CHAPTER VII. After the Inquest

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CHAPTER VII. After the Inquest

To be ill in college rooms, how miserable it is! Mainland's scout called him at half-past seven with the invariable question, "Do you breakfast out, sir?" If a man were in the condemned cell, his scout (if in attendance) would probably arouse him on the morning of his execution with, "Do you breakfast out, sir?"

"No," said Maitland, in reply to the changeless inquiry; "in common room as usual. Pack my bag, I am going down by the nine o'clock train."

Then he rose and tried to dress; but his head ached more than ever, his legs seemed to belong to someone else, and to be no subject of just complacency to their owner. He reeled as he strove to cross the room, then he struggled back into bed, where, feeling alternately hot and cold, he covered himself with his ulster, in addition to his blankets. Anywhere but in college, Maitland would, of course, have rung the bell and called his servant; but in our conservative universities, and especially in so reverend a pile as St. Gatiens, there was, naturally, no bell to ring. Maitland began to try to huddle himself into his greatcoat, that he might crawl to the window and shout to Dakyns, his scout.

But at this moment there fell most gratefully on his ear the sound of a strenuous sniff, repeated at short intervals in his sitting-room. Often had Maitland regretted the chronic cold and handkerchiefless condition of his bedmaker; but now her sniff was welcome as music, much more so than that of two hunting horns which ambitious sportsmen were trying to blow in quad.

"Mrs. Trattles!" cried Maitland, and his own voice sounded faint in his ears. "Mrs. Trattles!"

The lady thus invoked answered with becoming modesty, punctuated by sniffs, from the other side of the door:

"Yes, sir; can I do anything for you, sir?"

"Call Dakyns, please," said Maitland, falling back on his pillow. "I don't feel very well."

Dakyns appeared in due course.

"Sorry to hear you're ill, sir; you do look a little flushed. Hadn't I better send for Mr. Whalley, sir?"

Now, Mr. Whalley was the doctor whom Oxford, especially the younger generation, delighted to honor.

"No; I don't think you need. Bring me breakfast here. I think I'll be able to start for town by the 11.58. And bring me my letters."

"Very well, sir," answered Dakyns.

Then with that fearless assumption of responsibility which always does an Englishman credit, he sent the college messenger in search of Mr. Whalley before he brought round Maitland's letters and his breakfast commons.

There were no letters bearing on the subject of Margaret's disappearance; if any such had been addressed to him, they would necessarily be, as Maitland remembered after his first feeling of disappointment, at his rooms in London. Neither Miss Marlett, if she had aught to communicate, nor anyone else, could be expected to know that Mait-land's first act would be to rush to Oxford and consult Bielby.

The guardian of Margaret turned with no success to his breakfast commons; even tea appeared unwelcome and impossible.

Maitland felt very drowsy, dull, indifferent, when a knock came to his door, and Mr. Whalley entered. He could not remember having sent for him; but he felt that, as an invalid once said, "there was a pain somewhere in the room," and he was feebly pleased to see his physician.

"A very bad feverish cold," was the verdict, and Mr. Whalley would call again next day, till which time Maitland was forbidden to leave his room.

He drowsed through the day, disturbed by occasional howls from the quadrangle, where the men were snowballing a little, and, later, by the scraping shovels of the navvies who had been sent in to remove the snow, and with it the efficient cause of nocturnal disorders in St. Gatien's.

So the time passed, Maitland not being quite conscious of its passage, and each hour putting Margaret Shields more and more beyond the reach of the very few people who were interested in her existence. Maitland's illness took a more severe form than Whalley had anticipated, and the lungs were affected. Bielby was informed of his state, and came to see him; but Maitland talked so wildly about the Hit or Miss , about the man in the bearskin coat, and other unintelligible matters, that the hermit soon withdrew to the more comprehensible fragments of "Demetrius of Scepsis." He visited his old pupil daily, and behaved with real kindness; but the old implicit trust never revived with Maitland's returning health.

At last the fever abated. Maitland felt weak, yet perfectly conscious of what had passed, and doubly anxious about what was to be done, if there was, indeed, a chance of doing anything.

