XXXIII. UNEXPECTED TESTIMONY
Pol.
What do you read, my lord?
Ham.
Words, words, words.
—Hamlet.
MRS. BELDEN paused, lost in the sombre shadow which these words were calculated to evoke, and a short silence fell upon the room. It was broken by my asking for some account of the occurrence she had just mentioned, it being considered a mystery how Hannah could have found entrance into her house without the knowledge of the neighbors.
“Well,” said she, “it was a chilly night, and I had gone to bed early (I was sleeping then in the room off this) when, at about a quarter to one—the last train goes through R– at 12.50—there came a low knock on the window-pane at the head of my bed. Thinking that some of the neighbors were sick, I hurriedly rose on my elbow and asked who was there. The answer came in low, muffled tones, ‘Hannah, Miss Leavenworth’s girl! Please let me in at the kitchen door.’ Startled at hearing the well-known voice, and fearing I knew not what, I caught up a lamp and hurried round to the door. ‘Is any one with you?’ I asked. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Then come in.’ But no sooner had she done so than my strength failed me, and I had to sit down, for I saw she looked very pale and strange, was without baggage, and altogether had the appearance of some wandering spirit. ‘Hannah!’ I gasped, ‘what is it? what has happened? what brings you here in this condition and at this time of night?’ ‘Miss Leavenworth has sent me,’ she replied, in the low, monotonous tone of one repeating a lesson by rote. ‘She told me to come here; said you would keep me. I am not to go out of the house, and no one is to know I am here.’ ‘But why?’ I asked, trembling with a thousand undefined fears; ‘what has occurred?’ ‘I dare not say,’ she whispered; ‘I am forbid; I am just to stay here, and keep quiet.’ ‘But,’ I began, helping her to take off her shawl,—the dingy blanket advertised for in the papers—‘you must tell me. She surely did not forbid you to tell
me?
’ ‘Yes she did; every one,’ the girl replied, growing white in her persistence, ‘and I never break my word; fire couldn’t draw it out of me.’ She looked so determined, so utterly unlike herself, as I remembered her in the meek, unobtrusive days of our old acquaintance, that I could do nothing but stare at her. ‘You will keep me,’ she said; ‘you will not turn me away?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I will not turn you away.’ ‘And tell no one?’ she went on. ‘And tell no one,’ I repeated.
“This seemed to relieve her. Thanking me, she quietly followed me up-stairs. I put her into the room in which you found her, because it was the most secret one in the house; and there she has remained ever since, satisfied and contented, as far as I could see, till this very same horrible day.”
“And is that all?” I asked. “Did you have no explanation with her afterwards? Did she never give you any information in regard to the transactions which led to her flight?”
“No, sir. She kept a most persistent silence. Neither then nor when, upon the next day, I confronted her with the papers in my hand, and the awful question upon my lips as to whether her flight had been occasioned by the murder which had taken place in Mr. Leavenworth’s household, did she do more than acknowledge she had run away on this account. Some one or something had sealed her lips, and, as she said, ‘Fire and torture should never make her speak.’”
Another short pause followed this; then, with my mind still hovering about the one point of intensest interest to me, I said:
“This story, then, this account which you have just given me of Mary Leavenworth’s secret marriage and the great strait it put her into—a strait from which nothing but her uncle’s death could relieve her—together with this acknowledgment of Hannah’s that she had left home and taken refuge here on the insistence of Mary Leavenworth, is the groundwork you have for the suspicions you have mentioned?”
“Yes, sir; that and the proof of her interest in the matter which is given by the letter I received from her yesterday, and which you say you have now in your possession.”
Oh, that letter!
“I know,” Mrs. Belden went on in a broken voice, “that it is wrong, in a serious case like this, to draw hasty conclusions; but, oh, sir, how can I help it, knowing what I do?”
I did not answer; I was revolving in my mind the old question: was it possible, in face of all these later developments, still to believe Mary Leavenworth’s own hand guiltless of her uncle’s blood?
“It is dreadful to come to such conclusions,” proceeded Mrs. Belden, “and nothing but her own words written in her own hand would ever have driven me to them, but–”
“Pardon me,” I interrupted; “but you said in the beginning of this interview that you did not believe Mary herself had any direct hand in her uncle’s murder. Are you ready to repeat that assertion?”
“Yes, yes, indeed. Whatever I may think of her influence in inducing it, I never could imagine her as having anything to do with its actual performance. Oh, no! oh, no! whatever was done on that dreadful night, Mary Leavenworth never put hand to pistol or ball, or even stood by while they were used; that you may be sure of. Only the man who loved her, longed for her, and felt the impossibility of obtaining her by any other means, could have found nerve for an act so horrible.”
“Then you think–”
“Mr. Clavering is the man? I do: and oh, sir, when you consider that he is her husband, is it not dreadful enough?”
“It is, indeed,” said I, rising to conceal how much I was affected by this conclusion of hers.
Something in my tone or appearance seemed to startle her. “I hope and trust I have not been indiscreet,” she cried, eying me with something like an incipient distrust. “With this dead girl lying in my house, I ought to be very careful, I know, but–”
“You have said nothing,” was my earnest assurance as I edged towards the door in my anxiety to escape, if but for a moment, from an atmosphere that was stifling me. “No one can blame you for anything you have either said or done to-day. But”—and here I paused and walked hurriedly back,—“I wish to ask one question more. Have you any reason, beyond that of natural repugnance to believing a young and beautiful woman guilty of a great crime, for saying what you have of Henry Clavering, a gentleman who has hitherto been mentioned by you with respect?”
“No,” she whispered, with a touch of her old agitation.
I felt the reason insufficient, and turned away with something of the same sense of suffocation with which I had heard that the missing key had been found in Eleanore Leavenworth’s possession. “You must excuse me,” I said; “I want to be a moment by myself, in order to ponder over the facts which I have just heard; I will soon return “; and without further ceremony, hurried from the room.
By some indefinable impulse, I went immediately up-stairs, and took my stand at the western window of the large room directly over Mrs. Belden. The blinds were closed; the room was shrouded in funereal gloom, but its sombreness and horror were for the moment unfelt; I was engaged in a fearful debate with myself. Was Mary Leavenworth the principal, or merely the accessory, in this crime? Did the determined prejudice of Mr. Gryce, the convictions of Eleanore, the circumstantial evidence even of such facts as had come to our knowledge, preclude the possibility that Mrs. Belden’s conclusions were correct? That all the detectives interested in the affair would regard the question as settled, I did not doubt; but need it be? Was it utterly impossible to find evidence yet that Henry Clavering was, after all, the assassin of Mr. Leavenworth?
Filled with the thought, I looked across the room to the closet where lay the body of the girl who, according to all probability, had known the truth of the matter, and a great longing seized me. Oh, why could not the dead be made to speak? Why should she lie there so silent, so pulseless, so inert, when a word from her were enough to decide the awful question? Was there no power to compel those pallid lips to move?
Carried away by the fervor of the moment, I made my way to her side. Ah, God, how still! With what a mockery the closed lips and lids confronted my demanding gaze! A stone could not have been more unresponsive.
With a feeling that was almost like anger, I stood there, when—what was it I saw protruding from beneath her shoulders where they crushed against the bed? An envelope? a letter? Yes.
Dizzy with the sudden surprise, overcome with the wild hopes this discovery awakened, I stooped in great agitation and drew the letter out. It was sealed but not directed. Breaking it hastily open, I took a glance at its contents. Good heavens! it was the work of the girl herself!—its very appearance was enough to make that evident! Feeling as if a miracle had happened, I hastened with it into the other room, and set myself to decipher the awkward scrawl.
This is what I saw, rudely printed in lead pencil on the inside of a sheet of common writing-paper:
“I am a wicked girl. I have knone things all the time which I had ought to have told but I didn’t dare to he said he would kill me if I did I mene the tall splendud looking gentulman with the black mustash who I met coming out of Mister Levenworth’s room with a key in his hand the night Mr. Levenworth was murdered. He was so scared he gave me money and made me go away and come here and keep every thing secret but I can’t do so no longer. I seem to see Miss Elenor all the time crying and asking me if I want her sent to prisun. God knows I’d rathur die. And this is the truth and my last words and I pray every body’s forgivness and hope nobody will blame me and that they wont bother Miss Elenor any more but go and look after the handsome gentulman with the black mushtash.”
