Chapter XXXIV: The Great Skene Case

You see the heading to this chapter? Your fathers used to see and greet it for many a long day in their newspapers--especially in the evening issues, when a little excitement was needed to beguile the tedious minutes of the journey homeward from the city to Clapham, or Streatham, or Hampstead. How the boys used to shrill it out, decorated with its daily official furbelows, and make their halfpenny profits on that _cause célèbre_! There may be comfortable newsvendors now who owe their position to the social furore it created. I know that many lifelong friendships, not to speak of heads, were broken in the differences of opinion to which it led. You may unearth the full report of it all, if you will, from the dusty files of ’82. I am not going to be so silly as to retail it to an indifferent generation. Even the great Arthur--great in bulk as in impudence--has shrunk to-day into little more than a buffer for legal precedents. What modern can gauge the force of the contests which raged about the Tichborne or Skene standards, or find himself more than politely interested in the story of the blood spilt and reputations overthrown on those doughty fields?--lost, both, by their claimants, or pretenders; yet, I trust, in one case, an honourable defeat, a few words as to which must now suffice.

Lord Skene persisting obstinately in disputing my claim, and my cause being warmly espoused by my friends, led to the institution of those legal proceedings which were to result in that action at law before the Lords of the Court of Common Pleas, which came to be known as the Great Skene Mystery, and which in the end found me non-suited and disinherited. The case lasted many weeks, and entailed the production of a little army of witnesses. Its expenses shake my memory to this day; though, thank Heaven, some subsequent successes were to enable me to come to some sort of a compromise for them with their guarantor--my blessed and admirable Johnny. Its chief weakness consisted in its failure to procure any reliable depositions from the witness who should have been its first--my poor stricken mother. A disastrous blow to it was the death of Mother Carey on the very evening following her receipt of an official citation to the Court to give her evidence. That, resolving itself into a matter of second-hand, brought about my discomfiture. Whatever was the moral of the case--and their appreciation of its true bent was conveyed to me spontaneously by a large number of independent persons, legal and otherwise--so reckless a dealing with our institutions as would be entailed in the upsetting of an hereditary title on circumstantial evidence was hardly to be thought of. My claim was dismissed as, in Scottish parlance, not proven, and Master Baby was confirmed in his succession to the lordship of Evercreech.

Not so many weeks ago I strolled into the old Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, and tried to regather from its mouldering echoes some whisper of the enormous babble which my solitary voice had once awakened there. Quiet sunshine came in through the windows; there was an atmosphere in the place as of one of those little done-with and locked-away graveyards which one comes on unexpectedly in the green nooks of London. It was difficult to reincarnate in fancy from that silent dust the roar and scuffle of a dead generation. Its figures, and the emotions they had once evoked in me, would not be stirred to more than a very shadowy demonstration. They were not, in fact, so much the fallen precipitate of time as of a dead phase of my own existence. Between them and the present lay the verdict of the Court. Only on the hither side of that verdict was life a vivid and strenuous reality to me. Hence, though the case itself, with its judges, and droning counsels, and motley witnesses, and pomp and circumstance of legal warfare, was become as the shadow of a fantasia, every detail of its immediate issues was as clear to me as if it had happened yesterday. The verdict had severed my past from my present self, as a surgeon’s knife cuts away a diseased limb. I could recall the very queer stunned feeling with which I had awakened from the operation amidst the rising buzz and shuffle of the court, or theatre. The solemn withdrawal of the judges--figures like old ermine-muffled dowagers making for their chariots; the yawning and stretching barristers, laughing as they gathered their papers; the excited gossip of the audience; the general movement, and rush of draughts, and gusty wind of cab-hailing voices, loud or indistinct as the doors opened and shut like an organ-swell--it all came back to me like a last week’s harlequinade to a child.

Someone takes me by the arm, and leads me out, unresisting, into the mild May evening. A sense as of something rather comical bubbles in me like weak laughter. There is a smell of water carts in the roads, and the unconcerned sparrows are hopping in the intervals of the traffic.

“Never mind, old fellow,” says the dear voice in my ear. “You’re the one that comes out of it with credit.”

I stop, reeling a little, as if stupidly drunk.

“O, credit, Johnny!” I answer, with an inane giggle. “You’ll have to give me that with a vengeance.”

