The Passing of Mr Quinn

by G. Roy McRae

  Then followed another witness, Vera, the house parlourmaid. Her vulgar nature delighted in the white glare of publicity. She was breathing in the rarefied atmosphere of fame, or notoriety. She gave her evidence with gusto, indeed, with something of the verve and effect of a dramatic actress.

  ‘… And I came rushing into the study to find the professor in his death throes in the chair,’ she told a hushed court. ‘She was there, pale as a sheet’—referring to Eleanor—‘holding on to the curtain, she was, and watching him like a cat.

  ‘He looked all round as the others came in, and there was froth on his lips. Ghastly he looked, and his throat was rattling. He was trying to speak. At last he got it out. “Someone’s poisoned me,” he said, and he pointed—at her!’

  At this point the coroner sternly admonished the witness, asking her to give her evidence with a little more decorum and fewer gestures. His rebuke served to heighten the almost hysterical atmosphere in the court.

  ‘And then what happened?’ the coroner asked sharply. ‘Tell us in as few words as possible.’

  ‘He asked for a drink—Mr Capel, that is. He said he wanted to pull himself together. That seemed to wake the mistress up as if out of a dream. She took up the port decanter, and then with a little scream she let it drop, and it broke into a thousand pieces on the floor.’

  ‘Hardly a thousand pieces,’ the coroner said dryly. ‘You exaggerate.’

  A solicitor on the side of what was virtually the prosecution jumped up. ‘I have a witness who will put it in as evidence that the decanter was found smashed in several large parts,’ he said. ‘It was of English cut glass, and the stem, or neck, bore a finger-print which is identical with one of those taken of Mrs Appleby’s.’

  Again there was a hubbub in the court. When a stern reprimand from the coroner had at length quelled the excited disturbance, Eleanor Appleby’s name was called as a witness.

  She appeared quite dazed as she rose to her feet, and a warder helped her into the witness-box. Alec Portal’s heart bled for her as he watched the slight, girlish form in black walking with faltering steps across the intervening space. And a murmur of sympathy and admiration rose from the crowded court as they saw the delicate, exquisite face of this child-woman who was suspected of murdering her husband by administering poison.

  Her mass of lovely hair was almost hidden by the widow’s veil she wore, but fair tendrils of it curled about her temples; her creamy-white skin appeared like marble by reason of the shock she was sustaining, and which was palpable in her large brown eyes that appeared too big for her little oval face.

  The coroner looked at her and sighed. Could guilt really be masked by this fair semblance of youth and innocence.

  He leant towards her. ‘Just answer the questions put to you,’ he said gently. ‘You are distraught. Remember that the law takes no heed of this, however, and do not in confusion run any risk of contradicting your own statements.’

  She tried to stay the fluttering of her white hands on the rail. She drew herself up proudly, and her sweet eyes met his frankly and candidly. As she spoke her voice thrilled through the court, clear and pure.

  ‘Thank you. I appreciate the motive of your warning, but I have nothing to conceal.’

  Involuntarily his manhood did homage to her grace and dignity, and he bowed his head gravely.

  It was poor Eleanor’s last desperate stand, however. When the questions came with machine-gun rapidity she became terribly confused, the colour flamed and went in her cheeks, and her voice, when she answered, was low and indistinct.

  It became painful to wait for her answers.

  ‘You were asleep?… Yes?—oh, no, you say. You were aroused by the breaking of the vase. Were you the first to arrive in the study? Your bedroom was situated exactly overhead the study. Did you hear any sounds of a struggle?’

  And so on, ad infinitum. The witness constantly contradicted herself. Her lips moved, and would utter no words. The jury listened and watched her compassionately, but they were to do their duty, and they had already decided that they could return but one verdict.

  ‘Your husband was cruel to you, was he not?… What form did his cruelty take?… Oh, you cannot say. Did he threaten you with cruelty on this particular night? Yes? What did he threaten? Please try to speak up.’

  She shook her head helplessly.

  Derek Capel watched it all, his handsome, rather dark face working convulsively. Several times he almost started up with hands clenching and unclenching, but something chained him to his seat. Horror—fear—all the emotions of which mankind is capable, fleeted across his face. Tears of anguish appeared in his eyes, and he was like a soul in torment. He loved this woman—loved her madly. And before his eyes she was going through Hell.

  Doctor Alec Portal was almost in the same condition of mind, except that he had more faith, more self-control. He believed in her. He believed her innocent as an angel above. Nothing could shake him, and he told himself that if there was a law to punish the wicked and uphold the just—if the law were not a wicked and outrageous mockery—then in a very short time this painful inquisition would be over, and she would be free.

  Alec Portal sat with white teeth clenched in his tanned face, his blue eyes gleaming straight into her dear face. It was as though he were trying to give her some of his own superb self-control, the steel nerves that had stood him in such good stead in the operating theatre.

  ‘Speak up, little thing—oh, my dear, look up and tell him it is a lie.’

  For the coroner was speaking, and from his lips with terrific intentness came the words: ‘Now, please tell us, did you or did you not take up the wine decanter? And did it drop from your hands, or did it crash to the floor from the table as you brushed past it?’

  Eleanor looked up piteously, the tears streaming from her eyes.

  ‘I—I, oh, don’t ask me!’ she cried, her voice ringing once more clear and sweet as a bell throughout the court. ‘Heaven help me, whatever I did that night, I swear I meant him no harm. I don’t remember, I—I didn’t mean to do it. Oh, please have mercy!’

  She stopped. She could not go on, though it was evident that she was trying to say something more. In the eyes of more than one of the jurors the tears of emotion glistened.

  Alec Portal was standing up. He was not conscious of what he was doing, but across the empty space that divided him from Eleanor, he sent her all that he had in him—his will-power pent up, and screwed down to terrific compressions—bidding her take a hold on herself, that just for this moment her dear life itself was at stake.

  Her lips parted—moving; she was trying to speak as she swayed in the dock.

  ‘I—I— Yes, it is true,’ she said, very quietly and simply, with her eyes closed like one in a mesmeric trance, ‘I dropped the decanter!’

  There was a shout in the court, a mad, husky shout: ‘Eleanor!’—It came from Derek Capel, wild-eyed, haggard.

  But Eleanor did not look at him. She swayed where she stood, like a slender reed in the wind, and then quietly and with only a sighing breath, she slid to the floor of the witness-box.

  Whilst they were carrying her away the coroner ordered those parts of the court admitting the general public to be cleared.

  The hearing of the case lasted only a little time longer. The evidence of Inspector Brent was taken, and that of other police experts. The police said very little. It was evident they were satisfied so far with their case, and at length the jury retired.

  They were absent half an hour, during which early editions of the London evening newspapers came damp from the press, and were sold like hot cakes. A vast throng was being moved on by the police outside the coroner’s court. The interest of the general public in what had now become known as ‘The Poisoned Professor Case’ had reached fever heat.

  In the court, Doctor Alec Portal sat with his head in his hands, waiting, hoping against hope. His faith in Eleanor was not shaken. He realised that she had given damning evidence against he
rself, but he knew—none better than he!—that she was not responsible for what she was saying.

  All around him he heard people discussing the case in low, whispered tones. He saw an eminent K.C. shake his head sorrowfully: ‘Poor woman! She must have had a hell of a time with that man! Oh, you can’t get away from it—she put the poison in the decanter. They’ll find traces of it in the body yet!’

  ‘A damned shame!’ said someone else. ‘She’ll get off with manslaughter, though. A dashed pretty woman, too, by gad!’

  The young doctor felt that he could bear it no longer. Manslaughter! Eleanor—manslaughter! That meant imprisonment for life. But she was innocent—innocent, pure and good! He could have staked his life on it.

  The ringing of a bell! That meant that the jury were returning. The court was miraculously crowded again, and amidst a deathly silence the coroner entered by the side door, and took his place in the high oaken seat.

  The jurymen filed in gravely. They looked very white and shaken, and the foreman upset a glass of water as he rose to the question: ‘Gentlemen of the jury, have you considered your verdict?’

