The Bram Stoker Megapack (254 page)

The MacCallum More and Roderick MacDhu.

The Scotch All-Wool Tartan Clothing Mart

Copthall Court, E.C.,

30th September, 1892.

DEAR SIR,—I trust you will pardon the liberty which I take in writing to you, but I am desirous of making an inquiry, and I am informed that you have been sojourning during the summer in Aberdeenshire (Scotland, N.B.). My partner, Mr. Roderick MacDhu—as he appears for business reasons on our bill heads and in our advertisements, his real name being Emmanuel Moses Marks of London—went early last month to Scotland (N.B.) for a tour, but as I have only once heard from him, shortly after his departure, I am anxious lest any misfortune may have befallen him. As I have been unable to obtain any news of him on making all inquiries in my power, I venture to appeal to you. His letter was written in deep dejection of spirit, and mentioned that he feared a judgment had come upon him for wishing to appear as a Scotchman on Scottish soil, as he had one moonlight night shortly after his arrival seen his ‘wraith.’ He evidently alluded to the fact that before his departure he had procured for himself a Highland costume similar to that which we had the honour to supply to you, with which, as perhaps you will remember, he was much struck. He may, however, never have worn it, as he was, to my own knowledge, diffident about putting it on, and even went so far as to tell me that he would at first only venture to wear it late at night or very early in the morning, and then only in remote places, until such time as he should get accustomed to it. Unfortunately he did not advise me of his route, so that I am in complete ignorance of his whereabouts; and I venture to ask if you may have seen or heard of a Highland costume similar to your own having been seen anywhere in the neighbourhood in which I am told you have recently purchased the estate which you temporarily occupied. I shall not expect an answer to this letter unless you can give me some information regarding my friend and partner, so pray do not trouble yourself to reply unless there be cause. I am encouraged to think that he may have been in your neighbourhood as, though his letter is not dated, the envelope is marked with the postmark of ‘Yellon,’ which I find is in Aberdeenshire, and not far from the Mains of Crooken.

I have the honour to be, dear sir,

Yours very respectfully,

JOSHUA SHEENY COHEN BENJAMIN

(The MacCallum More.)

OLD HOGGEN: A MYSTERY

“If he had the spirit of a man in him, he would go himself,” said my mother-in-law.

“Indeed, I think you might, Augustus. I know I often deny myself and make efforts to please you, and you know that my dear mamma loves crabs,” said my mother-in-law’s daughter.

“Far be it from me to interfere,” said Cousin Jemima, as they call her, smoothing down her capstrings as she spoke. “But I do think that it would be well if Cousin Kate—who, like myself, is not at all so strong as she looks—could have something to tempt her appetite.”

Cousin Jemima, who was my mother-in-law’s cousin, was as robust as a Swiss guide, and had the appetite and digestion of a wild Indian. I began to get riled.

“What on Earth are you all talking about?” said I. “One would think you were all suffering some terrible wrong. You want crabs—and you are actually now engaged in bolting down one of the biggest crabs I ever saw. What does it all mean? Unless, indeed, you want merely to annoy me!”

Here my mother-in-law laid down her fork in a majestic way and glared at me, saying:

“If there are no crabs nearer than Bridport, then you must go there,” while her daughter began to cry.

This, of course, settled the matter. When my mother-in-law has a go in at me I can—although it makes me uncomfortable and unhappy—stand it; but when her daughter cries, I am done: so I made an effort by an attempt at jocularity—feeble, though, it was—to grace my capitulation and go out with the honors of war.

“I shall get you some crabs,” said I, “my dear mother-in-law, which even you will not be able to vanquish—or even, Cousin Jemima, with her feeble digestion.”

They all looked very glum, so I made another effort.

“Yes,” I went on. “I shall bring you some giant crabs, even if I have to find Old Hoggen first.”

The only answer made in words was by my mother-in-law, who cut in sharply: “If Old Hoggen was as great a brute as you, I don’t wonder that he has got rid of—”

Cousin Jemima endorsed the sentiment with a series of sniffs and silences, as eloquent and expressive as the stars and negative chapters of Tristram Shandy. Lucy looked at me, but it was a good look, more like my wife’s, and less like that of my mother-in-law’s daughter than had hitherto been, so tacitly we became a linked battalion.

There was a period of silence, which was broken by my mother-in-law:

“I do not see—I fail to see why you will always introduce that repulsive subject.”

As she began the battle, and as Lucy was now on my side, I did not shun the fight, but made a counter attack.

“Crabs?” I asked interrogatively, in a tone which I felt to be dangerous.

“No, not crabs—how dare you call the subject of my food—and you know how delicate an appetite I have—disgusting—”

“Well, what do you mean?” I inquired, again showing the green lamps.

