“By what name did you call him”? Mr. Brockwood looked at the coroner angrily. What difference could it make?
“I called, ‘Viley, Viley, my boy!’ three times, at the top of my voice. I used to call him so in the nursery, and he always liked it. I canʼt make out why he did not answer, for he must have been close by—though the bushes were very thick, certainly. At that instant, before I had time to jump down into the covert, a woodcock, flushed, perhaps, by the sound of my voice, crossed a little clearing not thirty yards in front of me. I forgot all about my determination not to shoot that day, cocked both barrels in a moment, but missed him clean with the first, because a branch of the hedge flew back and jerked the muzzle sharply. But the bird was flying rather slowly, and I got a second shot at him, as he crossed a little path in the copse, too narrow to be called a ride. I felt quite sure that I shot straight at him, and I thought I saw him fall; but the light was very bad, and the trees were very thick, and he gave one of those flapping jerks at the moment I pulled the trigger, so perhaps I missed him”.
“That ’ee doednʼt, Meester Craydock. Aiʼse larned ’ee a bit too much for thic. What do ’ee call thissom”? Here he held up the woodcock. “Meester Craydock, my lard, be the sprackest shat anywhur round these pearts”.
Poor Mark knew not that in his anxiety to vindicate his favouriteʼs skill, he was making the case more black for him.
“Mark Stote, no more interruptions, if you please”, exclaimed the coroner; “Mr. Nowell, pray proceed”.
“Dwoanʼt ’ee be haish upon un, my lard, dwoanʼt ’ee vaind un guilty. A coodnʼt no how ’ave doed it. A wor that naice and pertiklar, a woodnʼt shat iven toard a gipsy bwoy. And his oyes be as sprack as a merlinʼs. A cood zee droo a mokpieʼs neestie”.
Cradockʼs face, so pale and haggard but a minute before, was now of a burning red. The jury looked at him with astonishment, and each, according to his bias, put his construction upon the change. Two of them thought it was conscious guilt; the rest believed it to be indignation at the idea of being found guilty. It was neither; it was hope. The flash and flush of sudden hope, leaping across the heart, like a rocket over the sea of despair. He could not speak, but gasped in vain, then glutched (to use a forest word, which means gulped down a sob), and fell back into John Rosedewʼs arms, faint, and stark, and rigid.
The process of his mind which led him to the shores of light—but only for a little glimpse, a glimpse and then all dark again—was somewhat on this wise: “Only a bullet, or balled cartridge, at the distance I was from him, could have killed my darling Viley on the spot, as I saw him dead, with the hole cut through him. I am almost sure that my cartridge was in the left barrel of the gun, where I always put it. And now it is clear that the left barrel killed that unlucky bird, and killed him with shot flying separate, so the cartridge must have opened. Viley, too, was ten feet under the height the bird was flying. I donʼt believe that I hit him at all. I had loose shot in my right barrel; the one that sent so random, on account of the branch that struck it. I am almost sure I had, and I fired quite straight with the left barrel. God is good, the great God is merciful, after all I thought of Him”. No wonder that he fainted away, in the sudden reaction.
There is no need to dwell any longer on the misery of that inquest. The principal evidence has been given. The place where Cradock stood in the hedge, and the place where Clayton fell and died; how poor Cradock saw him first, in the very act of jumping, and hung like a nut–shuck, paralysed; how he ran back to his dead twin–brother and could not believe in his death, and went through the woods like a madman, with nothing warm about him except his brotherʼs blood,—all this, I think, is clear enough, as it had long been to the jury, and now was to the coroner. Only Cradock awoke from his hope—what did he care for their verdict? He awoke from his hope not in his moral—that there could be no doubt of—but in his manual innocence; when, to face all circumstances, he had nothing but weak habit. He could not swear, he could not even feel confident (and we want three times three for swearing, that barbarous institution) that he had rammed the cartridge down the left barrel, and the charge of shot down the right. All he could say was this, that it was a very odd thing if he had not.