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VI

       Two Coroner’s Inquests

       Table of Contents

      There had not been since the last general election, when George Augustus Slashington, the Liberal member, had been returned against strong Conservative opposition, in a blaze of triumph and a shower of rotten eggs and cabbage-stumps—there had not been since that great day such excitement in Slopperton as there was on the discovery of the murder of Mr. Montague Harding.

      A murder was always a great thing for Slopperton. When John Boggins, weaver, beat out the brains of Sarah his wife, first with the heel of his clog and ultimately with a poker, Slopperton had a great deal to say about it—though, of course, the slaughter of one “hand” by another was no great thing out of the factories. But this murder at the Black Mill was something out of the common. Uncommonly cruel, cowardly, and unmanly, and moreover occurring in a respectable rank of life.

      Round that lonely house on the Slopperton road there was a crowd and a bustle throughout that short foggy day on which Richard Marwood was arrested.

      Gentlemen of the Press were there, sniffing out, with miraculous acumen, particulars of the murder, which as yet were known to none but the heads of the Slopperton police force.

      How many lines at three-halfpence per line these gentlemen wrote concerning the dreadful occurrence, without knowing anything whatever about it, no one unacquainted with the mysteries of their art would dare to say.

      The two papers which appeared on Friday had accounts varying in every item, and the one paper which appeared on Saturday had a happy amalgamation of the two conflicting accounts—demonstrating thereby the triumph of paste and scissors over penny-a-liners’ copy.

      The head officials of the Slopperton police, attired in plain clothes, went in and out of the Black Mill from an early hour on that dark November day. Every time they came out, though none of them ever spoke, by some strange magic a fresh report got current among the crowd. I think the magical process was this: Some one man, auguring from such and such a significance in their manner, whispered to his nearest neighbour his suggestion of what might have been revealed to them within; and this whispered suggestion was repeated from one to another till it grew into a fact, and was still repeated through the crowd, while with every speaker it gathered interest until it grew into a series of imaginary facts.

      Of one thing the crowd was fully convinced—that was, that those grave men in plain clothes, the Slopperton detectives, knew all, and could tell all, if they only chose to speak. And yet I doubt if there was beneath the stars more than one person who really knew the secret of the dreadful deed.

      The following day the coroner’s inquisition was held at a respectable hostelry near the Black Mill, whither the jury went, accompanied by the medical witness, to contemplate the body of the victim. With solemn faces they hovered round the bed of the murdered man: they took depositions, talked to each other in low hushed tones; and exchanged a few remarks, in a low voice, with the doctor who had probed the deep gashes in that cold breast.

      All the evidence that transpired at the inquest only amounted to this—

      The servant Martha, rising at six o’clock on the previous morning, went, as she was in the habit of doing, to the door of the old East Indian to call him—he being always an early riser, and getting up even in winter to study by lamp-light.

      Receiving, after repeated knocking at the door, no answer the old woman had gone into the room, and there had beheld, by the faint light of her candle, the awful spectacle of the Anglo-Indian lying on the floor by the bed-side, his throat cut, cruel stabs upon his breast, and a pool of blood surrounding him; the cabinet in the room broken open and ransacked, and the pocket-book and money which it was known to contain missing. The papers of the murdered gentleman were thrown into confusion and lay in a heap near the cabinet; and as there was no blood upon them, the detectives concluded that the cabinet had been rifled prior to the commission of the murder.

      The Lascar had been found lying insensible on his bed in the little dressing-room, his head cruelly beaten; and beyond this there was nothing to be discovered. The Lascar had been taken to the hospital, where little hope was given by the doctors of his recovery from the injuries he had received.

      In the first horror and anguish of that dreadful morning Mrs. Marwood had naturally inquired for her son; had expressed her surprise at his disappearance; and when questioned had revealed the history of his unexpected return the night before. Suspicion fell at once upon the missing man. His reappearance after so many years on the return of his rich uncle; his secret departure from the house before any one had risen—everything told against him. Inquiries were immediately set on foot at the turnpike gates on the several roads out of Slopperton; and at the railway station from which he had started for Gardenford by the first train.

      In an hour it was discovered that a man answering to Richard’s description had been seen at the station; half an hour afterwards a man appeared, who deposed to having seen and recognized him on the platform—and deposed, too, to Richard’s evident avoidance of him. The railway clerks remembered giving a ticket to a handsome young man with a dark moustache, in a shabby suit, having a pipe in his mouth. Poor Richard! the dark moustache and pipe tracked him at every stage. “Dark moustache—pipe—shabby dress—tall—handsome face.” The clerk who played upon the electric-telegraph wires, as other people play upon the piano, sent these words shivering down the line to the Gardenford station; from the Gardenford station to the Gardenford police-office the words were carried in less than five minutes; in five minutes more Mr. Jinks the detective was on the platform, and his dumb assistant, Joe Peters, was ready outside the station; and they both were ready to recognize Richard the moment they saw him.

      O wonders of civilized life! cruel wonders, when you help to track an innocent man to a dreadful doom.

      Richard’s story of the letter only damaged his case with the jury. The fact of his having burned a document of such importance seemed too incredible to make any impression in his favour.

      Throughout the proceedings there stood in the background a shabbily-dressed man, with watchful observant eyes, and a mouth very much on one side.

      This man was Joseph Peters, the scrub of the detective force of Gardenford. He rarely took his eyes from Richard, who, with pale bewildered face, dishevelled hair, and slovenly costume, looked perhaps as much like guilt as innocence.

      The verdict of the coroner’s jury was, as every one expected it would be, to the effect that the deceased had been wilfully murdered by Richard Marwood his nephew; and poor Dick was removed immediately to the county gaol on the outskirts of Slopperton, there to lie till the assizes.

      The excitement in Slopperton, as before observed, was immense. Slopperton had but one voice—a voice loud in execration of the innocent prisoner, horror of the treachery and cruelty of the dreadful deed, and pity for the wretched mother of this wicked son, whose anguish had thrown her on a sick bed—but who, despite of every proof repeated every hour, expressed her assurance of her unfortunate son’s innocence.

      The coroner had plenty of work on that dismal November day: for from the inquest on the unfortunate Mr. Harding he had to hurry down to a little dingy public-house on the river’s bank, there to inquire into the cause of the untimely death of a wretched outcast found by some bargemen in the Sloshy.

      This sort of death was so common an event in the large and thickly-populated town of Slopperton, that the coroner and the jury (lighted by two guttering tallow candles with long wicks, at four o’clock on that dull afternoon) had very little to say about it.

      One glance at that heap of wet, torn, and shabby garments—one half-shuddering, half-pitying look at the white face, blue lips, and damp loose auburn hair, and a merciful verdict—“Found drowned.”

      One juryman, a butcher—(we sometimes think them hard-hearted, these butchers)—lays a gentle hand upon the auburn hair, and brushes a lock of it away from the pale forehead.

      Perhaps so tender a touch had not been laid upon that head for two

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