“Quarrelling?” cried the lawyer.
“Yes, sir; and were roaring out at one another like wolves. Mr. ——”
“Stay a moment, ma’am. How long was it after you admitted Captain Tanerton that you heard this quarrelling?”
“Not above three or four minutes, sir. I’m sure of that. ‘Mr. Pym’s catching it from his captain, and he is just in the right mood to take it unkindly,’ I thought to myself. However, it was no business of mine. The sounds soon ceased, and I was just dozing off again, when Mr. Saxby came home. He went into the parlour to see Mr. Pym, and found him lying dead on the floor.”
A silent pause.
“You are sure, ma’am, it was Captain Tanerton who was quarrelling with him?” cried the lawyer, who asked more questions than all the rest put together.
“Of course I am sure,” returned Mrs. Richenough. “Why, sir, how could it be anybody else? Hadn’t I just let in Captain Tanerton to him? Nobody was there but their two selves.”
Naturally the room turned to Jack. He answered the mute appeal very quietly.
“It was not myself that quarrelled with Pym. No angry word of any kind passed between us. Pym had been drinking; Mrs. Richenough is right in that. He was not in a state to be reproved or reasoned with, and I came away at once. I did not stay to sit down.”
“You hear this, Mrs. Richenough?”
“Yes, sir, I do; and I am sure the gentleman don’t speak or look like one who could do such a deed. But, then, I heard the quarrelling.”
An argument indisputable to her own mind. Sir Dace looked up and put a question for the first time. He had listened in silence. His dark face had a wearied look on it, and he spoke hardly above a whisper.
“Did you know the voice to be that of Captain Tanerton, Mistress Landlady? Did you recognize it for his!”
“I knew the voice couldn’t be anybody else’s, sir. Nobody but the captain was with Mr. Pym.”
“I asked you whether you recognized it?” returned Sir Dace, knitting his brow. “Did you know by its tone that it was Captain Tanerton’s?”
“Well, no, sir, I did not, if you put it in that way. Captain Tanerton was nearly a stranger to me, and the two shut doors and the passage was between me and him. I had only heard him speak once or twice before, and then in a pleasant, ordinary voice. In this quarrel his voice was raised to a high, rough pitch; and in course I could not know it for his.”
“In point of fact, then, it comes to this: You did not recognize the voice for Captain Tanerton’s.”
“No, sir; not, I say, if you put it in that light.”
“Let me put it in this light,” was Sir Dace Fontaine’s testy rejoinder: “Had three or four people been with Mr. Pym in his parlour, you could not have told whose voice it was quarrelling with him? You would not have known?”
“That is so, sir. But, you see, I knew it was his captain that was with him.”
Sir Dace folded his arms and leaned back in his chair, his cross-questioning over. Mrs. Richenough was done with for the present, and Captain Tanerton entered upon his version of the night’s events.
“I wished particularly to see Mr. Pym, and went to Ship Street in search of him, as I have already said. He was not there. Later, I went down again——”
“I beg your pardon, Captain Tanerton,” interrupted the lawyer; “what time do you make it—that second visit?”
“It must have been nearly nine o’clock. Mr. Pym was at home, and I went into his parlour. He sat at the table writing, or preparing to write. I asked him the question I had come to ask, and he answered me. Scarcely anything more passed between us. He was three-parts tipsy. I had intended to tell him that he was no longer chief mate of my ship—had been superseded; but, seeing his condition, I did not. I can say positively that I was not more than two minutes in the room.”
“And you and he did not quarrel?”
“We did not. Neither were our voices raised. It is very probable, in his then condition, that he would have attempted to quarrel had he known he was discharged; but he did not know it. We were perfectly civil to each other; and when I wished him good-night, he came into the passage and shut the front-door after me.”
“You left no one with him?”
“No one; so far as I saw. I can answer for it that no one was in the parlour with us: whether any one was in the back room I cannot say. I do not think so.”
“After that, Captain Tanerton?”
“After that I went straight to my hotel in the Minories, and ordered tea. While taking it, Mr. Ferrar came in and told me Edward Pym was dead. I could not at first believe it. I went back to Ship Street and found it too true. In as short a time as I could manage it, I went to carry the news to Sir Dace Fontaine, taking young Saxby with me.”
Jack had spoken throughout in the ready, unembarrassed manner of one who tells a true tale. But never in all my life had I seen him so quiet and subdued. He was like one who has some great care upon him. The other hearers, not knowing Jack as I knew him, would not notice this; though I cannot answer for it that one of them did not James Freeman. He never took his eyes off Jack all the while; peered at him as if he were a curiosity. It was not an open stare; more of a surreptitious one, taken stealthily from under his eyebrows.
Some testimony as to Pym’s movements that afternoon was obtained from Mrs. Ball, the lawyer having already been to Woburn Place to get it. She said that young Pym came to her house between five and six o’clock nearer six than five, she thought, and seemed very much put out and disappointed to find Miss Verena Fontaine had left for her own home. He spoke of the ship’s having sprung a leak and put back again, but he believed she would get out again on the morrow. Mrs. Ball did not notice that he had been drinking; but one of her servants met him in the street after he left the house, heard him swearing to himself, and saw him turn into a public-house. If he remained in it until the time he next appeared in Ship Street, his state then was not to be wondered at.
This was about all that had been gathered at present. A great deal of talking took place, but no opinion was expressed by anybody. Time enough for that when the jury met on the morrow. As we were turning out of the back-room, the meeting over, Mr. Freeman put his hand upon Jack, to detain him. Jack, in his turn, detained me.
“Captain Tanerton,” he said, in a grave whisper, “do you remember making a remark to me not long ago, in this, my private room—that if we persisted in sending Pym out with you in the ship, there would be murder committed?”
“I believe I do,” said Jack, quietly. “They were foolish words, and meant nothing.”
“I do not like to remember them,” pursued Mr. Freeman. “As things have turned out, it would have been better that you had not used them.”
“Perhaps so,” answered Jack. “They have done no harm, that I know of.”
“They have been singularly verified. The man has been murdered.”
“Not on board the Rose of Delhi.”
“No. Off it.”
“I should rather call it death by misadventure,” said Jack, looking calmly at the broker. “At the worst, done in a scuffle; possibly in a fall.”
“Most people, as I think you will find, will call it murder, Captain Tanerton.”
“I fear they will.”
Mr. Freeman stood before Jack, waiting—at least it struck me so—to hear him add, “But I did not commit it”—or words to that effect. I waited too. Jack never spoke them: he remained silent and still. Since the past day his manner had changed. All the light-hearted ease had gone out of it; the sunny temperament seemed exchanged for one of thought and gloom.
Fine tidings to travel down to Timberdale!
On Wednesday, the day following this, the Squire stood at the gate of Crabb Cot after breakfast, looking this way and that. Dark clouds were chasing each other over the face of the sky, now obscuring the sun, now leaving it to shine out with intense fierceness.
