Authors: Sheridan Le Fanu
Of Lewis Pyneweck, of course, so far as the outer world could see, he
knew nothing. He would try him after his fashion, without fear, favour,
or affection.
But did he not remember a certain thin man, dressed in mourning, in
whose house, in Shrewsbury, the Judge's lodgings used to be, until a
scandal of ill-treating his wife came suddenly to light? A grocer with a
demure look, a soft step, and a lean face as dark as mahogany, with a
nose sharp and long, standing ever so little awry, and a pair of dark
steady brown eyes under thinly-traced black brows—a man whose thin lips
wore always a faint unpleasant smile.
Had not that scoundrel an account to settle with the Judge? had he not
been troublesome lately? and was not his name Lewis Pyneweck, some time
grocer in Shrewsbury, and now prisoner in the jail of that town?
The reader may take it, if he pleases, as a sign that Judge Harbottle
was a good Christian, that he suffered nothing ever from remorse. That
was undoubtedly true. He had, nevertheless, done this grocer, forger,
what you will, some five or six years before, a grievous wrong; but it
was not that, but a possible scandal, and possible complications, that
troubled the learned Judge now.
Did he not, as a lawyer, know, that to bring a man from his shop to the
dock, the chances must be at least ninety-nine out of a hundred that he
is guilty?
A weak man like his learned brother Withershins was not a judge to keep
the high-roads safe, and make crime tremble. Old Judge Harbottle was the
man to make the evil-disposed quiver, and to refresh the world with
showers of wicked blood, and thus save the innocent, to the refrain of
the ancient saw he loved to quote:
Foolish pity
Ruins a city.
In hanging that fellow he could not be wrong. The eye of a man
accustomed to look upon the dock could not fail to read "villain"
written sharp and clear in his plotting face. Of course he would try
him, and no one else should.
A saucy-looking woman, still handsome, in a mob-cap gay with blue
ribbons, in a saque of flowered silk, with lace and rings on, much too
fine for the Judge's housekeeper, which nevertheless she was, peeped
into his study next morning, and, seeing the Judge alone, stepped in.
"Here's another letter from him, come by the post this morning. Can't
you do nothing for him?" she said wheedlingly, with her arm over his
neck, and her delicate finger and thumb fiddling with the lobe of his
purple ear.
"I'll try," said Judge Harbottle, not raising his eyes from the paper he
was reading.
"I knew you'd do what I asked you," she said.
The Judge clapt his gouty claw over his heart, and made her an ironical
bow.
"What," she asked, "will you do?"
"Hang him," said the Judge with a chuckle.
"You don't mean to; no, you don't, my little man," said she, surveying
herself in a mirror on the wall.
"I'm d—d but I think you're falling in love with your husband at
last!" said Judge Harbottle.
"I'm blest but I think you're growing jealous of him," replied the lady
with a laugh. "But no; he was always a bad one to me; I've done with him
long ago."
"And he with you, by George! When he took your fortune, and your spoons,
and your ear-rings, he had all he wanted of you. He drove you from his
house; and when he discovered you had made yourself comfortable, and
found a good situation, he'd have taken your guineas, and your silver,
and your ear-rings over again, and then allowed you half-a-dozen years
more to make a new harvest for his mill. You don't wish him good; if you
say you do, you lie."
She laughed a wicked, saucy laugh, and gave the terrible Rhadamanthus a
playful tap on the chops.
"He wants me to send him money to fee a counsellor," she said, while her
eyes wandered over the pictures on the wall, and back again to the
looking-glass; and certainly she did not look as if his jeopardy
troubled her very much.
"Confound his impudence, the
scoundrel
!" thundered the old Judge,
throwing himself back in his chair, as he used to do
in furore
on the
bench, and the lines of his mouth looked brutal, and his eyes ready to
leap from their sockets. "If you answer his letter from my house to
please yourself, you'll write your next from somebody else's to please
me. You understand, my pretty witch, I'll not be pestered. Come, no
pouting; whimpering won't do. You don't care a brass farthing for the
villain, body or soul. You came here but to make a row. You are one of
Mother Carey's chickens; and where you come, the storm is up. Get you
gone, baggage! get you
gone
!" he repeated, with a stamp; for a knock
at the hall-door made her instantaneous disappearance indispensable.
