alarm, at any living object that might present itself, were now within
thirty or forty yards of the house, and had halted to reconnoitre; when
the sergeant, who had been on his knees for several minutes before, with
his piece at his eye, said softly, "Now," and fired. Whether he had
aimed at the foremost man of the gang, I do not know; but if so, he had
missed him, for he still stood firm. At this person, however, I now
levelled, fired, and down he came. In the next instant the shots were
rapping thick and fast from the different windows of the house.
The bushrangers, taken by surprise, paused for an instant, returned two
or three straggling shots, and then fled in the utmost consternation and
disorder. We kept pelting after them for a few minutes, and then,
quitting the house, gave them chase, with a whooping and hallooing that
must have added in no small degree to their terror. In this chase we
overtook two that had been severely wounded, and came upon a third near
the skirt of the wood, who, after running so far, had dropped down dead.
The others, who had fled, some of whom, we had no doubt, were also
wounded, escaped by getting into the forest, where it was no use looking
for them. The two wounded men we made prisoners, and carried back to the
house. As we were returning, we came upon the man whom I had brought
down. Being extended motionless on the ground at full length, we thought
him dead, and were about to pass on, intending to leave him where he lay
till the morning, when I thought I heard him breathing. I knelt down
beside him, looked narrowly into his face, and found that he was still
living. On discovering this, we had the unfortunate man carried to the
house; and having placed him on a mattress, staunched the bleeding of
his wound, which was on the right breast, and administered a little
brandy and water, which almost immediately revived him. He opened his
eyes, began to breathe more freely, and in a short time was so far
recovered as to be able to speak, although with difficulty.
The excitement of the fray over, if the late affair could be so called,
my heart bled within me for the unhappy wretch who had been reduced by
my hand to the deplorable condition in which he now lay before me. My
conscience rose up against me, and would not be laid by any suggestions
of the necessity that prompted the deed. In my anxiety to make what
reparation I could for what now seemed to me my cruelty, I sat by the
miserable sufferer, ready and eager to supply any want he might express,
and to administer what comfort I could do him in his dying moments; for
that he was dying, notwithstanding the temporary revival alluded to, was
but too evident from his ghastly look and rapidly glazing eye.
It was while I thus sat by the unhappy man, and while silently
contemplating his pallid countenance, by the faint light of a lamp that
hung against the wall of the apartment, that I suddenly thought I
perceived in that countenance some traces of features that I had seen
before. Whose they were, or where I had seen them, I did not at first
recollect. But the idea having once presented itself, I kept hunting it
through all the recesses of my memory. At length Digby occurred to me.
But no, Digby it could not be. Impossible.
I looked on the countenance of the sufferer again. It was slightly
distorted with pain, and all trace of the resemblance I had fancied was
gone. An interval of ease succeeded. The real or imagined resemblance
returned. Again I lost sight of it, and again I caught it; for it was
only in some points of view I could detect it at all. At length, after
marking for some time longer, with intense interest, the features of the
sufferer, my conviction becoming every moment stronger and stronger, and
my agitation in consequence extreme, I bent my head close to the dying
man, and, taking his cold and clammy hand in mine, asked him, in a
whisper, if his name was not Digby. His eyes were closed at the moment,
but I saw he was not sleeping. On my putting the question, he opened
them wide, and stared wildly upon me, but without saying a word. He
seemed to be endeavouring to recognise me, but apparently in vain. I
repeated the question. This time he answered. Still gazing earnestly at
me, he said, and it was all he did say, "It is."
"Don't you know me?" I inquired.
He shook his head.
"My name is Lorimer," said I.
"Thank God," he exclaimed solemnly. "For one, at least, of my crimes it
is permitted me to make some reparation. Haste, haste, get witnesses and
hear my dying declaration. There's no time to lose, for I feel I am fast
going!"
