IN WHICH SEVERAL PERSONS QUIT THE STAGE
FOR EVER.
No great amount of persuasion was required to induce Lord Verner to
give up his intention of prosecuting the superintendent of police at
Brazencrook. The Watch Committee of the old borough had intimated to
the officer that it would be necessary he should resign his situation,
and he had done so. They were very obsequious to Lord Verner, and this
was the most practical way of showing the town’s allegiance to his
lordship. But the chief contended, as fairly he might, that there were
grounds of suspicion against Captain Hammerton, and that although he
might have been hasty, he had not exceeded his duty in apprehending
that gentleman. The subject was taken up warmly by the local Press,
and a smart London paper had a powerfully sarcastic and biting article
calling the Brazencrook Watch Committee a set of snobs, and upholding
the officer of police. On all hands, however, testimony was borne to
the complete exculpation of Lionel Hammerton.
Seeing that the guilt of Shuffleton Gibbs was established most clearly
in the first examination before the Brazencrook magistrates, it was
certainly due to Lionel that he should be regarded as an injured man in
that unfortunate apprehension by the Brazencrook chief. All his trouble
and sorrow had arisen out of his own pride and want of confidence in
the woman whom he professed to love. If he had been content to accept
the warning of Paul Somerton that night in London, near the steps of
the Ashford Club, what a world of misery he might have been spared; a
manly faith in that high-spirited girl at Barton would have saved him.
No one saw all this now more clearly than Lionel Hammerton, and what
was more, he knew that he had been rightly punished. The only real bit
of consolation in the whole business was the prison episode. This was
his only real grievance, the only bit of martyrdom in his career. If he
could have felt that he had been injured by Amy; if the grievance had
been on his side, he might have been more content. It is better to be
wronged than to wrong; it is more comfortable to receive an injury than
to commit an injustice. All Lionel Hammerton’s troubles had been of
his own creation, and family pride was at the bottom of them all. His
incarceration was the only injury done to him which he had not courted,
which his pride and injustice had not brought upon himself; but it was
a source of gratification to him that Amy felt he had undergone this
indignity on her account.
It was hard work to part from Amy; to leave the two girls whom he had
known in those happy days at Barton Hall; to erase the past, and look
forward into a future in which there were no familiar faces; but this
was his penance, and he was willing now to abide by it. If that most
unkind suspicion of mercenary motives (which Lionel had not strength
of mind enough to keep back in the personal explanations) set forth in
a previous chapter, had not rankled in the mind of the Countess, the
parting would have been no small trial on her part. She would not have
given any outward sign of her feelings had her heart been breaking;
but Lionel’s unmanly suspicion had almost entirely removed the last
fragment of her romantic love for him. Setting this aside, her honour
as a wife, her gratitude towards Lord Verner, and a strong sense of
duty (kept in constant excitement by Mrs. Arthur Phillips), would
have saved her from any further exhibition of strong feeling. It is
not in human nature to maintain a full control over the passions, and
particularly over that love between man and woman which God has planted
in the human heart for His own wise and beneficent purposes. When that
great instinct of nature, which, secretly and unseen, draws two souls
together, is set at nought, certain sorrow is the result. Happiness may
come in time to each of those who have broken this first instinctive
contract of nature; but it is a very limited happiness compared with
that perfect bliss which true lovers feel.
The Countess of Verner was as happy as a woman can be who had loved and
lost, and married for revenge and ambition. Regard and respect ripened
by degrees into what may be called sincere matrimonial friendship, and
this was still further enhanced by the discovery of her old lover’s
unworthy suspicion about the sincerity of her love. She vowed to Mrs.
Phillips, that had she been free to accept Lionel Hammerton, and he had
sued at her feet with ten times the honeyed sweetness of his eloquence
in the Barton gardens, the knowledge of his unworthy doubt of her true
faith would have made her refuse him, had he been twenty times Lionel
Hammerton and her first love.
So when they parted, Lionel Hammerton’s brotherly kiss sent no thrill
to Amy’s heart, though she knew it was his intention never to return.
Lord Verner shook his brother warmly by the hand, begging him to come
home as soon as he liked and as often. Mrs. Arthur Phillips kissed
him for “Auld Lang Syne;” and her husband, the artist, exchanged a
sympathetic glance with the friend of his early days, which deeply
affected the voluntary exile. Mrs. Dibble, who was living in the
housekeeper’s room until Thomas should be released, begged to be
allowed to shake hands with the Captain, and she told the servants
afterwards that it did not need a boarding-school education to see
that the Earl’s brother was born nobility, and that you need not be a
builder’s daughter and copy specifications to know that Mr. Bales was
a policeman in disguise, as he stood by all the time without the least
emotion, for all the world as if a trial had just come to an end and
the prisoner was going to be hanged, and he had the job of taking him
back to gaol prior to the sentence being carried out.
