CHAPTER XVI
THE WIDOW GIBBERTY'S TRIAL
The following day, with all the masquerading that the Law delights in, Master Nathaniel was pronounced in the Senate to be dead. His robes of office were taken off him, and they were donned by Master Polydore Vigil, the new Mayor. As for Master Nathaniel—was wrapped in a shroud, laid on a bier and carried to his home by four of the Senators, the populace lining the streets and greeting the mock obsequies with catcalls and shouts of triumph.
But the ceremony over, when Master Ambrose, boiling with indignation at the outrage, came to visit his friend, he found a very cheerful corpse who greeted him with a smack on the back and a cry of "Never say die, Brosie! I've something here that should interest you," and he thrust into his hand an open in-folio.
"What's this?" asked the bewildered Master Ambrose.
There was a certain solemnity in Master Nathaniel's voice as he replied, "It's the Law, Ambrose—the homoeopathic antidote that our forefathers discovered to delusion. Sit down this very minute and read that trial through."
As Master Ambrose knew well, it was useless trying to talk to Nat about one thing when his mind was filled with another. Besides, his curiosity was aroused, for he had come to realize that Nat's butterfly whims were sometimes the disguise of shrewd and useful intuitions. So, through force of long habit, growling out a protest about this being no time for tomfoolery and rubbish, he settled down to read the volume at the place where Master Nathaniel had opened it, namely, at the account of the trial of the widow Gibberty for the murder of her husband.
The plaintiff, as we have seen, was a labourer, Diggory Carp by name, who had been in the employ of the late farmer. He said he had been suddenly dismissed by the defendant just after harvest, when it was not easy to find another job.
No reason was given for his dismissal, so Diggory went to the farmer himself, who, he said, had always been a kind and just master, to beg that he might be kept on. The farmer practically admitted that there was no reason for his dismissal except that the mistress had taken a dislike to him. "Women are kittle cattle, Diggory," he had said, with an apologetic laugh, "and it's best humouring them. Though it's hard on the folks they get their knife into. So I fear it will be best for every one concerned that you should leave my service, Diggory."
But he gave him a handful of florins over and above his wages, and told him he might take a sack of lentils from the granary—if he were careful that the mistress did not get wind of it.
Now, Diggory had a shrewd suspicion as to why the defendant wanted to get rid of him. Though she was little more than a girl—she was the farmer's second wife and more like his daughter's elder sister than her stepdame—she had the reputation of being as staid and sensible as a woman of forty. But Diggory knew better. He had discovered that she had a lover. One evening he had come on her in the orchard, lying in the arms of a young foreigner, called Christopher Pugwalker, a herbalist, who had first appeared in the neighbourhood just before the great drought.
"And from that time on," said Diggory, "she had got her knife into me, and everything I did was wrong. And I believe she hadn't a moment's peace till she'd got rid of me. Though, if she'd only known, I was no blab, and not one for blaming young blood and a wife half the age of her husband."
So he and his wife and his children were turned out on the world.
The first night they camped out in a field, and when they had lighted a fire Diggory opened the sack that, with the farmer's permission, he had taken from the granary, in order that his wife might make them some lentil soup for supper. But lo and behold! instead of lentils the sack contained fruit—fruit that Diggory Carp, as a west countryman, born and bred near the Elfin Marches, recognised at the first glance to be of a kind that he would not dream of touching himself or of allowing his wife and children to touch ... the sack, in fact, contained fairy fruit. So they buried it in the field, for, as Diggory said, "Though the stuff be poison for men, they do say as how it's a mighty fine manure for the crops."
For a week or so they tramped the country, living from hand to mouth. Sometimes Diggory would earn a little by doing odd jobs for the farmers, or by playing the fiddle at village weddings, for Diggory, it would seem, was a noted fiddler.
But with the coming of winter they began to feel the pinch of poverty, and his wife bethought her of the trade of basket-making she had learned in her youth; and, as they were camping at the time at the place where grew the best osiers for the purpose, she determined to see if her fingers had retained their old cunning. As the sap of these particular osiers was a deadly poison, she would not allow the children to help her to gather them.
