I
DEACON BRODIE
AS William Brodie stood at the bar,on trial for a his life,he seemed the gallantest gentleman in court.Thither he had been carried in a chair,and,still conscious of the honour paid him,he flashed a condescending smile upon his judges.His step was jaunty as ever;his superb attire well became the Deacon of a Guild.His coat was blue,his vest a very garden of flowers;while his satin breeches and his stockings of white silk were splendid in their simplicity.Beneath a cocked hat his hair was fully dressed and powdered,and even the prosecuting counsel assailed him with the respect due to a man of fashion.The fellow's magnificence was thrown into relief by the squalor of his accomplice.For George Smith had neither the money nor the taste to disguise himself as a polished rogue,and he huddled as far from his master as he could in the rags of his mean estate.
Nor from this moment did Brodie ever abate one jot of his dignity.He faced his accusers with a clear eye and a frigid amiability;he listened to his sentence with a calm contempt;he laughed complacently at the sorry interludes of judicial wit;and he faced the last music with a bravery and a cynicism which bore the stamp of true greatness.
It was not until after his crime that Brodie's heroism approved itself.And even then his was a triumph not of skill but of character.Always a gentleman in manner and conduct,he owed the success and the failure of his life to this one quality.When in flight he made for Flushing on board the Endeavour,the other passengers,who knew not his name,straightway christened him `the gentleman.'The enterprise itself would have been impossible to one less persuasively gifted,and its proper execution is a tribute to the lofty quality of his mind.There was he in London,a stranger and a fugitive;yet instead of crawling furtively into a coalbarge he charters a ship,captures the confidence of the captain,carries the other passengers to Flushing,when they were bound for Leith,and compels every one to confess his charm!The thief,also,found him irresistible;and while the game lasted,the flash kens of Edinburgh murmured the Deacon's name in the hushed whisper of respect.
His fine temperament disarmed treachery.In London he visited an ancient doxy of his own,who,with her bully,shielded him from justice,though betrayal would have met with an ample reward.
Smith,if he knew himself the superior craftsman,trembled at the Deacon's nod,who thus swaggered it through life,with none to withhold the exacted reverence.To this same personal compulsion he owed his worldly advancement.Deacon of the Wrights'Guild while still a young man,he served upon the Council,was known for one of Edinburgh's honoured citizens,and never went abroad unmarked by the finger of respectful envy.He was elected in 1773a member of the Cape Club,and met at the Isle of Man Arms in Craig's Close the wittiest men of his time and town.Raeburn,Runciman,and Ferguson the poet were of the society,and it was with such as these that Brodie might have wasted his vacant hour.Indeed,at the very moment that he was cracking cribs and shaking the ivories,he was a chosen leader of fashion and gaiety;and it was the elegance of the `gentleman' that distinguished him from his fellows.
The fop,indeed,had climbed the altitudes of life;the cracksman still stumbled in the valleys.If he had a ready cunning in the planning of an enterprise,he must needs bungle at the execution;and had he not been associated with George Smith,a king of scoundrels,there would be few exploits to record.And yet for the craft of housebreaker he had one solid advantage:he knew the locks and bolts of Edinburgh as he knew his primerfor had he not fashioned the most of them himself?But,his knowledge once imparted to his accomplices,he cheerfully sank to a menial's office.In no job did he play a principal's part:he was merely told off by Smith or another to guard the entrance and sound the alarm.When M`Kain's on the Bridge was broken,the Deacon found the false keys;it was Smith who carried off such poor booty as was found.And though the master suggested the attack upon Bruce's shop,knowing full well the simplicity of the lock,he lingered at the Vintner's over a game of hazard,and let the man pouch a sumptuous booty.
Even the onslaught upon the Excise Office,which cost his life,was contrived with appalling clumsiness.The Deacon of the Wrights'Guild,who could slash wood at his will,who knew the artifice of every lock in the city,let his men go to work with no better implements than the stolen coulter of a plough and a pair of spurs.And when they tackled the ill omened job,Brodie was of those who brought failure upon it.Long had they watched the door of the Excise;long had they studied the habits of its clerks;so that they went to work in no vain spirit of experiment.Nor on the fatal night did they force an entrance until they had dogged the porter to his home.Smith and Brown ransacked the place for money,while Brodie and Andrew Ainslie remained without to give a necessary warning.Whereupon Ainslie was seized with fright,and Brodie,losing his head,called off the others,so that six hundred pounds were left,that might have been an easy prey.Smith,indignant at the collapse of the longpondered design,laid the blame upon his master,and they swung,as Brodie's grim spirit of farce suggested,for four pounds apiece.
The humours of the situation were all the Deacon's own.He dressed the part in black;his respectability grinned behind a vizard;and all the while he trifled nonchalantly with a pistol.