Without a moment's delay--- for I felt the importance of obtaining the
declaration, which I had no doubt would establish my innocence--I ran
for my father and Sergeant Lindsay, and, to make assurance doubly sure,
brought two of the privates also along with me. It was a striking scene
of retributive justice,
On our entering the apartment where Digby lay, the wretched man raised
himself upon his elbow. I ran and placed two pillows beneath him to
support him. He thanked me. Then raising his hand impressively, and
directing it towards me--
"That young man there," he said, "David Lorimer, is, as I declare on
the word of a dying man, innocent of the crime for which he was banished
to this country. I, and no other, am the guilty person. It was I who
robbed my master, Mr. Wallscourt, of the silver plate for which this
young man was blamed; and it was I who put the silver spoon in his
pocket, in order to substantiate the charge I subsequently brought
against him, and in which I was but too successful."
He then added, that in case his declaration should not be deemed
sufficient to clear me of the guilt imputed to me, we should endeavour
to find out a person of the name of Nareby--Thomas Nareby--who, he said,
was in the colony under sentence of transportation for life for
housebreaking; and that this person, who had been, at the time of the
robbery for which I suffered, a receiver of stolen goods, and with whom
he, Digby, had deposited Mr. Wallscourt's plate, would acknowledge--at
least he hoped so--this transaction, and thus add to the weight of his
dying testimony to my innocence.
Digby having concluded, I immediately committed what he had just said to
writing, and having read it over to him, obtained his approval of it. He
then, of his own accord, offered to subscribe the declaration, and with
some difficulty accomplished the task. The signature was hardly legible,
but it was quite sufficient when attested, as it was, by the signatures
of all present excepting myself. Exhausted with the effort he had made,
Digby now sank back on his pillow, and in less than three minutes after
expired.
We now learned from the unhappy man's two wounded companions, who, the
reader will recollect, were our prisoners, that, soon after my trial and
condemnation, he, Digby, had left Mr. Wallscourt's service, not under
any suspicion of the robbery of the plate, but with no very good
general character; that he had the betaken himself entirely to live with
the abandoned characters whose acquaintance he had formed, and to
subsist by swindling and robbery; that he had proceeded from crime to
crime, until he at length fell into the hands of justice; and his
banishment to the colony where he had arrived about six months before,
was the result; that he had not been more than a month in the country
when he and several other convicts ran away from the master to whom they
had been assigned, and took to the bush. Such was the brief but dismal
history of this wretched man.
On the following day we buried his remains in a lonely spot in the
forest, at the distance of about half a mile from the house, and
thereafter proceeded with our prisoners to Liverpool. On arriving there,
I accompanied my father to the magistrate on whom he had waited on a
former occasion, and having stated to this gentleman the extraordinary
circumstance which had taken place--meaning Digby's declaration--he
advised an immediate application to the governor, setting forth the
circumstances of the case. This I lost no time in doing, enclosing
within my memorial Digby's attested declaration, and pointing out Nareby
as a person likely to confirm its tenor. The singularity and apparent
hardship of the case, combined with the favourable knowledge of me
previously existing, attracted the attention of the governor in a
special manner, and excited in him so lively an interest, that he
instantly had Nareby subjected to a judicial examination, the result of
which was a full admission on the part of that person of the transaction
to which Digby alluded.
Satisfied now of my innocence, and of the injustice which had been
unwittingly done me, the governor not only immediately transmitted me a
full and free pardon but offered me, by way of compensation, a
lucrative government appointment. This appointment I accepted, and held
for thirty years, I trust with credit to myself, and satisfaction to my
superiors. At the end of this period, feeling my health giving way, my
father and mother having both, in the meantime, died, and having all
that time scraped together a competency, I returned to my native land,
and have written these little memoirs in one of the pleasantest little
retirements on the banks of the Tweed.
I have only now to add, that I had frequent opportunities of seeing both
Lindsay and his wife after the establishment of my innocence, and that
no persons would more sincerely rejoice in that event than they did. My
poor mother, whom my father had made aware of my situation soon after my
arrival, and who had borne the intelligence much better than we
expected, it put nearly distracted with joy.
"My puir laddie," she exclaimed, "I aye kent to be innocent. But noo the
world 'll ken it too, and I can die happy."
THE AMATEUR ROBBERY.
