"I had failed to bring a magnifying-glass with me, but my eyes are phenomenally sharp. Knowing where to look, I was able to pick out enough words here and there in the lines composing the hair, to feel quite sure that my wife had neither deceived me nor been deceived as to certain directions being embodied there in writing. Shaken in my last lingering hope, but not yet quite convinced that these words pointed to outrageous crime, I flew next to the closet and drew out the fatal drawer.
"You have been there and know what the place is, but no one but myself can ever realize what it was for me, still loving, still clinging to a wild inconsequent belief in my wife, to grope in that mouth of hell for the spring she had chattered about in her sleep, to find it, press it, and then to hear, down in the dark of the fearsome recess, the sound of something deadly strike against what I took to be the cushions of the old settle standing at the edge of the library hearthstone.
"I think I must have fainted. For when I found myself possessed of sufficient consciousness to withdraw from that hole of death, the candle in the candelabrum was shorter by an inch than when I first thrust my head into the gap made by the removed drawers. In putting back the drawers I hit the candelabrum with my foot, upsetting it and throwing out the burning candle. As the flames began to lick the worm-eaten boarding of the floor a momentary impulse seized me to rush away and leave the whole place to burn. But I did not. With a sudden frenzy, I stamped out the flame, and then finding myself in darkness, griped my way downstairs and out. If I entered the library I do not remember it. Some lapses must be pardoned a man involved as I was."
"But the fact which you dismiss so lightly is an important one," insisted the major. "We must know positively whether you entered this room or not."
"I have no recollection of doing so"
"Then you can not tell us whether the little table was standing there, with the candelabrum upon it or—"
"I can tell you nothing about it."
The major, after a long look at this suffering man, turned toward Miss Tuttle.
"You must have loved your sister very much," he sententiously remarked.
She flushed and for the first time her eyes fell from their resting-place on Mr. Jeffrey's face.
"I loved her reputation," was her quiet answer, "and—" The rest died in her throat.
But we all—such of us, I mean, who were possessed of the least sensibility or insight, knew how that sentence sounded as finished in her heart "and I loved him who asked this sacrifice of me."
Yet was her conduct not quite clear.
"And to save that reputation you tied the pistol to her wrist?" insinuated the major.
"No," was her vehement reply. "I never knew what I was tying to her. My testimony in that regard was absolutely true. She held the pistol concealed in the folds of her dress. I did not dream—I could not—that she was contemplating any such end to the atrocious crime—to which she had confessed. Her manner was too light, too airy and too frivolous—a manner adopted, as I now see, to forestall all questions and hold back all expressions of feeling on my part. 'Tie these hanging ends of ribbon to my wrist,' were her words. 'Tie them tight; a knot under and a bow on top. I am going out— There, don't say anything— What you want to talk about will keep till tomorrow. For one night more I am going to make merry—to—to enjoy myself.' She was laughing. I thought her horribly callous and trembled with such an unspeakable repulsion that I had difficulty in making the knot. To speak at all would have been impossible. Neither did I dare to look in her face. I was touching the hand and she kept on laughing—such a hollow laugh covering up such an awful resolve! When she turned to give me that last injunction about the note, this resolve glared still in her eyes."
"And you never suspected?"
"Not for an instant. I did not do justice either to her misery or to her conscience. I fear that I have never done her justice in anyway. I thought her light, pleasure-loving. I did not know that it was assumed to hide a terrible secret."
"Then you had no knowledge of the contract she had entered into while a school-girl?"
"Not in the least. Another woman, and not myself, had been her confidante; a woman who has since died. No intimation of her first unfortunate marriage had ever reached me till Mr. Jeffrey rushed in upon me that Tuesday morning with her dreadful confession on his lips."
The district attorney, who did not seem quite satisfied on a certain point passed over by the major, now took the opportunity of saying:
"You assure us that you had no idea that this once lighthearted sister of yours meditated suicide when she left you?"
"And I repeat it, sir."
"Then why did you immediately go to Mr. Jeffrey's drawer, where you could have no business, unless it was to see if she had taken his pistol with her?"
Miss Tuttle's head fell and a soft flush broke through the pallor of her cheek.
"Because I was thinking of him. Because I was terrified for him. He had left the house the morning before in a half-maddened condition and had not come back to sleep or eat since. I did not know what a man so outraged in every sacred feeling of love and honor might be tempted to do. I thought of suicide. I remembered the old house and how he had said, 'I don't believe her. I don't believe she ever did so cold-blooded an act, or that any such dreadful machinery is in that house. I never shall believe it till I have seen and handled it myself. It is a nightmare, Cora. We are insane.' I thought of this, sirs, and when I went into her room, to change the place of the little note in the book, I went to his bureau drawer, not to look for the pistol—I did not think of that then,—but to see if the keys of the Moore house were still there. I knew that they were kept in this drawer, for I had been present in the room when they were brought in after the wedding. I had also been short-sighted enough to conclude that if they were gone it was he who had taken them. They were gone, and that was why I flew immediately from the house to the old place in Waverley Avenue. I was concerned for Mr. Jeffrey! I feared to find him there, demented or dead."
"But you had no key."
"No. Mr. Jeffrey had taken one of them and my sister the other. But the lack of a key or even of a light—for the missing candles were not taken by me1—could not keep me at home after I was once convinced that he had gone to this dreadful house. If I could not get in I could at least hammer at the door or rouse the neighbors. Something must be done. I did not think what; I merely flew."
"Did you know that the house had two keys?"
"Not then."
"But your sister did?"
"Probably."
"And finding the only key, as you supposed, gone, you flew to the Moore house?"
"Immediately."
"And now what else?"
"I found the door unlocked."
"That was done by Mrs. Jeffrey?"
"Yes, but I did not think of her then."
"And you went in?"
"Yes; it was all dark, but I felt my way till I came to the gilded pillars."
"Why did you go there?"
"Because I felt—I knew—if he were anywhere in that house he would be there!"
"And why did you stop?"
Her voice rose above its usual quiet pitch in shrill protest:
"You know! you know! I heard a pistol-shot from within, then a fall. I don't remember anything else. They say I went wandering about town. Perhaps I did; it is all a blank to me—everything is a blank till the policeman said that my sister was dead and I learned for the first time that the shot I had heard in the Moore house was not the signal of his death, but hers. Had I been myself when at that library door," she added, after a moment of silence, "I would have rushed in at the sound of that shot and have received my sister's dying breath."
1
We afterwards found that these candles were never delivered at the house at all; that they had been placed in the wrong basket and left in a neighboring kitchen.