Judge a very strange story. He

might be himself a conspirator; he might possibly be crazed; or possibly

his whole story was straight and true.

The aged gentleman in the bottle-green coat, on finding himself alone

with Mr. Justice Harbottle, had become agitated. He said,

“There is, perhaps you are not aware, my lord, a prisoner in Shrewsbury

jail, charged with having forged a bill of exchange for a hundred and

twenty pounds, and his name is Lewis Pyneweck, a grocer of that town.”

“Is there?” says the Judge, who knew well that there was.

“Yes, my lord,” says the old man.

“Then you had better say nothing to affect this case. If you do, by ——

I’ll commit you; for I’m to try it,” says the Judge, with his terrible

look and tone.

“I am not going to do anything of the kind, my lord; of him or his case

I know nothing, and care nothing. But a fact has come to my knowledge

which it behoves you to well consider.”

“And what may that fact be?” inquired the Judge; “I’m in haste, sir, and

beg you will use dispatch.”

“It has come to my knowledge, my lord, that a secret tribunal is in

process of formation, the object of which is to take cognisance of the

conduct of the judges; and first, of _your_ conduct, my lord: it is a

wicked conspiracy.”

“Who are of it?” demands the Judge.

“I know not a single name as yet. I know but the fact, my lord; it is

most certainly true.”

“I’ll have you before the Privy Council, sir,” says the Judge.

“That is what I most desire; but not for a day or two, my lord.”

“And why so?”

“I have not as yet a single name, as I told your lordship; but I expect

to have a list of the most forward men in it, and some other papers

connected with the plot, in two or three days.”

“You said one or two just now.”

“About that time, my lord.”

“Is this a Jacobite plot?”

“In the main I think it is, my lord.”

“Why, then, it is political. I have tried no State prisoners, nor am

like to try any such. How, then, doth it concern me?”

“From what I can gather, my lord, there are those in it who desire

private revenges upon certain judges.”

“What do they call their cabal?”

“The High Court of Appeal, my lord.”

“Who are you sir? What is your name?”

“Hugh Peters, my lord.”

“That should be a Whig name?”

“It is, my lord.”

“Where do you lodge, Mr. Peters?”

“In Thames-street, my lord, over against the sign of the Three Kings.”

“Three Kings? Take care one be not too many for you, Mr. Peters! How

come you, an honest Whig, as you say, to be privy to a Jacobite plot?

Answer me that.”

“My lord, a person in whom I take an interest has been seduced to take a

part in it; and being frightened at the unexpected wickedness of their

plans, he is resolved to become an informer for the Crown.”

“He resolves like a wise man, sir. What does he say of the persons? Who

are in the plot? Doth he know them?”

“Only two, my lord; but he will be introduced to the club in a few days,

and he will then have a list, and more exact information of their plans,

and above all of their oaths, and their hours and places of meeting,

with which he wishes to be acquainted before they can have any

suspicions of his intentions. And being so informed, to whom, think you,

my lord, had he best go then?”

“To the king’s attorney-general straight. But you say this concerns me,

sir, in particular? How about this prisoner, Lewis Pyneweck? Is he one

of them?”

“I can’t tell, my lord; but for some reason, it is thought your lordship

will be well advised if you try him not. For if you do, it is feared

’twill shorten your days.”

“So far as I can learn, Mr. Peters, this business smells pretty strong

of blood and treason. The king’s attorney-general will know how to deal

with it. When shall I see you again, sir?”

“If you give me leave, my lord, either before your lordship’s court

sits, or after it rises, to-morrow. I should like to come and tell your

lordship what has passed.”

“Do so, Mr. Peters, at nine o’clock to-morrow morning. And see you play

me no trick, sir, in this matter; if you do, by ——, sir, I’ll lay you

by the heels!”

“You need fear no trick from me, my lord; had I not wished to serve you,

and acquit my own conscience, I never would have come all this way to

talk with your lordship.”

“I’m willing to believe you, Mr. Peters; I’m willing to believe you,

sir.”

And upon this they parted.

“He has either painted his face, or he is consumedly sick,” thought the

old Judge.

The light had shone more effectually upon his features as he turned to

leave the room with a low bow, and they looked, he fancied, unnaturally

chalky.

“D—— him!” said the judge ungraciously, as he began to scale the

stairs: “he has half-spoiled my supper.”

But if he had, no one but the Judge himself perceived it, and the

evidence was all, as any one might perceive, the other way.

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 recognising the livery. He very

gratefully accepted the proferred assistance, 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 lamp-lighter 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

assassination for its sanction, would be an uncomfortable institution

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, bloody, 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 his 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-glass; 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 brass 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 was 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 identity.

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 passed; 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 for ever. 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 Assizes 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.”

She had to read it half-a-dozen times over before she was sure she

understood it. Here was the paragraph:

“_Sentence, Death_—7.

“Executed accordingly, on Friday the 13th instant, to wit:

“Thomas Primer, _alias_ Duck—highway robbery.

“Flora Guy—stealing to the value of 11_s._ _6d._

“Arthur Pounden—burglary.

“Matilda Mummery—riot.

“Lewis Pyneweck—forgery, bill of exchange.”

And when she reached this, she read it over and over, feeling very cold

and sick. This buxom housekeeper was known in the house as Mrs.

Carwell—Carwell being her maiden name, which she had resumed.

No one in the house except its master knew her history. Her introduction

had been managed craftily. No one suspected that it had been concerted

between her and the old reprobate in scarlet and ermine.

Flora Carwell ran up the stairs now, and snatched her little girl,

hardly seven years of age, whom she met on the lobby, hurriedly up in

her arms, and carried her into her bedroom, without well knowing what

she was doing, and sat down, placing the child before her. She was not

able to speak. She held the child before her, and looked in the little

girl’s wondering face, and burst into tears of horror.

She thought, the Judge could have saved him. I daresay he could. For a

time she was furious with him; and hugged and kissed her bewildered

little girl, who returned her gaze with large round eyes.

That little girl had lost her father, and knew nothing of the matter.

She had been always told that her father was dead long ago.

A woman, coarse, uneducated, vain, and violent, does not reason, or even

feel, very distinctly; but in these tears of consternation were mingling

a self-upbraiding. She felt afraid of that little child.

But Mrs. Carwell was a person who lived not upon sentiment, but upon

beef and pudding; she consoled herself with punch; she did not trouble

herself long even with resentments; she was a gross and material person,

and could not mourn over the irrevocable for more than a limited number

of hours, even if she would.

Judge Harbottle was soon in London again. Except the gout, this savage

old epicurean never knew a day’s sickness. He laughed and coaxed and

bullied away the young woman’s faint upbraidings, and in a little time

Lewis Pyneweck troubled her no more; and the Judge secretly chuckled

over the perfectly fair removal of a bore, who might have grown little

by little into something very like a tyrant.

It was the lot of the Judge whose adventures I am now recounting to try

criminal cases at the Old Bailey shortly after his return. He had

commenced his charge to the jury in a case of forgery, and was, after

his wont, thundering dead against the prisoner, with many a hard

aggravation and cynical gibe, when suddenly all died away in silence,

and, instead of looking at the jury, the eloquent Judge was gaping at

some person in the body of the court.

Among the persons of small importance who stand and listen at the sides

was one tall enough to show with a little prominence; a slight mean

figure, dressed in seedy black, lean and dark of visage. He had just

handed a letter to the crier, before he caught the Judge’s eye.

That Judge descried, to his amazement, the features of Lewis Pyneweck.

He has the usual faint thin-lipped smile; and with his blue chin raised

in air, and as it seemed quite unconscious of the distinguished notice

he has attracted, he was stretching his low cravat with his crooked

fingers, while he slowly turned his head from side to side—a process

which enabled the Judge to see distinctly a stripe of swollen blue round

his neck, which indicated, he thought, the grip of the rope.

This man, with a few others, had got a footing on a step, from which he

could better see the court. He now stepped down, and the Judge lost

sight of him.

His lordship signed energetically with his hand in the direction in

which this man had vanished. He turned to the tipstaff. His first effort

to speak ended in a gasp. He cleared his throat, and told the astounded

official to arrest that man who had interrupted the court.

“He’s but this moment gone down _there_. Bring him in custody before me,

within ten minutes’ time, or I’ll strip your gown from your shoulders

and fine the sheriff!” he thundered, while his eyes flashed round the

court in search of the functionary.

Attorneys, counsellors, idle spectators, gazed in the direction in which

Mr. Justice Harbottle had shaken his gnarled old hand. They compared

notes. Not one had seen any one making a disturbance. They asked one

another if the Judge was losing his head.

Nothing came of the search. His lordship concluded his charge a great

deal more tamely; and when the jury retired, he stared round the court

with a wandering mind, and looked as if he would not have given sixpence

to see the prisoner hanged.

CHAPTER V.

CALEB SEARCHER.

The Judge had received the letter; had he known from whom it came, he

would no doubt have read it instantaneously. As it was he simply read

the direction:

_To the Honourable_

_The Lord Justice_

_Elijah Harbottle_,

_One of his Majesty’s Justices of_

_the Honourable Court of Common Pleas._

It remained forgotten in his pocket till he reached home.

