“I think you ought to be ashamed o’ yourselves, all on you, to sit and ask a body such a thing!” exploded Mrs. Dovey, growing every moment more resentful, at being questioned. “If I had knowed the bother that was to spring up, I’d have chucked the box, pills and all, into the fire first. I wish I had!”
“Was the box, that you handed to Hester Reed on her return, the same box she left with you? Were the pills the same pills?”
“Why, where d’ye think I could have got another box from?” shrieked Ann Dovey. “D’you suppose, sir, I carry boxes and pills about with me? I bain’t so fond o’ physic as all that comes to.”
“Dovey takes pills on occasion for that giddiness of his; I’ve seen him take ’em; mayhap you’d picked up a box of his,” spoke Dobbs the blacksmith, mildly.
That was adding fuel to fire. Two of a trade don’t agree. Dovey and Dobbs were both blacksmiths: the one in Church Dykely; the other in Piefinch Cut, not much more, so to say, than a stone’s-throw from each other. The men were good friends enough; but their respective ladies were apt to regard jealously all work taken to the rival establishment. Any other of the jurymen might have made the remark with comparative impunity; not so Dobbs. And, besides the turn the inquiry seemed to be taking, Mrs. Dovey had not been easy about it in her mind from the first; proof of which was furnished by the call, already mentioned, made by her husband on Abel Crew.
“Dovey takes pills on occasion, do he!” she shrilly retorted. “And what do you take, Bill Dobbs? Pints o’ beer when you can get ’em. Who lamed Poole’s white horse the t’other day a-shoeing him?”
“Silence!” sternly interrupted the coroner. While Dobbs, conscious of the self-importance imparted to him by the post he was now filling, and of the necessity of maintaining the dignity of demeanour which he was apt to put on with his best clothes, bore the aspersion with equanimity and a stolid face.
“Attend to me, witness, and confine yourself to replying to the questions I put to you,” continued the coroner. “Did you take with you any pills or pill-box of your own when you went to Mrs. Reed’s that evening?”
“No, I didn’t,” returned Ann Dovey, the emphasis culminating in a sob: and why she should have set on to shiver and shake was more than the jury could understand.
“Do you wear pockets?”