THE PRIME MINISTER (81 page)

After a while he went back into the hall and took a first-class return ticket, not for Birmingham, but for the Tenway Junction. It is quite unnecessary to describe the Tenway Junction, as everybody knows it From this spot, some six or seven miles distant from London, lines diverge east, west,
and north, north-east, and northwest, round the metropolis in every direction, and with direct communication with every other line in and out of London. It is a marvellous place, quite unintelligible to the uninitiated, and yet daily used by thousands who only know that when they get there, they are to do what someone tells them. The space occupied by the convergent rails seems to be sufficient for
a large farm. And these rails always run one into another with sloping points, and cross passages, and mysterious meandering sidings, till it seems to the thoughtful stranger to be impossible that the best-trained engine should know its own line. Here and there and around there is ever a wilderness of waggons, some loaded, some empty, some smoking with close-packed oxen, and others furlongs in
length black with coals, which look as though they had been stranded there by chance, and were never destined to get again into the right path of traffic. Not a minute passes without a train going here or there, some rushing by without noticing Tenway in the least, crashing through like flashes of substantial lightning, and others stopping, disgorging and taking up passengers by the hundreds. Men
and women, – especially the men, for the women knowing their ignorance are generally willing to trust to the pundits of the place, – look doubtful, uneasy, and bewildered. But they all do get properly placed and unplaced, so that the spectator at last acknowledges that over all this apparent chaos there is presiding a great genius of order. From dusky morn to dark night, and indeed almost throughout
the night,
the air is loaded with a succession of shrieks. The theory goes that each separate shriek, – if there can be any separation where the sound is so nearly continuous, – is a separate notice to separate ears of the coming or going of a separate train. The stranger, as he speculates on these pandemoniac noises, is able to realize the idea that were they discontinued the excitement necessary
for the minds of the pundits might be lowered, and that activity might be lessened, and evil results might follow. But he cannot bring himself to credit that theory of individual notices.

At Tenway Junction there are half-a-dozen long platforms, on which men and women and luggage are crowded. On one of these for a while Ferdinand Lopez walked backwards and forwards as though waiting for the coming
of some especial train. The crowd is ever so great that a man might be supposed to walk there from morning to night without exciting special notice. But the pundits are very clever, and have much experience in men and women. A well-taught pundit, who has exercised authority for a year or two at such a station as that of Tenway, will know within a minute of the appearance of each stranger what
is his purpose there, – whether he be going or has just come, whether he is himself on the way or waiting for others, whether he should be treated with civility or with some curt command, – so that if his purport be honest all necessary assistance may be rendered him. As Lopez was walking up and down, with smiling face and leisurely pace, now reading an advertisement and now watching the contortions
of some amazed passenger, a certain pundit asked him his business. He was waiting, he said, for a train from Liverpool, intending, when his friend arrived, to go with him to Dulwich by a train which went round the west of London. It was all feasible, and the pundit told him that the stopping train from Liverpool was due there in six minutes, but that the express from the north would pass first
Lopez thanked the pundit and gave him sixpence, – which made the pundit suspicious. A pundit hopes to be paid when he handles luggage, but has no such expectation when he merely gives information.

The pundit still had his eye on our friend when the shriek and the whirr of the express from the north was heard. Lopez walked quickly up towards the edge of the platform, when the pundit followed him,
telling him that this was not his train. Lopez then ran a few yards
along the platform, not noticing the man, reaching a spot that was unoccupied: – and there he stood fixed. And as he stood the express flashed by. ‘I am fond of seeing them pass like that,’ said Lopez to the man, who had followed him.

‘But you shouldn’t do it, sir,’ said the suspicious pundit ‘No one isn’t allowed to stand near
like that. The very hair of it might take you off your legs when you’re not used to it.’