When he pulled out that and others from the capacious pocket of his

coat, it had its turn, as he sat in his library in his thick silk

dressing-gown; and then he found its contents to be a closely-written

letter, in a clerk’s hand, and an enclosure in ‘secretary hand,’ as I

believe the angular scrivinary of law-writings in those days was termed,

engrossed on a bit of parchment about the size of this page. The letter

said:

“Mr. Justice Harbottle,—My Lord,

“I am ordered by the High Court of Appeal to acquaint your lordship, in

order to your better preparing yourself for your trial, that a true bill

hath been sent down, and the indictment lieth against your lordship for

the murder of one Lewis Pyneweck of Shrewsbury, citizen, wrongfully

executed for the forgery of a bill of exchange, on the—the day of ——

last, by reason of the wilful perversion of the evidence, and the undue

pressure put upon the jury, together with the illegal admission of

evidence by your lordship, well knowing the same to be illegal, by all

which the promoter of the prosecution of the said indictment, before the

High Court of Appeal, hath lost his life.

“And the trial of the said indictment, I am farther ordered to acquaint

your lordship is fixed for the 10th day of —— next ensuing, by the

right honourable the Lord Chief-Justice Twofold, of the court aforesaid,

to wit, the High Court of Appeal, on which day it will most certainly

take place. And I am farther to acquaint your lordship, to prevent any

surprise or miscarriage, that your case stands first for the said day,

and that the said High Court of Appeal sits day and night, and never

rises; and herewith, by order of the said court, I furnish your lordship

with a copy (extract) of the record in this case, except of the

indictment, whereof, notwithstanding, the substance and effect is

supplied to your lordship in this Notice. And farther I am to inform

you, that in case the jury then to try your lordship should find you

guilty, the right honourable the Lord Chief-Justice will, in passing

sentence of death upon you, fix the day of execution for the 10th day of

——, being one calendar month from the day of your trial.”

It was signed by “CALEB SEARCHER,

“Officer of the Crown Solicitor in the

“Kingdom of Life and Death.”

The Judge glanced through the parchment.

“’Sblood! Do they think a man like me is to be bamboozled by their

buffoonery?”

The Judge’s coarse features were wrung into one of his sneers; but he

was pale. Possibly, after all, there was a conspiracy on foot. It was

queer. Did they mean to pistol him in his carriage? or did they only

aim at frightening him?

Judge Harbottle had more than enough of animal courage. He was not

afraid of highwaymen, and he had fought more than his share of duels,

being a foul-mouthed advocate while he held briefs at the bar. No one

questioned his fighting qualities. But with respect to this particular

case of Pyneweck, he lived in a house of glass. Was there not his

pretty, dark-eyed, over-dressed housekeeper, Mrs. Flora Carwell? Very

easy for people who knew Shrewsbury to identify Mrs. Pyneweck, if once

put upon the scent; and had he not stormed and worked hard in that case?

Had he not made it hard sailing for the prisoner? Did he not know very

well what the bar thought of it? It would be the worst scandal that ever

blasted judge.

So much there was intimidating in the matter, but nothing more. The

Judge was a little bit gloomy for a day or two after, and more testy

with every one than usual.

He locked up the papers; and about a week after he asked his

housekeeper, one day, in the library:

“Had your husband never a brother?”

Mrs. Carwell squalled on this sudden introduction of the funereal topic,

and cried exemplary “piggins full,” as the Judge used pleasantly to say.

But he was in no mood for trifling now, and he said sternly:

“Come, madam! this wearies me. Do it another time; and give me an answer

to my question.” So she did.

Pyneweck had no brother living. He once had one; but he died in Jamaica.

“How do you know he is dead?” asked the Judge.

“Because he told me so.”

“Not the dead man?”

“Pyneweck told me so.”

“Is that all?” sneered the Judge.

He pondered this matter; and time went on. The Judge was growing a

little morose, and less enjoying. The subject struck nearer to his

thoughts than he fancied it could have done. But so it is with most

undivulged vexations, and there was no one to whom he could tell this

one.

It was now the ninth; and Mr. Justice Harbottle was glad. He knew

nothing would come of it. Still it bothered him; and to-morrow would see

it well over.

[What of the paper, I have cited? No one saw it during his life; no one,

after his death. He spoke of it to Dr. Hedstone; and what purported to

be “a copy,” in the old Judge’s hand-writing, was found. The original

was nowhere. Was it a copy of an illusion, incident to brain disease?

Such is my belief.]

CHAPTER VI.

ARRESTED.

Judge Harbottle went this night to the play at Drury Lane. He was one of

those old fellows who care nothing for late hours, and occasional

knocking about in pursuit of pleasure. He had appointed with two cronies

of Lincoln’s Inn to come home in his coach with him to sup after the

play.

They were not in his box, but were to meet him near the entrance, and to

get into his carriage there; and Mr. Justice Harbottle, who hated

waiting, was looking a little impatiently from the window.