If there is anything more than another of which civilisation has reason
to be proud, it is the amelioration that has been effected in punishment
for crimes. Nor is it yet very long since we began to get quit of the
shame of our folly and inhumanity, if we have not traces of these yet,
coming out like sympathetic ink dried by the choler of self-perfection
and a false philosophy, as in such writings as the latter-day pamphlets.
How a man who loves his species, and has a heart, will hang his head
abashed as he turns his vision back no further than the sixteenth
century, and sees the writhing creatures--often aged unhappy
women--under the pilniewinkies, caschielaws, turkases, thumbikens, and
other instruments of torture, frantically bursting out with the demanded
confession that was to fit them for the stake or the rope! And even
after these things in the curiosity shop of Nemesis were got rid of, the
abettors of the law rushed with full swing into the operation of
hanging, scarcely allowing a crime to escape, from cold-blooded murder
down to the act of the famished wretch who snatched a roll from a
baker's basket. However insensible these strange lawgivers may have been
to so much cruelty, however blind to the perversity, prejudices, and
weaknesses incident to human testimony, however ignorant of the total
inefficacy of their remedy to deter from crime, one might have imagined
that they could not but have known, if they ever looked inwardly into
their own hearts, how obscure are human motives, and especially those
that instigate to breaches of the law; and yet their consistent rule
was, to make the _corpus delicti_ prove the intention. These
considerations have been suggested to me by the recollection of a wild
adventure of some young men in Edinburgh, the circumstances of which,
not belonging to fiction, will show better than a learned dissertation
how easy it was for these Dracos to catch the fact and miss the motive.
The skeleton names--now, alas! the only representatives of skeleton
bodies--Andrew W----pe, Henry S----k, and Charles S----th, may recall to
the memory of some people in Edinburgh still, three young men, who, with
good education, fair talents, and graces from nature, might have played
a respectable _rôle_ in the drama of life, had it not been for a
tendency to "fastness," a disease which seems to increase with
civilisation. In their instance the old adage of Aristotle, _simile
gaudet simili_, was exemplified to the letter; and the union confirmed
in each a mind which, originally impatient of authority, fretted itself
against the frame of society, simply because that frame was the result
of order. They were never happy except when they went up to the
palisades, struck upon them with their lath-blades, and when some
orderly indweller looked over atop, ran away laughing. No doubt they had
strong passions to gratify too; but, as is usual with this peculiar race
of beings, the gratification was the keener the more it owed to a
rebellion against decorum. If they ever differed, it was only in their
rivalry of success; or when they did not go a spree-hunting together,
they recounted their exploits at their nightly meetings, and then the
result was an increase of moral inflammation.
Sometimes, for a change, they would take strolls into the country, where
they could extract as tribute the admiration or wrath of clodhoppers
without being troubled with any fears of the police; not that on any of
these occasions they perpetrated any great infringements on the law,
for, like the rest of their kind, if they could make themselves objects
of observation, they were regardless whether their bizarreries were paid
with admiration or only anger or fear, though, if they could produce by
any means a causeless panic, the very height of their ambition was
attained. In regard to this last effect of their escapades, they were,
in the instance I am about to record, more than satisfied. They had
gone, on a fine, clear, winter day, along the coast of the Firth of
Forth towards Cramond; and, to diversify their amusements, they took
with them a gun, which was carried by S----th, with the intention of
having a shot at any wild bird or barn-door fowl that might come
conveniently within his range. Of this kind of game they had fewer
chances, and the stroll would doubtless have appeared a very monotonous
affair to a person fond of rational conversation. Nor was there much
even to themselves of diversification till they got into a small
change-house at Davidson's Mains, where, with a rampant authority, they
contrived to get served up to them a kind of dinner, intending to make
up for the want of better edibles by potations of whisky toddy.
If facts, as Quinctilian says, are the bones of conversation, opinions
are certainly its sinews; and we might add, that whisky toddy is its
nervous fluid. These youths, though unwilling to acquire solid
information, could wrangle even to quarrelling; but such were their
affinities, that they adhered again in a short time, and were as firm
friends as ever. They had raised a subject--no other than the question
whether highwaymen are necessarily or generally possessed of true
courage. Very absurd, no doubt, but as good for a wrangle as any other
that can be divided into affirmative and negative by the refracting
medium of feeling or prejudice. S----th declared them all to be cowards.
