The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton | Page 9

now the steering becomes difficult. I will try to keep as nearly as
possible to Anne's own statements; though toward the end, poor
thing . . .
Well, to go back. The very year after the little brown dog was brought
to Kerfol, Yves de Cornault, one winter night, was found dead at the
head of a narrow flight of stairs leading down from his wife's rooms to
a door opening on the court. It was his wife who found him and gave
the alarm, so distracted, poor wretch, with fear and horror--for his
blood was all over her--that at first the roused household could not
make out what she was saying, and thought she had gone suddenly mad.
But there, sure enough, at the top of the stairs lay her husband, stone
dead, and head foremost, the blood from his wounds dripping down to
the steps below him. He had been dreadfully scratched and gashed

about the face and throat, as if with a dull weapon; and one of his legs
had a deep tear in it which had cut an artery, and probably caused his
death. But how did he come there, and who had murdered him?
His wife declared that she had been asleep in her bed, and hearing his
cry had rushed out to find him lying on the stairs; but this was
immediately questioned. In the first place, it was proved that from her
room she could not have heard the struggle on the stairs, owing to the
thickness of the walls and the length of the intervening passage; then it
was evident that she had not been in bed and asleep, since she was
dressed when she roused the house, and her bed had not been slept in.
Moreover, the door at the bottom of the stairs was ajar, and the key in
the lock; and it was noticed by the chaplain (an observant man) that the
dress she wore was stained with blood about the knees, and that there
were traces of small blood-stained hands low down on the staircase
walls, so that it was conjectured that she had really been at the
postern-door when her husband fell and, feeling her way up to him in
the darkness on her hands and knees, had been stained by his blood
dripping down on her. Of course it was argued on the other side that the
blood-marks on her dress might have been caused by her kneeling
down by her husband when she rushed out of her room; but there was
the open door below, and the fact that the fingermarks in the staircase
all pointed upward.
The accused held to her statement for the first two days, in spite of its
improbability; but on the third day word was brought to her that Herve
de Lanrivain, a young nobleman of the neighbourhood, had been
arrested for complicity in the crime. Two or three witnesses thereupon
came forward to say that it was known throughout the country that
Lanrivain had formerly been on good terms with the lady of Cornault;
but that he had been absent from Brittany for over a year, and people
had ceased to associate their names. The witnesses who made this
statement were not of a very reputable sort. One was an old
herb-gatherer suspected of witch-craft, another a drunken clerk from a
neighbouring parish, the third a half-witted shepherd who could be
made to say anything; and it was clear that the prosecution was not
satisfied with its case, and would have liked to find more definite proof

of Lanrivain's complicity than the statement of the herb- gatherer, who
swore to having seen him climbing the wall of the park on the night of
the murder. One way of patching out incomplete proofs in those days
was to put some sort of pressure, moral or physical, on the accused
person. It is not clear what pressure was put on Anne de Cornault; but
on the third day, when she was brought into court, she "appeared weak
and wandering," and after being encouraged to collect herself and
speak the truth, on her honour and the wounds of her Blessed Redeemer,
she confessed that she had in fact gone down the stairs to speak with
Herve de Lanrivain (who denied everything), and had been surprised
there by the sound of her husband's fall. That was better; and the
prosecution rubbed its hands with satisfaction. The satisfaction
increased when various dependents living at Kerfol were induced to
say--with apparent sincerity--that during the year or two preceding his
death their master had once more grown uncertain and irascible, and
subject to the fits of brooding silence which his household had learned
to dread before his second marriage. This seemed to show that things
had not been