Part 21 (1/2)
”Quite a remarkable one,” replied Mr. Flint, as he rang the bell. ”Desire the gentlemen in the library to step up,” he added to the footman who answered the summons. In about three minutes in marched Cunningham and Mullins, followed by two police-officers. An irrepressible exclamation of terror escaped Chilton, which was immediately echoed by Mr. Flint's direction to the police, as he pointed towards the trembling caitiff: ”That is your man--secure him.”
A storm of exclamations, questions, remonstrances, instantly broke forth, and it was several minutes before attention could be obtained for the statements of our two Irish witnesses and the reading of the happily-found letter. The effect of the evidence adduced was decisive, electrical. Lady Seyton, as its full significance flashed upon her, screamed with convulsive joy, and I thought must have fainted from excess of emotion. The Rev. John Hayley returned audible thanks to G.o.d in a voice quivering with rapture, and Miss Hayley ran out of the apartment, and presently returned with the children, who were immediately half-smothered with their mother's ecstatic kisses. All was for a few minutes bewilderment, joy, rapture! Flint persisted to his dying day, that Lady Seyton threw her arms round his neck, and kissed his bald old forehead. This, however, I cannot personally vouch for, as my attention was engaged at the moment by the adverse claimant, the Honorable James Kingston, who exhibited one of the most irresistibly comic, wo-begone, lackadaisical aspects it is possible to conceive. He made a hurried and most undignified exit, and was immediately followed by the discomfited ”family” solicitors. Chilton was conveyed to a station-house, and the next day was fully committed for trial. He was convicted at the next sessions, and sentenced to seven years' transportation; and the ”celebrated” firm of Flint and Sharp, derived considerable l.u.s.tre, and more profit, from this successful stroke of professional dexterity.
JANE ECCLES
The criminal business of the office was, during the first three or four years of our partners.h.i.+p, entirely superintended by Mr. Flint; he being more _an fait_, from early practice, than myself in the art and mystery of prosecuting and defending felons, and I was thus happily relieved of duties which, in the days when George III. was king, were frequently very oppressive and revolting. The criminal pract.i.tioner dwelt in an atmosphere tainted alike with cruelty and crime, and pulsating alternately with merciless decrees of death, and the shrieks and wailings of sentenced guilt. And not always guilt! There exist many records of proofs, incontestable, but obtained too late, of innocence having been legally strangled on the gallows in other cases than that of Eliza Fenning. How could it be otherwise with a criminal code crowded in every line with penalties of death, nothing but--death? Juster, wiser times have dawned upon us, in which truer notions prevail of what man owes to man, even when sitting in judgment on transgressors; and this we owe, let us not forget, to the exertions of a band of men who, undeterred by the sneers of the reputedly wise and _practical_ men of the world, and the taunts of ”influential” newspapers, persisted in teaching that the rights of property could be more firmly cemented than by the shedding of blood--law, justice, personal security more effectually vindicated than by the gallows. Let me confess that I also was, for many years, amongst the mockers, and sincerely held such ”theorists” and ”dreamers” as Sir Samuel Romilly and his fellow-workers in utter contempt. Not so my partner, Mr. Flint. Constantly in the presence of criminal judges and juries, he had less confidence in the unerring verity of their decisions than persons less familiar with them, or who see them only through the medium of newspapers. Nothing could exceed his distress of mind if, in cases in which he was prosecuting attorney, a convict died persisting in his innocence, or without a full confession of guilt. And to such a pitch did this morbidly-sensitive feeling at length arrive, that he all at once refused to undertake, or in any way meddle with, criminal prosecutions, and they were consequently turned over to our head clerk, with occasional a.s.sistance from me if there happened to be a press of business of the sort. Mr. Flint still, however, retained a monopoly of the _defences_, except when, from some temporary cause or other, he happened to be otherwise engaged, when they fell to me. One of these I am about to relate, the result of which, whatever other impression it produced, thoroughly cured me--as it may the reader--of any propensity to sneer or laugh at criminal-law reformers and denouncers of the gallows.
One forenoon, during the absence of Mr. Flint in Wilts.h.i.+re, a Mrs.
Margaret Davies called at the office, in apparently great distress of mind. This lady, I must premise, was an old, or at all events an elderly maiden, of some four-and-forty years of age--I have heard a very intimate female friend of hers say she would never see fifty again, but this was spite--and possessed of considerable house property in rather poor localities. She found abundant employment for energies which might otherwise have turned to cards and scandal, in collecting her weekly, monthly, and quarterly rents, and in promoting, or fancying she did, the religious and moral welfare of her tenants. Very bare-faced, I well knew, were the impositions practiced upon her credulous good-nature in money matters, and I strongly suspected the spiritual and moral promises and performances of her motley tenantry exhibited as much discrepancy as those pertaining to rent. Still, deceived or cheated as she might be, good Mrs. Davies never wearied in what she conceived to be well-doing, and was ever ready to pour balm and oil into the wounds of the sufferer, however self-inflicted or deserved.
”What is the matter now?” I asked as soon as the good lady was seated, and had untied and loosened her bonnet, and thrown back her shawl, fast walking having heated her prodigiously. ”Nothing worse than transportation is, I hope, likely to befall any of those interesting clients of yours?”
”You are a hard-hearted man, Mr. Sharp,” replied Mrs. Davies between a smile and a cry; ”but being a lawyer, that is of course natural, and, as I am not here to consult you as a Christian, of no consequence.”
”Complimentary, Mrs. Davies; but pray, go on.”
”You know Jane Eccles, one of my tenants in Bank Buildings--the embroidress who adopted her sister's orphan child?”
”I remember her name. She obtained, if I recollect rightly, a balance of wages for her due to the child's father, a mate, who died at sea. Well, what has befallen her?”
”A terrible accusation has been preferred against her,” rejoined Mrs.
Davies; ”but as for a moment believing it, that is quite out of the question. Jane Eccles,” continued the warm-hearted lady, at the same time extracting a crumpled newspaper from the miscellaneous contents of her reticule--”Jane Eccles works hard from morning till night, keeps herself to herself; her little nephew and her rooms are always as clean and nice as a new pin; she attends church regularly; and pays her rent punctually to the day. This disgraceful story, therefore,” he added, placing the journal in my hands, ”_cannot_ be true.”
I glanced over the police news:--'Uttering forged Bank-of-England notes, knowing them to be forged;' I exclaimed, ”The devil!”
”There's no occasion to be spurting that name out so loudly, Mr. Sharp,”
said Mrs. Davies with some asperity, ”especially in a lawyer's office.
People have been wrongfully accused before to-day, I suppose?”
I was intent on the report, and not answering, she continued, ”I heard nothing of it till I read the shameful account in the paper half an hour agone. The poor slandered girl was, I dare say, afraid or ashamed to send for me.”
”This appears to be a very bad case, Mrs. Davies,” I said at length.
”Three forged ten-pound notes changed in one day at different shops each time, under the pretence of purchasing articles of small amount, and another ten-pound note found in her pocket! All that has, I must say, a very ugly look.”
”I don't care,” exclaimed Mrs. Davies quite fiercely, ”if it looks as ugly as sin, or if the whole Bank of England was found in her pocket! I know Jane Eccles well; she nursed me last spring through the fever; and I would be upon my oath that the whole story, from beginning to end, is an invention of the devil, or something worse.”
”Jane Eccles,” I persisted, ”appears to have been unable or unwilling to give the slightest explanation as to how she became possessed of the spurious notes. Who is this brother of hers, 'of such highly respectable appearance,' according to the report, who was permitted a private interview with her previous to the examination?”
”She has no brother that I have ever heard of,” said Mrs. Davies. ”It must be a mistake of the papers.”
”That is not likely. You observed of course that she was fully committed--and no wonder!”
Mrs. Davies's faith in the young woman's integrity was not to be shaken by any evidence save that of her own bodily eyes, and I agreed to see Jane Eccles on the morrow, and make the best arrangements for the defence--at Mrs. Davies' charge--which the circ.u.mstances and the short time I should have for preparation--the Old Bailey session would be on in a few days--permitted. The matter so far settled, Mrs. Margaret hurried off to see what had become of little Henry, the prisoner's nephew.
I visited Jane Eccles the next day in Newgate. She was a well-grown young woman of about two or three-and-twenty--not exactly pretty perhaps, but very well-looking. Her brown hair was plainly worn, without a cap, and the expression of her face was, I thought, one of sweetness and humility, contradicted in some degree by rather harsh lines about the mouth, denoting strong will and purpose. As a proof of the existence of this last characteristic, I may here mention that, when her first overweening confidence had yielded to doubt, she, although dotingly fond of her nephew, at this time about eight years of age, firmly refused to see him, ”in order,” she once said to me--and the thought brought a deadly pallor to her face--in order that, should the worst befall, her memory might not be involuntarily connected in his mind with images of dungeons, and disgrace, and shame. Jane Eccles had received what is called in the country, ”a good schooling,” and the books Mrs. Davies had lent her she had eagerly perused. She was therefore to a certain extent a cultivated person; and her speech and manners were mild, gentle, and, so to speak, religious. I generally found, when I visited her, a Bible or prayer-book in her hand. This, however, from my experience, comparatively slight though it was, did not much impress me in her favor--devotional sentiment so easily, for a brief time, a.s.sumed, being in nine such cases out of ten a hypocritical deceit. Still she, upon the whole, made a decidedly favorable impression on me, and I no longer so much wondered at the bigotry of unbelief manifested by Mrs. Davies in behalf of her apparently amiable and grateful protegee.
But beyond the moral doubt thus suggested of the prisoner's guilt, my interviews with her utterly failed to extract anything from her in rebutment of the charge upon which she was about to be arraigned. At first she persisted in a.s.serting that the prosecution was based upon manifest error; that the impounded notes, instead of being forged, were genuine Bank-of-England paper. It was some time before I succeeded in convincing her that this hope, to which she so eagerly, desperately clung, was a fallacious one. I did so at last; and either, thought I, as I marked her varying color and faltering voice, ”either you are a consummate actress, or else the victim of some frightful delusion or conspiracy.”