“It won’t do to-day,” cried the Squire. “It’s too windy, Joe. The fish would not bite.”
“They’d bite fast enough,” said Tod, who had set his mind upon a day’s fishing, and wanted the Squire to go with him.
“Feel that gust, Joe! Why, if—halloa, here comes Letsom!”
Colonel Letsom was approaching at the pace of a steam-engine, his mild face longer than usual. Tod laughed.
The colonel, never remembering to say How d’ye do, or to shake hands, dragged two letters out of his pocket, all in a flurry.
“Such fearful news, Todhetley!” he exclaimed. “Pym—you remember that poor Pym?”
“What should hinder me?” cried the Squire. “A fine dance we had, looking for him and Verena Fontaine the other night in London! What of Pym!”
“He is dead!” gasped the colonel. “Murdered.”
The pater took off his spectacles, thinking they must affect his hearing, and stared.
“And it is thought,” added the colonel, “that—that Captain Tanerton did it.”
“Good mercy, Letsom! You can’t mean it.”
Colonel Letsom’s answer was to read out portions of the two letters. One of them was written to his daughter Mary Ann by Coralie Fontaine; three sheets full. She gave much the same history of the calamity that has been given above. It could not have been done by any hand but Captain Tanerton’s, she said; though of course not intentionally; nobody thought that: her father, Sir Dace, scorned any worse idea. Altogether, it was a dreadful thing; it had struck Verena into a kind of wild despair, and bewildered them all. And in a postscript she added what she had apparently forgotten to say before—that Captain Tanerton denied it.
Tod looked up, a flush on his face. “One thing may be relied upon, colonel—that if Tanerton did do it, he will avow it. He would never deny it.”
“This other letter is from Sir Dace,” said the colonel, after putting Coralie’s aside. And he turned round that we might look over his shoulder while he read it.
It gave a much shorter account than Coralie’s; a lighter account, as if he took a less grave view of the affair; and it concluded with these words: “Suspicion lies upon Tanerton. I think unjustly. Allowing that he did do it, it could only have been done by a smartly-provoked blow, devoid of ill-intention. No one knows better than myself how quarrelsome and overbearing that unfortunate young man was. But I, for one, believe what Tanerton says—that he was not even present when it happened. I am inclined to think that Pym, in his unsteady state, must in some way have fallen when alone, and struck his head fatally.”
“Sir Dace is right; I’ll lay my fortune upon it,” cried Tod warmly.
“Don’t talk quite so fast about your fortune, Joe; wait till you’ve got one,” rebuked the pater. “I must say it is grievous news, Letsom. It has upset me.”
“I am off now to show the letters to Paul,” said the colonel. “It will be but neighbourly, as he is a connection of the Fontaines.”
Shaking hands, he turned away on the road to Islip. The Squire, leaning on the gate, appeared to be looking after him: in reality he was deep in a brown study.
“Joe,” said he, in a tone that had a sound of awe in it, “this is curious, taken in conjunction with what Alice Tanerton told us yesterday morning.”
“Well, it does seem rather queer,” conceded Tod. “Something like the dream turning up trumps.”
“Trumps?” retorted the pater.
“Truth, then. Poor Alice!”
A singular thing had happened. Especially singular, taken in conjunction (as the Squire put it) with this unfortunate news. And when the reader hears the whole, though it won’t be just yet, he will be ready to call out, It is not true. But it is true. And this one only fact, with its truth and its singularity, induced me to recount the history.
On Tuesday morning, the day after the calamity in Ship Street—you perceive that we go back a day—the Squire and Tod turned out for a walk. They had no wish to go anywhere in particular, and their steps might just as well have been turned Crabb way as Timberdale way—or, for that matter, any other way. The morning was warm and bright: they strolled towards the Ravine, went through it, and so on to Timberdale.
“We may as well call and see how Herbert Tanerton is, as we are here,” remarked the Squire. For Herbert had a touch of hay-fever. He was always getting something or other.
The Rector was better. They found him pottering about his garden; that prolific back-garden from which we once saw—if you don’t forget it—poor, honest, simple-minded Jack bringing strawberries on a cabbage-leaf for crafty Aunt Dean. The suspected hay-fever turned out to be a bit of a cold in the head: but the Rector could not have looked more miserable had it been in the heart.
“What’s the matter with you now?” cried the Squire, who never gave in to Herbert’s fancies.
“Matter enough,” he growled in answer: “to have a crew of ridiculous women around you, no better than babies! Here’s Alice in a world of a way about Jack, proclaiming that some harm has happened to him.”
“What harm? Does she know of any?”
“No, she does not know of any,” croaked Herbert, flicking a growing gooseberry off a bush with the rake. “She says a dream disclosed it to her.”
The pater stared. Tod threw up his head with a laugh.
“You might have thought she’d got her death-warrant read out to her, so white and trembling did she come down,” continued Herbert in an injured tone. “She had dreamt a dream, foreshadowing evil to Jack, she began to tell us—and not a morsel of breakfast could she touch.”
“But that’s not like Alice,” continued the Squire. “She is too sensible: too practical for such folly.”
“It’s not like any rational woman. And Grace would have condoled with her! Women infect each other.”
“What was the dream?”
“Some nonsense or other, you may be sure. I would not let her relate it, to me, or to Grace. Alice burst into tears and called me hard-hearted. I came out here to get away from her.”
“For goodness’ sake don’t let her upset herself over a rubbishing dream, Tanerton,” cried the Squire, all sympathy. “She’s not strong, you know, just now. I dreamt one night the public hangman was appointed to take my head off; but it is on my shoulders yet. You tell her that.”
“Yesterday was the day Jack was to sail,” interrupted Tod.
“Of course it was,” acquiesced the Rector: “he must be half-way down the channel by this time. If—— Here comes Alice!” he broke off. “I shall go. I don’t want to hear more of such stuff.”
He went on down the garden in a huff, disappearing behind the kidney-beans. Alice, wearing a light print gown and black silk apron, her smooth brown hair glossy as ever, and her open face as pretty, shook hands with them both.
“And what’s this we hear about your tormenting yourself over a dream?” blundered the Squire. Though whether it was a blunder to say it, I know not; or whether, but for that, she would have spoken: once the ice is broken, you may plunge in easily. “My dear, I’d not have thought it of you.”
Alice’s face took a deeper gravity, her eyes a far-off look. “It is quite true, Mr. Todhetley,” she sighed. “I have been very much troubled by a dream.”
“Tell it us, Alice,” said Tod, his whole face in a laugh. “What was it about?”
“That you may ridicule it?” she sighed.
“Yes,” he answered. “Ridicule it out of you.”
“You cannot do that,” was her quiet answer: and Tod told me in later days that it rather took him aback to see her solemn sadness. “I should like to relate it to you, Mr. Todhetley. Herbert would not hear it, or let Grace.”
