Читать книгу Traced and Tracked; Or, Memoirs of a City Detective - James M'Govan - Страница 11

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I had to take Jess Murray for her share in a very bold robbery, in which a commercial traveller, peaceably walking home to his hotel, had been waylaid and stripped of pocket-book, purse, and watch, the haul altogether amounting to upwards of £100 in value, the greater part of which was not his own. The gentleman could give no description of the men, but remembered that they had been assisted at a critical moment by a woman, who, so far as he could judge, was tall and handsome, and not very old. It was the style of the robbery as much as that brief and imperfect description which directed my attention to Jess Murray. She was a bold wench, strong as a lion, and so thoroughly bad that I took the trouble of hating her—an exceptional case indeed, as in general one gets to look upon her kind with as much indifference as a drover does upon a herd of horned knowte, under his care one day and gone the next.

I believed Jess to be one of the few who have not one redeeming quality or trait, and was eager for the chance which should put her out of harm’s way for a good long term of years.

I had really no evidence, but an instinctive feeling, connecting Jess with the robbery; but when on my way to her place I chanced to pass one of her acquaintances on the street. I let him pass, and then a thought struck me, and I turned back and stopped him. A scared look at once came into his face, so I asked him to come with me—back to the Office. He came reluctantly, and the cause I speedily understood when he tried to throw away behind his back a £20 bank note taken from the pocket-book of the commercial traveller. The number and description of this note was already in my possession, and I picked up the paper money with the most lively satisfaction, when the fellow immediately began to protest that he had only been sent to change the note, and was willing to tell all about the robbery if things were made right for himself.

The result of this chance capture was that we had abundant evidence against Jess and another, and I went for her with the greatest of pleasure. She was in the “kitchen” of the place among a crowd of her kind when I entered, and it needed only a motion of my finger and a nod of my head to chase the merriment from her face, and bring her slowly across the floor to my side. It is not usual for me to be communicative, but on the present occasion I was elated, and said in reply to her sullen inquiry—

“It’s that affair of the commercial traveller. It’s all blown, and you are in for five years at least. Jim White is in the office already, and the £20 bank note with him.”

Jess seemed struck in a heap with the news. She flashed deadly pale and sank feebly into a chair, with her bold, bright eyes becoming shiny with tears.

“Where’s Dickie?” she faintly articulated to some of the silent onlookers, and, fearing treachery, I snatched out a double brass whistle which can be heard a whole street off, and swiftly raised it to my lips.

“Stop! you needn’t,” Jess quickly interposed, understanding the motion. “Dickie’s only my laddie. Oh, what will become of him when I’m away?”

Dickie was said to be playing down on the street, so I told her we might see him as we left. Jess began to cry bitterly—Jess! whom I believed to have not one genuine tear in her! and thus we descended the stairs together. In the street a ragged and unkempt boy of seven or eight was brought to her side, and she clutched him to her breast, kissing his smudged face with a passionate fervour which gave me quite a fresh insight into her character. The boy resembled her in features, and would have passed for good-looking had he only been washed and dressed up a little.

“What’s to ’come o’ my bairn?—oh, what’s to ’come o’ my bairn?” wailed Jess, and the boy began to howl in concert, and I saw that it would be useless to try to separate them just then.

“Oh, he’ll be looked after as he has often been before,” I carelessly answered. “He’ll go to the Poorhouse. He’ll be safer there than under your care—and cleaner.”

The remark did not appear to console Jess in the least. Dickie was her only child, and the whole strength of her nature seemed concentrated in her love of that boy. I was astonished, and speculated on the matter all the way to the office, quietly wondering what “line of business” that same gutter child was destined to torment me and others by adopting, when he should be a few years older.

I had made a pretty shrewd guess at Jess’s sentence, for the list of previous convictions was so strong against her that she was awarded exactly the number of years I had named. I was convinced by that time that she did not grieve over the punishment at all, but over her separation from her child, and I remember thinking—“We are poor judges of one another. What a strong hold could be taken of that woman through that child, if one only knew how to use the power.”

