"MY WIFE! MY WIFE! WHAT WIFE? I HAVE NO WIFE."
The Golden Lion had reassumed its accustomed air of rustic tranquillity
when John Mellish returned to it. The jurymen had gone back to their
different avocations, glad to have finished the business so easily;
the villagers, who had hung about the inn to hear what they could
of the proceedings, were all dispersed; and the landlord was eating
his dinner, with his wife and family, in the comfortable little
bar-parlour. He put down his knife and fork as John entered the sanded
bar, and left his meal to receive such a distinguished visitor.
"Mr. Hayward and Mr. Lofthouse are in the coffee-room, sir," he said.
"Will you please to step this way?"
He opened the door of a carpeted room, furnished with shining mahogany
tables, and adorned by half a dozen gaudily-coloured prints of the
Doncaster meetings, the great match between Voltigeur and Flying
Dutchman, and other events which had won celebrity for the northern
race-course. The coroner was sitting at the bottom of one of the
long tables, with Mr. Lofthouse standing near him. William Dork, the
Meslingham constable, stood near the door, with his hat in his hand,
and with rather an alarmed expression dimly visible in his ruddy face.
Mr. Hayward and Mr. Lofthouse were both very pale.
One rapid glance was enough to show all this to John Mellish,--enough
to show him this, and something more: a basin of blood-stained water
before the coroner, and an oblong piece of wet paper, which lay under
Mr. Hayward's clenched hand.
"What is the matter? Why did you send for me?" John asked.
Bewildered and alarmed as he had been by the message which had summoned
him hurriedly back to the inn, he was still more so by the confusion
evident in the coroner's manner as he answered this question.
"Pray sit down, Mr. Mellish," he said. "I--I--sent for
you--at--the--the advice of Mr. Lofthouse, who--who, as a clergyman and
a family man, thought it incumbent upon me----"
Reginald Lofthouse laid his hand upon the coroner's arm with a warning
gesture. Mr. Hayward stopped for a moment, cleared his throat, and then
continued speaking, but in an altered tone.
"I have had occasion to reprehend William Dork for a breach of
duty, which, though I am aware it may have been, as he says, purely
unintentional and accidental----"
"It was indeed, sir," muttered the constable submissively. "If I'd ha'
know'd----"
"The fact is, Mr. Mellish, that on the night of the murder, Dork,
in examining the clothes of the deceased, discovered a paper, which
had been concealed by the unhappy man between the outer material and
the lining of his waistcoat. This paper was so stained by the blood
in which the breast of the waistcoat was absolutely saturated, that
Dork was unable to decipher a word of its contents. He therefore was
quite unaware of the importance of the paper; and, in the hurry and
confusion consequent on the very hard duty he has done for the last
two days, he forgot to produce it at the inquest. He had occasion to
make some memorandum in his pocket-book almost immediately after the
verdict had been given, and this circumstance recalled to his mind the
existence of the paper. He came immediately to me, and consulted me
upon this very awkward business. I examined the document, washed away a
considerable portion of the stains which had rendered it illegible, and
have contrived to decipher the greater part of it."
"The document is of some importance, then?" John asked.
He sat at a little distance from the table, with his head bent and his
fingers rattling nervously against the side of his chair. He chafed
horribly at the coroner's pompous slowness. He suffered an agony of
fear and bewilderment. Why had they called him back? What was this
paper? How _could_ it concern him?
"Yes," Mr. Hayward answered; "the document is certainly an important
one. I have shown it to Mr. Lofthouse, for the purpose of taking his
advice upon the subject. I have not shown it to Dork; but I detained
Dork in order that you may hear from him how and where the paper was
found, and why it was not produced at the inquest."
"Why should I ask any questions upon the subject?" cried John, lifting
his head suddenly, and looking from the coroner to the clergyman. "How
should this paper concern me?"
"I regret to say that it does concern you very materially, Mr.
Mellish," the rector answered gently.
John's angry spirit revolted against that gentleness. What right had
they to speak to him like this? Why did they look at him with those
grave, pitying faces? Why did they drop their voices to that horrible
tone in which the bearers of evil tidings pave their way to the
announcement of some overwhelming calamity?
"Let me see this paper, then, if it concerns me," John said very
carelessly. "Oh, my God!" he thought, "what is this misery that is
coming upon me? What is this hideous avalanche of trouble which is
slowly descending to crush me?"
"You do not wish to hear anything from Dork?" asked the coroner.
"No, no!" cried John savagely. "I only want to see that paper." He
pointed as he spoke to the wet and blood-stained document under Mr.
Hayward's hand.
"You may go, then, Dork," the coroner said quietly; "and be sure you do
not mention this business to any one. It is a matter of purely private
interest, and has no reference to the murder. You will remember?"
"Yes, sir."
The constable bowed respectfully to the three gentlemen and left the
room. He was very glad to be so well out of the business.
"They needn't have _called_ me," he thought. (To _call_, in the
northern _patois_, is to scold, to abuse.) "They needn't have said it
was repri--what's its name--to keep the paper. I might have burnt it,
if I'd liked, and said naught about it."
"Now," said John, rising and walking to the table as the door closed
upon the constable, "now then, Mr. Hayward, let me see this paper. If
it concerns me, or any one connected with me, I have a right to see it."
"A right which I will not dispute," the coroner answered gravely, as he
handed the blood-stained document to Mr. Mellish. "I only beg you to
believe in my heartfelt sympathy with you in this----"
"Let me alone!" cried John, waving the speaker away from him as he
snatched the paper from his hand; "let me alone! Can't you see that I'm
nearly mad?"
He walked to the window, and with his back to the coroner and Mr.
Lofthouse, examined the blotched and blotted document in his hands. He
stared for a long time at those blurred and half-illegible lines before
he became aware of their full meaning. But at last the signification of
that miserable paper grew clear to him, and with a loud cry of anguish
he dropped into the chair from which he had risen, and covered his face
with his strong right hand. He held the paper in the left, crumpled and
crushed by the convulsive pressure of his grasp.
"My God!" he ejaculated, after that first cry of anguish,--"my God! I
never thought of this. I never could have imagined this."
Neither the coroner nor the clergyman spoke. What could they say to
him? Sympathetic words could have no power to lessen such a grief as
this; they would only fret and harass the strong man in his agony; it
was better to obey him; it was far better to let him alone.
He rose at last, after a silence that seemed long to the spectators of
his grief.
"Gentlemen," he said, in a loud, resolute voice that resounded through
the little room, "I give you my solemn word of honour that when
Archibald Floyd's daughter married me, she believed this man, James
Conyers, to be dead."
He struck his clenched first upon the table, and looked with proud
defiance at the two men. Then, with his left hand, the hand that
grasped the blood-stained paper, thrust into his breast, he walked
out of the room. He walked out of the room and out of the house, but
not homewards. A grassy lane, opposite the Golden Lion, led away to a
great waste of brown turf, called Harper's Common. John Mellish walked
slowly along this lane, and out upon this quiet common-land, lonely
even in the broad summer daylight. As he closed the five-barred gate
at the end of the lane, and emerged upon the open waste, he seemed to
shut the door of the world that lay behind him, and to stand alone with
his great grief, under the low, sunless, summer sky. The dreary scene
before him, and the gray atmosphere above his head, seemed in strange
harmony with his grief. The reedy water-pools, unbroken by a ripple;
the barren verdure, burnt a dull grayish brown by the summer sun; the
bloomless heather, and the flowerless rushes,--all things upon which
he looked took a dismal colouring from his own desolation, and seemed
to make him the more desolate. The spoiled child of fortune,--the
popular young squire, who had never been contradicted in nearly
two-and-thirty years,--the happy husband, whose pride in his wife had
touched upon that narrow boundary-line which separates the sublime from
the ridiculous,--ah! whither had they fled, all these shadows of the
happy days that were gone? They had vanished away; they had fallen into
the black gulf of the cruel past. The monster who devours his children
had taken back these happy ones, and a desolate man was left in their
stead. A desolate man, who looked at a broad ditch and a rushy bank, a
few paces from where he stood, and thought, "Was it I who leapt that
dike a month ago to gather forget-me-nots for my wife?"
