“Perhaps that would be as well. With the returning of the verdict the
inquest is over, and anything you may like to say afterwards will be in
the nature of a private address, not one held in a coroner’s court.”
He put the usual questions, and a verdict of “Death by Misadventure,”
was returned, with a rider of sympathy to the widower “in the peculiarly
sad circumstances of his bereavement.”
“Death by Misadventure,” Silas repeated slowly; everybody listened in
greedy anticipation; the accident and the inquest both provided
succulent material for the curiosity of the vulgar, and to batten upon
the exposed passions of a fellow-being—and that fellow-being a Dene!—was
an excitement, a treat, albeit an alarming treat, full of surprise and
of that quality of danger never very far removed from all manifestations
of the Denes. The audience bent forward, with a slight rasping of
chair-legs on the wooden floor; they gazed at Silas as though he were an
animal at bay, devouring him all the more shamelessly that they knew he
could neither see them nor read the unthinking hunger on their faces. He
was the centre of mystery and alarm in the village, emerging from his
darkness and seclusion only to terrorise. Celebrated as an orator at the
village debating society, the men never knew whether to regard him as a
leader, an enemy, or an ally. But here his heart, and not his theories,
was concerned!