“Now, governor, I’m done, and if you’ve no objection we’d all like to
hear how you came by that ugly gash of yours? It wasn’t no rope did
that. Common or garden murder, I’ll be bound.”
“Certainly, my man, it was a murder--a murder most _apropos_. The
circumstances were peculiar. I have often longed to get the ear of the
jury who tried a man for relieving me of my light purse and
intolerably heavy life, and tell them--the whole hard-working,
conscientious twelve of them, trying their best to bring in an honest
verdict and avenge my wrongs--my own proper feelings, surely no
negligible factor in the case! They could not guess, these ignorant
living men, whose eyes had not yet been opened by death to a due sense
of the proportions of things--that I bore the poor creature no malice,
but instead was actually grateful for his skilful surgery that had
severed the life-cord that bored me, so neatly and completely.”
“It isn’t every one would take it like that!” remarked the smart
woman. “Yet that is, more or less, how I feel about these things
myself. Only in my case it is impossible to speak of skilful surgery!
I was disgracefully cut up. I couldn’t possibly have worn a low dress
again!”
“Have you ever heard?” said the man in grey thoughtfully, “of the
Greek story of the Gold of Rhampsinitos, and the inviolable cellar he
built to store it in? According to the modern system, my gold was
hoarded in my brain, where fat assets and sordid securities bred and
bred all day long. The laws that govern wealth are hard. You must give
it, devise it, you must not allow it to be taken. But for my part I
would have welcomed the two sons of the master builder who broke into
the Greek King’s Treasure House. In the strong-room of my brain it
lodged. With one careless calculation, one stroke of a pen, I could
make money breed money there to madden me. I was lonely, too. I had no
wife to divide my responsibilities. She might even have enjoyed them.
But I dared approach no woman in the way of love--I did not choose to
be loved for my cheque-signing powers. I was not loved at all. I was
hated. Unrighteous things were done in my name, by the greedy
husbandmen of my load of money. Then I was told that I went in danger
of my life, and I condescended to take care of that--for a time--only
for a time!
“One dark winter evening--I forget what had happened during the day,
what fresh instance of turpitude or greed had come before me--I was so
revolted that I kicked away all the puling safeguards by which my
agents guarded their best asset of all, and gave the rein to my
instinct. I disregarded precautions of every sort--with the exception
of my faithful loaded stick, and the carrying of that had come to be a
mere matter of habit with me--and I walked home from the station alone
and unattended, up to my big house and good dinner which I hoped--nay,
I almost knew--that I should not be alive to eat. And indeed, as luck
would have it, on that night of all nights the trap was set for me.
The appointed death-dealer was waiting--he took me on at once. I got
my desire--kind, speedy, merciful, violent death. I never even saw the
face of my deliverer.”
“By George!” softly swore the man in corduroys. “This beats all. Are
you sure you aren’t kidding us?”
“No indeed, that is exactly how I felt about it, and if I had known of
knowledge, as I knew of instinct, what was going to happen, I would
have thought to realize some of my wealth before setting out to walk
through that wood, and made it more worth the honest fellow’s while.
But as you are aware, a millionaire does not carry portable gold about
with him, and my cheque-book which I had on me would, of course, be of
no use to him. Alas, all the poor devil got for his pains was exactly
nineteen shillings and eleven pence. I had changed a sovereign at the
book-stall to buy a paper, and out of habit, had waited for the
change.”
The man in corduroys was by this time in a considerable state of
excitement. He had rent the red handkerchief fiercely from his neck,
and now made as if to tear it across his knee.…
“Why, governor!” he exclaimed passionately, “do you mean to say it was
through you that I got this here”--he put both hands behind his head
and interlocked them, “in return for giving you that there cut at the
back of your neck? Well, how things do come about, to be sure!”
“Gently, gently! my man,” the elder soothed him. “Don’t be so
melodramatic about a very ordinary coincidence. See, the ladies are
quite upset. It doesn’t do to allow oneself to get excited here--it’s
not in the rules. If I had made the little discovery you have done, I
don’t think--no, I really don’t think I would have made it public.
This undue exhibition of emotion of yours strikes me as belonging to
the vulgar world we have all left. But since you have allowed it to
come out, and every one is now aware of the peculiar relation in which
we stand to each other, you must let me tender you my best thanks, as
to a most skilful and firm operator, and believe me to be truly
grateful to you for your services in the past.”
“Quite the old school!” said the smart woman.
“I must say, Sir,--I consider you the real gentleman,” said the baby
farmer.
“I am a gentleman.”
“And a fairly accommodating one!” said the rough man, wiping his brow
where, however, no sweat was. “It isn’t every man as would give thanks
for being scragged!”
“Every man isn’t a millionaire,” said his victim calmly.
The smart woman, leaning forward, tapped the old gentleman amiably
with her jewelled pince-nez.
