“It’s about your father,” she said, “and I don’t know how to tell you now any better than I’d have done in the beginning, even though I’ve had seven years to think about it. Your father was hanged, Jim; he was hanged for murdering your Aunt Lilian; and that’s all there is to it. And you’d better know it from me than from gossiping busybodies later on.”
Father; Auntie Lilian; it was so long now since he had thought of them. Their names brought back another life: the dark house with the drawn shades, and the sound of the piano from the back room.
“It all happened that summer we were over there and brought you back with us. It’s all dead and forgotten, and I hope you’ll never think about it, any more than you can help or will have to. Uncle Harvey and I made you our own son from that time on, and gave you our name, for your poor mother’s sake, and it hasn’t anything to do with you, except that it did happen, and he was your father, God forgive him.”
She was sparing with the details, telling him only that it was poison — some kind of weed-killer, she said. Jim, with a memory of the summer evenings when they used to spray the stunted rosebushes to destroy the green-fly, could not escape a childish picture of his father turning the syringe on Auntie Lilian, or forcing her to drink from the bucket into which the syringe was dipped.
“Why did he do it?” he asked. “Why did he want to kill her?”
“It was on account of that girl. Violet Delcey. He wanted to marry her.”
Jim, who was by then beginning to be acquainted with the facts of sex, wondered whether his aunt was using a euphemism out of regard for his supposed innocence. He blushed; this part of the story affected him more than any other.
After that, Aunt Bet refused to talk about it. He knew enough, she said. When she went to the hospital to have her operation the next year, she told Jim that if anything happened to her he would find the press clippings about his father in an envelope in a secret drawer in the bureau.
“You can read them or not, as you want,” she said. “Your Uncle and I kept them for when you were old enough to know about it all.”
Nothing did happen to her then except to return from the hospital and linger another year in pain. But Jim read the clippings all the same. She had hardly left the house before he did so, kneeling on one of the green plush chairs in the living room, with the faded sheets of newspaper spread on the table cover before him. He read them greedily and guiltily, as though they were a dirty book.
For weeks he was terrified — terrified at the memory of the little house, and of his picture of his father stealing out to the toolshed that he so clearly remembered, getting the weed-killer from the shelf, and mixing it with Aunt Lilian’s medicine, carrying it up the narrow stairs to her room. Worse were the descriptions of Auntie Lilian’s symptoms, the exhumation, and the post-mortem examination. They were appalling, but they fascinated him, and he gloated over the details in his room at night...
Now, it was all a talc so old and so familiar that it was like a book that he had read too many times. The story of the murder was simple enough. Auntie Lilian was taken ill in July, 1912. The doctor attended her, and diagnosed gastritis. He prescribed medicine, and within a couple of weeks she was better. It was during those weeks that Violet Delcey nursed her. When she was out of danger, Violet went on a holiday.
This, Jim figured, must have been about the time that he himself was in Scotland with his aunt and uncle. Mr. Cawthra and his wife were alone in the house with Annie. Auntie Lilian was up again, and spending her time on the sofa, taking a tonic that the doctor had ordered her three times a day. Mr. Cawthra used to pour it out for her. Suddenly, she had a relapse; the former symptoms returned, and in three days she was dead. The doctor gave a death certificate, and the funeral took place at Kensal Green, Violet Delcey returning from her holiday specially for it. It was clear she had nothing to do with the murder.
Two weeks after the funeral (which must, Jim reckoned, have been just after he himself left for America), she returned to the house to live, chaperoned now only by Annie. Auntie Lilian’s friends were scandalized, and one of them, a Mrs. Pamphlett, paid a visit to the house to question Annie about what was going on. Finding Violet Delcey absent, she went on a tour of inspection and discovered that the girl had moved into the best bedroom, and that Mr. Cawthra was sleeping in the little room that she had occupied.
This, thought Mrs. Pamphlett, was outrageous, but what was worse was that across the bed, the marriage bed in which her poor friend had breathed her last, and in which her supplanter was now sleeping, was a lace bedspread that Auntie Lilian had finished making just before she died and had promised to Mrs. Pamphlett. She had a further conference with Annie, who had taken a dislike to Violet Delcey since she became mistress of the house. Encouraged, Annie now voiced dark suspicions; other friends joined in, and an exhumation order was applied for. Arsenic was found in large quantities in the body, and the police paid a visit to the house. They found the weedkiller in the tool shed, but they did not find Mr. Cawthra and Violet Delcey. They had fled.
They were discovered ten days later in Boulogne, living as father and daughter in a tiny pension, where they might have remained completely unsuspected, had not Violet Delcey had occasion to visit a dentist and objected to going to a French one. There was one English dentist in the town, and it happened that he had that day seen the police description in the London papers. It was the cat’s-eye brooch which gave her away; the dentist recognized it and communicated with the police. Faced with them, Mr. Cawthra confessed his guilt immediately, but stated passionately that Voilet Delcey knew nothing about it. After some trouble, they were extradited and brought home to stand their trials.
These were brief in the extreme. Mr. Cawthra persisted in his plea of guilty, all hope and interest seeming to have deserted him. “I did it,” he said in his statement to the police, “and even if I hadn’t, now that she knows I’ve been accused of it, there couldn’t be any possibility of happiness for us. She’s all I care about in life.” The rest of the statement was concerned with establishing her innocence. It was the only thought he had left. Her trial as an accessory followed his by a couple of days, and she was acquitted without witnesses being called. Three weeks later he was hanged at Pentonville.
It was Mr. Cawthra’s single-mindedness and his solicitude for her that appealed to the public imagination, turning him almost into a hero and a martyr, and giving to what would otherwise have been a sordid and commonplace story of wife-poisoning an enduring quality of tragedy and romance. It was this angle, too, that attracted the dramatist and the novelists who fictionized it; all three told the same essential story, with the same central characters: the nagging, fretful, or shrewish wife; the mild, agreeable little husband who murdered her from motives of respectability, so that he could marry the other woman whom he loved with a tenderness and an intensity that flooded the drab suburban background like a radiance; and the girl herself, meek, shrinking, and refined, inspiring by her gentleness and her devotion a depth of passion that she could never have dreamed of, dragged by it into the tragic whirlpool of the flight and the trial.
The story and its interpretation were so familiar to Jim now that, like the public at large, he accepted them without question. All that bothered him was the puzzle of how to resolve the inconsistency of the two figures — the Violet Delcey of fact and fiction, and the gay, mysterious Auntie Vi-Vi of his recollections. He would have liked to be able to assure himself that those recollections were untrustworthy; in his heart, he knew that they were not.
But in any case, it was all so long ago. So much had happened since then, to him as well as to the world. He was married to a wife who knew nothing of the case or his connection with it; he had a house, and a job, and the future to worry about; what did the dead remote past matter? It mattered only to the playwrights and the novelists, and to the compilers of books on criminology; to himself, it was hardly more, now, than would have been a mystery story he had read in his childhood and left without reaching the solution, in a volume long since lost and out of print.