At seven I had left the table and was shut up in my own room. I could not rest till I had fathomed1 my own mind in regard to the events of the day.
The question—the great question, of course, now—was how much of Howard's testimony2 was to be believed, and whether he was, notwithstanding his asseverations to the contrary, the murderer of his wife. To most persons the answer seemed easy. From the expression of such people as I had jostled in leaving the court-room, I judged that his sentence had already been passed in the minds of most there present. But these hasty judgments4 did not influence me. I[Pg 164] hope I look deeper than the surface, and my mind would not subscribe5 to his guilt6, notwithstanding the bad impression made upon me by his falsehoods and contradictions.
Now why would not my mind subscribe to it? Had sentiment got the better of me, Amelia Butterworth, and was I no longer capable of looking a thing squarely in the face? Had the Van Burnams, of all people in the world, awakened7 my sympathies at the cost of my good sense, and was I disposed to see virtue8 in a man in whom every circumstance as it came to light revealed little but folly9 and weakness? The lies he had told—for there is no other word to describe his contradictions—would have been sufficient under most circumstances to condemn10 a man in my estimation. Why, then, did I secretly look for excuses to his conduct?
Probing the matter to the bottom, I reasoned in this way: The latter half of his evidence was a complete contradiction of the first, purposely so. In the first, he made himself out a cold-hearted egotist with not enough interest in his wife to make an effort to determine whether she and the murdered woman were identical; in the latter, he showed himself in the light of a man influenced to the point of folly by a woman to whom he had been utterly11 unyielding a few hours before.
Now, knowing human nature to be full of contradictions, I could not satisfy myself that I should be justified12 in accepting either half of his testimony as absolutely true. The man who is all firmness one minute may be all weakness the next, and in face of the calm assertions made by this one when driven to bay by the unexpected discoveries of the police, I dared not decide that his final assurances were altogether false, and that he was[Pg 165] not the man I had seen enter the adjoining house with his wife.
Why, then, not carry the conclusion farther and admit, as reason and probability suggested, that he was also her murderer; that he had killed her during his first visit and drawn13 the shelves down upon her in the second? Would not this account for all the phenomena14 to be observed in connection with this otherwise unexplainable affair? Certainly, all but one—one that was perhaps known to nobody but myself, and that was the testimony given by the clock. It said that the shelves fell at five, whereas, according to Mr. Stone's evidence, it was four, or thereabouts, when Mr. Van Burnam left his father's house. But the clock might not have been a reliable witness. It might have been set wrong, or it might not have been running at all at the time of the accident. No, it would not do for me to rely too much upon anything so doubtful, nor did I; yet I could not rid myself of the conviction that Howard spoke15 the truth when he declared in face of Coroner and jury that they could not connect him with this crime; and whether this conclusion sprang from sentimentality or intuition, I was resolved to stick to it for the present night at least. The morrow might show its futility16, but the morrow had not come.
Meanwhile, with this theory accepted, what explanation could be given of the very peculiar17 facts surrounding this woman's death? Could the supposition of suicide advanced by Howard before the Coroner be entertained for a moment, or that equally improbable suggestion of accident?
Going to my bureau drawer, I drew out the old grocer-bill which has already figured in these pages,[Pg 166] and re-read the notes I had scribbled18 on its back early in the history of this affair. They related, if you will remember, to this very question, and seemed even now to answer it in a more or less convincing way. Will you pardon me if I transcribe19 these notes again, as I cannot imagine my first deliberations on this subject to have made a deep enough impression for you to recall them without help from me.
The question raised in these notes was threefold, and the answers, as you will recollect20, were transcribed21 before the cause of death had been
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