Merry-Garden and Other StoriesQuiller-Couch, Arthur
General
Merry-Garden and Other Stories
Quiller-Couch, Arthur
Cornwall (England : County) -- Fiction; France -- Fiction; Short stories
It was my duty to attend the funeral. The coffin, conveyed by train to
M---- Station, was there transferred to a hearse, and the procession
followed the valley road. I forget at what point it began to be impressed
upon me, who had never travelled the road before, that Mr. Molesworth's
'recollections' of it had been so exact that they compelled a choice
between the impossibility of accepting his story and the impossibility of
doubting the assurance of so entirely honourable a man that he had never
travelled the road in his life. At first I tried to believe that his
recollections of it--detailed as they were--might one by one have been
suggested by the view from the viaduct. But, honestly, I was soon obliged
to give this up: and when we arrived at the creek's head and the small
churchyard beside it, I confessed myself confounded. Point by point, and
at every point, the actual scene reproduced Mr. Molesworth's description.
I prefer to make no comment on my last discovery. After the funeral,
being curious to satisfy myself in every particular, I walked across the
track to the inn--The Saracen's Head--which again answered Mr.
Molesworth's description to the last detail. The house was kept by a
widow and her daughter: and the girl--an extremely good-looking young
person--made me welcome. I concluded she must be the original of Mr.
Molesworth's illusion--perhaps the strangest of all his illusions--and
took occasion to ask her (I confess not without a touch of trepidation) if
she remembered the day of the accident. She answered that she remembered
it well. I asked if she remembered any visitor, or visitors, coming to
the inn on that day. She answered, None: but that now I happened to speak
of it, somebody must have come that day while she was absent on an errand
to the Vicarage (which lies some way along the shore to the westward): for
on returning she found a fishing-rod and creel on the settle of the
inn-kitchen.
The creel had a luggage-label tied to it, and on the label was written
'Sir W. Moyle.' She had written to Sir Warwick about it more than a
month ago, but had not heard from him in answer. [It turned out that Sir
Warwick had left England, three days after the accident, on a yachting
excursion to Norway.]
"And a cigar-case?" I asked. "You don't remember seeing a cigar-case?"
She shook her head, evidently puzzled. "I know nothing about a
cigar-case," she said. "But you shall see the rod and fishing-basket."
She ran at once and fetched them. Now that rod and that creel (and the
fly-book within it) have since been restored to Sir Warwick Moyle. He had
left them in care of the station-master at M----, whence they had been
missing since the day of the accident. It was suspected that they had
been stolen, in the confusion that day prevailing at the little station,
by some ganger on the relief-train.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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