THE TRIAL, AND TALK AT WOODBURN.
The winter is over. There were pleasant cheery times again at
Woodburn Grange, at Hillmartin Hall, and at Cotmanhaye Manor. There
were splendid dinners at Christmas; and many a one that we know
seated at them; and faces as joyous as could be at the after games
and dances. There were all the Woodburns, but with some of them also
under other names. Mrs. Letty Thorsby, and fair Ann of Cotmanhaye
Manor, and their loving husbands, and the worthy Thomas Clavering,
as fond of a rubber at whist as ever. Ah, it was a bright, happy,
prosperous gathering and intergathering, after dark days and very
strange events. But winter is over, and March assizes have arrived.
When Hopcraft was brought into court and placed in the dock, all
those who had known him at Woodburn were astonished at the change
in his appearance. Instead of that thick, full-fed person, and
sun-burnt hue, he was become thin, sickly, and feeble-looking. He
gazed about him, on the judge, the barristers, and the crowd, with
a frightened stare. The fact was that he had suffered in his health
from the constant terror under which he lived so long as Scammel was
at large; but since he had been in prison, he had been the victim of
another fear, that of the certainty of being hanged. His poor stupid
intellect could make no distinction in a general fact. He had always
heard murder and hanging linked together in conversation; and he
could imagine nothing from his having been implicated in a murder,
and present at it, but being hanged for it. Though he contended that
he was totally innocent of any intention of assisting Scammel in
the dreadful deed, had warned him against perpetrating it, and was
greatly surprised at the deed he said, and probably quite truly; yet
he had been seen by the Shalcrosses helping to fling the murdered man
into the river, and consenting to share the money with the murderer.
This he himself had admitted to the magistrates, and this was the
vulture that all through the winter was gnawing at his heart. He was
in at the murder, and he must hang for it.
A word which the magistrates used had also greatly alarmed him. He
had heard one of them say that he was accessory. To his ignorant
imagination this presented itself as something direful and ominous.
He had soon forgotten, if he ever clearly caught the pronunciation,
and it had metamorphosed itself in his mind to “raxery.” He sat in
his cell calling himself a “raxery,” and believing that it sealed his
fate. He ventured once or twice to ask the turnkey what a raxery
meant; and on his shaking his head, and saying he did not know, he
was still more convinced that it meant something very like condemned,
and the man, therefore, would not tell him.
In this miserable condition poor Hopcraft lost his spirits, but
he never lost his appetite. It was the grand feature of his
constitution—even overtopping his brute strength; had that failed, he
would have collapsed and gone altogether; but his food did him little
good; he moped and lived on, often crying like a child through whole
nights; and now he came forth with the full conviction that he was
only a few days from the gallows.
The counsel for the crown, in stating the case against Hopcraft, gave
a clear account of the former trial of Mr. Woodburn for the alleged
murder of Mr. Drury, and then of the discovery of the real murderers
in the persons of Scammel and the prisoner.
At the mention of the prisoner, Hopcraft cried out in a voice of
terror, “No, sir, it wor na me—it wor Scammel!”
The counsel paused a moment, gave a glance at the prisoner,—the
jailer who stood by the dock told Hopcraft not to interrupt,—and
the barrister went on. He painted in strong colours the desperate
character of Scammel; showed the causes, all now fully brought to
light on the clearest evidence; Scammel’s spirit of revenge against
Mr. Drury; and then described the scene minutely at Wink’s Ferry.
Here the judge observed to the counsel,—“that he had heard a strange
story of the murder, after being for two years involved in deepest
mystery, and bringing a most respectable and estimable gentleman into
jeopardy and trial for his life, being brought to light by a dream.
Is that so?” he asked, “or am I dreaming, Mr. Whiteman?”
“It is perfectly true, my lord,” said the barrister. “It was
not only indicated, but absolutely described in detail, every
circumstance as accurately as if the dreamer had been himself on the
spot.”
“And pray, what highly imaginative old lady could this dreamer be?
But I think you said ‘himself?’”
