Between ten and eleven o’clock — a little after the chiming of the half-hour by the bells of St. Gwendoline’s Church — a man had come up to him, as he was just about shutting the gates of the stable-yard, and had asked him if there wasn’t a strange woman in the house — a woman who had spoken to Lord Haughton that afternoon. He had replied to the effect that there was such a woman, not in the house, but in a kind of loft over the stable. The ostler had pointed at the same time to the window of the loft, where there was a glimmer of light from a rushlight that the cook had left there. The man made no more ado, but went straight to the stable below the loft, clambered up the ladder leading to the woman’s sleeping-place, and five minutes afterwards came down again with the woman. They left the yard together; but before going away, the woman told the ostler it was all right, she was going to her husband. As to the man, the night was so dark that Bill didn’t see his face, — not to know it, Bill said, — though he had a kind of a fancy that the man’s voice wasn’t altogether strange to him, but he couldn’t say when or where he’d heard it before. The man was tall and broad-shouldered, and wore a velveteen coat. This was all that Bill the ostler had to say for himself. This was all that the coroner could extract from Bill, work him as he might.
It wasn’t very much. The woman had been seen to leave the stables of the King’s Head at half-past ten o’clock, with a strange man, and had never been seen again until the next morning, when she was found by a farm-labourer, floating in among the rushes that fringe the banks of the Avon, as it flows throw the meadows near Pendon.
The jury did not long deliberate upon their verdict.
The woman had been found drowned.
Nobody for a moment suspected foul play. There were no traces of violence, and who could have had any motive for attempting to injure a wretched tramp, who had nothing to be robbed of? The woman had parted with the man, most likely, people said, in discussing the inquest, and had lost her way in the darkness, and wandered into the river, or else had wilfully thrown herself into the water.
The coroner and the jurymen went home, and as it was long past dinner-time in Pendon, the crowd dispersed from the public chambers and passages of the Rose and Crown. But Herr von Volterchoker remained. He contrived to scrape acquaintance with the landlord, and as he produced a handful of gold and silver when he paid for his refreshment, the landlord concluded that he was a respectable bonâ-fide traveller, shabby and doubtful of aspect though he was. After ordering and doing ample justice to his dinner, he inquired if he could have a bed, and anon announced his intention of remaining in the house; whereupon the landlord invited him to take his tea in the snug little bar-parlour, where the fire burned as brightly as fires only burn in bar-parlours, and where there was a birdcage, with a bit of green baize hanging over it, a net of lemons, a little grove of clean clay-pipes bristling up out of a brown earthenware jug, an eight-day clock in a comer, and a highly-varnished and rather fly-blown coloured print of the Avondale and Pendon Highflyer mail-coach hanging above the crockeryware shepherdesses on the mantelpiece.
Herr von Volterchoker was not particularly fond of tea in a general way; but on this occasion he drank as many cupfuls of that beverage as his landlady would give him. Of course there was a good deal of conversation during the social meal, and of course that conversation was almost entirely upon the subject of the drowned woman, still lying in an obscure back-chamber of the snug little inn.
In the course of this discussion, Herr von Volterchoker heard how the chief surgeon in Pendon and the jurymen had been into the dismal back-chamber to see the corpse, before the examination of the witnesses, and how the medical man had declared that the woman had been alive when she fell into the water, and that death had ensued from suffocation by drowning.
“Perhaps you’d like to see the poor creature, sir?” the landlady said to Herr von Volterchoker.
The clown replied that he would like to see the dead woman; and by and by, when the teapot had been emptied, after the third watering of the leaves, and the last pile of buttered toast had been made away with, the landlady of the Rose and Crown lighted a candle, and conducted her visitor to the chamber of death.
The dead woman was lying on a table, with a sheet thrown over her rigid face and figure. The landlady lifted the sheet, and Herr von Volterchoker took the candle from her hand, and looked long and earnestly at the face.
“There’s a look in the face that I’ve seen before,” he thought; “the boy has light hair and blue eyes; but there’s a look in this woman’s dead face that I’ve often seen in his, for all that. Yours was a short widowhood, Mr. Jarvis, or Mr. Gervoise Palgrave, or my Lord Haughton, or whatever you please to call yourself,” muttered the clown, as he stood with the candle in his hand, looking down at the face of the dead.