“Herbert’s a parson, you know, my dear, and parsons think they ought to be above such things,” was the Squire’s soothing answer. “If it will ease your mind to tell it me—— Here, let us sit down under the pear-tree.”
So they sat down on the bench under the blossoms of the pear-tree, the pater admonishing Tod to behave himself; and poor Alice told her dream.
“I thought it was the present time,” she began. “This very present day, say, or yesterday; and that Jack was going to sea in command——”
“But, my dear, he always goes in command.”
“Of course. But in the dream the point was especially presented to my mind—that he was going out in command. He came to me the morning of the day he was to sail, looking very patient, pale, and sorrowful. It seemed that he and I had had some dispute, causing estrangement, the previous night: it was over then, and I, for one, repented of the coldness.”
“Well, Alice?” broke in Tod: for she had stopped, and was gazing out straight before her.
“I wish I could show to you how real all this was,” she resumed. “It was more as though I were wide awake, and enacting it. I never had so vivid a dream before; never in all my life.”
“But why don’t you go on?”
“Somebody had been murdered: some man. I don’t know who it was—or where, or how. Jack was suspected. Jack! But it seemed that it could not be brought home to him. We were in a strange town; at least, it was strange to me, though it seemed that I had stayed in it once before, many years ago. Jack was standing before me all this while, you understand, in his sadness and sorrow. It was not he who had told me what had happened. I seemed to have known it already. Everybody knew it, everybody spoke of it, and we were in cruel distress. Suddenly I remembered that when I was in the town the previous time, the man who was murdered had had a bitter quarrel with another man, a gentleman: and a sort of revelation came over me that this gentleman had been the murderer. I went privately to some one who had authority in the ship, and said so; I think her owner. He laughed at me—did I know how high this gentleman was, he asked; the first magnate in the town. That he had done it I felt sure; surer than if I had seen it done; but no one would listen to me—and in the trouble I awoke.”
“That’s not much to be troubled at,” cried the Squire.
“The trouble was terrible; you could not feel such in real life. But I have not told all. Presently I got to sleep again, and found myself in the same dream. I was going through the streets of the town in an open carriage, the ship’s owner with me——”
“Was the ship the Rose of Delhi?”
“I don’t know. The owner, sitting with me in the carriage, was not either of the owners of the Rose of Delhi, whom I know well; this was a stranger. We were going over a bridge. Walking towards us on the pavement, I saw two gentlemen arm-in-arm: one an officer in a dusky old red uniform and cocked-hat; the other an evil-looking man who wore a long brown coat. He walked along with his eyes on the ground. I knew him by intuition—that it was the man who had had the quarrel years before, and who had done the murder now. ‘There’s the gentleman you would have accused,’ said my companion before I could speak, pointing to this man: ‘he stands higher in position than anybody else in the town.’ They walked on in their security, and we drove on in our pain. I ought to say in my pain, for I alone felt it. Oh, I cannot tell you what it was—this terrible pain; not felt so much, it seemed, because my husband could not be cleared, as for his sadness and sorrow. Nothing like it, I say, can ever be felt on earth.”
“And what else, Alice?”
“That is all,” she sighed. “I awoke for good then. But the pain and the fear remain with me.”
“Perhaps, child, you are not very well?—been eating green gooseberries, or some such trash. Nothing’s more likely to give one bad dreams than unripe fruit.”
“Why should the dream have left this impression of evil upon me—this weight of fear?” cried Alice, never so much as hearing the pater’s irreverent suggestion. “If it meant nothing, if it were not come as a warning, it would pass from my mind as other dreams pass.”
Not knowing what to say to this, the Squire said nothing. He and Tod both saw how useless it would be; no argument could shake her faith in the dream, and the impression it had left.
The Squire, more easily swayed than a child, yet suspecting nothing of the news that was on its way to Timberdale, quitted the Rectory and went home shaking his head. Alice’s solemn manner had told upon him. “I can’t make much out of the dream, Joe,” he remarked, as they walked back through the Ravine; “but I don’t say dreams are always to be ridiculed, since we read of dreams sent as warnings in the Bible. Anyhow, I hope Jack will make a good voyage. He has got home safe and sound from other voyages: why should he not from this one?”
Before that day was over, they saw Alice again. She walked over to Crabb Cot in the evening with her little girl—a sprightly child with Jack’s own honest and kindly eyes. Alice put a sealed paper into the Squire’s hand.
“I know you will think me silly,” she said to him, in a low tone: “perhaps gone a little out of my senses; but, as I told you this morning, nothing has ever impressed me so greatly and so unpleasantly as this dream. I cannot get it out of my mind for a moment; every hour, as it goes by, only serves to render it clearer. I have written it down here, every particular, more minutely than I related it to you this morning, and I have sealed it up, you see; and I am come to ask you to keep it. Should my husband ever be accused, it may serve to——”
“Now, child, don’t you talk nonsense,” interrupted the pater. “Accused of what?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did. I hope you will pardon me, Mr. Todhetley,” she went on, in deprecation; “but indeed there lies upon me a dread—an apprehension that startles me. I dare say I express myself badly; but it is there. And, do you know, Jack has lately experienced the same sensation; he told me so on Sunday. He said it was like an instinct of coming evil.”
“Then that accounts for it,” cried the Squire, considerably relieved, and wondering how Jack could be so silly, if she was. “If your husband told you that, Alice, of course the first thing you’d do would be to go and dream of it.”
“Perhaps so. What he said made no impression on me; he laughed as he said it: I don’t suppose it made much on him. Please keep the paper.”
The Squire carried the paper upstairs and locked it up in the little old walnut bureau in his bedroom. He told Alice where he had put it. And she, declining any refreshment, left again with little Polly for Timberdale Rectory.
“Has Herbert come to?” asked Tod laughingly, as he went to open the gate for her.
“Oh dear, no,” answered Alice. “He never will, if you mean as to hearing me tell the dream.”
They had a hot argument after she left: Mrs. Todhetley maintaining that some dreams were to be regarded as sacred things; while Tod ridiculed them with all his might, asserting that there never had been, and never could be anything in them to affect sensible people. The Squire, now taking one side, now veering to the other, remained in a state of vacillation, something like Mahomet’s coffin hovering between earth and heaven.
And, you will now readily understand that when the following morning, Wednesday, Colonel Letsom brought the Squire the news of Pym’s death, calling it murder, and that Jack was suspected, and the ship had gone out without him, this dream of Alice Tanerton’s took a new and not at all an agreeable prominence. Even Tod, sceptical Tod, allowed that it was “queer.”
On this same morning, Wednesday, Alice received a letter from her husband. He spoke of the mishap to the ship, said that she had put back, and had again gone out; he himself being detained in London on business, but he expected to be off in a day or two and join her at some place down channel. But not a word did he say of the cause of his detention, or of the death of Edward Pym. She heard it from others.
