The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an AttorneyWarren, Samuel
General
The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney
Warren, Samuel
Detective and mystery stories, English; Legal stories, English
Good-natured and unsuspicious, perhaps also not sufficiently vigilant,
Harvey was long in discovering how he was pillaged. Cartwright, the name
of the person who was preying on his employer, was not a young man. He
was between forty and fifty years of age, and had been in various
situations, where he had always given satisfaction, except on the score
of being somewhat gay and somewhat irritable. Privately, he was a man of
loose habits, and for years his extravagances had been paid for by
property clandestinely abstracted from his too-confiding master. Slow to
believe in the reality of such wickedness, Mr. Harvey could with
difficulty entertain the suspicions which began to dawn on his mind. At
length all doubt was at an end. He detected Cartwright in the very act of
carrying off goods to a considerable amount. The man was tried at the Old
Bailey for the offence; but through a technical informality in the
indictment, acquitted.
Unable to find employment, and with a character gone, the liberated thief
became savage, revengeful, and desperate. Instead of imputing his fall to
his own irregularities, he considered his late unfortunate employer as
the cause of his ruin; and now he bent all the energies of his dark
nature to destroy the reputation of the man whom he had betrayed and
plundered. Of all the beings self-delivered to the rule of unscrupulous
malignity, with whom it has been my fate to come professionally in
contact, I never knew one so utterly fiendish as this discomfited
pilferer. Frenzied with his imaginary wrongs, he formed the determination
to labor, even if it were for years, to ruin his victim. Nothing short of
death should divert him from this the darling object of his existence.
Animated by these diabolical passions, Cartwright proceeded to his work.
Harvey, he had too good reason to know, was in debt to persons who had
made him advances; and by means of artfully-concocted anonymous letters,
evidently written by some one conversant with the matters on which he
wrote, he succeeded in alarming the haberdasher's creditors. The
consequences were--demands of immediate payment, and, in spite of the
debtor's explanations and promises, writs, heavy law expenses, ruinous
sacrifices, and ultimate bankruptcy. It may seem almost too marvelous for
belief, but the story of this terrible revenge and its consequences is no
fiction. Every incident in my narrative is true, and the whole may be
found in hard outline in the records of the courts with which a few years
ago I was familiar.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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