Davenport Dunn, a Man of Our Day. Volume 2

The night was dark as pitch, and a thin soft rain was falling, as Davis, with a rapidity that showed this was no first essay in such a walk, glided along from carriage to carriage, till he reached a heavy luggage van, immediately beyond which was the coupé of Mr. Davenport Dunn.

The brief prayer that good men utter ere they rush upon an enterprise of deadly peril must have its representative in some shape or other with those whose hearts are callous. Nature will have her due; and in that short interval – the bridge between two worlds – the worst must surely experience intense emotion. Whatever those of Davis, they were of the briefest. In another second he was at the door of Dunn’s carriage, his eyes glaring beneath the drawn-down blind, where, by a narrow slip of light, he could detect a figure busily employed in writing. So bent was he on mastering every portion and detail of the arrangement within, that he actually crept around till he reached the front windows, and could plainly see the whole coupé lighted up brilliantly with wax candles.

Surrounded with papers and letters and despatch-boxes, the man of business labored away as though in his office, every appliance for refreshment beside him. These Davis noted well, remarking the pistols that hung between the windows, and a bell-pull quite close to the writing-table. This latter passed through the roof of the carriage, and was evidently intended to signalize the guard when wanted. Before another minute had elapsed Davis had cut off this communication, and, knotting the string outside, still suffered it to hang down within as before.

All that precaution could demand was now done; the remainder must be decided by action. Noiselessly introducing the latch-key, Davis turned the lock, and, opening the door, stepped inside. Dunn started as the door banged, and there beheld him. To ring and summon the guard was the quick impulse of his ready wit; but when the bell-rope came down as he pulled it, the whole truth flashed across him that all had been concerted and plotted carefully.

“Never mind your pistols. I’m armed too,” said Davis, coolly. “If it was your life I wanted, I could have taken it easily enough at any minute during the last ten or twelve.”

“What do you mean, then, sir, by this violence? By what right do you dare to enter here?” cried Dunn, passionately.

“There has been no great violence up to this,” said Davis, with a grin. “As to my right to be here, we’ll talk about that presently. You know me, I believe?”

“I want to know why you are here,” cried Dunn, again.

“And so you shall; but, first of all, no treachery. Deal fairly, and a very few minutes will settle all business between us.”

“There is no business to be settled between us,” said Dunn, haughtily, “except the insolence of your intrusion here, and for that you shall pay dearly.”

“Don’t try bluster with me, man,” said Grog, contemptuously. “If you just stood as high in integrity as I know you to stand low in knavery, it would n’t serve you. I’ve braved pluckier fellows than ever you were.”

With a sudden jerk Dunn let down the window; but Grog’s iron grip held him down in his place, as he said sternly, “I ‘ll not stand nonsense. I have come here for a purpose, and I ‘ll not leave it till it’s accomplished. You know me.”

“I do know you,” said Dunn, with an insolent irony.

“And I know you. Hankes – Simmy Hankes – has told me a thing or two; but the world will soon be as wise as either of us.”

Dunn’s face became deadly pale, and, in a voice broken And faint, he said, “What do you mean? What has Hankes said?”

“All, – everything. Why, bless your heart, man, it was no secret to me that you were cheating, the only mystery was how you did the trick; now Hankes has shown me that. I know it all now. You had n’t so many trumps in your hand, but you played them twice over, – that was the way you won the game. But that’s no affair of mine. ‘Rook’ them all round, – only don’t ‘try it on’ with Kit Davis! What brought me here is this: my daughter is married to Annesley Beecher that was, the now Viscount Lackington; there’s another fellow about to contest the title and the estates. You know all about his claim and his chances, and you can, they tell me, make it all ‘snag’ to either party. Now, I ‘m here to treat with you. How much shall it be? There’s no use in going about the bush, – how much shall it be?”

“I can be of no use to you in this business,” said Dunn, hesitatingly; “the papers are not in my keeping. Conway’s suit is in the hands of the first men at the bar – ”

“I know all that, and I know, besides, you have an appointment with Fordyce at Calvert’s Hotel, to arrange the whole matter; so go in at once, and be on the square with me. Who has these papers? Where are they?”

Dunn started at the sudden tone of the question, and then his eyes turned as quickly towards a brass-bound despatch-box at the bottom of the carriage. If the glance was of the speediest, it yet had not escaped the intense watchfulness of Davis, who now reiterated his question of “Where are they?”

