Aurora Floyd · Chapter 25 (2/4)

He had very little to say for himself, except that he supposed it was poachers as had done it; and that he also supposed all “particklars” would come out at the inquest. He was a simple rural functionary, accustomed to petty dealings with refractory tramps, contumacious poachers, and impounded cattle, and was scarcely master of the situation in any great emergency.

Mr. Prodder and the servants lifted the plank upon which the body lay, and struck into the long avenue leading northward, walking a little ahead of the three gentlemen and the constable. The young man from the Reindeer returned to look after his horse, and to drive round to the north lodge, where he was to meet Mr. Prodder. All had been done so quietly that the knowledge of the catastrophe had not passed beyond the domains of Mellish Park. In the summer evening stillness James Conyers was carried back to the chamber from whose narrow window he had looked out upon the beautiful world, weary of its beauty, only a few hours before.

The purposeless life was suddenly closed. The careless wanderer’s journey had come to an unthought-of end. What a melancholy record, what a meaningless and unfinished page! Nature, blindly bountiful to the children whom she has yet to know, had bestowed her richest gifts upon this man. She had created a splendid image, and had chosen a soul at random, ignorantly enshrining it in her most perfectly fashioned clay. Of all who read the story of this man’s death in the following Sunday’s newspapers, there was not one who shed a tear for him; there was not one who could say, “That man once stepped out of his way to do me a kindness; and may the Lord have mercy upon his soul!”

Shall I be sentimental, then, because he is dead, and regret that he was not spared a little longer, and allowed a day of grace in which he might repent? Had he lived forever, I do not think he would have lived long enough to become that which it was not in his nature to be. May God, in His infinite compassion, have pity upon the souls which He has Himself created; and where He has withheld the light, may He excuse the darkness! The phrenologists who examined the head of William Palmer declared that he was so utterly deficient in moral perception, so entirely devoid of conscientious restraint, that he could not help being what he was. Heaven keep us from too much credence in that horrible fatalism! Is a man’s destiny here and hereafter to depend upon bulbous projections scarcely perceptible to uneducated fingers, and good and evil propensities which can be measured by the compass or weighed in the scale?

The dismal cortège slowly made its way under the silver moonlight, the trembling leaves making a murmuring music in the faint summer air, the pale glowworms shining here and there amid the tangled verdure. The bearers of the dead walked with a slow but steady tramp in advance of the rest. All walked in silence. What should they say? In the presence of death’s awful mystery, life made a pause. There was a brief interval in the hard business of existence; a hushed and solemn break in the working of life’s machinery.

“There’ll be an inquest,” thought Mr. Prodder, “and I shall have to give evidence. I wonder what questions they’ll ask me?”

He did not think this once, but perpetually; dwelling with a half-stupid persistence upon the thought of that inquisition which must most infallibly be made, and those questions that might be asked. The honest sailor’s simple mind was cast astray in the utter bewilderment of this night’s mysterious horror. The story of life was changed. He had come to play his humble part in some sweet domestic drama of love and confidence, and he found himself involved in a tragedy; a horrible mystery of hatred, secrecy, and murder; a dreadful maze, from whose obscurity he saw no hope of issue.

A beacon-light glimmered in the lower window of the cottage by the north gates⁠—a feeble ray, that glittered like a gem from out a bower of honeysuckle and clematis. The little garden-gate was closed, but it only fastened with a latch.

The bearers of the body paused before entering the garden, and the constable stepped aside to speak to Mr. Mellish.

“Is there anybody lives in the cottage?” he asked.

“Yes,” answered John; “the trainer employed an old hanger-on of my own⁠—a half-witted fellow called Hargraves.”

“It’s him as burns the light in there, most likely, then,” said the constable. “I’ll go in and speak to him first. Do you wait here till I come out again,” he added, turning to the men who carried the body.

The lodge-door was on the latch. The constable opened it softly, and went in. A rushlight was burning upon the table, the candlestick placed in a basin of water. A bottle half filled with brandy, and a tumbler, stood near the light; but the room was empty. The constable took his shoes off, and crept up the little staircase. The upper floor of the lodge consisted of two rooms⁠—one, sufficiently large and comfortable, looking towards the stable-gates; the other, smaller and darker, looked out upon a patch of kitchen-garden and on the fence which separated Mr. Mellish’s estate from the high road. The larger chamber was empty; but the door of the smaller was ajar; and the constable, pausing to listen at that half-open door, heard the regular breathing of a heavy sleeper.

He knocked sharply upon the panel.

