Whatever theory Sir Frank had formed as to the case, it had certainly not included this incident. He had thought it possible that after Weathered had carried off the bottle his wife had found it and taken it in turn from him. He had never conjectured that the feeble-looking woman had been brave and cool enough to checkmate her husband in advance like this.
“For the moment I felt safe,” Mrs. Neobard went on steadily. “But how long could I expect to be from such a husband as mine? He was a doctor, and it was easy for him to obtain other poisons. He would have had to do that in any case, I think, as it turned out. Mrs. Baker quarrelled with him soon after, because he had advised her to kill a favourite cat. She refused to have anything more to do with him, and as her letters were more damaging to him than to her he had no hold on her. I soon found that he had destroyed them.”
This was another new light for the consultant. And it prepared him for what was to come next.
“It seemed to me that my only chance of escape was to leave him. But what reason could I give to the world for doing so? I had nothing to complain of as far as his treatment of me was concerned. He was always perfectly courteous. We were on friendly terms outwardly. I couldn’t prove that he had been unfaithful to me; I wasn’t even sure in my own mind that he had been, yet, although the letters showed me that he was pursuing one of his victims. What could I say? Was I to denounce him publicly as a scoundrel, and produce the letters? I might have ruined dozens of innocent men and women. And I might fail. I might find that the world sided with him instead of me. I knew him well enough to know exactly what he would do. He would say that I had spied on his professional work, that I had pried into the secrets of his patients and that jealousy had made me insane. And he would have found plenty of people to believe him. A wife who betrays her husband is not likely to be forgiven.
“If I left him I doubted if my own daughter would have come with me.”
This was the first allusion the mother had made to her daughter’s unhappy infatuation. And it was the last one. Sarah had begun to cry quietly. Now Mrs. Neobard put out her hand again and took her child’s.
“You won’t expect me to give you all my reasons for deciding that I must act as I did, Sir Frank. Perhaps you will think I really was insane. I don’t know—after reading some of those letters that I found I sometimes feel it difficult to say who is sane and who isn’t. I can only say I thought over everything time after time, as quietly as I could, and I always came to the same conclusion. I think what stuck in my mind most of all was the death of poor Miss Sebright. There was no doubt that he had murdered her, as surely as if he had given her arsenic. I thought he ought to die.”
She said it without an effort, as though it were the most natural conclusion in the world.
“It looked like a providence to me that I had the poison ready. It was his own doing, you see. He had helped me to it through wanting it himself for his own wicked ends. I had taken it in self-defence, and there it was, ready to be used.”
The listener remembered Shakespeare’s lines, though he refrained from quoting them: