to afford matter for a guess.
Kinder did not die until four days after he was wounded by the discharge of Bertrand’s pistol; was, indeed, in a fair way to recover from the wound which broke his jaw and tore off most of his ear. He died suddenly, after Jane Bertrand had given him a glass of milk. This, Jane’s own story, comes at second-hand; but Mrs. Robertson testified to hearing Bertrand crying out in his fit, the night before Kinder died: “Bring the milk and mix the poison.” In Bertrand’s possession were found two vegetable poisons, aconite and belladonna, both of a nature to defy the chemist who assisted at the investigation of Kinder’s exhumed body.
To quote Dr. Ainsworth Mitchell, editor of The Analyst: “Medical criminals have often banked upon difficulties likely to be experienced in detecting vegetable alkaloids.” The test for aconitine was not perfected until later, when Dr. Stevenson, by a series of experiments upon mice, established its presence in the body of Dr. Lamson’s victim. Even so, the defence in that famous case suggested the possibility that effects attributed to aconitine might also have been caused by some substance of an alkaloidal nature formed in the decomposition of animal matter. Belladonna, more familiar nowadays under the name of its active principle, atropine, was, and is, equally as elusive. Both these poisons were (quite legitimately) in Bertrand’s possession; and Bertrand was a dentist, with enough general medical knowledge to call for comment from the judge. He may be allowed, for purposes of argument, to rank as a medical criminal. It is, for the detection story reader, a problem incapable of solution; hardly a problem at all, but rather a question of looking upon this picture and on this, and making a choice of suspicions. On the one hand a man succumbs to the shock of a wound not necessarily fatal, as a result of previous known excesses in drink, by which his resistance has been weakened. “It would shorten anybody’s days.” On the other hand, a murderer, already over the edge of sanity, hears that the victim whose death has been for weeks the main concern of his imagination is about to recover. He has poisons at hand, and an instrument; his wife, dazed, frightened, unable to refuse to perform his will. He is aware, in some convolution of his uneasy brain, that vegetable alkaloids take a lot of tracing in a dead man’s body.
Penny plain, twopence coloured. There is, and can be now no proof; as young Osric says, nothing neither way. But to the writer, as to the reader of detection stories, the second alternative is the more acceptable of the two.
XI
The main interest of this trial, apart from those purely legal complications which eventually brought about an appeal to the Privy Council, lies in the picture it offers of a lunatic murderer going about his business unhampered by sane persons to whom he had confided his purpose. “People don’t do these things,” the citizens of Sydney told each other; men capable of earning a fair living and playing a good game of cards are not to be suspected of homicidal tendencies. They took no steps, therefore, to restrain the young dentist who roared like a tiger when yawning in the street, who strolled Sydney by night dressed as a woman, vowed he could raise ghosts, and in the midst of a rubber of whist announced, with appropriate gesture, that he was the personal devil.
De Fries, Jackson, and Burne seem to have made no effort to get a doctor to Bertrand, or, when Kinder died, to inform the police of what they knew. De Fries did indeed plead with Bertrand for better treatment of his wife, and told Mrs. Robertson that he must be insane to go on as he did. But “he said it in a jocular manner.” Burne, a party to all his employer’s plans, buying pistols for him, rowing with him while the murderous tomahawk swung under his coat, held his tongue, would not speak until he was subpoenaed, even after Bertrand had been gaoled on another charge. He was twenty years old, and by no means unsophisticated, having played ‘juvenile business ‘at the Victoria Theatre before he came to the dentist as assistant. It is inconceivable that, after the first expedition in the boat, he should not have perceived Bertrand’s mental condition. Having accompanied him on three of these ventures and bought the pistols, it is understandable that he should then be afraid to speak. But how came he to undertake such commissions? How came he to remain in that equivocal employment at all? Fear accounts for some part of his conduct; for the rest we must hold responsible the reluctance of the normal human being to suppose that a man with whom he is in daily contact, and from whom he takes orders, is not right in his mind.
It is evident from the behaviour of these people that in many ways Bertrand could tell a hawk from a handsaw still; he was but mad nor’-nor’-west. His journal speaks rationally of money matters, and gives a shrewd picture of Mr. Wood, Helen Kinder’s shiftless father, who, having been told how matters stood between his daughter and the dentist, attempted to make capital out of his knowledge. His brutalities to poor Jane were kept secret, though he thrashed her with a whip and assaulted her with a penknife, after which last incident Jane showed her sister-in-law a pair of corsets soaked with blood. His mother-in-law, who visited the house often, was able to swear in court that he was very kind to her daughter, and by no means a man of strange manners and habits. Bellhouse, told the facts of the murder by Bertrand, casually, after a game of cards, could not make up his mind to believe that what he had heard was the truth, and lay awake all night debating the question. It would seem that in general Bertrand’s manner was normal enough; so that it must have been shocking to hear him offer, over the whist-table, to raise the ghost of the man he had killed; or to look up from that most innocent of occupations, the bathing of a baby, and be told: “Kinder did not shoot himself, I shot him.”
The heroine of the story, Ellen Kinder, makes no such extraordinary impression upon the mind; her behaviour rouses no question. She was a hearty, handsome, practical woman, fond of her pleasures, combining promiscuity with a genuine affection and care for her children. It is easy enough to believe that she yielded to Bertrand from fear; yet her imagination was not of a quality to tell her that the threats he was for ever making against her husband might one day come to action. The passion in her letters has in it a tang of theatre and of the expected. Perhaps this is always so; perhaps the true language of persons moved by great excitement is that of melodrama. “I had rather see you dead at my feet”; “I cannot live without seeing you”; “I shall go mad at the thought of our meeting”—all these are stock phrases which may stand for the expression of genuine as of false emotion. But the voice of the real Ellen Kinder is not to be heard in them. Rather she comes alive in such phrases as these, taken at random from her letters to her lover:
“Papa quite expects me to make a good match one of these days. I tell him I would not give thanks for the best man living, if I could make my own living.”
“I feel my position very much, as I know how little we are able to afford the extra expense we must be at. If there were anything I could do to make it up I should not mind, but there is absolutely nothing. I do not know how things are to go on if it were not for the children.”
“We are almost decided to take an hotel here, but on second thought I do not care much for it. I should not mind a respectable house in Sydney, but this is such a bad place. This is, oh, dreadfully matter of fact, dear dear love, but it is necessary, therefore I hope you will not mind it.”
“You see, deary, an hotel is such a public affair, that my position would be noticeable directly. I should not like to be in a public, and I know that you would not like for me to be a disgrace to everyone connected with me.”
“I must not forget to thank you for seeing about my business. I should like to get into a first-rate establishment for a few weeks to learn dressmaking, as a really good one would do well here. In that case, there is no place like Sydney; but, darling, I leave myself entirely in your hands—feeling, love, you will do everything for the best.”
It is not surprising after all these protestations to note that the first employment found by Mrs. Kinder after her acquittal was in an hotel. She returned to New Zealand, whence she had come three years before; a public-house keeper with some sense of the value of advertisement engaged her as barmaid, in which position she was completely successful. Almost at once, however, she married again, and, for all anyone
