The Inquest
The coroner, who fully realized that for that one day of his life as a
provincial solicitor he was living in the gaze of the world, had
resolved to be worthy of the fleeting eminence. He was a large man of
jovial temper, with a strong interest in the dramatic aspects of his
work, and the news of Manderson’s mysterious death within his
jurisdiction had made him the happiest coroner in England. A
respectable capacity for marshalling facts was fortified in him by a
copiousness of impressive language that made juries as clay in his
hands, and sometimes disguised a doubtful interpretation of the rules
of evidence.
The court was held in a long, unfurnished room lately built on to the
hotel, and intended to serve as a ballroom or concert-hall. A regiment
of reporters was entrenched in the front seats, and those who were to
be called on to give evidence occupied chairs to one side of the table
behind which the coroner sat, while the jury, in double row, with
plastered hair and a spurious ease of manner, flanked him on the other
side. An undistinguished public filled the rest of the space, and
listened, in an awed silence, to the opening solemnities. The newspaper
men, well used to these, muttered among themselves. Those of them who
knew Trent by sight assured the rest that he was not in the court.
The identity of the dead man was proved by his wife, the first witness
called, from whom the coroner, after some enquiry into the health and
circumstances of the deceased, proceeded to draw an account of the last
occasion on which she had seen her husband alive. Mrs. Manderson was
taken through her evidence by the coroner with the sympathy which every
man felt for that dark figure of grief. She lifted her thick veil
before beginning to speak, and the extreme paleness and unbroken
composure of the lady produced a singular impression. This was not an
impression of hardness. Interesting femininity was the first thing to
be felt in her presence. She was not even enigmatic. It was only clear
that the force of a powerful character was at work to master the
emotions of her situation. Once or twice as she spoke she touched her
eyes with her handkerchief, but her voice was low and clear to the end.
Her husband, she said, had come up to his bedroom about his usual hour
for retiring on Sunday night. His room was really a dressing-room
attached to her own bedroom, communicating with it by a door which was
usually kept open during the night. Both dressing-room and bedroom were
entered by other doors giving on the passage. Her husband had always
had a preference for the greatest simplicity in his bedroom
arrangements, and liked to sleep in a small room. She had not been
awake when he came up, but had been half-aroused, as usually happened,
when the light was switched on in her husband’s room. She had spoken to
him. She had no clear recollection of what she had said, as she had
been very drowsy at the time; but she had remembered that he had been
out for a moonlight run in the car, and she believed she had asked
whether he had had a good run, and what time it was. She had asked what
the time was because she felt as if she had only been a very short time
asleep, and she had expected her husband to be out very late. In answer
to her question he had told her it was half-past eleven, and had gone
on to say that he had changed his mind about going for a run.
“Did he say why?” the coroner asked.
“Yes,” replied the lady, “he did explain why. I remember very well what
he said, because—” she stopped with a little appearance of confusion.
“Because—” the coroner insisted gently.
“Because my husband was not as a rule communicative about his business
affairs,” answered the witness, raising her chin with a faint touch of
defiance. “He did not—did not think they would interest me, and as a
rule referred to them as little as possible. That was why I was rather
surprised when he told me that he had sent Mr. Marlowe to Southampton
to bring back some important information from a man who was leaving for
Paris by the next day’s boat. He said that Mr. Marlowe could do it
quite easily if he had no accident. He said that he had started in the
car, and then walked back home a mile or so, and felt all the better
for it.”
“Did he say any more?”
“Nothing, as well as I remember,” the witness said. “I was very sleepy,
and I dropped off again in a few moments. I just remember my husband
turning his light out, and that is all. I never saw him again alive.”
“And you heard nothing in the night?”
“No: I never woke until my maid brought my tea in the morning at seven
o’clock. She closed the door leading to my husband’s room, as she
always did, and I supposed him to be still there. He always needed a
great deal of sleep. He sometimes slept until quite late in the
morning. I had breakfast in my sitting-room. It was about ten when I
heard that my husband’s body had been found.” The witness dropped her
head and silently waited for her dismissal.
But it was not to be yet.
“Mrs. Manderson.” The coroner’s voice was sympathetic, but it had a
hint of firmness in it now. “The question I am going to put to you
must, in these sad circumstances, be a painful one; but it is my duty
to ask it. Is it the fact that your relations with your late husband
had not been, for some time past, relations of mutual affection and
confidence? Is it the fact that there was an estrangement between you?”
The lady drew herself up again and faced her questioner, the colour
rising in her cheeks. “If that question is necessary,” she said with
cold distinctness, “I will answer it so that there shall be no
misunderstanding. During the last few months of my husband’s life his
attitude towards me had given me great anxiety and sorrow. He had
changed towards me; he had become very reserved, and seemed
mistrustful. I saw much less of him than before; he seemed to prefer to
be alone. I can give no explanation at all of the change. I tried to
work against it; I did all I could with justice to my own dignity, as I
thought. Something was between us, I did not know what, and he never
told me. My own obstinate pride prevented me from asking what it was in
so many words; I only made a point of being to him exactly as I had
always been, so far as he would allow me. I suppose I shall never know
now what it was.” The witness, whose voice had trembled in spite of her
self-control over the last few sentences, drew down her veil when she
had said this, and stood erect and quiet.
One of the jury asked a question, not without obvious hesitation. “Then
was there never anything of the nature of what they call Words between
you and your husband, ma’am?”
“Never.” The word was colourlessly spoken; but every one felt that a
crass misunderstanding of the possibilities of conduct in the case of a
person like Mrs. Manderson had been visited with some severity.
Did she know, the coroner asked, of any other matter which might have
been preying upon her husband’s mind recently?