The Judge yawned.

He told the footman to watch for Counsellor Thavies and Counsellor

Beller, who were coming; and, with another yawn, he laid his cocked-hat

on his knees, closed his eyes, leaned back in his corner, wrapped his

mantle closer about him, and began to think of pretty Mrs. Abington.

And being a man who could sleep like a sailor, at a moment’s notice, he

was thinking of taking a nap. Those fellows had no business to keep a

judge waiting.

He heard their voices now. Those rake-hell counsellors were laughing,

and bantering, and sparring after their wont. The carriage swayed and

jerked, as one got in, and then again as the other followed. The door

clapped, and the coach was now jogging and rumbling over the pavement.

The Judge was a little bit sulky. He did not care to sit up and open his

eyes. Let them suppose he was asleep. He heard them laugh with more

malice than good-humour, he thought, as they observed it. He would give

them a d——d hard knock or two when they got to his door, and till then

he would counterfeit his nap.

The clocks were chiming twelve. Beller and Thavies were silent as

tombstones. They were generally loquacious and merry rascals.

The Judge suddenly felt himself roughly seized and thrust from his

corner into the middle of the seat, and opening his eyes, instantly he

found himself between his two companions.

Before he could blurt out the oath that was at his lips, he saw that

they were two strangers—evil-looking fellows, each with a pistol in

his hand, and dressed like Bow Street officers.

The Judge clutched at the check-string. The coach pulled up. He stared

about him. They were not among houses; but through the windows, under a

broad moonlight, he saw a black moor stretching lifelessly from right to

left, with rotting trees, pointing fantastic branches in the air,

standing here and there in groups, as if they held up their arms and

twigs like fingers, in horrible glee at the Judge’s coming.

A footman came to the window. He knew his long face and sunken eyes. He

knew it was Dingly Chuff, fifteen years ago a footman in his service,

whom he had turned off at a moment’s notice, in a burst of jealousy, and

indicted for a missing spoon. The man had died in prison of the

jail-fever.

The Judge drew back in utter amazement. His armed companions signed

mutely; and they were again gliding over this unknown moor.

The bloated and gouty old man, in his horror, considered the question of

resistance. But his athletic days were long over. This moor was a

desert. There was no help to be had. He was in the hands of strange

servants, even if his recognition turned out to be a delusion, and they

were under the command of his captors. There was nothing for it but

submission, for the present.

Suddenly the coach was brought nearly to a standstill, so that the

prisoner saw an ominous sight from the window.

It was a gigantic gallows beside the road; it stood three-sided, and

from each of its three broad beams at top depended in chains some eight

or ten bodies, from several of which the cere-clothes had dropped away,

leaving the skeletons swinging lightly by their chains. A tall ladder

reached to the summit of the structure, and on the peat beneath lay

bones.

On top of the dark transverse beam facing the road, from which, as from

the other two completing the triangle of death, dangled a row of these

unfortunates in chains, a hang-man, with a pipe in his mouth, much as we

see him in the famous print of the ‘Idle Apprentice,’ though here his

perch was ever so much higher, was reclining at his ease and listlessly

shying bones, from a little heap at his elbow, at the skeletons that

hung round, bringing down now a rib or two, now a hand, now half a leg.

A long-sighted man could have discerned that he was a dark fellow, lean;

and from continually looking down on the earth from the elevation over

which, in another sense, he always hung, his nose, his lips, his chin

were pendulous and loose, and drawn down into a monstrous grotesque.

This fellow took his pipe from his mouth on seeing the coach, stood up,

and cut some solemn capers high on his beam, and shook a new rope in the

air, crying with a voice high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering

over a gibbet, “A rope for Judge Harbottle!”

The coach was now driving on at its old swift pace.

So high a gallows as that, the Judge had never, even in his most

hilarious moments, dreamed of. He thought he must be raving. And the

dead footman! He shook his ears and strained his eyelids; but if he was

dreaming, he was unable to awake himself.

There was no good in threatening these scoundrels. A _brutum fulmen_

might bring a real one on his head.

Any submission to get out of their hands; and then heaven and earth he

would move to unearth and hunt them down.

Suddenly they drove round a corner of a vast white building, and under a

_porte-cochère_.

CHAPTER VII.

CHIEF JUSTICE TWOFOLD.

The Judge found himself in a corridor lighted with dingy oil lamps, the

walls of bare stone; it looked like a passage in a prison. His guards

placed him in the hands of other people. Here and there he saw bony and

gigantic soldiers passing to and fro, with muskets over their shoulders.

They looked straight before them, grinding their teeth, in bleak fury,

with no noise but the clank of their shoes. He saw these by glimpses,

round corners, and at the ends of passages, but he did not actually pass

them by.

