by M. P. Shiel
particularlyinartistic trick, unworthy of its author. The mere facility with whichRandolph discovered the buried jewels by the aid of a dim lantern,should have served as a hint to an educated police not afraid of facingthe improbable. The jewels had been _put_ there with the object ofthrowing suspicion on the imaginary burglars; with the same design thecatch of the window had been wrenched off, the sash purposely leftopen, the track made, the valuables taken from Lord Pharanx's room. Allthis was deliberately done by some one--would it be rash to say at onceby whom?
'Our suspicions having now lost their whole character of vagueness, andbegun to lead us in a perfectly definite direction, let us examine thestatements of Hester Dyett. Now, it is immediately comprehensible to methat the evidence of this woman at the public examinations was lookedat askance. There can be no doubt that she is a poor specimen ofhumanity, an undesirable servant, a peering, hysterical caricature of awoman. Her statements, if formally recorded, were not believed; or ifbelieved, were believed with only half the mind. No attempt was made todeduce anything from them. But for my part, if I wanted speciallyreliable evidence as to any matter of fact, it is precisely from such abeing that I would seek it. Let me draw you a picture of that class ofintellect. They have a greed for information, but the information, tosatisfy them, must relate to actualities; they have no sympathy withfiction; it is from their impatience of what seems to be that springstheir curiosity of what _is_. Clio is their muse, and she alone. Theirwhole lust is to gather knowledge through a hole, their whole facultyis to _peep_. But they are destitute of imagination, and do not lie; intheir passion for realities they would esteem it a sacrilege to distorthistory. They make straight for the substantial, the indubitable. Forthis reason the Peniculi and Ergasili of Plautus seem to me far moretrue to nature than the character of Paul Pry in Jerrold's comedy. Inone instance, indeed, the evidence of Hester Dyett appears, on thesurface of it, to be quite false. She declares that she sees a roundwhite object moving upward in the room. But the night being gloomy, hertaper having gone out, she must have been standing in a dense darkness.How then could she see this object? Her evidence, it was argued, mustbe designedly false, or else (as she was in an ecstatic condition) theresult of an excited fancy. But I have stated that such persons,nervous, neurotic even as they may be, are not fanciful. I thereforeaccept her evidence as true. And now, mark the consequence of thatacceptance. I am driven to admit that there must, from some source,have been light in the room--a light faint enough, and diffused enough,to escape the notice of Hester herself. This being so, it must haveproceeded from around, from below, or from above. There are no otheralternatives. Around these was nothing but the darkness of the night;the room beneath, we know, was also in darkness. The light then camefrom the room above--from the mechanic class-room. But there is onlyone possible means by which the light from an upper can diffuse a lowerroom. It _must_ be by a hole in the intermediate boards. We are thusdriven to the discovery of an aperture of some sort in the flooring ofthat upper chamber. Given this, the mystery of the round white object"driven" upward disappears. We at once ask, why not _drawn_ upwardthrough the newly-discovered aperture by a string too small to bevisible in the gloom? Assuredly it was drawn upward. And now havingestablished a hole in the ceiling of the room in which Hester stands,is it unreasonable--even without further evidence--to suspect anotherin the flooring? But we actually have this further evidence. As sherushes to the door she falls, faints, and fractures the lower part ofher leg. Had she fallen _over_ some object, as you supposed, the resultmight have been a fracture also, but in a different part of the body;being where it was, it could only have been caused by placing the footinadvertently in a hole while the rest of the body was in rapid motion.But this gives us an approximate idea of the _size_ of the lower hole;it was at least big enough to admit the foot and lower leg, big enoughtherefore to admit that "good-sized ball of cotton" of which the womanspeaks: and from the lower we are able to conjecture the size of theupper. But how comes it that these holes are nowhere mentioned in theevidence? It can only be because no one ever saw them. Yet the roomsmust have been examined by the police, who, if they existed, must haveseen them. They therefore did not exist: that is to say, the pieceswhich had been removed from the floorings had by that time been neatlyreplaced, and, in the case of the lower one, covered by the carpet, theremoval of which had caused so much commotion in Randolph's room on thefatal day. Hester Dyett would have been able to notice and bring atleast one of the apertures forward in evidence, but she fainted beforeshe had time to find out the cause of her fall, and an hour later itwas, you remember, Randolph himself who bore her from the room. Butshould not the aperture in the top floor have been observed by theclass? Undoubtedly, if its position was in the open space in the middleof the room. But it was not observed, and therefore its position wasnot there, but in the only other place left--behind the apparatus usedin demonstration. That then was _one_ useful object which theapparatus--and with it the elaborate hypocrisy of class, and speeches,and candidature--served: it was made to act as a curtain, a screen. Buthad it no other purpose? That question we may answer when we know itsname and its nature. And it is not beyond our powers to conjecture thiswith something like certainty. For the only "machines" possible to usein illustration of simple mechanics are the screw, the wedge, thescale, the lever, the wheel-and-axle, and Atwood's machine. Themathematical principles which any of these exemplify would, of course,be incomprehensible to such a class, but the first five most of all,and as there would naturally be some slight pretence of trying to makethe learners understand, I therefore select the last; and thisselection is justified when we remember that on the shot being heard,Randolph leans for support on the "machine," and stands in its shadow;but any of the others would be too small to throw any appreciableshadow, except one--the wheel, and-axle--and that one would hardlyafford support to a tall man in the erect position. The Atwood'smachine is therefore forced on us; as to its construction, it is, asyou are aware, composed of two upright posts, with a cross-bar fittedwith pulleys and strings, and is intended to show the motion of bodiesacting under a constant force--the force of gravity, to wit. But nowconsider all the really glorious uses to which those same pulleys maybe turned in lowering and lifting unobserved that "ball of cotton"through the two apertures, while the other strings with the weightsattached are dangling before the dull eyes of the peasants. I need onlypoint out that when the whole company trooped out of the room, Randolphwas the last to leave it, and it is not now difficult to conjecturewhy.
'Of what, then, have we convicted Randolph? For one thing, we haveshown that by marks of feet in the snow preparation was made beforehandfor obscuring the cause of the earl's death. That death must thereforehave been at least expected, foreknown. Thus we convict him ofexpecting it. And then, by an independent line of deduction, we canalso discover the _means_ by which he expected it to occur. It is clearthat he did not expect it to occur when it did by the hand of MaudeCibras--for this is proved by his knowledge that she had left theneighbourhood, by his evidently genuine astonishment at the sight ofthe closed window, and, above all, by his truly morbid desire toestablish a substantial, an irrefutable _alibi_ for himself by going toPlymouth on the day when there was every reason to suppose she would dothe deed--that is, on the 8th, the day of the earl's invitation. On thefatal night, indeed, the same morbid eagerness to build up a clear_alibi_ is observable, for he surrounds himself with a cloud ofwitnesses in the upper chamber. But that, you will admit, is not nearlyso perfect a one as a journey, say, to Plymouth would have been. Whythen, expecting the death, did he not take some such journey? Obviouslybecause on _this_ occasion his personal presence was necessary. When,_in conjunction_ with this, we recall the fact that during theintrigues with Cibras the lectures were discontinued, and again resumedimmediately on her unlooked-for departure, we arrive at the conclusionthat the means by which Lord Pharanx's death was expected to occur wasthe personal presence of Randolph _in conjunction_ with the politicalspeeches, the candidature, the cl
ass, the apparatus.
'But though he stands condemned of foreknowing, and being in some sortconnected with, his father's death, I can nowhere find any indicationof his having personally accomplished it, or even of his ever havinghad any such intention. The evidence is evidence of complicity--andnothing more. And yet--and yet--even of _this_ we began by acquittinghim unless we could discover, as I said, some strong, adequate,altogether irresistible motive for such complicity. Failing this, weought to admit that at some point our argument has played us false, andled us into conclusions wholly at variance with our certain knowledgeof the principles underlying human conduct in general. Let us thereforeseek for such a motive--something deeper than personal enmity, strongerthan personal ambition, _than the love of life itself!_ And now, tellme, at the time of the occurrence of this
