Sir Harold in a moved tone says:
“I fear that is so, though I would fain hope not, Mrs. Cheale.”
He waits a moment. He is so obviously, so genuinely moved, that every one in Court feels a sudden wave of liking for him.
“Very well,” he says, recovering himself. “Now tell me what happened next.”
“We was married then, sir. He’d fixed it all up before I came.”
Her face suddenly relaxes; it becomes almost cheerful as she adds:
“Of course he’d known all along that nothing he’d done would make any difference to me.”
Sir Harold goes on in a matter-of-fact tone:
“The moment the marriage had been solemnized, he insisted, I understand, on your sending for what I may call an unofficial witness?”
“Yes, sir. The minute the clergyman and all that wasgone, he made me call the landlady of the place where he was living—Mrs. Lightfoot’s her name. She had got quite fond of him before I came. She was the marriage witness—leastways one of them. He says to her: ‘Mrs. Lightfoot, I’ve something to tell you. It’s very grave—you’ve got to remember it. Maybe you’ll be sworn and asked about it.’ Then he told her what he had told me.”
“You mean he repeated to her the statement that he had poisoned Mrs. Emily Garlett?”
The witness again became almost inaudible, but it was evident that she had answered, “Yes, sir.”
“I understand, Mrs. Cheale, that it was not till the day before his death that he succeeded in persuading you to send for a commissioner for oaths?”
She answers in a low, halting voice:
“When the doctor told me he couldn’t last out the night, I didn’t think it mattered what happened. Besides, I knew they couldn’t do much till the next day, and I believed that the next day he would be dead—and so he was.”
“The commissioner for oaths,” Sir Harold looked at one of the papers in his hand, “is Mr. Theophilus Jones——”
There runs a nervous laugh through the Court. The judge looks very stern.
Sir Harold goes on—“of 15, London Wall. That gentleman, or so I understand, has influenza. That is why he is not here to-day.”
The witness answers, “Yes, sir—I’m afraid he caught cold coming out to see my husband at night time.”
There is another titter, which is quickly suppressed.
“You see, sir, I didn’t know what to do! And then Mrs. Lightfoot, she says to me, ‘There’s a gentleman as is a commissioner for oaths living in this very square. It was him as had to do with the lease of this house.’ So I went round to his home, sir, and I just told him the truth—that my dear husband was dying and wanted to make a confession to him. He’s an old gentleman, and he was very kind to me. He said it wasn’t in order, but that he’d come. And he did, sir. My husband had made me put down—he was too weak to write himself—what he wanted said, and the old gentleman, Mr. Jones, he read it over to him, and then my husband swore it was all true.”
At this point Mr. Toogood is seen entering the Court, and a memorandum is handed up to the judge.
Meanwhile the witness remains standing quite still in the box staring before her as if hardly knowing where she is.
Sir Harold reads a note from the judge, and then he goes on with his examination of the witness.
“Your husband, I understand, died within five hours of making this statement?”
“That is so, sir.”
“That was early yesterday morning?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you started at once, Mrs. Cheale, for Grendon? I understand you did this in obedience to a desire expressed by him?”
“Yes, sir. He made a joke like; he says to me: ‘You won’t have many opportunities of keeping your marriage vow—to obey me, Lucy—but I do give you an opportunity now. The minute the breath’s out of my body,’ he says, ‘you’re to go straight off with that paper of which you’ve got a copy. You’re to go to the office of that—’” she hesitates—“‘that rascally lawyer, Toogood,’ he called him, but then, sir, he always said all lawyers were rascals, and he often would have his joke. ‘There,’ he says, ‘you’re to find Toogood, and you’re to put this before him. No good telegraphing,’ he said, ‘to judge or counsel. Lawyers are dull, hide-bound villains, they’d take no notice of a telegram, they’d think it was a hoax.’”
The audience in Court turned amused eyes on the gentlemen who are hearing themselves so candidly described. But if they expect to see any signs of self-conscious confusion, they are disappointed. All the lawyers remain perfectly calm, and the witness goes on:
“He says to me, ‘Have you enough money for a motor, Lucy? That would perhaps be quickest of all. Then, on the other hand,’ he says, ‘you might be killed in the motor. So best go by train,’ he said. So I did what he wished. The moment he was dead I left him alone with that kind soul, Mrs. Lightfoot, and I only stopped long enough on the way to the station to get the black clothes I’m now wearing——”
And now the judge leans forward.
“I regret,” he said somewhat severely, “that this statement of yours was not put in yesterday.”
“I never had no chance, sir—your worship. I did try to be heard.”
Sir Harold interposes:
“May I ask your lordship to allow me to read the sworn statement made by Guy Cheale?”
Then Sir Almeric jumps up. He looks ruffled and disturbed, as he intimates:
“I do not oppose my learned friend’s application, my lord.”
The next thing to do is to release the witness.
“That will do, Mrs. Cheale,” says Sir Harold in a courteous tone. “We thank you very much for the clear way in which you have given your evidence. I understand that you wish to go back to London as soon as possible. If so, I hope you will use my motor car.”
A murmur of admiration for Sir Harold’s thoughtful kindness runs through the Court. But to the judge Sir Harold’s public announcement of his kindness seems highly irregular, and his lordship hastens to create a diversion.
“Sir Almeric Post,” he observes in his frigid tones, “in view of what is contained in that sworn statement, it is for you to read it to the jury, and not Sir Harold Anstey.”
“Very good, my lord,” says Sir Almeric, and then, in his passionless, clear tones he reads out the following words:
“I, Guy Cheale, in full possession of all my faculties though a dying man, wish to put it on record that I administered the arsenic to Mrs. Emily Garlett for reasons best known to myself, and which from my point of view were sufficiently good and conclusive at the time, though I do not expect any one else in the present state of our peculiar, complex civilization, built as it is on a pyramid of lies, to agree with me.
“My sister, Agatha Cheale, then lady housekeeper at the Thatched House, asked me three days before Mrs. Emily Garlett’s death to take a note for her to Miss Prince’s house, the Thatched Cottage. She informed me I could get straight into the house through a garden door.
“I followed her directions and found myself in the emptyhouse. I laid the letter on the hall table. I then bethought myself that I would go upstairs, as I’d heard Miss Prince had a curious collection of medicaments, and I have always been much interested in drugs.
“I found the room in which they were kept with no difficulty. The cupboard door was open, and I noticed the stoppered bottle of arsenic. I took out about an ounce of the white powder and put it in an envelope which I had in my pocket. I then walked back to the Thatched Farm. There I transferred the arsenic to a large empty pill-box. To the best of my belief the pill-box, with some of the arsenic still in it, will be found behind the fourth row of books in the small glazed bookcase in the parlour there.
“I ought here to add that when in the medicine room of Miss Prince’s house I turned up the entry ‘Arsenic’ in a medical work on her table. I thus discovered the right dose for an adult. On the afternoon which preceded Mrs. Garlett’s death I was one of two or three people who went and sat with her for a time. In a sense I may say I acted on a sudden impulse, for when I saw the small plateful of strawberries outside her door with the sugar sifter close to it I thought it an ideal opportunity for the accomplishment of my purpose.
“I asked her whether she would care to have the strawberries, and she said yes, that she had not known there were strawberries there. I went out of the room and mixed the arsenic with the sugar, then I brought the plate into her room. After she had eaten the strawberries I bade her good-bye and removed the plate—she thought outside the door—as a matter of fact I took it away with me, and threw it under a bush in the little wood, where it doubtless still is.
“I left the house as far as I know without having been seen, though Lucy Warren had admitted me, and we had had a short talk. Lucy was on the point of leaving the house owing to our having been found together—I may add not in any compromising sense—in the drawing room the night before by my sister and Mrs. Garlett. Mrs. Garlett, of course, had not recognized me. My sister, who is a generous woman, handed over to me practically the whole of her legacy—her unexpected legacy of a thousand pounds, which Mrs. Garlett left her in her will.”
Suddenly there breaks across the level, passionless tones of Sir Almeric’s voice a loud groan, and for the second time that day a man faints in Court. He is hastily taken below, but not before the Grendon folk present recognize him as Enoch Bent, Lucy Cheale’s uncle and Mr. Toogood’s highly respected head clerk. Few, however, of those who recognize him ask themselves why Guy Cheale’s reference in his statement to Mrs. Garlett’s will and the legacy to Guy Cheale’s sister should have had such an effect on the worthy Bent.
Fortunately for Bent, there is no need for him to be put in the witness-box, there to have drawn from him, by the persuasive arts of Sir Harold Anstey, an account—nay, a confession—of certain highly reprehensible and most unprofessional confidences concerning Mrs. Garlett’s will, made before that lady’s tragic death. That other and greater confession—the confession of Guy Cheale on his death-bed—has shed an amply sufficient light on the Terriford Mystery.
After the slight interruption caused by Bent’s collapse and removal, Sir Almeric goes on reading Guy Cheale’s statement from the exact place where he broke off:
“With this money I went abroad, and I was still abroad when the exhumation of Mrs. Garlett took place, and when Mr. Garlett was committed for trial. While abroad—in Spain, as a matter of fact—I became exceedingly ill. I therefore made for home. My sister unwillingly consented to hire a room in the house in which she was then living, namely the house in which I am now.
“In a sense it has been a race between my life and that of Henry Garlett. I hope—I try to persuade myself—that I should, in any case, have made this confession even had I not been a dying man. Had I done so I should of course have put myself first out of the power of English law, which would not have been difficult, as I have always been a rolling stone, as the silly saying is.
“I hope it will not be considered egotistic on my part to put on record my high appreciation of my wife’s fine nature. She is a thoroughly good woman, and I hope that in time she will forgive me, and that some man—a thousand-fold better man than I can claim to be—will make her yet a happy woman.”
And what is happening meantime in the cold, rather dark cell, where so many unhappy prisoners have sat, waiting to be taken upstairs to hear the verdict?
By special leave of the judge, Jean Bower has been allowed to go below and join her lover, who will not now be a prisoner for long.
Together again at last, Harry Garlett and Jean Bower are sitting on a hard wooden bench, hand in hand. They are not alone. Two warders are watching them with stolid faces, and they are still feeling bewildered, oppressed, by this wonderful thing that has happened to them.
Harry Garlett is saying to himself, “Guy Cheale?Guy Cheale!Why, Emily liked him—she liked him.”
The door opens. “Mr. Garlett,” says a kind voice—the voice of the Governor of Grendon Gaol. “Will you and Miss Bower come upstairs to hear the verdict?”
They get up. Still hand in hand they mount the dark stairs. Then the prisoner—he is still a prisoner—raises Jean’s hand and kisses it.
They emerge into the crowded Court, all eyes upon them, and he goes on up into the dock for the last time, while she walks round to the witness bench, where Dr. Maclean has preceded her.
The jury are all in their places. They have evidently had no difficulty in arriving at their verdict.
Then the clerk of the Court calls out:
“How say you, gentlemen—guilty or not guilty?”
The foreman of the jury, looking very pale, answers in a firm voice:
“Not Guilty.”
THE END
THE END
THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESSilently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in spelling.Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES