A Book of Scoundrels Part 9

At least a cloud of suspicion was dispelled. Here he lived for two years, with naught to disturb his tranquillity save Mrs. Thompson's taste for drink. The hours of darkness were spent in laborious activity, the open day brought its own distractions. There was always Bow Street wherein to loaf, and the study of the criminal law lost none of its excitement from the reward offered outside for the bald-headed fanatic who sat placidly within. And the love of music was Peace's constant solace. Whatever treasures he might discard in a hurried flight, he never left a fiddle behind, and so vast became his pilfered collection that he had to borrow an empty room in a friend's house for its better disposal.

Moreover, he had a fervent pride in his craft; and you might deduce from his performance the whole theory and practice of burglary. He worked ever without accomplices. He knew neither the professional thief nor his lingo; and no a.s.sociation with gaol-birds involved him in the risk of treachery and betrayal. His single colleague was a friendly fence, and not even at the gallows' foot would he surrender the fence's name. His master quality was a constructive imagination. Accident never marred his design. He would visit the house of his breaking until he understood its ground-plan, and was familiar with its inhabitants. This demanded an amazing circ.u.mspection, but Peace was as stealthy as a cat, and he would keep silent vigil for hours rather than fail from an over keen anxiety.

Having marked the place of his entry, and having chosen an appropriate hour, he would prevent the egress of his enemies by s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the doors.

He then secured the room wherein he worked, and the job finished, he slung himself into the night by the window, so that, ere an alarm could be raised, his pony-trap had carried the booty to Evelina Road.

Such was the outline of his plan; but, being no pedant, he varied it at will: nor was he likely to court defeat through lack of resource.

Accomplished as he was in his proper business, he was equally alert to meet the accompanying risks. He had brought the art of cozening strange dogs to perfection; and for the exigence of escape, his physical equipment was complete. He would resist capture with unparalleled determination, and though he shuddered at the shedding of blood, he never hesitated when necessity bade him pull the trigger. Moreover, there was no s.p.a.ce into which he would not squeeze his body, and the iron bars were not yet devised through which he could not make an exit.

Once--it was at Nottingham--he was surprised by an inquisitive detective who demanded his name and trade. 'I am a hawker of spectacles,' replied Peace, 'and my licence is downstairs. Wait two minutes and I'll show it you.' The detective never saw him again. Six inches only separated the bars of the window, but Peace asked no more, and thus silently he won his freedom. True, his most daring feat--the leap from the train--resulted not in liberty, but in a broken head. But he essayed a task too high even for his endeavour, and, despite his manacles, at least he left his boot in the astonished warder's grip.

No less remarkable than his skill and daring were his means of evasion.

Even without a formal disguise he could elude pursuit. At an instant's warning, his loose, plastic features would a.s.sume another shape; out shot his lower jaw, and, as if by magic, the blood flew into his face until you might take him for a mulatto. Or, if he chose, he would strap his arm to his side, and let the police be baffled by a wooden mechanism, decently finished with a hook. Thus he roamed London up and down unsuspected, and even after his last failure at Blackheath, none would have discovered Charles Peace in John Ward, the Single-Handed Burglar, had not woman's treachery prompted detection. Indeed, he was an epitome of his craft, the Complete Burglar made manifest.

Not only did he plan his victories with previous ingenuity, but he sacrificed to his success both taste and sentiment. His dress was always of the most sombre; his only wear was the decent black of everyday G.o.dliness. The least spice of dandyism might have distinguished him from his fellows, and Peace's whole vanity lay in his craft. Nor did the paltry sentiment of friendship deter him from his just course. When the panic aroused by the silent burglar was uncontrolled, a neighbour consulted Peace concerning the safety of his house. The robber, having duly noted the villa's imperfections, and having discovered the hiding-place of jewellery and plate, complacently rifled it the next night. Though his self-esteem sustained a shock, though henceforth his friend thought meanly of his judgment, he was rewarded with the solid pudding of plunder, and the world whispered of the mysterious marauder with a yet colder horror. In truth, the large simplicity and solitude of his style sets him among the Cla.s.sics, and though others have surpa.s.sed him at single points of the game, he practised the art with such universal breadth and courage as were then a revolution, and are still unsurpa.s.sed.

But the burglar ever fights an unequal battle. One false step, and defeat o'erwhelms him. For two years had John Ward intimidated the middle-cla.s.s seclusion of South London; for two years had he hidden from a curious world the ugly, furrowed visage of Charles Peace. The bald head, the broad-rimmed spectacles, the squat, thick figure--he stood but five feet four in his stockings, and adds yet another to the list of little-great men--should have ensured detection, but the quick change and the persuasive gesture were omnipotent, and until the autumn of 1878 Peace was comfortably at large. And then an encounter at Blackheath put him within the clutch of justice. His revolver failed in its duty, and, valiant as he was, at last he met his match. In prison he was alternately insolent and aggrieved. He bl.u.s.tered for justice, proclaimed himself the victim of sudden temptation, and insisted that his intention had been ever innocent.

But, none the less, he was sentenced to a lifer, and, the mask of John Ward being torn from him, he was sent to Sheffield to stand his trial as Charles Peace. The leap from the train is already recorded; and at his last appearance in the dock he rolled upon the floor, a petulant and broken man. When once the last doom was p.r.o.nounced, he forgot both fiddle and crowbar; he surrendered himself to those exercises of piety from which he had never wavered. The foolish have denounced him for a hypocrite, not knowing that the artist may have a life apart from his art, and that to Peace religion was an essential pursuit. So he died, having released from an unjust sentence the poor wretch who at Whalley Range had suffered for his crime, and offering up a consolatory prayer for all mankind. In truth, there was no enemy for whom he did not intercede. He prayed for his gaolers, for his executioner, for the Ordinary, for his wife, for Mrs. Thompson, his drunken doxy, and he went to his death with the sure step of one who, having done his duty, is reconciled with the world. The mob testified its affectionate admiration by dubbing him 'Charley,' and remembered with effusion his last grim pleasantry. 'What is the scaffold?' he asked with sublime earnestness.

And the answer came quick and sanctimonious: 'A short cut to Heaven!'

III--A PARALLEL

(DEACON BRODIE AND CHARLES PEACE)

NOT a parallel, but a contrast, since at all points Peace is Brodie's ant.i.thesis. The one is the austerest of Cla.s.sics, caring only for the ultimate perfection of his work. The other is the gayest of Romantics, happiest when by the way he produces a glittering effect, or dazzles the ear by a vain impertinence. Now, it is by thievery that Peace reached magnificence. A natural apt.i.tude drove him from the fiddle to the centre-bit. He did but rob, because genius followed the impulse. He had studied the remotest details of his business; he was sternly professional in the conduct of his life, and, as became an old gaol-bird, there was no antic of the policeman wherewith he was not familiar. Moreover, not only had he reduced house-breaking to a science, but, being ostensibly nothing better than a picture-frame maker, he had invented an incomparable set of tools wherewith to enter and evade his neighbour's house. Brodie, on the other hand, was a thief for distraction. His method was as slovenly as ignorance could make it.

Though by trade a wright, and therefore a master of all the arts of joinery, he was so deficient in seriousness that he stole a coulter wherewith to batter the walls of the Excise Office. While Peace fought the battle in solitude, Brodie was not only attended by a gang, but listened to the command of his subordinates, and was never permitted to perform a more intricate duty than the sounding of the alarm. And yet here is the ironical contrast. Peace, the professional thief, despised his brothers, and was never heard to patter a word of flash. Brodie, the amateur, courted the society of all cross coves, and would rather express himself in Pedlar's French than in his choicest Scots. While the Englishman sc.r.a.ped Tate and Brady from a one-stringed fiddle, the Scot limped a chaunt from The Beggar's Opera, and thought himself a devil of a fellow. The one was a man about town masquerading as a thief; the other the most serious among housebreakers, singing psalms in all good faith.

But if Peace was incomparably the better craftsman, Brodie was the prettier gentleman. Peace would not have permitted Brodie to drive his pony-trap the length of Evelina Road. But Brodie, in revenge, would have cut Peace had he met him in the Corn-market. The one was a sombre savage, the other a jovial comrade, and it was a witty freak of fortune that impelled both to follow the same trade. And thus you arrive at another point of difference. The Englishman had no intelligence of life's amenity. He knew naught of costume: clothes were the limit of his ambition. Dressed always for work, he was like the caterpillar which a.s.sumes the green of the leaf, wherein it hides: he wore only such duds as should attract the smallest notice, and separate him as far as might be from his business. But the Scot was as fine a dandy as ever took (haphazard) to the cracking of kens. If his refinement permitted no excess of splendour, he went ever gloriously and appropriately apparelled. He was well-mannered, cultured, with scarce a touch of provincialism to mar his gay demeanour: whereas Peace knew little enough outside the practice of burglary, and the proper handling of the revolver.

Our Charles, for example, could neither spell nor write; he dissembled his low origin with the utmost difficulty, and at the best was plastered over (when not at work) with the parochialism of the suburbs. So far the contrast is complete; and even in their similarities there is an evident difference. Each led a double life; but while Brodie was most himself among his own kind, the real Peace was to be found not fiddle-sc.r.a.ping in Evelina Road but marking down policemen in the dusky byways of Blackheath. Brodie's grandeur was natural to him; Peace's respectability, so far as it transcended the man's origin, was a cloak of villainy.

Each, again, was an inventor, and while the more innocent Brodie designed a gallows, the more hardened Peace would have gained notoriety by the raising of wrecks and the patronage of Mr. Plimsoll. And since both preserved a certain courage to the end, since both died on the scaffold as becomes a man, the contrast is once more characteristic.

Brodie's cynicism is a fine foil to the piety of Peace; and while each end was natural after its own fashion, there is none who will deny to the Scot the finer sense of fitness. Nor did any step in their career explain more clearly the difference in their temperament than their definitions of the gallows. For Peace it is 'a short cut to Heaven'; for Brodie it is 'a leap in the dark.' Again the Scot has the advantage.

Again you reflect that, if Peace is the most accomplished Cla.s.sic among the housebreakers, the Deacon is the merriest companion who ever climbed the gallows by the shoulders of the incomparable Macheath.

THE MAN IN THE GREY SUIT

THE Abbe Bruneau, who gave his shaven head in atonement for unnumbered crimes, was a finished exponent of duplicity. In the eye of day and of Entrammes he shone a miracle of well-doing; by night he prowled in the secret places of Laval. The world watched him, habited in the decent black of his calling; no sooner was he beyond sight of his parish than his valise was opened, and he arrayed himself--under the hedge, no doubt--in a suit of jaunty grey. The pleasures for which he sacrificed the lives of others and his own were squalid enough, but they were the best a provincial brain might imagine; and he sinned the sins of a hedge priest with a courage and effrontery which his brethren may well envy.

Indeed, the Man in the Grey Suit will be sent down the ages with a grimmer scandal, if with a staler mystery, than the Man in the Iron Mask.

He was born of parents who were certainly poor, and possibly honest, at a.s.se-le-Berenger. He counted a dozen Chouans among his ancestry, and brigandage swam in his blood. Even his childhood was crimson with crimes, which the quick memory of the countryside long ago lost in the pride of having bred a priest. He stained his first cure of souls with the poor, sad sin of arson, which the bishop, fearful of scandal and loth to check a promising career, condoned with a suitable advancement.

At Entrammes, his next benefice, he entered into his full inheritance of villainy, and here it was--despite his own protest--that he devised the grey suit which brought him ruin and immortality. To the wild, hilarious dissipation of Laval, the nearest town, he fell an immediate and unresisting prey. Think of the glittering lamps, the sparkling taverns, the bright-eyed women, the manifold fascinations, which are the character and delight of this forgotten city! Why, if the Abbe Bruneau doled out comfort and absolution at Entrammes--why should he not enjoy at Laval the wilder joys of the flesh? Lack of money was the only hindrance, since our priest was not of those who could pursue bonnes fortunes; ever he sighed for 'booze and the blowens,' but 'booze and the blowens' he could only purchase with the sovereigns his honest calling denied him. There was no resource but thievery and embezzlement, sins which led sometimes to falsehood or incendiarism, and at a pinch to the graver enterprise of murder. But Bruneau was not one to boggle at trifles. Women he would encounter--young or old, dark or fair, ugly or beautiful, it was all one to him--and the fools who withheld him riches must be punished for their n.i.g.g.ard hand. For a while a theft here and there, a cunning extortion of money upon the promise of good works, sufficed for his necessities, but still he hungered for a coup, and patiently he devised and watched his opportunity.

Meanwhile his cunning protected him, and even if the gaze of suspicion fell upon him he contrived his orgies with so neat a discretion that the Church, which is not wont to expose her malefactors, preserved a timid and an innocent silence. The Abbe disappeared with a commendable constancy, and with that just sense of secrecy which should compel even an archiepiscopal admiration. He was not of those who would drag his cloth through the mire. Not until the darkness he loved so fervently covered the earth would he escape from the dull respectability of Entrammes, nor did he ever thus escape unaccompanied by his famous valise. The grey suit was an effectual disguise to his calling, and so jealous was he of the Church's honour that he never--unless in his cups--disclosed his tonsure. One of his innumerable loves confessed in the witness-box that Bruneau always retained his hat in the glare of the Cafe, protesting that a headache rendered him fatally susceptible to draught; and such was his thoughtful punctilio that even in the comparative solitude of a guilty bed-chamber he covered his shorn locks with a nightcap.

And while his conduct at Laval was unimpeachable, he always proved a nice susceptibility in his return. A cab carried him within a discreet distance of his home, whence, having exchanged the grey for the more sober black, he would tramp on foot, and thus creep in tranquil and un.o.bserved. But simple as it is to enjoy, enjoyment must still be purchased, and the Abbe was never guilty of a meanness. The less guilty scheme was speedily staled, and then it was that the Abbe bethought him of murder.

His first victim was the widow Bourdais, who pursued the honest calling of a florist at Laval. Already the curate was on those terms of intimacy which unite the robber with the robbed; for some months earlier he had imposed a forced loan of sixty francs upon his victim. But on the 15th of July 1893, he left Entrammes, resolved upon a serious measure. The black valise was in his hand, as he set forth upon the arid, windy road.

Before he reached Laval he had made the accustomed transformation, and it was no priest, but a layman, doucely dressed in grey, that awaited Mme. Bourdais' return from the flower-market. He entered the shop with the coolness of a friend, and retreated to the door of the parlour when two girls came to make a purchase. No sooner had the widow joined him than he cut her throat, and, with the ferocity of the beast who loves blood as well as plunder, inflicted some forty wounds upon her withered frame. His escape was simple and dignified; he called the cabman, who knew him well, and who knew, moreover, what was required of him; and the priest was snugly in bed, though perhaps exhausted with blood and pleasure, when the news of the murder followed him to his village.

Next day the crime was common gossip, and the Abbe's friends took counsel with him. One there was astonished that the culprit remained undiscovered. 'But why should you marvel?' said Bruneau. 'I could kill you and your wife at your own chimney-corner without a soul knowing. Had I taken to evil courses instead of to good I should have been a terrible a.s.sa.s.sin.' There is a touch of the pride which De Quincey attributes to Williams in this boastfulness, and throughout the parallel is irresistible. Williams, however, was the better dandy; he put on a dress-coat and patent-leather pumps because the dignity of his work demanded a fitting costume. And Bruneau wore the grey suit not without a hope of disguise. Yet you like to think that the Abbe looked complacently upon his valise, and had forethought for the cut of his professional coat; and if he be not in the first flight of artistry, remember his provincial upbringing, and furnish the proper excuse.

Meanwhile the scandal of the murdered widow pa.s.sed into forgetfulness, and the Abbe was still impoverished. Already he had robbed his vicar, and the suspicion of the Abbe Fricot led on to the final and the detected crime. Now Fricot had noted the loss of money and of bonds, and though he refrained from exposure he had confessed to a knowledge of the criminal. M. Bruneau was naturally sensitive to suspicion, and he determined upon the immediate removal of this danger to his peace. On January 2, 1894, M. Fricot returned to supper after administering the extreme unction to a parishioner. While the meal was preparing, he went into his garden in sabots and bareheaded, and never again was seen alive. The supper cooled, the vicar was still absent; the murderer, hungry with his toil, ate not only his own, but his victim's share of the food, grimly hinting that Fricot would not come back. Suicide was dreamed of, murder hinted; up and down the village was the search made, and none was more zealous than the distressed curate.

At last a peasant discovered some blocks of wood in the well, and before long blood-stains revealed themselves on the masonry. Speedily was the body recovered, disfigured and battered beyond recognition, and the voice of the village went up in denunciation of the Abbe Bruneau.

