The Woman in White (80 page)

"Where is the gentleman who tried to save him?" said the voice.

"Here, sir—here he is!" Dozens of eager faces pressed about me—
dozens of eager arms parted the crowd. The man in authority came
up to me with a lantern in his hand.

"This way, sir, if you please," he said quietly.

I was unable to speak to him, I was unable to resist him when he
took my arm. I tried to say that I had never seen the dead man in
his lifetime—that there was no hope of identifying him by means
of a stranger like me. But the words failed on my lips. I was
faint, and silent, and helpless.

"Do you know him, sir?"

I was standing inside a circle of men. Three of them opposite to
me were holding lanterns low down to the ground. Their eyes, and
the eyes of all the rest, were fixed silently and expectantly on
my face. I knew what was at my feet—I knew why they were holding
the lanterns so low to the ground.

"Can you identify him, sir?"

My eyes dropped slowly. At first I saw nothing under them but a
coarse canvas cloth. The dripping of the rain on it was audible
in the dreadful silence. I looked up, along the cloth, and there
at the end, stark and grim and black, in the yellow light—there
was his dead face.

So, for the first and last time, I saw him. So the Visitation of
God ruled it that he and I should meet.

The inquest was hurried for certain local reasons which weighed
with the coroner and the town authorities. It was held on the
afternoon of the next day. I was necessarily one among the
witnesses summoned to assist the objects of the investigation.

My first proceeding in the morning was to go to the post-office,
and inquire for the letter which I expected from Marian. No
change of circumstances, however extraordinary, could affect the
one great anxiety which weighed on my mind while I was away from
London. The morning's letter, which was the only assurance I
could receive that no misfortune had happened in my absence, was
still the absorbing interest with which my day began.

To my relief, the letter from Marian was at the office waiting for
me.

Nothing had happened—they were both as safe and as well as when I
had left them. Laura sent her love, and begged that I would let
her know of my return a day beforehand. Her sister added, in
explanation of this message, that she had saved "nearly a
sovereign" out of her own private purse, and that she had claimed
the privilege of ordering the dinner and giving the dinner which
was to celebrate the day of my return. I read these little
domestic confidences in the bright morning with the terrible
recollection of what had happened the evening before vivid in my
memory. The necessity of sparing Laura any sudden knowledge of
the truth was the first consideration which the letter suggested
to me. I wrote at once to Marian to tell her what I have told in
these pages—presenting the tidings as gradually and gently as I
could, and warning her not to let any such thing as a newspaper
fall in Laura's way while I was absent. In the case of any other
woman, less courageous and less reliable, I might have hesitated
before I ventured on unreservedly disclosing the whole truth. But
I owed it to Marian to be faithful to my past experience of her,
and to trust her as I trusted herself.

My letter was necessarily a long one. It occupied me until the
time came for proceeding to the inquest.

The objects of the legal inquiry were necessarily beset by
peculiar complications and difficulties. Besides the
investigation into the manner in which the deceased had met his
death, there were serious questions to be settled relating to the
cause of the fire, to the abstraction of the keys, and to the
presence of a stranger in the vestry at the time when the flames
broke out. Even the identification of the dead man had not yet
been accomplished. The helpless condition of the servant had made
the police distrustful of his asserted recognition of his master.
They had sent to Knowlesbury over-night to secure the attendance
of witnesses who were well acquainted with the personal appearance
of Sir Percival Glyde, and they had communicated, the first thing
in the morning, with Blackwater Park. These precautions enabled
the coroner and jury to settle the question of identity, and to
confirm the correctness of the servant's assertion; the evidence
offered by competent witnesses, and by the discovery of certain
facts, being subsequently strengthened by an examination of the
dead man's watch. The crest and the name of Sir Percival Glyde
were engraved inside it.

The next inquiries related to the fire.

The servant and I, and the boy who had heard the light struck in
the vestry, were the first witnesses called. The boy gave his
evidence clearly enough, but the servant's mind had not yet
recovered the shock inflicted on it—he was plainly incapable of
assisting the objects of the inquiry, and he was desired to stand
down.

