The Rogue's March a romance

Front matter

BY THE SAME AUTHOR. A BRIDE FROM THE BUSH. UNDER TWO SKIES. TINY LUTTRELL. THE BOSS OF TAROOMBA. THE UNBIDDEN GUEST. A ROMANCE BY E. W. HORNUNG "As for the chain-gangs, you oft-times hear them jingling half-a milo away, and 'tis nigh all the music we get, a kind of Rogue's March, to remind us where we are, and why we came." — EXTEAOT FEOM CONVICT'S LETTER. CASSELL and COMPANY Limited LONDON, PARIS % MELBOURNE 1896 ALL RIOIITS RESERVED Price 3s. 6d. Tiny Luttrell. By E. W. HORNUNG. " 'Tiny Luttrell ' has a young Australian lady for its heroine — a charming incorporation of con tradictions and inconsistencies— and is in every respect worthy of its precursors." —Daily Telegraph. "It is a long time since we have read a novel so enthralling in interest and so sprightly in movement " — Weekly Sun. CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited, London; Paris & Melbourne. TLO RICHARD DOWLING.

Preface

. A few friends, whu were kind enough to follow " The Rogue's March " from week to week in its serial course, would have me add foot-notes on the ground that this story, though by no means founded upon facts, is nevertheless largely built up of them. I have, however, my own prejudice against foot notes to fiction — and I understand that Notes at the end are never read. I may therefore state at the outset that the Newgate scenes are as near the truth as I have been able to make them, with the aid of sundry Parliamentary papers, supplemented by the very kindly assistance of (I believe) the first living authority on the subject. And a certain " broadsheet " is still in existence as described and quoted, with its vile verses, and its illiterate but circumstantial account of the execution of a man who was not executed.

As to the Transportation details, they have been gleaned partly from the Blue-book published in 1837, partly from the New South Wales Calendar and the Sydney newspapers of those days, and partly from an admirable work by Mr. Charles White, of Bathurst, N.S.W. To this gentleman's " Convict Life " (which should be published in the old country too) I owe the experiences of the First Fleeter, with other items which I think must bear the stamp of flagrant fact. E. W. H September, 1890. CONTENTS. fart I.— THE OLD COUNTRY.

Chapter I

" SUDDEN DEATH." In the year 1837, and on a warm, moist April morning, there knocked at a modest lodging-house in Rolls Buildings, Fetter Lane, a recent lodger who could no longer afford even the attic's trifling rent. So now he made his bed in the parks of the metropolis, or in the damp green fields outside. And for all he pro fessed to care, the damp was welcome to kill him, if only it would kill outright. The man was very fair and spare, but of a medium height. His hands and feet were notably small, the wrists and arms a little deceptive. These looked lean, but were made of muscle, and quickened with hot, keen blood. He was very young ; but though, as a fact, not five-and-twenty, the thin, sardonic, reckless face looked half as old again. An abiding bitterness had curled the full nostrils, deepening the lines thence to the sensitive red lips, and drawing the latter too B habitually apart upon set teeth or a sneer.

Nor was the bitterness of the kind sown in proud hearts by capricious circumstance and crushing but not dis honourable defeat. It was rather the Dead Sea fruit of wilful riot and a contemptuous, impenitent remorse. And yet in the full brown eye and lifted chin, as in the ill-clad, well-carried figure, there was a lingering something that was gallant and fine and debonair ; as if the makings of angel or of devil still lurked beneath that crumpled kerseymere waistcoat and those faded blue swallow-tails. To this lost youth the door in Rolls Buildings was opened by a grey-haired woman, who nodded know ingly in response to an inquiry for letters, and handed one over with an invitation to enter and read it within. But the kindly words fell on inattentive ears. Looking fondly and yet fearfully at the superscription — "To Thomas Erichsen, Esquire," and the rest — the needy owner of that name suddenly pocketed his letter with unbroken seals.

He was turning as abruptly away when the blank face of his former landlady led him to pause a moment. " No ; bless you, no ! It's not from him," said Erichsen, grimly. " This is from a friend I met yesterday, who would insist on having my address. What was I to do ? I thought you wouldn't mind, so I gave my last." " Mind ! It is your address, and might be 3'our 'ome if you wasn't that 'igh and 'aughty. Dear, dear, dear ! So you've not heard from that villain yet?" " Not a line." " Nor of him ? " " Not a word. Give me time. If I don't root him "SUDDEN DEATH." 3 out by this day month — well, then he's fled the country — like a sensible man." " But what if you do ? " demanded the landlady, who was herself directly interested in the event. " What if I do, Mrs. Adcock ? Well, I shall pro bably half murder him, to begin with; he has wholly runted me.

