But you bluster and insult,as though you had never dealings with gentlemen.''Poor Jack,he was of a proud stomach,and could not abide interference;yet they would never let him go free.And he would have been so happy had he been allowed his own way.To pull out a rusty pistol now and again,and to take a purse from a travellersurely these were innocent pleasures,and he never meant to hurt a fellowcreature.But for all his kindness of heart,for all his love of splendour and fine clothes,they took him at last.
`And this time,too,it was a watch which was our ruin.How often did I warn him:``Jack,''I would say,``take all the money you can.Guineas tell no tale.But leave the watches in their owners'fobs.''Alas!he did not heed my words,and the last man he ever stopped on the road was that pompous rascal,Dr.
Bell,then chaplain to the Princess Amelia.``Give me your money,''screamed Jack,``and take no notice or I'll blow your brains out.''And the doctor gave him all that he had,the meanspirited devildodger,and it was no more than eighteenpence.
Now what should a man of courage do with eighteenpence?So poor Jack was forced to seize the parson's watch and trinkets as well,and thus it was that a second time we faced the Blind Beak.
When Jack brought home the watch,I was seized with a shuddering presentiment,and I would have given the world to throw it out of the window.But I could not bear to see him pinched with hunger,and he had already tossed the doctor's eighteenpence to a beggar woman.So I trudged off to the pawnbroker's,to get what price Icould,and I bethought me that none would know me for what I was so far away as Oxford Street.But the monster behind the counter had a quick suspicion,though I swear I looked as innocent as a babe;he discovered the owner of the watch,and infamously followed me to my house.
`The next day we were both arrested,and once more we stood in the hot,stifling Court of the Old Bailey.Jack was radiant as ever,the one spot of colour and gaiety in that close,sodden atmosphere.When we were taken from Bow Street a thousand people formed our guard of honour,and for a month we were the twin wonders of London.The lightest word,the fleetest smile of the renowned highwayman,threw the world into a fit of excitement,and a glimpse of Rann was worth a king's ransom.I could look upon him all day for nothing!And I knew what a fever of fear throbbed behind his mask of happy contempt.Yet bravely he played the part unto the very end.If the toasts of London were determined to gaze at him,he assured them they should have a proper salve for their eyes.So he dressed himself as a lighthearted sportsman.His coat and waistcoat were of peagreen cloth;his buckskin breeches were spotlessly new,and all tricked out with the famous strings;his hat was bound round with silver cords;and even the ushers of the Court were touched to courtesy.He would whisper to me,as we stood in the dock,``Cheer up,my girl.I have ordered the best supper that Covent Garden can provide,and we will make merry tonight when this foolish old judge has done his duty.''The supper was never eaten.Through the weary afternoon we waited for acquittal.The autumn sun sank in hopeless gloom.The wretched lamps twinkled through the jaded air of the courthouse.In an hour I lived a thousand years of misery,and when the sentence was read,the words carried no sense to my withered brain.It was only in my cell I realised that I had seen Jack Rann for the last time;that his peagreen coat would prove a final and ineffaceable memory.
`Alas!I,who had never been married,was already a hempen widow;but I was too hopelessly heartbroken for my lover's fate to think of my own paltry hardship.I never saw him again.They told me that he suffered at Tyburn like a man,and that he counted upon a rescue to the very end.They told me (still bitterer news to hear)that two days before his death he entertained seven women at supper,and was in the wildest humour.This almost broke my heart;it was an infidelity committed on the other side of the grave.But,poor Jack,he was a good lad,and loved me more than them all,though he never could be faithful to me.'And thus,bidding the drawer bring fresh glasses,Ellen Roach would end her story.Though she had told it a hundred times,at the last words a tear always sparkled in her eye.She lived without friend and without lover,faithful to the memory of SixteenString Jack,who for her was the only reality in the world of shades.Her middleage was as distant as her youth.The dressmaker's in Oxford Street was as vague a dream as the inhospitable shore of Botany Bay.So she waited on to a weary eld,proud of the `Green Pig's'wellordered comfort,prouder still that for two years she shared the glory of Jack Rann,and that she did not desert her hero,even in his punishment.
III
A PARALLEL
(GILDEROY AND SIXTEEN STRING JACK)
THEIR closest parallel is the notoriety which dogged them from the very day of their death.Each,for his own exploits,was the most famous man of his time,the favourite of broadsides,the prime hero of the balladmongers.And each owed his fame as much to good fortune as to merit,since both were excelled in their generation by more skilful scoundrels.If Gilderoy was unsurpassed in brutality,he fell immeasurably below Hind in artistry and wit,nor may he be compared to such accomplished highwaymen as Mull Sack or the Golden Farmer.His method was not elevated by a touch of the grand style.He stamped all the rules of the road beneath his contemptuous foot,and cared not what enormity he committed in his quest for gold.Yet,though he lived in the true Augustan age,he yielded to no one of his rivals in glorious recognition.So,too,Jack Rann,of the Sixteen Strings,was a near contemporary of George Barrington.
