He was tried, condemned, and sentenced to
fourteen years' penal servitude, which, in those days, meant
transportation abroad. For some little time the jury had not been
unanimous. One man doubted the prisoner's guilt--the man we afterwards
knew as the old miser of Walnut-tree Farm. But he was over-persuaded at
last, and Mr. Wood was convicted and sentenced. He had spent ten years
of his penal servitude in Bermuda when a man lying in Maidstone Jail
under sentence of death for murder, confessed (amongst other crimes of
which he disburdened his conscience) that it was he, and not the man who
had been condemned, who had committed the forgery. Investigation
confirmed the truth of this statement, and Mr. Wood was "pardoned" and
brought home.
He had just come. He was the tramp.
In this life the old miser never knew that his first judgment had been
the just one, but the doubt which seems always to have haunted
him--whether he had not helped to condemn the innocent--was the reason
of his bequest to the convict's wife, and explained much of the
mysterious wording of the will.
It was a tragic tale, and gave a terrible interest to the gaunt,
white-haired, shattered-looking man who was the hero of it.
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