They arrived at the place they had selected for their station; sometimes walking to and fro in order to escape observation, sometimes hiding behind the pillars of a neighbouring house, they awaited the coming of their victims. The time passed on; the streets grew more and more empty; and, at last, only the visitation of the watchman or the occasional steps of some homeward wanderer disturbed the solitude of their station.
At last, just after midnight, two men were seen approaching towards them, linked arm in arm, and walking very slowly.
"Hist! hist!" whispered Wolfe's comrade, "there they are at last; is your pistol cocked?"
"Ay," answered Wolfe, "and yours: man, collect yourself your hand shakes."
"It is with the cold then," said the ruffian, using, unconsciously, a celebrated reply; "let us withdraw behind the pillar."
They did so: the figures approached them; the night, though star-lit, was not sufficiently clear to give the assassins more than the outline of their shapes and the characters of their height and air.
"Which," said Wolfe, in a whisper,—for, as he had said, he had never seen either of his intended victims,—"which is my prey?"
"Oh, the nearest to you," said the other, with trembling accents; "you know his d—d proud walk, and erect head that is the way he answers the people's petitions, I'll be sworn. The taller and farther one, who stoops more in his gait, is mine."
The strangers were now at hand.
"You know you are to fire first, Wolfe," whispered the nearer ruffian, whose heart had long failed him, and who was already meditating escape.
"But are you sure, quite sure, of the identity of our prey?" said Wolfe, grasping his pistol.
"Yes, yes," said the other; and, indeed, the air of the nearest person approaching them bore, in the distance, a strong resemblance to that of the minister it was supposed to designate. His companion, who appeared much younger and of a mien equally patrician, but far less proud, seemed listening to the supposed minister with the most earnest attention. Apparently occupied with their conversation, when about twenty yards from the assassins they stood still for a few moments.
"Stop, Wolfe, stop," said the republican's accomplice, whose Indian complexion, by fear, and the wan light of the lamps and skies, faded into a jaundiced and yellow hue, while the bony whiteness of his teeth made a grim contrast with the glare of his small, black, sparkling eyes. "Stop, Wolfe, hold your hand. I see, now, that I was mistaken; the farther one is a stranger to me, and the nearer one is much thinner than the minister: pocket your pistol,—quick! quick!—and let us withdraw."
Wolfe dropped his hand, as if dissuaded from his design but as he looked upon the trembling frame and chattering teeth of his terrified accomplice, a sudden, and not unnatural, idea darted across his mind that he was wilfully deceived by the fears of his companion; and that the strangers, who had now resumed their way, were indeed what his accomplice had first reported them to be. Filled with this impression, and acting upon the momentary spur which it gave, the infatuated and fated man pushed aside his comrade, with a muttered oath at his cowardice and treachery, and taking a sure and steady, though quick, aim at the person, who was now just within the certain destruction of his hand, he fired the pistol. The stranger reeled and fell into the arms of his companion.
"Hurrah!" cried the murderer, leaping from his hiding place, and walking with rapid strides towards his victim, "hurrah! for liberty and England!"
Scarce had he uttered those prostituted names, before the triumph of misguided zeal faded suddenly and forever from his brow and soul.
The wounded man leaned back in the supporting arms of his chilled and horror-stricken friend; who, kneeling on one knee to support him, fixed his eager eyes upon the pale and changing countenance of his burden, unconscious of the presence of the assassin.
"Speak, Mordaunt; speak! how is it with you?" he said. Recalled from his torpor by the voice, Mordaunt opened his eyes, and muttering, "My child, my child," sank back again; and Lord Ulswater (for it was he) felt, by his increased weight, that death was hastening rapidly on its victim.
"Oh!" said he, bitterly, and recalling their last conversation—"oh! where, where, when this man—the wise, the kind, the innocent, almost the perfect—falls thus in the very prime of existence, by a sudden blow from an obscure hand, unblest in life, inglorious in death,—oh! where, where is this boasted triumph of Virtue, or where is its reward?"
True to his idol at the last, as these words fell upon his dizzy and receding senses, Mordaunt raised himself by a sudden though momentary exertion, and, fixing his eyes full upon Lord Ulswater, his moving lips (for his voice was already gone) seemed to shape out the answer, "It is here!"
With this last effort, and with an expression upon his aspect which seemed at once to soften and to hallow the haughty and calm character which in life it was wont to bear, Algernon Mordaunt fell once more back into the arms of his companion and immediately expired.