  ‘Are you agreed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We find,’ said the foreman of the jury in a voice that was not quite steady, ‘that Professor Appleby died from poison administered by his wife, Eleanor Appleby.’

  Doctor Alec Portal heard it, and got up and walked from the court. He could not look at the woman he loved. He knew that she was in the court, pale as alabaster, but trembling no longer. He had seen her, looking like one who is in a beautiful trance, and as he walked headlong down the street he cursed the dead, cursed the fiend whose hatred and cruelty had pursued her beyond the grave.

  ‘He was insane,’ Doctor Alec Portal whispered to himself. ‘He killed himself, cunningly—cleverly, so that she might suffer. Oh, I know it! That is the solution of the mystery.’

  And in the court a police officer was gently detaining Eleanor whilst it was being cleared of the general public. At length Chief Inspector Brent descended to where she sat, and his grizzled face was compassionate. He had been chiefly instrumental in pursuing her and trapping her in the mesh of the law, but he had come almost to hate the duty he had set himself to perform.

  ‘Madam,’ he said quietly and gravely, looking down at some papers he held in his hand. ‘You know me. I am Chief Inspector Brent of Scotland Yard, and I have a warrant—’

  ‘I know—I know,’ she gulped, looking up. ‘I quite understand. Please do not go on. Oh, God!’ she cried in her agony, ‘help me to bear up under this awful outrage perpetrated under the name of law!’

  But the law is not to be denied. Chief Inspector Brent’s droning voice went on, as he read from his papers:

  ‘WHEREAS at an inquest held at X—, T— county on the twenty-seventh day of October before Jeremiah Johns, Esq., Coroner of said county, on the body of Aldous Luke Appleby, there lying dead, by the jurors whose names are hereto subscribed …

  ‘The said jurors upon their oath do say that Aldous Luke Appleby came to his death on the night of Thursday, October twenty-sixth, by poison taken internally. And from all the evidence brought before them the jury believe that the poison was administered by the hand of his wife, Eleanor Appleby.

  ‘In testimony whereof the said jurors have hereunto set their hands this …’

  Inspector Brent stopped, peering over his papers. For the second time within an hour Eleanor Appleby had swooned.

  CHAPTER V

  THE final battle was raging around Eleanor Appleby. Long ago the Grand Jury had returned a true bill against her, and she had been committed for trial. Four months of dread and agony of suspense had unnerved her, changed her completely, yet only to make her more ethereally beautiful than ever, more childlike in her innocent guilelessness. No longer was she even a woman fighting for her life and honour. She seemed utterly unable to realise the dreadful issues at stake. And as she stood in the dock, facing the judge in his wig and gown, sometimes looking round wonderingly at the sea of faces in the well of the court, or facing the battery of scrutinising eyes turned on her from the jury-box, her air was wistfully eager—childishly pathetic—as one who thinks she has done some wrong, and is sorry for the pain and trouble caused by it to others.

  It was an attitude that, all unwittingly on her part, blunted the terrible weapons that the prosecution had ready to use against her.

  The case had been put down for hearing at the Central Criminal Courts at Old Bailey, and Lord Justice Horlinge, one of the most humane and keenly penetrative of the High Court judges the bar had ever known, was hearing it. It had foregathered before the bench a dazzling array of forensic talent and legal ability. Sir Hugo Rattenbury, the eminent K.C. and criminal lawyer, was leading for the Public Prosecutor, and the brief for the defence had been entrusted to the fashionable David Greatorex, whose meteoric progress across the legal firmament was being guided by his wonderful voice, his merciless, uncanny faculty for cross-examination, and his biting wit that so swiftly brought ridicule upon a hostile witness.

  He was supported by a host of minor legal lights, and into the defence of Eleanor Appleby he had thrown all his characteristic force and energy, allied to a passionate fervour that bespoke his own deep-rooted belief in her innocence.

  The case for the prosecution had been clearly and abundantly stated. Chief Inspector Brent had given his evidence, and he had seemed in very heavy humour about it—entirely unlike the brisk, soldierly police officer whose reputation in the conduct of such cases was so high. He studiously avoided looking at the prisoner more than was absolutely necessary, whilst Eleanor, for her part, watched him at first with half-parted lips, a wistful, eager look on her face, which gradually changed to cold despair.

