XI

The inquest was hurried for certain local reasons which weighed with

the coroner and the town authorities. It was held on the afternoon of

the next day. I was necessarily one among the witnesses summoned to

assist the objects of the investigation.

My first proceeding in the morning was to go to the post-office,

and inquire for the letter which I expected from Marian. No change

of circumstances, however extraordinary, could affect the one great

anxiety which weighed on my mind while I was away from London. The

morning’s letter, which was the only assurance I could receive that no

misfortune had happened in my absence, was still the absorbing interest

with which my day began.

To my relief, the letter from Marian was at the office waiting for me.

Nothing had happened—they were both as safe and as well as when I

had left them. Laura sent her love, and begged that I would let her

know of my return a day beforehand. Her sister added, in explanation

of this message, that she had saved “nearly a sovereign” out of her

own private purse, and that she had claimed the privilege of ordering

the dinner and giving the dinner which was to celebrate the day of

my return. I read these little domestic confidences in the bright

morning with the terrible recollection of what had happened the evening

before vivid in my memory. The necessity of sparing Laura any sudden

knowledge of the truth was the first consideration which the letter

suggested to me. I wrote at once to Marian to tell her what I have

told in these pages—presenting the tidings as gradually and gently as

I could, and warning her not to let any such thing as a newspaper fall

in Laura’s way while I was absent. In the case of any other woman, less

courageous and less reliable, I might have hesitated before I ventured

on unreservedly disclosing the whole truth. But I owed it to Marian to

be faithful to my past experience of her, and to trust her as I trusted

myself.

My letter was necessarily a long one. It occupied me until the time

came for proceeding to the inquest.

The objects of the legal inquiry were necessarily beset by peculiar

complications and difficulties. Besides the investigation into the

manner in which the deceased had met his death, there were serious

questions to be settled relating to the cause of the fire, to the

abstraction of the keys, and to the presence of a stranger in the

vestry at the time when the flames broke out. Even the identification

of the dead man had not yet been accomplished. The helpless condition

of the servant had made the police distrustful of his asserted

recognition of his master. They had sent to Knowlesbury overnight to

secure the attendance of witnesses who were well acquainted with the

personal appearance of Sir Percival Glyde, and they had communicated,

the first thing in the morning, with Blackwater Park. These precautions

enabled the coroner and jury to settle the question of identity, and

to confirm the correctness of the servant’s assertion; the evidence

offered by competent witnesses, and by the discovery of certain facts,

being subsequently strengthened by an examination of the dead man’s

watch. The crest and the name of Sir Percival Glyde were engraved

inside it.

The next inquiries related to the fire.

The servant and I, and the boy who had heard the light struck in the

vestry, were the first witnesses called. The boy gave his evidence

clearly enough, but the servant’s mind had not yet recovered the shock

inflicted on it—he was plainly incapable of assisting the objects of

the inquiry, and he was desired to stand down.

To my own relief, my examination was not a long one. I had not known

the deceased—I had never seen him—I was not aware of his presence at

Old Welmingham—and I had not been in the vestry at the finding of the

body. All I could prove was that I had stopped at the clerk’s cottage

to ask my way—that I had heard from him of the loss of the keys—that

I had accompanied him to the church to render what help I could—that

I had seen the fire—that I had heard some person unknown, inside the

vestry, trying vainly to unlock the door—and that I had done what I

could, from motives of humanity, to save the man. Other witnesses, who

had been acquainted with the deceased, were asked if they could explain

the mystery of his presumed abstraction of the keys, and his presence

in the burning room. But the coroner seemed to take it for granted,

naturally enough, that I, as a total stranger in the neighbourhood, and

a total stranger to Sir Percival Glyde, could not be in a position to

offer any evidence on these two points.

The course that I was myself bound to take, when my formal examination

had closed, seemed clear to me. I did not feel called on to volunteer

any statement of my own private convictions; in the first place,

because my doing so could serve no practical purpose, now that all

proof in support of any surmises of mine was burnt with the burnt

register; in the second place, because I could not have intelligibly

stated my opinion—my unsupported opinion—without disclosing the

whole story of the conspiracy, and producing beyond a doubt the same

unsatisfactory effect an the minds of the coroner and the jury, which I

had already produced on the mind of Mr. Kyrle.

In these pages, however, and after the time that has now elapsed, no

such cautions and restraints as are here described need fetter the free

expression of my opinion. I will state briefly, before my pen occupies

itself with other events, how my own convictions lead me to account for

the abstraction of the keys, for the outbreak of the fire, and for the

death of the man.

