CHAPTER XXIX

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“WILFUL MURDER.”

Sickened, helpless, Adrian Gordon had stood, indeed, for the last five minutes, as a man who comes on some awful bit of cruelty he cannot stop. Ravenel’s hunted face, her desperate eyes, her answers about seeing no one--that instinct told him was a lie--paralyzed him with sick astonishment.

They were baiting her like a helpless beast, justly enough if they were right. But every drop of his blood knew they were wrong. And she was not defending herself, was not telling all she knew; for he knew what that veiled look in her eyes meant. He had seen it before, when her thoughts were one thing and her words another.

“Think, Lady Levallion,” said the coroner earnestly, “for even if you saw no one in Lord Levallion’s dressing-room, some one might have been there! This rag of tweed was caught in the door, in the box of the door-latch.”

“I don’t know it,” was all she said. “I didn’t see any one.”

Something like a flash of lightning went through Adrian Gordon’s brain. She knew it well enough, since it was a suit he had worn that May that was dead and gone--not that very suit he was wearing. She had seen some one, and was lying because she knew the clothes they wore. He strode into the middle of the room, tall, strong, blackly angry.

“Be good enough to put me on the stand,” he cried roughly, for she should lie no more for so inconceivable a suspicion; to defend a man who had been miles away. “And look at my clothes, if you want to know where that rag came from!”

Lady Levallion caught her breath, stared at him with narrowed eyes, and, without a word, slipped like water to the floor. But he never even seemed to see, never stirred, as Houghton came quickly forward and took her to a sofa.

Gordon took the tweed scrap and held it against his coat.

“You see!” he said contemptuously. “Now, perhaps you will think I poisoned my cousin! Fortunately, I was miles away that night, and with half a dozen other men, who can tell you so.”

“Then I hardly see----” began the coroner.

“I will help you,” and every soul in the room saw the sudden likeness to the dead Levallion as he spoke. “I was in London, but my clothes weren’t. I had two suits exactly alike. I wore one of them down here the day I was taken ill. They cut the coat off me, and when I got better I sent up to town for the other coat, and my man sent me the whole suit. I put it on and forgot about the other, with the cut coat. And I’ve never seen it from that day to this. But”--and he tapped the rag of tweed--“that came out of it. And that I can swear, for I spilt something on it, and you can see the edge of the stain on this. It was some one, dressed in my clothes, who caught their knickerbockers in Levallion’s door, whether Lady Levallion saw them or not.” He laughed coldly, as he saw that in spite of what he said the jury’s eyes were glued to the knickerbockers he had on. “Some one stole those clothes, perhaps you can tell me who!” he cried. “Till you find out that, it might be as well to accuse no one.”

Houghton, bending over Lady Levallion in a distant corner, drew his breath. He understood something now of that terror that had been on her.

“I wish to God she’d told me, instead of lying!” he thought, as he saw her coming to. “They won’t believe one word he says now; for he can’t prove it.”

Nor could he. Not a servant in the house had known anything about his clothes. He had taken the second suit out of his box himself, and shoved the spoiled suit in there; from whence, on going back to town, he found it had vanished. The story was lame.

The coroner asked him a hundred questions that might have made any woman flinch to hear, since her name came in each one. But Ravenel, leaning sick and faint on Tommy’s shoulder, never winced. All that bygone story of the card Adrian Gordon told. His face was set like flint as he spoke.

“I don’t ask other men’s wives to meet me after dark,” he ended contemptuously. “If the letters from that woman that prove it are lost, there has been culpable negligence somewhere.”

When told Sir Thomas Annesley had seen him at night with a strange woman in black, he looked round the room quietly, as if to see which of the servants was like him in figure. But none was as tall, except Carrousel, who was stouter, and had a beard.

“Sir Thomas was mistaken,” he said slowly. “But I do not doubt he saw some one in my clothes. I was in my room. I know no woman with whom I would go out.”

“To whose knowledge were you in your room?”

“Levallion’s. He came and sat with me.”

“Lord Levallion’s!” said Aston slowly, and deadly disbelief in a man who could only call a dead witness crept into each juror’s soul.

Gordon shrugged his shoulder.

“Have you all gone mad?” he said coldly. “If I can’t prove I was in my room when Sir Thomas thought he saw me, I can prove I was in town last night. Just call my servant in, will you?”

And his man routed the jury, horse and foot. Captain Gordon had been in his own rooms, playing cards with some other gentlemen, with whom he had dined at the club. The man gave half a dozen names of men whose word would be taken on their oath, or not. Carrousel sat listening, with a curious scorn. It was all so different from his ideas of justice; so short-sighted, so biased. He even smiled a little at the foolish tale of those two suits of clothes, till Captain Gordon said quietly that his tailor’s book could settle that question.

His sternness, his contempt for stupidity and foregone conclusions had made the jury almost forget he had not been able to prove he was not the man who had drunk champagne in the wood. But, as he stepped down, the coroner recalled Lady Levallion; and she came, a living, breathing woman now, instead of one of stone. Relief was in her eyes, in her very hands, as they hung at her sides. But Houghton was looking like a man distraught at the coroner’s face.

“You swear that you had no part nor lot in the poisoning of your husband; that you saw no one in the dressing-room who could have put poison into that bottle of liqueur, or changed it?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I swear I had no hand in it. That I tried, even at the last minute, to save him.”

“Then,” said Doctor Aston slowly, “how did you come by these? A housemaid found them this morning behind your window-curtains, in your bedroom.”

He held out to her a bottle of Eau de Vie Magique, half-full, with a rough seam running down each side of the bottle; a tiny flask full of clear, faintly green liquid, that, as he uncorked it, smelled of bitter almonds in the hot room.

Lacy started forward.

“That’s my lord’s bottle!” he cried. “I thought the other was not.”

“Exactly,” said the coroner. “And this is distilled laurel-water and deadly poison. I analyzed it and gave some to a cat, which died in three minutes, with every symptom of prussic-acid poisoning. Gentlemen of the jury, we have heard all the evidence.”

“You shall hear me!” Lady Levallion’s face was on fire. “What do I know about those bottles?--nothing but that they were put in my room by some one. Find out who did that”--for, with that deadly conviction gone from her mind, she could speak out, since that disappearing shadow in Levallion’s dressing-room--a shadow that had been substance enough to bang the door in Mr. Jacobs’ face, and run--had not been Adrian Gordon--“and you may find out who murdered Levallion. It was not I, for I would have died for him.”

Every man of the jury turned to look at her, but not one of them spoke. To their stolid, conventional minds it seemed clear enough that she and Gordon had had reason to wish Levallion out of the way, that the poisoning was her work, an unhappy, probably rejected, girl, who had been deceived into a marriage with a callous, heartless rake; that the story of the second suit of clothes was a trumped-up fiction of her old lover’s.

To the childish tale of the woman who had been seen looking in the windows they paid no attention. Plenty of people would have been glad to gape at the quality. One by one they filed out into the next room, some pitying even while they judged; others, a wife who could kill her husband like a dog, needed nothing but justice!

Lord Chayter moved to Lady Levallion’s side.

“My dear child,” he said nervously, “no one believes you did it,” but he knew he lied.

She could not answer. She looked at the women who had eaten her bread, and not one of them met her eyes; looked at Tommy, at Houghton, at every soul but Adrian Gordon, who stood apart in futile anger against every one, himself included.

“If it had not been for my alibi they would have thought I did it,” he thought. “And now, because some one is too clever for them, they’re putting it on her. On Nel!” the horror of it made him quiver from head to foot. “And I swore myself clear like a fool! No wonder she won’t look at me. I’d have been hanged before I did it, if I’d known! I wish to God I’d got here at first,” and he turned his back flatly on a man who was bold enough to come forward and greet him as Lord Levallion.

“Tommy,” said Houghton sharply, “take your sister away!” He moved to Doctor Aston and laid a hand on his sleeve.

“Permit me to congratulate you on your methods of conducting an inquest,” he said, and his low voice was furious. “You are responsible for a damnably iniquitous thing if they commit her to trial. Where was your housemaid who gave that fool’s evidence, and when did she give it? Not here, for I was your first witness.”

“The second,” said Aston uncomfortably, knowing perfectly well that to begin an inquiry with evidence like that was simply making all subsequent testimony worthless, in nine cases out of ten. “The girl was in the room when you entered it. There she is now!”

Houghton followed his eyes, and saw a pale, fat-faced girl turning to follow her fellow servants from the room.

“Find the man who that anemic, hysterical fool is in love with before you go far on her evidence!” he observed contemptuously. “Supposing it true, which I don’t, you’d no right to begin the inquest with a biasing fact like that. An astute man like you should know that much.”

“I had a right to conduct my inquest as I pleased!” hotly. “If you must know, the girl was too terrified to speak before the other servants. She came to me in floods of tears. I believe it cost her honest pain to come at all.”

“Honest!” returned Houghton, as cold as the other was hot. “Thanks to you and her----” He turned away without finishing. Because he was convinced, without any reason except a dogged belief in Levallion’s wife, that she was innocent, gave him no hope of upsetting the opposite conviction of a pigheaded man like Aston.

He stood in silent, dogged endurance till, after an interminable time of waiting, the jury filed in again. But the end of the chairman’s speech made his heart turn over.

“Two attempts having been made to poison Lord Levallion, both of which were in the power of one person only, your jury are compelled to find a verdict of wilful murder against Lady Levallion.”

Houghton was poor; the wives and children of each juryman were his patients; but he would not have cared if they had been kings and queens.

“Permit me to congratulate you on a crassly incapable jury,” he said to the coroner. “And you, gentlemen, on a piece of hasty iniquity that I pray you may never forget till your dying day.”

But his face was gray with despair as he went out before they could answer him.

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