Mr. Cutts held a very peculiar position in that section of the great world to which he belonged. He possessed the advantage of an education superior to that of the generality of his companions, having been originally a clerk to an Old Bailey attorney, and having since that early day accomplished his natural shrewdness by a variety of speculative enterprises both at home and abroad. In these adventures he had not only contrived to make money, but, what is very rare with the foes of law, to save it. Being a bachelor, he was at small expenses, but besides his bachelor’s lodging in the dark court, he had an establishment in the heart of the City, near the Thames, which was intrusted to the care of a maiden sister, as covetous and as crafty as himself. At this establishment, ostensibly a pawnbroker’s, were received the goods which Cutts knew at his residence in the court were to be sold a bargain, having been obtained for nothing. It was chiefly by this business that the man enriched himself. But his net was one that took in fishes of all kinds. He was a general adviser to the invaders of law. If he shared in the schemes he advised, they were so sure to be successful, that he enjoyed the highest reputation for luck. It was but seldom that he did actively share in those schemes—lucky in what he shunned as in what he performed. He had made no untruthful boast to Mrs. Crane of the skill with which he had kept himself out of the fangs of justice. With a certain portion of the police he was indeed rather a favourite; for was anything mysteriously “lost,” for which the owner would give a reward equal to its value in legal markets, Cutts was the man who would get it back. Of violence he had a wholesome dislike; not that he did not admire force in others—not that he was physically a coward—but that caution was his predominant characteristic. He employed force when required—set a just value on it—would plan a burglary, and dispose of the spoils; but it was only where the prize was great and the danger small, that he lent his hand to the work that his brain approved. When Losely proposed to him the robbery of a lone country-house, in which Jasper, making light of all perils, brought prominently forward the images of some thousands of pounds in gold and notes, guarded by an elderly gentleman, and to be approached with ease through an uninhabited building—Cutts thought it well worth personal investigation. Nor did he consider himself bound, by his general engagement to Mrs. Crane, to lose the chance of a sum so immeasurably greater than he could expect to obtain from her by revealing the plot and taking measures to frustrate it. Cutts was a most faithful and intelligent agent when he was properly paid, and had proved himself so to Mrs. Crane on various occasions. But then, to be paid properly meant a gain greater in serving than he could get in not serving. Hitherto it had been extremely lucrative to obey Mrs. Crane in saving Jasper from crime and danger. In this instance the lucre seemed all the other way. Accordingly, the next morning, having filled a saddle-bag with sundry necessaries, such as files, picklocks, masks—to which he added a choice selection of political tracts and newspapers—he and Jasper set out on two hired but strong and fleet hackneys to the neighbourhood of Fawley. They put up at a town on the other side of the Manor-house from that by which Jasper had approached it, and at about the same distance. After baiting their steeds, they proceeded to Fawley by the silent guide of a finger-post, gained the vicinity of the park, and Cutts, dismounting, flitted across the turf, and plunged himself into the hollows of the unfinished mansion while Jasper took charge of the horses in a corner of the wooded lane. Cutts, pleased by the survey of the forlorn interior, ventured, in the stillness that reigned around, to mount the ladder, to apply a picklock to the door above, and, opening this with ease, crept into the long gallery, its walls covered with pictures. Through the crevices in another door at the extreme end gleamed a faint light. Cutts applied his eye to the chinks and keyhole, and saw that the light came from a room on the other side the narrow passage which connected the new house with the old. The door of that room was open, candles were on the table, and beside the table Cutts could distinguish the outline of a man’ s form seated—doubtless the owner; but the form did not seem “elderly.” If inferior to Jasper’s in physical power, it still was that of vigorous and unbroken manhood. Cutts did not like the appearance of that form, and he retreated to outer air with some misgivings. However, on rejoining Losely, he said: “As yet things look promising-place still as death—only one door locked, and that the common country lock, which a schoolboy might pick with his knife.”
“Or a crooked nail,” said Jasper.
“Ay, no better picklock in good hands. But there are other things besides locks to think of.”
