Delphi Complete Works of Elizabeth Gaskell

by Elizabeth Gaskell

  ‘Oh! it was a shocking, terrible murder!’ said Mr. Higgins, not raising his look from the fire, but gazing on with his eyes dilated till the whites were seen all round them. ‘A terrible, terrible murder! I wonder what will become of the murderer? I can fancy the red glowing centre of that fire-look and see how infinitely distant it seems, and how the distance magnifies it into something awful and unquenchable.’

  ‘My dear sir, you are feverish; how you shake and shiver !’ said Mr. Davis, thinking privately that his companion had symptoms of fever, and that he was wandering in his mind.

  ‘Oh, no!’ said Mr. Higgins. ‘I am not feverish. It is the night which is so cold.’ And for a time he talked with Mr. Davis about the article in the Gentleman’s Magazine, for he was rather a reader himself, and could take more interest in Mr. Davis’s pursuits than most of the people at Barford. At length it drew near to ten, and Mr. Davis rose up to go home to his lodgings.

  ‘No, Davis, don’t go. I want you here. We will have a bottle of port together, and that will put Saunders into good humour. I want to tell you about this murder,’ he continued, dropping his voice, and speaking hoarse and low. ‘She was an old woman, and he killed her, sitting reading her Bible by her own fireside!’ He looked at Mr. Davis with a strange searching gaze, as if trying to find some sympathy in the horror which the idea presented to him.

  ‘Who do you mean, my dear sir? What is this murder you are so full of? No one has been murdered here.’

  ‘No, you fool! I tell you it was in Bath!’ said Mr. Higgins, with sudden passion; and then calming himself to most velvet-smoothness of manner, he laid his hand on Mr. Davis’s knee, there, as they sat by the fire, and gently detaining him, began the narration of the crime he was so full of; but his voice and manner were constrained to a stony quietude: he never looked in Mr. Davis’s face; once or twice, as Mr. Davis remembered afterwards, his grip tightened like a compressing vice.

  ‘She lived in a small house in a quiet old-fashioned street, she and her maid. People said she was a good old woman; but for all that, she hoarded and hoarded, and never gave to the poor. Mr. Davis, it is wicked not to give to the poor----wicked----wicked, is it not? I always give to the poor, for once I read in the Bible that “Charity covereth a multitude of sins”. The wicked old woman never gave, but hoarded her money, and saved, and saved. Some one heard of it; I say she threw temptation in his way, and God will punish her for it. And this man----or it might be a woman, who knows?----and this person heard also that she went to church in the mornings, and her maid in the afternoons; and so----while the maid was at church, and the street and the house quite still, and the darkness of a winter afternoon coming on----she was nodding over the Bible----and that, mark you! is a sin, and one that God will avenge sooner or later; and a step came in the dusk up the stair, and that person I told you of stood in the room. At first he----no! At first, it is supposed----for, you understand, all this is mere guess-work----it is supposed that he asked her civilly enough to give him her money, or to tell him where it was; but the old miser defied him, and would not ask for mercy and give up her keys, even when he threatened her, but looked him in the face as if he had been a baby----Oh, God! Mr. Davis, I once dreamt when I was a little innocent boy that I should commit a crime like this, and I wakened up crying; and my mother comforted me-that is the reason I tremble so now----that and the cold, for it is very very cold!’

  ‘But did he murder the old lady?’ asked Mr. Davis. ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but I am interested by your story.’

  ‘Yes! he cut her throat; and there she lies yet in her quiet little parlour, with her face upturned and all ghastly white, in the middle of a pool of blood. Mr. Davis, this wine is no better than water; I must have some brandy!’

  Mr. Davis was horror-struck by the story, which seemed to have fascinated him as much as it had done his companion.

  ‘Have they got any clue to the murderer?’ said he. Mr. Higgins drank down half a tumbler of raw brandy before he answered.

  ‘No! no clue whatever. They will never be able to discover him; and I should not wonder, Mr. Davis----should not wonder if he repented after all, and did bitter penance for his crime; and if so----will there be mercy for him at the last day?’

