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.