The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney Part 5

I descended, full of emotion, to the library, where Dr. Curteis promised shortly to join me. Noiselessly entering the room, I came suddenly upon the housekeeper and a tall young man, standing with their backs towards me in the recesses of one of the windows, and partly shrouded by the heavy cloth curtains. They were evidently in earnest conference, and several words, the significance of which did not at the moment strike me, reached my ears before they perceived my approach. The instant they did so, they turned hastily round, and eyed me with an expression of flurried alarm, which at the time surprised me not a little. "All is over, Mrs.

Bourdon," said I, finding she did not speak; "and your presence is probably needed by Miss Armitage." A flash of intelligence, as I spoke, pa.s.sed between the pair; but whether indicative of grief or joy, so momentary was the glance, I should have been puzzled to determine. The housekeeper immediately left the room, keeping her eyes, as she pa.s.sed, fixed upon me with the same nervous apprehensive look which had before irritated Dr. Curteis. The young man followed more slowly. He was a tall and rather handsome youth, apparently about one or two-and-twenty years of age. His hair was black as jet, and his dark eyes were of singular brilliancy; but the expression, I thought, was scarcely a refined or highly-intellectual one. His resemblance to Mrs. Bourdon, whose son indeed he was, was very striking. He bowed slightly, but courteously, as to an equal, as he closed the door, and I was left to the undisturbed enjoyment of my own reflections, which, ill-defined and indistinct as they were, were anything but pleasant company. My reverie was at length interrupted by the entrance of the doctor, with the announcement that the carriage was in waiting to re-convey us to town.

We had journeyed several miles on our return before a word was spoken by either of us. My companion was apparently even more painfully pre-occupied than myself. He was, however, the first to break silence.

"The emaciated corpse we have just left little resembles the gay, beautiful girl, for whose smiles you and I were once disposed to shoot each other!" The doctor's voice trembled with emotion, and his face, I perceived, was pale as marble.

"Mary Rawdon," I remarked, "lives again in her daughter."

"Yes; her very image. Do you know," continued he, speaking with rapid energy, "I suspect Mary Rawdon--Mrs. Armitage, I would say--has been foully, treacherously dealt with!"

I started with amazement; and yet the announcement but embodied and gave form and color to my own ill-defined and shadowy suspicions.

"Good heavens! How? By whom?"

"Unless I am greatly mistaken, she has been poisoned by an adept in the use of such destructive agents."

"Mrs. Bourdon?"

"No; by her son. At least my suspicions point that way. She is probably cognizant of the crime. But in order that you should understand the grounds upon which my conjectures are princ.i.p.ally founded, I must enter into a short explanation. Mrs. Bourdon, a woman of Spanish extraction, and who formerly occupied a much higher position than she does now, has lived with Mrs. Armitage from the period of her husband's death, now about sixteen years ago. Mrs. Bourdon has a son, a tall, good-looking fellow enough, whom you may have seen."

"He was with his mother in the library as I entered it after leaving you."

"Ah! well, hem! This boy, in his mother's opinion--but that perhaps is somewhat excusable--exhibited early indications of having been born a "genius." Mrs. Armitage, who had been first struck by the beauty of the child, gradually acquired the same notion; and the result was, that he was little by little invested--with at least her tacit approval--with the privileges supposed to be the lawful inheritance of such gifted spirits; namely, the right to be as idle as he pleased--geniuses, you know, can, according to the popular notion, attain any conceivable amount of knowledge _per saltum_ at a bound--and to exalt himself in the stilts of his own conceit above the useful and honorable pursuits suited to the station in life in which Providence had cast his lot. The fruit of such training soon showed itself. Young Bourdon grew up a conceited and essentially-ignorant puppy, capable of nothing but bad verses, and thoroughly impressed with but one important fact, which was, that he, Alfred Bourdon, was the most gifted and the most ill-used of all G.o.d's creatures. To genius, in any intelligible sense of the term, he has in truth no pretension. He is endowed, however, with a kind of reflective talent, which is often mistaken by fools for _creative_ power. The morbid fancies and melancholy scorn of a Byron, for instance, such gentry reflect back from their foggy imaginations in exaggerated and distorted feebleness of whining versicles, and so on with other lights celestial or infernal. This, however, by the way. The only rational pursuit he ever followed, and that only by fits and starts, and to gratify his faculty of "wonder," I fancy, was chemistry. A small laboratory was fitted up for him in the little summer-house you may have observed at the further corner of the lawn. This study of his, if study such desultory s.n.a.t.c.hes at science may be called, led him, in his examination of vegetable bodies, to a smattering acquaintance with botany, a science of which Ellen Armitage is an enthusiastic student. They were foolishly permitted to _botanize_ together, and the result was, that Alfred Bourdon, acting upon the principle that genius--whether sham or real--levels all merely mundane distinctions, had the impudence to aspire to the hand of Miss Armitage. His pa.s.sion, sincere or simulated, has never been, I have reason to know, in the slightest degree reciprocated by its object; but so blind is vanity, that when, about six weeks ago, an _eclairciss.e.m.e.nt_ took place, and the fellow's dream was somewhat rudely dissipated, the untoward rejection of his preposterous suit was, there is every reason to believe, attributed by both mother and son to the repugnance of Mrs.

Armitage alone; and to this idiotic hallucination she has, I fear, fallen a sacrifice. Judging from the emaciated appearance of the body, and other phenomena communicated to me by her ordinary medical attendant--a blundering ignoramus, who ought to have called in a.s.sistance long before--she has been poisoned with _iodine_, which, administered in certain quant.i.ties, would produce precisely the same symptoms. Happily there is no mode of destroying human life which so surely leads to the detection of the murderer as the use of such agents; and of this truth the post mortem examination of the body, which takes place to-morrow morning, will, if I am not grossly mistaken, supply another vivid ill.u.s.tration. Legal a.s.sistance will no doubt be necessary, and I am sure I do not err in expecting that _you_ will aid me in bringing to justice the murderer of Mary Rawdon?"

A pressure of his hand was my only answer. "I shall call for you at ten o'clock" said he, as he put me down at my own door. I bowed, and the carriage drove off.

"Well!" said I, as Dr. Curteis and Mr. ---- the eminent surgeon entered the library at Mount Place the following morning after a long absence.

"As I antic.i.p.ated," replied the doctor with a choking voice: "she has been poisoned!"

I started to my feet. "And the murderer?"

"Our suspicions still point to young Bourdon; but the persons of both mother and son have been secured."

"Apart?"

"Yes; and I have despatched a servant to request the presence of a neighbor--a county magistrate. I expect him momently."

After a brief consultation, we all three directed our steps to the summer-house which contained young Bourdon's laboratory. In the room itself nothing of importance was discovered; but in an enclosed recess, which we broke open, we found a curiously-fas.h.i.+oned gla.s.s bottle half full of iodine.

"This is it!" said Mr. ----; "and in a powdered state too--just ready for mixing with brandy or any other available dissolvent." The powder had somewhat the appearance of fine black lead. Nothing further of any consequence being observed, we returned to the house, where the magistrate had already arrived.

Alfred Bourdon was first brought in; and he having been duly cautioned that he was not obliged to answer any question, and that what he did say would be taken down, and, if necessary, used against him, I proposed the following questions:--

"Have you the key of your laboratory?"

"No; the door is always open."

"Well, then, of any door or cupboard in the room?"

At this question his face flushed purple: he stammered, "There is no"--and abruptly paused.

"Do I understand you to say there is no cupboard or place of concealment in the room?"

"No: here is the key."

"Has any one had access to the cupboard or recess of which this is the key, except yourself?"

The young man shook as if smitten with ague: his lips chattered, but no articulate sound escaped them.

"You need not answer the question," said the magistrate, "unless you choose to do so. I again warn you that all you say will, if necessary, be used against you."

"No one," he at length gasped, mastering his hesitation by a strong exertion of the will--"no one can have had access to the place but myself. I have never parted with the key."

Mrs. Bourdon was now called in. After interchanging a glance of intense agony, and, as it seemed to me, of affectionate intelligence with her son, she calmly answered the questions put to her. They were unimportant, except the last, and that acted upon her like a galvanic shock. It was this--"Did you ever struggle with your son on the landing leading to the bedroom of the deceased for the possession of this bottle?" and I held up that which we had found in the recess.

A slight scream escaped her lips; and then she stood rigid, erect, motionless, glaring alternately at me and at the fatal bottle with eyes that seemed starting from their sockets. I glanced towards the son; he was also affected in a terrible manner. His knees smote each other, and a clammy perspiration burst forth and settled upon his pallid forehead.

"Again I caution you," iterated the magistrate, "that you are not bound to answer any of these questions."

The woman's lips moved. "No--never!" she almost inaudibly gasped, and fell senseless on the floor.

As soon as she was removed, Jane Withers was called. She deposed that three days previously, as she was, just before dusk, arranging some linen in a room a few yards distant from the bedroom of her late mistress, she was surprised at hearing a noise just outside the door, as of persons struggling and speaking in low but earnest tones. She drew aside a corner of the muslin curtain of the window which locked upon the pa.s.sage or corridor, and there saw Mrs. Bourdon striving to wrest something from her son's hand. She heard Mrs. Bourdon say, "You shall not do it, or you shall not have it"--she could not be sure which. A noise of some sort seemed to alarm them: they ceased struggling, and listened attentively for a few seconds: then Alfred Bourdon stole off on tip-toe, leaving the object in dispute, which witness could not see distinctly, in his mother's hand. Mrs. Bourdon continued to listen, and presently Miss Armitage, opening the door of her mother's chamber, called her by name.

She immediately placed what was in her hand on the marble top of a side-table standing in the corridor, and hastened to Miss Armitage.

Witness left the room she had been in a few minutes afterwards, and, curious to know what Mrs. Bourdon and her son had been struggling for, went to the table to look at it. It was an oddly-shaped gla.s.s bottle, containing a good deal of a blackish-gray powder, which, as she held it up to the light, looked like black-lead!

"Would you be able to swear to the bottle if you saw it?"

"Certainly I should."

"By what mark or token?"

"The name of Valpy or Vulpy was cast into it--that is, the name was in the gla.s.s itself."

"Is this it?"

"It is: I swear most positively."

A letter was also read which had been taken from Bourdon's pocket. It was much creased, and was proved to be in the handwriting of Mrs. Armitage.

It consisted of a severe rebuke at the young man's presumption in seeking to address himself to her daughter, which insolent ingrat.i.tude, the writer said, she should never, whilst she lived, either forget or forgive. This last sentence was strongly underlined in a different ink from that used by the writer of the letter.

The surgeon deposed to the cause of death. It had been brought on by the action of iodine, which, administered in certain quant.i.ties, produced symptoms as of rapid atrophy, such as had appeared in Mrs. Armitage. The gla.s.s bottle found in the recess contained iodine in a pulverized state.

I deposed that, on entering the library on the previous evening I overheard young Mr. Bourdon, addressing his mother, say, "Now that it is done past recall, I will not shrink from any consequences, be they what they may!"

This was the substance of the evidence adduced; and the magistrate at once committed Alfred Bourdon to Chelmsford jail, to take his trial at the next a.s.size for "wilful murder." A coroner's inquisition a few days after also returned a verdict of "wilful murder" against him on the same evidence.

About an hour after his committal, and just previous to the arrival of the vehicle which was to convey him to the county prison, Alfred Bourdon requested an interview with me. I very reluctantly consented; but steeled as I was against him, I could not avoid feeling dreadfully shocked at the change which so brief an interval had wrought upon him. It had done the work of years. Despair--black, utter despair--was written in every lineament of his expressive countenance.