“I call ‘disgusting’ the subject of conversation on which you always harp—that disreputable old man whom they say was murdered. I have made inquiries—many inquiries—concerning him, and I find that his life was most disreputable. Some of the details of his low amours which I have managed to find out are most improper. What do you think, Cousin Jemima—”

Here she whispered to the other old dear, who eagerly inclined her ear to listen.

“No, really! Seventeen? What a wretched old man,” and Cousin Jemima became absorbed in a moral reverie.

My mother-in-law went on:

“When you, Augustus, bring perpetually before our notice the name of this wicked man, you affront your wife.”

Here the worm, which had hitherto been squirming about trying to imagine that it was built on the lines of a serpent, which can threaten and strike, turned, and I spoke.

“I do not think it is half so bad to mention a topic of common interest, and which is forced upon us every hour of every day since we came here, as it is for you to make such a charge. I respect and love my wife too much”—here I pulled Lucy toward me, who came willingly—“to affront her even by accident. And, moreover, I think, madam, that it would be better if, instead of making such preposterous and monstrous charges, you would give me a little peace at my meals by holding your tongue and giving yourself an opportunity of getting tired and sick of crabs. I have not sat down to a meal since I came here that you have not spoiled it with your quarrelling. You quite upset my digestion. Can’t you let me alone?”

The effect of the attack was appalling.

My mother-in-law, who had by this time finished the last morsel of the crab, sat for a moment staring and speechless, and for the only time in her life burst into tears.

Her tears were not nearly so effective upon me as Lucy’s, and I sat unmoved. Cousin Jemima, with an inborn tendency to rest secure on the domineering side, said, audibly:

“Served you quite right, Cousin Kate, for interrupting the man at his supper.”

Lucy said nothing, but looked at me sympathetically.

Presently my mother-in-law, with a great effort, pulled herself together and said:

“Well, Augustus, perhaps you are right. We have suffered enough about Old Hoggen to make his name familiar to us.”

* * * *

Indeed we suffered. The whole history of Old Hoggen had for some weeks past been written on our souls in the darkest shade of ink. We had come to Charmouth hoping to find in that fair spot the peace that we yearned for after the turmoil and troubles of the year. With the place we were more than satisfied, for it is a favored spot. In quiet, lazy Dorsetshire it lies, close to the sea, but sheltered from its blasts. The long straggling village of substantial houses runs steeply down the hillside parallel to the seaboard. Everywhere are rivulets of sweet water, everywhere are comfort and seeming plenty. A smiling and industrious peasantry are the normal inhabitants, among whom the good old customs of salutation have not died away. A town-made coat enacts a bob courtesy from the females and a salute in military fashion from the men, for the young men are all militia or volunteers.

We had been at Charmouth some three weeks. Our arrival had caused us to swell with importance, for, from the time we left Axminster in the diurnal omnibus till our being deposited at our pretty cottage, bowered in enticing greenery and rich with old world flowers, our advent seemed to excite interest and attention. Naturally I surmised that the rustic mind was overcome by the evidence of metropolitan high tone manifested in our clothes and air. Lucy put it down—in her own mind which her mother kindly interpreted for her—to the striking all-the-world-over effect of surpassing loveliness. Cousin Jemima attributed it to their respect for blood; and my mother-in-law took it as a just homage to the rare, if not unique, union of birth, grace, gentleness, breeding, talent, wisdom, culture and power—as embodied in herself. We soon found, however, that there was a cause different from all these.

There had lately come to light certain circumstances tending to show that we were objects of suspicion rather than veneration.

Some days before our arrival great excitement had been caused in Charmouth by the disappearance, and, consequently, rumored murder, of an old inhabitant, one Jabez Hoggen, reputed locally to be of vast wealth and miserly in the extreme. This good reputation brought him much esteem, not just in Charmouth alone, but through the country round, from Lyme Regis on the one hand as far as distant Bridport on the other.

Even inland the trumpet note of Old Hoggen’s wealth sounded to Axminster and even to Chard. This good repute of wealth was, however, the only good repute he had, for his social misdoings were so manifold and continuous as to interest all the social stars of Lyme. These are old ladies who inhabit the snug villas in the uplands at Lyme, and who claim as their special right the covered seats on the Madeira walk of that pretty town, and who are so select that they will not even associate with others except in massed groups or nebulae. Old Hoggen’s peccadilloes afforded them a fertile theme for gossip. There was an inexhaustible store of minute and wicked details of this famous sinner.

Year after year Old Hoggen moved among the law-abiding inhabitants of Charmouth, wallowing in his wickedness and adding to his store of goods in the here and ills in the hereafter.

