CHAPTER II.
How that deed was done, I learned at once, and will tell. By whom andwhy it was done, I have given my life to learn. The evidence laidbefore the coroner was a cloud and fog of mystery. For days and days mymother lay insensible. Then, for weeks and weeks, she would leap fromher bed in fits of terror, stare, and shriek and faint. As for theservants, they knew very little, but imagined a great deal. The onlyother witnesses were a medical man, a shoemaker, and two Londonpolicemen. The servants said that, between one and two in the morning,a clear, wild shriek rang through the house. Large as the building was,this shriek unrepeated awoke nearly all but me. Rushing anyhow forth,they hurried and huddled together at the head of the great staircase,doubting what to do. Some said the cry came one way, some another.Meanwhile Ann Maples, who slept with me in an inner room at the end of alittle passage, in the courage of terror went straight to her master andmistress. There, by the light of a dim night-lamp, used to visit me,she saw my mother upright in the bed, and pointing towards my father'sbreast. My father lay quite still; the bed-clothes were smooth uponhim. My mother did not speak. Ann Maples took the lamp, and looked inher master's face. His eyes were open, wide open as in amazement, butthe surprise was death. One arm was stiff around his wife, the otherlax upon the pillow. As she described it in West-country phrase, "helooked all frore." The woman rushed from the room, and screamed alongthe passage. The servants ran to her, flurried and haggard, each afraidto be left behind. None except the butler dared to enter. Whisperingand trembling they peered in after him, all ready to run away. ThomasKenwood loved his master dearly, being his foster-brother. He at onceremoved the bedclothes, and found the fatal wound. So strongly andtruly was it dealt, that it pierced the centre of my dear father'sheart. One spot of blood and a small three-cornered hole was all thatcould be seen. The surgeon, who came soon after, said that the weaponmust have been a very keen and finely-tempered dagger, probably offoreign make. The murderer must have been quite cool, and wellacquainted with the human frame. Death followed the blow on the instant,without a motion or a groan. In my mother's left hand strongly clutchedwas a lock of long, black, shining hair. A curl very like it, butrather finer, lay on my father's bosom. In the room were no signs ofdisorder, no marks of forcible entrance.
One of the maids, a timid young thing, declared that soon after thestable-clock struck twelve, she had heard the front balusters creak; butas she was known to hear this every night, little importance wasattached to it. The coroner paid more attention to the page (a sharpyouth from London), who, being first in the main corridor, after thecry, saw, or thought he saw, a moving figure, where the faint starlightcame in at the oriel window. He was the more believed, because he ownedthat he durst not follow it. But no way of escape could be discoveredthere, and the eastern window was strongly barred betwixt the mullions.No door, no window was anywhere found open.
Outside the house, the only trace was at one remarkable spot. The timehad been chosen well. It was a hard black frost, without, as yet, anysnow. The ground was like iron, and an Indian could have spied notrail. But at this one spot, twenty-five yards from the east end of thehouse, and on the verge of a dense shrubbery, a small spring, scarcelyvisible, oozed among the moss. Around its very head, it cleared, andkept, a narrow space quite free from green, and here its margin was athin coat of black mineral mud, which never froze. This space, at thebroadest, was but two feet and ten inches across from gravel to turf,yet now it held two distinct footprints, not of some one crossing andre-crossing, but of two successive steps leading from the house into theshrubbery. These footprints were remarkable; the one nearest the housewas of the left foot, the other of the right. Each was the impressionof a long, light, and pointed boot, very hollow at the instep. But theydiffered in this--the left footprint was plain and smooth, without markof nail, or cue, or any other roughness; while the right one was clearlystamped in the centre of the sole with a small rectangular cross. Thismark seemed to have been made by a cruciform piece of metal, or someother hard substance, inlaid into the sole. At least, so said ashoemaker, who was employed to examine it; and he added that the bootswere not those of the present fashion, what he called "duck's bills"being then in vogue. This man being asked to account for the fact ofthe footprints being so close together, did so very easily, and withmuch simplicity. It was evident, he said, that a man of averagestature, walking rapidly, would take nearly twice that distance in everystride; but here the verge of the shrubbery, and the branches strikinghim in the face, had suddenly curtailed the step. And to this, mostlikely, and not to any hurry or triumph, was to be ascribed the factthat one so wily and steadfast did not turn back and erase the dangeroustokens. Most likely, he did not feel what was beneath his feet, whilehe was battling with the tangle above.
Be that as it may, there the marks remained, like the blotting-paper ofhis crime. Casts of them were taken at once, and carefully have theybeen stored by me.
The shoemaker, a shrewd but talkative man, said unasked that he hadnever seen such boots as had left those marks, since the "Young Squire"(he meant Mr. Edgar Vaughan) went upon his travels. For this gratuitousstatement, he was strongly rebuked by the coroner.
For the rest, all that could be found out, after close inquiry, was,that a stranger darkly clad had been seen by the gamekeepers, in a copsesome half-mile from the house, while the men were beating for woodcockson the previous day. He did not seem to be following my father, andthey thought he had wandered out of the forest road. He glided quicklyaway, before they could see his features, but they knew that he was talland swarthy. No footprints were found in that ride like those by theshrubbery spring.
I need not say what verdict the coroner's jury found.