Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon

by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

  She did not fall into a swoon, but she sat as one transfixed, and, with her blue eyes opened to their widest extent, stared aghast at the intruder.

  “Again,” she murmured, “again, again!”

  The official to whom the new corner had been speaking made his way through the crowd, and whispered some message into the ear of Millicent’s counsel.

  The barrister turned to the judge with a sudden gesture of surprise.

  “My lud,” he exclaimed; “convinced as I have myself felt of the innocence of my client, I must freely confess that my list of witnesses for the defence was rot a strong one; but I am now in a position to call a new witness — I am now in a position to declare that no murder has been committed, and that George Duke now stands in this court.”

  “No, no, no!”

  It was from the lips of the prisoner that this feeble murmur came; but at that moment every eye was fixed upon the brown-eyed stranger in the shabby naval uniform, who was now placed in the witness-box, Thomas Masterson giving way to the new comer.

  “Stop where you are, Mr. Masterson,” said Millicent’s counsel; “we may want you presently.”

  The mariner stepped a few paces from the witness-box, staring with a peculiarly puzzled expression at the face of the new comer, and scratching his closely shorn head with a slow and reflective gesture.

  The new witness was duly sworn, after some little discussion as to whether his evidence could be admitted in the course of that trial. The judge could urge no precedent against such a proceeding; for in no criminal case that either experience or reading had made him familiar with had the supposed victim of a foul murder appeared to give his evidence during the trial of his supposed assassin. It was altogether a business out of the ordinary line, and judge and king’s counsel allowed Mr. Weldon to have his own way.

  “May I ask, Captain George Duke,” said the barrister, “for what reason you have been pleased to keep out of the way until your wife was placed in a criminal dock under the charge of wilful murder?”

  The dusk was gathering in the furthermost corners of the court, and creeping slowly up towards the benches, the dock, and the witness-box. Two or three officials began to light the candles in the brass sconces; but the red sunlight had not yet faded out of the building, and the great windows glowed with the last glory of the day.

  In this half-light the man in the witness-box looked slowly round the court, scanning the eager faces turned towards him. But while making this deliberate surrey, it was to be observed that he carefully avoided meeting the eyes of the accused — those widely opened blue eyes, which were fixed as the eyes that gaze upon a ghost.

  “I stayed away,” said the man, “because I got no pleasant welcome from my wife yonder. We quarrelled before I went to rest; and having drunk more than was good for me, and being disheartened by my uncivil reception, I thought life was so little worth having, that I made a gash in my own throat, thinking to finish with it. But though I let blood enough to cure twenty fever patients, I did no more harm to myself than was enough to bring me to a more reasonable way of thinking. So I stanched the wound by tying a thick woollen handkerchief about my throat, and walked straight out of the house, never meaning to set eyes on yonder lady again. I made a cut of nine miles across country, and contrived to meet the York mail. From York I went to London, where I’ve been staying ever since. Three days ago a chance paragraph in a newspaper informed me of the mischief caused by my absence. I lost no time in booking my place in the North coach, and here I am to clear my wife yonder of the charge brought against her.”

  The man looked round defiantly as he finished his statement. Millicent’s counsel crushed the papers in his hand. There was no little sense of disappointment amongst the unconcerned spectators. The business had come to a very shabby and commonplace termination, people thought, and Captain Duke ought to have been ashamed of himself for playing such tricks upon a British public.

  The counsel for the prosecution rose at this juncture.

  “My learned friend forgets,” he said, “that the person stating himself to be Captain Duke has been only recognized by one man, and that man a witness for the defence. The gentlemen of the jury will require stronger proof of this person’s identity before they admit that there has been no murder committed.”

  “The gentlemen of the jury shall be satisfied,” replied Millicent’s counsel. “Call Samuel and Sarah Pecker, Darrell Markham, Martha Meggis, and Hugh Martin.”

  The witnesses were called.

  “Be good enough, Captain Duke, to step forward into the strongest light the court will afford,” said the barrister.

  The man advanced into the full glare of the candles. He wore the very clothes he had worn upon the night of his arrival at Compton; the shabby blue coat, adorned with naval buttons and shreds of tarnished gold lace, the jack-boots, the threadbare waistcoat, and the weatherbeaten three-cornered hat. He wore the chestnut wig, which had replaced the captain’s flowing curls, and his brown eyes had the same cruel light in them which every one could remember in the eyes of George Duke.

  One by one the witnesses swore to his identity. Hugh Martin the constable was the last to swear.

  “I knew Captain Duke well,” he said; “and I can take my oath the man at whom I am now looking is no other than he. If a better proof of his identity is needed, I think I can give it.”

  “Let us have it, then, by all means,” answered Millicent’s counsel.

  The constable took something from his waistcoat-pocket and handed it to the barrister. It was a naval button, with a fragment of shabby blue cloth still fastened to the hank.

  “I picked that up in the oak parlour at Compton Hall on the night of the supposed murder,” said Hugh; “and it strikes me that you’ll find it to correspond with the other buttons on that gentleman’s coat.”

  On examination, the buttons were found to correspond. They were of a foreign make, and bore the arms of the King of Spain. No such buttons had ever been bought in England.

  “Gentlemen of the jury,” exclaimed Horace Weldon—” what need can there be to delay you any longer upon this business? We have no occasion to press Captain Duke as to the motives of his strange conduct. He has been identified in open court by six -witnesses. My client’s innocence is so self-evident that I call upon you to acquit her without leaving your seats.”

  The judge spoke very briefly.

  “Gentlemen of the jury,” he said—” I fully concur in the words addressed to you by the counsel for the defence. The case appears to me to be a very simple one, and your course in the matter sufficiently clear.

  There was a little whispering amongst the jurymen, a suppressed murmur of applause from the crowd, and an hysterical shriek of delight from Sarah Pecker. The foreman of the jury rose to address the judge.

  But, before he could speak, Millicent Duke rose from her seat for the first time since the trial had begun. She stood up, calmly facing the eager crowd, which had been so ready to condemn her for a witch and a murderess, and which was now as ready to applaud and pity her as an innocent victim.

  She turned to the judge, and said, with quiet deliberation, —

  “I thank you, my lord, for your goodness to me; but that man is not my husband!”

  Millicent’s counsel had seated himself, and was busy collecting his papers. He rose to his feet as she spoke.

  “My lud, and gentlemen of the jury!” he said, “this day’s proceedings have unsettled the mind of my client. I beg of you to pay no attention to this. Captain Duke, remove your wife.”

  “I repeat,” said Millicent, “that man is not my husband!”

  “O, I saw it, I saw it! I knew how it would be the day she spoke to me in her cell, poor innocent lamb!” exclaimed Sarah Pecker, wringing her hands, as she and Darrell advanced to take Millicent from the dock; “I knew that her sufferings were driving her mad.”

  “Let Mrs. Duke’s friends remove her from the court,” said the judge.

  “I will not
stir until I have spoken, my lord,” cried Mrs. Duke. “Do I look or speak as if I were mad? That man is not my husband. George Duke was murdered upon the night of the 30th of January last. It was his dead body which I saw stretched on the bed in the garden chamber, with the blood streaming from a great gash in his throat. As for that man standing there, it is no new thing for to see the shadow of my husband. I saw it seven years ago, upon the pier at Marley Water, as the church clocks were striking twelve.”

  The story of Captain Duke’s ghost, narrated by Samuel Pecker, flashed upon the spectators, and many a check grew pale at the thought that the man standing under the light of the flaring candles might be something more or less than mortal.

  The man himself looked at Mrs. Duke with a savage scowl.

  “My wife is mad,” he said. “Are we to stop here all night to listen to her ravings?”

  “Will anyone ask that man two or three questions said Mrs. Duke.

  The barrister who had defended her replied.

  “If you really desire it, madam,” he said; “but I warn you that—”

  “I do most earnestly desire it.”

  “Then I am at your service.”

  “Ask him if he has in his possession a single earring — a diamond set in Indian filigree work?”

  The man took a little canvas bag from his waistcoat, opened it, and picked out the jewel, which he handed to the counsel.

  “Perhaps that’ll satisfy my wife,” he said.

  “The gem corresponds with your description, Mrs. Duke,” said the barrister. “Are you satisfied?”

  “Not yet. Be so good as to ask that man what my husband said when he took that earring from me.”

  The man laughed.

  “What should a husband say when he takes a keepsake from his wife,” he answered, after a moment’s hesitation; “what could he say but promise to keep the treasure faithfully, and not to give it away to any sweetheart he may pick up in foreign parts?” —

  “You hear, you hear!” cried Millicent; “he cannot tell me what George Duke said when he took that trinket from me seven years ago. He told me that whoever came to me, calling himself my husband, and yet was unable to produce that earring, would be an impostor.”

  “Then,” said the barrister, shrugging his shoulders in evident impatience of his client’s folly, “the very fact of this person being able to produce the jewel is in itself a proof of his identity.”

  Millicent put her hand to her forehead, and was silent for some moments. After a pause she said slowly, —

  “Whoever murdered my husband carried away his clothes. That earring was in the pocket of his waistcoat.”

  There is an earnestness in the sincerity of the speaker which carries conviction to the listener. Fully as Mr. Horace Weldon believed the man standing before him to be George Duke of the Vulture, he was, in spite of himself, shaken by the words and by the aspect of this quiet woman, who seemed bent on knotting afresh the rope which had just been loosed from about her neck.

  Accustomed to the study of the human countenance, Millicent’s advocate bent his grave eyes upon the face of the man in the witness-box. From him he looked a little way to the right, where stood the worthy Thomas Masterson under watch and ward of one of the officials, being, as we know, only temporarily released from prison to attend this trial. The two men were looking earnestly at each other, and Thomas Masterson’s mouth was moving in a peculiar contortion, which might he either a convulsive motion of that feature or a signal.

  It was a signal, for it was accompanied by a rapid gesture of the hand — a kind of gesture common amongst French thieves and vagabonds.

  “How dare you make signs to that gentleman, sir?” exclaimed the barrister, fixing his eyes sternly upon Thomas Masterson.

  “Let the gentleman give me the countersign,” answered Thomas, “if he can! If he can’t, he has never been in the galleys, and he is not George Duke.”

  “He is not George Duke?”

  “No. I’ve had my suspicions ever since I first swore to him. If he is George Duke, let him strip off his clothes, and show his bare shoulders in open court If he is George Duke, let him show the mark of the branding-iron on his back. Let him show such a mark as I can show, for George Duke and I were taken the same day and branded the same day.”

  “I suppose you will have no objection to do this, Captain Duke?” said the barrister, after a pause.

  The stranger’s face flushed with an angry red.

  “Egad!” he cried, “I have an objection, and a strong objection too. Curse me, gentlemen! must a man strip off his clothes in open court, and show a shameful mark burnt into his flesh by the enemies of his country, in order to prove his identity, after having been sworn to by half-a-dozen competent witnesses? Is a man to do this because his mad wife chooses to deny her husband? Gad’s life! it’s enough to rouse the spirit of the veriest milksop that ever trod “British ground.”

  He looked round defiantly as he spoke, and there was a murmur of applause in the court.

  “Come, come, sir,” said the judge; “I do not wish you to do anything unpleasant to your own feelings; but this case is becoming involved in such a mystery as we may never be able to clear up. Here are five people who swear that you are George Duke, and here are two other people who swear that you are not George Duke. The question must be settled before you leave the court; for it is a question upon which hinges the guilt or innocence of the prisoner at the bar. You have no need to bare your shoulders in open court; you can withdraw with two gentlemen appointed by me, and show them the mark of the branding-iron.”

  The man was silent. Then, after a long pause, he looked about him with a scowl, and said, —

  “Suppose I deny that I ever was in the galleys?”

