For the Term of His Natural Life | Page 9

you bloody villain! Jem, bring him along here, p'r'aps his
lordship can recognize him!"
"It was not I!" cried Richard Devine. "For God's sake, my lord say--"
then he stopped abruptly, and being forced on his knees by his captors,
remained staring at the dying man, in sudden and ghastly fear.
Those men in whom emotion has the effect of quickening circulation of
the blood reason rapidly in moments of danger, and in the terrible
instant when his eyes met those of Lord Bellasis, Richard Devine had
summed up the chances of his future fortune, and realized to the full his
personal peril. The runaway horse had given the alarm. The drinkers at
the Spaniards' Inn had started to search the Heath, and had discovered a
fellow in rough costume, whose person was unknown to them, hastily
quitting a spot where, beside a rifled pocket-book and a blood-stained
whip, lay a dying man.
The web of circumstantial evidence had enmeshed him. An hour ago
escape would have been easy. He would have had but to cry, "I am the
son of Sir Richard Devine. Come with me to yonder house, and I will

prove to you that I have but just quitted it,"--to place his innocence
beyond immediate question. That course of action was impossible now.
Knowing Sir Richard as he did, and believing, moreover, that in his
raging passion the old man had himself met and murdered the destroyer
of his honour, the son of Lord Bellasis and Lady Devine saw himself in
a position which would compel him either to sacrifice himself, or to
purchase a chance of safety at the price of his mother's dishonour and
the death of the man whom his mother had deceived. If the outcast son
were brought a prisoner to North End House, Sir Richard--now doubly
oppressed of fate--would be certain to deny him; and he would be
compelled, in self-defence, to reveal a story which would at once bring
his mother to open infamy, and send to the gallows the man who had
been for twenty years deceived--the man to whose kindness he owed
education and former fortune. He knelt, stupefied, unable to speak or
move.
"Come," cried Mogford again; "say, my lord, is this the villain?"
Lord Bellasis rallied his failing senses, his glazing eyes stared into his
son's face with horrible eagerness; he shook his head, raised a feeble
arm as though to point elsewhere, and fell back dead.
"If you didn't murder him, you robbed him," growled Mogford, "and
you shall sleep at Bow Street to-night. Tom, run on to meet the patrol,
and leave word at the Gate-house that I've a passenger for the
coach!--Bring him on, Jack!--What's your name, eh?"
He repeated the rough question twice before his prisoner answered, but
at length Richard Devine raised a pale face which stern resolution had
already hardened into defiant manhood, and said "Dawes--Rufus
Dawes."
* * * * * *
His new life had begun already: for that night one, Rufus Dawes,
charged with murder and robbery, lay awake in prison, waiting for the
fortune of the morrow.

Two other men waited as eagerly. One, Mr. Lionel Crofton; the other,
the horseman who had appointment with the murdered Lord Bellasis
under the shadow of the fir trees on Hampstead Heath. As for Sir
Richard Devine, he waited for no one, for upon reaching his room he
had fallen senseless in a fit of apoplexy.

BOOK I.--THE SEA. 1827.
CHAPTER I.
THE PRISON SHIP.

In the breathless stillness of a tropical afternoon, when the air was hot
and heavy, and the sky brazen and cloudless, the shadow of the
Malabar lay solitary on the surface of the glittering sea.
The sun--who rose on the left hand every morning a blazing ball, to
move slowly through the unbearable blue, until he sank fiery red in
mingling glories of sky and ocean on the right hand--had just got low
enough to peep beneath the awning that covered the poop-deck, and
awaken a young man, in an undress military uniform, who was dozing
on a coil of rope.
"Hang it!" said he, rising and stretching himself, with the weary sigh of
a man who has nothing to do, "I must have been asleep"; and then,
holding by a stay, he turned about and looked down into the waist of
the ship.
Save for the man at the wheel and the guard at the quarter-railing, he
was alone on the deck. A few birds flew round about the vessel, and
seemed to pass under her stern windows only to appear again at her
bows. A lazy albatross, with the white water flashing from his wings,
rose with a dabbling sound to leeward, and in the place where he had
been glided the hideous