“If you ‘d come to me after my interview with Fordyce,” said Dunn, with a slow deliberation, as though giving the matter a full reflection, “I think we might hit upon something together.”

“To be sure, we might,” said Grog, laughing; “there ‘s only one obstacle to that pleasant arrangement, – that I should find an inspector and two constables of the police ready waiting for my visit. No, Master Dunn, what we ‘re to do we ‘ll do here and now.”

“You appear to measure all men by your own standard, sir,” said Dunn, indignantly; “and let me tell you that in point of honor it is a scant one.”

“We’re neither of us fit for a grenadier-company of integrity, that’s a fact, Dunn; but, upon my solemn oath, I believe I ‘m the best man of the two. But what’s the use of this ‘chaff’? I have heard from Hankes how it stands about that Irish estate you pretended to buy for the late Lord, and never paid for. Now you want to stand all square upon that, naturally enough; it is a pot of money, – seven-and-thirty thousand pounds. Don’t you see, old fellow, I have the whole story all correct and clear; so once more, do be business-like, and say what’s your figure, – how much?”

Again did Dunn’s eyes revert to the box at his feet, but it was difficult to say whether intentionally or not Davis, however, never ceased to watch their gaze; and when Dunn, becoming suddenly conscious of the scrutiny, grew slightly red, Grog chuckled to himself and muttered, “You’re no match for Kit Davis, deep as you are.”

“Until we learn to repose some trust in each other, sir,” said Dunn, whose confusion still continued, “all dealing together is useless.”

“Well, if you mean by that,” retorted Davis, “that you and I are going to start for a ten years’ friendship, I declare off, and say it’s no match. I told you what brought me here, and now I want you to say how I ‘m to go back again. Where are these same papers? – answer me that.”

“Some are in the hands of Conway’s lawyers; some are in the Crimea, carded away surreptitiously by a person who was once in my confidence; some are, I suspect, in the keeping of Conway’s mother, in Wales – ”

“And some are locked up in that red box there,” said Grog, with a defiant look.

“Not one. I can swear by all that is most solemn and awful there’s not a document there that concerns the cause.” As Dunn spoke these words, his voice trembled with intense agitation, and he grew sickly pale.

“What if I wouldn’t believe you on your oath?” broke in Grog, whose keen eyes seemed actually to pierce the other’s secret thoughts. “It was n’t to-day, or yesterday, that you and I learned how to dodge an oath. Open that box there; I ‘ll have a look through it for myself.”

“That you never shall,” said Dunn, fiercely, as he grasped the bundle of keys that lay before him and placed them in his breast-pocket.

“Come, I like your pluck, Dunn, though it won’t serve your turn this time. I ‘ll either see that box opened before me now, or I’ll carry it off with me, – which shall it be?”

“Neither, by Heaven!” cried Dunn, whose passion was now roused effectually.

“We ‘ll, first of all, get these out of the way; they’re ugly playthings,” said Davis, as with a spring he seized the pistols and hurled them through the open window; in doing so, however, he necessarily leaned forward, and partly turned his back towards Dunn. With a gesture quick as lightning, Dunn drew a loaded pistol from his breast, and, placing the muzzle almost close to the other’s head, drew the trigger. A quick motion of the neck made the ball glance from the bone of the skull, and passing down amongst the muscles of the neck, settle above the shoulder. Terrible as the wound was, Davis sprang upon him with the ferocity of a tiger. Not a word nor a cry escaped his lips, as, in all the agony of his suffering, he seized Dunn by the throat with one hand, while, drawing from his breast a heavy life-preserver, he struck him on the head with the other. A wild scream, – a cry for help, half smothered in the groan that followed, rang out, and Dunn reeled from his seat and fell dead on the floor! Two fearful fractures had rent the skull open, and life was extinguished at once. Davis bent down, and gazed long and eagerly at the ghastly wounds; but it was not till he had laid his hand over the heart that he knew them to be fatal. A short shudder, more like the sense of sudden cold than any sentiment of horror, passed over him as he stood for a few seconds motionless; then, opening the dead man’s coat, he drew forth his keys and searched for that one which pertained to the red box. He carefully placed the box upon the table and unlocked it The contents were title-deeds of the Glengariff family, but all in duplicate, and so artfully imitated that it would have been scarcely possible to distinguish original from copy. Of the Lackingtons there was nothing but a release of all claims against Davenport Dunn, purporting to have been the act of the late Lord, but of which the signature was only indicated in pencil.

