The effect of the attack was appalling.
My mother-in-law, who had by this time finished the last morsel of the crab, sat for a moment staring and speechless, and for the only time in her life burst into tears.
Her tears were not nearly so effective upon me as Lucy’s, and I sat unmoved. Cousin Jemima, with an inborn tendency to rest secure on the domineering side, said, audibly:
“Served you quite right, Cousin Kate, for interrupting the man at his supper.”
Lucy said nothing, but looked at me sympathetically.
Presently my mother-in-law, with a great effort, pulled herself together and said:
“Well, Augustus, perhaps you are right. We have suffered enough about Old Hoggen to make his name familiar to us.”
* * * *
Indeed we suffered. The whole history of Old Hoggen had for some weeks past been written on our souls in the darkest shade of ink. We had come to Charmouth hoping to find in that fair spot the peace that we yearned for after the turmoil and troubles of the year. With the place we were more than satisfied, for it is a favored spot. In quiet, lazy Dorsetshire it lies, close to the sea, but sheltered from its blasts. The long straggling village of substantial houses runs steeply down the hillside parallel to the seaboard. Everywhere are rivulets of sweet water, everywhere are comfort and seeming plenty. A smiling and industrious peasantry are the normal inhabitants, among whom the good old customs of salutation have not died away. A town-made coat enacts a bob courtesy from the females and a salute in military fashion from the men, for the young men are all militia or volunteers.
We had been at Charmouth some three weeks. Our arrival had caused us to swell with importance, for, from the time we left Axminster in the diurnal omnibus till our being deposited at our pretty cottage, bowered in enticing greenery and rich with old world flowers, our advent seemed to excite interest and attention. Naturally I surmised that the rustic mind was overcome by the evidence of metropolitan high tone manifested in our clothes and air. Lucy put it down—in her own mind which her mother kindly interpreted for her—to the striking all-the-world-over effect of surpassing loveliness. Cousin Jemima attributed it to their respect for blood; and my mother-in-law took it as a just homage to the rare, if not unique, union of birth, grace, gentleness, breeding, talent, wisdom, culture and power—as embodied in herself. We soon found, however, that there was a cause different from all these.
There had lately come to light certain circumstances tending to show that we were objects of suspicion rather than veneration.
Some days before our arrival great excitement had been caused in Charmouth by the disappearance, and, consequently, rumored murder, of an old inhabitant, one Jabez Hoggen, reputed locally to be of vast wealth and miserly in the extreme. This good reputation brought him much esteem, not just in Charmouth alone, but through the country round, from Lyme Regis on the one hand as far as distant Bridport on the other.
Even inland the trumpet note of Old Hoggen’s wealth sounded to Axminster and even to Chard. This good repute of wealth was, however, the only good repute he had, for his social misdoings were so manifold and continuous as to interest all the social stars of Lyme. These are old ladies who inhabit the snug villas in the uplands at Lyme, and who claim as their special right the covered seats on the Madeira walk of that pretty town, and who are so select that they will not even associate with others except in massed groups or nebulae. Old Hoggen’s peccadilloes afforded them a fertile theme for gossip. There was an inexhaustible store of minute and wicked details of this famous sinner.
Year after year Old Hoggen moved among the law-abiding inhabitants of Charmouth, wallowing in his wickedness and adding to his store of goods in the here and ills in the hereafter.
Strange to say, all this time not once—not even once—did the Earth yawn and swallow him. On the contrary, he flourished. No matter what weather came he always benefited. Even if the raid did destroy one of his crops, it made another flourish exceedingly. When there was a storm, he accumulated sea rack; when there was calm, he got fish. Many of his neighbors began to have serious doubts about the Earth ever yawning and swallowing at all; and even the old ladies in Lyme Regis—those who had passed the age of proposals and begun to regret, or at least to reconsider, their youth—sometimes thought that perhaps immortality was a little too harshly condemned after all.
Suddenly this old man disappeared, and Charmouth woke up to the fact that he was the best known, the most respected, the most important person in the place. His ill-doing sank into insignificance, and his good stood revealed in gigantic proportions. Men pointed out his public spirit, the reforms he had instituted, the powers he had developed; women called attention to the tenderness he had always exhibited to their sex, unworthy as had been the examples of the same that had darkened the horizon of his life. More than one wise matron was heard to remark that if his lot in life had been to meet one good woman, instead of those hussies, his manner of life might have been different.
It is a fact worth notice that in the logic of might-have-been, which is pitying woman’s pathway to heaven, the major premise is pitying woman.
However, were his life good or ill, Old Hoggen had disappeared, and murder was naturally suspected. Two suppositions—no one knew whence originating—were current. The most popular was that some of his unhappy companions, knowing of his wealth and greedy of his big gold watch and his diamond ring, had incited to his murder other still more disreputable companions. The alternative belief was that some of his relations—for he was believed to have some, although no one had ever seen or heard of them—had quietly removed him so that in due time they might in legal course become possessed of his heritage.
Consequent upon the latter supposition suspicion attached itself to every newcomer. It was but natural that the vulture-like relatives should appear upon the scene as soon as possible, and eager eyes scanned each fresh arrival. As I soon discovered, my respected connection by marriage, Cousin Jemima, bore a strong resemblance to the missing man, and drew around our pretty resting place the whole curiosity of Charmouth and concentrated there the attention of the secret myrmidons of the law.
In fact, the Charmouth policeman haunted the place, and strange men in slop clothes and regulation boots came from Bridport and Lyme Regis, and even from Axminster itself.
These latter representatives of the intellectual subtlety of Devon, Dorset, and Wilts were indeed men full of wile and cunning of device. The bucolic mind in moments of unbending, when frank admission of incompleteness is a tribute to good fellowship, may sometimes admit that its working are slow, but even in the last stage of utter and conscious drunkenness one quality is insisted on—surety.
Of surety, in simple minds the correlation is tenacity of purpose and belief.
Thus it was that when once the idea of our guilt had been mooted and received, no amount of evidence, direct or circumstantial, could obliterate the idea from the minds of the rustic detectives. These astute men, one by one, each jealous of the other, and carrying on even among themselves the fiction of non-identification, began to seek the evidences of our guilt. It struck me as a curious trait in the inhabitants of the diocese of Salisbury that their primary intellectual effort had one tendency, and that all their other efforts were subordinate to this principle. It may have been that the idea arose from historical contemplation of the beauty of their cathedral and an unconscious effort to emulate the powers of its originators.
Or it may not have been.
But, at all events, their efforts took the shape of measuring. I fail myself to see how their measurements, be they never so accurate, could in anywise have helped them. Further, I can not comprehend how the most rigid and exact scrutiny in this respect could have even suggested a combination of facts whence a spontaneous idea could have emanated. Still, they measured, never ceasing day or night for more than a week, and always surreptitiously. They measured one night the whole of the outside of our cottage. I heard them in the night, out on
the roof, crawling about like gigantic cats, and, although we learned that one man had fallen off the roof and broken his arm, we were never officially informed of the fact. They made incursions into the house, under various pretexts, there to endeavor to measure the interior.
In every case a ruse was adopted. One morning, while we were out bathing, a man called to measure the gas pipes, and, after going through several of the rooms taking the dimensions of the walls, was informed by the servant that there was no gas, not only in the house, but in the village. Not being prepared with a further excuse, he said, with that nonchalance he could assume, that “it was no matter,” and went away. Another time a British workman, as he styled himself, arrayed in cricket flannels and a straw hat, came to look at the kitchen boiler for the landlord, and asked that he might begin on the roof. I saw the inevitable rule and tape measure, and told him that the landlord’s house was next door, and that he would find the boiler buried in the garden. He withdrew, thanking me with effusion, and making a note of the words “buried in the garden” in his notebook.
Another day a man called with fish—he had only one sole and that he carried in his hand. The cook was out and I told him we would have it. He asked if he might go into the garden to skin it. I told him he might, and went out. When I came back in about an hour’s time, I found him there still, measuring away. He had got all the dimensions of the garden and the walls, and was now engaged on the heights of the various flowers. I asked him what the dickens he was doing there still, and why he was measuring. He answered vaguely that he was not measuring.
“Why, man alive,” said I, “don’t tell me such a story—I saw you at it—why, you are doing it still,” as indeed he was.
He stood up and answered me:
“Well, sir, I will tell you why. I was looking to see if I could find room to bury the skin of the sole.”
He had not skinned the sole, which lay on a flag in the hot sunshine, and was beginning to look glassy.
They even measured as well as they could the height of the members of the family. When any of us passed a wall where any of these men were, he immediately spotted some place on the wall of equal height, and the moment we passed, out came the rule and he measured it.
Our cook was asked one night by a tall man to lay her head on his shoulder. She did so, as she told us afterward being so surprised that she did not know what to do. When she came in we saw on her black bonnet a series of reversed numbers in chalk dying away over the temple with 5 ft. 6-1⁄2 in.
Cousin Jemima, who was of a full habit of body—to say the least of it—was one evening stopped in the lane by two men, who put their arms round her waist from opposite sides. She distinctively said that they had something that looked like a long rope marked in yards, or, as she persisted, in chains, which, when she had escaped from them, they examined with seeming anxiety, and made some entry in books which they carried, laughing all the time heartily and digging each other in the ribs as they pointed at her.
Our dog was often measured, and one afternoon there was a terrible caterwauling, which we found to arise from a respectable man trying to weigh our cat in an ouncel, borrowed from a neighboring shop.
My mother-in-law, who had no suspicion whatever that she was an object of suspicion, waxed at times furiously indignant at the rudeness of the loiterers round our door, and now and again comported herself so violently as to cause them serious fright. I was unaware during the time of my courtship that this remarkable woman possessed such a power of invective. She certainly proved herself a consummate actress in concealing it as she did; for during that time of rapture and agony I enjoyed the contemplation and experienced the practical outcome of a sympathy and sweetness as ripe as unalloyed. My wife and I both understood the motives of the local detectives, and always recognized them under their disguises. It was a never-ending source of mirth to us to enjoy the spectacle of Cousin Jemima’s ungratified curiosity, and of my mother-in-law’s periodic anger. For the purposes of our own amusement we filled up the daily blanks caused by the slackness of the executive in keeping perpetually before them the theme of Old Hoggen. I amused myself by keeping a little note book, in which I jotted down all kinds of odd measurements for the purpose of leaving it about sometime to puzzle the detectives.
