Читать книгу A Modern Madonna - Caroline Abbot Stanley - Страница 12

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At the coroner's inquest Margaret was the first one questioned.

When Victor De Jarnette breathed his last, Dr. Semple had taken her by the hand and led her, apparently almost stupefied, into Richard's room, there to await the summons to appear before the coroner, who was immediately notified of the death. When she came in she was entirely collected, though very pale. Her appearance indicated more horror at what had occurred than grief, which was but natural under the circumstances, as more than one man thought, recalling the past year.

When questioned, she stated that her husband had been with her through the afternoon, that he had left her home about four o'clock, and that she had come down to the office an hour or so later. She had gone directly to the door of the main office, and just before reaching it had heard the pistol shot. She ran through the front office into Mr. De Jarnette's private room, feeling sure that the sound had come from there. She had found him on the floor, and near him a revolver which she recognized as one that he had had in his possession for several years.

Here, suddenly recalling Mr. De Jarnette's peremptory command to her to put the pistol down, she hesitated, and looked at him. His face was averted.

She went on, saying nothing about having had the pistol in her hand, nor about its being one of a pair that her husband owned, though this fact came to her suddenly. She had not had time to question him, she said, nor even to go to him before Mr. De Jarnette came in.

Had she heard any sound at the other door?

No, she had heard nothing, or rather she had been so horror-stricken to come upon her husband in this condition that she had not noticed anything.

Richard De Jarnette stated that he had heard the shot while he was in his own room across the hall and had hurried at once to the outside door of his brother's room. Finding it locked he had run around through the main office and found things just as Mrs. De Jarnette had testified. The door was locked, but it was a night latch, he got up to show. One might have gone out that way.

"Without encountering you?" the coroner asked. And Mr. De Jarnette, hesitating, and weighing his words, thought it hardly probable, though possible.

Margaret interrupted timidly here to say that since he spoke of the door she recollected hearing something just as she came in that sounded like the closing of a door. Mr. De Jarnette turned toward her, and with his hard eyes upon her, Margaret faltered that perhaps it was the outer door of the lavatory. Investigation proved that that door was bolted on the inside.

"I cannot see the pertinence of this line of inquiry," said Mr. De Jarnette, at length, almost roughly, "in the face of his dying statement that it was accidental." And his eyes as if by chance turned upon his sister-in-law.

The elevator boy was questioned as to whether any suspicious person had gone down about that time. He could not remember. It seemed to him, upon further thought, that a fat old lady had got on going down at the time of the pistol shot, but so many people went up and down all the time he couldn't be sure that it was not on the floor below.

Dr. Semple was examined as to the wound.

"I have made no careful examination," he said slowly, "beyond assuring myself that nothing could be done for him, and later that life was extinct. I have not thought it necessary. A dozen men are here who heard him say it was accidental, and from a weapon in his own hand." He picked up the cloth used in cleaning the revolver. "This seems to substantiate his statement as to how he happened to have the pistol." Several men were examined as to the ante-mortem statement.

The coroner's report was, "Accidental killing from a weapon in the hand of the deceased." Since it had been clearly shown to be accidental, no jury was impaneled.

It was Margaret's wish that Victor should be buried from his own home. When Judge Kirtley communicated this wish to Richard De Jarnette, he was surprised to find him averse to the arrangement. He preferred that he should be buried from his home, he said briefly. They were separated, and there was no use keeping up a pretence that they were not.

The Judge remonstrated that nobody knew what had passed between them that afternoon, not even Mr. De Jarnette, nor how it would have gone in the future had Victor lived. Margaret's wish to have him buried from his own home would seem to indicate that there had been a reconciliation. At any rate, it would put a different face on the matter to the world, and make it easier for her afterwards.

"Yes," Richard agreed, grimly, "it might make things easier for her." And he consented.

The burial service was brief and wholly impersonal. The burial was private.

Margaret went to the carriage on the arm of her brother-in-law by the arrangement of the undertaker. He had not been near her since the day they separated at the close of the coroner's inquest. Victor De Jarnette's body had lain in his brother's house two days and nights and had then been taken to the house on Massachusetts Avenue the morning of the burial. This was the most that Mr. De Jarnette would consent to. Whatever was thought about the grief of the wife, at this untimely death, there was no doubt as to that of the brother. Richard De Jarnette had aged years in these few days.

As the carriage door was closed upon Margaret alone, Judge Kirtley stepped up to the undertaker.

"Does not Mr. De Jarnette ride with Mrs. De Jarnette?" he asked in a low tone.

"No, sir, he preferred to ride in the second carriage alone. The third is reserved for you, sir."

"I will trouble you to open that door," said the Judge, rather stiffly, indicating the first carriage. "You may use your third carriage for some one else or dismiss it. I shall ride with Mrs. De Jarnette."

In a green bank at Oak Hill he was laid—Oak Hill, that beautiful silent suburb which, for a century of the capital's life—the shifting, heaving, kaleidoscopic life in which men come and go, and wax and wane, and pass into obscurity in ceaseless flow—has steadily gained in population and never lost. A passionate, turbulent soul was Victor De Jarnette, not wholly bad certainly; capable of much that was generous; productive of little that was worth perpetuating; not lacking in good impulses, but casting them oftener than otherwise in a mould of wax, which melted at the first hot blast of passion—a mixture, like most of us perhaps, of good and evil, black and white. But alas!

"The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones."

That night Margaret De Jarnette sat long before the grate fire of the lonely house to which she had come a bride—looking into the darkening coals and seeing nothing—looking into the embers of a dead fire within, and finding much that had burned out. She lived relentlessly over the past two years—putting to herself searching questions and exacting an answer to every one; going down into black depths of whose existence she once had not dreamed and coming up with staring, frightened eyes from which the scales of innocence had dropped.

Then she drew a long, shuddering breath.

"That book is closed," she whispered, "never to be opened again, thank God! … My girlhood is put away with it. I am old—old!"—she threw herself on her knees beside her sleeping child—"But oh, my baby! my little one! my blessed one! I have you! I have you!"

"Semple," Richard De Jarnette said abruptly as he and his friend sat together that night—a long silence had fallen between them—"could a wound like that be self-inflicted? In God's name, tell me the truth!"

It was the question Dr. Semple had been dreading for three days. He had thought of several ways to evade it. When it came, there was something in the haggard face of the man before him that would not be denied.

"No," he said, simply. "It would be a physical impossibility."