Cutts then hurried on to suggest that it was just the hour when some of the workmen employed on the premises might be found in the Fawley public-house; that he should ride on, dismount there, and take his chance of picking up details of useful information as to localities and household. He should represent himself as a commercial traveller on his road to the town they had quitted; he should take out his cheap newspapers and tracts; he should talk politics—all workmen love politics, especially the politics of cheap newspapers and tracts. He would rejoin Losely in an hour or so.
The bravo waited—his horse grazed—the moon came forth, stealing through the trees, bringing into fantastic light the melancholy old dwelling-house—the yet more melancholy new pile. Jasper was not, as we have seen, without certain superstitious fancies, and they had grown on him more of late as his brain had become chronically heated and his nerves relaxed by pain. He began to feel the awe of the silence and the moonlight; and some vague remembrances of earlier guiltless days—of a father’s genial love—of joyous sensations in the priceless possession of youth and vigour—of the admiring smiles and cordial hands which his beauty, his daring, and high spirits had attracted towards him—of the all that he had been, mixed with the consciousness of what he was, and an uneasy conjecture of the probable depth of the final fall—came dimly over his thoughts, and seemed like the whispers of remorse. But it is rarely that man continues to lay blame on himself; and Jasper hastened to do, as many a better person does without a blush for his folly—viz., shift upon the innocent shoulders of fellow-men, or on the hazy outlines of that clouded form which ancient schools and modern plagiarists call sometimes “Circumstance,” sometimes “Chance,” sometimes “Fate,” all the guilt due to his own wilful abuse of irrevocable hours.
With this consolatory creed came, of necessity—the devil’s grand luxury, Revenge. Say to yourself, “For what I suffer I condemn another man, or I accuse the Arch-Invisible, be it a Destiny, be it a Maker!” and the logical sequel is to add evil to evil, folly to folly—to retort on the man who so wrongs, or on the Arch-Invisible who so afflicts you. Of all our passions, is not Revenge the one into which enters with the most zest a devil? For what is a devil?—A being whose sole work on earth is some revenge on God!
Jasper Losely was not by temperament vindictive; he was irascible, as the vain are—combative, aggressive, turbulent, by the impulse of animal spirits; but the premeditation of vengeance was foreign to a levity and egotism which abjured the self-sacrifice that is equally necessary to hatred as to love. But Guy Darrell had forced into his moral system a passion not native to it. Jasper had expected so much from his marriage with the great man’s daughter—counted so thoroughly on her power to obtain pardon and confer wealth—and his disappointment had been so keen—been accompanied with such mortification—that he regarded the man whom he had most injured as the man who had most injured him. But not till now did his angry feelings assume the shape of a definite vengeance. So long as there was a chance that he could extort from Darrell the money that was the essential necessary to his life, he checked his thoughts whenever they suggested a profitless gratification of rage. But now that Darrell had so scornfully and so inexorably spurned all concession—now that nothing was to be wrung from him except by force—force and vengeance came together in his projects. And yet even in the daring outrage he was meditating, murder itself did not stand out as a thought accepted—no; what pleased his wild and turbid imagination was the idea of humiliating by terror the man who had humbled him. To penetrate into the home of this haughty scorner—to confront him in his own chamber at the dead of night, man to man, force to force; to say to him, “None now can deliver you from me—I come no more as a suppliant—I command you to accept my terms”; to gloat over the fears which, the strong man felt assured, would bow the rich man to beg for mercy at his feet;—this was the picture which Jasper Losely conjured up; and even the spoil to be won by violence smiled on him less than the grand position which the violence itself would bestow. Are not nine murders out of ten fashioned thus from conception into deed? “Oh that my enemy were but before me face to face—none to part us!” says the vindictive dreamer. Well, and what then? There, his imagination halts—there he drops the sable curtain; he goes not on to say, “Why, then another murder will be added to the long catalogue from Cain.” He palters with his deadly wish, and mutters, perhaps, at most, “Why, then—come what may!”
Losely continued to gaze on the pale walls gleaming through the wintry boughs, as the moon rose high and higher. And now out broke the light from Darrell’s lofty casement, and Losely smiled fiercely, and muttered—hark! the very words—“And then! come what may!”
Hoofs are now heard on the hard road, and Jasper is joined by his accomplice.
