UNWILLING WITNESSES.
The confession of Oscar Coldstream received in London, and published in
all the papers, did indeed excite a great deal of interest in England.
It was the subject of articles in religious periodicals, was commented
on from pulpits, and was looked upon as an unprecedented instance of
the power of conscience.[4]
Nowhere was greater excitement caused than in a small sitting-room in
a second-class lodging-house in Dover, where two elderly ladies were
sitting together, one engaged in knitting. Miss Deborah was reading
aloud to Miss Betsy a newspaper lent to them by a neighbour, for the
sisters did not indulge in the luxury of taking one in for themselves.
Suddenly Deborah stopped short, and her mittened hands shook so
violently that she almost dropped the newspaper.
“What is the matter, Deborah?” asked her sister in alarm. “You look as
if you had seen a ghost!”
“Oh, it is all out――the murder is out! The wretched man has confessed
that it was he who threw poor young Manly down the cliff on that
terrible, terrible day!”
Betsy was usually slow and sedate, but she now almost snatched the
paper from Deborah’s hand, that her eyes might confirm the witness of
her ears. She read the paragraph headed _A Murderer’s Confession_ with
tears running down her cheeks.
To explain the cause of such strong emotion, we must recur to what had
happened more than a year before.
The reader may have inferred from silence on the subject that there had
been no witnesses of Walter’s fatal fall. Such, however, had not been
the case. It is true that Manly had purposely chosen for his difficult
and dangerous ascent a time when Dover was attracted by the “new and
astounding exhibition” of a conjurer who was going his rounds. Walter
felt that the presence of spectators would affect his chance of winning
his foolish bet――a shout of encouragement or a cry of alarm from
below might make him lose his foothold. But not every one cared for
the conjurer’s exhibition, and the Misses Demster could not easily
spare their shillings to see it, so they took an evening stroll on
the beach instead. They were the daughters of a deceased clergyman;
highly respectable ladies with moderate means, who tried to eke out a
slender patrimony by letting out furnished lodgings in the season, and
occupying them themselves when visitors were few. The Misses Demster
were specimens of a pretty numerous class of reduced gentlewomen, whom
poverty does not rob of a claim to respect. Both were of kindly nature
and pious character, and they were strongly attached to each other.
Miss Deborah looked on her elder sister as a model of perfection.
Deborah could not claim such merit for herself; she had the care
of the housekeeping, and housekeeping on slender means is often a
trial to temper. The good lady knew that she was often angry with the
butcher, and impatient with Lizzie, the dull-witted maid-of-all-work.
Miss Betsy, who was not exposed to such daily temptation, and who was
brought little in contact with any one but a sister who deemed her an
oracle of wisdom and a model of virtue, was rather disposed to accept
Deborah’s opinion as a correct one. Miss Betsy never put the thought
into words, was scarcely sensible that she harboured it, but her real
estimate of herself was not much unlike that of the Pharisee in the
parable: “Lord, I thank Thee that we are not as other women are. We, on
our narrow means, never run into debt, but give to charities a tithe of
all we possess. We go to church daily, fair weather or foul, and teach
in a Sunday school. We pay wages and bills with regularity; we harm
no one, and are useful to many.” Miss Demster set up her own standard
of perfection, and was honestly convinced that she had nearly if not
quite attained thereto. She taught Sunday scholars that our duty is to
love God with all our heart, soul, and strength, and our neighbour as
ourselves; but it never occurred to Betsy to test her own character by
a standard so high, so divine.
The two ladies were taking their walk beneath the cliffs on that
evening when Manly was attempting his perilous feat. Deborah saw him
climbing, and tightly grasped the arm of her sister.
“O Betsy! Betsy! look! look! that must be that hare-brained Walter
Manly, who won the steeple-chase, attempting to climb to the top! Oh,
mercy! I cannot bear to see him; he will fall, and be dashed to pieces!”
Miss Demster, with equal interest, watched the young man’s ascent.
