by Neil Munro
CHAPTER XLII
I DEPART IN THE MIDST OF ILLUMINATION AND COME TO A JAIL, BAD NEWS, ANDAN OLD ENEMY
We carried this elation all through England with us. Whatever town westopped at flags were flying, and the oldest resident must be tipsy onthe green for the glory of the British Isles. The seven passengers whooccupied the coach with me found in these rejoicings, and in the greatevent which gave rise to them, subjects of unending discourse as wedragged through the country in the wake of steaming horses. There waswith us a maker of perukes that had found trade dull in Town (as theycall it), and planned to start business in York; a widow woman whohad buried her second husband and was returning to her parents inNorthumberland with a sprightliness that told she was ready to try athird if he offered; and a squire (as they call a laird) of Morpeth.
But for the common interest in the rejoicings it might have been a weekbefore the company thawed to each other enough to start a conversation.The first mile of the journey, however, found us in the briskest clebateon Hawke and his doings. I say us, but in truth my own share in theconversation was very small as I had more serious reflections.
The perruquier, as was natural to his trade, knew everything and itchedto prove it.
"I have it on the very best authority," he would say, "indeed"--witha whisper for all the passengers as if he feared the toiling horsesoutside might hear him--"indeed between ourselves I do not mind tellingthat it was from Sir Patrick Dall's man--that the French would have beenon top of us had not one of themselves sold the plot for a hatful ofguineas."
"That is not what I heard at all," broke in the squire. "I fancy you aremistaken, sir. The truth, as I have every reason to believe, is that oneof the spies of the Government--a Scotsman, by all accounts--discoveredConflans' plans, and came over to London with them. A good business too,egad! otherwise we'd soon have nothing to eat at Morpeth George Inn onmarket days but frogs, and would find the parley-voos overrunning thecountry by next Lent with their masses and mistresses, and so on. A goodbusiness for merry old England that this spy had his English ears open."
"It may be you are right, sir," conceded the perruquier deferentially."Now that I remember, Sir Patrick's gentleman said something of the samekind, and that it was one of them Scotsmen brought the news. Like enoughthe fellow found it worth his while. It will be a pretty penny in hispocket, I'll wager. He'll be able to give up spying and start an inn."
I have little doubt the ideal nature of retirement to an inn came tothe mind of the peruke maker from the fact that at the moment we weredrawing up before "The Crown" at Bawtry. Reek rose in clouds from thehorses, as could be seen from the light of the doors that showed thenarrow street knee-deep in snow; a pleasant smell of cooking supper andwarm cordials came out to us, welcome enough it may be guessed after ourlong day's stage. The widow clung just a trifle too long on my arm asI gallantly helped her out of the coach; perhaps she thought my silenceand my abstracted gaze at her for the last hour or two betrayed a tenderinterest, but I was thinking how close the squire and the wig-maker hadcome upon the truth, and yet made one mistake in that part of their talethat most closely affected their silent fellow passenger.
The sea-fight and the war lasted us for a topic all through England, butwhen we had got into Scotland on the seventh day after my departure fromLondon, the hostlers at the various change-houses yoked fresh horses tothe tune of "Daniel Risk."
We travelled in the most tempestuous weather. Snow fell incessantly,and was cast in drifts along the road; sometimes it looked as if we werebound for days, but we carried the mails, and with gigantic toil thedriver pushed us through.
The nearer we got to Edinburgh the more we learned of the notoriousDaniel Risk, whom no one knew better than myself. The charge of losinghis ship wilfully was, it appeared, among the oldest and least heinousof his crimes. Smuggling had engaged his talent since then, and he hadmurdered a cabin-boy under the most revolting circumstances. He hadalmost escaped the charge of scuttling the _Seven Sisters_, for it wasnot till he had been in the dock for the murder that evidence of thattransaction came from the seaman Horn, who had been wrecked twice, itappeared, and far in other parts of the world between the time he wasabandoned in the scuttled ship and returned to his native land, to tellhow the ruffian had left two innocent men to perish.
Even in these days of wild happenings the fame of Risk exceeded that ofevery malefactor that season, and when we got to Edinburgh the streetsingers were chanting doleful ballads about him.
I would have given the wretch no thought, or very little, for my ownaffairs were heavy enough, had not the very day I landed in Edinburghseen a broad-sheet published with "The Last Words and Warning" of Risk.The last words were in an extraordinarily devout spirit; the homilybreathed what seemed a real repentance for a very black life. It wouldhave moved me less if I could have learned then, as I did later, thatthe whole thing was the invention of some drunken lawyer's clerk inthe Canongate, who had probably devised scores of such fictions for theentertainment of the world that likes to read of scaffold repentancesand of wicked lives. The condition of the wretch touched me, and Imade up my mind to see the condemned man who, by the accounts of thejournals, was being visited daily by folks interested in his forlorncase.
With some manoeuvring I got outside the bars of his cell.
There was little change in him. The same wild aspect was there thoughhe pretended a humility. The skellie eye still roved with little ofthe love of God or man in it; his iron-grey hair hung tawted about histemples. Only his face was changed and had the jail-white of the cells,for he had been nearly two months in confinement. When I entered he didnot know me; indeed, he scarce looked the road I was on at first, butapplied himself zealously to the study of a book wherein he pretended tobe rapturously engrossed.
The fact that the Bible (for so it was) happened to be upside down inhis hands somewhat staggered my faith in the repentance of Daniel Risk,who, I remembered, had never numbered reading among his arts.
I addressed him as Captain.
"I am no Captain," said he in a whine, "but plain Dan Risk, the blackestsinner under the cope and canopy of heaven." And he applied himself tohis volume as before.
"Do you know me?" I asked, and he must have found the voice familiar,for he rose from his stool, approached the bars of his cage, andexamined me. "Andy Greigs nephew!" he cried. "It's you; I hope you're aguid man?"
"I might be the best of men--and that's a dead one--so far as you areconcerned," I replied, stung a little by the impertinence of him.
"The hand of Providence saved me that last item in my bloody list o'crimes," said he, with a singular mixture of the whine for his sins andof pride in their number. "Your life was spared, I mak' nae doubt, thatye micht repent o' your past, and I'm sorry to see ye in sic fallals o'dress, betokenin' a licht mind and a surrender to the vanities."
My dress was scantily different from what it had been on the _SevenSisters_, except for some lace, my tied hair, and a sword.
"Indeed, and I am in anything but a light frame of mind, Captain Risk,"I said. "There are reasons for that, apart from seeing you in thiscondition which I honestly deplore in spite of all the wrong you didme."
"I thank God that has been forgiven me," he said, with a hypocriticalcock of his hale eye. "I was lost in sin, a child o' the deevil, but nooI am made clean," and much more of the same sort that it is unnecessaryhere to repeat.
"You can count on my forgiveness, so far as that goes," I said,disgusted with his manner.
"I'm greatly obleeged," said he, "but man's forgiveness doesna coont saemuckle as a preen, and I would ask ye to see hoo it stands wi' yersel',Daniel Risk has made his peace wi' his Maker, but what way is it wi' thenephew o' Andrew Greig?"
"It ill becomes a man in a condemned cell to be preacher to thoseoutside of it," I told him in some exasperation at his presumption.
He threw up his hands and glowered at me with his gleed eye lookingseven ways for sixpence as the saying goes.
"
Dinna craw ower crouse, young man," he said. "Whit brings ye here Icanna guess, but I ken that you that's there should be in here where Iam, for there's blood on your hands."
He had me there! Oh, yes, he had me there! Every vein in my body toldme so. But I was not in the humour to make an admission of that kind tothis creature.
"I have no conceit of myself in any respect whatever, Daniel Risk," Isaid slowly. "I came here from France but yesterday after experiencesthere that paid pretty well for my boy's crime, for I have heard fromneither kith nor kin since you cozened me on the boards of the _SevenSisters_."
He put his hands upon the bars and looked at me. He wore a prison garbof the most horrible colour, and there were round him the foul stenchesof the cell.
"Ay!" said he. "New back! And they havena nabbed ye yet! Weel,they'll no' be lang, maybe, o' doin' that, for I'll warrant ye've beenadvertised plenty aboot the country; ony man that has read a gazette orclattered in a public-hoose kens your description and the blackness o'the deed you're chairged wi'. All I did was to sink a bit ship that wasrotten onyway, mak' free trade wi' a few ankers o' brandy that wad haebeen drunk by the best i' the land includin' the very lords that triedme, and accidentally kill a lad that sair needed a beltin' to gar himdae his honest wark. But you shot a man deliberate and his blood iscrying frae the grund. If ye hurry ye'll maybe dance on naethin' soonernor mysel'."
There was so much impotent venom in what he said that I lost my angerwith the wretch drawing near his end, and looked on him with pity. Itseemed to annoy him more than if I had reviled him.
"I'm a white soul." says he, clasping his hands--the most arrantblasphemy of a gesture from one whose deeds were desperately wicked!"I'm a white soul, praise God! and value not your opinions a dockenleaf. Ye micht hae come here to this melancholy place to slip a bitguinea into my hand for some few extra comforts, instead o' which it'sjist to anger me."
He glued his cheek against the bars and stared at me from head to foot,catching at the last a glance of my fateful shoes. He pointed at themwith a rigid finger.
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"Man! man!" he cried, "there's the sign and token o' the lot o' ye--thebloody shoon. They may weel be red for him and you that wore them. Redshoon! red shoon!" He stopped suddenly. "After a'," said he, "I bearye nae ill-will, though I hae but to pass the word to the warder on theither side o' the rails. And oh! abin a' repent----" He was off againinto one of his blasphemies, for at my elbow now was an old lady who wasdoubtless come to confirm the conversion of Daniel Risk. I turned to go.
He cast his unaffected eye piously heavenward, and coolly offered up abrief prayer for "this erring young brother determined on the ways ofvice and folly."
It may be scarce credible that I went forth from the condemned cell withthe most shaken mind I had had since the day I fled from the moor ofMearns. The streets were thronged with citizens; the castle rampartsrose up white and fine, the bastions touched by sunset fires, a windowblazing like a star. Above the muffled valley, clear, silvery, proud,rang a trumpet on the walls, reminding me of many a morning rouse in farSilesia. Was I not better there? Why should I be the sentimental fooland run my head into a noose? Risk, whom I had gone to see in pity, paidme with a vengeance! He had put into the blunt language of the world allthe horror I had never heard in words before, though it had often beenin my mind. I saw myself for the first time the hunted outlaw, capturedat last. "You that's out there should be in where I am!" It was true!But to sit for weeks in that foul hole within the iron rail, waiting ondoom, reflecting on my folks disgraced--I could not bear it!
Risk cured me of my intention to hazard all on the flimsy chance ofa Government's gratitude, and I made up my mind to seek safety andforgetfulness again in flight to another country.