Hunted Down: The Detective Stories of Charles Dickens by Charles Dickens (fiction novels to read TXT) 📖

prize of two thousand pounds in your power, I was to be done to death with brandy, and, brandy not proving quick enough, with something quicker?  Have I never seen you, when you thought my senses gone, pouring from your little bottle into my glass?  Why, you Murderer and Forger, alone here with you in the dead of night, as I have so often been, I have had my hand upon the trigger of a pistol, twenty times, to blow your brains out!’

This sudden starting up of the thing that he had supposed to be his imbecile victim into a determined man, with a settled resolution to hunt him down and be the death of him, mercilessly expressed from head to foot, was, in the first shock, too much for him.  Without any figure of speech, he staggered under it.  But there is no greater mistake than to suppose that a man who is a calculating criminal, is, in any phase of his guilt, otherwise than true to himself, and perfectly consistent with his whole character.  Such a man commits murder, and murder is the natural culmination of his course; such a man has to outface murder, and will do it with hardihood and effrontery.  It is a sort of fashion to express surprise that any notorious criminal, having such crime upon his conscience, can so brave it out.  Do you think that if he had it on his conscience at all, or had a conscience to have it upon, he would ever have committed the crime?

Perfectly consistent with himself, as I believe all such monsters to be, this Slinkton recovered himself, and showed a defiance that was sufficiently cold and quiet.  He was white, he was haggard, he was changed; but only as a sharper who had played for a great stake and had been outwitted and had lost the game.

‘Listen to me, you villain,’ said Beckwith, ‘and let every word you hear me say be a stab in your wicked heart.  When I took these rooms, to throw myself in your way and lead you on to the scheme that I knew my appearance and supposed character and habits would suggest to such a devil, how did I know that?  Because you were no stranger to me.  I knew you well.  And I knew you to be the cruel wretch who, for so much money, had killed one innocent girl while she trusted him implicitly, and who was by inches killing another.’

Slinkton took out a snuff-box, took a pinch of snuff, and laughed.

‘But see here,’ said Beckwith, never looking away, never raising his voice, never relaxing his face, never unclenching his hand.  ‘See what a dull wolf you have been, after all!  The infatuated drunkard who never drank a fiftieth part of the liquor you plied him with, but poured it away, here, there, everywhere—almost before your eyes; who bought over the fellow you set to watch him and to ply him, by outbidding you in his bribe, before he had been at his work three days—with whom you have observed no caution, yet who was so bent on ridding the earth of you as a wild beast, that he would have defeated you if you had been ever so prudent—that drunkard whom you have, many a time, left on the floor of this room, and who has even let you go out of it, alive and undeceived, when you have turned him over with your foot—has, almost as often, on the same night, within an hour, within a few minutes, watched you awake, had his hand at your pillow when you were asleep, turned over your papers, taken samples from your bottles and packets of powder, changed their contents, rifled every secret of your life!’

He had had another pinch of snuff in his hand, but had gradually let it drop from between his fingers to the floor; where he now smoothed it out with his foot, looking down at it the while.

‘That drunkard,’ said Beckwith, ‘who had free access to your rooms at all times, that he might drink the strong drinks that you left in his way and be the sooner ended, holding no more terms with you than he would hold with a tiger, has had his master-key for all your locks, his test for all your poisons, his clue to your cipher-writing.  He can tell you, as well as you can tell him, how long it took to complete that deed, what doses there were, what intervals, what signs of gradual decay upon mind and body; what distempered fancies were produced, what observable changes, what physical pain.  He can tell you, as well as you can tell him, that all this was recorded day by day, as a lesson of experience for future service.  He can tell you, better than you can tell him, where that journal is at this moment.’

Slinkton stopped the action of his foot, and looked at Beckwith.

‘No,’ said the latter, as if answering a question from him.  ‘Not in the drawer of the writing-desk that opens with a spring; it is not there, and it never will be there again.’

‘Then you are a thief!’ said Slinkton.

Without any change whatever in the inflexible purpose, which it was quite terrific even to me to contemplate, and from the power of which I had always felt convinced it was impossible for this wretch to escape, Beckwith returned,

‘And I am your niece’s shadow, too.’

