The fact thus ascertained, in opposition to the expectation of those who favoured the orphan, was viewed by the court as depriving, to a great extent, the case of that aspect of a riddle by which it had been so unfortunately distinguished; and as the case had been hung up even beyond the time generally occupied by cases at that period, when, as it was sometimes remarked, law-suits were as often settled by the old rule, Romanus sedendo vincit—by the death of one or other of the parties—as by a judgment, the case was again put to the Roll for a hearing on the effect of the new evidence. It was contended for the nephew by Mr. Wight, that the question was now virtually settled, insomuch that the court was not bound to solve riddles, but to find to whom pertained a certain right of inheritance. The birth of the child had been sworn to by the nurse, as well as its death, and the final placing of it in the coffin; and now the court had, as it were, ocular demonstration of these facts by the body having been seen by their own commissioner, placed on the breast of the mother in that very peculiar way described by Mrs. Temple. All claim on the part of the girl was thus virtually excluded, for the proceedings which took place that evening in another room, under circumstances of suspicion, were sworn to only by Mrs. Hislop herself, an interested witness, and were only partially confirmed by an eavesdropper, who, as eavesdroppers generally do (except when their own characters are concerned), perhaps heard according as foregone prejudices induced her to wish. These suspicious proceedings might be explained by as many hypotheses as had been devised by the wise judges of the taverns, among which was the theory of the living child being Cowie's own by Isabel Napier, and palmed off as Mrs. Napier's to hide the shame of the true mother,—all unlikely enough, no doubt, but not so impossible as that the coffined child should now be alive and awaiting the issue of this case, in the expectation of being Lady of Eastleys.
On the other side, Mr. Andrews, counsel for Henrietta, maintained that while his learned brother assumed the one half of the case as proved, and repudiated the other as a lie or a myth, he had a right to embrace the other half, and pronounce the first a stratagem or trick. The proceedings in the back-room into which Jean Graham introduced Mrs. Hislop were more completely substantiated than those in the bedroom where Mrs. Napier lay; for while the one were sworn to by Mrs. Hislop herself, a soothfast witness, and confirmed in all points by the woman Graham, the other were attempted to be proven by the solitary testimony of the nurse Temple. The paper containing the curse was as indisputably in the handwriting of Mr. Napier as was the funeral letter. The money paid was proved by the fact that the orphan had been kept and educated for fifteen years. The name Henrietta was not likely to have been a mere coincidence, and it was still more unlikely that a respectable woman such as Mrs. Hislop would invent a story of affiliation so strangely in harmony with the secrets of the house in Meggat's Land, and fortify it by a forged document. Then Mrs. Hislop was unable to write, and no attempt had been made on the other side to prove that Henrietta had a father other than he who was pointed out by the paper of the curse. So he (the counsel) might follow the example of his brother, and hold the other half of the case to be unexplainable by hypotheses, however ridiculous. The child having been disposed of to Mrs. Hislop,—a fact thus proved,—what was to prevent him (the counsel) from going also to the haunts of the tabernian Solons, or anywhere else in the regions of fancy, for the theory that Mr. Napier, or some plotter for him in the shape of Mrs. Kemp or John Cowie, substituted the dead child of a stranger for the living one of his wife, and bribed the nurse Temple to tell the tale she had told? to which she would be the more ready by the golden promptings of the woman Isabel Napier, the niece, whose brother would, in the event of the stratagem being concealed, succeed to the estate of Eastleys.
At the conclusion of these pleadings, the judges were inclined to be even more humorous than they had been previous to the issuing of the commission, for they had thought they saw their way to a judgment against the orphan. The president (Braxfield), it is said, indulged in a joke, to the effect that he had read somewhere—it was not for so religious a man to say where—of a child having been claimed by two mothers; he would like to see two fathers at that work, at least he would not be one; but here the claim was set up by Death on the one side, and Life (if a personification could be allowed) on the other, and they could not follow the old precedent, because he suspected none of their lordships would like to see the grim claimant at the bar to receive his half. And so they chuckled, as judges sometimes do, at their own jokes—generally very bad—altogether oblivious of the fable of the frogs who could see no fun in a game which was death to them; for, as we have indicated, the opinion of a great majority was against the claim of the young woman: nor would the decision have been suspended that day, had not Mr. Andrews risen and made a statement—perhaps as fictitious as a counsel's conscience would permit—to the effect that the agent (Mr. White) had procured some trace of the butler Cowie, who could throw more light on the case than Death had done, and that if some time were accorded to complete the inquiry, something might turn up which would alter the complexion even of this Protean mystery. The request was granted.