BOOK IV. THE PROBLEM SOLVED
XXXIV. MR. GRYCE RESUMES CONTROL
“It out-herods Herod.”
—Hamlet.
“A thing devised by the enemy.”
—Richard III
A HALF-HOUR had passed. The train upon which I had every reason to expect Mr. Gryce had arrived, and I stood in the doorway awaiting with indescribable agitation the slow and labored approach of the motley group of men and women whom I had observed leave the depot at the departure of the cars. Would he be among them? Was the telegram of a nature peremptory enough to make his presence here, sick as he was, an absolute certainty? The written confession of Hannah throbbing against my heart, a heart all elation now, as but a short half-hour before it had been all doubt and struggle, seemed to rustle distrust, and the prospect of a long afternoon spent in impatience was rising before me, when a portion of the advancing crowd turned off into a side street, and I saw the form of Mr. Gryce hobbling, not on two sticks, but very painfully on one, coming slowly down the street.
His face, as he approached, was a study.
“Well, well, well,” he exclaimed, as we met at the gate; “this is a pretty how-dye-do, I must say. Hannah dead, eh? and everything turned topsy-turvy! Humph, and what do you think of Mary Leavenworth now?”
It would therefore seem natural, in the conversation which followed his introduction into the house and installment in Mrs. Belden’s parlor, that I should begin my narration by showing him Hannah’s confession; but it was not so. Whether it was that I felt anxious to have him go through the same alternations of hope and fear it had been my lot to experience since I came to R–; or whether, in the depravity of human nature, there lingered within me sufficient resentment for the persistent disregard he had always paid to my suspicions of Henry Clavering to make it a matter of moment to me to spring this knowledge upon him just at the instant his own convictions seemed to have reached the point of absolute certainty, I cannot say. Enough that it was not till I had given him a full account of every other matter connected with my stay in this house; not till I saw his eye beaming, and his lip quivering with the excitement incident upon the perusal of the letter from Mary, found in Mrs. Belden’s pocket; not, indeed, until I became assured from such expressions as “Tremendous! The deepest game of the season! Nothing like it since the Lafarge affair!” that in another moment he would be uttering some theory or belief that once heard would forever stand like a barrier between us, did I allow myself to hand him the letter I had taken from under the dead body of Hannah.
I shall never forget his expression as he received it; “Good heavens!” cried he, “what’s this?”
“A dying confession of the girl Hannah. I found it lying in her bed when I went up, a half-hour ago, to take a second look at her.”
Opening it, he glanced over it with an incredulous air that speedily, however, turned to one of the utmost astonishment, as he hastily perused it, and then stood turning it over and over in his hand, examining it.
“A remarkable piece of evidence,” I observed, not without a certain feeling of triumph; “quite changes the aspect of affairs!”
“Think so?” he sharply retorted; then, whilst I stood staring at him in amazement, his manner was so different from what I expected, looked up and said: “You tell me that you found this in her bed. Whereabouts in her bed?”
“Under the body of the girl herself,” I returned. “I saw one corner of it protruding from beneath her shoulders, and drew it out.”
He came and stood before me. “Was it folded or open, when you first looked at it?”
“Folded; fastened up in this envelope,” showing it to him.
He took it, looked at it for a moment, and went on with his questions.
“This envelope has a very crumpled appearance, as well as the letter itself. Were they so when you found them?”
“Yes, not only so, but doubled up as you see.”
“Doubled up? You are sure of that? Folded, sealed, and then doubled up as if her body had rolled across it while alive?”
“Yes.”
“No trickery about it? No look as if the thing had been insinuated there since her death?”
“Not at all. I should rather say that to every appearance she held it in her hand when she lay down, but turning over, dropped it and then laid upon it.”
Mr. Gryce’s eyes, which had been very bright, ominously clouded; evidently he had been disappointed in my answers. Laying the letter down, he stood musing, but suddenly lifted it again, scrutinized the edges of the paper on which it was written, and, darting me a quick look, vanished with it into the shade of the window curtain. His manner was so peculiar, I involuntarily rose to follow; but he waved me back, saying:
“Amuse yourself with that box on the table, which you had such an ado over; see if it contains all we have a right to expect to find in it. I want to be by myself for a moment.”