“The discovery was n’t worth the price,” muttered Davis, as he turned a half-sickly look upon the lifeless mass at his feet. “I ‘m not the first who found out that the swag did n’t pay for the smash; not,” added he, after a moment, “that I was to blame here: it was he began it!”

With some strange mysterious blending of reverence for the dead, with a vague sense of how the sight would strike the first beholders, Davis raised the corpse from the floor and placed it on the seat He then wiped the clotted gore from the forehead, and dried the hair. It was a gruesome sight, and even he was not insensible to its terrors; for, as he turned away, he heaved a short, thick sigh. How long he stood thus, half stunned and bewildered, he knew not; but he was, at length, recalled to thought and activity by the loud whistle that announced the train was approaching a station. The next minute they glided softly in beside a platform, densely crowded with travellers. Davis did not wait for the guard, but opened the door himself, and slowly, for he was in pain, descended from the carriage.

“Call the station-master here,” said he to the first official he met “Let some one, too, fetch a doctor, for I am badly wounded, and a policeman, for I want to surrender myself.” He then added, after a pause, “There’s a dead man in that carriage yonder!”

The terrible tidings soon spread abroad, and crowds pressed eagerly forward to gaze upon the horrible spectacle. No sooner was it announced that the murdered man was the celebrated Davenport Dunn, than the interest increased tenfold, and, with that marvellous ingenuity falsehood would seem ever to have at her disposal, a dozen artfully conceived versions of the late event were already in circulation. It was the act of a maniac, – a poor creature driven mad by injustice and persecution. It was the vengeance of a man whose fortune had been ruined by Dunn. It was the father of a girl he had seduced and abandoned. It was a beggared speculator, – a ruined trustee, – and so on; each narrative, strangely enough, inferring that the fatal catastrophe was an expiation! How ready is the world to accept this explanation of the sad reverses that befall those it once has stooped to adulate, – how greedily does it seek to repay itself for its own degrading homage, by maligning the idol of its former worship! Up to this hour no man had ever dared to whisper a suspicion of Dunn’s integrity; and now, ere his lifeless clay was cold, many were floundering away in this pseudo-morality about the little benefit all his wealth was to him, and wondering if his fate would not be a lesson! And so the train went on its way, the coupé with the dead body detached and left for the inspection of the inquest, And Davis on a sick-bed and in custody of the police.

His wound was far more serious than at first was apprehended; the direction the ball had taken could not be ascertained, and the pain was intense. Grog, however, would not condescend to speak of his suffering, but addressed himself vigorously to all the cares of his situation.

“Let me have some strong cavendish tobacco and a pint of British gin, pen, ink, and paper, and no visitors.”

The remonstrances of the doctor he treated with scorn.

“I’m not one of your West-end swells,” said he, “that’s afraid of a little pain, nor one of your Guy’s Hospital wretches that’s frightened by the surgeon’s tools; only no tinkering, no probing. If you leave me alone, I have a constitution that will soon pull me through.”

His first care was to dictate a telegraphic despatch to a well-known lawyer, whose skill in criminal cases had made him a wide celebrity. He requested him to come down at once and confer with him. His next was to write to his daughter, and in this latter task he passed nearly half the night. Written as it was in great bodily pain and no small suffering of mind, the letter was marvellously indicative of the man who penned it. He narrated the whole incident to its fatal termination exactly as it occurred; not the slightest effort did he make at exculpation for his own share in it; and he only deplored the misfortune in its effect upon the object he had in view.

“If Dunn,” said he, “hadn’t been so ready with his pistol, I believe we might have come to terms; but there’s no guarding against accidents. As matters stand, Annesley must make his own fight, for, of course, I can be of little use to him or to any one else till the assizes are over. So far as I can see, the case is a bad one, and Conway most likely to succeed; but there’s yet time for a compromise. I wish you ‘d take the whole affair into your own hands.”

To enable her to enter clearly upon a question of such complication, he gave a full narrative, so far as he could, of the contested claim, showing each step he had himself taken in defence, and with what object he had despatched Paul Classon to the Crimea. Three entire pages were filled with this theme; of himself, and his own precarious fortunes, he said very little indeed.

