CHAPTER XXII.—SOME CONTRASTS
The inquest and the garden party—A policeman sits behind the screen—The portrait of a prosperous impostor—From his wife's death-bed to the House—The judge and his pet dog—Tea and cakes while they wait for the sentence
UNDER the trees in the garden the tables are spread for a pastoral fête. Smiling waitresses are handing ices and claret cup and strawberries and cream to daintily-gowned ladies who are sitting in the shade and chatting gaily with their admiring cavaliers. I come out from a little building in the grounds and gaze at the fair and festive scene. As I see the pretty frocks and pretty faces, and listen to the rippling laughter, I cannot help being struck by the vivid contrast between the tragedy I have that moment left and the comedy I have come upon.
These grounds are the grounds of a famous hospital, and the company are gathered together under the trees after listening to speeches and witnessing the presentation of prizes in the great hall of the institution.
I come through the little door of the out-building to step right into the joy of life, and the door as it closes behind has shut away a tragedy. Behind it lies a dead man upon whom the verdict of a coroner's jury has been pronounced.
I am not easily upset, and I have looked in my professional wanderings upon many gruesome sights, but my nerves have been sorely tried during the five minutes I have been inside that little out-building of a great hospital.
There were only two men inside it when I entered, and one of them was dead. The living man was the inquest porter, and he was spending the blazing summer afternoon in giving back to the dead one the shape and impress of humanity.
It was a sight to make the unaccustomed spectator shudder, and I only lingered long enough to hear the story of the tragedy. Then I passed out again into the sunshine and found myself at a garden party. I looked at the charming scene and the smiling faces of the fair guests; I listened to the rippling laughter and the musical clink of the ice in the cooling wine cups, and I could not help thinking of the strangeness of the contrast. Only a few inches of space and a wooden door separated the garden party from the dead-house.
Not one fair visitor in that gay crowd had the faintest idea of what was happening within a few yards of where she sat in the sunshine under the trees eating strawberries and cream.
As I passed the group a young lady whom I knew came towards me. "What a delightful place this is!" she said. "Really, I never thought a hospital was so charming."
"Charming" seemed a strange word to apply to a hospital. But in our great palaces of pain to-day the eye is constantly cheered, and in the note of colour and comfort the casual visitor forgets the anguish that lies hidden beneath the gay coverlets and behind the pretty curtains.
Here is a hospital ward that an artist might delight in. The colour scheme is soothing to the eye. Along the ward are little tables on which stand bowls and vases of daintily arranged flowers. In the centre of the ward is a square of carpet of a soft artistic green. A young lady with a basket of roses is passing from bed to bed. She places one of her sweet flowers in the hand of every sufferer.
Outside the sun is shining and the birds are singing. The scene is delightful, and the visitor forgets the pain of the patients in the charm of the environment.
But at the far end of the room there is a screen. Behind that screen is a bed on which lies a man white and motionless, with his throat swathed in surgical bandages.
Beside the bed, hidden also by the screen, sits a policeman.
The visitor sees the flowers and the pretty coverlets and curtains, the polished floors, and the soft green art carpet. But he does not see the horror behind the screen; he does not suspect it, for he is not allowed to go near enough to know that the screen conceals anything at all.
The man behind the screen was brought to the hospital with a gaping wound in his throat. He had inflicted it himself, after stabbing the wife who lay by his side. The woman may die. She is in another part of the hospital. When the man is well enough he will be taken to prison. If the woman dies the charge against him will be murder. Night and day in that charmingly arranged, flower-decorated ward, the officer of justice sits guarding, not a patient, but a prisoner.
In the next bed lies a young man who is rapidly approaching convalescence. His happy wife bends over him with tender love in her eyes. The sunshine of returning life and the shadow of a dreadful death are separated only by a few inches of polished floor and a little table on which stands a bowl of roses.
The world once rang with the story of the Tichborne Claimant. The romance of that colossal imposture will be told again and again for many a long year to come.
In the days when he was still "Sir Roger" to the great public, I met the Claimant and conversed with him. Long after the huge edifice of fraud had crumbled to the dust I made the acquaintance of some members of the Orton family, and from them received certain photographs, which I added to my souvenirs of famous cases.
After he had served his sentence the Claimant made a confession, which he sent to a weekly newspaper. Later on he tried to withdraw the confession, but it was substantially true, and its publication destroyed the last vestige of faith which some few people still had in him.
After this "Sir Roger" gradually dropped out of public knowledge. He lived quietly and meanly in furnished rooms in a street in Marylebone. In these rooms he died. He was taken to the Marylebone mortuary, and there one sunny morning I went to see him in his coffin.
A gravel path bordered by flowers and trees leads to the hostel of the dead. After I had seen the Claimant, the adventurous life ended at last, the lying lips closed for ever in the eternal silence, I came back along that flower-bordered pathway and out into the busy thoroughfare.
My way home lay through a long street of private houses. Passing one of the houses, I looked up at the windows of the drawing-room floor, and the thought of the dead man I had left came vividly back to me. For in these rooms there lived for many years a gentleman whose name was on every one's lips in the days of the great Tichborne trial. He believed in the Claimant implicitly. He found large sums of money for "Sir Roger" during the years that the case remained undecided.
Long after the butcher of Wapping had gone to reduce his weight on a convict regime, his friend and supporter took this house. He lived there and died there, and up to the day of his death, quaint and eccentric in many things, he still believed that Arthur Orton was Sir Roger Tichborne, Bart., of the B.K.
