The officer bowed and obeyed. The man, who seemed a little intoxicated, gave it with a look of ludicrous triumph and self-importance.
‘Stand avay, man!’ he added to the constable, who now laid hand on his collar. ‘You’ll see vot the judge says to that ’ere bit of paper; and so vill the prisoner, poor fellow!’
This scene, so unworthy of the dignity of the court, attracted the notice and (immediately around the intruder) the merriment of the crowd, and many an eye was directed towards Brandon, as with calm gravity he opened the note and glanced over the contents. In a large school-boy hand – it was the hand of Long Ned – were written these few words:
My Lord Judge,
I make bold to beg you will do all you can for the prisoner at the barre; as he is no other than the ‘Paul’ I spoke to your Worship about. You know what I mean.
Dummie Dunnaker
As he read this note, the judge’s head was observed to droop suddenly, as if by a sickness or a spasm; but he recovered himself instantly, and whispering to the officer who brought him the note, said, ‘See that that madman be immediately removed from the court, and lock him up alone. He is so deranged as to be dangerous!’
The officer lost not a moment in seeing the order executed. Three stout constables dragged the astounded Dummie from the court in an instant, yet the more ruthlessly for his ejaculating: –
‘Eh, sirs, what’s this? I tells you I have saved the judge’s hown flesh and blood. Vy now, gently there; you’ll smart for this, my fine fellow! Never you mind, Paul, my arty: I’se done you a pure good –’
‘Silence!’ proclaimed the voice of the judge, and that voice came forth with so commanding a tone of power that it awed Dummie, despite his intoxication. In a moment more, and, ere he had time to recover, he was without the court. During this strange hubbub, which nevertheless scarcely lasted above two or three minutes, the prisoner had not once lifted his head, nor appeared aroused in any manner from his reverie. And scarcely had the intruder been withdrawn before the jury returned.
The verdict was as all had foreseen, – ‘Guilty;’ but it was coupled with a strong recommendation to mercy.
The prisoner was then asked, in the usual form, whether he had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed against him?
As these dread words struck upon his ear, slowly the prisoner rose. He directed first towards the jury a brief and keen glance, and his eyes then rested full, and with a stern significance on the face of his judge.
‘My lord,’ he began, ‘I have but one reason to advance against the sentence of the law. If you have interest to prevent or mitigate it, that reason will, I think, suffice to enlist you on my behalf. I said that the first cause of those offences against the law which bring me to this bar, was the committing me to prison on a charge of which I was wholly innocent! My lord judge, you were the man who accused me of that charge, and subjected me to that imprisonment! Look at me well, my lord, and you may trace in the countenance of the hardened felon you are about to adjudge to death the features of a boy whom, some seven years ago, you accused before a London magistrate of the theft of your watch. On the oath of a man who has one step on the threshold of death, the accusation was unjust. And, fit minister of the laws you represent! – you, who will now pass my doom, – YOU were the cause of my crimes! My lord, I have done. I am ready to add another to the long and dark list of victims who are first polluted, and then sacrificed, by the blindness and the injustice of human codes!’