And now, passing under a narrow doorway, he found himself in the dock,

confronting a judge in his scarlet robes, in a large court-house. There

was nothing to elevate this temple of Themis above its vulgar kind

elsewhere. Dingy enough it looked, in spite of candles lighted in decent

abundance. A case had just closed, and the last juror’s back was seen

escaping through the door in the wall of the jury-box. There were some

dozen barristers, some fiddling with pen and ink, others buried in

briefs, some beckoning, with the plumes of their pens, to their

attorneys, of whom there were no lack; there were clerks to-ing and

fro-ing, and the officers of the court, and the registrar, who was

handing up a paper to the judge; and the tipstaff, who was presenting a

note at the end of his wand to a king’s counsel over the heads of the

crowd between. If this was the High Court of Appeal, which never rose

day or night, it might account for the pale and jaded aspect of

everybody in it. An air of indescribable gloom hung upon the pallid

features of all the people here; no one ever smiled; all looked more or

less secretly suffering.

“The King against Elijah Harbottle!” shouted the officer.

“Is the appellant Lewis Pyneweck in court?” asked Chief-Justice Twofold,

in a voice of thunder, that shook the woodwork of the Court, and boomed

down the corridors.

Up stood Pyneweck from his place at the table.

“Arraign the prisoner!” roared the Chief; and Judge Harbottle felt the

pannels of the dock round him, and the floor, and the rails quiver in

the vibrations of that tremendous voice.

The prisoner, _in limine_, objected to this pretended court, as being a

sham, and non-existent in point of law; and then, that, even if it were

a court constituted by law, (the Judge was growing dazed), it had not

and could not have any jurisdiction to try him for his conduct on the

bench.

Whereupon the chief-justice laughed suddenly, and every one in court,

turning round upon the prisoner, laughed also, till the laugh grew and

roared all round like a deafening acclamation; he saw nothing but

glittering eyes and teeth, a universal stare and grin; but though all

the voices laughed, not a single face of all those that concentrated

their gaze upon him looked like a laughing face. The mirth subsided as

suddenly as it began.

The indictment was read. Judge Harbottle actually pleaded! He pleaded

“Not guilty.” A jury were sworn. The trial proceeded. Judge Harbottle

was bewildered.

This could not be real. He must be either mad, or _going_ mad, he

thought.

One thing could not fail to strike even him. This Chief-Justice Twofold,

who was knocking him about at every turn with sneer and gibe, and

roaring him down with his tremendous voice, was a dilated effigy of

himself; an image of Mr. Justice Harbottle, at least double his size,

and with all his fierce colouring, and his ferocity of eye and visage,

enhanced awfully.

Nothing the prisoner could argue, cite, or state was permitted to retard

for a moment the march of the case towards its catastrophe.

The chief-justice seemed to feel his power over the jury, and to exult

and riot in the display of it. He glared at them, he nodded to them; he

seemed to have established an understanding with them. The lights were

faint in that part of the court. The jurors were mere shadows, sitting

in rows; the prisoner could see a dozen pair of white eyes shining,

coldly, out of the darkness; and whenever the judge in his charge, which

was contemptuously brief, nodded and grinned and gibed, the prisoner

could see, in the obscurity, by the dip of all these rows of eyes

together, that the jury nodded in acquiescence.

And now the charge was over, the huge chief-justice leaned back panting

and gloating on the prisoner. Every one in the court turned about, and

gazed with steadfast hatred on the man in the dock. From the jury-box

where the twelve sworn brethren were whispering together, a sound in the

general stillness like a prolonged “hiss-s-s!” was heard; and then, in

answer to the challenge of the officer, “How say you, gentlemen of the

jury, guilty or not guilty?” came in a melancholy voice the finding,

“Guilty.”

The place seemed to the eyes of the prisoner to grow gradually darker

and darker, till he could discern nothing distinctly but the lumen of

the eyes that were turned upon him from every bench and side and corner

and gallery of the building. The prisoner doubtless thought that he had

quite enough to say, and conclusive, why sentence of death should not be

pronounced upon him; but the lord chief-justice puffed it contemptuously

away, like so much smoke, and proceeded to pass sentence of death upon

the prisoner, having named the 10th of the ensuing month for his

execution.

Before he had recovered the stun of this ominous farce, in obedience to

the mandate, ‘Remove the prisoner,’ he was led from the dock. The lamps

seemed all to have gone out, and there were stoves and charcoal-fires

here and there, that threw a faint crimson light on the walls of the

corridors through which he passed. The stones that composed them looked

now enormous, cracked and unhewn.

He came into a vaulted smithy, where two men, naked to the waist, with

heads like bulls, round shoulders, and the arms of giants, were welding

red-hot chains together with hammers that pelted like thunderbolts.

