Facing the Footlights - 1883 Author:Florence Marryat Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. 'IS THERE ANYTHING BETWEEN YOU?' The coroner's inquest on the remains of the mistress of the manor house was conducted (as the doctor had promi... more »sed the survivors) as quietly and privately as possible. These matters are usually more than half arranged out of court, and the confirmed opinion of so reliable a practitioner as Dr Onslow that the deceased woman had come to her death by self- accident had its due weight in rendering the necessary formalities as brief as was consistent with justice. In fact, Eudora Thane, who had been dreading the inquiry as a terrible ordeal, was surprised to find how simply and naturally it seemed to pass off. A few strangers assembled in the dining-room, and busied themselves with pen and ink and paper, and she, and Edgar, and Bartholomew were summoned in turn, to answer such questions as might be put to them, and then quietly dismissed with a word of thanks. The servant's testimony went further than any other to convince the jury that Dr Onslow's opinion of the case was a correct one. She gave witness boldly to the fact that her late mistress always physicked herself, and would not allow a doctor in the house ; that she asserted the members of the medical profession to be a lot of blundering fools, who knew nothing of their business, and she would rather die than owe her life to one of them ; that she had been in the daily habit of swallowing small doses from one or other of the phials on the chest of drawers ; and that on a former occasion she had made herself seriously ill by taking camphor liniment, in mistake for sal-volatile. Bartholomew had never heard of, nor seen, such a thing as 'laurel water.' She did not even know it by name, but neither did she know the name of half the mixtures Mrs Griffin kept in her phials, and it...« less