Afternoon Tea Mysteries [Vol Three]

by Anthology

  No safe opportunity of secretly putting the clock right again had occurred, until the last thing at night. She had then moved the hands back to the right time. At the hour of the evening when Mr. Dubourg had called on her mistress, she positively swore that the clock was a quarter of an hour too fast. It had pointed, as her mistress had declared, to twenty-five minutes to nine—the right time then being, as Mr. Dubourg had asserted, twenty minutes past eight.

  Questioned why she had refrained from giving this extraordinary evidence at the inquiry before the magistrate, she declared that in the remote Cornish village to which she had gone the next day, and in which her illness had detained her from that time, nobody had heard of the inquiry or the trial. She would not have been then present to state the vitally important circumstances to which she had just sworn, if the prisoner’s twin-brother had not found her out on the previous day—had not questioned her if she knew anything about the clock—and had not (hearing what she had to tell) insisted on her taking the journey with him to the court the next morning.

  This evidence virtually decided the trial. There was a great burst of relief in the crowded assembly when the woman’s statement had come to an end.

  She was closely cross-examined as a matter of course. Her character was inquired into; corroborative evidence (relating to the chisel and the scratches on the frame) was sought for and was obtained. The end of it was that, at a late hour on the second evening, the jury acquitted the prisoner, without leaving their box. It was not too much to say that his life had been saved by his brother. His brother alone had persisted, from first to last, in obstinately disbelieving the clock—for no better reason than that the clock was the witness which asserted the prisoner’s guilt! He had worried everybody with incessant inquiries—he had discovered the absence of the housemaid, after the trial had begun—and he had started off to interrogate the girl, knowing nothing, and suspecting nothing; simply determined to persist in the one everlasting question with which he persecuted everybody belonging to the house: “The clock is going to hang my brother; can you tell me anything about the clock?”

  Four months later, the mystery of the crime was cleared up. One of the disreputable companions of the murdered man confessed on his death-bed that he had done the deed. There was nothing interesting or remarkable in the circumstances. Chance which had put innocence in peril, had offered impunity to guilt. An infamous woman; a jealous quarrel; and an absence at the moment of witnesses on the spot—these were really the commonplace materials which had composed the tragedy of Pardon’s Piece.

  CHAPTER THE NINTH

  The Hero of the Trial

  “You have forced it out of me. Now you have had your way, never mind my feelings—Go!”

  Those were the first words the Hero of the Trial said to me, when he was able to speak again! He withdrew with a curious sullen resignation to the farther end of the room. There he stood looking at me, as a man might have looked who carried some contagion about him, and who wished to preserve a healthy fellow-creature from the peril of touching him.

  “Why should I go?” I asked.

  “You are a bold woman,” he said, “to remain in the same room with a man who has been pointed at as a murderer, and who has been tried for his life.”

  The same unhealthy state of mind which had brought him to Dimchurch, and which had led him to speak to me as he had spoken on the previous evening, was, as I understood it, now irritating him against me as a person who had made his own quick temper the means of entrapping him into letting out the truth. How was I to deal with a man in this condition? I decided to perform the feat which you call in England, “taking the bull by the horns.”

  “I see but one man here,” I said. “A man honourably acquitted of a crime which he was incapable of committing. A man who deserves my interest, and claims my sympathy. Shake hands, Mr. Dubourg.”

  I spoke to him in a good hearty voice, and I gave him a good hearty squeeze. The poor, weak, lonely, persecuted young fellow dropped his head on my shoulder like a child, and burst out crying.

  “Don’t despise me!” he said, as soon as he had got his breath again. “It breaks a man down to have stood in the dock, and to have had hundreds of hard-hearted people staring at him in horror—without his deserving it. Besides, I have been very lonely, ma’am, since my brother left me.”

  We sat down again, side by side. He was the strangest compound of anomalies I had ever met with. Throw him into one of those passions in which he flamed out so easily—and you would have said, This is a tiger. Wait till he had cooled down again to his customary mild temperature—and you would have said with equal truth, This is a lamb.

