The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper | Page 8

a ribbon, so
she should, good girl, and the pedlar shouldn't pass the door unbidden;
Mary, too, might have a cotton kerchief, and the babes a doll and a
rattle, and poor Thomas a shilling to spend as he liked; and so, in happy
revery, the kind father distributed his ill-got sovereign.
For a while he held it in his hand, as loth to part from the tangible
possession of his treasure; but manual contact could not last all day,
and, as he neared his scene of labour--he came late after all, by the by,
and lost the quarter-day, but it mattered little now--he began to cogitate
a place of safety; and carefully put it in his fob. Poor fellow--he had
never had enough to stow so well away before: his pockets had been
thought quite trust-worthy enough for any treasures hitherto: never had
he used that fob for watch, or note, or gold--and his predecessor in the
cast-off garment had probably been quite aware how little that false fob
was worthy of the name of savings' bank; it was in the situation of the
Irishman's illimitable rope, with the end cut off. So while Roger was
brewing up vast schemes of nascent wealth, and prosperous days at last,
the filched sovereign, attracted by centripetal gravity, had found a
passage downwards, and had straightway rolled into a crevice of
mother-earth, long before its "brief lord" had commenced his day's
labour. Yes, it had been lost a good hour ere he found it out, for he had
fancied that he had felt it there, and often did he feel, but his fancy was
a button; and when he made the dread discovery, what a sting of
momentary anguish, what a sickening fear, what an eager search! and,
as the grim truth became more evident, that, indeed, beyond all remedy,
his new-got, ill-got, egg of coming wealth was all clean gone--oh! this
was worm-wood, this was bitter as gall, and the strong man well-nigh
fainted. It was something sad to have done the ill--but misery to have
done it all for nothing: the sin was not altogether pleasant to his taste,
but it was aloe itself to lose the reward. And when, pale and sick,
leaning on his spade, he came to his old strength again, what was the
reaction? Compunction at incipient crime, and gratitude to find its
punishment so mercifully speedy, so lenient, so discriminative? I fear

that if ever he had these thoughts at all, he chased them wilfully away:
his disappointment, far from being softened into patience, was
sharpened to a feeling of revenge at fate; and all his hope now
was--such another chance, gold, more gold, never mind how; more gold,
he burnt for gold, he lusted after gold!
We must leave him for a time to his toil and his reflections, and touch
another topic of our theme.
CHAPTER V.
THE INQUEST.
Just a week before the baronet came of age, and a fortnight from the
present time, an awful and mysterious event had happened at the Hall:
the old house-keeper, Mrs. Quarles, had been found dead in her bed,
under circumstances, to say the very least, of a black and suspicious
appearance. The county coroner had got a jury of the neighbours
impanelled together; who, after sitting patiently on the inquest, and
hearing, as well as seeing, the following evidence, could arrive at no
verdict more specific than the obvious fact, that the poor old creature
had been "found dead." The great question lay between apoplexy and
murder; and the evidence tended to a well-matched conflict of opinions.
First, there lay the body, quietly in bed, tucked in tidily and undisturbed,
with no marks of struggling, none whatever--the clothes lay smooth,
and the chamber orderly: yet the corpse's face was of a purple hue, the
tongue swollen, the eyes starting from their sockets: it might, indeed,
possibly have been an apoplectic seizure, which took her in her sleep,
and killed her as she lay; but that the gripe of clutching fingers had left
their livid seals upon the throat, and countenanced the dreadful thought
of strangulation!
Secondly, a surgeon (one Mr. Eager, the Union doctor, a very young
personage, wrong withal and radical) maintained that this actual
strangulation might have been effected by the hands of the deceased
herself, in the paroxysm of a rush of blood to the brain; and he fortified
his wise position by the instance of a late statesman, who, he averred,

cut his throat with a pen-knife, to relieve himself of pressure on the
temples: while another surgeon--Stephen Cramp, he was farrier as well,
and had been, until lately, time out of mind, the village Æsculapius,
who looked with scorn on his pert rival, and opposed him tooth and nail
on all