“Don’t be alarmed, Lizzy,” wrote he; “if the coroner’s inquest should find a verdict of ‘Wilful Murder’ against me, such a decision does not signify a rush; and as I mean to reserve all my defence for the trial, such a verdict is likely enough. There will be, besides this, the regular hue and cry people get up against the gambler, the leg, and who knows what else they ‘ll call me. Don’t mind that, either, girl. Let the moralists wag their charitable tongues; we can afford to make a waiting race, and, if I don’t mistake much, before the trial comes off, Davenport Dunn himself will be more ill thought of than Kit Davis. Above all, however, don’t show in public; get away from Rome, and stay for a month or two in some quiet, out-of-the-way place, where people cannot make remarks upon your manner, and either say, ‘See how this disgraceful affair has cut her up,’ or, ‘Did you ever see any one so brazen under an open shame?’

“I have sent for Ewin Jones, the lawyer, and expect him by the down train; if he should say anything worth repeating to you, I ‘ll add it ere I seal this.”

A little lower down the page were scrawled, half illegibly, the following few words: —

“Another search for the ball, and no better luck; it has got down amongst some nerves, where they ‘re afraid to follow it, – a sort of Chancery Court Jones is here, and thinks ‘we ‘ll do,’ particularly if ‘the Press’ blackguards Dunn well in the mean time. Remember me to A. B., and keep him from talking nonsense about the business, – for a while, at least, – that is, if you can, and

“Believe me, yours, as ever,

“C. Davis.”

CHAPTER XXXV. THE TRIAL

Scarcely had the town been struck by the large placards announcing the dreadful murder of Davenport Dunn, which paraded the streets in all directions, when a second edition of the morning papers brought the first tidings of the ruin that was to follow that event; and now, in quick succession, came news that the treasurer of the grand Glengariff Company had gone off with some fifty thousand pounds; that the great Ossory Bank had stopped payment; companies on every hand smashing’; misfortune and calamity everywhere. Terrible as was the detail which the inquest revealed, the whole interest of the world was turned to the less striking but scarcely less astounding news that society had for years back been the dupe of the most crafty and unprincipled knave of all Europe, that the great idol of its worship, the venerated and respected in all enterprises of industry, the man of large philanthropy and wide benevolence, was a schemer and a swindler, unprincipled and unfeeling. The fatal machinery of deception and falsehood which his life maintained crumbled to ruin at the very moment of his death; he was himself the mainspring of all fraud, and when he ceased to dictate, the game of roguery was over. While, therefore, many deplored the awful crime which had just been committed, and sorrowed over the stain cast upon our age and our civilization, there arose amidst their grief the wilder and more heartrending cry of thousands brought to destitution and beggary by this bold, bad man.

Of the vast numbers who had dealings with him, scarcely any escaped: false title-deeds, counterfeited shares, forged scrip abounded. The securities intrusted to his keeping in all the trustfulness of an unlimited confidence had been pledged for loans of money; vast sums alleged to have been advanced on mortgage were embezzled without a shadow of security. From the highest in the peerage to the poorest peasant, all were involved in the same scheme of ruin, and the great fortunes of the rich and the hardly saved pittance of the poor alike engulfed. So suddenly did the news break upon the world that it actually seemed incredible. It was not alone a shock given to mercantile credit and commercial honesty, but it seemed an outrage against whatever assumed to be high-principled and honorable. It could not be denied that this man had been the world’s choicest favorite. Upon him had been lavished all the honors and rewards usually reserved for the greatest benefactors of their kind. The favors of the Crown, the friendship and intimacy with the highest in station, immense influence with the members of the Government, power and patronage to any extent, and, greater than all these, because more wide-spread and far-reaching, a sort of acceptance that all he said and did and planned and projected was certain to be for the best, and that they who opposed his views or disparaged his conceptions were sure to be mean-minded and envious men, jealous of the noble ascendancy of his great nature. And all this because he was rich and could enrich others! Had the insane estimate of this man been formed by those fighting the hard battle of fortune, and so crushed by poverty that even a glimpse of affluence was a gleam of Paradise, it might have been more pardonable; but far from it. Davenport Dunn’s chief adherents and his primest flatterers were themselves great in station and rolling in wealth; they were many of them the princes of the land. The richest banker of all Europe – he whose influence has often decided the fate of contending nations – was Dunn’s tried and trusted friend. The great Minister, whose opening speech of a session was the mot d’ordre for half the globe, had taken counsel with him, stooping to ask his advice, and condescending to indorse his opinions. A proud old noble, as haughty a member of his order as the peerage possessed, did not disdain to accept him for a son-in-law; and now the great banker was to find himself defrauded, the great minister disgraced, and the noble Lord who had stooped to his alliance was to see his estate dissipated and his fortune lost!