But, in truth, Mr. Andrews' suggestion was simply a bit of ingenuity, intended to ward off an unfavourable judgment, and allow a development of the chapter of accidents;—a wise policy; for as the womb of Time is never empty, so Fate writes in the morning a chapter of every man's life of a day, at which in the evening he is sometimes a little surprised. No trace had yet been got of Cowie; it was not even known whether he was alive. But if we throw some fourteen days into the wallet-bag of Saturn, we may come to a day whereupon a certain person, in an inn far down in a valley of Westmoreland, and in the little town called Kirby Lonsdale, was busy reading the Caledonian Mercury—for it was not more easy to say where the winged Mercury of that time would not go, than it is to tell where a certain insect without wings, "which aye travels south," might not be found in England as an immigrant. It was at least no wonder that the paper should contain an account of the romance wrapped up in the case Napier versus Napier; and certainty, if we could have judged from the face of the individual, we would have set him down as one given to the reading of riddles; for, after he had perused the paragraph, he looked as if he knew more about that case than all the fifteen, with the macers to boot. Nor was he contented with an indication of a mere look of wisdom: he actually burst out into a laugh—an expression wondrously unsuited to the gravity of the subject. You who read this will no doubt suspect that we are merely shading this man for the sake of effect: and this is true; but you are to remember that, while we are chroniclers of things mysterious, we work for the advantage to you of putting into your power to venture a shrewd guess; in making which, you are only working in the destined vocation of man, for the world is only guesswork all over, and you yourself are only guesswork as a part of it. The reader of the Mercury was verily Mr. John Cowie, whilom butler to Mr. John Napier, and now waiter in the Lonsdale Arms of the obscure Kirby—a place like Peebles, where, if you wanted to deposit a secret, you could do so by crying it out at the market-cross; and, moreover, he was verily in possession of the key to the Napier mystery.
Accordingly, Mr. White of Mill's Court in two days afterwards received a letter, informing him that John Cowie was the writer of the same, and that, if a reasonable consideration were held out to him, he would proceed to the northern metropolis, and there settle for ever a case which apparently had kept the newsmongers of Edinburgh in aliment for a length of time much exceeding the normal nine days. Opportune and happily come in the very nick of time as the latter was—for the delay allowed by the court had all but expired—Mr. White saw the danger of promising anything which could be construed into a reward; but he could use other means of decoying the shy bird into his meshes; and these he used in his answer with such effect, that the man who could solve the mystery was in Edinburgh at the end of a week. Nor was Mr. White unprepared to receive him, for he had previously got a commission to examine him and take his deposition: but then an agent likes to know what a witness will say before he cites him; and the canny Scotchman, of all men in the world, is the most uncanny if brought to swear without some hope of being benefited by his oath. There was, therefore, need of tact as well as delicacy; and Mr. White contrived in the first place to get his man to take up his quarters in the house in Mill's Court. A good supper and chambers formed the first demulcent—we do not say bribe, because, by a legal fiction, all eating and drinking is set down to the score of hospitality. A Scotch breakfast followed in the morning, at which were present Mrs. White and Mrs. Hislop, and our favourite Henney—the last of whom, spite of all the efforts of her putative mother to keep from her the secret of her birth and prospects, had caught the infection of the general topic of the city, and wondered at her strange fortune, much as the paladin in the "Orlando" did when he got into the moon. No man can precognosce like a woman, and here were three; but perhaps they might have all failed, had it not been for the natural art of Henney, who, out of pure goodness and gratitude, was so delighted with the man who had rolled her in a blanket and sent her to her beloved mother, as she still called her, that she promised to make him butler at Eastleys, and keep him comfortable all his days.
"Now," said the cautious agent, "this promise of Henney's is not made in consideration of your giving evidence for her before the commissioner."
"I'm thinking of nothing but her face," said John. "I could swear to it out of a thousand; and Heaven bless her! for I think I am again in the once happy house in Meggat's Land."
And John pretended he was wiping a morsel of egg from his mouth, while the handkerchief was extended as far as the eye.
"A terrible night that was," he continued. "Mrs. Napier had been in labour all day; and when Mrs. Kemp told me to tell my master that my lady had been delivered of TWINS—"
"Twins!" cried they all, as if moved by some sympathetic chord which ran from heart to heart.