Yes, it will be my money — and your money— or his life ! He knows it, too, if he's got my letters. Feel the weight of that ! " And he put in her hands a heavy ash stick, green and sinewy, with the nob still creamy from the knife. " Lord save us ! " cried the woman. " Is this the rod in pickle for him ? " " That's the rod in pickle. Nice and heavy, isn't it?" " Too 'eavy, Mr. Erichsen. Too 'eavy by 'alf. I'd show no mercy to thieves and swindlers, but I should be very careful what I did with that. I wouldn't take the law into my own hands, if I were you." " You wouldn't ? " cried he. " Not if you'd been cleaned out as I have, by as blackguardly a dodge ? By the Lord that made him, I'd break every bone in his infernal body ; and will, too, if I find him and he won't pay up. I'll pay him ! I grant you it was my own cursed fault in the beginning; but what about that last thirty pounds ?

Who got that ? Why am I rotting and starving here ? Who threw me on the mercy of kind good folks like you — yes, and made a sponge of me in my turn ? Whose doing is it that I've got to pawn the clothes off my back, or beg my meals ; to tramp the streets all day, to lie all night in the fields " b " Your own ! " exclaimed the woman, coming hastily down from the step upon which she had been standing all this time. " It's your own fault, is that, however. You know well it isn't mine. Our attic has been empty ever since you went ; you're welcome to it until it's wanted again, if only you'll come back. Nay, sir, I do assure you, I'd rather have you for nothing than most of them that pays. Come back to-night, or I'm sure I sha'n't sleep a wink for thinking of you ; come in now, and I'll get you some nice 'ot breakfast.

You look as if you hadn't 'ad any yet, I'm sure you do. So in you come ! " Erichsen held out his hand. " No, no," said he. " I owe you quite enough already, Mrs. Adcock ; besides, I'm as strong as a horse, and doing much better than you think. But the world is full of kindness, after all ; and God bless you for yours ! " And his dark eyes, that but now had flashed and burnt with bitter fires — that were the more striking always for a shock of almost flaxen hair — stood full of tears. He could say no more, but only wring the dry, chapped hand in his. Then he was gone ; and might have been seen, a little later, hurrying with bent head towards Temple Bar ; or, later yet, spread at full length in that green asylum of his homeless days, the south west corner of St. James's Park. And here he read the letter from his friend.

It began on one side of the large white paper, and ended on the next. The girlish handwriting was piti fully tremulous, but yet instinct with a self-reliance then uncommon in young English ladies. The letter ran : — " SUDDEN DEATH." 5 •'Avenue Lodge, " Regent's Park, "April 26th. " Darling, — What docs it mean P I was picturing you in Calcutta wlien I saw you this afternoon in Piccadilly ! I had been thinking about you just then — I always am — and there you were ! Oh, my darling, what can it mean ? Tell me quickly, or I shall go mad with anxiety, as I nearly did on the spot this afternoon. Come here, os you love me, and tell me all I " Darling, what can it be that has kept you here, and so silent all this time; or did you go out and come straight back ? No, there has not bsen time. The Jumna sailed on the last day of September, and I have prayed for her safety all these months.

I was so sure my love was on board ! '• Oh, if only I dire have stopped to speak to you a few more seconds. The groom was so close behind. But, Tom, you seemed not to want lo give me your address ? I would not have left you without it ; and now I shall come to you there unless you come to me. You looked so sad and ill, my sweetheart ! I can see his poor faco still! " Come and tell me all, and let me help you, or my heart will break. You are in trouhle. I know it, and must help you — it is my right. We are in tho new Avenue Road ; you will easily find it. Tho house is far the largest on the right-hand side as you come from town. There are fields behind, and our garden goes the farthest back ; that is, we have a field of our own walled in with it, and there is a green gate in the wall. It is kept locked, but I will be there at nine o'clock to-morrow (Thursday) night, and so must you.

Be there for my sake, aud tell me all. " I have written the moment I got in. I will post it myself. Dear Tom, do not be hard on this girl if you think her over bold ; for she loves you ! she loves you ! and would give her life to make yours happy. Your own true " Claire. " Twenty-eight mortal hours to wait. I shall hear my heart beating — as I hear it now — as I have heard it ever since I saw that sad, sad face — until I see it again ! " When Thomas Erichsen came to the end of this passionate, pure love-letter, he buried his face in the sweet spring grass, and lay immovable with a grief too great for tears. The sounds of London (louder then than now) boomed and rattled in his ears ; the racket of unmuffled wheels upon street beyond street of cobbles; a coachman's horn in Whitehall; a roll of drums from the barracks across Birdcage Walk ; elsewhere a hurdy-gurdy ; near at hand an altercation between two other hiveless drones; and in the middle distance an errand-boy whistling "All Round My Hat."

Such were the sounds heard that April morning by Tom Erichsen's outward ears ; to those of his soul, a brave soft voice was whispering the last God-speed, while his own, the more broken of the two, was vowing not only eternal constancy, but eternal goodness and an honest life for her sake. He could see the steady grey eyes filled with tears that never fell, and shining into his with the love that knew no shame ; he must never look in them again, nor ever more defile with his the brave lips that had trembled, truly, but yet spoken comfortable words up to the end. And here he lay, in culpable poverty and dishonourable rags ; fallen already to an ultimate deep. So now, too late, as through the gates of hell, must come this message of angelic love ! He read it again, tore off the clean half-sheet, and, sitting cross-legged, wrote as follows in pencil upon his knee : — " It means that 1 am a blackguard, and no longer worthy to be even your friend.

" The Jumna was ten days behind her advertised time of sailing, and I was miserable. You might have pitied me then ■ "SUDDEN DEATH." 7 I neither ask nor deseiwe any pity now. I had vile thoughts. Even if I made my fortune, your father would hate my father's son for ever — and I him — so it could never be. You would marry in due course. How could you help yoursolf ? Those were my thoughts. And then I made a friend ! " He showed me the town. He helped me to forget. He won most of my money, and took the rest by fraud. I never even booked my passage. And now I only live to spill the fellow's blood. " But that's all he did. He didn't disgrace me. I disgraced myself, and broke all my promises to the noble girl of whom I never was worthy ; and must therefore see her no more. It would be no good. Why should I insult you too ?

I have done so enough in coming to this. Simply forget me, for I am not worth your scorn. Forget me utterly. I am too ashamed to sign my name." This he folded up, addressed with his pencil, and sealed (in a fashion) with the wafers which had been used already : her lips had touched them before his ! Then he sat where he was, and noted the other moral corpses stretched upon that daily battle-field, and wondered if any of them had wrecked their lives as wilfully as he his. And then he thought of his father's white hairs, and thanked God they had won to the "rave without this to bring them there. Then he lay down again, and wrestled with hunger and anguish alternately and both together. It was evening when he left the park, heavy-laden with a fact remembered on the way. He lacked the price of a two-penny stamp !

Not a farthing had he left, nor a thing to pawn, save his long silk purse so ignobly emptied, and that had been his father's before him. It should not go, even for this ; yet the letter must ; then how ? He sat down again on a bench ; for he was weak for want of food ; and in his weakness came a temptation, that was indeed more like an inspiration, so luminous was its flash. He might take his letter and leave it himself in the key-hole of the garden-gate. Why not ? Then she would get it at once — that evening. Why not ? He had already given the reasons in the letter itself. And see her he would— he must is once he got as far as that garden gate. So the reasons in the letter held very good indeed ; and how weak to be himself the first to fly in their face ! But then weakness was his present portion, whereas the temptation grew stronger and stronger: only to see her face once more : only to hear her voice, although it lashed him with the reproaches he so richly deserved !

Yet he did not give in without a kind of struggle. He had become a gambler, and a gambler's compromise occurred to him now. This was when the yellow London sun was setting, a little after seven o'clock ; about twenty minutes past, several of the better-favoured pedestrians in Pall Mall were accosted by a timid ragamuffin with a ghastly face, who begged the loan of a penny, and was rightly treated to deaf ears. But at length a dapper youDg man, in a long bottle-green coat, wheeled round with an oath and a tAvinkling eye. " Lend you one ' " cried he. " I like that ! What d'ye mean by it, eh ? " " What I say. I ask the loan of the smallest coin you've got — and your pardon for the liberty." " Pray when shall I see it again ? " " In half a minute." " Half a what ? Well, you're a rum 'un, you are ; here's your brown."

" SUDDEN DEATH." 9 " Thank you," said Erichsen, and balanced it on his right thumbnail. " Now you stand by and see fair play. Heads I go, and tails I don't ; sudden death ; let it fall clear ! " His beggar's manners (such as these were) had been forgotten on the instant. The coin rang upon the paving-stone with his words. " Heads it is ! " cried the owner, on his haunches, with his fine long coat in the dust. " Then I'm unspeakably obliged to you," replied the fervent beggar, returning the penny. " I wish you good-night, sir, with a thousand thanks ! " "No, no; hang it ah! I'm a sportsman myself; you're a man of my kidney, and you hadn't even a brown to toss with ! Oblige me by taking this yellow boy; no, curse it, I beg your pardon — I might have seen ! At least, sir, you will join me at a tavern, to show there's no ill-feeling ?

A cut off the joint, I think, and a tankard of stout ; what say you ? I feel peckish myself. Come, come, or you'll offend me ! " But the eyes which his miseries had left dry were dim again at the kindness of the world ; and Tom Erichsen had not spoken because he could not. " May I live to repay this ! " he muttered now. " It will be my first bite since yesterday/'' And in another hour it was a new man who was pushing forward, with such brisk steps, upon the high road to Avenue Lodge and his appointed fate. Moreover, the currents of other lives than his had been deflected, for good or evil, by the spin of that borrowed coin.

Chapter II. The Other Lives

The household at Avenue Lodge consisted at this period of Nicholas Harding, M. P., J. P. (also of Fish Street Hill, E.C., and Winwood Hall, Suffolk); his five daughters; his men-servants and maid-servants, and a certain stranger within his gates. Nicholas Harding was fifty years of age, and a widower for the second time. He was a big, blonde, jovial, loud, overbearing man, without a grey hair in his massive, reddish head, or a sign of sorrow upon his healthy, pink, domineering face. Yet private bereavement was not the only misfortune that had fallen to a lot otherwise enviable enough : since the last General Election, a little charge of flagrant bribery had found its way even to an assize court, where it had indeed broken down, but not in a fashion wholly satisfactory to the accused. An important witness had refused to open his mouth, as some said because he was well paid by Mr. Harding to keep it shut and endure the penalty; in any event, the charge was not permitted to be with drawn, but the action merely dismissed, to allow of a new trial of which nothing had been heard up to the present time.

But a naked sword thus dangled over Nicholas Harding's ruddy, hard head, whose true temper the situation served to prove. So far from resigning his seat, he returned to the House with a shrug and a half-smile ; and in the whole matter continued to bear himself with such modest gallantry as to remove the prejudices of many who had at first sided with the enemy. Among his own Suffolk constituents the popular sympathy had been his from the beginning; and in London itself the feeling gained ground that a judgment which neither convicted nor exonerated was a judgment to be repudiated by all fair-minded persons. Ex - Ministers said or wrote as much to Mr. Harding (who belonged to the fashionable Opposition) in as manj' words. Cockaded coachmen were once more directed to drive to his house. In vitations were received which were worth receiving ; and thus encouraged, Mr. Harding sent out invitations in return.

He had deemed it inexpedient to enter tain much of late ; and even now it was a very judicious selection of his friends that was bidden to quite a small dinner-party on the last Wednesday in April ; while his sister, Lady Starkie, was called up from Bath to play hostess for the occasion. " On any other," wrote her brother, " Claire would do very well. But the enemy may blaspheme the less if you are here. I want you to see Claire. She is greatly improved since you were with us last." " It is the enemy that hath done this thing," replied Lady Starkie ; " those wicked Radicals, how I should like to transport the whole crew ! Of course I will come. Why isn't Claire married ? She must be getting on in years." She was not yet twenty-one. The only child of his first wife, Claire had never occupied the place of the younger ones in her father's affections; had been consistently repressed in childhood ; but had since contrived to please that critic by her clever manage ment of an enlarged establishment.

Indeed, the girl had come home from school very capable and shrewd and self-possessed, with an admirable drawing-room manner, and even better qualities of which Mr. Hard ing would have thought less ; so they were carefully hidden from his view ; for Claire had also her faults, and was both secretive and politic in the home circle, as a result of that early repression and injustice. Given that cause and this effect, and some clandestine folly may be counted upon in nine cases out of ten, and Claire's was not the tenth. It came about at Winwood Hall, the Suffolk shooting-box where the family had spent the three last autumns. Nicholas Harding had begun there in characteristic fashion by quarrelling with the gentle, white-haired parson (who would yet be neither domineered nor overborne by an interloping Lon doner), and by forbidding his daughters the church, glebe, rectory, or any communication with its inmates from that day forth.

A week or two later he came full upon Claire and the rector's idle son comparing notes in the lane ; and a pretty scene ensued. Mr. Harding shook his stick at the lad, who snatched it from him and snapped it across his knee. Claire was imprisoned under lock and key for four-and-twenty hours, and young Erichsen shinned up the waterspout and sat on her window-sill while the rest were at dinner. But this and succeeding incidents never came to the ears of Nicholas Harding. And partly in revenge for the indignity to which she had been sub jected, and partly by reason of those adventitious traits already touched upon, the motherless and then all but friendless Claire disobeyed and intrigued thenceforward without a qualm. The callow pair had enough in common : the girl had suffered from a step-mother, the lad was suffering from one then.

