International Short Stories: English Part 25

When she was gone, he cursed himself for his weakness in letting her know his misfortunes. They would be all over the house soon. "Why, that fellow next door must have heard me bawl them out. I have lost my head," said he, "and I never needed it more."

Barbara returned with the cold powdered beef and carrots, and a bottle of wine she had paid for herself. She found him sullen, but composed.

He made her solemnly promise not to mention his losses. She consented readily, and said, "You know I can hold my tongue."

When he had eaten and drunk, and felt stronger, he resolved to put a question to her. "How about that poor fellow?"

She looked puzzled a moment, then turned pale, and said solemnly, "'Tis for this day week, I hear. 'Twas to be last week, but the King did respite him for a fortnight."

"Ah! indeed! Do you know why?"

"No, indeed. In his place, I'd rather have been put out of the way at once; for they will surely hang him."

Now in our day the respite is very rare: a criminal is hanged or reprieved. But at the period of our story men were often respited for short or long periods, yet suffered at last. One poor wretch was respited for two years, yet executed. This respite, therefore, was nothing unusual, and Cowen, though he looked thoughtful, had no downright suspicion of anything so serious to himself as really lay beneath the surface of this not unusual occurrence.

I shall, however, let the reader know more about it. The judge in reporting the case notified to the proper authority that he desired His Majesty to know he was not entirely at ease about the verdict. There was a lacuna in the evidence against this prisoner. He stated the flaw in a very few words. But he did not suggest any remedy.

Now the public clamored for the man's execution, that travellers might be safe. The King's adviser thought that if the judge had serious doubts, it was his business to tell the jury so. The order for execution issued.

Three days after this the judge received a letter from Bradbury, which I give verbatim.

THE KING vs. c.o.x

"My Lord,--Forgive my writing to you in a case of blood. There is no other way. Daniel c.o.x was not defended. Counsel went against his wish, and would not throw suspicion on any other. That made it c.o.x or n.o.body. But there was a man in the inn whose conduct was suspicious.

He furnished the wine that made the victim sleepy--and I must tell you the landlady would not let me see the remnant of the wine. She did everything to baffle me and defeat justice--he loaded two pistols so that neither could go off. He has got a pa.s.s-key, and goes in and out of the 'Swan' at all hours. He provided counsel for Daniel c.o.x. That could only be through compunction.

"He swore in court that he slept that night at 13 Farringdon Street.

Your lords.h.i.+p will find it on your notes. For 'twas you put the question, and methinks Heaven inspired you. An hour after the trial I was at 13 Farringdon Street. No Cowen and no captain had ever lodged there nor slept there. Present lodger, a City clerk; lodger at date of murder, an old clergyman that said he had a country cure, and got the simple body to trust him with a pa.s.s-key: so he came in and out at all hours of the night. This man was no clerk, but, as I believe, the cracksman that did the job at the 'Swan.'

"My lord, there is always two in a job of this sort--the professional man and the confederate. Cowen was the confederate, hocussed the wine, loaded the pistols, and lent his pa.s.s-key to the cracksman. The cracksman opened the door with his tools, unless Cowen made him duplicate keys. Neither of them intended violence, or they would have used their own weapons. The wine was drugged expressly to make that needless. The cracksman, instead of a black mask, put on a calf-skin waistcoat and a bottle-nose, and that pa.s.sed muster for c.o.x by moonlight; it puzzled c.o.x by moonlight, and deceived Gardiner by moonlight.

"For the love of G.o.d get me a respite for the innocent man, and I will undertake to bring the crime home to the cracksman and to his confederate Cowen."

Bradbury signed this with His name and quality.

The judge was not sorry to see the doubt his own wariness had raised so powerfully confirmed. He sent this missive on to the minister, with the remark that he had received a letter which ought not to have been sent to him, but to those in whose hands the prisoner's fate rested.

He thought it his duty, however, to transcribe from his notes the question he had put to Captain Cowen, and his reply that he had slept at 13 Parringdon Street on the night of the murder, and also the substance of the prisoner's defence, with the remark that, as stated by that uneducated person, it had appeared ridiculous; but that after studying this Bow Street officer's statements, and a.s.suming them to be in the main correct, it did not appear ridiculous, but only remarkable, and it reconciled all the undisputed facts, whereas that c.o.x was the murderer was and ever must remain irreconcilable with the position of the knife and the track of the blood.

Bradbury's letter and the above comment found their way to the King, and he granted what was asked--a respite.

Bradbury and his fellows went to work to find the old clergyman, alias cracksman. But he had melted away without a trace, and they got no other clew. But during Cowen's absence they got a traveller, i.e., a disguised agent, into the inn, who found relics of wax in the key-holes of Cowen's outer door and of the door of communication.

Bradbury sent this information in two letters, one to the Judge, and one to the minister.

