The coroner shrugged his shoulders, annoyed and perplexed, then said,—
“Perhaps that would be as well. With the returning of the verdict the inquest is over, and anything you may like to say afterwards will be in the nature of a private address, not one held in a coroner’s court.”
He put the usual questions, and a verdict of “Death by Misadventure,” was returned, with a rider of sympathy to the widower “in the peculiarly sad circumstances of his bereavement.”
“Death by Misadventure,” Silas repeated slowly; everybody listened in greedy anticipation; the accident and the inquest both provided succulent material for the curiosity of the vulgar, and to batten upon the exposed passions of a fellow-being—and that fellow-being a Dene!—was an excitement, a treat, albeit an alarming treat, full of surprise and of that quality of danger never very far removed from all manifestations of the Denes. The audience bent forward, with a slight rasping of chair-legs on the wooden floor; they gazed at Silas as though he were an animal at bay, devouring him all the more shamelessly that they knew he could neither see them nor read the unthinking hunger on their faces. He was the centre of mystery and alarm in the village, emerging from his darkness and seclusion only to terrorise. Celebrated as an orator at the village debating society, the men never knew whether to regard him as a leader, an enemy, or an ally. But here his heart, and not his theories, was concerned!
His first words startled them beyond their hopes of gratification,—
“Are you so sure?” He had intoned, but now, seeking effect with the skill of a natural speaker, he dropped his voice a full octave as he swung out into the current of his theme, “It seems to me a paltry sort of thing, to die by misadventure. A paltry ending, to be taken away willy-nilly, like a brat from a party! Why, a man might be leaving many things incompleted, many things he had set his heart on doing before he died. Death by misadventure! I wouldn’t set much store by the man that couldn’t look after his own life better than that, owning himself the sport when he ought to be the master. It’s a shameful thing to be beaten. It’s a shameful thing to give up your right of choice. Death by misadventure! a blunder, a clumsy mismanagement, a failure to carry through to the end, that’s all.”
His audience was amazed at the scorn he contrived to infuse into what was, to them, nothing but a trumped-up thesis. They could not admit that this unexpected, unnecessary, far-fetched thesis could be anything other than trumped-up. Even Silas Dene, full of surprising opinions as he was, could not, with the longest plumb-line, have discovered such an opinion as this anchored in the wells of his heart. He must be joking at their expense—deluding himself, perhaps, in his effort to delude them. A practical joker, Silas; even, it would appear, over his wife’s body!
He had paused after his preamble, gathered all his thoughts up into his grip, and began to deal them out to his audience.
“Suicide, now—there’s nobility in that. That’s grand. That’s escape; true escape from a prison. The man who doesn’t care a damn for his own life is no prisoner. I call him the contemptuous man. He’s a conquerer; he’s free. How many of you have got that freedom? and how many have got snivelling, timorous little spirits that cling on to their miserable breath as a treasure? So long as you do that you’re bound slaves and prisoners. There’s no escape for you.
“You’re angry? I shouldn’t bait you and gibe at you? Every one of you is man enough to live up to my principles? Well, the floods are out; they’re handy; there’s nothing to prevent any one of you from proving his manhood and his independence. The floods over the fields, and there’s the Wash for anybody who’d like something a bit deeper.”