In his old age Mr. Erichsen had married a managing woman thirty years his junior ; and the blackness by her embedded in Tom Erichsen's heart had known no relief till Claire Harding lit up his life. Claire understood ; she sympathised, she soothed, she softened. And though so stealthily employed, her influence was all for good. Tom put his soul in her keeping, and made a great effort to run straight at College for her sake; but was nevertheless rusticated in the spring; and was absent, penitently reading, all the autumn following, when they never met. A year later the rector was in his own churchyard, and Tom a broken-hearted lodger in the village. Mrs. Erichsen had gone her way ; and Tom was going his, to India, where through her unlooked for interest a berth had been obtained for him in a Calcutta counting-house.

A hundred guineas for outfit and passage-money was his only picking from the good old man's estate ; and it was a loan. Tom said his long good-bye to Winwood just three days after the Hardings arrived. But in those three days Claire and he made many noble vows, and parted in a storm of tears. And there ended the first chapter of their secret history. The single page known to Nicholas Harding was a thing of the past in his mind. He never thought of it now, and for the best of reasons. He firmly be lieved that Claire intended to marry an entirely different person, of whom he himself most cordially approved ; and it made liim for the first time as cordially approve of Claire. And Claire on a sudden divined it all, and saw (also for the first time) the false position in which she had placed herself; and yet never regretted it, but rather gloried in having the least little thing to suffer for Tom's sake.

Now, the other man in her mind, and in Nicholas Harding s too, was the Stranger within their Gates. James Edward William, Sir Emilius Daintree's son, and heir to the baronetcy and entailed estates, was a melancholy brooding bachelor little worse than thirty years of age. Unlike Mr. Harding, however, he looked much older, with his swarthy, saturnine countenance, and the white threads in the coal-black whiskers that curled beneath his deep-set chin. His lines had fallen in very different places from those of Mr. Harding; he had spent most of his restless life abroad. His soul had been burdened with a very different temperament ; he had that of a poet ; and his manhood had been poisoned at the fount by one of those wretched family quarrels which redound to nobody's credit, and of which the outside world never gets the rights.

It was only known that Sir Ernilius and his son had not been on speaking terms for years. Such sympathy as is felt in these matters was entirely on the side of the son. The present baronet was not a popular man. His character was eccentric, and his morals were so notorious that in many quarters the quarrel was from the first considered creditable to young Daintree. WTien, however, after an absence of eight years, the latter came home on leave from New South Wales, where he was a magistrate and a man of some importance and more promise in the young colony ; and when the old savage, his father, not only still refused a reconciliation, but publicly cut his son on every possible occasion, then — well, the indignation might have been greater had James Daintree been himself a more popular man. But the truth was, he had come home a morbid, sensitive misanthropist ; and this treatment made him ten times worse.

He was seldom seen by his old friends anywhere ; but he happened to make a staunch new one in the person of Nicholas Harding, whose house, indeed, became the wanderer's home. Claire's attitude will be readily apprehended. Daintree opened his bruised heart to her, and she considered his father the most abominable old man alive. It was at Avenue Lodge that a parcel of faded flowers arrived for Daintree, and drove him almost crazy with rage and grief. He had placed them a day or two before upon his mother's grave. He burst into a storm of oaths and tears before the girl, who thought the worse of him for neither. Lady Daintree had died the year before ; in fact, it was her death that had brought the outcast home, for the reconciliation for which he pleaded in vain. He had the sympathy of all who knew him ; that of Claire was spontaneous and heartfelt and frank ; but it never blinded her to Daintree's faults, which were those of a warped, egotistical, but yet an ardent nature.

She cured him of one or two. But he was a man with a weight upon his soul, and she could not cure him of that. She was not told enough. After all, too, her head and her heart were full of another. And thus she was slower to detect the new lover in the new friend than would or could have been the case in normal circumstances. Indeed it might never have dawned upon her until he spoke, but for the calling in of Lady Starkie to lend her distinguished countenance to the first dinner-party given by Nicholas Harding after his late ordeal. Lady Starkie was a lieutenant-general's widow, and, at all events, a shrewd woman of the world. " My dear," said she, after luncheon, " that yoimg man never took his eyes off you once, and you never once looked him in the face. You are in love at last ! —you both are !