Читать книгу The Orator - Edgar Wallace - Страница 4

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The letter she promised did not come till three months later.

... I was horrified when I discovered he had this terrible habit I couldn’t believe it was possible.... Our life was a very unhappy one. He was irritable, meanly cruel. Twice he struck me in one of his childish frenzies. I wanted to tell the doctor,——threatened if I did that he would deny that he had ever taken arsenic and would tell the doctor that I was poisoning him. Then he fell ill with bronchial trouble, and I had to procure the arsenic. His own chemist refused to supply him with any more. One night I withheld it from him, and there was a terrible scene in his room. At last I gave him a dose, and he wanted more. He screamed out at me from the bed: “I’ll tell them you’re poisoning me. You want my money—you murderess!” It was at that minute I heard something, and, looking round, saw a rough-looking man, a stranger, standing in the doorway, between my room and my husband’s, and at that moment Eustace made a horrible sound and fell back on his pillow. You can guess who the stranger was. It was Osawold. He had broken into the house and had overheard. Can’t you guess what happened? He really believed I had killed Eustace. If I could have thought rationally I should have called in a doctor and told him the truth. It would have been easy to prove that he had been an arsenic eater for years, but I was crazy with fear; I gave the man some money, and later sent him more. You will never know what I endured all the days of that trial. He managed to get word out to me that unless I got him off the charge he would betray me, and my madness culminated that horrible day at the Law Courts.

The Orator read the letter twice before he put it into the fire.