“Yes, it was a gentleman of this town, my lord.”
“His name is not Bunyan, is it?” asked the judge.
There was a smile on every face both at the bar and in the crowd, and
some slight titters amongst the ladies in the gallery.
“Possibly the young gentleman may be descended from the great dreamer
of Bedford, but he does not bear his name,” said the counsel; he
also looking rather merry over the matter. “He is a learned, and, I
understand, a very able and accomplished physician here, who has,
moreover, travelled and seen a good deal of the world, moves in the
first society, and would be taken to be most perfectly wide awake in
general.”
“Very odd,” said the judge. “I would like very much, Mr. Whiteman, to
peruse the account, if you happen to have it.”
“Certainly, my lord. I have here an attested copy of the letter
containing the dream; and that your lordship may not suppose that the
gentleman dreamed the dream after the event, you will note that the
letter was written in India on the night following the very evening
on which the murder was perpetrated here, so that the gentleman to
whom the vision of the night came upon his bed, could not possibly
have heard anything of it. And another thing I may note, that the
murder was so wholly improbable, that the real perpetrators escaped
all suspicion till this dream, and, as it proved, rightly, threw it
upon them, having previously caused the most unfortunate arrest and
trial of a most unlikely man for a murderer, merely from his having
been last seen on the spot.”
“Most extraordinary!” said the judge. “Perhaps, Mr. Whiteman, we
don’t understand everything yet, even in this enlightened nineteenth
century.”
“No, my lord,” said the barrister, “I certainly do not pretend to
understand anything of this sort. I am bound to receive it, as a
thoroughly attested fact, and I have much pleasure in handing up to
your lordship this singular document.”
The letter was handed across the table by some of the counsel to the
judge, and the barrister proceeded:—
“The prisoner at the bar, it is admitted by himself in the
depositions taken by the magistrates, and as was and will be also
proved by two eye-witnesses, was in company with the chief criminal,
Scammel. It cannot be proved that he assisted in the murder itself,
but it can that he helped to throw the murdered man into the river,
and shared the money of which the deceased gentleman was plundered;
and that the prisoner never, till arrested for the crime, took any
pains to make the fact known to any one.
“I don’t see,” said the judge, “how there could be two eye-witnesses,
unless they are partners in the crime who have turned king’s
evidence, and yet the complete concealment of the true perpetrators
of the crime have brought an innocent person into question for it.”
“Your lordship will soon see the reason when the witnesses are
called.”
“Very well; go on,” said the judge.
The depositions were read, and the evidence was then gone through;
and as the counsel called in the two Shalcrosses, he said, “Now, my
lord, you will see the two eye-witnesses.”
The evidence was that with which our readers are already acquainted.
The jury found Hopcraft guilty on the second count—that of being
accessory to the fact; and on the third—that of concealment; and
Hopcraft was very agreeably surprised to find himself not condemned
to be hanged, but only transported to Botany Bay for the term of
fourteen years.
When the Shalcrosses were brought up, it was at first separately,
and then together; and the judge, who had evidently read the
depositions of Jenny with much interest, put several questions to
her himself, and both he and the court at large showed themselves
struck by the clearness and shrewdness of her answers. In summing
up, his lordship said, he could not see how these old people could
have acted differently from what they had done. They had evidently
been casual witnesses of the murder, and had from that very moment,
and ever since, been the real prisoners of the murderer—under daily
terror of their own lives. The instant that they found themselves
freed from his _surveillance_, they had hastened to disclose their
knowledge of the crime. He could not himself connect them in any
manner with the murder. The jury, without withdrawing from the box,
pronounced them “Not Guilty,” and they were immediately discharged,
to wander again at will amongst the country villages, and dream out
their few remaining days on sunny commons and by running brooks. Many
a shilling was thrust into their hands as they passed through the
crowd, and issued once more into the open air and unimpeded streets.
A subscription was raised, to send Hopcraft’s wife and children out
with him, amongst our friends at Woodburn, Hillmartin, Cotmanhaye,
&c., and another of Mr. Woodburn’s labourers was put into his cottage.
