The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby | Page 3

had a
suspicion that the label might be the production of some practical joker
staying at the hotel, who had heard of his Neapolitan adventure (it was
reported in many newspapers) and designed to give him a fright. But
that very evening my poor father was found dead, stabbed in a dozen
places, in a short, quiet street not forty yards from the hotel. He had
merely gone out to buy a few cigars of a particular brand which he
fancied, at a shop two streets away, and in less than half an hour of his
departure the police were at the hotel door with the news of his death,
having got his address from letters in his pockets.
It is no part of my present design to enlarge on my mother's grief, or to
describe in detail the incidents that followed my father's death, for I am
going back to this early period of my life merely to make more clear
the bearings of what has recently happened to myself. It will be
sufficient therefore to say that at the inquest the jury returned a verdict
of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown; that it was
several times reported that the police had obtained a most important
clue, and that being so, very naturally there was never any arrest. We
returned to Sydney, and then I grew up.
I should perhaps have mentioned ere this that my profession -- or I
should rather say my hobby -- is that of an artist. Fortunately or
unfortunately, as you may please to consider it, I have no need to
follow any profession as a means of livelihood, but since I was sixteen
years of age my whole time has been engrossed in drawing and
painting. Were it not for my mother's invincible objection to parting
with me, even for the shortest space of time, I should long ago have
come to Europe to work and to study in the regular schools. As it was I
made shift to do my best in Australia, and wandered about pretty freely,
struggling with the difficulties of moulding into artistic form the
curious Australian landscape. There is an odd, desolate, uncanny note
in characteristic Australian scenery, which most people are apt to
regard as of little value for the purposes of the landscape painter, but
with which I have always been convinced that an able painter could do

great things. So I did my feeble best.
Two years ago my mother died. My age was then twenty-eight, and I
was left without a friend in the world, and, so far as I know, without a
relative. I soon found it impossible any longer to inhabit the large
house by the Lane Cove river. It was beyond my simple needs, and the
whole thing was an embarrassment, to say nothing of the associations
of the house with my dead mother, which exercised a painful and
depressing effect on me. So I sold the house, and cut myself adrift. For
a year or more I pursued the life of a lonely vagabond in New South
Wales, painting as well as I could its scattered forests of magnificent
trees, with their curious upturned foliage. Then, miserably dissatisfied
with my performance, and altogether filled with a restless spirit, I
determined to quit the colony and live in England, or at any rate
somewhere in Europe. I would paint at the Paris schools, I promised
myself, and acquire that technical mastery of my material that I now
felt the lack of.
The thing was no sooner resolved on than begun. I instructed my
solicitors in Sydney to wind up my affairs and to communicate with
their London correspondents in order that, on my arrival in England, I
might deal with business matters through them. I had more than half
resolved to transfer all my property to England, and to make the old
country my permanent headquarters; and in three weeks from the date
of my resolve I had started. I carried with me the necessary letters of
introduction to the London solicitors, and the deeds appertaining to
certain land in South Australia, which my father had bought just before
his departure on the fatal European trip. There was workable copper in
this land, it had since been ascertained, and I believed I might
profitably dispose of the property to a company in London.
I found myself to some extent out of my element on board a great
passenger steamer. It seemed no longer possible for me in the constant
association of shipboard to maintain that reserve which had become
with me a second nature. But so much had it become my nature that I
shrank ridiculously from breaking it, for, grown man as I was, it must
be confessed