 CHAPTER XIV. The Woman's Answer Thus far I have written of myself with perfect frankness, and I think I may fairly add, with some courage as well. My frankness fails me, and my courage fails me, when I look back to my husband's farewell letter, and try to recall the storm of contending passions that had roused in my mind. No, I cannot tell the truth about myself, I dare not tell the truth about myself at that terrible time. Men, consult your observation of women, and imagine what I felt. Women, look into your own hearts, and see what I felt for yourselves. What I did, when my mind was quiet again, is an easier matter to deal with. I answered my husband's letter. My reply to him shall appear in these pages. It will show in some degree what effect of the lasting sword his desertion of me produced on my mind. It will also reveal the motives that sustained me, the hopes that animated me, and the new and strange life which my next chapters must describe. I was removed from the hotel in the care of my fatherly old friend, Benjamin. A bedroom was prepared for me in his little villa. There I passed the first night of my separation from my husband. Toward the morning my weary brain got some rest. I slept. At breakfast-time made if it's David called to inquire about me. He had kindly volunteered to go and speak for me to my husband's lawyer on the preceding day. They had admitted that they knew where your stars had gone, but they declared at the same time that they were positively forbidden to communicate his address to any one. In other respects their instructions, in relation to the wife of the client, were, as they were pleased to express it, generous to a fault. I had only to write to them, and they would furnish me with a copy by return of post. This was the major's news. He refrained with attack that distinguished him from putting any questions to me beyond questions relating to the state of my health. These answers he took asleep of me for that day. He and Benjamin had a long talk together afterward in the garden of the villa. I retired to my room and wrote to my uncle Starkweather, telling him exactly what had happened and enclosing him a copy of my husband's letter. This done I went out for a little while to breathe the fresh air and to think. I was soon weary and went back again to my room to rest. My kind old Benjamin left me at perfect liberty to be alone as long as I pleased. Toward the afternoon I began to feel a little more like my old self again. I mean by this that I could think of you, Stark, without bursting out crying, and could speak to Benjamin without his dressing and frightening the dear old man. That night I had a little more sleep. The next morning I was strong enough to confront the first and foremost duty that I now owe to myself, the duty of answering my husband's letter. I've wrote to him in these words. I am still too weak and weary, you stars, to write to you at any length. But my mind is clear. I have formed my own opinion of you and your letter, and I know what I mean to do now you have left me. Some women in my situation might think that you had forfeited all right to their confidence. I don't think that, so I write and tell you what is in my mind in the plainest and fewest words that I can use. You say you love me, and you leave me. I don't understand loving a woman and leaving her. For my part, in spite of the hard things you have said and written to me, and in spite of the cruel manner in which you have left me, I love you, and I won't give you up. No, as long as I live I mean to leave your wife. Does this surprise you? It surprises me. If another woman wrote in this manner to a man who had behaved to her as you have behaved, I should be quite at a loss to account for her conduct. I am quite at a loss to account for my own conduct. I ought to hate you, and yet I can't help loving you. I am ashamed of myself, but so it is. You need feel no fear of my attempting to find out where you are, and of my trying to persuade you to return to me. I'm not quite foolish enough to do that. You are not in a fit state of mind to return to me. You're all wrong, all over, from head to foot. When you get right again, I am vain enough to think that you will return to me of your own accord. And shall I be weak enough to forgive you? Yes, I shall certainly be weak enough to forgive you. But how are you to get right again? I have puzzled my brains over this question by night and by day, and my opinion is that you will never get right again unless I help you. How am I to help you? That question is easily answered. What the law has failed to do for you, your wife must do for you. Do you remember what I said when we were together in the back room of Major Fitz David's house? I told you that the first thought that came to me when I heard what the Scotch Jewry had done was the thought of setting their vile verdict right. Well, your letter has fixed this idea more firmly in my mind than ever. The only chance that I can see of winning you back to me and the character of a penitent and loving husband is to change that underhand Scotch verdict of not proven into an honest English verdict of not guilty. Are you surprised at the knowledge of the law which this way of writing betrays an ignorant woman? I have been learning, my dear. The law and the lady have begun by understanding one another. In plain English I have looked into Ogilvy's Imperial Dictionary, and Ogilvy tells me, a verdict of not proven only indicates that in the opinion of the jury there is a deficiency in the evidence to convict the prisoner. A verdict of not guilty imports the jury's opinion that the prisoner is innocent. He used to ask that shall be the opinion of the world in general and of the Scotch Jewry in particular in your case. To that one object I dedicate my life to come, if God spare me. Who will help me when I need help is more than I yet know. There was a time when I had hoped that we should go hand in hand together in doing this good work. That hope is at an end. I no longer expect you or ask you to help me. A man who thinks as you think can give no help to anybody, it is his miserable condition to have no hope. So be it. I will hope for two, and will work for two, and I shall find someone to help me, never fear if I deserve it. I will say nothing about my plans. I have not read the trial yet. It is quite enough for me that I know you are innocent. When a man is innocent there must be a way of proving it. The one thing needful is to find the way. Sooner or later, with or without assistance, I shall find it. Yes, before I know any single particular of the case, I tell you positively. I shall find it. You may laugh over this blind confidence on my part, or you may cry over it. I don't pretend to know whether I am an object for ridicule or an object for pity. Of one thing only I am certain. I mean to win you back, a man vindicated before the world, without a stain on his character or his name, thanks to his wife. Right to me sometimes, you stars. You believe me. Through all the bitterness of this bitter business, you are faithful and loving, Balearia. There was my reply. Poor enough as a composition, I could write a much better letter now. It had, if I may presume to say so, one merit. It was the honest expression of what I really meant and felt. I read it to Benjamin. He held up his hands with his customary gesture when he was thoroughly bewildered and dismayed. It seems the rashest letter that ever was written, said the dear old man. I never heard, Balearia, of a woman doing what you proposed to do. Lord, help us, the new generation is beyond my favouring. I wish your uncle Starkwether was here. I wonder what he would say. Oh, dear me, what a letter from a wife to a husband. Do you really mean to send it to him? I edit immeasurably to my old friend's surprise by not even employing the post-office. I wished to see the instructions which my husband had left behind him, so I took the letter to his lawyers myself. The firm consisted of two partners. They both received me together. One was a soft, lean man with a sour smile. The other was a hard, fat man with ill-tempered eyebrows. I took a great dislike to both of them. On their side they appeared to feel a strong distrust of me. We began by disagreeing. They showed me my husband's instructions, providing, among other things, for the payment of one clear half of his income as long as he lived to his wife. I positively refused to touch a farthing of his money. The lawyers were unaffectedly shocked and astonished at this decision. Nothing of the sort had ever happened before in the whole course of their experience. They argued and demonstrated with me. The partner with the ill-tempered eyebrows wanted to know what my reasons were. The partner with a sour smile reminded his colleagues atirically that I was a lady and had therefore no reasons to give. I only answered, Be so good as to forward my letter, gentlemen, and left them. I have no wish to claim any credit to myself in these pages which I do not honestly deserve. The truth is that my pride forbade me to accept help from you, stars, now that he had left me. My own little fortune, eight hundred a year, had been settled on myself when I married. It had been more than I wanted as a single woman, and I was resolved that it should be enough for me now. Benjamin had insisted on my considering his cottage as my home. Under the circumstances, the expenses in which my determination to clear my husband's character might involve me were the only expenses for which I had to provide. I could afford to be independent, and independent I resolved that I would be. While I am occupied in confessing my weakness and my errors, it is only right to add that, dearly as I still loved my unhappy, misguided husband, there was one little fault of his, which I found it not easy to forgive. Pardoning other things, I could not quite pardon his concealing from me that he had been married to a first wife. Why I should have felt this so bitterly as I did at certain times and seasons, I am not able to explain. Jealousy was at the bottom of it, I suppose. And yet I was not conscious of being jealous, especially when I thought of the poor creature's miserable death. Still, you stars ought not to have kept that secret from me, I used to think to myself, at odd times, when I was discouraged and out of temper. What would he have said if I had been a widow and had never told him of it? It was getting on toward evening when I returned to the cottage. Benjamin appeared to have been on the lookout for me. Before I could ring at the bell, he opened the garden gate. Prepare yourself for a surprise, my dear," he said. Your uncle, a reverent Doctor Stark, whether has arrived from the north and is waiting to see you. He received your letter this morning, and he took the first train to London as soon as he dreaded. In another minute my uncle's strong arms were round me. In my fore-own position I felt the good vicar's kindness in travelling all the way to London to see me very gratefully. It brought the tears into my eyes, tears without bitterness that did me good. I have come, my dear child, to take you back to your old home," he said. No words can tell how fervently I wish you had never left your aunt and me. Well, well, we won't talk about it. The mischief is done, and the next thing is to mend it as well as we can. If I could only get within arms a length of that husband of yours, Valyria. There, there, God forgive me, I'm forgetting that I'm a clergyman. What shall I forget next, I wonder? By the by, your aunt sends you her dearest love. She's more superstitious than ever. This miserable business doesn't surprise her a bit. She says it all began with your making that mistake about your name and signing the jit register. You remember? Was there ever such stuff? Ah! She's a foolish woman that wife of mine. But she means, well, a good soul at bottom. She would have travelled all the way here along with me if I would have let her. I said, No, you stop at home and look after the house, and prepare it, and I'll bring the child back. You shall have your old bedroom, Valyria, with white curtains, you know, looped up with blue. We will return to the vicarage, if you can get up in time, by the nine forty train tomorrow morning. Return to the vicarage. How could I do that? How could I hope to gain what was now the one object of my existence if I buried myself in a remote North Country village? It was simply impossible for me to accompany Dr. Stark wither on his return to his own house. I thank you, Uncle, with all my heart, I said. But I am afraid I can't leave London for the present. You can't leave London for the present," he repeated. What does this girl mean, Mr. Benjamin? Benjamin evaded a direct reply. She is kindly welcome here, Dr. Stark wither, he said, as long as she chooses to stay with me. Let's no answer, retorted my uncle in his roughened ready way. He returned to me. What's there to keep you in London? He asked. You used to hate London. I suppose there's some reason. It was only due to my good guardian and friend that I should take him into my confidence sooner or later. There was no help for it but arouse my garage and tell him frankly what I had it in my mind to do. The vicar listened and breathlessed his may. He turned to Benjamin, with distressed as well as surprise in his face when I had done— �God help her!� cried the worthy man. �The poor thing's troubles have turned her brain.� �I thought you would disapprove of it, sir� said Benjamin, in his mild and moderate way. �I confess I disapprove of it myself.� �Disapprove of it isn't the word� retorted the vicar. �Don't put it in that feeble way, if you please. An act of madness. That's what it is, if she really mean what she says.� He turned my way, and looked as he used to look at the afternoon service when he was catishizing an obstinate child. �You don't mean it� he said. �Do you? �I am sorry to have a fitty good opinion, uncle� I replied. �But I must own that I do certainly mean it.