THE REV. HORACE SALUSBURY Cotton, Ordinary of Newgate, stumbled once or twice as he hastened over the rough ground of the Press Yard.
A turnkey, carrying a lantern, followed him respectfully. The lantern light shone on the clergyman’s black billowing gown, and the neat white bands at his neck.
The Rev. Horace Cotton was a large, rosy, robust man, with two kinds of strength in him. He was a trifle unctuous, they say, and a little inclined to be strong in his hell-fire sermons to the condemned. But this came only from zeal and earnestness; at heart he was a kindly man.
Midway across the yard he stopped, his prayer book in his hand, and looked round him.
The condemned cells were ratholes crowded round three sides of the small yard. “Press Yard” was only a name derived from an older Newgate; no one nowadays was pressed or crushed to death. After dark, as a rule, these cells were lightless. Sometimes as many as fifty persons were pushed, willy-nilly, into the few of them.
But Press Yard was strangely quiet tonight.
“Which cell,” asked the Rev. Horace, in his rich voice, “is the prisoner’s?”
“W’y sir,” answered the turnkey, pointing toward a very faint gleam inside the grill of an arched iron door, “it’s that ’un with the light in it. Dick must’a paid something ’andsome for it.”
They approached the door. The Rev. Horace cleared his throat, for better richness of exhortation. He could have sworn he heard, inside the cell, the rattle of iron fetters against a wall: as of a man in a convulsion of mortal terror. But this ceased instantly as the jailer’s keys rattled.
The Rev. Horace, having forgotten something in his haste, bent close to the turnkey and spoke in a low voice.
“Er—the prisoner’s name?” he inquired.
“Darwent, sir. Dick Darwent.”
“And his—er—offense?”
“Ain’t sure, sir. There’s so many of ’em.”
Handing the Rev. Horace his lantern, the turnkey unlocked the iron door for the clergyman to enter, locked it behind him, and waited stolidly.
And the Rev. Horace swept in, large and robust and rosy, like a sunrise over a sewer.
“My poor fellow …!” he began.
Facing him, sitting back to the wall on the pile of straw which served as a bed, was a figure whose hands were fettered to the wall with long rusty chains attached to iron cuffs. He had one leg fettered as well.
If Darwent had been washed and cleansed of lice, he would have been a middle-sized, lean, very wiry young man in his early thirties. But he had allowed himself to go to seed in detention before his trial. A dark stubble of beard marred his dirty face, and mingled with long greasy hair. His clothes were a scarecrow’s amid straw. His eyes—gray eyes, rather bloodshot but steady and compelling—regarded the clergyman with watchful friendliness.
“My poor fellow,” continued the Rev. Horace, “I have come to help you during your last hours on earth.”
“Good evening, Padre,” replied the scarecrow, in a voice of polished courtesy. “It was kind of you to visit me in my somewhat cramped lodgings.”
The Rev. Horace took a step backwards, and tightened his hand on the prayer book. His astonishment held him speechless.
At one side of the cell was a small niche of a seat, reserved for visitors. In this stood another lantern, with a tall candle burning inside. There was no other furniture except a wooden bucket, which the French politely called a chaise d’aisance, within reach of the condemned man’s chains. In the straw bed stood a bottle of brandy, only an inch or so depleted.
“And before you continue, Padre,” Darwent spoke earnestly, “may I venture a small request?”
“Of—of course,” said the clergyman.
With some effort Darwent rose to his feet, the chains rattling, and propped his back against the wall.
He was weak, since the condemned were permitted only bread and water after their sentence. He had drunk too much brandy, both before and after trial. The iron cuffs galled his wrists to festering, with ceaseless pain.
“Padre,” he said, “I would mock at no man’s religion, even the faith of those we are taught to call the heathen. Therefore,”—Darwent held up his hand to forestall objection, and pain burned him—“therefore let us discuss all books save only Holy Writ.
“By your look, Padre,” he went on, “you are good fellow. By your calling you are a man of education. Let us sit here, like two friends—I am devilish lonely!—and talk together until you’re obliged to go. I beg of you to do this!”
Here, thought his visitor, was a very bad case.
The Rev. Horace Cotton had not long occupied his post at Newgate. He had not yet seen, in the condemned cell at least, such a dirt-coated wreck of what was plainly a gentleman. His whole nature and soul became as hard as a rock.
“My poor fellow!” he repeated. Then his voice rolled out. “Do you not credit the reality of the Lord God Almighty?”
Darwent considered this. His gaze moved slowly over the damp stone ceiling.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “That’s the most fair and honest answer I can give. I don’t know.”
“Tomorrow morning,” said the Rev. Horace, “you stand in the awful presence of your Maker, who may condemn you to the torture of fire everlasting and sear you with pain beyond human knowledge. Make your peace with Him!”
