took this blow. She sat very still, and her face was white even to the lips. I could see it was only by a brave exercise of will-power that she kept herself from collapse. Morland looked angry and belligerent He glared at Lasseter, and the secretary responded with a stare equally unfriendly. Barbara looked horror-stricken. She seemed about to speak, and then shut her lips tightly, as if determined to say nothing at this crisis. In agony, my heart cried, “Anybody but Anne!”
I was unable to keep still. “Nonsense!” I exclaimed. “You are theorizing without data. Your implication is unwarranted and false.”
The coroner looked at me, not reprovingly, but as if deeply interested. Then he dismissed Archer from the stand.
Chapter XII.
Anne’s Testimony
Mrs. Van Wyck was next called to testify. If Barbara had appeared calm and composed, the same could not be said of Anne. She was white and trembling to the very lips; she tottered as she walked, and with an audible sigh she sank into the chair placed for her. But all this, at least to my mind, in no way impaired her strange, eerie beauty. Her large gray eyes looked almost black against the whiteness of her pallor, and as she swept a mournful, unseeing glance round the room, I endeavored to intercept her gaze and give her a nod of sympathy and help. But she did not look at me, and, clasping her hands in her lap, prepared to meet the ordeal of the coroner’s questions.
Mr. Mellen looked at her for a moment before he spoke, and his hard face took on a slightly softer expression at the sight of her evident distress.
In what he doubtless meant to be a gentle voice, he said, “When did you last see your husband alive, Mrs. Van Wyck?”
To my surprise, Anne showed a decided agitation. She clasped her hands tightly to her breast, and in a choked, almost inaudible voice she replied, “When he left me after dinner, to go to his study.”
“He was then in good health and spirits?” asked Mr. Mellen, and a more inane question I never heard. It seemed perfunctory, as if the man scarcely knew how to broach the subject.
For a moment Anne simply stared at her questioner, as if trying to control her voice. Then she said, “My husband was in perfect health, and—yes, I think I may say he was in good spirits.”
“What were his last words to you as he left you?”
If this were a random shot, it was certainly a peculiar coincidence. For we all remembered how, as he left the room, David Van Wyck had whispered to his wife something that had caused her the deepest emotion.
Anne’s great eyes looked at each of us in turn. After the briefest glance at the others, she gazed longer at Archer. It may have been my imagination, but I thought he gave to her an almost imperceptible negative shake of his head. She looked frightened, and then her glance met mine. I so feared that any appearance of secrecy on her part would be prejudicial to her, that I nodded my head affirmatively, meaning for her to answer the question.
“Must I tell that?” she asked in a pained voice.
“Yes,” said Mr. Mellen; “especially if it has any bearing on Mr. Van Wyck’s death.”
But Anne did not hear the coroner’s words. She was nerving herself for her reply, and she said in a low voice, but distinctly, “As he left me, my husband whispered to me that he would give the Van Wyck pearls as well as his gift of money to the library committee.”
A wave of indignation swept over the audience. Anxious as the villagers were for the gift of the library, not one of them would have wished Anne Van Wyck’s jewels sacrificed in its cause.
Elated by the sensational answer, the coroner continued. “Did he say anything more?” he inquired.
“Must I tell that?” Anne scarcely breathed, her face as white as the handkerchief she held.
And the coroner said inexorably, “Yes.”
Had Anne looked toward me then, I should have shaken my head, for I feared from her expression that the revelation would be a startling one. She looked dazed, she spoke almost as one in a trance, but she said clearly, “He said, ‘Now don’t you wish I was dead?’ ”
Doubtless it was unconscious and involuntary, but Anne had reproduced almost exactly the jeering tones of David Van Wyck’s sarcastic voice, and not one of us doubted that those were the very words and the very inflection that had sounded in her ear as he had whispered to her just before leaving the drawing-room. I well remembered the agonized expression on her face as he turned away from her, and I knew that at this moment she was vividly seeing a picture of the scene.
The audience fairly rustled with this new sensation. The coroner seemed spurred, and with great enthusiasm continued his catechising.
“Why did he say that?” he said bluntly. “Had you wished him dead?”
A murmur of indignation was heard from the audience, and both Archer and Morland started as if about to protest.
But Anne raised her clear eyes to the coroner’s face, and said coldly, “No, I had never wished such a thing.”
“Why, then, did he speak that way?”
“Mr. Van Wyck was quick-tempered and very sarcastic of speech,” she replied. “I can only explain his remark by assuming that it was prompted by anger and sarcasm.”
“Mr. Van Wyck was angry, then?”
“Yes, he was angry.”
“At what?”
“He was angry because the members of his family were opposed to his plan of giving away practically all his fortune to a public institution.”
“And then Mr. Van Wyck left you, and you never saw him again alive?”
“That—that is so.”
Except for a slight hesitation, the statement was direct, but it was manifestly untrue. Anne’s eyes fell, the color came and went in her cheeks, her foot tapped nervously on the floor, and she was rapidly tying her handkerchief into knots. A more agonized, indeed a more guilty, demeanor could not have been manifested.
At that moment my eyes met hers, and it flashed across me that she and I had looked in at the window of the study and had seen Mr. Van Wyck in colloquy with the committee. Perhaps it was telepathy that carried the same thought to her, for she said suddenly, and I know she spoke truly, “Oh, yes, I did see him again after that! I was walking on the terrace later, and I saw him through the study window, talking with his visitors.”
“At what hour was this?” inquired the coroner, as if the exact time of the incident were the turning-point of the whole case.
“I don’t know,” returned Anne carelessly. “Perhaps about half-past nine or quarter of ten, I should say.”
Mr. Mellen looked a little crestfallen, as if an important bit of evidence had gone wrong. To my mind, he certainly was a block-head, but, after all, he was merely there to ask questions, and, if the jurymen desired, they could supplement his inquiries. I glanced at the detective, Markham, to see how he took it. He was exceedingly attentive to what was going on, and sat with his head slightly forward and his eyes alert, apparently gleaning more information than was offered by the mere spoken words.
“And then,” pursued the coroner, “after that glimpse through the window, you never saw your husband again alive?”
Anne answered this in the negative, but so low and uncertain was her voice that she was obliged to repeat it twice before the coroner was satisfied with her reply. I felt a vague alarm. If Anne were speaking the truth, why should she act so strangely about it? And if, by any chance, she was not veracious, she must know that her manner was unconvincing. I had no interest in any one else who might be implicated in the tragedy, but my heart again