THE GREAT SKENE CASE
You see the heading to this chapter? Your fathers used to see and
greet it for many a long day in their newspapers--especially in the
evening issues, when a little excitement was needed to beguile the
tedious minutes of the journey homeward from the city to Clapham, or
Streatham, or Hampstead. How the boys used to shrill it out, decorated
with its daily official furbelows, and make their halfpenny profits on
that _cause célèbre_! There may be comfortable newsvendors now who
owe their position to the social furore it created. I know that many
lifelong friendships, not to speak of heads, were broken in the
differences of opinion to which it led. You may unearth the full
report of it all, if you will, from the dusty files of ’82. I am not
going to be so silly as to retail it to an indifferent generation.
Even the great Arthur--great in bulk as in impudence--has shrunk
to-day into little more than a buffer for legal precedents. What
modern can gauge the force of the contests which raged about the
Tichborne or Skene standards, or find himself more than politely
interested in the story of the blood spilt and reputations overthrown
on those doughty fields?--lost, both, by their claimants, or
pretenders; yet, I trust, in one case, an honourable defeat, a few
words as to which must now suffice.
Lord Skene persisting obstinately in disputing my claim, and my cause
being warmly espoused by my friends, led to the institution of those
legal proceedings which were to result in that action at law before
the Lords of the Court of Common Pleas, which came to be known as the
Great Skene Mystery, and which in the end found me non-suited and
disinherited. The case lasted many weeks, and entailed the production
of a little army of witnesses. Its expenses shake my memory to this
day; though, thank Heaven, some subsequent successes were to enable me
to come to some sort of a compromise for them with their guarantor--my
blessed and admirable Johnny. Its chief weakness consisted in its
failure to procure any reliable depositions from the witness who
should have been its first--my poor stricken mother. A disastrous blow
to it was the death of Mother Carey on the very evening following her
receipt of an official citation to the Court to give her evidence.
That, resolving itself into a matter of second-hand, brought about my
discomfiture. Whatever was the moral of the case--and their
appreciation of its true bent was conveyed to me spontaneously by a
large number of independent persons, legal and otherwise--so reckless
a dealing with our institutions as would be entailed in the upsetting
of an hereditary title on circumstantial evidence was hardly to be
thought of. My claim was dismissed as, in Scottish parlance, not
proven, and Master Baby was confirmed in his succession to the
lordship of Evercreech.
Not so many weeks ago I strolled into the old Court of Common Pleas at
Westminster, and tried to regather from its mouldering echoes some
whisper of the enormous babble which my solitary voice had once
awakened there. Quiet sunshine came in through the windows; there was
an atmosphere in the place as of one of those little done-with and
locked-away graveyards which one comes on unexpectedly in the green
nooks of London. It was difficult to reincarnate in fancy from that
silent dust the roar and scuffle of a dead generation. Its figures,
and the emotions they had once evoked in me, would not be stirred to
more than a very shadowy demonstration. They were not, in fact, so
much the fallen precipitate of time as of a dead phase of my own
existence. Between them and the present lay the verdict of the Court.
Only on the hither side of that verdict was life a vivid and strenuous
reality to me. Hence, though the case itself, with its judges, and
droning counsels, and motley witnesses, and pomp and circumstance of
legal warfare, was become as the shadow of a fantasia, every detail of
its immediate issues was as clear to me as if it had happened
yesterday. The verdict had severed my past from my present self, as a
surgeon’s knife cuts away a diseased limb. I could recall the very
queer stunned feeling with which I had awakened from the operation
amidst the rising buzz and shuffle of the court, or theatre. The
solemn withdrawal of the judges--figures like old ermine-muffled
dowagers making for their chariots; the yawning and stretching
barristers, laughing as they gathered their papers; the excited gossip
of the audience; the general movement, and rush of draughts, and gusty
wind of cab-hailing voices, loud or indistinct as the doors opened and
shut like an organ-swell--it all came back to me like a last week’s
harlequinade to a child.
Someone takes me by the arm, and leads me out, unresisting, into the
mild May evening. A sense as of something rather comical bubbles in me
like weak laughter. There is a smell of water carts in the roads, and
the unconcerned sparrows are hopping in the intervals of the traffic.
“Never mind, old fellow,” says the dear voice in my ear. “You’re the
one that comes out of it with credit.”
I stop, reeling a little, as if stupidly drunk.
“O, credit, Johnny!” I answer, with an inane giggle. “You’ll have to
give me that with a vengeance.”
“Come, Dicky!” he says, peremptorily for him. “That’s neither sense
nor kindness, old man. Nor it isn’t fair to me, you know. I didn’t
lead you on to this for my own profit. What I lose is what you lose,
and nothing more--faith in men’s justice, that’s all. The rest counts
for nothing; and if you’re the friend I believe, you’ll see it as I
do.”
I may be morally intoxicated. I am not ashamed to own, nevertheless,
that, there in the open street, I take his good hand and kiss it.
“Now, come along home,” he says, flushing; “and hear what she’s got to
say about it all. Your defeat will pay you with her, if I know her,
better than any victory would. I only wish I was you, by golly!”
We reach the flat, and he leaves me to mount the stairs alone. There,
in the gorgeous drawing-room, ablaze with lights, I find her--a little
soft radiant figure, “born to consume the soil” and the bleeding
hearts of its labourers. I look round and about me with a renunciatory
laugh and shrug of my shoulders, and my eyes, bitter and defiant, come
back to her.
“Yes, Miss Christmas,” I say, “this is your proper setting. I have
lost my case.”
The vile brute in me--the vile brute! She does not answer a word; but,
with a quick sob, she wrenches the diamond from her bosom, the pearls
from her hair, and that falls and half veils her face. And the next
moment she is prostrate at my feet.
“Richard! I will be poor--O, I will be poor!”
Hush! Who is this come suddenly upon us from the shadows, where Ira,
hearing my step, had hidden her?
“Will you make my burden, Richard, more than I can bear?”
I turn in amazement. It is Lady Skene.
“I have dared much to come to you--to her,” she says, in a low
agitated voice. “I knew from my husband that you could never win--not
there--not in that Court. But here, Richard? O, it is great to be
generous in triumph, but greater in defeat.”
“Generous! What have I left to give in all the world?”
“Yourself.”
“Ira!” I cry, as if waking from a dream. “What have I been saying?
What wicked nonsense have I been talking? Why, what has all this to do
with you and me? Money and titles? I don’t remember their ever having
had anything to do with the understanding between us. Or had they? I
am stupid, and I can’t remember.”
“Richard!”
I am on my knees to her.
“What tomfoolery, of course. I can’t imagine what I was thinking of.
To quarrel with my own heart because it wouldn’t stop beating!”
I look round. Lady Skene has gone.
“Ira!” I cry once more--and heaven flows upon me under the tangle of
her hair.
ENVOI.
I have only a note or two to add, inessential but explanatory to the
curious.
Lord Skene never forgave me for that stand made in my own rights, but
persisted to the end in regarding me as an impostor who had got even
something better than his deserts. His ward coming of age soon after
the trial, and persisting no less obstinately in her attachment to a
rascal, he washed his hands of her and committed us both to the devil.
The death of his mother-in-law, I am satisfied to think, caused him
some retributive pangs; for, out of pocket as he was by the action, he
could not afford to ignore her substantial leavings, or fail to suffer
the social penalties entailed thereby through his obligation to admit
his wife’s relationship with the horrible old miser. After Mother
Carey’s demise, bonds, scrip, and securities to a handsome tune were
discovered hidden about her premises, besides a considerable amount of
property in hard, but dirty, cash. I hope his lordship enjoyed
handling it. But I bear him no grudge. Old kindly memories of him
predominate in my mind.
From facts subsequently unearthed by Mr Shapter, it was believed that
Mr Mark Dalston had originally purposed the infanticide, through the
co-operation of his friend, Dr Blague, of the teller of this
narrative, and that it was nothing more that the accidental
interposition of Mother Carey which had suggested to him the
compromise which, though after a long interval, was to bring about his
undoing. If he had been imbued with only a little less confidence in
his own managing villainy, he might have been a respected citizen at
this day, and my story had never been written.
The trial had at least one sequel satisfying to justice. It
led--largely through Johnny’s instrumentality--to an inquiry into the
circumstances of Geoletti’s conviction (an inquiry only less notable
than the one to which it was supernumerary), with the result that the
victim was granted a free pardon, together with some pecuniary
compensation nicely adapted to his deserts at the time of his arrest.
It was sufficient, however, to his expectations; and returning with
the sum to his native land, he was enabled to realise the desire of
his heart in the purchase of an auberge in the Aosta Valley, where in
after days I called upon him, in company with my wife, and found him a
quiet prosperous man, not speaking much, but possessed with an
insatiable craving to make up for past abstinences from tobacco and
wine.
