CHAPTER XL

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AT THE HINGES OF DEATH.

“Adrian and I! I and Adrian!”

Lady Levallion had reason to look like a dead woman as she stood in court, and looked once--but once--round the sea of hostile and curious faces. Not till her own lawyers had begged for an adjournment on account of the absence of one of their principal witnesses--and been refused--did she know that Tommy was missing, and the grip of despair caught her as she heard it. Not on her own account, for Tommy had little enough to say that would help her, but for sheer terror that the boy was hurt or killed somewhere in London.

When they had told her that she was not to stand alone in the dock, but Adrian as well, she had never said a word, had never glanced at him all the time in court, but now, when the prosecution had finished, she looked at his face and saw there what she knew. Unless there was a miracle from the skies they two would be found guilty.

“Adrian and I,” she kept repeating to herself, and her cold hands grew wet.

For the prosecution had swept away any and every chance for them.

The housekeeper, against her will, had been forced to confess what was quite true, that Lady Levallion had often come to the still-room and learned to make distilled waters. The coroner swore that such a water made from laurel-leaves had killed Lord Levallion, and every servant in the house at the time of the murder had proved they had nothing to do with it.

And slowly, with silky questions, the prosecution showed their reasons for arresting Captain Gordon as her accomplice. His supposed alibi in London on the night of the murder did not hold water. He had dined with a man at a restaurant, it was true, but between that and the card-party at his own rooms there had been three hours unaccounted for. And those three hours could easily have taken him to Levallion Castle and back. And the very absence of Sir Thomas Annesley was made into the certainty that the boy was staying away on purpose, lest he should have to repeat his evidence of seeing Captain Gordon in a wood in those very tweed clothes of which a piece had been found in Levallion’s room. No one could prove Captain Gordon had not been in the wood, and the theory of a stranger in his clothes was shown to be absurd. His tailor, beyond the fact that Captain Gordon owed him fifty pounds, could say nothing as to what he had made for him. The only entry in his books were uniforms and “tweeds, fifteen guineas.” Nothing else. Adrian remembered that he had never had a bill for the clothes, and on saying that fifteen guineas could not possibly represent one suit alone, was shown that it easily could.

As for any tale of a strange woman being seen hanging about Levallion Castle, it was openly laughed at. Lord Chayter, who swore to the face at the window, had to confess that Levallion had assured him he was mistaken. And in the absence of Sir Thomas Annesley there was no one to prove that woman in the wood had not been Lady Levallion herself. She had certainly left the drawing-room.

The terms on which the prisoners were left no room for doubt; indeed, they had openly discussed the death of Lord Levallion--one of them had made no bones about speaking of poison. And the winding up of the matter was this: In the wood at night the two had arranged matters. Captain Gordon had come down from London unknown to any one but Lady Levallion, had poisoned with laurel water given him by her a bottle of Eau de Vie Magique which he had brought with him--for such another bottle had been found in his London rooms--and had been frightened by Sir Thomas’ dog into going away without these two incriminating bottles found in Lady Levallion’s bedroom. The prosecution did not mean to say that the guilty pair had foreseen that night would give them their opportunity--merely that on being put into their hands they had made use of it. Probably Captain Gordon had come merely to see his cousin’s wife clandestinely, but that the two had been overcome by temptation could not be doubted.

No one but Lady Levallion could have placed those bottles in her bedroom, as no servant had been away from the others during the evening, and no one of the guests but Lady Gwendolen Brook--who had cleared herself by being able to relate the exact words of a quarrel between Lord and Lady Levallion in the lower hall, a quarrel of which Lacy also was cognizant.

Surely no intelligent juror could doubt which way the evidence tended. As for bringing in an innocent woman like Mrs. Murray, the prosecution had nothing but contempt for so far-fetched a story. If Sir Thomas Annesley had a piece of the cloak which Captain Gordon, on no evidence whatever, supposed to be Mrs. Murray’s, why was he not in court to produce it? It seemed that he had excellent reason to stay away.

And to all this Ravenel’s lawyer had nothing to reply, except that letter from the Pension Bocage and that mouse-eaten telegram. He spun them out as long as he could, and to no earthly purpose. Ravenel, in the dock, never looked up, but only prayed he would be done--make an end, and let her get back to prison out of the range of those countless eyes that lost not one line in her anguished face.

But Adrian Gordon--and the court wondered at his shameless bearing--stood staring at his own lawyer, who would not look at him.

