The Escape over the Houses.—Many Perils.—Gray’s Great Sufferings.—The
Guide Rope.
Gray was silent for some moments, then, with, a deep groan, he dropped
his head upon his hands, and gave himself up to a bitterness of anguish
that must have both alarmed and melted any heart but the stubborn one
of the man who now had him in his power.
“All I have struggled for,” thought Gray—“all that I have dipped my
hands in blood for is about to be wrested from me for the mere doubtful
boon of existence.”
At that awful moment of misery he did indeed feel that he had chosen
the wrong path in life, and the gaudy flowers which had lured him from
the right road of virtue to the intricate one of crime and deep
iniquity, were but delusion, and had vanished, now leaving him a
wanderer in a region of dissolution and gaunt despair. Oh, what would
he have not given in that awful moment, when busy memory conjured up
all his crimes before him in frightful array, to have been the veriest
beggar that ever crept for alms from door to door, so that he could
have said, “I am innocent of great wrong—I have shed no man’s blood!”
It might be that the evident mortal agony of Jacob Gray really had some
effect even upon the hardened and obdurate heart of his companion, for
it was several minutes before he spoke, and then when he did, his voice
was scarcely so harshly tuned as before, and it is probable he meant to
offer something very consolatory when he said,—
“Snivelling be bothered, I have cracked never so many cribs, and I
never gaved up to the enemy yet. Keep up your heart, old ’un, you’ll
light on your feet yet, like a cat as is shied out o’ a attic window.”
Gray only groaned and shook his head.
“Now, I tell you what I’ll do for you,” continued the man, “you shall
go into partnership with me, and we’ll do a lot o’ work together.
You’ve got a good sneaking sort o’ face that’ll gammon the flats. You
can poke about and insinuate where family plate and such like things is
kept, and then I’ll go and crack the cribs. Don’t be groaning here.”
The robber then gave Gray another encouraging blow upon the back, which
effectually prevented him from groaning for some minutes, by leaving
him no breath to groan with. Gray then looked up, and, glancing in the
face of the man he said,—
“I will own to you that I have about me a larger sum than I at first
named.”
“I know’d it,” cried the man, “I know’d—you white-mugged fellers always
has larger sums than they names.”
“In one word,” said Gray, “I have two hundred pounds. Will you take one
hundred and leave me at liberty to go from here when the ardour of
pursuit has abated?”
“Without the search?”
“Yes. Without the search. You talk of your honour—why not rely upon
mine?”
“’Cos I’m a known gentleman, and you isn’t,” replied the fellow. “My
word’s respected all through the profession. If I say I’ll crack that
crib, I goes and cracks it.”
“Exactly. You will agree to my terms?”
“Why, you see, I’m rather awkwardly situated just now. It isn’t safe
for you to go out by the way you came in. You may think it is, but I
can tell you it isn’t. The people down stairs have had a cool hundred
offered for nabbing you, and ain’t they on the look-out?”
“A hundred?”
“Yes. You see that’s all you offer me. Now there’s Bill’s attic to pay
for, and Bill’s young woman.”
Gray replied by a groan.
“There you go, now, groaning away. It’s well for you that you’ve fell
among people with fine feelings, and all that sort o’ thing. Some folks
now, as know’d as much as, I’m pretty sure, I know, would put a knife
in your guts.”
“What—what—do—you know?” stammered Gray, shivering at the very idea of
such a process.
“What do I know? Why, I know you are trying to deceive a gentleman.
You’ve got more money then you’ll own to, you know you have.”
“You wrong me. Indeed you do.”
“Well, well, I’ll take Bill’s opinion. He’s better nor all the lawyers
in London, is Bill. If he says as it’s all right and we are to take the
hundred only, I consents. Now, my covey, I’ll trouble you to come with
me to Bill’s attic.”
“But can we go without danger? The people down stairs, you say, are on
the watch.”
“Let ’em watch—we ain’t a-going down stairs. The window’s the thing for
us.”
“Is it the next house?”
“No, it isn’t—nor the next arter that either—but it’s all the safer for
that. You’ve got a few roofs to get over, but I know ’em if well as I
know my own pocket.”
The man then opened the small latticed window of the room and looked
out for a moment. Then, with a satisfied tone, he said,—
“It’s a regular dark night. There ain’t a shadow o’ fear.”
“You think I shall escape?”
“I know it. I’ve said it. Think o’ my honour.”
He then took from an old chest a coil of very thick rope, in one end of
which he busied himself in making a noose, which, when he had
completed, he advanced with it to Gray, saying,—
“Just pop your head through.”
“Gracious Heavens!” cried Gray, starting up. “What do you mean?”
“Mean? Why to take care of you to be sure; I know the way over the
roofs, but you don’t. You’ll smash yourself in some of the courts
without a guide rope, you will.”
“A guide rope?”
“Yes. Don’t be making those faces. Do you think I’m going to hang you?”
“Oh no—no,” said Gray, with a nervous smile. “No—certainly.”
“I wouldn’t do such a ungentlemanly thing. Poke your head through.”
The man accompanied these words by seizing Gray by the hair and
thrusting his head into the noose, which then he passed over his
shoulder down to his waist.