Men of his own standing had by this time become aware that he was in Oxford, and sick, consequently there was always someone to look after him.

"Brown," said Maitland to a friend, on the fifth day after his illness began, "would you mind giving me my things? I'll try to dress."

The experiment was so far successful that Maitland left the queer bare slit of a place called his bedroom (formed, like many Oxford bedrooms, by a partition added to the large single room of old times), and moved into the weirdly aesthetic study, decorated in the Early William Morris manner.

"Now will you howl for Dakyns, and make him have this telegram sent to the post? Awfully sorry to trouble you, but I can't howl yet for myself," whispered Maitland, huskily, as he scribbled on a telegraph form.

"Delighted to howl for you," said Brown, and presently the wires were carrying a message to Barton in town. Maitland wanted to see him at once, on very pressing business. In a couple of hours there came a reply: Barton would be with Maitland by dinner-time.

The ghostly room, in the Early William Morris manner, looked cosey and even homelike when the lamp was lit, when the dusky blue curtains were drawn, and a monster of the deep--one of the famous Oxford soles, larger than you ever see them elsewhere--smoked between Maitland and Barton. Beside the latter stood a silver quart pot, full of "strong," a reminiscence of "the old coaching days," when Maitland had read with Barton for Greats. The invalid's toast and water wore an air of modest conviviality, and might have been mistaken for sherry by anyone who relied merely on such information as is furnished by the sense of sight The wing of a partridge (the remainder of the brace fell to Barton's lot) was disposed of by the patient; and then, over the wine, which he did not touch, and the walnuts, which he tried nervously to crack in his thin, white hands, Maitland made confession and sought advice.

It was certainly much easier talking to Barton than to Bielby, for Barton knew so much already, especially about the Hit or Miss ; but when it came to the story of the guardianship of Margaret, and the kind of prospective engagement to that young lady, Barton rose and began to walk about the room. But the old beams creaked under him in the weak places; and Barton, seeing how much he discomposed Maitland, sat down again, and steadied his nerves with a glass of the famous St. Gatien's port.

Then, when Maitland, in the orderly course of his narrative, came to the finding of poor Dick Shields' body in the snow-cart, Barton cried, "Why, you don't mean to say that was the man, the girl's father? By George, I can tell you something about him ! At the inquest my partner, old Munby, made out--"

"Has there been an inquest already? Oh, of course there must have been," said Maitland, whose mind had run so much on Margaret's disappearance that he had given little of his thoughts (weak and inconsecutive enough of late) to the death of her father.

"Of course there has been an inquest Have you not read the papers since you were ill?"

Now, Maitland had the common-room back numbers of the Times since the day of his return from Devonshire in his study at that very moment But his reading, so far, had been limited to the "Agony Column" of the advertisements (where he half hoped to find some message), and to all the paragraphs headed "Strange Occurrence" and "Mysterious Disappearance." None of these had cast any light on the fortunes of Margaret.

"I have not seen anything about the inquest," he said. "What verdict did they bring in? The usual one, I suppose--'Visitation,' and all that kind of thing, or 'Death from exposure while under the influence of alcoholic stimulants.'"

"That's exactly what they made it," said Barton; "and I don't blame them; for the medical evidence my worthy partner gave left them no other choice. You can see what he said for yourself in the papers."

Barton had been turning over the file of the Times , and showed Maitland the brief record of the inquest and the verdict; matters so common that their chronicle might be, and perhaps is, kept stereotyped, with blanks for names and dates.

"A miserable end," said Maitland, when he had perused the paragraph. "And now I had better go on with my story? But what did you mean by saying you didn't 'blame' the coroner's jury?"

"Have you any more story? Is it not enough? I don't know that I should tell you; it is too horrid!"

"Don't keep anything from me, please," said Maitland, moving nervously. "I must know everything."

"Well," answered Barton, his voice sinking to a tone of reluctant horror--"well, your poor friend was murdered! That's what I meant when I said I did not blame the jury; they could have given no other verdict than they did on the evidence of my partner."