He asked himself that question, reader, which we must all ask ourselves
sometimes. Was he really that creature of the irrecoverable past? Even
as I write this, I can see that common-land of which I write. The low
sky, the sunburnt grass, the reedy water-pools, the flat landscape
stretching far away on every side to regions that are strange to me.
I can recall every object in that simple scene,--the atmosphere of
the sunless day, the sounds in the soft summer air, the voices of
the people near me; I can recall everything except--_myself_. This
miserable _ego_ is the one thing that I cannot bring back; the one
thing that seems strange to me; the one thing that I can scarcely
believe in. If I went back to that northern common-land to-morrow,
I should recognize every hillock, every scrap of furze, or patch of
heather. The few years that have gone by since I saw it will have made
a scarcely perceptible difference in the features of the familiar
place. The slow changes of nature, immutable in her harmonious law,
will have done their work according to that unalterable law; but this
wretched me has undergone so complete a change, that if you could
bring me back that _alter ego_ of the past, I should be unable to
recognize the strange creature; and yet it is by no volcanic shocks,
no rending asunder of rocky masses, no great convulsions, or terrific
agonies of nature, that the change has come about; it is rather by
a slow, monotonous wearing away of salient points; an imperceptible
adulteration of this or that constituent part; an addition here, and
a subtraction there, that the transformation takes place. It is hard
to make a man believe in the physiologists, who declare that the hand
which uses his pen to-day is not the same hand that guided the quill
with which he wrote seven years ago. He finds it very difficult to
believe this; but let him take out of some forgotten writing-desk,
thrust into a corner of his lumber-room, those letters which he wrote
seven years ago, and which were afterwards returned to him by the
lady to whom they were addressed, and the question which he will ask
himself, as he reads the faded lines, will most surely be, "Was it I
who wrote this bosh? Was it I who called a lady with white eyelashes
'the guiding star of a lonely life'? Was it I who was 'inexpressibly
miserable' with one _s_, and looked 'forward with unutterable anxiety
to the party in Onslow Square, at which I once more should look
into those soft blue eyes?' What party in Onslow Square? _Non mi
recordo._ 'Those soft blue eyes' were garnished with white lashes,
and the lady to whom the letters were written, jilted me, to marry a
rich soap-boiler." Even the law takes cognizance of this wonderful
transformation. The debt which Smith contracts in 1850 is null and void
in 1857. The Smith of '50 may have been an extravagant rogue; the Smith
of '57 may be a conscientious man, who would not cheat his creditors
of a farthing. Shall Smith the second be called upon to pay the debts
of Smith the first? I leave that question to Smith's conscience and
the metaphysicians. Surely the same law should hold good in breach
of promise of marriage. Smith the first may have adored Miss Brown;
Smith the second may detest her. Shall Smith of 1857 be called upon
to perform the contract entered into by that other Smith of 1850?
The French criminal law goes still further. The murderer whose crime
remains unsuspected for ten years can laugh at the police-officers
who discover his guilt in the eleventh. Surely this must be because
the real murderer is no longer amenable to justice; because the hand
that struck the blow, and the brain that plotted the deed, are alike
vanished.
Poor John Mellish, with the world of the past crumbled at his feet,
looked out at the blank future, and mourned for the people who were
dead and gone.
He flung himself at full length upon the stunted grass, and taking the
crumpled paper from his breast, unfolded it and smoothed it out before
him.
It was a certificate of marriage. The certificate of a marriage which
had been solemnized at the parish church of Dover, upon the 2nd of
July, 1856, between James Conyers, bachelor, rough-rider, of London,
son of Joseph Conyers, stage-coachman, and Susan, his wife, and Aurora
Floyd, spinster, daughter of Archibald Floyd, banker, of Felden Woods,
Kent.