Mr. Bales travelled as far as London with the Captain, and almost the
first person he met, after seeing Lionel off, was Mr. Williamson, the
barrister, walking into the Temple. The two recognised each other
immediately.
“Ah, Mr. Williamson, sir! how do you do? I thought you were lost,” said
the detective.
“No, not lost, Bales,” said the barrister, extending his hand. “Come
with me.”
It was evening, and the detective followed his friend up the dark
staircase.
When they reached the barrister’s room, Williamson produced a latch
key, and opened the door; the old woman who attended to this part of
the chambers came blundering after them, full of exclamations of joy at
seeing the barrister again.
“Light a fire,” said the barrister.
“Lor, sir, the room is as damp as can be; it ain’t fit to sit in after
all these months; they wanted to break the door open, but I paid the
rent regular out of the money you sent me, and I knowed, of course, as
you would come back some day,” said the woman.
“I never expected to do so, or only for a day, to settle my affairs
here and give up the chambers properly,” said the barrister,
addressing Bales, in reply to the woman.
“Lor, sir!” said the old woman, bustling about and lighting the fire
and putting the table to rights.
“We can keep the damp out,” said the barrister, “if there is any whisky
left.”
“O yes, sir, plenty!” said the woman.
“Very well,” said the barrister, producing his cigar case, and in
a very short time Mr. Bales sat listening to those portions of Mr.
Williamson’s story with which he was not already acquainted.
The barrister’s manner was far more quiet and subdued than it was
when we first made his acquaintance. All that cynicism and apparent
infidelity had dropped bodily as it were out of his conversation. He
was evidently quietly resigned to his lot, calmly resolved to live out
the end of his days uncomplainingly. He had succeeded to a certain
extent in his somewhat romantic and almost hopeless resolves to reform
his miserable daughter. He did not tell Bales how and by what degrees
he had worked upon her darkened mind; he said nothing of the days of
patient and unflagging effort to instruct her, to excite her higher
sensibilities, to animate her with a true love for the beautiful and
sublime, and through the medium of nature and art to bring her to a
knowledge of the divine blessings of the Christian faith and hope. It
was a plain unvarnished story which the barrister told his friend the
detective. Whatever may have been the result of the father’s endeavour
to change the perverted nature of his singularly-discovered child, her
career was at an end--she died of a fever in a French convent, where
the barrister had placed her, by her own desire; and Mr. Williamson had
left France only the day before the detective met him after the burial
of his daughter, upon whose tomb he had inscribed those words of the
second commandment, which he had written down in that memorable epistle
to Paul Somerton.
The detective told Williamson all about the stirring occurrences which
had taken place during his absence, and the barrister resolved that
he would convert what stock and property he had into money, and join
Lieutenant Somerton in the Cape, at any rate for a time.
“I shall travel about the world and occupy myself with the manners and
customs of other lands,” said the barrister, “and write sketches of
travel for some of my publishing friends in town. If I could put my own
trials into a book, and make capital out of my own troubles, I might
perpetrate a novel, Bales.”
“It would be very taking,” said Bales; “I have been asked, sir, by
a gentleman that writes for the _Pyrotechnic_, to let him do my
autobiography, with all the cases I have been mixed up in; but I don’t
think I shall.”
They chatted together for some hours in the familiar room, and we
leave them enveloped in clouds of smoke through which the candles burn
as dimly as the barrister’s future hopes; we leave them to carry our
readers to the Brazencrook county gaol, where there are three prisoners
in whom we have an interest.
Shuffleton Gibbs had been examined before the magistrates, and
committed for trial on the clearest evidence, as we have intimated; so
that the prediction of the showman, that he would not leave his bed
again, was not fully verified: only a very few weeks elapsed, however,
before the criminal gradually sank, and at last died as much from want
of gin as through disease. He died a miserable death, uninfluenced
altogether by the ministrations of the chaplain who, by a strange
coincidence, had been a member of that very college where Gibbs and
Richard Tallant had first become acquainted; but before he died, when
he felt quite satisfied that he was in no danger of being hung, he
admitted the truth of the showman’s evidence, and not only confessed
his own guilt, but boasted of it, gloated over it, and described the
murder in fearfully graphic terms, until the prison officials sickened
at the details, and shrunk back from the awful skeleton-like figure
that grinned and raved in those last death agonies.
Confronted with the chief witness against him, Gibbs put out his
skinny hand, which the showman took timidly in his, and with that
professional feeling which never deserted the owner of the famous dog
Momus, Digby Martin, _alias_ Smith, thought to himself what a rival
Gibbs would have been just then to that living skeleton, who had
treated him so shamefully at Severntown!
