Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (582 page)

He paused, and looked at his father in sudden perplexity. Far from being overwhelmed by the discovery which had just burst on him, Mr. Bashwood, after the first natural movement of surprise, faced his son with a self-possession which was nothing short of extraordinary under the circumstances. There was a new brightness in his eyes, and a new colour in his face. If it had been possible to conceive such a thing of a man in his position, he seemed to be absolutely encouraged instead of depressed by what he had just heard. “Go on, Jemmy,” he said, quietly; “I am one of the few people who didn’t read the trial; I only heard of it.”

Still wondering inwardly, Bashwood the younger recovered himself, and went on.

“You always were, and you always will be, behind the age,” he said. “When we come to the trial, I can tell you as much about it as you need know. In the meantime, we must go back to the baroness and Mr. Waldron. For a certain number of nights the Englishman let the card-sharpers have it all their own way; in other words, he paid for the privilege of making himself agreeable to Miss Gwilt. When he thought he had produced the necessary impression on her, he exposed the whole confederacy without mercy. The police interfered; the baroness found herself in prison; and Miss Gwilt was put between the two alternatives of accepting Mr. Waldron’s protection or being thrown on the world again. She was amazingly virtuous, or amazingly clever, which you please. To Mr. Waldron’s astonishment, she told him that she could face the prospect of being thrown on the world; and that he must address her honourably or leave her forever. The end of it was what the end always is, where the man is infatuated and the woman is determined. To the disgust of his family and friends, Mr. Waldron made a virtue of necessity, and married her.”

“How old was he?” asked Bashwood the elder, eagerly.

Bashwood the younger burst out laughing. “He was about old enough, daddy, to be your son, and rich enough to have burst that precious pocket-book of yours with thousand-pound notes! Don’t hang your head. It wasn’t a happy marriage, though he
was
so young and so rich. They lived abroad, and got on well enough at first. He made a new will, of course, as soon as he was married, and provided handsomely for his wife, under the tender pressure of the honey-moon. But women wear out, like other things, with time; and one fine morning Mr. Waldron woke up with a doubt in his mind whether he had not acted like a fool. He was an ill-tempered man; he was discontented with himself; and of course he made his wife feel it. Having begun by quarreling with her, he got on to suspecting her, and became savagely jealous of every male creature who entered the house. They had no incumbrances in the shape of children, and they moved from one place to another, just as his jealousy inclined him, till they moved back to England at last, after having been married close on four years. He had a lonely old house of his own among the Yorkshire moors, and there he shut his wife and himself up from every living creature, except his servants and his dogs. Only one result could come, of course, of treating a high-spirited young woman in that way. It may be her fate, or it may be chance; but, whenever a woman is desperate, there is sure to be a man handy to take advantage of it. The man in this case was rather a ‘dark horse,’ as they say on the turf. He was a certain Captain Manuel, a native of Cuba, and (according to his own account) an ex-officer in the Spanish navy. He had met Mr. Waldron’s beautiful wife on the journey back to England; had contrived to speak to her in spite of her husband’s jealousy; and had followed her to her place of imprisonment in Mr. Waldron’s house on the moors. The captain is described as a clever, determined fellow — of the daring piratical sort — with the dash of mystery about him that women like — ”

“She’s not the same as other women!” interposed Mr. Bashwood, suddenly interrupting his son. “Did she — ?” His voice failed him, and he stopped without bringing the question to an end.

“Did she like the captain?” suggested Bashwood the younger, with another laugh. “According to her own account of it, she adored him. At the same time her conduct (as represented by herself) was perfectly innocent. Considering how carefully her husband watched her, the statement (incredible as it appears) is probably true. For six weeks or so they confined themselves to corresponding privately, the Cuban captain (who spoke and wrote English perfectly) having contrived to make a go-between of one of the female servants in the Yorkshire house. How it might have ended we needn’t trouble ourselves to inquire — Mr. Waldron himself brought matters to a crisis. Whether he got wind of the clandestine correspondence or not, doesn’t appear. But this is certain, that he came home from a ride one day in a fiercer temper than usual; that his wife showed him a sample of that high spirit of hers which he had never yet been able to break; and that it ended in his striking her across the face with his riding-whip. Ungentlemanly conduct, I am afraid we must admit; but, to all outward appearance, the riding-whip produced the most astonishing results. From that moment the lady submitted as she had never submitted before. For a fortnight afterward he did what he liked, and she never thwarted him; he said what he liked, and she never uttered a word of protest. Some men might have suspected this sudden reformation of hiding something dangerous under the surface. Whether Mr. Waldron looked at it in that light, I can’t tell you. All that is known is that, before the mark of the whip was off his wife’s face, he fell ill, and that in two days afterward he was a dead man. What do you say to that?”

“I say he deserved it!” answered Mr. Bashwood, striking his hand excitedly on the table, as his son paused and looked at him.

“The doctor who attended the dying man was not of your way of thinking,” remarked Bashwood the younger, dryly. “He called in two other medical men, and they all three refused to certify the death. The usual legal investigation followed. The evidence of the doctors and the evidence of the servants pointed irresistibly in one and the same direction; and Mrs. Waldron was committed for trial, on the charge of murdering her husband by poison. A solicitor in first-rate criminal practice was sent for from London to get up the prisoner’s defense, and these ‘Instructions’ took their form and shape accordingly. — What’s the matter? What do you want now?”

Suddenly rising from his chair, Mr. Bashwood stretched across the table, and tried to take the papers from his son. “I want to look at them,” he burst out, eagerly. “I want to see what they say about the captain from Cuba. He was at the bottom of it, Jemmy — I’ll swear he was at the bottom of it!”

“Nobody doubted that who was in the secret of the case at the time,” rejoined his son. “But nobody could prove it. Sit down again, dad, and compose yourself. There’s nothing here about Captain Manuel but the lawyer’s private suspicions of him, for the counsel to act on or not, at the counsel’s discretion. From first to last she persisted in screening the captain. At the outset of the business she volunteered two statements to the lawyer — both of which he suspected to be false. In the first place she declared that she was innocent of the crime. He wasn’t surprised, of course, so far; his clients were, as a general rule, in the habit of deceiving him in that way. In the second place, while admitting her private correspondence with the Cuban captain, she declared that the letters on both sides related solely to a proposed elopement, to which her husband’s barbarous treatment had induced her to consent. The lawyer naturally asked to see the letters. ‘He has burned all my letters, and I have burned all his,’ was the only answer he got. It was quite possible that Captain Manuel might have burned
her
letters when he heard there was a coroner’s inquest in the house. But it was in her solicitor’s experience (as it is in my experience too) that, when a woman is fond of a man, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, risk or no risk, she keeps his letters. Having his suspicions roused in this way, the lawyer privately made some inquiries about the foreign captain, and found that he was as short of money as a foreign captain could be. At the same time, he put some questions to his client about her expectations from her deceased husband. She answered, in high indignation, that a will had been found among her husband’s papers, privately executed only a few days before his death, and leaving her no more, out of all his immense fortune, than five thousand pounds. ‘Was there an older will, then,’ says the lawyer, ‘which the new will revoked?’ Yes, there was; a will that he had given into her own possession — a will made when they were first married. ‘Leaving his widow well provided for?’ Leaving her just ten times as much as the second will left her. ‘Had she ever mentioned that first will, now revoked, to Captain Manuel?’ She saw the trap set for her, and said, ‘No, never!’ without an instant’s hesitation. That reply confirmed the lawyer’s suspicions. He tried to frighten her by declaring that her life might pay the forfeit of her deceiving him in this matter. With the usual obstinacy of women, she remained just as immovable as ever. The captain, on his side, behaved in the most exemplary manner. He confessed to planning the elopement; he declared that he had burned all the lady’s letters as they reached him, out of regard for her reputation; he remained in the neighbourhood; and he volunteered to attend before the magistrates. Nothing was discovered that could legally connect him with the crime, or that could put him into court on the day of the trial, in any other capacity than the capacity of a witness. I don’t believe myself that there’s any moral doubt (as they call it) that Manuel knew of the will which left her mistress of fifty thousand pounds; and that he was ready and willing, in virtue of that circumstance, to marry her on Mr. Waldron’s death. If anybody tempted her to effect her own release from her husband by making herself a widow, the captain must have been the man. And unless she contrived, guarded and watched as she was, to get the poison for herself, the poison must have come to her in one of the captain’s letters.”

“I don’t believe she used it, if it did come to her!” exclaimed Mr. Bashwood. “I believe it was the captain himself who poisoned her husband!”

Bashwood the younger, without noticing the interruption, folded up the Instructions for the Defense, which had now served their purpose, put them back in his bag, and produced a printed pamphlet in their place.

“Here is one of the published Reports of the Trial,” he said, “which you can read at your leisure, if you like. We needn’t waste time now by going into details. I have told you already how cleverly her counsel paved his way for treating the charge of murder as the crowning calamity of the many that had already fallen on an innocent woman. The two legal points relied on for the defense (after this preliminary flourish) were: First, that there was no evidence to connect her with the possession of poison; and, secondly, that the medical witnesses, while positively declaring that her husband had died by poison, differed in their conclusions as to the particular drug that had killed him. Both good points, and both well worked; but the evidence on the other side bore down everything before it. The prisoner was proved to have had no less than three excellent reasons for killing her husband. He had treated her with almost unexampled barbarity; he had left her in a will (unrevoked so far as she knew) mistress of a fortune on his death; and she was, by her own confession, contemplating an elopement with another man. Having set forth these motives, the prosecution next showed by evidence, which was never once shaken on any single point, that the one person in the house who could by any human possibility have administered the poison was the prisoner at the bar. What could the judge and jury do, with such evidence before them as this? The verdict was Guilty, as a matter of course; and the judge declared that he agreed with it. The female part of the audience was in hysterics; and the male part was not much better. The judge sobbed, and the bar shuddered. She was sentenced to death in such a scene as had never been previously witnessed in an English court of justice. And she is alive and hearty at the present moment; free to do any mischief she pleases, and to poison, at her own entire convenience, any man, woman, or child that happens to stand in her way. A most interesting woman! Keep on good terms with her, my dear sir, whatever you do, for the Law has said to her in the plainest possible English, ‘My charming friend, I have no terrors for
you
!’“

“How was she pardoned?” asked Mr. Bashwood, breathlessly. “They told me at the time, but I have forgotten. Was it the Home Secretary? If it was, I respect the Home Secretary! I say the Home Secretary was deserving of his place.”

“Quite right, old gentleman!” rejoined Bashwood the younger. “The Home Secretary was the obedient humble servant of an enlightened Free Press, and he
was
deserving of his place. Is it possible you don’t know how she cheated the gallows? If you don’t, I must tell you. On the evening of the trial, two or three of the young buccaneers of literature went down to two or three newspaper offices, and wrote two or three heart-rending leading articles on the subject of the proceedings in court. The next morning the public caught light like tinder; and the prisoner was tried over again, before an amateur court of justice, in the columns of the newspapers. All the people who had no personal experience whatever on the subject seized their pens, and rushed (by kind permission of the editor) into print. Doctors who had
not
attended the sick man, and who had
not
been present at the examination of the body, declared by dozens that he had died a natural death. Barristers without business, who had
not
heard the evidence, attacked the jury who had heard it, and judged the judge, who had sat on the bench before some of them were born. The general public followed the lead of the barristers and the doctors, and the young buccaneers who had set the thing going. Here was the law that they all paid to protect them actually doing its duty in dreadful earnest! Shocking! shocking! The British Public rose to protest as one man against the working of its own machinery; and the Home Secretary, in a state of distraction, went to the judge. The judge held firm. He had said it was the right verdict at the time, and he said so still. ‘But suppose,’ says the Home Secretary, ‘that the prosecution had tried some other way of proving her guilty at the trial than the way they did try, what would you and the jury have done then?’ Of course it was quite impossible for the judge to say. This comforted the Home Secretary, to begin with. And, when he got the judge’s consent, after that, to having the conflict of medical evidence submitted to one great doctor; and when the one great doctor took the merciful view, after expressly stating, in the first instance, that he knew nothing practically of the merits of the case, the Home Secretary was perfectly satisfied. The prisoner’s death-warrant went into the waste-paper basket; the verdict of the law was reversed by general acclamation; and the verdict of the newspapers carried the day. But the best of it is to come. You know what happened when the people found themselves with the pet object of their sympathy suddenly cast loose on their hands? A general impression prevailed directly that she was not quite innocent enough, after all, to be let out of prison then and there! Punish her a little — that was the state of the popular feeling — punish her a little, Mr. Home Secretary, on general moral grounds. A small course of gentle legal medicine, if you love us, and then we shall feel perfectly easy on the subject to the end of our days.”