� In plain English, retorted the vicar, �You were conceited enough to think that you can succeed where the greatest lawyers in Scotland have failed. They couldn't prove this man's innocence or working together. And you were going to prove it single-handed. �Upon my word, you are a wonderful woman� cried my uncle, suddenly descending from indignation to irony. �May a plain country person who isn't used to lawyers and petticoats be permitted to ask how you mean to do it?� �I mean to begin by reading the trial, uncle. �Nice reading for a young woman. You will be wanting a batch of nasty French novels next. Well, and when you have read the trial, what then have you thought of that? �Yes, uncle, I have thought of that. I shall first try to form some conclusion after reading the trial, as to the guilty person who really committed the crime. Then I shall make out a list of witnesses who spoke in my husband's defence. I shall go to those witnesses, and tell them who I am, and what I want. I shall ask all sorts of questions which great lawyers might think it beneath the dignity to put. I shall be guided in what I do next, by the answers I receive. And I shall not be discouraged, no matter what difficulties are thrown in my way. Those are my plan, uncle, so far as I know them now. The vicar in Benjamin looked at each other as if they doubted the evidence of their own senses. The vicar spoke. �Do you mean to tell me,� he said, �that you are going roaming about the country to throw yourself on the mercy of strangers, and to risk whatever rough reception you may get in the course of your trials? You, a young woman, deserted by your husband, with nobody to protect you? Mr. Benjamin, do you hear her? And can you believe your ears? I declare to heaven I don't know whether I am awake or dreaming. Look at her, just look at her, there she sits as cool and easy as if she had said nothing at all extraordinary, and was going to do nothing out of the common way. What am I to do with her? That's the serious question. What on earth am I to do with her? Let me try my experiment, uncle, rash as it may look to you,� I said. What else will comfort and support me, and God knows I won't comfort and support? Don't think, P. obstinate, I'm ready to admit that there are serious difficulties in my way. The vicar resumed his ironical tone. �Oh!� he said, �you admit that, do you?� �Well, there is something going into it at any rate!� Many another woman before me, I went on, has faced serious difficulties and has conquered them for the sake of the men she loved. Dr. Starkweather rose slowly to his feet, with the ear of a person whose capacity of toleration had reached its last limits. �Am I to understand that you are still in love with Mr. Eustace MacAllen?� he asked. �Yes,� I answered. �The hero of the great poison trial,� pursued my uncle, �the man who has deceived and deserted you,� �you love him?� �I love him more daily than ever.� �Mr. Benjamin� said the vicar, �if Sherrick cover her senses between this and nine o'clock to-morrow morning, send her with her luggage to Locksley Hotel, where I am now staying.� �Good night, Valeria. I shall consult with your aunt as to what is to be done next. I have no more to say.� �Give me a kiss, Uncle Ed parting.� �Oh, yes, I'll give you a kiss, anything you like, Valeria. I shall be sixty-five next birthday, and I thought I knew something of women at my time of life. It seems I know nothing.� �Locksley Hotel is the address, Mr. Benjamin. Good night.� Benjamin looked very grave when he returned to me after accompanying Dr. Stark with her to the garden-gate. �Pray be advised, my dear,� he said. �I don't ask you to consider my view of this matter as good for much. But your uncle's opinion is surely worth considering.� I did not reply. It was useless to say any more. I made up my mind to be misunderstood and discouraged and to bear it. �Good night, my dear old friend,� was all I said to Benjamin. Then I turned away. I confessed with the tears in my eyes, and took refuge in my bedroom. The window-blind was up, and the autumn-moon light shone brilliantly into the little room. As I stood by the window looking out, the memory came to me of another moonlit night, when you stars and I were walking together in the vicarage garden before our marriage. It was the night of which I had written many pages back, when there were obstacles to our union, and when you stars had offered to release me from my engagement to him. I saw the dear face again looking at me in the moonlight. I heard once more his words in mind. �Forgive me,� he had said. �For having loved you, passionately, devotedly loved you, forgive me, and let me go.� Then I had answered, �Oh, you stars, I'm only a woman. Don't madden me. I can't live without you. I must and will be your wife.� And now after marriage had united us we were parted, parted still loving each other as passionately as ever. And why? Because he had been accused of a crime that he had never committed, and because his God's jury had failed to see that he was an innocent man. I looked at the lovely moonlight, pursuing these remembrances and these thoughts. �A new ardour burned in me.� �No,� I said to myself, �neither relations nor friends shall prevail on me to falter and fail in my husband's cause. The assertion of his innocence is the work of my life. I will begin it to night.� I drew down the blind and lighted the candles. In the quiet night, alone and unaided, I took my first step on the toilsome and terrible journey that lay before me. From the title-page to the end, without stopping to rest and without missing a word, I read the trial of my husband for the murder of his wife. Chapter 15 of the Law and the Lady This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Chapter 15 The Story of the Trial Third Preliminaries Let me confess another weakness on my part before I begin the story of the trial. I cannot prevail upon myself to copy for the second time the horrible title-page which holds up to public ignominy my husband's name. I have copied it once in my tenth chapter. That once be enough. Turning to the second page of the trial I found a note, assuring the reader of the absolute correctness of the report of the proceedings. The compiler described himself as having enjoyed certain special privileges. Thus the presiding judge had himself revised his charge to the jury, and again the treacherous lawyers of the prosecution and the defence following the judge's example had revised their speeches for and against the prisoner. Every particular care had been taken to secure literally correct report of the evidence given by the various witnesses. It was some relief to me to discover this note and to be satisfied at the outset that the story of the trial was in every particular fully and truly given. The next page interested me more nearly still. It enumerated the actors in the judicial drama, the men who held in the hands my husband's honour and my husband's life. Here is the list. The Lord Justice Clerk, Lord Drumphanic, Lord Noble Kirk, judges on the bench. The Lord Advocate, Mintlaw, Donald Drew, Esquire, Advocate Deputy, Council for the Crown. Mr. James A. Ellis, W.S., Agent for the Crown. The Dean of Faculty, Farrah Michael, Council for the Panel. Alexander Crockett, Esquire, Advocate. Otherwise the prisoner. Mr. Thawney Bank, W.S., Mr. Playmore, W.S., Agents for the Panel. The Indictment against the prisoner then followed, I shall not copy the uncouth language full of needless repetitions and, if I know anything of the subject, not guiltless of bad grammar as well, in which my innocent husband was solemnly and falsely accused of poisoning his first wife. The less there is of that false and hateful indictment on this page, the better and truer the page will look to my eyes. To be brief then, U.S. Tars MacAllen was indicted and accused at the instance of David Mintlaw Esquire, Her Majesty's Advocate, for Her Majesty's interest, of the murder of his wife by poison at his residence called Gleninch in the country of Midlothian. The poison was alleged to have been wickedly and feloniously given by the prisoner to his wife Sarah on two occasions in the form of arsenic, administered in tea, medicine, or other article or articles of food or drink to the prosecutor unknown. It was further declared that the prisoner's wife had died of the poison thus administered by her husband on one or other or both of the stated occasions, and that she was thus murdered by her husband. The next paragraph asserted that the set U.S. Tars MacAllen, taken before John David Esquire, Advocate, Sheriff's Substitute of Midlothian, did in his presence at Edinburgh on a given date, the 29th of October, subscribe a declaration stating as innocence of the alleged crime, this declaration being reserved in the indictment, together with certain documents, papers and articles enumerated in an inventory to be used in evidence against the prisoner. The indictment concluded by declaring that in the event of the offence charged against the prisoner being found proven by the verdict, he, the set U.S. Tars MacAllen, ought to be punished with the pains of the law to deter others from committing like crimes in all time coming. So much for the indictment. I have done with it, and I am rejoiced to be done with it. An inventory of papers, documents and articles followed at great length on the next three pages. This, in its turn, was succeeded by the list of the witnesses, and by the names of the jurors, fifteen in number, balloted for to try the case. And then, at last, the report of the trial began. It resolved itself to my mind into three great questions, as it appeared to me at the time. So let me present it here. End of Chapter 15 Chapter 16 OF THE LAW AND THE LADY This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Vipgamulla THE LAW AND THE LADY by Wilkie Collins Chapter 16 First question. Did the woman die poisoned? The proceedings began at ten o'clock. The prisoner was placed at the bar before the High Court of Justiceery at Edinburgh. He bowed respectfully to the bench and pleaded not guilty in a low voice. It was observed by every one present that the prisoner's face betrayed traces of acute mental suffering. He was deadly pale. His eyes never once wandered to the crowd in the court. When certain witnesses appeared against him he looked at them with a momentary attention, at other times he kept his eyes on the ground. When the evidence touched on his wife's illness and death, he was deeply affected and covered his face with his hands. It was a subject of general remark and general surprise that the prisoner, in this case, although a man, showed far less self-possession than the last prisoner tried in that court for murder, a woman who had been convicted on overwhelming evidence. There were persons present, a small minority only, who considered this wand of composure on the part of the prisoner to be a sign in his favour. Self-possession, in his dreadful position, signified to their minds the stark insensibility of a heartless and shameless criminal and afforded in itself a presumption not of innocence but of guilt. The first witness called was John Davy at Esquire, Sheriff's substitute of Midlothian. He was examined by the Lord Advocate as counsel for the prosecution and said, The prisoner was brought before me on the present charge. He made and subscribed to declaration on the 29th of October. It was freely and voluntarily made. The prisoner, having been first duly warranted and admonished. Having identified the declaration, the Sheriff's substitute, being cross-examined by the Dean of Faculty as counsel for the defense, continued his evidence in these words. The charge against the prisoner was murder. This was communicated to him before he made the declaration. The questions addressed to the prisoner were put partly by me, partly by another officer, the procurator fiscal. The answers were given distinctly and so far as I could judge without reserve. The statements put forward in the declaration were all made in answer to questions asked by the procurator fiscal or by myself. A clerk in the Sheriff's office then officially produced the declaration and corroborated the evidence of the witness who had preceded him. The appearance of the next witness created a market sensation in the court. This was no lesser person than the nurse who had attended Mrs. McAllen in her last illness, by name Christina Ormsey. After the first formal answers, the nurse, examined by the Lord Advocate, proceeded to say, I was first sent for to attend the deceased lady on the 7th of October. She was then suffering from a severe cold, accompanied by a rheumatic infection of the left knee joint. Previous to this, I understood that her health had been fairly good. She was not a very difficult person to nurse when you got used to her and understood how to manage her. The main difficulty was caused by her temper. She was not a sullen person. She was headstrong and violent, easily excited to fly into her passion, and quite reckless in her fits of anger as to what she said or did. At such times, I really hardly think she knew what she was about. My own idea is that her temper was made still more irritable by unhappiness in her married life. She was far from being a reserved person. Indeed, she was disposed as I thought to be a little too communicative about herself and her troubles with persons like me who were beneath her in station. She did not scruple, for instance, to tell me, when we had been long enough together to get used to each other, that she was very unhappy and fretted a good deal about her husband. One night, when she was wakeful and restless, she said to me, The dean of faculty here interposed, speaking on the prisoner's behalf. He appealed to the judges to say whether such loose and unreliable evidence as this was evidence which could be received by the court. The Lord Advocate, speaking on behalf of the Crown, claimed it as his right to produce the evidence. It was of the utmost importance in this case to show, on the testimony of an unprejudiced witness, on what terms the husband and wife were living. The witness was a most respectable woman. She had won and deserved the confidence of the unhappy lady whom she attended on her deathbed. After briefly consulting together, the judges unanimously decided that the evidence could not be admitted. What the witness had herself seen and observed of the relations between the husband and wife was the only evidence that they could receive. The Lord Advocate thereupon continued his examination of the witness. Christina Ormsay resumed her evidence as follows. My position as nurse led necessarily to my seeing more of Mrs. McAllen than any other person in the house. I am able to speak from experience of many things not known to others who were only in her rumoured intervals. For instance, I had more than one opportunity of personally observing that Mr. and Mrs. McAllen did not live together very happily. I can give you an example of this not drawn from what others told me, but from what I noticed for myself. Toward the latter part of my attendance on Mrs. McAllen, a young widowed lady named Mrs. Bowley, a cousin of Mr. McAllen's, came to stay at Glen Inch. Mrs. McAllen was jealous of this lady, and she showed it in my presence only the day before her death, when Mr. McAllen came into her room to inquire how she had passed the night. Oh! she said. Never mind how I have slept. What do you care whether I sleep well or ill? How has Mrs. Bowley passed the night? Is she more beautiful than ever this morning? Go back to her. Pray go back to her. Don't waste your time with me. Beginning in that manner she worked herself into one of her furious rages. I was brushing her hair at the time, and feeling that my presence was an improper priority under the circumstances, I attempted to leave the room. She forbade me to go. Mr. McAllen felt, as I did, that my duty was to withdraw, and he said so in plain words. Mrs. McAllen insisted on my staying in language so insolent to her husband, that he said, If you cannot control yourself, either the nurse leaves the room, or I do. She refused to yield even then. A good excuse, she said, for getting back to Mrs. Bowley. Go! He took her at her word, and walked out of the room. He had barely closed the door before she began reviling him to me in the most shocking manner. She declared, among other things, she said of him, that the news of all others, which he would be most glad to hear, would be the news of her death. I ventured quite respectfully on remonstrating with her. She took up the hair, brushed and threw it at me, and then and there dismissed me from my attendance on her. I left her and waited below, until her fit of passion had worn itself out. Then I returned to my place at the bedside, and for a while things went on again as usual. It may not be a mist to add a word which may help to explain Mrs. McAllen's jealousy of her husband's cousin. Mrs. McAllen was a very plain woman. She had a cast in one of her eyes, and, if I may use the expression, one of the most muddy, blotchy complexions it was ever my misfortune to see in a person's face. Mrs. Bowley, on the other hand, was a most attractive lady. Her eyes were universally admired, and she had a most beautifully clear and delicate colour. Poor Mrs. McAllen said of her, most untruly, that she painted. No, the defects in the complexion of the deceased lady were not in any way attributable to her illness. I should call them borne and bred defects in herself. Her illness, if I am asked to describe it, I should say was troublesome, nothing more, until the last day there were no symptoms in the least degree serious about the melody that had taken her. Her rheumatic knee was painful, of course, acutely painful, if you like, when she moved it, and the confinement to bed was irksome enough, no doubt. But otherwise there was nothing in the lady's condition before the fatal attack came to alarm her or anybody about her. She had her books and her writing materials on an invalid table, which worked on a pivot, and could be arranged in any position most agreeable to her. At times she read and wrote a good deal. At other times she lay quiet, thinking her own thoughts or talking with me, and with one or two lady-friends in the neighbourhood who came regularly to see her. Her writing, so far as I knew, was almost entirely of the poetical sort. She was a grand hand at composing poetry. On one occasion only she showed me some of her poems. I am no judge of such things. Her poetry was of the dismal kind, disappearing about herself and wondering why she had ever been born in nonsense like that. Her husband came in more than once for some hard hits at his cruel heart and his ignorance of his wife's merit. In short, she vented her discontent with her pen, as well as with her tongue. There were times, and pretty often too, when an angel from heaven would have failed to have satisfied Mrs. McAllen. Throughout the period of her illness, the deceased lady occupied the same room, a large bedroom situated like all the best bedrooms on the first floor of the house. Yes, the plan of the room now shown to me is quite accurately taken, according to my remembrance of it. One door led into the great passage or corridor on which all the doors opened. A second door at one side marked B on the plan led to Mr. McAllen's sleeping room. A third door on the opposite side marked C on the plan communicated with a little study or book room used, as I was told by Mr. McAllen's mother when she was staying at Glen Inge, but seldom or never entered by anyone else. Mr. McAllen's mother was not at Glen Inge while I was there. The door between the bedroom and this study was locked, and the key was taken out. I don't know who had the key or whether there were more keys than one in existence. The door was never open to my knowledge. I only got into the study to look at it along with a housekeeper by entering through a second door that opened onto the corridor. I vexed to say that I can speak from my own knowledge positively about Mrs. McAllen's illness and about the sudden change which ended in her death. By the doctor's advice I made notes at the time of dates and hours and such like. I looked at my notes before coming here. From the 7th of October, when I was first called in to nurse her, to the 20th of the same month, she slowly but steadily improved in health. Her knee was still painful, no doubt, but the inflammatory look of it was disappearing. As to the other symptoms except weakness from lying in bed and irritability of temper, there was really nothing the matter with her. She slept badly, I ought perhaps to add, but we remedied this by means of composing draughts prescribed for that purpose by the doctor. On the morning of the 21st, at a few minutes past six, I got my first alarm that something was going wrong with Mrs. McAllen. I was awoke at the time I have mentioned by the ringing of the hand-bell which she kept on her bed-table. Let me say for myself that I had only fallen asleep on the sofa in the bedroom at past two in the morning from sheer fatigue. Mrs. McAllen was then awake. She was in one of her bed-humours with me. I had tried to prevail on her to let me remove her dressing-case from her bed-table after she had used it in making her toilet for the night. It took up a great deal of room, and she could not possibly want it again before the morning. But no, she insisted on my letting it be. There was a glass inside the case, and plain as she was, she never weary of looking at herself in that glass. I saw that she was in a bad state of temper, so I gave her her way, and let the dressing-case be. Finding that she was too silent to speak to me after that, and too obstinate to take her composing-draught from me when I offered it, I laid me down on the sofa at her bed-foot, and fell asleep, as I have said. The moment her bell rang, I was up and at the bed-site, ready to make myself useful. I asked what was the matter with her. She complained of faintness and depression, and said she felt sick. I inquired if she had taken anything in the way of physics, or food, while I had been asleep. She answered that her husband had come in about an hour since, and finding her still sleepless had himself administered the composing-draught. Mr. MacAllan, sleeping in the next room, joined as while she was speaking. He too had been aroused by the bell. He heard what Mrs. MacAllan said to me about the composing-draught, and made no remark upon it. It seemed to me that he was alarmed at his wife's faintness. I suggested that she should take a little wine or brandy and water. She answered that she could swallow nothing so strong as wine or brandy, having a burning pain in her stomach already. I put my hand on her stomach, quite lightly. She screamed when I touched her. This symptom alarmed us. We went to the village for the medical man who had attended Mrs. MacAllan during her illness, one Mr. Gale. The doctor seemed no better able to account for the change for the worse in his patient than we were. Hearing her complain of thirst, he gave her some milk. Not long after taking it, she was sick. The sickness appeared to relieve her. She soon grew drowsy and slumbered. Mr. Gale left us, with strict injunctions, to send for him instantly, if she was taken ill again. Nothing of this would happen. No change took place for the next three hours or more. She roused up toward half past nine, and inquired about her husband. I informed her that he had returned to his own room and asked if I should send for him. She said, No. I asked next if she would like anything to eat or drink. She said, No, again, in rather a vacant, stupefied way, and then told me to go downstairs and get my breakfast. On my way down I met the housekeeper. She invited me to breakfast with her in her room, instead of in the servants' hall, as usual. I remained with the housekeeper but a short time, certainly not more than half an hour. Coming upstairs again I met the under-housemate sweeping on one of the landings. The girl informed me that Mrs. McAllen had taken a cup of tea during my absence in the housekeeper's room. Mr. McAllen's valet had ordered the tea for his mistress by his master's direction. The under-housemate made it and took it upstairs herself to Mrs. McAllen's room. Her master, she said, opened the door when she knocked, and took the tea-cup from her with his own hand. He opened the door widely enough for her to see into the bedroom, and to notice that nobody was with Mrs. McAllen but himself. After a little talk with the under-housemate I returned to the bedroom. No one was there. Mrs. McAllen was lying perfectly quiet with her face turned away from me on the pillow. Approaching the bedside I kicked against something on the floor. It was a broken tea-cup. I said to Mrs. McAllen, How comes the tea-cup to be broken, ma'am? She answered without turning towards me in an odd muffled kind of voice. I dropped it. Before you drank your tea, ma'am, I asked. No, she said, in handing the cup back to Mr. McAllen after I had done. I had put my question wishing to know in case she had spilled the tea when she dropped the cup whether it would be necessary to get her any more. I'm quite sure I remember correctly my question and her answer. I inquired next if she had been long alone. She said shortly, Yes, I have been trying to sleep. I said, Do you feel pretty comfortable? She answered, Yes, again. All this time she still kept her face sulkily turned from me to the wall, stooping over her to arrange the bed-clothe. I looked toward her table. The writing materials which were always kept on it were disturbed, and there was a wet ink on one of the pens. I said, Surely you haven't been writing, ma'am. Why not? She said. I couldn't sleep. Another poem? I asked. She laughed to herself, a bitter short laugh. Yes, she said. Another poem. That's good, I said. It looks as if you were getting quite like yourself again. We shan't want the doctor any more to-day. She made no answer to this except an impatient sign with a hand. I didn't understand the sign. Upon that she spoke again and crossly enough too. I want to be alone. Leave me. I had no choice but to do as I was told. To the best of my observation there was nothing the matter with her and nothing for the nurse to do. I put the bell-rope within reach of her hand and went downstairs again. Half an hour more, as well as I can guess it, pass. I kept within hearing of the bell, but it never rang. I was not quite at my ease, without exactly knowing why. That odd muffled voice in which she had spoken to me hung on my mind as it were. I was not quite satisfied about leaving her alone for too long a time together, and then again I was unwilling to risk throwing her into one of her fits of passion by going back before she rang for me. It ended in my venturing into the room on the ground floor called the Morning Room to consult Mr. MacAllen. He was usually to be found there in the forenoon of the day. On this occasion, however, when I looked into the Morning Room it was empty. At the same moment I heard the master's voice on the terrace outside. I went out and found him speaking to one Mr. Dexter, an old friend of his and, like Mrs. Bowley, a guest staying in the house. Mr. Dexter was sitting at the window of his room upstairs. He was a cripple and could only move himself about in a chair on wheels, and Mr. MacAllen was speaking to him from the terrace below. "'Dexter,' I heard Mr. MacAllen say, "'where is Mrs. Bowley? Have you seen anything of her?' Mr. Dexter answered in his quick, off-handed way of speaking, "'Not I. I know nothing about her.' Then I advanced, and begging pardon for intruding, I mentioned to Mr. MacAllen the difficulty I was in about going back or not to his wife's room without waiting until she rang for me. Before he could advise me in the matter, the footman made his appearance and informed me that Mrs. MacAllen's bell was then ringing, and ringing violently. It was then close on eleven o'clock. As fast as I could mount the stairs I hastened back to the bedroom. Before I opened the door I heard Mrs. MacAllen groaning. She was in dreadful