With this confirmation, as it seemed, of her dream, Alice took it up more warmly. She went over to the old lawyer at Islip, John Paul, recounted the dream to him, and asked what she was to do. Naturally, old Paul told her “nothing:” and he must have laughed in his sleeve as he said it.
The good ship, Rose of Delhi, finally went away with all her sails set for the East; but John Tanerton went not with her.
The inquest on the unfortunate young man, Pym, was put off from time to time, and prolonged and procrastinated. Captain Tanerton had to wait its pleasure; the ship could not.
The case presented difficulties, and the jury could not see their way to come to a verdict. Matters looked rather black against Captain Tanerton; that was not denied; but not sufficiently black, it would seem, for the law to lay hold of him. At any rate, the law did not. Perhaps the persistent advocacy of Sir Dace Fontaine went some way with the jury. Sir Dace gave it as his strong opinion that his misguided nephew, being the worse for drink, had fallen of himself, probably with his head on the iron fender, and that Captain Tanerton’s denial was a strictly true one. The end finally arrived at was—that there was not sufficient evidence to show how the death was caused.
At the close of the investigation Jack went down to Timberdale. Not the open-hearted, ready-handed Jack of the old days, but a subdued, saddened man who seemed to have a care upon him. The foolish speech he had thoughtlessly made to Mr. Freeman preceded him: and Herbert Tanerton—always looking on the darkest side of everything and everybody, considered it a proof that Jack had done the deed.
Timberdale (including Crabb) held opposite opinions; half of it taking Captain Tanerton’s side, half the contrary one. As to the Squire, he was more helpless than an old sheep. He had always liked Jack, had believed in him as in one of us: but, you see, when one gets into trouble, faith is apt to waver. A blow, argued the pater in private, is so easily given in the heat of passion.
“A pretty kettle of fish this is,” croaked Herbert to Jack, on his brother’s arrival.
“Yes, it is,” sighed Jack.
“The ship’s gone without you, I hear.”
“She had to go. Ships cannot be delayed to await the convenience of one man: you must know that, Herbert.”
“How came you to do it, John?”
“To do what?” asked Jack. “To stay? It was no fault of mine. I was one of the chief witnesses, and the coroner would not release me.”
“You know what I mean. Not that. How came you to do it, I ask?”
“To do what?” repeated Jack.
“Kill Pym.”
Jack’s face took a terrible shade of pain as he looked at his brother. “I should have thought, Herbert, that you, of all people, might have judged me better than that.”
“I don’t mean to say you did it deliberately; that you meant to do it,” returned the Rector in his coldest manner. “But that was a very awkward threat of yours—that if the brokers persisted in sending Pym out with you, there’d be murder committed. Very incautious!”
“You can’t mean what you say; you cannot surely reflect on what you would imply—that I spoke those words with intention!” flashed Jack.
“You did speak them—and they were verified,” contended Herbert. Just the same thing, you see, that Mr. Freeman had said to Jack in London. Poor Jack!
“How did you hear that I had said anything of the kind?”
“Somebody wrote it to Timberdale,” answered the parson, crustily. There could be no question that the affair had crossed him more than anything that had ever happened in this world. “I think it was Coralie Fontaine.”
“I am deeply sorry I ever spoke them, Herbert—as things have turned out.”
“No doubt you are. The tongue’s an evil and dangerous member. Let us drop the subject: the less it is recurred to now, the better.”
Captain Tanerton saw how it was—that all the world suspected him, beginning with his brother.
And he certainly did not do as much to combat the feeling as he might have done. This was noticed. He did not assert his innocence strenuously and earnestly. He said he was not guilty, it’s true, but he said it too quietly. A man accused of so terrible a crime would move heaven and earth to prove the charge false—if false it were. Jack denied his guilt, but denied it in a very tame fashion. And this had its effect upon his upholders.
There could be no mistaking that some inward trouble tormented him. His warm, genial manners had given place to thoughtfulness and care. Was Jack guilty?—his best friends acknowledged the doubt now, in the depths of their heart. Herbert Tanerton was worrying himself into a chronic fever: chiefly because disgrace was reflected on his immaculate self, Jack being his brother. Squire Todhetley, meeting Jack one day in Robert Ashton’s cornfield, took Jack’s hands in his, and whispered that if Jack did strike the blow unwittingly, he knew it was all the fault of that unhappy, cross-grained Pym. In short, the only person who retained full belief in Jack was his wife. Jack had surely done it, said Timberdale under the rose, but done it unintentionally.
Alice related her dream to Jack. Not being given to belief in dreams, Jack thought little of it. Nothing, in fact. It was no big, evil-faced man who harmed Pym, he answered, shaking his head; and he seemed to speak as one who knew.
Timberdale was no longer a pleasant resting-place for John Tanerton, and he quitted it for Liverpool, with Alice and their little girl. Aunt Dean received him coolly and distantly. The misfortune had put her out frightfully: with Jack’s income threatened, there would be less for herself to prey upon. She told him to his face that if he wanted to correct Pym, he might have waited till they got out to sea: blows were not thought much of on board ship.
The next day Jack paid a visit to the owners, and resigned his command. For, he was still attached ostensibly to the Rose of Delhi, though another master had temporarily superseded him.
“Why do you do this?” asked Mr. Charles Freeman. “We can put you into another ship, one going on a shorter voyage, and when your own comes home you can take her again.”
“No,” said Jack. “Many thanks, though, for your confidence in me. All the world seems to believe me guilty. If I were guilty I am not fit to command a ship’s crew.”
“But you were not guilty?”
More emphatically than Jack had yet spoken upon the affair, he spoke now: and his truthful, candid eyes went straight into those of his questioner.
“I was not. Before Heaven, I say it.”
Charles Freeman heaved a sigh of relief. He liked Jack, and the matter had somewhat troubled him.
“Then, Captain Tanerton—I fully believe you—why not reconsider your determination, and remain on active service? The Shamrock is going to Madras; sails in a day or two; and you shall have her. She’ll be home again before the Rose of Delhi. For your own sake I think you should do this—to still rancorous tongues.”
Jack sighed. “I can’t feel free to go,” he said. “This suspicion has troubled me more than you can imagine. I must get some employment on shore.”
“You should stand up before the world and assert your innocence in this same emphatic manner,” returned the owner. “Why have you not done it?”
Jack’s voice took a tone of evasion at once. “I have not cared to do it.”
Charles Freeman looked at him. A sudden thought flashed into his mind.
“Are you screening some one, Captain Tanerton?”
“How can you ask such a question?” rejoined Jack. But the deep and sudden flush that rose with the words, gave fresh food for speculation to Mr. Freeman. He dropped his voice.
“Surely it was not Sir Dace Fontaine who—who killed him? The uncle and nephew were not on good terms.”