Dickie was allowed to see his mother once before she was sent to the Penitentiary, and then he went back to the Poorhouse. He was a good deal cleaner by that time, and had on different clothing, but there was one plaything, or fetish, with which he had resolutely refused to part, and that still hung from his neck. It was a broken cairngorm stone, with a hole drilled at one end, through which a bit of twine had been drawn, that he might suspend the trinket from his neck. I had noticed the stone when I took him to the office with his mother, but merely glanced at it, thinking that it was but an imitation moulded in yellow glass. I was mistaken, for it was part of a real stone, and had probably been set in some stolen brooch which had been broken up for the metal.

It was of no great value, but it pleased Dickie, and kept him from wearying during his long confinement in the Poorhouse, which to him was as irksome as being shut up in a prison. He was a lively, spirited boy, and had never been checked or curbed, so it may be imagined he got into as many scrapes as the average boy of his age.

However, in spite of his mischief and wild pranks, Dickie had a soft spot in his heart, and could be tamed by a gentle word or appeal when lashing had been tried in vain. When he had been about eighteen months in the Poorhouse, a poor knife-grinder was admitted for a day or two, who told Dickie such grand romances of his free life on the road that the boy took an insatiable longing for freedom. Squinting Jerry was the man’s name, but though he had an evil look, he was really an honest fellow.

Jerry had been driven to the Poorhouse for a night’s shelter, and while there had been laid up for a day or two with a bad leg which troubled him at times, but as soon as he was able to move he hastened to quit the oppressive confinement. Before he had done so, Dickie, by a series of pathetic appeals, had extracted from him a consent to receiving him as an apprentice.

Jerry was really not reluctant to having an assistant, whom he needed sorely at times, but he was afraid that the arrangement might get him into trouble with the parochial authorities, should he be followed and Dickie taken back. Then there were Dickie’s antecedents to be considered—he was the son of a convict, and might have the “bad blood” in him, as Jerry expressed it. The old knife-grinder therefore agreed to the proposal with reluctance, as we often do with what turns out a great blessing. Dickie had no difficulty in fulfilling his part of the agreement, for he had already run away twice, and each time gone back of his own accord.

He therefore got out of the Poorhouse easily, and joined Jerry a mile or two out of the city. He took with him his only treasure, the broken cairngorm, which some one had declared to him was a diamond, and worth a great deal of money. This opinion was not shared by Jerry, who failed to find a purchaser for the stone, and finally relegated it to a little box in the grinding machine, which they trundled before them wherever they went. Perhaps the parochial authorities were glad to get rid of Dickie, for he was not followed or taken back. The new life suited him—it was free and untrammelled; it had constant variety, and there was a certain spice of romance about it, which made sleeping in the open air, or getting drenched with rain, or lost and benighted, as they often were, mere trifles, to be forgotten with the first blaze of sunshine. Compared with his life in the Poorhouse Dickie found it heavenly, and very soon a new and altogether unexpected result began to arise from his changed condition.

When Dickie had taken to the road it was sheer impatience of restraint that sent him thither, and he had many ideas of right and wrong which are tolerated only among my “bairns.” Now Jerry was an ignorant man, who did not know one letter from another, but there was one lesson he had learned—that a life of crime is the worst paying trade in the world. Halting by roadside hamlets, resting under shady hedges, or wandering along green lanes, Jerry laid down his ideas to Dickie in a homely fashion, which would have thrown a teacher of grammar into hysterics, but which nevertheless carried conviction to the heart of the boy. Not that Dickie had ever meant to wrong Jerry, but he had only taken to this life as a make-shift till his mother should be released from prison.

When questioned as to his intentions for the future, and especially after rejoining his mother, he coolly said that he supposed he should take to her trade. It was this callous idea that Jerry set himself to undermine, and admirably the old man succeeded, thus affixing a brighter gem to his brow for all eternity than if he had gone as a missionary to the heathen and converted a whole troop of savages. Dickie first listened in respectful patience to the new doctrines of honesty and hard work, then began to imbibe them and manfully adopt them himself, and finally became as firm and resolute in their dissemination as Jerry himself. Out of this sprang a strange act. Dickie had once written to his mother describing his new life, and promising to rejoin her on her liberation; he now wrote a final letter, asserting his intention of separating himself for ever from her and her influence, and declaring his intention of growing up “on the square.” Jess was nearly insane over the news—not that she cared whether he grew up honest or a thief—but that he should think of separating his life entirely from her own. Three months elapsed before she was able to reply to his letter, and by that time Dickie was hundreds of miles away, leaving no address, and the letter was returned to the Penitentiary, marked “Not Found.” Jerry was an Irishman, and though he always earned less money in his own country than in Scotland or England, he inclined more to wander at that side of the Channel, where, if the people could give nothing else, they were always ready with a kindly greeting or a sympathetic answer, and, of course, Dickie accompanied him, and gradually acquired such a strong smack of the Irish brogue that he would have passed for one of themselves.

