THE calling of the new witness provoked a burst of laughter among the audience due partly, no doubt, to the strange name by which he had been summoned; partly, also, to the instinctive desire of all crowded assemblies, when their interest is painfully excited, to seize on any relief in the shape of the first subject of merriment which may present itself. A severe rebuke from the Bench restored order among the audience. The Lord Justice Clerk declared that he would “clear the Court” if the interruption to the proceedings were renewed.
During the silence which followed this announcement the new witness appeared.
Gliding, self-propelled in his chair on wheels, through the opening made for him among the crowd, a strange and startling creature—literally the half of a man—revealed himself to the general view. A coverlet which had been thrown over his chair had fallen off during his progress through the throng. The loss of it exposed to the public curiosity the head, the arms, and the trunk of a living human being: absolutely deprived of the lower limbs. To make this deformity all the more striking and all the more terrible, the victim of it was—as to his face and his body—an unusually handsome and an unusually well-made man. His long silky hair, of a bright and beautiful chestnut color, fell over shoulders that were the perfection of strength and grace. His face was bright with vivacity and intelligence. His large clear blue eyes and his long delicate white hands were like the eyes and hands of a beautiful woman. He would have looked effeminate but for the manly proportions of his throat and chest, aided in their effect by his flowing beard and long mustache, of a lighter chestnut shade than the color of his hair. Never had a magnificent head and body been more hopelessly ill-bestowed than in this instance! Never had Nature committed a more careless or a more cruel mistake than in the making of this man!
He was sworn, seated, of course, in his chair. Having given his name, he bowed to the Judges and requested their permission to preface his evidence with a word of explanation.
“People generally laugh when they first hear my strange Christian name,” he said, in a low, clear, resonant voice which penetrated to the remotest corners of the Court. “I may inform the good people here that many names, still common among us, have their significations, and that mine is one of them. ‘Alexander,’ for instance, means, in the Greek, ‘a helper of men.’ ‘David’ means, in Hebrew, ‘well-beloved.’ ‘Francis’ means, in German, ‘free.’ My name, ‘Miserrimus,’ means, in Latin, ‘most unhappy.’ It was given to me by my father, in allusion to the deformity which you all see—the deformity with which it was my misfortune to be born. You won’t laugh at ‘Miserrimus’ again, will you?” He turned to the Dean of Faculty, waiting to examine him for the defense. “Mr. Dean. I am at your service. I apologize for delaying, even for a moment, the proceedings of the Court.”
He delivered his little address with perfect grace and good-humor. Examined by the Dean, he gave his evidence clearly, without the slightest appearance of hesitation or reserve.
“I was staying at Gleninch as a guest in the house at the time of Mrs. Eustace Macallan’s death,” he began. “Doctor Jerome and Mr. Gale desired to see me at a private interview—the prisoner being then in a state of prostration which made it impossible for him to attend to his duties as master of the house. At this interview the two doctors astonished and horrified me by declaring that Mrs. Eustace Macallan had died poisoned. They left it to me to communicate the dreadful news to her husband, and they warned me that a post-mortem examination must be held on the body.
“If the Fiscal had seen my old friend when I communicated the doctors’ message, I doubt if he would have ventured to charge the prisoner with the murder of his wife. To my mind the charge was nothing less than an outrage. I resisted the seizure of the prisoner’s Diary and letters, animated by that feeling. Now that the Diary has been produced, I agree with the prisoner’s mother in denying that it is fair evidence to bring against him. A Diary (when it extends beyond a bare record of facts and dates) is nothing but an expression of the poorest and weakest side in the character of the person who keeps it. It is, in nine cases out of ten, the more or less contemptible outpouring of vanity and conceit which the writer dare not exhibit to any mortal but himself. I am the prisoner’s oldest friend. I solemnly declare that I never knew he could write downright nonsense until I heard his Diary read in this Court!
