“I had my arm around her neck, but was only playing the fool, which Kitty knew as well as I. There was a bright moon, and, although almost invisible ourselves in the shadow of the hedge and tree, we could see clearly into both paddock and garden. My back was toward the hotel. Suddenly, we heard someone running down the gravel path. I turned and saw that it was Betsy Thwaites, Kitty’s sister, a girl whom I believed to be then in a situation at Hereford. I had promised to marry Betsy, and was naturally vexed at being caught in an apparently compromising attitude with her sister. Betsy had a knife in her hand. I could see it glittering in the moonlight.”
He paused. He was corpse-like in color. The red spots on his face were darker than before by contrast with the wan cheeks. He motioned to the nurse, who gave him a glass of barley water. He emptied it at a gulp. Catching Mr. Beckett-Smythe’s mournful glance, he smiled with ghastly pleasantry.
“It sounds like a coroner’s inquest, doesn’t it?” he said.
Then, while his eyes roved incessantly from the face of the policeman to that of the magistrate, he continued:
“I imagined that Betsy meant to do her sister some harm, so sprang forward to meet her. Then I saw that she was minded to attack me, for she screamed out: ‘You have ruined my life. I’ll take care you do not ruin Kitty’s.’”
The words, of course, were spoken very slowly. They alternated with the steady scratching of the pen. Others in the room were pallid now. Even the rigid nurse yielded to the excitement of the moment. Her linen bands fluttered and her bosom rose and fell with the restraint she imposed on her breathing.
George Pickering suddenly became the most composed person present. His hearers were face to face with a tragedy. After all, did he mean to tell the truth? Ah, it was well that his affianced wife was weeping in an adjoining room, that her soul was not pierced by the calm recital which would condemn her to prison, perchance to the scaffold.
“Her cry warned me,” he went on. “I knew she could not hurt me. I was a strong and active man, she a weak, excited woman. She was very near, advancing down the path which runs close to the dividing hedge of the garden and the stackyard. To draw her away from Kitty, I ran toward this hedge and jumped over. It was dark there. I missed my footing and stumbled. I felt something run into my left breast. It was the prong of a pitchfork.”
The pen ceased. A low gasp of relief came from the nurse, for she was a woman. The superintendent looked gravely at the floor. But the magistrate faltered:
“George—remember—you are a dying man!”