The Affair Next Door (17 page)

But let me give his testimony. Having acknowledged that he knew the Van
Burnam family well, and Howard in particular, he went on to state that
on the night of the seventeenth he had been detained at his office by
business of a more than usual pressing nature, and finding that he could
expect no rest for that night, humored himself by getting off the cars
at Twenty-first Street instead of proceeding on to Thirty-third Street,
where his apartments were.

The smile which these words caused (Miss Althorpe lives in Twenty-first
Street) woke no corresponding light on his face. Indeed, he frowned at
it, as if he felt that the gravity of the situation admitted of nothing
frivolous or humorsome. And this feeling was shared by Howard, for he
started when the witness mentioned Twenty-first Street, and cast him a
haggard look of dismay which happily no one saw but myself, for every
one else was concerned with the witness. Or should I except Mr. Gryce?

"I had of course no intentions beyond a short stroll through this street
previous to returning to my home," continued the witness, gravely; "and
am sorry to be obliged to mention this freak of mine, but find it
necessary in order to account for my presence there at so unusual an
hour."

"You need make no apologies," returned the Coroner. "Will you state on
what line of cars you came from your office?"

"I came up Third Avenue."

"Ah! and walked towards Broadway?"

"Yes."

"So that you necessarily passed very near the Van Burnam mansion?"

"Yes."

"At what time was this, can you say?"

"At four, or nearly four. It was half-past three when I left my office."

"Was it light at that hour? Could you distinguish objects readily?"

"I had no difficulty in seeing."

"And what did you see? Anything amiss at the Van Burnam mansion?"

"No, sir, nothing amiss. I merely saw Howard Van Burnam coming down the
stoop as I went by the corner."

"You made no mistake. It was the gentleman you name, and no other whom
you saw on this stoop at this hour?"

"I am very sure that it was he. I am sorry—"

But the Coroner gave him no opportunity to finish.

"You and Mr. Van Burnam are friends, you say, and it was light enough
for you to recognize each other; then you probably spoke?"

"No, we did not. I was thinking—well of other, things," and here he
allowed the ghost of a smile to flit suggestively across his firm-set
lips. "And Mr. Van Burnam seemed preoccupied also, for, as far as I
know, he did not even look my way."

"And you did not stop?"

"No, he did not look like a man to be disturbed."

"And this was at four on the morning of the eighteenth?"

"At four."

"You are certain of the hour and of the day?"

"I am certain. I should not be standing here if I were not very sure of
my memory. I am sorry," he began again, but he was stopped as
peremptorily as before by the Coroner.

"Feeling has no place in an inquiry like this." And the witness was
dismissed.

Mr. Stone, who had manifestly given his evidence under compulsion,
looked relieved at its termination. As he passed back to the room from
which he had come, many only noticed the extreme elegance of his form
and the proud cast of his head, but I saw more than these. I saw the
look of regret he cast at his friend Howard.

A painful silence followed his withdrawal, then the Coroner spoke to the
jury:

"Gentlemen, I leave you to judge of the importance of this testimony.
Mr. Stone is a well-known man of unquestionable integrity, but perhaps
Mr. Van Burnam can explain how he came to visit his father's house at
four o'clock in the morning on that memorable night, when according to
his latest testimony he left his wife there at twelve. We will give him
the opportunity."

"There is no use," began the young man from the place where he sat. But
gathering courage even while speaking, he came rapidly forward, and
facing Coroner and jury once more, said with a false kind of energy that
imposed upon no one:

"I can explain this fact, but I doubt if you will accept my explanation.
I was at my father's house at that hour, but not in it. My restlessness
drove me back to my wife, but not finding the keys in my pocket, I came
down the stoop again and went away."

"Ah, I see now why you prevaricated this morning in regard to the time
when you missed those keys."

"I know that my testimony is full of contradictions."

"You feared to have it known that you were on the stoop of your father's
house for the second time that night?"

"Naturally, in face of the suspicion I perceived everywhere about me."

"And this time you did not go in?"

