“Was the opiate black?”
“Not as it ought to have been given,” said Aunty; “many and many’s the time I give it, so I ought to know. It didn’t ought to have coloured the water——”
“You did not attach so much importance to these circumstances at the time—for what reason? The deceased, you have informed us, was not dangerously ill?”
“It was along of them fainting fits,” said Aunty. “She was subject to them—the doctors had always warned us as she might go off in one any day, if we didn’t take care. We had to be very careful not to cross her. As long as she was at home she was never crossed; but when a lady’s married it’s different. I had been frightened for the faintings so long that I never thought of nothing else—that’s the truth. If I’d had my wits about me, I’d have seen in a minute; but being as it was, with all them warnings against the faints, and knowing as she had been crossed badly, and in a temper just before——the other was never put into my head in a moment like; though it would have been, if I’d had my wits about me,” she concluded, in a tone of defiance, facing the eager listeners round her. The wary prosecution perceived coming danger, and dismissed her with soothing compliments.
“You have given your evidence with great distinctness; that will do, Miss Johnson. For the present I will not trouble you any more.”
Mr. Serjeant Ryder was peremptory in ordinary life, but he could be very suave and sweet to a witness. He began his cross-examination with the same compliments.
“You have given your evidence with so much distinctness,” he said, “and discharged your onerous duty so well, that I am sure there are a few further particulars with which you can favour us.—May I ask, for instance, how your suspicions were first directed against the accused?”
This was an embarrassing question, with which the witness was scarcely prepared to cope; but she got through it by a vigorous exercise of mother wit, and told, not ineffectively, how Jane’s story cleared up to her many difficulties which had dwelt in her mind in respect to Amanda’s death, and how she felt at once that a flood of light had been poured upon that event which, ever since it happened, she had been brooding over, feeling that there was something inexplainable in it.
“I saw it all as clear as daylight,” she said; and as here again the feeling was natural, she carried the audience with her, as every practised eye could see.
“Still you felt no necessity at the time for any other explanation except the faulting fits to which the deceased was liable. How long had she been subject to these fainting fits?”