by Grant Allen
Yet, nothing daunted by all these chimeras breathing fire in his path, Douglas went next morning, at the earliest possible hour, to see Linda, as she desired, after a somewhat stormy interview with her much-scandalized solicitors.
In the end, however, Linda carried her point. Even in gaol, Linda generally did, in fact. In spite of everybody, it was finally arranged that Douglas Harrison, that briefless unknown, should conduct the defence in the most sensational murder case known in England for years; and that Mitchell Hanbury, Q.C., that obliging counsel, should look on in a friendly way, merely to advise and assist with his superior experience his raw and unheard, but enthusiastic colleague.
‘‘Pon my soul, there’s a chance for her still,’ Mitchell Hanbury said in confidence to the distinguished solicitor after all was settled. ‘The man’s mad, to be sure, but he believes in her thoroughly. If Vernon or I were to make a speech for the defence, you see, we’d urge everything that human ingenuity or legal subtlety could devise in mitigation of proof; we’d be argumentative, demonstrative, suggestive, critical — but, hang it all, my dear Walberswick, dashed if we could ever be enthusiastically convinced of our client’s innocence. Now, that’s just what this young man will be — enthusiastically convinced — and there’s no counting, therefore, upon the electric effect he may possibly exert upon the minds of the jury. Enthusiasm’s contagious — extremely contagious — especially when the subject of it is a pretty woman. This fellow Harrison won’t be content with proving the Duchess may conceivably not have administered the morphia; he’ll go in for demonstrating, through thick and thin, that the woman’s misunderstood, and that, instead of being a murderess, she’s a much-wronged angel. Vernon or I couldn’t walk into the lions’ den like that — we’d be afraid of making ourselves simply ridiculous; but this young man has no fear, and no good sense either; so, of course, he may succeed in carrying away the good sense of twelve honest men before the flood of his eloquence by pure force of human infatuation.’
So it seemed, too, to Basil Maclaine, in his utter dejection.
‘If you should get her off, though, Harrison,’ he said, the night before the trial, as they sat together in the room at Clandon Street, discussing the chances, ‘there’ll be only one course open both for her and me — she’ll have to marry me.’
And with that consolation he buoyed up his soul. They were playing for high stakes now, the Duchess and he; but it would be a wonderful thing if, after all, these strange events led to his allying himself at last with the British peerage.
Douglas, however, only gazed at him fixedly with a stony stare, and answered, almost in indignation:
‘I don’t want to “get her off” at all, as you call it. I want to prove her innocent before the eyes of all England.’
CHAPTER XLIV.
BEFORE TWELVE GOOD MEN AND TRUE.
At last the great day of the trial arrived, and Linda found herself confronted once for all with that unspeakable accusation.
She had looked forward with infinite dread to the ordeal of her public appearance, but when the crucial moment actually arrived her nerves availed her far more than she could have imagined. As her need was, so was her strength also. But her need was great. As she entered the crowded court by a side-door, in her deep mourning dress and her widow’s bonnet, a buzz of voices, surging deep over the well, called attention to her entrance. Some scraps of comment that Linda caught as she passed sufficed to show her — what she already knew, indeed, far too well — how generally the sense of the public was against her.
‘Hush! Look there!’ ‘That’s her!’ ‘That’s the prisoner!’ ‘Here she comes!’ ‘That’s the Duchess!’
‘Oh, doesn’t she look handsome, too! Who’d ‘a thought she could ‘a done it?’
‘You wouldn’t say by the look of ‘er she was a murderess, would you?’
‘Poor thing! Poor thing! And so young and pretty, too! Hers doesn’t look like a neck for a rope! What a shame if they were to hang her! Though, to be sure, she poisoned him.’ This last from a woman.
Through an undercurrent of such anticipatory verdicts, overheard here and there above the buzz of voices, Linda moved on as in a dream, with stately dignity, to her place in the dock. Some good spirit befriended her. A chair had been placed for her by the courtesy of the court. She sat down on it without flinching, and gazed about her with the old frank and fearless manner, not bold or brazen, but upheld by an inner consciousness of innocence that disdained to simulate guilt by downcast eyes or pretended deference. She was there on trial for her life, she knew; but she had nothing to dread from the sternest justice; and if injustice must be wrought, she would take it smiling.
Her attitude evidently impressed the court. An approving hum ran through the dense mass of close-packed sightseers. Whatever else she looked, the prisoner was every inch a Duchess.
She gazed around at the bench, and took in the whole scene. An old, half-blind and mumbling judge occupied the chief seat of British Themis. Right and left sat a few of his friends who had come to hear the case on his introduction. Among the barristers, Linda’s eye soon picked out the counsel for the Crown, the senior of whom she had met at Lady Albury’s, and her own chosen advocate, sitting pale and anxious, but with vigilant resolution on his pallid and clear-cut countenance. The Dowager Duchess, her mother-in-law, in crape as deep as her own, gazed across at her from a seat near the bench with a stern look as of embodied justice. She had prejudged the case, of course, like everybody else, and saw in her daughter-in-law only her son’s murderess. Other acquaintances, not a few, refused to meet her eye. When her glance lighted upon them they looked at their feet, or acknowledged her presence by a bow of chilly courtesy.
The jury was empanelled, and the case began.
‘Linda, Duchess of Powysland, do you plead guilty or not guilty to the wilful murder of your husband, Adalbert Owen Trefaldwyn, Duke of Powysland?’
There was dead silence in court as Linda stood up and answered, in a very firm and unshaken voice, ‘Not Guilty.’
After the usual business of getting the court to work, Mr. Attorney-General, for the Crown, rose briskly to his feet, and opened the case for the prosecution. Adjusting his wig, and clearing his throat, Sir George ran briefly through the chief facts he proposed to prove, and the previous history of the personages to this high domestic tragedy. He was respectful to Linda, of course — professionally respectful; never for a moment did he forget the fact that the prisoner at the bar was an English Duchess. But none the less he skimmed lightly over the circumstances of her early history, her acquaintance with Basil Maclaine, her removal to America, her sudden accession to a dazzling and blinding fortune, meeting with the Duke— ‘the murdered man,’ as he often called him — and, last of all, her unexpected rise to the most exalted rank in the British peerage. Conspicuous fairness marked Sir George’s allusions to her humble origin. Then he detailed in a few words the beginning of the Duke’s suspicions as to her grace’s relations with Mr. Maclaine, the hiring of the detectives, the hurried trip to Norway, the return to London, the attack of fever, the strange symptoms that baffled the most experienced members of the faculty, the evidences of morphia-poisoning, the Duke’s lethargic death, the analysis of the barley-water, the results of the post-mortem, the universal occurrence of the suspected drug in everything submitted to the noble and unfortunate patient. Further than that, Mr. Attorney said, he would not go at present. The circumstantial links connecting the Duchess with this terrible crime would come out more fully during the examination of the witnesses. It would suffice for him just now to point out that he proposed to prove — first, an adequate motive; second, an opportunity; third, a long chain of concurrent testimony to the mode of administration; and, fourth, the dying man’s own deliberate suspicion, as well as his evidence as to the Duchess’s action, given with almost his last breath to the physician in attendance. Their mode of proof would be strictly cumulative. He would call first — Sir Frederick Weston.
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sp; At the call, Sir Frederick stepped briskly and elastically into the box, a wizened old man, with small beady pig’s-eyes, but otherwise wonderfully agile and youthful in manner for his years. He gave his evidence in a quiet, scientific, cocksure way. He had no doubts or misgivings. Linda listened breathless — so much of what he had to say was new to her now, even after the preliminary investigation at the coroner’s inquest and the police-court.
Sir Frederick had attended the murdered man during his last illness?
Yes, certainly he had attended him.
Did he remember when he first noticed the peculiar circumstances suggestive of morphia-poisoning?
He had a note of it here in his casebook. It was — h’m — the Sunday before the fatal termination of the illness.
Did the deceased die of typhoid fever?
Certainly not. The crisis of the fever had passed some days before, and there was neither relapse nor complication of any sort.
‘Of what, then, in your opinion, did deceased die?’
‘Undoubtedly of morphia-poisoning.’
And then Sir Frederick went on to explain, in minute detail and with much technical accuracy, the nature of the symptoms by which he had detected the action of the opiate. At the end of a long medical disquisition of the usual sort, the examining barrister asked once more: ‘And what led you first to suspect the drug was administered by the Duchess?’
Sir Frederick looked up with his small beady eyes and answered quickly, amid profound silence: ‘The Duke himself suggested it first to me. He told me the Duchess kept meddling and muddling with everything he had to eat and drink, that she was always messing about his food and medicine in extraordinary ways, and that whatever he took from her hands seemed somehow to make him immediately drowsy.’
As those unexpected words burst upon Linda’s ears she gave a little start of surprise, and grew still paler than before. This was, indeed, an awful revelation. Then Bertie himself had died believing she poisoned him.
She grasped the railings of the dock with her hand and steadied herself tremulously.
‘When did this conversation take place?’ the Crown counsel went on.
‘Two evenings before the Duke’s death. The night he died, however, he desired to speak to me further alone; and then he called my attention to the contents of a medicine bottle and a jug of barley-water, into both of which he said he had seen the Duchess drop something like powdered sugar. This put me on my guard. I immediately forbade the Duchess the room, and told her I’d see about the medicine in person.’
‘You took away the medicine and the barley-water for analysis?’
‘I did, and I analyzed them, with Dr. Moreton’s aid. Both contained large quantities of morphia. The barley-water alone contained enough of the opiate to kill three or four adults. It was perfectly saturated.’
Many other details came out in further examination which equally astonished and horrified Linda. Bit by bit it dawned upon her, as the case went on, that Bertie himself had supplied the most killing evidence of all. She had to fight, not only against a strange concatenation of misleading circumstances, but also against the word of a dead man — and that man her own husband — whom they could no longer submit to cross-examination.
When Sir Frederick had finished his evidence in chief, the judge looked at Douglas. Douglas rose, irresolute, and looked at the judge. ‘I — I have no questions to ask,’ he said at last, faltering.
The half-blind old judge glanced sharply up in astonishment. ‘No questions to ask!’ he repeated, incredulous. ‘No questions to ask the witness? A principal witness like this! Surely you mistake! You don’t wish to cross-examine?’
‘No,’ Douglas answered, flushing very red; ‘none whatsoever.’
A slight titter ran rippling through the ranks of the bar. Evidently this young man had misunderstood his vocation. What singular conduct! To let the chief witness for the prosecution stand down from the box without a single word of cross-examination!
The Crown shrugged its shoulders, and proceeded to put the nurses into the box. Mr. Erskine, the smart young junior whom Linda knew of old, rose jauntily to question them. Mr. Erskine’s manner had not improved with years. When Linda saw him begin, her heart sank within her. She remembered the smart young man’s previous forensic exploit with no great satisfaction. She felt he was unscrupulous — all he cared for on earth was a professional victory. What to her was an issue of life and death was to him an opportunity for displaying his talents as an advocate.
The smart young barrister proceeded, by dexterous side-questions, to get out the gist of the nurses’ story — their chief point being how the Duke had seemed better after the Duchess went away, till, by an unfortunate coincidence, they were both of them sent down from the room together on successive errands by the unfortunate patient. They oughtn’t to have gone both at once, they allowed; but the Duke insisted. He was very imperious; when he asked for anything he must have it at once. And so they went down perforce when he told them. While they were away the Duchess slipped into the room unbidden; and as soon as they returned they found her there once more, standing ‘messing about the things’ by her husband’s bedside. She was close by the table with the medicines and the barley-water, and she looked as if she had just administered a dose from the bottle to the patient. Later on, when the Duke complained of thirst, she insisted upon giving him some barley-water with her own hands. From the moment of her arrival his grace seemed worse; after sipping the barley-water he became rapidly unconscious. They had kept the rest of that barley-water, as Sir Frederick ordered. It was in a jug labelled ‘A,’ and sent to the Government analyst for analysis.