He was startled by something falling at his feet, something that fell with a jingling noise upon the stone flooring of the room.
The landlady had dropped a bunch of keys out of a little basket that she carried on her arm. She was a portly woman, and did not relish the exertion of stooping; she looked piteously at the clown.
“Would you mind—” she began.
“Picking up the keys. Of course not,” said Herr von Volterchoker.
He knelt down and put the candle on the ground beside him. He found the keys, and he found something else, too, which he picked up and examined thoughtfully, still kneeling on the stone floor.
It was only a few shreds of brightly-coloured worsted — red, green, and blue; but the clown scrutinised the scraps of woollen stuff as earnestly as if he had been an entymologist, and had just found some new insect.
He got up presently, and showed the shreds of worsted to the landlady.
“Does this belong to anything of yours?” he asked.
“Not it,” answered the landlady. “I can tell you where those bits of worsted came from; they were in the palm of that poor drowned creature’s right hand, and it was clenched upon them as tight as if it had been made of iron. Mr. Manders, the surgeon, he forced the poor soul’s fingers open, and the bits of worsted dropped out.”
“And he didn’t take any special notice of them?”
“Not he, sir.”
“Nor any of the jurymen?”
“No, sir.”
“Humph!” muttered Herr von Volterchoker. “What sharp fellows these coroner’s jurymen are, to be sure; and what a blessing that we’ve got such clever people always ready to investigate the circumstances of our deaths, and bring foul play to light, when we don’t come by our deaths fairly!”
The clown took an old envelope out of his pocket, and put the scraps of worsted into it.
“I’ll keep these, if you’ve no objection, ma’am?” he said.
“Objection! lor’, no, sir. If you’ve a fancy to keep them as a kind of curiosity like, pray do; you’re as welcome as can be to them.”
“There was nothing found about the woman — no letter or paper — nothing to give a clue to her identity?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“Humph! well, I won’t detain you in this cold room any longer. I’ll go out and take a stroll between this and suppertime.”
Herr von Volterchoker put on his hat, and went out into the village street, there to deliberate at his leisure upon the discoveries of the day.
“How did those scraps of wool come into the woman’s hand?” he asked himself: “they must belong to something that she snatched at when she was drowning. They belong to no garment of hers: they must have belonged to some other person’s clothes; and that other person threw her into the river. The bits of worsted look like part of the fringe of a woman’s shawl. It was a woman, then, that threw her into the water. But how can that be? — she was last seen with a man. She left the stable-yard of the King’s Head in company with a man, at half-past ten o’clock. She was found drowned this morning. Who can doubt that the man drowned her? But who was the man? Could it be that man in disguise? And then, how about these scraps of colou
red worsted in my pocket? They must have belonged to a woman’s garment; men don’t wear such bright colours. Yes,” thought the clown suddenly, “they do sometimes. The coloured worsted might have belonged to a man’s knitted comforter.”
Herr von Volterchoker paused before one of the windows of an emporium which was called by the Pendonians “the shop.” There were other shops in the village, but this was the shop par excellence, by right of its superior standing.
It was a queer, low-ceilinged place, with a window upon each side of the door, dingy, and dimly lit up by the tremulous flare of oil-lamps. Stationery and haberdashery, grocery, crockery, butter, cheese, pork, bacon, and confectionery, children’s toys, working-men’s smock-frocks, and wide-awake hats of hard, coarse-grained felt, were all to be had at “the shop.” There was a post-office also attached to the establishment, and a glimmering lamp, that was very little better than a lantern, hung over the letter-box at an angle of the old-fashioned house.
Herr von Volterchoker went into this shop. There were some customers gathered together in a little knot near the counter, talking, in solemn and mysterious tones, to the proprietor of the establishment, about the wedding, or the inquest, no doubt; but at the sight of a stranger, the proprietor left his friends and patrons to shift for themselves.
“What can I do for you, sir?” he asked blandly.
