The Crime and the Criminal

by Richard Marsh

I could not, however, have lost them for long. Perhaps for not more than a minute or so. When I came to I opened my eyes, and looking up saw that the moon was shining in the sky overhead, and that it was almost as light as day. I wondered where I was, and whether the end of the world had come. I found that I was lying among a group of bushes on what seemed a sloping bank, and that something very like a miracle had taken place. Falling out of the train while it was rushing along the top of an embankment, I must have gone, backwards, into a bush, which while it had let me through, had sufficed to break my fall. I must have rolled down the bank, until I was stopped by the clump of bushes amidst which I found myself.

The miracle was that I was unhurt. I was a trifle shaken and a trifle dazed. But not a bone was broken, and I felt that, so far as material damage was concerned, I could get up when I chose and walk off, practically as if nothing had occurred.

But I was a trifle dazed, and it was some moments before my senses quite returned to me. What hastened their return was the fact of my hearing footsteps. I listened. Somebody was walking, and not very far off either. The person, whoever it was, seemed to be quite close at hand. I did not know whereabouts I might be lying. I was only aware that I was somewhere between Brighton and London. I had no notion how far I might be from a station or a town. It struck me that it would be just as well that I should discover who the pedestrian might chance to be.

As I was about to rise, with the intention of prospecting, something heavy falling among the bushes almost on top of me startled me half out of my wits. I sprang to my feet. At the bottom of the bank on the other side of a fence which formed a boundary between the railway and the country beyond, a man stood, staring at me in the moonlight. He was tall, and he wore a long black overcoat and a billycock hat; even then, and in that light, I could see he was a gentleman. But it was the look which was on his face which took me aback. I never saw such a look on a man's face before. He stared at me as if he was staring at a ghost. And just as I was about to accost him, and to request his assistance, at least to the extent of informing me as to my whereabouts, leaping right round, he began to tear across the moonlit field as if Satan was at his heels.

I was going to call and beg him not to leave me, a stranger in the land, alone in the lurch like that, when I was reminded of the something which had fallen among the bushes, and which had first made me conscious of his presence, by kicking against something which felt soft and yielding, and which was lying on the ground.

I stooped down to see what it was.

"Sakes alive! It's a woman!"

It was; a young woman--and she was dead. No wonder he had stared at me as if he had been staring at a ghost. No wonder, as he saw me looking at him from among the bushes, that he had thought that the victim of his handiwork had risen from the dead to look again upon his face. No wonder he had torn for his life across the grass, feeling that she was at his heels.

I seemed to be in for a pretty thing. I have looked upon dead folk many a time; yes, and upon not a few who have come to their death by "accident." I have lived in parts of the world in which life is not held so sacred as it is in England; where not such a fuss is made every time the doctor is forestalled--where the doctor is not the only individual who is licensed to kill; where men shoot now and then at sight, and, when they are pushed to it, women too. I know a girl--and liked her--who shot a man who had insulted her in New Orleans, and left him on the sidewalk. Nobody said a word. She is married now to a rich man, and to a good man, as good men go, and she has a family, and she is highly esteemed. In England that seems odd, but I suppose the fact is that when one is in Rome one does as the Romans do, and that is all about it.

And at that moment I happened to be in England, and I made up my mind there and then that, if I could help it, I would have no finger in the pie. I had no desire to go into the witness-box--I would almost as soon have gone into the dock. Cross-examining counsel have a knack of making mincemeat of a witness. Things come out--the things which one would much rather did not come out. I had not returned to England, a widow, with my big pile, with the intention of coming such a cropper at the outset. Rather than be mixed up in such a mess, I would almost sooner take my passage in the first steamer back to the States, and count the ties out West again.