Return we now to Mrs. Fitzhardinge, whom the officers of justice had arrested at Dover, on suspicion of being concerned in the murder of Mr. Percival, the miser.

The old woman, when made acquainted with the cause of her apprehension, was completely thunder-struck; for, in truth, she had not even heard until that moment of the dreadful deed which had taken place. But the Dover constables who took her into custody, and who were in plain clothes, insisted upon her accompanying them to London; and, yielding to the imperious necessity with as good a grace as possible, Mrs. Fitzhardinge cherished that consolation that her innocence must inevitably become apparent when the case should undergo a magisterial investigation.

For a variety of reasons, she made no mention of her daughter and Charles, who, she doubted not, had embarked in safety; neither did she volunteer any explanations relative to her acquaintance with Mr. Percival, or the business which she had with him on the night when, as it appeared, the murder was committed. She had already in her life passed through the ordeal of arrest—examination at a police-court—committal—trial—and condemnation—aye, and expiation also; and she was well aware that unseasonable garrulity, or explanatory remarks inconsiderately volunteered, seldom benefit even the innocent person when unjustly accused. She accordingly shrouded herself, or, rather, took refuge in a complete silence, from which the officers did not seek to draw her, as they all proceeded together by railway to London.

On their arrival in the metropolis at a somewhat late hour in the afternoon, Mrs. Fitzhardinge was consigned to Clerkenwell prison, where she passed the night; and at ten o’clock on the following morning she was removed in a cab to Marylebone police-court, to undergo an examination relative to the serious charge existing against her.

The prisoner, who had retained counsel in her behalf, and made other arrangements for her defence, appeared perfectly cool and collected; and although the sinister expression of her countenance might have told somewhat in her disfavour, in the estimation of common observers, yet, to the eye of the experienced magistrate, it spoke not of guilt in this instance. Nevertheless, that very experience which he possessed taught him not to judge either way by outward appearances; and he therefore prepared himself to give the matter the most searching investigation.

The first witness examined was Mrs. Dyer, who deposed as follows:—“I occupy a house adjoining that of the deceased. At half-past eleven o’clock on the night in question, I returned home from the dwelling of a friend in the neighbourhood, and saw deceased at his door, taking leave of two females. He had a light in his hand. One of the women, who seemed by her figure and general appearance to be young, was at the garden-gate; and I could not see her countenance. The light which the deceased carried fell fully upon the face of the other female; and I therefore obtained a good view of her. The prisoner at the bar is the female alluded to.”

Mrs. Dyer then narrated how she and her lodgers had discovered the murder on the ensuing morning; but these details are already known to the reader.

The inspector of police who had the case in hand, was next examined, and his deposition was to the following effect:—“In consequence of the information I received from Mrs. Dyer, immediately after the murder was discovered, I instituted certain inquiries, and ascertained, in the course of the morning, that an old and a young woman had taken a cab in the neighbourhood of the Angel at Islington, on the previous night, which was the one in question. They drove to Suffolk-street, Pall Mall, where the young lady paid the driver his fare from a heavy and well-filled purse. The driver gave me a description of the elder female; and that description tallied with the one already given by Mrs. Dyer. I thereupon repaired to Suffolk-street, and learnt that the two women had taken their departure in a post-chaise, between nine and ten o’clock that morning. This was the morning after the murder. Previous to their departure, they were joined by a young gentleman who went away with them. He had called on several occasions at the lodgings; and his name was——”

Here the magistrate interposed, and said that it might not be necessary to mention this name publicly, as there was nothing to implicate the gentleman referred to.

The inspector accordingly proceeded thus:—“The chaise was sent for in a great hurry, and its destination was unknown to the landlady and servants of the house. No previous intimation of the intended departure of the lodgers had been given. They settled all their liabilities before they left. The prisoner at the bar paid the rent and other little matters owing; but did not display any large sum of money. Having ascertained all these particulars, I sent a description of the elder female to the various railways having electric telegraphs; and the prisoner at the bar was apprehended at Dover, in consequence of the information thus conveyed.”

Upon being cross-examined by the learned gentleman for the defence, the inspector fairly and impartially deposed as follows:—“The stake with which the murder was evidently perpetrated, was found by the side of the corpse. It was taken from a piece of unenclosed waste ground at the back of the house. I believe this to be the fact, because I have discovered a hole from which a stake had most likely been taken; and the stake now produced fits that hole. I also discovered marks of footsteps between the back door of the house and the spot where the stake had been pulled up. Those marks are of a man’s boots. The soil of some part of the waste ground is moist and damp. There are marks on the window-ledge of the back parlour, as if some one with dirty boots or shoes had clambered up and stood there. The shutters have numerous heart-holes in them, so that a person standing up on the ledge, outside the window could see into the back parlour. I discovered no traces of any female footsteps on the waste ground neither are there two descriptions of marks. They are all produced by the same sized boots. The door-post of the back gate was cut away from the outside. Whoever did it must have known the precise place where the bolt fitted into the door-post in the inside. The cutting away rendered it easy to force back the bolt with the fingers. The work of cutting was performed, I should say, with a knife—most probably a pocket or clasp-knife. It must have taken half an hour at the least to accomplish; and the hand that did it must have been tolerably strong. There are marks of footsteps, indicated in the same manner as those on the window-ledge, up the stairs from the back door to the back parlour. The lock of the back door so often alluded to, was picked from the outside.”

The inspector’s evidence terminated here; and the counsel for Mrs. Fitzhardinge recalled Mrs. Dyer.

“Will you state, as accurately as you can, the hour when you returned home on the night of the murder?” he asked.

“Half-past eleven, sir,” was the answer.

“That will do,” said the learned gentleman, who forthwith proceeded to call the driver of the cab which Mrs. Fitzhardinge and Perdita had taken on the night in question. “At what hour,” he demanded, “did the prisoner and the young lady who accompanied her hire your vehicle?”

“It was twelve o’clock,” replied the man. “I am sure it was precisely midnight, because I had just left a public-house when I was hailed by the ladies.”

This witness was ordered to stand down; and the landlady of the house in Suffolk-street was called next. She deposed that she was sitting up for her lodgers on the night in question, and that they reached home at twenty minutes to one. She was certain as to the correctness of her statement, because she looked at the clock in the passage as she passed by to let the ladies in. There was nothing confused in their manner. She attended them to the door of their bed-chamber, and did not observe that their shoes were at all soiled with damp clay. She was convinced that they did not leave the house again that night. The ladies had always appeared to have plenty of money from the very day they entered her dwelling.

The learned counsel then proceeded to address the magistrate on behalf of Mrs. Fitzhardinge. He began by remarking on the meagre nature of the evidence against her—the mere fact that she and the young lady who was with her, and who was her daughter, were the last persons seen in the company of the murdered man;—and he complained bitterly that his client should have been arrested—ignominiously brought back to London—and forced through the ordeal of a public examination on such a shallow pretence. Every circumstance, adduced that morning—every feature of the evidence, tended only to exculpate the prisoner at the bar. In the first place, it was clear, from the testimony recorded, that the prisoner and her daughter had quitted the house of the deceased at half-past eleven—had taken a cab at the Angel at midnight—and had driven straight home, reaching Suffolk-street at twenty minutes to one. Now the distance from the scene of the murder to the Angel would require rapid walking for two females to accomplish in half an hour, and leave not an instant to accomplish the crime before they set out, much less to cut away the door-post, ransack the deceased’s boxes, and so forth. From the Angel they were traced home, and they did not leave the house again that night. Now, the evidence of the inspector of police tended, to show incontestibly that the murder had been perpetrated by a man. He (the learned counsel) was instructed to state that Mrs. Fitzhardinge and her daughter had called upon Mr. Percival for the purpose of obtaining the discount of a bill; that he did discount the document, and that he left his cash-box open on the table during the negotiation. It was presumable that some man, who probably knew the premises well, had clambered up against the back-window, had beheld the cash-box and its contents, and, during the night, had perpetrated the bloody deed. The speedy departure of the prisoner, her daughter, and the gentleman who had been alluded to, on the morning following that night of the crime, was occasioned by the fact that the young people contemplated a matrimonial alliance unknown to the gentleman’s parents; and the means of travelling having been procured by the discount already mentioned, there was no necessity to delay the departure for Paris any longer. This was the simple and plain explanation of the suddenly undertaken journey and the precipitate decampment from Suffolk-street. But the ladies did not act as if they had committed a crime, nor their male companion as if he had been an accomplice in one; for they travelled by post-chaise instead of by rail, to Dover; and there they waited quietly until the steam-packet left next morning, instead of hiring some small craft, as they might have done, to waft them across, the same night of their arrival, to Calais. Again, if the prisoner and her daughter had even entertained such a fearful idea as that of depriving the miser of his life for the sake of his gold, they would have had a better opportunity of carrying it into execution while alone with him in his back parlour, than by the roundabout manner suggested by the nature of the charge against Mrs. Fitzhardinge. During the short time the two ladies had dwelt at the lodgings in Suffolk-street they had not been embarrassed for want of funds; nor even when they sought the aid of the discounter was their need so pressing, much less was it of that desperate nature which could alone prompt to such a dreadful alternative as murder. The reason why the assistance of the deceased was sought at all, could be readily explained by the avowal that the bill to be discounted was not a security which any other class of money-lenders would entertain: it was the promissory note of a young gentleman raising cash upon his expectations, and therefore of a character suiting only the purposes of a discounter who took an amount of interest proportionate to the risk which he ran. In conclusion, the learned gentleman insisted that there was not a shadow of evidence against his client.

