by G. Roy McRae
And the experience through which he was passing had served to transfigure him. He was not the same old Derek Capel with glistening, dark hair, tanned face and the haunting, romantic eyes that went so well with his flashing smile. The change was subtle, yet vast. Lines had appeared in his face; he had become a little haggard, and in the depths of his eyes lurked fear.
Fear was a thing he had never known before. Daily he had hurtled through shrieking, shell-filled skies in a one-seater fighter ’plane during the war; recklessly, with a laugh on his lips. Pain of wounds—horrors—fear of death; nothing had ever made him quail until it came to the sight of a woman’s marble-white, childish face with the great brown eyes bearing that piteous stricken look.
For the past five months the thought that Eleanor’s health, her happiness, her life itself hung in the balance had had its effect, until, now that the crisis was near, he had become completely unnerved.
He entered the public-house, looking round him almost furtively, and gave a great start as he saw that the only other occupant, save the bartender, was a woman, smartly if vulgarly dressed. He could not fail to recognise her at once after staring at her for five hours during her ordeal in the witness-box. It was Vera, the late house parlourmaid at the Lodge.
Derek Capel hesitated a moment, and then walked to the bar and ordered draught champagne. He felt that he needed it, and with a somewhat shaky hand, that indicated this was not the first time his need had been met, he put it to his lips.
Vera was surveying him with dawning recognition in her bold eyes. She put down her glass of stout.
‘Are you giving evidence tomorrow?’ she asked with easy familiarity. She ignored their respective status as servant and employer, and perhaps the situation was unique.
His eyes were hostile as he leant on the bar.
‘Why do you hate Mrs Appleby so?’ he asked in a low, tense voice. ‘She’s done you no harm.’
‘She took my man away,’ the woman muttered sullenly. ‘I wanted ’im—I ’ad need of ’im. She didn’t want Professor Appleby; she hated him. But, well—you heard what they said in court. It was all the truth. And it was up to ’im to support me.’
‘You fool!’ he burst out in low, vibrant tones, seizing her wrist. ‘He was insane. Things were crawling in his brain that night. I believe he would have killed her, or any other woman. You, perhaps. He was brooding mischief.’
A frightened gleam came into Vera’s eyes. She began to sense something of what she had escaped. Professor Appleby had been too formidable for her that fateful night; she shuddered anew at the memory of his staggering anger when she had whispered her confidence to him.
Nevertheless, she snatched her hand away from Derek Capel’s grasp with a show of sullen malice.
‘Since you know so much,’ she said acidly, ‘why don’t you tell the jury all you know? Why don’t you tell ’em exactly what happened on that night?’
He stared at her with haunted eyes. ‘What do you mean?’ he rasped.
She laughed maliciously and leant towards him. ‘Tell ’em all you know,’ she said in a low voice, whilst she eyed him closely. ‘Tell ’em what I saw that night, eh?… what you saw.’ Her voice sank lower. ‘Tell ’em the truth—that you saw Mrs Appleby actually put poison in the port decanter.’
She watched him closely to mark the effects of her words, but the cold horror seemed to have faded from his face as she proceeded, and now he threw back his head with a slightly forced laugh.
‘Always the actress, eh, Vera?’ he said harshly. ‘Always lying. Trying to snare me now, eh? You know that neither you nor I saw any such thing. It might be more near the truth to say that you saw your own hand pouring the poison into the decanter. Good-night.’
And he left her biting her lips and staring ahead of her, her eyes glittering, and wondering what Derek Capel really did know.
CHAPTER VI
ON the following morning a dense crowd invaded the Old Bailey, hoping for an opportunity to hear the proceedings during the resumption of the trial of Eleanor Appleby. It was in vain that the police tried to turn them away, and eventually formed them up into long queues; those who could not get into the court-room seemed content to wait outside for news.
They anticipated a speedy end to the trial. It seemed to be moving with all the certainty of a stage drama towards its conclusion. There was Derek Capel’s evidence yet to come, and that was deemed important from many standpoints.