I need hardly say that the venerable Hugh Peters did not appear again.
The Judge never mentioned him. But oddly enough, considering how he
laughed to scorn the weak invention which he had blown into dust at the
very first puff, his white-wigged visitor and the conference in the dark
front parlour were often in his memory.
His shrewd eye told him that allowing for change of tints and such
disguises as the playhouse affords every night, the features of this
false old man, who had turned out too hard for his tall footman, were
identical with those of Lewis Pyneweck.
Judge Harbottle made his registrar call upon the crown solicitor, and
tell him that there was a man in town who bore a wonderful resemblance
to a prisoner in Shrewsbury jail named Lewis Pyneweck, and to make
inquiry through the post forthwith whether any one was personating
Pyneweck in prison and whether he had thus or otherwise made his escape.
The prisoner was safe, however, and no question as to his identity.
In due time Judge Harbottle went circuit; and in due time the judges
were in Shrewsbury. News travelled slowly in those days, and newspapers,
like the wagons and stage coaches, took matters easily. Mrs. Pyneweck,
in the Judge's house, with a diminished household—the greater part of
the Judge's servants having gone with him, for he had given up riding
circuit, and travelled in his coach in state—kept house rather
solitarily at home.
In spite of quarrels, in spite of mutual injuries—some of them,
inflicted by herself, enormous—in spite of a married life of spited
bickerings—a life in which there seemed no love or liking or
forbearance, for years—now that Pyneweck stood in near danger of death,
something like remorse came suddenly upon her. She knew that in
Shrewsbury were transacting the scenes which were to determine his fate.
She knew she did not love him; but she could not have supposed, even a
fortnight before, that the hour of suspense could have affected her so
powerfully.
She knew the day on which the trial was expected to take place. She
could not get it out of her head for a minute; she felt faint as it drew
towards evening.
Two or three days passed; and then she knew that the trial must be over
by this time. There were floods between London and Shrewsbury, and news
was long delayed. She wished the floods would last forever. It was
dreadful waiting to hear; dreadful to know that the event was over, and
that she could not hear till self-willed rivers subsided; dreadful to
know that they must subside and the news come at last.
She had some vague trust in the Judge's good nature, and much in the
resources of chance and accident. She had contrived to send the money he
wanted. He would not be without legal advice and energetic and skilled
support.
At last the news did come—a long arrear all in a gush: a letter from a
female friend in Shrewsbury; a return of the sentences, sent up for the
Judge; and most important, because most easily got at, being told with
great aplomb and brevity, the long-deferred intelligence of the
Shrewsbury Assizes in the
Morning Advertiser
. Like an impatient reader
of a novel, who reads the last page first, she read with dizzy eyes the
list of the executions.
Two were respited, seven were hanged; and in that capital catalogue was
this line:
"Lewis Pyneweck—forgery."
She had to read it a half-a-dozen times over before she was sure she
understood it. Here was the paragraph:
Sentence, Death—7.
Executed accordingly, on Friday the 13th instant, to wit:
Thomas Primer,
alias
Duck—highway robbery. Flora Guy—stealing to
the value of 11s. 6d. Arthur Pounden—burglary. Matilda
Mummery—riot. Lewis Pyneweck—forgery, bill of exchange.
And when she reached this, she read it over and over, feeling very cold
and sick.
This buxom housekeeper was known in the house as Mrs. Carwell—Carwell
being her maiden name, which she had resumed.
No one in the house except its master knew her history. Her introduction
had been managed craftily. No one suspected that it had been concerted
between her and the old reprobate in scarlet and ermine.