"No."

"Nor ring the bell?"

"No."

"Why not, if you left your wife within, alive and well?"

"I did not wish to disturb her. My purpose was not strong enough to
surmount the least difficulty. I was easily deterred from going where I
had little wish to be."

"So that you merely went up the stoop and down again at the time Mr.
Stone saw you?"

"Yes, and if he had passed a minute sooner he would have seen this: seen
me go up, I mean, as well as seen me come down. I did not linger long in
the doorway."

"But you did linger there a moment?"

"Yes; long enough to hunt for the keys and get over my astonishment at
not finding them."

"Did you notice Mr. Stone going by on Twenty-first Street?"

"No."

"Was it as light as Mr. Stone has said?"

"Yes, it was light."

"And you did not notice him?"

"No."

"Yet you must have followed very closely behind him?"

"Not necessarily. I went by the way of Twentieth Street, sir. Why, I do
not know, for my rooms are uptown. I do not know why I did half the
things I did that night."

"I can readily believe it," remarked the Coroner.

Mr. Van Burnam's indignation rose.

"You are trying," said he, "to connect me with the fearful death of my
wife in my father's lonely house. You cannot do it, for I am as innocent
of that death as you are, or any other person in this assemblage. Nor
did I pull those shelves down upon her as you would have this jury
think, in my last thoughtless visit to my father's door. She died
according to God's will by her own hand or by means of some strange and
unaccountable accident known only to Him. And so you will find, if
justice has any place in these investigations and a manly intelligence
be allowed to take the place of prejudice in the breasts of the twelve
men now sitting before me."

And bowing to the Coroner, he waited for his dismissal, and receiving
it, walked back not to his lonely corner, but to his former place
between his father and brother, who received him with a wistful air and
strange looks of mingled hope and disbelief.

"The jury will render their verdict on Monday morning," announced the
Coroner, and adjourned the inquiry.

My cook had prepared for me a most excellent dinner, thinking that I
needed all the comfort possible after a day of such trying experiences.
But I ate little of it; my thoughts were too busy, my mind too much
exercised. What would be the verdict of the jury, and could this
especial jury be relied upon to give a just verdict?

At seven I had left the table and was shut up in my own room. I could
not rest till I had fathomed my own mind in regard to the events of the
day.

The question—the great question, of course, now—was how much of
Howard's testimony was to be believed, and whether he was,
notwithstanding his asseverations to the contrary, the murderer of his
wife. To most persons the answer seemed easy. From the expression of
such people as I had jostled in leaving the court-room, I judged that
his sentence had already been passed in the minds of most there present.
But these hasty judgments did not influence me. I hope I look deeper
than the surface, and my mind would not subscribe to his guilt,
notwithstanding the bad impression made upon me by his falsehoods and
contradictions.

Now why would not my mind subscribe to it? Had sentiment got the better
of me, Amelia Butterworth, and was I no longer capable of looking a
thing squarely in the face? Had the Van Burnams, of all people in the
world, awakened my sympathies at the cost of my good sense, and was I
disposed to see virtue in a man in whom every circumstance as it came to
light revealed little but folly and weakness? The lies he had told—for
there is no other word to describe his contradictions—would have been
sufficient under most circumstances to condemn a man in my estimation.
Why, then, did I secretly look for excuses to his conduct?

Probing the matter to the bottom, I reasoned in this way: The latter
half of his evidence was a complete contradiction of the first,
purposely so. In the first, he made himself out a cold-hearted egotist
with not enough interest in his wife to make an effort to determine
whether she and the murdered woman were identical; in the latter, he
showed himself in the light of a man influenced to the point of folly by
a woman to whom he had been utterly unyielding a few hours before.

Now, knowing human nature to be full of contradictions, I could not
satisfy myself that I should be justified in accepting either half of
his testimony as absolutely true. The man who is all firmness one minute
may be all weakness the next, and in face of the calm assertions made by
this one when driven to bay by the unexpected discoveries of the police,
I dared not decide that his final assurances were altogether false, and
that he was not the man I had seen enter the adjoining house with his
wife.