“Who’s there?” asked the person within, starting up from a truckle bedstead. “Is’t thou, Muster Conyers?”

“No,” answered the constable. “It’s me, William Dork, of Little Meslingham. Come downstairs; I want to speak to you.”

“Is there aught wrong?”

“Yes.”

“Poachers?”

“That’s as may be,” answered Mr. Dork. “Come downstairs, will you?”

Mr. Hargraves muttered something to the effect that he would make his appearance as soon as he could find sundry portions of his rather fragmentary toilet. The constable looked into the room, and watched the “Softy” groping for his garments in the moonlight. Three minutes afterwards Stephen Hargraves slowly shambled down the angular wooden stairs, which wound in a corkscrew fashion, affected by the builders of small dwellings, from the upper to the lower floor.

“Now,” said Mr. Dork, planting the “Softy” opposite to him, with the feeble rays of the rushlight upon his sickly face⁠—“now then, I want you to answer me a question. At what time did your master leave the house?”

“At half-past seven o’clock,” answered the “Softy,” in his whispering voice; “she was stroikin the half-hour as he went out.”

He pointed to a small Dutch clock in a corner of the room. His countrymen always speak of a clock as “she.”

“Oh, he went out at half-past seven o’clock, did he?” said the constable; “and you haven’t seen him since, I suppose?”

“No. He told me he should be late, and I wasn’t to sit oop for him. He swore at me last night for sitting oop for him. But is there aught wrong?” asked the “Softy.”

Mr. Dork did not condescend to reply to this question. He walked straight to the door, opened it, and beckoned to those who stood without in the summer moonlight, patiently waiting for his summons. “You may bring him in,” he said.

They carried their ghastly burden into the pleasant rustic chamber⁠—the chamber in which Mr. James Conyers had sat smoking and drinking a few hours before. Mr. Morton, the surgeon from Meslingham, the village nearest to the Park-gates, arrived as the body was being carried in, and ordered a temporary couch of mattresses to be spread upon a couple of tables placed together, in the lower room, for the reception of the trainer’s corpse.

John Mellish, Samuel Prodder, and Mr. Lofthouse remained outside the cottage. Colonel Maddison, the servants, the constable, and the doctor, were all clustered round the corpse.

“He has been dead about an hour and a quarter,” said the doctor, after a brief inspection of the body. “He has been shot in the back; the bullet has not penetrated the heart, for in that case there would have been no haemorrhage. He has respired after receiving the shot; but death must have been almost instantaneous.”

Before making his examination, the surgeon had assisted Mr. Dork, the constable, to draw off the coat and waistcoat of the deceased. The bosom of the waistcoat was saturated with the blood that had flowed from the parted lips of the dead man.

It was Mr. Dork’s business to examine these garments, in the hope of finding some shred of evidence which might become a clue to the secret of the trainer’s death. He turned out the pockets of the shooting coat, and of the waistcoat; one of these packets contained a handful of halfpence, a couple of shillings, a fourpenny-piece, and a rusty watch-key; another held a little parcel of tobacco wrapped in an old betting-list, and a broken meerschaum pipe, black and greasy with the essential oil of bygone shag and bird’s-eye. In one of the waistcoat pockets Mr. Dork found the dead man’s silver watch, with a bloodstained ribbon and a worthless gilt seal. Amongst all these things there was nothing calculated to throw any light upon the mystery. Colonel Maddison shrugged his shoulders as the constable emptied the paltry contents of the trainer’s pockets on to a little dresser at one end of the room.

“There’s nothing here that makes the business any clearer,” he said; “but to my mind it’s plain enough. The man was new here, and he brought new ways with him from his last situation. The poachers and vagabonds have been used to have it all their own way about Mellish Park, and they didn’t like this poor fellow’s interference. He wanted to play the tyrant, I dare say, and made himself obnoxious to some of the worst of the lot; and he’s caught it hot, poor chap!⁠—that’s all I’ve got to say.”

Colonel Maddison, with the recollection of a refractory Punjaub strong upon him, had no very great reverence for the mysterious spark that lights the human temple. If a man made himself obnoxious to other men, other men were very likely to kill him. This was the soldier’s simple theory; and, having delivered himself of his opinion respecting the trainer’s death, he emerged from the cottage, and was ready to go home with John Mellish, and drink another bottle of that celebrated tawny port which had been laid in by his host’s father twenty years before.