CHAPTER LXXXVIII
Come, Death, these are thy victims, and the axe
Waits those who claimed the chariot.—Thus we count
Our treasures in the dark, and when the light
Breaks on the cheated eye, we find the coin
Was skulls—
. . . . . .
Yet the while
Fate links strange contrasts, and the scaffold's gloom
Is neighboured by the altar.
—ANONYMOUS.
When Crauford's guilt and imprisonment became known; when inquiry developed, day after day, some new maze in the mighty and intricate machinery of his sublime dishonesty; when houses of the most reputed wealth and profuse splendour, whose affairs Crauford had transacted, were discovered to have been for years utterly undermined and beggared, and only supported by the extraordinary genius of the individual by whose extraordinary guilt, now no longer concealed, they were suddenly and irretrievably destroyed; when it was ascertained that, for nearly the fifth part of a century, a system of villany had been carried on throughout Europe, in a thousand different relations, without a single breath of suspicion, and yet which a single breath of suspicion could at once have arrested and exposed; when it was proved that a man whose luxury had exceeded the pomp of princes, and whose wealth was supposed more inexhaustible than the enchanted purse of Fortunatus, had for eighteen years been a penniless pensioner upon the prosperity of others; when the long scroll of this almost incredible fraud was slowly, piece by piece, unrolled before the terrified curiosity of his public, an invading army at the Temple gates could scarcely have excited such universal consternation and dismay.
The mob, always the first to execute justice, in their own inimitable way took vengeance upon Crauford by burning the house no longer his, and the houses of his partners, who were the worst and most innocent sufferers for his crime. No epithet of horror and hatred was too severe for the offender; and serious apprehension for the safety of Newgate, his present habitation, was generally expressed. The more saintly members of that sect to which the hypocrite had ostensibly belonged, held up their hands, and declared that the fall of the Pharisee was a judgment of Providence. Nor did they think it worth while to make, for a moment, the trifling inquiry how far the judgment of Providence was also implicated in the destruction of the numerous and innocent families he had ruined!
But, whether from that admiration for genius, common to the vulgar, which forgets all crime in the cleverness of committing it, or from that sagacious disposition peculiar to the English, which makes a hero of any person eminently wicked, no sooner did Crauford's trial come on than the tide of popular feeling experienced a sudden revulsion. It became, in an instant, the fashion to admire and to pity a gentleman so talented and so unfortunate. Likenesses of Mr. Crauford appeared in every print-shop in town; the papers discovered that he was the very fac-simile of the great King of Prussia. The laureate made an ode upon him, which was set to music; and the public learned, with tears of compassionate regret at so romantic a circumstance, that pigeon-pies were sent daily to his prison, made by the delicate hands of one of his former mistresses. Some sensation, also, was excited by the circumstance of his poor wife (who soon afterwards died of a broken heart) coming to him in prison, and being with difficulty torn away; but then, conjugal affection is so very commonplace, and there was something so engrossingly pathetic in the anecdote of the pigeon- pies!
It must be confessed that Crauford displayed singular address and ability upon his trial; and fighting every inch of ground, even to the last, when so strong a phalanx of circumstances appeared against him that no hope of a favourable verdict could for a moment have supported him, he concluded the trial with a speech delivered by himself, so impressive, so powerful, so dignified, yet so impassioned, that the whole audience, hot as they were, dissolved into tears.
Sentence was passed,—Death! But such was the infatuation of the people that every one expected that a pardon, for crime more complicated and extensive than half the "Newgate Calendar" could equal, would of course be obtained. Persons of the highest rank interested themselves in his behalf; and up to the night before his execution, expectations, almost amounting to certainty, were entertained by the criminal, his friends, and the public. On that night was conveyed to Crauford the positive and peremptory assurance that there was no hope. Let us now enter his cell, and be the sole witnesses of his solitude.
Crauford was, as we have seen, a man in some respects of great moral courage, of extraordinary daring in the formation of schemes, of unwavering resolution in supporting them, and of a temper which rather rejoiced in, than shunned, the braving of a distant danger for the sake of an adequate reward. But this courage was supported and fed solely by the self-persuasion of consummate genius, and his profound confidence both in his good fortune and the inexhaustibility of his resources. Physically he was a coward! immediate peril to be confronted by the person, not the mind, had ever appalled him like a child. He had never dared to back a spirited horse. He had been known to remain for days in an obscure ale-house in the country, to which a shower had accidentally driven him, because it had been idly reported that a wild beast had escaped from a caravan and been seen in the vicinity of the inn. No dog had ever been allowed in his household lest it might go mad. In a word, Crauford was one to whom life and sensual enjoyments were everything,—the supreme blessings, the only blessings.
