THE EVE OF THE INQUEST.
“WELL, you’ve seen it?” said Shadwell, gloomily, when the. vicar had entered the study again.
“Yes,” said Temple, very pale. “I’m almost sorry I have seen it. I sha’n’t easily recover the impression. I wish I could forget it.”
“I’m afraid I’ve been very unreasonable and thoughtless. I dare say I should have made my request to some other friend, although, except your brother Roger, I can hardly reckon another,” said Mark, sourly.
“Pray, don’t mistake me. I would willingly do a great deal more, and for people in whom I took a much less interest, in so deplorable an emergency. I only meant to say, how very awfully that scene has impressed me.
But I do assure you I’m only anxious to be of any use in my power.” And so saying, he extended his hand to Mark, who took it, and held it for a moment, looking gloomily at him.
“I wrote to the coroner at eight o’clock this morning,” said he, “to entreat that he would summon his jury without any loss of time, and I have just had a letter from him to say they will be here at eleven o’clock to-morrow. Would it be asking too much if I were to beg that you and your brother in this, as you say, emergency, would come here at that hour? Think as you may. I have enemies, and bitter enemies, some of whom will be no doubt upon this jury. I don’t say avowed enemies — it may be even unconscious ones — but on this account the more unscrupulous. Of course such fellows as Mervyn and Desborough would be only too glad to reflect upon me.”
“Reflect upon you! — I don’t see how that can be, though,” said the vicar.
“Why, they may say — that I ought to have dismissed that wretched Sherlock long ago — perhaps I ought. I don’t pretend to say; the event at least seems to say so, but you know my motive in keeping him. You know how I trusted him with my own interests, and how impossible it was that any of us — crazy in some of his fancies as we might suppose him — could have believed that there was the smallest danger in harbouring him. He was, as you say, so gentle and patient, and with so much refinement and cultivation.”
“Certainly; I never was so much shocked and astonished — the last man in the world I should have suspected,” said Stour Temple.
“I can’t go quite that length, however,” said Shadwell. “He had his malignities, and I have heard some things since that induce me to think that he had conceived one of his intense antipathies against the man upstairs. He spoke in an odd menacing way about him to some of the servants, and I should not like the jury to tack a censure upon me, or any other insult to their verdict.”
“And you wish me and Roger to attend? You may, with God’s permission, reckon absolutely upon that.”
“Thanks; one does not like to be totally without a friend to stand by one, you know, in the midst of such neighbours as I have about me.”
“I’ve made some notes,” said the vicar, holding his open pocket-book in his fingers.
“May I look?” asked Mark, extending his hand.
“Certainly,” said the clergyman.
And Mark, taking it to the window, read these memoranda very carefully.
“You mention footprints marked with blood?” said Shadwell. “Clewson said something of them also. You mention here that they are traceable to the bed-room door which opens on the great gallery. Did you look out to see whether the marks were continued on the floor of the gallery?”
“No,” said Stour Temple, “for there were marks of blood upon the key, and I thought you were so clear that nothing should ever be disturbed.”
“Quite right! Thank you; exactly what I would have wished; but suppose we go now — it did not strike me before. We can take Clewson with us, and examine the floor.”
They did go and made their scrutiny, but not the slightest trace appeared.
Shadwell and the vicar paused upon the lobby. “God sends nothing in vain,” said the vicar, laying his hand on Mark’s arm; “even crime and death. His warnings are whispered to some, and spoken in thunders to others. This tragedy,. does it not, my dear sir, speak trumpet-tongued to you? That wretched Mr. Sherlock had no religion, neither had that unhappy man who has perished by his hand. Is there not a double lesson in this? How near, even in its unlikeliest forms, death may be, and how vain are the securities afforded by unaided human nature against the access of even the most monstrous crimes! I have often talked on the subject of revealed religion to you; but what are the man’s pleadings compared with the eloquence of these tremendous events? Lay the lesson, then, I implore of you, to your heart.”
“I’m sure you mean well, Temple, I always thought so. But each man reads his own lessons for himself. I must read mine, as best I may. I don’t suppose one man is better than another in the eye of God. It is all temperament and circumstance. I’ll talk it over with you whenever you like, except now. I’m half distracted, that’s the truth.”