Immunity had made the culprit callous, and in a few hours suspicion became certainty. A bleeding nose was the lame explanation given for the stains which were on his clothes, on the table, on the keys of his harmonium. A quaint and characteristic folly was it that drove the murderer straight to the solace of his religion. You picture him, hot and red-handed from murder, soothing his battered conscience with some devilish Requiem for the unshrived soul he had just parted from its broken body, and leaving upon the harmonium the ineradicable traces of his guilt. Thus he lived, poised between murder and the Church, spending upon the vulgar dissipation of a Breton village the blood and money of his foolish victims. But for him 'les tavernes et les filles' of Laval meant a veritable paradise, and his sojourn in the country is proof enough of a limited cunning. Had he been more richly endowed, Paris had been the theatre of his crimes. As it is, he goes down to posterity as the Man in the Grey Suit, and the best friend the cabmen of Laval ever knew. Them, indeed, he left inconsolable.

MONSIEUR L'ABBe

The childhood of the Abbe Rosselot is as secret as his origin, and no man may know whether Belfort or Bavaria smiled upon his innocence. A like mystery enshrouds his early manhood, and the malice of his foes, who are legion, denounces him for a Jesuit of Innsbruck. But since he has lived within the eye of the world his villainies have been revealed as clearly as his attainments, and history provides him no other rival in the corruption of youth than the infamous Thwack.u.m.

It is not every scholar's ambition to teach the elements, and Rosselot adopted his modest calling as a cloak of crime. No sooner was he installed in a mansion than he became the mansion's master, and henceforth he ruled his employer's domain with the tyrannical severity of a Grand Inquisitor. His soul wrapped in the triple bra.s.s of arrogance, he even dared to lay his hands upon food before his betters were served; and presently, emboldened by success, he would order the dinners, reproach the cook with a too lavish use of condiments, and descend with insolent expostulation into the kitchen. In a week he had opened the cupboards upon a dozen skeletons, and made them rattle their rickety bones up and down the draughty staircases, until the inmates shivered with horror and the terrified neighbours fled the haunted castle as a lazar-house. Once in possession of a family secret, he felt himself secure, and henceforth he was free to browbeat his employer and to flog his pupil to the satisfaction of his waspish nature. Moreover, he was endowed with all the insight and effrontery of a trained journalist. So sedulous was he in his search after the truth, that neither man nor woman could deny him confidence. And, as vinegar flowed in his veins for blood, it was his merry sport to set wife against husband and children against father. Not even were the servants safe from his watchful inquiry, and housemaids and governesses alike entrusted their hopes and fears to his malicious keeping. And when the house had retired to rest, with what a sinister delight did he chuckle over the frailties and infamies, a guilty knowledge of which he had dragged from many an unwilling sinner! To oust him, when installed, was a plain impossibility, for this wringer of hearts was only too glib in the surrender of another's scandal; and as he accepted the last scurrility with Christian resignation, his unfortunate employer could but strengthen his vocabulary and patiently endure the presence of this smiling, demoniacal tutor.

But a too villainous curiosity was not the Abbe's capital sin.

Not only did he entertain his leisure with wrecking the happiness of a united family, but he was an enemy open and declared of France. It was his amiable pastime at the dinner-table, when he had first helped himself to such delicacies as tempted his dainty palate, to p.r.o.nounce a pompous eulogy upon the German Emperor. France, he would say with an exultant smile, is a pays pourri, which exists merely to be the football of Prussia. She has but one hope of salvation--still the monster speaks--and that is to fall into the benign occupation of a vigorous race. Once upon a time--the infamy is scarce credible--he was conducting his young charges past a town-hall, over the lintel of whose door glittered those proud initials 'R. F.' 'What do they stand for?' asked this demon Barlow. And when the patriotic Tommy hesitated for an answer, the preceptor exclaimed with ineffable contempt, 'Race de fous'! It is no wonder, then, that this foe of his fatherland feared to receive a letter openly addressed; rather he would slink out under cover of night and seek his correspondence at the poste restante, like a guilty lover or a British tourist.

