Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated) (1255 page)

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Authors: SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

BOOK: Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated)

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‘Sooner or later I must see her,’ said Parker. ‘I have written to release her from her engagement, but I must hear from her own lips that she gives me up. She is of age and must please herself. I know that I am not a good match, and I do not wish to stand in her way.’

The master then remarked that it was time for school, but that he should be free again at half-past four if Parker had anything more to say to him, and Parker left, promising to return. It is not known how he spent the next two hours, but he may have found some country inn in which he obtained some luncheon. At half-past four he was back at the school, and asked the master for advice as to how to act. The master suggested that his best course was to write a note to Miss Groves and to make an appointment with her for next morning.

‘If you were to call at the house, perhaps Miss Groves would see you,’ said this sympathetic and most injudicious master.

‘I will do so and get it off my mind,’ said Vincent Parker.

It was about five o’clock when he left the school, his manner at that time being perfectly calm and collected.

It was forty minutes later when the discarded lover arrived at the house of his sweetheart. He knocked at the door and asked for Miss. Groves. She had probably seen him as he came down the drive, for she met him at the drawing-room door as he came in, and she invited him to come with her into the garden. Her heart was in her mouth, no doubt, lest her grandfather should see him and a scene ensue. It was safer to have him in the garden than in the house. They walked out, therefore, and half an hour later they were seen chatting quietly upon one of the benches. A little afterwards the maid went out and told Miss Groves that tea was ready. She came in alone, and it is suggestive of the views taken by the grandfather that there seems to have been no question about Parker coming in also to tea. She came out again into the garden and sat for a long time with the young man, after which they seem to have set off together for a stroll down the country lanes. What passed during that walk, what recriminations upon his part, what retorts upon hers, will never now be known. They were only once seen in the course of it. At about half-past eight o’clock a labourer, coming up a long lane which led from the high road to the Manor-house, saw a man and a woman walking together. As he passed them he recognised in the dusk that the lady was Miss Groves, the granddaughter of the squire. When he looked back he saw that they had stopped and were standing face to face conversing.

A very short time after this Reuben Conway, a workman, was passing down this lane when he heard a low sound of moaning. He stood listening, and in the silence of the country evening he became aware that this ominous sound was drawing nearer to him. A wall flanked one side of the lane, and as he stared about him his eye caught something moving slowly down the black shadow at the side. For a moment it must have seemed to him to be some wounded animal, but as he approached it he saw to his astonishment that it was a woman who was slowly stumbling along, guiding and supporting herself by her hand against the wall. With a cry of horror he found himself looking into the face of Miss Groves, glimmering white through the darkness.

‘Take me home!’ she whispered. ‘Take me home! The gentleman down there has been murdering me.’

The horrified labourer put his arms round her, and carried her for about twenty yards towards home.

‘Can you see anyone down the lane?’ she asked, when he stopped for breath.

He looked, and through the dark tunnel of trees he saw a black figure moving slowly behind them. The labourer waited, still propping up the girl’s head, until young Parker overtook them.

‘Who has been murdering Miss Groves?’ asked Reuben Conway.

‘I have stabbed her,’ said Parker, with the utmost coolness.

‘Well, then, you had best help me to carry her home,’ said the labourer. So down the dark lane moved that singular procession: the rustic and the lover, with the body of the dying girl between them.

‘Poor Mary!’ Parker muttered. ‘Poor Mary! You should not have proved false to me!’

When they got as far as the lodge-gate Parker suggested that Reuben Conway should run and get something which might stanch the bleeding. He went, leaving these tragic lovers together for the last time. When he returned he found Parker holding something to her throat.

‘Is she living?’ he asked.

‘She is,’ said Parker.

‘Oh, take me home!’ wailed the poor girl. A little farther upon their dolorous journey they met two farmers, who helped them.

‘Who has done this?’ asked one of them.

‘He knows and I know,’ said Parker, gloomily. ‘I am the man who has done this, and I shall be hanged for it. I have done it, and there is no question about that at all.’

These replies never seem to have brought insult or invective upon his head, for everyone appears to have been silenced by the overwhelming tragedy of the situation.

‘I am dying!’ gasped poor Mary, and they were the last words which she ever said. Inside the hall-gates they met the poor old squire running wildly up on some vague rumour of a disaster. The bearers stopped as they saw the white hair gleaming through the darkness.

‘What is amiss?’ he cried.

Parker said, calmly, ‘It is your grand-daughter Mary murdered.’

‘Who did it?’ shrieked the old man.

‘I did it.’

‘Who are you?’ he cried.

‘My name is Vincent Parker.’

‘Why did you do it?’

‘She has deceived me, and the woman who deceives me must die.’

The calm concentration of his manner seems to have silenced all reproaches.

‘I told her I would kill her,’ said he, as they all entered the house together. ‘She knew my temper.’

The body was carried into the kitchen and laid upon the table. In the meantime Parker had followed the bewildered and heart-broken old man into the drawing-room, and holding out a handful of things, including his watch and some money, he asked him if he would take care of them. The squire angrily refused. He then took two bundles of her letters out of his pocket — all that was left of their miserable love story.

