MR. LONGCLUSE PROPOSES.
"Clear your head," says Mr. Longcluse, sternly, seating himself before
Sir Richard, with the table between; "you must conceive a distinct idea
of your situation, Sir, and I shall then tell you something that
remains. You have committed a forgery under aggravated circumstances,
for which I shall have you convicted and sentenced to penal servitude at
the next sessions. I have been a good friend to you on many occasions;
you have been a false one to me--who baser?--and while I was anonymously
helping you with large sums of money, you forged my name to a legal
instrument for ten thousand pounds, to swindle your unknown benefactor,
little suspecting who he was."
Longcluse smiled.
"I have heard how you spoke of me. I'm an adventurer, a leg, an
assassin, a person whom you were compelled to drop; rather a low person,
I fear, if a felon can't afford to sit beside me! You were always too
fine a man for me. Your get up was always peculiar; you were famous for
that. It will soon be more singular still, when your hair and your
clothes are cut after the fashion of the great world you are about to
enter. How your friends will laugh!"
Sir Richard heard all this with a helpless stare.
"I have only to stamp on the ground, to call up the men who will
accomplish your transformation. I can change your life by a touch, into
convict dress, diet, labour, lodging, for the rest of your days. What
plea have you to offer to my mercy?"
Sir Richard would have spoken, but his voice failed him. With a second
effort, however, he said--"Would it not be more manly if you let me meet
my fate, without this."
"And you are such an admirable judge of what is manly, or even
gentlemanlike!" said Longcluse. "Now, mind, I shall arrest you in five
minutes, on your three over-due bills. The men with the writ are in the
next room. I sha'n't immediately arrest you for the forgery. That shall
hang over you. I mean to make you, for a while, my instrument. Hear, and
understand; I mean to marry your sister. She don't like me, but she
suits me; I have chosen her, and I'll not be baulked. When that is
accomplished, you are safe. No man likes to see his brother a spectacle
of British justice, with cropped hair, and a log to his foot. I may hate
and despise you, as you deserve, but that would not do. Failing that,
however, you shall have justice, I promise you. The course I propose
taking is this: you shall be arrested here, for _debt_. You will be good
enough to allow the people who take you, to select your present place of
confinement. It is arranged. I will then, by a note, appoint a place of
meeting for this evening, where I shall instruct you as to the
particulars of that course of conduct I prescribe for you. If you mean
to attempt an escape, you had better try it _now_; I will give you
fourteen hours' start, and undertake to catch and bring you back to
London as a forger. If you make up your mind to submit to fate, and do
precisely as you are ordered, you may emerge. But on the slightest
evasion, prevarication, or default, the blow descends. In the meantime
we treat each other civilly before these people. Levi is in my hands,
and you, I presume, keep your own secret."
"That is all?" inquired Sir Richard, faintly, after a minute's silence.
"All for the _present_," was the reply; "you will see more clearly,
by-and-by, that you are my property, and you will act accordingly."
The two Jewish-looking gentlemen, whom Richard had passed in a
conference in their carriage which stood now at the steps of the house,
were the sheriff's officers destined to take charge of the fallen
gentleman, and convey him, by Levi's direction, to a "sponging house,"
which, I believe, belonged jointly to him and his partner, Mr. Goldshed.
It was on the principle, perhaps, on which hunters tame wild beasts, by
a sojourn at the bottom of a pit-fall, that Mr. Longcluse doomed the
young baronet to some ten hours' solitary contemplation of his hopeless
immeshment in that castle of Giant Despair, before taking him out and
setting him again before him, for the purpose of instructing him in the
conditions and duties of the direful life on which he was about to
enter.
Mr. Longcluse left the baronet suddenly, and returned to Levi's office
no more.
Sir Richard's _rôle_ was cast. He was to figure, at least first, as a
captive in the drama for which fate had selected him. He had no wish to
retard the progress of the piece. Nothing more odious than his present
situation was likely to come.
"You have something to say to me?" said the baronet, making tender, as
it were, of himself. The offer was, obligingly, accepted, and the
sheriffs, by his lieutenants, made prisoner of Sir Richard Arden, who
strode down the stairs between them, and entered the seedy coach, and
sitting as far back as he could, drove rapidly toward the City.
Stunned and confused, there was but one image vividly present to his
recollection, and that was the baleful face of Walter Longcluse.