I might give it freely; he said two even wouldn’t hurt him.”
“And did you give the pill?” asked the coroner.
“No, sir. He’s a rare bad one to give physic to, Gregory is, and I let him get well without it.”
“How old is he?”
“Turned of three, sir.”
“You are absolutely certain, Mrs. Reed, that these pills, from which you took out two to give the deceased children, were the very self-same pills you had from Abel Crew?”
“I be sure and certain of it, sir. Nobody never put a finger upon the box but me. It stood all the while in the corner o’ the press-shelf in the children’s bedroom. Twice a week when I got upon a chair to dust the shelf, I see it there. There was nobody in the house but me, except the little ones. My husband don’t concern himself with the places and things.”
Circumstantial evidence could not well go farther. Mrs. Reed was dismissed, and the coroner told Abel Crew to come near the table. He did as he was bid, and stood there upright and manly, a gentle look on his face.
“You have heard the evidence, Abel Crew,” said the coroner. “The pills have been analyzed and found to contain a certain portion of arsenic—a great deal more than enough to kill a child. What have you to say to it?”
“Only this, sir; only what I said before. That the pills analyzed were not my pills. The pills I gave to Mrs. Reed contained neither arsenic nor any other poison.”
“It is showing great obstinacy on your part to repeat that,” returned the coroner, impatiently. “Mrs. Reed swears that the pills were the same pills; and she evidently speaks the truth.”
“I am sure she thinks she speaks it,” replied Abel, gently. “Nevertheless, sir, I assure you she is mistaken. In some way the pills must have been changed whilst in her possession, box and all.”
“Why, man, in what manner do you suppose they could have been changed?”
“I don’t know, sir. All I do know is, that the pills and the box produced here last week were not, either of them, the pills and the box she had from me. Never a box went out from me, sir, but had my private mark on it—the mark I spoke of. Jones the constable searched my place whilst I was detained in the lock-up, and took away all the pill-boxes out of it. Let him testify whether he found one without the mark.”
At this juncture a whole cargo of pill-boxes were shot out of a bag on the table by old Jones, some empty, some filled with pills. The coroner and jury began to examine them, and found the mark on all, lids and boxes.
“And if you’d be so good as to cause the pills to be analyzed, sir, they would be found perfectly free from poison,” resumed Abel. “They are made from herbs that possess healing properties, not irritant; a poisonous herb, whether poisonous in itself, or one from which poison may be extracted, I never plucked. Believe me, sir, for I am telling the truth; the truth before Heaven.”
The coroner said nothing for a minute or two: I think the words impressed him. He began lifting the lid again from one or two of the boxes.
“What are these pills for? All for the same disorder?”
“They were made up for different disorders, sir.”
“And pray how do you distinguish them?”
“I cannot distinguish them now. They have been mixed. Even if returned to me I could not use them. I have a piece of furniture at home, sir, that I call my pill-case. It has various drawers in it, each drawer being labelled with the sort of pills kept in it: camomile, dandelion, and so on. Mr. Jones must be able to corroborate this.”
Old Jones nodded. He had never seen nothing neater nor more exact in all his life, than the keeping o’ them there pills. He, Mr. Jones, had tumbled the drawerfuls indiscriminately into his bag, and so mixed them.
“And they will be so much loss to me,” quietly observed Abel. “It does not matter.”
“Were you brought up to the medical profession?” cried the coroner—and some of us thought he put the question in irony.
“No, sir,” replied Abel, taking it seriously. “I have learnt the healing art, as supplied by herbs and roots, and I know their value. Herbs will cure sometimes where the regular doctor fails. I have myself cured cases with them that the surgeons could not cure; cases that but for me, under God, might never have been cured in this world. I make no boast of it; any one else might do as much who had made herbs a study as I have.”
“Are you making a fortune by it?” went on the coroner.
Abel shook his head.
“I have a small income of my own, sir, and it is enough for my simple wants. What little money I make by my medicines, and honey, and that—it is not much—I find uses for in other ways. I indulge in a new book now and then; and there are many poor people around who need a bit of help sometimes.”
“You ‘read’ the stars, I am told, Abel Crew. What do you read in them?”
“The same that I read, sir, in all other of nature’s works: God’s wonderful hand. His wisdom, His power, His providence.”
Perhaps the coroner thought to bring Abel to ridicule in his replies: if so, it was a mistake, for he seemed to be getting the worst of it himself. At any rate, he quitted the subject abruptly, brushed his energy up, and began talking to the jury.
The drift of the conversation was, so far as the room could hear it, that Crew’s pills, and only Crew’s, could have been the authors of the mischief to the two deceased children, whose bodies they were sitting upon, and that Crew must be committed to take his trial for manslaughter. “Hester Reed’s evidence,” he continued, “is so clear and positive, that it quite puts aside any suspicion of the box of pills having been changed–”
“The box had not my mark upon it, sir,” respectfully spoke Abel Crew, his tone anxious.
“Don’t interrupt me,” rebuked the coroner, sharply. “As to the box not having what he calls his private mark upon it,” he added to the jury, “that in my opinion tells little. Because a man has put a mark on fifty pill-boxes, he is not obliged to have put it on the fifty-first. An unintentional omission is readily made. It appears to me–”
“Am I in time? Is it all over? Is Abel Crew found guilty?”
This unceremonious interruption to the official speech came from a woman’s voice. The door of the room was thrown open with a fling, considerably discomposing those who had their backs against it and were taken unawares, and they were pushed right and left by the struggles of some one to get to the front. The coroner looked daggers; old Jones lifted his staff; but the intruder forced her way forward with resolute equanimity. Cathy Reed: we never remembered to call her Parrifer. Cathy in her Sunday-going gown and a pink bonnet.
“How dare you?” cried the coroner. “What do you mean by this? Who are you?”
“I have come rushing over from Tewkesbury to clear Abel Crew,” returned Cathy, recovering her breath after the fight. “The pills that killed the children were my pills.”
The commotion this avowal caused in the room was beyond describing. The coroner stared, the jury all turned to look at the speaker, the crowd trod upon one another.
“And sorry to my heart I am that it should have been so,” went on Cathy. “I loved those two dear little ones as if they were my own, and I’d rather my pills had killed myself. Just look at that, please, Mr. Coroner.”
The ease with which Cathy spoke to the official gentleman, the coolness with which she put down a pill-box on the green cloth before him, took the room by surprise. As Ann Dovey remarked, later, “She must ha’ learnt that there manner in her travels with young Parrifer.”
“What is this?” questioned the coroner, curtly, picking up the box.
“Perhaps you’ll ask Mr. Crew whether he knows it, sir, before I say what it is,” returned Cathy.
The coroner had opened it.