by T. F. Powys
‘When you bought the morphia for Mr. Neville, did you know he would try to kill himself?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he tell you?’
‘Yes, he told me.’
‘And he thought it right that a clergyman should take his own life in this cowardly way?’
‘Yes, he thought it right.’
‘Why did he do it?’
‘My brother did not wish me to see him suffer any more pain.’
‘And you gave him the poison?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Do you understand that I might have you tried for murder?’
Molly Neville was silent, she even smiled.
‘Before I allow you to go. Miss Neville, I wish to say in the presence of these gentlemen that your conduct appears to me to have been very wicked. You knew that your brother contemplated this dreadful act, and, instead of restraining him, you even went so far as to help him to do it. You helped to kill him, and now you are bold enough to smile. You preferred that your brother should become a corpse, rather than that you should suffer from seeing him ill. I have considered your case. I might commit you for trial. As it is, I have decided to very strongly censure your conduct. One more question I must ask you, a very important one—when you saw your brother last alive, when you bid him good-night for the last time, knowing quite well what he was going to do, was he in his right mind?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thank you. You may go. I think I will see Mrs. Lefevre.’
As Molly Neville went out she saw the shadows by the table move; one coughed, one brushed its sleeve, one wrote or pretended to write notes upon three different sheets of paper.
The housekeeper came in. She had, like the old woman in the fable, only lived upon the smell of the bottle since Miss Neville had come there, and for that reason she would have been only too delighted to have seen Molly hanged. Mrs. Lefevre informed the coroner, somewhat breathlessly, that while she was dusting the sickroom:
‘I likes to keep it clean, you know, sir,’ she said. ‘And I heard the master and ’er talkin’—about killing ’eself. She says, “Be ’e going to do it or bain’t ’e? Take thik poison and leave your money to I.”’
‘Did you hear anything else?’
‘She took me keys, sir.’
‘And when you went up with his breakfast the next morning you found him dead?’
‘Yes, sir. I know death. I smell it. I smell it sooner than most folks.’
‘Have you anything else to say?’
‘In the night when the wind rumbled, I peeped me face out, and there was som’at black like a wicked soul flies out of master’s window among the great trees.’
‘Let the woman go. Gentlemen of the Jury, I have a sad duty to put upon you. I have given a good deal of thought to this case, and I must advise you to give a verdict of felo de se. The sacred life that God Almighty has given cannot be taken away in this wicked manner without a punishment. The growing idea of modern freethinkers that to kill oneself in cold blood is a right and lawful act, must be stamped out. I censured Miss Neville. I might have done more. I did not do so. The death of her brother will be her punishment—on her soul. Without her help he would have been alive now. I fear, gentlemen, that we cannot, by any stretch of our feelings, call Mr. Neville mad. Your verdict will bring sorrow upon the people of this parish, it will bring sorrow upon the Church—but we must do our duty.—Your pastor committed this terrible crime, not insulting his own soul alone, but insulting the Church, insulting the law, and last but not least, insulting God Himself.’
An hour after the inquest, when the coroner entered his own dining-room for lunch, his daughters opened the windows very wide.
CHAPTER XXI
‘OLD LANTERN’
AT the sign of ‘The Puss and Bottle,’ the inn by the road to Maidenbridge, where the labourers of South Egdon used to meet in good fellowship, a discussion was going forward the evening after the inquest. The discussion was commenced by a thoughtful man, a tinker whose beer-can happened to be empty. It was necessary for his pleasure that it should be filled at the expense of some one else, as his pocket was as empty as his can.
This good man, in order to attract attention to his emptiness, declared to the assembled company that Mr. Neville was to be buried at the cross-roads in the true old Christian fashion, with a stake cut out from the squire’s wood rammed through his body and held and hammered there by the king’s hangman.
‘What do they do that for?’ asked a rather nervous ploughman.
‘To stop thik wicked parson from walking the village, sure, carter.’