So she set to and make wicker urns in which the farmers' wives could keep their grain in winter, and baskets of fancy shapes for lads to give to their sweethearts to hold their ribbands and fal-lals. The children peddled them about the countryside, and thus they managed to keep the pot boiling.
The following summer, shortly before harvest, Diggory's eldest girl went to try and sell some baskets in the village of Swan. There she met the defendant, whom she asked to look at her wares, relying on not being recognised as a daughter of Diggory's, through having been in service at another farm when her father was working at the Gibbertys'.
The defendant seemed pleased with the baskets, bought two or three, and got into talk with the girl about the basket-making industry, in the course of which she learned that the best osiers for the purpose were very poisonous. Finally she asked the girl to bring her a bundle of the osiers in question, as making baskets, she said, would make a pleasant variety, of an evening, from the eternal spinning; and in the course of a few days the girl brought her, as requested, a bundle of the osiers, and was well paid for them.
Not long afterwards came the news that the farmer Gibberty had died suddenly in the night, and with it was wafted the rumour of foul play. There was an old custom in that part of the country that whenever there was a death in the house all the inmates should march in procession past the corpse. It was really a sort of primitive inquest, for it was believed that in the case of foul play the corpse would bleed at the nose as the murderer passed it. This custom, said Diggory, was universally observed in that part of the country, even in cases as free from all suspicion as those of women dying in child-bed. And in all the taverns and farm-houses of the neighbourhood it was being whispered that the corpse of the farmer Gibberty, on the defendant's walking past it, had bled copiously, and when Christopher Pugwalker's turn had come to pass it, it had bled a second time.
And knowing what he did, Diggory Carp came to feel that it was his duty to lodge an accusation against the widow.
His two reasons, then, for thinking her guilty were that the corpse had bled when she passed it, and that she had bought from his daughter osiers the sap of which was poisonous. The motive for the crime he found in her having a young lover, whom she wished should stand in her dead husband's shoes. It was useless for the defendant to deny that Pugwalker was her lover—the fact had for months been the scandal of the neighbourhood, and she had finally lost all sense of shame and had actually had him to lodge in the farm for several months before her husband's death. This was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt by the witnesses summoned by Diggory.
As for the bleeding of the corpse: vulgar superstitions did not fall within the cognizance of the Law, and the widow ignored it in her defence. However, with regard to that other vulgar superstition to which the plaintiff had alluded, fairy fruit, she admitted, in passing, that very much against her wishes her late husband had sometimes used it as manure—though she had never discovered how he procured it.
As to the osiers—she allowed that she had bought a bundle from the plaintiff's daughter; but that it was for no sinister purpose she was able conclusively to prove. For she summoned various witnesses—among others the midwife from the village, who was always called in in cases of sickness—who had been present during the last hours of the farmer, and who had been present during the last hours of the farmer, and who all of them swore that his death had been a painless one. And various physicians, who were summoned as expert witnesses, all maintained that the victim of the poisonous sap of osiers always died in agony.
Then she turned the tables on the plaintiff. She proved that Diggory's dismissal had been neither sudden nor unjust; for, owing to his thieving propensities, he had often been threatened with it by her late husband, and several of the farm-servants testified to the truth of her words.
As to the handful of florins and the sack of lentils, all she could say was that it was not like the farmer to load a dishonest servant with presents. But nothing had been said about two sacks of corn, a pig, and a valuable hen and her brood, which had disappeared simultaneously with the departure of the plaintiff. Her husband, she said, had been very angry about it, and had wanted to have Diggory pursued and clapped into gaol; but she had persuaded him to be merciful. The long and the short of it was that the widow left the court without a stain on her character, and that a ten years' sentence for theft was passed on Diggory.
As for Christopher Pugwalker, he had disappeared shortly before the trial, and the widow denied all knowledge of his whereabouts.