Calm and collected, if a trifle pale, Derek Capel stepped into the witness-box.
For a moment his eyes met Eleanor’s. She smiled at him like a child, and something flared up in his eyes, the love and passion that shook him at times with galvanic force. But her eyes were cast down now, and the tiny flags of colour had mounted to her cheeks. Derek endeavoured to pull himself together.
He was soon being submitted to fire from heavy guns of interrogation and cross-examination brought up by the prosecution.
‘You say you called at the Lodge at ten to twelve? Are you sure of the time?’
‘… Oh, you are sure. Let us see whether you are sure of all the events that took place that evening. Now, what was your pretext for visiting the Lodge at so late an hour? A book. What was this book you say you lent to the deceased?’
‘It was a valuable old edition on witchcraft, the art of herbalists, and concerning mediæval poisons,’ answered Derek Capel steadily.
Counsel seized on this, and questions were hurled at the witness with machine-gun rapidity.
‘Poisons? Do you know anything of poisons?’ Derek Capel replied that he did not; he explained his possession of the book by telling the court that he collected old and rare editions. Sir Hugo Rattenbury peered at him through his gold-rimmed spectacles.
‘Where is this book? Can you give the court that information?’
‘I don’t know,’ Derek answered in a low voice.
Learned counsel looked scandalised. A rare volume, and he had mislaid it. Derek replied that he had left it with Professor Appleby. Was it there, demanded the cross-examining lawyer, when he returned to find the professor dead?
Derek replied that he could not recollect.
Counsel pounced on him, as a terrier does a rat, and tried to shake him with a bombardment of questions. Derek put up an imperturbable barrage. But the startling fact emerged that detectives had searched the house and had found no trace of the book. It was missing!
Here was another riddle to add to the many that this strange case presented.
Counsel for the prosecution came to the point whether Derek did or did not see Eleanor Appleby drop the port decanter.
‘I did,’ Derek said composedly in answer to the question. He did not look at the figure in the dock, but the nerves twitched visibly in his face.
Sir Hugo Rattenbury affected surprise.
‘At another court you have said that Mrs Appleby did not drop the decanter. Do you now say that you were lying when you made that statement?’
‘Yes, I was lying,’ answered Derek Capel calmly. ‘You see, I did not know which way the cat would jump. I meant to shield Mrs Appleby at whatever cost. But now I know positively that she dropped the decanter by accident. My suspicions were unworthy and base. You see,’ he concluded with obvious triumph, ‘no trace of poison has been discovered in the body.’
And that was the trump card of the defence. The Home Office pathologist was baffled, and he admitted it. Other experts spoke to tracing Mrs Appleby’s finger-prints on the black bottle. But it contained a deadly poison whose effects were well known. Surely if it had been administered, traces would have been discovered in the body.
So the battle raged, until Eleanor Appleby, becoming confused and frightened, could detect but a blur of words, and stood as if in a trance, waiting for the end which seemed so long delayed.
A doctor—Professor Appleby’s own doctor—went into the witness-box and swore that, as far as his knowledge went, the deceased had not been subject to epileptic fits. Then D
octor Alec Portal was called. Fair and stalwart, he stepped into the witness-box, and his blue eyes were suffused with a great tenderness as he looked at the still figure of the woman he loved.
She stirred and raised her head, like a flower on the slender white column of her neck. Their eyes were mutually questioning for a moment, but strangely enough, in that fraction of time, the tale was told between them. The old, old tale of a man’s love for a maid, and of a woman’s discovery of her own trembling helplessness—the love that comes suddenly and renders her weak.
She had been thinking a great deal of Alec Portal during these last four agonising months. Somehow he had persisted in her thoughts. She had grown instinctively to rely on him. When all else failed—when despair and misery, terror and horror held her in their grip during the silent watches of the night, she had often shaken them off by thinking of that fair, grim face with the steel-blue eyes. The face of a faithful friend. One who was a fighter.