Jack’s face and voice brightened again—he could answer this with his whole heart. “No, no,” he impressively said, “it was not Sir Dace Fontaine. You may at least rely upon that.”
When I at length got back to Crabb, the Fontaines were there. After the inquest, they had gone again to Brighton. Poor Verena looked like a ghost, I thought, when I saw her on the Sunday in their pew at church.
“It has been a dreadful thing,” I said to her, as we walked on together after service; “but I am sorry to see you look so ill.”
“A dreadful thing!—ay, it has, Johnny Ludlow,” was her answer, spoken in a wail. “I expect it will kill some of us.”
Sir Dace looked ill too. His furtive eyes had glanced hither and thither during the service, like a man who has a scare upon him; but they seemed ever to come back to Verena.
Not another word was said by either of us until we were near the barn. Then Verena spoke.
“Where is John Tanerton?”
“In Liverpool, I hear.”
“Poor fellow!”
Her tone was as piteous as her words, as her looks. All the bloom had gone from her pretty face; its lips were white, dry, and trembling. In Coralie there was no change; her smiles were pleasant as ever, her manners as easy. The calamity had evidently passed lightly over her; as I expect most things in life did pass.
Saying good-morning at the turning, Sir Dace and Verena branched off to Maythorn Bank. Coralie lingered yet, talking with Mr. Todhetley.
“My dear, how ill your father is looking!” exclaimed the Squire.
“He does look ill,” answered Coralie. “He has never been quite the same since that night in London. He said one day that he could not get the sight of Pym out of his mind—as he saw him lying on the floor in Ship Street.”
“It must have been a sad sight.”
“Papa is also, I think, anxious about Verena,” added Coralie. “She has taken the matter to heart in quite an unnecessary manner; just, I’m sure, as if she intended to die over it. That must vex papa: I see him glancing at her every minute in the day. Oh, I assure you I am the only cheerful one of the family now,” concluded Coralie, lightly, as she ran away to catch the others.
That was the last we saw of them that year. On the morrow we left for Dyke Manor.
In the course of the autumn John Tanerton ran up to Timberdale from Liverpool. It had come to his knowledge that the Ash Farm, belonging to Robert Ashton, was to let—Grace had chanced to mention it incidentally when writing to Alice—and poor Jack thought if he could only take it his fortune was made. He was an excellent, practical farmer, and knew he could make it answer. But it would take two or three thousand pounds to stock the Ash Farm, and Jack had not as many available shillings. He asked his brother to lend him the money.
“I always knew you were deficient in common sense,” was the Rector’s sarcastic rejoiner to the request. “Three thousand pounds! What next?”
“It would be quite safe, Herbert: you know how energetic I am. And I will pay you good interest.”
“No doubt you will—when I lend it you. You have a cheek!”
“But——”
“That will do; don’t waste breath,” interrupted Herbert, cutting him short. And he positively refused the request—refused to listen to another word.
Strolling past Maythorn Bank that same afternoon, very much down in looks and spirits, Jack saw Sir Dace Fontaine. He was leaning over his little gate, looking just as miserable as Jack. For Sir Dace to look out of sorts was nothing unusual; for Jack it was. Sir Dace asked what was amiss: and Jack—candid, free-spoken, open-natured Jack—told of his disappointment in regard to the Ash Farm: his brother not feeling inclined to advance him the necessary money to take it—three thousand pounds.
“I wonder you do not return to the sea, Captain Tanerton,” cried Sir Dace.
“I do not care to return to it,” was Jack’s answer.
“Why?”
“I shall never go to sea again, Sir Dace,” he said in his candour.
“Never go to sea again!”
“No. At any rate, not until I am cleared. While this dark cloud of suspicion lies upon me I am not fit to take the command of others. Some windy night insubordinate men might throw the charge in my teeth.”
“You are wrong,” said Sir Dace, his countenance taking an angry turn. “You know, I presume, your own innocence—and you should act as if you knew it.”
He turned back up the path without another word, entered his house, and shut the door. Jack walked slowly on. Presently he heard footsteps behind him, looked round, and saw Verena Fontaine. They had not met since the time of Pym’s death, and Jack thought he had never seen such a change in any one. Her bright colour was gone, her cheeks were wasted—a kind of dumb despair sat in her once laughing blue eyes. All Jack’s pity—and he had his share of it—went out to her.
“I heard a little of what you said to papa at the garden-gate, Captain Tanerton—not much of it. I was in the arbour. Why is it that you will not yet go to sea again? What is it you wait for?”
“I am waiting until I can stand clear in the eyes of men,” answered Jack, candid as usual, but somewhat agitated, as if the topic were a sore one. “No man with a suspicion attaching to him should presume to hold authority over other men.”
“I understand you,” murmured Verena. “If you stood as free from suspicion with all the world as you are in my heart, and—and”—she paused from emotion—“and I think in my father’s also, you would have no cause to hesitate.”
Jack took a questioning glance at her; at the sad, eager eyes that were lifted beseechingly to his. “It is kind of you to say so much,” he answered. “It struck me at the time of the occurrence that you could not, did not, believe me guilty.”
Verena shivered. As if his steady gaze were too much for her, she turned her own aside towards the blue sky.
“Good-bye,” she said faintly, putting out her hand. “I only wanted to say this—to let you know that I believe in your innocence.”
“Thank you,” said Jack, meeting her hand. “It is gratifying to hear that you do me justice.”
He walked quietly away. She stood still to watch him. And of all the distressed, sad, aching countenances ever seen in this world, few could have matched that of Miss Verena Fontaine.
V.
Spring sunshine, bright and warm to-day, lay on Timberdale. Herbert Tanerton, looking sick and ill, sat on a bench on the front lawn, holding an argument with his wife, shielded from outside gazers by the clump of laurel-trees. We used to say the Rector’s illnesses were all fancy and temper; but it seemed to be rather more than that now. Worse tempered he was than ever; Jack’s misfortunes and Jack’s conduct annoyed him. During the past winter Jack had taken some employment at the Liverpool Docks, in connection with the Messrs. Freeman’s ships. Goodness knew of what description it was, Herbert would say, turning up his nose.
A day or two ago Jack made his appearance again at the Rectory; had swooped down upon it without warning or ceremony, just as he had in the autumn. Herbert did not approve of that. He approved still less of the object which had brought Jack at all. Jack was tired of the Liverpool Docks; the work he had to do was not congenial to him; and he had now come to Timberdale to ask Robert Ashton to make him his bailiff. Not being able to take a farm on his own account, Jack thought the next best thing would be to take the management of one. Robert Ashton would be parting with his bailiff at Midsummer, and Jack would like to drop into the post. Anything much less congenial to the Rector’s notions, Jack could hardly have pitched upon.