The Chateau de Presles was built for his reception. It was haunted by a secret, which none dare murmur in the remotest garret. There was no more than a whisper of murder in the air, but the Marquis shuddered when his wife's eye frowned upon him. True, the miserable Menaldo had disappeared from his seminary ten years since, but threats of disclosure were uttered continually, and respectability might only be purchased by a profound silence. Here was the Abbe's most splendid opportunity, and he seized it with all the eagerness of a greedy temperament. The Marquise, a wealthy peasant, who was rather at home on the wild hill-side than in her stately castle, became an instant prey to his devilish intrigue.

The governess, an antic old maid of fifty-seven, whose conversation was designed to bring a blush to the cheek of the most hardened dragoon, was immediately on terms of so frank an intimacy that she flung bread pellets at him across the table, and joyously proposed, if we may believe the priest on his oath, to set up housekeeping with him, that they might save expense. Two high-spirited boys were always at hand to encourage his taste for flogging, and had it not been for the Marquis, the Abbe's cup would have been full to overflowing. But the Marquis loved not the lean, ogling instructor of his sons, and presently began to a.s.sail him with all the abuse of which he was master. He charged the Abbe with unspeakable villainy; salop and saligaud were the terms in which he would habitually refer to him. He knew the rascal for a spy, and no modesty restrained him from proclaiming his knowledge. But whatever insults were thrown at the Abbe he received with a grin complacent as Shylock's, for was he not conscious that when he liked the pound of flesh was his own!

With a fiend's duplicity he laid his plans of ruin and death. The Marquise, swayed to his will, received him secretly in the blue room (whose very colour suggests a guilty intrigue), though never, upon the oath of an Abbe, when the key was turned in the lock. A journey to Switzerland had freed him from the haunting suspicion of the Marquis, and at last he might compel the wife to denounce her husband as a murderer. The terrified woman drew the indictment at the Abbe's dictation, and when her husband returned to St. Amand he was instantly thrust into prison. Nothing remained but to cajole the sons into an expressed hatred of their father, and the last enormity was committed by a masterpiece of cunning. 'Your father's one chance of escape,' argued this villain in a ca.s.sock, 'is to be proved an inhuman ruffian.

Swear that he beat you unmercifully and you will save him from the guillotine.' All the dupes learned their lesson with a certainty which reflects infinite credit upon the Abbe's method of instruction.

For once in his life the Abbe had been moved by greed as well as by villainy. His early exploits had no worse motive than the satisfaction of an inhuman l.u.s.t for cruelty and destruction. But the Marquise was rich, and when once her husband's head were off, might not the Abbe reap his share of the gathered harvest? The stakes were high, but the game was worth the playing, and Rosselot played it with spirit and energy unto the last card. His appearance in court is ever memorable, and as his ferret eyes glinted through gla.s.s at the President, he seemed the villain of some Middle Age Romance. His head, poised upon a lean, bony frame, was embellished with a nose thin and sharp as the blade of a knife; his tightly compressed lips were an indication of the rascal's determination. 'Long as a day in Lent'--that is how a spectator described him; and if ever a sinister nature glared through a sinister figure, the Abbe's character was revealed before he parted his lips in speech. Unmoved he stood and immovable; he treated the imprecations of the Marquis with a cold disdain; as the burden of proof grew heavy on his back, he shrugged his shoulders in weary indifference. He told his monstrous story with a cynical contempt, which has scarce its equal in the history of crime; and priest, as he was, he proved that he did not yield to the Marquis himself in the Rabelaisian amplitude of his vocabulary. He brought charges against the weird world of Presles with an insouciance and brutality which defeated their own aim. He described the vices of his master and the sins of the servants in a slang which would sit more gracefully upon an idle roysterer than upon a pious Abbe.

And, his story ended, he leered at the Court with the satisfaction of one who had discharged a fearsome duty.

But his rascality overshot its mark; the Marquise, obedient to his priestly casuistry, displayed too fierce a zeal in the execution of his commands. And he took to flight, hoping to lose in the larger world of Paris the notoriety which his prowess won him among the poor despised Berrichons. He left behind for our consolation a s.n.a.t.c.h of philosophy which helps to explain his last and greatest achievement. 'Those who have money exist only to be fleeced.' Thus he spake with a reckless revelation of self. Yet the mystery of his being is still unpierced. He is traitor, schemer, spy; but is he an Abbe? Perhaps not. At any rate, he once attended the 'Messe des Morts,' and was heard to mumble a 'Credo,' which, as every good Catholic remembers, has no place in that solemn service.