Boyd, seeing my fierce determination, held back, a look of undisguised
annoyance upon his face.
"I have a duty to perform. I beg of you not to obstruct me, Mr. Urwin,"
he said coldly. "It is quite as unpleasant to me as to you."
"Unpleasant!" I echoed. "I tell you that you shall not arrest her,"
and I stood firmly with my back to the door of my room.
"Come," he said, in a tone of persuasion. "This action of yours cannot
benefit her in the least. She has made every preparation for flight.
Her trunk is in the cloakroom at Charing Cross Station, and she means
within an hour to get away to the Continent. Let me pass."
"I shall not," I roared.
"In that case I shall be compelled to use force, however much I regret
it."
As he uttered these words the door was suddenly flung back, and I saw
Eva's tragic, almost funereal, figure in the opening. She was white to
the lips, her countenance terribly wan and haggard.
"Enough!" she cried hoarsely. "Let the police enter. I am ready," and
she tottered back, clutching at the corner of my writing-table for
support.
Her outward purity and innocence were a rare equipment for the committal
of a crime. Who, indeed, would have suspected her of guile and
intrigue? When Love is dead there is no God.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
We were standing together in my sitting-room, Boyd being our only
companion. A dozen times I had implored her to speak the truth, but
without avail. She stood pale and trembling, yet still silent before
us. Terror held her dumb.
"Those who turn King's evidence obtain free pardon," the detective
gravely observed, speaking for the first time.
She laughed a little to herself.
"You might have striven for ever in vain to solve the mystery," she
answered at last, apparently bracing herself up for an effort. "Those
who aimed that terrible blow, so swift and so fatal, were not the kind
of persons to be ever caught napping. They never made a false move, and
always took such elaborate precautions that to solve the enigma would be
impossible to any one unacquainted with previous events."
Her breast rose and fell quickly in her wild agitation. She was stirred
by emotion to the depths of her being.
"I was weak and helpless," she faltered. "God knows how I have
suffered; how deep has been my repentance. Hear me to the end," she
urged, turning her fine eyes to mine. "Then, when I have told you my
wretched if astounding story, Frank, judge me as you think fit--for I am
yours."
"Speak!" I said anxiously. "My justice shall be tempered with mercy."
By that sentence she had acknowledged her love for me, but now I
hesitated. She was accused of murder.
"Then I must begin at the very beginning, for it is a long and most
complicated story, a story of a deep-laid intrigue and conspiracy, and
of a duplicity extraordinary," she said, her thin, nerveless hand
trembling in mine as I held her with my arm about her waist. "In the
days when I had reached my sixteenth year I lived with my mother abroad,
in Italy for the most part, because it was cheap, and further because my
father, who had been guilty of certain shady transactions, had been
compelled to fly from England. He had treated my mother shamefully,
therefore they were separated, and mother and I lived economically in
these cheap pensions in Florence and Rome which seem to exist as asylums
for the well-bred needy. A few days after I was sixteen, while we were
at an obscure pension in Siena, my mother took typhoid and died, leaving
me absolutely alone in the world, and practically penniless. Nearly a
year before we had received a letter from my father's solicitors in
London stating that he had died in poverty in Buenos Aires, therefore I
was utterly alone. The position of a friendless girl on the Continent
is always serious," she said, with a catch in her voice. "Acting upon
the advice of some English people in the pension I went to Florence and
saw there the Consul-General, who not only gave me money from the
British Relief Fund, which is supported by English residents in that
city, but also interested himself actively upon my behalf and obtained
for me a post as governess in a wealthy Italian family living near
Bologna. In their service I remained nearly three years, until, by the
death of the head of the house, the family became scattered, when I took
a fresh engagement with a lady who advertised for an English companion.
She was a Madame Damant, a good-looking woman of forty-five, whose
father, I understood, had been Italian, and whose mother English. She
spoke English quite as well as I did, and had a fine apartment in
Florence, where she received a good deal, for she was well-known there.
With the winter over we travelled first to Paris, where we stayed
several months, and then to Switzerland. Our life was pleasant, as
Madame had plenty of money and we always lived at the best hotels."
She paused and drew a long breath. There was a hardness about her
mouth, and tears were in her eyes.
"It was in Zurich that I had my first misgivings, for there one day in
late autumn we were joined by a strange old gentleman, Hartmann by name,
whom I understood was Madame's brother, a curious old fellow, whose main
object in life appeared to be the carrying out of certain scientific
experiments. He remained with us in the same hotel for nearly a
fortnight, during which time Madame, who was extremely well-educated,
held frequent consultations with him upon scientific matters, until one
day I was overjoyed when she announced that we were all three to go
straight to London."
"Then the Lady Glaslyn at The Hollies was not your mother?" I gasped,
profoundly amazed at this revelation.
"I am about to explain," she went on in a hard voice. "On the night
before our departure from Zurich I chanced to pass the door of Madame's
bedroom after everybody had retired to rest, and seeing a light issuing
from the keyhole was prompted by natural curiosity to peep within. What
I saw was certainly strange. In one hand she was holding an unopened
bottle of Benedictine liqueur upside down, while with the other she took
a hypodermic syringe filled with some liquid, and with the long thin
needle pierced the cork, then slowly, and with infinite care, she
injected the liquid from the tiny glass syringe. Afterwards she
withdrew the hollow needle, glanced at the parchment capsule beneath the
light, and having satisfied herself that the puncture made was quite
unnoticeable, she shook the bottle so as to thoroughly mix the injected
liquid with the liqueur. Then I saw her wrap the bottle carefully in a
number of towels and place it in her trunk. Next day, when packing, I
glanced at the bottle with some curiosity, examining the parchment
covering the cork, but so tiny had been the puncture that I failed to
discover the hole. The parchment had, I think, been touched with gum,
which had caused the tiny hole to close."
"That liqueur was evidently poisoned," Boyd remarked, his brows knit in
thought.
"Yes," she answered. "I have every reason to believe so, although the
true state of affairs did not dawn upon me until long afterwards. When
alone in our compartment in the _wagon-lit_ between Basle and Calais,
Madame, however, made a very extraordinary proposal to me. She
confessed that her husband had been made the scapegoat of some financial
fraud in England and was in hiding somewhere near Paris, therefore, in
going back, she feared that if she went under her right name--Damant--
that the police would begin to make active inquiries regarding monsieur.
She wished, she said, to avoid this and set up a house in some pleasant
suburb of London, so as to have a _pied-a-terre_ in the country she so
dearly loved. Now my mother was dead, and no friends in England knew
her, so many years had she lived on the Continent, why should she not
pass as Lady Glaslyn and I as her daughter? At first this proposal
utterly staggered me, but when she pointed out how much more I would be
respected as her daughter instead of her companion, and told me of the
manner in which she intended to live--a manner befitting her assumed
station--I at length gave my consent, for which she made me a present
there and then of a very acceptable bank-note."
"Then that woman only posed as your mother!" I exclaimed. "She was not
the real Lady Glaslyn?"
"Certainly not," answered my beloved frankly. "At first I was very
indisposed to be a party to any such transaction, but she had shown me
so many kindnesses, and had always been so generous, that I, a
friendless girl, felt compelled to accede. Ah! if I had but known what
lay behind all that outward show of good feeling and sympathy I would
have cast her accursed money from me as I could cast the gold of Satan.
I would rather have made matches for a starvation wage, or slaved at a
shop-counter, than have remained one day longer beneath her roof. But
she was full of cool ingenuity and marvellous cunning, and on my
acceptance of this proposal instantly set to work to bind me further to
secrecy. This was not difficult, alas! for I was entirely unsuspicious
of treachery, and least of all of my generous friend and benefactor.
After some search and many interviews with house-agents we found The
Hollies, which she purchased, together with the furniture just as it
stood, and ere long neighbours began to call upon us, and we soon
entered local society. Many times in those dull winter days I pondered
long and deeply upon what I had seen in Zurich, wondering for what
reason she had so carefully prepared the bottle which had passed the
customs at Charing Cross undiscovered, and still remained locked in the
travelling-trunk, surrounded by the wrappings she had placed upon it."
"Was any of the liqueur given to any one?" asked Boyd grimly.
Ere she could respond the door was thrown open, and Dick entered with
Lily Lowry. He had, it transpired, gone that day and besought her
forgiveness.
In a single glance he realised what had occurred, and without a word he
closed the door, and both stood in silence to listen to her statement.
How strange a thing is this life of ours! We are in hell one hour, and
in heaven the next.