Subduing my astonishment, I proceeded to comply with his request, but scarcely had I lifted the lid of the box before me when he came hurrying back, flung the letter down on the table with an air of the greatest excitement, and cried:
“Did I say there had never been anything like it since the Lafarge affair? I tell you there has never been anything like it in any affair. It is the rummest case on record! Mr. Raymond,” and his eyes, in his excitement, actually met mine for the first time in my experience of him, “prepare yourself for a disappointment. This pretended confession of Hannah’s is a fraud!”
“A fraud?”
“Yes; fraud, forgery, what you will; the girl never wrote it.”
Amazed, outraged almost, I bounded from my chair. “How do you know that?” I cried.
Bending forward, he put the letter into my hand. “Look at it,” said he; “examine it closely. Now tell me what is the first thing you notice in regard to it?”
“Why, the first thing that strikes me, is that the words are printed, instead of written; something which might be expected from this girl, according to all accounts.”
“Well?”
“That they are printed on the inside of a sheet of ordinary paper–”
“Ordinary paper?”
“Yes.”
“That is, a sheet of commercial note of the ordinary quality.”
“Of course.”
“But is it?”
“Why, yes; I should say so.”
“Look at the lines.”
“What of them? Oh, I see, they run up close to the top of the page; evidently the scissors have been used here.”
“In short, it is a large sheet, trimmed down to the size of commercial note?”
“Yes.”
“And is that all you see?”
“All but the words.”
“Don’t you perceive what has been lost by means of this trimming down?”
“No, unless you mean the manufacturer’s stamp in the corner.” Mr. Gryce’s glance took meaning. “But I don’t see why the loss of that should be deemed a matter of any importance.”
“Don’t you? Not when you consider that by it we seem to be deprived of all opportunity of tracing this sheet back to the quire of paper from which it was taken?”
“No.”
“Humph! then you are more of an amateur than I thought you. Don’t you see that, as Hannah could have had no motive for concealing where the paper came from on which she wrote her dying words, this sheet must have been prepared by some one else?”
“No,” said I; “I cannot say that I see all that.”
“Can’t! Well then, answer me this. Why should Hannah, a girl about to commit suicide, care whether any clue was furnished, in her confession, to the actual desk, drawer, or quire of paper from which the sheet was taken, on which she wrote it?”
“She wouldn’t.”
“Yet especial pains have been taken to destroy that clue.”
“But–”
“Then there is another thing. Read the confession itself, Mr. Raymond, and tell me what you gather from it.”
“Why,” said I, after complying, “that the girl, worn out with constant apprehension, has made up her mind to do away with herself, and that Henry Clavering–”
“Henry Clavering?”
The interrogation was put with so much meaning, I looked up. “Yes,” said I.
“Ah, I didn’t know that Mr. Clavering’s name was mentioned there; excuse me.”
“His name is not mentioned, but a description is given so strikingly in accordance–”
Here Mr. Gryce interrupted me. “Does it not seem a little surprising to you that a girl like Hannah should have stopped to describe a man she knew by name?”
I started; it was unnatural surely.
“You believe Mrs. Belden’s story, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Consider her accurate in her relation of what took place here a year ago?”
“I do.”
“Must believe, then, that Hannah, the go-between, was acquainted with Mr. Clavering and with his name?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Then why didn’t she use it? If her intention was, as she here professes, to save Eleanore Leavenworth from the false imputation which had fallen upon her, she would naturally take the most direct method of doing it. This description of a man whose identity she could have at once put beyond a doubt by the mention of his name is the work, not of a poor, ignorant girl, but of some person who, in attempting to play the
role
of one, has signally failed. But that is not all. Mrs. Belden, according to you, maintains that Hannah told her, upon entering the house, that Mary Leavenworth sent her here. But in this document, she declares it to have been the work of Black Mustache.”
“I know; but could they not have both been parties to the transaction?”
“Yes,” said he; “yet it is always a suspicious circumstance, when there is a discrepancy between the written and spoken declaration of a person. But why do we stand here fooling, when a few words from this Mrs. Belden, you talk so much about, will probably settle the whole matter!”
“A few words from Mrs. Belden,” I repeated. “I have had thousands from her to-day, and find the matter no nearer settled than in the beginning.”
“
You
have had,” said he, “but I have not. Fetch her in, Mr. Raymond.”
I rose. “One thing,” said I, “before I go. What if Hannah had found the sheet of paper, trimmed just as it is, and used it without any thought of the suspicions it would occasion!”
“Ah!” said he, “that is just what we are going to find out.”
Mrs. Belden was in a flutter of impatience when I entered the sitting-room. When did I think the coroner would come? and what did I imagine this detective would do for us? It was dreadful waiting there alone for something, she knew not what.
I calmed her as well as I could, telling her the detective had not yet informed me what he could do, having some questions to ask her first. Would she come in to see him? She rose with alacrity. Anything was better than suspense.
Mr. Gryce, who in the short interim of my absence had altered his mood from the severe to the beneficent, received Mrs. Belden with just that show of respectful courtesy likely to impress a woman as dependent as she upon the good opinion of others.
“Ah! and this is the lady in whose house this very disagreeable event has occurred,” he exclaimed, partly rising in his enthusiasm to greet her. “May I request you to sit,” he asked; “if a stranger may be allowed to take the liberty of inviting a lady to sit in her own house.”
“It does not seem like my own house any longer,” said she, but in a sad, rather than an aggressive tone; so much had his genial way imposed upon her. “Little better than a prisoner here, go and come, keep silence or speak, just as I am bidden; and all because an unhappy creature, whom I took in for the most unselfish of motives, has chanced to die in my house!”
“Just so!” exclaimed Mr. Gryce; “it is very unjust. But perhaps we can right matters. I have every reason to believe we can. This sudden death ought to be easily explained. You say you had no poison in the house?”
“No, sir.”
“And that the girl never went out?”
“Never, sir.”
“And that no one has ever been here to see her?”
“No one, sir.”
“So that she could not have procured any such thing if she had wished?”
“No, sir.”
“Unless,” he added suavely, “she had it with her when she came here?”
“That couldn’t have been, sir. She brought no baggage; and as for her pocket, I know everything there was in it, for I looked.”
“And what did you find there?”
“Some money in bills, more than you would have expected such a girl to have, some loose pennies, and a common handkerchief.”
“Well, then, it is proved the girl didn’t die of poison, there being none in the house.”
He said this in so convinced a tone she was deceived.
“That is just what I have been telling Mr. Raymond,” giving me a triumphant look.
“Must have been heart disease,” he went on, “You say she was well yesterday?”
“Yes, sir; or seemed so.”
“Though not cheerful?”
“I did not say that; she was, sir, very.”
“What, ma’am, this girl?” giving me a look. “I don’t understand that. I should think her anxiety about those she had left behind her in the city would have been enough to keep her from being very cheerful.”
“So you would,” returned Mrs. Belden; “but it wasn’t so. On the contrary, she never seemed to worry about them at all.”
“What! not about Miss Eleanore, who, according to the papers, stands in so cruel a position before the world? But perhaps she didn’t know anything about that—Miss Leavenworth’s position, I mean?”
“Yes, she did, for I told her. I was so astonished I could not keep it to myself. You see, I had always considered Eleanore as one above reproach, and it so shocked me to see her name mentioned in the newspaper in such a connection, that I went to Hannah and read the article aloud, and watched her face to see how she took it.”
“And how did she?”
“I can’t say. She looked as if she didn’t understand; asked me why I read such things to her, and told me she didn’t want to hear any more; that I had promised not to trouble her about this murder, and that if I continued to do so she wouldn’t listen.”
“Humph! and what else?”
“Nothing else. She put her hand over her ears and frowned in such a sullen way I left the room.”
“That was when?”
“About three weeks ago.”
“She has, however, mentioned the subject since?”
“No, sir; not once.”
“What! not asked what they were going to do with her mistress?”
“No, sir.”
“She has shown, however, that something was preying on her mind—fear, remorse, or anxiety?”
“No, sir; on the contrary, she has oftener appeared like one secretly elated.”
“But,” exclaimed Mr. Gryce, with another sidelong look at me, “that was very strange and unnatural. I cannot account for it.”
“Nor I, sir. I used to try to explain it by thinking her sensibilities had been blunted, or that she was too ignorant to comprehend the seriousness of what had happened; but as I learned to know her better, I gradually changed my mind. There was too much method in her gayety for that. I could not help seeing she had some future before her for which she was preparing herself. As, for instance, she asked me one day if I thought she could learn to play on the piano. And I finally came to the conclusion she had been promised money if she kept the secret intrusted to her, and was so pleased with the prospect that she forgot the dreadful past, and all connected with it. At all events, that was the only explanation I could find for her general industry and desire to improve herself, or for the complacent smiles I detected now and then stealing over her face when she didn’t know I was looking.”
Not such a smile as crept over the countenance of Mr. Gryce at that moment, I warrant.
“It was all this,” continued Mrs. Belden, “which made her death such a shock to me. I couldn’t believe that so cheerful and healthy a creature could die like that, all in one night, without anybody knowing anything about it. But–”
“Wait one moment,” Mr. Gryce here broke in. “You speak of her endeavors to improve herself. What do you mean by that?”
“Her desire to learn things she didn’t know; as, for instance, to write and read writing. She could only clumsily print when she came here.”
I thought Mr. Gryce would take a piece out of my arm, he griped it so.
“When she came here! Do you mean to say that since she has been with you she has learned to write?”
“Yes, sir; I used to set her copies and–”
“Where are these copies?” broke in Mr. Gryce, subduing his voice to its most professional tone. “And where are her attempts at writing? I’d like to see some of them. Can’t you get them for us?”
“I don’t know, sir. I always made it a point to destroy them as soon as they had answered their purpose. I didn’t like to have such things lying around. But I will go see.”
“Do,” said he; “and I will go with you. I want to take a look at things upstairs, any way.” And, heedless of his rheumatic feet, he rose and prepared to accompany her.
“This is getting very intense,” I whispered, as he passed me.
The smile he gave me in reply would have made the fortune of a Thespian Mephistopheles.
Of the ten minutes of suspense which I endured in their absence, I say nothing. At the end of that time they returned with their hands full of paper boxes, which they flung down on the table.
“The writing-paper of the household,” observed Mr. Gryce; “every scrap and half-sheet which could be found. But, before you examine it, look at this.” And he held out a sheet of bluish foolscap, on which were written some dozen imitations of that time-worn copy, “BE GOOD AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY”; with an occasional “
Beauty soon fades,”
and “
Evil communications corrupt good manners.”
“What do you think of that?”
“Very neat and very legible.”
“That is Hannah’s latest. The only specimens of her writing to be found. Not much like some scrawls we have seen, eh?”
“No.”
“Mrs. Belden says this girl has known how to write as good as this for more than a week. Took great pride in it, and was continually talking about how smart she was.” Leaning over, he whispered in my ear, “This thing you have in your hand must have been scrawled some time ago, if she did it.” Then aloud: “But let us look at the paper she used to write on.”
Dashing open the covers of the boxes on the table, he took out the loose sheets lying inside, and scattered them out before me. One glance showed they were all of an utterly different quality from that used in the confession. “This is all the paper in the house,” said he.
“Are you sure of that?” I asked, looking at Mrs. Belden, who stood in a sort of maze before us. “Wasn’t there one stray sheet lying around somewhere, foolscap or something like that, which she might have got hold of and used without your knowing it?”
“No, sir; I don’t think so. I had only these kinds; besides, Hannah had a whole pile of paper like this in her room, and wouldn’t have been apt to go hunting round after any stray sheets.”
“But you don’t know what a girl like that might do. Look at this one,” said I, showing her the blank side of the confession. “Couldn’t a sheet like this have come from somewhere about the house? Examine it well; the matter is important.”
“I have, and I say, no, I never had a sheet of paper like that in my house.”
Mr. Gryce advanced and took the confession from my hand. As he did so, he whispered: “What do you think now? Many chances that Hannah got up this precious document?”
I shook my head, convinced at last; but in another moment turned to him and whispered back: “But, if Hannah didn’t write it, who did? And how came it to be found where it was?”
“That,” said he, “is just what is left for us to learn.” And, beginning again, he put question after question concerning the girl’s life in the house, receiving answers which only tended to show that she could not have brought the confession with her, much less received it from a secret messenger. Unless we doubted Mrs. Belden’s word, the mystery seemed impenetrable, and I was beginning to despair of success, when Mr. Gryce, with an askance look at me, leaned towards Mrs. Belden and said:
“You received a letter from