The magistrates of the county, at their next sitting after the
assizes, sent for Tom Boddily, and informed him that the reward of
one hundred pounds offered by Government for the apprehension of
the murderer, Scammel, was awarded to him, and they had received
a Treasury order to pay it to him. The friends of the murdered
gentleman would, no doubt, now pay over to him the two hundred pounds
which they had offered; and the Chairman, holding out a cheque on
the bank for the one hundred, said that he had well earned the whole
amount, and had discharged the duty of tracing out and securing that
notorious criminal in a very praiseworthy manner. He advised Tom to
allow his employers to invest the sum for him, and not let it make
him unsteady, by leading him to the public-house.
“Sir,” said Tom, respectfully, “I will undertake that the money shall
do me no harm, because I would not touch it if it were a thousand
times the sum. Gentlemen,” he said, “I have done my duty, I hope, in
catching that murdering villain, and I am glad of it; but I never
will, here or anywhere else, touch blood-money.”
“Blood-money?” said the Chairman. “Why, where is the difference
between catching a murderer and insuring his death, and taking the
reward for it?”
“That is just all the difference,” said Tom, “to my mind. To secure
a murderer is every man’s bounden duty. To take a reward for getting
a man put out of life—well, gentlemen, it may be all the same, but
I’m an uneducated man, and can’t see it so. Excuse me, but I cannot
accept the money—it would burn my pocket-bottom out in no time. No,
gentlemen, no man shall say I did what I did for money.”
Tom made his bow, and retired, to the great astonishment of the
whole bench, except Sir Henry Clavering and Mr. Degge; the Chairman
observing, as the door closed after Tom, “A crotchety fellow, after
all.”
George Woodburn, who had received orders from Miss Drury to pay to
Tom the two hundred pounds offered by herself and mother, said,
“Well, Tom, so you cannot receive this money, then?”
“No, sir,” said Tom, “I can’t do it, anyhow. I am glad that arch
rogue is out of the way of doing further mischief; but to get rich on
any man’s death—it’s not the thing, somehow.”
“I can understand you, Tom,” said George, “though the greater part of
the magistrates could not.”
“And do you know, sir,” said Tom, “I can tell you what I could not
tell them justices? Freddy—the poor boy who taught me to play on the
pipe and the lark-whistle—has been to me again and again in dreams,
and said, ‘Don’t touch that money, Tom—none of it! You’ve done your
duty, and may sleep on it; but don’t let any envious fellow say you
did it to get the three hundred pounds. No, don’t touch it, Tom—don’t
touch it.’ And that is just as it stands, sir. I can’t take it. My
dutiful thanks to Miss Drury, however.” And Tom went off about his
business.
Tom did not suffer for his conscientiousness, though many, very many
people said he was more nice than wise. Mr. Heritage called Tom the
next morning into the library, praised his disinterested conduct, and
gave him a bit of paper, which, on reading, he found was the promise
of his cottage and garden rent-free for his life, and his wife’s
life, if she survived him. Tom was greatly affected. Without saying
anything to him, Mr. Simon Degge, Sir Henry Clavering, Mr. Woodburn,
Miss Drury, Mr. Heritage, Mr. Fairfax, Mr. Thorsby, and others,
subscribed a sum of money, which they invested, and which would amply
suffice to put out Tom’s children at a proper time, and leave a
provision for his own and his wife’s old age.
Great was the wonder and the discussion at the village inn, the Grey
Goose, at this refusal of Tom Boddily to take money so honestly his
due. Howell Crusoe, who used to read the Castleborough papers, and
often put in absurd things to mystify his hearers, and once sent
them about saying, on his authority, that the great dog of Venus
(Doge of Venice) was dead, now read all the account of the trials at
Castleborough, and of Tom’s refusal to take the reward.
“Now that’s out-and-out o’er-dainty of Tom Boddily,” said Tim
Bentley, the landlord. “It does very well for gentlemen to have such
tickle stomachs; but for poor folks like Tom, zounds, it’s a robbing
of his family.”