‘All right, old fellow,’ said Lopez, retreating. The next train was the Liverpool train; and it seemed that our friend’s friend had not come, for, when the Liverpool passengers had cleared themselves off, he was still walking up and down the platform. ‘He’ll come by the next,’ said Lopez to the pundit, who
now followed him about and kept an eye on him.

‘There ain’t another from Liverpool stopping here till the 2.20,’ said the pundit. ‘You had better come again if you mean to meet him by that.’

‘He has come on part of the way, and will reach this by some other train,’ said Lopez.

‘There ain’t nothing he can come by,’ said the pundit ‘Gentlemen can’t wait here all day, sir. The horders is against
waiting on the platform.’

‘All right,’ said Lopez, moving away as though to make his exit through the station.

Now, Tenway Junction is so big a place, and so scattered, that it is impossible that all the pundits should by any combined activity maintain to the letter that order of which our special pundit had spoken. Lopez, departing from the platform which he had hitherto occupied, was soon
to be seen on another, walking up and down, and again waiting. But the old pundit had had his eye upon him, and had followed him round. At that moment there came a shriek louder than all the other shrieks, and the morning express down from Euston to Inverness was seen coming round the curve at a thousand miles an hour. Lopez turned round and looked at it, and again walked towards the edge of the platform.
But now it was not exactly the edge that he neared, but a descent to a pathway, – an inclined plane leading down to the level of the rails, and made there for certain purposes of traffic. As he did so the pundit called to him, and then made a rush at him, – for our friend’s back was turned to the
coming train. But Lopez heeded not the call, and the rush was too late. With quick, but still with
gentle and apparently unhurried steps, he walked down before the flying engine – and in a moment had been knocked into bloody atoms.

The catastrophe described in the last chapter had taken place during the first week in March. By the end of that month old Mr Wharton had probably reconciled himself to the tragedy, although in fact it had affected him very deeply. In the first days after the news had reached him he seemed to be bowed to the ground. Stone Buildings were neglected,
and the Eldon saw nothing of him. Indeed, he barely left the house from which he had been so long banished by the presence of his son-in-law. It seemed to Everett, who now came to live with him and his sister, as though his father were overcome by the horror of the affair. But after a while he recovered himself, and appeared one morning in court with his wig and gown, and argued a case, – which
was now unusual with him, – as though to show the world that a dreadful episode in his life was passed, and should be thought of no more. At this period, three or four weeks after the occurrence, – he rarely spoke to his daughter about Lopez; but to Everett the man’s name would be often on his tongue. ‘I do not know that there could have been any other deliverance,’ he said to his son one day.
‘I thought it would have killed me when I first heard it, and it nearly killed her. But, at any rate, now there is peace.’

But the widow seemed to feel it more as time went on. At first she was stunned, and for a while absolutely senseless. It was not till two days after the occurrence that the fact became known to her, – not known as a certainty to her father and brother. It seemed as though
the man had been careful to carry with him no record of identity, the nature of which would permit it to outlive the crash of the train. No card was found, no scrap of paper with his name; and it was discovered at last that when he left the house on the fatal morning he had been careful to dress himself in shirt and socks, with handkerchief and collar that had been newly purchased for his proposed
journey and which bore no mark. The fragments of his body set identity at defiance, and even his watch had been crumpled
into ashes. Of course the fact became certain with no great delay. The man himself was missing, and was accurately described both by the young lady from the refreshment room, and by the suspicious pundit who had actually seen the thing done. There was first belief that it was
so, which was not communicated to Emily, – and then certainty.

