t was many hours before the body was recovered,
half a mile from the spot where he sank.

XXII

Boden was just coming to the end of his evidence. The adjourned
inquest on Melrose, held in the large parlour of the old Whitebeck
inn, was densely crowded, and the tension of a charged moment might be
felt. Men sat gaping, their eyes wandering from the jury to the witness
or the gray-haired coroner; to young Lord Tatham sitting beside the tall
dark man who had been Mr. Melrose's agent, and was now the inheritor of
his goods; to the alert and clean-shaven face of Undershaw, listening
with the concentration of the scientific habit to the voice from the
witness-box. And through the strained attention of the room there ran the
stimulus of that gruesome new fact--the presence overhead of yet another
dead man, dragged only some twenty-four hours earlier from the swollen
waters of the river.

The murderer had been found--a comparatively simple proceeding. But, in
the finding him, the ulcer of a hideous suspicion, spread by popular
madness, and inflamed by popular hatred, had also been probed and
cleansed. As Boden's evidence progressed, building up the story of
Brand's sleuth-hound pursuit of his victim, and silently verified from
point to point by the local knowledge of the audience, the change in the
collective mind of this typical gathering of shepherds, farmers, and
small tradesmen might have been compared to the sudden coming of soft
weather into the iron tension, the black silence, of a great frost. Gales
of compunction blew; of self-interest also; and the common judgment
veered with them.

After the inevitable verdict had been recorded, a fresh jury was
empanelled, and there was a stamping of sturdy Cumbrian feet up the inn
stairs to view the pitiful remains of another human being, botched by
Nature in the flesh, no less lamentably than Melrose in the spirit. The
legal inquiry into Brand's flight and death was short and mostly formal;
but the actual evidence--as compared with current gossip--of his luckless
mother, now left sonless and husbandless, and as to the relations of the
family with Faversham, hastened the melting process in the public mind.
It showed a man in bondage indeed to a tyrant; but doing what he could to
lighten the hand of the tyrant on others; privately and ineffectively
generous; remorseful for the sins of another; and painfully aware of his
mixed responsibility.

Yet naturally there were c