  ‘God knows!’ said Mr. Davis, with solemnity. ‘It is an awful story,’ continued he, rousing himself; ‘I hardly like to leave this warm light room and go out into the darkness after hearing it. But it must be done,’ buttoning on his greatcoat------I can only say I hope and trust they will find out the murderer and hang him------If you’ll take my advice, Mr. Higgins, you’ll have your bed warmed, and drink a treacle-posset just the last thing; and, if you’ll allow me, I’ll send you my answer to Philologus before it goes up to old Urban.’

  The next morning, Mr. Davis went to call on Miss Pratt, who was not very well; and, by way of being agreeable and entertaining, he related to her all he had heard the night before about the murder at Bath; and really he made a very pretty connected story out of it, and interested Miss Pratt very much in the fate of the old lady----partly because of a similarity in their situations; for she also privately hoarded money, and had but one servant, and stopped at home alone on Sunday afternoons to allow her servant to go to church.

  ‘And when did all this happen?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know if Mr. Higgins named the day; and yet I think it must have been on this very last Sunday.’

  ‘And to-day is Wednesday. Ill news travels fast.’

  ‘Yes, Mr. Higgins thought it might have been in the London newspaper.’

  ‘That it could never be. Where did Mr. Higgins learn all about it?’

  ‘I don’t know; I did not ask. I think he only came home yesterday: he had been south to collect his rents, somebody said.’

  Miss Pratt grunted. She used to vent her dislike and suspicions of Mr. Higgins in a grunt whenever his name was mentioned.

  ‘Well, I shan’t see you for some days. Godfred Merton has asked me to go and stay with him and his sister; and I think it will do me good. Besides,’ added she, ‘these winter evenings----and these murderers at large in the country----I don’t quite like living with only Peggy to call to in case of need.’

  Miss Pratt went to stay with her cousin, Mr. Merton. He was an active magistrate, and enjoyed his reputation as such. One day he came in, having just received his letters.

  ‘Bad account of the morals of your little town here, Jessy!’ said he, touching one of his letter. ‘You’ve either a murderer among you, or some friend of a murderer. Here’s a poor old lady at Bath had her throat cut last Sunday week; and I’ve a letter from the Home Office, asking to lend them “my very efficient aid”, as they are pleased to call it, towards finding out the culprit. It seems he must have been thirsty, and of a comfortable jolly turn; for before going to his horrid work he tapped a barrel of ginger wine the old lady had set by to work; and he wrapped the spigot round with a piece of a letter taken out of his pocket, as may be supposed; and this piece of a letter was found afterwards; there are only these letters on the outside, “ns, Esq., -arford, -egwor’h,” which some one has ingeniously made out to mean Barford, near Kegworth. On the other side there is some allusion to a race-horse, I conjecture, though the name is singular enough: “Church-and-King-and-down-with-the-Rump.”‘

  Miss Pratt caught at this name immediately; it had hurt her feelings as a dissenter only a few months ago, and she remembered it well.

  ‘Mr. Nat Hearn has----or had (as I am speaking in the witness-box, as it were, I must take care of my tenses), a horse with that ridiculous name.’

  ‘Mr. Nat Hearn,’ repeated Mr. Merton, making a note of the intelligence; then he recurred to his letter from the Home Office again.

  ‘There is also a piece of a small key, broken in the futile attempt to open a desk----well, well. Nothing more of consequence. The letter is what we must rely upon.’

  ‘Mr. Davis said that Mr. Higgins told him----’ Miss Pratt began.

 
‘Higgins!’ exclaimed Mr. Merton, ‘ns. Is it Higgins, the blustering fellow that ran away with Nat Hearn’s sister?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Miss Pratt. ‘But though he has never been a favourite of mine----’

  ‘ns,’ repeated Mr. Merton. ‘It is too horrible to think of; a member of the hunt-kind old Squire Hearn’s son-in-law! Who else have you in Barford with names that end in ns?’

  ‘There’s Jackson, and Higginson, and Blenkinsop, and Davis, and Jones. Cousin! One thing strikes me----how did Mr. Higgins know all about it to tell Mr. Davis on Tuesday what had happened on Sunday afternoon?’

  There is no need to add much more. Those curious in lives of the highwayman may find the name of Higgins as conspicuous among those annals as that of Claude Duval. Kate Hearn’s husband collected his rents on the highway, like many another ‘gentleman’ of the day; but, having been unlucky in one or two of his adventures, and hearing exaggerated accounts of the hoarded wealth of the old lady at Bath, he was led on from robbery to murder, and was hung for his crime at Derby, in 1775.