And a lover!
It came to her suddenly in a flash from his blue eyes, the message of a man’s fine clean love and adoration. And ere she could control her own emotion, her confusion had betrayed her too. With the blood mantling her face like a flame, she cast her eyes down. But to the wild beating of her heart an inner voice sang an old, old song that once she had sang for him at the piano, and which he had rather liked. Strange that it should come back to her now!
‘Love holds the key to set me free,
And love will find a way.’
Both were unconscious that a man was leaning forward in his seat in the well of the court, tense, held in thrall, the only one indeed, who had discerned the little by-play between them. And it had come to Derek Capel like a physical shock. He stared at them with hands clenching and unclenching, his breath coming hard between his teeth. He had lost again. Of a truth he was fortune’s fool and plaything. Though he loved her dearly, she did not love him—never had loved him. All her love was given to this other man.
Then, indeed, the hopeless, bleak look settled in Derek Capel’s eyes, and he became a lost man. His wealth, good name, the beautiful old home of Capel Manor—what were they without her by his side to share them? He sat back with folded arms, watching them, a prey to the blackest despair. No good trying to face it out. He took the cup of bitterness and drained it to its dregs.
He scarce took any heed as the procedure of the court went on. Sick at heart, he would have got up and lurched out—left it all behind him, but that he knew he would not be permitted to interrupt at such a stage.
For Alec Portal was giving his evidence, and he spoke in a quiet, authoritative tone that impressed judge and jury alike.
‘Will you tell us what you know of the relations existing between deceased and his wife?’ asked counsel for the defence.
‘They were unhappy,’ said the young doctor gravely. ‘Professor Appleby was a man of brilliant but perverted gifts. His discoveries in the cause of science bear witness to his amazing genius. But I must speak of the warped side of his nature, of which the world knows little. He was a man with a twisted heart, a man who delighted in evil, and worked it for its own sake.
‘In certain moods,’ went on Doctor Portal, ‘he came very near the border-line of insanity. I have seen him in such moods, and I knew him to be positively dangerous. His greatest obsession was a hatred of physical beauty in women. And he had married a young and beautiful wife.’
In the pause that ensued, all eyes were turned on the exquisite face of the woman in the dock, with the great brown eyes darkened now by the violet shadows suffering had cast. The terrific strain gave way suddenly, and Eleanor covered her face with her hands, her slim body becoming shaken by sobs.
‘He was cruel to her,’ Doctor Alec Portal went on. ‘Subtly, hideously cruel. He brought her to a state of nervous exhaustion.’ And he proceeded to tell of his professional visit to Professor Appleby’s wife on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, his concern at her obvious condition of nervous excitement and fear, and of his straight-forward warning to the professor that had resulted in him being ordered from the house.
‘Do you think,’ asked counsel, ‘that she might have been goaded to such a condition of mind as to plot and carry out her husband’s death?’
‘Emphatically not,’ answered Doctor Portal in a firm voice that rang through the court. ‘She was in a state of childish and helpless fear. She was like an innocent child in the hands of King Herod. Such people cannot plot and carry out murders.’
This almost ended the doctor’s evidence for the defence. That it carried weight with Justice Horlinge and the jury could not be gainsaid. It had been delivered with a straightforward earnestness and manliness that held the whole court in thrall, though it was recognised that it had been a pleading for the defence, rather than the evidence of facts elicited from cross-examination.
One more question David Greatorex asked.
‘What is your opinion, as a medical man, of the manner in which Professor Appleby met his death?’
‘I have not been allowed to examine the body, though I asked to do so,’ answered the doctor coldly. ‘From my own observations, however, I should not be surprised if the professor died in an epileptic fit.’
Then he retired from the witness-box.
Eleanor was next called, and she told her story in low, sweet tones that thrilled the court. Unnaturally calm and wonderfully beautiful in sublime surrender to her fate, it was not strange that every heart beat faster when upon the ears of the assembly in court fell the clear, sweet, indescribably mournful voice.
