Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu (Illustrated)

by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

  “Reflect upon you! — I don’t see how that can be, though,” said the vicar.

  “Why, they may say — that I ought to have dismissed that wretched Sherlock long ago — perhaps I ought. I don’t pretend to say; the event at least seems to say so, but you know my motive in keeping him. You know how I trusted him with my own interests, and how impossible it was that any of us — crazy in some of his fancies as we might suppose him — could have believed that there was the smallest danger in harbouring him. He was, as you say, so gentle and patient, and with so much refinement and cultivation.”

  “Certainly; I never was so much shocked and astonished — the last man in the world I should have suspected,” said Stour Temple.

  “I can’t go quite that length, however,” said Shadwell. “He had his malignities, and I have heard some things since that induce me to think that he had conceived one of his intense antipathies against the man upstairs. He spoke in an odd menacing way about him to some of the servants, and I should not like the jury to tack a censure upon me, or any other insult to their verdict.”

  “And you wish me and Roger to attend? You may, with God’s permission, reckon absolutely upon that.”

  “Thanks; one does not like to be totally without a friend to stand by one, you know, in the midst of such neighbours as I have about me.”

  “I’ve made some notes,” said the vicar, holding his open pocketbook in his fingers.

  “May I look?” asked Mark, extending his hand.

  “Certainly,” said the clergyman.

  And Mark, taking it to the window, read these memoranda very carefully.

  “You mention footprints marked with blood?” said Shadwell. “Clewson said something of them also. You mention here that they are traceable to the bedroom door which opens on the great gallery. Did you look out to see whether the marks were continued on the floor of the gallery?”

  “No,” said Stour Temple, “for there were marks of blood upon the key, and I thought you were so clear that nothing should ever be disturbed.”

  “Quite right! Thank you; exactly what I would have wished; but suppose we go now — it did not strike me before. We can take Clewson with us, and examine the floor.”

  They did go and made their scrutiny, but not the slightest trace appeared.

  Shadwell and the vicar paused upon the lobby. “God sends nothing in vain,” said the vicar, laying his hand on Mark’s arm; “even crime and death. His warnings are whispered to some, and spoken in thunders to others. This tragedy,. does it not, my dear sir, speak trumpet-tongued to you? That wretched Mr. Sherlock had no religion, neither had that unhappy man who has perished by his hand. Is there not a double lesson in this? How near, even in its unlikeliest forms, death may be, and how vain are the securities afforded by unaided human nature against the access of even the most monstrous crimes! I have often talked on the subject of revealed religion to you; but what are the man’s pleadings compared with the eloquence of these tremendous events? Lay the lesson, then, I implore of you, to your heart.”

  “I’m sure you mean well, Temple, I always thought so. But each man reads his own lessons for himself. I must read mine, as best I may. I don’t suppose one man is better than another in the eye of God. It is all temperament and circumstance. I’ll talk it over with you whenever you like, except now. I’m half distracted, that’s the truth.”

  “I can well suppose it, Mr. Shadwell. Men of the world don’t avow it, but there is too much real paganism — here in the light of the Gospel — to escape the most careless eye. Oh! Mr. Shadwell, think of this sudden death and sudden crime, and trust no more to the ever-shifting illusions of scepticism, and to the fancied virtues of human nature.”

  Mark Shadwell was holding the banister with a hard grasp, and looking, with a contracted face, darkly on the ground, like a man in sudden pain, whilst the vicar spoke; and when he ceased he continued motionless, and seemed to listen for more of this homily for some seconds; and then, with a sigh, he said: “Would you like to see my poor wife? She has been very low and nervous about this miserable affair, and I am certain would be the better of a few minutes’ talk with you.”

  “If you think she would really wish it, I shall be most happy,” assented the clergyman.

  “I know it,” said Shadwell, and led him along the gallery to the door of Mrs. Shadwell’s sitting-room, where he found that lady, frightened, nervous, almost hysterical. Mark Shadwell had intended going in, but he stopped suddenly at the threshold, merely saying —

  “Amy, I’ve asked Mr. Temple to pay you a few minutes’ visit. He is here.”

  And angrily, you would have fancied, he walked swiftly away, down the gallery, and then to the left, and so down the stairs, and into his library once more; where, pale and exhausted, he threw himself into a chair, and with a deep groan he said:

  “Black a thing as death is, I wish I were dead instead of him — I wish to God I were.” Stour Temple took his departure; Mark heard him cross the hall. He did not care to see him again; and he heard the tramp of his horse, as he rode away, and did not wish to recall him.

  Mark had received one of those shocks which, for a while, convert men into the ideal of an anchorite. To fast, to watch, with one idea always perched or fluttering, like an imprisoned bird, in his brain; and one choking emotion rising from his heart — was his present doom. Pale, distrait, nervous, furious at times when disturbed by message or question, or even a tap at his door, he occupied his library in utter solitude. Sunset came with its solemn glare; the cold moon rose, and sheeted the landscape in white. Mark lighted his candles and closed his shutters, and drew his curtains for himself. He hated the faces of his servants; they seemed to be reading him with prying eyes, and coming again and again on pretexts to his door for the purpose. After one or two such calls, met with unaccountable bursts of fury, he secured the door. He stirred the fire. He sat before it, looking sullenly among its embers, and then peeping slowly back, over his shoulder, he would get up, and stand with his back to the fire, looking drearily from corner to comer, and then he would pour out a glass of sherry and drink it in haste.

  Slowly wore the night away. He was horribly nervous. All kinds of fancies beset and startled him. He thought he heard the handle of his door turned, and stood watching it, with a freezing gaze, for minutes. He opened the shutters and drew the curtains of the window next him; but there was a tall plant just before it, that in the white moonlight took the shape of a man, standing there nodding and swaying himself slowly backward and forward; and look where he would, he still saw obliquely this teasing object, and could not rest till he had closed shutters and curtains again. Later in the night came the distant howling of a dog — dismalest of sounds — and on a sudden he fancied he heard a sharp whisper at the window say Wycherly. It was the twitter, perhaps, of some passing night-bird, or a spray of the rose-tree brushing lightly on the glass. But he would have sworn that he had heard that ominous name so syllabled.

  Chilled and fixed, he listened for its repetition, but it came not. He fancied then that it might have been uttered by Carmel Sherlock, whom he had begun to fear with a dreadful antipathy. He dared not open the shutter. He fancied he should see that strange face, with its eyes and lips to the window pane.

  It was hard to move his mind from the hated subject under which it lay in a monotonous pain. An image was always before him. The only thought allied to life and action was that of the inquest that the day would bring; and there, too, among the sinister faces of unfriendly neighbours, was the same odious image.

  To his sherry, for courage, Mark Shadwell often had recourse through that hateful night. At last, worn out, he fell into a slumber in his chair, from which he waked with a cry, he knew not why uttered. It was still in his ears, and the walls seemed ringing with it, as he looked about him. The candles were expiring in the sockets. He started up and drew the curtains, and was glad to see the grey light of morning through the chinks of the shutters.

  “Oh! glad was t
he knight when he heard the cock crow,

  His enemies trembled and left him!”

  So now that first detested night was over, and the old house of Raby was dimly lighted by the dawning day that was to witness the inquest upon the body of the murdered baronet.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  THE CORONER.

  As the day wore on, strange faces began to appear. Men rode up to the door, and dismounted, sending their horses round to the stables. Broughams, dog-carts, all sorts of vehicles, drove to the open hall-door, and set down their masters. The coroner had come, and Doctor Lincott from Gilleston. The Reverend Stour Temple was there, and our honest friend Roger, his fat face charged with a supernatural solemnity.

  Some stood on the steps talking of fairs and prices in a decent undertone, as people sometimes mention irrelative subjects at funerals. The hall-door stood wide open as that of an inn, and in the hall were various little groups, earnest and grave in their talk. Others were in the two drawingrooms. Mark Shadwell was among them, pale and grave. Very formal, too, with those guests, whose dispositions towards himself he suspected.

  And now the hour having arrived, the coroner opened his court in the hall of Raby, and the jury were sworn. He then told them what they each knew already — the nature of the inquiry, and the general character of the tragedy they were to investigate.

  Then at his own request Mr. Shadwell was sworn, and informed the jury of the circumstance under which Sir Roke Wycherly had made his brief sojourn at Raby; he described the particulars of his parting with him on the fatal night; also, generally, the state in which he found his room in the morning on visiting it with Clewson, who gave the alarm. He mentioned, also, that the Reverend Stour Temple had visited it later in the day, and made, at his request, a note of everything that struck him as at all bearing on the subject of their inquiry, and he, Mark Shadwell, had done this, and also retained possession of the key of the room; the door of which he had kept locked, lest there should be any uncertainty as to whether the indications so supplied had been ever so little disturbed, either by accident or design.

  He then described Carmel Sherlock: he was eccentric, hypochondriac, in some points a little crazed almost; but he was habitually gentle. He should not have dreamed of suspecting him of violence had it not been for the distinct evidence of Clewson, supported by that of the vicar, whose strange interview with him at Applebury he mentioned. It was, however, certain that Carmel Sherlock had conceived an intense but unaccountable antipathy to Sir Roke Wycherly, and that he had made no secret of that feeling, as only too many witnesses were ready to prove.

  The coroner and jury then went upstairs to view the body and inspect the room. Shadwell accompanied them, as did Clewson, at his suggestion.

  The master of Raby, pale but collected, pointed out to them what was most striking in the disarrangements of the room.

  Clewson was sworn here, and described Sir Roke’s habits.

  “You say,” said one of the jurors, “that Sir Roke Wycherly always locked the door opening upon the great gallery before going to his bed; but he had not gone to bed, he was still seated at the tale when he was stabbed. What leads you to the conclusion, that the door in question had been locked before the murder took place?”

  “He usu’lly locked his door before he removed his wig; he had a great objection any one should see him without it. And the wig being took off, it’s in that ‘ere box, sir, and his nightcap on, I’m certain sure his door was locked.”

  “How do you account for the blood on the handle of the key?” persisted this gentleman; “does not it look as if the murderer locked the door after he had committed the crime, and with his hand bloody?”

  “Well, it might be; but I think Sir Roke had locked it. No, he wouldn’t by no chance, leave it open for no one to come in and see him settling of his wig. No, no, never; it could not be, sir.”

  “The murderer, then, must have been thinking of going out by that door, and stained the key with blood, and you think Mr. Sherlock must have entered this room, as he went out of it, by the other door, and across the dressing-room, and so through your room. Now recollect yourself. Did you hear any sound? Were you, that you can remember, even partially wakened by any noise in your room?”

  “No, sir, not in my room.”

  “Are we to understand, however, that you were awakened by a noise before Mr. Sherlock’s visit to your room?” interposed Mr. Mervyn, a tall, gaunt gentleman, with a high grey head, and the dress of another generation — blue coat and brass buttons, and a shirt frill, and gaiters buttoned up to his knee.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What was it?”

  Clewson described what has been mentioned already.

  “You went to sleep after this?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And for how long did you sleep before you awoke again and saw Mr. Sherlock?”

  “Well, it might have been an hour, and it might not have been so long.”

  “Could it have been so short a time as a quarter of an hour?”

  “It might, sir.”

  Shadwell here whispered in the vicar’s ear, who nodded, and whispered something in the ear of his neighbour, Mr. Digges, who was upon the jury, and Digges asked the witness: “Might it have been less?”

