But that plan of his of saying no more about it could not quite be carried out. I was endeavouring to explain to him, as I thought it necessary to do, the circumstances of the case, and he was protesting his indifference to any such details, when there came a knock at the door, and the boy who waited on us below ushered Mrs. Grimes into the room. As the reader is aware, we had, during the last two months, become very intimate with the landlady of the Spotted Dog, but we had never hitherto had the pleasure of seeing her outside her own house. “Oh, Mr. ⸻” she began, and then she paused, seeing the Doctor.
We thought it expedient that there should be some introduction. “Mrs. Grimes,” we said, “this is the gentleman whose invaluable manuscript has been destroyed by that unfortunate drunkard.”
“Oh, then you’re the Doctor, Sir?” The Doctor bowed and smiled. His heart must have been very heavy, but he bowed politely and smiled sweetly. “Oh, dear,” she said, “I don’t know how to tell you!”
“To tell us what?” asked the Doctor.
“What has happened since?” we demanded. The woman stood shaking before us, and then sank into a chair. Then arose to us at the moment some idea that the drunken woman, in her mad rage, had done some great damage to the Spotted Dog—had set fire to the house, or injured Mr. Grimes personally, or perhaps run a muck amidst the jugs and pitchers, window glass, and gas lights. Something had been done which would give the Grimeses a pecuniary claim on me or on the Doctor, and the woman had been sent hither to make the first protest. Oh—when should I see the last of the results of my imprudence in having attempted to befriend such a one as Julius Mackenzie! “If you have anything to tell, you had better tell it,” we said, gravely.
“He’s been, and—”
“Not destroyed himself?” asked the Doctor.
“Oh yes, Sir. He have indeed—from ear to ear—and is now a lying at the Spotted Dog!”
And so, after all, that was the end of Julius Mackenzie! We need hardly say that our feelings, which up to that moment had been very hostile to the man, underwent a sudden revulsion. Poor, overburdened, struggling, ill-used, abandoned creature! The world had been hard upon him, with a severity which almost induced one to make complaint against Omnipotence. The poor wretch had been willing to work, had been industrious in his calling, had had capacity for work; and he had also struggled gallantly against his evil fate, had recognised and endeavoured to perform his duty to his children and to the miserable woman who had brought him to his ruin!
And that sin of drunkenness had seemed to us to be in him rather the reflex of her vice than the result of his own vicious tendencies. Still it might be doubtful whether she had not learned the vice from him. They had both in truth been drunkards as long as they had been known in the neighbourhood of the Spotted Dog; but it was stated by all who had known them there that he was never seen to be drunk unless when she had disgraced him by the public exposure of her own abomination. Such as he was he had now come to his end! This was the upshot of his loud claims for liberty from his youth upwards;—liberty as against his father and family; liberty as against his college tutor; liberty as against all pastors, masters, and instructors; liberty as against the conventional thraldom of the world. He was now lying a wretched corpse at the Spotted Dog, with his throat cut from ear to ear, till the coroner’s jury should have decided whether or not they would call him a suicide!
Mrs. Grimes had come to tell us that the coroner was to be at the Spotted Dog at four o’clock, and to say that her husband hoped that we would be present. We had seen Mackenzie so lately, and had so much to do with the employment of the last days of his life, that we could not refuse this request, though it came accompanied by no legal summons. Then Mrs. Grimes again became voluble and poured out to us her biography of Mackenzie as far as she knew it. He had been married to the woman ten years, and certainly had been a drunkard before he married her. “As for her, she’d been well-nigh suckled on gin,” said Mrs. Grimes, “though he didn’t know it, poor fellow.” Whether this was true or not, she had certainly taken to drink soon after her marriage, and then his life had been passed in alternate fits of despondency and of desperate efforts to improve his own condition and that of his children. Mrs. Grimes declared to us that when the fit came on them—when the woman had begun and the man had followed—they would expend upon drink in two days what would have kept the family for a fortnight. “They say as how it