pain, feeling a burning heat in the stomach and in the throat, together with the same sickness which had troubled her in the early morning. Though no doctor, I could see in her face that this second attack was of a far more serious nature than the first. After ringing the bell for a messenger to send to Mr. MacAllen, I ran to the door to see if any of the servants happened to be within call. The only person I saw in the corridor was Mrs. Bowley. She was on her way from her own room, she said, to inquire after Mrs. MacAllen's health. I said to her, Mrs. MacAllen is seriously ill again, ma'am. Would you please tell Mr. MacAllen and send for the doctor? She ran downstairs at once to do as I told her. I had not been long back at the bedside, when Mr. MacAllen and Mrs. Bowley both came in together. Mrs. MacAllen cast a strange look on them, a look I cannot at all describe, and bade them leave her. Mrs. Bowley, looking very much frightened, withdrew immediately. Mr. MacAllen advanced a step or two nearer to the bed. His wife looked at him again in the same strange way, and cried out, half as if she was threatening him, half as if she was in treating him, leave me with the nurse, go! He only waited to say to me in a whisper, the doctor is sent for, and then he left the room. Before Mr. Gale arrived, Mrs. MacAllen was violently sick. What came from her was muddy and frothy, and faintly streaked with blood. When Mr. Gale saw it, he looked very serious. I heard him say to himself, what does this mean? He did his best to relieve Mrs. MacAllen, but with no good result that I could see. After a time she seemed to suffer less. Then more sickness came on, then there was another intermission. Whether she was suffering or not, I observed that her hands and feet, whenever I touched them, remained equally cold. Also the doctor's report of her pulse was always the same, very small and feeble. I said to Mr. Gale, what is to be done, sir? And Mr. Gale said to me, I won't take the responsibility on myself any longer, I must have a physician from Edinburgh. The fastest horse in the stables at Glen Inge was put into a dock-cart, and the coachman drove away full speed to Edinburgh to fetch the famous Dr. Jerome. While we were waiting for the physician, Mr. MacAllen came into his wife's room with Mr. Gale. Exhausted as she was, she instantly lifted her hand and signed to him to leave her. He tried by soothing words to persuade her to let him stay. No, she still insisted on sending him out of her room. He seemed to feel it at such a time and in the presence of the doctor. Before she was aware of him, he suddenly stepped up to the bedside and kissed her on the forehead. She shrank from him with a scream. Mr. Gale interfered and let him out of the room. In the afternoon Dr. Jerome arrived. The great physician came just in time to see her seized with another attack of sickness. He watched her attentively, without speaking a word. In the interval when the sickness stopped, he still studied her, as it were in perfect silence. I thought he would never have done examining her. When he was at last satisfied, he told me to leave him alone with Mr. Gale. We will ring, he said, when we want you here again. It was a long time before they rang for me. The coachman was sent for before I was summoned back to the bedroom. He was dispatched to Edinburgh for the second time with a written message from Dr. Jerome to his head-servant, saying that there was no chance of his returning to the city and to his patients for some hours to come. Some of us thought this looked badly for Mrs. McAllen. Others said it might mean that the doctor had hopes of saving her, but expected to be a long time in doing it. At last I was sent for. On my presenting myself in the bedroom, Dr. Jerome went out to speak to Mr. McAllen, leaving Mr. Gale along with me. From that time as long as the poor lady lived, I was never left alone with her. One of the two doctors was always in her room. Refreshments were prepared for them, but still they took it in turns to eat their meal, one relieving the other at the bedside. If they had administered remedies to their patient, I should not have been surprised by this proceeding. But they were at the end of their remedies. Their only business then seemed to be to keep watch. I was puzzled to account for this. Keeping watch was the nurse's business. I thought the conduct of the doctors very strange. By the time that the lamp was lighted in the sick room, I could see that the end was near. Accepting an occasional feeling of cramp in her legs, she seemed to suffer less. But her eyes looked sunk in her head. Her skin was cold and clammy. Her lips had turned to a bluish paleness. Nothing roused her now, excepting the last attempt made by her husband to see her. He came in with Dr. Jerome looking like a man terror struck. She was past speaking, but the moment she saw him she feebly made signs and sounds, which showed that she was just as resolved as ever not to let him come near her. He was so overwhelmed that Mr. Gale was obliged to help him out of the room. No other person was allowed to see the patient. Mr. Dexter and Mrs. Bollet made their inquiries outside the door, and were not invited in. As the evening drew on, the doctor set on either side of the bed, silently watching her, silently waiting for her death. Toward eight o'clock she seemed to have lost the use of her hands and arms. They lay helpless outside the bed-clothes. A little later she sank into a sort of dull sleep. Little by little the sound of a heavy breathing grew fainter. At twenty minutes past nine Dr. Jerome told me to bring the lamp to the bed-side. He looked at her, and put his hand on her heart. Then he said to me, You can go downstairs, nurse. It is all over. He turned to Mr. Gale. Would you inquire if Mr. MacAllen can see us? He said. I opened the door for Mr. Gale, and followed him out. Dr. Dexter Rome called me back for a moment and told me to give him the key of the door. I did so, of course, but I thought it also very strange. When I got down to the servant's hall I found there was a general feeling that something was wrong. We were all uneasy, without knowing why. A little later the two doctors left the house. Mr. MacAllen had been quite incapable of receiving them and hearing what they had to say. In this difficulty they had spoken privately, with Mr. Dexter as Mr. MacAllen's old friend, and the only gentleman then staying at Glenn Inge. Before bedtime I went upstairs to prepare the remains of the deceased lady for the coffin. The room in which he lay was locked, the door leading into Mr. MacAllen's room being secured, as well as the door leading into the corridor. The keys had been taken away by Mr. Gale. Two of the men's servants were posted outside the bedroom to keep watch. They were to be relieved at four in the morning. That was all they could tell me. In the absence of any explanations or directions I took the liberty of knocking at the door of Mr. Dexter's room. From his lips I first heard the startling news. Both the doctors had refused to give the usual certificate of death. There was to be a medical examination of the body in the morning. There the examination of the nurse Christina Olmsey came to an end. Ignorant as I was of the law I could see what impression the evidence so far was intended to produce on the minds of the jury. After first showing that my husband had had two opportunities of administering the poison, once in the medicine, and once in the tea, the counsel for the crown led the jury to infer that the prisoner had taken those opportunities to rid himself of an ugly and jealous wife, whose detestable temper he could no longer endure. Having directed his examination to the attainment of this object, the Lord Advocate had done with the witness. The dean of faculty acting in the prisoner's interest then rose to bring out the favourable side of the wife's character by cross-examining the nurse. If he succeeded in this attempt, the jury might reconsider their conclusion that the wife was a person who had exasperated her husband beyond endurance. In that case, where so far was the husband's motive for poisoning her, and where was the presumption of the prisoner's guilt. Pressed by the skillful lawyer, the nurse was obliged to exhibit my husband's first wife under an entirely new aspect. Here is the substance of what the dean of faculty extracted from Christina Olmsey. I persist in declaring that Mrs. McAllen had a most violent temper, but she was certainly in the habit of making amends for the offence that she gave by her violence. When she was quiet again, she always made her excuses to me, and she made them with a good grace. Her men as were engaging at such times as these. She spoke and acted like a well-bred lady. Then again as to her personal appearance. Plain as she was in face, she had a good figure. Her hands and feet, I was told, had been modelled by a sculptor. She had a very pleasant voice, and she was reported when in health to sing beautifully. She was also, if her maid's account was to be trusted, a pattern on the matter of dressing for the other ladies in the neighbourhood. Then as to Mrs. Bowley, though she was certainly jealous of the beautiful young widow, she had shown at the same time that she was capable of controlling that feeling. It was through Mrs. McAllen that Mrs. Bowley was in the house. Mrs. Bowley had wished to postpone her visit on account of the state of Mrs. McAllen's health. It was Mrs. McAllen herself, not her husband, who decided that Mrs. Bowley should not be disappointed and should pay her visit to Gleninch then and there. Further, Mrs. McAllen, in spite of her temper, was popular with her friends and popular with her servants. There was hardly a dry eye in the house when it was known she was dying. And further still, in those little domestic disagreements at which the nurse had been present, Mr. McAllen had never lost his temper and had never used harsh language. He seemed to be more sorry than angry when the quarrels took place. Morale for the jury, was this the sort of woman who would exasperate a man into poisoning her, and was this the sort of man who would be capable of poisoning his wife? Having produced this salutary counter-impression, the dean of faculty sat down, and the medical witnesses were called next. Here the evidence was simply irresistible. Dr. Jerome and Mr. Gale positively swore that the symptoms of the illness were the symptoms of poisoning by arsenic. The surgeon who had performed the post-mortem examination followed. He positively swore that the appearance of the internal organs proved Dr. Jerome and Mr. Gale to be right in declaring that their patient had died poisoned. Lastly to complete this overwhelming testimony, two analytical chemists actually produced in court the arsenic which they had found in the body, in a quantity admittedly sufficient to have killed two persons instead of one. In the face of such evidence as this, cross-examination was a mere form. The first question raised by the trial, did the woman die poisoned, was answered in the affirmative, and answered beyond the possibility of doubt. The next witness is called, were witnesses concerned with the question that now followed. The obscure and terrible question, who poisoned her? 2. Who poisoned her? The evidence of the doctors and the chemists closed the proceedings on the first day of the trial. On the second day the evidence to be produced by the prosecution was anticipated with a general feeling of curiosity and interest. The court was now to hear what had been seen and done by the persons officially appointed to verify such cases of suspected crime as the case which had occurred at Gleninch. The procurator Fiskel, being the person officially appointed to direct the preliminary investigations of the law, was the first witness called on the second day of the trial. Examined by the Lord Advocate, the Fiskel gave his evidence as follows. On the 26th of October I received a communication from Dr. Jerome of Edinburgh and from Mr. Alexander Gale, medical practitioner residing in the village or hamlet of Dink Dovey near Edinburgh. The communication related to the death under circumstances of suspicion of Mrs. Eustace MacAllum at her husband's house, hard-biting Dovey called Gleninch. There were also four words to me enclosed in the document just mentioned to reports. One described the results of a post-mortem examination of the deceased lady, and the other stated the discoveries made after a chemical analysis of certain of the interior organs of her body. The result in both instances proved a demonstration that Mrs. Eustace MacAllum had died of poisoning by arsenic. Under these circumstances I set in motion a search and inquiry in the house at Gleninch and elsewhere simply for the purpose of throwing light on the circumstances which had attended the lady's death. No criminal charge in connection with the death was made at my office against any person, either in the communication which I received from the medical min or in any other form. The investigations at Gleninch and elsewhere beginning on the 26th of October were not completed until the 28th. Upon this latter date, acting on certain discoveries which were reported to me and on my own examination of letters and other documents brought to my office, I made a criminal charge against the prisoner and obtained a warrant for his apprehension. He was examined before the sheriff on the 29th of October and was committed for trial before this court. The fiscal having made his statement and having been cross-examined on technical matters only, the persons employed in his office were called next. These men had a story of startling interest to tell. There were the fatal discoveries which had justified the fiscal in charging my husband with the murder of his wife. The first of the witnesses was the sheriff's officer. He gave his name as Yizaya Schoolcraft. Examined by Mr. Drew, Advocate Deputy and Council for the Crown with the Lord Advocate, Yizaya Schoolcraft said, I got a warrant on the 26th of October to go to the country house near Edinburgh called Gleninch. I took with me Robert Laurie, assistant to the fiscal. We first examined the room in which Mrs. Eustace MacAllen had died. On the bed, and on a movable table which was attached to it, we found books and writing materials and a paper containing some unfinished verses and manuscript, afterwards identified as being in the handwriting of the deceased. We enclosed these articles in paper and sealed them up. We next opened an Indian cabinet in the bedroom. Here we found many more verses on many more sheets of paper in the same handwriting. We also discovered first some letters and next a crumpled piece of paper thrown aside in a corner of one of the shelves. On closer examination a chemist's printed label was discovered on this morsel of paper. We also found, in the folds of it, a few scattered grains of some white powder. The paper and the letters were carefully enclosed and sealed up as before. Further investigation of the room revealed nothing which could throw any light on the purpose of our inquiry. We examined the clothes, jewellery and books of the deceased. These were left under lock and key. We also found a dressing case, which we protected by seals, and took away with us to the fiscal's office, along with all the other articles that we had discovered in the room. The next day we continued our examination in the house, having received in the interval fresh instructions from the fiscal. We began our work in the bedroom communicating with the room in which Mrs. McAllen had died. It had been kept locked since the death. Finding nothing of any importance here, we went next to another room on the same floor, in which we were informed the prisoner was then lying ill in bed. His honest was described to us as a nervous complaint caused by the death of his wife, and by the proceedings which had followed it. He was reported to be quite incapable of exerting himself and quite unfit to see strangers. We insisted nevertheless, indeference to our instructions on obtaining admission to his room. He made no reply when we inquired whether he had or had not removed anything from the sleeping room next to his late wife's, which he usually occupied, to the sleeping room in which he now lay. All he did was to close his eyes, as if he were too feeble to speak to us or to notice us. Without further disturbing him, we began to examine the room and the different objects in it. While we were so employed, we were interrupted by a strange sound. We likened it to the rumbling of wheels in the corridor outside. The door opened, and there came swiftly in a gentleman, a cripple, wheeling himself along in a chair. He wheeled his chair straight up to a little table which stood by the prisoner's bedside, and said something to him in a whisper too low to be overheard. The prisoner opened his eyes and quickly answered by a sign. We informed the cripple gentleman, quite respectfully, that we could not allow him to be in the room at this time. He appeared to think nothing of what we said. He only answered, My name is Dexter. I am one of Mr. MacAllen's old friends. It is you who are intruding here, not I. We again notified to him that he must leave the room, and we pointed out particularly that he had got his chair in such a position against the bedside table as to prevent us from examining it. He only laughed. Can't you see for yourselves, he said, that it is a table, and nothing more? In reply to this we warned him, that we were acting under a legal warrant, and that he might get into trouble if he obstructed us in the execution of our duty. Finding there was no moving him by fair means, I took his chair and pulled it away, while Robert Lawrie laid hold of the table and carried it to the other end of the room. The crippled gentleman flew into a furious rage with me for presuming to touch his chair. My chair is me, he said. How dare you lay hands on me? I first opened the door, and then by way of accommodating him gave the chair a good push behind, with my stick instead of my hand, and so santed and him safely and swiftly out of the room. Having locked the door so as to prevent any further intrusion, I joined Robert Lawrie in examining the bedside table. It had one drawer in it, and that drawer, we found secured. We asked the prisoner for the key. He flatly refused to give it to us, and said we had no right to unlock his drawers. He was so angry that he even declared it was lucky for us he was too weak to rise from his bed. I answered civilly that our duty obliged us to examine the drawer, and that if he still declined to produce the key, he would only oblige us to take the table away and have the lock opened by a smith. While we were still disputing, there was a knock at the door of the room. I opened the door cautiously. Instead of the crippled gentleman whom I had expected to see again, there was another stranger standing outside. The prisoner hailed him as a friend and neighbor, and eagerly called upon him for protection from us. We found this second gentleman pleasant enough to deal with. He informed us readily that he had been sent for by Mr. Dexter, and that he was himself a lawyer, and he asked to see our warrant. Having looked at it, he at once informed the prisoner evidently very much to the prisoner's surprise that he must submit to have the drawer examined under protest. And then, without more ado, he got the key and opened the table drawer for us himself. We found inside several letters, and a large book with a lock to it, having the words My Diary and scribed on it in gilt letters. As a matter of course, we took possession of the letters and the diary, and sealed them up to be given to the fiscal. At the same time, the gentleman wrote out a protest on the prisoner's behalf, and handed us his card. The card informed us that he was Mr. Playmore, now one of the agents for the prisoner. The card and the protests were deposited with the other documents in the care of the fiscal. No other discoveries of any importance were made at Gleninch. Our next inquiries took us to Edinburgh, to the druggist whose label we had found on the crumpled morsel of paper, and to other druggists likewise whom we were instructed to question. On the twenty-eighth of October the fiscal was in possession of all the information that we could collect, and our duties for the time being came to an end. This concluded the evidence of Schoolcraft and Laurie. It was not taken on cross-examination, and it was plainly unfavorable to the prisoner. Matters grew worse still when the next witnesses were called. The druggist, whose label had been found on the crumpled bit of paper, now appeared on the stand, to make the position of my unhappy husband more critical than ever. Andrew Kinlay, druggist of Edinburgh, deposed as follows. I keep a special registry book of the poison sold by me. I produce the book. On the date therein mentioned, the prisoner at the bar, Mr. Eustace McAllen, came into my shop and said that he wished to purchase some arsenic. I asked him what it was wanted for. He told me it was wanted by his gardener to be used in solution for the killing of insects in the greenhouse. At the same time he mentioned his name, Mr. McAllen of Glen Inge. I had once directed my assistant to put up the arsenic to ounce his off it, and I made the necessary entry in my book. Mr. McAllen signed the entry, and I signed it afterward as witness. He paid for the arsenic, and took it away with him, wrapped up in two papers. The outer paper, being labelled with my name and address, and with the word poison in large letters, exactly like the label now produced on the piece of paper found at Glen Inge. The next witness, Peter Stockdale, also a drugist of Edinburgh, followed and said, The prisoner at the bar called at my shop on the date indicated on my register, some days later than the date indicated in the register of Mr. Kinlay. He wished to purchase six penny worth of arsenic. My assistant, to whom he had addressed himself, called me. It is a rule in my shop that no one sells poison but myself. I asked the prisoner what he wanted the arsenic for. He answered that he wanted it for killing rats at his house, called Glen Inge. I said, Have I the honour of speaking to Mr. McAllen of Glen Inge? He said that was his name. I sold him the arsenic, about an ounce and a half, and labelled the bottle in which I put it with the word poison in my own hand-frighting. He signed the register, and took the arsenic away with him after paying for it. The cross-examination of the two men succeeded in asserting certain technical objections to their evidence, but the terrible fact that my husband himself had actually purchased the arsenic in both cases remained unshaken. The next witnesses, the gardener and the cook at Glen Inge, warned the chain of hostile evidence around the prisoner more mercilessly still. On examination the gardener said on his oath, I never received any arsenic from the prisoner or from anyone else, at the date to which you refer, or at any other date. I never used any such thing as a solution of arsenic, or ever allowed the men working under me to use it in the conservatories or in the garden at Glen Inge. I disapprove of arsenic, as a means of destroying noxious insects and festing flowers and plants. The cook, being called next, spoke as positively as the gardener. Neither my master nor any other person gave me any arsenic to destroy rats at any time. No such thing was wanted. I declare on my oath that I never saw any rats in or about the house, or ever heard of any rats and festing it. Other household servants at Glen Inge gave similar evidence. Nothing could be extracted from the Moncross examination except that there might have been rats in the house, though they were not aware of it. The possession of the poison was traced directly to my husband and to no one else, that he had bought it was actually proved, and that he had kept it was the one conclusion that the evidence justified. The witnesses who came next did their best to press the charge against the prisoner home to him, having the arsenic in his possession, what had he done with it? The evidence led the jury to infer what he had done with it. The prisoner's valet deposed that his master had rung for him at twenty minutes to ten on the morning of the day on which his mistress died, and had ordered a cup of tea for her. The man had received the order at the open door of Mrs. MacAllen's room, and could positively swear that no other person but his master was there at the time. The under-housemaid, appearing next, said that she had made the tea, and had herself taken it upstairs before ten o'clock to Mrs. MacAllen's room. Her master had received it from her at the open door. She could look in and could see that he was alone in her mistress's room. The nurse, Christina Ormsey, being recalled, repeated what Mrs. MacAllen had said to her on the day when that lady was first taken ill. She had said, speaking to the nurse at six o'clock in the morning, Mr. MacAllen came in about an hour since. He found me still sleepless, and gave me my composing-draught. This was at five o'clock in the morning, while Christina Ormsey was asleep on the sofa. The nurse thus swore that she had looked at the bottle containing the composing mixture, and had seen by the measuring-marks on the bottle that her dose had been poured out since the dose previously given administered by herself. On this occasion special interest was excited by the cross-examination. The closing questions put to the under-housemaid and the nurse revealed for the first time what the nature of the defence was to be. Cross-examining the under-housemaid, the dean of faculty said, Did you ever notice when you were setting Mrs. Eustace MacAllen's room to rights, where the water left in the basin was of a blackish or bluish colour? The witness answered, I never noticed anything of the sort. The dean of faculty went on. Did you ever find under the pillow of the bed, or in any other hiding-place, in Mrs. MacAllen's room, any books or pamphlets telling of remedies used for improving a bad complexion? The witness answered, No. The dean of faculty persisted. Did you ever hear Mrs. MacAllen speak of arsenic, taken as a wash or taken as a medicine, as a good thing to improve the complexion? The witness answered, Never. Similar questions were next put to the nurse, and were all answered by this witness also in the negative. Here, then, in spite of the negative answers, was the plan of the defence made dimly visible for the first time to the jury and to the audience, by way of preventing the possibility of a mistake and so serious a matter, the chief judge, the Lord Justice Click, put this plain question when the witness had retired to the council for the defence. The court and the jury said as Lordship, which distinctly to understand the object of your cross-examination of the housemate and the nurse, is it the theory of the defence that Mrs. Eustace MacAllen used the arsenic which her husband purchased for the purpose of improving the defects of her complexion? The dean of faculty answered, That is what we say, my Lord, and what we propose to prove as the foundation of the defence. We cannot dispute the medical evidence which declares that Mrs. MacAllen died poisoned. But we assert that she died of an overdose of arsenic, ignorantly taken, in the privacy of her own room as a remedy for the defects, the approved and admitted defects of her complexion. The prisoner's declaration before the sheriff expressly sets forth that he purchased the arsenic at the request of his wife. The Lord Justice Click inquired upon this, if there were any objection on the part of either of the learned counsel to have the declaration read in court before the trial proceeded further. To this the dean of faculty replied that he would be glad to have the declaration read. If he might use the expression it would use fully pave the way in the minds of the jury for the defence which he had to submit to them. The Lord Advocate, speaking on the other side, was happy to be able to accommodate his learned brother in this matter, so long as the mere assertions which the declaration contained were not supported by proof, he looked upon that document as evidence for the prosecution, and he too was quite willing to have it read. Thereupon the prisoner's declaration of his innocence on being charged before the sheriff, with the murder of his wife, was read in the following terms. I bought the two packets of arsenic, on each occasion at my wife's own request. On the first occasion she told me the poison was wanted by the gardener for use in the conservatories. On the second occasion she said it was required by the cook for reading the lower part of the House of Rats. I handed both packets of arsenic to my wife immediately on my return home. I had nothing to do with the poison after buying it. My wife was the person who gave orders to the gardener and cook, not I. I never held any communication with either of them. I asked my wife no questions about the use of the arsenic, feeling no interest in the subject. I never entered the conservatories for a month together. I care little about flowers. As for the rats, I left the killing of them to the cook and the other servants, just as I should have left any other part of the domestic business to the cook and the other servants. My wife never told me she wanted the arsenic to improve her complexion. Surely I should be the last person admitted to the knowledge of such a secret of her toilet as that. I implicitly believe what she told me, vis that the poison was wanted for the purpose specified by the gardener and the cook. I said positively that I lived on friendly terms with my wife, allowing, of course, for the little occasional disagreements and misunderstandings of married life. Any sense of disappointment in connection with my marriage, which I might have felt privately, I conceived it to be my duty as a husband and as a gentleman to conceal from my wife. I was not only shocked and grieved by her untimely death. I was filled with fear that I had not, with all my care, behaved affectionately enough to her in her lifetime. Furthermore, I solemnly declare that I know no more of how she took the arsenic found in her body than the babe unborn. I am innocent, even of the thought of harming that unhappy woman. I administered the composing draught exactly as I found it in the bottle. I afterward gave her the cup of tea exactly as I received it from the under-housemaid's hand. I never had access to the arsenic after I placed the two packages in my wife's possession. I am entirely ignorant of what she did with them or where she kept them. I declare before God I am innocent of the horrible crime with which I am charged. With the reading of those true and touching words, the proceedings on the second day of the trial came to an end. So far I must own. The effect on me of reading the report was to depress my spirits and to lower my hopes. The whole weight of the evidence at the close of the second day was against my unhappy husband. Woman as I was and partisan as I was, I could plainly see that. The merciless Lord Advocate, I confess I hated him, had proved, one, that Eustace had bought the poison, two, that the reason which he had given to the drugist for buying the poison was not the true reason, three, that he had two opportunities of secretly administering the poison to his wife. On the other hand, what had the Dean of Faculty proved, is yet nothing. The assertions in the prisoner's declaration of his innocence were still, as the Lord Advocate had remarked, assertions not supported by proof. Not one item of evidence had been produced to show that it was the wife who had secretly used the arsenic and used it for her complexion. My one consolation was that the reading of the trial had already revealed to me the helpful figures of two friends on whose sympathy I might surely rely. The crippled Mr. Dexter had especially shown himself to be a thorough good ally of my husband's. My heart warmed to the man who had moved his cheer against the bedside table, the man who had struggled to the last to defend Eustace's papers from the Fretches who had seized them. I decided then and there that the first person to whom I would confide my aspirations and my hopes should be Mr. Dexter. If he felt any difficulty about advising me, I would then apply next to the agent, Mr. Playmore, the second good friend who had formally protested against the seizure of my husband's papers. Fortified by this resolution I turned the page and read the history of the third day of the trial. The First Question The first question did the woman die poisoned had been answered positively. The second question, who poisoned her, had been answered, apparently. There now remained the third and final question. What was his motive? The first evidence called in answer to that inquiry was the evidence of relatives and friends of the dead wife. Lady Bridehaven, widow of reread Merrill Sir George Bridehaven, examined by Mr. Drew, counsel for the Crown with her Lord Advocate, gave evidence as follows. The deceased lady, Mrs. Eustace MacEllen, was my niece. She was the only child of my sister and she lived under my roof after the time of her mother's death. I objected to her marriage on grounds which were considered purely fanciful and sentimental by her other friends. It is extremely painful to me to state the circumstances in public, but I am ready to make the sacrifice if the ends of justice require it. The prisoner at the bar, at the time of which I am now speaking, was staying as a guest in my house. He met with an accident while he was outriding, which caused a serious injury to one of his legs. The leg had been previously hurt while he was serving with the army in India. This circumstance tended greatly to aggravate the injury received in the accident. He was confined to a recumbent position on a sofa for many weeks together and the ladies in the house took it in turns to sit with him, and while away the weary time by reading to him and talking to him. My niece was foremost among those volunteer nurses. She played admirably on the piano, and the sick man happened most unfortunately as the event proved to be fond of music. The consequences of the perfectly innocent intercourse thus begun were deplorable consequences for my niece. She became passionately attached to Mr. Ustaz MacAllen without awakening any corresponding affection on his side. I did my best to interfere delicately and usefully, while it was still possible to interfere with advantage. Unhappily my niece refused to place any confidence in me. She persistently denied that she was actuated by any warmer feeling to ward Mr. MacAllen than a feeling of friendly interest. This made it impossible for me to separate them without openly acknowledging my reason for doing so and thus producing a scandal which might have affected my niece's reputation. My husband was alive at that time, and the one thing I could do under the circumstances was the thing I did. I requested him to speak privately to Mr. MacAllen and to appeal to his honor to help us out of the difficulty without prejudice to my niece. Mr. MacAllen behaved admirably. He was still helpless, but he made an excuse for leaving us, which it was impossible to dispute. In two days after my husband had spoken to him, he was removed from the house. The remedy was well intended, but it came too late, and it utterly failed. The mischief was done. My niece pined away visibly. Neither medical help nor change of ear and scene did anything for her. In course of time after Mr. MacAllen had recovered from the effects of his accident, I found that she was carrying on a clandestine correspondence with him by means of her maid. His letters, I am bound to say, were most considerably and carefully written. Nevertheless I felt at my duty to stop the correspondence. My interference, what else could I do but interfere, brought matters to a crisis. One day my niece was missing at breakfast time. The next day we discovered that the poor infatuated creature had gone to Mr. MacAllen's chambers in London, and had been found hidden in his bedroom by some bachelor friend who came to visit him. For this disaster, Mr. MacAllen was in no respect to blame. Hearing footsteps outside, he had only time to take measures for saving her character by concealing her in the nearest room, and the nearest room happened to be his bed-champer. The matter was talked about, of course, and motives were misinterpreted in the vilest manner. My husband had another private conversation with Mr. MacAllen. He again behaved admirably. He publicly declared that my niece had visited him as his betrothed wife. In a fortnight from that time he silenced scandal in the one way that was possible, he married her. I was alone in opposing the marriage. I thought it at the time what it has proved to be since. A fatal mistake. It would have been said enough if Mr. MacAllen had only married her without a particle of love on his side. But to make the prospect more hopeless still, he was at that very time the victim of a misplaced attachment to a lady who was engaged to another man. I am well aware that he compassionately denied this, just as he compassionately affected to be in love with my niece when he married her. But his hopeless admiration of the lady whom I have mentioned was a matter of fact notorious among his friends. It may not be amiss to add that her marriage preceded his marriage. He had irretrievably lost the woman he really loved. He was without a hope or an aspiration in life when he took pity on my niece. In conclusion I can only repeat that no evil which could have happened if she had remained a single woman would have been comparable in my opinion to the evil of such a marriage as this. Never, I sincerely believe, were two more ill assaulted persons united in the bonds of matrimony than the prisoner at the bar and his deceased wife. The evidence of this witness produced a strong sensation among the audience, and had a marked effect on the minds of the jury. Cross-examination forced Lady Bright Haven to modify some of her opinions, and to acknowledge that the hopeless attachment of the prisoner to another woman was a matter of rumour only. But the facts and the narrative remained unshaken, and for that one reason they invested the crime charged against the prisoner with an appearance of possibility, which it had entirely failed to assume during the earlier part of the trial. Two other ladies, intimate friends of Mrs. Eustace MacAllen, were called next. They differed from Lady Bright Haven in their opinions on the propriety of the marriage, but on all the material points they supported her testimony, and confirmed the series' impression which the first witness had produced on every person in court. The next evidence which the prosecution proposed to put in was the silent evidence of the letters and the diary found at Glen Inge. In answer to a question from the bench, the Lord Advocate stated that the letters were written by friends of the prisoner and his deceased wife, and that passages in them bore directly on the terms on which the two associated in their married life. The diary was still more valuable as evidence. It contained the prisoner's daily records of domestic events and of the thoughts and feelings which they aroused in him at the time. The most painful scene followed this explanation. Frighting as I do, long after the events took place, I still cannot prevail upon myself to describe in detail what my unhappy husband said and did at this distressing period of the trial. Deeply affected while Lady Bright Haven was giving her evidence, he had with difficulty restrained himself from interrupting her. He now lost all control over his feelings. In piercing tones which rang through the court, he protested against the contemplated violation of his own most sacred secrets, and his wife's most sacred secrets. Hang me, innocent as I am, he cried, but spare me that. The effect of this terrible outbreak on the audience is reported to have been indescribable. Some of the women present were in hysterics. The judges interfered from the bench, but with no good result. Quiet was at length restored by the Dean of Faculty, who succeeded in soothing the prisoner and who then addressed the judges, pleading for indulgence to his unhappy client in most touching and eloquent language. The speech, a masterpiece of impromptu oratory, concluded with a temperate yet strongly urged protest against the reading of the papers discovered at Glen Inge. The three judges retired to consider the legal questions admitted to them. The sitting was suspended for more than half an hour. As usual in such cases, the excitement in the court communicated itself to the crowd outside in the street. The general opinion here, led as it was supposed, by one of the clerks or other inferior persons connected with the legal proceedings, was decidedly adverse to the prisoner's chance of escaping a sentence of death. If the letters on the diary are read, said the brutal spokesman of the mob, the letters on the diary will hang him. On the return of the judges into court, it was announced that they had decided by a majority of two to one on permitting the documents and dispute to be produced in evidence. Each of the judges, in turn, gave his reasons for the decision at which he had arrived. This done, the trial proceeded. The reading of the extracts from the letters and the extracts from the diary began. The first letters produced were the letters found in the Indian cabinet in Mrs. Eustace Macallan's room. They were addressed to the deceased lady by intimate female friends of her, with whom she was accustomed to correspond. Three separate extracts from letters written by three different correspondents were selected to be read in court. First Correspondent I despair, my dearest Sarah, of being able to tell you how your last letter has distressed me. Pray forgive me if I own to thinking that your very sensitive nature exaggerates or misinterprets quite unconsciously, of