The Ordeal of Elizabeth

by Anonymous

Elizabeth, to whom an abundance of light and air had been one of the necessities of life, who had a passion for space and luxury, for fresh, dainty surroundings, looked about her in blank dismay. Yet she said nothing. From the first she seemed to school herself to a silent stoicism, which her friends called courage and her enemies insensibility, and which may have been a combination of both. The last two months had been crowded with so many startling events, so intense, conflicting a tumult of thought and emotion, that her capacity for acute suffering was for the moment exhausted.

Yet the mere physical horror that the cell inspired her with was very great. The first time that the key was turned upon her, and she was left entirely alone, with the twilight coming on, with no power to free herself, nothing to do but wait for the matron's return, she felt as she had felt once when for some childish offence, she had been locked into a dark closet. Now as then she threw herself against the door, trying with fierce, unreasoning efforts to force the lock, uttering hoarse cries for help. Then the door had been quickly opened, her aunts had let her out with remorseful tears, and the experiment had never been repeated. Now no help came to her, and she was left to adapt herself to the situation as best she might. The struggle left deep marks on her young face, a look in her eyes which they never afterwards lost.

There were many ways in which the prison routine was softened in her favor. Social distinctions count, as Mrs. Bobby had said, with every one and everywhere. Money is powerful, even in The Tombs. The warden and the other officials reaped in those days a harvest of gold coins from Mrs. Bobby.

A more comfortable bed, a hand-mirror, all sorts of forbidden luxuries, found their way into Elizabeth's cell. Neither warden nor matron apparently recognized their existence. She was permitted to receive her visitors alone, to have a light in her cell after dark, to walk for an hour a day in the corridor or the court. At these times she would see those other women, her fellow-prisoners, huddled together in an abject group, and feel thankful that at least she was not obliged to mingle with them. Her meals were served to her in her cell, and she could order what she wanted. Her friends sent her constantly an abundance of fruit and flowers.

The people who came to see her, and there were many of them, used to go away wondering at her calmness. They went prepared for tragedy, and Elizabeth received them as she might in her own drawing-room. They noticed no change in her, except that her head had never been held so proudly, and she had never looked so pale. But there were no confidences, no tears, no consciousness apparently of the extraordinary state of things. Even to her aunts, even to Eleanor Van Antwerp, she maintained this attitude of proud reserve. They could only guess at the thoughts which lay beneath it. There were times, indeed, when she did not think, when her brain would seem dazed. In those days she would read eagerly all the books that people brought her; read them through from beginning to end, but she had never any idea of what they were about.

There was one form of reading which no one suggested, which she did not, apparently, think of herself. No one brought her a newspaper, and she never asked to see one. Perhaps she did not realize how much her case was discussed, perhaps she realized it only too well. Her aunts were thankful for her lack of curiosity. They could not themselves open a paper, or enter a street-car, without an agony of dread as to what they might see or hear.

For the yellow journals, of course, were exploiting the affair—it was Mrs. Bobby's opinion, indeed, that it had been started originally on their account, for the enlivenment of a dull season. This may or may not be true; but certainly they made the most of it. They published Elizabeth's picture, and long accounts of her conquests. There were pictures, too, of her grandmother, that stately beauty whose fame was traditional, and of old Van Vorsts who had held important offices, and served city and state with credit in colonial and revolutionary times. Then, by contrast, there were accounts of her mother's past and her mother's kindred through several generations of moral and social disrepute. The Neighborhood was overrun by disguised reporters who made copious notes of local items, and took photographs of the Van Vorst Homestead, of the village, of Bassett Mills and even of the church—thereby causing the Rector's wife nervous spasms in her anxiety lest any of Elizabeth's moral perversions should be laid to the account of the religious teaching that she had received. Bassett Mills was all a-flutter in its excitement over this gratuitous advertisement. But in the Neighborhood—the staid, aristocratic old Neighborhood—there was a feeling of humiliation, a presentiment that it could never recover from the disgrace of such notoriety.

And yet, in spite of all discredit, what a subject for conversation—in the Neighborhood as well as Bassett Mills! Nothing else was talked of at the various tea-parties, of which so many had never been given before. People who had guests took them over on Sunday afternoons to the Homestead, and wandered about the grounds relating the family history, while the strangers stared with interest at the old house, and the horse-shoe on the door. There was a dreary look about the place for the Misses Van Vorst were not coming back that summer, and the old gardener left in charge had not the heart under the circumstances to keep it in order. Grass grew in the gravel-walks, the flowers in the garden hung their heads, the foliage was sadly in need of clipping. A shadow seemed to brood over house and grounds, as in the day of old Madam Van Vorst.

In town, where there were more things to talk about, the great poisoning case still took precedence of all other subjects, and society was divided on account of it into warring camps. There were those—a very large number—who followed Mrs. Hartington's lead, and spoke of Elizabeth as a sort of adventuress, who had thrust herself into circles which she had no right to enter; a party which disowned her entirely and believed implicitly in her guilt. But there was another party, smaller perhaps but not less influential, which took uncompromisingly the opposite side. The people who composed it were friends, many of them, of Mrs. Van Antwerp, and there were others who had cared for Elizabeth for her own sake, and again others to whom the romantic facts of the case appealed irresistibly, inducing them to espouse her cause regardless of reason. These all spoke of her as a suffering martyr and regarded her imprisonment as an outrage. They did not discuss the evidence, but met all doubts with the one unanswerable argument of their own intuitions.

But the first side had in point of logic, so much the best of it! This conviction intruded itself reluctantly on Eleanor Van Antwerp's mind, as she looked up from an exhaustive summary of the case for the prosecution. The article presented, in clear, remorseless details, all the links in the terrible chain of evidence—her hasty marriage, and then her repentance; her efforts to buy off her husband; the trouble she had to supply him with money; her evident fear of his betraying her to Gerard; her refusal to name her wedding day, till she had in sheer desperation decided on the murder; then when the thing was at last accomplished, her sudden remorse, her strange actions; the rumor that she had in the first excitement confessed her guilt before witnesses; the description too, of the woman who had bought the flask, and which fitted Elizabeth exactly in height, coloring and general appearance; the resemblances which the experts were said to have discovered between her letters and the handwriting on the package—never was chain more strongly forged! And what, the article further demanded, had her friends to offer in rebuttal but her social position, her youth and her beauty?