Murder! The very word has power to startle, as if the crime were a new thing, not as old (so all religions tell us) as the first brothers. As a meteoric stone falls on our planet, strange and unexplained, a waif of the universe, from a nameless system, so the horror of murder descends on us, when we meet it, with an alien dread, as of an intrusion from some lost star, some wandering world that is Hell.

"Murdered!" cried Maitland. "Why, Barton, you must be dreaming! Who on earth could have murdered poor Shields? If ever there was a man who was no one's enemy but his own, that man was Shields! And he literally had nothing that anyone could have wanted to steal. I allowed him so much--a small sum--paid weekly, on Thursdays; and it was a Wednesday when he was--when he died. He could not have had a shilling at that moment in the world!"

"I am very sorry to have to repeat it, but murdered he was, all the same, and that by a very cunning and cautious villain--a man, I should say, of some education.

"But how could it possibly have been done? There's the evidence before you in the paper. There was not a trace of violence on him, and the circumstances, which were so characteristic of his ways, were more than enough to account for his death. The exposure, the cold, the mere sleeping in the snow--it's well known to be fatal Why," said Maitland, eagerly, "in a long walk home from shooting in winter, I have had to send back a beater for one of the keepers; and we found him quite asleep, in a snowdrift, under a hedge. He never would have wakened."

He was naturally anxious to refute the horrible conclusion which Barton had arrived at.

The young doctor only shook his head. His opinion was manifestly fixed.

"But how can you possibly know better than the jury," urged Maitland peevishly, "and the coroner, and the medical officer for the district, who were all convinced that his death was perfectly natural--that he got drunk, lost his way, laid down in the cart, and perished of exposure? Why, you did not even hear the evidence. I can't make out," he went on, with the querulousness of an invalid, "why you should have come up just to talk such nonsense. The coroner and the jury are sure to have been right."

"Well, you see, it was not the coroner's business nor the jury's business, to know better than the medical officer for the district, on whose evidence they relied. But it is my business; for the said officer is my partner, and, but for me, our business would be worth very little. He is about as ignorant and easy-going an excellent old fellow as ever let a life slip out of his hands."

"Then, if you knew so much, why didn't you keep him straight?"

"Well, as it happened, I was down in Surrey with my people, at a wedding, when the death occurred, and they made a rather superficial examination of the deceased."

"Still, I see less than ever how you got a chance to form such an extraordinary and horrible opinion if you were not there, and had only this printed evidence," said Maitland, waving a sheet of the Times , "to go by; and this is dead against you. You're too clever."

"But I made a proper and most careful examination myself, on my return to town, the day after the inquest," said Barton, "and I found evidence enough for me --never mind where--to put the matter beyond the reach of doubt. The man was murdered , and murdered, as I said, very deliberately, by some one who was not an ordinary ignorant scoundrel."

"Still, I don't see how you got a chance to make your examination," said Maitland; "the man would be buried as usual--"

"Excuse me. The unclaimed bodies of paupers--and there was no one to claim his --are reserved, if needed--"

"I see--don't go on," said Maitland, turning rather pale, and falling back on his sofa, where he lay for a little with his eyes shut "It is all the fault of this most unlucky illness of mine," he said, presently. "In my absence, and as nobody knew where I was, there was naturally no one to claim the body. The kind of people who knew about him will take no trouble or risk in a case like that." He was silent again for a few moments; then, "What do you make out to have been tbe cause of death?" he asked.

"Well," said Barton slowly, "I don't much care to go into details which you may say I can hardly prove, and I don't want to distress you in your present state of health."

"Why don't you speak out! Was he poisoned? Did you detect arsenic or anything? He had been drinking with some one!"

"No; if, in a sense, he had been poisoned, there was literally nothing that could be detected by the most skilled analysis. But, my dear fellow, there are venoms that leave no internal trace. If I am right--and I think I am--he was destroyed by one of these. He had been a great traveller, had he not?"

"Yes," answered Maitland.

"Well, it is strange; the murderer must have been a great traveller also. He must have been among the Macoushi Indians of Guiana, and well acquainted with their arts. I know them too. I went there botanizing."

"You won't be more explicit?"

