The detective told Williamson all about the stirring occurrences which had taken place during his absence, and the barrister resolved that he would convert what stock and property he had into money, and join Lieutenant Somerton in the Cape, at any rate for a time.
“I shall travel about the world and occupy myself with the manners and customs of other lands,” said the barrister, “and write sketches of travel for some of my publishing friends in town. If I could put my own trials into a book, and make capital out of my own troubles, I might perpetrate a novel, Bales.”
“It would be very taking,” said Bales; “I have been asked, sir, by a gentleman that writes for the Pyrotechnic, to let him do my autobiography, with all the cases I have been mixed up in; but I don’t think I shall.”
They chatted together for some hours in the familiar room, and we leave them enveloped in clouds of smoke through which the candles burn as dimly as the barrister’s future hopes; we leave them to carry our readers to the Brazencrook county gaol, where there are three prisoners in whom we have an interest.
Shuffleton Gibbs had been examined before the magistrates, and committed for trial on the clearest evidence, as we have intimated; so that the prediction of the showman, that he would not leave his bed again, was not fully verified: only a very few weeks elapsed, however, before the criminal gradually sank, and at last died as much from want of gin as through disease. He died a miserable death, uninfluenced altogether by the ministrations of the chaplain who, by a strange coincidence, had been a member of that very college where Gibbs and Richard Tallant had first become acquainted; but before he died, when he felt quite satisfied that he was in no danger of being hung, he admitted the truth of the showman’s evidence, and not only confessed his own guilt, but boasted of it, gloated over it, and described the murder in fearfully graphic terms, until the prison officials sickened at the details, and shrunk back from the awful skeleton-like figure that grinned and raved in those last death agonies.
Confronted with the chief witness against him, Gibbs put out his skinny hand, which the showman took timidly in his, and with that professional feeling which never deserted the owner of the famous dog Momus, Digby Martin, alias Smith, thought to himself what a rival Gibbs would have been just then to that living skeleton, who had treated him so shamefully at Severntown!
It is neither necessary nor desirable that we should dwell upon this wretched scene in the prison, where the last of the race to which Gibbs belonged ended his miserable career. Let it suffice that he died and was buried; and that the showman was released, and afterwards brought quite a small fortune to the proprietor of the tavern near the Brazencrook Music Hall, by relating the true particulars of the murder in the ruined castle of Montem, exhibiting the clothes of the murderer, and the pistol with which the deed was done. Momus took her share in these performances, and afterwards went round with the hat,—being faithful to her rough master to the last, and never wearying in her obedience to his behests.
Thomas Dibble was found guilty; but in consideration of the excellent character which he received from several witnesses, and the whole of the circumstances under which the robbery was committed, he was only sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. During the whole of this time, Mrs. Dibble remained at Montem Castle with the housekeeper, except when she went, once a month, to see Thomas, for a few minutes, at the gaol, upon which occasions she made a show of forgiveness and sympathy; but she could never resist telling the turnkey, in Dibble’s presence, of her boarding-school education, the proposals of marriage which she had received when she lived at home with her pa, and other biographical reminiscences with which the reader is already too familiar.
When Thomas was released he was conducted from the gaol by an agent of Lord Verner to a comfortable cottage near Avonworth, a few miles from Barton Hall, in which cottage Mrs. Dibble was already living. She would have met her husband at the end of his confinement; but Lady Verner had made the arrangements of the time, and the agent carried them out. When he had driven Dibble to the cottage he told him that this was his future home, and that he would receive from Lady Verner, a quarterly allowance sufficient to enable his wife and himself to live comfortably all their days. Poor Dibble’s surprise and gratitude knew no bounds; he cried and laughed by turns; and he was quite content to believe ever afterwards what Mrs. Dibble told him, that all this had been done because of her boarding-school education, and on account of her pa being a gentleman. With all this good fortune following so soon upon a series of miseries, and coming to him at the gloomiest period of his career, Thomas Dibble’s spirits soon rose to a high pitch of buoyancy; whilst “comfortable living” and plenty to eat and drink gave him courage to withstand the renewal of his wife’s domineering influence. He never succeeded in being master, and he would not have drunk of the well of St. Keyne if he could; for Dibble’s was a humble spirit; he had always served, and was content to do so;—in fact, he rather preferred it than otherwise. But once in these latter days he asserted his dignity in such a way that prevented Mrs. Dibble from drawing the rein too tightly, and enabled them to live more happily than ever they had lived before.
“Never you mention that roll of notes business again, Maria; it baint that I wishes to deny that I was not an honest man, but I thinks on it often enough myself, without your dinning it into my ears. I’se never said I had a boarding-school education, an’ all that, Maria, and I knows you has; but when a man’s shown a woman that he would do anything in the world for her, even to putting his hand to thieve, it baint for that woman to throw it in his face. Don’t do it again, Maria, or I goes out of this house never to come back no more.”