course, the neglect that you experience at the hands of your husband. I cannot say anything about his peculiarities of character, because I am not well enough acquainted with him to know what they are, but my dear, I am much older than you, and I have had a much longer experience than yours of what somebody calls the lights and shadows of married life. Speaking from that experience, I must tell you what I have observed. Young married women, like you, who are devotely attached to their husbands, are apt to make one very serious mistake. As a rule, they all expect too much from their husbands. Men, my poor Sarah, are not like us. Their love, even when it is quite sincere, is not like our love. It does not last as it does with us. It is not the one hope and one thought of their lives as it is with us. We have no alternative, even when we most truly respect and love them, but to make allowances for this difference between the man's nature and the woman's. I do not for one moment excuse your husband's coldness. He is wrong, for example, in never looking at you when he speaks to you, and in never noticing the efforts that you make to please him. He is worse than wrong. He is really cruel, if you like, in never returning your kiss when you kiss him. But, my dear, are you quite sure that he is always designately cold and cruel? May not his conduct be sometimes the result of troubles and anxieties which weigh on his mind, and which are troubles and anxieties that you cannot share? If you try to look at his behaviour in this slide, you will understand many things which puzzle in pain you now. Be patient with him, my child. Make no complaints, and never approach him with your caresses at times, when his mind is preoccupied with his temper ruffled. This may be hard advice to follow, loving him as ardently as you do. But rely on it. The secret of happiness for us women is to be found, alas, only too often, in such exercise of restraint and resignation as your old friend now recommends. Think, my dear, over what I have written, and let me hear from you again. Second Correspondent How can you be so foolish, Sarah, as to waste your love on such a cold-blooded brute as your husband seems to be? To be sure I am not married yet, or perhaps I should not be so surprised at you. But I shall be married one of these days, and if my husband ever treats me as Mr. McAllen treats you, I shall insist on a separation. I declare, I think I would rather be actually beaten, like the women among the lower orders, than be treated with the polite neglect and contempt which you describe. I burn with indignation when I think of it. It must be quite insufferable. Don't bear it any longer, my poor dear. Leave him, and come and stay with me. My brother is a lawyer, as you know. I read to him portions of your letter, and he is of opinion that you might get what he calls a judicial separation. Come and consult him. Third Correspondent You know, my dear Mrs. McAllen, what my experience of men has been. Your letter does not surprise me in the least. Your husband's conduct to you points to one conclusion. He is in love with some other woman. There is somebody in the dark who gets from him everything that he denies to you. I have been through it all, and I know. Don't give way. Make it the business of your life to find out who the creature is. Perhaps there may be more than one of them. It doesn't matter. One or many, if you can only discover them, you may make his existence as miserable to him as he makes your existence to you. If you want my experience to help you, say the word, and it is freely at your service. I can come and stay with you at Glen Inge any time after the fourth of next month. With those abominable lines, the readings from the letters of the women came to an end. The first and longest of the extracts produced the most vivid impression in court. Evidently the writer was in this case a worthy and sensible person. It was generally felt, however, that all three of the letters, no matter how widely they might differ in tone, justified the same conclusion. The wife's position at Glen Inge, if the wife's account of it were to be trusted, was the position of a neglected and unhappy woman. The correspondence of the prisoner, which had been found, with his diary, and the locked bed-table drawer, was produced next. The letters in this case were with one exception all written by men. Though the tone of them was moderation itself, as compared with the second and third of the women's letters, the conclusion still pointed the same way. The life of the husband at Glen Inge appeared to be just as intolerable as the life of the wife. For example, one of the prisoner's male friends wrote inviting him to make a yacht voyage around the world. Another suggested an absence of six months on the continent. A third recommended field sports and fishing. The one object aimed at by all the writers was plainly to counsel a separation, more or less plausible and more or less complete, between the married pair. The last letter read was addressed to the prisoner in a woman's handwriting, and was signed by a woman's Christian name, only. Ah! my poor you-stars! what a cruel destiny as ours! the letter began. When I think of your life, sacrifice to that vretched woman my heart bleeds for you. If we had been men and wife, if it had been my unadreplhappiness to love and cherish the best, the dearest of men, what a paradise of our own we might have lived in, what delicious hours we might have known, but regret is vain, we're separated in this life, separated by ties which we both mourn, and yet which we must both respect. My you-stars, there is a world beyond this. There our souls will fly to meet each other, and mingle in one long, heavenly embrace, in a rapture forbidden to us on earth. The misery described in your letter, Oh! why, why did you marry her? has wrung this confession of feeling from me. Let it comfort you, but let no other eyes see it. Burn my rashly written lines, and look as I look to the better life, which you may yet share with your own Helena. The reading of this outrageous letter provoked a question from the bench. One of the judges asked if the writer had attached any date or address to the letter. In answer to this the Lord Advocate stated that neither the one nor the other appeared. The envelope showed that the letter had been posted in London. We propose, the learned counsel continued, to read certain passages from the prisoner's diary in which the name signed at the end of the letter occurs more than once, and we may possibly find other means of identifying the writer to the satisfaction of your lordship before the trial is over. The promised passages from her husband's private diary were now read. The first extract related to a period of nearly a year before the date of Mrs. Eustace MacAllan's death. It was expressed in these terms. News by this morning's post, which has quite overwhelmed me. Helena's husband died suddenly two days since of heart disease. She is free. My beloved Helena is free. And I? I am fettered to a woman with whom I have not a single feeling in common. Helena is lost to me by my own act. Ah! I can understand now, as I never understood before, how irresistible temptation can be, and how easily sometimes crime may follow it. I had better shut up these leaves for the night. It maddens me to no purpose to think of my position or to write of it. The next passage, dated a few days later, dwelt on the same subject. Of all the follies that a man can commit, the greatest is acting on impulse. I acted on impulse when I married the unfortunate creature who is now my wife. Helena was then lost to me, as I too hastily supposed. She had married the man to whom she irrationally engaged herself before she met with me. She was younger than I, and to all appearance, heartier and stronger than I. So far as I could see, my fate was sealed for life. Helena had written a farewell letter, taking leave of me in this world for good. My prospects were closed, my hopes had ended. I had not an aspiration left. I had no necessity to stimulate me to take refuge in work. A tribal resection, an exertion of noble self-denial, seemed to be all that was left to me, and that I was fit for. The circumstances of the moment adapted themselves with a fatal facility to this idea. The ill-fated woman who had become attached to me, heaven knows, without so much as the shadow of encouragement on my part, had just at that time rashly placed her reputation at the mercy of the world. It rested with me to silence the scandalous tongues that reviled her. With Helena lost to me happiness was not to be expected. All women were equally indifferent to me. A generous action would be the salvation of this woman. Why not perform it? I married her on that impulse. Married her just as I might have jumped into the water and saved her if he had been drowning, just as I might have knocked a man down if I had seen him ill-treating her in the street. And now the woman for whom I have made the sacrifice stands between me and my Helena. My Helena, free to pour out all the treasures of her love on the man who doors the earth that she touches with her foot. Fool, madman, why don't I dash out my brains against the wall that I see opposite to me while I've right these lines? My gun is there in the corner. I have only to tie a string to the trigger and to put the muzzle to my mouth. No, my mother is alive. My mother's love is sacred. I have no right to take the life which she gave me. I must suffer and submit. Oh, Helena, Helena! The third extract, one among many similar passages, had been written about two months before the death of the prisoner's wife. More reproaches addressed to me. There never was such a woman for complaining. She lives in a perfect atmosphere of ill temper and discontent. My new offences are to a number. I never ask her to play to me now, and when she puts on a new dress expressly to please me, I never notice it. Notice it! Good heavens! The effort of my life is not to notice her in anything she does or says. How could I keep my temper unless I kept as much as possible out of the way of private interviews with her? And I do keep my temper. I am never hard on her. I never use her language to her. She has a double claim on my forbearance. She is a woman, and the law has made her my wife. I remember this, but I am human. The less I see of her except when visitors are present, the more certain I can feel of preserving my self-control. I wonder what it is that makes her so utterly distasteful to me. She is a plain woman, but I have seen uglier women than she whose caresses I could have endured without the sense of shrinking that comes over me when I am obliged to submit to her caresses. I keep the feeling hidden from her. She loves me poor thing, and I pity her. I wish I could do more. I wish I could return in the smallest degree the feeling with which she regards me. But no, I can only pity her. If she would be content to live on friendly terms with me and never to exact demonstrations of tenderness, we might get on pretty well. But she wants love. Unfortunate creature, she wants love. Oh, my Helena, I have no love to give her. My heart is yours. I dreamed last night that this unhappy wife of mine was dead. The dream was so vivid that I actually got out of my bed and opened the door of her room and listened. Her calm, regular breathing was distinctly audible in the stillness of the night. She was in a deep sleep. I closed the door again and lighted my candle and read. Helena was in all my thoughts. It was hard work to fix my attention on the book, but anything was better than going to bed again and dreaming perhaps for the second time that I too was free. What a life-minus! What a life my wife's is! If the house were to take fire, I wonder whether I should make an effort to save myself or to save her. The last two passages, read, referred to later dates still. A gleam of brightness has shown over the stismal existence of mine at last. Helena has no longer condemned to the seclusion of widowhood, time enough has passed to permit of her mixing again in society. She is paying visits to friends and our part of Scotland, and as she and I are cousins it is universally understood that she cannot leave the North without also spending a few days at my house. She writes me weird that the visit, however embarrassing it may be to us privately, is nevertheless a visit that must be made for the sake of appearances. I shall see this angel in my purgatory, and all because society in Midlothian would think it's strange that my cousin should be visiting in my part of Scotland and not visit me. But we are to be very careful, Helena says in so many words, I come to see you, you stars, as a sister. You must receive me as a brother, or not receive me at all. I shall write to your wife to propose the day for my visit. I shall not forget—do you not forget—that it is by your wife's permission that I enter your house. Only let me see her. I will submit to anything to obtain the unutterable happiness of seeing her. The last extract followed, and consisted of these lines only. A new misfortune. My wife has fallen ill. She has taken to her bed with a bed-rumatic cold, just at the time appointed for Helena's visit to Gleninch, but on this occasion I gladly own it she has behaved charmingly. She has written to Helena to say that her illness is not serious enough to render a change necessary in the arrangements, and make it her particular request that my cousin's visit shall take place upon the day originally decided on. This is a great sacrifice made to me on my wife's part. Jealous of every woman under forty who comes near me, she is, of course, jealous of Helena, and she controls herself and trusts me. I am bound to show my gratitude for this, and I will show it. From this day forth I vow to live more affectionately with my wife. I tenderly embraced her this very morning, and I hope, poor soul, she did not discover the effort that it cost me. There the readings from the diary came to an end. The most unpleasant page and