by Grant Allen
At sound of the sudden shots, Alvan Griswold started, surprised. Next moment a pang of pain shot fiercely through and through him. He sat down on the bank in an utter collapse. Strong man as he was, he almost fainted at once with pain and loss of blood from the two wounds, for both bullets had taken effect. Basil saw at a glance that he was seriously injured. Blood flowed from either leg; in point of fact, one ball had buried itself in his left shin bone, the other had passed clean through his right calf, which now bled profusely.
The American was too much accustomed to the use of firearms to be entirely surprised by this unexpected attack under such seemingly unprovoked circumstances. After a moment’s delay he looked up at his assailant, and burst forth with all the coolness and sangfroid of his western countrymen.
“Well, say now, I want to know: what the devil did you shoot for?”
Basil had meant to disable him. He saw his man was disabled. He wouldn’t shoot him outright, indeed, because he felt he had first a message from God and man to deliver to him.
With a stern face of retributive justice he held the revolver still pointed, without a quiver, full at the man’s heart. “Alvan Griswold,” he said calmly, with the supernatural calm of one who holds his own life as dust in the balance, by comparison with the work he has set upon him to accomplish, “I am going to shoot you. I shot low at first, because I wanted to maim you and to make you listen to me. When I have delivered my judgment I will shoot you dead, for the murder of De Marigny. I hardly knew him; I only saw him once or twice. It is not him I desire to avenge, but offended justice. I learnt as a child one great law, ‘Thou shalt do no murder.’ When I heard of this man you killed in cold blood, in a private quarrel at the Hotel des Vosges, I fully expected that even this world’s law would rise up and punish you. Deliberately, and of set purpose, you laid a trap for that man and that woman. Deliberately, and of set purpose, you returned that night from Paris to surprise and discover them. Deliberately, and of set purpose, you took your savage vengeance — the vengeance of the red Indian — upon the man who, as you no doubt would choose to put it, had attacked your honour. The law of France and a jury of Frenchmen were entrusted by God and man with the task of appraising and punishing your crime. They failed in their duty. An odious exception in their Penal Code gave you the seeming right to exercise, unpunished, the barbaric revenge which you chose to wreak upon your defenceless enemy. But I fail to see in their uncivilized statute-book any provision which says that if your wife had surprised you at some hell in Paris with one of the women of your choice, the law would have justified her in executing a like vengeance upon you and your paramour. So unequal and unfair a law as that deserves no respect at all from any human being. But the law of God, which tells me, in plain words, ‘Thou shalt do no murder,’ still remains to be vindicated, if not by the constituted authority of the land, then by the private act of every well-disposed citizen. It is nothing to me that if I shoot you here to-day, I shall pay in the end myself with my own useless life for it. I have come here simply and solely to perform the duty which the French court left unperformed at La Roche that morning.... Alvan Griswold, in the name of God and humanity, I try you; I find you guilty; I condemn you to death. And in accordance with that verdict I shall proceed to shoot you. Have you anything to say that may show just cause why the sentence of this court should not at once, here and now, be executed upon you?”
While he spoke, the man Griswold, pale as a ghost with pain and loss of blood and terror, gazed up at him vacantly. His heavy lower jaw dropped by degrees on his breast. Those keen dark eyes stared in front of him glassily. He heard every word Basil Hume had to say. In a vague kind of fashion he took it all in, and thoroughly understood it; but he was stunned by the suddenness and unexpectedness of the attack. He cowered before the actual face of death as though he himself had never been a successful bully. While Basil still spoke, he sat still, chained to the bank, as it were, by his wounded legs. When Basil finished, he staggered up, flung his arms wildly in the air, and raised one loud mad shriek, “Help! help! Murder! murder!”
Basil held the revolver point-blank at him.
“No, not murder,” he said quietly: “execution — justice. If you have nothing else to say against the sentence of the court, and can only call out like a coward for aid against the just fate imposed by divine law upon you — then I shall wait no longer. Alvan Griswold, I shoot you!”
