Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  “Miss Millicent! — Miss Millicent!” —

  “Who can tell? I know that I was nigh upon being distraught that cruel night on which my husband came home. The magistrate asked me what I was doing in all those hours that I was alone in my room, and I could not tell him. My mind was distraught, and I had no memory of that time. Who knows if it may not be, as Mr. Bowers thinks, that I killed George Duke in a paroxysm of madness? Heaven knows I was close enough to madness that night.”

  Sarah Pecker fell upon her knees at the feet of Mrs. Duke.

  “O, Miss Milly!” she cried, “for pity’s sake — for the sake of the merciful God who looks down upon you and sees your helplessness, do not utter these horrible words. Do you know that to say in the court of justice one week hence what you have said to me this day? would be to doom yourself to certain death? I know, Miss Millicent, that you are innocent, and you know it too. Never, never, never let that thought leave your brain; for when it does, you will be mad! Remember, whatever others may think of you — however the wisest in the land may judge you — remember through all, and until death — if death must come — that you are innocent!” —

  Sarah Pecker did not content herself with this adjuration, she waited upon the governor of the gaol, and being admitted to his presence, implored of him that he would place some kind and discreet woman in the cell with Mrs. Duke as nurse or watcher, for that the poor lady was in danger of losing her wits from the effects of long and solitary confinement. “I would ask leave to stay with her myself, poor darling,” Sarah said, “but that I have one lying ill at home whose days are well nigh numbered.”

  Mrs. Pecker spoke with a heartfelt energy that carried conviction with it; and although those were no great days for mercy, and though the glorious fiction of the law which pretends to hold a man innocent until the hour of his condemnation, was then little attended to, the governor acceded to Sarah’s prayer, and a woman (herself doing penance for some petty offence) was placed with Millicent to lighten the horrors of her cell.

  That modern saint and martyr, John Howard, had not yet shed the light of his noble intellect upon the darkness of the felon’s gaol, and in those days a prison was indeed a den of wretchedness and despair, an earthly Inferno, in which guilty creatures suffered tortures that may, perhaps, have been sometimes accepted by a merciful Heaven as an expiation of their crimes.

  Sarah had her hands full of trouble this melancholy spring. She had told so much of her son’s story as she could safely venture to reveal to Samuel Pecker. She had informed that honest creature that the pedlar was the brother of her dead husband, Thomas Masterson, and had given him very little information about her son’s delinquencies. She also told Mr. Pecker that which is apt to soften the sternest of us towards the sinning — she told him that whatever Henry Masterson’s failings might have been he would soon be beyond the chance of making any earthly atonement for them, and before a Judge who is wiser, and yet more pitiful, than any justice of the peace in the county of Cumberland, or on the face of the wide earth.

  So, simple and soft-hearted Samuel Pecker opened his arms to the dying son of the vagabond Thomas Masterson; and the worthy Thomas, having enjoyed a good night’s rest and a hearty breakfast, strode away in the dusky dawn of the February day; after leaving behind him a message for Mrs. Pecker, to the effect that he should return before the week was out to fetch that little matter they had talked about.

  Betty delivered this message with laudable accuracy, and Mrs. Pecker fully understood that the little matter in question was the hundred pounds she had promised as the price of the pedlar’s secret. She obtained the sum with little difficulty from her confiding husband, who went by coach to the market town one afternoon within the week, to draw the money from the bank. But it happened that on that very afternoon Thomas Masterson, dressed in a new suit, bought by him out of a handful of ready cash obtained from Sarah on the night of their interview, swaggered through the High Street of the same market town, and was betrayed into the natural weakness of putting his big hand into somebody else’s pocket. Whether from long residence in a foreign land and want of practice in the art, I know not, but Thomas on that particular afternoon was so very far from up to the mark in his performance, that he was caught in the act by his intended victim, and delivered over to the constables, who handed him on to Carlisle gaol to await his trial at the ensuing assizes, with many other culprits of the same calibre.

  This unfortunate circumstance of course hindered Mr. Masterson from appearing to claim the reward promised by Sarah; and the worthy woman, after living for several days and nights in perpetual dread of his arrival, began to hope that some happy chance had befallen to send him out of her way.

  She had enough to do in watching by the sick-bed of her son, who lay in a comfortable garret chamber under the gabled roof of the Black Bear, and whose whereabouts were known to none but his mother, Samuel Pecker, and the doctor who attended upon him.

  The brilliant Sir Lovel Mortimer — the notorious Captain Fanny — could scarcely have had a safer hiding-place than the garret chamber in this old inn. Bow Street had grown weary of counting on the reward which was offered for his capture. His old comrades — fine fellows, of course, every one of them, but any one of whom might, in some unlucky moment, have taken it into his head to turn king’s evidence — had entirely lost sight of him; and it seemed almost as if the highwayman had dropped out of the troubled sea of human life and crime, without leaving so much as a bubble to mark the spot where he had gone down.

  CHAPTER XXIV. THE TRIAL OF MILLICENT DUKE.

  DARRELL Markham had not been idle. The noble Scottish gentleman whom he served was ready to give him all help in his hour of need, and three days after the examination before Mr. Montague Bowers, the case of Millicent Duke was in the hands of the most distinguished criminal lawyers of the day. Busy Bow Street runners — better known as Robin-redbreasts — had been placed upon the scent; but look which way they would at the case it had an equally sinister aspect.

  Endeavours to throw light upon the antecedents of George Duke resulted in the discovery that the Captain of the Vulture had well deserved the worst fate that could befall him. Inquiries, which occupied much time and caused a great deal of trouble in the making, revealed the fact that the good ship Vulture had been seized and burnt by a vessel belonging to the French Government off the coast of Barbary; and that her captain, George Duke, together with his first mate, one Thomas Masterson, had been sent to the galleys by the same French Government as slavers, pirates, and suspected assassins; from which dismal captivity they had escaped in conjunction upon the first of January last past.

  The attorney employed by Darrell Markham for the preparation of his cousin’s defence deemed it expedient to discover the whereabouts of this very Thomas Masterson, in the hope that some clue to the mystery might be extracted from this, the familiar companion of the murdered man.

  An advertisement, inserted several times in the London Gazette, resulted in a letter from the governor of Carlisle gaol, containing the information that this man, Thomas Masterson, was confined in that prison for some petty theft, awaiting his trial at the same assizes which were to decide the fate of Mrs. George Duke.

  One of the best men at the Old Bailey was retained for Millicent’s defence by the solicitors intrusted with the case. Darrell Markham implored the worthy gentlemen to spare neither trouble nor money in compassing the acquittal of his unhappy cousin; but the advocate shook his head over the contents of his brief, and freely told Mr. Markham that he saw but little hope in the dreary business.

  So, on the eve of Millicent’s trial, the northern mail carried Darrell Markham to the city of Carlisle, where he met Mr. Pauncet, the solicitor, and Mr. Horace Weldon, barrister-at-law, who went circuit on horseback, according to the fashion of those days, and who was quartered with his fraternity at the chief inn. Darrell looked sadly at the great grim court-house, past which the coach carried him, remembering how upon the terrible morrow a
delicate woman of seven-and-twenty years of age was to be within those walls charged with the crime of wilful murder.

  The eve of the trial brought Sarah Pecker from the bedside of her dying son. The poor woman came to Carlisle attended by Samuel, who was one of the witnesses for the Crown, and whose brain was well-night turned by the responsibilities of his position.

  The cold March sunshine lighted up every corner of the crowded court when Millicent Duke was led to her place in the criminal dock to answer to the charge of murder. She had been brought so low in health by her long imprisonment, that her custodians, out of pity for her weak state, allowed her to sit throughout the proceedings.

  Fifty years after that day there were people living in Carlisle who could tell of the pale golden head, lighted by the faint spring sunshine, and the delicate face, worn and wasted by trial and suffering, but very beautiful in its white tranquillity.

