Leave Her to Heaven

by Ben Ames Williams

  Roger said contentedly: ‘Besides, you’re not done yet. You can put on Doctor Patron, and the doctors who attended Ellen on those other occasions when she was sick. And you can ...’

  But Mr. Pettingill interrupted him. ‘No, Pryde, when you’ve got a case won, leave it alone. We’ll get an acquittal on the evidence. When court comes in in the morning, I shall rest.’

  Roger was doubtful. ‘Really?’

  ‘Ruth’s all right,’ Mr. Pettingill insisted. ‘We don’t need to worry about her.’ He said soberly: ‘But I’m afraid you’re due for trouble, Mr. Harland. Your testimony would almost certainly have cleared Ruth, even without Leick; but it puts you in a hole. When Ellen allowed Danny to drown, she probably committed a crime. In the case of a person whose duty it is to provide sustenance, warmth, or medical attention to another, if they deliberately and purposely fail or refuse to do so, it’s usually been held to be manslaughter, or murder if the circumstances were bad enough.’

  And he continued: ‘Ellen went along with Danny that day so that if he got in trouble she could save him. That was her job and her responsibility and her duty. But he got in trouble and she didn’t try to save him, although she could easily have done so. If he’d tried to get in the boat, say, and she pried his fingers loose, that’d probably be murder. If she just let him drown, that’s probably manslaughter.’

  Harland said grimly: ‘I’ve always felt she murdered him. She encouraged him to try that long swim — and I had asked her not to do so unless I was with them. I think she hoped something of the sort might happen.’

  ‘Well, say it’s manslaughter anyway,’ Pettingill assented.

  ‘You knew about it and didn’t report it. That made you just a passive accessory, and that might not be so bad. But also you destroyed evidence of the crime. That makes you an active accessory, and that’s serious.

  ‘Quinton’s going to lose his case against Mrs. Harland, but he’s got you on the hook and he won’t let you off. My guess is that he’ll send his assistant, young Cushing, who’s been sitting at his table during this trial, before the grand jury tomorrow, while we’re finishing up; and Cushing will take a transcript of your testimony and they’ll indict you as an accessory to murder, and probably as an accessory to manslaughter too, just to cover the whole ground. I’d expect you’ll be arrested on an indictment warrant some time tomorrow.’

  ‘I see.’ Harland felt cold. ‘When I told Ellen I knew what she had done, she warned me that I was as guilty as she was,’ he remembered. ‘I judge she was right.’

  ‘The only fight we can make,’ Pettingill explained, ‘is on the point as to whether what she did was a crime or not, but we won’t get far with that. Your testimony amounted to an admission that you believe she premeditated Danny’s death and that you actively concealed evidence of her acts. You can’t deny what you did. You’ve already admitted it.’

  Harland’s hand clenched hard. ‘I’ll plead guilty,’ he said.

  ‘You might full as well,’ Pettingill agreed. ‘I’ll try to get you off with no jail sentence, or a light one, but I’d expect you’ll have to go to jail.’

  Harland felt his breath catch; but then he relaxed, and he smiled. ‘If Ruth can stand a few days in jail, why so can I,’ he said.

  ‘It’ll be more than a few days, if it’s anything,’ the lawyer warned him. ‘But I’ll see what I can do.’

  – X –

  Harland had been able to speak calmly; but an hour later, alone, he felt the oppression of stifling terror, so that his instinct was to burst out of his room, out into the streets, out of the confinement of any walls at all. His thoughts went around and around the same track without pause; he lived in imagination the months of imprisonment which might now await him; he remembered prisoners who had gone mad, or who saved themselves from madness by scuffing a pin into the thick dust on their cell floor and then sifting the dust with their hands till they found it again, or by watching through their narrow windows a single leaf upon a single tree, or by scratching a line each day in the stone wall of their cells. Once as a reporter he had seen in Charlestown State Prison the quarters where Jesse Pomeroy lived out his life in solitary confinement; and he remembered now that he had thought the cell not so bad, long and narrow, with matting on the floor — or was it a rug; he could not be sure — and a high window that admitted ample light, and pictures on the wall. It was a cheerful little slot of a room — except that from it one could see nothing but the sky.

