How that deed was done, I learned at once, and will tell. By whom and
why it was done, I have given my life to learn. The evidence laid
before the coroner was a cloud and fog of mystery. For days and days my
mother lay insensible. Then, for weeks and weeks, she would leap from
her bed in fits of terror, stare, and shriek and faint. As for the
servants, they knew very little, but imagined a great deal. The only
other witnesses were a medical man, a shoemaker, and two London
policemen. The servants said that, between one and two in the morning,
a clear, wild shriek rang through the house. Large as the building was,
this shriek unrepeated awoke nearly all but me. Rushing anyhow forth,
they hurried and huddled together at the head of the great staircase,
doubting what to do. Some said the cry came one way, some another.
Meanwhile Ann Maples, who slept with me in an inner room at the end of a
little passage, in the courage of terror went straight to her master and
mistress. There, by the light of a dim night-lamp, used to visit me,
she saw my mother upright in the bed, and pointing towards my father's
breast. My father lay quite still; the bed-clothes were smooth upon
him. My mother did not speak. Ann Maples took the lamp, and looked in
her master's face. His eyes were open, wide open as in amazement, but
the surprise was death. One arm was stiff around his wife, the other
lax upon the pillow. As she described it in West-country phrase, "he
looked all frore." The woman rushed from the room, and screamed along
the passage. The servants ran to her, flurried and haggard, each afraid
to be left behind. None except the butler dared to enter. Whispering
and trembling they peered in after him, all ready to run away. Thomas
Kenwood loved his master dearly, being his foster-brother. He at once
removed the bedclothes, and found the fatal wound. So strongly and
truly was it dealt, that it pierced the centre of my dear father's
heart. One spot of blood and a small three-cornered hole was all that
could be seen. The surgeon, who came soon after, said that the weapon
must have been a very keen and finely-tempered dagger, probably of
foreign make. The murderer must have been quite cool, and well
acquainted with the human frame. Death followed the blow on the instant,
without a motion or a groan. In my mother's left hand strongly clutched
was a lock of long, black, shining hair. A curl very like it, but
rather finer, lay on my father's bosom. In the room were no signs of
disorder, no marks of forcible entrance.
One of the maids, a timid young thing, declared that soon after the
stable-clock struck twelve, she had heard the front balusters creak; but
as she was known to hear this every night, little importance was
attached to it. The coroner paid more attention to the page (a sharp
youth from London), who, being first in the main corridor, after the
cry, saw, or thought he saw, a moving figure, where the faint starlight
came in at the oriel window. He was the more believed, because he owned
that he durst not follow it. But no way of escape could be discovered
there, and the eastern window was strongly barred betwixt the mullions.
No door, no window was anywhere found open.
Outside the house, the only trace was at one remarkable spot. The time
had been chosen well. It was a hard black frost, without, as yet, any
snow. The ground was like iron, and an Indian could have spied no
trail. But at this one spot, twenty-five yards from the east end of the
house, and on the verge of a dense shrubbery, a small spring, scarcely
visible, oozed among the moss. Around its very head, it cleared, and
kept, a narrow space quite free from green, and here its margin was a
thin coat of black mineral mud, which never froze. This space, at the
broadest, was but two feet and ten inches across from gravel to turf,
yet now it held two distinct footprints, not of some one crossing and
re-crossing, but of two successive steps leading from the house into the
shrubbery. These footprints were remarkable; the one nearest the house
was of the left foot, the other of the right. Each was the impression
of a long, light, and pointed boot, very hollow at the instep. But they
differed in this--the left footprint was plain and smooth, without mark
of nail, or cue, or any other roughness; while the right one was clearly
stamped in the centre of the sole with a small rectangular cross. This
mark seemed to have been made by a cruciform piece of metal, or some
other hard substance, inlaid into the sole. At least, so said a
shoemaker, who was employed to examine it; and he added that the boots
were not those of the present fashion, what he called "duck's bills"
being then in vogue. This man being asked to account for the fact of
the footprints being so close together, did so very easily, and with
much simplicity. It was evident, he said, that a man of average
stature, walking rapidly, would take nearly twice that distance in every
stride; but here the verge of the shrubbery, and the branches striking
him in the face, had suddenly curtailed the step. And to this, most
likely, and not to any hurry or triumph, was to be ascribed the fact
that one so wily and steadfast did not turn back and erase the dangerous
tokens. Most likely, he did not feel what was beneath his feet, while
he was battling with the tangle above.
Be that as it may, there the marks remained, like the blotting-paper of
his crime. Casts of them were taken at once, and carefully have they
been stored by me.
The shoemaker, a shrewd but talkative man, said unasked that he had
never seen such boots as had left those marks, since the "Young Squire"
(he meant Mr. Edgar Vaughan) went upon his travels. For this gratuitous
statement, he was strongly rebuked by the coroner.
For the rest, all that could be found out, after close inquiry, was,
that a stranger darkly clad had been seen by the gamekeepers, in a copse
some half-mile from the house, while the men were beating for woodcocks
on the previous day. He did not seem to be following my father, and
they thought he had wandered out of the forest road. He glided quickly
away, before they could see his features, but they knew that he was tall
and swarthy. No footprints were found in that ride like those by the
shrubbery spring.
I need not say what verdict the coroner's jury found.