ANOTHER WITNESS.
There was a slight commotion in the dingy-room when this woman with
the lovely figure and beautiful head and face entered. The coroner
straightened himself and looked at her under his spectacles. The jury
leaned forward and stared, and the few members of the general public
who had succeeded in gaining admission to the room strained their
necks and shuffled their feet.
She advanced quietly to the table at which the coroner sat, with the
jury on his right, and having thrown back her thick widow's veil and
ungloved her right hand, took the Book and kissed it when the proper
moment for doing so arrived. The coroner pointed to a chair, and told
her she might be seated. She simply bowed and remained standing.
She was pale, rigid, collected. The coroner busied himself with the
pens, ink, and paper before him for a little while, and then asked
her to tell them all she knew of the night and event under
consideration.
When she spoke her voice was clear and firm--as free from emotion as
though she was repeating an old task by rote. The earlier portions of
what she said may be partly omitted, for they have been already
related to Alfred Paulton and Richard Pringle. For the sake of
conciseness, the remainder of the evidence taken that day will, in
the case of each witness, follow the order of events in narrative
form, and not the order of events as given by the witnesses.
"She and her husband arrived at Crescent House the night he died. He
was not so well as usual, but she had known the asthma more
troublesome. They had supper together. He ate more sparingly than
usual. They were alone in the house. He decided upon resting on the
couch all night. No room but her sleeping room was in anything like
order. She was tired after the journey. They had come from Chester
that day. Her husband suggested she should go to bed. At about ten
o'clock she went to her room, but resolved not to lie down yet, as
she was anxious about her husband, and resolved to see him once more,
and put more coal on the fire before retiring finally. She sat down
in a chair, and, being overcome with fatigue and drowsiness, fell
asleep. She had no means of telling exactly when she fell asleep, but
she thought she must have been about twenty minutes in her room
before she grew unconscious.
"Close to midnight she awoke with a start. It must have been the
opening of the dining-room door that aroused her. She had left her
bed-room door ajar, and the carpets not being down, sounds were
exaggerated and travelled far.
"She listened and heard voices--the voices of two people, two men.
She knew the two voices. One was that of her husband--the other that
of Mr. Thomas Blake. Both voices seemed friendly, but she did not
catch the words. Shortly after she heard Mr. Blake distinctly say
'Good-night,' and her husband answer 'Good-night, Blake.' She was
quite positive these were the words spoken, and that the tones were
friendly--yes, she was prepared to swear, cordial. Then she heard a
man's footstep on the uncarpeted boards of the hall, and in a moment
the front door was closed.
"Some time elapsed before she went down--half-an-hour, or perhaps a
little more. She had a reason for not going down immediately. From
the time the front door was shut until she went down she had not
heard a sound, not the faintest sound, in the house. A slight noise
arising in the dining-room, where she had left Mr. Davenport, would
be inaudible to her; but she felt almost certain no one could in that
interval of time enter or leave the house without her hearing him.
"At twenty minutes past twelve she descended and crept cautiously
into the dining-room, wishing not to disturb her husband if he should
be sleeping. Her husband was reclining on the couch in very nearly
the same attitude she had left him; it was such as he always took
when his cough prevented his lying down.
"She believed he was sleeping, and stood gazing at him for a few
seconds. Then, becoming uneasy, she did not know why, she called him
several times, and failing to arouse him with her voice, she placed
her hand on his shoulder. She now became grievously alarmed, for he
had always been a remarkably light sleeper. She listened for his
breathing, but could hear nothing.
"After a few moments she became terrified, desperate, and, going to
the front door, opened it and attracted the attention of Mr. Paulton,
who in a short time brought Dr. Santley, who said he was dead.
"Yes; she identified that bottle. It was the one in which her husband
used to keep chloroform. He had the bottle always by him. When she
left him to go to her room that night two hours earlier the bottle
was more than three-quarters full of chloroform, and the cork was in
it. Thirty or forty drops was the quantity her husband generally used
at a time. He always spilled the chloroform into a napkin formed into
a rude resemblance of a cornucopia, and then inhaled it. To her
knowledge, he never used the drug internally, nor in any way but that
described.
