Chapter Forty One.
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A double inquest and a long inquiry, too, in which an intelligent British jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against Saul Harrington—the most satisfactory of circumstantial evidence going to prove that he had, by a deep-laid scheme slowly insinuated himself into the good graces of the man he believed to be the cousin, who stood between him and fortune and the woman he loved. He had drugged him night after night during their drinking bouts while in the study; and during his victim’s insensibility, with diabolical ingenuity, prepared his tomb—the keys thereof being within his reach, and being replaced when he had done. Then when all was ripe on the night following his supposed start for the Continent, the victim disappeared. Saul returning and entering the house by the staircase window to find that the whiskey he had left well drugged had thoroughly done its work.
He might have let it seem to be that his victim had died of poison, but that would have meant ugly inquiries, and their intercourse and his position as heir have thrown suspicion upon him. He thought his own plan the better, and the pseudo George Harrington disappeared—his going off appearing the more natural from the fact that he had been drawing large sums of money from the estate.
The work was cunningly done, and to Saul Harrington’s brain so sure that he thought the safer way was to bury with his victim the money he had drawn; watch, chain, everything. But murderers’ brains are generally clever up to a certain point, and then shallow as that of a child.
So Saul Harrington did his work cleverly and completely, toiling at the completion of his task in the cellar with the skill of one to the manner trained; and then just before daybreak escaped down the garden to encounter an old enemy in the shape of the dog.
“It was a mere bite that would soon heal,” Saul said laughingly as he made his way to Paris, and then on to Switzerland; but it did not heal; and then came the fiction of the accident on the ice slope, then the news of something wrong at The Mynns; and he returned to play his part—a desperate one—but with a tremendous prize as reward for having helped a worthless man to a rather earlier end, when, like a thunder clap, it came upon him that his labour had been in vain. He had slain the would-be murderer of his cousin—the impostor who had struck George Harrington down, robbed him, and taken his place with sufficient ability to be received as the acknowledged heir.
Doctors argued over the question of its being genuine hydrophobia from which Saul died. A bad wound, combined with mental disturbance, certainly did cause his end; and there were those who said it was better so than through the vengeance of the law.