Some one paid for the tinker’s pint.
In the parlour of that same inn three other persons were consulting. Two were well known in the village, and the third, the estate agent, had been seen there before. His presence now prevented the gentlemen in the bar from using their favourite national word ‘bloody,’ and caused them to say ‘damn’ instead, a word much more genteel and more fit for the polite ears of a land-agent.
This same agent had arrived there with instructions from the Church and from the squire. The sexton was there to give his advice, and the village undertaker, who was rather deaf, was there to take whatever might be said loud enough as his orders.
The sexton had been explaining to the agent the nature of a piece of waste ground close to the blessed field of bones. He advised that this last departure from the right way should be buried in this waste corner.
‘I knowed it would end like this, sir,’ said the sexton. ‘I seed ’e peeping through thik little ’ole that the nippers ’ave knocked out of vestry window the same year the old cow fell into ditch. Parson said ’e liked God’s air to get in—I could tell you some fine tales——’
‘Never mind about that now, sexton. Get your lantern and show us the ground you consider suitable.’ The agent buttoned his coat.
Leaving the friendly glitter and clatter of the inn, the three proceeded to the churchyard, where they were joined by the policeman. Just outside the churchyard there was a narrow strip of ground used by the farm-hands as an allotment, wherein they grew potatoes. The hedge in one corner between the potatoes and the graves had been beaten down by the boys on Sundays. The workers of the potato gardens had left a little corner angle of grass and nettles. Just at that point of the churchyard side there was nothing of any particular importance laid to rest. There were a few shaky wooden crosses marking the spot where infants were planted a few feet below the surface, those who died so young being carried to that corner in a bovril box and placed in a hole suitable for a dead cat. Over in the corner, on the potato side, there were nettles and long yellow grass.
After tumbling over and breaking down at least half a dozen of the little wooden crosses, the four men clambered over the already broken bank and stood together in the little disused plot three yards from the consecrated ground, that is to say, the ground upon which the magic feet of the Bishop—who bought his boots at Jeffrey’s in the Strand—had trod. The gaze of the four men, though they pretended otherwise, was directed towards the vicarage just across the road, and their eyes were fixed, even the agent’s as well, upon a glowing bright light that shone streaming through the black trees, making a burning pathway of light.
The men knew that the light came from the suicide’s room, where it seemed that all the candles in the village must have been lit. The evening being misty and the window of the room open, without a blind, the light, like a silver sword, pierced the outer gloom, as though it tried to cut a wonderful path in the heavy darkness that lay around the house.
The agent, thinking that the hour was becoming rather unsuitably late, hurriedly gave directions about setting up a wire railing, and marked the place where he wished the grave to be, in the Squire’s, instead of in God’s, acre. The funeral had been arranged for the next day. The newly appointed clergyman was going to be there, to appear, robed, and ready to be of use in keeping proper order, to watch the coffin put into the ground, and to keep his mout
h legally closed all the time.
The next morning came, and amongst those who awaked that good morrow were the undertaker and his silent bearers. They passed along up the vicarage drive, that was now, by reason of the death of the master, almost trampled into a proper drive-way. The funeral was to be as early as possible by direction of the new clergyman. He feared that a scandalous Unitarian minister, a man of no private means, should, in the malice of his heart, take a turn that way from the town and make a scene by trying to shout out a service of his own invention, that God Himself might hear above the noise of His own winds, and in that way the law and the devil would be cheated of their rightful booty.
The Rev. Edward Lester, for it was he and no other, through the interest of Miss Rudge with the patron, who was the new clergyman, waited at the gate, keeping an open eye down the road. He had risen early that morning, and had driven out from the town so that he might be able to see for himself that a proper way had been cut through the broken hedge into the potato garden where the new grave was.