They looked on the prisoner with fierce red eyes, and rested on their

hammers for a minute; and said the elder to his companion, “Take out

Elijah Harbottle’s gyves;” and with a pincers he plucked the end which

lay dazzling in the fire from the furnace.

“One end locks,” said he, taking the cool end of the iron in one hand,

while with the grip of a vice he seized the leg of the Judge, and locked

the ring round his ankle. “The other,” he said with a grin, “is welded.”

The iron band that was to form the ring for the other leg lay still

red-hot upon the stone floor, with brilliant sparks sporting up and down

its surface.

His companion in his gigantic hands seized the old Judge’s other leg,

and pressed his foot immovably to the stone floor; while his senior in a

twinkling, with a masterly application of pincers and hammer, sped the

glowing bar round his ankle so tight that the skin and sinews smoked and

bubbled again, and old Judge Harbottle uttered a yell that seemed to

chill the very stones, and make the iron chains quiver on the wall.

Chains, vaults, smiths, and smithy all vanished in a moment; but the

pain continued. Mr. Justice Harbottle was suffering torture all round

the ankle on which the infernal smiths had just been operating.

His friends Thavies and Beller were startled by the Judge’s roar in the

midst of their elegant trifling about a marriage à-la-mode case which

was going on. The Judge was in panic as well as pain. The street-lamps

and the light of his own hall-door restored him.

“I’m very bad,” growled he between his set teeth; “my foot’s blazing.

Who was he that hurt my foot? ’Tis the gout—’tis the gout!” he said,

awaking completely. “How many hours have we been coming from the

playhouse? ’Sblood, what has happened on the way? I’ve slept half the

night?”

There had been no hitch or delay, and they had driven home at a good

pace.

The Judge, however, was in gout; he was feverish too; and the attack,

though very short, was sharp; and when, in about a fortnight, it

subsided, his ferocious joviality did not return. He could not get this

dream, as he chose to call it, out of his head.

CHAPTER VIII.

SOMEBODY HAS GOT INTO THE HOUSE.

People remarked that the Judge was in the vapours. His doctor said he

should go for a fortnight to Buxton.

Whenever the Judge fell into a brown study, he was always conning over

the terms of the sentence pronounced upon him in his vision—“in one

calendar month from the date of this day;” and then the usual form, “and

you shall be hanged by the neck till you are dead,” &c. “That will be

the 10th—I’m not much in the way of being hanged. I know what stuff

dreams are, and I laugh at them; but this is continually in my thoughts,

as if it forecast misfortune of some sort. I wish the day my dream gave

me were passed and over. I wish I were well purged of my gout. I wish I

were as I used to be. ’Tis nothing but vapours, nothing but a maggot.”

The copy of the parchment and letter which had announced his trial with

many a snort and sneer he would read over and over again, and the

scenery and people of his dream would rise about him in places the most

unlikely, and steal him in a moment from all that surrounded him into a

world of shadows.

The Judge had lost his iron energy and banter. He was growing taciturn

and morose. The Bar remarked the change, as well they might. His friends

thought him ill. The doctor said he was troubled with hypochondria, and

that his gout was still lurking in his system, and ordered him to that

ancient haunt of crutches and chalk-stones, Buxton.

The Judge’s spirits were very low; he was frightened about himself; and

he described to his housekeeper, having sent for her to his study to

drink a dish of tea, his strange dream in his drive home from Drury Lane

playhouse. He was sinking into the state of nervous dejection in which

men lose their faith in orthodox advice, and in despair consult quacks,

astrologers, and nursery story-tellers. Could such a dream mean that he

was to have a fit, and so die on the 10th? She did not think so. On the

contrary, it was certain some good luck must happen on that day.

The Judge kindled; and for the first time for many days, he looked for a

minute or two like himself, and he tapped her on the cheek with the hand

that was not in flannel.

“Odsbud! odsheart! you dear rogue! I had forgot. There is young

Tom—yellow Tom, my nephew, you know, lies sick at Harrogate; why

shouldn’t he go that day as well as another, and if he does, I get an

estate by it? Why, lookee, I asked Doctor Hedstone yesterday if I was

like to take a fit any time, and he laughed, and swore I was the last

man in town to go off that way.”

The Judge sent most of his servants down to Buxton to make his lodgings

and all things comfortable for him. He was to follow in a day or two.

It was now the 9th; and the next day well over, he might laugh at his

visions and auguries.

On the evening of the 9th, Doctor Hedstone’s footman knocked at the

Judge’s door. The doctor ran up the dusky stairs to the drawing-room. It

was a March evening, near the hour of sunset, with an east wind

whistling sharply through the chimney-stacks. A wood fire blazed

cheerily on the hearth. And Judge Harbottle, in what was then called a

brigadier-wig, with his red roquelaure on, helped the glowing effect of

the darkened chamber, which looked red all over like a room on fire.