"What say you to Cartouche?" said S----k; "was he a coward?"
"Not sure but he was," said S----th; "he kept a band of blackguards and
received their pay, but he was seldom seen in the wild _mélee_ himself.
He was fond of the name of terror he bore; but then, as he listened to
the wonderful things the Parisian _blanchisseuses_ and _chiffonniers_
and _gamins_ said of him, he knew he was not recognisable, for the very
reason that he kept out of sight."
"Oh yes," said W----pe, who joined S----k; "and so he was like Wallace,
who kept out of the sight of the English, and yet delighted in Dundee to
hear himself spoken of by the crowds who collected in these troublesome
times to discuss public affairs. S----th, you know Wallace was a coward,
don't you?"
"A thorough poltroon," cried S----th, laughing; "ay, and all the people
in Scotland are wrong about him. Didn't he run off, after stabbing the
governor's son? and he was always skulking about the Cartland Crags.
Then, didn't he flee at the battle of Falkirk; and was he not a robber
when Scotland belonged to Longshanks? No doubt the fellow had a big
body, strong bones, and good thews; but that he had the real pluck that
nerved the little bodies of such men as Nelson, or Suwarrow, ay, or of
Napoleon, I deny." Then he began a ludicrous singing, see-saw recitation
of the English doggrel--
"The noble wight,
The Wallace dight,
Who slew the knight
On Beltane night,
And ran for fright
Of English might,
And English fight,
And English right;"
and so on in drunken ribaldry.
"All very well for you who are a Shamite, Shmite, Shmith, Smith," said
W----pe. "We happen to be Japhetites. Then what say you to Rob Roy?"
"That, in the first place," replied S----th, "he was a Shemite; for
Gathelus, the first Scottish monarch, was a grandson of Nimrod, and,
what is worse, he married Scota, the daughter of an Egyptian queen, so
there was a spice of Ham in Rob; and as all the Hamites were robbers,
Rob was a robber too;--as to whose cowardice there is no doubt whatever;
for a man who steals another man's cattle in the dark must be a coward.
Did you ever hear one single example of Rob attacking when in good
daylight, and fighting for them in the sun?"
"Ingenious, S----th, at any rate," roared S----k; "but I don't agree
with you. A robber on the highway, must, in the general case, have
courage. He braves public opinion, he laughs at the gallows, and he
throws himself right against a man in bold competition, without knowing
often whether he is a giant or a dwarf."
"All the elements of a batter pudding," cried S----th, "without the
battering principle. Ay, you forget the head-battering bludgeon, the
instantaneous pistol, or the cunning knife; none of all which would a
man with a spark of courage in him use against an unarmed, defenceless
traveller. Another thing you forget, the robber acts upon surprises. He
produces confusion by his very presentation, fear by his demand of life
or money; and when the poor devil's head is running round, he runs away
with his watch or his purse, perhaps both. 'Tis all selfishness, pure
unadulterated selfishness; and will you tell me that a man without a
particle of honesty or generosity can have courage?"
"Not moral courage, perhaps; but he may have physical."
"All the same, no difference," continued the doughty S----th. "Who ever
heard of a bodily feeling except as something coming through the body?
There are only two physical feelings: pain in being wounded or starved,
and pleasure in being relieved from pain, or fed when hungry or thirsty.
I know none other; all the others are moral feelings."
"You may be bold through drink acting on the stomach and head."
"Ay, but the boldness, though the effect of a physical cause, is itself
a moral entity."
"Whoever thought that S----th was such a metaphysician!" said W----pe, a
little agoggled in his drunken eyes.
"But the same may be said of every feeling," rejoined S----k, somewhat
roused to ambition by W----pe's remark.
