MR. JUSTICE HARBOTTLE
by J Sheridan LeFanu


PROLOGUE
ON this case Doctor Hesselius has inscribed nothing more than the words, 
"Harman's Report," and a simple reference to his own extraordinary Essay on 
"The Interior Sense, and the Conditions of the Opening thereof." 

  The reference is to Vol. I, Section 317, Note Za. The note to which 
reference is thus made, simply says: "There are two accounts of the 
remarkable case of the Honourable Mr. Justice Harbottle, one furnished to me 
by Mrs. Trimmer, of Tunbridge Wells (June, 1805); the other at a much later 
date, by Anthony Harman, Esq. I much prefer the former; in the first place, 
because it is minute and detailed, and written, it seems to me, with more 
caution and knowledge; and in the next, because the letters from Dr. 
Hedstone, which are embodied in it, furnish matter of the highest value to a 
right apprehension of the nature of the case. It was one of the best 
declared cases of an opening of the interior sense which I have met with. It 
was affected too by the phenomenon which occurs so frequently as to indicate 
a law of these eccentric conditions; that is to say, it exhibited what I may 
term the contagious character of this sort of intrusion of the spirit-world 
upon the proper domain of matter. So soon as the spirit-action has 
established itself in the case of one patient, its developed energy begins 
to radiate, more or less effectually, upon others. The interior vision of 
the child was opened; as was, also, that of its mother, Mrs. Pyneweck; and 
both the interior vision and hearing of the scullery-maid were opened on the 
same occasion. After-appearances are the result of the law explained in Vol. 
II, Sections 17 to 49. The common centre of association, simultaneously 
recalled, unites, or reunites, as the case may be, for a period measured, as 
we see, in Section 37. The maximum will extend to days, the minimum is 
little more than a second. We see the operation of this principle perfectly 
displayed, in certain cases of lunacy, of epilepsy, of catalepsy, and of 
mania, of a peculiar and painful character, though unattended by incapacity 
of business." 

  The memorandum of the case of Judge Harbottle, which was written by Mrs. 
Trimmer, of Tunbridge Wells, which Doctor Hesselius thought the better of 
the two, I have been unable to discover among his papers. I found in his 
escritoire a note to the effect that he had lent the Report of Judge 
Harbottle's case, written by Mrs. Trimmer, to Dr. F. Heyne. To that learned 
and able gentleman accordingly I wrote, and received from him, in his reply, 
which was full of alarms and regrets, on account of the uncertain safety of 
that "valuable MS.," a line written long since by Dr. Hesselius, which 
completely exonerated him, inasmuch as it acknowledged the safe return of 
the papers. The narrative of Mr. Harman is, therefore, the only one 
available for this collection. The late Dr. Hesselius, in another passage of 
the note that I have cited, says, "As to the facts (non-medical) of the 
case, the narrative of Mr. Harman exactly tallies with that furnished by 
Mrs. Trimmer." The strictly scientific view of the case would scarcely 
interest the popular reader; and, possibly, for the purposes of this 
selection, I should, even had I both papers to choose between, have referred 
that of Mr. Harman, which is given in full in the following pages. 

CHAPTER I
THE JUDGE'S HOUSE
THIRTY years ago an elderly man, to whom I paid quarterly a small annuity 
charged on some property of mine, came on the quarter-day to receive it. He 
was a dry, sad, quiet man, who had known better days, and had always 
maintained an unexceptionable character. No better authority could be 
imagined for a ghost story. 

  He told me one, though with a manifest reluctance; he was drawn into the 
narration by his choosing to explain, what I should not have remarked, that 
he had called two days earlier than that week after the strict day of 
payment, which he had usually allowed to elapse. His reason was a sudden 
determination to change his lodgings, and the consequent necessity of paying 
his rent a little before it was due. 

  He lodged in a dark street in Westminster, in a spacious old house, very 
warm, being wainscoted from top to bottom, and furnished with no undue 
abundance of windows, and those fitted with thick sashes and small panes. 

  This house was, as the bills upon the windows testified, offered to be 
sold or let. But no one seemed to care to look at it. 

  A thin matron, in rusty black silk, very taciturn, with large, steady, 
alarmed eyes, that seemed to look in your face, to read what you might have 
seen in the dark rooms and passages through which you had passed, was in 
charge of it, with a solitary "maid-of-all-work" under her command. My poor 
friend had taken lodgings in this house, on account of their extraordinary 
cheapness. He had occupied them for nearly a year without the slightest 
disturbance, and was the only tenant, under rent, in the house. He had two 
rooms; a sitting-room and a bed-room with a closet opening from it, in which 
he kept his books and papers locked up. He had gone to his bed, having also 
locked the outer door. Unable to sleep, he had lighted a candle, and after 
having read for a time, had laid the book beside him. He heard the old clock 
at the stair-head strike one; and very shortly after, to his alarm, he saw 
the closet-door, which he thought he had locked, open stealthily, and a 
slight dark man, particularly sinister, and somewhere about fifty, dressed 
in mourning of a very antique fashion, such a suit as we see in Hogarth, 
entered the room on tip-toe. He was followed by an elder man, stout, and 
blotched with scurvy, and whose features, fixed as a corpse's, were stamped 
with dreadful force with a character of sensuality and villany. 

  This old man wore a flowered silk dressing-gown and ruffles, and he 
remarked a gold ring on his finger, and on his head a cap of velvet, such 
as, in the days of perukes, gentlemen wore in undress. 

  This direful old man carried in his ringed and ruffled hand a coil of 
rope; and these two figures crossed the floor diagonally, passing the foot 
of his bed, from the closet door at the farther end of the room, at the 
left, near the window, to the door opening upon the lobby, close to the 
bed's head, at his right. 

  He did not attempt to describe his sensations as these figures passed so 
near him. He merely said, that so far from sleeping in that room again, no 
consideration the world could offer would induce him so much as to enter it 
again alone, even in the daylight. He found both doors, that of the closet 
and that of the room opening upon the lobby, in the morning fast locked as 
he had left them before going to bed. 

  In answer to a question of mine, he said that neither appeared the least 
conscious of his presence. They did not seem to glide, but walked as living 
men do, but without any sound, and he felt a vibration on the floor as they 
crossed it. He so obviously suffered from speaking about the apparitions, 
that I asked him no more questions. 

  There were in his description, however, certain coincidences so very 
singular, as to induce me, by that very post, to write to a friend much my 
senior, then living in a remote part of England, for the information which I 
knew he could give me. He had himself more than once pointed out that old 
house to my attention, and told me, though very briefly, the strange story 
which I now asked him to give me in greater detail. 

  His answer satisfied me; and the following pages convey its substance. 

  Your letter (he wrote) tells me you desire some particulars about the 
closing years of the life of Mr. Justice Harbottle, one of the judges of the 
Court of Common Pleas. You refer, of course, to the extraordinary 
occurrences that made that period of his life long after a theme for "winter 
tales" and metaphysical speculation. I happen to know perhaps more than any 
other man living of those mysterious particulars. 

  The old family mansion, when I revisited London, more than thirty years 
ago, I examined for the last time. During the years that have passed since 
then, I hear that improvement, with its preliminary demolitions, has been 
doing wonders for the quarter of Westminster in which it stood. If I were 
quite certain that the house had been taken down, I should have no 
difficulty about naming the street in which it stood. As what I have to 
tell, however, is not likely to improve its letting value, and as I should 
not care to get into trouble, I prefer being silent on that particular 
point. 