“But we belong to the same world, I perceive,” she said, “and I am
quite able to understand your refined feeling. It is as I said in my
own case. Indeed if those two good people, who shall be nameless, had
only dealt with me a little more gently, I don’t know that I should
not forgive them absolutely. I shall at any rate be perfectly civil
when I do meet them--only perhaps a little distant. But that Monte
Carlo existence I was leading when they interrupted it, was really
becoming intolerable! No one who hasn’t done it, thoroughly can
realize what it is. Glare, noise, glitter, fever--that heartless,
blue, laughing sea they talk of in the railway advertisements----”
The baby farmer, left out in this elegant discussion, obviously took
no pleasure in it, but staring straight before her, muttered sulkily--
“Cote d’Azur and Pentonville! There’s some little difference, isn’t
there, between one life and the other? Yet I enjoyed my life, I did,
and as for gratitude, I can’t say as I see all those blessed infants
a-coming up to me, and slobbering me for what I did for ’em. I may
meet them, but they’ll not notice me. It isn’t in human nature. Their
mothers’ thanks was all I got, and they thanked me beforehand in hard
cash for what I was a-going to do. Lord, what’s a ricketty baby more
or less? I say, we’re slowing up! Going to stop perhaps, and a good
thing too!”
“Yes,” said the man in the grey frock coat, still enouncing his curt
sentences to the unheeding listeners, “I am able to cordially thank
the man who rid me with one clean scientific blow of my wretched life
and all its tedious accessories. A skilled workman is worthy of his
hire.”
“Mercy!” muttered the baby farmer. “Is he never going to stop? If it
was for nothing else, he ought to have got scragged for being a bore!”
But being fully wound up, though in the excitement of arriving at the
depôt no one was attending, the man in grey continued, “Suicide I had
thought of, but abhorred, though on my soul I had nearly come to that,
and then it was merely a question of courage--you spoke truly, Sir.
Mine was a thin, pusillanimous nature, as you said. You came by, a
kind Samaritan, and sacrificed your own good life freely to rid me of
my wretched one. I think I told you that when you were being tried, I
followed urgently all the details of the trial, and made interest with
the authorities here to allow me to appear to the judge in his sleep,
say, and instil into his mind some inkling of the true state of my
feelings towards you. I do not know, however, if you would have
thanked me, for life may have been no sweeter to you than it was to
me--you spoke of an uncongenial helpmate, I think? Still one never
knows. I might have been the means of procuring you some good years
yet, in the full exercise of your undeniable vigour and remarkable
decision of character. But it was apparently not to be. You followed
me here, after a long interval of waiting, and now we have met, face
to face. The introduction on that dark night was worth nothing. I like
your face. We shall probably never meet again--their ways are dark and
devious here, so I am the more glad of this opportunity of opening my
mind to you on a delicate subject, perhaps, but one that has always
been very near my heart. By the way”--he lifted his stick with its
shining ivory crown into view. “Did you notice this? You read the
papers, you said, and they told you it was heavily weighted and that I
carried it always as a precaution. Well, on that eventful night for
both of us--perhaps you were too hurried to notice?--but I never used
it. Accept it now, will you not, as a memento?… I think, from sundry
truly unearthly bumpings, that we seem to have come at last to our
journey’s end.… I am right, the coachman has got down from his perch
and taken his head under his arm.… We part. Mesdames, I salute you.
Again, Sir----” He addressed himself more particularly to the
shamefaced man in corduroys--“Farewell. Very pleased to have met you!”
One by one, the passengers faded away into the distance. The polite
old man paused in the semblance of an inn yard where the coach had
drawn up. A pale proud woman’s face, shining up by the step, had
touched him. She was an intending passenger, and she was alone. She
wore white dog-skin gloves, but no hat. Unusual, he fancied, in a
woman of her class. On looking closer, he saw that she had a hat, but
that it hung disregarded over her shoulder by an elastic, and was much
battered and destroyed. He decided to speak to her.
“You are the lady we killed, I think?” he asked gently.
She acknowledged with a bow that it was so.
“We could none of us do anything,” he apologized, “or I hope you will
believe----”
“Certainly, Sir, it was no fault of yours, or indeed of the company’s,
I am sure. The accident was inevitable!” so she assured him, smiling
faintly. He looked at her kindly. There was blood on the hair, he was
able to convince himself.… “But Rory--our pony--never can pass things,
at the best of times, and the look of your conveyance was certainly
rather unusual. And at that time of night we rarely meet anything at
all on the Great North Road. We choose that time on purpose, my sister
and I--we had been staying away for a week with friends, and we were
going home. When we saw you coming, Lucy said, half in jest--she is
older than I--‘Suppose that thing in front were the Coach of Death the
foolish country people talk about? They say it travels this way once a
year, with its cargo of souls, on St. John’s Eve.’ I bade her not be
superstitious, but I confess I thought the vehicle looked odd myself,
and I did wonder how Rory would stand it. When it came nearer I saw
distinctly that the coachman was headless, and I laughingly told my
sister so. She bade me not disturb her, for death coach or live coach,
she meant to do her best to get Rory past it. She failed----”
The man in grey looked nervously around. He was alone with the young
lady in the dull inn yard. The headless coachman was preparing to
ascend to the box seat again.…
“Where is your sister now?” he inquired.
“She lies at the bottom of the ditch. Rory has galloped home. She fell
on her head, but she is alive still. When they find her in the
morning, she will be dead, I know that. For now I know all things. I
am at peace… you need have no care for me.…”
“Let me at least put you into the coach,” he begged. “And you will
prefer the corner seat?”…