Then Douglas Harrison, rising up, still pale, but resolute, proceeded to cross-examine. He had only one important point to ask about. It was at the Duke’s request, then, that they both left the room together?
Yes, at the Duke’s request, most urgently repeated.
He insisted upon their going?
Yes, he insisted firmly.
How long were they both away together?
Oh, several minutes — maybe six, maybe seven.
There would have been time for much to happen meanwhile?
Well, time for anybody to do a good deal in.
Further cross-examination dealt only with the point that the barley-water was there before the nurses went down; and that they had not actually seen the Duchess give the Duke a dose of medicine when she broke into the room during their somewhat lengthy absence. They only inferred it from the Duchess’s attitude on their return, and from the fact that a dose was gone from the bottle.
Other witnesses for the Crown proved various other points essential to the prosecution: the circumstances of the Duchess’s early life; her acquaintance with Maclaine; the detectives’ story; the Duke’s suspicions; the finding of the remaining morphia in the Duchess’s jewel-case; its presence in the jars labelled ‘A,’ ‘B,’ and ‘C’; the result of the post-mortem; the suspicious conduct of the Duchess during the whole illness. The day wore away slowly while all this was being proved; and Douglas Harrison’s cross-examination, at times directed to very small details, seemed to bring out but little that was of a clearly rebutting nature. His only main points were the annihilation of one part of the detectives’ case by showing how brief and unimportant were Basil Maclaine’s visits to the house during the Duke’s absence; and his careful proof, by drawing out the servants at Onslow Gardens, that no interview of any sort could ever be shown to have taken place alone between Maclaine and the Duchess. It was noticeable, too, that Douglas carefully avoided the use of the question-begging expression ‘the murdered man,’ which counsel for the prosecution used so freely; and often, in repeating witness’s words to them in a second question, he substituted for it ‘the deceased’ with marked emphasis. Altogether, however, at the end of the first day, when counsel for the Crown bowed to the court and remarked, triumphantly, that ‘this concluded their case,’ appearances all along had gone dead against Linda
, while nothing of importance had been elicited in her favour. It was evident beyond a doubt that the Duke had died by the administration of morphia; and strong probabilities pointed to the fact that the morphia had been administered in food and medicine given him by the Duchess.
With a weary heart once more, Linda, standing again, heard the court adjourned till the next morning. As she drove off alone to her quarters in gaol, she wondered how Douglas Harrison could ever find any way of his own out of this labyrinth of conspiracy, doubt, and coincidence.
For it was beginning to dawn upon her that conspiracy as well as coincidence had entered the lists against her.
CHAPTER XLV.
COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENCE.
When the court re-assembled next morning, Linda saw with a thrill of delight that Cecil had at last arrived from America. He was standing in his travel-stained tweed suit by the side of the dock to greet her on her entrance, for he had only just come in by night train from Queenstown, where he had landed the day before, and hurried on at all speed across Ireland to join his sister in her hour of need in London. News of Bertie’s death had reached him by telegraph in a remote part of Montana, where he was engaged in applying a new electrical apparatus for the separation of silver from the ore to the mines of his syndicate; and he had returned to New York post haste, as fast as American stages and trains could carry him, in his eagerness to stand by his sister’s side in her day of peril. It was a long journey, for Amberley Pike lies miles away from the ordinary means of communication, and the snow had drifted deep in the passes of the Sierra. A ten days’ tossing across the Atlantic, with head winds to battle against, had still further delayed him, so that he had only that moment arrived in town, and leaving his luggage hastily in the cloak-room at Euston, had driven straight to court in the clothes he wore throughout the long sea-voyage.