“I can see what it is—Jack is going to be a thorn in my side for ever,” the Rector was remarking to his wife, who sat near him, doing some useful work. “He never had any idea of the fitness of things. A bailiff, now!—a servant!”
“I wish you would let him take a farm, Herbert—lend him the money to stock one.”
“I know you do; you have said so before.”
Grace sighed. But when she had it on her conscience to say a thing she said it.
“Herbert, you know—you know I have never thought it fair that we should enjoy all the income we do; and——”
“What do you mean by ‘fair’?” interrupted Herbert. “I only enjoy my own.”
“Legally it is yours. Rightly, a large portion of it ought to be Jack’s. It does not do us any good, Herbert, this superfluous income; you only put it by. It does not in the slightest degree add to our enjoyment of life.”
“Do be quiet, Grace—unless you can talk sense. Jack will get no money from me. He ought to be at sea. What right had he to give it up? The Rose of Delhi is expected back now: let him take her again.”
“You know why he will not, Herbert. And he must do something for a living. I wish you would not object to his engaging himself to Robert Ashton. If——”
“Why don’t you wish anything else that’s lowering and degrading? You are as devoid of common sense as he!” retorted the parson, walking away in a fume.
Matters were in this state when we got back to Crabb Cot; to stop at it for a longer or a shorter period as fate and the painters at Dyke Manor would allow. Jack urging Robert Ashton to promise him the bailiffs post—vacant the next Midsummer; Herbert strenuously objecting to it; and Robert Ashton in a state of dilemma between the two. He would have liked well enough to engage John Tanerton: but he did not like to defy the Rector. When the Squire heard this later, his opinion vacillated, according to custom: now leaning to Herbert’s side, now to Jack’s. And the Fontaines, we found, were in all the bustle of house-moving. Their own house, Oxlip Grange, being at length ready for them, they were quitting Maythorn Bank.
“Goodness bless me!” cried the Squire, coming in at dusk from a stroll he had taken the evening of our arrival. “I never got such a turn in my life.”
“What has given it you, sir?”
“What has given it me, Johnny? why, Sir Dace Fontaine. I never saw any man so changed,” he went on, rubbing up his hair. “He looks like a ghost, more than a man.”
“Is he ill?”
“He must be ill. Sauntering down that narrow lane by Maythorn Bank, I came upon a tall something mooning along like a walking shadow. I might have taken it for a shadow, but that it lifted its bent head, and threw its staring eyes straight into mine—and I protest that a shadowy sensation crept over myself when I recognized it for Fontaine. You never saw a face so gloomy and wan. How long is it since we saw him, Johnny?”
“About nine months, I think, sir.”
“The man must be suffering from a wasting complaint, or else he has some secret care that’s fretting him to fiddle-strings. Mark my words, all of you, it is one or the other.”
“Dear me!” put in Mrs. Todhetley, full of pity. “I always thought him a gloomy man. Did you ask him whether he was ill?”
“Not I,” said the pater: “he gave me no opportunity. Had I been a sheriffs-officer with a writ in my hand he could hardly have turned off shorter. They had moved into the other house that day, he muttered, and he must lock up Maythorn Bank and be after them.”
This account of Sir Dace was in a measure cleared up the next morning. Who should come in after breakfast but the surgeon, Cole. Talking of this and that, Sir Dace Fontaine’s name came up.
“I am on my way now to Sir Dace; to the new place,” cried Cole. “They went into it yesterday. Might have gone in a month ago, but Sir Dace made no move to do it. He seems to have no heart left to do anything; neither heart nor energy.”
“I knew he was ill,” cried the Squire. “No mistaking that. And now, Cole, what is it that’s the matter with him?”
“He shows symptoms of a very serious inward complaint,” gravely answered Cole. “A complaint that, if it really does set in, must prove fatal. We have some hopes yet that we shall ward it off. Sir Dace does not think we shall, and is in a rare fright about himself.”
“A fright, is he! That’s it, then.”
“Never saw any man in such a fright before,” went on Cole. “Says he’s going to die—and he does not want to die.”
“I said last night the man was like a walking shadow. And there’s a kind of scare in his face.”
Cole nodded. “Two or three weeks ago I got a note from him, asking me to call. I found him something like a shadow, as you observe, Squire. The cold weather had kept him indoors, and I had not chanced to see him for some weeks. When Sir Dace told me his symptoms, I suppose I looked grave. Combined with his wasted appearance, they unpleasantly impressed me, and he took alarm. ‘The truth,’ he said, in his arbitrary way: ‘tell me the truth; only that. Conceal nothing.’ Well, when a patient adjures me in a solemn manner to tell the truth, I deem it my duty to do so,” added Cole, looking up.
“Go on, Cole,” cried the Squire, nodding approval.
“I told him the truth, softening it in a degree—that I did not altogether like some of the symptoms, but that I hoped, with skill and care, to get him round again. The same day he sent for Darbyshire of Timberdale, saying we must attend him conjointly, for two heads were better than one. Two days later he sent for somebody else—no other than Mr. Ben Rymer.”
We all screamed out in surprise. “Ben Rymer!”
“Ay,” said Cole, “Ben Rymer. Ben has got through and is a surgeon now, like the rest of us. And, upon my word, I believe the fellow has his profession thoroughly in hand. He will make a name in the world, the chances for it being afforded him, unless I am mistaken.”
Something like moisture stood in the Squire’s good old eyes. “If his father, poor Rymer, had but lived to see it!” he softly said. “Anxiety, touching Ben, killed him.”
“So we three doctors make a pilgrimage to Sir Dace regularly everyday; sometimes together, sometimes apart,” added Cole. “And, of the three of us, I believe the patient likes young Rymer best—has most confidence in him.”
“Shall you cure him?”
“Well, we do not yet give up hope. If the disease does set in, it will——”
“What?”
“Run its course quickly.”
“An instant yet, Cole,” cried the Squire, stopping the surgeon as he was turning away. “You have told us nothing. How does the parish get on?—and the people? How is Letsom?—and Crabb generally? Tanerton—how is he?—and Timberdale? Coming here fresh, we are thirsting for news.”
Cole laughed. He knew the pater liked gossip as much as any old woman: and the reader must understand that, as yet, we had not heard any, having reached Crabb Cot late the previous afternoon.
“There is no particular news, Squire,” said he. “Letsom is well; so is Crabb. Herbert Tanerton’s not well. He is in a crusty way over Jack.”
“He is always in a way over something. Where is Jack?”
“Jack’s here, at the Rectory; just come to it. Robert Ashton’s bailiff is about to take a farm on his own account, and Jack came rushing over from Liverpool to apply for the post.”
Tod, who had been too much occupied with his fishing-flies to take much heed before, set up a shrill whistle at this. “How will the parson like that?” he asked.
“The parson does not like it at all. Whether he will succeed in preventing it, is another matter,” concluded Cole. And, with that, he made his escape.
