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My luggage was to follow when I sent for it. Now, unhampered even by a hand-bag, I joyfully descended the steps at the north end of the bridge and headed for King's Bench Walk by way of the Embankment and Middle Temple Lane. Jeffrey Blackmore's Will My arrival at Thorndyke's chambers was not unexpected, having been heralded by a premonitory post-card.
The circumstances surrounding the execution of Jeffrey Blackmore's will intruded into all my cogitations on the subject with hopeless persistency. That scene in the porter's lodge was to me what King Charles's head was to poor Mr. Dick. In the midst of my praiseworthy efforts to construct some intelligible scheme of the case, it would make its appearance and reduce my mind to instant chaos.
Of Blackmore's attainments in the ancient tongues, it may be sufficient to say that, in his prose, he has confounded an aphorism with an apophthegm, and that when, in his verse, he treats of classical subjects, his habit is to regale his readers with four false quantities to a page.
Although I had uttered no hint to Thorndyke, I lamented inwardly that I had not been given some work if there was any to do connected with this case, in which I was so deeply interested, rather than with the dry, purely legal and utterly bewildering case of Jeffrey Blackmore's will. Nevertheless, I stuck loyally to my task.
Blackmore's passage in Lorna Doone, describing the superlative ease and speed of Tom Faggus's mare, when John Ridd as a boy was allowed to ride her after a rough experience at the beginning of the venture is, though printed as prose, perhaps better poetry than most similar efforts.
The light in the sitting-room was out by ten o'clock. "We now come to John Blackmore's evidence. He says: "'I have viewed the body of the deceased and recognize it as that of my brother Jeffrey. I last saw him alive on the twenty-third of February, when I called at his chambers. He then seemed in a very despondent state of mind and told me that his eyesight was fast failing.
So I went up; and as soon as I got in at the window I saw that the gentleman was dead. I went through the other room and opened the outer door and let in the porter and the policeman. "That," said Mr. Marchmont, laying down the paper containing the depositions, "is the way in which poor Jeffrey Blackmore's death came to be discovered.
Yet it is certain that for about a quarter of a century, from 1845 to 1870, not merely the historical novel, but the romance generally, did lose general practice and general attention, while, though about the latter date at least one novel of brilliant quality, Mr. Blackmore's Lorna Doone, vindicated romance, and historical romance, it was still something of an exception.
You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse or two tied to posts, and making a fine figure with their Mexican housings. It struck me oddly to come across some of the CORNHILL illustrations to Mr. Blackmore's EREMA, and see all the characters astride on English saddles.
He pushed across the table a little cardboard box, having first removed the lid. In it were a number of very small pieces of broken glass, some of which had been cemented together by their edges. "These, I suppose," said I, looking with considerable curiosity at the little collection, "are the pieces of glass that we picked up in poor Blackmore's bedroom?" "Yes.
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