The constable stood close against a candle, that had been hastily lighted and thrust unceremoniously into a disused blacking-bottle, with the waistcoat still in his hands. He was turning the bloodstained garment inside out; for while emptying the pockets he had felt a thick substance that seemed like a folded paper, but the whereabouts of which he had not been able to discover. He uttered a suppressed exclamation of surprise presently; for he found the solution of this difficulty. The paper was sewn between the inner lining and the outer material of the waistcoat. He discovered this by examining the seam, a part of which was sewn with coarse stitches and a thread of a different colour to the rest. He ripped open this part of the seam, and drew out the paper, which was so much bloodstained as to be undecipherable to Mr. Dork’s rather obtuse vision. “I’ll say naught about it, and keep it to show to th’ coroner,” he thought; “I’ll lay he’ll make something out of it.” The constable folded the document and secured it in a leathern pocketbook, a bulky receptacle, the very aspect of which was wont to strike terror to rustic defaulters. “I’ll show it to th’ coroner,” he thought; “and if aught particklar comes out, I may get something for my trouble.”

The village surgeon having done his duty, prepared to leave the crowded little room, where the gaping servants still lingered, as if loth to tear themselves away from the ghastly figure of the dead man, over which Mr. Morton had spread a patchwork coverlet, taken from the bed in the chamber above. The “Softy” had looked on quietly enough at the dismal scene, watching the faces of the small assembly, and glancing furtively from one to another beneath the shadow of his bushy red eyebrows. His haggard face, always of a sickly white, seemed tonight no more colourless than usual. His slow whispering tones were not more suppressed than they always were. If he had a hangdog manner and a furtive glance, the manner and the glance were both common to him. No one looked at him; no one heeded him. After the first question as to the hour at which the trainer left the lodge had been asked and answered, no one spoke to him. If he got in anybody’s way, he was pushed aside; if he said anything, nobody listened to him. The dead man was the sole monarch of that dismal scene. It was to him they looked with awestricken glances; it was of him they spoke in subdued whispers. All their questions, their suggestions, their conjectures, were about him, and him alone. There is this to be observed in the physiology of every murder⁠—that before the coroner’s inquest the sole object of public curiosity is the murdered man; while immediately after that judicial investigation the tide of feeling turns; the dead man is buried and forgotten, and the suspected murderer becomes the hero of men’s morbid imaginations.

John Mellish looked in at the door of the cottage to ask a few questions.

“Have you found anything, Dork?” he asked.

“Nothing particklar, sir.”

“Nothing that throws any light upon this business?”

“No, sir.”

“You are going home, then, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir, I must be going back now; if you’ll leave someone here to watch⁠—”

“Yes, yes,” said John; “one of the servants shall stay.”

“Very well, then, sir; I’ll just take the names of the witnesses that’ll be examined at the inquest, and I’ll go over and see the coroner early tomorrow morning.”

“The witnesses; ah, to be sure. Who will you want?”

Mr. Dork hesitated for a moment, rubbing the bristles upon his chin.

“Well, there’s this man here, Hargraves, I think you called him,” he said presently; “we shall want him; for it seems he was the last that saw the deceased alive, leastways as I can hear on yet; then we shall want the gentleman as found the body, and the young man as was with him when he heard the shot: the gentleman as found the body is the most particklar of all, and I’ll speak to him at once.”

John Mellish turned round, fully expecting to see Mr. Prodder at his elbow, where he had been some time before. John had a perfect recollection of seeing the loosely-clad seafaring figure standing behind him in the moonlight; but, in the terrible confusion of his mind, he could not remember exactly when it was that he had last seen the sailor. It might have been only five minutes before; it might have been a quarter of an hour. John’s ideas of time were annihilated by the horror of the catastrophe which had marked this night with the red brand of murder. It seemed to him as if he had been standing for hours in the little cottage-garden, with Reginald Lofthouse by his side, listening to the low hum of the voices in the crowded room, and waiting to see the end of the dreary business.

Mr. Dork looked about him in the moonlight, entirely bewildered by the disappearance of Samuel Prodder.

“Why, where on earth has he gone?” exclaimed the constable. “We must have him before the coroner. What’ll Mr. Hayward say to me for letting him slip through my fingers?”

“The man was here a quarter of an hour ago, so he can’t be very far off,” suggested Mr. Lofthouse. “Does anybody know who he is?”

No; nobody knew anything about him. He had appeared as mysteriously as if he had risen from the earth, to bring terror and confusion upon it with the evil tidings which he bore. Stay; someone suddenly remembered that he had been accompanied by Bill Jarvis, the young man from the Reindeer, and that he had ordered the young man to drive his trap to the north gates, and wait for him there.