CHAPTER XVI.--The Verdict of Fate.
Maitland did not dally long in the Levant after getting Barton"s letter.
He was soon in a position to receive, in turn, the congratulations which he offered to Margaret and Barton with unaffected delight.
Mrs. St. John Deloraine and he understood each other!
Maitland, for perhaps the first time in his life, was happy in a thoroughly human old-fashioned way.
Meanwhile the preparations for Cranley"s trial dragged on. Interest, as usual, was frittered away in examinations before the magistrates.
But at last the day of judgment shone into a court crowded as courts are when it is the agony of a gentleman that the public has to view.
When the prisoner, uttering his last and latest falsehood, proclaimed himself "Not Guilty," his voice was clear and strong enough, though the pallor of his face attested, not only the anxiety of his situation, but the ill-health which, during his confinement, had often made it doubtful whether he could survive to plead at the bar of any earthly judgment.
The Counsel for the Crown, opening the case, stated the theory of the prosecution, the case against Cranley. His argument is here offered in a condensed form:
First, Counsel explained the position of Johnson, or Shields, as the unconscious heir of great wealth, and set forth his early and late relations with the prisoner, a dishonored and unscrupulous outcast of society. The prisoner had been intimately acquainted with the circ.u.mstances of Johnson"s early life, with his history and his home. His plan, therefore, was to kill him, and then personate him. A celebrated case, which would be present to the minds of the jury, proved that a most plausible attempt at the personation of a long-missing man might be made by an uneducated impostor, who possessed none of the minute local and personal knowledge of the prisoner. Now, to personate Johnson, a sailor whose body was known to have been indelibly marked by the tattooing of various barbarous races, it was necessary that the prisoner should be similarly tattooed. It would be shown that, with unusual heartlessness, he had persuaded his victim to reproduce on his body the distinctive marks of Johnson, and then had destroyed him with fiendish ingenuity, in the very act of a.s.suming his personality. The very instrument, it might be said, which stamped Cranley as Johnson, slew Johnson himself, and the process which hallmarked the prisoner as the heir of vast wealth stigmatized him with the brand of Cain.
The personal marks which seemed to establish the claimant"s case demonstrated his guilt He was detected by the medical expert brought in to prove his ident.i.ty, and was recognized by that gentleman, Dr. Barton, who would be called, and who had once already exposed him in a grave social offence--cheating at cards. The same witness had made a _post-mortem_ examination of the body of Richard Johnson, and had then suspected the method by which he had been murdered.
The murder itself, according to the theory of the prosecution, was committed in the following manner: Cranley, disguised as a sailor (tbe disguise in which he was finally taken), had been in the habit of meeting Johnson, and being tattooed by him, in a private room of the _Hit or Miss_ tavern, in Chelsea. On the night of February 7th, he met him there for the last time. He left the tavern late, at nearly twelve o"clock, telling the landlady that "his friend," as he called Johnson, had fallen asleep upstairs. On closing the establishment, the landlady, Mrs. Gullick, found the room, an upper one, with dormer windows opening on the roof, empty. She concluded that Johnson--or Shields, as she called him--had wakened, and left the house by the back staircase, which led to a side-alley. This way Johnson, who knew the house well, often took, on leaving. On the following afternoon, however, the dead body of Johnson, with no obvious marks of violence on it, was found in a cart belonging to the vestry--a cart which, during the night, had remained near a shed on the piece of waste ground adjoining the _Hit or Miss_. A coroner"s jury had taken the view that Johnson, being intoxicated, had strayed into the piece of waste ground (it would be proved that the door in the palisade surrounding it was open on that night), had lain down in the cart, and died in his sleep of cold and exposure. But evidence derived from a later medical examination would establish the presumption, which would be confirmed by the testimony of an eye-witness, that death had been wilfully caused by Cranley, employing a poison which it would be shown he had in his possession--a poison which was not swallowed by the victim, but introduced by means of a puncture into the system. The dead man"s body had then been removed to a place where his decease would be accounted for as the result of cold and exhaustion. A witness would be put in the box who, by an extraordinary circ.u.mstance, had been enabled to see the crime committed by the prisoner, and the body carried away, though, at the moment, he did not understand the meaning of what he saw. As the circ.u.mstances by which this witness had been enabled to behold what was done at dead of night, in an attic room, locked and bolted, and not commanded from any neighboring house nor eminence, were exceedingly peculiar, testimony would be brought to show that the witness really had enjoyed the opportunity of observation which he claimed.