  How old the house was, I can't tell. People said it was built by Roger 
Harbottle, a Turkey merchant, in the reign of King James I. I am not a good 
opinion upon such questions; but having been in it, though in its forlorn 
and deserted state, I can tell you in a general way what it was like. It was 
built of dark-red brick, and the door and windows were faced with stone that 
had turned yellow by time. It receded some feet from the line of the other 
houses in the street, and it had a florid and fanciful rail of iron about 
the broad steps that invited your ascent to the hall-door, in which were 
fixed, under a file of lamps among scrolls and twisted leaves, two immense 
"extinguishers," like the conical caps of fairies, into which, in old times, 
the footmen used to thrust their flambeaux when their chairs or coaches had 
set down their great people, in the hall or at the steps, as the case might 
be. That hall is panelled up to the ceiling, and has a large fire-place. Two 
or three stately old rooms open from it at each side. The windows of these 
are tall, with many small panes. Passing through the arch at the back of the 
hall, you come upon the wide and heavy well-staircase. There is a back 
staircase also. The mansion is large, and has not as much light, by any 
means, in proportion to its extent, as modern houses enjoy. When I saw it, 
it had long been untenanted, and had the gloomy reputation beside of a 
haunted house. Cobwebs floated from the ceilings or spanned the corners of 
the cornices, and dust lay thick over everything. The windows were stained 
with the dust and rain of fifty years, and darkness had thus grown darker. 

  When I made it my first visit, it was in company with my father, when I 
was still a boy, in the year 1808. I was about twelve years old, and my 
imagination impressible, as it always is at that age. I looked about me with 
great awe. I was here in the very centre and scene of those occurrences 
which I had heard recounted at the fireside at home, with so delightful a 
horror. 

  My father was an old bachelor of nearly sixty when he married. He had, 
when a child, seen Judge Harbottle on the bench in his robes and wig a dozen 
times at least before his death, which took place in 1748, and his 
appearance made a powerful and unpleasant impression, not only on his 
imagination, but upon his nerves. 

  The Judge was at that time a man of some sixty-seven years. He had a great 
mulberry-coloured face, a big, carbuncled nose, fierce eyes, and a grim and 
brutal mouth. My father, who was young at the time, thought it the most 
formidable face he had ever seen; for there were evidences of intellectual 
power in the formation and lines of the forehead. His voice was loud and 
harsh, and gave effect to the sarcasm which was his habitual weapon on the 
bench. 

  This old gentleman had the reputation of being about the wickedest man in 
England. Even on the bench he now and then showed his scorn of opinion. He 
had carried cases his own way, it was said, in spite of counsel, 
authorities, and even of juries, by a sort of cajolery, violence, and 
bamboozling, that somehow confused and overpowered resistance. He had never 
actually committed himself; he was too cunning to do that. He had the 
character of being, however, a dangerous and unscrupulous judge; but his 
character did not trouble him. The associates he chose for his hours of 
relaxation cared as little as he did about it. 

CHAPTER II
MR. PETERS
ONE night during the session of 1746 this old Judge went down in his chair 
to wait in one of the rooms of the House of Lords for the result of a 
division in which he and his order were interested. 

  This over, he was about to return to his house close by, in his chair; but 
the night had become so soft and fine that he changed his mind, sent it home 
empty, and with two footmen, each with a flambeau, set out on foot in 
preference. Gout had made him rather a slow pedestrian. It took him some 
time to get through the two or three streets he had to pass before reaching 
his house. 

  In one of those narrow streets of tall houses, perfectly silent at that 
hour, he overtook, slowly as he was walking, a very singular-looking old 
gentleman. 

  He had a bottle-green coat on, with a cape to it, and large stone buttons, 
a broad-leafed low-crowned hat, from under which a big powdered wig escaped; 
he stooped very much, and supported his bending knees with the aid of a 
crutch-handled cane, and so shuffled and tottered along painfully. 

  "I ask your pardon, sir," said this old man, in a very quavering voice, as 
the burly Judge came up with him, and he extended his hand feebly towards 
his arm. 

  Mr. Justice Harbottle saw that the man was by no means poorly dressed, and 
his manner that of a gentleman. 

  The Judge stopped short, and said, in his harsh peremptory tones, "Well, 
sir, how can I serve you?" 

  "Can you direct me to Judge Harbottle's house? I have some intelligence of 
the very last importance to communicate to him." 

  "Can you tell it before witnesses?" asked the Judge. 

  "By no means; it must reach his ear only," quavered the old man earnestly. 

  "If that be so, sir, you have only to accompany me a few steps farther to 
reach my house, and obtain a private audience; for I am Judge Harbottle." 

  With this invitation the infirm gentleman in the white wig complied very 
readily; and in another minute the stranger stood in what was then termed 
the front parlour of the Judge's house, tête-à-tête with that shrewd and 
dangerous functionary. 

  He had to sit down, being very much exhausted, and unable for a little 
time to speak; and then he had a fit of coughing, and after that a fit of 
gasping; and thus two or three minutes passed, during which the Judge 
dropped his roquelaure on an arm-chair, and threw his cocked-hat over that. 

  The venerable pedestrian in the white wig quickly recovered his voice. 
With closed doors they remained together for some time. 

  There were guests waiting in the drawing-rooms, and the sound of men's 
voices laughing, and then of a female voice singing to a harpsichord, were 
heard distinctly in the hall over the stairs; for old Judge Harbottle had 
arranged one of his dubious jollifications, such as might well make the hair 
of godly men's heads stand upright for that night. 

  This old gentleman in the powdered white wig, that rested on his stooped 
shoulders, must have had something to say that interested the Judge very 
much; for he would not have parted on easy terms with the ten minutes and 
upwards which that conference filched from the sort of revelry in which he 
most delighted, and in which he was the roaring king, and in some sort the 
tyrant also, of his company. 

  The footman who showed the aged man out observed that the Judge's 
mulberry-coloured face, pimples and all, were bleached to a dingy yellow, 
and there was the abstraction of agitated thought in his manner, as he bid 
the stranger good-night. The servant saw that the conversation had been of 
serious import, and that the Judge was frightened. 

  Instead of stumping upstairs forthwith to his scandalous hilarities, his 
profane company, and his great china bowl of punch--the identical bowl from 
which a bygone Bishop of London, good easy man, had baptised this Judge's 
grandfather, now clinking round the rim with silver ladles, and hung with 
scrolls of lemon-peel--instead, I say, of stumping and clambering up the 
great staircase to the cavern of his Circean enchantment, he stood with his 
big nose flattened against the window-pane, watching the progress of the 
feeble old man, who clung stiffly to the iron rail as he got down, step by 
step, to the pavement. 

  The hall-door had hardly closed, when the old Judge was in the hall 
bawling hasty orders, with such stimulating expletives as old colonels under 
excitement sometimes indulge in now-a-days, with a stamp or two of his big 
foot, and a waving of his clenched fist in the air. He commanded the footman 
to overtake the old gentleman in the white wig, to offer him his protection 
on his way home, and in no case to show his face again without having 
ascertained where he lodged, and who he was, and all about him. 

  "By--, sirrah! if you fail me in this, you doff my livery to-night!" 

  Forth bounced the stalwart footman, with his heavy cane under his arm, and 
skipped down the steps, and looked up and down the street after the singular 
figure, so easy to recognize. 

  What were his adventures I shall not tell you just now. 

  The old man, in the conference to which he had been admitted in that 
stately panelled room, had just told the Judge a very strange story. He 
might be himself a conspirator; he might possibly be crazed; or possibly his 
whole story was straight and true. 

  The aged gentleman in the bottle-green coat, on finding himself alone with 
Mr. Justice Harbottle, had become agitated. He said: 

  "There is, perhaps you are not aware, my lord, a prisoner in Shrewsbury 
jail, charged with having forged a bill of exchange for a hundred and twenty 
pounds, and his name is Lewis Pyneweck, a grocer of that town." 

  "Is there?" says the Judge, who knew well that there was. 

  "Yes, my lord," says the old man. 

  "Then you had better say nothing to affect this case. If you do, by ---- 
I'll commit you! for I'm to try it," says the Judge, with his terrible look 
and tone. 

  "I am not going to do anything of the kind, my lord; of him or his case I 
know nothing, and care nothing. But a fact has come to my knowledge which it 
behoves you to well consider." 

  "And what may that fact be?" inquired the Judge; "I'm in haste, sir, and 
beg you will use dispatch." 

  "It has come to my knowledge, my lord, that a secret tribunal is in 
process of formation, the object of which is to take cognizance of the 
conduct of the judges; and first, of your conduct, my lord: it is a wicked 
conspiracy." 

  "Who are of it?" demands the Judge. 

  "I know not a single name as yet. I know but the fact, my lord; it is most 
certainly true." 

  "I'll have you before the Privy Council, sir," says the Judge. 

  "That is what I most desire; but not for a day or two, my lord." 

  "And why so?" 

  "I have not as yet a single name, as I told your lordship; but I expect to 
have a list of the most forward men in it, and some other papers connected 
with the plot, in two or three days." 

  "You said one or two just now." 

  "About that time, my lord." 

  "Is this a Jacobite plot?" 

  "In the main I think it is, my lord." 

  "Why, then, it is political. I have tried no State prisoners, nor am like 
to try any such. How, then, doth it concern me?" 

  "From what I can gather, my lord, there are those in it who desire private 
revenges upon certain judges." 

  "What do they call their cabal?" 

  "The High Court of Appeal, my lord." 

  "Who are you, sir? What is your name?" 

  "Hugh Peters, my lord." 

  "That should be a Whig name?" 

  "It is, my lord." 

  "Where do you lodge, Mr. Peters?" "In Thames Street, my lord, over against 
the sign of the 'Three Kings.'" 

  "'Three Kings?' Take care one be not too many for you, Mr Peters! How come 
you, an honest Whig, as you say, to be privy to a Jacobite plot? Answer me 
that." 

  "My lord, a person in whom I take an interest has been seduced to take a 
part in it; and being frightened at the unexpected wickedness of their 
plans, he is resolved to become an informer for the Crown." 

  "He resolves like a wise man, sir. What does he say of the persons? Who 
are in the plot? Doth he know them?" 

  "Only two, my lord; but he will be introduced to the club in a few days, 
and he will then have a list, and more exact information of their plans, and 
above all of their oaths, and their hours and places of meeting, with which 
he wishes to be acquainted before they can have any suspicions of his 
intentions. And being so informed, to whom, think you, my lord, had he best 
go then?" 

  "To the king's attorney-general straight. But you say this concerns me, 
sir, in particular? How about this prisoner, Lewis Pyneweck? Is he one of 
them?" 

  "I can't tell, my lord; but for some reason, it is thought your lordship 
will be well advised if you try him not. For if you do, it is feared 'twill 
shorten your days." 

  "So far as I can learn, Mr. Peters, this business smells pretty strong of 
blood and treason. The king's attorney-general will know how to deal with 
it. When shall I see you again, sir?" 

  "If you give me leave, my lord, either before your lordship's court sits, 
or after it rises, to-morrow. I should like to come and tell your lordship 
what has passed." 

  "Do so, Mr. Peters, at nine o'clock to-morrow morning. And see you play me 
no trick, sir, in this matter; if you do, by sir, I'll lay you by the 
heels!" 

  "You need fear no trick from me, my lord; had I not wished to serve you, 
and acquit my own conscience, I never would have come all this way to talk 
with your lordship." 

  "I'm willing to believe you, Mr. Peters; I'm willing to believe you, sir." 

  And upon this they parted. 

  "He has either painted his face, or he is consumedly sick," thought the 
old Judge. 

  The light had shone more effectually upon his features as he turned to 
leave the room with a low bow, and they looked, he fancied, unnaturally 
chalky. 

  "D-- him!" said the Judge ungraciously, as he began to scale the stairs: 
"he has half-spoiled my supper." 

  But if he had, no one but the Judge himself perceived it, and the evidence 
was all, as anyone might perceive, the other way. 

CHAPTER III
LEWIS PYNEWECK
IN the meantime the footman dispatched in pursuit of Mr. Peters speedily 
overtook that feeble gentleman. The old man stopped when he heard the sound 
of pursuing steps, but any alarms that may have crossed his mind seemed to 
disappear on his recognizing the livery. He very gratefully accepted the 
proffered assistance, and placed his tremulous arm within the servant's for 
support. They had not gone far, however, when the old man stopped suddenly, 
saying: 

  "Dear me! as I live, I have dropped it. You heard it fall. My eyes, I 
fear, won't serve me, and I'm unable to stoop low enough; but if you will 
look, you shall have half the find. It is a guinea; I carried it in my 
glove." 

  The street was silent and deserted. The footman had hardly descended to 
what he termed his "hunkers," and begun to search the pavement about the 
spot which the old man indicated, when Mr. Peters, who seemed very much 
exhausted, and breathed with difficulty, struck him a violent blow, from 
above, over the back of the head with a heavy instrument, and then another; 
and leaving him bleeding and senseless in the gutter, ran like a lamp-
lighter down a lane to the right, and was gone. 

  When, an hour later, the watchman brought the man in livery home, still 
stupid and covered with blood, Judge Harbottle cursed his servant roundly, 
swore he was drunk, threatened him with an indictment for taking bribes to 
betray his master, and cheered him with a perspective of the broad street 
leading from the Old Bailey to Tyburn, the cart's tail, and the hangman's 
lash. 

  Notwithstanding this demonstration, the Judge was pleased. It was a 
disguised "affidavit man," or footpad, no doubt, who had been employed to 
frighten him. The trick had fallen through. 

  A "court of appeal," such as the false Hugh Peters had indicated, with 
assassination for its sanction, would be an uncomfortable institution for a 
"hanging judge" like the Honourable Justice Harbottle. That sarcastic and 
ferocious administrator of the criminal code of England, at that time a 
rather pharisaical, bloody and heinous system of justice, had reasons of his 
own for choosing to try that very Lewis Pyneweck, on whose behalf this 
audacious trick was devised. Try him he would. No man living should take 
that morsel out of his mouth. 

  Of Lewis Pyneweck, of course, so far as the outer world could see, he knew 
nothing. He would try him after his fashion, without fear, favour, or 
affection. 

  But did he not remember a certain thin man, dressed in mourning, in whose 
house, in Shrewsbury, the Judge's lodgings used to be, until a scandal of 
his ill-treating his wife came suddenly to light? A grocer with a demure 
look, a soft step, and a lean face as dark as mahogany, with a nose sharp 
and long, standing ever so little awry, and a pair of dark steady brown eyes 
under thinly-traced black brows--a man whose thin lips wore always a faint 
unpleasant smile. 

  Had not that scoundrel an account to settle with the Judge? had he not 
been troublesome lately? and was not his name Lewis Pyneweck, some time 
grocer in Shrewsbury, and now prisoner in the jail of that town? 

  The reader may take it, if he pleases, as a sign that Judge Harbottle was 
a good Christian, that he suffered nothing ever from remorse. That was 
undoubtedly true. He had, nevertheless, done this grocer, forger, what you 
will, some five or six years before, a grievous wrong; but it was not that, 
but a possible scandal, and possible complications, that troubled the 
learned Judge now. 

  Did he not, as a lawyer, know, that to bring a man from his shop to the 
dock, the chances must be at least ninety-nine out of a hundred that he is 
guilty? 

  A weak man like his learned brother Withershins was not a judge to keep 
the high-roads safe, and make crime tremble. Old Judge Harbottle was the man 
to make the evil-disposed quiver, and to refresh the world with showers of 
wicked blood, and thus save the innocent, to the refrain of the ancient saw 
he loved to quote: 

  "Foolish pity Ruins a city." 

  In hanging that fellow he could not be wrong. The eye of a man accustomed 
to look upon the dock could not fail to read "villain" written sharp and 
clear in his plotting face. Of course he would try him, and no one else 
should. 

  A saucy-looking woman, still handsome, in a mob-cap gay with blue ribbons, 
in a saque of flowered silk, with lace and rings on, much too fine for the 
Judge's housekeeper, which nevertheless she was, peeped into his study next 
morning, and, seeing the Judge alone, stepped in. 