When the queer partnership had first been formed, Dickie did little but go round the houses at which they paused and ask for knives or scissors to grind, but gradually, as he grew stronger and mastered the intricacies of the grinding as taught by old Jerry, the position of the partners became inverted, Dickie taking the heavy part of the work and Jerry the light. A strong affection had sprung up between them, and Dickie never thought he could do too much for the feeble old man, whose bad leg at times held them in a poor locality till they were literally starved out of it. During these detentions, Dickie, not at all dismayed, sturdily faced the road alone, sometimes making a round of thirty miles in a day, and faithfully returning with the grinding machine and his earnings at night. In this way he had “eaten the district bare,” as he said, while Jerry’s leg showed no sign of mending or allowing him to move.

“Ye’ll have to take another county, Dickie, darlint,” he said, after they had discussed the matter, and found some action imperative. “I’m not afeard of ye running away an’ forgetting your poor owld grandfather. I’ve teached ye better nor that, more by token they can never expect to prosper that wrongs the helpless or the suffering.”

“May I drop dead the minute such a thought enters my head!” said Dickie with energy. “Rest where you are, Jerry dear—and get well and take all the comfort ye can, for sure ye’ve been a blessed friend to me, and made a man of me when I’d have turned out nothing but a jail bird and a vagabone.”

The “man,” as he termed himself, was then just twelve years of age, but his sentiments, as the reader will admit, were worthy of twice that number of years.

Thus it was that Dickie came to face the world as an independent traveller. He moved over a great part of Ireland in this way, always sending the net gains regularly to old Jerry, and, on the whole, doing nearly as well as before the separation. He almost invariably met with kindness and sympathy, but once he was attacked and robbed of three days’ earnings. But in taking the money the wretches took also Dickie’s carefully cherished talisman, the broken cairngorm, and by that they were identified and convicted, while the trinket was returned to Dickie, who cherished it and guarded it, with greater faith than ever in its power. He would not have parted with that senseless bit of stone for a twenty-pound note, for it was the only link which connected the present with the past, and he never looked at it, as he was wont to declare, without remembering what he might have been but for old Jerry.

“Faith, I believe if I were to lose that stone my good luck would go with it,” he repeatedly asserted, from which it will be seen that there was mixed up with Dickie’s well-doing a spice of superstition, which, however, is not a bad thing, when it keeps in the straight path feet inclined to wander.

On one of the rare occasions when Dickie was able to get back as far as Belfast to see Jerry, he found the old grinder unusually weak and worn. Hitherto Jerry had doctored his leg himself, but now it had assumed such a strange appearance that he was glad to have Dickie by his side to advise him. It had begun to grow black, and, what was more strange, the pain had all gone out of it. Dickie had been doing pretty well on his travels, so he promptly decided that they should call in a doctor.

When that gentleman came he looked at the leg, and then at the emaciated face of the old man, and then said compassionately—

“Why did you send for me?”

“To mend me leg, plase God,” said Jerry.

The doctor quietly covered up the limb and shook his head.

“Ye’ve more need of a praist, good man,” he said, shortly, but not unkindly. “No doctor alive will ever make you well.”

Dickie felt his heart suddenly grow cold and empty within him; then a revulsion came and he burst into tears. Jerry alone was calm, and even radiant.

