At last I began to draw near, by reasonable stages, to the neighbourhood
of Wakefield; and the name of Mr. Burchell Fenn came to the top in my
memory. This was the gentleman (the reader may remember) who made a
trade of forwarding the escape of French prisoners. How he did so:
whether he had a sign-board, _Escapes forwarded_, _apply within_; what he
charged for his services, or whether they were gratuitous and charitable,
were all matters of which I was at once ignorant and extremely curious.
Thanks to my proficiency in English, and Mr. Romaine’s bank-notes, I was
getting on swimmingly without him; but the trouble was that I could not
be easy till I had come to the bottom of these mysteries, and it was my
difficulty that I knew nothing of him beyond the name. I knew not his
trade beyond that of Forwarder of Escapes—whether he lived in town or
country, whether he were rich or poor, nor by what kind of address I was
to gain his confidence. It would have a very bad appearance to go along
the highwayside asking after a man of whom I could give so scanty an
account; and I should look like a fool, indeed, if I were to present
myself at his door and find the police in occupation! The interest of
the conundrum, however, tempted me, and I turned aside from my direct
road to pass by Wakefield; kept my ears pricked, as I went, for any
mention of his name, and relied for the rest on my good fortune. If Luck
(who must certainly be feminine) favoured me as far as to throw me in the
man’s way, I should owe the lady a candle; if not, I could very readily
console myself. In this experimental humour, and with so little to help
me, it was a miracle that I should have brought my enterprise to a good
end; and there are several saints in the calendar who might be happy to
exchange with St. Ives!
I had slept that night in a good inn at Wakefield, made my breakfast by
candle-light with the passengers of an up-coach, and set off in a very
ill temper with myself and my surroundings. It was still early; the air
raw and cold; the sun low, and soon to disappear under a vast canopy of
rain-clouds that had begun to assemble in the north-west, and from that
quarter invaded the whole width of the heaven. Already the rain fell in
crystal rods; already the whole face of the country sounded with the
discharge of drains and ditches; and I looked forward to a day of
downpour and the hell of wet clothes, in which particular I am as dainty
as a cat. At a corner of the road, and by the last glint of the drowning
sun, I spied a covered cart, of a kind that I thought I had never seen
before, preceding me at the foot’s pace of jaded horses. Anything is
interesting to a pedestrian that can help him to forget the miseries of a
day of rain; and I bettered my pace and gradually overtook the vehicle.
The nearer I came, the more it puzzled me. It was much such a cart as I
am told the calico printers use, mounted on two wheels, and furnished
with a seat in front for the driver. The interior closed with a door,
and was of a bigness to contain a good load of calico, or (at a pinch and
if it were necessary) four or five persons. But, indeed, if human beings
were meant to travel there, they had my pity! They must travel in the
dark, for there was no sign of a window; and they would be shaken all the
way like a phial of doctor’s stuff, for the cart was not only ungainly to
look at—it was besides very imperfectly balanced on the one pair of
wheels, and pitched unconscionably. Altogether, if I had any glancing
idea that the cart was really a carriage, I had soon dismissed it; but I
was still inquisitive as to what it should contain, and where it had come
from. Wheels and horses were splashed with many different colours of
mud, as though they had come far and across a considerable diversity of
country. The driver continually and vainly plied his whip. It seemed to
follow they had made a long, perhaps an all-night, stage; and that the
driver, at that early hour of a little after eight in the morning,
already felt himself belated. I looked for the name of the proprietor on
the shaft, and started outright. Fortune had favoured the careless: it
was Burchell Fenn!
‘A wet morning, my man,’ said I.
The driver, a loutish fellow, shock-headed and turnip-faced, returned not
a word to my salutation, but savagely flogged his horses. The tired
animals, who could scarce put the one foot before the other, paid no
attention to his cruelty; and I continued without effort to maintain my
position alongside, smiling to myself at the futility of his attempts,
and at the same time pricked with curiosity as to why he made them. I
made no such formidable a figure as that a man should flee when I
accosted him; and my conscience not being entirely clear, I was more
accustomed to be uneasy myself than to see others timid. Presently he
desisted, and put back his whip in the holster with the air of a man
vanquished.
‘So you would run away from me?’ said I. ‘Come, come, that’s not
English.’
‘Beg pardon, master: no offence meant,’ he said, touching his hat.
‘And none taken!’ cried I. ‘All I desire is a little gaiety by the way.’
I understood him to say he didn’t ‘take with gaiety.’
‘Then I will try you with something else,’ said I. ‘Oh, I can be all
things to all men, like the apostle! I dare to say I have travelled with
heavier fellows than you in my time, and done famously well with them.
Are you going home?’
‘Yes, I’m a goin’ home, I am,’ he said.
