IN the gray light of the new morning I closed the Report of my husband's Trial for the Murder of his first Wife.
No sense of fatigue overpowered me. I had no wish, after my long hours of reading and thinking, to lie down and sleep. It was strange, but it was so. I felt as if I _had_ slept, and had now just awakened--a new woman, with a new mind.
I could now at last understand Eustace's desertion of me. To a man of his refinement it would have been a martyrdom to meet his wife after she had read the things published of him to all the world in the Report. I felt that as he would have felt it. At the same time I thought he might have trusted Me to make amends to him for the martyrdom, and might have come back. Perhaps it might yet end in his coming back. In the meanwhile, and in that expectation, I pitied and forgave him with my whole heart.
One little matter only dwelt on my mind disagreeably, in spite of my philosophy. Did Eustace still secretly love Mrs. Beauly? or had I extinguished that passion in him? To what order of beauty did this lady belong? Were we by any chance, the least in the world like one another?
The window of my room looked to the east. I drew up the blind, and saw the sun rising grandly in a clear sky. The temptation to go out and breathe the fresh morning air was irresistible. I put on my hat and shawl, and took the Report of the Trial under my arm. The bolts of the back door were easily drawn. In another minute I was out in Benjamin's pretty little garden.
Composed and strengthened by the inviting solitude and the delicious air, I found courage enough to face the serious question that now confronted me--the question of the future.
I had read the Trial. I had vowed to devote my life to the sacred object of vindicating my husband's innocence. A solitary, defenseless woman, I stood pledged to myself to carry that desperate resolution through to an end. How was I to begin?
The bold way of beginning was surely the wise way in such a position as mine. I had good reasons (founded, as I have already mentioned, on the important part played by this witness at the Trial) for believing that the fittest person to advise and assist me was--Miserrimus Dexter. He might disappoint the expectations that I had fixed on him, or he might refuse to help me, or (like my uncle Starkweather) he might think I had taken leave of my senses. All these events were possible. Nevertheless, I held to my resolution to try the experiment. If he were in the land of the living, I decided that my first step at starting should take me to the deformed man with the strange name.
Supposing he received me, sympathized with me, understood me?
What would he say? The nurse, in her evidence, had reported him as speaking in an off-hand manner. He would say, in all probability, "What do you mean to do? And how can I help you to do it?"Had I answers ready if those two plain questions were put to me?
Yes! if I dared own to any human creatu re what was at that very moment secretly fermenting in my mind. Yes! if I could confide to a stranger a suspicion roused in me by the Trial which I have been thus far afraid to mention even in these pages!
It must, nevertheless, be mentioned now. My suspicion led to results which are part of my story and part of my life.
Let me own, then, to begin with, that I closed the record of the Trial actually agreeing in one important particular with the opinion of my enemy and my husband's enemy--the Lord Advocate! He had characterized the explanation of Mrs. Eustace Macallan's death offered by the defense as a "clumsy subterfuge, in which no reasonable being could discern the smallest fragment of probability." Without going quite so far as this, I, too, could see no reason whatever in the evidence for assuming that the poor woman had taken an overdose of the poison by mistake. I believed that she had the arsenic secretly in her possession, and that she had tried, or intended to try, the use of it internally, for the purpose of improving her complexion. But further than this Icould not advance. The more I thought of it, the more plainly justified the lawyers for the prosecution seemed to me to be in declaring that Mrs. Eustace Macallan had died by the hand of a poisoner--although they were entirely and certainly mistaken in charging my husband with the crime.
My husband being innocent, somebody else, on my own showing, must be guilty. Who among the persons inhabiting the house at the time had poisoned Mrs. Eustace Macallan? My suspicion in answering that question pointed straight to a woman. And the name of that woman was--Mrs. Beauly!
Yes! To that startling conclusion I had arrived. It was, to my mind, the inevitable result of reading the evidence.
Look back for a moment to the letter produced in court, signed "Helena," and addressed to Mr. Macallan. No reasonable person can doubt (though the Judges excused her from answering the question)that Mrs. Beauly was the writer. Very well. The letter offers, as I think, trustworthy evidence to show the state of the woman's mind when she paid her visit to Gleninch.