But this did not advance him much. He had long been sure that Cowen was in it. It was the professional hand, the actual robber and murderer, he wanted.

The days succeeded one another: nothing was done. He lamented, too late, he had not applied for a reprieve, or even a pardon. He deplored his own presumption in a.s.suming that he could unravel such a mystery entirely. His busy brain schemed night and day; he lost his sleep, and even his appet.i.te. At last, in sheer despair, he proposed to himself a new solution, and acted upon it in the dark and with consummate subtlety; for he said to himself: "I am in deeper water than I thought Lord, how they skim a case at the Old Bailey! They take a pond for a puddle, and go to fathom it with a forefinger."

Captain Cowen sank into a settled gloom; but he no longer courted solitude; it gave him the horrors. He preferred to be in company, though he no longer shone in it. He made acquaintance with his neighbor, and rather liked him. The man had been in the Commissariat Department, and seemed half surprised at the honor a captain did him in conversing with him. But he was well versed in all the incidents of the late wars, and Cowen was glad to go with him into the past; for the present was dead, and the future horrible.

This Mr. Cutler, so deferential when sober, was inclined to be more familiar when in his cups, and that generally ended in his singing and talking to himself in his own room in the absurdest way. He never went out without a black leather case strapped across his back like a despatch-box. When joked and asked as to the contents, he used to say, "Papers, papers," curtly.

One evening, being rather the worse for liquor, he dropped it, and there was a metallic sound. This was immediately commented on by the wags of the company.

"That fell heavy for paper," said one.

"And there was a ring," said another.

"Come, unload thy pack, comrade, and show us thy papers."

Cutler was sobered in a moment, and looked scared. Cowen observed this, and quietly left the room. He went up-stairs to his own room, and, mounting on a chair, he found a thin place in the part.i.tion and made an eyelet-hole.

That very night he made use of this with good effect. Cutler came up to bed, singing and whistling, but presently threw down something heavy, and was silent. Cowen spied, and saw him kneel down, draw from his bosom a key suspended round his neck by a ribbon, and open the despatch-box. There were papers in it, but only to deaden the sound of a great many new guineas that glittered in the light of the candle, and seemed to fire, and fill the receptacle.

Cutler looked furtively round, plunged his hands in them, took them out by handfuls, admired them, kissed them, and seemed to wors.h.i.+p them, locked them up again, and put the black case under his pillow.

While they were glaring in the light, Cowen's eyes flashed with unholy fire. He clutched his hands at them where he stood, but they were inaccessible. He sat down despondent, and cursed the injustice of fate. Bubbled out of money in the City; robbed on the road; but when another had money, it was safe; he left his keys in the locks of both doors, and his gold never quitted him.

Not long after this discovery he got a letter from his son, telling him that the college bill for battels, or commons, had come in, and he was unable to pay it; he begged his father to disburse it, or he should lose credit.

This tormented the unhappy father, and the proximity of gold tantalized him so that he bought a phial of laudanum, and secreted it about his person.

"Better die," said he, "and leave my boy to Barrington. Such a legacy from his dead comrade will be sacred, and he has the world at his feet."

He even ordered a bottle of red port and kept it by him to swill the laudanum in, and so get drunk and die.

But when it came to the point he faltered.

Meantime the day drew near for the execution of Daniel c.o.x. Bradbury had undertaken too much; his cracksman seemed to the King's advisers as shadowy as the double of Daniel c.o.x.

The evening before that fatal day Cowen came to a wild resolution; he would go to Tyburn at noon, which was the hour fixed, and would die under that man's gibbet--so was this powerful mind unhinged.

This desperate idea was uppermost in his mind when he went up to his bedroom.

But he resisted. No, he would never play the coward while there was a chance left on the cards; while there is life there is hope. He seized the bottle, uncorked it, and tossed off a gla.s.s. It was potent and tingled through his veins and warmed his heart.

He set the bottle down before him. He filled another gla.s.s; but before he put it to his lips jocund noises were heard coming up the stairs, and noisy, drunken voices, and two boon companions of his neighbor Cutler--who had a double-bedded room opposite him--parted with him for the night. He was not drunk enough, it seems, for he kept demanding "t'other bottle." His friends, however, were of a different opinion; they bundled him into his room and locked him in from the other side, and shortly after burst into their own room, and were more garrulous than articulate.

Cutler, thus disposed of, kept saying and shouting and whining that he must have "t'other bottle." In short, any one at a distance would have thought he was announcing sixteen different propositions, so various were the accents of anger, grief, expostulation, deprecation, supplication, imprecation, and whining tenderness in which he declared he must have "t'other bo'l."

At last he came b.u.mp against the door of communication. "Neighbor,"

said he, "your wus.h.i.+p, I mean, great man of war."

"Well, sir?"

"Let's have t'other bo'l."