CHAPTER XIX.
IN WHICH SEVERAL PERSONS QUIT THE STAGE FOR
EVER.
No great amount of persuasion was required to induce Lord Verner to give up his intention of prosecuting the superintendent of police at Brazencrook. The Watch Committee of the old borough had intimated to the officer that it would be necessary he should resign his situation, and he had done so. They were very obsequious to Lord Verner, and this was the most practical way of showing the town’s allegiance to his lordship. But the chief contended, as fairly he might, that there were grounds of suspicion against Captain Hammerton, and that although he might have been hasty, he had not exceeded his duty in apprehending that gentleman. The subject was taken up warmly by the local Press, and a smart London paper had a powerfully sarcastic and biting article calling the Brazencrook Watch Committee a set of snobs, and upholding the officer of police. On all hands, however, testimony was borne to the complete exculpation of Lionel Hammerton.
Seeing that the guilt of Shuffleton Gibbs was established most clearly in the first examination before the Brazencrook magistrates, it was certainly due to Lionel that he should be regarded as an injured man in that unfortunate apprehension by the Brazencrook chief. All his trouble and sorrow had arisen out of his own pride and want of confidence in the woman whom he professed to love. If he had been content to accept the warning of Paul Somerton that night in London, near the steps of the Ashford Club, what a world of misery he might have been spared; a manly faith in that high-spirited girl at Barton would have saved him. No one saw all this now more clearly than Lionel Hammerton, and what was more, he knew that he had been rightly punished. The only real bit of consolation in the whole business was the prison episode. This was his only real grievance, the only bit of martyrdom in his career. If he could have felt that he had been injured by Amy; if the grievance had been on his side, he might have been more content. It is better to be wronged than to wrong; it is more comfortable to receive an injury than to commit an injustice. All Lionel Hammerton’s troubles had been of his own creation, and family pride was at the bottom of them all. His incarceration was the only injury done to him which he had not courted, which his pride and injustice had not brought upon himself; but it was a source of gratification to him that Amy felt he had undergone this indignity on her account.
It was hard work to part from Amy; to leave the two girls whom he had known in those happy days at Barton Hall; to erase the past, and look forward into a future in which there were no familiar faces; but this was his penance, and he was willing now to abide by it. If that most unkind suspicion of mercenary motives (which Lionel had not strength of mind enough to keep back in the personal explanations) set forth in a previous chapter, had not rankled in the mind of the Countess, the parting would have been no small trial on her part. She would not have given any outward sign of her feelings had her heart been breaking; but Lionel’s unmanly suspicion had almost entirely removed the last fragment of her romantic love for him. Setting this aside, her honour as a wife, her gratitude towards Lord Verner, and a strong sense of duty (kept in constant excitement by Mrs. Arthur Phillips), would have saved her from any further exhibition of strong feeling. It is not in human nature to maintain a full control over the passions, and particularly over that love between man and woman which God has planted in the human heart for His own wise and beneficent purposes. When that great instinct of nature, which, secretly and unseen, draws two souls together, is set at nought, certain sorrow is the result. Happiness may come in time to each of those who have broken this first instinctive contract of nature; but it is a very limited happiness compared with that perfect bliss which true lovers feel.
The Countess of Verner was as happy as a woman can be who had loved and lost, and married for revenge and ambition. Regard and respect ripened by degrees into what may be called sincere matrimonial friendship, and this was still further enhanced by the discovery of her old lover’s unworthy suspicion about the sincerity of her love. She vowed to Mrs. Phillips, that had she been free to accept Lionel Hammerton, and he had sued at her feet with ten times the honeyed sweetness of his eloquence in the Barton gardens, the knowledge of his unworthy doubt of her true faith would have made her refuse him, had he been twenty times Lionel Hammerton and her first love.
So when they parted, Lionel Hammerton’s brotherly kiss sent no thrill to Amy’s heart, though she knew it was his intention never to return. Lord Verner shook his brother warmly by the hand, begging him to come home as soon as he liked and as often. Mrs. Arthur Phillips kissed him for “Auld Lang Syne;” and her husband, the artist, exchanged a sympathetic glance with the friend of his early days, which deeply affected the voluntary exile. Mrs. Dibble, who was living in the housekeeper’s room until Thomas should be released, begged to be allowed to shake hands with the Captain, and she told the servants afterwards that it did not need a boarding-school education to see that the Earl’s brother was born nobility, and that you need not be a builder’s daughter and copy specifications to know that Mr. Bales was a policeman in disguise, as he stood by all the time without the least emotion, for all the world as if a trial had just come to an end and the prisoner was going to be hanged, and he had the job of taking him back to gaol prior to the sentence being carried out.
