“And was that the first day of your work there?”
“No, sir; I had been there all the day before.”
“You don’t speak loud enough,” objected the Coroner; “remember that every one in this room wants to hear you.”
She looked up, and with a frightened air surveyed the crowd about her. Publicity evidently made her most uncomfortable, and her voice sank rather than rose.
“Where did you get the key of the house, and by what door did you enter?”
“I went in at the basement, sir, and I got the key at Mr. Van Burnam’s agent in Dey Street. I had to go for it; sometimes they send it to me; but not this time.”
“And now relate your meeting with the policeman on Wednesday morning, in front of Mr. Van Burnam’s house.”
She tried to tell her story, but she made awkward work of it, and they had to ply her with questions to get at the smallest fact. But finally she managed to repeat what we already knew, how she went with the policeman into the house, and how they stumbled upon the dead woman in the parlor.
Further than this they did not question her, and I, Amelia Butterworth, had to sit in silence and see her go back to her seat, redder than before, but with a strangely satisfied air that told me she had escaped more easily than she had expected. And yet Mr. Gryce had been warned that she knew more than appeared, and by one in whom he seemed to have placed some confidence!
The doctor was called next. His testimony was most important, and contained a surprise for me and more than one surprise for the others. After a short preliminary examination, he was requested to state how long the woman had been dead when he was called in to examine her.
“More than twelve and less than eighteen hours,” was his quiet reply.
“Had the rigor mortis set in?”
“No; but it began very soon after.”
“Did you examine the wounds made by the falling shelves and the vases that tumbled with them?”
“I did.”
“Will you describe them?”
He did so.
“And now”—there was a pause in the Coroner’s question which roused us all to its importance, “which of these many serious wounds was in your opinion the cause of her death?”
The witness was accustomed to such scenes, and was perfectly at home in them. Surveying the Coroner with a respectful air, he turned slowly towards the jury and answered in a slow and impressive manner:
“I feel ready to declare, sirs, that none of them did. She was not killed by the falling of the cabinet upon her.”
“Not killed by the falling shelves! Why not? Were they not sufficiently heavy, or did they not strike her in a vital place?”
“They were heavy enough, and they struck her in a way to kill her if she had not been already dead when they fell upon her. As it was, they simply bruised a body from which life had already departed.”
As this was putting it very plainly, many of the crowd who had not been acquainted with these facts previously, showed their interest in a very unmistakable manner; but the Coroner, ignoring these symptoms of growing excitement, hastened to say: