Works of Grant Allen

by Grant Allen

  The tide was undoubtedly turning in Linda’s favour.

  Step by step, through all his succeeding witnesses, Douglas built up his case with wonderful ingenuity. Mere forensic desire to make the best of a difficult defence could never have led him to get so much out of such unpromising materials. Nothing but his intense devotion to Linda, and his profound conviction that he had read the secret of the mystery aright, could have enabled any man so to bring together into one strong strand all the threads of a separately weak but cumulative proof. His next witnesses were servants and friends, who spoke to the natural jealousy and deep vindictiveness of the Duke’s character, as well as to the growing signs of distrust towards Linda which had been more and more obvious in his conduct from the night of her first meeting with Basil Maclaine at the Simpsons’ party. Then Mrs. Bouverie-Barton went into the box — for Douglas, as soon as the case was put into his hands, had diligently hunted up everybody who had seen anything of the Duke in the brief interval after his return to London — and detailed her conversation on the bench on the Embankment, with the Duke’s short answers and moody outbursts of fitful temper. Witness particularly observed the angry flash of the Duke’s eye when casual mention was made of Mr. Maclaine; his curt remark, ‘Six months is a precious short time to give a man for domestic felicity;’ and his bitter reflection, ‘That’s the way with these women. They marry a fellow for whatever they can get; and then, having secured his name and title, they break the rest of their implied bargain.’ Above all, Mrs. Bouverie-Barton recalled vividly two special and very significant phrases. When she spoke to the Duke of his sceptical attitude about another lady to whom he had formerly paid marked attentions — poor Sabine felt a tell-tale blush mantling her face at that awkward incident — the Duke had answered grimly, ‘I was wiser in my generation then than now;’ and when he told her at last he thought he was going to be seriously ill, he had added, with bitterness, ‘and a good job, too, as things go at present.’

  It was clear from all the evidence brought forward from this point onward that the Duke expected and wished to die; hardly less clear that he desired most definitely to cast the blame of his death upon the head of the Duchess. One link alone still remained to be proved. Where did the poison come from? Had the Duke any reason to have morphia in his possession? For that final link in his chain of proof, Douglas proceeded somewhat complacently to call the dead man’s valet.

  The valet’s evidence was direct and to the point. His grace had always suffered severely from sleeplessness — especially on nights when he had played high; and on such occasions he was accustomed to give himself, as the valet phrased it with vast affectation of medical accuracy, ‘hypodermal injections of morphia.’

  ‘Have you ever procured him morphia for the purpose?’ Douglas asked, amid a pause of solemn silence.

  ‘Yes, frequently. Often in America, while his grace was there, I bought him large amounts, and also to a less extent in England. He had a prescription for the purpose from a medical man, which he used to send me out with.’

  ‘Did you get any in Norway?’

  ‘No, never; but his grace went more than once, to my knowledge, into chemists’ shops, both at Bergen and Lillehammer, and he may have bought some then. I believe he did. At any rate, I noticed a blue paper packet of something in his dressing-case when I was putting up his things at the hotel at Christiania, which I can’t now find in any of his luggage. I have searched for it in his portmanteaus without discovering it. It had something printed outside, in Norse, I suppose, that I didn’t understand. I can’t tell you what the packet contained, but it was a white powder, which might have been soda, of course, or might have been sugar. I didn’t taste it.’

  ‘But did you form any opinion at the time what the powder was?’

  ‘I did. I believed it to be morphia, as usual.’

  ‘That isn’t evidence,’ the judge said dryly; ‘that’s pure conjecture.’

  Then Douglas produced from his pocket with sudden promptitude a tiny glass syringe.

  ‘Do you recognise this?’ he asked the man quickly.

  The valet started.

  ‘I do,’ he said, ‘perfectly. It’s the syringe his grace was accustomed to use whenever he made the injections of morphia.’

  ‘Explain to the jury how it came into your possession,’ the judge interposed, looking up sharply, with the nimble senile alertness of his class, at Douglas.

  ‘My lord,’ the barrister answered, with a respectful inclination, ‘my next witness, the housemaid in charge of the Duke’s room, will prove to your lordship and the court that she found this instrument beside the Duke’s bed, on the evening of his death, as if accidentally dropped on the ground, upon the opposite side from the one on which the Duchess was sitting.’

  CHAPTER XLVII.

  A MISSING WITNESS.

  When the witnesses had all been compelled, willing or unwilling, to yield up each his small part towards the cumulative proof, Douglas rose once more, with a very pale face, and proceeded to review the evidence for his Theory.