The Judge had his feet on a stool, and his huge grim purple face

confronted the fire and seemed to pant and swell, as the blaze

alternately spread upward and collapsed. He had fallen again among his

blue devils, and was thinking of retiring from the Bench, and of fifty

other gloomy things.

But the doctor, who was an energetic son of Æsculapius, would listen to

no croaking, told the Judge he was full of gout, and in his present

condition no judge even of his own case, but promised him leave to

pronounce on all those melancholy questions, a fortnight later.

In the meantime the Judge must be very careful. He was over-charged

with gout, and he must not provoke an attack, till the waters of Buxton

should do that office for him, in their own salutary way.

The doctor did not think him perhaps quite so well as he pretended, for

he told him he wanted rest, and would be better if he went forthwith to

his bed.

Mr. Gerningham, his valet, assisted him, and gave him his drops; and the

Judge told him to wait in his bedroom till he should go to sleep.

Three persons that night had specially odd stories to tell.

The housekeeper had got rid of the trouble of amusing her little girl at

this anxious time by giving her leave to run about the sitting-rooms and

look at the pictures and china, on the usual condition of touching

nothing. It was not until the last gleam of sunset had for some time

faded, and the twilight had so deepened that she could no longer

discern the colours on the china figures on the chimney-piece or in the

cabinets, that the child returned to the housekeeper’s room to find her

mother.

To her she related, after some prattle about the china, and the

pictures, and the Judge’s two grand wigs in the dressing-room off the

library, an adventure of an extraordinary kind.

In the hall was placed, as was customary in those times, the sedan-chair

which the master of the house occasionally used, covered with stamped

leather, and studded with gilt nails, and with its red silk blinds down.

In this case, the doors of this old-fashioned conveyance were locked,

the windows up, and, as I said, the blinds down, but not so closely that

the curious child could not peep underneath one of them, and see into

the interior.

A parting beam from the setting sun, admitted through the window of a

back room, shot obliquely through the open door, and lighting on the

chair, shone with a dull transparency through the crimson blind.

To her surprise, the child saw in the shadow a thin man dressed in black

seated in it; he had sharp dark features; his nose, she fancied, a

little awry, and his brown eyes were looking straight before him; his

hand was on his thigh, and he stirred no more than the waxen figure she

had seen at Southwark fair.

A child is so often lectured for asking questions and on the propriety

of silence, and the superior wisdom of its elders, that it accepts most

things at last in good faith; and the little girl acquiesced

respectfully in the occupation of the chair by this mahogany-faced

person as being all right and proper.

It was not until she asked her mother who this man was, and observed her

scared face as she questioned her more minutely upon the appearance of

the stranger, that she began to understand that she had seen something

unaccountable.

Mrs. Carwell took the key of the chair from its nail over the footman’s

shelf, and led the child by the hand up to the hall, having a lighted

candle in her other hand. She stopped at a distance from the chair, and

placed the candlestick in the child’s hand.

“Peep in, Margery, again, and try if there’s anything there,” she

whispered; “hold the candle near the blind so as to throw its light

through the curtain.”

The child peeped, this time with a very solemn face, and intimated at

once that he was gone.

“Look again, and be sure,” urged her mother.

The little girl was quite certain; and Mrs. Carwell, with her mob-cap of

lace and cherry-coloured ribbons, and her dark brown hair, not yet

powdered, over a very pale face, unlocked the door, looked in, and

beheld emptiness.

“All a mistake, child, you see.”

“_There_, ma’am! see there! He’s gone round the corner,” said the child.

“Where?” said Mrs. Carwell, stepping backward a step.

“Into that room.”

“Tut, child! ’twas the shadow,” cried Mrs. Carwell angrily, because she

was frightened. “I moved the candle.” But she clutched one of the poles

of the chair, which leant against the wall in the corner, and pounded

the floor furiously with one end of it, being afraid to pass the open

door the child had pointed to.

The cook and two kitchen-maids came running upstairs, not knowing what

to make of this unwonted alarm.

They all searched the room; but it was still and empty, and no sign of

any one’s having been there.

Some people may suppose that the direction given to her thoughts by this

odd little incident will account for a very strange illusion which Mrs.

Carwell herself experienced about two hours later.

CHAPTER IX.

THE JUDGE LEAVES HIS HOUSE.

Mrs. Flora Carwell was going up the great staircase with a posset for

the Judge in a china bowl, on a little silver tray.