  "Here's another letter from him, come by the post this morning. Can't you 
do nothing for him?" she said wheedlingly, with her arm over his neck, and 
her delicate finger and thumb fiddling with the lobe of his purple ear. 

  "I'll try," said Judge Harbottle, not raising his eyes from the paper he 
was reading. 

  "I knew you'd do what I asked you," she said. 

  The Judge clapt his gouty claw over his heart, and made her an ironical 
bow. 

  "What," she asked, "will you do?" 

  "Hang him," said the Judge with a chuckle. 

  "You don't mean to; no, you don't, my little man," said she, surveying 
herself in a mirror on the wall. 

  "I'm d--d but I think you're falling in love with your husband at last!" 
said Judge Harbottle. 

  "I'm blest but I think you're growing jealous of him," replied the lady 
with a laugh. "But no; he was always a bad one to me; I've done with him 
long ago." 

  "And he with you, by George! When he took your fortune, and your spoons, 
and your ear-rings, he had all he wanted of you. He drove you from his 
house; and when he discovered you had made yourself comfortable, and found a 
good situation, he'd have taken your guineas, and your silver, and your ear-
rings over again, and then allowed you half-a-dozen years more to make a new 
harvest for his mill. You don't wish him good; if you say you do, you lie." 

  She laughed a wicked, saucy laugh, and gave the terrible Rhadamanthus a 
playful tap on the chops. 

  "He wants me to send him money to fee a counsellor," she said, while her 
eyes wandered over the pictures on the wall, and back again to the looking-
glass; and certainly she did not look as if his jeopardy troubled her very 
much. 

  "Confound his impudence, the scoundrel!" thundered the old Judge, throwing 
himself back in his chair, as he used to do in furore on the bench, and the 
lines of his mouth looked brutal, and his eyes ready to leap from his 
sockets. "If you answer his letter from my house to please yourself, you'll 
write your next from somebody else's to please me. You understand, my pretty 
witch, I'll not be pestered. Come, no pouting; whimpering won't do. You 
don't care a brass farthing for the villain, body or soul. You came here but 
to make a row. You are one of Mother Carey's chickens; and where you come, 
the storm is up. Get you gone, baggage! get you gone!" he repeated, with a 
stamp; for a knock at the halldoor made her instantaneous disappearance 
indispensable. 

  I need hardly say that the venerable Hugh Peters did not appear again. The 
Judge never mentioned him. But oddly enough, considering how he laughed to 
scorn the weak invention which he had blown into dust at the very first 
puff, his white-wigged visitor and the conference in the dark front parlour 
was often in his memory. 

  His shrewd eye told him that allowing for change of tints and such 
disguises as the playhouse affords every night, the features of this false 
old man, who had turned out too hard for his tall footman, were identical 
with those of Lewis Pyneweck. 

  Judge Harbottle made his registrar call upon the crown solicitor and tell 
him that there was a man in town who bore a wonderful resemblance to a 
prisoner in Shrewsbury jail named Lewis Pyneweck, and to make inquiry 
through the post forthwith whether anyone was personating Pyneweck in 
prison, and whether he had thus or otherwise made his escape. 

  The prisoner was safe, however, and no question as to his identity. 

CHAPTER IV
INTERRUPTION IN COURT
IN due time Judge Harbottle went circuit; and in due time the judges were in 
Shrewsbury. News travelled slowly in those days, and newspapers, like the 
wagons and stage-coaches, took matters easily. Mrs. Pyneweck, in the Judge's 
house, with a diminished household--the greater part of the Judge's servants 
having gone with him, for he had given up riding circuit, and travelled in 
his coach in state--kept house rather solitarily at home. 

  In spite of quarrels, in spite of mutual injuries--some of them inflicted 
by herself, enormous--in spite of a married life of spited bickerings--a 
life in which there seemed no love or liking or forbearance, for years--now 
that Pyneweck stood in near danger of death, something like remorse came 
suddenly upon her. She knew that in Shrewsbury were transacting the scenes 
which were to determine his fate. She knew she did not love him; but she 
could not have supposed, even a fortnight before, that the hour of suspense 
could have affected her so powerfully. 

  She knew the day on which the trial was expected to take place. She could 
not get it out of her head for a minute; she felt faint as it drew towards 
evening. 

  Two or three days passed; and then she knew that the trial must be over by 
this time. There were floods between London and Shrewsbury, and news was 
long delayed. She wished the floods would last for ever. It was dreadful 
waiting to hear; dreadful to know that the event was over, and that she 
could not hear till self-willed rivers subsided; dreadful to know that they 
must subside and the news come at last. 

  She had some vague trust in the Judge's good-nature, and much in the 
resources of chance and accident. She had contrived to send the money he 
wanted. He would not be without legal advice and energetic and skilled 
support. 

  At last the news did come--a long arrear all in a gush: a letter from a 
female friend in Shrewsbury; a return of the sentences, sent up for the 
Judge; and most important, because most easily got at, being told with great 
aplomb and brevity, the long-deferred intelligence of the Shrewsbury Assizes 
in the Morning Advertiser. Like an impatient reader of a novel, who reads 
the last page first, she read with dizzy eyes the list of the executions. 

  Two were respited, seven were hanged; and in that capital catalogue was 
this line: 

  "Lewis Pyneweck--forgery." 

  She had to read it half-a-dozen times over before she was sure she 
understood it. Here was the paragraph: 

"Sentence, Death--7.
"Executed accordingly, on Friday the 13th instant, to wit:
"Thomas Primer, alias Duck--highway robbery.
"Flora Guy--stealing to the value of 11s. 6d.
"Arthur Pounden--burglary.
"Matilda Mummery--riot.
"Lewis Pyneweck--forgery, bill of exchange."

  And when she reached this, she read it over and over, feeling very cold 
and sick. 

  This buxom housekeeper was known in the house as Mrs. Carwell--Carwell 
being her maiden name, which she had resumed. 

  No one in the house except its master knew her history. Her introduction 
had been managed craftily. No one suspected that it had been concerted 
between her and the old reprobate in scarlet and ermine. 

  Flora Carwell ran up the stairs now and snatched her little girl, hardly 
seven years of age, whom she met on the lobby, hurriedly up in her arms, and 
carried her into her bedroom, without well knowing what she was doing, and 
sat down, placing the child before her. She was not able to speak. She held 
the child before her, and looked in the little girl's wondering face, and 
burst into tears of horror. 

  She thought the Judge could have saved him. I daresay he could. For a time 
she was furious with him, and hugged and kissed her bewildered little girl, 
who returned her gaze with large round eyes. 

  That little girl had lost her father, and knew nothing of the matter. She 
had been always told that her father was dead long ago. 

  A woman, coarse, uneducated, vain, and violent, does not reason, or even 
feel, very distinctly; but in these tears of consternation were mingling a 
self-upbraiding. She felt afraid of that little child. 

  But Mrs. Carwell was a person who lived not upon sentiment, but upon beef 
and pudding; she consoled herself with punch; she did not trouble herself 
long even with resentments; she was a gross and material person, and could 
not mourn over the irrevocable for more than a limited number of hours, even 
if she would. 

  Judge Harbottle was soon in London again. Except the gout, this savage old 
epicurean never knew a day's sickness. He laughed, and coaxed, and bullied 
away the young woman's faint upbraidings, and in a little time Lewis 
Pyneweck troubled her no more; and the Judge secretly chuckled over the 
perfectly fair removal of a bore, who might have grown little by little into 
something very like a tyrant. 

  It was the lot of the Judge whose adventures I am now recounting to try 
criminal cases at the Old Bailey shortly after his return. He had commenced 
his charge to the jury in a case of forgery, and was, after his wont, 
thundering dead against the prisoner, with many a hard aggravation and 
cynical gibe, when suddenly all died away in silence, and, instead of 
looking at the jury, the eloquent Judge was gaping at some person in the 
body of the court. 

