A time of terror

PROLOGUE
(A.D. 1885)

PART I
A HERITAGE OF HATE

The Court was densely crowded, and an atmosphere already vitiated became doubly poisonous now that the ushers had lighted the gas. The flaring jets revealed on every side the flushed and strained faces of those who were eagerly waiting for the verdict. A great number of women had been present at the Old Bailey throughout the trial—women of fashion, eager to be thrilled by the most potent sensation of the hour, and women of the lower orders, mostly Irish. A babble of excited conversation arose directly the judges and the jury left the Court. There were three judges, for this was an alleged case of treason felony. In technical language the four prisoners were indicted for having feloniously compassed, devised, and intended to depose our Lady the Queen from the style, honour, and royal name of the Imperial Crown of the United Kingdom, and further that they, with divers other persons unknown, did manifest such intent by certain overt acts; all of which was set out with the customary amount of verbiage in the indictment.

Reduced to plain English, the actual charge was that the accused had purchased arms and ammunition for distribution amongst a revolutionary brotherhood; that they had been concerned in storing gunpowder and other explosive materials for the purpose of wrecking public buildings and overthrowing the Government of the Queen. Chester Castle, with its great store of arms, was to be seized. Arms were to be transmitted in piano packing-cases by the mail train from Euston, and the express was to be held up on the route to Holyhead. Thereafter the rails were to be torn up, the telegraph wires cut, and an armed band of two thousand men was to take forcible possession of the mail boat and land in due course on the Irish coast.

None of these things, beyond the purchase of a limited quantity of arms and ammunition, had really come to pass; but, as usual, the inevitable informer had revealed the alleged plot to the Government. Four arrests had been made, but the principal efforts of the prosecution were vigorously employed to obtain the conviction of one prisoner in particular—Michael White.

This prisoner was a journalist, hitherto living in one of the suburbs of London, and acting as correspondent for certain journals in Ireland and in America. Under a search warrant the police had ransacked every corner of his house. They found what purported to be an incriminatory letter written in invisible ink, also a glass tube containing a liquid which, when tested by the Government analyst, was proved to contain crystals. These crystals, if dissolved in water, could be used for the purpose of making impressions on paper, and such impressions would be invisible until copperas or certain other chemicals had been applied. Beyond these discoveries and the evidence of the informers, there was but little to connect Michael White with the alleged conspiracy.

The prisoner was a handsome, middle-aged man, whose intellectual face was in striking contrast with those of the two shifty-eyed and cringing informers, on whom from time to time he bent looks of infinite disgust and scorn. The sympathy of not a few was with the accused; but so strenuous was the conduct of the prosecution, and so adverse the judicial summing up, that only one result could be expected from the trial.

One member of White’s family was present through the long and agonising trial—the prisoner’s only son, and there was a double bitterness in the young man’s heart as hour by hour he saw the net being weaved about his father, for he, himself, had his own personal reason for hating Westwood, the zealous junior counsel for the Crown. When the fierce eyes of young Marcus White met the barrister’s, the latter shifted his gaze, fumbled with his papers, or made a show of entering into conversation with other counsel. The prisoner’s son watched these poor devices with a contemptuous smile. A complex, burning sense of wrong filled his breast. The private wrong which he believed had been done to himself by Westwood, blended, as it were, with the wrong that he conceived was being done to his father; and this in turn was interwoven with the sense of wholesale wrong inflicted during centuries upon prisoners and captives who had come within the iron grip of English criminal law.

Marcus White, like his father, was a man of no small intellectual power. A journalist who is to write anything worth reading must read much before he writes, and the prisoner’s son had read much. At one time it had been intended that he should join the army of advocates, but he turned away with repugnance after a preliminary survey of the law. Later, his father, to whom he was devotedly attached, gave him some training in his own profession, the profession of the pen. The elder White had long had in hand a book on the subject of barbarous punishments, and his son diligently assisted him in looking up and collating ancient records of the shocking violence in times past done to humanity under the sanction of the law. He knew that the English Criminal Code included at one time nearly two hundred offences punishable with death; he knew that this dreadful catalogue comprised innumerable offences of the most trifling character, while it omitted enormities of the utmost atrocity.

A study of these penal statutes and their ruthless application had shattered his instinctive reverence for the law and its administration. He had learnt to see in the sanguinary monuments of so-called justice the oppression of the strong, the cruelty of the cowardly, a terrible revelation of “man’s inhumanity to man.” His mind revolted at the idea of a divine right in kings to hang, draw, and quarter any one who criticised their conduct or advocated another form of government. It was, he held, only the Lex talionis, supported by force, and all the traps and complexities of criminal pleading were but the miserable devices of lawyers ever ready to prostitute a calling that in itself was noble. History proved it—history of which nearly every page was stained with judgments of expediency or the dark crime of judicial murder. “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” was supposed to have come from the poisonous lips of such creatures as Titus Oates. The judge—he might be a Jeffreys or a Scroggs—was but the Government in wig and ermine. The Crown counsel were paid pleaders for the party in power. The docile jury, ruled by the judge, were in effect the most obedient servants of the Government. This, then, was human justice—which in its true essence was supernal and divine. This was the Western Baal that men were called on to revere!

Rightly or wrongly, thus he reasoned. From such thoughts there had sprung up and still was growing and destined to grow in the mind of Marcus White a loathing for the law and a desire for vengeance on all who followed it as servitors. Such were the feelings with which he had seen his own father caught in these dreadful toils; practised advocates, perjured witnesses, and crafty detectives, all combining to bring about the climax that was imminent.