The revolver rang out clear, once, twice, and thrice. Griswold clapped one white hand to his breast in horror, and fell back with a low moan. Basil Hume dropped the pistol on the path by his side and gazed at his man listlessly. Not a motion of his body; not a tremor of his limbs. Surely justice had been done on him! Then he sat down in a careless attitude on the granite rock by the dead man’s feet, and waited till the gendarmes, aroused by the firing, should come up from St. Pierre to the hills to arrest him.
THE MISSING LINK.
Richard Hawkins was the Dimthorpe doctor. You’ve heard of Dimthorpe, no doubt — that stranded little village on the low Suffolk coast, bounded on the north by a salt-marsh, on the south by a sand-bank, on the right by a spreading East Anglian broad, and on the left by the wild waves of the German Ocean. As you tack along that flat shore, in a lumbering lugger, you see a faint streak of land and a squat church tower on your weather bow; and if you ask the Southwold skipper who navigates your boat what place that is, he’ll answer you offhand, “Yon’s the hill at Dimthope.” He says it’s a hill, you know, because it rises full eight feet high above sea-level at spring tides. Anywhere else in the world but in the Suffolk marshes, you’d laugh at the notion of calling that a hill. In Suffolk the wise man accepts elevations at the native estimate.
All the doctors who ever came to Dimthorpe before Richard Hawkins, had taken to drink; except one, his predecessor, and he took to opium-eating. There was nothing else for an educated man to do in the place, people said. Perhaps it was the lowness and dampness of that marshy islet, and the depressing climate. But anyhow, in the marshes, men begin with quinine, for their first six weeks, to ward off fever and ague; take next, after twelve months, to brandy or gin; and end, after a year or two, with injections of morphia. That’s the regular round, if a man lives long enough; but most of them die off before they reach the opiate stage.
Richard Hawkins, however, was a religious man: a secretary of Young Men’s Christian Associations and Bible Society Auxiliaries: so he took instead to the pursuit of science. He had taken to it, indeed, long before he bought the retiring opium-eater’s practice at Dimthorpe. The Christian Young Men have a taste for magic lanterns and for the wonders of creation. They like to glance curiously at a creature under the microscope, and to say, as they pass on, with an unctuous air, “The handicraft of God is very marvellous.” Early in life, therefore, Richard Hawkins undertook to supply that felt want of the Christian Young Men by Wednesday evening lectures. As a student, he had paid particular attention to botany, comparative anatomy, geology; as a full-fledged medical man, he managed to find time still in the intervals of his practice, for these favourite studies. He had an adamantine constitution, which enabled him to go his rounds all day in his dog-cart or on his short-legged cob, and to be up again, fossil-hunting in the crag pits by the river, at five o’clock next morning. A clean-shaven man, stubborn, pig-headed, conscientious, honest; the father of a family, blest with many twins, and ruling his own house well; one of those solid, stolid cast-iron Britons who know they’re in the right, and will go to the stake gladly for their dearest prejudices rather than swerve an inch to the right or to the left from the path of truth as their eyes envisage it.
At Dimthorpe, Richard Hawkins gained universal respect. A doctor who didn’t drink was indeed a novelty there. A doctor who served his turn in due time as churchwarden: a doctor who had means of his own, and paid his bills weekly: a doctor who lectured on the errors of Darwinism to the budding East Anglian grocer’s assistant: a doctor who buttressed the tottering fabric of orthodoxy wi
th magic-lantern slides, and combated the growing scepticism of this Erastian age with the two-edged sword of the Bible and Science — that was a rare treasure. The vicar congratulated himself on so useful an ally, though with an undercurrent of terror lest Dr. Hawkins should suggest more doubts than he laid, and should rouse by his apologies more questions than he answered, in the candid minds of the young ladies of Dimthorpe. For the young should be shielded from the very shadow of error.