There was a stir in the court, but Gordon’s face was turned from the door. Only Monsieur Carrousel, standing, an idle and pitiful spectator, who might be cross-questioned by the defense on a subject of which he knew nothing, suddenly changed color and moved loungingly to the door. But the packed room would not make way for him.

“My lord,” said Ravenel’s lawyer suddenly, as if something for which he had been waiting had happened, “we can now produce our missing witnesses!” And Adrian thought the man had gone suddenly crazy, for he called Pierre Carrousel.

And Carrousel, after one glance behind him, came with a light laugh. Yet the first question astonished him, for it was about Towers, the boot-boy.

“I took him to his place,” he said jauntily; “there I left him. The housekeeper heard from him the next morning. I know no more.”

“In that case,” returned Ravenel’s counsel, “you can step down. I will call Mary Price.”

Carrousel turned livid, tried to leave the room, and found his way unaccountably blocked by a strange policeman.

And all the while Adrian Gordon stared, as if the world had suddenly gone mad.

“Do you know any one in this court-room?” The question made the new witness, a woman in soiled finery, look at him contemptuously.

“I know him!” she cried, and she pointed, not at Adrian Gordon, as the crowd expected, but at Lord Levallion’s innocent cook. “That’s what I come for. My name is Mary Price, and I lived with him for three years, till he deserted me. My father kept a public house in Southsea, and I was barmaid. I ran away with this man, who said his name was Archer. He ill-treated me, took me to a London slum, and lived on what I earned.”

Carrousel interrupted coolly. He had had time to glance round the court, and saw no newcomer but Mary Price. The missing links in the defense were missing still.

“I never saw this woman in my life!” he cried. “She is a liar! My name never was Archer--never! She cannot know me.”

The woman gave him a deadly glance.

“I never said your name was Archer,” she said coolly; “only that you told me it was. And if I don’t know you, why--there’s some one else who will! Am I to go on, sir?” to the lawyer, who nodded.

“What his real name is, I don’t know,” she said, “but the people where we lived in London called him French Pete. He’d got tired of me, and I hated him, for he’d killed my dog that I’d brought from home, made me leave him for dead on a country road--we were tramping to London then. After he left me I saw nothing of him for a year; then I met him in the street dressed like a gentleman. He gave me money, and found out where I lived. I was pretty low, and I was afraid of him besides.

“Just a week ago he came to my room and brought a boy. Said he’d been cruelly treated in his place, and would I look after him. He’d pay me. And I did. But the boy seemed so queer that I was afraid to leave him alone--stupidlike and terrified. When I went out I’d put him in a loft there was over my room. The ceiling was all cracked and stained, and no one would see the trap. I put him there because from what he talked of in his sleep I knew Archer meant him no good. The boy knew something. And, for fear Archer would get in while I was out and do away with him and say it was me, I used to keep him hid away most of the time. He was up there when Garrety broke in my room that night and got the paper parcel.”

Not a soul knew what she meant. The prosecution had never heard of Policeman Garrety, any more than had Adrian Gordon, and the former was ill-advised enough to say so.

“That’s him there!” said Miss Price, “and perhaps it’d be better for him to speak before I go on.” Which was allowed, after some dispute, and at the policeman’s evidence Carrousel stood like a creature demented.

“Certainly I know that man,” he said simply, “I’ve known him for years as French Pete, the best cook in London when he chose to work. But I know him better without his beard,” and before Carrousel could move he had leaned backward to a brother policeman, who coolly tweaked the chestnut beard from the cook’s face.

A confused murmur ran round the court, and Adrian Gordon stood more confounded than Carrousel. Tommy had been right--it was that man, and no other, he had seen going into Hester Murray’s house.

“It was like that I see him lying stunned like in Bethnal Court near a week ago,” pursued the policeman calmly, and it was Allington’s turn to start, for he had never dreamed that Carrousel had ever left Levallion Castle since the night he knew of, “and there was a dog standing over him and a boy beside him. And when I emptied his pockets and held his false beard to his face the boy calls out Carrousel, and says if I went up-stairs I’d find another boy that he had detected, and a parcel he’d just left there. There was no boy, and I come down, and there wasn’t a soul in the court--French Pete, nor the boy, nor the dog! But I’d got the parcel right enough, and here it is.” He produced before the whole court a black satin cloak lined with chinchilla.

And cross-examination failed to get anything more out of him except that not until yesterday had he known that the cloak he had left at Scotland Yard was wanted in this trial.

