The Filigree Ball - Anna Katharine Green (historical books to read txt) 📗

murmured, her hands going up to her face.

But in another moment she had dropped them and looked directly at the coroner.

“I walked there - I never said that I did not walk there - when I went later to see my sister and in sight of a number of detectives passed straight through the halls and into the library.”

“And that this footstep,” inexorably proceeded the coroner, “is not in a line with the main thoroughfare extending from the front to the back of the house, but turned inwards toward the wall as if she who made it had stopped to lean her head against the partition?”

Miss Tuttle’s head drooped. Probably she realized at this moment, if not before, that the coroner and jury had ample excuse for mistrusting one who had been so unmistakably caught in a prevarication; possibly her regret carried her far enough to wish she had not disdained all legal advice from those who had so earnestly offered it. But though she showed alike her shame and her disheartenment, she did not give up the struggle.

“If I went into the house,” she said, “it was not to enter that room. I had too great a dread of it. If I rested my head against the wall it was in terror of that shot. It came so suddenly and was so frightful, so much more frightful than anything you can conceive.”

“Then you did enter the house?”

“I did.”

“And it was while you were inside, instead of outside, that you heard the shot?”

“I must admit that, too. I was at the library door.”

“You acknowledge that?”

“I do.”

“But you did not enter the library?”

“No, not then; not till I was taken back by the officer who told me of my sister’s death”

“We are glad to hear this precise statement from you. It encourages me to ask again the nature of the freak which took you into this house. You say that it was not from any dread on your sister’s account? What, then, was it? No evasive answer will satisfy us, Miss Tuttle.”

She realized this as no one else could.

Mr. Jeffrey’s reason for his visit there could not be her reason, yet what other had she to give? Apparently none.

“I can not answer,” she said.

And the deep sigh which swept through the room was but an echo of the despair with which she saw herself brought to this point.

“We will not oblige you to,” said the coroner with apparent consideration. But to those who knew the law against forcing a witness to incriminate himself, this was far from an encouraging concession.

“However,” he now went on, with suddenly assumed severity, “you may answer this. Was the house dark or light when you entered it? And, how did you get in?”

“The house was dark, and I got in through the front door, which I found ajar.”

“You are more courageous than most women! I fear there are few of your sex who could be induced to enter it in broad daylight and under every suitable protection.”

She raised her figure proudly.

“Miss Tuttle, you have heard Chloe say that you were in the kitchen of Mr. Jeffrey’s house when the grocer boy delivered the candles which had been left by your brother-in-law on the counter of the store where he bought them. Is this true?”

“Yes, sir, it is true.”

“Did you see those candles?”

“No, sir.”

“You did not see them?”

“No, sir.”

“Yet you went over to the table?”

“Yes, sir, but I did not meddle with the packages. I had really no business with them.”

The coroner, surveying her sadly, went quickly on as if anxious to terminate this painful examination.

“You have not told us what you did when you heard that pistol-shot.”

“I ran away as soon as I could move; I ran madly from the house.”

“Where?”

“Home.”

“But it was half-past ten when you got home.”

“Was it?”

“It was half-past ten when the man came to tell you of your sister’s death.”

“It may have been.”

“Your sister is supposed to have died in a few minutes. Where were you in the interim?”

“God knows. I do not.”

A wild look was creeping into her face, and her figure was swaying. But she soon steadied it. I have never seen a more admirable presence maintained in the face of a dreadful humiliation.

“Perhaps I can help you,” rejoined the coroner, not unkindly. “Were you not in the Congressional Library looking up at the lunettes and gorgeously painted walls?”

“I?” Her eyes opened wide in wondering doubt. “If I was, I did not know it. I have no remembrance of it.”

She seemed to lose sight of her present position, the cloud under which she rested, and even the construction which might be put upon such a forgetfulness at a time confessedly prior to her knowledge of the purpose and effect of the shot from which she had so incontinently fled.

“Your condition of mind and that of Mr. Jeffrey seem to have been strangely alike,” remarked the coroner.

“No, no!” she protested.

“Arguing a like source.”

“No, no,” she cried again, this time with positive agony. Then with an effort which awakened respect for her powers of mind, if for nothing else, she desperately added: “I can not say what was in his heart that night, but I know what was in mine - dread of that old house, to which I had been drawn in spite of myself, possibly by the force of the tragedy going on inside it, culminating in a delirium of terror, which sent me flying in an opposite direction from my home and into places I had been accustomed to visit when my heart was light and untroubled.”

The coroner glanced at the jury, who unconsciously shook their heads. He shook his, too, as he returned to the charge.

“Another question, Miss Tuttle. When you heard a pistol-shot sounding from the depths of that dark library, what did you think it meant?”