And, finally--of ourselves? Under the seal of love’s confessional lies
locked all that is worth knowing there; but we were married, if the
term is essential to the propriety of an ending. I am not fond of it
myself, I confess. It is the conventional expression for a
conventionally vulgar festivity. But one has to endure it, and get
away from it as quickly as possible, and commit to one’s fancy a
picture of the thing as one would have liked it to be--something out
in the woods, perhaps, with maids dancing, and garlanded heifers, and
a gentle poem of wedlock, as binding as its natural symbol in the oak
and eglantine. It is nothing but a question of terms, when the sweet
and solemn oath is exchanged, after all.
Well, the thing had to be, and my fairy, who should have come dressed
like the green lace-wing, must drag after her a preposterous train of
watered tabby, or moiré antique bombazine, or some such unnameable
stuff at something terrifying the yard. Johnny, the best of men, was
likewise my best man; and, in the enthusiasm of both parts, pursued
us, flying, with a dropping fire of telegrams in cypher, which
punctuated our honeymoon with merriment.
And afterwards? Why, I started life dependent on my wife; and what was
to say against it? A sense of honour? Pooh! Fine honour or kindness to
wreck two lives on a sentiment of vanity! That curse of the golden
balance! Go, fall into love, my friend--really into love, I mean--and
marry you a wife, and learn what mutual confidence means. After the
second day you will be beating your brains to remember which of you it
was brought the money into the concern. But that is not to say you
will be justified in leading an idle life.
_Méchant poulain_, says an old French proverb, _peut devenir bon
cheval_. Nature having given me a certain fanciful inventiveness,
which might appear to be my most negotiable asset, I thought I would
try writing for a living, and even began with some illusions about
Literature (with a capital), and the certainty of high purpose and
high endeavour meeting in time with their due recognition and reward.
But long was not wanted to put me out of that preposterous conceit,
and make me understand the terms upon which “literature” is permitted
to include itself among the high arts, such as the forming of a trust,
or the exploiting of a pill or hair wash. I then stuffed a manuscript
into an old potted beef tin, and forwarded it to an enterprising
publisher, with the intimation that it had been discovered on a
dust-heap, and that my terms were such and such, not as author but as
entrepreneur. The ruse, being appreciated at its worth by a sagacious
spirit, and the venture launched on a flood-tide of puffery, proved an
instant success. The literary value of the book may have been anything
or nothing; it ran into its twenty-fifth edition on a much solider
basis; and I found myself suddenly the possessor of capital. Ira and
Johnny were both immensely indignant with me when they discovered the
truth. That occurred on the very day on which my wife had unearthed
from Keats a quotation which she considered peculiarly applicable to
my destiny and the ideals which ruled it:
“... to die content on pleasant sward,
Leaving great verse unto a little clan.”
I laughed as I kissed her.
“Good poets make unpractical fathers,” I said--“and you must not
excite yourself, my loveliness. This money, well invested, is going to
prove the nest-egg of our song-bird. We must line the nest, you know,
if we want the bird to sing. And now, being independent of the public,
I am going to pull its ears.”
“You donkey,” she said, and pulled mine.
So ends the Great Skene Mystery, the symbol of whose “stopping” is to
be found at this day, if one is curious enough to look for it, in the
little lead plug let into a hole in the floor of the old Court at
Westminster, where once was inserted the rod which held the screen
which protected the judges from the draughts. And, if I am Richard
Gaskett still, I have at least earned a popular title to my name.
[The End]
NOTES.
[1]
#The Eye# Equals Johnny himself--the ego, that is to say. All his own.
[2]
For the sake of clearness, the story is given in reporter’s English, as
afterwards minuted, and not in the hybrid phraseology characteristic of
the narrator.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.
Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ frowsy/frowzy,
notepaper/note-paper, etc.) have been preserved.
Text-edition only: “#” is used to indicate bolded text.
Alterations to the text:
Convert footnotes to endnotes.
Punctuation fixes: quotation mark pairing, missing periods, etc.
[Chapter III]
Change “to realise in it a a sense of my own” delete one _a_.
“to _marshall_ these resolutely before my mind’s eye” to _marshal_.
[Chapter IV]
(“Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut,” she answered,) italicize French
text.
[Chapter V]
“Didn’t she suggest this to to you?” delete one _to_.
[Chapter XI]
“a bottle of gin and one of peppermint _esssence_” to _essence_.
[Chapter XIII]
“that must be _Jonnny_ Dando!” to _Johnny_.
[Chapter XV]
“consequences of an _intreege_ with some girl” to _intrigue_.
[Chapter XX]
“honesty of the confession _evercame_ me” to _overcame_.
[End of text]