‘You are happy, then?’
‘Beyond all words! Harry, I want to meet Archie.’
We were now close on the river, and would have met my poor friend before, only that he had paused to look back at Bessie’s home, as it appeared to me, thinking, doubtless, of the lost girl he so dearly loved. As our footsteps sounded near him he turned round suddenly, and as he saw his cousin, so great a change came over him that I gazed at him in fear as well as wonder.
He advanced to Hester Thorne with a face as white as her own, and set teeth gleaming between pallid, dry lips. I saw he was suffering greatly, and wondered how far I could depend on his assistance in case of an outburst, which I dreaded.
‘Hester!’ he cried. ‘What have you done with my darling? You need not deny it I know it was you! Jealous of my love for my sweet, innocent Bessie, you have decoyed her from her home, and if evil has happened her, so help me heaven, but you shall suffer for it!’
‘Hush!’ I whispered, for I saw the awful change in the listening woman’s countenance – the flush that mounted, blood-red to her forehead – the fierce clutching of her long, thin fingers, and the quick gasps of the hot, hard breath between her white, clenched teeth.
‘I will not hush! Why should I? If I were to hold my tongue the stones would cry out! Hester Thorne, what have you done with my darling? Where is my Bessie – my own darling love – my life? For she is all that; give me my love, I say, or you shall suffer for it!’
The poor fellow seemed nearly mad himself, while she grew strangely and unaccountably calm with every added word of his violent accusation.
‘You love her very much, then?’ she asked, in a tone of ice.
‘More than my life – more than my soul. If anything should happen to my Bessie I should die! Do you hear? I should die!’
‘Yes – I hear. To listen to your ravings, a fool might fancy that love was the strongest passion of the human heart, but there’s a stronger.’
‘There is not! Nothing could be stronger than my love for Bessie!’
‘You are mistaken. My hate was stronger. Come, and I will prove it to you.’
Archie staggered back – an inkling of the fearful truth was beginning to creep dimly on him; there was something awful in the hard, cold gaze she now turned on him – a something indescribably suggestive of evil in the very tones so her voice.
‘Follow her!’ I whispered. ‘Humour her! Good heavens, Archie, don’t you see she is mad – quite mad, like her unfortunate father?’
He looked at me, and guessed it all! Like a blind man, he silently followed Hester Thorne, as she moved quietly, and with a firm step toward her favourite seat at the foot of the tree. She passed it and went toward the river bank where the sweeping branches dipped low in the water, and the ripples ran murmuring through green, glossy leaves. With one swift hand she drew back a heavy branch, and then stepping aside, turned her face toward us, with a bitter smile on the pale lips, as her outstretched right hand pointed toward the river at her feet.
Archie would have bounded forward, but almost by main force I held him back until I passed before him and looked first through the leaves down toward the sweet murmuring water. Never shall I forget the sight! Under the young branches which the young girl had drawn back lay the boat which I guessed at once was the one belonging to Riverview, and in the bottom of the boat lay a white form, stark dead. Ah! that was my introduction to hapless Bessie Elliot!
In spite of my exertions, Archie had managed to get a look at the pitiful object, and his shout of wild horror was a sound to be remembered. It was, however, outvoiced by the triumphant laughter of Hester Thorne.
‘Which is strongest – love or hate?’ she cried with a fierce laugh of derision.
‘Hate!’ he shouted. ‘I hate you more than I could ever love even my murdered darling! Murderess! Fiend! All evil in the shape of disgraced womanhood – are there words vile enough to couple with your name! But, thank God, you will, at least, share a cell with your mad father!’
‘Mad?’ she repeated in awful tones of horror. ‘What is he saying about being mad? My God, is it true? Am I mad?’ And as she screamed out the words she lifted her hands to her head and fell back on the grass in a strong fit.
Poor Bessie Elliot! Enticed to the boat by the madwoman’s forgery, declaring her lover seized with a sudden illness, she had been stabbed in the back by a sharp carving-knife that the lunatic had abstracted from her own home. Her pretty muslin dress was covered with gore, and her bright hair torn in handfuls from her head by the vindictive maniac. The scene, when Archie lifted the body from the boat, and wept and raved over the senseless remains, was dreadful; but he outlived it, and time has so softened the memory of his loss that he is now a prosperous and contented parent of a young family.
Hester Thorne is dead. She was one of the most violent patients ever incarcerated in the Yarra Bend Asylum for one terrible year, and then death released her. And, strange to say, Mrs Thorne was reconciled to life by the perfect restoration of her husband, whose disorder took an unexpected return to perfect sanity.
Mrs Elliot, as might be expected of so weak a character, raved like a lunatic at the first recognition of her sorrow and loss, but that she returned to resignation you may guess when I tell you that she is no longer Mrs Elliot, but rejoices in a newer and prettier name.
If you are at all interested in Mr Sprague and Miss Dempsey, I may mention that they are at the present moment both serving well-deserved sentences in the Melbourne Gaol, where I do hope they will yet vegetate for a considerable time.
FERGUS HUME
The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, the first of some 140 novels written by Fergus Hume, is also the only one he is remembered for. Hume was born in England in 1859 and travelled with his family to New Zealand where his father, Dr James Hume, assisted in the foundation of Ashburn Hall, Dunedin. He made a career in law, was admitted to the Bar in 1885 but soon after travelled to Melbourne.
It was literary, not legal, fame that Fergus Hume lusted after and in 1886 he privately published The Mystery of a Hansom Cab. The first print run, comprising 5,000 copies, sold quickly and another soon followed. Despite the success, Hume sold all rights for £50 and he did not share in the wealth that spilled from the novel both in Australia and overseas.
As business moves go, it wasn’t a particularly smart one. He published another novel, Professor Brankel’s Secret (Melbourne, W.M. Baird, 1886), then returned to Britain where his output exceeded the prolific. The rest of his novels were merely Victorian pot-boilers with hardly any mitigating interest. A few, including Madam Midas (London, Hansom Cab Publishing Company and New York, Munro, 1888) and Miss Mephistopheles (London, F.V. White, 1890; New York, Lovell, 1890), had Australian settings. Although ‘The Green-stone God and the Stock broker’ from The Dwarf’s Chamber (London, Ward Lock & Bowden 1896), is set firmly in England, it shows what Hume could do with the detective genre on a good day.
The Green-stone God and the Stock-broker
As a rule, the average detective gets twice the credit he deserves. I am not talking of the novelist’s miracle-monger, but of the flesh and blood reality who is liable to err, and who frequently proves such liability. You can take it as certain that a detective who sets down a clean run and no hitch as entirely due to his astucity, is young in years, and still younger in experience. Older men, who have been bamboozled a hundred times by the craft of criminality, recognize the influence of Chance to make or mar. There you have it! Nine times out of ten, Chance does more in clinching a case than all the dexterity and mother-wit of the man in charge. The exception must be engineered by an infallible apostle. Such a one is unknown to me – out of print.