by Grant Allen
The moment Douglas perceived him he moved up at once and grasped his old friend’s hand warmly. But they had hardly exchanged greetings and explained these particulars before Douglas, scanning him critically from head to foot asked, in a confidential whisper:
‘You’ve your luggage in town, I suppose? You’ve a better suit than that one, no doubt, in your portmanteau?’
Cecil nodded assent.
‘The best clothes a good New York tailor could make me,’ he answered, half suspecting at once his questioner’s meaning.
‘Then don’t lose a minute. Drive straight to an hotel; wash, shave, and dress,’ Douglas responded quickly, ‘and come back here as neat and trim as you can look. I shall want you to-day for a special purpose, and your appearance at present doesn’t do it justice.’
‘I see,’ Cecil answered, catching at his idea with quick apprehension. ‘You’re right, of course. It never struck me, in my anxiety to come direct to Linda. But I won’t be gone an hour, and when I get back — well, you needn’t be afraid your case will suffer by me.’
By this time the mumbling little old judge had taken his seat on the bench; silence was proclaimed in the court; and everybody fell into the attitude of attention for further proceedings. Linda, glancing around once more with that frank, fearless gaze of hers, though pale as death, could see that a deeper interest was taken in her personally than the day before. The brief recognition between brother and sister, and the conscious pride with which each had greeted the other in spite of their painful situation, told distinctly on the crowd of sightseers in Linda’s favour.
‘Well, anyhow her brother don’t believe she did it,’ they murmured to one another in the intervals between the formal business.
Presently Douglas Harrison rose to open the defence. He would open it, he said, turning full upon the jury, in a somewhat longer and ampler speech than usual. The peculiarity of the circumstances demanded this treatment. He rested his case, not so much upon rebutting evidence, as upon a theory totally different to that of the prosecution — a theory which, had he been retained at the time, and had he then had an occasion of forming it in full, he might have brought forward more opportunely at the inquest on the body of the late Duke. The defence he proposed to offer to the charge brought against his client hung, in fact, upon this theory — that no murder had been committed in the case at all; that the Duke had himself administered with his own hands, and for his own purposes, the fatal doses of morphia whose effects had been proved to them by Sir Frederick Weston.
As he said those words, after a long and clear preamble, he paused and took breath, looking hard at the jury. Linda, watching him narrowly, was surprised to see he showed no signs of nervousness. She had had fears of this. Douglas himself would have had fears of it in the conduct of any other trial. But here he had none. He had ceased to be self-conscious. One devouring feeling alone usurped his whole soul. He was possessed with a fiery determination that Linda should have justice. Seeing the whole case clearly now in his own mind, without one doubt or hesitation, he could think of nothing save the most effective way of laying his conviction convincingly before the eyes of the jury.
He began, then, by treating the case, though always as an opening only, from the very beginning. He explained what his witnesses would be called to prove. They must learn what sort of person the late Duke was. They must learn from what family he sprang, in what ideas he was educated, with what hereditary feelings he was possessed and permeated. He would bring evidence to show them that the late Duke’s father had been a confirmed gambler; yes, and that the late Duke’s father had committed suicide as a direct result of his gambling transactions. He would also bring evidence to show them that the late Duke’s father never left a line in writing behind to explain the circumstances of his sudden death, and that suspicion accordingly fell afterwards — most unjust suspicion, as they knew later — upon innocent persons. Next, he would bring evidence to show them that the late Duke’s brother was likewise a gambler, that the late Duke’s brother likewise committed suicide, and that a similar uncertainty hung at first over both his reasons for the deed and the very fact of his having performed it. It was matter of history that remote ancestors in their day had also been gamblers, and also suicides. The two tendencies ran together in the Montgomery blood. And so, admittedly, did the other half-insane tendency to a mad jealousy of their wives. Several of the Montgomeries had killed themselves within a very short period indeed after marriage; and they had died on bad terms with their Duchesses for no sufficient or well-defined reason.
After that, Douglas went on, he would call witnesses who would testify to the late Duke’s own opinion of suicide, and his own foreshadowing in his own very words of the self-inflicted fate that finally overtook him.
Then, altering his voice unconsciously to a more sympathetic key, Douglas went on to give his own history of the Amberley family, and the means by which they had risen to wealth and eminence. In contradistinction to the ‘upstart’ view, put forth by the Crown, he dwelt lovingly upon Cecil’s skill, knowledge, and scientific attainments; the position the family had taken up in New York; the temptations held out by so wealthy and accomplished an heiress to the cupidity of an impoverished English nobleman. He would bring forward witnesses to show the Duke’s embarrassed condition before he sailed for America; the way, on his return, he had recklessly squandered his wife’s money; the load of accumulating debt; the resulting crisis; the determination slowly formed in the Duke’s mind to meet it in the hereditary Montgomery fashion.
In short, he would bring evidence to show that before ever the Duke left for Norway his financial straits alone had led him to contemplate the possibility of suicide.
Then came in the other and still more terrible heirloom of the Powysland blood — their insensate jealousy. He would call witnesses to prove the existence of that, too, and its presence in the Duke’s case without any adequate reason. He would show them the improbability of the Duchess having bought or administered the morphia, and the probability that the Duke himself, dimly contemplating suicide, had purchased it in Norway for that very purpose, and had been driven to use it, partly by the influence of delirium during the paroxysms of fever; partly by the increase in his own mad jealousy, produced, it might be, by physical causes; but partly, also, owing to the detectives’ adverse report on the Duchess’s conduct, which he had grossly misjudged; and partly owing to a casual conversation with a lady whom he would produce — Mrs. Bouverie-Barton. There Douglas paused. He had made this opening speech, he said, much fuller than usual (in spite of the obvious uneasiness of the judge, a stickler for precedent), but that was in order that the jury might clearly understand beforehand, and follow intelligently, the course of the evidence he was about to lay before them. Put briefly, his theory amounted, in fact, to this — that the Duke had deliberately poisoned himself, out of mingled despair and personal jealousy; and that he had just as deliberately planned a vile and horrible attempt to satisfy his vengeance by making suspicion fall upon his wife, ‘that innocent lady who stands before you in the dock this moment, on trial for her life and, what is dearer to her by far than life itself, her honour.’
As he spoke, an instant flood of conviction burst over Linda’s soul. It came upon her with a flash. He had unravelled the tangle. Impossible, incredible, horrible as it was to conceive, she saw in a moment that Douglas was right. The key he had discovered was one that unlocked all the twisted wards of that intricate combination. Bertie himself had put the morphia in his own food and medicine; and he had done it with deliberate intent to ruin and murder her. She understood it all now; she saw it all distinctly. In a sudden revulsion of feeling, the man as he lived stood revealed before her in all his hideous, mad, selfish cruelty. She knew he had devised it of malice prepense; she knew he had done it all for a horrible revenge. Resolved to die in any case, and goaded to reprisals by his own baseless, unreasoning jealousy, he had died with this ghastly lie upon his lips in order to wreak upon
his innocent wife that hateful, incredible, posthumous vengeance.
So Douglas pointed out briefly in the concluding words of his speech, and sat down exhausted. The court was evidently deeply impressed by this unexpected line of defence. Mr. Mitchell Hanbury, leaning across to the young barrister with a satisfied smile, whispered in his ear in a half-audible voice:
‘Well done indeed! It’s very irregular to open at such length — you should have kept half that for your final review — but I congratulate you, all the same, upon your brilliant theory. It’s the strongest and most original plan of defence you could possibly have set up; it so completely traverses and sets at nought the whole line of the prosecution. And it interests the jury sympathetically in your client.’
But Douglas, wiping his brow and moistening his parched lips, answered, in almost equally audible tones:
‘I don’t care twopence about all that. The point to me is, it’s the only true one.’
And Linda, sitting rigid as stone on her chair in the appalling horror of that first awful disclosure — for as yet she had never suspected Bertie — saw that Douglas believed it as firmly as herself, and thanked Heaven with silent lips that she had followed her own instinct, and insisted upon choosing the advocate who trusted her.
CHAPTER XLVI.
CUMULATIVE EVIDENCE.
Then Douglas began calling his witnesses in order. The first of them proved only what everybody knew already — the main facts as to the history of the Montgomery family. But a little sensation was caused in court when, after eliciting these facts in the most telling manner, the unknown barrister proceeded with some evident hesitation to call — his own brother, the member for South Hampstead.