“Come, Dicky!” he says, peremptorily for him. “That’s neither sense nor kindness, old man. Nor it isn’t fair to me, you know. I didn’t lead you on to this for my own profit. What I lose is what you lose, and nothing more--faith in men’s justice, that’s all. The rest counts for nothing; and if you’re the friend I believe, you’ll see it as I do.”

I may be morally intoxicated. I am not ashamed to own, nevertheless, that, there in the open street, I take his good hand and kiss it.

“Now, come along home,” he says, flushing; “and hear what she’s got to say about it all. Your defeat will pay you with her, if I know her, better than any victory would. I only wish I was you, by golly!”

We reach the flat, and he leaves me to mount the stairs alone. There, in the gorgeous drawing-room, ablaze with lights, I find her--a little soft radiant figure, “born to consume the soil” and the bleeding hearts of its labourers. I look round and about me with a renunciatory laugh and shrug of my shoulders, and my eyes, bitter and defiant, come back to her.

“Yes, Miss Christmas,” I say, “this is your proper setting. I have lost my case.”

The vile brute in me--the vile brute! She does not answer a word; but, with a quick sob, she wrenches the diamond from her bosom, the pearls from her hair, and that falls and half veils her face. And the next moment she is prostrate at my feet.

“Richard! I will be poor--O, I will be poor!”

Hush! Who is this come suddenly upon us from the shadows, where Ira, hearing my step, had hidden her?

“Will you make my burden, Richard, more than I can bear?”

I turn in amazement. It is Lady Skene.

“I have dared much to come to you--to her,” she says, in a low agitated voice. “I knew from my husband that you could never win--not there--not in that Court. But here, Richard? O, it is great to be generous in triumph, but greater in defeat.”

“Generous! What have I left to give in all the world?”

“Yourself.”

“Ira!” I cry, as if waking from a dream. “What have I been saying? What wicked nonsense have I been talking? Why, what has all this to do with you and me? Money and titles? I don’t remember their ever having had anything to do with the understanding between us. Or had they? I am stupid, and I can’t remember.”

“Richard!”

I am on my knees to her.

“What tomfoolery, of course. I can’t imagine what I was thinking of. To quarrel with my own heart because it wouldn’t stop beating!”

I look round. Lady Skene has gone.

“Ira!” I cry once more--and heaven flows upon me under the tangle of her hair.

ENVOI.

I have only a note or two to add, inessential but explanatory to the curious.

Lord Skene never forgave me for that stand made in my own rights, but persisted to the end in regarding me as an impostor who had got even something better than his deserts. His ward coming of age soon after the trial, and persisting no less obstinately in her attachment to a rascal, he washed his hands of her and committed us both to the devil. The death of his mother-in-law, I am satisfied to think, caused him some retributive pangs; for, out of pocket as he was by the action, he could not afford to ignore her substantial leavings, or fail to suffer the social penalties entailed thereby through his obligation to admit his wife’s relationship with the horrible old miser. After Mother Carey’s demise, bonds, scrip, and securities to a handsome tune were discovered hidden about her premises, besides a considerable amount of property in hard, but dirty, cash. I hope his lordship enjoyed handling it. But I bear him no grudge. Old kindly memories of him predominate in my mind.

From facts subsequently unearthed by Mr Shapter, it was believed that Mr Mark Dalston had originally purposed the infanticide, through the co-operation of his friend, Dr Blague, of the teller of this narrative, and that it was nothing more that the accidental interposition of Mother Carey which had suggested to him the compromise which, though after a long interval, was to bring about his undoing. If he had been imbued with only a little less confidence in his own managing villainy, he might have been a respected citizen at this day, and my story had never been written.

The trial had at least one sequel satisfying to justice. It led--largely through Johnny’s instrumentality--to an inquiry into the circumstances of Geoletti’s conviction (an inquiry only less notable than the one to which it was supernumerary), with the result that the victim was granted a free pardon, together with some pecuniary compensation nicely adapted to his deserts at the time of his arrest. It was sufficient, however, to his expectations; and returning with the sum to his native land, he was enabled to realise the desire of his heart in the purchase of an auberge in the Aosta Valley, where in after days I called upon him, in company with my wife, and found him a quiet prosperous man, not speaking much, but possessed with an insatiable craving to make up for past abstinences from tobacco and wine.

And, finally--of ourselves? Under the seal of love’s confessional lies locked all that is worth knowing there; but we were married, if the term is essential to the propriety of an ending. I am not fond of it myself, I confess. It is the conventional expression for a conventionally vulgar festivity. But one has to endure it, and get away from it as quickly as possible, and commit to one’s fancy a picture of the thing as one would have liked it to be--something out in the woods, perhaps, with maids dancing, and garlanded heifers, and a gentle poem of wedlock, as binding as its natural symbol in the oak and eglantine. It is nothing but a question of terms, when the sweet and solemn oath is exchanged, after all.

Well, the thing had to be, and my fairy, who should have come dressed like the green lace-wing, must drag after her a preposterous train of watered tabby, or moiré antique bombazine, or some such unnameable stuff at something terrifying the yard. Johnny, the best of men, was likewise my best man; and, in the enthusiasm of both parts, pursued us, flying, with a dropping fire of telegrams in cypher, which punctuated our honeymoon with merriment.

And afterwards? Why, I started life dependent on my wife; and what was to say against it? A sense of honour? Pooh! Fine honour or kindness to wreck two lives on a sentiment of vanity! That curse of the golden balance! Go, fall into love, my friend--really into love, I mean--and marry you a wife, and learn what mutual confidence means. After the second day you will be beating your brains to remember which of you it was brought the money into the concern. But that is not to say you will be justified in leading an idle life.

_Méchant poulain_, says an old French proverb, _peut devenir bon cheval_. Nature having given me a certain fanciful inventiveness, which might appear to be my most negotiable asset, I thought I would try writing for a living, and even began with some illusions about Literature (with a capital), and the certainty of high purpose and high endeavour meeting in time with their due recognition and reward. But long was not wanted to put me out of that preposterous conceit, and make me understand the terms upon which “literature” is permitted to include itself among the high arts, such as the forming of a trust, or the exploiting of a pill or hair wash. I then stuffed a manuscript into an old potted beef tin, and forwarded it to an enterprising publisher, with the intimation that it had been discovered on a dust-heap, and that my terms were such and such, not as author but as entrepreneur. The ruse, being appreciated at its worth by a sagacious spirit, and the venture launched on a flood-tide of puffery, proved an instant success. The literary value of the book may have been anything or nothing; it ran into its twenty-fifth edition on a much solider basis; and I found myself suddenly the possessor of capital. Ira and Johnny were both immensely indignant with me when they discovered the truth. That occurred on the very day on which my wife had unearthed from Keats a quotation which she considered peculiarly applicable to my destiny and the ideals which ruled it:

“... to die content on pleasant sward,
Leaving great verse unto a little clan.”

I laughed as I kissed her.

“Good poets make unpractical fathers,” I said--“and you must not excite yourself, my loveliness. This money, well invested, is going to prove the nest-egg of our song-bird. We must line the nest, you know, if we want the bird to sing. And now, being independent of the public, I am going to pull its ears.”

“You donkey,” she said, and pulled mine.

So ends the Great Skene Mystery, the symbol of whose “stopping” is to be found at this day, if one is curious enough to look for it, in the little lead plug let into a hole in the floor of the old Court at Westminster, where once was inserted the rod which held the screen which protected the judges from the draughts. And, if I am Richard Gaskett still, I have at least earned a popular title to my name.

[The End]

NOTES.

[1] #The Eye# Equals Johnny himself--the ego, that is to say. All his own.

[2] For the sake of clearness, the story is given in reporter’s English, as afterwards minuted, and not in the hybrid phraseology characteristic of the narrator.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.

Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ frowsy/frowzy, notepaper/note-paper, etc.) have been preserved.

Text-edition only: “#” is used to indicate bolded text.

Alterations to the text:

Convert footnotes to endnotes.

Punctuation fixes: quotation mark pairing, missing periods, etc.

[Chapter III]

Change “to realise in it a a sense of my own” delete one _a_.

“to _marshall_ these resolutely before my mind’s eye” to _marshal_.

[Chapter IV]

(“Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut,” she answered,) italicize French text.

[Chapter V]

“Didn’t she suggest this to to you?” delete one _to_.

[Chapter XI]

“a bottle of gin and one of peppermint _esssence_” to _essence_.

[Chapter XIII]

“that must be _Jonnny_ Dando!” to _Johnny_.

[Chapter XV]

“consequences of an _intreege_ with some girl” to _intrigue_.

[Chapter XX]

“honesty of the confession _evercame_ me” to _overcame_.

[End of text]