Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (805 page)

The witness, appearing in the box, proved to be a young woman, in delicate health. On the evening when the prisoner had paid his visit to the lady, she was in that lady’s service as housemaid. The day after, she had been permitted (by previous arrangement with her mistress) to take a week’s holiday, and to go on a visit to her parents, in the west of Cornwall. While there, she had fallen ill, and had not been strong enough since to return to her employment. Having given this preliminary account of herself, the housemaid then stated the following extraordinary particulars in relation to her mistress’s clock.

On the morning of the day when Mr. Dubourg had called at the house, she had been cleaning the mantelpiece. She had rubbed the part of it which was under the clock with her duster, had accidentally struck the pendulum, and had stopped it. Having once before done this, she had been severely reproved. Fearing that a repetition of the offense, only the day after the clock had been regulated by the maker, might lead perhaps to the withdrawal of her leave of absence, she had determined to put matters right again, if possible, by herself.

After poking under the clock in the dark, and failing to set the pendulum going again properly in that way, she next attempted to lift the clock, and give it a shake. It was set in a marble case, with a bronze figure on the top; and it was so heavy that she was obliged to hunt for something which she could use as a lever. The thing proved to be not easy to find on the spur of the moment. Having at last laid her hand on what she wanted, she contrived so to lift the clock a few inches and drop it again on the mantelpiece, as to set it going once more.

The next necessity was of course to move the hands on. Here again she was met by an obstacle. There was a difficulty in opening the glass-case which protected the dial. After uselessly searching for some instrument to help her, she got from the footman (without telling him what she wanted it for) a small chisel. With this, she opened the case — after accidentally scratching the brass frame of it — and set the hands of the clock by guess. She was flurried at the time; fearing that her mistress would discover her. Later in the day, she found that she had over-estimated the interval of time that had passed while she was trying to put the clock right. She had, in fact, set it exactly
a quarter of an hour too fast.

No safe opportunity of secretly putting the clock right again had occurred, until the last thing at night. She had then moved the hands back to the right time. At the hour of the evening when Mr. Dubourg had called on her mistress, she positively swore that the clock was a quarter of an hour too fast. It had pointed, as her mistress had declared, to twenty-five minutes to nine — the right time then being, as Mr. Dubourg had asserted, twenty minutes past eight.

Questioned why she had refrained from giving this extraordinary evidence at the inquiry before the magistrate, she declared that in the remote Cornish village to which she had gone the next day, and in which her illness had detained her from that time, nobody had heard of the inquiry or the trial. She would not have been then present to state the vitally important circumstances to which she had just sworn, if the prisoner’s twin-brother had not found her out on the previous day — had not questioned her if she knew anything about the clock — and had not (hearing what she had to tell) insisted on her taking the journey with him to the court the next morning.

This evidence virtually decided the trial. There was a great burst of relief in the crowded assembly when the woman’s statement had come to an end.

She was closely cross-examined as a matter of course. Her character was inquired into; corroborative evidence (relating to the chisel and the scratches on the frame) was sought for and was obtained. The end of it was that, at a late hour on the second evening, the jury acquitted the prisoner, without leaving their box. It was not too much to say that his life had been saved by his brother. His brother alone had persisted, from first to last, in obstinately disbelieving the clock — for no better reason than that the clock was the witness which asserted the prisoner’s guilt! He had worried everybody with incessant inquiries — he had discovered the absence of the housemaid, after the trial had begun — and he had started off to interrogate the girl, knowing nothing, and suspecting nothing; simply determined to persist in the one everlasting question with which he persecuted everybody belonging to the house: “The clock is going to hang my brother; can you tell me anything about the clock?”

Four months later, the mystery of the crime was cleared up. One of the disreputable companions of the murdered man confessed on his death-bed that he had done the deed. There was nothing interesting or remarkable in the circumstances. Chance which had put innocence in peril, had offered impunity to guilt. An infamous woman; a jealous quarrel; and an absence at the moment of witnesses on the spot — these were really the commonplace materials which had composed the tragedy of Pardon’s Piece.

CHAPTER THE NINTH

The Hero of the Trial

“You have forced it out of me. Now you have had your way, never mind my feelings — Go!”

Those were the first words the Hero of the Trial said to me, when he was able to speak again! He withdrew with a curious sullen resignation to the farther end of the room. There he stood looking at me, as a man might have looked who carried some contagion about him, and who wished to preserve a healthy fellow-creature from the peril of touching him.

“Why should I go?” I asked.

“You are a bold woman,” he said, “to remain in the same room with a man who has been pointed at as a murderer, and who has been tried for his life.”

The same unhealthy state of mind which had brought him to Dimchurch, and which had led him to speak to me as he had spoken on the previous evening, was, as I understood it, now irritating him against me as a person who had made his own quick temper the means of entrapping him into letting out the truth. How was I to deal with a man in this condition? I decided to perform the feat which you call in England, “taking the bull by the horns.”

“I see but one man here,” I said. “A man honourably acquitted of a crime which he was incapable of committing. A man who deserves my interest, and claims my sympathy. Shake hands, Mr. Dubourg.”

I spoke to him in a good hearty voice, and I gave him a good hearty squeeze. The poor, weak, lonely, persecuted young fellow dropped his head on my shoulder like a child, and burst out crying.

“Don’t despise me!” he said, as soon as he had got his breath again. “It breaks a man down to have stood in the dock, and to have had hundreds of hard-hearted people staring at him in horror — without his deserving it. Besides, I have been very lonely, ma’am, since my brother left me.”