“I’ve been expecting the message,” he quietly returned. “Plase the Lord, I’m ready to die. Dickie, avourneen, don’t sob the heart out ov ye like that. Sure, it’s rejoicing ye ought to be that I’m getting rid of all my troubles and pains at wanst; and, blessed be God, it’s aisy dyin’ when love smooths the pillow. Ye’ve been a true son to me, and my own heart’s blood couldn’t have been affectionater. Pay the gintleman for his trouble, Dickie, aroon, and then run for a praist, for I feel the blackness creeping up on me, and when it covers my heart I’ll be in heaven. The Lord is always good; He’s kept me alive till you got back, Dickie, to take my hand an’ help me over the dark stile.”

The doctor would accept of no fee, and Dickie ran off and got a priest, who came and went, leaving Jerry happy and peaceful, with one arm round Dickie’s neck and the other clasping his hand. He had a great deal to tell his young partner, but the most important of all was a strong injunction that he should continue honest and industrious.

“There’s some money in the owld snuff-box under my head,” he continued. “I’ve tuck care of it for ye, for ye’ve earned the most of it, and deserved it all. You’ll get all that, and give me a dacent funeral, and keep the rest. It’ll maybe start ye in a better way of doing some day, but if the other way isn’t the straight way, ye’d better pitch the money into the salt say and go on as ye are.”

The next morning the blackness crept up on Jerry’s tender heart, and Dickie, still clasping the old man’s hand and wetting it with his tears, helped him over the dark stile, and stood alone in the world.

The courage had nearly gone out of Dickie under this blow, but youth is buoyant, hopeful, and active. After laying the head of Jerry in the grave, and paying every one, Dickie found that he had nearly £20 left, all in gold sovereigns, for Jerry had imbibed the national distrust of bank notes. Dickie left the money in safe keeping, and started once more with his grinding machine. It was only when going over his old rounds that he discovered how much Jerry had been beloved and respected—truly another testimony that “honour and shame from no condition rise.” Every one had a good word for his memory, and many a tear was shed as Dickie described his peaceful and courageous end. After another year of this wandering in Ireland, Dickie crossed to Liverpool, and spent a year in England, at the end of which time he sold his grinding machine, and became a hawker of cheap jewellery.

He was now a smart-tongued lad of fifteen, nicely dressed, with a good stock, all bought with Jerry’s careful savings, and found the new line much more congenial, and quite as profitable as the old. Much of the Irish accent dropped from his tongue, and at length it would have puzzled even an expert to decide his nationality by his speech. As he increased in experience and accumulated capital, he was enabled to deal in a finer class of jewellery, which he carried about in a mahogany box having several lifting trays and compartments, and having on the side a stout leather handle, and on the top a brass plate bearing the words—

“RICHARD MURRAY, Licensed Hawker.”

Till he was seventeen he never thought of coming near Scotland, and had long since forgotten his mother’s features, and given up any idea of seeking her out, or joining his fortunes with her own; but some one then fired his mind with a glowing account of what could be done in his line in some of the towns, and Dickie crossed the Border and worked his way to Glasgow, in which city he succeeded well. Saturday afternoon and night were his best times for business, as then the working folks were all free and plentiful of money.

After one of these successful days he had wandered into a big, flashy public-house, close to one of the theatres, for a last effort before going home to his humble lodging. The place was crowded, bar and boxes, for the theatre had just disgorged its contents, and it was near closing time. Dickie sold some of his wares, and then found himself in one of the boxes offering a silver brooch, set with imitation diamonds, to a company of three there seated—two men and a big muscular woman, with some traces of beauty still about her face.

The woman fancied the brooch, and appeared resolved on buying it, but among them they could not muster the price of the trinket, and as Dickie would not abate to their price, the brooch was reluctantly handed back and shut up in his box. The moment he had gone a significant look ran round the three.

“It would be easily done, and he’s quite a boy,” said Jess Murray eagerly. “He won’t give it for a fair price; if you’ve any spirit at all, you’ll take the boxful.”

