The Uttermost Farthing | Page 6

a face.
"I sprang up with a gasp of terror and searched frantically for the
matches. In a few moments I had found them and tremblingly struck a
light; and the first glimmer of the flame turned my deadly fear into yet
more deadly realization. My wife lay on the hearth-rug, her upturned
face as white as marble, her half-open eyes already glazing. A great,
brown scorch marked the breast of her night-dress and at its center was
a small stain of blood.

"She was stone dead. I saw that at a glance. The bullet must have
passed right through her heart and she must have died in an instant.
That, too, I saw. And though I called her by her name and whispered
words of tenderness into her ears; though I felt her pulseless wrists and
chafed her hands--so waxen now and chill--I knew that she was gone.
"I was still kneeling beside her, crazed, demented by grief and horror;
still stroking her poor white hand, telling her that she was my dear one,
my little Kate, and begging her, foolishly, to come back to me, to be
my little friend and playmate as of old; still, I say, babbling in the
insanity of grief, when I heard a soft step descending the stairs. It came
nearer. The door opened and someone stole into the room on tip-toe. It
was the housemaid, Harratt. She stood stock still when she saw us and
stared and uttered strange whimpering cries like a frightened dog. And
then, suddenly, she turned and stole away silently as she had come, and
I heard her running softly upstairs. Presently she came down again, but
this time she passed the dining-room and went out of the street door. I
vaguely supposed she had gone for assistance, but the matter did not
concern me. My wife was dead. Nothing mattered now.
"Harratt did not return, however, and I soon forgot her. The death of
my dear one grew more real. I began to appreciate it as an actual fact.
And with this realization, the question of my own death arose. I took it
for granted from the first. The burden of solitary existence was not to
be entertained for a moment. The only question was how, and I debated
this in leisurely fashion, sitting on the floor with Kate's hand in mine. I
had a pistol upstairs and, of course, there were keen-edged scalpels in
the laboratory. But, strange as it may appear, the bias of an anatomical
training even then opposed the idea of gross mechanical injuries.
However, there were plenty of poisons available, and to this method I
inclined as more decent and dignified.
"Having settled on the method, I was disposed to put it into practice at
once; but then another consideration arose. My wife would have to be
buried. By some hands she must be laid in her last resting-place, and
those hands could be none other than my own. So I must stay behind
for a little while.

"The hours passed on unreckoned until pencils of cold blue daylight
began to stream in through the chinks of the shutters and contend with
the warm gaslight within. Then another footstep was heard on the stairs
and the cook, Wilson, came into the room. She, like the housemaid,
stopped dead when she saw my wife's corpse, and stood for an instant
staring wildly with her mouth wide open. But only for an instant. The
next she was flying out of the front door, rousing the street with her
screams.
"The advent of the cook roused me. I knew that the police would arrive
soon and I instinctively looked about me to see how this unspeakable
thing had happened. I had already noticed that one of my wife's
hands--the one that I had not been holding--was clenched, and I now
observed that it grasped a little tuft of hair. I drew out a portion of the
tuft and looked at it. It was coarse hair, about three inches long and a
dull gray in color. I laid it on the clean note-paper in the drawer of the
bureau bookcase to examine later, and then glanced around the room.
The origin of the tragedy was obvious. The household plate had been
taken out of the plate chest in the pantry and laid out on the end of the
dining table. There the things stood, their polished surfaces sullied by
the greasy finger-marks of the wretch who had murdered my wife. At
those tell-tale marks I looked with new and growing interest.
Finger-prints, in those days, had not yet been recognized by the public
or the police as effective means of identification. But they were well
known to scientific men and I had given the subject some attention
myself.