“He’ll never do it,” exclaimed Deborah. “See what a place he has
reached; he will never get up that. What fools these boys are to risk
precious life for nothing!”
“He’s a wonderful climber!” cried Betsy, as she breathlessly watched
efforts which seemed to her almost superhuman.
“He’s nearly at the top now; he’s stopping to take breath; he dare
not look down or he’s lost!” exclaimed Deborah in nervous excitement.
“There――there――he has one hand on the top of the cliff!”
“Now the other; he will swing himself up!” cried Betsy. But even as
the words were on her lips her look of interest changed to one of
intense horror, and the next moment poor Walter fell, turning over head
foremost in the terrible fall. The once fine powerful climber lay a
corpse with a broken neck at the foot of the cliff.
The two ladies hastened to the spot, overwhelmed with horror and
distress.
“Dead, quite dead!” exclaimed Deborah in much sorrow. “We cannot carry
the poor corpse ourselves; we must hasten off for assistance.”
“Stop! stop!” gasped Miss Demster, shaking as if in a violent fit of
ague. “You saw it as well as I. He did not slip; he was flung down. Oh,
mercy! he was _murdered_! I saw the wretch who did the deed.”
“I saw some one too,” cried Deborah.
“I shall never forget the murderer’s face――the handsomest face that
ever I saw in my life, but fierce as a demon’s. I could swear to it in
a court of justice,” said Betsy.
“Oh, don’t talk of swearing or of courts of justice,” exclaimed the
younger sister nervously; “it would be too dreadful to think of.”
“Of course there will be an inquest,” said Miss Demster. “We shall be
called as witnesses.”
“I would not go for the world!” cried Deborah. “Besides, if we took an
oath to tell _all_ the truth, we should have to speak of the murder.”
Betsy’s thin lips turned white as she faltered out, “We might get a man
_hanged_!”
“Oh, horrible! horrible!” exclaimed poor Deborah; “I would almost
rather be hanged myself.”
“We had better hurry away then, and leave some one else to find the
body――some one who would not be mixed up in a murder case, as we should
be certain to be.” Seizing her sister by the arm, Miss Demster almost
dragged her away from the spot.
But the ladies had not gone far before they both stopped as by a common
impulse. “Are we doing right?” came almost simultaneously from the lips
of both.
“Suppose that through us a murderer escape?” said Miss Demster. “If
he commit another murder, shall we be quite clear of the guilt of the
crime?”
“Or the murder may be discovered, but not the right person, and an
innocent man be hanged.” Deborah’s terrible suggestion made both the
ladies shudder.
“I tell you what we’ll do,” said Miss Demster, after some minutes
of painful reflection: “we’ll hurry home and say nothing about the
matter, unless some innocent poor man be seized, and then we’ll come
forward and declare all that we saw, and give evidence that it was a
gentleman――I mean, one who looked like a gentleman――who committed the
murder.”
This was a compromise with conscience, and any compromise with
conscience is a dangerous thing. However, for the time it half quieted
the minds of the two poor ladies.
They hurried home, hardly heeding the furious blast which suddenly
rose, and which, had they been at the top of the cliffs, would almost
have blown them off their feet. Miss Demster opened the door of her
house with a trembling hand. There was a kind of hope in her mind that
once within the quiet little dwelling trouble, like the stormy wind,
could be shut out; but memory and consciousness of having evaded a duty
could not be excluded. Hard did the sisters try to persuade themselves
that they had only done what was natural and right. Betsy thought of
the history of Achan, and recalled other instances in Scripture of sin
being brought to light. Deborah remembered stories of murder having
been found out when there had seemed to be no clue by which to discover
who had committed the crime.
A neighbour dropped in just when the ladies were attempting to eat
their frugal supper, for which all appetite was gone. The storm by this
time had lulled.
“O Miss Demster, Miss Deborah, have you heard the shocking, shocking
news?” cried the visitor, throwing herself down on a seat. “Poor young
Manly has been found, with his neck and ever so many other bones broken,
at the bottom of a cliff!”
“Indeed!” exclaimed the sisters, their consciences pricking them sorely
for expressing such hypocritical surprise.
“He had evidently fallen when attempting an impossible feat. You
were intending to take a walk in that direction, I know. Did you hear
nothing, see nothing, of this dreadful accident?”
Miss Demster actually knocked over the tea-tray, smashed her cherished
china, and sent the boiling contents of the pot over the carpet and
her visitor’s feet. It was her desperate resource for avoiding giving
a reply.
The doctoring of the scalded feet, the picking up of the broken
fragments of china, did divert attention from the subject of poor
Walter. Betsy made many excuses for awkwardness――she who was never
awkward; Deborah ran for cotton-wool to put over the scald; the visitor
presently departed limping (her house was but two doors off), and the
Demsters had kept their terrible secret.
“Deborah, we can’t stand this kind of thing!” exclaimed Betsy, as soon
as the outer door was shut. “Manly’s fall will be the talk of all Dover,
and I can’t break cups and saucers every time that an uncomfortable
question is asked. We’ll be off to London by the stagecoach to-morrow.”
And off the Demsters did go, though at great inconvenience. They could
ill afford the serious expense, and a journey in February gave severe
colds to both the sisters. They did not return till the nine days’
wonder was over; and a coroner’s inquest having been held on the body
of Walter, a verdict had been given――“Accidental death by a fall from
a cliff.”
It is a true saying that a little sin troubles more than a great deal
of sorrow, and its truth was proved by the amiable ladies in Paradise
Square. The quiet, even tenor of their lives was destroyed; they
felt almost like hypocrites when they taught Sunday scholars to be
straightforward and truthful; they took no pleasure in going to church;
they were half afraid to partake of Holy Communion.
“And yet what would every one say if we turned away?” cried Betsy.
“Oh, how wretched we should feel!” sighed Deborah. “Oh that we had
had the courage to do what was right! And yet I am afraid, should all
happen over again, that I should never dare to give evidence that might
cause a man to be hanged.”
A thorn in the flesh often brings a man nearer to God; a thorn in the
conscience severs from communion with God. The former may be endured
with patience; the latter must be drawn out, or the wound rankles and
festers.
The reader will now understand the emotion with which the Misses
Demster read of Oscar Coldstream’s confession.
“That poor sinner has some good in him,” observed the elder――“he has
had the courage to speak the whole truth. Perhaps he acted under great
provocation, and repented of the deed as soon as it was done.”
“He has done all he can to redeem the past,” said Deborah, wiping her
eyes. “I wonder what will be done with the poor gentleman. They will
hardly hang him for telling the truth.”
“You see that a commission is coming to Dover to inquire into the
matter,” observed Miss Demster, pointing to the end of the paragraph.
“Deborah, Deborah, ought we not even now to make clean breasts, and
confess all that we know?”
“That was just what I was thinking,” replied poor Deborah. “We have had
no peace since we hid that dreadful matter, and now our speaking out
will not cause any one to be hanged.”
“That Mr. Coldstream――whatever else he may be――is a brave and
conscientious man,” observed Betsy. “I think――though it would be an
effort, a horrible effort――that we ought to give evidence now.”
And the poor ladies did appear in court, their heads bowed down with
shame, and veils over their faces. They received meekly and with much
self-abasement the reproof of the eminent lawyer appointed to examine
into the case.
“Ladies, you may hitherto have suppressed facts, and tried to defeat
justice, from motives of humanity,” said he; “but know that he who
conceals another’s crime becomes an accessory after the deed; he who
shields a murderer from justice may be regarded as being, in some
measure, a partaker in his guilt.”
It was a consolation to the poor Misses Demster that Oscar Coldstream
was not to be hanged after all. His crime had been unpremeditated
and voluntarily confessed; he was therefore recommended to mercy.
Instructions were forwarded to the Indian Government that the murderer
of Walter Manly should be transported to the nearest penal settlement,
to remain there for the term of his natural life.