Mr. Bales travelled as far as London with the Captain, and almost the first person he met, after seeing Lionel off, was Mr. Williamson, the barrister, walking into the Temple. The two recognised each other immediately.
“Ah, Mr. Williamson, sir! how do you do? I thought you were lost,” said the detective.
“No, not lost, Bales,” said the barrister, extending his hand. “Come with me.”
It was evening, and the detective followed his friend up the dark staircase.
When they reached the barrister’s room, Williamson produced a latch key, and opened the door; the old woman who attended to this part of the chambers came blundering after them, full of exclamations of joy at seeing the barrister again.
“Light a fire,” said the barrister.
“Lor, sir, the room is as damp as can be; it ain’t fit to sit in after all these months; they wanted to break the door open, but I paid the rent regular out of the money you sent me, and I knowed, of course, as you would come back some day,” said the woman.
“I never expected to do so, or only for a day, to settle my affairs here and give up the chambers properly,” said the barrister, addressing Bales, in reply to the woman.
“Lor, sir!” said the old woman, bustling about and lighting the fire and putting the table to rights.
“We can keep the damp out,” said the barrister, “if there is any whisky left.”
“O yes, sir, plenty!” said the woman.
“Very well,” said the barrister, producing his cigar case, and in a very short time Mr. Bales sat listening to those portions of Mr. Williamson’s story with which he was not already acquainted.
The barrister’s manner was far more quiet and subdued than it was when we first made his acquaintance. All that cynicism and apparent infidelity had dropped bodily as it were out of his conversation. He was evidently quietly resigned to his lot, calmly resolved to live out the end of his days uncomplainingly. He had succeeded to a certain extent in his somewhat romantic and almost hopeless resolves to reform his miserable daughter. He did not tell Bales how and by what degrees he had worked upon her darkened mind; he said nothing of the days of patient and unflagging effort to instruct her, to excite her higher sensibilities, to animate her with a true love for the beautiful and sublime, and through the medium of nature and art to bring her to a knowledge of the divine blessings of the Christian faith and hope. It was a plain unvarnished story which the barrister told his friend the detective. Whatever may have been the result of the father’s endeavour to change the perverted nature of his singularly-discovered child, her career was at an end—she died of a fever in a French convent, where the barrister had placed her, by her own desire; and Mr. Williamson had left France only the day before the detective met him after the burial of his daughter, upon whose tomb he had inscribed those words of the second commandment, which he had written down in that memorable epistle to Paul Somerton.
The detective told Williamson all about the stirring occurrences which had taken place during his absence, and the barrister resolved that he would convert what stock and property he had into money, and join Lieutenant Somerton in the Cape, at any rate for a time.
“I shall travel about the world and occupy myself with the manners and customs of other lands,” said the barrister, “and write sketches of travel for some of my publishing friends in town. If I could put my own trials into a book, and make capital out of my own troubles, I might perpetrate a novel, Bales.”
“It would be very taking,” said Bales; “I have been asked, sir, by a gentleman that writes for the Pyrotechnic, to let him do my autobiography, with all the cases I have been mixed up in; but I don’t think I shall.”
They chatted together for some hours in the familiar room, and we leave them enveloped in clouds of smoke through which the candles burn as dimly as the barrister’s future hopes; we leave them to carry our readers to the Brazencrook county gaol, where there are three prisoners in whom we have an interest.
Shuffleton Gibbs had been examined before the magistrates, and committed for trial on the clearest evidence, as we have intimated; so that the prediction of the showman, that he would not leave his bed again, was not fully verified: only a very few weeks elapsed, however, before the criminal gradually sank, and at last died as much from want of gin as through disease. He died a miserable death, uninfluenced altogether by the ministrations of the chaplain who, by a strange coincidence, had been a member of that very college where Gibbs and Richard Tallant had first become acquainted; but before he died, when he felt quite satisfied that he was in no danger of being hung, he admitted the truth of the showman’s evidence, and not only confessed his own guilt, but boasted of it, gloated over it, and described the murder in fearfully graphic terms, until the prison officials sickened at the details, and shrunk back from the awful skeleton-like figure that grinned and raved in those last death agonies.
Confronted with the chief witness against him, Gibbs put out his skinny hand, which the showman took timidly in his, and with that professional feeling which never deserted the owner of the famous dog Momus, Digby Martin, alias Smith, thought to himself what a rival Gibbs would have been just then to that living skeleton, who had treated him so shamefully at Severntown!