It is neither necessary nor desirable that we should dwell upon this
wretched scene in the prison, where the last of the race to which
Gibbs belonged ended his miserable career. Let it suffice that he died
and was buried; and that the showman was released, and afterwards
brought quite a small fortune to the proprietor of the tavern near the
Brazencrook Music Hall, by relating the true particulars of the murder
in the ruined castle of Montem, exhibiting the clothes of the murderer,
and the pistol with which the deed was done. Momus took her share in
these performances, and afterwards went round with the hat,--being
faithful to her rough master to the last, and never wearying in her
obedience to his behests.
Thomas Dibble was found guilty; but in consideration of the excellent
character which he received from several witnesses, and the whole of
the circumstances under which the robbery was committed, he was only
sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. During the whole of this time,
Mrs. Dibble remained at Montem Castle with the housekeeper, except when
she went, once a month, to see Thomas, for a few minutes, at the gaol,
upon which occasions she made a show of forgiveness and sympathy; but
she could never resist telling the turnkey, in Dibble’s presence, of
her boarding-school education, the proposals of marriage which she had
received when she lived at home with her pa, and other biographical
reminiscences with which the reader is already too familiar.
When Thomas was released he was conducted from the gaol by an agent of
Lord Verner to a comfortable cottage near Avonworth, a few miles from
Barton Hall, in which cottage Mrs. Dibble was already living. She would
have met her husband at the end of his confinement; but Lady Verner
had made the arrangements of the time, and the agent carried them out.
When he had driven Dibble to the cottage he told him that this was his
future home, and that he would receive from Lady Verner, a quarterly
allowance sufficient to enable his wife and himself to live comfortably
all their days. Poor Dibble’s surprise and gratitude knew no bounds;
he cried and laughed by turns; and he was quite content to believe
ever afterwards what Mrs. Dibble told him, that all this had been done
because of her boarding-school education, and on account of her pa
being a gentleman. With all this good fortune following so soon upon a
series of miseries, and coming to him at the gloomiest period of his
career, Thomas Dibble’s spirits soon rose to a high pitch of buoyancy;
whilst “comfortable living” and plenty to eat and drink gave him
courage to withstand the renewal of his wife’s domineering influence.
He never succeeded in being master, and he would not have drunk of
the well of St. Keyne if he could; for Dibble’s was a humble spirit;
he had always served, and was content to do so;--in fact, he rather
preferred it than otherwise. But once in these latter days he asserted
his dignity in such a way that prevented Mrs. Dibble from drawing the
rein too tightly, and enabled them to live more happily than ever they
had lived before.
“Never you mention that roll of notes business again, Maria; it baint
that I wishes to deny that I was not an honest man, but I thinks on it
often enough myself, without your dinning it into my ears. I’se never
said I had a boarding-school education, an’ all that, Maria, and I
knows you has; but when a man’s shown a woman that he would do anything
in the world for her, even to putting his hand to thieve, it baint for
that woman to throw it in his face. Don’t do it again, Maria, or I goes
out of this house never to come back no more.”
Mrs. Dibble did not mention the subject again, and they lived all the
more happily together after this assertion of his position by Dibble.
But the builder’s daughter, with her peculiar intermittent lisp,
did not fail, whenever an opportunity arose, to proclaim her birth,
parentage, and education to the inhabitants of the district. In course
of time, by dint of household economy, Mrs. Dibble bought an old square
piano at Avonworth, and she would sit as she did in the old times of
Still Street on Sunday evenings, and thump out the “Old Hundredth”
until her hooks-and-eyes came undone, and Dibble had a fine prospect
of back and back hair which reminded him of those prosperous days when
he was porter at the famous offices of the Meter Iron Works Company.
This, however, excited feelings of regret in poor Dibble’s mind that he
was dependent upon the bounty of Lady Verner now, instead of earning
his own living; so he made application to the agent for “something to
do;” and, pleased with Dibble’s desire to make some practical return
for the kindness he received, Lady Verner recommended him to Mr. Arthur
Phillips, who gave him another cottage near Barton, and had him
instructed in the mystery of grinding colours. Dibble soon made himself
useful, and found enough to do at Barton Hall (where he had once been
in the employ of Christopher Tallant, Esq.) all day long. This made
his evenings happier; the music of the old piano no longer twitted him
with his dependency. Mrs. Dibble, as had been her wont in the happy
times, mixed every night for him a glass of gin toddy, and whilst they
sat together by the fire on the conclusion of the “Old Hundredth,” she
acknowledged that after all Thomas Dibble was worthy to be the husband
of a woman who had had a boarding-school education, with music and
extras.