Part 14 (1/2)
”What would you say, young lady?” said Mr. Justice Grose, kindly. ”If you have anything to testify in favor of the prisoner, you had better communicate with his counsel.”
”Not that--not that,” she hurriedly replied, as if fearful that her strength would fail before she had enunciated her purpose. ”Put, my lord, put Frederick--the prisoner, I mean--on his oath. Bid him declare, as he shall answer at the bar of Almighty G.o.d, who is the murderer for whom he is about to madly sacrifice himself, and you will then find”--
”Your request is an absurd one,” interrupted the judge with some asperity. ”I have no power to question a prisoner.”
”Then,” shrieked the unfortunate lady, sinking back fainting and helpless in her father's arms, ”he is lost--lost!”
She was immediately carried out of court; and as soon as the sensation caused by so extraordinary and painful an incident had subsided, the trial proceeded. A cloud of witnesses to character were called; the judge summed up; the jury deliberated for a few minutes; and a verdict of ”guilty” was returned. Sentence to die on the day after the next followed, and all was over!
Yes; all was, we deemed, over; but happily a decree, reversing that of Mr. Justice Grose, had gone forth in Heaven. I was sitting at home about an hour after the court had closed, painfully musing on the events of the day, when the door of the apartment suddenly flew open, and in rushed Mr. Sharpe in a state of great excitement, accompanied by Sergeant Edwards, whom the reader will remember had called the previous day at that gentleman's house. In a few minutes I was in possession of the following important information, elicited by Mr. Sharpe from the half-willing, half-reluctant sergeant, whom he had found waiting for him at his office:--
In the first place, Captain Everett was _not_ the father of the prisoner!
The young man was the son of Mary Fitzhugh by her _first_ marriage; and his name, consequently, was Mordaunt, not Everett. His mother had survived her second marriage barely six months. Everett, calculating doubtless upon the great pecuniary advantages which would be likely to result to himself as the reputed father of the heir to a splendid English estate, should the quarrel with Mrs. Eleanor Fitzhugh--as he nothing doubted--be ultimately made up, had brought his deceased wife's infant son up as his own. This was the secret of Edwards and his wife; and to purchase their silence, Captain Everett had agreed to give the bond for an annuity which Mr. Sharpe was to draw up. The story of the legacy was a mere pretence. When Edwards was in Yorks.h.i.+re before, Everett pacified him for the time with a sum of money, and a promise to do more for him as soon as his reputed son came into the property. He then hurried the _cidevant_ sergeant back to London; and at the last interview he had with him, gave him a note addressed to a person living in one of the streets--I forget which--leading out of the Haymarket, together with a five-pound note, which he was to pay the person to whom the letter was addressed for some very rare and valuable powder, which the captain wanted for scientific purposes, and which Edwards was to forward by coach to Woodlands Manor-House. Edwards obeyed his instructions, and delivered the message to the queer bushy-bearded foreigner to whom it was addressed, who told him that, if he brought him the sum of money mentioned in the note on the following day, he should have the article required. He also bade him bring a well-stoppered bottle to put it in. As the bottle was to be sent by coach, Edwards purchased a tin flask, as affording a better security against breakage; and having obtained the powder, packed it nicely up, and told his niece, who was staying with him at the time, to direct it, as he was in a hurry to go out, to Squire Everett, Woodlands Manor-House, Yorks.h.i.+re, and then take it to the booking-office. He thought, of course, though he said _Squire_ in a jocular way, that she would have directed it _Captain_ Everett, as she knew him well; but it seemed she had not. Edwards had returned to Yorks.h.i.+re only two days since, to get his annuity settled, and fortunately was present in court at the trial of Frederick Mordaunt, _alias_ Everett, and at once recognized the tin flask as the one he had purchased and forwarded to Woodlands, where it must in due course have arrived on the day stated by the butler. Terrified and bewildered at the consequences of what he had done, or helped to do, Edwards hastened to Mr. Sharpe, who, by dint of exhortations, threats, and promises, judiciously blended, induced him to make a clean breast of it.
As much astounded as elated by this unlooked-for information, it was some minutes before I could sufficiently concentrate my thoughts upon the proper course to be pursued. I was not, however, long in deciding.
Leaving Mr. Sharpe to draw up an affidavit of the facts disclosed, I hastened off to the jail, in order to obtain a thorough elucidation of all the mysteries.
The revulsion of feeling in the prisoner's mind when he learned that the man for whom he had so recklessly sacrificed himself was not only _not_ his father, but a cold-blooded villain, who, according to the testimony of Sergeant Edwards, had embittered, perhaps shortened, his mother's last hours, was immediate and excessive. ”I should have taken Lucy's advice!”