“Well!” said Jasper.
“Mount!” returned Cutts; “I have much to say as we ride.”
“This will not do,” resumed Cutts, as they sped fast down the lane; “why, you never told me all the drawbacks. There are no less than four men in the house—two servants besides the master and his secretary; and one of those servants, the butler or valet, has firearms, and knows how to use them.”
“Pshaw!” said Jasper scoffingly; “is that all? Am I not a match for four?”
“No, it is not all; you told me the master of the house was a retired elderly man, and you mentioned his name. But you never told me that your Mr. Darrell was the famous lawyer and Parliament man—a man about whom the newspapers have been writing the last six months.”
“What does that signify?”
“Signify! Just this, that there will be ten times more row about the affair you propose than there would be if it concerned only a stupid old country squire, and therefore ten times as much danger. Besides, on principle I don’t like to have anything to do with lawyers—a cantankerous, spiteful set of fellows. And this Guy Darrell! Why, General Jas., I have seen the man. He cross-examined me once when I was a witness on a case of fraud, and turned me inside out with as much ease as if I had been an old pincushion stuffed with bran. I think I see his eye now, and I would as lief have a loaded pistol at my head as that eye again fixed on mine.”
“Pooh! You have brought a mask; and, besides, YOU need not see him; I can face him alone.”
“No, no; there might be murder! I never mix myself with things of that kind, on principle; your plan will not do. There might be a much safer chance of more swag in a very different sort of scheme. I hear that the pictures in that ghostly long room I crept through are worth a mint of money. Now, pictures of great value are well known, and there are collectors abroad who would pay almost any price for some pictures, and never ask where they came from; hide them for some years perhaps, and not bring them forth till any tales that would hurt us had died away. This would be safe, I say. If the pictures are small, no one in the old house need be disturbed. I can learn from some of the trade what pictures Darrell really has that would fetch a high price, and then look out for customers abroad. This will take a little time, but be worth waiting for.”
“I will not wait,” said Jasper, fiercely; “and you are a coward. I have resolved that to-morrow night I will be in that man’s room, and that man shall be on his knees before me.”
Cutts turned sharply round on his saddle, and by the aid of the moonlight surveyed Losely’s countenance. “Oh, I see,” he said, “there is more than robbery in your mind. You have some feeling of hate—of vengeance; the man has injured you?”
“He has treated me as if I were a dog,” said Jasper; “and a dog can bite.”
Cutts mused a few moments. “I have heard you talk at times about some rich relation or connection on whom you had claims; Darrell is the man, I suppose?”
“He is; and hark ye, Cutts, if you try to balk me here, I will wring your neck off. And since I have told you so much, I will tell you this much more—that I don’t think there is the danger you count on; for I don’t mean to take Darrell’s blood, and I believe he would not take mine.”
“But there may be a struggle-and then?”
“Ay, if so, and then—man to man,” replied Jasper, mutteringly.
Nothing more was said, but both spurred on their horses to a quicker pace. The sparks flashed from the hoofs. Now through the moonlight, now under shade of the boughs, scoured on the riders—Losely’s broad chest and marked countenance, once beautiful, now fearful, formidably defined even under the shadows—his comrade’s unsubstantial figure and goblin features flitting vague even under the moonlight.
The town they had left came in sight, and by this time Cutts had resolved on the course his prudence suggested to him. The discovery that, in the proposed enterprise, Losely had a personal feeling of revenge to satisfy had sufficed to decide the accomplice peremptorily to have nothing to do with the affair. It was his rule to abstain from all transactions in which fierce passions were engaged. And the quarrels between relations or connections were especially those which his experience of human nature told him brought risk upon all intermeddlers. But he saw that Jasper was desperate; that the rage of the bravo might be easily turned on himself; and therefore, since it was no use to argue, it would be discreet to dissimulate. Accordingly, when they reached their inn, and were seated over their brandy-and-water, Cutts resumed the conversation, appeared gradually to yield to Jasper’s reasonings, concerted with him the whole plan for the next night’s operations, and took care meanwhile to pass the brandy. The day had scarcely broken before Cutts was off, with his bag of implements and tracts. He would have fain carried off also both the horses; but the ostler, surly at being knocked up at so early an hour, might not have surrendered the one ridden by Jasper, without Jasper’s own order to do so. Cutts, however, bade the ostler be sure and tell the gentleman, before going away, that he, Cutts, strongly advised him “to have nothing to do with the bullocks.”