‘A very fortunate circumstance for me!’ said I. ‘At this rate we shall
see a good deal of each other, going the same way; and, now I come to
think of it, why should you not give me a cast? There is room beside you
on the bench.’
With a sudden snatch, he carried the cart two yards into the roadway.
The horses plunged and came to a stop. ‘No, you don’t!’ he said,
menacing me with the whip. ‘None o’ that with me.’
‘None of what?’ said I. ‘I asked you for a lift, but I have no idea of
taking one by force.’
‘Well, I’ve got to take care of the cart and ’orses, I have,’ says he.
‘I don’t take up with no runagate vagabones, you see, else.’
‘I ought to thank you for your touching confidence,’ said I, approaching
carelessly nearer as I spoke. ‘But I admit the road is solitary
hereabouts, and no doubt an accident soon happens. Little fear of
anything of the kind with you! I like you for it, like your prudence,
like that pastoral shyness of disposition. But why not put it out of my
power to hurt? Why not open the door and bestow me here in the box, or
whatever you please to call it?’ And I laid my hand demonstratively on
the body of the cart.
He had been timorous before; but at this, he seemed to lose the power of
speech a moment, and stared at me in a perfect enthusiasm of fear.
‘Why not?’ I continued. ‘The idea is good. I should be safe in there if
I were the monster Williams himself. The great thing is to have me under
lock and key. For it does lock; it is locked now,’ said I, trying the
door. ‘_A propos_, what have you for a cargo? It must be precious.’
He found not a word to answer.
Rat-tat-tat, I went upon the door like a well-drilled footman.
‘Any one at home?’ I said, and stooped to listen.
There came out of the interior a stifled sneeze, the first of an
uncontrollable paroxysm; another followed immediately on the heels of it;
and then the driver turned with an oath, laid the lash upon the horses
with so much energy that they found their heels again, and the whole
equipage fled down the road at a gallop.
At the first sound of the sneeze, I had started back like a man shot.
The next moment, a great light broke on my mind, and I understood. Here
was the secret of Fenn’s trade: this was how he forwarded the escape of
prisoners, hawking them by night about the country in his covered cart.
There had been Frenchmen close to me; he who had just sneezed was my
countryman, my comrade, perhaps already my friend! I took to my heels in
pursuit. ‘Hold hard!’ I shouted. ‘Stop! It’s all right! Stop!’ But
the driver only turned a white face on me for a moment, and redoubled his
efforts, bending forward, plying his whip and crying to his horses; these
lay themselves down to the gallop and beat the highway with flying hoofs;
and the cart bounded after them among the ruts and fled in a halo of rain
and spattering mud. But a minute since, and it had been trundling along
like a lame cow; and now it was off as though drawn by Apollo’s coursers.
There is no telling what a man can do, until you frighten him!
It was as much as I could do myself, though I ran valiantly, to maintain
my distance; and that (since I knew my countrymen so near) was become a
chief point with me. A hundred yards farther on the cart whipped out of
the high-road into a lane embowered with leafless trees, and became lost
to view. When I saw it next, the driver had increased his advantage
considerably, but all danger was at an end, and the horses had again
declined into a hobbling walk. Persuaded that they could not escape me,
I took my time, and recovered my breath as I followed them.
Presently the lane twisted at right angles, and showed me a gate and the
beginning of a gravel sweep; and a little after, as I continued to
advance, a red brick house about seventy years old, in a fine style of
architecture, and presenting a front of many windows to a lawn and
garden. Behind, I could see outhouses and the peaked roofs of stacks;
and I judged that a manor-house had in some way declined to be the
residence of a tenant-farmer, careless alike of appearances and
substantial comfort. The marks of neglect were visible on every side, in
flower-bushes straggling beyond the borders, in the ill-kept turf, and in
the broken windows that were incongruously patched with paper or stuffed
with rags. A thicket of trees, mostly evergreen, fenced the place round
and secluded it from the eyes of prying neighbours. As I came in view of
it, on that melancholy winter’s morning, in the deluge of the falling
rain, and with the wind that now rose in occasional gusts and hooted over
the old chimneys, the cart had already drawn up at the front-door steps,
and the driver was already in earnest discourse with Mr. Burchell Fenn.
He was standing with his hands behind his back—a man of a gross,
misbegotten face and body, dewlapped like a bull and red as a harvest
moon; and in his jockey cap, blue coat and top boots, he had much the air
of a good, solid tenant-farmer.
The pair continued to speak as I came up the approach, but received me at
last in a sort of goggling silence. I had my hat in my hand.
‘I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Burchell Fenn?’ said I.
‘The same, sir,’ replied Mr. Fenn, taking off his jockey cap in answer to
my civility, but with the distant look and the tardy movements of one who
continues to think of something else. ‘And who may you be?’ he asked.
‘I shall tell you afterwards,’ said I. ‘Suffice it, in the meantime,
that I come on business.’