Close upon the surgeon’s departure, Colonel Letsom came in; he had heard of our arrival. It was a pity, he said, the two brothers should be at variance. Jack wanted the post—he must make a living somehow; and the Rector was in a way over it; not quite mad, but next door to it; Ashton of course not knowing what to do between them. From that subject, he began to speak of the Fontaines.
A West Indian planter, one George Bazalgette, had been over on a visit, he said, and had spent Christmas at Maythorn Bank; his object being to induce Verena to accept him as her husband. Verena would not listen to him, and he wasted his eloquence in vain. She made no hesitation in vowing to him that her affections were buried in the grave of Edward Pym.
“Fontaine told me confidentially in London that he intended she should have Bazalgette,” remarked the Squire. “It was the evening we went looking for her at that wax-work place.”
“Ay; but Fontaine is changed,” returned the colonel: “all his old domineering ways are gone out of him. When Bazalgette was over here, he did not attempt even to persuade her: she must take her own course, he said. So poor Bazalgette went back as he came—wifeless. It was a pity.”
“Why?”
“Because this George Bazalgette was a nice fellow,” replied Colonel Letsom. “An open-hearted, fine-looking, generous man, and desperately in love with her. Miss Verena will not readily find his compeer in a summer day’s march.”
“As old as Adam, I suppose, colonel,” interjected Tod.
“Yes—if you choose to put Adam’s age down at three or four and thirty,” laughed the colonel, as he took his leave.
To wait many hours, once she was at Crabb, without laying in a stock of those delectable “family pills,” invented by the late Thomas Rymer, would have been quite beyond the philosophy of Mrs. Todhetley. That first morning, not ten minutes after Colonel Letsom left us, taking the Squire with him, she despatched me to Timberdale for a big box of them. Tod would not come: said he had his flies to see to.
Dashing through the Ravine and out on the field beyond it, I came upon Jack Tanerton. Good old Jack! The Squire had said Sir Dace was changed: I saw that Jack was. He looked taller and thinner, and the once beaming face had care upon it.
“Where are you bound for, Jack?”
“Not for any place in particular. Just sauntering about.”
“Walk my way, then. I am going to Rymer’s.”
“It is such nonsense,” cried Jack, speaking of his brother, after we had plunged a bit into affairs. “Calling it derogatory, and all the rest of it! I could be just as much of a gentleman as Ashton’s bailiff as I am now. Everybody knows me. He gives a good salary, and there’s a pretty house; and I have also my own small income. Alice and I and the little ones should be as happy as the day’s long. If I give in to Herbert and don’t take it, I don’t see what I am to turn to.”
“But, Jack, why do you give up the sea?” I asked. And Jack told me what he had told others: he should never take command again until he was a free man.
“Don’t you think you are letting that past matter hold too great an influence over you?” I presently said. “You must be conscious of your own innocence—and yet you seem as sad and subdued as though you were guilty!”
“I am subdued because other people think me guilty!” he answered. “Changed? I am. It is that which has changed me; not the calamity itself.”
“Jack, were I you, I should stand up in the face and eyes of all the world, and say to them, ‘Before God, I did not kill Pym.’ People would believe you then. But you don’t do it.”
“I have my reasons for not doing it, Johnny Ludlow. God knows what they are; He knows all things. I dare say I may be set right with the world in time: though I don’t see how it is to be done.”
A smart young man, a new assistant, was behind the counter at Ben Rymer’s, and served me with the pills. Coming out, box in hand, we met Ben himself. I hardly knew him, he was so spruce. His very hair and whiskers were trimmed down to neatness and looked of a more reasonable colour; his red-brown beard was certainly handsome, and his clothes were well cut.
“Why, he has grown into a dandy, Jack,” I said, after we had stood a minute or two, talking with the surgeon.
“Yes,” said Jack, “he is going in for the proprieties of life now. Ben may make a gentleman yet—and a good man to boot.”
That same afternoon, it chanced that the Squire met Ben Rymer. Striding along in his powerful fashion, Ben came full tilt round the sharp corner that makes the turning to the Islip Road, and nearly ran over the pater. Ben had been to Oxlip Grange.
“So, sir,” cried the pater, stopping him, “I hear you are in practice now, and intend to become a respectable man. It’s time you did.”
“Ay, at last,” replied Ben good-humouredly. “It is a long lane, Squire, that has no turning.”
“Don’t you lapse back again, Mr. Ben.”
“Not if I know it, sir. I hope I shall not.”
“It was anxiety on your score, you know, that troubled your good father’s mind in dying.”
“If it did not bring his death on,” readily conceded Ben, his light tone changing. “I know it all, Squire—and have felt it.”
“Look here,” cried the Squire, catching at Ben’s button-hole, which had a lovely lily-of-the-valley in it, “there was nothing on earth your poor patient father prayed for so earnestly as for your welfare; that you might be saved for time and eternity. Now I don’t believe such prayers are ever lost. So you will be helped on your way if you bear steadfastly onwards.”
Giving the young man’s hand a wring, the Squire turned off on his way. In half-a-minute he was back again.
“Hey, Mr. Benjamin?—here. How is Sir Dace Fontaine? I suppose you have just left him?”
So Ben had to come back at the call. To the pater’s surprise he saw his eyes were moist.
“He is worse, sir, to-day; palpably worse.”
“Will he get over it?”
Ben gave his head an emphatic shake, which somehow belied his words: “Cole and Darbyshire think there is hope yet, Squire.”
“And you do not; that’s evident. Well, good-day.”
The next move in this veritable drama was the appearance of Alice Tanerton and her six-months-old baby at Timberdale. Looking upon the Rectory as almost her home—it had been Jack’s for many years of his life—Alice came to it without the ceremony of invitation: the object of her coming now being to strive to induce Herbert to let her husband engage himself to Robert Ashton. And this visit of Alice’s was destined to bring about a most extraordinary event.
One Wednesday evening when Jack and his wife were dining with us—and that troublesome baby, which Alice could not, as it seemed, stir abroad without, was in the nursery squealing—Alice chanced to say that she had to go to Islip the following day, her mother having charged her to see John Paul the lawyer, concerning a little property that she, Aunt Dean, held in Crabb. It would be a tremendously long walk for Alice from Timberdale, especially as she was not looking strong, and Mrs. Todhetley proposed that I should drive her over in the pony-carriage: which Alice jumped at.
Accordingly, the next morning, which was warm and bright, I took the pony-carriage to the Rectory, picked up Alice, and then drove back towards Islip. As we passed Oxlip Grange, which lay in our way, Sir Dace Fontaine was outside in the road, slowly pacing the side-path. I thought I had never seen a man look so ill: so down and gloomy. He raised his eyes, as we came up, to give me a nod. I was nodding back again, when Alice screamed out and startled me. She started the pony too, which sprang on at a tangent.