But these are, alas! unbelieving days. Now, Dimthorpe was cursed with a very bad man— “a blaspheming cobbler,” the mild-eyed curate called him — one Job Whittingham by name, a shrunken little creature, who took the National Reformer and the Secularist for his intellectual diet, and who had read wicked books by Colenso, Huxley, Spencer, and Tyndall. Nourishing his spare soul on these indigestible morsels, the cobbler in time waxed fat and kicked, intellectually speaking: for corporally, he was as lean and miserable as a scarecrow. He was a fearful radical too, folks thought, that cobbler: he feared neither squire nor parson, God nor devil. And therefore, at one of Richard Hawkins’s Wednesday Evenings for the People — the Reverend the Vicar in the Chair as usual — he rose in his seat when all was done, and, humming and hawing somewhat in his native modesty, yet with much vehement oratory, as is the fashion of the British working-man when he speaks in public, he ventured, he said, ‘umbly to call in question some of our learned lecturer’s most ‘ardy conclusions.
Richard Hawkins smiled. With that ample consciousness of intellectual superiority which the right use of the aspirate always gives to an educated man, face to face with the objections of an uneducated opponent, he leaned with both hands on the little table before him, and ejaculated blandly in a very soft voice, “Which ones, pray? Which ones?”
“With Dr. ‘Awkins’s permission, sir,” the cobbler answered sturdily, addressing himself with a fine sense of propriety to the vicar in the chair, “I would like to offer an observation or two on his cumalative argament against the hanimal origin of the ‘uman species.”
The vicar frowned faintly. This was just as he feared. When once you begin to reason about matters of faith, you open the floodgates of unbelief, and there’s no knowing in what abysses of doubt you may be finally landed. (The vicar’s metaphors were always rather exuberant than strictly consistent.) Besides, to give a common cobbler a chance of airing his infidel opinions at a public meeting was a thing not to be dreamed of. “I think, Whittingham,” the vicar said coldly — it was a matter of principle with the vicar to keep the lower orders in that station in life to which, — and so forth; so he carefully abstained from addressing an unbelieving cobbler as Mister Whittingham: “I think any public discussion on these delicate questions is out of order at our meetings. If there are points on which you’d like Dr. Hawkins to instruct you further” — with a very marked stress upon the good word instruct— “you’d better inquire about them privately of him in the vestry — I mean, in his study — afterwards.” For the vicar wasn’t one to encourage brawling, nor did he think it seemly that an unwashen cobbler should be heard in the assembly before the faces of his superiors.
Richard Hawkins, however, was made of other mould. Unlike the vicar, he had no sneaking undercurrent of terror in his inmost soul lest the religion of his fathers might be worsted and laid low in a hand-to-hand encounter with a journeyman shoemaker. A good man and true, he trusted his own cause, and he leapt into the fray as a knight armed at all points might leap upon the defenceless body of his Paynim assailant. He loved fair play; he loved free speech; he loved to see every man have a right to his opinion. And besides, he knew well he could crush that cobbler to earth in a second with the dead weight of his knowledge, his learning, his logical faculty.
“I think, Mr. Chairman,” he interposed, still bland, still smiling his condescending smile, and fingering his smooth chin, “if Mr. Whittingham will state his objections to my views outright, I may be able here and now to dispel his difficulties.”
The vicar’s face was black. The vicar’s eye was glassy. He shuffled uneasily in his chair of office. “As you will, Dr. Hawkins,” he answered, without attempting to conceal his grave disapproval. In the doctor’s own house, even the priest of the parish could hardly prevent the doctor from letting his guests have their say if they would. But it was certainly unseemly that he, a beneficed clergyman of the Church of England, should be presiding over a meeting where an unbelieving cobbler was allowed to vent his vulgar infidelity unchecked before the faces of his betters. Still, politeness too has its laws. Noblesse oblige. Against his better judgment, the vicar bowed to his host’s decision.
Then the cobbler, still swaying there awkwardly in his Sunday clothes, and waiting in some anxiety for the chairman’s leave, with his head craned forward, and his little black eyes screwed up inquiringly under his projecting eyebrows, — the cobbler, I say, fell to with a will upon his destructive argument. He orated, of course — the British workman is nothing if not oratorical; his one idea of a speech is to declaim, full-mouthed; rhetoric is to him the soul of debate; he warms up as he goes, and launches forth, fiercely vehement. Dust pours from the slapped thighs of his Sunday trousers. But still, for all that, the cobbler pressed his professional opponent hard in argument. He combatted the doctrine, he said, of any distinct creation of the ‘uman species. He believed, with ‘Erbert Spencer, in the principles of evvolootion and gradual development. He saw no necessary limits imposed by nature on the action of them laws. They were eternal, all-pervading, inevitable, self-hacting. Warming up with his subject as he went, he proceeded to quote from memory in very long screeds what ‘Uxley had said of man’s place in nature. He appealed to Darwin, he appealed to ‘Ackel, he appealed even to the partially adverse opinions of Mr. Awlfred Russel Wallace. He showed how shallow and sophistical, how devoid of solid basis, were the argaments advanced by Dr. ‘Awkins against them. He demolished Dr. ‘Awkins, indeed, with anatomy and physiology, with phylogeny and embryology, with the gorilla and the chimpanzee, with ar priory reasoning and ar posteriory facts. It was a triumphant vindication. The cobbler waxed warm over it, and mopped his bald forehead more than once by the way with the corner of his best red silk pocket-handkerchief.
But the audience — well, the audience just stared and tittered. In their well-bred ignorance — for most of them belonged to the local gentry and professional classes of the mud-bank islet — they felt the genial tolerance of superiority for the cobbler’s facts and the cobbler’s theories. It was nothing to them that Job Whittingham knew ten thousand times more about the question at issue than any one of themselves did. It was nothing to them that his logic was acute and his reasons convincing; nothing that his knowledge, though second-hand, was really in its way both wide and accurate. The man dropped his h’s; that was quite enough for Dimthorpe. What science can you expect from the lips of a man who misplaces the very letters of the English alphabet? As Job grew warmer, and mopped his face more vigorously, the audience tittered louder at each absentee aspirate. As he finished, the chartered wag of Dimthorpe turned round to the vicar’s second daughter with a broad smile on his face, and suggested in an audible aside that to judge from the speaker’s words the Missing Link of ‘umanity was the letter ‘H.’
Then Richard Hawkins, never heeding these rude allusions, but with the sweet smile of superiority on his smug clean-shaven face, rose once more from his seat, and expanding his white shirt-front with obtrusive respectability, addressed himself in the calm and courteous tone of the experienced lecturer to the Reverend the Chairman. That was a crushing answer. As the cobbler afterwards described it in a conversation with a friend, ‘Awkins pounced down upon him like an ‘awk; he was simply scarified. Not that the doctor could really reply to any one of his unlearned opponent’s cogent arguments; but the doctor’s aspirates were as firm as a rock, and the doctor’s delivery was after the manner of a man who demonstrates to a beginner well-ascertained certainties. “I ain’t a-arguin’ with you,” said a public-house orator
one day to a foolish objector; “I’m only a-tellin’ of you.” And Richard Hawkins didn’t argue either; he only told Job Whittingham where and how he was in error. Against Huxley and Darwin, the lecturer quoted with impressive effect (raising his voice as he spoke) that great and venerated anatomist, Sir Richard Owen; and the audience, thrilling to the title, as in duty bound, felt instinctively that just as a member of the Royal College of Physicians is a better authority on science than a common cobbler, so a professor who had received the dignity of knighthood at the hands of most sacred majesty itself, must be a better authority on comparative anatomy than a brace of plain misters. It stood to reason, of course, that the Queen must know best on a question of abstruse scientific opinion.
In short, Richard Hawkins beat down his cobbler antagonist by sheer dint of authority and of social position. It was white-tie and swallow-tail against Sunday suit; it was academical English against sound common sense and quaint homespun rhetoric, with no h’s to boast of.
As soon as the doctor had wagged his forefinger for the last time at a demonstrative period, the chairman, still wriggling uneasily in his chair, but with a pleasing consciousness that orthodoxy had now been amply vindicated, dissolved the meeting at once without waiting for Job Whittingham. The right of final reply, he said, rested always with the lecturer. That was a rule of debate. Dr. Hawkins had replied. We would now adjourn, and meet again in this place on Wednesday fortnight: subject, The Evidences supplied by the Geological Record as to the Authenticity and Truth of Holy Scripture.