  “Then you throw fresh difficulties into the business,” replied the judge. “This man, Thomas Masterson, has sworn that he and George Duke were taken together on board the Vulture the day she was burnt and sunk by the French; that they were sentenced together, and escaped together early in last January.”

  “Every word of which is gospel truth, my lord,” said Thomas, sturdily.

  At this juncture a weak voice interposed — a pale face made itself conspicuous amongst the crowd round about Millicent, and Mr. Samuel Pecker, of the Black Bear inn, claimed the attention of the court.

  “I know who it is,” he said. “It’s the ghost! The ghost that asked the way to Marley Water — the ghost that met Master Darrell upon Compton Moor, and robbed him of his purse and his horse, and was near taking his life — the ghost Miss Millicent saw on the pier — the ghost Squire Ringwood met in London — the ghost that called for a glass of brandy, and paid for it, on the night of the murder!”

  The little innkeeper was wonderful to look upon in his excitement. Thomas Masterson slapped his clenched fist violently down upon the wooden ledge before him.

  “Ghost!” he cried. “Lord save us! the man’s no ghost. I know who he is. It’s come upon me all in a moment, and I was a fool not to think of it before. That man is the bitterest enemy George Duke ever had in his life.”

  A ghastly change came over the man’s face as Thomas Masterson said these words, and he looked furtively round as if seeking some easy egress from the court. But he was hemmed in by the crowd, which had closed round him like a sea; and he could no more have escaped than if he had been bound hand and foot by bands of iron.

  “What! what! Thomas Masterson?” exclaimed the judge, while the breathless spectators stared all agape at the mariner.

  “I say that this man is the man George Duke hated worse than he hated the French captain who burnt his ship, or the French judge who sent him to the galleys. I’d a’most forgotten the story, for I’ve led too hard a life to think much of other men’s family histories, but it comes back upon me to-night. That man is George Duke’s twin-brother!”

  “His brother?” —

  “Yes, his twin-brother; born in the same hour, and be like him that the mother that nurse
d them could never tell the two apart. Cap’en Duke told me the whole story one night when we lay off the coast of Africa in a dead calm. He told me how he and his twin-brother had fought together as babies in the cradle, and hated each other as helpless orphan boys. They were the sons of a mate on board a merchantman, and their father died of yellow fever off the coast of Jamaica before they were six years of age. The mother was a drunken jade, who turned her sons out to play in the gutters of Portsmouth, while she drank with any one who would pay for her liquor. George took to the sea, and ran away when he was fifteen years of age. The other boy, James, was a thief and a rascal as soon as he could run alone; and George had many a time to pay for his brother’s delinquencies, for there wasn’t a magistrate or constable in London that could tell one of the boys from the other. James was a liar and a coward, always ready to sneak out of harm’s way, and leave brother George in the lurch; and a few such tricks as these didn’t go far to mend the hatred there was between ‘em. So when George Duke took to a seafaring life, his last word on leaving England was the word that cursed his only surviving kinsman and twin-brother. Mind,” added Thomas Masterson, “I give the story to you as the Cap’en give it to me. James Duke and me never clapped eyes on each other before to-day, but I know of them that know him.”

  “A singular story,” said the judge, “and a story that goes to prove this man guilty of perjury, unless he can contradict it.”

  “Which I dare swear he cannot, my lud,” interposed Millicent’s counsel. “If this man, who has upon his person the clothes worn by George Duke upon the night of his disappearance, is not George Duke, how does he account for the possession of those clothes, my lud? I venture to say that this man is the murderer of his brother. He is identified by the witness Sarah Pecker as the man who called at the Black Bear within a few hours of the murder. He left a horse at the inn for three days, and sent a messenger to fetch the animal instead of returning himself to do so. He comes into this court to-day with an improbable story, in order that, by passing himself off as the husband of Mrs. Millicent Duke, he may obtain possession of her fortune. Where has he been, and what has he been doing since the night of George Duke’s disappearance? Let him bring forward witnesses to answer these questions, and in the mean time let him be placed in custody on suspicion of having committed perjury and murder. I call upon you, my lud, to order the arrest of this man.”