  “One thing rather surprises me, Mr. Dubourg,” I went on. “I can’t quite understand——”

  “Don’t call me “Mr. Dubourg,” he interposed. “You remind me of the disgrace which has forced me to change my name. Call me by my Christian name. It’s a foreign name. You are a foreigner by your accent—you will like me all the better for having a foreign name. I was christened “Oscar”—after my mother’s brother: my mother was a Jersey woman. Call me “Oscar.”—What is it you don’t understand?”

  “In your present situation,” I resumed, “I don’t understand your brother leaving you here all by yourself.”

  He was on the point of flaming out again at that.

  “Not a word against my brother!” he exclaimed fiercely. “My brother is the noblest creature that God ever created! You must own that yourself—you know what he did at the trial. I should have died on the scaffold but for that angel. I insist on it that he is not a man. He is an angel!”

  (I admitted that his brother was an angel. The concession instantly pacified him.)

  “People say there is no difference between us,” he went on, drawing his chair companionably close to mine. “Ah, people are so shallow! Personally, I grant you, we are exactly alike. (You have heard that we are twins?) But there it ends, unfortunately for me. Nugent—(my brother was christened Nugent after my father)—Nugent is a hero! Nugent is a genius. I should have died if he hadn’t taken care of me after the trial. I had nobody but him. We are orphans; we have no brothers or sisters. Nugent felt the disgrace even more than I felt it—but he could control himself. It fell more heavily on him than it did on me. I’ll tell you why. Nugent was in a fair way to make our family name—the name that we have been obliged to drop—famous all over the world. He is a painter—a landscape painter. Have you never heard of him? Ah, you soon will! Where do you think he has gone to? He has gone to the wilds of America, in search of new subjects. He is going to found a school of landscape painting. On an immense scale. A scale that has never been attempted yet. Dear fellow! Shall I tell you what he said when he left me here? Noble words—I call them noble words. ‘Oscar! I go to make our assumed name famous. You shall be honourably known—you shall be illustrious, as the brother of Nugent Dubourg.’ Do you think I could stand in the way of such a career as that? After what he has sacrificed for me, could I let Such a Man stagnate here—for no better purpose than to keep me company? What does it matter about my feeling lonely? Who am I? Oh, if you had seen how he bore with the horrible notoriety that followed us, after the trial! He was constantly stared at and pointed at, for me. Not a word of complaint escaped him. He snapped his fingers at it. ‘That for public opinion!’ he said. What strength of mind—eh? From one place after another we moved and moved, and still there were the photographs, and the newspapers, and the whole infamous story (‘romance in real life,’ they called it), known beforehand to everybody. He never lost heart. ‘We shall find a place yet’ (that was the cheerful way he put it); ‘you have nothing to do with it, Oscar; you are safe in my hands; I promise you exactly the place of refuge you want.’ It was he who got all the information, and found out this lonely part of England where you live. I thought it pretty as we wandered about the hills—it wasn’t half grand enough for him. We lost ourselves. I began to feel nervous. He didn’t mind it a bit. “You have Me
with you,” he said; “My luck is always to be depended on. Mark what I say! We shall stumble on a village!” You will hardly believe me—in ten minutes more, we stumbled, exactly as he had foretold, on this place. He didn’t leave me—when I had prevailed on him to go—without a recommendation. He recommended me to the landlord of the inn here. He said, “My brother is delicate; my brother wishes to live in retirement; you will oblige me by looking after my brother.” Wasn’t it kind? The landlord seemed to be quite affected by it. Nugent cried when he took leave of me. Ah, what would I not give to have a heart like his and a mind like his! It’s something—isn’t it?—to have a face like him. I often say that to myself when I look in the glass. Excuse my running on in this way. When I once begin to talk of Nugent, I don’t know when to leave off.”