  “Not guilty!”

  The clear and silver tones in which those two words were spoken penetrated to the farthest corner of the court. There was a general conviction amongst those present that this feeble woman had actually committed the horrible crime of which she had been accused. The belief in witchcraft had not yet died out in that far northern county. Who could say that this fair woman, sitting there in such almost superhuman tranquillity, was not supported through her trial by the evil one himself? Her very youth and beauty were used to her prejudice by the simple north-country folk. Had not such as she been burned at the stake for offences very similar to the murder of George Duke? and who but the devil or his imps could have given her power to do the deed, and to carry the body of her husband down a flight of stone steps and over nigh upon forty yards of ground? For it was a notable feature of this wise and popular belief that the more incredible — nay, impossible — was the crime supposed to have been committed, the more determined people were in their conviction of the guilt of the accused.

  The evidence given by the witnesses for the prosecution was much the same as that already recited before Mr. Montague Bowers. Again Samuel Pecker became vague and obscure as to the identity of George Duke of the Vulture with that ghost, or shadow, which had appeared at three divers times to three separate individuals in the course of seven years.

  The story of the ghost was listened to with breathless interest by the country folk; but there was nothing to be made of it that could throw any light upon the foul murder which had been done at Compton Hall.

  Samuel Pecker, under a rigorous examination, faithfully narrated the first appearance of the shadow in the cold twilight of the October evening, and went on to tell how the same ghostly shade had been met three months afterwards on the pier at Marley Water by the prisoner at the bar, and how the shadow had again appeared upon the very night of the murder, bringing with it a horse of lean condition, but of actual flesh and blood; which horse had been afterwards fetched away from the Black Bear by a morose stable-lad, who refused to tell whence or from whom he came, but who paid the money due for the animal’s keep, mounted him, and rode away.

  All this savoured so very strongly of the scarcely exploded belief, that it perhaps influenced the minds of the spectators rather against Millicent than in her favour. There was witchcraft evidently at the root of the business, and very likely this wicked enchantress with the yellow hair had power to cause her victim to appeal in two or three places at once for the furtherance of her unholy ends.

  Now, while the facts recorded by Samuel Pecker produced this effect upon the more ignorant portion of the assembly, the more enlightened hearers were inclined to consider the whole story some confused creation emanating from the maze and fog of Samuel Pecker’s intellect, just as vaporous shadows and will-o’-the-wisps arise from a low and marshy soil. Mr. Weldon, the barrister retained for Millicent’s defence, was entirely of this opinion, and had little hope in following up a thread which only led away from the business in hand. Had a dozen ghosts of Captain George Duke appeared simultaneously in a dozen different places, the fact of their appearance could not have lessened that other fact of the sailor’s disappearance, the pool of blood upon the floor of the garden chamber, and the terrible chain of circumstantial evidence which connected Millicent Duke with the foul deed that had too surely been done.

  It was hard for Darrell Markham to take his place in the witness-box and answer the questions put to him by the counsel for the Crown, knowing full well that every word he spoke went to condemn his unhappy cousin. When asked if he had ever seen the captain’s double, he told of the encounter upon Compton Moor, in which he had been robbed and wounded, and further related the story told by Ringwood Markham of the young squire’s meeting with a man whom he mistook for George Duke in the house at Chelsea. —

  Mrs. Meggis, the deaf housekeeper, Hugh Martin, the constable, and Sarah Pecker, were then examined, with the same result as on the former occasion; and the case for the prosecution closed. A terribly strong case against the pale woman at the bar.

  A clock outside the court struck three as the counsel for the Crown sat down. More than half the day had been spent in the examination of these witnesses.

  After reading the deposition made by Millicent before Montague Bowers, the counsel for the defence summoned the first of his witnesses.

  The law, which even in those hard days — popularly known as the good old times, by the way — was supposed to regard an accused person as innocent until his or her guilt was duly established, did not afford the suspected individual much opportunity of proving that innocence. The prisoner’s counsel was not allowed to plead for his client. The counsel for the Crown might thunder forth what denunciations he pleased against the supposed criminal; a hanging judge might bully the jury into the finding of a fatal verdict; but the counsel of the accused had no chance of serving his client save by the cross-examination of witnesses, and by hazarding an objection now and then to some unfair question upon the part of his opponent.

  Thus it was that the one strong point in favour of Millicent was insufficiently demonstrated to the jury who were to decide the awful question of her guilt or innocence. That one point was the physical weakness of the accused, and the improbability, if not impossibility, that such a woman could have carried the body of a stalwart strongly built man down a flight of stone steps, and across a space of forty yards, to a frozen pond, the ice upon the surface of which she must have broken before throwing the corpse of her victim into the water. That even the unnatural strength of madness could have enabled the accused to do this unassisted was surely impossible; but this impossibility the prisoner’s counsel could only attempt to demonstrate in an indirect manner, by cross-examination of the witnesses who had found the body, and by the exhibition to the jury of a plan of the Compton Hall premises.

  Nor was he able to raise a doubt which might have saved his client — a doubt as to whether a murder had actually been committed in the absence of all direct proof as to the identity of that disfigured corpse which had been found in the pond. What proof was there that a murder had been committed? And if a murder had been done, was it not more likely to have been the work of practised robbers and assassins, who had entered Compton Hall in search of the late squire’s massive old plate; who had made their entrance by the garden chamber — so fatally easy of access — unaware of the presence of Captain Duke; and who, finding him there, and alarmed by some sign of awakening on his part, had assassinated him thereupon? The fact that no property had disappeared was proof that a robbery had not been perpetrated. What more likely than that the burglars were startled by the footsteps of Millicent in the corridor outside the garden chamber?

  But Mr. Weldon was not allowed to set forth all these possibilities. The laws of a hundred years ago were hard and bitter laws; and if to-day society is apt to pamper the criminal, it has good need to atone for past cruelty. Who shall say that poor innocent Eliza Fenning might not have been saved from the gallows, if an eloquent counsel had been permitted to plead her cause?

  Thomas Masterson
was the first witness called for the defence.

  It was no very easy matter to get the truth out of this gentleman: he fenced with the questions put to him in a manner which would have commanded considerable admiration at the Old Bailey; but he had au Old Bailey practitioner to deal with, and he was made to declare how he and George Duke had contrived to escape together from the watchful guardians of the galleys.

  Every ear was listening to this man’s words, every eye was fixed upon his face, as he told his story, and every creature in that court recoiled with a thrill of horror at sight of a change which suddenly came over the aspect of the speaker’s countenance towards the end of his examination.

  In the very midst of a sentence Thomas Masterson stopped, and with ashen cheeks and dilated eyes stared across the heads of the lawyers and the multitude at the doorway of the court, which was in an elevated situation, communicating by a flight of steps with the main body of the building.

  A man who had just entered the court was standing at the top of these steps apart from all other spectators. He was speaking in a whisper to an official close to him — speaking as if he was charging the official with a message, and it seemed by the man’s air that the intruder’s business was no common one.

  “Why do you pause, Thomas Masterson?” asked the barrister.

  The witness slowly raised his hand, and pointed to the stranger at the top of the steps.

  “Because Cap’en George Duke has just come into the court,” he answered.

  There was a simultaneous movement amongst the vast body of spectators, and a simultaneous cry of astonishment broke from every lip. Millicent Duke had been sitting quietly in the dock, with her head drooping forward, and her hands loosely folded in her lap, throughout the whole length of the proceedings, very much as if she were an uninterested spectator, to whom the issue of that day’s business mattered little; but as Thomas Masterson spoke these words she lifted her head, and looked in the direction to which the hand of the witness pointed. She looked full at the figure standing on the threshold of the door, and then uttered a feeble cry of horror.