“I can well suppose it, Mr. Shadwell. Men of the world don’t avow it, but there is too much real paganism — here in the light of the Gospel — to escape the most careless eye. Oh! Mr. Shadwell, think of this sudden death and sudden crime, and trust no more to the ever-shifting illusions of scepticism, and to the fancied virtues of human nature.”
Mark Shadwell was holding the banister with a hard grasp, and looking, with a contracted face, darkly on the ground, like a man in sudden pain, whilst the vicar spoke; and when he ceased he continued motionless, and seemed to listen for more of this homily for some seconds; and then, with a sigh, he said: “Would you like to see my poor wife? She has been very low and nervous about this miserable affair, and I am certain would be the better of a few minutes’ talk with you.”
“If you think she would really wish it, I shall be most happy,” assented the clergyman.
“I know it,” said Shadwell, and led him along the gallery to the door of Mrs. Shadwell’s sitting-room, where he found that lady, frightened, nervous, almost hysterical. Mark Shadwell had intended going in, but he stopped suddenly at the threshold, merely saying —
“Amy, I’ve asked Mr. Temple to pay you a few minutes’ visit. He is here.”
And angrily, you would have fancied, he walked swiftly away, down the gallery, and then to the left, and so down the stairs, and into his library once more; where, pale and exhausted, he threw himself into a chair, and with a deep groan he said:
“Black a thing as death is, I wish I were dead instead of him — I wish to God I were.” Stour Temple took his departure; Mark heard him cross the hall. He did not care to see him again; and he heard the tramp of his horse, as he rode away, and did not wish to recall him.
Mark had received one of those shocks which, for a while, convert men into the ideal of an anchorite. To fast, to watch, with one idea always perched or fluttering, like an imprisoned bird, in his brain; and one choking emotion rising from his heart — was his present doom. Pale, distrait, nervous, furious at times when disturbed by message or question, or even a tap at his door, he occupied his library in utter solitude. Sunset came with its solemn glare; the cold moon rose, and sheeted the landscape in white. Mark lighted his candles and closed his shutters, and drew his curtains for himself. He hated the faces of his servants; they seemed to be reading him with prying eyes, and coming again and again on pretexts to his door for the purpose. After one or two such calls, met with unaccountable bursts of fury, he secured the door. He stirred the fire. He sat before it, looking sullenly among its embers, and then peeping slowly back, over his shoulder, he would get up, and stand with his back to the fire, looking drearily from corner to comer, and then he would pour out a glass of sherry and drink it in haste.
Slowly wore the night away. He was horribly nervous. All kinds of fancies beset and startled him. He thought he heard the handle of his door turned, and stood watching it, with a freezing gaze, for minutes. He opened the shutters and drew the curtains of the window next him; but there was a tall plant just before it, that in the white moonlight took the shape of a man, standing there nodding and swaying himself slowly backward and forward; and look where he would, he still saw obliquely this teasing object, and could not rest till he had closed shutters and curtains again. Later in the night came the distant howling of a dog — dismalest of sounds — and on a sudden he fancied he heard a sharp whisper at the window say Wycherly. It was the twitter, perhaps, of some passing night-bird, or a spray of the rose-tree brushing lightly on the glass. But he would have sworn that he had heard that ominous name so syllabled.
Chilled and fixed, he listened for its repetition, but it came not. He fancied then that it might have been uttered by Carmel Sherlock, whom he had begun to fear with a dreadful antipathy. He dared not open the shutter. He fancied he should see that strange face, with its eyes and lips to the window pane.
It was hard to move his mind from the hated subject under which it lay in a monotonous pain. An image was always before him. The only thought allied to life and action was that of the inquest that the day would bring; and there, too, among the sinister faces of unfriendly neighbours, was the same odious image.
To his sherry, for courage, Mark Shadwell often had recourse through that hateful night. At last, worn out, he fell into a slumber in his chair, from which he waked with a cry, he knew not why uttered. It was still in his ears, and the walls seemed ringing with it, as he looked about him. The candles were expiring in the sockets. He started up and drew the curtains, and was glad to see the grey light of morning through the chinks of the shutters.
“Oh! glad was the knight when he heard the cock crow,
His enemies trembled and left him!”
So now that first detested night was over, and the old house of Raby was dimly lighted by the dawning day that was to witness the inquest upon the body of the murdered baronet.