McLevy (10 page)

“Now, Andrew,” said I, as he lay grinning at me so like another black gentleman when angry, “as sure as you are your mother’s darling, I will take you up and throw you
again if you are not peaceable, and behave yourself like a gentleman.”

And getting my assistant to hold him, I took from his pocket three silver screws. It was all up with my ghost, who almost instantly became as gentle as these creatures, even the real white kind,
generally are. He got up, and we proceeded to the Office. Nor did all the parts of this remarkable case end here, for, as we passed along St Mary’s Wynd, whom should we meet but Janet
Ireland. The moment she saw us, she appeared stupified.

“He is risen again, Janet,” said I, in a kind of whisper, “they forgot to fasten the coffin with the silver screws.”

“And the more shame yours, you thaif of a thousand,” she cried, “to steal the darling boy of a poor widow. Dead! Isn’t he worse than dead when in the hands of the biggest
scoundrel that ever walked the airth?”

And what, in addition to this ingenuous turn which Janet gave to the story of the white coffin, Janet said or roared, I cannot tell, for we hurried away to avoid a gathering crowd.

I will never forget the look of the Superintendent when I told him that the man before him was the dead and buried Andrew Ireland, the stealer of the hens, the climber through the skylight of
the jail, and the robber of the silversmiths shop. What puzzled him most was, how, with the conviction on my mind that the lad was dead and buried, I could have recognised him through the soot. He
looked at him again and again, nor could he say that, with the minutest investigation, he could say that he recognised the well-known thief who had cost us so much trouble.

Andrew was tried for the escape from prison as well as for the robbery; and that the judges did not think he was the short-lived person described by Janet, appears from the judgment, which
condemned him to fourteen years’ transportation.

❖

Y
ou will have perceived that among my mysteries I have never had anything to do with dreams or dream-mongers. My dreams have been all of that
peep-o’-day kind when a man is “wide awake” as they say, and “up to a thing or two”. Not to say that I disbelieve in dreams when they have a streak of sunlight in
them, as all veritable ones have. Nor is the strange case I am about to relate free from the suspicion that the dream which preceded a terrible act, was just a daylight feeling reflected from some
dark corner of the brain.

In 1835, I met one morning, as I was going to commence the duties of the day, William Wright, shoemaker in Fountain Close. He had been drinking the evening before, for his eyes were red and
swollen, and he had the twittering about the tumified top of the cheeks, which shows that the inflammation is getting vent. There was some wildness in his look, and, as it afterwards appeared,
something in his talk with a deeper meaning than I could comprehend.

“You have had more than enough last night, William,” said I.

“Why, yes,” replied he, “James and I had a bout, and I am off work for an hour or two till my hand steadies.”

“Better for you and your wife if your hand was always steady,” said I, as I made a movement to walk on.

“Do you believe in dreams?”

“Some,” replied I, meaning the streaked ones I have alluded to. “Why do you put that question?”

“Because,” replied he, “I am quite disturbed this morning by one I had last night. I thought that James Imrie stabbed me with the knife I cut my leather with.”

“But James hasn’t done it yet, has he?”

“No, but I awoke as angry at him as if he had; and though I have come out to get a mouthful of fresh air, I can’t get quit of my wrath.”

“Angry at a dream,” said I, as I looked into William’s scowling face. “I thought we had all quite enough to be angry at, without having recourse to dreams.”

“Ay, but I can’t help it,” said he again; “I have been trying to shake it off, but it won’t do.”

“It will fly off with the whisky fever, William,” said I. “James and you are old friends, and you mustn’t allow a dream to break your friendship.”

“Wouldn’t like that either,” was the reply. “He’s a good-natured creature, and I like him; but I can’t get quit of his visage as he stuck the knife into me.
It has haunted me all the morning.”

“So that you would reverse the dream, and make it true by
contraries
, as the old ladies do, when they can’t get things to fit—by sticking the knife into
him
?”

“No, I wouldn’t feel it in my heart to stab the best friend I have,” said he; and looking wistfully into my face with his bloodshot eyes, he added, “But maybe a glass
with James will wear it off.”

“Yes, of pure spring water from the Fountain well there,” said I.

“I never was very fond of water,” said he, with a kind of grim smile, “nor is it very fond of me. One can’t talk over it.”

“Your old political twists, William,” said I, as I recollected a curious theory he sported everywhere, and was rather mad upon.

“Oh, but I don’t hate James for opposing me in that. I rather like him the better for it. We get fun out of it.”

“The more reason,” said I, “for you to give up your ill-natured fancy. Stab you!—why, man, James Imrie is so inoffensive a creature, that, though a flesher’s
runner, he wouldn’t flap a fly that blows his beef, unless it were a very tempting bluebottle.”

“I believe it,” said he, looking a little more calm; “and I will try to forget the face. I will be better after my breakfast.”

So I left William to his morning meal, suspecting that there would be a dram before it, thinking too of the strange fancy that had taken possession of him, but never dreaming that anything would
come of it. It was some time afterwards that the thread of the story again recurred to my mind, and what I have now to relate was derived from a conversation I had with Wright himself at a time
when he was likely to speak the truth. I cannot answer for every word of the conversation I am to report, but I have little doubt that the substance comes as near the thing as other recitals of the
same kind recorded a considerable time after they have occurred.

It appeared that James Imrie, according to his old habit, and without knowing anything of William’s dream, had left his house in Skinner’s Close, and gone to his friend’s, for
the purpose of having a crack and a spark. William, who was at the time busy with a job of cobbling which he had promised to finish that night, received his friend with all his usual warmth, but,
what was strange enough, without saying a word of his dream. James sat at a little side-table near William’s stool, and some whisky was produced, according to their old fashion; for the
shoemaker, like other political cobblers, liked nothing better than to spin his politics and take his dram while he was plying his awl and rosin-end. So scarcely had the first glass been swallowed,
when William got upon his hobby—“The five acres and the thousand pounds” doctrine as he used to call it, and which the reader will understand as the conversation progresses. Poor
James was no great adept at the sublime mystery that, like Fourier’s, was to regenerate the world, and make every snob and flesher’s runner as happy as the denizens of Paradise; and
therefore, with his tardy thoughts and slow Scotch pronunciation, was no match for his book-read and voluble antagonist; but he was a good “butt”, and that was all probably that Wright
cared for—his sole ambition being to speak and to be heard speaking by any one, however unable to understand the extent of his learning.

“There now,” began William, “I have been reading in the
Scotsman
to-day that the Duke of Buccleuch has a thousand a-day. Good Lord! just think, if all the land
possessed by this one man, made of clay no finer than the potter’s, and maybe not so well turned, was divided into ploughgates, how many poor people would be lairds, and rendered
happy.”

“But if we were a’ lairds,” drawled James, “wha wad mak’ the shoon and rin wi’ the beef?”

“They would make their own shoes out of their own leather, and rear their own beef,” was the triumphant reply. “Then, people say I’m for French equality. I’m not.
The idiots don’t understand the ‘five acres and thousand pounds’ doctrine. No man should have more than that quality of land, or that sum of money. The overplus should be taken
from him and divided.”

“It looks weel,” replied James, with a good-natured smile; “but how would it work? It puts me in mind o’ Laird Gilmour’s plan wi’ his snuff. ‘Let every
prudent man ken,’ said he, ‘that there’s twa hundred pinches in half an unce; and let him keep count as he taks every pinch, and his nose will never cheat him, and he’ll
never cheat his nose.’ I’ve tried it, but I aye lost count.”

“Nonsense, man! You’re just like the rest, trying to crack a joke at the expense of a grand scheme for benefiting our species. You forget that under our present idiotic system a poor
man cannot often get his half ounce to divide into pinches, whereas under the ‘five acres and thousand pounds’ doctrine you could rear your own tobacco, dry it, make Taddy of it, and
then snuff it, without the necessity of your arithmetic.”

“And mak’ our ain whisky tae,” rejoined James, “and get a’ drunk?”

“No,” responded the theorist. “We might certainly distil our own whisky, but not get all drunk. Drunkenness is the consequence of our present system, where poverty makes
misery, and misery flies to the bottle, and where bloated wealth produces epicures, who disdain whisky, but wallow in wine from morning to night.”