“I ain’t no detective,” he said quietly, “I never leave my beat. And yesterday it took me to Bethnal Court, and there I found out. The girl will tell you that it was I kicked her door down for her no later than yesterday afternoon. I don’t know nothing of what went between.”

“I do,” said Molly Price, and she swallowed in her throat as at a memory that hurt her. “That night Garrety tells of I come into Bethnal Court on my way home. I live there. And as I was going into the house I fell over something. I saw ’twas Archer, or French Pete, or whatever he chose to call himself, and I thought he was dead. And then a dog--my dog that I thought he killed long ago,” tears blinding her--“jumped at me! He knew me after all those years, just as he’d known Archer. I know there’d been bad work by the look of Archer’s clothes, and I was afraid for my Jack if they found him. I looked at the boy that was lying on the ground in a faint, and I felt kindly toward him because Jack seemed to love him--and I said to myself he shouldn’t get into no trouble either. So I took them up to my room--after waiting awhile, because I heard some one up there, and if I’d known all I do now I’d have come out that second--and there they’ve been ever since. First Towers was like to die, but Sir Thomas worked over him night and day.”

“Towers!” Adrian Gordon’s face grew like that of a man who sees a hope dawning, very faint and far, but still hope. Ravenel never looked up. She knew nothing about the boot-boy.

“And then?” came a question.

“Well, it wasn’t till yesterday that we got Towers to talk, and then we’d never nearly got here at all,” grimly. “Sir Thomas had no money, but I’d sixpence, and when he was going out to wire to you that he’d found out Towers, why, we couldn’t get out! Archer’d put some dodge on my door so he could open it from outside, and it had got out of order. We couldn’t get the door open, and kicking was no good, for it opened inside. Nobody heard us yelling, for there was a row in the house down-stairs. And that really let us out, for Garrety was there professionally”--calmly--“and he heard me shouting ‘Help!’ and come and knocked the door in. So here we comes this morning. It wouldn’t have been any use to let strangers and police know we was there before, for Towers was frightened, and wouldn’t talk. But he isn’t now.” And Towers, white and weak from what had nearly wrecked his brain, stood up before the court.

Carrousel glared at him. But the eyes he had once obeyed dumbly had lost their power. The boot-boy quivered, but he spoke:

“I was the boot-boy,” he began timidly. “I did the cook’s errands. He told me----”

“He lies!” yelled Carrousel, shaking his fist. “I beat and beat him because he was a liar, and lazy.”

“You have not heard the lie yet,” said the judge coldly. “Another word, and you leave.”

“He can’t hurt me, can he?” cried Towers pitifully. “Sir Thomas said he couldn’t.”

“He can’t touch you. Go on,” said the lawyer kindly.

“He told me to pick some laurel-leaves, bunches of them. He said they were to decorate the table. But I heard some one in the still-room while I was cleaning boots, and I looked in. He was chopping them up and making something. He didn’t know there was a door in the boot-hole till I creaked it and he saw me. Then Sir Thomas’ dog was poisoned, and I said to the cook that perhaps he’d got at what he was making. For everybody knows laurel-water is poison.”

A thrill ran through the court as he described the preparation of that devilish decoction of prussic acid that every one thought Lady Levallion had made. But Towers did not see.

“He beat me,” he said simply, “and said if I said one word he’d say it was me. And two of the kitchen-maids had seen me with the laurel leaves, only they didn’t know they was poison. And I thought I might be wrong, for the dog got well. I’d forgotten it, when one night late the footman brought the dirty boots, and I sat down in the boot-hole to clean them. I saw the cook’s white jacket and apron in there behind the door, and I picked them up because I thought he’d beat me if I got blacking on them. I had them in my hand when the boot-hole door opened and in he come. He closed the door behind him quick and soft, and I heard a dog go by, and he stood there fetching his breath. He had on a tweed suit with a bit tore out of the trousers. He never said a word--just grabbed his jacket and apron that I was holding, and put them on. Then he puts his fingers on my eyes and forehead just as he’d done once before, the day he beat me about the laurel-water.

“‘You don’t know nothing,’ he says, and he slips just as quiet as nothing through that door into the still-room. I began to feel as if I hadn’t seen him, and yet I knew I had. But whenever anybody asked me anything I couldn’t seem to answer them. I just had to say, ‘I don’t know nothing.’ But after that I wouldn’t let him touch my face. I’d lie down and hide it, and let him beat me nearly to death. Once Sir Thomas caught him at it. He’d nearly got me that time. It sounds crazy,” apologetically, “but it seemed to me it was his hands on my face that made me say what he told me. I knew all the time it was him changed the bottles and put one in her ladyship’s room, for I see him put the laurel-water into a little blue bottle the day he made it, and ’twas that they found in her ladyship’s room. But I couldn’t tell--and then he took me to London because he said they was saying I killed his lordship, and he wanted to save me. He’d stopped beating me and got kind. But when he left me at a lady’s house he told me not to stay there, as it was there they’d look for me. I ran out the kitchen door, and that’s all I know”--wearily--“till I sort of woke up and saw Sir Thomas and a woman. I didn’t hardly know I was myself till I saw those trousers the cook give me.”

“What trousers?” said the prosecuting attorney, and the next second was sorry he had spoken.

“The torn ones he was dressed up in, that he’d stolen from Captain Gordon,” said the witness stolidly. “He told me Captain Gordon had give them to him, but I knew he took them, because I saw him coming out of his room with them, and I knowed he’d no call to be there. When there was that fuss about them he made me put them on in the posting-shed and wear them up to London. I’ve got ’em on now”--simply--“and I found these two letters down the leg,” producing the Umbrella’s useless, well-meant warnings.

“Why did you write from London that you were happy?” said the prosecution sharply.

“Me?” said Towers. “Lord, sir, I can’t write.”

In a dead silence the Umbrella’s letters were read out, the letters that proved it had been past and not present meetings for Lady Levallion and Adrian Gordon. And then, with damning proof against Carrousel and against the missing Hester Murray, it was shown that Towers’ supposed epistle and the letter from the pension in Boulogne were both in the same writing. And the telegram found in the mouse-hole fitted in with both--for if Adrian’s detectives had not found Hester Murray they had found that she had never been in Boulogne at all, and that the Pension Bocage was kept by Carrousel’s sister. Adrian’s letter of inquiry had been forwarded to him, and his answer posted in Boulogne. Sir Thomas Annesley swore positively that the clean-shaven Carrousel was the man he had seen in the wood and taken for Gordon. He had known him in Paddington Station before he followed him to Bethnal Court.

The counsel for the Crown observed somewhat hastily that, even supposing Lord Levallion’s chef had been guilty of his death, there was no possible reason for supposing Mrs. Murray to have been the woman seen with him in the wood by Sir Thomas Annesley. No one had identified her, or the cloak as her property. To bring in her name was not only guesswork, but malicious slander--and Tommy interrupted by saying he had seen Carrousel take the cloak from her house.

In the wrangle that ensued Houghton caught the duchess’ arm.

“Who’s that woman?” he whispered. “Isn’t it she?”

The duchess followed his eyes.

There stood Lady Annesley, emerged from her Harrogate retirement, perfectly dressed, and calm as a lake.

Ravenel looked up with a sick shudder and met the pale eyes of the woman without whom she would have been Adrian’s wife. What brought Sylvia here? Sylvia!

“My lord,” said Lady Annesley, addressing the judge, and scorning the jury, “I have just heard it said that Hester Murray is an innocent woman. I have brought something in her own handwriting which may throw a light on that, and first, if you will allow me, I will tell you how I came by it. I was not well; I saw no papers until last week, and then I read of the apprehension of my stepdaughter for the murder of her husband, and that other case in which Mrs. Murray claimed the title of Lady Levallion.

“I was not on good terms with my stepdaughter”--and the court, knowing why, believed her--“neither she nor any one else had written to me of the dreadful death of Lord Levallion. But, good terms or not”--and Sylvia’s cleverness had not left her--“I was certain it was impossible for her to have committed such a crime. It occurred to me that there was one woman who, with Levallion in his grave, could do what she would not have dared while he lived. I went from Harrogate to London; to the address given as Mrs. Murray’s in the papers, and she was not there. That made me certain she had reason to disappear, and I had reason”--slowly--“to guess where she had gone. She had a son, whom she chooses to call the present Lord Levallion, and I knew that the boy had spent most of his childhood with an old nurse in a wild part of Wales. I went there, on the chance. I waited till night; I looked in the window, and there in the old woman’s kitchen sat two women and a boy. I may tell you that I had a hold on Hester Murray. I went in and--did not use it! This gentleman will tell you what happened.”

She waved her hand to a man, and the court stared as they saw the ablest detective in England come forward.

