“Very good, my lord,” says Sir Almeric, and then, in his passionless, clear tones he reads out the following words:
“I, Guy Cheale, in full possession of all my faculties though a dying man, wish to put it on record that I administered the arsenic to Mrs. Emily Garlett for reasons best known to myself, and which from my point of view were sufficiently good and conclusive at the time, though I do not expect any one else in the present state of our peculiar, complex civilization, built as it is on a pyramid of lies, to agree with me.
“My sister, Agatha Cheale, then lady housekeeper at the Thatched House, asked me three days before Mrs. Emily Garlett’s death to take a note for her to Miss Prince’s house, the Thatched Cottage. She informed me I could get straight into the house through a garden door.
“I followed her directions and found myself in the empty house. I laid the letter on the hall table. I then bethought myself that I would go upstairs, as I’d heard Miss Prince had a curious collection of medicaments, and I have always been much interested in drugs.
“I found the room in which they were kept with no difficulty. The cupboard door was open, and I noticed the stoppered bottle of arsenic. I took out about an ounce of the white powder and put it in an envelope which I had in my pocket. I then walked back to the Thatched Farm. There I transferred the arsenic to a large empty pill-box. To the best of my belief the pill-box, with some of the arsenic still in it, will be found behind the fourth row of books in the small glazed bookcase in the parlour there.
“I ought here to add that when in the medicine room of Miss Prince’s house I turned up the entry ‘Arsenic’ in a medical work on her table. I thus discovered the right dose for an adult. On the afternoon which preceded Mrs. Garlett’s death I was one of two or three people who went and sat with her for a time. In a sense I may say I acted on a sudden impulse, for when I saw the small plateful of strawberries outside her door with the sugar sifter close to it I thought it an ideal opportunity for the accomplishment of my purpose.
“I asked her whether she would care to have the strawberries, and she said yes, that she had not known there were strawberries there. I went out of the room and mixed the arsenic with the sugar, then I brought the plate into her room. After she had eaten the strawberries I bade her good-bye and removed the plate—she thought outside the door—as a matter of fact I took it away with me, and threw it under a bush in the little wood, where it doubtless still is.
“I left the house as far as I know without having been seen, though Lucy Warren had admitted me, and we had had a short talk. Lucy was on the point of leaving the house owing to our having been found together—I may add not in any compromising sense—in the drawing room the night before by my sister and Mrs. Garlett. Mrs. Garlett, of course, had not recognized me. My sister, who is a generous woman, handed over to me practically the whole of her legacy—her unexpected legacy of a thousand pounds, which Mrs. Garlett left her in her will.”
Suddenly there breaks across the level, passionless tones of Sir Almeric’s voice a loud groan, and for the second time that day a man faints in Court. He is hastily taken below, but not before the Grendon folk present recognize him as Enoch Bent, Lucy Cheale’s uncle and Mr. Toogood’s highly respected head clerk. Few, however, of those who recognize him ask themselves why Guy Cheale’s reference in his statement to Mrs. Garlett’s will and the legacy to Guy Cheale’s sister should have had such an effect on the worthy Bent.
Fortunately for Bent, there is no need for him to be put in the witness-box, there to have drawn from him, by the persuasive arts of Sir Harold Anstey, an account—nay, a confession—of certain highly reprehensible and most unprofessional confidences concerning Mrs. Garlett’s will, made before that lady’s tragic death. That other and greater confession—the confession of Guy Cheale on his death-bed—has shed an amply sufficient light on the Terriford Mystery.