Everybody asked in a low whisper among themselves what on earth Mr. Hubert Harrison could have to do with the Duke’s murder.
‘You knew the late Duke when he was Lord Adalbert Montgomery?’ Douglas began quietly.
‘I did.’
‘You remember a conversation you had with him one day at Hurst Croft, near Leatherhead, after a pastoral play, in which he took part in Mr. Venables’ grounds?’
‘I remember it perfectly. It impressed itself upon my memory, because it so strongly illustrated the hereditary tendency of the Montgomery family. In fact, when I returned to town that night I made a note of it for future use as literary material — I being then engaged as a journalist and playwright.’
‘Please tell the court the gist of that conversation.’
‘We were discussing a suicide reported in that morning’s papers — Mr. Soames, of Wellington’s — and I remarked that the person who had just taken his own life had behaved most abominably to survivors. If he was going to kill himself, he might at least have left a note behind to say why he did it, so as to exculpate others. “For a fellow to commit suicide, leaving it in doubt whether he wasn’t murdered, is a gross injustice,” I said, “to many innocent people.”’
‘And what did Lord Adalbert answer to that?’
‘He said, “Oh, hang it all, Harrison, you’re too down upon him altogether, poor old wretch! Why should he go and try to bring disgrace upon the members of his family? For my part, I think he acted quite right; and when I commit suicide, as I shall do some day, I suppose, like all the rest of us Montgomeries, if ever luck runs against me a bit too hard, why, I’m not going to leave anything behind me in any way to incriminate myself. I’ll let ’em guess who did it; and if they can’t find out, well, then they may whistle for it.”’
‘What particularly impressed this remark on your memory?’
‘The fact that on that very afternoon news arrived from Homburg that Lord Adalbert’s brother, the previous Duke, had committed suicide.’
‘Did you make any comment on the circumstance at the time?’
‘Yes, I said to Mr. Charles Simmons, of the War Office, “It’s a family habit. Gambling and suicide are hereditary with the Montgomeries. They run through their money, and then they cut their throats. That’s the regular routine, and then the next in succession marries an heiress again, and begins da capo. As soon as her money’s all gone, cut throat, and exit.”’
‘That’s hardly evidence, what you said to Mr. Simmons, of the War Office,’ the mumbling old judge observed, with a preternaturally wise and cunning air, looking up from his notes suddenly. ‘Besides, after such a lapse of time as this the witness’s memory is likely to fail him as to detail, surely.’
‘I have my note-book here, my lord,’ Hubert responded, promptly producing it, ‘with all the conversation written down in full exactly as it occurred. I put it in writing at the time for its dramatic value, intending to use it in some future play. I hand up the book now for your lordship’s inspection and the jury’s. Your lordship will not fail to observe that the conversation is intercalated between two other notes referring obviously to the same period — the rehearsal of the play — and that the dates when the note-book was begun and finished are entered at either end on the fly-leaves.’
The court received this evidence with profound interest. That interest was certainly not lessened when Douglas continued:
‘You recollect the news of the eighth Duke’s death being communicated on the lawn at Hurst Croft to Lord Adalbert?’
‘I do. Lord Adalbert saw several of us looking at a paper which contained the news immediately after the performance of the pastoral play was over. He noticed we were disconcerted, and asked us at once, “Anything wrong at Homburg? Powysland been making a fool of himself again?” I told him, Yes; the Duke was seriously hurt. He took the paper from my hand and read it slowly through — I have a copy here which the jury can see for themselves — then he handed it back and said quite quietly, “I thought so; I thought so! At last he’s done it.” From which remark I naturally gathered that he had expected his brother sooner or later to put an end to his life in the usual family fashion.’
That smart young barrister, Erskine, who rose, after a few more questions put and answered, to cross-examine the witness, tried to undermine the value of Hubert’s evidence by suggesting with gentle lateral hints that he was moved by fraternal feeling to quicken his memory unduly, but he failed in his attempt to discredit the entries in the note-book; and when Charlie Simmons, of the War Office, and Mr. Venables, the well-known financier, called in quick succession, corroborated the main facts as to that prophetic conversation, Linda had only to scan the faces of the jury to see that the impression left upon the court by Bertie’s unconscious foreshadowing of his own guilt was deep and lasting.