  His speech was long, exhaustive, and able. He pointed out to the jury the character and antecedents of the man himself with whom they had to deal; the obviously insane strain which ran through the very warp and woof of his being; the vindictiveness and jealousy known to characterize his nature; and the probability of his being capable of conceiving and carrying out such a horrible revenge as that now suggested, if circumstances should ever arouse the devil within him to that pitch of wickedness. Then he showed how all the circumstances had just so aroused him; how the three hereditary Montgomery tendencies, to gambling, jealousy, suicide, had coincided to madden and inflame his soul; and how all the very accidents of the case had combined to precipitate the final catastrophe. He didn’t suppose himself — he didn’t ask them to believe — that the dead man had decided to take his own life merely in order to spite his wife and throw upon her innocent head the suspicion of a deadly crime. That would be more than human wickedness could compass or human credulity swallow. But he did ask them to believe that the Duke, having made up his mind on other grounds to die, had conceived and carried out that further aggravation of diabolical vengeance. He dwelt lightly on the real guilelessness of Linda’s life; any observations on that score, he said, with fine rhetorical sense of effect, he knew he need not waste upon them. He glanced at Linda as he spoke — Linda sitting there, calm, though pale and worn, in her deep mourning, and all the jury, following his eyes with theirs, felt that glance was more persuasive than the highest flights of human eloquence. In short, he built up a psychological theory of Adalbert Montgomery’s life that was all the more conclusive because he had known the man himself, and had gauged with his own mind the full depths of profound selfishness and cruelty that lurked unseen in his nature.

  Then Douglas went on to point out the utter absence of motive for the suggested crime in Linda’s case, and the presence of what was an adequate motive, to a mind so diseased and swallowed up by mean jealousy as the Duke’s, both for the suicide itself and the cruel attempt to make it seem a murder. He dwelt long upon the fact that the police, with all their vigilance, had failed to find any proof of the Duchess having ever bought a grain of morphia anywhere, or had it in her possession, side by side with the fact, unshaken in cross-examination, that the Duke had been in the constant habit both of buying and using it. He noted that opportunities would easily occur for the patient himself to put morphia unobserved into the food and drink; and that such opportunities would be far more difficult on the part of the Duchess. When the Duke was left alone in the room, counsel’s theory was that he had himself poisoned his food and drink, and administered hypodermal injections from the powder surreptitiously bought in Norway. It was a theory that fitted all the facts, and that fell in exactly with the nature and character of the man who had perpetrated, as he believed, with his dying hand and breath this gross injustice upon a woman who had loved and trusted him.

  Then, again, there was the
question of the remaining morphia found in the Duchess’s jewel-case. If the Duchess herself had perpetrated the crime, was it credible that she would leave this clue against herself among her own belongings? Nobody could believe her so foolish or so heedless. But if the Duke had poisoned himself, with the deliberate wish that the crime should be imputed to his wife, this clumsy device of the jewel-case was exactly the sort of thing that would first occur to the disordered mind of a half-delirious and half-insane patient. Rightly viewed, it really told in his client’s favour.

  Finally, after reviewing all the facts of the case in his own sense, Douglas ventured upon a bold and very unusual appeal to the jury. He did not ask them, he said, merely to acquit his client. He did not ask them, if they doubted, to give her the benefit of the doubt. That was neither his client’s desire nor his own. The old judge frowned, but Douglas never noticed him. He asked them confidently to proclaim her perfect innocence from every charge that directly or indirectly had been brought against her, in that court or elsewhere. He asked them to vindicate her character as a wife, as a citizen, as a woman, and as a moral agent. He asked them unreservedly to put the crime upon the shoulders of the man who had actually committed it. He asked them to declare before the face of all the world that Adalbert Montgomery, Duke of Powysland, a ruined and disappointed gambler, stung in his last despair by the mad jealousy of his race, and determined to die, had conceived in his heart the unspeakable wickedness of avenging himself after death upon the wife who had never wronged him in thought, word or deed; and had concocted for that purpose a vile plot to blast her reputation and to destroy her life in the cruellest way ever devised by the mind of man; and he asked them also to declare by their verdict that that plot had failed, and that crime had recoiled upon his own head; while Linda, Duchess of Powysland, his much-wronged wife, went forth from court that day vindicated by their finding as a spotless wife and an innocent woman. Nothing less than that they demanded as their right — nothing less than that, he felt sure, the jury would award them.

  He sat down almost fainting, while something very like applause broke from every corner of the court for a minute — to be promptly suppressed, of course — at the bold conclusion of his well-constructed defence. As the buzz of whispers ran round the well, Mr. Mitchell Hanbury himself leaned over once more, and whispered aloud, in a stage aside:

  ‘By George! sir, you’ve done it. You’ve done it. You’ve done it. You’ve convinced the jury; and hang me! if you haven’t almost succeeded in convincing me myself into the bargain!’

