Yet, degraded as she was, there were depths of vice from which her better instincts plucked her back; as if it were her good angel clutching her garments to drag her from the edge of an abyss. She had once loved her husband; nay, after her own manner, she loved him still, and could not calmly contemplate leaving him. Her brain, muddled by champagne and brandy, shaped all thoughts confusedly; yet at her worst the idea of selling herself to this Jewish profligate shocked and disgusted her. Her soul was swayed to and fro, to this side and to that. She had no inclination to vice, but she would have liked the wages of sin; for in this lower world the wages of sin meant a villa at Passy, and a couple of carriages.
“Good night,” she said abruptly to her lover. “I must not be seen talking to you. My husband may come home at any minute.”
“I hear that he generally comes home in the middle of the night,” said Mr. Lemuel.
“What business is it of yours if he does?” asked La Chicot, angrily.
“Everything that concerns you is my business. When I, who love the ground you walk upon, hear how you are neglected by your husband, do you suppose the knowledge does not make me so much the more determined to win you?”
“Send your messenger for my answer tomorrow,” said La Chicot, and then she shut the door in his face.
“I hate him,” she muttered when she was alone in the passage, stamping her foot as if she had trodden upon a venomous insect.
She, went upstairs, and again sat down half-undressed upon the floor, to look at the diamond necklace. She had a childish love of the gems—a delight in looking at them which differed very little from her feelings when she was fifteen years younger, and longed for a blue bead necklace exposed for sale in the quaint old market place at Auray.
“I shall send them back to him tomorrow,” she said to herself. “The diamonds are beautiful—and I am getting tired of my life here, and I know that Jack hates me—but that man is too horrible—and—I am an honest woman.”
She flung herself on her knees beside the bed, in the attitude of prayer, but not to pray. She had lost the habit of prayer soon after she left her native province. She was sobbing passionately for the loss of her husband’s love, with a dim consciousness that it was by her own degradation she had forfeited his regard.
“I’ve been a good wife to him,” she murmured in broken syllables, “better than ever I was—”
And then speech lost itself in convulsive sobs, and she cried herself to sleep.
XVII
Murder
Murder! an awful word under the most ordinary circumstances of everyday life—all awful word even when spoken of an event that happened long ago, or afar off. But what a word shouted in the dead of night, through the close darkness of a sleeping house, thrilling the ear of slumber, freezing the blood in the half-awakened sleepers’ veins.
Such a shout—repeated with passionate clamour—scared the inhabitants of the Cibber Street lodging-house at three o’clock in the winter morning, still dark as deepest night. Mrs. Rawber heard it in her back bedroom on the ground floor. It penetrated confusedly—not as a word, but as a sound of fear and dread—to the front kitchen, where Mrs. Evitt, the landlady, slept on an ancient press bedstead, which by day made believe to be a bookcase. Lastly, Desrolles, who seemed to have slept more heavily than the other two on that particular night, came rushing out of his room to ask the meaning of that hideous summons.
They all met on the first-floor landing, where Jack Chicot stood on the threshold of his wife’s bedroom, with a candle in his hand, the flickering flame making a patch of sickly yellow light amidst surrounding gloom—a faint light in which Jack Chicot’s pallid countenance looked like the face of a ghost.
“What is the matter?” Desrolles asked the two women simultaneously.
“My wife has been murdered. My God, it is too awful! See—see—”
Chicot pointed with a trembling hand to a thin thread of crimson that had crept along the dull grey carpet to the very threshold. Shudderingly the others looked inside, as he held the candle towards the bed, with white averted face. There were hideous stains on the counterpane, an awful figure lying in a heap among the bedclothes, a long loose coil of raven hair, curved like a snake round the rigid form—a spectacle which not one of those who gazed upon it, spellbound, fascinated by the horror of the sight, could ever hope to forget.
“Murdered, and in my house!” shrieked Mrs. Evitt, unconsciously echoing the words of Lady Macbeth, on a similar occasion. “I shall never let my first floor again. I’m a ruined woman. Seize him, ’old ’im tight,” she cried, with sudden intensity. “It must ’ave been her ’usband done it. You was often a-quarrelling, you know you was.”
This fierce attack startled Jack Chicot. He turned upon the woman with his ghastly face, a new horror in his eyes.
“I kill her!” he cried. “I never raised my hand against her in my life, though she has tempted me many a time. I came into the house three minutes ago, I should not have known anything, for when I come in late I sleep in the little room, but I saw that—”(he pointed to the thin red streak which had crept across the threshold, and under the door, to the carpetless landing outside), “and then I came in