“I want something warm for my throat, that’s all. This kind of weather plays the deuce with a man if he’s subject to bronchitis. I want something to wrap round my throat — something soft and comfortable.”
The proprietor looked rather doubtfully at his customer. There was very little of Herr von Volterchoker visible, except his nose, the end of which appeared above thick folds of woollen stuff.
It was scarcely within the range of possibility for the clown to be more wrapped up than he was at that moment. But, of course, it was the proprietor’s business to sell his goods, and not to wonder as to the requirements of his customers; so he retired to some mysterious corner of the shop, and reappeared presently with a couple of wooden boxes containing knitted scarfs, long and fleecy, and comfortable-looking.
“Here’s a sweet thing, sir; quite new, which we can highly recommend at—”
But Herr yon Volterchoker did not stop to hear the usual formula of recommendation. He turned the two wooden boxes upside-down without ceremony, and emptied the contents upon the counter.
The fleecy comforters were dark chocolate, dingy claret-colour and black, dirty orange, and insipid lavender. There was no red, green, or blue. There was nothing that matched the scraps of worsted in the clown’s waistcoat-pocket.
“Thank you,” he said coolly; “I don’t see the sort of thing I want. Are these all the comforters you’ve got?”
“They are, sir.”
“And you’ve had no others this year?”
“No, sir, no others. These are generally approved, sir, and—”
“Humph! I wanted something brighter — livelier colours. You had livelier colours last year, perhaps.”
“No, sir, not livelier colours than these, sir.” The proprietor pointed to the dingy claret and the dirty orange. “These have been very much approved, sir; livelier colours ain’t approved in comforters.”
“Ah, it’s no matter. Good-night.”
Herr von Volterchoker walked out of the shop. The proprietor looked after him with a flush of indignation mantling upon his fat face. He was rather an important man in Pendon, and was not accustomed to be treated so cavalierly.
“That’s a queer customer,” he said, as he returned to the group of gossips crowded about the counter, behind which the proprietor’s wife, and the proprietor’s son and daughter, were busy weighing ounces of tea and half-pounds of butter; “that’s a queer customer, whoever he is; and not much good either, I should say.”
On the following afternoon Herr von Volterchoker walked from Pendon to Avondale. He was a very good walker, and indeed, had become pretty well used to pedestrian exercise in the course of long, weary trampings through the country with Mr. Cadgers and his equestrian troupe. The frost had set in again, so the roads were dry and hard once more, and the sound of horses’ hoofs and rolling wheels, the jingling of bells, the occasional barking of a noisy sheep-dog, and sturdy labourers’ voices calling to each other on the high-road, travelled far in the thin, frosty air.
The town of Avondale was very quiet to-day; for it was only on market-days that there was much life or bustle in the queer old streets, and Herr von Volterchoker found no hindrance to the business that had brought him thither.
It did not appear to be very important business after all; for he employed himself in going from shop to shop, lookings at woollen comforters of all colours and descriptions. But he was difficult to please; and it was a very long time before he got the sort of thing he wanted.
At last, however, after he had been walking about the little town for upwards of two hours, and had sorely tried the patience of every haberdasher in the place, by reason of giving a great deal of trouble and not expending sixpence, he found a dingy, low-roofed shop, in a back street, or rather lane, close by the ponderous archway under St. Gwendoline’s Church. The shop was a miscellaneous sort of emporium, kept by a widow-woman who had a day-school in the back-parlour, and who sold sweet-stuff and gingerbread, and slate-pencil and writing-paper, and pickled cabbage and onions, as well as haberdashery.
But small as the good woman’s stock-in-trade might be, Herr von Volterchoker found that amongst it which he had not been able to discover elsewhere, namely, a knitted woollen scarf with stripes of gaudy colours — blue and red and green.
“This is the sort of thing I want,” said the clown, selecting the rainbow-hued muffler from half-a-dozen fabrics of a dingier character; “this is the sort of thing for me. Something bright and lively. Is it hand-knit, now, or wove?” Herr von Volterchoker went to the doorway of the little shop with the scarf in his hand, in order to satisfy himself on this point, by a close inspection of the fabric.
During this inspection he took from his waistcoat-pocket the envelope containing those scraps of worsted which he had picked up from the floor of the room in which the drowned woman lay, and contrived to compare them with the material of the scarf in his hand. They were exactly of the same colour and quality. He went back to the little counter.
“Yes,” he said, “it is hand-knit, and it’s the nicest made scarf I’ve seen in all Avondale. I should fancy now, that, first and last, you’ve sold a good many of these, eh?”
The widow shook her head dolefully.
“Business in Avondale ain’t what it used to be in the old coaching days, sir,” she answered. “ I had but two comforters of that pattern; they was knit by a poor woman in the almshouses, and the profit on ’em isn’t more than threehalfpence, and I’ve had one of ’em on my hands ever since last Christmas was a twelvemonth.”
“And you had only two of them first and last, including, this one?”
“No, sir, never more than two.”
“And when did you say you sold the other one?” asked Herr von Volterchoker carelessly enough, as he put his purchase in his pocket.
“I sold it last Christmas twelvemonth, sir, to Lord Haughton’s under-gamekeeper — not this Lord Haughton, sir, but the poor lord as was killed in the steeplechase last August.”
“To be sure. You sold it to the last Lord Haughton’s gamekeeper.”
“Yes, sir, and a good-hearted, pleasant-spoken young man he is, though very wild-like, and very much in favour with the present earl, which they do say the present earl was wet-nursed by Mrs. Melwood, which is Humphrey Melwood’s mother.”
“Humphrey Melwood! I think I know the young man — a dark, gipsy-looking fellow, with ear-rings in his ears.”
“Yes, sir. He’s got into disgrace many times, with drinkin’ and other wild ways; but he never was better off than he is at present, for Lord Haughton treats him quite as a kind of friend and companion like, and Mrs. Melwood sh
e keeps the principal lodge at Palgrave Chase she do, as pretty a little gorthic cottage as you might wish to live in, sir.”
The widow, having once broken the ice, would have been content to talk for half an hour together upon this or any other topic.
Herr von Volterchoker handed her a crown-piece, and she was a very long time selecting the change for that coin out of the little heap of silver and copper in a wooden bowl, which she had taken out of a drawer under the counter.
But the clown had obtained all the information that was likely to be of any value to him. He took his change, wished the widow good-day, and left the shop.
CHAPTER XVI. THE DETECTIVE SCIENCE.
THE principal lodge at Palgrave Chase was on the high-road between Pendon and Avondale; so Herr von Volterchoker was able to pass it on his way back to the Rose and Crown without going an inch out of his straight road.
But he did not pass the little gothic cottage, pleasantly sheltered by the black foliage of a group of spreading yew-trees, and a tall hedge of thick laurel. He paused at the great gates, and peered in through the iron scrollwork. A woman was standing at the open door, and a glow of red firelight streamed from the threshold out upon the hard, frosty ground, on which light flakes of snow were falling in the cold, gray twilight.
It was a very pretty picture, that of the gothic windows reddened by the firelight, the crimson glow upon the frost-bound path, the drifting snow, the background of dense wintry foliage, the steel-gray sky with one low streak of yellow light fading out in the west; but Herr von Volterchoker did not look at it from an artistic point of view; he only contemplated it with an eye to business.
Decent rearing and education this man had known in his early years, but the sense of goodness or beauty had never been given to him. He had a natural capacity for wickedness, and had graduated on racecourses and in gaming-booths, and taken high honours in the rogues’ university. He was a liar and a thief — a man in whom the greed of gain was a vile disease so deeply implanted in his nature that it would perhaps have broken out in him had he been born in a palace, undisputed heir to a kingdom. He was a man who could trade upon the vices of his fellow-men, and hold it no shame to prosper by reason of the perdition of his fellow-creatures” souls. His life had been for more than thirty years a long career of crime and infamy, sometimes prosperous, sometimes unlucky. He had been a traveller in almost every quarter of the globe, and had perhaps never so long existed by honest means as during those two years in which he had been content to earn a scanty living in the employment of the worthy Cadgers.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1079