Then Douglas, pausing again one rhetorical second, proceeded to call Mr. Cecil Amberley.
All the court looked up, deeply interested. The dramatic appearance in the box that morning of the great electrical engineer — the successor and rival of Edison — to give evidence at the last moment in his sister’s favour, came home to everyone’s imagination and everyone’s heart. And, indeed, prosperity had done much for the ex-workman of the Bloomsbury tube-works. As he stood there, in his manly, straightforward way, every inch a gentleman of Nature’s own mint, answering all Douglas’s questions in sound and sensible English, and describing the rise in the family fortunes with modest succinctness, Cecil Amberley looked and spoke like just what he was — a man of honour and a man of genius. Even in the old days at Clandon Street Cecil had always been a first-rate specimen of the best class of educated, self-respecting, scientifically-trained English mechanic. Dress and the other advantages of wealth had added all the rest; while intercourse with the world and with cultivated minds had given him a quietly confident manner, which, coming on top of his natural self-reliance and modest ease, stood him in good stead in any society.
Cecil’s examination-in-chief, and still more the way in which he passed through the ordeal of Mr. Erskine’s cross-examination, intended to confuse him, scattered at once to the winds all the absurd rumours as to the origin and rise of the Amberley family. It was abundantly evident, as soon as he had told his plain unvarnished tale, that the suppo
sed change of name was a simple myth, the gutter theory of the family antecedents a gross impertinence, the sneers of clubland utterly unwarranted, and even the view taken by the counsel for the prosecution an unfounded misstatement. Everybody saw, as the great engineer detailed his evidence with manly straightforwardness, that the Amberleys had always been self-helping and self-respecting people: that the removal to New York had been entirely due to Cecil’s own plans for the development of his wonderful inventions; that Linda’s interest in his undertakings had been fairly purchased by the embarkation of her own little capital, inherited and saved, in her brother’s ventures; that her part in the syndicates had been earned by her own labour; and that, from first to last, she had been the active assistant, confidante, and adviser of her distinguished brother. When Cecil sat down again after the ordeal of cross-examination, everybody knew exactly the simple truth that the Duchess of Powysland had once taken in lodgers in her house in Clandon Street, but everyone knew also the correlative truth that her whole past life bore a totally different complexion now from that which rumour had so long and so unjustly put upon it.
There was another sensation in court when Douglas Harrison, looking a little fatigued after his re-examination of Cecil Amberley, proposed to call, amid a deep hush of silence, Mr. Basil Maclaine, of the Board of Trade.
Nobody was prepared for this grand coup de théâtre. Every neck in the building craned to see him as he came slowly up — the skulking wretch, according to popular opinion one day before, who had led the Duchess into this horrible mess, and then had deserted her to flounder out by herself as best she might, instead of taking all the blame upon himself and standing by her side in the dock that moment as the real instigator and designer of the murder.
It was with manifold misgivings, indeed, that Douglas put his friend into the box that morning. He hardly knew how Maclaine would comport himself, how his little affectations and society graces would tell against him with the court, how he would behave under the crucial test of a searching cross-examination. But there are some great crises in our history when even the smallest of us seem to rise instinctively to the height of the occasion. For once in his life Basil Maclaine that day managed to forget himself and the figure he was cutting, and, as a consequence, cut a far better figure than was at all usual with him. He went into the box with just that mixture of modest reluctance and anxious desire to tell the whole truth, without reservation, which was best adapted to produce a favourable impression on the minds of the jury, already prejudiced against him. For the moment, he was fortunately possessed only by a profound and honest desire to free Linda from the unjust suspicion of any kind of intimate relations with himself during her husband’s absence. His handsome face, his manly bearing, his obvious earnestness and sincerity, his freedom from prevarication where there was nothing to hide, all gave weight to his words as he went on; and the mere fact that the defence had ventured to put him boldly into the box, and that he could give with unflinching directness a plain, straightforward ‘No!’ to all the insinuations and innuendoes of the prosecution, almost sufficed to dispel the gossip of the clubs about the supposed position in which he had stood towards Linda. The court listened throughout in breathless silence, and when at last Basil stood down, relieved, but with a feverish brow, there was scarcely a soul present who didn’t think better for the moment both of the poor Duchess herself and of the man for whose sake she was believed to have murdered her worthless husband.