One of the men, Bob Lynch by name, was indifferent whether they adopted the suggestion or not, and rose carelessly to follow the lad; the other, known as “Jockey” Savage, thought that the boy, as Jess called him, was not such a stripling, and might give them more trouble than they bargained for. They all agreed, however, that it was worth while following him, and, if a suitable spot were found, making the attempt. They left the public house and separated, one man going on either side of the street, and Jess following some distance behind, to assist in any emergency. Dickie’s lodging was in a narrow close off the Gallowgate, and they had to follow him thus far before any opportunity occurred for attacking him, as, though he did no business on the way, he kept persistently to the main thoroughfare, thronged with passengers. The moment he entered the close the men exchanged signals and dived in after him. Dickie had scarcely walked twenty yards when a garrotting arm was thrown round his neck, and a snatch made at the box in his hand. But Dickie had not knocked about the world so long without learning something. He held on to the leather strap of his box with all his strength, and at the same time delivered a backward kick at Jockey Savage’s shin bone, which made him slacken his grip, and squirm and howl with agony. As the intended victim made a great outcry at the same moment Bob Lynch made a desperate effort to bring out a leaden-headed life-preserver, but then Dickie, divining what the motion meant, grasped at the villain’s arm with his disengaged hand while he tried to pin the other to Lynch’s side with his teeth. Just then there was a swift rush to the spot, and Jess Murray, snatching the “neddy” from Lynch’s pocket, brought it down with a crashing swing on the fair brow of the lad. Dickie dropped like a log, and Jess caught the box as it fell from his hand, tossing the neddy back to its owner, and saying—

“You bunglers would take all night to it. Now bolt! I’ll take care of the swag.”

They vanished from the spot like magic, and by different routes gained a den further east, known to them all, and peculiarly handy in their present condition, as it was kept by a man who would reset anything—the Great Eastern, even, if anyone chose to steal it. Jess was the last to arrive, with the box hidden under her shawl, and she tossed it down on the table with much pride and satisfaction.

“You hit him twice, Jess,” observed Lynch, who was a bit of a coward, and was now very pale and concerned. “I hope to goodness you haven’t croaked him.”

“His own fault if I have,” coolly answered Jess. “Turn out the box and see what we’ve got, and then into the fire with it before the spots come.”

The order was speedily obeyed. The stock was of greater value than they had anticipated, but in addition, in the bottom compartment of the box, they found five or six pounds in money, and a bank-book representing a good deal more.

“What a pity! what a pity!” cried Jockey reflectively; “banks are a nuisance—if the money had only been here instead of the book!”

“What’s that in the tissue paper?” said Jess eagerly—“a pile of sovereigns, very like. Turn them out—the greedy beggar was as rich as a Jew.”

Jockey obeyed, and gave a whistle of disappointment. All that the tissue paper contained was a broken cairngorm stone, with a bit of dirty twine drawn through a hole at one end.

“There’s your pile of gold,” he said, tossing Dickie’s talisman over to Jess. “I hope you like it.”

Jess lifted the trinket and stared at it with her face slowly becoming ghastly, and her heart freezing within her.

“I’ve seen that before!” she slowly whispered, as the men stared at her in awe-stricken wonder and silence. “It was his when he was taken from me. Perhaps it is a mistake—perhaps I have not killed my own bairn. Read! read! you that can read—read what is on that brass plate on the lid of the box.”

Jockey glanced at the plate, and sprang to his feet in horror.

“God alive! it’s there,” was all he could articulate.

“What? what? tell me what?” moaned Jess, beginning to clutch at her breast with her hands, and to writhe about like one grown mad.

“RICHARD MURRAY, Licensed Hawker.”

was the awe-stricken response, and only the half of it was heard. Shriek upon shriek went pealing through that rookery. Nothing could check her outcry; she screamed at every one; tore at them like a tiger; denounced them with every gasp and mad exclamation, and finally drew to the spot the police by struggling to throw her two accomplices out at the window. They were all marched off to the Central—with the reset as a make-weight, and Jess was there put in a padded cell and watched the long night through, or she would never have seen the light of another day. The first thing that helped to soothe her was the news that Dickie was not killed, and though there was concussion of the brain, he was likely to recover. When he did recover he was allowed to visit her in prison, and put his arms through the bars and clasp her close and hear her say that she was done for ever with a life of crime.

Jess and her companions were tried shortly after, when she, on account of the peculiar circumstances of the case, and the tearful appeal to the jury by the chief witness—Dickie—got the mild sentence of two years’ imprisonment. Jockey and Lynch got ten each, as by a fiction of the law Jess was supposed to have acted under their influence.

When Jess was released, Dickie waited for her, and they vanished together.