With every encouragement of this kind from the old squire, it took everybody rather by surprise when, one morning, it was discovered that Miss Catherine Hearn was missing; and when, according to the usual fashion in such cases, a note was found, saying that she had eloped with ‘the man of her heart’, and gone to Gretna Green,11 no one could imagine why she could not quietly have stopped at home, and been married in the parish church. She had always been a romantic, sentimental girl; very pretty and very affectionate, and very much spoiled, and very much wanting in common sense. Her indulgent father was deeply hurt at this want of confidence in his never-varying affection; but when his son came, hot with indignation from the baronet’s (his future father-in-law’s house, where every form of law and of ceremony was to accompany his own impending marriage), Squire Hearn pleaded the cause of the young couple with imploring cogency, and protested that it was a piece of spirit in his daughter, which he admired and was proud of. However, it ended with Mr Nathaniel Hearn’s declaring that he and his wife would have nothing to do with his sister and her husband. ‘Wait will you’ve seen him, Nat!’ said the old squire, trembling with his distressful anticipations of family discord. ‘He’s an excuse for any girl. Only ask Sir Harry’s opinion of him.’ ‘Confound Sir Harry! So that a man sits his horse well, Sir Harry cares nothing about anything else. Who is this man – this fellow? Where does he come from? What are his means? Who are his family?’
‘He comes from the south – Surrey or Somersetshire, I forget which; and he pays his way well and liberally. There’s not a tradesmen in Barford but says he cares no more for money than for water; he spends like a prince, Nat. I don’t know who his family are; but he seals with a coat of arms, which may tell you if you want to know; and he goes regularly to collect his rents from his estates in the south.12 Oh, Nat! if you would but be friendly, I should be as well pleased with Kitty’s marriage as any father in the county.’
Mr Nathaniel Hearn gloomed, and muttered an oath or two to himself. The poor old father was reaping the consequences of his weak indulgence to his two children. Mr and Mrs Nathaniel Hearn kept apart from Catherine and her husband; and Squire Hearn durst never ask them to Levison Hall, though it was his own house. Indeed, he stole away as if he were a culprit whenever he went to visit the White House; and if he passed a night there, he was fain to equivocate when he returned home the next day; an equivocation which was well interpreted by the surly, proud Nathaniel. But the younger Mr and Mrs Hearn were the only people who did not visit at the White House. Mr and Mrs Higgins were decidedly more popular than their brother and sister-in-law. She made a very pretty, sweet-tempered hostess, and her education had not been such as to make her intolerant of any want of refinement in the associates who gathered round her husband. She had gentle smiles for townspeople as well as county people; and unconsciously played an admirable second in her husband’s project of making himself universally popular.
But there is some one to make ill-natured remarks, and draw ill-natured conclusions from very simple premises, in every place; and in Barford this bird of ill-omen was a Miss Pratt. She did not hunt – so Mr Higgins’s admirable riding did not call out her admiration. She did not drink – so the well-selected wines, so lavishly dispensed among his guests, could never mollify Miss Pratt. She could not bear comic songs, or buffo13 stories – so, in that way, her approbation was impregnable. And these three secrets of popularity constituted Mr Higgins’s great charm. Miss Pratt sat and watched. Her face looked immovably grave at the end of any of Mr Higgins’s best stories; but there was a keen, needle-like glance of her unwinking little eyes, which Mr Higgins felt rather than saw, and which made him shiver, even on a hot day, when it fell upon him. Miss Pratt was a Dissenter,14 and, to propitiate this female Mordecai,15 Mr Higgins asked the Dissenting minister whose services she attended, to dinner; kept himself and his company in good order; gave a handsome donation to the poor of the chapel. All in vain – Miss Pratt stirred not a muscle more of her face towards graciousness; and Mr Higgins was conscious that, in spite of all his open efforts to captivate Mr Davis, there was a secret influence on the other side, throwing in doubts and suspicions, and evil interpretations of all he said or did. Miss Pratt, the little, plain old maid, living on eighty pounds a year, was the thorn in the popular Mr Higgins’s side, although she had never spoken one uncivil word to him; indeed, on the contrary, had treated him with a stiff and elaborate civility.
The thorn – the grief to Mrs Higgins was this. They had no children! Oh! how she would stand and envy the careless, busy motion of half-a-dozen children; and then, when observed, move on with a deep, deep sigh of yearning regret. But it was as well.
It was noticed that Mr Higgins was remarkably careful of his health. He ate, drank, took exercise, rested, by some secret rules of his own; occasionally bursting into an excess, it is true, but only on rare occasions – such as when he returned from visiting his estates in the south, and collecting his rents. That unusual exertion and fatigue – for there were no stage-coaches16 within forty miles of Barford, and he, like most country gentlemen of that day, would have preferred riding if there had been – seemed to require some strange excess to compensate for it; and rumours went through the town, that he shut himself up, and drank enormously for some days after his return. But no one was admitted to these orgies.
One day – they remembered it well afterwards – the hounds met not far from the town; and the fox was found in a part of the wild heath, which was beginning to be enclosed17 by a few of the more wealthy townspeople, who were desirous of building themselves houses rather more in the country than those they had hitherto lived in. Among these, the principal was a Mr Dudgeon, the attorney of Barford, and the agent for all the county families about. The firm of Dudgeon had managed the leases, the marriage settlements and the wills, of the neighbourhood for generations. Mr Dudgeon’s father had the responsibility of collecting the land-owners’ rents just as the present Mr Dudgeon had at the time of which I speak; and as his son and his son’s son have done since. Their business was an hereditary estate to them; and with something of the old feudal feeling, was mixed a kind of proud humility at their position towards the squires whose family secrets they had mastered, and the mysteries of whose fortunes and estates were better known to the Messrs Dudgeon than to themselves.
Mr John Dudgeon had built himself a house on Wildbury Heath – a mere cottage, as he called it; but though only two storeys high, it spread out far and wide, and work-people from Derby had been sent for on purpose to make the inside as complete as possible. The gardens, too, were exquisite in arrangement, if not very extensive; and not a flower was grown in them, but of the rarest species. It must have been somewhat of a mortification to the owner of this dainty place when, on the day of which I speak, the fox after a long race, during which he had described a circle of many miles, took refuge in the garden; but Mr Dudgeon put a good face on the matter when a gentleman hunter, with the careless insolence of the squires of those days and that place, rode across the velvet lawn, and tapping at the window of the dining-room with his whip-handle, asked permission – no! that is not it – rather, informed Mr Dudgeon of their intention – to enter his garden in a body, and have the fox unearthed. Mr Dudgeon compelled himself to smile assent, with the grace of a masculine Griselda;18 and then he hastily gave orders to have all that the house afforded of provision set out for luncheon, guessing rightly enough that a six hours’ run would give even homely fare an acceptable welcome. He bore without wincing the entrance of the dirty boots into his exquisitely clean rooms; he only felt grateful for the care with which Mr Higgins strode about, laboriously and noiselessly moving on the tip of his toes, as he reconnoitred the rooms with a curious eye.
‘I’m going to build a house myself, Dudgeon; and, upon my word, I don’t think I could take a better model than yours.’
‘Oh! my poor cottage would be too small to afford any hints for such a house as you would wish to build, Mr Higgins,’ replied
Mr Dudgeon, gently rubbing his hands nevertheless at the compliment.
‘Not at all! not at all! Let me see. You have dining-room, drawing-room, –’ he hesitated, and Mr Dudgeon filled up the blank as he expected.
‘Four sitting-rooms and the bed-rooms. But allow me to show you over the house. I confess I took some pains in arranging it, and, though far smaller than what you would require, it may, nevertheless, afford you some hints.’
So they left the eating gentlemen with their mouths and their plates quite full, and the scent of the fox overpowering that of the hasty rashers of ham; and they carefully inspected all the ground-floor rooms. Then Mr Dudgeon said, –
‘If you are not tired, Mr Higgins – it is rather my hobby, so you must pull me up if you are – we will go upstairs, and I will show you my sanctum.’
Mr Dudgeon’s sanctum was the centre room, over the porch, which formed a balcony, and which was carefully filled with choice flowers in pots. Inside, there were all kinds of elegant contrivances for hiding the real strength of all the boxes and chests required by the particular nature of Mr Dudgeon’s business; for although his office was in Barford, he kept (as he informed Mr Higgins) what was the most valuable here, as being safer than an office which was locked up and left every night. But, as Mr Higgins reminded him with a sly poke in the side, when next they met, his own house was not over secure. A fortnight after the gentlemen of the Barford hunt lunched there, Mr Dudgeon’s strong box, – in his sanctum upstairs, with the mysterious spring-bolt to the window invented by himself, and the secret of which was only known to the inventor and a few of his most intimate friends, to whom he had proudly shown it; – this strong-box, containing the collected Christmas rents of half-a-dozen landlords, (there was then no bank nearer than Derby,) was rifled; and the secretly rich Mr Dudgeon had to stop his agent in his purchases of paintings by Flemish artists, because the money was required to make good the missing rents.
The Dogberries and Verges19 of those days were quite incapable of obtaining any clue to the robber or robbers; and though one or two vagrants were taken up and brought before Mr Dunover and Mr Higgins, the magistrates who usually attended in the court-room at Barford, there was no evidence brought against them, and after a couple of nights’ durance in the lock-ups they were set at liberty. But it became a standing joke with Mr Higgins to ask Mr Dudgeon, from time to time, whether he could recommend him a place of safety for his valuables; or, if he had made any more inventions lately for securing houses from robbers.
About two years after this time – about seven years after Mr Higgins had been married – one Tuesday evening, Mr Davis was sitting reading the news in the coffee-room of the George Inn. He belonged to a club of gentlemen who met there occasionally to play at whist, to read what few newspapers and magazines were published in those days, to chat about the market at Derby, and prices all over the country. This Tuesday night it was a black frost, and few people were in the room. Mr Davis was anxious to finish an article in the Gentleman’s Magazine:20 indeed, he was making extracts from it, intending to answer it, and yet unable with his small income to purchase a copy. So he stayed late; it was past nine, and at ten o’clock the room was closed. But while he wrote, Mr Higgins came in. He was pale and haggard with cold. Mr Davis, who had had for some time sole possession of the fire, moved politely on one side, and handed to the new comer the sole London newspaper which the room afforded. Mr Higgins accepted it, and made some remark on the intense coldness of the weather; but Mr Davis was too full of his article, and intended reply, to fall into conversation readily. Mr Higgins hitched his chair nearer to the fire, and put his feet on the fender, giving an audible shudder. He put the newspaper on one end of the table near him, and sat gazing into the red embers of the fire, crouching down over them as if his very marrow were chilled. At length he said, –
‘There is no account of the murder at Bath in that paper?’ Mr Davis, who had finished taking his notes, and was preparing to go, stopped short, and asked, –
‘Has there been a murder at Bath? No! I have not seen anything of it – who was murdered?’
‘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.
‘Whom 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 id="page_45" give to the poor, for once I read in the Bible that “Charity covereth a multitude of sins.”21 The wicked old woman never gave, but hoarded her money, and saved and saved. Some one heard of it; I say she threw a 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 her 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 hi
s 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 – I 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 id="page_46" room and go out into the darkness after hearing it. But it must be done’ – buttoning on his great coat – ‘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 posset22 just the last thing; and, if you’ll allow me, I’ll send you my answer to Philologus23 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.