Thus it came about that the repulsive individuality of Old Hoggen became, in a manner, of interest to us, and his name to be interwoven in the web of our daily converse.
I knew that to mention Old Hoggen to my mother-in-law, when previously influenced by hunger or any collateral vexation, would have the effect of a red rag on a bull, and, as has been seen, I was not disappointed.
Now, however, that supper was over and the crab had been all consumed, I found myself pledged to discover by the morrow a full supply of that succulent food. I did not let the matter distress me, as I anticipated a delightful walk by the shore to Bridport, a walk which I had not yet undertaken. In the morning I awoke early, just a little after daybreak, and, leaving my wife asleep, started on my walk.
The atmosphere of the early dawn was delightful and refreshing, and the sight of the moving sea filled me with a great pleasure, notwithstanding the fact that an ominous shower on the water and a cold wind foretold a coming storm.
At this part of the Dorset coast the sea makes perpetual inroads on the land. As all the country is undulating, the shore presents from the sea an endless succession of steep cliffs, some of which rise by comparison to a scale of moderate grandeur.
The cliffs are either of blue clay or sandstone, which soft or friable material perpetually gives way under the undermining influence of the tides assisted by the exfiltration of springs, causing an endless series of moraines. The beach is either of fine gravel or of shingle, save at places where banks of half-formed rock full of fossils run into the sea.
The shingle, which forms the major portion of the road, makes walking at times trying work.
I passed by the target for a rifle practice, and the spot reserved tacitly as the bathing place for gentlemen, and so on under the first headland, the summits of whose bare yellow cliff is fringed with dark pine trees bent eastwards by the prevailing westerly breeze.
Here the shingle began to get heavier. It had been driven by successive tides and storms into a mass like a snow drift, and it was necessary to walk along the top of the ridge whence the pebbles rolled down every step.
The wind had now begun to rise, and as I went onward the waves increased in force till the whole shore was strewn with foam swept from the crests of the waves. Sometimes great beds of seaweed—a rare commodity on the Dorset coast—rose and fell as the waves rolled in and broke.
On I went as sturdily as I could. The blue-black earth of the Charmouth cliffs had now given place to sandstone, and great boulders shaped like mammoth bones—as indeed they probably were—cumbered the foreshore. I stopped to examine some of these, ostensibly from scientific interest, but in reality to rest myself. I was now getting a little tired, and more than a little hungry, for when starting I had determined to eat my breakfast at Bridport, and to test the culinary capabilities of the place.
As I sat on the stones looking seaward, I noticed something washing in and out among the boulders. On examination it proved to be a hat—a human hat. I hooked it in with a piece of driftwood. I turned it over, and in turning it saw something white stuck within the leather lining. Gingerly enough I made an examination, and found the white mass to be some papers, on the outside of one of which was the name “J. Hoggen.”
“Hullo!” said I to myself. “Here is some news of Old Hoggen at last.” I took the papers out, carefully squeezed the wet out of them, as well as I could between flat stones, and put them in the pocket of my shooting jacket. I placed the hat on a boulder and looked round to see if I could find any further signs of the missing man. All the while the breeze was freshening and the waves came rolling in in increasing volume.
Again I saw, some twenty yards out, something black floating, bobbing up and down wi
th each wave. After a while I made it out to be the body of a man. By this time my excitement had grown to intensity, and I could hardly await the incoming of the body borne by the waves.
On and on it came, advancing a little with each wave, till at last it got so close that reaching out I hooked part of the clothing with my piece of timber, and pulled the mass close to the shore.
Then I took hold of the collar of the coat and pulled. The cloth, rotten with the sea water, tore away, and left the piece in my hand.
With much effort—for I had to be very careful—I brought the body up on the beach, and began to make an accurate examination of it.
While doing so I found in the pocket a tape measure, and it occurred to me that I must fulfill all the requirements of the local police, and so began to take dimensions of the corpse.
I measured the height, the length of the limbs, of the hands and feet. I took the girth of the shoulders and the waist, and, in fact, noted in my pocketbook a sufficiency of detail to justify a tailor in commencing sartorial operations on a full scale. Some of the dimensions struck me at the time as rather strange, but having verified the measurements I noted them down.
On examination of the clothes and pockets, I found the massive gold watch hanging on the chain and the big diamond ring, to whose power of inspiring greed local opinion had attributed the murder. These I put in my pocket together with the purse, studs, papers and money of the dead man. In making the examination the coat became torn, revealing a mass of bank notes between cloth and lining: in fact, the whole garment was quilted with them. There was also a small note case containing the necessary papers for a voyage to Queensland by a ship leaving Southampton the previous week.
These discoveries I thought so valuable that I felt it my duty to try to bring the body to the nearest place of authority, which I considered would probably be Chidiock, a village on the Bridport road which I had seen upon the map.
The Bram Stoker Megapack Page 215