  “Well it might, sir.”

  “Were you sleepy?”

  “Very much so, sir.”

  “And dropped off again as fast as you were waked?”

  “Just so, sir.

  “A bit of a snooze, and then called up, as you might sitting in a chair?”

  “Well it was, sir, very much like that.”

  As soon as they had thoroughly examined the room, the jury, led by the coroner, and accompanied by Mark Shadwell and the lookers-on, returned to the hall.

  There was a good deal of evidence to show the ill-feeling which Sherlock seemed to cherish against the deceased.

  Then came an odd part of the evidence. Clewson had found upon the carpet, on entering the room in the morning, a dagger, or creese, with a sinuous blade, both the blade and handle of which were stained with blood, and a mark which resembled the pressure of a closed hand was also indicated indistinctly by a blurred brown stain.

  Now this creese was the property of Carmel Sherlock, and what was still more to the point, it was proved to have been in his hand at about two o’clock on the night of the murder. The evidence upon this point arose thus: Attached to Raby is a great old orchard, in the centre of which is a sort of small square tower of brick with a loft in it, which is known by the name of “The Watch.” Some of the apples had been lately stolen, and some timber cut at night not far from the house; and to check these depredations two men had been stationed in “The Watch,” who took it by turns to visit the woods that lie near it.

  One of these — Will Hedgelong by name — was, according to this arrangement, sauntering near the house of Raby on the night in question between one and two o’clock. He saw a light in Carmel Sherlock’s window, which, appearing through a piece of red curtain that hung at one side, looked like a fire in the room. Apprehending danger to the house, the man ran to the point from which the light came, and saw Carmel Sherlock leaning on the windowsill and looking out.

  On seeing him Carmel Sherlock appeared to be startled, but after they had exchanged a few words, talked just as usual. He asked the man to wait for a moment, as he had something to give him. He saw Sherlock move about the room, and he came again to the window, and told him to go to the hall-door, where Sherlock met him. He came out upon the steps, having unlocked and unbarred the door. He had a wideawake hat and a loose coat on, and a pair of leather leggings — the dress he usually wore when he rode any distance. Carmel looked pale and flurried. Hedgelong thought there was something “queer about him, more than usual. It certainly was not drink.” He gave him a note, with a request that he would give it to the servant to lay, in the morning, on the breakfast-table. This letter was produced, and read. It was addressed, “For the most honoure
d of the family of Shadwell, of Raby,” and contained only these words:

  “To that one, if any, who will be good enough to regret him, Carmel Sherlock, departing from Raby, worn out and disabused, with a heart full of gratitude and anguish, bids farewell.”

  As Carmel Sherlock placed this note in his hand, saying, “I have to ride to Wodely, early, and sha’n’t be here, so don’t fail,” Hedgelong saw something shining in his left hand, which was the knife found on the bed in Sir Roke’s room.

  “What light had you to see it by?” asked Mr. Mervyn.

  “It was full moon, and a clear sky, sir — very bright the knife was in his hand, careless-like. I saw it quite plain; the blade goes back and forward like a grig in the water, with a twist to and fro, and the handle’s black, with two silver rings. I knew it, when I saw it in his hand.”

  “Had you seen it before?”

  “Yes, sir. Mr. Sherlock showed it to me about three weeks ago; it was hung over his fireplace.”

  “Is that the knife?”

  “It is, sir.”

  “Had he the knife still in his hand when he left you on the night on which Sir Roke Wycherly lost his life?”

  “No, sir. He saw me a-looking at it. I think he forgot it was in his hand, and he dropped it into his pocket, in haste. When he gave me the letter he stepped back, and shut the hall-door, soft like. I can’t read. I did not know how odd the address on the letter was. It was about eight o’clock, it was; I gave it to the butler before it was known in the house Sir Roke was murdered. He looked on it, and shook his head, as much as to say there was summat queer in it, as I took it.”