  During the long wait for her trial Eleanor had been stricken down with brain fever, and at one time she had been walking perilously near to the Valley of the Shadow. During those awful days of fever, when she had lain tossing in her bed in the hospital, Chief Inspector Brent had visited her many times.

  Indeed, it was he who had comforted her—not Doctor Alec Portal—he who had told her at length that he believed in her innocence, and had held her hand and assured her that from the bar of Justice she would go forth a free woman, with honour untarnished. The grizzled old veteran of the Yard had been obviously moved by her innocence and childish beauty; he had listened to her delirious ravings, and from them he could gain nothing that would bolster up his case against her.

  And so he had told her in the end that he was her friend. And because she so pathetically wanted to believe—because it is those who oppress us most we do believe in and respect—his words had brought to Eleanor a blessed joy and relief. They had brought the relief of tears to her—tears that undoubtedly saved the racked and tortured woman’s brain, and caused her to mend both physically and mentally.

  And so she had been brought to this. She had been saved for the public sacrifice, Inspector Brent, with the conscious shame of a Judas, poured out a damning indictment of her in the box, and would not look at her. He was a man of simple, straightforward honesty himself, but cursed with a dogged and obstinate nature. And thinking the whole matter over in his own quiet watches, he had decided that he must be right—that the professor had been poisoned, and that none other but his wife could have administered that poison to him. The law had been outraged, and must be vindicated

  What travail it cost him to give his evidence no man guessed. He felt as if the brand of Cain was on his own forehead as he saw the prisoner, a delicate figure in black, shrink farther back in the dock, and as he finished she kept her face averted, shivering preceptibly.

  But now David Greatorex, chief counsel for the defence, had risen, his dark, resolute, sternly-chiselled face, cold yet handsome as some faultless god, a singular smile curving his lips as he gazed at the witness in the box.

  ‘You say that on the early morning of the tragedy, after the prisoner had again retired to her room, you and other of
ficers made a thorough examination of the study in which Professor Appleby came by his death?’

  Inspector Brent: ‘That is so.’

  ‘And amongst other things you discerned “Exhibit 19”—this little blue-black bottle marked “Poison”. Now there was a full cabinet of various chemicals and various poisons in that study. Why did your attention particularly alight on this blue-black bottle?’

  ‘Because—’ The Inspector hesitated.

  ‘Now, come, come! Answer me. Be careful what you say.’

  ‘Because since I had arrived at the house, and during the time I was making my inquiries, I saw one of those in the room glancing repeatedly across at the medicine cabinet. And since she was fairly near the cabinet, I was satisfied in my own mind that she was looking at this black bottle.’

  The great K.C. smiled—a bleak smile of scorn.

  ‘I notice you use the feminine gender in speaking of this person. But Mrs Appleby, you say, was standing over at the mahogany table that held the wine and spirit decanters. Therefore, according to this plan of the study, she could not have been “fairly near the medicine cabinet”. Who, then, was this person you saw glancing at the black bottle?’

  Inspector Brent bit his lip slightly. ‘It was Vera Cummings, the house parlourmaid, sir,’ he answered challengingly.

  ‘Ah!’

  Counsel arranged some papers before him, whilst a tiny smile of scorn played about the corners of his mouth. ‘This witness,’ he said dryly, ‘appeared to know a great deal of what went on at the Lodge, and particularly of the happenings of that night. I understand she is to be called next into the box, and it is possible that more information may be elicited from her.’

  He sat down then, amidst a stir. It was palpable that he made a point with the jury, who turned the battery of their attention keenly on the next witness as she stepped into the box.

  Vera, the late house parlourmaid at the Lodge, had imitated her mistress, in that she was garbed suitably in mourning. She retained her self-possession admirably, and took the oath in clear tones. She promised to be what the bar describes as ‘a good witness,’ except that there was just a hint of brazen defiance in her attitude—something that was faintly repellent to the court. Quite boldly and openly she looked across at the prisoner in the dock, and smiled. It was an impudent smile of sheer unmitigated malice.