he bitterly exclaimed, as he strode to and fro in his cell; ”have told the truth at all hazards, and have left the rest to G.o.d.” His explanation of the incidents that had so puzzled us all, was as simple as satisfactory. He had always, from his earliest days, stood much in awe of his father, who in the, to young Mordaunt, sacred character of parent, exercised an irresistible control over him; and when the butler entered the library, he believed for an instant it was his father who had surprised him in the act of reading his correspondence; an act which, however unintentional, would, he knew, excite Captain Everett's fiercest wrath. Hence arose the dismay and confusion which the butler had described. He re-sealed the parcel, and placed it in his reputed father's dressing-room; and thought little more of the matter, till, on entering his aunt's bedroom on the first evening of her illness, he beheld Everett pour a small portion of white powder from the tin flask into the bottle containing his aunt's medicine. The terrible truth at once flashed upon him. A fierce altercation immediately ensued in the father's dressing-room, whither Frederick followed him. Everett persisted that the powder was a celebrated Eastern medicament, which would save, if anything could, his aunt's life. The young man was not of course deceived by this shallow falsehood, and from that moment administered the medicine to the patient with his own hands, and kept the bottles which contained it locked up in his cabinet. ”On the very morning of my aunt's death, I surprised him shutting and locking one of my cabinet drawers. So dumbfounded was I with horror and dismay at the sight, that he left the room by a side-door without observing me. You have now the key to my conduct. I loathed to look upon the murderer; but I would have died a thousand deaths rather than attempt to save my own life by the sacrifice of a father's--how guilty soever he might be.”
Furnished with this explanation, and the affidavit of Edwards, I waited upon the judge, and obtained not only a respite for the prisoner, but a warrant for the arrest of Captain Everett.
It was a busy evening. Edwards was despatched to London in the friendly custody of an intelligent officer, to secure the person of the foreign-looking vender of subtle poisons; and Mr. Sharpe, with two constables, set off in a postchaise for Woodlands Manor-House. It was late when they arrived there, and the servants informed them that Captain Everett had already retired. They of course insisted upon seeing him; and he presently appeared, wrapped in a dressing-gown, and haughtily demanded their business with him at such an hour. The answer smote him as with a thunderbolt, and he staggered backwards, till arrested by the wall of the apartment, and then sank feebly, nervelessly, into a chair. Eagerly, after a pause, he questioned the intruders upon the nature of the evidence against him. Mr. Sharpe briefly replied that Edwards was in custody, and had revealed everything.
”Is it indeed so?” rejoined Everett, seeming to derive resolution and fort.i.tude from the very extremity of despair. ”Then the game is unquestionably lost. It was, however, boldly and skilfully played, and I am not a man to whimper over a fatal turn of the dice. In a few minutes, gentlemen,” he added, ”I shall have changed my dress, and be ready to accompany you.”
”We cannot lose sight of you for an instant,” replied Mr. Sharpe. ”One of the officers must accompany you.”
”Be it so: I shall not detain either him or you long.”
Captain Everett, followed by the officer, pa.s.sed into his dressing-room.
He pulled off his gown; and pointing to a coat suspended on a peg at the further extremity of the apartment, requested the constable to reach it for him. The man hastened to comply with his wish. Swiftly, Everett opened a dressing-case which stood on a table near him: the officer heard the sharp clicking of a pistol-lock, and turned swiftly round. Too late! A loud report rang through the house; the room was filled with smoke; and the wretched a.s.sa.s.sin and suicide lay extended on the floor a mangled corpse!
It would be useless minutely to recapitulate, the final winding-up of this eventful drama. Suffice it to record, that Mr. Frederick Mordaunt was, after a slight delay, restored to freedom and a splendid position in society. After the lapse of a decent interval, he espoused Lucy Carrington. Their eldest son represents in this present parliament one of the English boroughs, and is by no means an undistinguished member of the Commons House.
”THE ACCOMMODATION BILL.”
Such of the incidents of the following narrative as did not fall within my own personal observation, were communicated to me by the late Mr.
Ralph Symonds, and the dying confessions of James Hornby, one of the persons killed by the falling in of the iron roof of the Brunswick Theatre. A conversation the other day with a son of Mr. Symonds, who has been long settled in London, recalled the entire chain of circ.u.mstances to my memory with all the vivid distinctness of a first impression.
One evening towards the close of the year 1806, the Leeds coach brought Mr. James Hornby to the village of Pool, on the Wharf, in the West-Riding of Yorks.h.i.+re. A small but respectable house on the confines of the place had been prepared for his reception, and a few minutes after his descent from the top of the coach, the pale, withered-looking man disappeared within it. Except for occasional trips to Otley, a small market-town distant about three miles from Pool, he rarely afterwards emerged from its seclusion. It was not _Time_, we shall presently see--he was indeed but four-and-forty years of age--that had bowed his figure, thinned his whitening hair, and banished from his countenance all signs of healthy, cheerful life. This, too, appeared to be the opinion of the gossips of the village, who, congregated, as usual, to witness the arrival and departure of the coach, indulged, thought Mr. Symonds, who was an inside pa.s.senger proceeding on to Otley, in remarkably free-and-easy commentaries upon the past, present, and future of the new-comer.
”I mind him well,” quavered an old white-haired man. ”It's just three-and-twenty years ago last Michaelmas. I remember it because of the hard frost two years before, that young Jim Hornby left Otley to go to Lunnon: just the place, I'm told, to give the finis.h.i.+ng polish to such a miscreant as he seemed likely to be. He was just out of his time to old Hornby, his uncle, the grocer.”
”He that's left him such heaps of money?”
”Ay, boy, the very same, though he wouldn't have given him or any one else a cheese-paring whilst he lived. This one is a true chip of the old block, I'll warrant. You noticed that he rode outside, bitter cold as it is?”.