He seemed to digest my answer laboriously, his mouth gaping, his little
eyes never straying from my face.
‘Suffer me to point out to you, sir,’ I resumed, ‘that this is a devil of
a wet morning; and that the chimney corner, and possibly a glass of
something hot, are clearly indicated.’
Indeed, the rain was now grown to be a deluge; the gutters of the house
roared; the air was filled with the continuous, strident crash. The
stolidity of his face, on which the rain streamed, was far from
reassuring me. On the contrary, I was aware of a distinct qualm of
apprehension, which was not at all lessened by a view of the driver,
craning from his perch to observe us with the expression of a fascinated
bird. So we stood silent, when the prisoner again began to sneeze from
the body of the cart; and at the sound, prompt as a transformation, the
driver had whipped up his horses and was shambling off round the corner
of the house, and Mr. Fenn, recovering his wits with a gulp, had turned
to the door behind him.
‘Come in, come in, sir,’ he said. ‘I beg your pardon, sir; the lock goes
a trifle hard.’
Indeed, it took him a surprising time to open the door, which was not
only locked on the outside, but the lock seemed rebellious from disuse;
and when at last he stood back and motioned me to enter before him, I was
greeted on the threshold by that peculiar and convincing sound of the
rain echoing over empty chambers. The entrance-hall, in which I now
found myself, was of a good size and good proportions; potted plants
occupied the corners; the paved floor was soiled with muddy footprints
and encumbered with straw; on a mahogany hall-table, which was the only
furniture, a candle had been stuck and suffered to burn down—plainly a
long while ago, for the gutterings were green with mould. My mind, under
these new impressions, worked with unusual vivacity. I was here shut off
with Fenn and his hireling in a deserted house, a neglected garden, and a
wood of evergreens: the most eligible theatre for a deed of darkness.
There came to me a vision of two flagstones raised in the hall-floor, and
the driver putting in the rainy afternoon over my grave, and the prospect
displeased me extremely. I felt I had carried my pleasantry as far as
was safe; I must lose no time in declaring my true character, and I was
even choosing the words in which I was to begin, when the hall-door was
slammed-to behind me with a bang, and I turned, dropping my stick as I
did so, in time—and not any more than time—to save my life.
The surprise of the onslaught and the huge weight of my assailant gave
him the advantage. He had a pistol in his right hand of a portentous
size, which it took me all my strength to keep deflected. With his left
arm he strained me to his bosom, so that I thought I must be crushed or
stifled. His mouth was open, his face crimson, and he panted aloud with
hard animal sounds. The affair was as brief as it was hot and sudden.
The potations which had swelled and bloated his carcase had already
weakened the springs of energy. One more huge effort, that came near to
overpower me, and in which the pistol happily exploded, and I felt his
grasp slacken and weakness come on his joints; his legs succumbed under
his weight, and he grovelled on his knees on the stone floor. ‘Spare
me!’ he gasped.
I had not only been abominably frightened; I was shocked besides: my
delicacy was in arms, like a lady to whom violence should have been
offered by a similar monster. I plucked myself from his horrid contact,
I snatched the pistol—even discharged, it was a formidable weapon—and
menaced him with the butt. ‘Spare you!’ I cried, ‘you beast!’
His voice died in his fat inwards, but his lips still vehemently framed
the same words of supplication. My anger began to pass off, but not all
my repugnance; the picture he made revolted me, and I was impatient to be
spared the further view of it.
‘Here,’ said I, ‘stop this performance: it sickens me. I am not going to
kill you, do you hear? I have need of you.’
A look of relief, that I could almost have called beautiful, dawned on
his countenance. ‘Anything—anything you wish,’ said he.
Anything is a big word, and his use of it brought me for a moment to a
stand. ‘Why, what do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Do you mean that you will
blow the gaff on the whole business?’
He answered me Yes with eager asseverations.
‘I know Monsieur de Saint-Yves is in it; it was through his papers we
traced you,’ I said. ‘Do you consent to make a clean breast of the
others?’
‘I do—I will!’ he cried. ‘The ’ole crew of ’em; there’s good names among
’em. I’ll be king’s evidence.’
‘So that all shall hang except yourself? You damned villain!’ I broke
out. ‘Understand at once that I am no spy or thief-taker. I am a
kinsman of Monsieur de St. Yves—here in his interest. Upon my word, you
have put your foot in it prettily, Mr. Burchell Fenn! Come, stand up;
don’t grovel there. Stand up, you lump of iniquity!’
He scrambled to his feet. He was utterly unmanned, or it might have gone
hard with me yet; and I considered him hesitating, as, indeed, there was
cause. The man was a double-dyed traitor: he had tried to murder me, and
I had first baffled his endeavours and then exposed and insulted him.
Was it wise to place myself any longer at his mercy? With his help I
should doubtless travel more quickly; doubtless also far less agreeably;
and there was everything to show that it would be at a greater risk. In
short, I should have washed my hands of him on the spot, but for the
temptation of the French officers, whom I knew to be so near, and for
whose society I felt so great and natural an impatience. If I was to see
anything of my countrymen, it was clear I had first of all to make my
peace with Mr. Fenn; and that was no easy matter. To make friends with
any one implies concessions on both sides; and what could I concede?
What could I say of him, but that he had proved himself a villain and a
fool, and the worse man?
‘Well,’ said I, ‘here has been rather a poor piece of business, which I
dare say you can have no pleasure in calling to mind; and, to say truth,
I would as readily forget it myself. Suppose we try. Take back your
pistol, which smells very ill; put it in your pocket or wherever you had
it concealed. There! Now let us meet for the first time.—Give you good
morning, Mr. Fenn! I hope you do very well. I come on the
recommendation of my kinsman, the Vicomte de St. Yves.’
‘Do you mean it?’ he cried. ‘Do you mean you will pass over our little
scrimmage?’
‘Why, certainly!’ said I. ‘It shows you are a bold fellow, who may be
trusted to forget the business when it comes to the point. There is
nothing against you in the little scrimmage, unless that your courage is
greater than your strength. You are not so young as you once were, that
is all.’
‘And I beg of you, sir, don’t betray me to the Vis-count,’ he pleaded.
‘I’ll not deny but what my ’eart failed me a trifle; but it was only a
word, sir, what anybody might have said in the ’eat of the moment, and
over with it.’
‘Certainly,’ said I. ‘That is quite my own opinion.’
‘The way I came to be anxious about the Vis-count,’ he continued, ‘is
that I believe he might be induced to form an ’asty judgment. And the
business, in a pecuniary point of view, is all that I could ask; only
trying, sir—very trying. It’s making an old man of me before my time.
You might have observed yourself, sir, that I ’aven’t got the knees I
once ’ad. The knees and the breathing, there’s where it takes me. But
I’m very sure, sir, I address a gentleman as would be the last to make
trouble between friends.’
‘I am sure you do me no more than justice,’ said I; ‘and I shall think it
quite unnecessary to dwell on any of these passing circumstances in my
report to the Vicomte.’
‘Which you do favour him (if you’ll excuse me being so bold as to mention
it) exac’ly!’ said he. ‘I should have known you anywheres. May I offer
you a pot of ’ome-brewed ale, sir? By your leave! This way, if you
please. I am ’eartily grateful—’eartily pleased to be of any service to
a gentleman like you, sir, which is related to the Vis-count, and really
a fambly of which you might well be proud! Take care of the step, sir.
You have good news of ’is ’ealth, I trust? as well as that of Monseer the
Count?’
God forgive me! the horrible fellow was still puffing and panting with
the fury of his assault, and already he had fallen into an obsequious,
wheedling familiarity like that of an old servant,—already he was
flattering me on my family connections!
I followed him through the house into the stable-yard, where I observed
the driver washing the cart in a shed. He must have heard the explosion
of the pistol. He could not choose but hear it: the thing was shaped
like a little blunderbuss, charged to the mouth, and made a report like a
piece of field artillery. He had heard, he had paid no attention; and
now, as we came forth by the back-door, he raised for a moment a pale and
tell-tale face that was as direct as a confession. The rascal had
expected to see Fenn come forth alone; he was waiting to be called on for
that part of sexton, which I had already allotted to him in fancy.
I need not detain the reader very long with any description of my visit
to the back-kitchen; of how we mulled our ale there, and mulled it very
well; nor of how we sat talking, Fenn like an old, faithful, affectionate
dependant, and I—well! I myself fallen into a mere admiration of so much
impudence, that transcended words, and had very soon conquered animosity.
I took a fancy to the man, he was so vast a humbug. I began to see a
kind of beauty in him, his _aplomb_ was so majestic. I never knew a
rogue to cut so fat; his villainy was ample, like his belly, and I could
scarce find it in my heart to hold him responsible for either. He was
good enough to drop into the autobiographical; telling me how the farm,
in spite of the war and the high prices, had proved a disappointment; how
there was ‘a sight of cold, wet land as you come along the ’igh-road’;
how the winds and rains and the seasons had been misdirected, it seemed
‘o’ purpose’; how Mrs. Fenn had died—‘I lost her coming two year agone; a
remarkable fine woman, my old girl, sir! if you’ll excuse me,’ he added,
with a burst of humility. In short, he gave me an opportunity of
studying John Bull, as I may say, stuffed naked—his greed, his
usuriousness, his hypocrisy, his perfidy of the back-stairs, all swelled
to the superlative—such as was well worth the little disarray and fluster
of our passage in the hall.