“There you are now,” he said, “as safe as if you was a diamond in
cotton. Now, mind you, I go first, and you follow arter. You keep
coming on in the line of the rope, you understand, as long as you feel
me tugging at it; you are sure to be safe if you follow the rope, but
so certain as you don’t down you’ll go either into some of the yards o’
the houses, or into some o’ the open courts.”
“I understand,” said Gray, who felt anything but pleasantly situated
with a thick rope round his middle, by which he was to be hauled over
roofs of old houses. There was, however, no alternative, and he strove
to assume an air of composure and confidence, which sat but ill upon
him, and the ghastly smile which he forced his face to assume, looked
like some hideous contortion of the muscles produced by pain, rather
than an indication that the heart was at ease within him.
The housebreaker now took the coil of rope in his hand, leaving a
length between him and Jacob Gray of about three yards merely, and then
he nimbly got out at the window.
“Follow,” he said to Gray, “and mind ye now, if you say anything until
you are spoken to by me, I’ll let you down.”
Trembling and alarmed, Gray scrambled out at the window, and found
himself standing, or rather crouching in a narrow gutter, full of slime
and filth, and only protected from falling by a narrow coping, which
cut and scratched his ankles as he moved.
His guide crept on slowly and cautiously, and Gray followed guided by
the rope, which every now and then was pulled very tight with a jerk,
that at first very nearly upset him over the parapet.
There was a cold raw air blowing over the house tops, but Gray’s fears
produced a heavy perspiration upon him, and he shook excessively from
sheer fright at the idea of a false step precipitating him to a great
depth on to some stone pavement, where he would lay a hideous mass of
broken bones.
Tug, tug, went the rope, and now Jacob Gray felt the strain come in an
upward direction. He crawled on, and presently found that the rope
ascended a sloping roof of slates, which at the first dim sight of it,
struck him he would have the greatest difficulty in ascending. He was
not, however, left long to his reflections, for a sudden tug at the
rope which brought him with his face in violent contact with the
sloping roof, admonished him that his guide was getting rather
impatient.
With something between a curse and a groan, he commenced the slippery
and difficult ascent, which, however, by the aid of the rope, he
accomplished with greater ease than he had anticipated.
It happened that Gray, in the confusion of his mind, did not at all
take into consideration that the sloping roof might have a side to
descend as well as one to ascend, so that when he arrived at its
summit, he rolled over and came down with great speed into a gutter on
the other side, and partially upon the back of his guide, who, with a
muttered accusation of an awful character, seized him by the throat and
held down, in the gutter upon his back to the imminent risk of his
strangulation.
It seemed that Gray’s fall had given some kind of alarm, for in a
moment an attic window at some distance was opened with a creaking
sound, and the voice of a female cried,—
“Gracious me, what’s that?”
“Hush, for your life, hush,” whispered the man in Gray’s ear.
“Well, I never did hear such a rumpus,” said the woman’s voice. “It’s
those beastly cats again.”
She had no sooner uttered this suggestion, than Gray’s companion
perpetrated so excellent an imitation of a cat mewing, that Gray was
for a moment taken in it himself.
“Ah, there you are,” said the woman; “I only wish I was near you.
Puss—puss—puss.”
This call from the woman was a hypocritical one, and evidently intended
to deceive the supposed cat or cats to their serious personal detriment
should they venture to the window allured by such pacific sounds.
There was a pause of some moments, then the woman exclaimed,—
“Oh, you artful wretches; I declare these cats are as knowing as
Christians.”
The attic window was then shut with a very aggravated bang, and Gray’s
companion took his hand from his throat as he said to him,—
“Curse you, what the devil made you come down the slope with such a
run?“
“I—I didn’t know it,” said Gray.
“Come on and mind what you are about. I didn’t think you were so
precious green as you are; come on, I say.”
The fellow crept on ahead, and a tug at the rope caused Gray to follow,
which he did; so weak from terror and exhaustion that he could scarcely
contrive to keep up with his guide, and numerous were the falls he
received, as a sudden pull of the rope rebuked his tardy progress.
Altogether, it was, to Jacob Gray, an awful means of safety, if safety
was to be the result of it.
They proceeded along the gutter they were in until they came to the
corner house of the court, to turn which was no easy matter, from the
circumstance of the coping stones ceasing each way, at about a foot
from the absolute corner, down to which the roof came with a point.
Round this point the housebreaker stepped with ease, but to Gray,
oppressed as his mind was with fears and terrors, and weakened and
exhausted as he was from his recent unusual bodily exertion, it was a
task of the greatest magnitude and terror.
There was, however, no time to deliberate, and it was, perhaps, better
for Gray that such was the case, for his mind was not in that state to
reason itself out of nervous apprehensions.
A sharp tug of the rope settled his cogitations, and clinging with his
hands to the angle of the roof, he placed his leg round the corner. It
was then a moment or two before he could find, with his foot, the
coping stones on the other side, and those few moments seemed to him
hours of intense agony. At length he gained a hold with his foot, and
rubbing his very face against the roof for fear of overbalancing
himself in the outer direction, he contrived to get round.
For a moment a deadly sickness came over him, when he had accomplished
the, to him, difficult feat; then he felt as if he could have nothing
else to fear, and a feeling of congratulation sprang up in his mind,
that after all he might not only escape, but preserve the greater part
of the large sum he had about him.