At this juncture the question of money became pressing. For three months I had been out of a place. Jenny's money, of which she was so prodigal, was coming to an end; and although she hinted at other resources it became obvious to me that the attempt must be made to find employment. I looked forward to another round of walking about the town day after day in fruitless search. At this juncture, however, an event happened wholly unexpected, which changed the position altogether both for myself and, as it proved, for Jenny.

You have heard how I visited my cousin in the Prison; how I found him ragged and half starved; and how I gave him five guineas from his wife, which he instantly gambled away. Jenny sent him no more money; nor did she speak of him again; nor did I again visit him; nor did I think upon him. To think of one who had been my life-long enemy served no purpose but to make me angry: even now, after thirty years, when I have long since forgiven this poor deluded wretch, ever running after a Will-o'-the-wisp, I cannot think of what he did for me—how he made it impossible for my father to be reconciled—without a momentary wrath boiling up in my heart. Still, I say, at thinking of my Cousin Matthew the pulse beats quicker; the blood rises to my cheeks; it is like a wound whose scar never vanishes, though it may be hidden away: I would not injure Matthew if he were still living in the world, but I cannot forget. The old rule taught to children was that we must forget and forgive; two boys fight and are reconciled: the master flogs the boy, who is then forgiven and his offence at once forgotten: we all forget and forgive daily: yet some things may not be forgotten: the long years of continued persecution, animosity, misrepresentation and conspiracy against dear life I cannot forget, though I have long since forgiven.

One evening Mr. Ramage came to see me. 'Mr. Will,' he said, 'I have called to tell you what you ought to know. The Alderman, Sir, has I fear, lost his wits: his misfortunes have made him distracted: he now dreams that he is living in a palace, and that his riches have no limit. He buys land; he gives his daughters diamonds; he founds almshouses——'

'If he believes all that, he is surely happy,' I said.

This faithful servant shook his head. 'There is a look in his eyes which belies his words,' he said, 'I would rather see him wretched in his senses than happy without them.'

'How does he live?'

'He has a room on the Master's side; some of his old friends of the City send him a guinea every week: his daughters pass the day with him. He wants for nothing. But, Mr. Will—the change! the change!' and so his eyes filled with tears. 'And he who would have been Lord Mayor—Lord Mayor—next year!'

'How do my cousins treat you?'

'If I was a dog and toothless they could not treat me worse, because I gave that evidence.'

The unfortunate Alderman! This was, indeed, a wretched ending to an honourable career. I suppose that he knew nothing and suspected nothing of what was threatening; and that the news of his wrecked fortunes fell upon him like a thunderbolt. That some of his friends sent him a guinea a week showed that he was pitied rather than blamed for this wreck and ruin of a noble House. Poor old merchant! And this after his Alderman's pride and glory: after being Warden of his Company: after a long partnership in one of the oldest Houses in the City! Fortune, which used to put Kings down and put Kings up, just by a turn of her wheel, now makes rich merchants bankrupt and consigns Aldermen to Debtors' Prisons in order to bring home to all of us—even the humble musician—the uncertainty of human wealth. His wits gone a-wandering! A happiness for him: a thing to be expected, when, at his age, there had fallen upon him the thing which City merchants dread worse than death.

'How can we help him?' I asked.

'Nay: there is no help, but pity and to bear the scorn of the young ladies as best one may.'

'Do they know that Matthew is in the prison with him?'

'No, Sir. They do not know. They do not inquire after Mr. Matthew. But it was of him, Sir, that I came to speak.'

It then appeared that since in every depth of misery there is a lower depth, so the unfortunate man had sunk still lower since I last saw him. He was absolutely destitute, ragged, starving, even bare-footed.

'Will,' said Alice, 'we must take him to-morrow what we can spare. After all he is your cousin. You must forgive him.'

'I would not harm him, certainly.'

Alas! Silver and gold had we little: out of our slender store we might spare two or three shillings and some provisions. Half a loaf; a piece of cheese; a piece of gammon; a bottle of beer; these things I carried over to the Fleet Prison in the morning. I also carried over a warm coat which I could ill spare; a pair of shoes and stockings; a warm wrapper for the neck; and a thick blanket.

I had no difficulty in finding Matthew. He sat in a bare and wretched room where, on this cold day of January, with a sharp frost outside, there was no fire in the grate, no curtains to the rattling windows, no carpet, no beds, nothing but the hard planks to lie upon when night fell and the poor debtors could huddle together for such warmth as the half-starved human body could afford. There was a small bench—I suppose it found its way there by accident. Matthew sat on that, his feet under the bench, his body bent, his hands clasped. I called him by name. 'Matthew!'

He looked up. He knew me. He murmured something, I know not what, but it was unfriendly. To the last, he remained unfriendly.

I opened my bundle. I took out my provisions and the bottle of beer. He ate and drank enormously, but without a word of thanks. Then I took out the stockings and the shoes and put them on: tied the kerchief round his neck; laid the thick blanket on the floor, laid him on it and rolled it round him. He was quite unresisting; he was without gratitude; he cursed, but mechanically, and as if he could say nothing else. Instead of getting warmer, his teeth chattered and he shivered still.

I spoke to him again. 'Is there anything more I can do for you, Matthew?'

'You can go away,' he said, articulate at last. 'You can go away and leave me. The sight of you makes me mad.' I have since thought that this might be a sign of repentance.

'I will go away directly. Is there anything more I can do for you?'

'I want,' he said, lifting his head and looking round, 'I want to have my turn. The last time I lost. If you will find the man who won my coat and will send him here, I shall be warm directly, and I can have another turn. I've lost a good deal, somehow. The luck's been against me, always against me.'

He lay back and shivered again, though now he was wrapped up in the blanket with a warm coat on over his old rags. He should have been quite warm. I felt his forehead; it was hot and dry.

'Matthew,' I said, 'I think you are in some kind of fever. Shall I bring a doctor for you?' There are generally about a thousand people in this barrack, men, women, and children, yet they have not so much as an apothecary in the place. Outside, there is the wise woman who knows the herbs and professes to cure all the diseases that flesh is heir to with a bundle of camomile, feverfew, or vervain. She commonly lives in a court. In Fleet Street there is the apothecary who has a shop full of drugs. He despises the wise woman, yet is not so much wiser than she is, except in his own conceit. There is the tooth-drawer; and there is the bone-setter; but for physicians there are none.

His face, now that the pains of cold and hunger were appeased, looked gray, and what the old women call drawn. It is a bad sign had I known it, but I did not. I thought he was suffering from cold and hunger first, and from some kind of fever brought on by privation.

'You think,' he murmured—his voice was sunk almost to a whisper—'to bring a man—a murderer—to make an end—that is your revenge. But you shall not. I will send to the Warden for protection. Go away. Leave me alone. I can do you no more harm. I will have no doctor sent by you, to poison me.'

'Do you know, Matthew, that Probus received such terrible injuries in pillory that he will remain blind for the rest of his life?'

'Blind?' he sat up eagerly repeating. 'Blind for the rest of his life. Ha! Then he will not be able to find me. Will, he wanted to get you hung—so as to be out of the way. He was going to try next to get me hung. Then all the money would be his. Blind, is he? Then he can't find me. Will, the man is a devil; now a blind devil; a devil in the dark.' The thought seemed to revive and to comfort him.

'The other man, Merridew, was killed by the mob in pillory.'

'Killed—killed—by the mob. I was afraid he was going to give me up for the reward. Then I am safe; at last. Both of them out of the way. Now I shall prosper again.'

'Yes—you are quite safe.'

'Will,' he held out his hand. 'Don't bear malice. Don't give information against me.'

'I am not going to give any information against you.' But I could not take his hand, for which I was afterwards sorry.

'The information ought to be worth fifty pounds at least and a Tyburn ticket—a Tyburn ticket,' he went on repeating the words over one after the other, which showed the weakness of his condition.

It is useless setting down all the nonsense he talked. After a while I left him and looked about for someone who would attend to him. Presently I found an old man in rags, almost as bad as Matthew's, who undertook to look after him and give him some food from time to time. So I went away and repaired to my daily post at Newgate again, saying nothing to Jenny about this illness.

I repeat that I had no thought of anything but what they call a feverish cold, which would be checked by the warmth and the food. You may therefore imagine my surprise when I went to visit the sick man in the morning to learn that he was dead.

'He talked a lot of nonsense,' said the old man, his nurse; 'all day long he talked nonsense about murdering and hanging, and dividing thousands. Now and then I gave him a bit and a sup and he went on talking. There was no candle and I lay down beside him with a corner of his blanket over me, and in the middle of the night I woke up and found that he had left off talking and was quite still and cold. So I went to sleep again.' The insensate wretch had actually finished his sleep beside the corpse.

Matthew was dead.

They showed me his body lying in a small shed against the wall. It was laid in a shell of pinewood roughly painted black, with no name or plate upon it. It was to be taken across to the churchyard of St. George's that afternoon, to be laid in a pauper's grave without mourners or friends, and with a service hurriedly gabbled over his coffin.

The old man who had nursed him was now comfortably wrapped in the blanket and clothed in the coat and stockings which Alice had sent for the use of the dead man. I hope the things kept him warm.

Matthew was dead. At first I did not understand the difference it made to me. I asked if he had left anything behind him; any letters or papers or anything at all that his sisters might desire to have. There was nothing; absolutely nothing was left of him at all.

