The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney. Samuel Warren

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СКАЧАТЬ is it!" said Mr. ——; "and in a powdered state too—just ready for mixing with brandy or any other available dissolvent." The powder had somewhat the appearance of fine black lead. Nothing further of any consequence being observed, we returned to the house, where the magistrate had already arrived.

      Alfred Bourdon was first brought in; and he having been duly cautioned that he was not obliged to answer any question, and that what he did say would be taken down, and, if necessary, used against him, I proposed the following questions:—

      "Have you the key of your laboratory?"

      "No; the door is always open."

      "Well, then, of any door or cupboard in the room?"

      At this question his face flushed purple: he stammered, "There is no"—and abruptly paused.

      "Do I understand you to say there is no cupboard or place of concealment in the room?"

      "No: here is the key."

      "Has any one had access to the cupboard or recess of which this is the key, except yourself?"

      The young man shook as if smitten with ague: his lips chattered, but no articulate sound escaped them.

      "You need not answer the question," said the magistrate, "unless you choose to do so. I again warn you that all you say will, if necessary, be used against you."

      "No one," he at length gasped, mastering his hesitation by a strong exertion of the will—"no one can have had access to the place but myself. I have never parted with the key."

      Mrs. Bourdon was now called in. After interchanging a glance of intense agony, and, as it seemed to me, of affectionate intelligence with her son, she calmly answered the questions put to her. They were unimportant, except the last, and that acted upon her like a galvanic shock. It was this—"Did you ever struggle with your son on the landing leading to the bedroom of the deceased for the possession of this bottle?" and I held up that which we had found in the recess.

      A slight scream escaped her lips; and then she stood rigid, erect, motionless, glaring alternately at me and at the fatal bottle with eyes that seemed starting from their sockets. I glanced towards the son; he was also affected in a terrible manner. His knees smote each other, and a clammy perspiration burst forth and settled upon his pallid forehead.

      "Again I caution you," iterated the magistrate, "that you are not bound to answer any of these questions."

      The woman's lips moved. "No—never!" she almost inaudibly gasped, and fell senseless on the floor.

      As soon as she was removed, Jane Withers was called. She deposed that three days previously, as she was, just before dusk, arranging some linen in a room a few yards distant from the bedroom of her late mistress, she was surprised at hearing a noise just outside the door, as of persons struggling and speaking in low but earnest tones. She drew aside a corner of the muslin curtain of the window which locked upon the passage or corridor, and there saw Mrs. Bourdon striving to wrest something from her son's hand. She heard Mrs. Bourdon say, "You shall not do it, or you shall not have it"—she could not be sure which. A noise of some sort seemed to alarm them: they ceased struggling, and listened attentively for a few seconds: then Alfred Bourdon stole off on tip-toe, leaving the object in dispute, which witness could not see distinctly, in his mother's hand. Mrs. Bourdon continued to listen, and presently Miss Armitage, opening the door of her mother's chamber, called her by name. She immediately placed what was in her hand on the marble top of a side-table standing in the corridor, and hastened to Miss Armitage. Witness left the room she had been in a few minutes afterwards, and, curious to know what Mrs. Bourdon and her son had been struggling for, went to the table to look at it. It was an oddly-shaped glass bottle, containing a good deal of a blackish-gray powder, which, as she held it up to the light, looked like black-lead!

      "Would you be able to swear to the bottle if you saw it?"

      "Certainly I should."

      "By what mark or token?"

      "The name of Valpy or Vulpy was cast into it—that is, the name was in the glass itself."

      "Is this it?"

      "It is: I swear most positively."

      A letter was also read which had been taken from Bourdon's pocket. It was much creased, and was proved to be in the handwriting of Mrs. Armitage. It consisted of a severe rebuke at the young man's presumption in seeking to address himself to her daughter, which insolent ingratitude, the writer said, she should never, whilst she lived, either forget or forgive. This last sentence was strongly underlined in a different ink from that used by the writer of the letter.

      The surgeon deposed to the cause of death. It had been brought on by the action of iodine, which, administered in certain quantities, produced symptoms as of rapid atrophy, such as had appeared in Mrs. Armitage. The glass bottle found in the recess contained iodine in a pulverized state.

      I deposed that, on entering the library on the previous evening I overheard young Mr. Bourdon, addressing his mother, say, "Now that it is done past recall, I will not shrink from any consequences, be they what they may!"

      This was the substance of the evidence adduced; and the magistrate at once committed Alfred Bourdon to Chelmsford jail, to take his trial at the next assize for "wilful murder." A coroner's inquisition a few days after also returned a verdict of "wilful murder" against him on the same evidence.

      About an hour after his committal, and just previous to the arrival of the vehicle which was to convey him to the county prison, Alfred Bourdon requested an interview with me. I very reluctantly consented; but steeled as I was against him, I could not avoid feeling dreadfully shocked at the change which so brief an interval had wrought upon him. It had done the work of years. Despair—black, utter despair—was written in every lineament of his expressive countenance.

      "I have requested to see you," said the unhappy culprit, "rather than Dr. Curteis, because he, I know, is bitterly prejudiced against me. But you will not refuse, I think, the solemn request of a dying man—for a dying man I feel myself to be—however long or short the interval which stands between me and the scaffold. It is not with a childish hope that any assertion of mine can avail before the tribunal of the law against the evidence adduced this day, that I, with all the solemnity befitting a man whose days are numbered, declare to you that I am wholly innocent of the crime laid to my charge. I have no such expectation; I seek only that you, in pity of my youth and untimely fate, should convey to her whom I have madly presumed to worship this message: 'Alfred Bourdon was mad, but not blood-guilty; and of the crime laid to his charge he is innocent as an unborn child.'"

      "The pure and holy passion, young man," said I, somewhat startled by his impressive manner, "however presumptuous, as far as social considerations are concerned, it might be, by which you affect to be inspired, is utterly inconsistent with the cruel, dastardly crime of which such damning evidence has an hour since been given"—

      "Say no more, sir," interrupted Bourdon, sinking back in his seat, and burying his face in his hands: "it were a bootless errand; she could not, in the face of that evidence, believe my unsupported assertion! It were as well perhaps she did not. And yet, sir, it is hard to be trampled into a felon's grave, loaded with the maledictions of those whom you would coin your heart to serve and bless! Ah, sir," he continued, whilst tears of agony streamed through his firmly-closed fingers, "you cannot conceive the unutterable bitterness of the pang which rends the heart of him who feels that he is not only despised, but СКАЧАТЬ