She told the miserable, sordid story of her married life, of her constant and growing fear of her husband, and then of the fits of giddiness, the paling and trembling that had urged her to call in the aid of Doctor Portal.
When, however, she came to the events of that fateful night, she fell, as before, to faltering. The assembly in court hung on her words painfully. The hectic flush that stained her cheeks and then left them woefully pale; the frightened eyes that would never look directly at anyone; the marked hesitance to answer questions—all those produced a disturbing impression which it was difficult to shake off. It was as if she had some guilty knowledge of that night which she was endeavouring to conceal.
‘I—I had retired to my bedroom when Mr Capel called late that night,’ she said in low, scarcely audible tones. ‘He was not expected. My husband sent a maid to call me down to help to entertain him … Yes; I was fully dressed at that time.’
‘For what reason did you retire again before your guest had left?’ asked Sir Hugo Rattenbury inexorably.
‘I—my husband ordered me to go,’ she faltered.
‘Ordered you to go!’ repeated counsel sharply. ‘A man does not shame his wife without provocation. There was some reason for this, surely. Come, tell the court.’
‘There—I—he just did things like that,’ she said desperately.
Sir Hugo Rattenbury peered at her through his glasses. ‘I suggest there was a reason,’ he said sternly. ‘It was that your husband had reason to be jealous of your intimacy with Mr Capel.’
‘He had no reason,’ she cried in a sudden, clear, ringing voice. ‘As God is my witness, he had no cause to suspect me of being other than a faithful, if useless wife.’
Sir Hugo looked down at his papers.
‘You retired to your room, and this time undressed and went to bed? You did not go to sleep? No; you lay listening. You say that after quarter of an hour you heard Mr Capel go to the front door, and the professor with him. They stood talking there for perhaps three minutes. During that time you will admit you had an opportunity to slip down into the study?’
‘I—I suppose so,’ she said, looking round her fearfully. ‘But I didn’t,’ she added on a sudden note of anguish. ‘Oh, won’t you believe me—I didn’t do it.’
‘The jury have to sift the evidence before them,’ said eminent counsel grimly. ‘You have told them that earlier in the evening you came down surreptitiously from
your room and witnessed the conversation between the deceased and the late witness, Vera Cummings. I put it to you that, outraged by what you heard then, you stole down again later to the study and placed a certain poison in the port decanter?’
David Greatorex rose at once. ‘I protest, your lordship!’ he cried. ‘If my learned friend wishes to put such a fantastic hypothesis before the court, he should do so in his final speech. It is most irregular. There is not a tittle of evidence to support this absurd theory.’
‘I submit that there is,’ Sir Hugo Rattenbury said stiffly. ‘The maid, Vera Cummings, has said that after Mr Capel had gone she heard the stairs creaking, as if someone were softly creeping up and down.’
‘After this same witness had declared that she slept during this period, and had been proved a liar!’ declared counsel for the defence scornfully.
His lordship, however, looked up, and in his even tones allowed the question to stand. The respite, however, had served somewhat to cover Eleanor’s painful confusion, and counsel for the defence seated himself, hoping that she had nerved herself for the final ordeal.
‘And now,’ said Sir Hugo Rattenbury deliberately, ‘please tell us what you found when, upon being roused by the smashing of the vase, you came down into the study.’
‘I found him sitting huddled in the chair,’ she gasped. ‘He was groaning terribly. I—I didn’t know what to do. And then the others came.’
‘You were standing by the table bearing the decanters, clutching at the heavy plush curtain. You were trembling, scarce able to support yourself. What made you relinquish your grasp of the curtain and take up the port decanter?’
‘I—I—’ she looked wildly round. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Come, come. Mr Capel asked for a drink, did he not?’
‘I—I don’t remember.’
‘And before he could pour it out you snatched the decanter again and allowed it to slip from your grasp. I suggest that you did that wilfully, with the full knowledge that if Mr Capel had drunk from the decanter, he, too, would have been poisoned.’