The news of my being free on bail drove Sir Percival, as I believe, to

his last resources. The attempted attack on the road was one of those

resources, and the suppression of all practical proof of his crime,

by destroying the page of the register on which the forgery had been

committed, was the other, and the surest of the two. If I could produce

no extract from the original book to compare with the certified copy at

Knowlesbury, I could produce no positive evidence, and could threaten

him with no fatal exposure. All that was necessary to the attainment of

his end was, that he should get into the vestry unperceived, that he

should tear out the page in the register, and that he should leave the

vestry again as privately as he had entered it.

On this supposition, it is easy to understand why he waited until

nightfall before he made the attempt, and why he took advantage of the

clerk’s absence to possess himself of the keys. Necessity would oblige

him to strike a light to find his way to the right register, and common

caution would suggest his locking the door on the inside in case of

intrusion on the part of any inquisitive stranger, or on my part, if I

happened to be in the neighbourhood at the time.

I cannot believe that it was any part of his intention to make the

destruction of the register appear to be the result of accident, by

purposely setting the vestry on fire. The bare chance that prompt

assistance might arrive, and that the books might, by the remotest

possibility, be saved, would have been enough, on a moment’s

consideration, to dismiss any idea of this sort from his mind.

Remembering the quantity of combustible objects in the vestry—the

straw, the papers, the packing-cases, the dry wood, the old worm-eaten

presses—all the probabilities, in my estimation, point to the fire as

the result of an accident with his matches or his light.

His first impulse, under these circumstances, was doubtless to try

to extinguish the flames, and failing in that, his second impulse

(ignorant as he was of the state of the lock) had been to attempt to

escape by the door which had given him entrance. When I had called to

him, the flames must have reached across the door leading into the

church, on either side of which the presses extended, and close to

which the other combustible objects were placed. In all probability,

the smoke and flame (confined as they were to the room) had been too

much for him when he tried to escape by the inner door. He must have

dropped in his death-swoon—he must have sunk in the place where he was

found—just as I got on the roof to break the skylight window. Even if

we had been able, afterwards, to get into the church, and to burst open

the door from that side, the delay must have been fatal. He would have

been past saving, long past saving, by that time. We should only have

given the flames free ingress into the church—the church, which was

now preserved, but which, in that event, would have shared the fate of

the vestry. There is no doubt in my mind, there can be no doubt in the

mind of any one, that he was a dead man before ever we got to the empty

cottage, and worked with might and main to tear down the beam.

This is the nearest approach that any theory of mine can make towards

accounting for a result which was visible matter of fact. As I have

described them, so events passed to us outside. As I have related it,

so his body was found.

The inquest was adjourned over one day—no explanation that the eye of

the law could recognise having been discovered thus far to account for

the mysterious circumstances of the case.

It was arranged that more witnesses should be summoned, and that the

London solicitor of the deceased should be invited to attend. A medical

man was also charged with the duty of reporting on the mental condition

of the servant, which appeared at present to debar him from giving any

evidence of the least importance. He could only declare, in a dazed

way, that he had been ordered, on the night of the fire, to wait in

the lane, and that he knew nothing else, except that the deceased was

certainly his master.

My own impression was, that he had been first used (without any guilty

knowledge on his own part) to ascertain the fact of the clerk’s absence

from home on the previous day, and that he had been afterwards ordered

to wait near the church (but out of sight of the vestry) to assist his

master, in the event of my escaping the attack on the road, and of a

collision occurring between Sir Percival and myself. It is necessary

to add, that the man’s own testimony was never obtained to confirm

this view. The medical report of him declared that what little mental

faculty he possessed was seriously shaken; nothing satisfactory was

extracted from him at the adjourned inquest, and for aught I know to

the contrary, he may never have recovered to this day.

I returned to the hotel at Welmingham so jaded in body and mind, so

weakened and depressed by all that I had gone through, as to be quite

unfit to endure the local gossip about the inquest, and to answer the

trivial questions that the talkers addressed to me in the coffee-room.

I withdrew from my scanty dinner to my cheap garret-chamber to secure

myself a little quiet, and to think undisturbed of Laura and Marian.