Why, then, not carry the conclusion farther and admit, as reason and
probability suggested, that he was also her murderer; that he had killed
her during his first visit and drawn the shelves down upon her in the
second? Would not this account for all the phenomena to be observed in
connection with this otherwise unexplainable affair? Certainly, all but
one—one that was perhaps known to nobody but myself, and that was the
testimony given by the clock.
It
said that the shelves fell at five,
whereas, according to Mr. Stone's evidence, it was four, or thereabouts,
when Mr. Van Burnam left his father's house. But the clock might not
have been a reliable witness. It might have been set wrong, or it might
not have been running at all at the time of the accident. No, it would
not do for me to rely too much upon anything so doubtful, nor did I; yet
I could not rid myself of the conviction that Howard spoke the truth
when he declared in face of Coroner and jury that they could not connect
him with this crime; and whether this conclusion sprang from
sentimentality or intuition, I was resolved to stick to it for the
present night at least. The morrow might show its futility, but the
morrow had not come.

Meanwhile, with this theory accepted, what explanation could be given of
the very peculiar facts surrounding this woman's death? Could the
supposition of suicide advanced by Howard before the Coroner be
entertained for a moment, or that equally improbable suggestion of
accident?

Going to my bureau drawer, I drew out the old grocer-bill which has
already figured in these pages, and re-read the notes I had scribbled
on its back early in the history of this affair. They related, if you
will remember, to this very question, and seemed even now to answer it
in a more or less convincing way. Will you pardon me if I transcribe
these notes again, as I cannot imagine my first deliberations on this
subject to have made a deep enough impression for you to recall them
without help from me.

The question raised in these notes was threefold, and the answers, as
you will recollect, were transcribed before the cause of death had been
determined by the discovery of the broken pin in the dead woman's brain.

These are the queries:

First: was her death due to accident?

Second: was it effected by her own hand?

Third: was it a murder?

The replies given are in the form of reasons, as witness:

My reasons for not thinking it an accident.

1. If it had been an accident, and she had pulled the cabinet over upon
herself,
[2]
she would have been found with her feet pointing towards the
wall where the cabinet had stood. But her feet were towards the door and
her head under the cabinet.

2. The precise arrangement of the clothing about her feet, which
precluded any theory involving accident.

My reason for not thinking it a suicide.

She could not have been found in the position observed without having
lain down on the floor while living, and then pulled the shelves down
upon herself. (A theory obviously too improbable to be considered.)

My reason for not thinking it murder.

She would need to have been held down on the floor while the cabinet was
being pulled over on her, a thing which the quiet aspect of the hands
and feet make appear impossible. (Very good, but we know now that she
was dead when the shelves fell over, so that my one excuse for not
thinking it a murder is rendered null.)

My reasons for thinking it a murder.

—But I will not repeat these. My reasons for not thinking it an
accident or a suicide remained as good as when they were written, and if
her death had not been due to either of these causes, then it must have
been due to some murderous hand. Was that hand the hand of her husband?
I have already given it as my opinion that it was not.

Now, how to make that opinion good, and reconcile me again to myself;
for I am not accustomed to have my instincts at war with my judgment. Is
there any reason for my thinking as I do? Yes, the manliness of man. He
only looked well when he was repelling the suspicion he saw in the
surrounding faces. But that might have been assumed, just as his
careless manner was assumed during the early part of the inquiry. I must
have some stronger reason than this for my belief. The two hats? Well,
he had explained how there came to be two hats on the scene of crime,
but his explanation had not been very satisfactory.
I
had seen no hat
in her hand when she crossed the pavement to her father's house. But
then she might have carried it under her cape without my seeing
it—perhaps. The discovery of two hats and of two pairs of gloves in Mr.
Van Burnam's parlors was a fact worth further investigation, and
mentally I made a note of it, though at the moment I saw no prospect of
engaging in this matter further than my duties as a witness required.