Crime, so far as these areas are concerned, must be a far less profitable occupation than the worst-paid class of honest labour. And yet these people look solely to crime for their rent, their clothing, and their food, and wouldn't do an honest day's work if it were offered to them. CHAPTER XVI--THE BLACK SHEEP _A sham funeral to hide shame--Moneylenders who discount forged bills --Was she responsible?--Haunted by a living spectre--At the mercy of a spendthrift--Where the father is the black sheep_ |NOT very long ago a high dignitary of the Church stood in the witness-box while his brother stood in the dock. Human endurance had come to an end, and the well-known divine had given his brother in charge to protect himself from violence and his family from insult. This high dignitary of the Church was a man beloved and admired. No one who listened to his sermons, no one who saw him in his delightful home in the midst of his family, imagined that for years his life had been made miserable by the conduct of his own brother. But at last the torture passed endurance, and the aid of the law was invoked. Then the skeleton in the family cupboard was dragged out into the light of day. But thousands of men and women in good positions set their teeth and bear the strain and the pain. They endure in silence and keep a smiling face before the world. The blacker the black sheep of the family is, the more earnestly they strive to avoid doing or saying anything which will draw public attention to the evil-doer. It has happened in more than one case that the members of a noble family, stung to the quick by the infamy of one bearing their name, have connived at a false death and sham burial. Such a case occurred some years ago, when, death being the only way to avoid a criminal trial, the relatives of the offender, who had fled to avoid arrest, gave out that he was dead, procured a body, and buried a stranger in the family vault. With the supposed death of So-and-so the action which the outraged law had commenced against him ceased. The black sheep lay, so the world was informed, among his noble ancestors, beyond all human retribution. When the coffin that bore his name upon the plate was being lowered into the grave the black sheep was on his way to the East. There, under an assumed name, he lived for some years. It was not until his noble relatives received the news of his actual death through a faithful servant who had accompanied him into exile that they felt easy in their minds about him. They had always been haunted by the terror that in a fit of mad recklessness he would come back to England. He had threatened to do so more than once when the remittances were not as generous as he thought they should be.