“He kill his wife! He treat his wife with neglect and cruelty! I venture to say, from twenty years’ experience of him, that there is no man in this assembly who is constitutionally more incapable of crime and more incapable of cruelty than the man who stands at the Bar. While I am about it, I go further still. I even doubt whether a man capable of crime and capable of cruelty could have found it in his heart to do evil to the woman whose untimely death is the subject of this inquiry.
“I have heard what the ignorant and prejudiced nurse, Christina Ormsay, has said of the deceased lady. From my own personal observation, I contradict every word of it. Mrs. Eustace Macallan—granting her personal defects—was nevertheless one of the most charming women I ever met with. She was highly bred, in the best sense of the word. I never saw in any other person so sweet a smile as hers, or such grace and beauty of movement as hers. If you liked music, she sang beautifully; and few professed musicians had such a touch on the piano as hers. If you preferred talking, I never yet met with the man (or even the woman, which is saying a great deal more) whom her conversation could not charm. To say that such a wife as this could be first cruelly neglected, and then barbarously murdered, by the man—no! by the martyr—who stands there, is to tell me that the sun never shines at noonday, or that the heaven is not above the earth.
“Oh yes! I know that the letters of her friends show that she wrote to them in bitter complaint of her husband’s conduct to her. But remember what one of those friends (the wisest and the best of them) says in reply. ‘I own to thinking,’ she writes, ‘that your sensitive nature exaggerates or misinterprets the neglect that you experience at the hands of your husband.’ There, in that one sentence, is the whole truth! Mrs. Eustace Macallan’s nature was the imaginative, self-tormenting nature of a poet. No mortal love could ever have been refined enough for her. Trifles which women of a coarser moral fiber would have passed over without notice, were causes of downright agony to that exquisitely sensitive temperament. There are persons born to be unhappy. That poor lady was one of them. When I have said this, I have said all.
“No! There is one word more still to be added.
“It may be as well to remind the prosecution that Mrs. Eustace Macallan’s death was in the pecuniary sense a serious loss to her husband. He had insisted on having the whole of her fortune settled on herself, and on her relatives after her, when he married. Her income from that fortune helped to keep in splendor the house and grounds at Gleninch. The prisoner’s own resources (aided even by his mother’s jointure) were quite inadequate fitly to defray the expenses of living at his splendid country-seat. Knowing all the circumstances, I can positively assert that the wife’s death has deprived the husband of two-thirds of his income. And the prosecution, viewing him as the basest and cruelest of men, declares that he deliberately killed her—with all his pecuniary interests pointing to the preservation of her life!
“It is useless to ask me whether I noticed anything in the conduct of the prisoner and Mrs. Beauly which might justify a wife’s jealousy. I never observed Mrs. Beauly with any attention, and I never encouraged the prisoner in talking to me about her. He was a general admirer of pretty women—so far as I know, in a perfectly innocent way. That he could prefer Mrs. Beauly to his wife is inconceivable to me, unless he were out of his senses. I never had any reason to believe that he was out of his senses.
“As to the question of the arsenic—I mean the question of tracing that poison to the possession of Mrs. Eustace Macallan—I am able to give evidence which may, perhaps, be worthy of the attention of the Court.
“I was present in the Fiscal’s office during the examination of the papers, and of the other objects discovered at Gleninch. The dressing-case belonging to the deceased lady was shown to me after its contents had been officially investigated by the Fiscal himself. I happen to have a very sensitive sense of touch. In handling the lid of the dressing-case, on the inner side I felt something at a certain place which induced me to examine the whole structure of the lid very carefully. The result was the discovery of a private repository concealed in the space between the outer wood and the lining. In that repository I found the bottle which I now produce.”
The further examination of the witness was suspended while the hidden bottle was compared with the bottles properly belonging to the dressing-case.
These last were of the finest cut glass, and of a very elegant form—entirely unlike the bottle found in the private repository, which was of the commonest manufacture, and of the shape ordinarily in use among chemists. Not a drop of liquid, not the smallest atom of any solid substance, remained in it. No smell exhaled from it—and, more unfortunately still for the interests of the defense, no label was found attached to the bottle when it had been discovered.
The chemist who had sold the s............