‘The murderer entered, as I said, by means of his latchkey. But it was the first time he had used it. He did not know the peculiarity of the latch. He raised it too high, and it stuck.
‘Not staying to notice this, in his wickedness, he passed into the house and upstairs. He tried the door of his aunt’s—I mean the deceased’s—room. It was, of course, locked, as it was found the following morning. He went into the next, Miss Owen’s, which he knew to be empty, having seen her leave the house. Through this he passed into the adjoining chamber. Beneath the bed, in all probability, lay a chest of valuables. Charity would fain suggest that his first intention was merely to steal these, and that the blacker crime was, in a sense, forced upon him by the awakening of the sleeper. The secrets of that terrible night will never be known. We cannot say what passed in that room between that strong, evil man and that weak old woman. We only know the result. A blow was struck, perhaps blows. A life was taken, and the robber became a murderer as well.
‘The next step was to remove the body. For what reason it matters not. It is an impulse with all murderers to conceal the traces of their guilt. They dig holes in the earth and bury it, they carry it into the wilderness and hide it, they sink it in the depths of the sea. But the earth will not contain it, the wilderness betrays the ghastly secret, the waves cast up the horror.’
His voice rang through the crowded court like that of one possessed, and every man trembled.
‘He lowered it through the window, where the traces were found next day. Then, clutching up his booty, and forgetting, it may be, that all would be his erelong, or possibly not feeling sufficiently sure of his heirship, he hurried down, with agitated tread, so that even the half-sleeping girl in the room above could discern a something strange about his walk.
‘Then he carried off the body, mutilated for some mysterious and terrible reason which may never be revealed—possibly to lighten his hideous load; but let me spare you these shocking considerations. (All this, remember, Lewis asks you to think was done by a young girl not twenty years of age.)
‘You know the rest. You know how the fisherman saw others that night, one of them a tall man, going in the direction of the bay where the remains were washed ashore within twenty-four hours. One only point I have to notice. Whether in carelessness, or whether in hellish malice, that man left a damning stain upon the door-handle in the prisoner’s room. I say I know not whether he did this in his haste and guilty dread, or whether he did this with a deliberate and diabolical intention of throwing suspicion upon a hapless, innocent girl, whom he has since pursued through every stage of this history, and under every form of law, with the persistence of a machine, and the passion of a bloodhound!’
The speaker’s voice vibrated with the fury which he threw into this denunciation. The jury trembled under his eye, as he rolled it fiercely from face to face. As for the object of these fearful invectives, he turned red and white by turns, and would have interrupted over and over again if he had not been almost forcibly restrained by the solicitor for the prosecution.
Tressamer went on, after a moment’s pause to recover from his exhaustion:
‘And Eleanor Owen, what of her? What was she doing meanwhile? Pacing the shore, and trying to soothe her throbbing head with the medicine of the sea breezes. At last she returns, tired and abstracted. She puts her key into the latch, the door yields before her; she notices nothing, but comes in, closes and fastens the door behind her, and retires to rest. And there she sleeps the sleep of innocence, knowing nothing, dreaming nothing, of the dark shadow which hangs over her head, nothing of the foul deed which has so recently been perpetrated under that roof, nothing of the frightful stain upon the empty bed next door, nothing of that yet more appalling stain which will meet her eyes when she attempts to pass out of her own room into that.