  Among the persons of small importance who stand and listen at the sides 
was one tall enough to show with a little I prominence; a slight mean 
figure, dressed in seedy black, lean and dark of visage. He had just handed 
a letter to the crier, before he caught the Judge's eye. 

  That Judge descried, to his amazement, the features of Lewis Pyneweck. He 
had the usual faint thin-lipped smile; and with his blue chin raised in air, 
and as it seemed quite unconscious of the distinguished notice he had 
attracted, he was stretching his low cravat with his crooked fingers, while 
he slowly turned his head from side to side--a process which enabled the 
Judge to see distinctly a stripe of swollen blue round his neck, which 
indicated, he thought, the grip of the rope. 

  This man, with a few others, had got a footing on a step, from which he 
could better see the court. He now stepped down, and the Judge lost sight of 
him. 

  His lordship signed energetically with his hand in the direction in which 
this man had vanished. He turned to the tipstaff. His first effort to speak 
ended in a gasp. He cleared his throat, and told the astounded official to 
arrest that man who had interrupted the court. 

  "He's but this moment gone down there. Bring him in custody before me, 
within ten minutes' time, or I'll strip your gown from your shoulders and 
fine the sheriff!" he thundered, while his eyes flashed round the court in 
search of the functionary. 

  Attorneys, counsellors, idle spectators, gazed in the direction in which 
Mr. Justice Harbottle had shaken his gnarled old hand. They compared notes. 
Not one had seen anyone making a disturbance. They asked one another if the 
Judge was losing his head. 

  Nothing came of the search. His lordship concluded his charge a great deal 
more tamely; and when the jury retired, he stared round the court with a 
wandering mind, and looked as if he would not have given sixpence to see the 
prisoner hanged. 

CHAPTER V
CALEB SEARCHER
THE Judge had received the letter; had he known from whom it came, he would 
no doubt have read it instantaneously. As it was he simply read the 
direction: 

  To the Honourable The Lord Justice Elijah Harbottle, One of his Majesty's 
Justices of the Honourable Court of Common Pleas. 

  It remained forgotten in his pocket till he reached home. 

  When he pulled out that and others from the capacious pocket of his coat, 
it had its turn, as he sat in his library in his thick silk dressing-gown; 
and then he found its contents to be a closely-written letter, in a clerk's 
hand, and an enclosure in "secretary hand," as I believe the angular 
scrivenary of law-writings in those days was termed, engrossed on a bit of 
parchment about the size of this page. The letter said: 

  MR. JUSTICE HARBOTTLE, MY LORD, 

  "I am ordered by the High Court of Appeal to acquaint your lordship, in 
order to your better preparing yourself for your trial, that a true bill 
hath been sent down, and the indictment lieth against your lordship for the 
murder of one Lewis Pyneweck of Shrewsbury, citizen, wrongfully executed for 
the forgery of a bill of exchange, on the --th day of ---- last, by reason 
of the Wilful perversion of the evidence, and the undue pressure put upon 
the jury, together with the illegal admission of evidence by your lordship, 
well knowing the same to be illegal, by all which the promoter of the 
prosecution of the said indictment, before the High Court of Appeal, hath 
lost his life. 

  "And the trial of the said indictment, I am farther ordered to acquaint 
your lordship, is fixed for the 10th day of next ensuing, by the right 
honourable the Lord Chief Justice Twofold, of the court aforesaid, to wit, 
the High Court of Appeal, on which day it will most certainly take place. 
And I am farther to acquaint your lordship, to prevent any surprise or 
miscarriage, that your case stands first for the said day, and that the said 
High Court of Appeal sits day and night, and never rises; and herewith, by 
order of the said court, I furnish your lordship with a copy (extract) of 
the record in this case, except of the indictment, whereof, notwithstanding, 
the substance and effect is supplied to your lordship in this Notice. And 
farther I am to inform you, that in case the jury then to try your lordship 
should find you guilty, the right honourable the Lord Chief Justice will, in 
passing sentence of death upon you, fix the day of execution for the 10th 
day of ----, being one calendar month from the day of your trial." 

  It was signed by 

"CALEB SEARCHER,

Officer of the Crown
Solicitor in the Kingdom of Life and Death." 

  The Judge glanced through the parchment. 

  "'Sblood! Do they think a man like me is to be bamboozled by their 
buffoonery?" 

  The Judge's coarse features were wrung into one of his sneers; but he was 
pale. Possibly, after all, there was a conspiracy on foot. It was queer. Did 
they mean to pistol him in his carriage? or did they only aim at frightening 
him? 

  Judge Harbottle had more than enough of animal courage. He was not afraid 
of highwaymen, and he had fought more than his share of duels, being a foul-
mouthed advocate while he held briefs at the bar. No one questioned his 
fighting qualities. But with respect to this particular case of Pyneweck, he 
lived in a house of glass. Was there not his pretty, dark-eyed, over-dressed 
housekeeper, Mrs. Flora Carwell? Very easy for people who knew Shrewsbury to 
identify Mrs. Pyneweck, if once put upon the scent; and had he not stormed 
and worked hard in that case? Had he not made it hard sailing for the 
prisoner? Did he not know very well what the bar thought of it? It would be 
the worst scandal that ever blasted Judge. 

  So much there was intimidating in the matter, but nothing more. The Judge 
was a little bit gloomy for a day or two after, and more testy with everyone 
than usual. 

  He locked up the papers; and about a week after he asked his housekeeper, 
one day, in the library: 

  "Had your husband never a brother?" 

  Mrs. Carwell squalled on this sudden introduction of the funereal topic, 
and cried exemplary "piggins full," as the Judge used pleasantly to say. But 
he was in no mood for trifling now, and he said sternly: 

  "Come, madam! this wearies me. Do it another time; and give me an answer 
to my question." So she did. 

  Pyneweck had no brother living. He once had one; but he died in Jamaica. 

  "How do you know he is dead? " asked the Judge. 

  "Because he told me so." 

  "Not the dead man." 

  "Pyneweck told me so." 

  "Is that all?" sneered the Judge. 

  He pondered this matter; and time went on. The Judge was growing a little 
morose, and less enjoying. The subject struck nearer to his thoughts than he 
fancied it could have done. But so it is with most undivulged vexations, and 
there was no one to whom he could tell this one. 

  It was now the ninth; and Mr. Justice Harbottle was glad. He knew nothing 
would come of it. Still it bothered him; and to-morrow would see it well 
over. 

  [What of the paper I have cited? No one saw it during his life; no one, 
after his death. He spoke of it to Dr. Hedstone; and what purported to be "a 
copy," in the old Judge's handwriting, was found. The original was nowhere. 
Was it a copy of an illusion, incident to brain disease? Such is my belief.] 

CHAPTER VI
ARRESTED
JUDGE HARBOTTLE went this night to the play at Drury Lane. He was one of 
those old fellows who care nothing for late hours, and occasional knocking 
about in pursuit of pleasure. He had appointed with two cronies of Lincoln's 
Inn to come home in his coach with him to sup after the play. 

  They were not in his box, but were to meet him near the entrance, and get 
into his carriage there; and Mr. Justice Harbottle, who hated waiting, was 
looking a little impatiently from the window. 

  The Judge yawned. 

  He told the footman to watch for Counsellor Thavies and Counsellor Beller, 
who were coming; and, with another yawn, he laid his cocked hat on his 
knees, closed his eyes, leaned back in his corner, wrapped his mantle closer 
about him, and began to think of pretty Mrs. Abington. 

  And being a man who could sleep like a sailor, at a moment's notice, he 
was thinking of taking a nap. Those fellows had no business to keep a judge 
waiting. 