She put her hands over her ears - it seemed as if she could not prevent this instinctive expression of recoil at the mention of the death-dealing weapon -and in very low tones replied:

“Something dreadful; something superstitious. It was night, you remember, and at night one has such horrible thoughts.”

“Yet an hour or two later you declared that the hearth was no lodestone. You forgot its horrors and your superstition upon returning to your own house.”

“It might be;” she murmured; “but if so, they soon returned. I had reason for my horror, if not for my superstition, as the event showed.”

The coroner did not attempt to controvert this. He was about to launch a final inquiry.

“Miss Tuttle; upon the return of yourself and Mr. Jeffrey to your home after your final visit to the Moore house, did you have any interview that was without witnesses?”

“No.”

“Did you exchange any words?”

“I think we did exchange some words; it would be only natural.”

“Are you willing to state what words?”

She looked dazed and appeared to search her memory.

“I don’t think I can,” she objected.

“But something was said by you and some answer was made by him?”

“I believe so.”

“Can not you say definitely?”

“We did speak.”

“In English?”

“No, in French.”

“Can not you translate that French for us?”

“Pardon me, sir; it was so long ago my memory fails me.”

“Is it any better for the second and longer interview between you the next day?”

“No-sir.”

“You can not give us any phrase or word that was uttered there?”

“No.”

“Is this your final reply on this subject?”

“It is.”

She never had been subjected to an interrogation like this before. It made her proud soul quiver in revolt, notwithstanding the patience with which she had fortified herself. With red cheeks and glistening eyes she surveyed the man who had made her suffer so, and instantly every other man there suffered with her; excepting possibly Durbin, whose heart was never his strong point. But our hearts were moved, our reasons were not convinced, as was presently shown, when, with a bow of dismissal, the coroner released her, and she passed back to her seat.

Simultaneously with her withdrawal the gleam of sensibility left the faces of the jury, and the dark and brooding look which had marked their countenances from the beginning returned, and returned to stay.

What would their verdict be? There were present two persons who affected to believe that it would be one of suicide occasioned by dementia. These were Miss Tuttle and Mr. Jeffrey, who, now that the critical period had come, straightened themselves boldly in their seats and met the glances concentrated upon them with dignity, if not with the assurance of complete innocence. But from the carefulness with which they avoided each other’s eyes and the almost identical expression mirrored upon both faces, it was visible to all that they regarded their cause as a common one, and that the link which they denied, as having existed between them prior to Mrs. Jeffrey’s death, had in some way been supplied by that very tragedy; so that they now unwittingly looked with the same eyes, breathed with the same breath, and showed themselves responsive to the same fluctuations of hope and fear.

The celerity with which that jury arrived at its verdict was a shock to us all. It had been a quiet body, offering but little assistance to the coroner in his questioning; but when it fell to these men to act, the precision with which they did so was astonishing. In a half-hour they returned from the room into which they had adjourned, and the foreman gave warning that he was prepared to render a verdict.

Mr. Jeffrey and Miss Tuttle both clenched their hands; then Miss Tuttle pulled down her veil.

“We find,” said the solemn foreman, “that Veronica Moore Jeffrey, who on the night of May eleventh was discovered lying dead on the floor of her own unoccupied house in Waverley Avenue, came to her death by means of a bullet, shot from a pistol connected to her wrist by a length of white satin ribbon.

“That the first conclusion of suicide is not fully sustained by the facts;

“And that attempt should be made to identify the hand that fired this pistol.”

It was as near an accusation of Miss Tuttle as was possible without mentioning her name. A groan passed through the assemblage, and Mr. Jeffrey, bounding to his feet, showed an inclination to shout aloud in his violent indignation. But Miss Tuttle, turning toward him, lifted her hand with a commanding gesture and held it so till he sat down again.

It was both a majestic and an utterly incomprehensible movement on her part, giving to the close of these remarkable proceedings a dramatic climax which set all hearts beating and, I am bound to say, all tongues wagging till the room cleared.

XVI

AN EGOTIST OF THE FIRST WATER

 

Had the control of affairs been mine at this moment I am quite positive that I should have found it difficult to deny these two the short interview which they appeared to crave and which would have been to them such an undeniable comfort. But a sterner spirit than mine was in charge, and the district attorney, into whose hands the affair had now fallen, was inexorable. Miss Tuttle was treated with respect, with kindness, even, but she was not allowed any communication with her brother-in-law beyond the formal “Good afternoon” incident upon their separation; while he, scorning to condemn his lips to any such trite commonplace, said nothing at all, only looked a haggard inquiry which called forth from her the most exalted look of patience and encouraging love it has ever been