  One thing, at any rate, was plainly discernible in this otherwise inscrutable young man. He adored his twin-brother.

  It would have been equally clear to me that Mr. Nugent Dubourg deserved to be worshipped, if I could have reconciled to my mind his leaving his brother to shift for himself in such a place as Dimchurch. I was obliged to remind myself of the admirable service which he had rendered at the trial, before I could decide to do him the justice of suspending my opinion of him, in his absence. Having accomplished this act of magnanimity, I took advantage of the first opportunity to change the subject. The most tiresome information that I am acquainted with, is the information which tells us of the virtues of an absent person—when that absent person happens to be a stranger.

  “Is it true that you have taken Browndown for six months?” I asked. “Are you really going to settle at Dimchurch?”

  “Yes—if you keep my secret,” he answered. “The people here know nothing about me. Don’t, pray don’t, tell them who I am! You will drive me away, if you do.”

  “I must tell Miss Finch who you are,” I said.

  “No! no! no!” he exclaimed eagerly. “I can’t bear the idea of her knowing it. I have been so horribly degraded. What will she think of me?” He burst into another explosion of rhapsodies on the subject of Lucilla—mixed up with renewed petitions to me to keep his story concealed from everybody. I lost all patience with his want of common fortitude and common sense.

  “Young Oscar, I should like to box your ears!” I said. “You are in a villainously unwholesome state about this matter. Have you nothing else to think of? Have you no profession? Are you not obliged to work for your living?”

  I spoke, as you perceive, with some force of expression—aided by a corresponding asperity of voice and manner.

  Mr. Oscar Dubourg looked at me with the puzzled air of a man who feels an overflow of new ideas forcing itself into his mind. He modestly admitted the degrading truth. From his childhood upwards, he had only to put his hand in his pocket, and to find the money there, without any preliminary necessity of earning it first. His father had been a fashionable portrait-painter, and had married one of his sitters—an heiress. Oscar and Nugent had been left in the detestable position of independent gentlemen. The dignity of labour was a dignity unknown to these degraded young men. “I despise a wealthy idler,” I said to Oscar, with my republican severity. “You want the ennobling influence of labour to make a man of you. Nobody has a right to be idle—nobody has a right to be rich. You would be in a more wholesome state of mind about yourself, my young gentleman, if you had to earn your bread and cheese before you ate it.”

  He stared at me piteously. The noble sentiments which I had inherited from Doctor Pratolungo, completely bewildered Mr. Oscar Dubourg.

  “Don’t be angry with me,” he said, in his innocent way. “I couldn’t eat my cheese, if I did earn it. I can’t digest cheese. Besides, I employ myself as much as I can.” He took his little golden vase from the table behind him, and told me what I had already heard him tell Lucilla while I was listening at the window. “You would have found me at work this morning,” he went on, “if the stupid people who send me my metal plates had not made a mistake. The alloy, in the gold and silver both, is all wrong this time. I must return the plates to be melted again before I can do anything with them. They are all ready to go back to-day, when the cart comes. If there are any labouring people here who want money, I’m sure I will give them some of mine with the greatest pleasure. It isn’t my fault, ma’am, that my father married my mother. And how could I help it if he left two thousand a year each to my brother and me?”

  Two thousand a year each to his brother and him! And the illustrious Pratolungo had never known what it was to have five pounds sterling at his disposal before his union with Me!

  I lifted my eyes to the ceiling. In my righteous indignation, I forgot Lucilla and her curiosity about Oscar—I forgot Oscar and his horror of Lucilla discovering who he was. I opened my lips to speak. In another moment I should have launched my thunderbolts against the whole infamous system of modern society, when I was silenced by the most extraordinary and unexpected interruption that ever closed a woman’s lips.

