into it with his eyes and nose. “Nor are these the pills.”
Up went the coroner’s head with a start. He had supposed the request to see the box came from a juryman. It might have been irregular for Abel Crew to be allowed so much; but as it arose partly through the coroner’s own fault, he was too wise to make a commotion over it.
“What is that you say?” he asked, stretching out his hand for the box as eagerly as though it had contained gold.
“That this box and these pills are not the same that I furnished to Mrs. Reed, sir,” replied Abel, advancing and placing the box in the coroner’s hand. “They are not indeed.”
“Not the same pills and box!” exclaimed the coroner. “Why, man, you have heard the evidence of the witness, Hester Reed; you may see for yourself that she spoke nothing but truth. Don’t talk nonsense here.”
“But they are not the same, sir,” respectfully persisted Abel. “I know my own pills, and I know my own boxes: these are neither the one nor the other.”
“Now that won’t do; you must take us all for fools!” exploded the coroner, who was a man of quick temper. “Just you stand back and be quiet.”
“Never a pill-box went out from my hands, sir, but it had my little private mark upon it,” urged Abel. “That box does not bear the mark.”
“What is the mark, pray?” asked the coroner.
“Four little dots of ink inside the rim of the lid, sir; and four similar dots inside the box near the edge. They are so faint that a casual observer might not notice them; but they are always there. Of all the pill-boxes now in my house, sir—and I suppose there may be two or three dozen of them—you will not find one but has the mark.”
Some whispering had been going on in different parts of the room; but this silenced it. You might have heard a pin drop. The words seemed to make an impression on the coroner: they and Abel Crew were both so earnest.
“You assert also that the pills are not yours,” spoke the coroner, who was known to be fond of desultory conversations while holding his inquests. “What proof have you of that?”
“No proof; that is, no proof that I can advance, that would satisfy the eye or ear. But I am certain, by the look of them, that those were never my pills.”
All this took the jury aback; the coroner also. It had seemed to some of them an odd thing that Hester Reed should have swallowed two or three of the pills at once without their entailing an ache or a pain, and that one each had poisoned the babies. Perkins the butcher observed to the coroner that the box must have been changed since Mrs. Reed helped herself from it. Upon which the coroner, after pulling at his whiskers for a moment as if in thought, called out for Mrs. Reed to return.
But when she did so, and was further questioned, she only kept to what she had said before, strenuously denying that the box could have been changed. It had never been touched by any hands but her own while it stood in its place on the press, and had never been removed from it at all until she took it downstairs on the past Tuesday night.
“Is the room where this press stands your own sleeping-room?” asked the coroner.
“No, sir. It’s the other room, where my three children sleep.”
“Could these children get to the box?”
“Dear no, sir! ’Twould be quite impossible.”
“Had any one an opportunity of handling the box when you took it down on Tuesday night?” went on the coroner after a pause.
“Only Mrs. Dovey, sir. Nobody else was there.”
“Did she touch it?”
“She laid hold of it to look at the pills.”
“Did you leave her alone with it?”
“No, sir. Leastways—yes, I did for a minute or so, while I went into the back’us to get the sugar and a saucer and spoon.”
“Had she the box in her hands when you returned?”
“Yes, sir, I think she had. I think she was still smelling at the pills. I know the poor little innocents was lying one on one knee, and one on t’other, all flat, and her two hands was lifted with the box in ’em.”
“It was after that that you took the pills out of it to give the children?”
“Yes, sir; directly after. But Ann Dovey wouldn’t do nothing wrong to the pills, sir.”
“That will do,” said the coroner in his curt way. “Call Ann Dovey.”
Ann Dovey walked forward with a face as red as her new bonnet-strings. She had heard the whole colloquy: something seemed, too, to have put her out. Possessing scant veneration for coroners at the best of times, and none for the jury at present assembled, she did not feel disposed to keep down her temper.
The few first questions asked her, however, afforded no opportunity for resentment, for they were put quietly, and tended only to extract confirmation of Mrs. Reed’s evidence, as to fetching the pill-box from upstairs and administering the pills. Then the coroner cleared his throat.
“Did you see the last witness, Hester Reed, go into the back kitchen for a spoon and saucer?”
“I saw her go and fetch ’em from somewhere,” replied Ann Dovey, who felt instinctively the ball was beginning, and gave the reins to her temper accordingly.
“Did you take charge of the pill-box while she was gone?”
“I had it in my hand, if you mean that.”
“Did anybody come into the kitchen during that interval?”
“No they didn’t,” was the tart response.
“You were alone, except for the two infants?”
“I were. What of it?”
“Now, witness, did you do anything with that box? Did you, for instance, exchange it for another?”
“I think you ought to be ashamed o’ yourselves, all on you, to sit and ask a body such a thing!” exploded Mrs. Dovey, growing every moment more resentful, at being questioned. “If I had knowed the bother that was to spring up, I’d have chucked the box, pills and all, into the fire first. I wish I had!”
“Was the box, that you handed to Hester Reed on her return, the same box she left with you? Were the pills the same pills?”
“Why, where d’ye think I could have got another box from?” shrieked Ann Dovey. “D’you suppose, sir, I carry boxes and pills about with me? I bain’t so fond o’ physic as all that comes to.”
“Dovey takes pills on occasion for that giddiness of his; I’ve seen him take ’em; mayhap you’d picked up a box of his,” spoke Dobbs the blacksmith, mildly.
That was adding fuel to fire. Two of a trade don’t agree. Dovey and Dobbs were both blacksmiths: the one in Church Dykely; the other in Piefinch Cut, not much more, so to say, than a stone’s-throw from each other. The men were good friends enough; but their respective ladies were apt to regard jealously all work taken to the rival establishment. Any other of the jurymen might have made the remark with comparative impunity; not so Dobbs. And, besides the turn the inquiry seemed to be taking, Mrs. Dovey had not been easy about it in her mind from the first; proof of which was furnished by the call, already mentioned, made by her husband on Abel Crew.
“Dovey takes pills on occasion, do he!” she shrilly retorted. “And what do you take, Bill Dobbs? Pints o’ beer when you can get ’em. Who lamed Poole’s white horse the t’other day a-shoeing him?”
“Silence!” sternly interrupted the coroner. While Dobbs, conscious of the self-importance imparted to him by the post he was now filling, and of the necessity of maintaining the dignity of demeanour which he was apt to put on with his best clothes, bore the aspersion with equanimity and a stolid face.
“Attend to me, witness, and confine yourself to replying to the questions I put to you,”