While Clifford spoke, every eye turned from him to the judge, and everyone was appalled by the ghastly and fearful change which had fallen over Brandon’s face. Men said afterwards, that they saw written there, in terrible distinctness, the characters of death; and there certainly seemed something awful and præternatural in the bloodless and haggard calmness of his proud features. Yet his eye did not quail, nor the muscles of his lip quiver; and with even more than his wonted loftiness, he met the regard of the prisoner. But, as alone conspicuous throughout the motionless and breathless crowd, the judge and criminal gazed upon each other; and as the eyes of the spectators wandered on each, a thrilling and electric impression of a powerful likeness between the doomed and the doomer, for the first time in the trial, struck upon the audience, and increased, though they scarcely knew why, the sensation of pain and dread which the prisoner’s last words excited. Perhaps it might have chiefly arisen from a common expression of fierce emotion conquered by an iron and stern character of mind, or perhaps, now that the ashy paleness of exhaustion had succeeded the excited flush on the prisoner’s face, the similarity of complexion thus obtained, made the likeness more obvious than before; or perhaps, the spectators had not hitherto fixed so searching, or, if we may so speak, so alternating a gaze upon the two. However that be, the resemblance between the men, placed as they were in such widely different circumstances – that resemblance which, as we have hinted, had at certain moments occurred startlingly to Lucy – was plain and unavoidably striking, the same the dark hue of their complexions, the same the haughty and Roman outline of their faces, the same the height of the forehead, the same even a displeasing and sarcastic rigidity of mouth, which made the most conspicuous feature in Brandon, and which was the only point that deteriorated from the singular beauty of Clifford. But, above all, the same inflexible, defying, stubborn spirit, though in Brandon it assumed the stately cast of majesty, and in Clifford it seemed the desperate sternness of the bravo, stamped itself in both. Though Clifford ceased, he did not resume his seat, but stood in the same attitude as that in which he had reversed the order of things, and merged the petitioner in the accuser. And Brandon himself, without speaking or moving, continued still to survey him. So, with erect fronts, and marble countenances, in which what was defying and resolute did not altogether quell the mortal leaven of pain and dread, they looked as might have looked the two men in the Eastern story, who had the power of gazing each other unto death.
What, at that moment, was raging in Brandon’s heart, it is in vain to guess. He doubted not for a moment that he beheld before him his long-lost, his anxiously demanded son! Every fibre, every corner of his complex and gloomy soul, that certainty reached, and blasted with a hideous and irresistible glare. The earliest, perhaps the strongest, though often the least acknowledged principle of his mind, was the desire to rebuild the fallen honours of his house; its last scion he now beheld before him, covered with the darkest ignominies of the law! He had coveted worldly honours; he beheld their legitimate successor in a convicted felon! He had garnered the few affections he had spared from the objects of pride and ambition, in his son. That son he was about to adjudge to the gibbet and the hangman! Of late, he had increased the hopes of regaining his lost treasure, even to an exultant certainty. Lo! The hopes were accomplished! How? With these thoughts warring, in what manner we dare not even by an epithet express, within him, we may cast one hasty glance on the horror of aggravation they endured, when he heard the prisoner accuse HIM, as the cause of his present doom, and felt himself at once the murderer and the judge of his son!
Minutes had elapsed since the voice of the prisoner ceased; and Brandon now drew forth the black cap. As he placed it slowly over his brows, the increasing and corpse-like whiteness of his face became more glaringly visible, by the contrast which this dread head-gear presented. Twice as he essayed to speak his voice failed him, and an indistinct murmur came forth from his hueless lips, and died away like a fitful and feeble wind. But with the third effort, the resolution and long self-tyranny of the man conquered, and his voice went clear and unfaltering through the crowd, although the severe sweetness of its wonted tones was gone, and it sounded strange and hollow on the ears that drank it.
‘Prisoner at the bar! – It has become my duty to announce to you the close of your mortal career. You have been accused of a daring robbery, and, after an impartial trial, a jury of your countrymen and the laws of your country have decided against you. The recommendation to mercy’ – h
ere, only, throughout his speech, Brandon gasped convulsively for breath – ‘so humanely added by the jury, shall be forwarded to the supreme power, but I cannot flatter you with much hope of its success’ – the lawyers looked with some surprise at each other: they had expected a far more unqualified mandate, to abjure all hope from the jury’s recommendation. – ‘Prisoner! For the opinions you have expressed, you are now only answerable to your God; I forbear to arraign them. For the charge you have made against me, whether true or false, and for the anguish it has given me, may you find pardon at another tribunal! It remains for me only – under a reserve too slight, as I have said, to afford you a fair promise of hope – only to – to’ – All eyes were on Brandon: he felt it, exerted himself for a last effort, and proceeded – ‘to pronounce on you the sharp sentence of the law! It is, that you be taken back to the prison whence you came, and thence (when the supreme authority shall appoint) to the place of execution, to be there hanged by the neck till you are dead; and the Lord God Almighty have mercy on your soul!’
With this address concluded that eventful trial; and while the crowd, in rushing and noisy tumult, bore towards the door, Brandon, concealing to the last, with a Spartan bravery, the anguish which was gnawing at his entrails, retired from the awful pageant. For the next half hour he was locked up with the strange intruder on the proceedings of the court. At the end of that time the stranger was dismissed; and in about double the same period Brandon’s servant readmitted him, accompanied by another man, with a slouched hat, and in a carman’s frock. The reader need not be told that the new-comer was the friendly Ned, whose testimony was indeed a valuable corroborative to Dummie’s, and whose regard for Clifford, aided by an appetite for rewards, had induced him to venture to the town of —, although he tarried concealed in a safe suburb, until reassured by a written promise from Brandon of safety to his person, and a sum for which we might almost doubt whether he would not have consented (so long had he been mistaking means for an end) to be hanged himself. Brandon listened to the details of these confederates, and when they had finished, he addressed them thus: –
‘I have heard you, and am convinced you are liars and impostors: there is the money I promised you’ – throwing down a pocket-book – ‘take it; – and, hark you, if ever you dare whisper – ay, but a breath of the atrocious lie you have now forged, be sure I will have you dragged from the recess or nook of infamy in which you may hide your heads, and hanged for the crimes you have already committed. I am not the man to break my word – begone! – Quit this town instantly: if, in two hours hence, you are found here, your blood be on your own heads! – Begone, I say!’
These words, aided by a countenance well adapted at all times to expressions of a menacing and ruthless character, at once astounded and appalled the accomplices. They left the room in hasty confusion; and Brandon, now alone, walked with uneven steps (the alarming weakness and vacillation of which he did not himself feel) to and fro the apartment. The hell of his breast was stamped upon his features, but he uttered only one thought aloud!
‘I may, – yes, yes, – I may yet conceal this disgrace to my name!’
His servant tapped at the door to say that the carriage was ready, and that Lord Mauleverer had bid him remind his master that they dined punctually at the hour appointed.
‘I am coming!’ said Brandon, with a slow and startling emphasis on each word. But he first sat down and wrote a letter to the official quarter, strongly aiding the recommendation of the jury; and we may conceive how pride clung to him to the last, when he urged the substitution for death, of transportation for life! As soon as he had sealed this letter, he summoned an express, gave his orders coolly and distinctly, and attempted, with his usual stateliness of step, to walk through a long passage which led to the outer door. He found himself fail. ‘Come hither,’ he said to his servant – ‘give me your arm!’
All Brandon’s domestics, save the one left with Lucy, stood in awe of him, and it was with some hesitation that his servant ventured to inquire ‘if his master felt well.’
Brandon looked at him, but made no reply: he entered his carriage with slight difficulty, and, telling the coachman to drive as fast as possible, pulled down (a general custom with him) all the blinds of the windows.
Meanwhile, Lord Mauleverer, with six friends, was impatiently awaiting the arrival of the seventh guest.
‘Our august friend tarries!’ quoth the Bishop of —, with his hands folded across his capacious stomach. ‘I fear the turbot your lordship spoke of may not be the better for the length of the trial.’
‘Poor fellow!’ said the Earl of —, slightly yawning.
‘Whom do you mean?’ asked Lord Mauleverer, with a smile. ‘The bishop, the judge, or the turbot?’
‘Not one of the three, Mauleverer, – I spoke of the prisoner.’
‘Ah, the fine dog! I forgot him,’ said Mauleverer. ‘Really, now you mention him, I must confess that he inspires me with great compassion, but, indeed, it is very wrong in him to keep the judge so long!’
‘Those hardened wretches have such a great deal to say,’ mumbled the bishop sourly.
‘True!’ said Mauleverer. ‘A religious rogue would have had some bowels for the state of the church esurient.’
‘Is it really true, Mauleverer,’ asked the Earl of —, ‘that Brandon is to succeed —?’
‘So I hear,’ said Mauleverer. ‘Heavens! How hungry I am!’
A groan from the bishop echoed the complaint.
‘I suppose it would be against all decorum to sit down to dinner without him?’ said Lord —.