  CHAPTER THE TENTH

  First Appearance of Jicks

  THERE walked in, at the open door of the room—softly, suddenly, and composedly—a chubby female child, who could not possibly have been more than three years old. She had no hat or cap on her head. A dirty pinafore covered her from her chin to her feet. This amazing apparition advanced into the middle of the room, holding hugged under one arm a ragged and disreputable-looking doll; stared hard, first at Oscar, then at me; advanced to my knees; laid the disreputable doll on my lap; and, pointing to a vacant chair at my side, claimed the rights of hospitality in these words:

  “Jicks will sit down.”

  How was it possible, under these circumstances, to attack the infamous system of modern society? It was only possible to kiss “Jicks.”

  “Do you know who this is?” I inquired, as I lifted our visitor on to the chair.

  Oscar burst out laughing. Like me, he now saw this mysterious young lady for the first time. Like me, he wondered what the extraordinary nick-name under which she had presented herself could possibly mean.

  We looked at the child. The child—with its legs stretched out straight before it, terminating in a pair of little dusty boots with holes in them—lifted its large round eyes, overshadowed by a penthouse of unbrushed flaxen hair; looked gravely at us in return; and made a second call on our hospitality, as follows:

  “Jicks will have something to drink.”

  While Oscar ran into the kitchen for some milk, I succeeded in discovering the identity of “Jicks.”

  Something—I cannot well explain what—in the manner in which the child had drifted into the room with her doll, reminded me of the lymphatic lady of the rectory, drifting backwards and forwards with the baby in one hand and the novel in the other. I took the liberty of examining “Jicks’s” pinafore, and discovered the mark in one corner:—“Selina Finch.” Exactly as I had supposed, here was a member of Mrs. Finch’s numerous family. Rather a young member, as it struck me, to be wandering hatless round the environs of Dimchurch, all by herself.

  Oscar returned with the milk in a mug. The child—insisting on taking the mug into her own hands—steadily emptied it to the last drop—recovered her breath with a gasp—looked at me with a white moustache of milk on her upper lip—and announced the conclusion of her visit, in these terms:

  “Jicks will get down again.”

  I deposited our young friend on the floor. She took her doll, and stood for a moment deep in thought. What was she going to do next? We were not kept long in suspense. She suddenly put her little hot fat hand into mine, and tried to pull me after her out of the room.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  Jicks answered in one untranslatable compound word:

  “Man-Gee-gee.”

  I suffered myself to be pulled out of the room—to see “Man-Gee-gee,” to play “Man-Gee-gee,” or to eat “Man-Gee-gee,” it was impossible to tell which. I was pulled along the passage—I was pulled out to the front door. There�
��having approached the house inaudibly to us, over the grass—stood the horse, cart, and man, waiting to take the case of gold and silver plates back to London. I looked at Oscar, who had followed me. We now understood, not only the masterly compound word of Jicks (signifying man and horse, and passing over cart as unimportant), but the polite attention of Jicks in entering the house to inform us, after a rest and a drink, of a circumstance which had escaped our notice. The driver of the cart had, on his own acknowledgment, been investigated and questioned by this extraordinary child; strolling up to the door of Browndown to see what he was doing there. Jicks was a public character at Dimchurch. The driver knew all about her. She had been nicknamed “Gipsy” from her wandering habits, and had shortened the name in her own dialect, into “Jicks.” There was no keeping her in at the rectory, try how you might: they had long since abandoned the effort in despair. Sooner or later, she turned up again—or somebody brought her back—or one of the sheep-dogs found her asleep under a bush, and gave the alarm. “What goes on in that child’s head,” said the driver, regarding Jicks with a sort of superstitious admiration, “the Lord only knows. She has a will of her own, and a way of her own. She is a child; and she aint a child. At three years of age, she’s a riddle none of us can guess. And that’s the long and the short of what I know about her.”

  While this explanation was in progress, the carpenter who had nailed up the case, and the carpenter’s son, accompanying him, joined us in front of the house. They followed Oscar in, and came out again, bearing the heavy burden of precious metal—more than one man could conveniently lift—between them.