On the whole, then, as the prisoner had undeniably personated Johnson, and claimed Johnson"s property; as he undeniably had induced Johnson, unconsciously, to aid him in the task of personation; as the motive for the murder was plain and obvious; as Johnson, according to the medical evidence, had probably been murdered; and as an eye-witness professed to have seen, without comprehending, the operation by which death, according to the medical theory, was caused, the counsel for the prosecution believed that the jury could find no other verdict than that the prisoner had wilfully murdered Richard Johnson on the night of February 7th.
This opened the case for the Crown. It is unnecessary to recapitulate the evidence of all the witnesses who proved, step by step, the statements of the prosecution. First was demonstrated the ident.i.ty of Shields with Johnson. To do this cost enormous trouble and expense; but Johnson"s old crony, the man who drew the chart of his tattoo marks, was at length discovered in Paraguay, and, by his aid and the testimony he collected, the point was satisfactorily made out. It was, of course, most important in another respect, as establishing Margaret"s claims on the Linkheaton estate.
The discovery of the body of Johnson (or Shields) in the snow was proved by our old friends Bill and Tommy.
The prisoner was recognized by Mrs. Gullick as the sailor gentleman who had been with Johnson on the last night of his life. In spite of the difference of dress, and of appearance caused by the absence of beard--for Cranley was now clean shaved--Mrs. Gullick was positive as to his voice and as to his eyebrows, which were peculiarly black and mobile.
Barton, who was called next, and whose evidence excited the keenest interest, identified the prisoner as the man whom he had caused to be arrested in the office of Messrs. Martin and Wright, and whom he had known as Cranley. His medical evidence was given at considerable length, and need not be produced in full detail On examining the body of Richard Johnson, his attention had naturally been directed chiefly to the tattooings. He had for some years been deeply interested, as an ethnologist, in the tattooed marks of various races. He had found many curious examples on the body of the dead man. Most of the marks were obviously old; but in a very unusual place, generally left blank--namely, behind and under the right shoulder--he had discovered certain markings of an irregular character, clearly produced by an inexperienced hand, and perfectly fresh and recent. They had not healed, and were slightly discolored. They could not, from their position, possibly have been produced by the man himself. Microscopic examinations of these marks, in which the coloring matter was brown, not red or blue, as on the rest of the body, showed that this coloring matter was of a character familiar to the witness as a physiologist and scientific traveller. It was the _Woorali_, or arrow poison of the Macoushi Indians of Guiana.
Asked to explain the nature of this poison to the Court, the witness said that its "principle" (to use the term of the old medical writers) had not yet been disengaged by Science, nor had it ever been compounded by Europeans. He had seen it made by the Macoushi Indians, who combined the juice of the Woorali vine with that of certain bulbous plants, with certain insects, and with the poison-fangs of two serpents, boiling the whole amidst magical ceremonies, and finally straining off a thick brown paste, which, when perfectly dry, was used to venom the points of their arrows. The poison might be swallowed by a healthy man without fatal results. But if introduced into the system through a wound, the poison would act almost instantaneously, and defy a.n.a.lysis. Its effect was to sever, as it were, the connection between the nerves and the muscles, and the muscles used in respiration being thus gradually paralyzed, death followed within a brief time, proportionate to the size of the victim, man or animal, and the strength of the dose.
Traces of this poison, then, the witness had found in the fresh tattoo marks on Johnson"s body.
The witness now produced the sharp wooden needle, the stem of the leaf of the coucourite palm, which he had found among Johnson"s tattooing materials, in the upper chamber of the _Hit or Miss_. This needle had been, he said, the tip of one of the arrows used for their blowpipes, by the Macoushi of Guiana.