There was a cry of “Silence!” The jury were stumbling back into the box; the judges returned to the bench. Amid a breathless stillness the Clerk of Arraigns put the accustomed questions: “Do you find the prisoner, Patrick Desmond, guilty or not guilty?”—“Not guilty.”

“Do you find the prisoner, John O’Leary, guilty or not guilty?”—“Not guilty.”

“Do you find the prisoner, Robert Dale, guilty or not guilty?”—“Not guilty.”

Then, last of all, “Do you find the prisoner, Michael White, guilty or not guilty?” The pale face of the foreman twitched; there was a momentary hesitation in his manner. Every ear was strained to catch the verdict. Then, in a low voice, it came,—“Guilty.”

There was a swift scratching of pens. The Clerk of Arraigns was recording the verdict on the parchment of the long indictment, the judge was noting it, the counsel were indorsing the result upon their briefs, but the eyes of all others were on the face of the prisoner at the bar.

“Michael White,” said the Clerk of Arraigns, “you stand convicted upon this indictment. Have you any cause to show why the Court should not pass judgment upon you?”

“I have to say,” answered the prisoner, in a clear, strong voice, “that I had no hand in this so-called plot. My conviction has been brought about by perjured evidence and trickery; but, my lord, do not suppose that I shall whine for mercy. I am not the first man to suffer for a cause. I love my native land, and I hate those who oppress it. If my life could be the price of justice to Ireland and the Irish I would gladly lay it down; if the hand that I now raise to heaven could bring vengeance on those who have wronged us I should rejoice; and though death or prison-house make me powerless, with my last breath I would whisper to my son to carry on the work.”

For a moment the prisoner’s face was turned towards his son’s, and there were those in Court who saw and afterwards recalled the answering look.

Then Michael White received, unmoved, his sentence.

Penal servitude for life.

PART II
RIVALS IN LOVE

“Stand aside,” said Westwood, in a voice which he vainly strove to steady.

“Not yet,” was the savage answer; “you’ve got to listen!”

The two men faced each other in the calm starlight of the April evening. The Embankment was almost deserted save for the huddled, heedless outcasts on the benches. A few hansoms rattled westward; a few small vessels, with sails spread, moved ghostly and silent on the swirling river. Nature’s placidity was in strange contrast with the fiery passion that flamed in the eyes of Marcus White and found expression in his threatening gestures. Both men were pale; their facial muscles tense. But the pallor of the one was begotten of anger and hatred. With Westwood it was the outcome of nervous apprehension, if not of actual fear.

“This is folly,” he said, with a better effort at self-command. “So far as I am concerned you have nothing to complain of——”

“Nothing to complain of,” exclaimed White. “What! You steal the girl who was mine. Yes, mine,—until you sneaked in between us——”

“That is not true, White.”

“I say you stole her—she was beguiled away from me. I was poor, and likely to be poorer. You had your profession, your respectability, and your prospects. Curse you! You’re not fit to touch her hand. Nor am I. I know that well enough; but I love her, and always shall. She was everything to me—my strength, my hope—till you stepped in; and to-night I’d think no more of taking you by the throat and ending your mean life than I would of crushing a beetle or any other filthy thing beneath my heel.

“I’m sorry if you think——” began Westwood. Then he paused, half ashamed of his own propitiatory tone, but debating how he could appease the fury of his enemy and escape from a situation which had become so threatening.

“And not content with taking her from me,” the other went on, drawing a step nearer and speaking with increased intensity, “you stood up in Court to prosecute my father. You and the others have helped to send him into slavery for life. The prosecution was a lie, I say, and you lied as much as any of the witnesses. Not on oath; that wasn’t wanted. You saw your chances, and you laid hold of them. You got the advertisement you wanted. There was deviltry in your pretended moderation. But you know the tricks of your trade—your looks and gestures to the jury said what you dared not put in words. He was in the dock and you were at the bar, with all its privileges and all its honourable traditions! Faugh! You sickened me. Yours was the face I watched; not the judge’s; not the foreman’s when he stood up and gave the verdict——”

“Let me pass, man; you’re acting like a madman,” said the barrister.

“Ah! You’re afraid of me. Coward! coward! You daren’t deny it.”

Westwood glanced round. He had been kept late at his chambers in Paper Buildings, and near the corner of Temple Avenue had come suddenly upon this enemy whom, of all men, he least desired to meet. The stream of wheeled traffic came steadily across Blackfriars Bridge and branched off right and left, but on the footway of the Embankment still scarcely a creature was to be seen. Westwood spoke again.

“I only did my duty. The brief came to me because of the illness of another man, and I was bound to take it. You ought to understand that legal etiquette——”

“Legal etiquette!” exclaimed White scornfully, “etiquette that allows you lawyers to libel other men and twist and turn the truth to suit your case. Etiquette that justifies your taking fees you don’t earn, and neglecting cases when it suits you. For you and your brood there is no sort of penalty. You pose as good citizens. You talk yourselves into Parliament, and fawn on the Government when there are places to be given away. You sit on the Bench and draw a year’s salary for little more than half a year’s work, and send to penal servitude men in whose presence you ought to stand bare-headed.”

“I can’t stay here and listen to your raving,” said Westwood angrily.

“You’ve got the best of it at present. You’ve had us every way,” persisted White. “There’s nothing left for me in England. That suits your purpose, too. But, mark my words, Westwood, I haven’t done with you. Sooner or later the tables shall be turned. I swear by heaven they shall! Some day you’ll hear of me again!”

Ending, he spat on him. Then, with a contemptuous gesture, turned away. Westwood, with a movement of disgust and anger, took two steps as if to follow him; then hesitated, stopped.

Marcus White did not even condescend to turn his head, but, striding eastward, passed into the shadows of the London night.

END OF PROLOGUE