Strange to say, all this time not once—not even once—did the Earth yawn and swallow him. On the contrary, he flourished. No matter what weather came he always benefited. Even if the raid did destroy one of his crops, it made another flourish exceedingly. When there was a storm, he accumulated sea rack; when there was calm, he got fish. Many of his neighbors began to have serious doubts about the Earth ever yawning and swallowing at all; and even the old ladies in Lyme Regis—those who had passed the age of proposals and begun to regret, or at least to reconsider, their youth—sometimes thought that perhaps immortality was a little too harshly condemned after all.

Suddenly this old man disappeared, and Charmouth woke up to the fact that he was the best known, the most respected, the most important person in the place. His ill-doing sank into insignificance, and his good stood revealed in gigantic proportions. Men pointed out his public spirit, the reforms he had instituted, the powers he had developed; women called attention to the tenderness he had always exhibited to their sex, unworthy as had been the examples of the same that had darkened the horizon of his life. More than one wise matron was heard to remark that if his lot in life had been to meet one good woman, instead of those hussies, his manner of life might have been different.

It is a fact worth notice that in the logic of might-have-been, which is pitying woman’s pathway to heaven, the major premise is pitying woman.

However, were his life good or ill, Old Hoggen had disappeared, and murder was naturally suspected. Two suppositions—no one knew whence originating—were current. The most popular was that some of his unhappy companions, knowing of his wealth and greedy of his big gold watch and his diamond ring, had incited to his murder other still more disreputable companions. The alternative belief was that some of his relations—for he was believed to have some, although no one had ever seen or heard of them—had quietly removed him so that in due time they might in legal course become possessed of his heritage.

Consequent upon the latter supposition suspicion attached itself to every newcomer. It was but natural that the vulture-like relatives should appear upon the scene as soon as possible, and eager eyes scanned each fresh arrival. As I soon discovered, my respected connection by marriage, Cousin Jemima, bore a strong resemblance to the missing man, and drew around our pretty resting place the whole curiosity of Charmouth and concentrated there the attention of the secret myrmidons of the law.

In fact, the Charmouth policeman haunted the place, and strange men in slop clothes and regulation boots came from Bridport and Lyme Regis, and even from Axminster itself.

These latter representatives of the intellectual subtlety of Devon, Dorset, and Wilts were indeed men full of wile and cunning of device. The bucolic mind in moments of unbending, when frank admission of incompleteness is a tribute to good fellowship, may sometimes admit that its working are slow, but even in the last stage of utter and conscious drunkenness one quality is insisted on—surety.

Of surety, in simple minds the correlation is tenacity of purpose and belief.

Thus it was that when once the idea of our guilt had been mooted and received, no amount of evidence, direct or circumstantial, could obliterate the idea from the minds of the rustic detectives. These astute men, one by one, each jealous of the other, and carrying on even among themselves the fiction of non-identification, began to seek the evidences of our guilt. It struck me as a curious trait in the inhabitants of the diocese of Salisbury that their primary intellectual effort had one tendency, and that all their other efforts were subordinate to this principle. It may have been that the idea arose from historical contemplation of the beauty of their cathedral and an unconscious effort to emulate the powers of its originators.

Or it may not have been.

But, at all events, their efforts took the shape of measuring. I fail myself to see how their measurements, be they never so accurate, could in anywise have helped them. Further, I can not comprehend how the most rigid and exact scrutiny in this respect could have even suggested a combination of facts whence a spontaneous idea could have emanated. Still, they measured, never ceasing day or night for more than a week, and always surreptitiously. They measured one night the whole of the outside of our cottage. I heard them in the night, out on the roof, crawling about like gigantic cats, and, although we learned that one man had fallen off the roof and broken his arm, we were never officially informed of the fact. They made incursions into the house, under various pretexts, there to endeavor to measure the interior.

In every case a ruse was adopted. One morning, while we were out bathing, a man called to measure the gas pipes, and, after going through several of the rooms taking the dimensions of the walls, was informed by the servant that there was no gas, not only in the house, but in the village. Not being prepared with a further excuse, he said, with that nonchalance he could assume, that “it was no matter,” and went away. Another time a British workman, as he styled himself, arrayed in cricket flannels and a straw hat, came to look at the kitchen boiler for the landlord, and asked that he might begin on the roof. I saw the inevitable rule and tape measure, and told him that the landlord’s house was next door, and that he would find the boiler buried in the garden. He withdrew, thanking me with effusion, and making a note of the words “buried in the garden” in his notebook.

Another day a man called with fish—he had only one sole and that he carried in his hand. The cook was out and I told him we would have it. He asked if he might go into the garden to skin it. I told him he might, and went out. When I came back in about an hour’s time, I found him there still, measuring away. He had got all the dimensions of the garden and the walls, and was now engaged on the heights of the various flowers. I asked him what the dickens he was doing there still, and why he was measuring. He answered vaguely that he was not measuring.