If I had been a richer man I would have gone back to London, and

would have comforted myself with a sight of the two dear faces again

that night. But I was bound to appear, if called on, at the adjourned

inquest, and doubly bound to answer my bail before the magistrate

at Knowlesbury. Our slender resources had suffered already, and the

doubtful future—more doubtful than ever now—made me dread decreasing

our means unnecessarily by allowing myself an indulgence even at the

small cost of a double railway journey in the carriages of the second

class.

The next day—the day immediately following the inquest—was left at my

own disposal. I began the morning by again applying at the post-office

for my regular report from Marian. It was waiting for me as before,

and it was written throughout in good spirits. I read the letter

thankfully, and then set forth with my mind at ease for the day to go

to Old Welmingham, and to view the scene of the fire by the morning

light.

What changes met me when I got there!

Through all the ways of our unintelligible world the trivial and the

terrible walk hand in hand together. The irony of circumstances holds

no mortal catastrophe in respect. When I reached the church, the

trampled condition of the burial-ground was the only serious trace

left to tell of the fire and the death. A rough hoarding of boards

had been knocked up before the vestry doorway. Rude caricatures were

scrawled on it already, and the village children were fighting and

shouting for the possession of the best peep-hole to see through. On

the spot where I had heard the cry for help from the burning room, on

the spot where the panic-stricken servant had dropped on his knees, a

fussy flock of poultry was now scrambling for the first choice of worms

after the rain; and on the ground at my feet, where the door and its

dreadful burden had been laid, a workman’s dinner was waiting for him,

tied up in a yellow basin, and his faithful cur in charge was yelping

at me for coming near the food. The old clerk, looking idly at the

slow commencement of the repairs, had only one interest that he could

talk about now—the interest of escaping all blame for his own part on

account of the accident that had happened. One of the village women,

whose white wild face I remembered the picture of terror when we pulled

down the beam, was giggling with another woman, the picture of inanity,

over an old washing-tub. There is nothing serious in mortality! Solomon

in all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible

lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his palace.

As I left the place, my thoughts turned, not for the first time, to

the complete overthrow that all present hope of establishing Laura’s

identity had now suffered through Sir Percival’s death. He was gone—and

with him the chance was gone which had been the one object of all my

labours and all my hopes.

Could I look at my failure from no truer point of view than this?

Suppose he had lived, would that change of circumstance have altered

the result? Could I have made my discovery a marketable commodity, even

for Laura’s sake, after I had found out that robbery of the rights of

others was the essence of Sir Percival’s crime? Could I have offered

the price of MY silence for HIS confession of the conspiracy, when the

effect of that silence must have been to keep the right heir from the

estates, and the right owner from the name? Impossible! If Sir Percival

had lived, the discovery, from which (in my ignorance of the true

nature of the Secret) I had hoped so much, could not have been mine to

suppress or to make public, as I thought best, for the vindication of

Laura’s rights. In common honesty and common honour I must have gone

at once to the stranger whose birthright had been usurped—I must have

renounced the victory at the moment when it was mine by placing my

discovery unreservedly in that stranger’s hands—and I must have faced

afresh all the difficulties which stood between me and the one object

of my life, exactly as I was resolved in my heart of hearts to face

them now!

I returned to Welmingham with my mind composed, feeling more sure of

myself and my resolution than I had felt yet.

On my way to the hotel I passed the end of the square in which Mrs.

Catherick lived. Should I go back to the house, and make another

attempt to see her? No. That news of Sir Percival’s death, which was

the last news she ever expected to hear, must have reached her hours

since. All the proceedings at the inquest had been reported in the

local paper that morning—there was nothing I could tell her which she

did not know already. My interest in making her speak had slackened. I

remembered the furtive hatred in her face when she said, “There is no

news of Sir Percival that I don’t expect—except the news of his death.”

I remembered the stealthy interest in her eyes when they settled on me

at parting, after she had spoken those words. Some instinct, deep in

my heart, which I felt to be a true one, made the prospect of again

entering her presence repulsive to me—I turned away from the square,

and went straight back to the hotel.

Some hours later, while I was resting in the coffee-room, a letter was

placed in my hands by the waiter. It was addressed to me by name, and

I found on inquiry that it had been left at the bar by a woman just as

it was near dusk, and just before the gas was lighted. She had said

nothing, and she had gone away again before there was time to speak to

her, or even to notice who she was.

I opened the letter. It was neither dated nor signed, and the

handwriting was palpably disguised. Before I had read the first

sentence, however, I knew who my correspondent was—Mrs. Catherick.