Cutts, on arriving in London, went straight to Mrs. Crane’s old lodging opposite to Jasper’s. But she had now removed to Podden Place, and left no address. On reaching his own home, Cutts, however, found a note from her, stating that she should be at her old lodging that evening, if he would call at half-past nine o’clock; for, indeed, she had been expecting Jasper’s promised visit—had learned that he had left his lodgings, and was naturally anxious to learn from Cutts what had become of him. When Cutts called at the appointed hour and told his story, Arabella Crane immediately recognised all the danger which her informant had so prudently shunned. Nor was she comforted by Cutts’s assurance that Jasper, on finding himself deserted, would have no option but to abandon, or at least postpone, an enterprise that, undertaken singly, would be too rash even for his reckless temerity. As it had become the object of her life to save Losely from justice, so she now shrunk from denouncing to justice his meditated crime; and the idea of recurring to Colonel Morley happily flashed upon her.
Having thus explained to the reader these antecedents in the narrative, we return to Jasper. He did not rise till late at noon; and as he was generally somewhat stupefied on rising by the drink he had taken the night before, and by the congested brain which the heaviness of such sleep produced, he could not at first believe that Cutts had altogether abandoned the enterprise—rather thought that, with his habitual wariness, that Ulysses of the Profession had gone forth to collect further information in the neighbourhood of the proposed scene of action. He was not fully undeceived in this belief till somewhat late in the day, when, strolling into the stable-yard, the ostler, concluding from the gentleman’s goodly thews and size that he was a north-country grazier, delivered Cutts’s allegorical caution against the bullocks.
Thus abandoned, Jasper’s desperate project only acquired a still more concentrated purpose and a ruder simplicity of action. His original idea, on first conceiving the plan of robbery, had been to enter into Darrell’s presence disguised and masked. Even, however, before Cutts deserted him; the mere hope of plunder had become subordinate to the desire of a personal triumph; and now that Cutts had left him to himself, and carried away the means of disguise, Jasper felt rather pleased than otherwise at the thought that his design should have none of the characteristics of a vulgar burglary. No mask now; his front should be as open as his demand. Cutts’s report of the facility of penetrating into Darrell’s very room also lessened the uses of an accomplice. And in the remodification of his first hasty plan of common place midnight stealthy robbery, he would no longer even require an assistant to dispose of the plunder he might gain.
Darrell should now yield to his exactions, as a garrison surprised accepts the terms of its conqueror. There would be no flight, no hiding, no fear of notes stopped at banks. He would march out, hand on haunch, with those immunities of booty that belong to the honours of war. Pleasing his self-conceit with so gallant a view of his meditated exploit, Jasper sauntered at dark into the town, bought a few long narrow nails and a small hammer, and returning to his room, by the aid of the fire, the tongs, and the hammer, he fashioned these nails, with an ease and quickness which showed an expert practitioner, into instruments that would readily move the wards of any common country-made lock. He did not care for weapons. He trusted at need to his own powerful hands. It was no longer, too, the affair of a robber unknown, unguessed, who might have to fight his way out of an alarmed household. It was but the visit which he, Jasper Losely, Esquire, thought fit to pay, however unceremoniously and unseasonably, to the house of a father-in-law! At the worst, should he fail in finding Darrell, or securing an unwitnessed interview—should he, instead, alarm the household, it would be a proof of the integrity of his intentions that he had no weapons save those which Nature bestows on the wild man as the mightiest of her wild beasts. At night he mounted his horse, but went out of his way, keeping the high-road for an hour or two, in order to allow ample time for the farmers to have quitted the rent-feast, and the old Manor-house to be hushed in sleep. At last, when he judged the coast clear and the hour ripe, he wound back into the lane towards Fawley; and when the spire of its hamlet-church came in sight through the frosty starlit air, he dismounted—led the horse into one of the thick beech-woods that make the prevailing characteristic of the wild country round that sequestered dwelling-place—fastened the animal to a tree, and stalked towards the park-pales on foot. Lightly, as a wolf enters a sheepfold, he swung himself over the moss-grown fence; he gained the buttresses of the great raw pile; high and clear above, from Darrell’s chamber, streamed the light; all the rest of the old house was closed and dark, buried no doubt in slumber.