“And yet they’re no ill chields, thae grand folk, after a’,” said James. “Mony a shilling I get when my basket’s emptied. It comes a’ round. If they
get, they gie; and they’re no unmindfu’ o’ the puir.”

“I’m poor,” cried the cobbler; “do they mind me? No. They grind me down to a farthing, and are ready to say, when I support the rights of labour, ‘Well, labour
then, and be paid; and when you can’t work, you have the workhouse between you and starvation.’ And yet I have a soul as noble as theirs.”

“And nobler,” said James, with his quiet humour; “for you would mak’ a paradise o’ the world, and every ane o’ us an angel without wings; but we
wouldna’ need wings, for wha would think o’ fleeing out o’ paradise?”

“Your old mockery, James,” said Wright, a little touched. “The great problem of the happiness of mankind is not a subject for ridicule.”

“It’s yoursel’ that’s making the fun,” rejoined his friend. “I was only using your ain words. But could we no speak about something else than the ‘five
acres and thousand pounds’ doctrine? I never could comprehend it.”

“And never can,” was the tart reply. “You haven’t capacity. It requires deep thought to solve the problem of human happiness, and you needn’t try; but you might
listen to instruction.”

“I have listened lang aneugh,” said the other, alike ruffled in his turn, “and it comes aye to the same knotted thrum. Ye canna mak a gude job o’t by slicing aff the
lords and the puir. Ye might as weel try to fancy a sheep wi’ nae mair body than a king’s-hood and some trollops, without head or trotters.” And James laughed good-naturedly.

“Gibes again,” retorted Wright, as (according to his account to me) the vision of the dream came before him, and the anger which had accompanied it flared upon his heart.

But he wrestled with it, occasionally looking at his friend, whom he really loved, yet still fancying that the face of that friend, however illuminated with the good humour probably inspired by
the whisky, might or would assume the demoniac expression it carried when he dreamed that he had stabbed him to the heart. It signified little that James was smiling,—the other expression
would return when the smile left. It was embodied in the muscles. It appeared as a phantasm, and the strength of a morbid imagination gave it form and expression.

“Yes, the old gibes.”

“No,” replied James; “I canna jibe wi’ an auld freend. But to end a’ this just never speak mair o’ the new paradise.”

“Worse and worse!” cried Wright. “You despise a subject that ought to interest all people. What are you who laugh at the idea of being made a proprietor of the rights of
man—a poor wretch, who makes a shilling a-day by carrying beef, and licks the hand that gives you a penny, which by the rights of nature belongs to you; for is it not robbed from you by your
masters, who have made a forceful division of property, and then you scoff at the man who would right you. I say, man, you’re a born idiot.”

A word this that changed James’s face into as much of ill-nature as the poor fellow’s naturally good and simple heart would permit. Wright at that moment looked at him. He saw, as he
thought, the very countenance of the stabber, and his heart burned again, his eye flashed, and he instinctively grasped the knife in his hand. The fit lasted for a moment and went off, and the
conversation was renewed at a point where I break off my narrative, to resume it when Wright gave me the parting words.

All this time I was in my own house. It would be, I think, about nine o’clock when I left to go up the High Street. I saw a number of people collected at the mouth of the Fountain Close,
and heard dreadful cries of murder from the high windows of a house a little way down the entry. I was not thinking of Wright, and pushing the people aside, I was beginning to make my way down,
when up the close comes running a man in his shirt-sleeves. I caught him in an instant in my arms, while the people were crying wildly, the women screaming, “Take care of the
knife!”

And to be sure the knife was in his hand,
all bloody
.

“Wright!” cried I, as I wrenched the weapon from him.

“Ay, Wright,” replied he; “I have murdered James,” and then drawing a deep sigh he added, in choking accents. “Oh, that dream!”

Holding him tight I got him from amongst the crowd for indeed at the time I thought him mad. In leading him up I began to recollect the story he had told me before. I wished to speak, but when I
turned to him I beheld such a wild distortion of features that I shrunk from increasing his agony. I heard him groaning, every groan getting into the articulation, “My friend,”
“My best friend,” “Surely I am mad,” “Take care of me, M’Levy—I’m a maniac.” I didn’t think so now, yet I was upon my guard, and, as he
was a strong man, I got a constable to take him by the other arm.