A certain amount of talk, of house-to-house conversation, was caused by the strange fact that in the process of digging the grave very early that morning by the light of his lantern, the sexton, who was known as ‘Old Lantern’ to the youth of the village, had turned up human bones. What could this mean? Was it, after all, a mistake that this corner was outside the churchyard? Or had, at some time or another, the whole potato patch been blessed by some former holy boots made by Jeffrey’s in the Strand, perhaps even a more expensive pair than the present Lordship could afford?
‘Old Lantern’ had declared it as his opinion to one or two persons—and his opinion was considered of value—that the bones he had cast out had once belonged to the flesh of a young man or a young maid. ‘They were,’ he said, ‘snaky bones,’ and though he had sent his spade ‘crash!’ through the skull, ‘it was,’ so he expressed it, ‘a pretty one.’
Mr. Lester, being informed of this find, said very wisely that no doubt the same spot had been used before, probably for another wicked suicide. His opinion was confirmed by old Mr. Parks, who remembered, when he was a little boy, in the same year that the old barn was burnt, seeing the very same gap through the hedge, and even helping other youthful sparks to break it down again after the then clergyman’s gardener had fenced it up. Old Parks affirmed that the bones undoubtedly had belonged once to a live maid: ‘he minded his mother talking of it at Sunday dinner and saying, “What a wicked maid she were for drowning herself in Farmer White’s horse-pond because she were expecting.”’
The Rev. Edward Lester received the coffin at the church gates, and preceded it up the path in silence. A lady in black and one man with bowed head followed as mourners, and passed in silence amongst the graves. Two short halts had to be made. One of the bearers had put his pipe while still burning into his trousers’ pocket, and had to stop to take it out again. A little farther, near the new gap, another of the bearers caught his foot in a bramble and nearly brought poor Neville’s remains to the ground before the right time.
Without any prayer being uttered, the body of Henry Neville was lowered into the ground to rest beside the crushed skull of the girl. The two mourners returned to the vicarage. Quietly and serenely Molly arranged her cushions upon her favourite easy-chair and lay back, her eyes looking wonderingly, not towards ‘heaven,’ but towards eternity. She had loved the silence of the funeral. It was to her more full of meaning than many prayers. To her the silence had been in itself a prayer, the deepest, the holiest, the most illuminating. A light, shining and clear, filled her heart. He was no more in pain; the end had come, the eternal silence was reached.
Waking out of what was nearly a trance, she saw that Henry Turnbull was still sitting there, sadly looking out at the tall trees. If Henry had not walked with her she would have been quite alone. The housekeeper had crawled under the dining-room table, declaring that she had seen two little black dogs run under the dresser.
Unlike Molly, Henry had felt the silence as an insult to the dead. He had read in it the hatred of ‘the people’ that stone to death the best lives amongst them. And he prayed that they too might be trampled in the earth where no bishop’s holy boot had trod. He felt the hatred of the people upon the poor corpse, a hatred vindictive, savage, and cruel. Gently, and in quite an ordinary way, he said good-bye to Molly, and the sweet winter wind crept and sighed round him as he walked home.
The grave was slowly covered in, ‘Old Lantern’ pleasantly smiling as he slid the earth upon the coffin. Around the grave, the nettles and thistles, after having been beaten down by winter rains, were now quite trampled into the ground by human feet. There had been no flowers to waste and fade and die at this funeral. Neville had grown only nettles in his garden. The sexton cleaned his spade, using a broken bone; then, gently placing it upon his shoulder, he made his way down the road to his home, stopping here and there to enjoy a conversation with one or two doorway women. The potato patch was left to one inquisitive robin that had discovered a worm thrown up out of the ground.
Besides the uninvited robin, an unnoticed human face had been watching the burying; peering through the hedge next the road. When all the sombre actors were gone, this face and the dirty and ragged body that belonged to it broke a way for itself and shuffled up to the brown mound, that heaped witness that told the winds how it had been taken out and a man put in. The stumbling figure of the newcomer carried a heavy stick, and he also held a bunch of late winter roses tied with stolen twine to a root, shaped naturally like a cross, pulled from the vicarage hedge. The drover, more foul than ever, planted his cross firmly into the loose mould, and again shaking, this time with terror, climbed through the hedge. His protector had gone thud: who was there now to save him from ‘she’?
