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 superst.i.tious. 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 superst.i.tion 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 superst.i.tion, 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.surance 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 a.s.sistance 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 pa.s.sed through the a.s.semblage, 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