He was sitting on the side of his bed, with his head drooping and his hands hanging listlessly over his knees when I first caught sight of him. At the sound of my approach he started to his feet, and, without speaking a word, flung both his arms round my neck.
My heart swelled up.
"Tell me it's not true, sir! For God's sake, tell me it's not true!" was all I could say to him.
He never answered--oh me! he never answered, and he turned away his face.
There was one dreadful moment of silence. He still held his arms round my neck, and on a sudden he put his lips close to my ear.
"Did you get your money out?" he whispered. "Were you in time on Saturday afternoon?"
I broke free from him in the astonishment of hearing those words.
"What!" I cried out loud, forgetting the third person at the window. "That man who brought the message--"
"Hush!" he said, putting his hand on my lips. "There was no better man to be found, after the officers had taken me--I know no more about him than you do--I paid him well as a chance messenger, and risked his cheating me of his errand."
"You sent him, then!"
"I sent him."
My story is over, gentlemen. There is no need for me to tell you that Mr. Fauntleroy was found guilty, and that he died by the hangman's hand. It was in my power to soothe his last moments in this world by taking on myself the arrangement of some of his private affairs, which, while they remained unsettled, weighed heavily on his mind. They had no connection with the crimes he had committed, so I could do him the last little service he was ever to accept at my hands with a clear conscience.
I say nothing in defense of his character--nothing in palliation of the offense for which he suffered. But I cannot forget that in the time of his most fearful extremity, when the strong arm of the law had already seized him, he thought of the young man whose humble fortunes he had helped to build; whose heartfelt gratitude he had fairly won; whose simple faith he was resolved never to betray. I leave it to greater intellects than mine to reconcile the anomaly of his reckless falsehood toward others and his steadfast truth toward me. It is as certain as that we sit here that one of Fauntleroy's last efforts in this world was the effort he made to preserve me from being a loser by the trust that I had placed in him. There is the secret of my strange tenderness for the memory of a felon; that is why the word villain does somehow still grate on my heart when I hear it associated with the name--the disgraced name, I grant you--of the forger Fauntleroy. Pass the bottles, young gentlemen, and pardon a man of the old school for having so long interrupted your conversation with a story of the old time.