  From that moment forth the rest of the proceedings fell fearfully flat till the jury retired to consider their verdict. After Douglas’s fiery and impassioned eloquence, nobody was much impressed by the eminent Q.C.’s frigid but ingenious reply for the Crown, nor by the mumbling old judge’s evenly balanced and insipid summing-up of the respective cases, in which he pointed out, with the usual luminous judicial impartiality, that if the jury believed the Duchess had poisoned the Duke, they should most unhesitatingly find her guilty; but if, on the other hand, they believed the Duke had poisoned himself to get out of a hole, as the defence suggested, and afterwards tried out of pure spite to make it appear his wife had done it — why, then, in that case, it would be a gross miscarriage of justice for twelve honest and intelligent men to hang the Duchess. Everybody seemed so perfectly ready to admit the truth of these trite judicial platitudes that they hardly even listened to them, and the crowd in court manifested towards the end some little impatience of such mumbled remarks in its eagerness to hear how the jury decided.

  At last the critical moment arrived, and the jury left the room for awhile to deliberate. They were gone some minutes, discussing the case among themselves; and the public in court waited anxiously with breathless attention for their verdict. Linda leaned back in her chair, still very white, but with a certain air of conscious and triumphant innocence. She cared infinitely less herself which way the verdict went now. To her own mind, Douglas Harrison’s speech and the evidence of the witnesses had completely exculpated her and told the whole truth as to Bertie’s conduct. She felt certain that that man she had once called her husband, in an insane access of jealousy, had hatched this mad scheme against her life and honour, exactly as Douglas had so aptly described it. She had ceased to love him entirely now; she had ceased to regret him. A terrible whirlwind had passed through her soul as she sat there in court, and left her wholly changed; her one wonder was, now she knew him for himself, how on earth she could ever have consented to marry him.

  Half an hour is a terribly long time when an issue of life and death is hanging by a thread in it. Linda had full leisure for these and many other tempestuous reflections before the jury, with official calmness, returned to deliver their expected verdict.

  And so had the people in court. They had discussed the question at issue freely meanwhile; and by the looks that were cast towards her — most of them now sympathetic and pitying — Linda could feel tolerably well assured that the sense of the public was wholly with her. Douglas Harrison’s bold defence had completely turned the tables. In the eyes of the assembled audience she was almost undoubtedly now a much injured lady.

  But did the jury themselves accept that view? or why did they take so long to deliberate? A tremor passed visibly through Linda’s frame as the twelve good men and true at last re-entered. Every eye gazed hard, and every ear was strained to catch the words of that fateful verdict.

  The clerk of arraigns put the formal question:

  ‘Gentlemen of the jury, do you find the prisoner at the bar guilty or not guilty of wilful murder?’

  The foreman glanced lightly at a tiny scrap of paper held in his hand, cleared his throat, and began to answer:

  ‘We find — —’

  At that moment, before he could complete his sentence, a loud cry was heard from the further end of the court, a scuffle by the door, a disturbance with the police, a wild rush towards the ushers.

  The foreman hesitated; he looked up and waited; the turmoil increased. Even the mumbling old judge rose solemnly from the bench, where he had been going over his notes through his spectacles, and, peering across the well, tried his best to make out the cause of the uproar. Amid the din and confusion a woman’s voice, raised loud above all else, rang clear through the building.

  ‘I have evidence to give, my lord — important evidence. They won’t let me in. I must and shall be heard. I’ve come to save her!’

  ‘Who is it?’ the blind old judge muttered vacantly through his false teeth, craning his neck and gazing with his bleared eyes away down into the distance. ‘This is very irregular: very, very irregular. If the woman had evidence to give in the case, why, in the name of goodness, didn’t she come here sooner?’

  But Linda, venturing just for once to break silence at this crisis before the eyes of all that attentive crowd, cried out in her turn:

  ‘My lord, let her come. It’s my maid, who disappeared mysteriously from the house just before the Duke’s return, and whom we’ve been unable, in spite of all our efforts, to trace till this moment. If she has evidence to give on my behalf I hope and trust the verdict will be delayed until the jury have had a chance of hearing her.’

  For she felt, in some dim, instinctive way, that Elizabeth Woodward, as she called the girl to herself, had really come there, as she declared, to save her.

  CHAPTER XLVIII.

  MISS POMEROY GIVES EVIDENCE.

  The blind old judge mumbled and hesitated ineffectively. He whispered aside with the clerk of arraigns, while the foreman, still fumbling the scrap of paper in his hand, stood waiting respectfully for his lordship’s decision. Evidently, his lordship was very much annoyed. It was disconcerting, most disconcerting, to the dignity of the court, that a woman, unknown, without even so much as a bonnet on her head, should insist, at the eleventh hour, on thus interrupting an important case in which the court itself had already summed up with such luminous inconclusiveness. Episodes like this were
unseemly — very unseemly. And probably, after all, the court mumbled to itself, the woman would have nothing essential to add to what other witnesses had long since told them!

  However, English judges, if they have no other virtue, are at least well trained in the professional etiquette of seeming impartiality; so the mumbling old gentleman on the bench (being no exception to this rule), after readjusting his wig and setting his spectacles straight, observed with some acerbity, that if the witness thought she had anything important to communicate on the case, she might step forward and be sworn, though he must say, for his part, her evidence would have been more welcome had it been tendered in the regular course of events at an earlier stage of the day’s proceedings.