“Sleep no more!”—Macbeth
After winding through gloomy and labyrinthine passages, which conducted to a different range of cellars from those entered by the unfortunate Favart, Gawtrey emerged at the foot of a flight of stairs, which, dark, narrow, and in many places broken, had been probably appropriated to servants of the house in its days of palmier glory. By these steps the pair regained their attic. Gawtrey placed the lantern on the table and seated himself in silence. Morton, who had recovered his self-possession and formed his resolution, gazed on him for some moments, equally taciturn. At length he spoke:
“Gawtrey!”
“I bade you not call me by that name,” said the coiner; for we need scarcely say that in his new trade he had assumed a new appellation.
“It is the least guilty one by which I have known you,” returned Morton, firmly. “It is for the last time I call you by it! I demanded to see by what means one to whom I had entrusted my fate supported himself. I have seen,” continued the young man, still firmly, but with a livid cheek and lip, “and the tie between us is rent for ever. Interrupt me not! it is not for me to blame you. I have eaten of your bread and drunk of your cup. Confiding in you too blindly, and believing that you were at least free from those dark and terrible crimes for which there is no expiation—at least in this life—my conscience seared by distress, my very soul made dormant by despair, I surrendered myself to one leading a career equivocal, suspicious, dishonourable perhaps, but still not, as I believed, of atrocity and bloodshed. I wake at the brink of the abyss—my mother’s hand beckons to me from the grave; I think I hear her voice while I address you—I recede while it is yet time—we part, and for ever!”
Gawtrey, whose stormy passion was still deep upon his soul, had listened hitherto in sullen and dogged silence, with a gloomy frown on his knitted brow; he now rose with an oath—
“Part! that I may let loose on the world a new traitor! Part! when you have seen me fresh from an act that, once whispered, gives me to the guillotine! Part—never! at least alive!”
“I have said it,” said Morton, folding his arms calmly; “I say it to your face, though I might part from you in secret. Frown not on me, man of blood! I am fearless as yourself! In another minute I am gone.”
“Ah! is it so?” said Gawtrey; and glancing round the room, which contained two doors, the one concealed by the draperies of a bed, communicating with the stairs by which they had entered, the other with the landing of the principal and common flight: he turned to the former, within his reach, which he locked, and put the key into his pocket, and then, throwing across the latter a heavy swing bar, which fell into its socket with a harsh noise,—before the threshold he placed his vast bulk, and burst into his loud, fierce laugh: “Ho! ho! Slave and fool, once mine, you were mine body and soul for ever!”
“Tempter, I defy you! stand back!” And, firm and dauntless, Morton laid his hand on the giant’s vest.
Gawtrey seemed more astonished than enraged. He looked hard at his daring associate, on whose lip the down was yet scarcely dark.
“Boy,” said he, “off! do not rouse the devil in me again! I could crush you with a hug.”
“My soul supports my body, and I am armed,” said Morton, laying hand on his cutlass. “But you dare not harm me, nor I you; bloodstained as you are, you gave me shelter and bread; but accuse me not that I will save my soul while it is yet time!—Shall my mother have blessed me in vain upon her death-bed?”
Gawtrey drew back, and Morton, by a sudden impulse, grasped his hand.
“Oh! hear me—hear me!” he cried, with great emotion. “Abandon this horrible career; you have been decoyed and betrayed to it by one who can deceive or terrify you no more! Abandon it, and I will never desert you. For her sake—for your Fanny’s sake—pause, like me, before the gulf swallow us. Let us fly!—far to the New World—to any land where our thews and sinews, our stout hands and hearts, can find an honest mart. Men, desperate as we are, have yet risen by honest means. Take her, your orphan, with us. We will work for her, both of us. Gawtrey! hear me. It is not my voice that speaks to you—it is your good angel’s!”
Gawtrey fell back against the wall, and his chest heaved.
“Morton,” he said, with choked and tremulous accent, “go now; leave me to my fate! I have sinned against you—shamefully sinned. It seemed to me so sweet to have a friend; in your youth and character of mind there was so much about which the tough strings of my heart wound themselves, that I could not bear to lose you—to suffer you to know me for what I was. I blinded—I deceived you as to my past deeds; that was base in me: but I swore to my own heart to keep you unexposed to every danger, and free from every vice that darkened my own path. I kept that oath till this night, when, seeing that you began to recoil from me, and dreading that you should desert me, I thought to bind you to me for ever by implicating you in this fellowship of crime. I am punished, and justly. Go, I repeat—leave me to the fate that strides nearer and nearer to me day by day. You are a boy still—I am no longer young. Habit is a second nature. Still—still I could repent—I could begin life again. But repose!—to look back—to remember—to be haunted night and day with deeds that shall meet me bodily and face to face on the last day—”
“Add not to the spectres! Come—fly this night—this hour!”