What a moral strain did not the great monitors of our age pour forth; what noble words of reproof fell from Pulpit and Press upon the lust of wealth, the base pursuit of gold; what touching contrasts were drawn between the hard-won competence of the poor man and the ill-gotten abundance of the gambler! How impressively was the lesson proclaimed, that patient industry was a nobler characteristic of a people than successful enterprise, and that it was not to lucky chances and accidental success, but to the virtues of truthfulness, order, untiring labor, and economy, that England owed the high place she occupied amongst the nations of the earth. All this was, perhaps, true; the only pity was that the pæan over our greatness should be also a funeral wail over thousands reduced to beggary and want! For weeks the newspapers had no other themes than the misery of this man’s cruel frauds. Magistrates were besieged by appeals from people reduced to the last destitution; public offices crowded with applicants, pressing to know if the titles or securities they held as the sole guarantees of a livelihood, were true or false. All confidence seemed gone. Men trembled at every letter they opened; and none knew whether the tidings of each moment might not be the announcement of utter ruin.

Until the event had actually occurred, it was not easy to conceive how the dishonesty of one man could so effectually derange the whole complex machinery of a vast society; but so it really proved. So intensely had the money-getting passion taken possession of the national mind, so associated had national prosperity seemed to be with individual wealth, that nothing appeared great, noble, or desirable but gold, and the standard of material value was constituted to be the standard of all moral excellence: intending to honor Industry, the nation had paid its homage to Money!

Of all the victims to Dunn’s perfidy, there was one who never could be brought to believe in his guilt This was the old Earl of Glengariff. So stunned was he by the first news of the murder that his faculties never rightly recovered the shock, and his mind balanced between a nervous impatience for Dunn’s arrival and a dreary despondency as to his coming; and in this way he lived for years, his daughter watching over him with every care and devotion, hiding with many an artifice the painful signs of their reduced fortune, and feeding with many a false hope the old man’s yearnings for wealth and riches. The quiet old town of Bruges was their resting-place; and there, amidst deserted streets and grass-grown pavements, they lived, pitied and unknown.

The “Dunn Frauds,” as by journalist phrase they were now recognized, formed for months long a daily portion of the public reading, and only at length yielded their interest to a case before the “Lords,” – the claim preferred by a Crimean hero to the title of Viscount Lackington, and of which some successful trials at Bar gave speedy promise of good result. Indeed, had the question been one to be decided by popular suffrage, the issue would not have been very doubtful. Through the brilliant records of “our own correspondent” and the illustrated columns of a distinguished “weekly,” Charles Conway had now become a celebrity, and meetings were held and councils consulted how best to honor his arrival on his return to England. As though glad to turn from the disparaging stories of fraud, baseness, and deception which Dunn’s fall disclosed, to nobler and more spirit-stirring themes, the nation seemed to hail with a sort of enthusiasm the character of this brave soldier!

His whole military career was narrated at length, and national pride deeply flattered by a record which proved that in an age stigmatized by late disclosures, chivalry and heroism had not died out, but survived in all their most brilliant and ennobling features. While municipal bodies voted their freedom and swords of honor, and public journals discussed the probable rewards of the Crown, another turn was given to popular interest by the announcement that, on a certain day, Christopher Davis was to be tried at the Old Bailey for the murder of Davenport Dunn. Had the hand which took away his life been that of some one brought down to beggary by his machinations, a certain amount of sympathy would certainly have been wrung from national feeling. Here, however, if any such plea existed, no token was given. Davis had maintained, at the coroner’s inquest, a dogged, unbroken silence, simply declaring that he reserved whatever he meant to say for the time of his trial. He did not scruple, besides, to exhibit an insolent contempt for a verdict which he felt could exercise little influence on the future, while to his lawyer he explained that he was not going to give “Conway’s people” the information that he had so totally failed in securing the documents he sought for, and his presumed possession of which might induce a compromise with Beecher.