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As long as I lived, moved, and thought, my one purpose now was to make Miserrimus Dexter confide to me his ideas on the subject of Mrs. Eustace Macallan's death. To those ideas I looked as my guiding stars along the dark way on which I was going. I wrote back to Mrs. Macallan, as I really felt gratefully and penitently. And then I went out to the chaise.
The witness answered, "I never noticed anything of the sort." The Dean of Faculty went on: "Did you ever find under the pillow of the bed, or in any other hiding place in Mrs. Macallan's room, any books or pamphlets telling of remedies used for improving a bad complexion?" The witness answered, "No." The Dean of Faculty persisted: "Did you ever hear Mrs.
"Goneril and Regan!" he cried. "My two unnatural daughters, my she-devil children come to mock at me!" "Nothing of the sort," said my mother-in-law, as quietly as if she were addressing a perfectly reasonable being. "I am your old friend, Mrs. Macallan; and I have brought Eustace Macallan's second wife to see you."
Macallan followed her easily, knowing the place; and I walked in Mrs. Macallan's footsteps as closely as I could. "This is a nice family," my mother-in-law whispered to me. "Dexter's cousin is the only woman in the house and Dexter's cousin is an idiot." We entered a spacious hall with a low ceiling, dimly lighted at its further end by one small oil-lamp.
I saw his hands tremble as he laid them on the coverlet; I saw his face grow paler and paler, and his under lip drop. What dead and buried remembrances had I brought to life in him, in all their olden horror? He was the first to speak again. "So this is your interest," he said, "in clearing up the mystery of Mrs. Eustace Macallan's death?" "Yes." "And you believe that I can help you?" "I do."
The closing questions put to the under-housemaid and the nurse revealed for the first time what the nature of the defense was to be. Cross-examining the under-housemaid, the Dean of Faculty said: "Did you ever notice when you were setting Mrs. Eustace Macallan's room to rights whether the water left in the basin was of a blackish or bluish color?"
The crumpled paper, with the grains of powder left in it, had been identified by the chemist, and had been declared to contain grains of arsenic. But where was the proof that Mrs. Eustace Macallan's hand had placed the packet in the cabinet, and had emptied it of its contents? No direct evidence anywhere! Nothing but conjecture!
Eustace Macallan's death offered by the defense as a "clumsy subterfuge, in which no reasonable being could discern the smallest fragment of probability." Without going quite so far as this, I, too, could see no reason whatever in the evidence for assuming that the poor woman had taken an overdose of the poison by mistake.
As for the evidence of the under-gardener, it was little better than pure invention. The greater part of the conversation which he had described himself as overhearing had never taken place. For the rest, Mr. Macallan's behavior toward his wife was invariably kind and considerate.
And, again, she says, "If it had been my unutterable happiness to love and cherish the best, the dearest of men, what a paradise of our own we might have lived in, what delicious hours we might have known!" If this is not the language of a woman shamelessly and furiously in love with a man not her husband what is? Macallan's "soul."
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