As long as he had the hope, and it was a sanguine hope, of saving life, nothing had disturbed his mind from its serenity. His gayety had never forsaken him; and his cheerfulness and fortitude had been the theme of every one admitted to his presence. But when this hope was abruptly and finally closed; when Death, immediate and unavoidable,—Death, the extinction of existence, the cessation of sense,—stood bare and hideous before him, his genius seemed at once to abandon him to his fate, and the inherent weakness of his nature to gush over every prop and barrier of his art.
No hope!" muttered he, in a voice of the keenest anguish, "no hope; merciful God! none, none? What, I, I, who have shamed kings in luxury,—I to die on the gibbet, among the reeking, gaping, swinish crowd with whom—O God, that I were one of them even! that I were the most loathsome beggar that ever crept forth to taint the air with sores! that I were a toad immured in a stone, sweltering in the atmosphere of its own venom! a snail crawling on these very walls, and tracking his painful path in slime!—anything, anything, but death! And such death! The gallows, the scaffold, the halter, the fingers of the hangman paddling round the neck where the softest caresses have clung and sated. To die, die, die! What, I whose pulse now beats so strongly! whose blood keeps so warm and vigorous a motion! in the very prime of enjoyment and manhood; all life's million paths of pleasure before me,—to die, to swing to the winds, to hang,—ay, ay—to hang! to be cut down, distorted and hideous; to be thrust into the earth with worms; to rot, or—or—or hell! is there a hell?—better that even than annihilation!"
"Fool! fool!—damnable fool that I was" (and in his sudden rage he clenched his own flesh till the nails met in it); "had I but got to France one day sooner! Why don't you save me, save me, you whom I have banqueted and feasted, and lent money to! one word from you might have saved me; I will not die! I don't deserve it! I am innocent! I tell you, Not guilty, my lord,—not guilty! Have you no heart, no consciences? Murder! murder! murder!" and the wretched man sank upon the ground, and tried with his hands to grasp the stone floor, as if to cling to it from some imaginary violence.
Turn we from him to the cell in which another criminal awaits also the awful coming of his latest morrow.
Pale, motionless, silent, with his face bending over his bosom and hands clasped tightly upon his knees, Wolfe sat in his dungeon, and collected his spirit against the approaching consummation of his turbulent and stormy fate. His bitterest punishment had been already past; mysterious Chance, or rather the Power above chance, had denied to him the haughty triumph of self-applause. No sophistry, now, could compare his doom to that of Sidney, or his deed to the act of the avenging Brutus.
Murder—causeless, objectless, universally execrated—rested, and would rest (till oblivion wrapped it) upon his name. It had appeared, too, upon his trial, that he had, in the information he had received, been the mere tool of a spy in the ministers' pay; and that, for weeks before his intended deed, his design had been known, and his conspiracy only not bared to the public eye because political craft awaited a riper opportunity for the disclosure. He had not then merely been the blind dupe of his own passions, but, more humbling still, an instrument in the hands of the very men whom his hatred was sworn to destroy. Not a wreck, not a straw, of the vain glory for which he had forfeited life and risked his soul, could he hug to a sinking heart, and say, "This is my support."
The remorse of gratitude embittered his cup still further. On Mordaunt's person had been discovered a memorandum of the money anonymously inclosed to Wolfe on the day of the murder; and it was couched in words of esteem which melted the fierce heart of the republican into the only tears he had shed since childhood. From that time, a sullen, silent spirit fell upon him. He spoke to none,— heeded none; he made no defence on trial, no complaint of severity, no appeal from judgment. The iron had entered into his soul; but it supported, while it tortured. Even now as we gaze upon his inflexible and dark countenance, no transitory emotion; no natural spasm of sudden fear for the catastrophe of the morrow; no intense and working passions, struggling into calm; no sign of internal hurricanes, rising as it were from the hidden depths, agitate the surface, or betray the secrets of the unfathomable world within. The mute lip; the rigid brow; the downcast eye; a heavy and dread stillness, brooding over every feature,—these are all we behold.