It was a dreary winter's day; the dark leaden clouds that flitted past, and the long-sighing wind, seemed to add their sad influence to the melancholy. The house itself already appeared to feel its altered fortunes. Most of the windows were closed and shuttered; the decorations of rare plants and shrubs and lamps were removed; instead of the movement of liveried servants to and fro, ill-favored and coarse-clad men, the underlings of the law, crept stealthily about, noticing each circumstance of the locality, and conferring together in mysterious whispers. Mounted messengers, too, came and went with a haste that boded urgency; and post-horses were each moment arriving to carry away those whose impatience to leave was manifested in a hundred ways. Had the air of the place been infected with some pestilential malady, their eagerness could scarce have been greater. All the fretful irritability of selfishness, all the peevish discontent of petty natures, exhibited themselves without shame; and envious expressions towards those fortunate enough to “get away first,” and petulant complaints over their own delay, were bandied on every side.
A great table was laid for breakfast in the dining-room, as usual. All the luxuries and elegances that graced the board on former occasions were there, but a few only took their places. Of these, Frobisher and some military men were the chief; they, indeed, showed comparatively little of that anxiety to be gone so marked in the others. The monotony of the barrack and the parade was not attractive, and they lingered like men who, however little they had of pleasure here, had even less of inducement to betake them elsewhere.
Meek had been the first to make his escape, by taking the post-horses intended for another, and already was many miles on his way towards Dublin. The Chief Justice and his family were the next. From the hour of the fatal event, Mrs. Malone had assumed a judicial solemnity of demeanor that produced a great impression upon the beholders, and seemed to convey, by a kind of reflected light, the old judge's gloomiest forebodings of the result.
Mrs. Leicester White deferred her departure to oblige Mr. Howie, who was making a series of sketches for the “Pictorial Paul Pry,” showing not only the various façades of Tubbermore House, but several interesting “interiors:” such as the “Ball-room, when the fatal tidings arrived:” “Dressing-room of Roland Cashel, Esq., when entered by the Chief Justice and his party;” the most effective of all being a very shadowy picture of the “Gap of Ennismore—the scene of the murder;” the whole connected by a little narrative so ingeniously drawn up as to give public opinion a very powerful bias against Cashel, whose features, in the woodcut, would in themselves have made a formidable indictment.
Of the Kennyfecks, few troubled themselves with even a casual inquiry: except the fact that a fashionable physician had been sent for to Dublin, little was known about them. But where was Linton all this while? Some averred that he had set out for the capital, to obtain the highest legal assistance for his friend; others, that he was so overwhelmed by the terrible calamity as to have fallen into a state of fatuous insensibility. None, however, could really give any correct account of him; he had left Tubbermore, but in what direction none could tell.
As the day wore on, a heavy rain began to fall; and of those who still remained in the house, little knots of two and three assembled at the windows, to watch for the arrival of their wished-for “posters,” or to speculate upon the weather. Another source of speculation there was besides. Some hours before, a magistrate, accompanied by a group of ill-dressed and vulgar-looking men, had been seen to pass the house, and take the path which led to the Gap of Ennismore. These formed the inquest, who were to inquire into the circumstances of the crime, and whose verdict, however unimportant in a strictly legal sense, was looked for with considerable impatience by some of the company. To judge from the anxious looks that were directed towards the mountain road, or the piercing glances which at times were given through telescopes in that direction, one would have augured that some, at least, of those there, were not destitute of sympathy for him whose guests they had been, and beneath whose roof they still lingered. A very few words of those that passed between them will best answer how this impression is well founded.
“Have you sent your groom off, Upton?” asked Frobisher, as he stood with a coffee-cup in his hand at the window.
“Yes, he passed the window full half an hour ago.”
“They are confoundedly tedious,” said Jennings, half suppressing a yawn. “I thought those kind of fellows just gave a look at the body, and pronounced their verdict at once.”
“So they do when it's one of their own class; but in the case of a gentleman they take a prodigious interest in examining his watch and his purse and his pocket-book; and, in fact, it is a grand occasion for prying as far as possible into his private concerns.”