“Johnny! Johnny Ludlow!” she gasped, her face whiter than death and her lips trembling like an aspen leaf, “did you see that man? Did you see him?”
“Yes. I was nodding to him. What is the matter?”
“It was the man I saw in my dream: the man who had committed the murder in it.”
I stared at her, wondering whether she had lost her wits.
“Do you remember the description I gave of that man?” she continued, in excitement. “I do. I wrote it down at the time, and Mr. Todhetley holds it, sealed up. Every word, every particular is in my memory now, as I saw him in my dream. ‘A tall, evil-looking, dark man in a long brown coat, who walked with his eyes fixed on the ground.’ I tell you, Johnny Ludlow, that is the man.”
Her vehemence infected me. I looked round after Sir Dace. He was turning this way now. Certainly the description seemed like enough. His countenance just now did look an evil one; and he was tall and he was dark, and he wore a long brown coat this morning, nearly reaching to his heels, and his eyes were fixed on the ground as he walked.
“But what if his looks do tally with the man you saw in your dream, Alice? What of it?”
“What of it!” she echoed, vehemently. “What of it! Why, don’t you see, Johnny Ludlow? This man must have killed Edward Pym.”
“Hush, Alice! It is impossible. This is Sir Dace Fontaine.”
“I do not care who he is,” was her impulsive retort. “As surely as that Heaven is above us, Edward Pym got his death at the hand of this man. My dream revealed it to me.”
I might as well have tried to stem a torrent as to argue with her; so I drove on and held my tongue. Arrived at the office of Paul and Chandler, I following her in, leaving a boy with the pony outside. Alice pounced upon old Paul with the assertion: Sir Dace Fontaine was the evil and guilty man she had seen in her dream. Considering that Paul was a sort of cousin to Sir Dace’s late wife, this was pretty well. Old Paul stared at her as I had done. Her cheeks were hectic, her eyes wildly earnest. She recalled to the lawyer’s memory the dream she had related to him; she asserted in the most unqualified manner that Dace Fontaine was guilty. Tom Chandler, who was old Paul’s partner and had married his daughter Emma, came into the room in the middle of it, and took his share of staring.
“It must be investigated,” said Alice to them. “Will you undertake it?”
“My dear young lady, one cannot act upon a fancy—a dream,” cried old Paul: and there was a curious sound of compassionate pity in his voice, which betrayed to Alice the gratifying fact that he was regarding her as a monomaniac.
“If you will not act, others will,” she concluded at last, after exhausting her arguments in vain. And she came away with me in resentment, having totally forgotten all about her mother’s business.
To Crabb Cot then—she would go—to take counsel with the Squire. He told her to her face she was worse than a lunatic to suspect Sir Dace; and he would hardly get out the sealed packet at all. It was opened at last, and the dream, as written down in it by herself at the time, read.
“John Tanerton, my husband, was going to sea in command,” it began. “He came to me the morning of the day they were to sail, looking very patient, pale and sorrowful: more so than any one, I think, could look in life. He and I seemed to have had some estrangement the previous night that was not remembered by either of us now, and I, for one, repented of it. Somebody was murdered (though I could not tell how this had been revealed to me), some man; Jack was suspected by all people, but they could not bring it home to him. We were in some strange town; strangers in it; though I, as it seemed to me, had been in it once, many years before. All this while, Jack was standing before me in his sadness and sorrow, mutely appealing to me, as it seemed, to clear him. Everybody was talking of it and glancing at us askance, everybody shunned us, and we were in cruel distress. Suddenly I remembered that when I was in the town before, the man now murdered had had a bitter quarrel with another man, a gentleman of note in the town; and a conviction came over me, powerful as a revelation, that it was he who had now committed the murder. I left Jack, and told this to some one connected with the ship, its owner, I think. He laughed at the words, saying that the gentleman I would accuse was of high authority in the town, one of its first magnates. That he had done it, however high he might be, I felt perfectly certain; but nobody would listen to me; nobody would heed so improbable a tale: and, in the trouble this brought me, I awoke. Such trouble! Nothing like it could be felt in real life.
“That was dream the first.
“I lay awake for some little time thinking of it, and then went to sleep again: and this was dream the second.
“The dream seemed to recommence from where it had left off. It was afternoon. I was in a large open carriage, going through the streets of the town, the ship’s owner (as I say I think he was) sitting beside me. In passing over a bridge we saw two gentlemen walking towards us arm-in-arm on the footpath, one of them an officer in a dusky old red uniform and cocked hat, the other a tall, evil-looking dark man, who wore a long brown coat and kept his eyes on the ground. Though I had never seen him in my life before, I knew it was the guilty man; he had killed the other, committed the crime in secret: but ere I could speak, he who was sitting with me said, ‘There’s the gentleman you would have accused this morning. He stands before everybody else in the town. Fancy your accusing him of such a thing!’ It seemed to me that I did not answer, could not answer for the pain. That he was guilty I knew, and not Jack, but I had no means of bringing it home to him. He and the man in uniform walked on in their secure immunity, and I went on in the carriage in my pain. The pain awoke me.
“And now it only remains for me to declare that I have set down this singular dream truthfully, word for word; and I shall seal it up and keep it. It may be of use if any trouble falls upon Jack, as the dream seems to foretell—and of some trouble in store for him he has already felt the shadow. So strangely vivid a dream, and the intense pain it brought and leaves with me, can hardly have visited me for nothing.—Alice Tanerton.”
That was all the paper said. The Squire, poring through his good old spectacles over it, shook his head as Alice pointed out the description of the guilty man, how exactly it tallied with the appearance of Sir Dace Fontaine; but he only repeated Paul the lawyer’s words, “One cannot act upon a dream.”
“It was Sir Dace; it was Sir Dace,” reiterated Alice, clasping her hands piteously. “I am as sure of it as that I hope to go to heaven.” And I drove her home in the belief.
There ensued a commotion. Not a commotion to be told to the parish, but a private one amidst ourselves. I never saw a woman in such a fever of excitement as Alice Tanerton was in from that day, or any one take up a matter so warmly.
Captain Tanerton did not adopt her views. He shook his head, and said Sir Dace it could not have been. Sir Dace was at his house in the Marylebone Road at the very hour the calamity happened off Tower Hill. I followed suit, hearing out Jack’s word. Was I not at the Marylebone Road that evening myself, playing chess with Coralie?—and was not Sir Dace shut up in his library all the time, and never came out of it?
Alice listened, and looked puzzled to death. But she held to her own opinion. And when a fit of desperate obstinacy takes possession of a woman without rhyme or reason, you cannot shake it. As good try to argue with the whistling wind. She did not pretend to see how it could have been, she said, but Sir Dace was guilty. And she haunted Paul and Chandler’s office at Islip, praying them to take the matter up.
At length, to soothe her, and perhaps to prevent her carrying it elsewhere, they promised they would. And of course they had to make some show of doing it.