Most of our lives are like the stones thrown in the water; it makes circles widening and growing indistinct; presently these signs vanish altogether. Then the stone is clean forgotten. So the man and his life are clean forgotten, never to be brought to mind again. Matthew left no circles even; his was a stone that fell into the water silently and made no splash and left no mark upon the surface even for a minute. He lived for eight-and-twenty years: he ruined an old and noble House of trade; he lost all the wealth and possessions and money of the House; he lost all the money he could borrow; he plotted against me continually in order to get some of the money which might be mine; he wilfully and deliberately deceived the woman who married him; he died in a debtors' prison without a single friend in the world or a single possession to bequeath to a single friend, if he had one. To die lying on the floor—it would have been on the bare planks but for Alice; in the dark room without fire or light; what more wretched end could one desire for his worst enemy? What more miserable record could one set down against a man?

I could do nothing more. I left the poor shell in the shed and passed over to the other side. If my uncle could understand anything I had to communicate the sad news to him. His only son was dead—What a son! What a life! What a death!

The alderman was sitting before the fire. With him sat his two daughters. The guinea a week which was meant for him alone procured food for the two girls as well. They passed the whole day, I believe, sitting thus before the fire in gloom and bitterness; their bitterness was mostly directed against myself as the supposed cause of all their troubles.

'Cousin,' said one of them looking up, 'you are not wanted here.'

'Perhaps not. I have come, however, to bring you news. It is not good news, I am sorry to say.'

'That one can see by the joy expressed in your face.' Yet I did not feel joyful.

'Sir,' I addressed my uncle. 'I bring you bad news.'

He looked up and smiled vacuously. 'You will find my brother, sir, on Change, I believe.'

'Yes, Sir. I would speak to you of Matthew.'

'He is in the counting-house, or perhaps on board one of the ships. Or on the Quay.'

I turned to the daughters. 'I see that he understands nothing.'

'No. He eats and sleeps. He talks nonsense. It is no use speaking to him. You have seen us in our shame and misery. Give us your news and go.'

'It is about Matthew.'

'Matthew? Where is he? We heard he had escaped.'

'You do not know? Matthew has been in this prison for some weeks.'

'Here? In this prison? And we have not see him?'

'He has been on the Common side; on the Poor side. Perhaps that is the reason; perhaps he did not know that.

They looked at each other. Then they burst into tears. I thought they were natural tears such as a sister might shed over the loss of her brother. But they were not. 'Oh!' they cried. 'Oh! Oh! Oh! And now you will have the whole of that great fortune. And we thought that you would die and that Matthew would have it. What a misfortune! What a dreadful thing!' They wept and lamented, capping each other in lamentations all to the effect that the fortune had fallen to the undeserving one. 'And after all his plots and after his shameful trial before all the world! And after his highway robbery! And after the things that have been done to us! and now that people will say that Matthew died a Pauper—on the Common side! On the Poor side! We can never hold up our heads again.'

So I left these dear creatures. Never could I understand why they attributed any one of their misfortunes to me; nor of what nature were the plots to which they referred; nor why my trial was shameful.

However, I left these poor ladies. The reduction in their circumstances; their precarious condition; their having nothing but the guinea a week given by the Alderman's old friend; the uncertainty of his life; all should be considered when we think of their bitterness.

For my own part it was not until my cousins reminded me that I understood the great difference which the event made to me.

I was the survivor: and my succession came to me in less than three years after my father's death.

I was the survivor. At a single step I rose from the condition of a simple fiddler, at twenty-five or thirty shillings a week, to the possession of a fortune of over a hundred thousand pounds.

I hastened to our trusty attorney, Mr. Dewberry. I apprised him of what had happened; he undertook to present my claims and to transfer the money to my name, which he faithfully effected, and without difficulty.

Then I went on to Newgate.

'What is the matter, Will?' cried Jenny, 'you look strangely agitated.'

'Jenny'—I took her hand and held it—'you told me the other day that you were in no anxiety about money.'

'I never am, Will. For people of parts there is always plenty of money.'

'You are a Prophetess, Jenny. You will never want for money so long as you live. For all that I have is yours, and I am rich.'

'You are rich?' Over her face, so quick to change, there passed a cloud. 'You are rich? Then—Will ... then ... if you are rich—I must be—a widow. Is Matthew dead?'

'He is dead, Jenny.'

She sank into a chair. She shed no tears: she expressed no sorrow.

'Matthew is dead. I wish I had never met him—Matthew is dead.'

'He is dead, Jenny. He died in the prison.'

'And I am a widow. I am free again. I am a widow who never was a wife. Will, I would not speak ill of the dead—of the unburied: but ... alas! I can find no good words to speak of him. He can do no more harm—either to you or to me.'

'Let us not speak of him, then.'

'No—we must forget him. As for this money, Will, it is yours—your own—yours and Alice's—and the lovely boy's.'

'Jenny—all that we have is yours: all that we have and more ... more ... gratitude and love and devotion—which are more than gold.'