THE END OF IT.
JOHN JAGO was brought before the magistrate, and John Jago was
identified the next day.
The lives of Ambrose and Silas were, of course, no longer in peril, so
far as human justice was concerned. But there were legal delays to be
encountered, and legal formalities to be observed, before the brothers
could be released from prison in the characters of innocent men.
During the interval which thus elapsed, certain events happened which
may be briefly mentioned here before I close my narrative.
Mr. Meadowcroft the elder, broken by the suffering which he had gone
through, died suddenly of a rheumatic affection of the heart. A codicil
attached to his will abundantly justified what Naomi had told me of
Miss Meadowcroft’s influence over her father, and of the end she had in
view in exercising it. A life income only was left to Mr. Meadowcroft’s
sons. The freehold of the farm was bequeathed to his daughter, with the
testator’s recommendation added, that she should marry his “best and
dearest friend, Mr. John Jago.”
Armed with the power of the will, the heiress of Morwick sent an
insolent message to Naomi, requesting her no longer to consider herself
one of the inmates at the farm. Miss Meadowcroft, it should be here
added, positively refused to believe that John Jago had ever asked
Naomi to be his wife, or had ever threatened her, as I had heard him
threaten her, if she refused. She accused me, as she accused Naomi, of
trying meanly to injure John Jago in her estimation, out of hatred
toward “that much-injured man;” and she sent to me, as she had sent to
Naomi, a formal notice to leave the house.
We two banished ones met the same day in the hall, with our
traveling-bags in our hands.
“We are turned out together, friend Lefrank,” said Naomi, with her
quaintly-comical smile. “You will go back to England, I guess; and I
must make my own living in my own country. Women can get employment in
the States if they have a friend to speak for them. Where shall I find
somebody who can give me a place?”
I saw my way to saying the right word at the right moment.
“I have got a place to offer you,” I replied.
She suspected nothing, so far.
“That’s lucky, sir,” was all she said. “Is it in a telegraph-office or
in a dry-goods store?”
I astonished my little American friend by taking her then and there in
my arms, and giving her my first kiss.
“The office is by my fireside,” I said; “the salary is anything in
reason you like to ask me for; and the place, Naomi, if you have no
objection to it, is the place of my wife.”
I have no more to say, except that years have passed since I spoke
those words and that I am as fond of Naomi as ever.
Some months after our marriage, Mrs. Lefrank wrote to a friend at
Narrabee for news of what was going on at the farm. The answer informed
us that Ambrose and Silas had emigrated to New Zealand, and that Miss
Meadowcroft was alone at Morwick Farm. John Jago had refused to marry
her. John Jago had disappeared again, nobody knew where.
NOTE IN CONCLUSION.--The first idea of this little story was suggested
to the author by a printed account of a trial which actually took
place, early in the present century, in the United States. The
published narrative of this strange case is entitled “The Trial,
Confessions, and Conviction of Jesse and Stephen Boorn for the Murder
of Russell Colvin, and the Return of the Man supposed to have been
murdered. By Hon. Leonard Sargeant, Ex-Lieutenant Governor of Vermont.
(Manchester, Vermont, _Journal_ Book and Job Office, 1873.)” It may not
be amiss to add, for the benefit of incredulous readers, that all the
“improbable events” in the story are matters of fact, taken from the
printed narrative. Anything which “looks like truth” is, in nine cases
out of ten, the invention of the author.--W. C.