  He heard their voices now. Those rake-hell counsellors were laughing, and 
bantering, and sparring after their wont. The carriage swayed and jerked, as 
one got in, and then again as the other followed. The door clapped, and the 
coach was now jogging and rumbling over the pavement. The Judge was a little 
bit sulky. He did not care to sit up and open his eyes. Let them suppose he 
was asleep. He heard them laugh with more malice than good-humour, he 
thought, as they observed it. He would give them a d--d hard knock or two 
when they got to his door, and till then he would counterfeit his nap. 

  The clocks were chiming twelve. Beller and Thavies were silent as 
tombstones. They were generally loquacious and merry rascals. 

  The Judge suddenly felt himself roughly seized and thrust from his corner 
into the middle of the seat, and opening his eyes, instantly he found 
himself between his two companions. 

  Before he could blurt out the oath that was at his lips, he saw that they 
were two strangers--evil-looking fellows, each with a pistol in his hand, 
and dressed like Bow Street officers. 

  The Judge clutched at the check-string. The coach pulled up. He stared 
about him. They were not among houses; but through the windows, under a 
broad moonlight, he saw a black moor stretching lifelessly from right to 
left, with rotting trees, pointing fantastic branches in the air, standing 
here and there in groups, as if they held up their arms and twigs like 
fingers, in horrible glee at the Judge's coming. 

  A footman came to the window. He knew his long face and sunken eyes. He 
knew it was Dingly Chuff, fifteen years ago a footman in his service, whom 
he had turned off at a moment's notice, in a burst of jealousy, and indicted 
for a missing spoon. The man had died in prison of the jail-fever. 

  The Judge drew back in utter amazement. His armed companions signed 
mutely; and they were again gliding over this unknown moor. 

  The bloated and gouty old man, in his horror, considered the question of 
resistance. But his athletic days were long over. This moor was a desert. 
There was no help to be had. He was in the hands of strange servants, even 
if his recognition turned out to be delusion, and they were under the 
command of his captors. There was nothing for it but submission, for the 
present. 

  Suddenly the coach was brought nearly to a standstill, so that the 
prisoner saw an ominous sight from the window. 

  It was a gigantic gallows beside the road; it stood three-sided, and from 
each of its three broad beams at top depended in chains some eight or ten 
bodies, from several of which the cere-clothes had dropped away, leaving the 
skeletons swinging lightly by their chains. A tall ladder reached to the 
summit of the structure, and on the peat beneath lay bones. 

  On the top of the dark transverse beam facing the road, from which, as 
from the other two completing the triangle of death, dangled a row of these 
unfortunates in chains, a hangman, with a pipe in his mouth, much as we see 
him in the famous print of the "Idle Apprentice," though here his perch was 
ever so much higher, was reclining at his ease and listlessly shying bones, 
from a little heap at his elbow, at the skeletons that hung round, bringing 
down now a rib or two, now a hand, now half a leg. A long-sighted man could 
have discerned that he was a dark fellow, lean; and from continually looking 
down on the earth from the elevation over which, in another sense, he always 
hung, his nose, his lips, his chin were pendulous and loose, and drawn down 
into a monstrous grotesque. 

  This fellow took his pipe from his mouth on seeing the coach, stood up, 
and cut some solemn capers high on his beam, and shook a new rope in the 
air, crying with a voice high and distant as the caw of a raven hovering 
over a gibbet, "A rope for Judge Harbottle!" 

  The coach was now driving on at its old swift pace. 

  So high a gallows as that, the Judge had never, even in his most hilarious 
moments, dreamed of. He thought he must be raving. And the dead footman! He 
shook his ears and strained his eyelids; but if he was dreaming, he was 
unable to awake himself. 

  There was no good in threatening these scoundrels. A brutum fulmen might 
bring a real one on his head. 

  Any submission to get out of their hands, and then heaven and earth he 
would move to unearth and hunt them down. 

  Suddenly they drove round a corner of a vast white building, and under a 
porte-cochère. 

CHAPTER VII
CHIEF JUSTICE TWOFOLD
THE Judge found himself in a corridor lighted with dingy oil lamps, the 
walls of bare stone; it looked like a passage in a prison. His guards placed 
him in the hands of other people. Here and there he saw bony and gigantic 
soldiers passing to and fro, with muskets over their shoulders. They looked 
straight before them, grinding their teeth, in bleak fury, with no noise but 
the clank of their shoes. He saw these by glimpses, round corners, and at 
the ends of passages, but he did not actually pass them by. 

  And now, passing under a narrow doorway, he found himself in the dock, 
confronting a judge in his scarlet robes, in a large court-house. There was 
nothing to elevate this Temple of Themis above its vulgar kind elsewhere. 
Dingy enough it looked, in spite of candles lighted in decent abundance. A 
case had just closed, and the last juror's back was seen escaping through 
the door in the wall of the jury-box. There were some dozen barristers, some 
fiddling with pen and ink, others buried in briefs, some beckoning with the 
plumes of their pens, to their attorneys, of whom there were no lack; there 
were clerks to-ing and fro-ing, and the officers of the court, and the 
registrar, who was handing up a paper to the judge; and the tipstaff, who 
was presenting a note at the end of his wand to a king's counsel over the 
heads of the crowd between. If this was the High Court of Appeal, which 
never rose day or night, it might account for the pale and jaded aspect of 
everybody in it. An air of indescribable gloom hung upon the pallid features 
of all the people here; no one ever smiled; all looked more or less secretly 
suffering. 

  "The King against Elijah Harbottle!" shouted the officer. 

  "Is the appellant Lewis Pyneweck in court?" asked Chief-Justice Twofold, 
in a voice of thunder, that shook the woodwork of the court, and boomed down 
the corridors. 

  Up stood Pyneweck from his place at the table. 

  "Arraign the prisoner!" roared the Chief: and Judge Harbottle felt the 
panels of the dock round him, and the floor and the rails quiver in the 
vibrations of that tremendous voice. 

  The prisoner, in limine, objected to this pretended court, as being a 
sham, and non-existent in point of law; and then, that, even if it were a 
court constituted by law (the Judge was growing dazed), it had not and could 
not have any jurisdiction to try him for his conduct on the bench. 

  Whereupon the chief-justice laughed suddenly, and everyone in court, 
turning round upon the prisoner, laughed also, till the laugh grew and 
roared all round like a deafening acclamation; he saw nothing but glittering 
eyes and teeth, a universal stare and grin; but though all the voices 
laughed, not a single face of all those that concentrated their gaze upon 
him looked like a laughing face. The mirth subsided as suddenly as it began. 

  The indictment was read. Judge Harbottle actually pleaded! He pleaded "Not 
Guilty." A jury were sworn. The trial proceeded. Judge Harbottle was 
bewildered. This could not be real. He must be either mad, or going mad, he 
thought. 

  One thing could not fail to strike even him. This Chief-Justice Twofold, 
who was knocking him about at every turn with sneer and gibe, and roaring 
him down with his tremendous voice, was a dilated effigy of himself; an 
image of Mr. Justice Harbottle, at least double his size, and with all his 
fierce colouring, and his ferocity of eye and visage, enhanced awfully. 

  Nothing the prisoner could argue, cite, or state, was permitted to retard 
for a moment the march of the case towards its catastrophe. 

  The chief-justice seemed to feel his power over the jury, and to exult and 
riot in the display of it. He glared at them, he nodded to them; he seemed 
to have established an understanding with them. The lights were faint in 
that part of the court. The jurors were mere shadows, sitting in rows; the 
prisoner could see a dozen pair of white eyes shining, coldly, out of the 
darkness; and whenever the judge in his charge, which was contemptuously 
brief, nodded and grinned and gibed, the prisoner could see, in the 
obscurity, by the dip of all these rows of eyes together, that the jury 
nodded in acquiescence. 

  And now the charge was over, the huge chief-justice leaned back panting 
and gloating on the prisoner. Everyone in the court turned about, and gazed 
with steadfast hatred on the man in the dock. From the jury-box where the 
twelve sworn brethren were whispering together, a sound in the general 
stillness, like a prolonged "hiss-s-s!" was heard; and then, in answer to 
the challenge of the officer, "How say you, gentlemen of the jury, guilty or 
not guilty?" came in a melancholy voice the finding, " Guilty." 

  The place seemed to the eyes of the prisoner to grow gradually darker and 
darker, till he could discern nothing distinctly but the lumen of the eyes 
that were turned upon him from every bench and side and corner and gallery 
of the building. The prisoner doubtless thought that he had quite enough to 
say, and conclusive, why sentence of death should not be pronounced upon 
him; but the lord chief-justice puffed it contemptuously away, like so much 
smoke, and proceeded to pass sentence of death upon the prisoner, having 
named the tenth of the ensuing month for his execution. 

  Before he had recovered the stun of this ominous farce, in obedience to 
the mandate, "Remove the prisoner," he was led from the dock. The lamps 
seemed all to have gone out, and there were stoves and charcoal-fires here 
and there, that threw a faint crimson light on the walls of the corridors 
through which he passed. The stones that composed them looked now enormous, 
cracked and unhewn. 

  He came into a vaulted smithy, where two men, naked to the waist, with 
heads like bulls, round shoulders, and the arms of giants, were welding red-
hot chains together with hammers that pelted like thunderbolts. 

  They looked on the prisoner with fierce red eyes, and rested on their 
hammers for a minute; and said the elder to his companion, "Take out Elijah 
Harbottle's gyves"; and with a pincers he plucked the end which lay dazzling 
in the fire from the furnace. 

  "One end locks," said he, taking the cool end of the iron in one hand, 
while with the grip of a vice he seized the leg of the Judge and locked the 
ring round his ankle. "The other," he said with a grin, "is welded." 

  The iron band that was to form the ring for the other leg lay still red 
hot upon the stone floor, with brilliant sparks sporting up and down its 
surface. 

  His companion, in his gigantic hands, seized the old Judge's other leg, 
and pressed his foot immovably to the stone floor; while his senior, in a 
twinkling, with a masterly application of pincers and hammer, sped the 
glowing bar round his ankle so tight that the skin and sinews smoked and 
bubbled again, and old Judge Harbottle uttered a yell that seemed to chill 
the very stones and make the iron chains quiver on the wall. 

  Chains, vaults, smiths, and smithy all vanished in a moment; but the pain 
continued. Mr. Justice Harbottle was suffering torture all round the ankle 
on which the infernal smiths had just been operating. 

  His friends, Thavies and Beller, were startled by the Judge's roar in the 
midst of their elegant trifling about a marriage à-la-mode case which was 
going on. The Judge was in panic as well as pain. The street lamps and the 
light of his own hall door restored him. 

  "I'm very bad," growled he between his set teeth; "my foot's blazing. Who 
was he that hurt my foot? 'Tis the gout--'tis the gout!" he said, awaking 
completely. "How many hours have we been coming from the playhouse? 'Sblood, 
what has happened on the way? I've slept half the night!" 

  There had been no hitch or delay, and they had driven home at a good pace. 

  The Judge, however, was in gout; he was feverish too; and the attack, 
though very short, was sharp; and when, in about a fortnight, it subsided, 
his ferocious joviality did not return. He could not get this dream, as he 
chose to call it, out of his head. 

CHAPTER VIII
SOMEBODY HAS GOT INTO THE HOUSE
PEOPLE remarked that the Judge was in the vapours. His doctor said he should 
go for a fortnight to Buxton. 

  Whenever the Judge fell into a brown study he was always conning over the 
terms of the sentence pronounced upon him in his vision--"in one calendar 
month from the date of this day"; and then the usual form, "and you shall be 
hanged by the neck till you are dead," etc. "That will be the 10th--I'm not 
much in the way of being hanged. I know what stuff dreams are, and I laugh 
at them; but this is continually in my thoughts, as if it forecast 
misfortune of some sort. I wish the day my dream gave me were passed and 
over. I wish I were well purged of my gout. I wish I were as I used to be. 
'Tis nothing but vapours, nothing but a maggot." The copy of the parchment 
and letter which had announced his trial with many a snort and sneer he 
would read over and over again, and the scenery and people of his dream 
would rise about him in places the most unlikely, and steal him in a moment 
from all that surrounded him into a world of shadows. 

  The Judge had lost his iron energy and banter. He was growing taciturn and 
morose. The Bar remarked the change, as well they might. His friends thought 
him ill. The doctor said he was troubled with hypochondria, and that his 
gout was still lurking in his system, and ordered him to that ancient haunt 
of crutches and chalk-stones, Buxton. 

  The Judge's spirits were very low; he was frightened about himself; and he 
described to his housekeeper, having sent for her to his study to drink a 
dish of tea, his strange dream in his drive home from Drury Lane Playhouse. 
He was sinking into the state of nervous dejection in which men lose their 
faith in orthodox advice, and in despair consult quacks, astrologers, and 
nursery story-tellers. Could such a dream mean that he was to have a fit, 
and so die on the 10th? She did not think so. On the contrary, it was 
certain some good luck must happen on that day. 

  The Judge kindled; and for the first time for many days he looked for a 
minute or two like himself, and he tapped her on the cheek with the hand 
that was not in flannel. 

  "Odsbud! odsheart! you dear rogue! I had forgot. There is young Tom--
yellow Tom, my nephew, you know, lies sick at Harrogate; why shouldn't he go 
that day as well as another, and if he does, I get an estate by it? Why, 
lookee, I asked Doctor Hedstone yesterday if I was like to take a fit any 
time, and he laughed, and swore I was the last man in town to go off that 
way." 

  The Judge sent most of his servants down to Buxton to make his lodgings 
and all things comfortable for him. He was to follow in a day or two. 

  It was now the 9th; and the next day well over, he might laugh at his 
visions and auguries. 

  On the evening of the 9th, Dr. Hedstone's footman knocked at the Judge's 
door. The Doctor ran up the dusky stairs to the drawing-room. It was a March 
evening, near the hour of sunset, with an east wind whistling sharply 
through the chimney-stacks. A wood fire blazed cheerily on the hearth. And 
Judge Harbottle, in what was then called a brigadier-wig, with his red 
roquelaure on, helped the glowing effect of the darkened chamber, which 
looked red all over like a room on fire. 

  The Judge had his feet on a stool, and his huge grim purple face 
confronted the fire and seemed to pant and swell, as the blaze alternately 
spread upward and collapsed. He had fallen again among his blue devils, and 
was thinking of retiring from the Bench, and of fifty other gloomy things. 

  But the Doctor, who was an energetic son of Æsculapius, would listen to no 
croaking, told the Judge he was full of gout, and in his present condition 
no judge even of his own case, but promised him leave to pronounce on all 
those melancholy questions a fortnight later. 

  In the meantime the Judge must be very careful. He was overcharged with 
gout, and he must not provoke an attack till the waters of Buxton should do 
that office for him in their own salutary way. 

  The Doctor did not think him perhaps quite so well as he pretended, for he 
told him he wanted rest, and would be better if he went forthwith to his 
bed. 

  Mr. Gerningham, his valet, assisted him, and gave him his drops; and the 
Judge told him to wait in his bedroom till he should go to sleep. 

  Three persons that night had specially odd stories to tell. 

  The housekeeper had got rid of the trouble of amusing her little girl at 
this anxious time, by giving her leave to run about the sitting-rooms and 
look at the pictures and china, on the usual condition of touching nothing. 
It was not until the last gleam of sunset had for some time faded, and the 
twilight had so deepened that she could no longer discern the colours on the 
china figures on the chimneypiece or in the cabinets, that the child 
returned to the housekeeper's room to find her mother. 

  To her she related, after some prattle about the china, and the pictures, 
and the Judge's two grand wigs in the dressing-room oœ the library, an 
adventure of an extraordinary kind. 