It is neither necessary nor desirable that we should dwell upon this wretched scene in the prison, where the last of the race to which Gibbs belonged ended his miserable career. Let it suffice that he died and was buried; and that the showman was released, and afterwards brought quite a small fortune to the proprietor of the tavern near the Brazencrook Music Hall, by relating the true particulars of the murder in the ruined castle of Montem, exhibiting the clothes of the murderer, and the pistol with which the deed was done. Momus took her share in these performances, and afterwards went round with the hat,—being faithful to her rough master to the last, and never wearying in her obedience to his behests.
Thomas Dibble was found guilty; but in consideration of the excellent character which he received from several witnesses, and the whole of the circumstances under which the robbery was committed, he was only sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. During the whole of this time, Mrs. Dibble remained at Montem Castle with the housekeeper, except when she went, once a month, to see Thomas, for a few minutes, at the gaol, upon which occasions she made a show of forgiveness and sympathy; but she could never resist telling the turnkey, in Dibble’s presence, of her boarding-school education, the proposals of marriage which she had received when she lived at home with her pa, and other biographical reminiscences with which the reader is already too familiar.
When Thomas was released he was conducted from the gaol by an agent of Lord Verner to a comfortable cottage near Avonworth, a few miles from Barton Hall, in which cottage Mrs. Dibble was already living. She would have met her husband at the end of his confinement; but Lady Verner had made the arrangements of the time, and the agent carried them out. When he had driven Dibble to the cottage he told him that this was his future home, and that he would receive from Lady Verner, a quarterly allowance sufficient to enable his wife and himself to live comfortably all their days. Poor Dibble’s surprise and gratitude knew no bounds; he cried and laughed by turns; and he was quite content to believe ever afterwards what Mrs. Dibble told him, that all this had been done because of her boarding-school education, and on account of her pa being a gentleman. With all this good fortune following so soon upon a series of miseries, and coming to him at the gloomiest period of his career, Thomas Dibble’s spirits soon rose to a high pitch of buoyancy; whilst “comfortable living” and plenty to eat and drink gave him courage to withstand the renewal of his wife’s domineering influence. He never succeeded in being master, and he would not have drunk of the well of St. Keyne if he could; for Dibble’s was a humble spirit; he had always served, and was content to do so;—in fact, he rather preferred it than otherwise. But once in these latter days he asserted his dignity in such a way that prevented Mrs. Dibble from drawing the rein too tightly, and enabled them to live more happily than ever they had lived before.
“Never you mention that roll of notes business again, Maria; it baint that I wishes to deny that I was not an honest man, but I thinks on it often enough myself, without your dinning it into my ears. I’se never said I had a boarding-school education, an’ all that, Maria, and I knows you has; but when a man’s shown a woman that he would do anything in the world for her, even to putting his hand to thieve, it baint for that woman to throw it in his face. Don’t do it again, Maria, or I goes out of this house never to come back no more.”
Mrs. Dibble did not mention the subject again, and they lived all the more happily together after this assertion of his position by Dibble. But the builder’s daughter, with her peculiar intermittent lisp, did not fail, whenever an opportunity arose, to proclaim her birth, parentage, and education to the inhabitants of the district. In course of time, by dint of household economy, Mrs. Dibble bought an old square piano at Avonworth, and she would sit as she did in the old times of Still Street on Sunday evenings, and thump out the “Old Hundredth” until her hooks-and-eyes came undone, and Dibble had a fine prospect of back and back hair which reminded him of those prosperous days when he was porter at the famous offices of the Meter Iron Works Company. This, however, excited feelings of regret in poor Dibble’s mind that he was dependent upon the bounty of Lady Verner now, instead of earning his own living; so he made application to the agent for “something to do;” and, pleased with Dibble’s desire to make some practical return for the kindness he received, Lady Verner recommended him to Mr. Arthur Phillips, who gave him another cottage near Barton, and had him instructed in the mystery of grinding colours. Dibble soon made himself useful, and found enough to do at Barton Hall (where he had once been in the employ of Christopher Tallant, Esq.) all day long. This made his evenings happier; the music of the old piano no longer twitted him with his dependency. Mrs. Dibble, as had been her wont in the happy times, mixed every night for him a glass of gin toddy, and whilst they sat together by the fire on the conclusion of the “Old Hundredth,” she acknowledged that after all Thomas Dibble was worthy to be the husband of a woman who had had a boarding-school education, with music and extras.