‘Clear your head,’ says Mr. Longcluse, sternly, seating himself before Sir Richard, with the table between; ‘you must conceive a distinct idea of your situation, Sir, and I shall then tell you something that remains. You have committed a forgery under aggravated circumstances, for which I shall have you convicted and sentenced to penal servitude at the next sessions. I have been a good friend to you on many occasions; you have been a false one to me—who baser?—and while I was anonymously helping you with large sums of money, you forged my name to a legal instrument for ten thousand pounds, to swindle your unknown benefactor, little suspecting who he was.’
Longcluse smiled.
‘I have heard how you spoke of me. I'm an adventurer, a leg, an assassin, a person whom you were compelled to drop; rather a low person, I fear, if a felon can't afford to sit beside me! You were always too fine a man for me. Your get up was always peculiar; you were famous for that. It will soon be more singular still, when your hair and your clothes are cut after the fashion of the great world you are about to enter. How your friends will laugh?’
Sir Richard heard all this with a helpless stare.
‘I have only to stamp on the ground, to call up the men who will accomplish your transformation. I can change your life by a touch, into convict dress, diet, labour, lodging, for the rest of your days. What plea have you to offer to my mercy?’
Sir Richard would have spoken, but his voice failed him. With a second effort, however, he said— ‘Would it not be more manly if you let me meet my fate, without this.’
‘And you are such an admirable judge of what is manly; or
‘That is all?’ inquired Sir Richard, faintly, after a minute's silence.
‘All for the present,’ was the reply; ‘you will see more clearly, by-and-by, that you are my property, and you will act accordingly.’
The two Jewish-looking gentlemen, whom Richard had passed in a conference in their carriage which stood now at the steps of the house, were the sheriff's officers destined to take charge of the fallen gentleman, and convey him, by Levi's direction, to a ‘sponging house,’ which, I believe, belonged jointly to him and his partner, Mr. Goldshed.
It was on the principle, perhaps, on which hunters tame wild beasts, by a sojourn at the bottom of a pit-fall, that Mr. Longcluse doomed the young baronet to some ten hours' solitary contemplation of his hopeless immeshment in that castle of Giant Despair, before taking him out and setting him again before him, for the purpose of instructing him in the conditions and duties of the direful life on which he was about to enter.
Mr. Longcluse left the baronet suddenly, and returned to Levi's office no more.
Sir Richard's rôle was cast. He was to figure, at least first, as a captive in the drama for which fate had selected him. He
‘You have something to say to me?’ said the baronet, making tender, as it were, of himself. The offer was, obligingly, accepted, and the sheriffs, by his lieutenants, made prisoner of Sir Richard Arden, who strode down the stairs between them, and entered the seedy coach, and sitting as far back as he could, drove rapidly toward the City.
Stunned and confused, there was but one image vividly present to his recollection, and that was the baleful face of Walter Longcluse.