Flora Carwell ran up the stairs now, and snatched her little girl,
hardly seven years of age, whom she met on the lobby, hurriedly up in
her arms, and carried her into her bedroom, without well knowing what
she was doing, and sat down, placing the child before her. She was not
able to speak. She held the child before her, and looked in the little
girl's wondering face, and burst into tears of horror.
She thought the Judge could have saved him. I daresay he could. For a
time she was furious with him, and hugged and kissed her bewildered
little girl, who returned her gaze with large round eyes.
That little girl had lost her father, and knew nothing of the matter.
She had always been told that her father was dead long ago.
A woman, coarse, uneducated, vain, and violent, does not reason, or even
feel, very distinctly; but in these tears of consternation were mingling
a self-upbraiding. She felt afraid of that little child.
But Mrs. Carwell was a person who lived not upon sentiment, but upon
beef and pudding; she consoled herself with punch; she did not trouble
herself long even with resentments; she was a gross and material person,
and could not mourn over the irrevocable for more than a limited number
of hours, even if she would.
Judge Harbottle was soon in London again. Except the gout, this savage
old epicurean never knew a day's sickness. He laughed, and coaxed, and
bullied away the young woman's faint upbraidings, and in a little time
Lewis Pyneweck troubled her no more; and the Judge secretly chuckled
over the perfectly fair removal of a bore, who might have grown little
by little into something very like a tyrant.
It was the lot of the Judge whose adventures I am now recounting to try
criminal cases at the Old Bailey shortly after his return. He had
commenced his charge to the jury in a case of forgery, and was, after
his wont, thundering dead against the prisoner, with many a hard
aggravation and cynical gibe, when suddenly all died away in silence,
and, instead of looking at the jury, the eloquent Judge was gaping at
some person in the body of the court.
Among the persons of small importance who stand and listen at the sides
was one tall enough to show with a little prominence; a slight mean
figure, dressed in seedy black, lean and dark of visage. He had just
handed a letter to the crier, before he caught the Judge's eye.
That Judge descried, to his amazement, the features of Lewis Pyneweck.
He had the usual faint thin-lipped smile; and with his blue chin raised
in air, and as it seemed quite unconscious of the distinguished notice
he has attracted, he was stretching his low cravat with his crooked
fingers, while he slowly turned his head from side to side—a process
which enabled the Judge to see distinctly a stripe of swollen blue round
his neck, which indicated, he thought, the grip of the rope.
This man, with a few others, had got a footing on a step, from which he
could better see the court. He now stepped down, and the Judge lost
sight of him.
His lordship signed energetically with his hand in the direction in
which this man had vanished. He turned to the tipstaff. His first effort
to speak ended in a gasp. He cleared his throat, and told the astounded
official to arrest that man who had interrupted the court.
"He's but this moment gone down
there
. Bring him in custody before me,
within ten minutes' time, or I'll strip your gown from your shoulders
and fine the sheriff!" he thundered, while his eyes flashed round the
court in search of the functionary.
Attorneys, counsellors, idle spectators, gazed in the direction in which
Mr. Justice Harbottle had shaken his gnarled old hand. They compared
notes. Not one had seen any one making a disturbance. They asked one
another if the Judge was losing his head.
Nothing came of the search. His lordship concluded his charge a great
deal more tamely; and when the jury retired, he stared round the court
with a wandering mind, and looked as if he would not have given sixpence
to see the prisoner hanged.
The Judge had received the letter; had he known from whom it came, he
would no doubt have read it instantaneously. As it was he simply read
the direction:
To the Honourable
The Lord Justice
Elijah Harbottle,
One of his Majesty's Justices of
the Honourable Court of Common Pleas.
It remained forgotten in his pocket till he reached home.
When he pulled out that and others from the capacious pocket of his
coat, it had its turn, as he sat in his library in his thick silk
dressing-gown; and then he found its contents to be a closely-written
letter, in a clerk's hand, and an enclosure in "secretary hand," as I
believe the angular scrivinary of law-writings in those days was termed,
engrossed on a bit of parchment about the size of this page. The letter
said: