The Victorian Rogues MEGAPACK ™: 28 Classic Tales

by Maurice Leblanc

  I saw in a moment how things went. Neither Charles nor Amelia could face cross-examination on the subject of one of Colonel Clay’s accomplices. No doubt, in Amelia’s case, it was merely a question of rouge and hair-dye; but what woman would not sooner confess to a forgery or a murder than to those toilet secrets?

  I returned to Charles, therefore, and spent half an hour in composing, as well as I might, these little domestic difficulties. In the end, it was arranged that if Charles did his best to protect Césarine from arrest, Amelia would consent to do her best in return on behalf of Madame Picardet.

  We had next the police to tackle—a more difficult business. Still, even they were reasonable. They had caught Colonel Clay, they believed, but their chance of convicting him depended entirely upon Charles’s identification, with mine to back it. The more they urged the necessity of arresting the female confederates, however, the more stoutly did Charles declare that for his part he could by no means make sure of Colonel Clay himself, while he utterly declined to give evidence of any sort against either of the women. It was a difficult case, he said, and he felt far from confident even about the man. If his decision faltered, and he failed to identify, the case was closed; no jury could convict with nothing to convict upon.

  At last the police gave way. No other course was open to them. They had made an important capture; but they saw that everything depended upon securing their witnesses, and the witnesses, if interfered with, were likely to swear to absolutely nothing.

  Indeed, as it turned out, before the preliminary investigation at Bow Street was completed (with the usual remands), Charles had been thrown into such a state of agitation that he wished he had never caught the Colonel at all.

  “I wonder, Sey,” he said to me, “why I didn’t offer the rascal two thousand a year to go right off to Australia, and be rid of him for ever! It would have been cheaper for my reputation than keeping him about in courts of law in England. The worst of it is, when once the best of men gets into a witness-box, there’s no saying with what shreds and tatters of a character he may at last come out of it!”

  “In your case, Charles,” I answered, dutifully, “there can be no such doubt; except, perhaps, as regards the Craig-Ellachie Consolidated.”

  Then came the endless bother of “getting up the case” with the police and the lawyers. Charles would have retired from it altogether by that time, but, most unfortunately, he was bound over to prosecute. “You couldn’t take a lump sum to let me off?” he said, jokingly, to the inspector. But I knew in my heart it was one of the “true words spoken in jest” that the proverb tells of.

  Of course we could see now the whole building-up of the great intrigue. It had been worked out as carefully as the Tichborne swindle. Young Finglemore, as the brother of Charles’s broker, knew from the outset all about his affairs; and, after a gentle course of preliminary roguery, he laid his plans deep for a campaign against my brother-in-law. Everything had been deliberately designed beforehand. A place had been found for Césarine as Amelia’s maid—needless to say, by means of forged testimonials. Through her aid the swindler had succeeded in learning still more of the family ways and habits, and had acquired a knowledge of certain facts which he proceeded forthwith to use against us. His first attack, as the Seer, had been cleverly designed so as to give us the idea that we were a mere casual prey; and it did not escape Charles’s notice now that the detail of getting Madame Picardet to inquire at the Crédit Marseillais about his bank had been solemnly gone through on purpose to blind us to the obvious truth that Colonel Clay was already in full possession of all such facts about us. It was by Césarine’s aid, again, that he became possessed of Amelia’s diamonds, that he received the letter addressed to Lord Craig-Ellachie, and that he managed to dupe us over the Schloss Lebenstein business. Nevertheless, all these things Charles determined to conceal in court; he did not give the police a single fact that would turn against either Césarine or Madame Picardet.

  As for Césarine, of course, she left the house immediately after the arrest of the Colonel, and we heard of her no more till the day of the trial.

  When that great day came, I never saw a more striking sight than the Old Bailey presented. It was crammed to overflowing. Charles arrived early, accompanied by his solicitor. He was so white and troubled that he looked much more like prisoner than prosecutor. Outside the court a pretty little woman stood, pale and anxious. A respectful crowd stared at her silently. “Who is that?” Charles asked. Though we could both of us guess, rather than see, it was White Heather.

  “That’s the prisoner’s wife,” the inspector on duty replied. “She’s waiting to see him enter. I’m sorry for her, poor thing. She’s a perfect lady.”

  “So she seems,” Charles answered, scarcely daring to face her.

  At that moment she turned. Her eyes fell upon his. Charles paused for a second and looked faltering. There was in those eyes just the faintest gleam of pleading recognition, but not a trace of the old saucy, defiant vivacity. Charles framed his lips to words, but without uttering a sound. Unless I greatly mistake, the words he framed on his lips were these: “I will do my best for him.”

  We pushed our way in, assisted by the police. Inside the court we saw a lady seated, in a quiet black dress, with a becoming bonnet. A moment passed before I knew—it was Césarine. “Who is—that person?” Charles asked once more of the nearest inspector, desiring to see in what way he would describe her.

  And once more the answer came, “That’s the prisoner’s wife, sir.”

  Charles started back, surprised. “But—I was told—a lady outside was Mrs. Paul Finglemore,” he broke in, much puzzled.

  “Very likely,” the inspector replied, unmoved. “We have plenty that way. When a gentleman has as many aliases as Colonel Clay, you can hardly expect him to be over particular about having only one wife between them, can you?”

  “Ah, I see,” Charles muttered, in a shocked voice. “Bigamy!”

  The inspector looked stony. “Well, not exactly that,” he replied, “occasional marriage.”

  Mr. Justice Rhadamanth tried the case. “I’m sorry it’s him, Sey,” my brother-in-law whispered in my ear. (He said him, not he, because, whatever else Charles is, he is not a pedant; the English language as it is spoken by most educated men is quite good enough for his purpose.) “I only wish it had been Sir Edward Easy. Easy’s a man of the world, and a man of society; he would feel for a person in my position. He wouldn’t allow these beasts of lawyers to badger and pester me. He would back his order. But Rhadamanth is one of your modern sort of judges, who make a merit of being what they call ‘conscientious,’ and won’t hush up anything. I admit I’m afraid of him. I shall be glad when it’s over.”

  “Oh, you’ll pull through all right,” I said in my capacity of secretary. But I didn’t think it.

  The judge took his seat. The prisoner was brought in. Every eye seemed bent upon him. He was neatly and plainly dressed, and, rogue though he was, I must honestly confess he looked at least a gentleman. His manner was defiant, not abject like Charles’s. He knew he was at bay, and he turned like a man to face his accusers.

  We had two or three counts on the charge, and, after some formal business, Sir Charles Vandrift was put into the box to bear witness against Finglemore.

  Prisoner was unrepresented. Counsel had been offered him, but he refused their aid. The judge even advised him to accept their help; but Colonel Clay, as we all called him mentally still, declined to avail himself of the judge’s suggestion.

  “I am a barrister myself, my lord,” he said—“called some nine years ago. I can conduct my own defence, I venture to think, better than any of these my learned brethren.”

  Charles went through his examination-in-chief quite swimmingly. He answered with promptitude. He identified the prisoner without the slightest hesitation as the man who had
swindled him under the various disguises of the Reverend Richard Peploe Brabazon, the Honourable David Granton, Count von Lebenstein, Professor Schleiermacher, Dr. Quackenboss, and others. He had not the slightest doubt of the man’s identity. He could swear to him anywhere. I thought, for my own part, he was a trifle too cocksure. A certain amount of hesitation would have been better policy. As to the various swindles, he detailed them in full, his evidence to be supplemented by that of bank officials and other subordinates. In short, he left Finglemore not a leg to stand upon.

  When it came to the cross-examination, however, matters began to assume quite a different complexion. The prisoner set out by questioning Sir Charles’s identifications. Was he sure of his man? He handed Charles a photograph. “Is that the person who represented himself as the Reverend Richard Peploe Brabazon?” he asked persuasively.

  Charles admitted it without a moment’s delay.

  Just at that moment, a little parson, whom I had not noticed till then, rose up, unobtrusively, near the middle of the court, where he was seated beside Césarine.

  “Look at that gentleman!” the prisoner said, waving one hand, and pouncing upon the prosecutor.

  Charles turned and looked at the person indicated. His face grew still whiter. It was—to all outer appearance—the Reverend Richard Brabazon in propriâ personâ.

  Of course I saw the trick. This was the real parson upon whose outer man Colonel Clay had modelled his little curate. But the jury was shaken. And so was Charles for a moment.

  “Let the jurors see the photograph,” the judge said, authoritatively. It was passed round the jury-box, and the judge also examined it. We could see at once, by their faces and attitudes, they all recognised it as the portrait of the clergyman before them—not of the prisoner in the dock, who stood there smiling blandly at Charles’s discomfiture.

  The clergyman sat down. At the same moment the prisoner produced a second photograph.

  “Now, can you tell me who that is?” he asked Charles, in the regular brow-beating Old Bailey voice.

  With somewhat more hesitation, Charles answered, after a pause: “That is yourself as you appeared in London when you came in the disguise of the Graf von Lebenstein.”

  This was a crucial point, for the Lebenstein fraud was the one count on which our lawyers relied to prove their case most fully, within the jurisdiction.

  Even while Charles spoke, a gentleman whom I had noticed before, sitting beside White Heather, with a handkerchief to his face, rose as abruptly as the parson. Colonel Clay indicated him with a graceful movement of his hand. “And this gentleman?” he asked calmly.

  Charles was fairly staggered. It was the obvious original of the false Von Lebenstein.

  The photograph went round the box once more. The jury smiled incredulously. Charles had given himself away. His overweening confidence and certainty had ruined him.

  Then Colonel Clay, leaning forward, and looking quite engaging, began a new line of cross-examination. “We have seen, Sir Charles,” he said, “that we cannot implicitly trust your identifications. Now let us see how far we can trust your other evidence. First, then, about those diamonds. You tried to buy them, did you not, from a person who represented himself as the Reverend Richard Brabazon, because you believed he thought they were paste; and if you could, you would have given him 10 pounds or so for them. Do you think that was honest?”

  “I object to this line of cross-examination,” our leading counsel interposed. “It does not bear on the prosecutor’s evidence. It is purely recriminatory.”

  Colonel Clay was all bland deference. “I wish, my lord,” he said, turning round, “to show that the prosecutor is a person unworthy of credence in any way. I desire to proceed upon the well-known legal maxim of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. I believe I am permitted to shake the witness’s credit?”

  “The prisoner is entirely within his rights,” Rhadamanth answered, looking severely at Charles. “And I was wrong in suggesting that he needed the advice or assistance of counsel.”

  Charles wriggled visibly. Colonel Clay perked up. Bit by bit, with dexterous questions, Charles was made to acknowledge that he wanted to buy diamonds at the price of paste, knowing them to be real; and, a millionaire himself, would gladly have diddled a poor curate out of a couple of thousand.

  “I was entitled to take advantage of my special knowledge,” Charles murmured feebly.

  “Oh, certainly,” the prisoner answered. “But, while professing friendship and affection for a clergyman and his wife, in straitened circumstances, you were prepared, it seems, to take three thousand pounds’ worth of goods off their hands for ten pounds, if you could have got them at that price. Is not that so?”

  Charles was compelled to admit it.

  The prisoner went onto the David Granton incident. “When you offered to amalgamate with Lord Craig-Ellachie,” he asked, “had you or had you not heard that a gold-bearing reef ran straight from your concession into Lord Craig-Ellachie’s, and that his portion of the reef was by far the larger and more important?”

  Charles wriggled again, and our counsel interposed; but Rhadamanth was adamant. Charles had to allow it.

  And so, too, with the incident of the Slump in Golcondas. Unwillingly, shamefacedly, by torturing steps, Charles was compelled to confess that he had sold out Golcondas—he, the Chairman of the company, after repeated declarations to shareholders and others that he would do no such thing—because he thought Professor Schleiermacher had made diamonds worthless. He had endeavoured to save himself by ruining his company. Charles tried to brazen it out with remarks to the effect that business was business. “And fraud is fraud,” Rhadamanth added, in his pungent way.

  “A man must protect himself,” Charles burst out.

  “At the expense of those who have put their trust in his honour and integrity,” the judge commented coldly.

  After four mortal hours of it, all to the same effect, my respected brother-in-law left the witness-box at last, wiping his brow and biting his lip, with the very air of a culprit. His character had received a most serious blow. While he stood in the witness-box all the world had felt it was he who was the accused and Colonel Clay who was the prosecutor. He was convicted on his own evidence of having tried to induce the supposed David Granton to sell his father’s interests into an enemy’s hands, and of every other shady trick into which his well-known business acuteness had unfortunately hurried him during the course of his adventures. I had but one consolation in my brother-in-law’s misfortunes—and that was the thought that a due sense of his own shortcomings might possibly make him more lenient in the end to the trivial misdemeanours of a poor beggar of a secretary!

  I was the next in the box. I do not desire to enlarge upon my own achievements. I will draw a decent veil, indeed, over the painful scene that ensued when I finished my evidence. I can only say I was more cautious than Charles in my recognition of the photographs; but I found myself particularly worried and harried over other parts of my cross-examination. Especially was I shaken about that misguided step I took in the matter of the cheque for the Lebenstein commission—a cheque which Colonel Clay handed to me with the utmost politeness, requesting to know whether or not it bore my signature. I caught Charles’s eye at the end of the episode, and I venture to say the expression it wore was one of relief that I too had tripped over a trifling question of ten percent on the purchase money of the castle.

  Altogether, I must admit, if it had not been for the police evidence, we would have failed to make a case against our man at all. But the police, I confess, had got up their part of the prosecution admirably. Now that they knew Colonel Clay to be really Paul Finglemore, they showed with great cleverness how Paul Finglemore’s disappearances and reappearances in London exactly tallied with Colonel Clay’s appearances and disappearances elsewhere, under the guise of the little curate, the S
eer, David Granton, and the rest of them. Furthermore, they showed experimentally how the prisoner at the bar might have got himself up in the various characters; and, by means of a wax bust, modelled by Dr. Beddersley from observations at Bow Street, and aided by additions in the gutta-percha composition after Dolly Lingfield’s photographs, they succeeded in proving that the face as it stood could be readily transformed into the faces of Medhurst and David Granton. Altogether, their cleverness and trained acumen made up on the whole for Charles’s over-certainty, and they succeeded in putting before the jury a strong case of their own against Paul Finglemore.

  The trial occupied three days. After the first of the three, my respected brother-in-law preferred, as he said, not to prejudice the case against the prisoner by appearing in court again. He did not even allude to the little matter of the ten percent commission further than to say at dinner that evening that all men were bound to protect their own interests—as secretaries or as principals. This I took for forgiveness; and I continued diligently to attend the trial, and watch the case in my employer’s interest.

  The defence was ingenious, even if somewhat halting. It consisted simply of an attempt to prove throughout that Charles and I had made our prisoner the victim of a mistaken identity. Finglemore put into the box the ingenuous original of the little curate—the Reverend Septimus Porkington, as it turned out, a friend of his family; and he showed that it was the Reverend Septimus himself who had sat to a photographer in Baker Street for the portrait which Charles too hastily identified as that of Colonel Clay in his personification of Mr. Richard Brabazon. He further elicited the fact that the portrait of the Count von Lebenstein was really taken from Dr. Julius Keppel, a Tyrolese music-master, residing at Balham, whom he put into the box, and who was well known, as it chanced, to the foreman of the jury. Gradually he made it clear to us that no portraits existed of Colonel Clay at all, except Dolly Lingfield’s—so it dawned upon me by degrees that even Dr. Beddersley could only have been misled if we had succeeded in finding for him the alleged photographs of Colonel Clay as the count and the curate, which had been shown us by Medhurst. Altogether, the prisoner based his defence upon the fact that no more than two witnesses directly identified him; while one of those two had positively sworn that he recognised as the prisoner’s two portraits which turned out, by independent evidence, to be taken from other people!