The next day after dinner Graves came in in quite a bustle, and said, “I say, Mrs. Beckett, whatever do you think has happened?”
“How should I know?” I said. And if you come to think of it, it’s absurd for people to ask you what you think has happened. As if, out of the thousands of things that might happen, anybody could think straight off at once of the one that has happened.
“Oh,” said Graves, “there’s been an awful scene in the village! Old Gwillam was out for a walk this morning, and he saw old Dame Trueman coming along, and he ran after her and seized her by the neck and tried to push her into the horse-pond, shouting out that she was a witch, and a crowd came round, and some of them said, “Serve her right!” But the others interfered and dragged the old woman away, half-choked and black in the face, and then he ran after her, and laid into her with his walking-stick, shouting and cursing, and saying that she had bewitched him, and prevented him from sleeping; and the end of it was that Jones, the policeman, had to come to the rescue, and rush in and stop Mr. Gwillam. But he was so excited that he whacked into the policeman, and for that he was marched off to the police-station, all the village tagrag and bobtail following.”
When Graves told me that, I thought it was a very dreadful thing. I laid the blame on the people who had told the poor old gentleman all that nonsense about Dame Trueman being a witch.
Harry went up to the police-station to make inquiries, and he told me that Mr. Gwillam had been allowed to go home; but he was to be summoned for assaulting the policeman, and also that Dame Trueman had been and applied for a summons against him for assaulting her.
There was a lot of talk about it in our bar and in the parlour that evening, and it was the biggest sensation we had had in the village since the inquest on the London gentleman, who was found dead in the wood near the Silent Pool, with a pistol in his hand, and a letter in his pocket saying he had committed suicide because he heard voices. It was a dreadful letter, and showed the poor fellow was quite mad. I cut the letter out from our county paper, and kept it, because I thought it so curious, as showing what extraordinary delusions some people go through life with, appearing sane in every other way. This was some of the letter—
“I have committed suicide to escape from the pursuit of a devilish agency. This is the story of my life. When I was a boy of tender age, some organization of individuals erected—where, of course, I cannot tell—an elaborate scientific contrivance for conveying all kinds of sounds and disagreeable sensations to the human frame. At the time this was first erected it was not brought into full play; but at a very early stage these persons worked upon my feelings by simulating the voices of persons with whom I was brought into contact. But, since then, wherever I go I have been annoyed by this scientific agency. Wherever I go the sound of human voices is conveyed to me. When I sit down an intense heavy pressure is brought to bear upon my body, destroying the effect of the food I eat, and producing great discomfort. This and the voices have at last driven me mad, and as no human agency will protect me I am determined to end my life, believing that beyond the grave those voices will not be allowed to pursue me, and I shall be at rest.”
Poor fellow!—but I suppose it is a common delusion, that about voices.
Of course Mr. Gwillam wasn’t as mad as that; but it was certain that he must have delusions because of his believing about the end of the world coming at twenty-five past six on a Friday, and about our going up into the skies on a whirlwind. And it was a delusion for him to believe that Dame Trueman had bewitched him.
When the summonses came on for hearing before our magistrate, the little justice-room was crowded almost to suffocation. Mr. Gwillam, poor gentleman, had gone about the village, and got all the people who had anything to say against Dame Trueman to promise to come forward and prove that she had practised witchcraft, and what he called the black art.