The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK ®. Sarah Orne Jewett
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I felt Jonathan Jelf plucking at my sleeve.
“Look at Raikes,” he whispered; “look at Raikes!”
I turned to where the under-secretary had been standing a moment before, and saw him, white as death, with lips trembling and livid, stealing towards the door.
To conceive a sudden, strange, and indefinite suspicion, to fling myself in his way, to take him by the shoulders as if he were a child, and turn his craven face, perforce, towards the board, were with me the work of an instant.
“Look at him!” I exclaimed. “Look at his face! I ask no better witness to the truth of my words.”
The chairman’s brow darkened.
“Mr. Raikes,” he said, sternly, “if you know anything you had better speak.”
Vainly trying to wrench himself from my grasp, the under-secretary stammered out an incoherent denial.
“Let me go,” he said. “I know nothing—you have no right to detain me—let me go!”
“Did you, or did you not, meet Mr. John Dwerrihouse at Blackwater station? The charge brought against you is either true or false. If true, you will do well to throw yourself upon the mercy of the board and make full confession of all that you know.”
The under-secretary wrung his hands in an agony of helpless terror.
“I was away!” he cried. “I was two hundred miles away at the time! I know nothing about it—I have nothing to confess—I am innocent—I call God to witness I am innocent!”
“Two hundred miles away!” echoed the chairman. “What do you mean?”
“I was in Devonshire. I had three weeks’ leave of absence—I appeal to Mr. Hunter—Mr. Hunter knows I had three weeks’ leave of absence! I was in Devonshire all the time; I can prove I was in Devonshire!”
Seeing him so abject, so incoherent, so wild with apprehension, the directors began to whisper gravely among themselves, while one got quietly up and called the porter to guard the door.
“What has your being in Devonshire to do with the matter?” said the chairman. “When were you in Devonshire?”
“Mr. Raikes took his leave in September,” said the secretary, “about the time when Mr. Dwerrihouse disappeared.”
“I never even heard that he had disappeared till I came back!”
“That must remain to be proved,” said the chairman. “I shall at once put this matter in the hands of the police. In the meanwhile, Mr. Raikes being myself a magistrate and used to deal with these cases, I advise you to offer no resistance, but to confess while confession may yet do you service. As for your accomplice—”
The frightened wretch fell upon his knees.
“I had no accomplice!” he cried. “Only have mercy upon me—only spare my life, and I will confess all! I didn’t mean to harm him! I didn’t mean to hurt a hair of his head! Only have mercy upon me, and let me go!”
The chairman rose in his place, pale and agitated. “Good heavens!” he exclaimed, “what horrible mystery is this? What does it mean?”
“As sure as there is a God in heaven,"said Jonathan Jelf, “it means that murder has been done.”
“No! No! No!” shrieked Raikes, still upon his knees, and cowering like a beaten hound. “Not murder! No jury that ever sat could bring it in murder. I thought I had only stunned him—I never meant to do more than stun him! Manslaughter—manslaughter—not murder!”
Overcome by the horror of this unexpected revelation, the chairman covered his face with his hand and for a moment or two remained silent.
“Miserable man,” he said at length, “you have betrayed yourself!”
“You made me confess! You urged me to throw myself upon the mercy of the board!”
“You have confessed to a crime which no one suspected you of having committed,” replied the chairman, “and which this board has no power either to punish or forgive. All that I can do for you is to advise you to submit to the law, to plead guilty, and to conceal nothing. When did you do this deed?”
The guilty man rose to his feet, and leaned heavily against the table. His answer came reluctantly, like the speech of one dreaming.
“On the 22nd of September!”
On the 22nd of September! I looked in Jonathan Jelf’s face, and he in mine. I felt my own paling with a strange sense of wonder and dread. I saw his blanch suddenly, even to the lips.
“Merciful heaven!” he whispered. “What was it, then, that you saw in the train?”
What was it that I saw in the train? That question remains unanswered to this day. I have never been able to reply to it. I only know that it bore the living likeness of the murdered man, whose body had then been lying some ten weeks under a rough pile of branches and brambles and rotting leaves, at the bottom of a deserted chalk-pit about half-way between Blackwater and Mallingford. I know that it spoke and moved and looked as that man spoke and moved and looked in life; that I heard, or seemed to hear, things related which I could never otherwise have learned; that I was guided, as it were, by that vision on the platform to the identification of the murderer; and that, a passive instrument myself, I was destined, by means of these mysterious teachings, to bring about the ends of Justice. For these things I have never been able to account.
As for that matter of the cigar-case, it proved, on inquiry, that the carriage in which I travelled down that afternoon to Clayborough had not been in use for several weeks, and was, in point of fact, the same in which poor John Dwerrihouse had performed his last journey. The case had doubtless been dropped by him, and had lain unnoticed till I found it.
Upon the details of the murder I have no need to dwell. Those who desire more ample particulars may find them, and the written confession of Augustus Raikes, in the files of The Times for 1856. Enough that the under-secretary, knowing the history of the new line, and following the negotiation step by step through all its stages, determined to waylay Mr. Dwerrihouse, rob him of the seventy-five thousand pounds, and escape to America with his booty.
In order to effect these ends he obtained leave of absence a few days before the time appointed for the payment of the money, secured his passage across the Atlantic in a steamer advertised to start on the 23rd, provided himself with a heavily loaded “life-preserver”, and went down to Blackwater to await the arrival of his victim. How he met him on the platform with a pretended message from the board, how he offered to conduct him by a short cut across the fields to Mallingford, how, having brought him to a lonely place, he struck him down with the life-preserver, and so killed him, and how, finding what he had done, he dragged the body to the verge of an out-of-the-way chalk-pit, and there flung it in and piled it over with branches and brambles, are facts still fresh in the memories of those who, like the connoisseurs in De Quincey’s famous essay, regard murder as a fine art. Strangely enough, the murderer, having done his work, was afraid to leave the country. He declared that he had not intended to take the director’s life, but only to stun and rob him; and that, finding the blow had killed, he dared not fly for fear of drawing down suspicion upon his own head. As a mere robber he would have been safe in the States, but as a murderer he would inevitably have been pursued and given up to justice. So he forfeited his passage, returned to the office as usual at the end of his leave, and locked up his ill-gotten thousands till a more convenient opportunity. In the meanwhile he had the satisfaction of finding that Mr. Dwerrihouse was universally believed to have absconded with the money, no one knew how or whither.
Whether he meant murder or not, however, Mr. Augustus Raikes paid the full penalty of his crime, and was hanged at the Old Bailey, in the second week in January, 1857. Those who desire to make his further acquaintance may see him any day (admirably done in wax) in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s exhibition, in Baker Street. He is there to be found in the midst of a select society of ladies and gentlemen of atrocious