The magistrate acquiesced in this view of the case, and discharged Mrs. Fitzhardinge forthwith. She was, however, compelled to repair from the Marylebone Police-court to the tavern where the coroner was holding an adjourned inquest upon the body; but the result of her examination before the magistrate being communicated to that functionary, she was not detained on his authority. A verdict of “Wilful murder against some person or persons unknown” was returned, and the old woman once more found herself at liberty.

The evidence given by the inspector of police at the Marylebone court, and repeated in the presence of the coroner, had excited certain suspicions in the mind of Mrs. Fitzhardinge; and the more she pondered upon the subject—the more she reflected upon the occurrences at Percival’s house on the night of the murder, and the details of the manner in which the deed itself must have been accomplished, the more confident did she become that she could name the assassin.

Had circumstances permitted, she would have remained in London to ferret out the individual whom she thus associated with the crime: but she could not now spare the time; for she was anxious to proceed, without delay, to Paris, and join her daughter and Charles Hatfield, who, she had no doubt, had reached that capital in safety.

Her examination at the police-court, and her attendance at the inquest, had however consumed the entire day; and she therefore waited until the next morning, when she departed by the first train for Folkestone, at which town she arrived in time to embark on board a steamer for Boulogne.

In order that we may accurately show the precise time when Mrs. Fitzhardinge reached Paris, we must request our readers to observe, that on the same day that Charles and Perdita crossed the water to Calais, the old woman was borne back to London by the constables: on the following day, while they were journeying towards the French capital, she was undergoing the examination already recorded;—on the third day, when they were married at the British Ambassador’s chapel, she was hastening to join them;—and it was, therefore, in the after-part of the fourth day, being the one on which the separation of Charles and her daughter had occurred, that Mrs. Fitzhardinge entered Paris in the diligence, or stage-coach—thoroughly wearied out by the fatigue, annoyance, and excitement she had lately undergone.

The old woman repaired to an hotel in the immediate neighbourhood of the office where the coach stopped; and, having changed her apparel, drove forthwith in a hackney vehicle to the British Embassy: for it must be remembered that she was entirely ignorant of every thing that had taken place in respect to her daughter and Charles since she had been separated from them, and knew not where they had put up in Paris. Indeed, she even had her misgivings whether they were in the French capital at all, or whether they might not have set out upon some tour immediately after their marriage; for that they were already united in matrimonial bonds, she had no doubt. That they had returned to Dover to look for her, she did not flatter herself; inasmuch as she had latterly seen enough of Perdita’s altered disposition to be fully aware that all maternal authority or filial affection were matters which the young lady was more inclined to treat with contempt than with serious consideration. But Mrs. Fitzhardinge was resolved not to be thrust aside without an effort to regain the maternal authority: as for the filial affection, her soul—tanned, hardened, rendered rough and inaccessible, and with all its best feelings irremediably blunted by the incidents of her stormy life—her soul, we say, experienced but a slight pang at the idea of having to renounce that devotedness which it is usually a mother’s joy and delight to receive at the hands of a daughter.

No; the aim of this vile intriguing woman was merely the re-establishment of her former ascendancy over her daughter,—by fair means or by foul—by conciliation or intimidation—by ministering to her vanity and her pride, or by working on her fears—by rendering herself necessary to her, or by reducing her to subjection through a course of studied despotism and tyranny. Her imagination pictured the voluptuous and impassioned Perdita clinging to her young husband as to something which had become necessary to her very existence, and from which it were death to part; and she chuckled within herself, as she muttered between her lips,—“The girl would have this marriage; and it shall be made in my hands a means to subdue her! For in her tenderest moments—when reading love in his eyes, and looking love with her own,—when wrapt in Elysian dreams and visions of ineffable bliss—then will I steal near her, and whisper in her ear, ‘Perdita, you must yield to me in all things; or with a word—a single word—will I betray you to that fond, confiding fool; I will blast all your happiness, and he shall cast thee away from him as a loathsome and polluted thing!’”

With such agreeable musings as these did Mrs. Fitzhardinge while away the half-hour which the hackney-coach occupied in driving her from the hotel to the British Embassy. It was now five o’clock in the evening, and she fortunately found the chaplain’s clerk in an office to which the gate-porter directed her to proceed. From the official to whom she was thus referred, she learnt that Charles Hatfield and Perdita Fitzhardinge were united in matrimonial bonds on the previous day; and an inspection of the register, for which she paid a small fee, enabled her to ascertain the address they had given as their place of abode in the French capital.

Satisfied with these results, Mrs. Fitzhardinge returned to the vehicle, and ordered the coachman to drive her to an hotel which she named, and which was the one mentioned in the register. We should observe that the old woman spoke French with fluency; and thus she had no difficulty in making herself understood in the gay city of Paris.