Until a jury should decide, in so far as human fallibility may decide, just whether or how Dora McDonald shot down Webster Guerin, that victim of tangled love and jealousy, a waiting city hung expectant on every incident bared since the day that the artist toppled before a pistol ball in his studio with a woman of furs and furbelows standing sobbing above him.
A "Sappho" and "Salome."
A "Sappho" in a grimy city she was called because her heart was touched by the strength of youth; a "Salome" because she planted a kiss on his dying lips, but whether she was victim or vampire, sinner or sinned against, was solely for the jury to say.
Cries of blackmail, of bribery, of frenzied jealousy, of shameless love and daring intrigue, rang around the courtroom for the long days of the trial, but for the jury it was only to look behind the locked door of the artist's studio and see whether the revolver with which Guerin was shot down was held by the woman or the young man; whether there was malice or accident or self-destruction, and what the motive for either might be.
The shot that sounded his death was the climax to an attachment—guilty or not, as the case might be—that began when Dora McDonald was a wonderfully beautiful and younger woman, the wife of a wealthy gambler, and the lady of a mansion, and Webster Guerin was a mere lad, just old enough to doff short trousers for manly attire.
Affection, money and attention were lavished on the young man by this woman. At banquet board and in the theater box they passed their hours together. Of this there was no dispute. The sole question was whether the woman gave way to the lure of a boy, or whether the boy was importuned by the woman; whether in after years that boy blackmailed that same woman, or whether she loved him to a distraction that brought the madness of jealousy and the revolver.
And what of the love attachment? the police wondered. But as they delved a little they unearthed strange and tender things, but nothing more strange than poems written by the woman and apparently dedicated to the youth.
The tragedy of a soul was bared when Assistant State's Attorney Day read to the jury poems of passion found in the reticule taken from Mrs. McDonald on her arrest.
The State regarded the declarations contained in the verse as disclosing a dual motive of murder and suicide, and introduced them as circumstantial evidence. One entitled "Mistakes" was written on the day of the Guerin love tragedy.