“You see, my story does not stand alone.”

Mr. David’s story was short enough, perhaps, only Lady Annesley did not see that it was pitiful.

“I went to Wales,” he said quietly, “Lady Annesley’s story to me having confirmed something already told me by Captain Gordon. We found Mrs. Murray in a farmhouse. She had not been well for some time, her hurried flight, her trouble, and a chill had brought on pneumonia. When we reached her she was sitting by the fire, a dying woman, who should have been in her bed. Lady Annesley has told you she had a hold on her. I may tell you there was no need for it. Mrs. Murray knew she was dying, had written a letter already to clear herself from any share in the death of Lord Levallion that might accrue to her. In fact, she turned queen’s evidence before she died.”

There was not a sound as he read that strange, self-excusing letter, which told how she and no other had been living in the bungalow all summer. How Lord Levallion had shaken her off, and how she had formed the acquaintance in her evening hauntings of Levallion Castle, of a tall, dark man named Carrousel.

“He fell in love with me,” Hester Murray’s hand had written, in the terror of that death which neither judge nor jury had brought on her; “he used to come and see me, and bring me things--Levallion’s flowers, fruit--anything he could lay hands on. And I found out easily enough that he hated Levallion. One wet night I came home. I had been looking in the windows at Levallion Castle. I was watching Lady Levallion and Captain Gordon, and Levallion caught me. He was so angry I thought he would kill me. I was beside myself, distraught, and in my house Carrousel was waiting for me. I told him all my story--that I knew then. For it was not till Levallion was dead that I heard about John Davidge.

“And Carrousel said it was a very simple business to pay Levallion out in his own coin. All I need do, he said, was to go away to London and let Levallion know it. I could take a lodging near the station, and come up and down every night unobserved if I got off at the siding. It did not matter, he said, how circumspect Lady Levallion and Captain Gordon chose to be, if he and I could play their parts, and two nights after I met him in the wood dressed in Adrian Gordon’s clothes. When first he came up behind me I screamed, for I thought it was Gordon himself. He showed me a telegram from his sister in Boulogne; he was to describe me, and she would say I had been there all summer. He had champagne; we drank to the health of the new Lord Levallion, my son; to Captain Gordon and Lady Levallion, who would put the Levallion I hated out of the world; and I thought he meant it. Before God, I did not know what was in Carrousel’s head till it was done, and he came to me and told me that my cloak might bring me into it,” and perhaps when she wrote it she believed it.

In the first hush that followed Carrousel leaned forward.

“She says I killed him,” he said quietly. “Perhaps I did. But the woman who wrote that letter put it in my mind. She knew nothing, she says”--and the venom in his face was unspeakable--“she knew she told me that she was the true Lady Levallion, who had been wronged and betrayed; that if I avenged her she would marry me! She laughed when I said in the wood that night how I could avenge her. Laughed then--and afterward, when I told her it was done, and how--put her fingers in her ears, and said she had no hand in it. A man has just said she is dead, and it is well for her. For if she were alive I could tell you what would hang her as well as it will execute me.”

For a long moment no one spoke. Then a sharp question was asked Lady Annesley by the prosecution regarding the hold she had said she had over Mrs. Murray.

“A very simple one,” she answered, “but I can prove it. She claimed she was Countess of Levallion, because, as was perfectly true, she had been married to Lord Levallion after the death of John Davidge. What she did not know was that she was never Davidge’s wife at all. He married me, two years before he ever saw Mrs. Murray, and after his death I became the wife of Sir Thomas Annesley. Mrs. Murray’s only legal marriage was with Murray himself, who is now recovering from an operation in Guy’s Hospital. And here is my marriage-certificate, which proves what I say.”

A thunderbolt could not have made more sensation. Every one knew her name had been Davidge, but no one had connected her in any way with Hester Murray.

She stepped down as coolly as she had come up.

The judge, after a stupefied pause, addressed the jury, but they did not even leave their box.

Lady Levallion and Captain Gordon stood acquitted, without a stain, and Carrousel, Archer, or whatever his true name might be, was committed for trial on the counts of conspiracy and murder.

Through two long and awful days Ravenel had never winced, had stood, like a stone image that breathed and spoke, before a hundred hostile, curious faces. But now that she was free she covered her eyes with that ringless left hand that the whole court had marveled at.

It is no light thing to move away from the hinges of death and see another take your place there. But in all the room not another soul had pity for Carrousel.

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