Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/672

 664 be mercenary. That bright, impulsive creature could never be guilty of any deliberate meanness,—and what could be a worse meanness than that of the woman who could marry a man out of sordid and mercenary motives, beguiling him by a simulated affection, and thereby compassing her own advancement?

“If I have won her heart, in its untainted freshness,” thought Gilbert Monckton, “I must be content, though that girlish heart may seem cold. She will love me better by-and-by. She will learn to confide in me; she will learn to sympathise with me.”

By such arguments as these Mr. Monckton endeavoured to satisfy himself, and sometimes, indeed, succeeded in doing so,—that his young wife’s absent and thoughtful manner was a matter of course; the thoughtfulness of a girl unused to her new position, and perhaps a little bewildered by its strangeness. But on the morning of the 1st of October, Gilbert Monckton perceived a change in Eleanor’s manner, and on that morning the demon familiar took up a permanent station upon the lawyer’s shoulder.

Mrs. Monckton was no longer grave and listless. A feverish impatience, a sudden flow of high spirits, seemed to have taken possession of her.

“You observe,” whispered the familiar spirit, as Mr. Monckton sat opposite his wife in a compartment of the express train that was to take them to London, en route for Berkshire, “you observe the glow in her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes. You saw her turn pale the other day when she mentioned Launcelot Darrell’s name. You know what the young man’s mother told you. You can do the commonest sum in logical arithmetic, I suppose. You can put two and two together. Your wife has been wearied to death of the North, and the sea, and the sands, and you. She is in high spirits to-day, and it is very easy to account for the change in her manner. She is glad to go back to Berkshire—she is glad to go back there, because she will see Launcelot Darrell.”

Mr. Monckton, with a cambric handkerchief thrown over his face, kept a covert watch upon his wife from between its artfully-adjusted folds, and enjoyed such converse as this with the spirit he had chosen for his companion.

life of a coroner in a mighty metropolis like London must be an odd one. His grim duty leads him day by day into palace and cottages, back-slums and noble mansions. In a certain sense he is a modern Charon, whose pass is required ere a company of corpses, some days more, some days less, can find quiet burial. They say ghosts listen for the sound of the crowing cock before they retreat to their narrow beds, so mortals, suddenly deprived of life, must have the permit of twelve good men and true, and the coroner’s signature, ere the sexton will lift a shovel in their behalf. Being desirous of having one day’s experience of the accidents and offences which pick out, as it were,—we will not say by accident, for there is a natural law in these cases as in all others—the lives of a certain per-centage of our population, I asked permission to accompany my friend, the able medical coroner for the central district. Permission being obtained, I was ready at the office at the appointed hour. “Now you must be prepared,” said my friend, “for a good hard day’s work. Here are nine cases,” said he, consulting an official paper as a gourmand would a bill of fare, “I don’t know what they are, or how they will turn out.” In short, it was a kind of invitation to take pot-luck. Our first visit was to Middlesex Hospital, and our first duty to visit the dead-house. Even to those accustomed to the presence of death there is something very startling in the sudden transition from the life and noise of a great metropolitan thoroughfare to the dead-house of a large hospital, tenanted by silent inmates such as these, who but a few days since moved in health and spirits amid the hubbub, dreaming not that they were on the edge of that bourne from which no traveller returns. Three blackened deal coffins, placed side by side, with their lids removed, revealed the subjects of the impending inquiry, after a glance at which the coroner returned to the inquest-room.

The importance of being able thoroughly to identify the features of the dead is of the last consequence. It will be remembered that in the Sadlier case, the very fact of the death was disputed, and it was asserted that the body found on Hampstead Heath was not that of the delinquent M.P. Indeed, to this moment it is believed by the Irish that he is still alive. Fortunately, the late Mr. Wakley was able to put the matter beyond dispute, as he knew the deceased, and recognised him when the inquest was held.

Conditions, however, are always arising under which it is exceedingly difficult to identify a body in consequence of the progress which decomposition has made. Such a case has just arisen. It will be remembered that a body was found floating in the Thames, which the police suggested might be the body of the supposed murderer of the poor girl who was stabbed in George Street. It was of great consequence, therefore, that the corpse should be identified. The features, however, from long immersion in the water, were so swollen and disfigured, as to be absolutely unrecognisable. At this juncture, however, Dr. Richardson suggested that science was able to restore the face of the corpse; and he succeeded in his efforts. Having reduced the face to its original size by the action of a principle known by the scientific terms of “exosmosis” and “endosmosis,” and its blackened colour having been bleached by the action of chlorine gas, so much of the face of the dead was made out as to prove that it belonged to a youth of twenty—a fact quite sufficient to prove it was not that of the murderer. Thus science once more has come to the aid of justice. But I must return to the story of my day’s doings.

The jury having assembled, the process of swearing them in commenced. It may be as well to observe that, in ordinary cases, the run of the jurors called by the coroner’s beadle seem to consist of the small householders and shopkeepers of the parish—certainly a very unlikely-looking lot to investigate any knotty case,—indeed, my experience