Barton also produced the Oriental silver cigarette-case, the instrument of his cheating at baccarat, which Cranley had left in the club on the evening of his detection. He showed that the case had contained a small crystal receptacle, intended to hold opium. This crystal had been broken by Cranley when he dashed down the case, in the office of Martin and Wright. But crumbs of the poison--"Woorali," or "Ourali"--perfectly dry, remained in this receptacle. It was thus clear that Cranley, himself a great traveller, was possessed of the rare and perilous drug.
The medical evidence having been heard, and confirmed in its general bearing by various experts, and Barton having stood the test of a severe cross-examination, William Winter was called.
There was a flutter in the Court, as a pale and partly paralyzed man was borne in on a kind of litter, and accommodated in the witness-box.
"Where were you," asked the counsel for the prosecution, when the officer had sworn the witness, "at eleven o"clock on the night of February 7th?"
"I was on the roof of the _Hit or Miss_ tavern."
"On which part of the roof?"
"On the ledge below the dormer window at the back part of the house, facing the waste ground behind the plank fence."
"Will you tell the Court what you saw while you were in that position?"
Winter"s face was flushed with excitement; but his voice, though thin, was clear as he said:
"There was a light streaming through the dormer window beside which I was lying, and I looked in."
"What did you see?"
"I saw a small room, with a large fire, a table, on which were bottles and gla.s.ses, and two men, one seated, the other standing."
"Would you recognize either man if you saw him?"
"I recognize the man who was seated, in the prisoner at the bar; but at that time he wore a beard."
"Tell the Court what happened."
"The men were facing me. One of them--the prisoner--was naked to the waist. His breast was tattooed. The other--the man who stood up--was touching him with a needle, which he applied, again and again, to a saucer on the table."
"Could you hear what they said?"
"I could; for the catch of the lattice window had not caught, and there was a slight c.h.i.n.k open."
"You listened?"
"I could not help it; the scene was so strange. I heard the man with the needle give a sigh of relief, and say, "There, it"s finished, and a pretty job too, though I say it." The other said, "You have done it beautifully, d.i.c.ky; it"s a most interesting art. Now, just out of curiosity, let _me_ tattoo _you_ a bit." The other man laughed, and took off his coat and shirt while the other dressed. "There"s scarce an inch of me plain," he said, "but you can try your hand here," pointing to the lower part of his shoulder."
"What happened then?"
"They were both standing up now. I saw the prisoner take out something sharp; his face was deadly pale, but the other could not see that. He began touching him with the sharp object, and kept chaffing all the time. This lasted, I should think, about five minutes, when the face of the man who was being tattooed grew very red. Then he swayed a little, backward and forward, then he stretched out his hands like a blind man, and said, in a strange, thick voice, as if he was paralyzed, "I"m very cold; I can"t shiver!" Then he fell down heavily, and his body made one or two convulsive movements. That was all."
"What did the prisoner do?"
"He looked like death. He seized the bottle on the table, poured out half a tumbler full of the stuff in it, drank it off, and then fell into a chair, and laid his face between his hands. He appeared ill, or alarmed, but the color came back into his cheek after a third or fourth gla.s.s. Then I saw him go to the sleeping man and bend over him, listening apparently to his breathing. Then he shook him several times, as if trying to arouse him. But the man lay like a log. Finally, about half-an-hour after what I have described, he opened the door and went out. He soon returned, took up the sleeping man in his arms--his weight seemed lighter than you would expect--and carried him out. From the roof I saw him push the door in the palisade leading into the waste land, a door which I myself had left open an hour before. It was not light enough to see what he did there; but he soon returned alone and walked away."
Such was the sum of Winter"s evidence, which, if accepted, entirely corroborated Barton"s theory of the manner of the murder.
In cross-examination, Winter was asked the very natural question:
"How did you come to find yourself on the roof of the _Hit or Miss_ late at night?"
Winter nearly rose from his litter, his worn faced flushed, his eye sparkling.
"Sir, I flew!"
There was a murmur and t.i.tter through the court, which was, of course, instantly suppressed.