Murder in Stained Glass. Armstrong Margaret
came, and Phyllis and I started out bright and early. But we had to park a long way from the glass shop, for the roads were simply packed with cars of all sorts and kinds, and there was such a solid mass of people jammed together in front of the shop that Phyllis and I wondered how in the world we were ever going to get through.
The path had been roped off and a policeman stood at the gate, but he was a stranger and didn’t pay the slightest attention to us when we signaled to him for help. We stopped on the opposite side of the road, and stood looking about, hoping to see Mr. Merritt, or Sam Beers, or somebody else we knew; but there wasn’t a soul. The village had been crowded out by a rather horrid-looking mob of sightseers, laughing and shouting and chewing gum. We were at our wits’ end when, to my relief, I caught sight of a familiar figure; an old friend, Edgar Farraday, had just reached the gate and was speaking to the policeman.
“Oh, Edgar!” I called. “Edgar Farraday! Come over and help us. We can’t get through.”
He turned, smiled, waved his hat, and began making his way towards us. I couldn’t help laughing a little; he looked so absurdly out of place.
Edgar Farraday is a good deal older than I am, but when I came out he was still going to dances and still considered the best dressed man in New York. Both he and I care less for dancing than we used to, but we have preserved our interest in clothes, and it did my heart good to see him now in his well-cut rough coat, so exactly right for a March morning in the country, with a red carnation in his buttonhole.
As he is over six feet tall, he hadn’t much difficulty in reaching us. We shook hands. I introduced him to Phyllis. He regarded her with pleasure.
“I knew your mother,” he said—Edgar always remembers everybody’s mother. “A charming girl. You are very like her, my dear; except that her eyes were gray.” Edgar always remembers everybody’s mother’s eyes. “Yours, I see, are forget-me-not blue. What brings you here, Harriet?”
“I’m staying with Charlotte Blair. You remember Charlotte Blair?”
“Yes, indeed,” he said politely, but without enthusiasm. “You’re staying here? Then you can give me the details of this strange affair. Is it true that a murder was committed in Fred Ullathorne’s studio?”
“It looks that way. But I can’t tell you about it now. The inquest begins at nine and Phyllis and I are expected to attend. Can you get us through?”
“Of course. Come along!” He gave us each an arm and we began our difficult progress.
“How do you happen to be here, Edgar?” I asked, as we were brought to a halt behind two stout women arm-in-arm. “Did you come for the inquest?”
“Not exactly. I happened to be in Banbury, staying with the Lorrimers, on my way back from New Hampshire where I went to look at a piece of property. I’ve been dabbling in real estate, lately. Of course, when the news came of this murder, being such an old friend of Fred Ullathorne’s, I thought—”
He broke off; the crowd was moving again. With some powerful pushing and a good deal of persuasion, in a few minutes we were at the gate.
The policeman let us through when I explained that we were all friends of Mr. Frederick Ullathorne. The door stood open. The furnace cellar, “scene of the tragedy,” had been roped off, and we were told to go straight upstairs to the workroom.
Up we went. Edgar followed close behind me. I anticipated an exclamation of delight as he saw the rose window, and I wasn’t disappointed.
“By Jove!” he exclaimed, pausing. “Ullathorne has surpassed himself. That’s magnificent!”
“Come along,” I whispered. “It’s a crime, not art, we’re after for the moment. Where shall we sit? Over there in the corner?”
“Why not sit on this side facing the window? If the proceedings are dull—most legal proceedings are dull—we can look, not listen.”
I nodded. We moved to the chairs he had pointed out. I beckoned to Leo. He joined us. We all sat down.
In some ways, the workroom was less changed in appearance than I had expected. The drafting tables had been taken down and stacked in a far corner, and the local undertaker had provided plenty of camp stools; but the cartoons on the walls—Moses and Elijah, Ruth and Naomi, Saint George and Saint Patrick—and the rose window blazing down over everything, preserved the medieval effect that had impressed me when I first saw the place. We might have been in Rheims five hundred years ago, instead of twentieth century New England. I noticed that almost every person stopped talking as he entered, gave an upward glance at the rose window, and took his seat as if it were a pew.
The room was not crowded. No one spoke above a whisper. I had heard the coroner was a martinet, a stickler for decorum. Cameras were taboo, radio wires and extra telephone connections forbidden, and only persons involved in the investigation were to be allowed to come in.
Evidently the coroner had been obeyed, and when I saw him I wasn’t surprised. There the old gentleman sat enthroned in a magnificent Gothic bishop’s chair of carved oak from Mr. Ullathorne’s studio, placed against the wall at our left. An equally ancient carved oak stand that might once have been part of a miserere seat stood at his elbow. The pitcher of water and the tumbler upon it seemed oddly modern by contrast. So did the single “exhibit,” a very small pearl-handled revolver that didn’t look as if it could kill a bird, much less a man.
But the coroner himself fitted his surroundings to a T. He might have been a doge, or at least a prime minister. He sat motionless, contemplating the assembled company with the serene indifference of extreme old age. His attitude and dress reminded me of Saint Gaudens’ statue of Peter Cooper. He looked very frail, as if a breath would blow him into the grave. Only his eyes were vividly alive.
They roved about the room for a moment. He considered the jury, farmers and farm hands, filing out into the next room to “view the corpse.” He glanced at the reporters herded in a corner; his eyes turned to our side of the room, regarded Leo for a second or two, moved on to Edgar Farraday’s face and paused. His head bent in a nod of recognition. Then away his eyes went again, and came to rest on the rose window. For the next ten minutes he sat motionless, gazing contentedly at that galaxy of heavenly beings surrounded by the wealth of the animal and vegetable kingdom, as if district attorneys and sheriffs and all of us mortals didn’t exist. No doubt, I reflected, when you get to be very old the celestial world seems a good deal more important than the terrestrial.
“Do you know the coroner?” I whispered to Edgar.
“Oh, yes. Everybody knows Lucius Cornell. I’ve known him all my life. A splendid old fossil. Ought to have been retired years ago. He’s nearly ninety. But the community is proud of him and won’t let him go. They give him an assistant, fellow by the name of Culver, who does all the work.”
“Is he just a figurehead then?”
“Lord, no! You’ll see. When the evidence is all in he’ll address the jury, and very ably too. By the way, I don’t see Fred Ullathorne. Isn’t he here?”
“No, he isn’t. He went to New York a few days before the murder and hasn’t been back.” I glanced at Leo, saw he was too taken up with Phyllis to hear what I was saying, and went on: “Leo has tried to get in touch with him, of course, and so have the police. Leo isn’t accustomed to responsibility, and I think it worries him not to have his father here.”
“Naturally. Fred will blame Leo if anything goes wrong. He has always been hard on the boy and—Here comes the jury!”
Twelve men were emerging from the studio. They moved solemnly to a row of chairs placed below the rose window and sat down.
Probably all inquests start off in much the same routine way, recapitulating what everybody knows already. Anyway the first half hour of this one was as dull as ditch-water. There was nothing new and repetition had taken the life out of stories that had once seemed thrilling. Clarence’s account of his gruesome find was now as prosaic as if the bones had been twigs or rusty