the whole report of the trial were, to me, the pages which contained the extract from my husband's diary. There were expressions here and there which not only pained me, but which always took Eustace's position in my estimation. I think I would have given everything I possessed to have had the power of annihilating certain lines in the diary. As for his passionate expressions of love for Mrs. Bowley, every one of them went through me like a sting. He had whispered words quite as warm into my ears in the days of his courtship. I had no reason to doubt that he truly and dearly loved me. But the question was, had he just as truly and dearly loved Mrs. Bowley before me? Had she or I won the first love of his heart? He had declared to me over and over again that he had only fancied himself to be in love before the day when we met. I had believed him then. I determined to believe him still. I did believe him. But I hated Mrs. Bowley. As for the painful impression produced in court by the readings from the letters and the diary, it seemed to be impossible to increase it. Nevertheless, it was perceptibly increased. In other words, it was rendered more unfavorable still toward the prisoner by the evidence of the next and last witness called on the part of the prosecution. William Enzi, under gardener Red Glen Inge, was sworn and deposed as follows. On the twentieth of October at eleven o'clock in the morning, I was sent to work in the shrubbery on the side next to the garden called the Dutch Garden. There was a summer house in the Dutch Garden having its back set toward the shrubbery. The day was wonderfully fine and warm for the time of year. Passing to my work I passed the back of the summer house. I heard voices inside, a man's voice and a lady's voice. The lady's voice was strange to me. The man's voice I recognized as the voice of my master. The ground in the shrubbery was soft and my curiosity was excited. I stepped up to the back of the summer house without being heard and I listened to what was going on inside. The first words I could distinguish were spoken in my master's voice. He said, if I could only have foreseen that you might one day be free, what a happy man I might have been. The lady's voice answered, Hush, you must not talk so. My master said upon that, I must talk of what's in my mind. It is always in my mind that I have lost you. He stopped a bit there, and then he said on a sudden, Do me one favour, my angel. Promise me not to marry again. The lady's voice spoke out there upon sharply enough. What do you mean? My master said, I wish no harm to the unhappy creature who was a burden on my life, but suppose— Suppose nothing, the lady said. Come back to the house. She led the way into the garden and turned round, beckoning my master to join her. In that position I saw her face plainly, and I knew it for the face of the young widow lady who was visiting at the house. She was pointed out to me by the head gardener when she first arrived for the purpose of warning me that I was not to interfere if I found her picking the flowers. The gardens at Glen Inge were shown to tourists on certain days, and we made a difference, of course, in the matter of the flowers between strangers and guests staying in the house. I'm quite certain of the identity of the lady who was talking with my master. Mrs. Bollay was a comely person, and there was no mistaking her for any other than herself. She and my master withdrew together on the way to the house. I heard nothing more of what passed between them. The witness was severely cross-examined as to the correctness of his recollection of the talk in the summer-house, and as to his capacity for identifying both the speakers. On certain minor points he was shaken, but he firmly asserted his accurate remembrance of the last words exchanged between his master and Mrs. Bollay, and he personally described the lady in terms which proved that he had correctly identified her. With this the answer to the third question raised by the trial, the question of the prisoner's motive for poisoning his wife, came to an end. The story for the prosecution was now a story told. The staunchest friends of the prisoner in court were compelled to acknowledge that the evidence thus far pointed clearly and conclusively against him. He seemed to feel this himself. When he withdrew at the close of the third day of the trial he was so depressed and exhausted that he was obliged to lean on the arm of the governor of the jail. CHAPTER XIX The feeling of interest excited by the trial was prodigiously increased on the fourth day. The witnesses for the defense were now to be heard, and first and foremost among them appeared the prisoner's mother. She looked at her son, and she lifted her veil to take the oath. He burst into tears. At that moment the sympathy felt for the mother was generally extended to the unhappy son. Examined by the dean of faculty, Mrs. MacAllen the elder gave her answers with remarkable dignity and self-control. Questioned as to certain private conversations which had passed between her late daughter-in-law and herself, she declared that Mrs. Eustace MacAllen was morbidly sensitive on the subject of her personal appearance. She was devotedly attached to her husband. The great anxiety of her life was to make herself as attractive to him as possible. The imperfections in her personal appearance and especially in her complexion were subjects to her of the bitterest regret. The witness had heard her say, over and over again, referring to her complexion, that there was no risk she would not run, and no pain she would not suffer, to improve it. Min, she had said, are all called by outward appearances. My husband might love me better if I had a better colour. Being asked next if the passages from her son's diary were to be depended on as evidence, that is to say if they fairly represented the peculiarities in his character and his true sentiments towards his wife, Mrs. MacAllen denied it in the plainest and strongest terms. The extracts from my son's diary are reliable on his character, she said, and not the less reliable because they happen to be written by himself. Speaking from a mother's experience of him, I know that he must have written the passages produced in moments of uncontrollable depression and despair. No just person judges hastily of a man by the rash words which may escape him in his moody and miserable moments. Is my son to be judged because he happens to have written his rash words instead of speaking them? His pan has been his most deadly enemy in this case. It has presented him at his very worse. He was not happy in his marriage, I admit that. But I say at the same time that he was invariably considerate toward his wife. I was implicitly trusted by both of them. I saw them in their most private moments. I declare in the face of what he appears to have written to her friends and correspondence that my son never gave his wife any just cause to assert that he treated her with cruelty or neglect. The words firmly and clearly spoken produced a strong impression. The Lord Advocate, evidently perceiving that any attempt to weaken that impression would not be likely to succeed, confined himself in cross-examination to two significant questions. In speaking to you of the defects in her complexion, he said, Did your daughter-in-law refer in any way to the use of arsenic as a remedy? The answer to this was no. The Lord Advocate proceeded, Did you yourself ever recommend arsenic, or mentrinate casually, in the course of the private conversations which you have described? The answer to this was never. The Lord Advocate resumed his seat. Mrs. McEllen the elder withdrew. An interest of a new kind was excited by the appearance of the next witness. This was no lesser person than Mrs. Bowley herself. The report describes her as a remarkably attractive person, modest and ladylike in her manner, and to all appearance feeling sensitively the public position in which she was placed. The first portion of her evidence was almost a recapitulation of the evidence given by the prisoner's mother, with this difference that Mrs. Bowley had been actually questioned by the deceased lady on the subject of cosmetic applications to the complexion. Mrs. Eustace McEllen had complimented her on the beauty of her complexion, and had asked what artificial means she used to keep it in such good order. Using no artificial means and knowing nothing whatever of cosmetics, Mrs. Bowley had resented the question, and a temporary coolness between the two ladies had been the result. Interrogated as to her relations with the prisoner, Mrs. Bowley indignantly denied that she or Mr. McEllen had ever given the deceased lady the slightest cause for jealousy. It was impossible for Mrs. Bowley to leave Scotland after visiting at the houses of her cousin's neighbors, without also visiting at her cousin's house. To take any other cause would have been an act of downright rudeness and would have excited remark. She did not deny that Mr. McEllen had admired her in the days when they were both single people. But there was no further expression of that feeling when she had married another man, and when he had married another woman. From that time the intercourse was the innocent intercourse of a brother and sister. Mr. McEllen was a gentleman. He knew what was due to his wife and to Mrs. Bowley. She would not have entered the house if experience had not satisfied her of that. As for the evidence of the undergardener, it was little better than pure invention. The greater part of the conversation which he had described himself as overhearing had never taken place. The little that was really said, as the man reported it, was said jestingly, and she had checked it immediately, as the witness had himself confessed. For the rest Mr. McEllen's behaviour toward his wife was invariably kind and considerate. He was constantly devising means to alleviate her sufferings from the rheumatic affection which confined her to her bed. He had spoken of her not once, but many times in terms of the sincerest sympathy. When she ordered her husband and witness to leave the room on the day of her death, Mr. McEllen said to witness afterwards, we must bear with her jealousy, poor soul, we know that we don't deserve it. In that patient manner he submitted to her infirmities of temper from first to last. The main interest in the cross-examination of Mrs. Bowley centered in a question which was put at the end. After reminding her that she had given her name on being sworn as Helena Bowley, the Lord Advocate said, A letter addressed to the prisoner and signed Helena has been read in court. Look at it, if you please. Are you the writer of that letter? Before the witness could reply the dean of faculty protested against the question. The judges allowed the protest and refused to permit the question to be put. Mrs. Bowley, thereupon, withdrew. She had betrayed a very perceptible agitation on hearing the letter referred to and on having it placed in her hands. This exhibition of feeling was variously interpreted among the audience. Upon the whole, however, Mrs. Bowley's evidence was considered to have aided the impression which the mother's evidence had produced in the prisoner's favour. The next witnesses, both ladies, and both school-friends of Mrs. Eustace MacAllen, created a new feeling of interest in court. They supplied the missing link in the evidence for the defence. The first of the ladies declared that she had mentioned arsenic as a means of improving the complexion in conversation with Mrs. Eustace MacAllen. She had never used it herself, but she had read of the practice of eating arsenic among the Styrian peasantry for the purpose of clearing the colour, and of producing a general appearance of plumpness and good health. She positively swore that she had related this result of her reading to the deceased lady exactly as she now related it in court. The second witness, present at the conversation already mentioned, corroborated the first witness in every particular, and added that she had procured the book relating to the arsenic-eating practices of the Styrian peasantry and their results at Mrs. Eustace MacAllen's own request. The book she had herself dispatched by post to Mrs. Eustace MacAllen at Gleninch. There was but one assailable point in this otherwise conclusive evidence. The cross-examination discovered it. Both the ladies were asked, in turn, if Mrs. Eustace MacAllen had expressed to them directly or indirectly any intention of obtaining arsenic with a view to the improvement of her complexion. In each case the answer to that all-important question was no. Mrs. Eustace MacAllen had heard of the remedy and had received the book, but of her own intentions in the future she had not said one word. She had begged both the ladies to consider the conversation as strictly private, and there it had ended. It required no lawous eye to discern the fatal effect which was now revealed in the evidence for the defence. Every intelligent person present could see that the prisoner's chance of an honourable acquittal depended on tracing the poison to the possession of his wife, or at least on proving her expressed intention to obtain it. In either of these cases the prisoner's declaration of his innocence would claim the support of testimony, which, however indirect it might be, no honest and intelligent men would be likely to resist. Was that testimony forthcoming? Was the council for the defence not at the end of his resources yet? The crowded audience waited in breathless expectation for the appearance of the next witness. A whisper went round among certain well-instructed persons that the court was now to see and hear the prisoner's old friend, already often referred to in the course of the trial as Mr. Dexter. After a brief interval of delay there was a sudden commotion among the audience, accompanied by suppressed exclamations of curiosity and surprise. At the same moment the crier summoned the new witness by the extraordinary name of Miserimus Dexter. End of Chapter 19