"I have known Mr. Thomas Blake for many years. We were once secretly
engaged to be married, but my father broke the matter off, and I
married Mr. Davenport, who was much older than I--twenty-five or
twenty-six years older. When Mr. Blake was a very young man he met
Mr. Davenport abroad, so my late husband told me. It was Mr. Blake
introduced my late husband to me. At that time Mr. Blake and I were
secretly engaged. After this engagement was known to my father and
broken off by him, as far as his forbidding me to see Mr. Blake, I
still communicated with Mr. Blake and received letters from him.
These were surreptitious communications.
"Mr. Davenport then proposed to me and I refused him. Shortly after
this I received a letter from Mr. Blake, saying there was no use in
our continuing to hope we should one day be married, as neither of us
had any money or the chance of getting any, and consequently we ought
to make up our minds to resign ourselves to fate. Shortly after this
Mr. Davenport proposed to me again and I accepted him. We were
married a few months later, and have most of the time since then
resided at Mr. Davenport's place near Kilcash, in the county of
Waterford.
"The terms upon which Mr. Blake gave me up will be told you by
himself. I had nothing to do with that bargain. After an absence of a
little time from Ireland, Mr. Blake came back and stayed occasionally
in Kilcash, close to which my husband's house was. I saw little of
Mr. Blake. My husband met him now and then. In those days I believe
Mr. Blake gave me up solely for the reason mentioned in the letter of
which I have spoken. Subsequently I found out other considerations
had been working in Mr. Blake's mind.
"My marriage with Mr. Davenport was not a love-match. A variety of
reasons urged me into marrying him. Among these reasons I cannot
count love. I have diligently, conscientiously done my duty by him
for ten years. I never pretended or professed to love him. I
respected his moral code, but his social and intellectual faculties
did not impress, did not interest me, and certainly did not gain my
esteem. We lived in peace and comfort. He never once quarrelled with
me--I never with him.
"I said I had a reason for not going down immediately after Mr. Blake
left the house the other night. My reason was that generally after a
visit from Mr. Blake, Mr. Davenport was unpleasantly excited with, as
I even then thought, a lingering feeling of jealousy. At such times
he never said anything harsh or unpleasant of Mr. Blake or of myself,
but he was certain to become feverishly angry with some one or other;
and believing that after such a journey, and with so bad a cough, it
would be injurious to him to excite himself unduly, I kept back
awhile.
"I had the strongest possible objection to having this unhappy
occurrence made the object of official inquiry or public comment. I
would not have spoken as I have since I came in here for any other
consideration in the world than my inability to tell anything that is
not true.
"I would not swear anything that was not true to save my life; no,
nor to save the life of any one living or any one who has lived. You
ask me did I not perjure myself when I swore at the altar to love my
late husband. I say I did not. When I took that oath I meant to
keep it. I meant to try and love him with all my--I will not say
heart--with all my reason, if such an expression may be allowed. I
was fully honest when I took the oath. When you do all you can to
carry out your promise, and yet fail in the end, there is no flaw.
One cannot control the inevitable.
"Now that all is known, all my recent life laid bare, who is the
richer? Does any one wonder I had no liking to expose what has been
told of since I came into this place? You, Mr. Edward Davenport,
have, in the moment of her sorest trial, done all you could to injure
the character of your brother's wife. You had not the courage to
attack her openly when she was a widow, but must shamble and crouch
behind a hireling advocate--a creature who would pocket as clean the
gold of any one even more leprous than himself."
And before the coroner could collect himself, or stay her by gesture,
she had swept out of the room.
From beginning to end her voice had never altered in pitch. The
concluding words were spoken in the same manner as those of the
opening. Hence when the import of her final words began to reach the
minds of the hearers, she had finished, and was in the act of leaving
the room. Her words "shamble" and "crouch" were peculiarly applicable
to Edward Davenport at the time, for no sooner did she begin her
reference to him than she pointed him out, and he instinctively
shrank behind his solicitor, to whom he had been prompting questions
most offensive.
When the murmur which followed the disappearance of Mrs. Davenport
had subsided, and the coroner had somewhat recovered from his
astonishment, Thomas Blake stood up, stepped forward to the table,
and, laying his hand on it, said:
"I am the last person who saw Mr. Louis Davenport alive. I desire to
be examined."