We sat down again, side by side. He was the strangest compound of anomalies I had ever met with. Throw him into one of those passions in which he flamed out so easily — and you would have said, This is a tiger. Wait till he had cooled down again to his customary mild temperature — and you would have said with equal truth, This is a lamb.

“One thing rather surprises me, Mr. Dubourg,” I went on. “I can’t quite understand —
 
— ”

“Don’t call me Mr. Dubourg,” he interposed. “You remind me of the disgrace which has forced me to change my name. Call me by my Christian name. It’s a foreign name. You are a foreigner by your accent — you will like me all the better for having a foreign name. I was christened ‘Oscar’ — after my mother’s brother: my mother was a Jersey woman. Call me ‘Oscar.’ — What is it you don’t understand?”

“In your present situation,” I resumed, “I don’t understand your brother leaving you here all by yourself.”

He was on the point of flaming out again at that.

“Not a word against my brother!” he exclaimed fiercely. “My brother is the noblest creature that God ever created! You must own that yourself — you know what he did at the trial. I should have died on the scaffold but for that angel. I insist on it that he is not a man. He is an angel!”

(I admitted that his brother was an angel. The concession instantly pacified him.)

“People say there is no difference between us,” he went on, drawing his chair companionably close to mine. “Ah, people are so shallow! Personally, I grant you, we are exactly alike. (You have heard that we are twins?) But there it ends, unfortunately for
me.
Nugent — (my brother was christened Nugent after my father) — Nugent is a hero! Nugent is a genius. I should have died if he hadn’t taken care of me after the trial. I had nobody but him. We are orphans; we have no brothers or sisters. Nugent felt the disgrace even more than I felt it — but
he
could control himself. It fell more heavily on him than it did on me. I’ll tell you why. Nugent was in a fair way to make our family name — the name that we have been obliged to drop — famous all over the world. He is a painter — a landscape painter. Have you never heard of him? Ah, you soon will! Where do you think he has gone to? He has gone to the wilds of America, in search of new subjects. He is going to found a school of landscape painting. On an immense scale. A scale that has never been attempted yet. Dear fellow! Shall I tell you what he said when he left me here? Noble words — I call them noble words. ‘Oscar, I go to make our assumed name famous. You shall be honourably known — you shall be illustrious, as the brother of Nugent Dubourg.’ Do you think I could stand in the way of such a career as that? After what he has sacrificed for
me,
could I let Such a Man stagnate here — for no better purpose than to keep me company? What does it matter about
my
feeling lonely? Who am I? Oh, if you had seen how he bore with the horrible notoriety that followed us, after the trial! He was constantly stared at and pointed at, for
me.
Not a word of complaint escaped him. He snapped his fingers at it. ‘That for public opinion!’ he said. What strength of mind — eh? From one place after another we moved and moved, and still there were the photographs, and the newspapers, and the whole infamous story (‘romance in real life,’ they called it), known beforehand to everybody.
He
never lost heart. ‘We shall find a place yet’ (that was the cheerful way he put it); ‘you have nothing to do with it, Oscar; you are safe in my hands; I promise you exactly the place of refuge you want.’ It was he who got all the information, and found out this lonely part of England where you live.
I
thought it pretty as we wandered about the hills — it wasn’t half grand enough for
him.
We lost ourselves. I began to feel nervous. He didn’t mind it a bit. ‘You have Me with you,’ he said; ‘My luck is always to be depended on. Mark what I say! We shall stumble on a village!’ You will hardly believe me — in ten minutes more, we stumbled, exactly as he had foretold, on this place. He didn’t leave me — when I had prevailed on him to go — without a recommendation. He recommended me to the landlord of the inn here. He said, ‘My brother is delicate; my brother wishes to live in retirement; you will oblige me by looking after my brother.’ Wasn’t it kind? The landlord seemed to be quite affected by it. Nugent cried when he took leave of me. Ah, what would I not give to have a heart like his and a mind like his! It’s something — isn’t it? — to have a face like him. I often say that to myself when I look in the glass. Excuse my running on in this way. When I once begin to talk of Nugent, I don’t know when to leave off.”

One thing, at any rate, was plainly discernible in this otherwise inscrutable young man. He adored his twin-brother.

It would have been equally clear to me that Mr. Nugent Dubourg deserved to be worshipped, if I could have reconciled to my mind his leaving his brother to shift for himself in such a place as Dimchurch. I was obliged to remind myself of the admirable service which he had rendered at the trial, before I could decide to do him the justice of suspending my opinion of him, in his absence. Having accomplished this act of magnanimity, I took advantage of the first opportunity to change the subject. The most tiresome information that I am acquainted with, is the information which tells us of the virtues of an absent person — when that absent person happens to be a stranger.

“Is it true that you have taken Browndown for six months?” I asked. “Are you really going to settle at Dimchurch?”

“Yes — if you keep my secret,” he answered. “The people here know nothing about me. Don’t, pray don’t, tell them who I am! You will drive me away, if you do.”

“I must tell Miss Finch who you are,” I said.

“No! no! no!” he exclaimed eagerly. “I can’t bear the idea of her knowing it. I have been so horribly degraded. What will she think of me?” He burst into another explosion of rhapsodies on the subject of Lucilla — mixed up with renewed petitions to me to keep his story concealed from everybody. I lost all patience with his want of common fortitude and common sense.