Roath had regained his self-command,—which, to do him justice, he had but for an instant lost. "If you were not beside yourself with grief," said he, coldly, "there could be but one answer to such a charge as that. As it is—"
"'As it is,' I repeat it," interrupted Trubie, with bitter scorn. "I repeat it, and am ready to maintain it, always—anywhere—anyhow!"
Roath drew himself up. "I, too, am ready,"—he began, haughtily, but the professor interposed. "Mr. Roath," said he, with dignity, "I command you to be silent. Mr. Trubie,"—laying his hand on the shoulder of the agitated young man, and speaking in a tone of grave rebuke,—"much may be forgiven to the first excitement of sorrow and horror, but this is going too far. Such an accusation is not to be made lightly."
"Lightly!" repeated the frantic Trubie;—"he hated Alec, I tell you! He couldn't forgive him for rivalling him—aye, and beating him, too—everywhere; in scholarship, in popularity, in"—he hesitated for an instant,—"in love."
Roath's face grew dark; a frown traced a deep, vertical line between his brows; he set his teeth, and made a quick stride forward. But a dozen hands seized him, a dozen others laid hold of Trubie, and both were half forced, half led away to their rooms; while the faculty of the college, hastily called together, gathered around the corpse, to examine more minutely into the cause of death.
A coroner's jury was duly summoned. It examined the body, weighed the evidence, and being about equally divided in regard to the question of suicide, finally agreed upon "Accidental Death by Poison," as, upon the whole, the safer and less objectionable verdict. There seemed to be no good reason to suspect murder, nor any ground whatever for implicating Roath, or anybody else, as a perpetrator thereof.
Trubie, to be sure, persisted in his accusation; but it was with a vehemence and a dogmatism so unlike his wonted careless good nature, as to suggest the idea that his mind had been temporarily thrown off its balance by the shock of his friend's death. This idea gained color from the fact that all which he could offer, in support of so grave a charge, was the statement that he had long seen or suspected, in Roath a secret hatred of Arling, and a willingness to do him covert mischief. He had even mentioned the suspicion to his friend; but Arling—being of the most candid and generous, as well as unsuspecting temper, unable to conceive of any but an open, honorable enemy—had refused to entertain it for a moment. Trubie also solemnly affirmed that his passionate accusation of Roath, by the side of the newly-discovered corpse, was the involuntary result of an intuition so sudden, so clear, and so powerful, that, though little given to look for supernatural agencies in human affairs, he could not rid himself of the conviction that it was the direct inspiration of his dead friend. But it may readily be imagined how much weight a statement of this sort was likely to have with men of plain minds and sturdy understanding, searching among the external phenomena of the event for grounds upon which to base a reasonable verdict.
On the other hand, the theory of accidental poisoning was supported, negatively, by the lack of apparent cause for self-destruction; and positively, by the fact that on the dead man's table, side by side with the potent narcotic before mentioned, stood a phial of exactly the same size, and with equally colorless contents. Of this Arling had been accustomed to take two or three spoonfuls, mixed with a few drops of a third preparation of exceeding bitter flavor. A careless hand might have mistaken the one phial for the other. The taste of the morphine, so swallowed, would be much disguised; while the dose was sufficient, under the circumstances, to produce death. It will be seen, therefore, that the verdict rendered was the only one upon which a coroner's jury could well have been expected to agree.
The body was next solemnly laid in a vault, to await the disposal of the parents, who lived in a western state; and the widening circles of excitement, horror, curiosity, and regret, of which it had been the unconscious centre, rapidly subsided, or were effaced by the growing interests of the now imminent closing examination.
Even Trubie, though he flatly refused to acquiesce in the coroner's verdict, was forced tacitly to accept its results. He took refuge in a complete personal proscription of Roath; he neither spoke to him nor looked at him; he treated him precisely as if he did not exist. To a person of Roath's cold, hard, steely temper, and obtuse sensibilities, this demeanor was, perhaps, the most tolerable of which the circumstances admitted. It spared him the necessity of being either conciliatory or resentful; he was well content to ignore Trubie as completely as Trubie ignored him.