‘Will you take care of these?’ said he. ‘You may read them, burn them, do what you like with them. I don’t wish them to be brought into court.’

The grandfather took the letters and they were duly burned.

And now the doctor and the policeman, the twin attendants upon violence, came hurrying down the avenue. Poor Mary was dead upon the kitchen table, with three great wounds upon her throat. How, with a severed carotid, she could have come so far or lived so long is one of the marvels of the case. As to the policeman, he had no trouble in looking for his prisoner. As he entered the room Parker walked towards him and said that he wished to give himself up for murdering a young lady. When asked if he were aware of the nature of the charge he said, ‘Yes, quite so, and I will go with you quietly, only let me see her first.’

‘What have you done with the knife?’ asked the policeman.

Parker produced it from his pocket, a very ordinary one with a clasp blade. It is remarkable that two other penknives were afterwards found upon him. They took him into the kitchen and he looked at his victim.

‘I am far happier now that I have done it than before, and I hope that she is.’ said he.

This is the record of the murder of Mary Groves by Vincent Parker, a crime characterized by all that inconsequence and grim artlessness which distinguish fact from fiction. In fiction we make people say and do what we should conceive them to be likely to say or do, but in fact they say and do what no one would ever conceive to be likely. That those letters should be a prelude to a murder, or that after a murder the criminal should endeavour to stanch the wounds of his victim, or hold such a conversation as that described with the old squire, is what no human invention would hazard. One finds it very difficult on reading all the letters and weighing the facts to suppose that Vincent Parker came out that day with the preformed intention of killing his former sweetheart. But whether the dreadful idea was always there, or whether it came in some mad flash of passion provoked by their conversation, is what we shall never know. It is certain that she could not have seen anything dangerous in him up to the very instant of the crime, or she would certainly have appealed to the labourer who passed them in the lane.

The case, which excited the utmost interest through the length and breadth of England, was tried before Baron Martin at the next assizes. There was no need to prove the guilt of the prisoner, since he openly gloried in it, but the whole question turned upon his sanity, and led to some curious complications which have caused the whole law upon the point to be reformed. His relations were called to show that madness was rampant in the family, and that out of ten cousins five were insane. His mother appeared in the witness-box contending with dreadful vehemence that her son was mad, and that her own marriage had been objected to on the ground of the madness latent in her blood. All the witnesses agreed that the prisoner was not an ill-tempered man, but sensitive, gentle, and accomplished, with a tendency to melancholy. The prison chaplain affirmed that he had held conversations with Parker, and that his moral perception seemed to be so entirely wanting that he hardly knew right from wrong. Two specialists in lunacy examined him, and said that they were of opinion that he was of unsound mind. The opinion was based upon the fact that the prisoner declared that he could not see that he had done any wrong.

‘Miss Groves was promised to me,’ said he, ‘and therefore she was mine. I could do what I liked with her. Nothing short of a miracle will alter my convictions.’

The doctor attempted to argue with him. ‘Suppose anyone took a picture from you, what steps would you take to recover it?’ he asked.

‘I should demand restitution,’ said he ‘if not, I should take the thief’s life without compunction.’

The doctor pointed out that the law was there to be appealed to, but Parker answered that he had been born into the world without being consulted, and therefore he recognised the right of no man to judge him. The doctor’s conclusion was that his moral sense was more vitiated than any case that he had seen. That this constitutes madness would, however, be a dangerous doctrine to urge, since it means that if a man were only wicked enough he would be screened from the punishment of his wickedness.

Baron Martin summed up in a common-sense manner. He declared that the world was full of eccentric people, and that to grant them all the immunity of madness would be a public danger. To be mad within the meaning of the law a criminal should be in such a state as not to know that he has committed crime or incurred punishment. Now, it was clear that Parker did know this, since he had talked of being hanged. The Baron accordingly accepted the jury’s finding of ‘Guilty,’ and sentenced the prisoner to death.

There the matter might very well have ended were it not for Baron Martin’s conscientious scruples. His own ruling had been admirable, but the testimony of the mad doctors weighed heavily upon him, and his conscience was uneasy at the mere possibility that a man who was really not answerable for his actions should lose his life through his decision. It is probable that the thought kept him awake that night, for next morning he wrote to the Secretary of State, and told him that he shrank from the decision of such a case.

The Secretary of State, having carefully read the evidence and the judge’s remarks, was about to confirm the decision of the latter, when, upon the very eve of the execution, there came a report from the gaol visitors — perfectly untrained observers — that Parker was showing undoubted signs of madness. This being so the Secretary of State had no choice but to postpone the execution, and to appoint a commission of four eminent alienists to report upon the condition of the prisoner. These four reported unanimously that he was perfectly sane. It is an unwritten law, however, that a prisoner once reprieved is never executed, so Vincent Parker’s sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life — a decision which satisfied, upon the whole, the conscience of the public.

THE END