CHAPTER XXII
ROSE NETLEY
MILL STREET in Portstown had changed its character, though Mrs. Fancy still lived there. The street was not the same, had not been the same since that night when poor forlorn Alice crawled to the empty seat under the tree. A social worker, a mild-eyed, merry young person, more determined than she looked, and always brimming over with hatred against any injustice to women, had penetrated to Mill Street and had even dared to enter the upper room of the boarding-house near the lamp-post.
She made it her business to visit certain houses to find out whether young girls were admitted to them, and if they were, Miss Rose Netley was inquisitive enough to want to know the use they were put to. She was quite without fear, and had been born with, or perhaps she had invented it for herself, an affection for girls. She went so far, quite out of all truth and reason, to call them all her sisters, even the fallen ones.
She was a perfectly normal young person, and nursed, girl-like at the bottom of her heart, a desire to marry. Among her men friends the one she liked and trusted most of all was a very quiet, harmless, bulky, simple-minded bank clerk who loved warm slippers and chess, was forty years old, perhaps a little German to look at, and at the same time one of the most sure and sincere fellows in the world.
Rose Netley liked the simple element in this good man’s nature, but he, honest fellow, when he was with her, used to curse himself for being so big, and could never bring his simple mind to believe that Rose would take him for a husband. He was entirely on her side in the war that she so ruthlessly waged against the use that young maidens are put to in our rich towns. When she was up to anything dangerous he was allowed to follow behind, taking with him, hidden under his three-year-old overcoat, a heavy Indian club that he exercised with in the mornings. Once he had broken the bedroom door at his lodgings with a back-handed stroke, forgetting the long stretch of his arm. If it came to blows, Mr. Malden could deal them, for he had a fine straightforward swing in his arm, and a most determined, never-give-in look in his grey eyes.
While drinking tea in Mrs. Netley’s drawing-room, Rose had told him that she was going to tap a new district. She had heard a girl tell what would be called a droll story, about her ru
in in a certain lodging-house near the lamp-post in Mill Street. As Rose poured out Mr. Malden’s fifth cup of tea she told him that she was going to visit that house in the disguise of a young girl out of work.
Mr. Malden had heard of that street, and he advised his young lady to tell her story to the police. But Miss Netley, smiling at his dear simple-minded ignorance, explained that the police were just as likely to help her sisters as the Grand Turk, and it was her intention to find out what went on there for herself. Malden had seen her go off like this—at anything—before, and he was well aware that if there happened to be a sister in hell itself, Miss Rose would try to find a way in, if only to ask the girl if she were happy. So he had to content himself with permission to wait in hiding near the house. Rose had found out that the room the girl had been trapped in looked out into the main street, and if things in there were very nasty, she told him, she would simply break a window and he would be sure to hear that.
The next evening, according to orders, Malden waited near the chapel, with his Indian club stuffed under his coat, trying to hide his bigness as well as he could. He had not to wait long. Soon a remarkably little working girl trudged wearily by carrying a bundle, dragging one leg after the other, and looking about as though she were seeking some place to stay for the night. She stopped for a moment to ask the big Malden whether there was a boarding-house near ‘that was cheap,’ and Malden, as arranged, pointed out the one near the lamp-post.
He watched her go in, and then sauntered by smoking a cigarette, as any quiet young man might do after a hard day’s work, but keeping the front windows of the house in sight. After a time it began to rain, and he huddled in an archway opposite and saw two sailors go in and one come out. The sailor who came out lit a pipe and spat into the road, and then he heard some one inside lock the door. He was just dreaming to himself about carpet slippers and a kiss, when smash! out came half a window from the upper front room.