"No," he said; "you must take it on my word, after all."

Maitland, if not convinced, was silent He had knowledge enough of Barton, and of his healthy and joyous nature, to be certain that his theory was no morbid delusion; that he had good grounds for an opinion which, as he said, he could no longer, prove--which was, indeed, now incapable of any proof. No one had seen the commission of tbe crime, and the crime was of such a nature, and so cunningly planned, that it could not possibly be otherwise brought home to the murderer.

Now Maitland, knowing the Hit or Miss , and the private room up-stairs with the dormer windows, where the deed must have been done, if done at all, was certain that there could not possibly have been any eye-witness of the crime.

"What shall you do?" he asked, "or have you done anything in consequence of your discovery? Have you been to the police?"

"No," said Barton; "where was the use? How can I prove anything now? It is not as if poison had been used, that could be detected by analysis. Besides, I reflected that if I was right, the less fuss made, the more likely was the murderer to show his hand. Supposing he had a secret motive--and he must have had--he will act on that motive sooner or later. The quieter everything is kept, the more he feels certain he is safe, the sooner he will move in some way or other. Then, perhaps, there may be a chance of detecting him; but it's an outside chance. Do you know anything of the dead man's past history?"

"Nothing, except that he was from the North, and had lived a wandering life."

"Well, we must wait and see. But there is his daughter, left under your care. What do you mean to do about her? "

The question brought Maitland back to his old perplexities, which were now so terribly increased and confused by what he had just been told.

"I was going to tell you, when you broke in with this dreadful business. Things were bad before; now they are awful," said Maitland. " His daughter has disappeared! That was what I was coming to: that was the rest of my story. It was difficult and distressing enough before I knew what you tell me; now--great Heavens! what am I to do?"

He turned on the sofa, quite overcome. Barton put his hand encouragingly on his shoulder, and sat so for some minutes.

"Tell me all about it, old boy?" asked Barton, at length.

He was very much interested, and most anxious to aid his unfortunate friend. His presence, somehow, was full of help and comfort. Maitland no longer felt alone and friendless, as he had done after his consultation of Bielby. Thus encouraged, he told, as clearly and fully as possible, the tale of the disappearance of Margaret, and of his entire failure even to come upon her traces or those of her companion.

"And you have heard nothing since your illness?"

"Nothing to any purpose. What do you advise me to do?"

"There is only one thing certain, to my mind," said Barton. "The seafaring man with whom Shields was drinking on the last night of his life, and the gentleman in the fur travelling-coat who sent the telegram in your name and took away Margaret from Miss Marlett's, are in the same employment, or, by George, are probably the same person. Now, have you any kind of suspicion who they or he may be? or can you suggest any way of tracking him or them?"

"No," said Maitland; "my mind is a perfect blank on the subject. I never heard of the sailor till the woman at the Hit or Miss mentioned him, the night the body was found. And I never heard of a friend of Shields', a friend who was a gentleman, till I went down to the school."

"Then all we can do at present is, not to set the police at work--they would only prevent the man from showing--but to find out whether anyone answering to the description is 'wanted' or is on their books, at Scotland Yard. Why are we not in Paris, where a man, whatever his social position might be, who was capable of that unusual form of crime, would certainly have his dossier ? They order these things better in France."

"There is just one thing about him, at least about the man who was drinking with poor Shields on the night of his death. He was almost certainly tattooed with some marks or other. Indeed, I remember Mrs. Gullick--that's the landlady of the Hit or Miss --saying that Shields had been occupied in tattooing him. He did a good deal in that way for sailors."

"By Jove," said Barton, "if any fellow understands tattooing, and the class of jail-birds who practise it, I do. It is a clew after a fashion; but, after all, many of them that go down to the sea in ships are tattooed, even when they are decent fellows; and besides, we seldom, in our stage of society, get a view of a fellow-creature with nothing on but these early decorative designs."

This was only too obvious, and rather damping to Maitland, who for a moment had been inclined to congratulate himself on his flair as a detective. _

Read next: CHAPTER VIII. The Jaffa Oranges

Read previous: CHAPTER VI. At St. Gatien's

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