Page:010 Once a week Volume X Dec 1863 to Jun 64.pdf/500

 492 emptied some card-racks which stood on the mantelpiece; he opened the drawers of the sideboard; he went up-stairs to his bed-room, and searched the pockets of the clothes he had worn that night; he looked in every likely place he could think of. It seemed rather a superfluous task to do it, and it brought forth no results; but Mr. Carlton wished to feel quite sure upon the point.

“Then you cannot speak to this handwriting?” asked the coroner.

“Not with any certainty,” was the reply of the witness. “This writing, I fancy, looks not dissimilar to the other, so far as my remembrance of it carries me; but that’s a very slight one. All ladies write alike now-a-days.”

“Few ladies write so good a hand as this,” remarked the coroner, giving the torn sheet a jerk upwards to intimate it. “Are you near-sighted, Mr. Carlton, that you took it to the window?”

Mr. Carlton threw his eyes full in the face of the coroner, incipient defiance in their expression.

“I am not near-sighted. But the rain makes the room dark, and the evening is coming on. I thought, too, it must be a document of importance, throwing some great elucidation upon the case, by the commotion that was made over it.”

“Ay,” responded one of the jury, “we were all taken in.”

There was nothing more to be done; no further evidence to be taken. The coroner charged the jury, and he ordered the room to be cleared while they deliberated. Among the crowds filing out of it in obedience to the mandate, went Judith Ford. Judith had gone to the inquest partly to gratify her own pardonable curiosity—though her intense feeling of interest in the proceedings might be characterised by a better name than that; partly to be in readiness in case she should be called to bear testimony, as one of the attendants who had helped to nurse the lady through her illness.

She was not called, however. Her absence from the house at the time of the taking the medicine, and of the death, rendered her of no avail in a judicial point of view, and her name was not so much as mentioned during the day. She had found a seat in a quiet but convenient corner, and remained there undisturbed, watching the proceedings with the most absorbed interest. Never once from the witnesses, and their demeanour, as their separate evidence was given, were her eyes taken. Judith could not overget the dreadful death; she could not fathom the circumstances attending it.

In groups of fives, of tens, of twenties, the mob, gentry and draggletails, stood about, after their compulsory exit from the inquest-room, conversing eagerly, waiting impatiently. Stephen Grey and his brother, Mr. Brooklyn, Mr. Carlton, and a few more gentlemen collected together, deeply anxious for the verdict, as may be readily imagined; whether or not it would be manslaughter against Stephen Grey,

Judith meanwhile found her way to Mrs. Fitch. She was sitting in her bar-parlour—at least, when any odd moment gave her an opportunity to sit; but Mrs. Fitch could not remember many days of her busy life so full of bustle as this had been. She was however knitting when Judith in her deep mourning appeared at the door, and she started from her seat.

“Is it you, Judith? Is it over? What’s the verdict?”

“It is not over,” said Judith. “We are sent out while they deliberate. I don’t think,” she added, some pain in her tone, “they can bring it in against Mr. Stephen Grey.”

“I don’t think they ought, after that evidence about the cobwebs,” returned the landlady. “Anyway, though, it’s odd how the poison could have got there. And I say, Judith, what tale’s this about a face on the stairs?”

“Well, I—don’t know, ma'am. Mr. Carlton says now he thinks it was all his fancy.”

“It has got a curious sound about it, to my mind. I know this—if the poor young lady was anything to me, I should have it followed up. You don’t look well, Judith.”

“I can’t say but it has altogether been a great shock and puzzle to me,” acknowledged Judith, “and thinking and worrying over a thing does not help one’s looks. What with my face having been bad—but it’s better now—and what with this trouble, I have eaten nothing solid for days.”

“I’ll give you a drop of cherry brandy”

“No, ma'am, thank you, I couldn’t take it,” interposed Judith, more vehemently than the kind-hearted offer seemed to warrant. “I can neither eat nor drink to-day.”

“Nonsense, Judith! you are just going the way to lay yourself up. It is a very dreadful thing, there’s no doubt of that, but still she was a stranger to us, and there’s no cause for its throwing us off our proper meals.”

Judith silently passed from the topic, “I am anxious to get a place now,” she said; “I shouldn’t think of all this so much if I had something to do; besides, I don’t like to impose too long on Mrs. Jenkinson’s kindness. I suppose you don’t happen to have heard of a place, Mrs. Fitch?”