Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison: Fifteen Years in Solitude

this time--standing on the deck of that same wretched Channel steamer, it looked on a happy man. I did not know then that success in wrongdoing was ever a failure. The anxious toil of the London and Continental negotiations was a thing of the past. Was I not young; wealth was or soon would be mine; was I not in perfect health, body sound and digestion good, and, above all, was not the woman I loved awaiting me in Paris, to give herself to me, in all her youth and beauty, and then somewhere across the Western waters would I not find in some tropic seas a paradise, which gold would make mine, where I could bear my bride, and there, turning over a new leaf, live and die with the respect of all good men mine? Here was a stately structure I was going to erect, but how rotten the foundation! I, in my egotism, fancied, in my case, at least, the eternal course of things would be stayed, and that justice would grant me a clean bill of health. She did give me that, but it was long years after, and only when she had had from me her pound of flesh to the very last ounce. I joined my sweetheart and her family at the Hotel St. James, Rue Saint-Honore. She was an English lady, and for a whole year our courtship had been going on, and now, our wedding day being fixed a week ahead, we all set out sightseeing and having a good time generally. I now engaged the coachman I had met before as my valet, and a very good, all-around, handy man he proved to be. Of course I was anxious to hear that the first coup on the bank had succeeded, but I was tolerably confident it was all right. Had it fallen through it would have proved awkward for me. In that event the Paris climate would have been too warm for me, and I would have had to find a score of excuses to hasten our marriage and leave for the Western World as speedily as possible. I had a four-in-hand coach, and we drove everywhere in and around Paris, once to Versailles and on to Fontainebleau, where we dined, a merry party. What a strange world is this, what a stage it is, ever crowded with tragedies, too! How absolutely in the dark we are as to the motives and actions of men. There I was, the centre of merry pleasure parties in gay Paris. A young dude, driving my four-in-hand, and yet a criminal, waiting in hourly expectation a telegram announcing success in a great plot which, when it exploded, was destined to startle the business world, and to hurl me from the summit of happiness, where I was reveling, apparently free from care, to the misery of a dungeon, banishing the happy smiles from my face and the joyous ring from my voice, leaving in place of the smiles the sombre gloom of the prison, and in place of the snatches of song and eager accents I was wont to speak with, the hushed voice subdued to prison tones. Late one morning, on opening my eyes, my first thought was: It will be hit or miss at the Bank of England within the next sixty minutes. We had engaged for a coaching party to Versailles and were to dine there. I left for the drive that day with a dim fear that before the sun set I might be under the necessity of leaving Paris in a hurry. When starting for Versailles I left my servant behind to wait for the expected telegram, and to bring it to me by rail. We were at dinner, and I was just raising a glass of champagne to my lips when I saw my valet, Nunn, crossing the esplanade. He entered the room and handed me a telegram. Tearing open the envelope I read: "All well. Bought and shipped forty bales." That meant the first lot for $40,000 had gone through safely. It was certainly a great relief. The next day I received $25,000 in United States bonds, from George in London, my first share of the proceeds. I sold the bonds in Paris, receiving payment in French notes. On Thursday, the day before our marriage, I had a telegram from Mac and George to meet them in Calais, and to Calais I had to go. I arrived there at midnight, just before the Dover steamer got in, and was on the pier to meet them. We exchanged warm greetings; as we did so Mac placed a small but very heavy bag in my hands, and they began laughing over my surprise. It contained L4,000 in sovereigns, and was stuffed with bonds and paper money. We went to a hotel near by, and there they counted out to me the very nice sum of $100,000 in gold, bonds and French money. As they were going back on the same steamer, and I was to return to Paris by the train carrying the passengers of the steamer just arrived, we had only a brief half hour's talk. After giving me the money we went out and sat down on the pier, and that conversation and scene are forever impressed on my memory. I shall make no attempt to describe either, but could both be put on the stage, with the audience in possession of a full knowledge of the enterprise we were embarked in, there would be seen a picture of human life such as the novelist or playwright never had the imagination nor the daring to depict. To the earnest student of human life it would have been a revelation. There we were, three earnest, ambitious young men, enthusiastic for all that was good and noble. I about to wed a pure-souled woman, who thought me an angel of goodness, and about to fly with my plunder and bride to Mexico. My two companions were returning to London to continue carrying out a giant scheme of fraud against a great moneyed institution, but there we were, with $100,000 in plunder at our feet, sitting under the stars, listening to the dash of the waves, and talking not at all like pirates and robbers, but much more like crusaders setting out on a crusade, or like pilgrims going on a pilgrimage. I told my friends I should go to the City of Mexico for a year or two, and then meet them somewhere in America where we would unite our wealth to inaugurate some scheme that would benefit thousands in our own generation and millions in the generations to come. We would hedge ourselves about with kindly deeds, so live as to win the respect of all, and when under the sod live in the eyes and mouths of men. Too soon the whistle sounded, and we had to say good-bye, which we did in an enthusiasm that told how deeply we felt. We were walking in the Primrose Way, its flowers and songs were sweet, and we thought their perfume and melody eternal. I again arrived in Paris at daylight, but early as it was, my sweetheart, escorted by my servant, was waiting my arrival. It was our wedding morning. During our drive to the hotel, radiant with joy, she told me the separation had been a cruel one, and she was so happy to know we should never be separated again! At 4 o'clock that afternoon we were married at the American Embassy. I had told every one I was going to leave the next day for Havre, to embark for New York. Our baggage was all packed and placed in a van, which I accompanied to the Havre station, and had stored there. Sunday I purchased one ticket to Bayonne, one for Madrid and one to Burgos, each from different agencies. On Sunday morning I took a van to the Havre station, and transferring our baggage to the road into Spain, checked all of it to Madrid. My purpose was to sail by the Lopez & Co. steamer El Rey Felipe from Cadiz to Mexico, which was advertised to sail ten days later. We were married very quietly on Friday, and our friends, wisely recognizing the fact that young married people like to be alone, the next day said good-bye and returned to Normandy. We spent a quiet and happy Saturday and Sunday, and on Sunday night we left--my wife, servant and self--for Cadiz, via Madrid. My wife, like all English people, knew little of geography, and had such hazy notions of America that she thought it quite the thing to go to such an outlandish and far off quarter of the globe as America via a Spanish port. Columbus, she knew, had gone that way, and why should not we? We had an all-night ride to Bayonne in one of those antiquated compartments used in railway carriages all over Europe, but the ride was not tedious, nor was the night long. This little earth had no happier couple, and, talking of the happy years that lay before us, the night rushed by like a fairy dream. Where was my conscience? Why, my dear reader, I had sung it such a song that it was delighted with the music, and had, I was going to say, gone to sleep, but it had not. It was wide awake, and we were good chums. We both--conscience and I--had persuaded ourselves it was a virtuous deed to do evil that good might come. My conscience was perhaps as old as the sun, but I myself was young and too inexperienced to see the fallacy of the argument, since I myself was the doer of the wrong; but, of course, I should have hotly denounced any other such philosopher as a villain and rogue. The night flew by, and to our surprise we found 240 miles had slipped away and we were in Bayonne. Thirty minutes more and we were speeding south, and soon crossed the Bidassoa, the boundary between France and Spain. Then my wife saying, "Now I will sleep," laid her head on the shoulder of the happiest man in or out of Spain, and in ten minutes her regular breathing told me she was in the land of dreams. The Pyrenees, in dividing France and Spain, stand between two distinct peoples, and as the centuries go by the streams of national life meet, but only to repel each other, never to mingle. One has but to cross the bank to realize that he is among a different race. Dress, food and cooking--social life, religious devotion, modes of thought--are all different. To us here in America it is difficult to realize that so slight a thing as a mountain barrier, easily traversed, crossed by many defiles and good roads, should continue to separate two distinct peoples. But so it is. Stranger still, for nearly all time the inhabitants of the Spanish mountains have been more or less opposed to the people of the Spanish plains, and every century has seen several insurrections among the mountaineers. In 1872 and '73 the Carlists held the mountains and more or less fusillading was going on. The possibility of my way being blocked by the Carlists never entered into my calculations. The railway from Bayonne to Madrid is owned in Paris, and it seems that the directors were paying blackmail to Don Carlos, ostensibly to him, but really to several marauding bands who plundered under the name of fighting for the Don, upon the understanding that the railroad was not to be meddled with. The directors had been paying 100,000 francs a month. As will be easily believed, there was a difficulty in the distribution of the money among so many greedy and inartistic robbers, and the discontented determined to hold up the railroad itself and stop all trains. Unluckily, the train we were on was the one they proposed to experiment on first, and they proposed drastic measures, too--in fact, had blown up or down a short tunnel, and torn up the rails in front of our train. As we crossed the frontier a French gendarme and Spanish civil guard appeared, demanding passports. It was, of course, a sure thing that I had them all right. It is a safeguard under the protection of which the man who has anything to fear slips through the fingers of frontier guards and police, while the honest man quite frequently neglects the necessary formalities and is detained. Our train crossed the bridge over the Bidassoa and we were on Spanish soil. Soon we entered the gorges of the Pyrenees, and while speculating whether I should awaken my wife to see the magnificent scenery all necessity for awakening any one on that train was over. Three or four musket shots rang out, our train was off the rail, and after a crash or two came to a sudden stop, and then a babel arose, while the train was surrounded by armed men. It was laughable. It seemed like an opera