To my own relief, my examination was not a long one. I had not
known the deceased—I had never seen him—I was not aware of his
presence at Old Welmingham—and I had not been in the vestry at
the finding of the body. All I could prove was that I had stopped
at the clerk's cottage to ask my way—that I had heard from him of
the loss of the keys—that I had accompanied him to the church to
render what help I could—that I had seen the fire—that I had
heard some person unknown, inside the vestry, trying vainly to
unlock the door—and that I had done what I could, from motives of
humanity, to save the man. Other witnesses, who had been
acquainted with the deceased, were asked if they could explain the
mystery of his presumed abstraction of the keys, and his presence
in the burning room. But the coroner seemed to take it for
granted, naturally enough, that I, as a total stranger in the
neighbourhood, and a total stranger to Sir Percival Glyde, could
not be in a position to offer any evidence on these two points.

The course that I was myself bound to take, when my formal
examination had closed, seemed clear to me. I did not feel called
on to volunteer any statement of my own private convictions, in
the first place, because my doing so could serve no practical
purpose, now that all proof in support of any surmises of mine was
burnt with the burnt register; in the second place, because I
could not have intelligibly stated my opinion—my unsupported
opinion—without disclosing the whole story of the conspiracy, and
producing beyond a doubt the same unsatisfactory effect an the
mind of the coroner and the jury, which I had already produced on
the mind of Mr. Kyrle.

In these pages, however, and after the time that has now elapsed,
no such cautions and restraints as are here described need fetter
the free expression of my opinion. I will state briefly, before
my pen occupies itself with other events, how my own convictions
lead me to account for the abstraction of the keys, for the
outbreak of the fire, and for the death of the man.

The news of my being free on bail drove Sir Percival, as I
believe, to his last resources. The attempted attack on the road
was one of those resources, and the suppression of all practical
proof of his crime, by destroying the page of the register on
which the forgery had been committed, was the other, and the
surest of the two. If I could produce no extract from the
original book to compare with the certified copy at Knowlesbury, I
could produce no positive evidence, and could threaten him with no
fatal exposure. All that was necessary to the attainment of his
end was, that he should get into the vestry unperceived, that he
should tear out the page in the register, and that he should leave
the vestry again as privately as he had entered it.

On this supposition, it is easy to understand why he waited until
nightfall before he made the attempt, and why he took advantage of
the clerk's absence to possess himself of the keys. Necessity
would oblige him to strike a light to find his way to the right
register, and common caution would suggest his locking the door on
the inside in case of intrusion on the part of any inquisitive
stranger, or on my part, if I happened to be in the neighbourhood
at the time.

I cannot believe that it was any part of his intention to make the
destruction of the register appear to be the result of accident,
by purposely setting the vestry on fire. The bare chance that
prompt assistance might arrive, and that the books might, by the
remotest possibility, be saved, would have been enough, on a
moment's consideration, to dismiss any idea of this sort from his
mind. Remembering the quantity of combustible objects in the
vestry—the straw, the papers, the packing-cases, the dry wood,
the old worm-eaten presses—all the probabilities, in my
estimation, point to the fire as the result of an accident with
his matches or his light.

His first impulse, under these circumstances, was doubtless to try
to extinguish the flames, and failing in that, his second impulse
(ignorant as he was of the state of the lock) had been to attempt
to escape by the door which had given him entrance. When I had
called to him, the flames must have reached across the door
leading into the church, on either side of which the presses
extended, and close to which the other combustible objects were
placed. In all probability, the smoke and flame (confined as they
were to the room) had been too much for him when he tried to
escape by the inner door. He must have dropped in his death-
swoon, he must have sunk in the place where he was found, just as
I got on the roof to break the skylight window. Even if we had
been able, afterwards, to get into the church, and to burst open
the door from that side, the delay must have been fatal. He would
have been past saving, long past saving, by that time. We should
only have given the flames free ingress into the church—the
church, which was now preserved, but which, in that event, would
have shared the fate of the vestry. There is no doubt in my mind,
there can be no doubt in the mind of any one, that he was a dead
man before ever we got to the empty cottage, and worked with might
and main to tear down the beam.

This is the nearest approach that any theory of mine can make
towards accounting for a result which was visible matter of fact.
As I have described them, so events passed to us out-side. As I
have related it, so his body was found.

The inquest was adjourned over one day—no explanation that the
eye of the law could recognise having been discovered thus far to
account for the mysterious circumstances of the case.

It was arranged that more witnesses should be summoned, and that
the London solicitor of the deceased should be invited to attend.
A medical man was also charged with the duty of reporting on the
mental condition of the servant, which appeared at present to
debar him from giving any evidence of the least importance. He
could only declare, in a dazed way, that he had been ordered, on
the night of the fire, to wait in the lane, and that he knew
nothing else, except that the deceased was certainly his master.

My own impression was, that he had been first used (without any
guilty knowledge on his own part) to ascertain the fact of the
clerk's absence from home on the previous day, and that he had
been afterwards ordered to wait near the church (but out of sight
of the vestry) to assist his master, in the event of my escaping
the attack on the road, and of a collision occurring between Sir
Percival and myself. It is necessary to add, that the man's own
testimony was never obtained to confirm this view. The medical
report of him declared that what little mental faculty he
possessed was seriously shaken; nothing satisfactory was extracted
from him at the adjourned inquest, and for aught I know to the
contrary, he may never have recovered to this day.

I returned to the hotel at Welmingham so jaded in body and mind,
so weakened and depressed by all that I had gone through, as to be
quite unfit to endure the local gossip about the inquest, and to
answer the trivial questions that the talkers addressed to me in
the coffee-room. I withdrew from my scanty dinner to my cheap
garret-chamber to secure myself a little quiet, and to think
undisturbed of Laura and Marian.

If I had been a richer man I would have gone back to London, and
would have comforted myself with a sight of the two dear faces
again that night. But I was bound to appear, if called on, at the
adjourned inquest, and doubly bound to answer my bail before the
magistrate at Knowlesbury. Our slender resources had suffered
already, and the doubtful future—more doubtful than ever now—
made me dread decreasing our means unnecessarily by allowing
myself an indulgence even at the small cost of a double railway
journey in the carriages of the second class.

The next day—the day immediately following the inquest—was left
at my own disposal. I began the morning by again applying at the
post-office for my regular report from Marian. It was waiting for
me as before, and it was written throughout in good spirits. I
read the letter thankfully, and then set forth with my mind at
ease for the day to go to Old Welmingham, and to view the scene of
the fire by the morning light.

What changes met me when I got there!

Through all the ways of our unintelligible world the trivial and
the terrible walk hand in hand together. The irony of
circumstances holds no mortal catastrophe in respect. When I
reached the church, the trampled condition of the burial-ground
was the only serious trace left to tell of the fire and the death.
A rough hoarding of boards had been knocked up before the vestry
doorway. Rude caricatures were scrawled on it already, and the
village children were fighting and shouting for the possession of
the best peep-hole to see through. On the spot where I had heard
the cry for help from the burning room, on the spot where the
panic-stricken servant had dropped on his knees, a fussy flock of
poultry was now scrambling for the first choice of worms after the
rain; and on the ground at my feet, where the door and its
dreadful burden had been laid, a workman's dinner was waiting for
him, tied up in a yellow basin, and his faithful cur in charge was
yelping at me for coming near the food. The old clerk, looking
idly at the slow commencement of the repairs, had only one
interest that he could talk about now—the interest of escaping
all blame for his own part on account of the accident that had
happened. One of the village women, whose white wild face I
remembered the picture of terror when we pulled down the beam, was
giggling with another woman, the picture of inanity, over an old
washing-tub. There is nothing serious in mortality! Solomon in
all his glory was Solomon with the elements of the contemptible
lurking in every fold of his robes and in every corner of his
palace.