  In the hall was placed, as was customary in those times, the sedan-chair 
which the master of the house occasionally used, covered with stamped 
leather and studded with gilt nails, and with its red silk blinds down. In 
this case, the doors of this old-fashioned conveyance were locked, the 
windows up, and, as I said, the blinds down, but not so closely that the 
curious child could not peep underneath one of them, and see into the 
interior. 

  A parting beam from the setting sun, admitted through the window of a back 
room, shot obliquely through the open door and, lighting on the chair, shone 
with a dull transparency through the crimson blind. 

  To her surprise, the child saw in the shadow a thin man, dressed in black, 
seated in it; he had sharp dark features; his nose, she fancied, a little 
awry, and his brown eyes were looking straight before him; his hand was on 
his thigh, and he stirred no more than the waxen figure she had seen at 
Southwark fair. 

  A child is so often lectured for asking questions, and on the propriety of 
silence, and the superior wisdom of its elders, that it accepts most things 
at last in good faith; and the little girl acquiesced respectfully in the 
occupation of the chair by this mahogany-faced person as being all right and 
proper. 

  It was not until she asked her mother who this man was, and observed her 
scared face as she questioned her more minutely upon the appearance of the 
stranger, that she began to understand that she had seen something 
unaccountable. 

  Mrs. Carwell took the key of the chair from its nail over the footman's 
shelf, and led the child by the hand up to the hall, having a lighted candle 
in her other hand. She stopped at a distance from the chair, and placed the 
candlestick in the child's hand. 

  "Peep in, Margery, again, and try if there's anything there," she 
whispered; "hold the candle near the blind so as to throw its light through 
the curtain." 

  The child peeped, this time with a very solemn face, and intimated at once 
that he was gone. 

  "Look again, and be sure," urged her mother. 

  The little girl was quite certain; and Mrs. Carwell, with her mob-cap of 
lace and cherry-coloured ribbons, and her dark brown hair, not yet powdered, 
over a very pale face, unlocked the door, looked in, and beheld emptiness. 

  "All a mistake, child, you see." 

  "There! ma'am! see there! He's gone round the corner," said the child. 

  "Where?" said Mrs. Carwell, stepping backward a step. 

  "Into that room." 

  "Tut, child! 'twas the shadow," cried Mrs. Carwell, angrily, because she 
was frightened. "I moved the candle." But she clutched one of the poles of 
the chair, which leant against the wall in the corner, and pounded the floor 
furiously with one end of it, being afraid to pass the open door the child 
had pointed to. 

  The cook and two kitchen-maids came running upstairs, not knowing what to 
make of this unwonted alarm. 

  They all searched the room; but it was still and empty, and no sign of 
anyone's having been there. 

  Some people may suppose that the direction given to her thoughts by this 
odd little incident will account for a very strange illusion which Mrs. 
Carwell herself experienced about two hours later. 

CHAPTER IX
THE JUDGE LEAVES HIS HOUSE
MRS. FLORA CARWELL was going up the great staircase with a posset for the 
Judge in a china bowl, on a little silver tray. 

  Across the top of the well-staircase there runs a massive oak rail; and, 
raising her eyes accidentally, she saw an extremely odd-looking stranger, 
slim and long, leaning carelessly over with a pipe between his finger and 
thumb. Nose, lips, and chin seemed all to droop downward into extraordinary 
length, as he leant his odd peering face over the banister. In his other 
hand he held a coil of rope, one end of which escaped from under his elbow 
and hung over the rail. 

  Mrs. Carwell, who had no suspicion at the moment that he was not a real 
person, and fancied that he was someone employed in cording the Judge's 
luggage, called to know what he was doing there. 

  Instead of answering he turned about and walked across the lobby, at about 
the same leisurely pace at which she was ascending, and entered a room, into 
which she followed him. It was an uncarpeted and unfurnished chamber. An 
open trunk lay upon the floor empty, and beside it the coil of rope; but 
except herself there was no one in the room. 

  Mrs. Carwell was very much frightened, and now concluded that the child 
must have seen the same ghost that had just appeared to her. Perhaps, when 
she was able to think it over, it was a relief to believe so; for the face, 
figure, and dress described by the child were awfully like Pyneweck; and 
this certainly was not he. 

  Very much scared and very hysterical, Mrs. Carwell ran down to her room, 
afraid to look over her shoulder, and got some companions about her, and 
wept, and talked, and drank more than one cordial, and talked and wept 
again, and so on, until, in those early days, it was ten o'clock, and time 
to go to bed. 

  A scullery-maid remained up finishing some of her scouring and "scalding" 
for some time after the other servants--who, as I said, were few in number--
that night had got to their beds. This was a low-browed, broad-faced, 
intrepid wench with black hair, who did not "vally a ghost not a button," 
and treated the housekeeper's hysterics with measureless scorn. 

  The old house was quiet now. It was near twelve o'clock, no sounds were 
audible except the muffled wailing of the wintry winds, piping high among 
the roofs and chimneys, or rumbling at intervals, in under gusts, through 
the narrow channels of the street. 

  The spacious solitudes of the kitchen level were awfully dark, and this 
sceptical kitchen-wench was the only person now up and about in the house. 
She hummed tunes to herself, for a time; and then stopped and listened; and 
then resumed her work again. At last, she was destined to be more terrified 
than even was the housekeeper. 

  There was a back kitchen in this house, and from this she heard, as if 
coming from below its foundations, a sound like heavy strokes, that seemed 
to shake the earth beneath her feet. Sometimes a dozen in sequence, at 
regular intervals; sometimes fewer. She walked out softly into the passage, 
and was surprised to see a dusky glow issuing from this room, as if from a 
charcoal fire. 

  The room seemed thick with smoke. 

  Looking in, she very dimly beheld a monstrous figure, over a furnace, 
beating with a mighty hammer the rings and rivets of a chain. 

  The strokes, swift and heavy as they looked, sounded hollow and distant. 
The man stopped, and pointed to something on the floor, that, through the 
smoky haze, looked, she thought, like a dead body. She remarked no more; but 
the servants in the room close by, startled from their sleep by a hideous 
scream, found her in a swoon on the flags, close to the door, where she had 
just witnessed this ghastly vision. 

  Startled by the girl's incoherent asseverations that she had seen the 
Judge's corpse on the floor, two servants having first searched the lower 
part of the house, went rather frightened upstairs to inquire whether their 
master was well. They found him, not in his bed, but in his room. He had a 
table with candles burning at his bedside, and was getting on his clothes 
again; and he swore and cursed at them roundly in his old style, telling 
them that he had business, and that he would discharge on the spot any 
scoundrel who should dare to disturb him again. 

  So the invalid was left to his quietude. 

  In the morning it was rumoured here and there in the street that the Judge 
was dead. A servant was sent from the house three doors away, by Counsellor 
Traverse, to inquire at Judge Harbottle's hall door. 

  The servant who opened it was pale and reserved, and would only say that 
the Judge was ill. He had had a dangerous accident; Doctor Hedstone had been 
with him at seven o'clock in the morning. 

  There were averted looks, short answers, pale and frowning faces, and all 
the usual signs that there was a secret that sat heavily upon their minds, 
and the time for disclosing which had not yet come. That time would arrive 
when the coroner had arrived, and the mortal scandal that had befallen the 
house could be no longer hidden. For that morning Mr. Justice Harbottle had 
been found hanging by the neck from the banister at the top of the great 
staircase, and quite dead. 

  There was not the smallest sign of any struggle or resistance. There had 
not been heard a cry or any other noise in the slightest degree indicative 
of violence. There was medical evidence to show that, in his atrabilious 
state, it was quite on the cards that he might have made away with himself. 
The jury found accordingly that it was a case of suicide. But to those who 
were acquainted with the strange story which Judge Harbottle had related to 
at least two persons, the fact that the catastrophe occurred on the morning 
of March 10th seemed a startling coincidence. 

  A few days after, the pomp of a great funeral attended him to the grave; 
and so, in the language of Scripture, "the rich man died, and was buried."