"And so it may, my little Aristotle," continued the clever asserter of
his original proposition. "Why, man, look ye, what takes you into Miss
F----'s shop in Princes Street for snuff, when you never produce a
physical titillation in your nose by a single pinch? Why, it's something
you call love, a terribly moral thing, though personified by a little
fellow with pinions. Yes, wondrously moral; and sometimes, as in your
case, immoral. Well, what is it produced by? The face of the said Miss
F---- painted as a sun picture in the camera at the back of your eye,
where there is a membrane without a particle of nitrate of silver in its
composition, and which yet receives the image. Well, what is love but
just the titillation produced by this image imprinted on your flesh,
just as the pleasure of a pinch is the effect of a titillation of the
nerves in the nose? Yet we don't say that snuff pleasure is a moral
thing, but merely nasal or bodily. What makes the difference?"
"How S----th is coming it!" said W----pe, still more amazed. "Where the
devil has he got all this?"
"Why, the difference lies here. You know, by manipulation and blowing
it, that you have a nose; but you don't wipe the retina at the back of
your eye when you are weeping for love--only the outside, where the
puling tears are. In short, you know you have a nose, but you don't know
you have a retina. D'ye catch me, my small Stagyrite, my petit
Peripatetic, my comical Academician, eh? Take your toddy, and let's have
a touch of moral drunkenness."
"You ray-ther have me on the hip, S----th."
"Ay, just so; and if I should kick you there, you would not say the pain
was a moral thing. All through the same. It's just where and when we
don't know the medium we say things are moral and spiritual, and
poetical and rational, and all the rest of the humbug."
"But though you say all highwaymen are cowards, you won't try that trick
with your foot," said S----k, boiling up a little under the fire of the
toddy.
"Don't intend; though, if you were to produce moral courage in me by
pinching my nose, I think I could, after making up my mind and putting
you upon your guard with a stick in your hand if you chose. Eh! my
Peripatetic." And S----th was clearly getting drunk too.
"D----n the fellow, his metaphysics are making him [Transcriber's Note:
missing part of this word] dent," cried W----pe.
"Why, you don't see where they hit," said S----th drawlingly.
"Somewhere about the pineal; and therefore we say impudence is moral,
sometimes immoral, as just now when you damned me. No more of your old
junk, I say, sitting here in my cathedra, which by the way is
spring-bottomed, which may account for my moral elasticity that a
highwayman is a coward."
"Well," cried S----k, starting up. "I'll deposit a pound with W----pe,
on a bet that you'll not take sixpence from the first bumpkin we meet on
the road, by the old watchword, 'Stand and deliver;' and you'll have the
gun to boot."
"Ay, that's a physical bribe," cried W----pe; and, after pausing a
little, "The fellow flinches."
"And surely the reverse must hold," added S----k, "that, being a coward,
he must be a highwayman."
"Why, you see, gents," said S----th coolly, "I don't mind a very great
deal, you know, though I do take said sixpence from said bumpkin; but I
won't do it, you know, on compulsion."
"If there's no compulsion, there's no robbery," said S----k.
"Oh, I mean _your_ compulsion. As for mine, exercised on said bumpkin,
let me alone for that part of the small affair; but none of your
compulsion, if you love me. I can do anything, but not upon compulsion,
you know."
"Done then!"
"Why, ye-e-s," drawled S----th, "done; I may say, gents, done; but I say
with Sir John, don't misunderstand me, not upon compulsion, you know."
"Your own free will," shouted both the others, now pretty well to do in
the world of dithyrambics. "Here's your instrument for extorting the
sixpence by force or fear."
And this young man, half inebriated--with, we may here say
parenthetically, a mother living in a garret in James' Square, with one
son and an only daughter of a respectable though poor man, and who
trusted to her son for being the means of her support--qualified, as we
have seen, by high parts to extort from society respect, and we may add,
though that has not appeared, to conciliate love and admiration--took
willingly into his hand the old rusty "Innes," to perpetrate upon the
highway a robbery. And would he do it? You had only to look upon his
face for an instant to be certain that he would; for he had all the
lineaments of a young man of indomitable courage and resolution--the
steady eye, the firm lip, all under the high brows of intellect, nor
unmixed with the beauty that belongs to these moral expressions which in
the playfulness of the social hour he had been reducing to materialism,
well knowing all the while that he was arguing for effect and applause
from those who only gave him the return of stultified petulance. What if
that mother and sister, who loved him, and wept day and night over the
wild follies that consumed his energies and demoralized his heart, had
seen him now!