There was an inquest held of course, – well, we will say on the body, – and, singularly enough, great difference of opinion as to the manner, though of course none as to the immediate cause of the death. Had it been accidental, or premeditated? The pundit, who in the performance of his duties on the Tenway platforms was so efficient
and valuable, gave half-a-dozen opinions in half-a-dozen minutes when subjected to the questions of the Coroner. In his own mind he had not the least doubt in the world as to what had happened. But he was made to believe that he was not to speak his own mind. The gentleman, he said, certainly might have walked down by accident. The gentleman’s back was turned, and it was possible that the gentleman
did not hear the train. He was quite certain the gentleman knew of the train; but yet he could not say. The gentleman walked down before the train o’ purpose; but perhaps he didn’t mean to do himself an injury. There was a deal of this, till the Coroner, putting all his wrath into his brow, told the man that he was a disgrace to the service, and expressed a hope that the Company would no longer
employ a man so evidently unfit for his position. But the man was in truth a conscientious and useful railway pundit, with a large family, and evident capabilities for his business. At last a verdict was given, – that the man’s name was Ferdinand Lopez, that he had been crushed by an express train on the London and North Western Line, and that there was no evidence to show how his presence on the
line had been occasioned. Of course Mr Wharton had employed counsel, and of course the counsel’s object had been to avoid a verdict of felo de se. Appended to the verdict was a recommendation from the jury that the Railway Company should be advised to signalize their express trains more clearly at the Tenway Junction Station.

When these tidings were told to the widow she had already given way
to many fears. Lopez had gone, purporting, – as he said, – to be back to dinner. He had not come then, nor on the following
morning; nor had he written. Then she remembered all that he had done and said; – how he had kissed her, and left a parting malediction for her father. She did not at first imagine that he had destroyed himself, but that he had gone away, intending to vanish as other men
before now have vanished. As she thought of this something almost like love came back upon her heart. Of course he was bad. Even in her sorrow, even when alarmed as to his fate, she could not deny that But her oath to him had not been to love him only while he was good. She had made herself a part of him, and was she not bound to be true to him, whether good or bad? She implored her father and she
implored her brother to be ceaseless in their endeavours to trace him, – sometimes seeming almost to fear that in this respect she could not fully trust them. Then she discerned from their manner a doubt as to her husband’s fate. ‘Oh, papa, if you think anything, tell me what you think,’ she said late on the evening of the second day. He was then nearly sure that the man who had been killed at Tenway
was Ferdinand Lopez; – but he was not quite sure, and he would not tell her. But on the following morning, somewhat before noon, having himself gone out early to Euston Square, he came back to his own house, – and then he told her all. For the first hour she did not shed a tear or lose her consciousness of the horror of the thing; – but sat still and silent, gazing at nothing, casting back her
mind over the history of her life, and the misery which she had brought on all who belonged to her. Then at last she gave way, fell into tears, hysteric sobbings, convulsions so violent as for a time to take the appearance of epileptic fits, and was at last exhausted and, happily for herself, unconscious.

After that she was ill for many weeks, – so ill that at times both her father and her brother
thought that she would die. When the first month or six weeks had passed by she would often speak of her husband, especially to her father, and always speaking of him as though she had brought him to his untimely fate. Nor could she endure at this time that her father should say a word against him, even when she obliged the old man to speak of one whose conduct had been so infamous. It had all
been her doing! Had she not married him there would have been no misfortune! She did not say that he had been noble, true, or honest, – but she asserted that all the evils which had come upon him had been produced by herself ‘My
dear,’ her father said to her one evening, ‘it is a matter which we cannot forget, but on which it is well that we should be silent.’

‘I shall always know what that silence
means,’ she replied.

‘It will never mean condemnation of you by me,’ said he.

‘But I have destroyed your life, – and his. I know I ought not to have married him, because you bade me not And I know that I should have been gentler with him, and more obedient when I was his wife. I sometimes wish that I were a Catholic, and that I could go into a convent, and bury it all amidst sackcloths and ashes.’

‘That would not bury it,’ said her father.

‘But I should at least be buried. If I were out of sight, you might forget it all.’

She once stirred Everett up to speak more plainly than her father ever dared to do, and then also she herself used language that was very plain. ‘My darling,’ said her brother once, when she had been trying to make out that her husband had been more sinned against than
sinning,
¹
– ‘he was a bad man. It is better that the truth should be told.’