The language of the time was not intended to be cruel; it was meant to uplift hearts. The Rev. Horace Cotton thundered at him.
“Have you nothing to confess? Nothing to repent of?”
Darwent’s gray eyes looked back at him as steadily as his own.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Come, then!” the clergyman said persuasively.
Putting down his lantern on the floor, the Rev. Horace took up the other lantern from the seat niche and placed it beside the first. He sat down, his black gown billowing, within three feet of Darwent.
“Come, then!” he urged. “Let me meet you on worldly grounds, if you like. You need not stand in my presence. Sit down.”
Darwent slid down the rough-stone wall, amid rusty iron and damp straw.
“You say there is nothing you repent. Very well! Is there anything you regret?”
“Yes.”
“Ah! What is it?”
While the clergyman watched him steadily, Darwent reached out for the brandy bottle, took a deep swallow, shuddered, and then held out the bottle in his manacled hand as though thoughtfully considering a toast.
“I regret,” he said, “all the books I have not yet read. All the wine I have not yet drunk. All the ladies I have not yet ….”
“Stop!” roared his companion. “Would you add mockery to your other offenses?”
“Mockery? But I spoke no word of it! You asked me for the truth, Padre, and I told you.”
The Rev. Horace, now less rosy-faced, lowered his head. In his heart he was praying.
“And that is all you have to regret?”
“No. Forgive me. I had all but forgotten the most important regret. Little Dolly.”
“You—you mentioned a name?”
Darwent put down the brandy bottle amid straw, and corked it.
“I don’t know where she is! If she were not ill, or under duress, or God knows what, she would have come to visit me! She is Dorothy Spencer, of the Drury Lane Theatre.”
“Your wife?”
“No. I had not the good sense to make her my wife.”
This condemned felon, the Ordinary guessed, was holding himself under an almost inhuman self-restraint. Despite his weakness, despite the low tone in which he spoke, his voice had a strength and vibrancy that lingered in the ear.
And then, as Darwent took another swallow of brandy, his mood changed.
“Now the deuce take it, Padre, but we’re a pair of solemn owls. Do you know what I’ve got? Sewn up somewhere in this abominable coat of mine? A bright new half-sovereign that will buy us two more bottles of brandy. Let’s make a carouse of it until morning!”
“Would you go to your Maker in that state?”
“Quite frankly, yes. I feel the Creator must have enough dignity to make up for lack of mine. —No, stop!” Darwent said suddenly, and deliberately banged his fettered wrist against the wall.
“That was bravado and bad manners,” he added quietly. “I should be kicked for saying it. And I ask your pardon.”
His gray eyes, growing more bloodshot, looked out across the two lanterns toward the iron door of that little cell. Tomorrow he would walk across the Press Yard, and through a door into a room where they would strike off his irons.
“I won’t go like a coward,” he said, “but I won’t go with the strut and bravado which is worse. Let me go quietly, without fuss.”
“Now you speak like a man!” exclaimed the Ordinary, and sympathy welled up in his heart. “Let me exhort with you to repent, so that you may perhaps find mercy and salvation. Young man! You lie here condemned of the foulest and most dreadful crime. You lie here condemned of the crime of … of … I forget precisely what?”
Sardonic eyes regarded him.
“The indictment was for murder. I am supposed to have killed Frank Orford in a duel.”
For perhaps ten seconds there was quiet. A rat scuttled in the straw; and Darwent automatically thrashed at it with his ironed leg. The Rev. Horace Cotton sat with his mouth open, his thick knees wide apart, in utter incredulity.
“A duel?” he exclaimed. “And is that all?”
“’Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door,’” quoted his companion. “But ’tis enough. ’Twill serve.’”
Thick veins were swelling in the Rev. Horace Cotton’s neck. He surged to his feet in wrath.
“God damme!” said the parson.
The scarecrow was polite enough not to laugh. But a blood-shot eye twinkled.
“And now, Padre, you speak like a man.”
“I am,” confessed the Rev. Horace. “May heaven forgive me! I am one of His most undeserving servants, with too many faults. To—to shed blood, I know, is the most grievous …” His voice trailed off. “But a duel!”
Here he tugged at the neat white bands at his neck.
“The duel,” he went on, “has for centuries been the privilege of a gentleman. That is why the House of Lords fights tooth and nail for it.”
Again the Ordinary paused, fingering his prayer book.
“By custom if not law, your crime should have meant a few months in Newgate. Perhaps a year. Even transportation if you had no friends to make interest for you. Had you none?”
“None!”
“But the gallows! I do not understand this! Who was your judge?”
“Mr. Justice Twyford, they tell me.” Now Darwent smiled. “This learned judge, in his youth, once engaged another learned gentleman with smallswords. By accident or foul thrust, he was run through … well, it is a very necessary part of our anatomy. Don’t you find entertainment in this?”