“Oh, Tom’s lived so much among gentry,” said Job Latter, “that I
reckon he thinks he’s e’en one.” Job had received a handsome present
from Sir Henry Clavering for his able assistance in capturing
Scammel; and it seemed rather a reflection on him by Tom. “Tom,”
said he, “is getting as ginger as th’ owd mester here at th’
Grange. I seed him and Samul Davis going to hang th’ owd tarrier
t’other morning in th’ orchard. Th’ owd dog was blind and deaf, and
continyally under everybody’s feet. Well, they hung him up, and th’
rope broke, and down he came, and began howling as if he did na like
it. But th’ owd mester picks him up, and strokes him, and says, ‘So,
so then, poor old fellow!’ as if he were only going to crop his
ears or so, while Samul Davis ties him up again. They’ve such fine
feelings, gentry han; but Tom is na gentry just yet.”
“And why should na we lay hold of and put an end to men as would put
an end to us for a trifle?” said farmer Chaffers. “Does na everything
put an end to anything as it can, if it can feed on’t? It’s natur,
and nothing else, and God wills it.”
“Hold a bit there, Mr. Chaffers,” said Crusoe. “You must read your
Bible better than that. It was not God who made things so, but it
was man and the devil who did it at the fall. God has sent us
Christianity, and that is opposed to all cruelty in man and beast.”
Hereupon Farmer Chaffers fell into a stout argument with Crusoe,
and there ensued a long and violent debate, which ended, as many
a debate in a more illustrious assembly, where the arguments that
are worth anything are all on one side, and the votes on the
other—three-fourths of that village parliament wishing the money had
been offered to them, and they would have shown a little more sense
than Tom.
“That would have been a miracle,” said Howell Crusoe, knocking the
ashes out of his pipe, and rising to depart; “for we have not all
together as much sense as Tom Boddily has.”
“Sense!” said Latter. “Tom has about as much sense as that simple
Quaker of Castleborough, Seth Ward, who is only a poor stockinger,
and had saved twenty pounds by years of hard work and scraping, and
now he has gone and given it all away, by a guinea at a time, to
other poor creatures, because he thought it a sin to be laying up
treasure on earth. If that’s true, then what a sinner Mr. Heritage
must be, and a good many more on ’em!”
At this there was general laughter, and the Woodburn philosophers
dispersed to their several homes.
Betty Trapps and Sylvanus Crook got to high words, too, over Tom’s
refusal of the money. Sylvanus had gone down to the Grange with a
note from his mistress; and, while he waited for an answer, Betty
came down sharp on Sylvanus about Tom.
“So, Mester Crook, you’re making a Quaker of Tom Boddily. He’s too
nice to take money when he’s earned it.”
“Only what he calls blood-money,” said Sylvanus.
“Blood-money—stuff! Th’ money is just same as any other money. Does
Boddily know better than Government as offered it?”
“Perhaps he does,” said Sylvanus, quietly.
“Perhaps he does not,” retorted Betty, sharply. “He could go and
catch Scammel, and get him hanged, if he had not been drownded; and
then—oh, dear no! he could not take money for doing it! That’s just
like catching varmint, and then letting it go again, because you can
na bear to kill it, poor thing. Tom’s brains is getting addled, and
it’s all through your silly Quakerism.”
“I think thou can hardly prove that Tom has any concern with
Quakerism, or that it is silly, Betty.”
“Well, Mester Crook, it does na grow, does na your Quakerism; and a
thing as does na grow is silly or worse. If a system has salvation
in it, it ought to grow, for sin and wickedness grow like weeds, and
spread like wild-fire,—and what’s the use of a religion as goes and
sits still in a corner, and does na move no more nor a post, and
lets souls perish by thousands and millions?—that thinks a cocked
hat and a coat without a collar, or buttons, will stop the devil
when he’s going about like a roaring lion? If it is good, let it
come out and show itself, and not sit huddled up in silence like a
hen that has got the pip. I went one day into th’ Quaker meeting in
Castleborough; and I looked about, and, for the life of me, I could
na see any preacher. They all sat with their hats on, and looked, I
could na tell where. At last, after a plaguy long time, they shook
hands, and started up, and went out. Oh, what a place to call a place
of worship, where there’s neither prayer nor praise!”
