The Shadow of the Rope | Page 8

"and as friendless as ourselves."
"Was your husband jealous of him?"
"I had no idea of it until that night."
"Did you find it out then?"
"I did, indeed!"
"And where had your husband been spending the evening?"
"I had no idea of that either--until he told me he had been watching the
house--and why!"
Though the man was dead, she could not rid her voice of its scorn; and
presently, with bowed head, she was repeating his last words to her. A
cold thrill ran through the court.
"And was that the last time you saw him alive?" inquired counsel, his
face lightening in ready apprehension of the thrill, and his assurance
coming back to him on the spot, as though it were he who had insisted
on putting his client in the box.
But to this there was no immediate answer; for it was here that the
white-haired man raised his hand to his ear; and the event was exactly
as he seemed to have anticipated.
"Was that the last time you saw your husband alive?" repeated Rachel's
counsel, in the winning accents and with the reassuring face that he
could assume without an effort at his will.
"It was," said Rachel, after yet another moment's thought.
It was then that the white-headed man dropped his eyes for once; and
for once the thin, hard lines of his mouth relaxed in a smile that seemed
to epitomize all the evil that was in his face, and to give it forth in one

sudden sour quintessence.
CHAPTER III
NAME AND NATURE
The prisoner's evidence concluded with a perfectly simple if somewhat
hesitating account of her own doings during the remainder of the night
of her husband's murder. That story has already been told in greater
detail than could be extracted even by the urbane but deadly
cross-examiner who led for the Crown. A change had come over the
manner in which Rachel was giving her evidence; it was as though her
strength and nerve were failing her together, and henceforth the words
had to be put into her mouth. Curiously enough, the change in Mrs.
Minchin's demeanor was almost coincident with the single and rather
sinister display of feeling upon the part of the white-haired gentleman
who had followed every word of the case. On the whole, however, her
story bore the stamp of truth; and a half-apologetic but none the less
persistent cross-examination left it scarcely less convincing than before.
There was one independent witness for the defence, in addition to the
experts in photography and chains. The landlady of the house at which
Rachel called, in the early morning, on her way home with the cab, was
about five minutes in the witness-box, but in those five minutes she
supplied the defence with one of its strongest arguments. It was at least
conceivable that a woman who had killed her husband might coolly
proceed to pack her trunk, and thereafter fetch the cab which was to
remove herself and her effects from the scene of the tragedy. But was it
credible that a woman of so much presence of mind, to whom every
minute might make the difference between life and death, would,
having found her cab, actually drive out of her way to inquire after a
sick friend, or even a dying lover, before going home to pick up her
luggage and to ascertain whether her crime was still undetected?
Suppose it were a lover, and inquire one must: would one not still leave
those inquiries to the last? And having made them, last or first; and
knowing the grim necessity of flight; would one woman go out of her
way to tell another that she "had to go abroad very suddenly, and was

going for good?"
"Inconceivable!" cried the prisoner's counsel, dealing with the point;
and the word was much upon his lips during the course of a long and
very strenuous speech, in which the case for the Crown was flouted
from beginning to end, without, perhaps, enough of concentration on its
more obvious weaknesses, or of respect for its undoubted strength. For
the prisoner's proceedings on the night of the murder, however,
supposing she had committed it, and still more on the morning after, it
would have been difficult to find a better epithet; the only drawback
was that this one had seen service in the cause of almost every
murderer who ever went to the gallows--as counsel for the prosecution
remarked in his reply, with deadly deference to his learned friend.
"On the other hand," he went on, wagging his eyeglasses with leisurely
deliberation, and picking his words with a care that enhanced their
effect, after the unbridled rhetoric of the defence--"on the other hand,
gentlemen, if criminals never made mistakes, inconceivable or not