“Bravado,” the clergyman said quietly.
“True! Your pardon again.” Darwent remained satiric. “Meanwhile, Frank Orford’s family …”
“You refer, perhaps,” interrupted the Ordinary, with an odd glance, “to Lord Francis Orford?”
“That was the man. A lisping dandy who looked so closely at both sides of a penny that he could never endure to spend it. Frank Orford’s family, I say, were busy with a tune of clinking guineas for the jury.” At last Darwent burst out, with an animal snarl. “Who knows the reason of the verdict? And who cares?”
The Rev. Horace Cotton drew a deep breath.
“A while ago,” he said, “you asked that we should sit together and talk like friends. Well! Be not afraid. You have a friend.”
For a moment Richard Darwent looked at him, and then closed his eyes.
“I … thank you, Padre.” He would have said more, but he was incapable of it.
“And now,” continued the clergyman, planting himself in the seat niche, “you shall tell me the story.”
“Ah, but that’s the best part of the jest! And it was never once mentioned at the sessions house out there. —Padre, there was no duel.”
“No duel?”
“On my oath,” Darwent spoke with intensity, “I am neither drunk nor mad. Someone murdered Frank Orford, and put the blame on me. I never touched him.”
“But, man! Did you not speak—no; you may not speak—well! Did you not write a deposition of this for your trial?”
“No. I dared not.”
“For what reason?”
“I was advised (and rightly, I think) that what the truth was could not be told in a sessions court. It’s a brief tale; but it’s too full of goblins and wizardry for anyone to believe in our day. Besides, I—detain you from your duties.”
“You are my only duty. Speak!”
Richard Darwent settled back against the wall. Since brandy padded his senses against festering wrists and ankle, it seemed to him that for a little time—in imagination which almost became reality—he could be outside this rathole. The dream of green grass and trees! The dream of Dolly Spencer!
He saw again the rural immensity of Hyde Park, where cows and deer grazed under the trees by day: where there were few paths, yet all the world of fashion came to ride at five o’clock in the afternoon.
“It was nearly eight o’clock in the evening,” Darwent said drowsily, “and growing dark. To be exact, it was on the Piccadilly side of Hyde Park, and on the evening of May the fifth.
“I had gone for a long walk as far as open country. I saw nobody. The fashionables of Piccadilly would already have sat down to dinner, and wouldn’t stagger up from the table until midnight or one in the morning. On that side of the park, if you recall, there is a white-painted wooden rail like a paddock, with a broad open space so that carriages may pass through.
“Well, I walked perhaps ten yards into the park. And then I saw that damned coach.”
Darwent hesitated. The Rev. Horace, who knew that this long-haired patchbeard was half in a dream, forbore to interrupt him.
“It moved towards me along the path, out from the twilight trees in the park, like a coach from ghostland. It was no hackney coach. It was painted a rich dark blue edged in gold, with yellow wheels and, I think, someone’s crest on the panels. The horses were two fine bays.
“But the coachman, instead of resembling the wigged archbishop he usually seems, was a thin shabby man in a low-crowned hat, his scarf drawn across his face under the eyes.
“Mark you, now, I had no thought of deathliness or danger. Merely a passing wonder at so odd a driver on the box of so fine an equipage, and why anyone should drive in the park at this hour. I stood aside on the grass to let the coach pass towards Piccadilly, and continued to walk on the grass.
“And I didn’t hear the coach stop, except in a preoccupied manner. For there I strode along, whistling, my hat in my hand, under twilight becoming darkness. I was a happy man, you apprehend. A very happy man—until then.
“I did not hear the coachman approach me from behind, until he spoke through folds of the scarf. What he said was: ‘Are you ready?’
“We have mad moods in our happiness, Padre. Without thinking I cried:
“‘Ready for anything!’
“And, as I was in the act of turning round, a blow across the back of my head caught me fairly, or unfairly; and knocked me as senseless as ever Tom Cribb felled Molyneux.”
Once more Darwent ceased speaking.
“Do you find my tale,” he asked, “incredible so far?”
The Rev. Horace Cotton, his pale blue eyes wide open, hesitated, moistened his lips, and looked unhappy.
“I do not doubt you in the least,” said the Ordinary. “In fact—”
“Yes, Padre?”
“I live here amid crime and sin, with even the poor debtor rattling his cup against the door for alms.” The parson’s voice sounded despairing. “My duty? What is my duty? Yet I learn …”
“You learn?”
“Other men have seen your ghost coach. Yes; and ridden in it too.”
Something which was not quite hope, because no hope existed, struck into Darwent’s heart.
But the Ordinary quenched it by waving a big hand infront of his own face.
“Pray don’t question me. Continue!”
And Darwent shrugged his shoulders, and again he crouched like an animal above the brandy bottle.
