The Filigree Ball Part 36

"You a.s.sure us that you had no idea that this once lighthearted sister of yours meditated suicide when she left you?"

"And I repeat it, sir."

"Then why did you immediately go to Mr. Jeffrey's drawer, where you could have no business, unless it was to see if she had taken his pistol with her?"

Miss Tuttle's head fell and a soft flush broke through the pallor of her cheek.

"Because I was thinking of him. Because I was terrified for him.

He had left the house the morning before in a half-maddened condition and had not come back to sleep or eat since. I did not know what a man so outraged in every sacred feeling of love and honor might be tempted to do. I thought of suicide. I remembered the old house and how he had said, 'I don't believe her. I don't believe she ever did so cold-blooded an act, or that any such dreadful machinery is in that house. I never shall believe it till I have seen and handled it myself. It is a nightmare, Cora. We are insane.' I thought of this, sirs, and when I went into her room, to change the place of the little note in the book, I went to his bureau drawer, not to look for the pistol--I did not think of that then,--but to see if the keys of the Moore house were still there. I knew that they were kept in this drawer, for I had been present in the room when they were brought in after the wedding. I had also been short-sighted enough to conclude that if they were gone it was he who had taken them. They were gone, and that was why I flew immediately from the house to the old place in Waverley Avenue. I was concerned for Mr.

Jeffrey! I feared to find him there, demented or dead."

"But you had no key."

"No. Mr. Jeffrey had taken one of them and my sister the other.

But the lack of a key or even of a light--for the missing candles were not taken by me[1]--could not keep me at home after I was once convinced that he had gone to this dreadful house. If I could not get in I could at least hammer at the door or rouse the neighbors. Something must be done. I did not think what; I merely flew."

"Did you know that the house had two keys?"

"Not then."

"But your sister did?"

"Probably."

"And finding the only key, as you supposed, gone, you flew to the Moore house?"

"Immediately."

"And now what else?"

"I found the door unlocked."

"That was done by Mrs. Jeffrey?"

"Yes, but I did not think of her then."

"And you went in?"

"Yes; it was all dark, but I felt my way till I came to the gilded pillars."

"Why did you go there?"

"Because I felt--I knew--if he were anywhere in that house he would be there!"

"And why did you stop?"

Her voice rose above its usual quiet pitch in shrill protest:

"You know! you know! I heard a pistol-shot from within, then a fall. I don't remember anything else. They say I went wandering about town. Perhaps I did; it is all a blank to me--everything is a blank till the policeman said that my sister was dead and I learned for the first time that the shot I had heard in the Moore house was not the signal of his death, but hers. Had I been myself when at that library door," she added, after a moment of silence, "I would have rushed in at the sound of that shot and have received my sister's dying breath."

"Cora!" The cry was from Mr. Jeffrey, and seemed to be quite involuntary. "In the weeks during which we have been kept from speaking together I have turned all these events over in my mind till I longed for any respite, even that of the grave. But in all my thinking I never attributed this motive to your visit here.

Will you forgive me?"

There was a new tone in his voice, a tone which no woman could hear without emotion.

"You had other things to think of," she said, and her lips trembled.

Never have I seen on the human face a more beautiful expression than I saw on hers at that moment; nor do I think Mr. Jeffrey had either, for as he marked it his own regard softened almost to tenderness.

The major had no time for sentimentalities. Turning to Mr. Jeffrey, he said:

"One more question before we send for the letter which you say will give us full insight into your wife's crime. Do you remember what occurred on the bridge at Georgetown just before you came into town that night?"

He shook his head.

"Did you meet any one there?"

"I do not know."

"Can you remember your state of mind?"

"I was facing the future."

"And what did you see in the future?"

"Death. Death for her and death for me! A crime was on her soul and she must die, and if she, then myself. I knew no other course.

I could not summon the police, point out my bride of a fortnight and, with the declaration that she had been betrayed into killing a man, coldly deliver her up to justice. Neither could I live at her side knowing the guilty secret which parted us; or live anywhere in the world under this same consciousness. Therefore, I meant to kill myself before another sun rose. But she was more deeply stricken with a sense of her own guilt than I realized. When I returned home for the pistol which was to end our common misery I found that she had taken her punishment into her own hands. This strangely affected me, but when I found that, in doing this, she had remembered that I should have to face the world after she was gone, and so left a few lines for me to show in explanation of her act, my revolt against her received a check which the reading of her letter only increased.

But the lines she thus wrote and left were not true lines. All her heart was mine, and if it was a wicked heart she has atoned--"

He paused, quite overcome. Others amongst us were overcome, too, but only for a moment. The following remark from the district attorney soon recalled us to the practical aspects of the case.

"You have accounted for many facts not hitherto understood. But there is still a very important one which neither yourself nor Miss Tuttle has yet made plain. There was a candle on the scene of crime; it was out when this officer arrived here. There was also one found burning in the upstairs room, aside from the one you professedly used in your tour of inspection there. Whence came those candles? And did your wife blow out the one in the library herself, previous to the shooting, or was it blown out afterward and by other lips?"

"These are questions which, as I have already said, I have no means of answering," repeated Mr. Jeffrey. "The courage which brought her here may have led her to supply herself with light; and, hard as it is to conceive, she may even have found nerve to blow out the light before she lifted the pistol to her breast:"

The district attorney and the major looked unconvinced, and the latter, turning toward Miss Tuttle, asked if she had any remark to make on the subject.

But she could only repeat Mr. Jeffrey's statement.

"These are questions I can not answer either. I have said that I stopped at the library door, which means that I saw nothing of what pa.s.sed within."

Here the major asked where Mrs. Jeffrey's letter was to be found.

It was Mr. Jeffrey who replied:

"Search in my room for a book with an outside cover of paper still on it. You will probably find it on my table. The inner cover is red. Bring that book here. Our secret is hidden in it."

Durbin disappeared on this errand. I followed him as far as the door, but I did not think it necessary to state that I had seen this book lying on the table when I paid my second visit to Mr.

Jeffrey's room in company with the coroner. The thought that my hand had been within reach of this man's secret so many weeks before was sufficiently humiliating without being shared.