The trail of the serpent
witnesses.
The witnesses for the defence were few. A Frenchman, who represented
himself as a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, failed signally in an
endeavour to prove an _alibi_, and considerably damaged the defence.
Other witnesses appeared, who swore to having known the prisoner
in Paris the year of the murder. They could not say they had seen
him during the November of that year--it might have been earlier,
it might have been later. On being cross-examined, they broke down
ignominiously, and acknowledged that it might not have been that year
at all. But they _had_ known him in Paris _about_ that period. They
had always believed him to be a Frenchman. They had always understood
that his father fell at Waterloo, in the ranks of the Old Guard. On
cross-examination they all owned to having heard him at divers periods
speak English. He had, in fact, spoken it fluently, yes, even like an
Englishman. On further cross-examination it also appeared that he did
not like being thought an Englishman; that he would insist vehemently
upon his French extraction; that nobody knew who he was, or whence
he came; and that all anyone did know of him was what he himself had
chosen to state.
The defence was long and laboured. The prisoner’s counsel did not enter
into the question of the murder having been committed by Jabez North,
or not having been committed by Jabez North. What he endeavoured to
show was, that the prisoner at the bar was not Jabez North; but that he
was a victim to one of those cases of mistaken identity of which there
are so many on record both in English and foreign criminal archives. He
cited the execution of the Frenchman Joseph Lesurges, for the murder
of the Courier of Lyons. He spoke of the case of Elizabeth Canning,
in which a crowd of witnesses on either side persisted in supporting
entirely conflicting statements, without any evident motive whatsoever.
He endeavoured to dissect the evidence of Mr. William Withers; he
sneered at that worthy citizen’s wholesale slaughter of the English
of her most gracious Majesty and subjects. He tried to overthrow that
gentleman by ten minutes on the wrong side of the Slopperton clocks;
he did his best to damage him by puzzling him as to whether the truck
he spoke of had two legs and one wheel, or two wheels and one leg:
but he tried in vain. Mr. Withers was not to be damaged; he stood as
firm as a rock, and still swore that he carried the dead body of Jim
Lomax out of Blind Peter and on to the heath, and that the man who
commanded him so to do was the prisoner at the bar. Neither was Mr.
Augustus Darley to be damaged; nor yet the landlord of the Bargeman’s
Delight, who, in spite of all cross-examination, preserved a gloomy and
resolute attitude, and declared that “that young man at the bar, which
his hair was then light, had a row with a young woman in the tap-room,
and throwed that there gold coin to her, which she chucked it back
savage.” In short, the defence, though it lasted two hours and a half,
was a very lame one; and a close observer might have seen one flash
from the blue eyes of the man standing at the bar, which glanced in
the direction of the eloquent Mr. Prius, Q.C., as he uttered the last
words of his peroration, revengeful and murderous enough, brief though
it was, to give to the spectator some idea that the Count de Marolles,
innocent and injured victim of circumstantial evidence as he might be,
was not the safest person in the world to offend.
The judge delivered his charge to the jury, and they retired.
There was breathless impatience in the court for three-quarters of an
hour; such impatience that the three-quarters seemed to be three entire
hours, and some of the spectators would have it that the clock had
stopped. Once more the jury took their places.
“Guilty!” A recommendation to mercy? No! Mercy was not for such as he.
Not man’s mercy. Oh, Heaven be praised that there is One whose mercy is
as far above the mercy of the tenderest of earth’s creatures as heaven
is above that earth. Who shall say where is the man so wicked he may
not hope for compassion _there_?
The judge put on the black cap and delivered the sentence--
“To be hanged by the neck!”
The Count de Marolles looked round at the crowd. It was beginning to
disperse, when he lifted his slender ringed white hand. He was about
to speak. The crowd, swaying hither and thither before, stopped as one
man. As one man, nay, as one surging wave of the ocean, changed, in a
breath, to stone. He smiled a bitter mocking defiant smile.
“Worthy citizens of Slopperton,” he said, his clear enunciation ringing
through the building distinct and musical, “I thank you for the trouble
you have taken this day on my account. I have played a great game, and
I have lost a great stake; but, remember, I first won that stake, and
for eight years held it and enjoyed it. I have been the husband of
one of the most beautiful and richest women in France. I have been a
millionaire, and one of the wealthiest merchant princes of the wealthy
south. I started from the workhouse of this town; I never in my life
had a friend to help me or a relation to advise me. To man I owe
nothing. To God I owe only this, a will as indomitable as the stars He
made, which have held their course through all time. Unloved, unaided,
unprayed for, unwept; motherless, fatherless, sisterless, brotherless,
friendless; I have taken my own road, and have kept to it; defying the
earth on which I have lived, and the unknown Powers above my head. That
road has come to an end, and brought me--here! So be it! I suppose,
after all, the unknown Powers are strongest! Gentlemen, I am ready.” He
bowed and followed the officials who led him from the dock to a coach
waiting for him at the entrance to the court. The crowd gathered round
him with scared faces and eager eyes.
The last Slopperton saw of the Count de Marolles was a pale handsome
face, a sardonic smile, and the delicate white hand which rested upon
the door of the hackney-coach.
Next morning, very early, men with grave faces congregated at
street-corners, and talked together earnestly. Through Slopperton like
wildfire spread the rumour of something, which had only been darkly
hinted at the gaol.
The prisoner had destroyed himself!
Later in the afternoon it was known that he had bled himself to death
by means of a lancet not bigger than a pin, which he had worn for
years concealed in a chased gold ring of massive form and exquisite
workmanship.
The gaoler had found him, at six o’clock on the morning after his
trial, seated, with his bloodless face lying on the little table of his
cell, white, tranquil, and dead.
The agents from an exhibition of wax-works, and several phrenologists,
came to look at and to take casts of his head, and masks of the
handsome and aristocratic face. One of the phrenologists, who had given
an opinion on his cerebral development ten years before, when Mr. Jabez
North was considered a model of all Sloppertonian virtues and graces,
and who had been treated with ignominy for that very opinion, was now
in the highest spirits, and introduced the whole story into a series of
lectures, which were afterwards very popular. The Count de Marolles,
with very long eyelashes, very small feet, and patent-leather boots, a
faultless Stultsian evening costume, a white waistcoat, and any number
of rings, was much admired in the Chamber of Horrors at the eminent
wax-work exhibition above mentioned, and was considered well worth the
extra sixpence for admission. Young ladies fell in love with him, and
vowed that a being--they called him a being--with such dear blue glass
eyes, with beautiful curly eyelashes, and specks of lovely vermilion
in each corner, could never have committed a horrid murder, but was,
no doubt, the innocent victim of that cruel circumstantial evidence.
Mr. Splitters put the Count into a melodrama in four periods--not
acts, but periods: 1. Boyhood--the Workhouse. 2. Youth--the School.
3. Manhood--the Palace. 4. Death--the Dungeon. This piece was very
popular, and as Mr. Percy Cordonner had prophesied, the Count was
represented as living _en permanence_ in Hessian boots with gold
tassels; and as always appearing, with a spirited disregard for the
unities of time and space, two or three hundred miles distant from
the spot in which he had appeared five minutes before, and performing
in scene four the very action which his foes had described as being
already done in scene three. But the transpontine audiences to whom the
piece was represented were not in the habit of asking questions, and
as long as you gave them plenty of Hessian boots and pistol-shots for
their money, you might snap your fingers at Aristotle’s ethics, and all
the Greek dramatists into the bargain. What would they have cored for
the classic school? Would they have given a thank you for “Zaire, vous
pleurez!” or “Qu’il mourut!” No; give them enough blue fire and honest
British sentiment, with plenty of chintz waistcoats and top-boots, and
you might laugh Corneille and Voltaire to scorn, and be sure of a long
run on the Surrey side of the water.
So the race was run, and, after all, the cleverest horse was not the
winner. Where was the Countess de Marolles during her husband’s trial?
Alas! Valerie, thine has been a troubled youth, but it may be that a
brighter fate is yet in store for thee!
CHAPTER VII.
FAREWELL TO ENGLAND.
SCARCELY had Slopperton subsided in some degree from the excitement
into which it had been thrown by the trial and suicide of Raymond de
Marolles, when it was again astir with news, which was, if anything,
more exciting. It is needless to say that after the trial and
condemnation of De Marolles, there was not a little regretful sympathy
felt by the good citizens of Slopperton for their unfortunate townsman,
Richard Marwood, who, after having been found guilty of a murder he had
never committed, had perished, as the story went, in a futile attempt
to escape from the asylum in which he had been confined. What, then,
were the feelings of Slopperton when, about a month after the suicide
of the murderer of Montague Harding, a paragraph appeared in one of the
local papers which stated positively that Mr. Richard Marwood was still
alive, he having succeeded in escaping from the county asylum?
This was enough. Here was a hero of romance indeed; here was innocence
triumphant for once in real life, as on the mimic scene. Slopperton was
wild with one universal desire to embrace so distinguished a citizen.
The local papers of the following week were full of the subject,
and Richard Marwood was earnestly solicited to appear once more in
his native town, that every inhabitant thereof, from the highest to
the lowest, might be enabled to testify heartfelt sympathy for his
undeserved misfortunes, and sincere delight in his happy restoration to
name and fame.
The hero was not long in replying to the friendly petition of the
inhabitants of his native place. A letter from Richard appeared in one
of the papers, in which he stated that as he was about to leave England
for a considerable period, perhaps for ever, he should do himself the
honour of responding to the kind wishes of his friends, and once more
shake hands with the acquaintance of his youth before he left his
native country.
The Sloppertonian Jack-in-the-green, assisted by the rather stalwart
damsels in dirty pink gauze and crumpled blue-and-yellow artificial
flowers, had scarcely ushered in the sweet spring month of the year,
when Slopperton arose simultaneously and hurried as one man to the
railway station, to welcome the hero of the day. The report has
spread--no one ever knows how these reports arise--that Mr. Richard