The step on the stair

by Anna Katharine Green

“How could that be? Did he not stop to dress?”

“He was already dressed, just as he rose from dinner.”

What followed has already been told; I will not enlarge upon it. The burning of the one will in the presence of Orpha, Edgar and myself, with Wealthy Starr standing in the background. Uncle’s sudden death before he could tell us where the will containing his last wishes could be found, and the shock we had all received at the astonishment shown by the doctor at his patient having succumbed so suddenly when he had fully expected him to live another fortnight.

The excitement which had been worked up to fever-point gradually subsided after this and, the hour being late, the inquiry was adjourned, to be continued the next day.

XXX

In my haste to be through with the record of a testimony which so unmistakably gave the impression that I was the man who had tampered with the medicine which prematurely ended my uncle’s fast failing life, I omitted to state Wealthy’s eager admission that notwithstanding the doctor’s surprise at the sudden passing of his patient and her own knowledge that the room contained a previously used medicine which had been pronounced dangerous to him at this stage of his illness, she did not connect these two facts in her mind even then as cause and effect. Not till the dreadful night in which she heard the word poison uttered over Mr. Bartholomew’s casket, did she realize what the peculiar sound which had roused her from her nap beside the sick-bed really was. It was the setting down of the glass on the shelf from which it had been previously lifted.

This was where the proceedings had ended; and it was at this point they were taken up the next day.

I say nothing of the night between; I have tried to forget it. God grant the day will come when I may. Nor shall I enter into any description of the people who filled the room on this occasion or of the change in Orpha’s appearance or in that of such persons towards whom my eyes, hot with the lack of sleep, wandered during the first half hour. I am eager to go on; eager to tell the worst and have done with this part of my story.

To return then to Wealthy’s testimony as continued from the day before. The casket in which Mr. Bartholomew’s body had been laid on the morning of the second day had been taken in the early evening down into the court. She had not accompanied it. When asked why, she said that Mr. Edgar had asked her to remain in the room, and on no account to leave it without locking both doors. So she had stayed until she heard a scream ringing up through the house, and convinced from its hysterical sound that it came from one of the maids, she hastened to lock the one door which had been left unfastened, and go below. As in company with Mr. Quenton and Clarke she reached the balcony on the second floor, she could see that there were several persons in the court, so she stopped where she was, and simply looked down at what was going on. It was then she got the shock of her life. The girl who had uttered the scream was pointing at her dead master’s face and shouting the word poison. One can imagine what passed through her mind as the clouds cleared away from it and she realized to what in her ignorance she had been made a party to.

She certainly made the jury feel it, though she was less garrulous and simpler in her manners than on the previous day; and hardly knowing what to expect from her peculiar sense of duty, I was in dread anticipation of hearing her relate the few words which had passed between us as Orpha fell into my arms,—words in which she accused me of being the cause of all this trouble.