He opened a
deposit account at a local bank with four more fifty-pound notes,
instead of being patient, and increasing his balance at the savings bank
pound by pound, and he got uneasy about that which he had buried deep
enough for security in the back garden. Thinking to render himself safer
in this regard, he ordered a cartload of slag and stone fragments and
with the help of his lodger employed the summer evenings when work was
over, in building a sort of rockery over the spot. Then came the chance
circumstance which really set match to this dangerous train. There was a
fire in the lost luggage office at King’s Cross Station (from which he
ought to have claimed his mother’s property) and one of the two boxes
was partially burned. The company was liable for compensation, and his
mother’s name on her linen, and a letter with the Sheffield address on
it, led to the arrival of a purely official and formal notice, stating
that the company were prepared to consider claims. It was directed to
Mrs Linkworth, and Charles Linkworth’s wife received and read it. It seemed a sufficiently harmless document, but it was endorsed with his
death-warrant. For he could give no explanation at all of the fact of
the boxes still lying at King’s Cross Station, beyond suggesting that
some accident had happened to his mother. Clearly he had to put the
matter in the hands of the police, with a view to tracing her movements,
and if it proved that she was dead, claiming her property, which she had
already drawn out of the bank. Such at least was the course urged on him
by his wife and lodger, in whose presence the communication from the
railway officials was read out, and it was impossible to refuse to take
it. Then the silent, uncreaking machinery of justice, characteristic of
England, began to move forward. Quiet men lounged about Smith Street,
visited banks, observed the supposed increase in trade, and from a house
near by looked into the garden where ferns were already flourishing on
the rockery. Then came the arrest and the trial, which did not last very
long, and on a certain Saturday night the verdict. Smart women in large
hats had made the court bright with colour, and in all the crowd there
was not one who felt any sympathy with the young athletic-looking man
who was condemned. Many of the audience were elderly and respectable
mothers, and the crime had been an outrage on motherhood, and they
listened to the unfolding of the flawless evidence with strong approval. They thrilled a little when the judge put on the awful and ludicrous
little black cap, and spoke the sentence appointed by God. Linkworth went to pay the penalty for the atrocious deed, which no one
who had heard the evidence could possibly doubt that he had done, with
the same indifference as had marked his entire demeanour since he knew
his appeal had failed. The prison chaplain who had attended him had done
his utmost to get him to confess, but his efforts had been quite
ineffectual, and to the last he asserted, though without protestation,
his innocence. On a bright September morning, when the sun shone warm on
the terrible little procession that crossed the prison yard to the shed
where was erected the apparatus of death, justice was done, and Dr
Teesdale was satisfied that life was immediately extinct. He had been
present on the scaffold, had watched the bolt drawn, and the hooded and
pinioned figure drop into the pit. He had heard the chunk and creak of
the rope as the sudden weight came on to it, and looking down he had
seen the queer twitchings of the hanged body. They had lasted but a
second or two; the execution had been perfectly satisfactory. An hour later he made the post-mortem examination, and found that his
view had been correct: the vertebrae of the spine had been broken at the
neck, and death must have been absolutely instantaneous. It was hardly
necessary even to make that little piece of dissection that proved this,
but for the sake of form he did so. And at that moment he had a very
curious and vivid mental impression that the spirit of the dead man was
close beside him, as if it still dwelt in the broken habitation of its
body. But there was no question at all that the body was dead: it had
been dead an hour. Then followed another little circumstance that at the
first seemed insignificant though curious also. One of the warders
entered, and asked if the rope which had been used an hour ago, and was
the hangman’s perquisite, had by mistake been brought into the mortuary
with the body. But there was no trace of it, and it seemed to have
vanished altogether though it was a singular thing to be lost: it was
not here; it was not on the scaffold. And though the disappearance was
of no particular moment, it was quite inexplicable. Dr Teesdale was a bachelor and a man of independent means, and lived in
a tall-windowed and commodious house in Bedford Square, where a plain
cook of surpassing excellence looked after his food, and her husband his
person. There was no need for him to practise a profession at all, and
he performed his work at the prison for the sake of the study of the
minds of criminals. Most crime--the transgression, that is, of the rule
of conduct which the human race has framed for the sake of its own
preservation--he held to be either the result of some abnormality of the
brain, or of starvation. Crimes of theft, for instance, he would by no
means refer to one head; often it is true they were the result of actual
want, but more often dictated by some obscure disease of the brain. In
marked cases it was labelled as kleptomania, but he was convinced there
were many others which did not fall directly under the dictation of
physical need. More especially was this the case where the crime in
question involved also some deed of violence, and he mentally placed
underneath this heading, as he went home that evening, the criminal at
whose last moments he had been present that morning. The crime had been
abominable, the need of money not so very pressing, and the very
abomination and unnaturalness of the murder inclined him to consider the
murderer as lunatic rather than criminal. He had been, as far as was
known, a man of quiet and kindly disposition, a good husband, a sociable
neighbour. And then he had committed a crime, just one, which put him
outside all pales. So monstrous a deed, whether perpetrated by a sane
man or a mad one, was intolerable; there was no use for the doer of it
on this planet at all. But somehow the doctor felt that he would have
been more at one with the execution of justice, if the dead man had
confessed. It was morally certain that he was guilty, but he wished that
when there was no longer any hope for him, he had endorsed the verdict
himself. He dined alone that evening, and after dinner sat in his study which
adjoined the dining-room, and feeling disinclined to read, sat in his
great red chair opposite the fireplace, and let his mind graze where it
would.