“There thou art wrong,” said Sylvanus; “I hope there is both. For my
own part, I know there is; but thou talkest of things growing and
spreading,—and thou say’st ill weeds spread apace. Well, that is
true; and look thee, Betty, don’t thy people spread so fast as to
remind one rather of weeds? If there are but few that we acknowledge
as fitting members of our Society, does not our Saviour say, ‘Narrow
is the way, and few there be that find it?’ Methodism is so prolific,
it may be compared to the multiplication of vermin, which multiply by
thousands. The lion, the king of beasts, brings forth but one, but
then it is a lion.”
“What!” exclaimed Betty, greatly exasperated, “are we varmint, and
you Quakers lions? A pretty set of lions, all sitting with their
hats on in a meeting like so many stocks. Sheep, Sylvanus—call them
sheep—that’s more like it. Now I tell you what it is. You won’t take
anybody in lest you should be taken in by them, and they should get
any of your blessed money. You would not take the man who said he was
convinced of Friends’ principles, because he had eleven children,
and heard you took care of all your members. Eh, Sylvanus? Eh? We,
Mester Crook,—we take in all sorts and sizes. Methodism is a general
hospital, it takes in all, and cures as many as it can.”
“That is the best thing, Betty, thou hast said yet: and may the Lord
enable you to cure many.”
“I dare to say we shall cure a few, Mr. Crook,” said Betty, not
fully appeased by the last compliment, and always Mr. Crooking him,
when what she called her monkey was up,—“I dare say we shall cure a
few; but no thanks to sitting and samming altogether as if all the
deaf and dumb had been raked up from the four winds. If fish are to
be catched, it is not by sitting on the Trent bank without line and
hook, and wishing for them to jump into your creel. It must be by
praying in season and out of season, and by preaching the word with
unction. If mester niver sowed, he’d niver shear; if he did na mow
his grass, and his woots (oats) he’d have a bare crib in winter, Mr.
Crook; and what’s wisdom here is wisdom in them above, I reckon. As
for saving souls by sitting still on bare benches and twiddling yer
thumbs, it is just as good as telling th’ big miller at Cotmanhaye
mill that his corn will grind if he lets the water-wheel stand still.”
Sylvanus was prepared with an answer, but had no opportunity of
giving it, for the reply to his mistress’s note came out of the
parlour, and he was requested to deliver it as quickly as he could.
“There,” said Betty to herself, “let him chew his cud on that as he
goes home, with his lions and his varmint. Varmint, indeed! There’s
a fine fellow for you, who says, when he goes to quarterly meeting,
or other place of Quaker feasting, he looks round the dinner-table
of them rich Friends and takes what he likes least, to mortify his
carnal will! And he’ll never confess as he likes music,—‘Nor does
mester,’ he says. Does not he, though? And Mester Thorsby tells me as
how he’s seen both him and ‘mester’ listening as demurely as owls by
daylight to the barracks band at Castleborough. And did not Mester
Thorsby actchully catch Sylvanus listening to a ballad-singer i’ th’
street. ‘What, is that you, Sylvanus?’ says Mester Thorsby; and th’
old sly-boots says, as innocent as th’ parson’s horse, as niver works
o’ Sundays, ‘Yes, Friend Thorsby,’ says he, ‘I just staid a moment
to discover whether the vagabond was singing anything likely to
corrupt the youth.’ Ha, what an old cunning fox!—but he’ll not come
his lions over me again in a hurry, I’ll warrant.” And Betty gave her
milk-pails an extra-scouring; for a “bit of a raffle,” as she called
it, always made her put out her energies, and she laughed to herself
as she thought how she should tell it all to Sukey Priddo, as they
went to Hillmartin chapel together on Sunday; and how Sukey would
roast Sylvanus again about his lions.