He is now in the hollows of the skeleton pile; he mounts the ladder; the lock of the door before him yields to his rude implements but artful hand. He is in the long gallery; the moonlight comes broad and clear through the large casements. What wealth of art is on the walls! but how profitless to the robber’s greed. There, through the very halls which the master had built in the day of his ambition, saying to himself, “These are for far posterity,” the step of Violence, it may be of Murder, takes its stealthy way to the room of the childless man! Through the uncompleted pile, towards the uncompleted life, strides the terrible step.
The last door yields noiselessly. The small wooden corridor, narrow as the drawbridge which in ancient fortresses was swung between the commandant’s room in the topmost story and some opposing wall, is before him. And Darrell’s own door is half open; lights on the table—logs burning bright on the hearth. Cautiously Losely looked through the aperture. Darrell was not there; the place was solitary; but the opposite door was open also. Losely’s fine ear caught the sound of a slight movement of a footstep in the room just below, to which that opposite door admitted. In an instant the robber glided within the chamber—closed and locked the door by which he had entered, retaining the key about his person. The next stride brought him to the hearth. Beside it hung the bell-rope common in old-fashioned houses. Losely looked round; on the table, by the writing implements, lay a pen-knife. In another moment the rope was cut, high out of Darrell’s reach, and flung aside. The hearth, being adapted but for logwood fires, furnished not those implements in which, at a moment of need, the owner may find an available weapon—only a slight pair of brass wood-pincers, and a shovel equally frail. Such as they were, however, Jasper quietly removed and hid them behind a heavy old bureau. Steps were now heard mounting the stair that led into the chamber; Losely shrunk back into the recess beside the mantelpiece. Darrell entered, with a book in his hand, for which he had indeed quitted his chamber—a volume containing the last Act of Parliament relating to Public Trusts, which had been sent to him by his solicitor; for he is creating a deed of trust, to insure to the nation the Darrell antiquities, in the name of his father, the antiquarian.
Darrell advanced to the writing-table, which stood in the centre of the room; laid down the book, and sighed—the short, quick, impatient sigh which had become one of his peculiar habits. The robber stole from the recess, and, gliding round to the door by which Darrell had entered, while the back of the master was still towards him, set fast the lock, and appropriated the key as he had done at the door which had admitted himself. Though the noise in that operation was but slight, it roused Darrell from his abstracted thoughts. He turned quickly, and at the same moment Losely advanced towards him.
At once Darrell comprehended his danger. His rapid glance took in all the precautions by which the intruder proclaimed his lawless purpose—the closed door, the bell rope cut off. There, between those four secret walls, must pass the interview between himself and the desperado. He was unarmed, but he was not daunted. It was but man to man. Losely had for him his vast physical strength, his penury, despair, and vindictive purpose. Darrell had in his favour the intellect which gives presence of mind; the energy of nerve, which is no more to be seen in the sinew and bone than the fluid which fells can be seen in the jars and the wires; and that superb kind of pride, which, if terror be felt, makes its action impossible, because a disgrace, and bravery a matter of course, simply because it is honour.
As the bravo approached, by a calm and slight movement Darrell drew to the other side of the table, placing that obstacle between himself and Losely, and, extending his arm, said: “Hold, sir; I forbid you to advance another step. You are here, no matter how, to re-urge your claims on me. Be seated; I will listen to you.”
Darrell’s composure took Losely so by surprise that mechanically he obeyed the command thus tranquilly laid upon him, and sunk into a chair—facing Darrell with a sinister under-look from his sullen brow. “Ah!” he said, “you will listen to me now; but my terms have risen.”