Across the top of the well-staircase there runs a massive oak rail; and,

raising her eyes accidentally, she saw an extremely odd-looking

stranger, slim and long, leaning carelessly over with a pipe between his

finger and thumb. Nose, lips, and chin seemed all to droop downward into

extraordinary length, as he leant his odd peering face over the

banister. In his other hand he held a coil of rope, one end of which

escaped from under his elbow and hung over the rail.

Mrs. Carwell, who had no suspicion at the moment, that he was not a real

person, and fancied that he was some one employed in cording the Judge’s

luggage, called to know what he was doing there.

Instead of answering, he turned about, and walked across the lobby, at

about the same leisurely pace at which she was ascending, and entered a

room, into which she followed him. It was an uncarpeted and unfurnished

chamber. An open trunk lay upon the floor empty, and beside it the coil

of rope; but except herself there was no one in the room.

Mrs. Carwell was very much frightened, and now concluded that the child

must have seen the same ghost that had just appeared to her. Perhaps,

when she was able to think it over, it was a relief to believe so; for

the face, figure, and dress described by the child were awfully like

Pyneweck; and this certainly was not he.

Very much scared and very hysterical, Mrs. Carwell ran down to her room,

afraid to look over her shoulder, and got some companions about her, and

wept, and talked, and drank more than one cordial, and talked and wept

again, and so on, until, in those early days, it was ten o’clock, and

time to go to bed.

A scullery-maid remained up finishing some of her scouring and

“scalding” for some time after the other servants—who, as I said, were

few in number—that night had got to their beds. This was a low-browed,

broad-faced, intrepid wench with black hair, who did not “vally a ghost

not a button,” and treated the housekeeper’s hysterics with measureless

scorn.

The old house was quiet, now. It was near twelve o’clock, no sounds were

audible except the muffled wailing of the wintry winds, piping high

among the roofs and chimneys, or rumbling at intervals, in under gusts,

through the narrow channels of the street.

The spacious solitudes of the kitchen level were awfully dark, and this

sceptical kitchen-wench was the only person now up and about, in the

house. She hummed tunes to herself, for a time; and then stopped and

listened; and then resumed her work again. At last, she was destined to

be more terrified than even was the housekeeper.

There was a back-kitchen in this house, and from this she heard, as if

coming from below its foundations, a sound like heavy strokes, that

seemed to shake the earth beneath her feet. Sometimes a dozen in

sequence, at regular intervals; sometimes fewer. She walked out softly

into the passage, and was surprised to see a dusky glow issuing from

this room, as if from a charcoal fire.

The room seemed thick with smoke.

Looking in, she very dimly beheld a monstrous figure, over a furnace,

beating with a mighty hammer the rings and rivets of a chain.

The strokes, swift and heavy as they looked, sounded hollow and distant.

The man stopped, and pointed to something on the floor, that, through

the smoky haze, looked, she thought, like a dead body. She remarked no

more; but the servants in the room close by, startled from their sleep

by a hideous scream, found her in a swoon on the flags, close to the

door, where she had just witnessed this ghastly vision.

Startled by the girl’s incoherent asseverations that she had seen the

Judge’s corpse on the floor, two servants having first searched the

lower part of the house, went rather frightened upstairs to inquire

whether their master was well. They found him, not in his bed, but in

his room. He had a table with candles burning at his bedside, and was

getting on his clothes again; and he swore and cursed at them roundly in

his old style, telling them that he had business, and that he would

discharge on the spot any scoundrel who should dare to disturb him

again.

So the invalid was left to his quietude.

In the morning it was rumoured here and there in the street that the

Judge was dead. A servant was sent from the house three doors away, by

Counsellor Traverse, to inquire at Judge Harbottle’s hall-door.

The servant who opened it was pale and reserved, and would only say that

the Judge was ill. He had had a dangerous accident; Doctor Hedstone had

been with him at seven o’clock in the morning.

There were averted looks, short answers, pale and frowning faces, and

all the usual signs that there was a secret that sat heavily upon their

minds, and the time for disclosing which had not yet come. That time

would arrive when the coroner had arrived, and the mortal scandal that

had befallen the house could be no longer hidden. For that morning Mr.

Justice Harbottle had been found hanging by the neck from the banister

at the top of the great staircase, and quite dead.

There was not the smallest sign of any struggle or resistance. There had

not been heard a cry or any other noise in the slightest degree

indicative of violence. There was medical evidence to show that, in his

atrabilious state, it was quite on the cards that he might have made

away with himself. The jury found accordingly that it was a case of

suicide. But to those who were acquainted with the strange story which

Judge Harbottle had related to at least two persons, the fact that the

catastrophe occurred on the morning of the 10th March seemed a

startling coincidence.

A few days after, the pomp of a great funeral attended him to the grave;

and so, in the language of Scripture, “the rich man died, and was

buried.”

END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.