There were many mementoes of the old Tichborne days in the possession of his former supporter. When he died he left them to his housekeeper. His housekeeper kept the house on, and let a portion of it in apartment. I knew, for I had seen them, that the Tichborne relics were still in the drawing-room. One of them was a portrait of the Claimant, taken in the days of his prosperity, when the Tichborne Bonds had been put on the market and money was pouring in. I could not resist the temptation of calling and telling the lady of the house of the Claimant's death, and asking to see the portraits and the relics. There they stood as I remembered them in the old days. The portrait of "Sir Roger" was on the old-fashioned chiffonier, standing between two little vases of flowers. I looked at the smiling face of the prosperous impostor in his heyday a few minutes after I had seen Arthur Orton lying in the parish mortuary.
A nurse from one of the big nursing institutions has been sent for hurriedly to a woman who is lying dangerously ill in cheap apartments in Pimlico.
Nurses are accustomed to contrasts. One week they may be tending a patient in a magnificent mansion, the next they may be in charge of a case where the surroundings are of the humblest description.
The nurse whose adventure I am about to tell did not particularly like the look of the house to which she had been summoned. Her quick, professional eye read the character of the inmates before she had passed through the hall into the room occupied by her patient.
The patient, a woman of about five-and-thirty, was what is technically known as "a drink case." The doctor who had been in attendance and telephoned to the institution was in the room waiting for the nurse.
"She is very bad," he said, "and I don't think there is much hope. I have ascertained who she is, and I have communicated with her husband. He may come this afternoon or this evening."
At eight o'clock in the evening a gentleman called and asked to see Mrs. —————. He saw the nurse and told her the doctor had informed him that Mrs. ————— was ill. He asked to see her alone.
The visitor, a man of about fifty, remained alone with the sick woman for a few minutes. Then he came out and spoke to the nurse.
"She is very bad," he said. "Does the doctor give any hope?"
The nurse shook her head. "Very little," she replied.
Two days afterwards the blinds were down in the Pimlico lodging-house. The patient was dead.
The morning after the visitor had called, the nurse read the daily paper, and, because a certain fact which had come to her knowledge had aroused her curiosity, she turned to the Parliamentary Report.
A well-known and distinguished member of Parliament had made a speech the previous evening which had attracted general attention, and which was reproduced in full, as it was on a burning question of the day.
The politician had gone from the bed of the dying woman in the Pimlico lodging-house to the House of Commons to make the speech of the evening. The woman whom he had called to see he had not spoken to for many years. But she was his wife. The dying woman had revealed her identity to the doctor, and had implored him to let her husband know of her whereabouts and to beg him to come and see her.
In his Memoirs Lord Brampton, known to an earlier generation as Sir Henry Hawkins, quotes a little article written about his famous dog Jack, and says he wishes he knew who the author was.
I have not written to Lord Brampton telling him that the words he quotes are mine. If I refer to them here, it is because the great judge's pet was always associated in my mind with a vivid contrast.
Many years ago I was in a provincial town where a man was being tried for murder. I went to the court and heard the trial, and was present when the prisoner was sentenced to death. I saw the judge upon the Bench with the black cap upon his head, and I heard him pronounce the awful words of doom.
Early the next morning I went for a walk to a rural suburb of the town. Crossing a meadow I came upon a gentleman who was also taking a country stroll. In the middle of the meadow he was playing with his dog. He had a piece of stick in his hand, and the dog was jumping up and barking, and eagerly demanding in canine language that the stick should be thrown.
The smiling gentleman romping with his dog in the morning sunshine was the stem judge who had the previous evening sentenced a man to death. I recognized the dog before I recognized his master, because I had met Jack at Worcester Assizes, and had seen him held on a lead by his master, solemnly escorted by the javelin men, who met the Judge at Worcester Station to accompany him to his lodgings.
I can imagine no greater contrast than that between the solemn procession illustrating the majesty of the law and the antics in which Jack indulged as he followed the javelin men. The contrast is hardly a London one, but it is permissible to mention it here, as Jack, the famous judge's dog, was a great London celebrity as well as a provincial one.
A fashionable London church is filled with flowers and palms. The pews are crowded with pretty women and handsome men. Outside the church there is an eager, expectant crowd that is with difficulty kept back from the red carpet under the awning.
The bridesmaids have arrived and are waiting in the porch. Presently a carriage drives up, and there is a buzz of admiration as the beautiful and aristocratic bride alights, and, leaning on the arm of her father, enters the church.
There is a bishop at the altar, and he is "assisted" by a distant relative of the bridegroom. The service is fully choral, and the lady journalists are taking notes of the dresses for tomorrow's newspapers.
As the bridal party comes out of the church there is a little accident. A man falls in a fit in the crowd, and the policeman, turning to help him, the people surge up, and the bridal procession is interrupted. In the confusion some of the flowers in the bride's bouquet become detached and fall to the ground. A workman with a sad, careworn face bends down and picks them up. He will take them home when his work is over. The flowers of the bride's bouquet will lie on the breast of the dead girl who has given him a year of happy wedded life, and now lies dead in the desolate little home.
The fair young bride of the West will know nothing of the dead wife in the East. But the flowers that were bought for the bridal of the one will lie in the coffin of the other.