Gawtrey paused, irresolute and wavering, when at that moment he heard steps on the stairs below. He started—as starts the boar caught in his lair—and listened, pale and breathless.
“Hush!—they are on us!—they come!” as he whispered, the key from without turned in the wards—the door shook. “Soft! the bar preserves us both—this way.” And the coiner crept to the door of the private stairs. He unlocked and opened it cautiously. A man sprang through the aperture:
“Yield!—you are my prisoner!”
“Never!” cried Gawtrey, hurling back the intruder, and clapping to the door, though other and stout men were pressing against it with all their power.
“Ho! ho! Who shall open the tiger’s cage?”
At both doors now were heard the sound of voices. “Open in the king’s name, or expect no mercy!”
“Hist!” said Gawtrey. “One way yet—the window—the rope.”
Morton opened the casement—Gawtrey uncoiled the rope. The dawn was breaking; it was light in the streets, but all seemed quiet without. The doors reeled and shook beneath the pressure of the pursuers. Gawtrey flung the rope across the street to the opposite parapet; after two or three efforts, the grappling-hook caught firm hold—the perilous path was made.
“On!—quick!—loiter not!” whispered Gawtrey; “you are active—it seems more dangerous than it is—cling with both hands—shut your eyes. When on the other side—you see the window of Birnie’s room,—enter it—descend the stairs—let yourself out, and you are safe.”
“Go first,” said Morton, in the same tone: “I will not leave you now: you will be longer getting across than I shall. I will keep guard till you are over.”
“Hark! hark!—are you mad? You keep guard! what is your strength to mine? Twenty men shall not move that door, while my weight is against it. Quick, or you destroy us both! Besides, you will hold the rope for me, it may not be strong enough for my bulk in itself. Stay!—stay one moment. If you escape, and I fall—Fanny—my father, he will take care of her,—you remember—thanks! Forgive me all! Go; that’s right!”
With a firm impulse, Morton threw himself on the dreadful bridge; it swung and crackled at his weight. Shifting his grasp rapidly—holding his breath—with set teeth-with closed eyes—he moved on—he gained the parapet—he stood safe on the opposite side. And now, straining his eyes across, he saw through the open casement into the chamber he had just quitted. Gawtrey was still standing against the door to the principal staircase, for that of the two was the weaker and the more assailed. Presently the explosion of a fire-arm was heard; they had shot through the panel. Gawtrey seemed wounded, for he staggered forward, and uttered a fierce cry; a moment more, and he gained the window—he seized the rope—he hung over the tremendous depth! Morton knelt by the parapet, holding the grappling-hook in its place, with convulsive grasp, and fixing his eyes, bloodshot with fear and suspense, on the huge bulk that clung for life to that slender cord!
“Le voiles! Le voiles!” cried a voice from the opposite side. Morton raised his gaze from Gawtrey; the casement was darkened by the forms of his pursuers—they had burst into the room—an officer sprang upon the parapet, and Gawtrey, now aware of his danger, opened his eyes, and as he moved on, glared upon the foe. The policeman deliberately raised his pistol—Gawtrey arrested himself—from a wound in his side the blood trickled slowly and darkly down, drop by drop, upon the stones below; even the officers of law shuddered as they eyed him—his hair bristling—his cheek white—his lips drawn convulsively from his teeth, and his eyes glaring from beneath the frown of agony and menace in which yet spoke the indomitable power and fierceness of the man. His look, so fixed—so intense—so stern, awed the policeman; his hand trembled as he fired, and the ball struck the parapet an inch below the spot where Morton knelt. An indistinct, wild, gurgling sound-half-laugh, half-yell of scorn and glee, broke from Gawtrey’s lips. He swung himself on—near—near—nearer—a yard from the parapet.
“You are saved!” cried Morton; when at the moment a volley burst from the fatal casement—the smoke rolled over both the fugitives—a groan, or rather howl, of rage, and despair, and agony, appalled even the hardest on whose ear it came. Morton sprang to his feet and looked below. He saw on the rugged stones far down, a dark, formless, motionless mass—the strong man of passion and levity—the giant who had played with life and soul, as an infant with the baubles that it prizes and breaks—was what the Caesar and the leper alike are, when the clay is without God’s breath—what glory, genius, power, and beauty, would be for ever and for ever, if there were no God!
“There is another!” cried the voice of one of the pursuers. “Fire!”
“Poor Gawtrey!” muttered Philip. “I will fulfil your last wish;” and scarcely conscious of the bullet that whistled by him, he disappeared behind the parapet.
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