  He had not been an unkind husband; and his poor wife took lodgings in Derby to be near him in his last moments----his awful last moments. Her old father went with her everywhere but into her husband’s cell; and wrung her heart by constantly accusing himself of having promoted her marriage with a man of whom he knew so little. He abdicated his squireship in favour of his son Nathaniel. Nat was prosperous, and the helpless silly father could be of no use to him; but to his widowed daughter the foolish fond old man was all in all; her knight, her protector, her companion----her most faithful loving companion. Only he ever declined assuming the office of her councellor-shaking his head sadly, and saying----

  ‘Ah! Kate, Kate! if I had had more wisdom to have advised thee better, thou need’st not have been an exile here in Brussels, shrinking from the sight of every English person as if they knew thy story.

  I saw the White House not a month ago; it was to let, perhaps for the twentieth time since Mr. Higgins occupied it; but still the tradition goes in Barford that once upon a time a highwayman lived there, and amassed untold treasures; and that the ill-gotten wealth yet remains walled up in some unknown concealed chamber; but in what part of the house no one knows.

  Will any of you become tenants, and try to find out this mysterious closet? I can furnish the exact address to any applicant who wishes for it.

  TRAITS AND STORIES OF THE HUGUENOTS

  I have always been interested in the conversation of any one who could tell me anything about the Huguenots; and, little by little, I have picked up many fragments of information respecting them. I will just recur to the well-known fact, that five years after Henry the Fourth’s formal abjuration of the Protestant faith, in fifteen hundred and ninety-three, he secured to the French Protestants their religious liberty by the Edict of Nantes. His unworthy son, however, Louis the Thirteenth, refused them the privileges which had been granted to them by this act; and, when reminded of the claims they had, if the promises of Henry the Third and Henry the Fourth were to be regarded, he answered that “the first-named monarch feared them, and the latter loved them; but he neither feared nor loved them.” The extermination of the Huguenots was a favourite project with Cardinal Richelieu, and it was at his instigation that the second siege of Rochelle was undertaken - known even to the most careless student of history for the horrors of famine which the besieged endured. Miserably disappointed as they were at the failure of the looked-for assistance from England, the mayor of the town, Guiton, rejected the conditions of peace which Cardinal Richelieu offered: namely, that they would raze their fortifications to the ground, and suffer the Catholics to enter. But there was a traitorous faction in the town; and, on Guiton’s rejection of the terms, this faction collected in one night a crowd of women, and children, and aged persons, and drove them beyond the lines; they were useless, and yet they ate food. Driven out from the beloved city, tottering, faint, and weary, they were fired at by the enemy; and the survivors came pleading back to the walls of Rochelle, pleading for a quiet shelter to die in, even if their death were caused by hunger. When two-thirds of the inhabitants had perished; when the survivors were insufficient to bury their dead; when ghastly corpses outnumbered the living - miserable, glorious Rochelle, stronghold of the Huguenots, opened its gates to receive the Roman Catholic Cardinal, who celebrated mass in the church of St. Marguerite, once the beloved sanctuary of Protestant worship. As we cling to the memory of the dead, so did the Huguenots remember Rochelle. Years - long years of suffering - gone by, a village sprang up, not twenty miles from New York, and the name of that village was New Rochelle; and the old men told with tears of the suffering their parents had undergone when they were little children, far away across the sea, in the “pleasant” land of France.

  Richelieu was otherwise occupied after this second siege of Rochelle, and had to put his schemes for the extermination of the Huguenots on one side. So they lived in a kind of trembling, uncertain peace during the remainder of the reign of Louis the Thirteenth. But they strove to avert persecution by untiring submission. It was not until sixteen hundred and eighty-three that the Huguenots of the south of France resolved to profess their religion, and refuse any longer to be registered among those of the Roman Catholic faith; to be martyrs rather than apostates or hypocrites. On an appointed Sabbath, the old deserted Huguenot churches were re-opened; nay, those in ruins, of which but a few stones remained to tell the tale of having once been holy ground, were peopled with attentive hearers, listening to the word of God as preached by reformed ministers. Languedoc, the Cevennes, Dauphiny, seemed alive with Huguenots - even as the Highlands were, at the chieftain’s call, alive with armed men, whose tartans had been hidden but a moment before in the harmonious and blending colours of the heather.