Mrs. Manderson knew of none whatever. The coroner intimated that her
ordeal was at an end, and the veiled lady made her way to the door. The
general attention, which followed her for a few moments, was now
eagerly directed upon Martin, whom the coroner had proceeded to call.
It was at this moment that Trent appeared at the doorway and edged his
way into the great room. But he did not look at Martin. He was
observing the well-balanced figure that came quickly toward him along
an opening path in the crowd, and his eye was gloomy. He started, as he
stood aside from the door with a slight bow, to hear Mrs. Manderson
address him by name in a low voice. He followed her a pace or two into
the hall.
“I wanted to ask you,” she said in a voice now weak and oddly broken,
“if you would give me your arm a part of the way to the house. I could
not see my uncle near the door, and I suddenly felt rather faint.... I
shall be better in the air.... No, no; I cannot stay here—please, Mr.
Trent!” she said, as he began to make an obvious suggestion. “I must go
to the house.” Her hand tightened momentarily on his arm as if, for all
her weakness, she could drag him from the place; then again she leaned
heavily upon it, and with that support, and with bent head, she walked
slowly from the hotel and along the oak-shaded path toward White
Gables.
Trent went in silence, his thoughts whirling, dancing insanely to a
chorus of “Fool! fool!” All that he alone knew, all that he guessed and
suspected of this affair, rushed through his brain in a rout; but the
touch of her unnerved hand upon his arm never for an instant left his
consciousness, filling him with an exaltation that enraged and
bewildered him. He was still cursing himself furiously behind the mask
of conventional solicitude that he turned to the lady when he had
attended her to the house and seen her sink upon a couch in the
morning-room. Raising her veil, she thanked him gravely and frankly,
with a look of sincere gratitude in her eyes. She was much better now,
she said, and a cup of tea would work a miracle upon her. She hoped she
had not taken him away from anything important. She was ashamed of
herself; she thought she could go through with it, but she had not
expected those last questions. “I am glad you did not hear me,” she
said when he explained. “But of course you will read it all in the
reports. It shook me so to have to speak of that,” she added simply;
“and to keep from making an exhibition of myself took it out of me. And
all those staring men by the door! Thank you again for helping me when
I asked you.... I thought I might,” she ended queerly, with a little
tired smile; and Trent took himself away, his hand still quivering from
the cool touch of her fingers.
The testimony of the servants and of the finder of the body brought
nothing new to the reporters’ net. That of the police was as colourless
and cryptic as is usual at the inquest stage of affairs of the kind.
Greatly to the satisfaction of Mr. Bunner, his evidence afforded the
sensation of the day, and threw far into the background the interesting
revelation of domestic difficulty made by the dead man’s wife. He told
the court in substance what he had already told Trent. The flying
pencils did not miss a word of the young American’s story, and it
appeared with scarcely the omission of a sentence in every journal of
importance in Great Britain and the United States.
Public opinion next day took no note of the faint suggestion of the
possibility of suicide which the coroner, in his final address to the
jury, had thought it right to make in connection with the lady’s
evidence. The weight of evidence, as the official had indeed pointed
out, was against such a theory. He had referred with emphasis to the
fact that no weapon had been found near the body.
“This question, of course, is all-important, gentlemen,” he had said to
the jury. “It is, in fact, the main issue before you. You have seen the
body for yourselves. You have just heard the medical evidence; but I
think it would be well for me to read you my notes of it in so far as
they bear on this point, in order to refresh your memories. Dr Stock
told you—I am going to omit all technical medical language and repeat
to you merely the plain English of his testimony—that in his opinion
death had taken place six or eight hours previous to the finding of the
body. He said that the cause of death was a bullet wound, the bullet
having entered the left eye, which was destroyed, and made its way to
the base of the brain, which was quite shattered. The external
appearance of the wound, he said, did not support the hypothesis of its
being self-inflicted, inasmuch as there were no signs of the firearm
having been pressed against the eye, or even put very close to it; at
the same time it was not physically impossible that the weapon should
have been discharged by the deceased with his own hand, at some small
distance from the eye. Dr Stock also told us that it was impossible to
say with certainty, from the state of the body, whether any struggle
had taken place at the time of death; that when seen by him, at which
time he understood that it had not been moved since it was found, the
body was lying in a collapsed position such as might very well result
from the shot alone; but that the scratches and bruises upon the wrists
and the lower part of the arms had been very recently inflicted, and
were, in his opinion, marks of violence.
“In connection with this same point, the remarkable evidence given by
Mr Bunner cannot be regarded, I think, as without significance. It may
have come as a surprise to some of you to hear that risks of the
character described by this witness are, in his own country, commonly
run by persons in the position of the deceased. On the other hand, it
may have been within the knowledge of some of you that in the
industrial world of America the discontent of labour often proceeds to
lengths of which we in England happily know nothing. I have
interrogated the witness somewhat fully upon this. At the same time,
gentlemen, I am by no means suggesting that Mr. Bunner’s personal
conjecture as to the cause of death can fitly be adopted by you. That
is emphatically not the case. What his evidence does is to raise two
questions for your consideration. First, can it be said that the
deceased was to any extent in the position of a threatened man—of a man
more exposed to the danger of murderous attack than an ordinary person?
Second, does the recent alteration in his demeanour, as described by
this witness, justify the belief that his last days were overshadowed
by a great anxiety? These points may legitimately be considered by you
in arriving at a conclusion upon the rest of the evidence.”
Thereupon the coroner, having indicated thus clearly his opinion that
Mr Bunner had hit the right nail on the head, desired the jury to
consider their verdict.