  Yet to think of spending a lifetime in that room, unable to leave it if you chose — or of spending a year, or even a day — brought back to his nostrils the sickening prison smell; new paint, human effluvia, antiseptic. He shuddered in an icy sweat, twitching where he lay.

  He shrank from the imagined horrors of prison and scanned every possibility of avoiding them. The grand jury might refuse to indict, or the judge might be merciful, or the Governor might pardon him; or with Leick and Ruth to help him he might escape and make good his flight into the wilderness and never look upon the face of any — save these two — again. Through the hours of darkness, when the world at its best looks black enough, he lay in a waking nightmare; and the gray face of dawn peering into his windows was at first like the pallid countenance of a jailor come to summon him. Then the gray turned to brighter hues, and the sun rose and touched him with a friendly warmth, seeming to promise that the thing he dreaded would not come to pass.

  Yet with full day this shadowy promise faded, and in a calmer mind Harland faced the truth. He sat on the edge of his bed, thinking what his life had been; and at last, without realizing the strangeness of his own action — it was a thing he had never done before — he knelt, his head pressed on his crossed arms. He prayed no formal prayer, yet his thoughts shaped humble, grateful words. ‘I’ve made as many mistakes as most men. Probably I’ve made more. But Ruth loves me, so I’m the richest of men. Nothing can take that away from me; and, having her love, I’ll go through whatever’s coming and never damn my luck. I’ll need help — need all the help I can get, to be what I want to be to her; but I’ll do the best I can.’

  Humility and surrender brought him peace, and he who had lain wakeful through the dark hours, there on his knees beside the bed disordered by his tossing slept for a while as a child sleeps, his head pillowed on his arms.

  15

  RUTH knew better than anyone what it had cost Harland knew better than anyone what it had cost Harland to tell — to judge and jury, and to the racing pencils of the reporters, and through them to the world — the story of how Danny died; and that night, though they were physically separated, her thoughts and her dreams dwelt with him. In the morning she came eagerly to court, wishing he and she might have one moment alone; but she saw at once in him a serenity of spirit which reassured and comforted her. She spoke a warm and tender word, and they sat side by side, not needing the clasp of hands to feel the bond between them. In the interval before Judge Andrus appeared she looked toward Quinton’s table, and she whispered to Harland:

  ‘That young man isn’t here today, the one who’s been sitting with Mr. Quinton.’

  ‘Mr. Cushing?’ Harland asked, remembering Mr. Pettingill’s prediction. ‘Probably gone fishing,’ he said, and smiled crookedly as if at some secret jest.

  Then court came in and they spoke no more; and a moment later, to Ruth’s surprise, Mr. Pettingill rested his case. She heard him with a tremor of dismay, feeling that something else should be done, some other evidence presented; but she could think of no definite thing he ought to do. Unfamiliar with court procedure, she did not know what now to expect; but Quinton, after a brief consultation with the Attorney General, likewise rested for the State, and the closing arguments began.

  Mr. Pettingill spoke in slow and easy tones, and his manner assumed that he and the jury were already agreed. Ruth, listening, liked him and she felt the liking for him among those about her.

  ‘We’re trying a queer kind of case here,’ he explained. ‘Her
e’s a woman, when she died, everyone — Doctor Seyffert, and her husband, and her sister, and Leick, and everyone that was there — they all thought she’d just took sick and died. If her husband hadn’t married again, no one would ever have thought any different. So this is an unusual state of affairs we’re trying to get the straight of.

  ‘It’s unusual because Ellen Berent Harland was a mighty unusual woman. Our job is to try to figure out just what sort of a woman she was.’

  And he began to analyze the testimony from this point of view, reminding the jury of fragments of evidence which Ruth herself had forgotten, putting together bit by bit a biography of Ellen from her earliest childhood, illuminating each fact with homely wisdom and with references to familiar everyday circumstances in the lives of his listeners which would make his meaning clearer. Ruth perceived with appreciative wonder that he — who had never seen her — understood Ellen better than she did herself. He made Ruth see and recognize as true things she had never guessed before, leading her memories down forgotten vistas, shedding light on moments that once had seemed inexplicable. She found herself as he spoke remembering things Mrs. Berent had said, things which had seemed to her at the time meaningless, or meant to be amusing, or simply ill-tempered. When Mr. Pettingill described Ellen’s devotion to her father, she seemed to hear the older woman say, at Glen Robie’s dinner table: ‘Sometimes I was surprised she didn’t sleep with him.’ When he spoke of Ellen’s pursuit of Harland, she remembered the night Ellen asked him to walk in the moonlight with her, and Mrs. Berent acidly commented: ‘Quoth the spider to the fly!’ A dozen caustic phrases came back to her. In the hour of Ellen’s triumph: ‘I thought Mr. Harland had more sense.’ When Harland said he wished to marry Ellen: ‘She’ll eat you alive and gnaw your bones.’ When they heard of Danny’s death: ‘Ruth, Ellen had something to do with that. She always hated that youngster.’ When the baby was stillborn after Ellen’s fall: ‘There’s never been a sleepwalker in our family.’ Thus Ruth, listening to Mr. Pettingill, seemed again and again to hear Mrs. Berent’s biting tones, seemed to see her nod in angry affirmation of the truth of all he said.

  Mr. Pettingill built out of words and phrases which the jury had heard spoken on the stand a portrait, so valid, so true, and so terribly like Ellen that Ruth shivered as she listened, and her thoughts were lost in the past, seeing through his words truths to which she had at the time been blind.

  She returned to close attention again only when he began to speak of her, to compare her life to Ellen’s; and he said at last:

  ‘So, gentlemen, there’s the two women in this case. Ellen and Ruth. You know as much about what they’re like as I do. Keep thinking about them while we go on and see what happened. Some of the things that were done in this business, either one of them might have done. It’s our job — your job — to decide which one did them.

  ‘Now let’s take, first, what the State says happened. The State says Ruth, already worth over half a million dollars, wanted Ellen’s money; and the State says she wanted Ellen’s husband. The State says that to get that money and that husband Ruth took some arsenic out of her father’s workshop, and hid the lump sugar, and put arsenic in the granulated sugar she took along to the picnic for Ellen to use, and hid the rest of the arsenic behind the baseboard in her room, and gave the sugared arsenic to Ellen, and saw her drink it, and watched Ellen die. After that, the State says, she left the extra arsenic behind the baseboard; left it there for two years, even after she married Mr. Harland.

  ‘That, generally speaking, is what the State says Ruth did. Well, you’ve heard her testify. You’ve had a chance to size her up. You know what sort of a woman she is. You don’t believe for a minute that she did those things. She’s not greedy enough to kill anyone for money, not for all the money in the world. She’s never done anything selfish or greedy in her life. Nor she’s not a sex maniac, ready to kill her sister so she could marry her sister’s husband; nor she’s not foolish enough, if she did. kill her sister, to keep the rest of the arsenic long after she’d ever need it. Gentlemen, she’s just not that kind of a girl.

  ‘Now let’s see what the defense says Ellen did. Where the men she loved were concerned, she was a greedy woman. She loved her father — and she shut everyone else out of his life, even his own wife, her mother. When he died, her greed fastened on Harland. She set out to get him to marry her, and when she had him hooked, she told him: “I will never let you go.” When she found she had to share his love with Danny, she killed Danny — indirectly, it’s true, but she killed him all the same. But Mr. Harland saw her do that; and though he protected her against prosecution for the crime, he hated her from then on. Oh, he tried to get along with her, because he’s a loyal gentlemen and she was his wife; but he hated her just the same.

  ‘Well, she tried to win him back, but she failed. When she knew he was going to leave her, she decided to kill herself. She couldn’t bear to live without him; but she’d told him she would never let him go, and she meant it. She planned to reach out from the grave and lay her grip on him again. She planned to kill herself and lay the blame on him and Ruth.

  ‘Well, how did she go about it? She’d handled arsenic, and it was natural for her to decide to use It, choosing a time when Ruth had fixed up something for her to eat. The chance was bound to come during the Bar Harbor visit, so she got ready ahead of time. She wrote that letter, knowing Quinton hated Mr. Harland so he’d do something about it. She told him where to look for arsenic — there’d be time enough to hide it in Ruth’s room after she got to Bar Harbor — and she told him she’d asked to be buried. Matter of fact, she’d asked Mr. Harland to have her cremated; but if he did, when it was found out she’d died of arsenic poisoning, his having her cremated would count against him.

  ‘The picnic was her chance. She’d be the only one using sugar in their coffee, so she decided to have Ruth pack some sugar and then she could put arsenic in it herself. But you couldn’t mix arsenic with the lump sugar Ruth would naturally use, so Ellen slipped down to the kitchen early that morning and hid the lump sugar so Ruth would have to use granulated. Then she reminded Ruth about putting in the sugar, and watched her prepare it, and then she fixed up a similar envelope and put it in the pocket of her jacket. At the picnic she took Ruth’s envelope — made an excuse, said she wasn’t ready for her coffee — and put it in the same pocket. Later she took out her own envelope and used the sugar with the arsenic in it and put it back in the hamper. Then she wrapped up Ruth’s envelope full of real sugar in some paper napkins and threw it in the fire. Leick saw it burn.

  ‘Then she got sick. Maybe it was just an accident that she used the word “poison,” or maybe at the last minute she was afraid to die. But I think she wanted to make sure there’d be an immediate investigation of her death. I think she tried to tell Doctor Seyffert she was poisoned. She got the word out, but that’s all she could say. Then she died.

  ‘That’s what she did. She was a greedy, jealous, sexy, murderous, heartless, shrewd woman. She could do it, and she would do it, and she did do it.’ His voice grew shrill with angry scorn. ‘That’s the sort of a hairpin she was.’

  He went on, summing up; and Ruth found herself trembling while she listened, and the shocking impact of his harsh and level words made her senses waver. When at last he finished, she heard a movement across the courtroom, a rustling and a stirring as of relief; and she saw the jurors shift their positions, and knew that he had held them all alike motionlessly attentive.

  He came to resume his seat, and Quinton at once was on his feet. Quinton, from his first word, attacked not Ruth but Harland, and with an unrestrained ferocity, so that Ruth wished to cry out protest and denial. But when she looked at Harland she saw him unmoved, and so forgot to be angry; and she came presently to understand that Quinton knew himself defeated, knew she would go free. Now in pure malignance, he took on Harland his revenge; and as he raged, fairly foaming with venom, the naked hate in him plain to see, she began to be
almost sorry for the baffled man.

  He argued Ruth’s guilt not at all, seeming almost to concede her innocence, referring only twice, and then obliquely, to the charge against her. Once he cried: ‘Mr. Harland brags that Ellen loved him well enough to murder Danny and to commit suicide! Well, the State says Ruth loved him well enough to murder Ellen! Whichever you believe, you’ve got to say his physical charms led to the taking of life, to suicide or to murder. But look at him! He looks to you and me not greatly different from other men! He has the same number of features; two ears, two eyes, a nose, a mouth! What is this mysterious attribute which he possesses, and which makes him thus irresistible to women?’ And at a later stage of his argument he shouted: ‘He accuses his dead wife of murdering his brother, and admits his own connivance in that murder! Well, I accuse him of conniving not only in that murder, but also in this one!’

  But except for these allusions, it was Harland, not Ruth, whom he denounced; and his very violence seemed to Ruth to make him ridiculous and pitiable. To listen and to watch was like being a spectator at an outburst uncontrolled and shameful. Not for herself — nor for Harland — but for Quinton’s own sake, she was glad when he was done.

  Judge Andrus, when Quinton finished, looked at the clock. There was still — for Quinton had been as brief as he was violent — almost half an hour before the time for a noon recess. The judge’s charge to the jury was short, and it seemed to Ruth frighteningly stern. Once he said: ‘You are to remember, gentlemen, that the question of how Danny Harland came to his death is not here at issue, nor the question of who was primarily or as an accessory responsible. You are to remember too that Mr. Harland is not here on trial. It is Ellen Harland’s death with which you are to deal. Nor need you decide whether or not she committed suicide. Your task is simply this. If you find that Ruth Harland deliberately led Ellen Harland to take a dose of arsenic, planning thus to kill her, you will return a verdict of guilty. If you have any reasonable doubt that Ruth Harland did this, you will return a verdict of not guilty.’