  Dragonnades took place, and cruelties were perpetrated which it is as well, for the honour of human nature, should be forgotten. Twenty-four thousand conversions were announced to Le Grand Louis, who fully believed in them. The more far-seeing Madame de Maintenon hinted at her doubts in the famous speech, “Even if the fathers are hypocrites, the children will be Catholics.”

  And then came the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. A multitude of weak reasons were alleged, as is generally the case where there is not one that is really good, or presentable: such as that the Edict was never meant to be perpetual; that (by the blessing of Heaven and the dragonnades) the Huguenots had returned to the true faith, therefore the Edict was useless - a mere matter of form, &c. &c.

  As a “mere matter of form,” some penalties were decreed against the professors of the extinct heresy. Every Huguenot place of worship was to be destroyed; every minister who refused to conform was to be sent to the Hôpitaux de Forçats at Marseilles and at Valance. If he had been noted for his zeal he was to be considered “obstinate,” and sent to slavery for life in such of the West-Indian islands as belonged to the French. The children of Huguenot parents were to be taken from them by force, and educated by the Roman Catholic monks or nuns. These are but a few of the enactments contained in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

  And now come in some of the traditions which I have heard and collected.

  A friend of mine, a descendant from some of the Huguenots who succeeded in emigrating to England, has told me the following particulars of her great-great-grandmother’s escape. This lady’s father was a Norman farmer, or rather small landed proprietor. His name was Lefebvre; he had two sons, grown men, stout and true; able to protect themselves, and choose their own line of conduct. But he had also one little daughter, Magdalen, the child of his old age, and the darling of his house, keeping it alive and glad with her innocent prattle. His small estate was far away from any large town, with its corn-fields and orchards surrounding the old ancestral house. There was plenty always in it; and though the wife was an invalid, there was always a sober cheerfulness present, to give a charm to the abundance.

  The family Lefebvre lived almost entirely on t
he produce of the estate, and had little need for much communication with their nearest neighbours, with whom, however, as kindly well-meaning people, they were on good terms, although they differed in their religion. In those days, coffee was scarcely known, even in large cities; honey supplied the place of sugar; and for the pottage, the bouilli, the vegetables, the salad, the fruit, the garden, farm, and orchards of the Lefebvres was all-sufficient. The woollen cloth was spun by the men of the house on winter’s evenings, standing by the great wheel, and carefully and slowly turning it to secure evenness of thread. The women took charge of the linen, gathering and drying, and beating the bad-smelling hemp, the ugliest crop that grew about the farm; and reserving the delicate blue-flowered flax for the fine thread needed for the daughter’s trousseau; for as soon as a woman-child was born, the mother, lying too faint to work, smiled as she planned the web of dainty linen, which was to be woven at Rouen, out of the flaxen thread of gossamer fineness, to be spun by no hand, as you may guess, but that mother’s own. And the farm maidens took pride in the store of sheets and table napery which they were to have a share in preparing for the future wedding of the little baby, sleeping serene in her warm cot by her mother’s side. Such being the self-sufficient habits of the Norman farmers, it was no wonder that, in the eventful year of sixteen hundred and eighty-five, Lefebvre remained ignorant for many days of that Revocation which was stirring the whole souls of his co-religionists. But there was to be a cattle fair at Avranches, and he needed a barren cow to fatten up and salt for the winter’s provision. Accordingly, the large-boned Norman horse was accoutred, summer as it was, with all its paraphernalia of high-peaked wooden saddle, blue sheep-skin, scarlet worsted fringe and tassels; and the farmer Lefebvre, slightly stiff in his limbs after sixty winters, got on from the horse-block by the stable wall, his little daughter Magdalen nodding and kissing her hand as he rode away. When he arrived at the fair in the great place before the cathedral in Avranches, he was struck with the absence of many of those who were united to him by the bond of their common persecuted religion; and on the faces of the Huguenot farmers who were there was an expression of gloom and sadness. In answer to his inquiries, he learnt for the first time of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He and his sons could sacrifice anything - would be proud of martyrdom, if need were - but the clause which cut him to the heart was that which threatened that his pretty, innocent sweet Magdalen might be taken from him and consigned to the teachings of a convent. A convent, to the Huguenots’ excited prejudices, implied a place of dissolute morals, as well as of idolatrous doctrine.