With an imprecation Slinkton put his hand to his head, tore out some hair, and flung it to the ground.  It was the end of the smooth walk; he destroyed it in the action, and it will soon be seen that his use for it was past.

Beckwith went on: ‘Whenever you left here, I left here.  Although I understood that you found it necessary to pause in the completion of that purpose, to avert suspicion, still I watched you close, with the poor confiding girl.  When I had the diary, and could read it word by word,—it was only about the night before your last visit to Scarborough,—you remember the night? you slept with a small flat vial tied to your wrist,—I sent to Mr. Sampson, who was kept out of view.  This is Mr. Sampson’s trusty servant standing by the door.  We three saved your niece among us.’

Slinkton looked at us all, took an uncertain step or two from the place where he had stood, returned to it, and glanced about him in a very curious way,—as one of the meaner reptiles might, looking for a hole to hide in.  I noticed at the same time, that a singular change took place in the figure of the man,—as if it collapsed within his clothes, and they consequently became ill-shapen and ill-fitting.

‘You shall know,’ said Beckwith, ‘for I hope the knowledge will be bitter and terrible to you, why you have been pursued by one man, and why, when the whole interest that Mr. Sampson represents would have expended any money in hunting you down, you have been tracked to death at a single individual’s charge.  I hear you have had the name of Meltham on your lips sometimes?’

I saw, in addition to those other changes, a sudden stoppage come upon his breathing.

‘When you sent the sweet girl whom you murdered (you know with what artfully made-out surroundings and probabilities you sent her) to Meltham’s office, before taking her abroad to originate the transaction that doomed her to the grave, it fell to Meltham’s lot to see her and to speak with her.  It did not fall to his lot to save her, though I know he would freely give his own life to have done it.  He admired her;—I would say he loved her deeply, if I thought it possible that you could understand the word.  When she was sacrificed, he was thoroughly assured of your guilt.  Having lost her, he had but one object left in life, and that was to avenge her and destroy you.’

I saw the villain’s nostrils rise and fall convulsively; but I saw no moving at his mouth.

‘That man Meltham,’ Beckwith steadily pursued, ‘was as absolutely certain that you could never elude him in this world, if he devoted himself to your destruction with his utmost fidelity and earnestness, and if he divided the sacred duty with no other duty in life, as he was certain that in achieving it he would be a poor instrument in the hands of Providence, and would do well before Heaven in striking you out from among living men.  I am that man, and I thank God that I have done my work!’

If Slinkton had been running for his life from swift-footed savages, a dozen miles, he could not have shown more emphatic signs of being oppressed at heart and labouring for breath, than he showed now, when he looked at the pursuer who had so relentlessly hunted him down.

‘You never saw me under my right name before; you see me under my right name now.  You shall see me once again in the body, when you are tried for your life.  You shall see me once again in the spirit, when the cord is round your neck, and the crowd are crying against you!’

When Meltham had spoken these last words, the miscreant suddenly turned away his face, and seemed to strike his mouth with his open hand.  At the same instant, the room was filled with a new and powerful odour, and, almost at the same instant, he broke into a crooked run, leap, start,—I have no name for the spasm,—and fell, with a dull weight that shook the heavy old doors and windows in their frames.

That was the fitting end of him.

When we saw that he was dead, we drew away from the room, and Meltham, giving me his hand, said, with a weary air,

‘I have no more work on earth, my friend.  But I shall see her again elsewhere.’

It was in vain that I tried to rally him.  He might have saved her, he said; he had not saved her, and he reproached himself; he had lost her, and he was broken-hearted.

‘The purpose that sustained me is over, Sampson, and there is nothing now to hold me to life.  I am not fit for life; I am weak and spiritless; I have no hope and no object; my day is done.’

In truth, I could hardly have believed that the broken man who then spoke to me was the man who had so strongly and so differently impressed me when his purpose was before him.  I used such entreaties with him, as I could; but he still said, and always said, in a patient, undemonstrative way,—nothing could avail him,—he was broken-hearted.

He died early in the next spring.  He was buried by the side of the poor young lady for whom he had cherished those tender and unhappy regrets; and he left all he had to her sister.  She lived to be a happy wife and mother; she married my sister’s son, who succeeded poor Meltham; she is living now, and her children ride about the garden on my walking-stick when I go to see her.