Darrell, who had also seated himself, made no answer; but his face was resolute and his eye watchful. The ruffian resumed, in a gruffer tone: “My terms have risen, Mr. Darrell.”
“Have they, sir? and why?”
“Why! Because no one can come to your aid here; because here you cannot escape; because here you are in my power!”
“Rather, sir, I listen to you because here you are under my roof-tree; and it is you who are in my power!”
“Yours! Look round; the doors are locked on you. Perhaps you think your shouts, your cries might bring aid to you. Attempt it—raise your voice—and I strangle you with these hands.”
“If I do not raise my voice, it is, first, because I should be ashamed of myself if I required aid against one man; and, secondly, because I would not expose to my dependents a would-be assassin in him whom my lost child called husband. Hush, sir, hush, or your own voice will alarm those who sleep below. And now, what is it you ask? Be plain, sir, and be brief.”
“Well, if you like to take matters coolly, I have no objection. These are my terms. You have received large sums this day; those sums are in your house, probably in that bureau; and your life is at my will.”
“You ask the monies paid for rent to-day. True, they are in the house; but they are not in my apartments. They were received by another; they are kept by another. In vain, through the windings and passages of this old house, would you seek to find the room in which he stores them. In doing so you will pass by the door of a servant who sleeps so lightly that the chances are that he will hear you; he is armed with a blunderbuss, and with pistols. You say to me, ‘Your money or your life.’ I say to you, in reply, ‘Neither: attempt to seize the money, and your own life is lost.”
“Miser! I don’t believe that sums so large are not in your own keeping. And even if they are not, you shall show me where they are; you shall lead me through those windings and passages of which you so tenderly warn me, my hand on your throat. And if servants wake, or danger threaten me, it is you who shall save me, or die! Ha! you do not fear me—eh, Mr. Darrell!” And Losely rose.
“I do not fear you,” replied Darrell, still seated. “I cannot conceive that you are here with no other design than a profitless murder. You are here, you say, to make terms; it will be time enough to see whose life is endangered when all your propositions have been stated. As yet you have only suggested a robbery, to which you ask me to assist you. Impossible! Grant even that you were able to murder me, you would be just as far off from your booty. And yet you say your terms have risen! To me they seem fallen to nothing! Have you anything else to say?”
The calmness of Darrell, so supremely displayed in this irony, began to tell upon the ruffian—the magnetism of the great man’s eye and voice, and steadfast courage, gradually gaining power over the wild, inferior animal. Trying to recover his constitutional audacity, Jasper said, with a tone of the old rollicking voice: “Well, Mr. Darrell, it is all one to me how I wring from you, in your own house, what you refused me when I was a suppliant on the road. Fair means are pleasanter than foul. I am a gentleman—the grandson of Sir Julian Losely, of Losely Hall; I am your son-in-law; and I am starving. This must not be; write me a cheque.”
Darrell dipped his pen in the ink, and drew the paper towards him.
“Oho! you don’t fear me, eh? This is not done from fear, mind—all out of pure love and compassion, my kind father-in-law. You will write me a cheque for five thousand pounds—come, I am moderate—your life is worth a precious deal more than that. Hand me the cheque—I will trust to your honour to give me no trouble in cashing it, and bid you good-night-my father-in-law.”
As Losely ceased with a mocking laugh, Darrell sprang up quickly, threw open the small casement which was within his reach, and flung from it the paper on which he had been writing, and which he wrapt round the heavy armorial seal that lay on the table.
Losely bounded towards him. “What means that? What have you done?”
“Saved your life and mine, Jasper Losely,” said Darrell, solemnly, and catching the arm that was raised against him. “We are now upon equal terms.”
“I understand,” growled the tiger, as the slaver gathered to his lips—“you think by that paper to summon some one to your aid.”
“Not so—that paper is useless while I live. Look forth—the moonlight is on the roofs below—can you see where that paper has fallen? On the ledge of a parapet that your foot could not reach. It faces the window of a room in which one of my household sleeps; it will meet his eye in the morning when the shutters are unbarred; and on that paper are writ these words: ‘If I am this night murdered, the murderer is Jasper Losely,’ and the paper is signed by my name. Back, sir—would you doom yourself to the gibbet?”