“Well!” he said. “When I came to my senses, inside that coach, I was slung there in a seaman’s hammock. My legs and wrists were tightly tied; but with soft cords. Gently, do you see? I wasn’t gagged, but blindfolded; even my ears stopped. You may well ask how the devil I knew I was in the coach.
“But I knew it, Padre, and more which I could prove. I knew where we went.
“The coach carried me exactly nine miles into the country, to a house near Kinsmere in Bucks. It was Frank Orford’s country house; or, more precisely, it belonged to the old Earl, his father. It’s the only house of its kind within fifty miles of Kinsmere.
“Let me omit, under favor, the reasons why I knew this. The tale sickens me, I would make it short.
“Two persons, it seemed to me, lifted me out of the coach before the country house. I was carried up the front steps. They put me on my feet well inside an entrance hall, turning me gently sideways towards the right.
“Remember that I was still blindfolded and even my ears stopped up. Imagination (which proved to be correct) conjured up a door in front of me. My leg cords were cut with a knife. I was impelled forward towards an opening door; its panel brushed my right arm as it swung.
“Now how shall I describe a—a mere impression of the senses?
“It seemed that, in an instant, all things stopped as a clock stops. As though the persons with me, if there were more than one, stood paralyzed. The hand on my back, impelling me, rested motionless. I counted a dozen heartbeats. But, even through those devilish ear fastenings, I heard a woman scream.
Darwent stretched out his hand for the brandy bottle.
The Rev. Horace Cotton would not lift his gaze from the muddy floor.
“A woman, you say,” the Ordinary stated without inflection.
“I can swear it!”
“And then?”
“As though the spell had broken, I was suddenly pushed forward and I stumbled across carpet. My wrist cords, with the arms bound behind me, were swiftly cut. By the time I had dragged bandages from my head and eyes, the door was closed and locked behind me. Let me describe it, now:
“It was a fair-sized oblong room with a high ceiling, the walls papered in dark red patterned with gold. It had a fine Turkey carpet, I remember. Facing me, behind a tortoise-shell wood, writing desk in the middle of the room, sat Frank Orford. On the desk in front of him lay a black silk mask.
“Damme, I scarcely recognized the fellow! I had never known him well at Oxf … at another time in my life. It was more difficult to recognize him now.
“What kept his head and neck upright, as he sat in a tall thin chair behind the writing desk, was the height and starch of his shirt collar and white cravat … as worn by all the dandies, so that a man can’t see his own boots. Frank Orford could see nothing, though his eyes looked straight at me.
“He wore a brocade dressing gown, I recall: a fine pea-cock’s-feather color for a skinny figure. He had been run through the heart with a modern French rapier, a cup hilt, pinning him to the back of the chair and protruding in blood more than two feet behind the chair.
“Well, spiritual counselor, what would you have done in my place.
“There was Frank, with his long nose and high shirt collar, and the blood patch just ceasing to spread on his dressing gown. I think he died a moment before I entered; at least, I saw a twitch of the eyelids. High above his head was a glass castle of a chandelier, but with only two or three candles because of Frank’s miserliness. On a table stood a bowl of oranges, each looking as though it had been stabbed with a knife.
“Well, I tugged and banged and shouted at the locked door. I also cried, ‘Who are you?’ and ‘What do you want?’ and ‘Why was I brought here?’ But there was no answer.
“Two long windows at the front of the room were closely shuttered. One more window, in the side wall beyond Frank’s body, had no shutters. It was moonrise; I could see the lawn round Kinsmere House, and on the lawn a marble statue of the god Pan which, on my oath, I could identify at any time.
“And here was I, locked up in the deep dead quiet of the countryside with …
“For, mark me again, this was no duel! Nobody fights a duel sitting behind a desk, with empty hands, and a sneer of boredom even in death. And more! When our fathers ceased to wear swords, towards the end of the last century, the sword went out of fashion in England except in the style of foils for exercise. For duels, it’s the pistol now.
“But did I tell you I’m a fencing master? And keep a school near Covent Garden? And had—ay, still have!—a pair of French rapiers in my salle d’armes? Fencing is very much the fashion as exercise. If two drunken men bragged and bounced until they, fought with real swords …
“No matter! As I stood there, with Frank skewered to the chair under the thin candlelight, and a sense of stealthy life somewhere near, all I could think of was escape. That was when a voice spoke out of the air.
“I don’t know where the voice came from. There was no one except myself and Frank in the room. The voice spoke in a heavy whisper.
“And it said: ‘He must not reach the windows.’”
Richard Darwent paused.
As his voice broke off, there was a heavy knocking of fist and boot against the iron door of the condemned cell.
“Sir!” called the hoarse voice of a turnkey outside at the iron grill, and keys rattled. “Your Reverence! Dick’s got visitors!”