‘Why, really, I fear so,’ returned Mauleverer. ‘But our health – our health is at stake: we will only wait five minutes more. By Jove, there’s the carriage! I beg your pardon for my heathen oath, my lord bishop.’
‘I forgive you!’ said the good bishop, smiling.
The party thus engaged in colloquy were stationed at a window opening on the gravel road, along which the judge’s carriage was now seen rapidly approaching; this window was but a few yards from the porch, and had been partially opened for the better reconnoitring the approach of the expected guest.
‘He keeps the blinds down still! Absence of mind, or shame at unpunctuality – which is the cause, Mauleverer?’ said one of the party.
‘Not shame, I fear!’ answered Mauleverer. ‘Even the indecent immorality of delaying our dinner could scarcely bring a blush to the parchment skin of my learned friend.’
Here the carriage stopped at the porch; the carriage-door was opened.
‘There seems a strange delay,’ said Mauleverer, peevishly. ‘Why does not he get out?’
As he spoke, a murmur among the attendants, who appeared somewhat strangely to crowd around the carriage, smote the ears of the party.
‘What do they say? – What?’ said Mauleverer, putting his hand to his ear.
The bishop answered hastily; and Mauleverer, as he heard the reply, forgot for once his susceptibility to cold, and hurried out to the carriage-door. His guests followed.
They found Brandon leaning against the farther corner of the carriage – a corpse. One hand held the check-string, as if he had endeavoured involuntarily, but ineffectually, to pull it. The right side of his face was partially distorted, as by convulsion or paralysis; but not sufficiently so to destroy that remarkable expression of loftiness and severity which had characterized the features in life. At the same time, the distortion which had drawn up on one side the muscles of the mouth, had deepened into a startling broadness the half sneer of derision, that usually lurked around the lower part of his face. Thus unwitnessed and abrupt had been the disunion of the clay and spirit of a man, who, if he passed through life a bold, scheming, stubborn, unwavering hypocrite, was not without something high even amidst his baseness, his selfishness, and his vices; who seemed less to have loved sin, than by some strange perversion of reason to have disdained virtue, and who, by a solemn and awful suddenness of fate (for who shall venture t
o indicate the judgment of the arch and unseen Providence, even when it appears to mortal eye the least obscured?), won the dreams, the objects, the triumphs of hope, to be blasted by them at the moment of acquisition!
Chapter XXXVI
THE LAST
Subtle, – Surly, – Mammon, Dol,
Hot Ananias, Dapper, Drugger, all
With whom I traded.
The Alchemist
As when some rural citizen – retired for a fleeting holyday, far from the cares of the world, ‘strepitumque Romæ,’* to the sweet shades of Pentonville, or the remoter plains of Clapham – conduct some delighted visitor over the intricacies of that Dædalian masterpiece which he is pleased to call his labyrinth or maze, – now smiling furtively at his guest’s perplexity, – now listening with calm superiority to his futile and erring conjectures, – now maliciously accompanying him through a flattering path, in which the baffled adventurer is suddenly checked by the blank features of a thoroughfareless hedge, – now trembling as he sees the guest stumbling unawares into the right track, and now relieved, as he beholds him, after a pause of deliberation, wind into the wrong, – even so, O pleasant reader, doth the sage novelist conduct thee through the labyrinth of his tale, amusing himself with thy self-deceits, and spinning forth, in prolix pleasure, the quiet yarn of his entertainment from the involutions which occasion thy fretting eagerness and perplexity. But as when – thanks to the host’s good-nature or fatigue! – the mystery is once unravelled, and the guest permitted to penetrate even unto the concealed end of the leafy maze; the honest cit, satisfied with the pleasant pains he has already bestowed upon his visitor, puts him not to the labour of retracing the steps he hath so erratically trod, but leads him in three strides, and through a simpler path, at once to the mouth of the maze, and dismisseth him elsewhere for entertainment; even so will the prudent narrator, when the intricacies of his plot are once unfolded, occasion no stale and profitless delays to his wearied reader, but conduct him, with as much brevity as convenient, without the labyrinth which has ceased to retain the interest of a secret.
Paul Clifford Page 50
