“You! Jeffcock, you! You infernal lying Judas!” he cried, and hurled me from him right across the floor. I fell against the wall and lay there weakly repeating again and again, “It was Margaret. Vitriol. She’s mad and threw vitriol. It was Margaret.”
At last I attracted their attention, and Ralph came and stood beside me. He stooped to hear what it was that I said. Then Kenneth and Margaret stood above me too.
“She did it. She chloroformed her and then threw vitriol over her,” I gasped, half sitting up on the floor.
“Oh, you liar—you wicked liar—how can you say such a wicked thing. Why, you were caught in here with the door locked!”
Even to me she sounded quite convincing. Then she bent down over me suddenly and putting her hand into the side pocket of my coat she pulled out a key.
“Why, here’s the key of the door in his pocket! Now what have you to say for yourself?” she cried.
Ralph stooped and picked something up from the floor. “And this, I think, is your knife, Mr. Jeffcock,” he said very coldly.
Margaret shrugged her shoulders and turned away toward the doctor, who was kneeling by the bed.
Numb with my grief, I sat propped against the wall, my head athrob, my soul sick with the horror of what I had felt and heard. Through the broken door the light from the passage showed up the dusty floor, with its scattered papers and boxes and its derelict household lumber. Our movements had filled the air with dust, which the pallid passage light turned to a ghostly beam, and through it like some distorted figure in a dream, the doctor loomed gigantic as he knelt by Janet’s side.
This then was to be the final scene to the drama of this devil’s week, with myself the villain, bludgeoned and broken, a murderer and a Judas, spurned by my friends and accepted by all as the hell fiend who had defiled beauty and truth in the person of my darling. This was the hilltop to which my broad straight road of love and life had led me. In this dismal attic was I to part from the woman I loved with my love barely born and wholly unconfessed.