“I shall go back to bed,” said Desrolles, “as I don’t see my way to being of any use.”
“That’s the best thing you can do,” said the sergeant, approvingly; “and you, ma’am,” he added, turning to Mrs. Rawber, “had better follow the gentleman’s example.”
Mrs. Rawber felt as if her bedroom would be peopled with ghosts, but did not like to give utterance to her fears.
“I’ll go down and set a light to my parlour fire, and mix myself a wineglass full of something warm,” she said. “I feel chilled to the marrow of my bones.”
“You, ma’am, had better wait up here till I come back with the doctor,” said the policeman.
Desrolles had returned to his room by this time. Mrs. Rawber went downstairs with the policeman, glad of his company so far. He waited politely while she struck a lucifer and lighted her candle, and then he hurried off to find the doctor.
“There’s company in a fire,” mused Mrs. Rawber, as she groped for wood and paper in the bottom of a cupboard not wholly innocent of black beetles.
There was company in a glass of hot gin-and-water, too, by-and-by, when the tiny kettle had been coaxed into a boil. Mrs. Rawber was a temperate woman, but she liked what she called her “little comforts,” and an occasional tumbler of gin-and-water was one of them.
“It’s very hard upon me,” she said to herself, thinking of the dreadful deed that had been done upstairs; “the rooms suit me, and I’m used to them; and yet I believe I shall have to go. I shall fancy the place is haunted.”
She glanced round over her shoulder, fearful lest she should see La Chicot in her awful beauty—a marble face, a bloodstained throat, and glassy eyes regarding her with sightless stare.
“I shall have to leave,” thought Mrs. Rawber.
Meanwhile Mrs. Evitt was alone upstairs. She was a ghoul-like woman, for whom horrors were not without a ghastly relish. She liked to visit in the house of death, to sit beside the winter fire with a batch of gossips, consuming tea and toast, dwelling on the details of a last illness, or discussing the order of a funeral. She had a dreadful courage that came of familiarity with death. She took up the candle, and went in alone and unappalled to look at La Chicot.
“How tight that hand is clenched,” she said to herself; “I wonder whether there’s anything in it.”
She forced back the stiffening fingers, and with the candle held close, bent down to peer into the marble palm. In the hollow of that dead hand she found a little tuft of iron-grey hair, which looked as if it had been torn from a man’s head.
Mrs. Evitt drew the hairs from the dead hand, and with a careful precision laid them in an old letter which she took from her pocket, and folded up the letter into a neat little packet, which she returned to the same calico receptacle for heterogeneous articles.
“What a turn it has given me,” she said to herself, stealing back to the landing, her petticoats lifted lest the hem of her garments should touch that dreadful pool beside the bed.
The expression of her face had altered since she entered the room. There was a new intelligence in her dull grey eyes. Her countenance and bearing were as of one whose mind is charged with the weight of an awful secret.
The surgeon came, an elderly man, who lived close at hand, and was experienced in the ways of that doubtful section of society which inhabited the neighbourhood of Cibber Street. In his opinion La Chicot had been dead three hours. It was now on the stroke of four. One o’clock must, therefore, have been the time of the murder.
The police-sergeant came back in company with a man in plain clothes, and these two made a careful examination of the premises together, the result of which inspection went to show that it would have been extremely difficult for anyone to enter the house from the back. The front door was left on the latch all night, and had been for the last eleven years, and no harm had ever come of it, Mrs. Evitt declared, plaintively. It was a Chubb lock, and she didn’t believe there was another like it in all London.
The two men went into every room in the house, disturbed Mr. Desrolles in a comfortable slumber, and surveyed his bedchamber with eyes which took in every detail. There was very little for them to see: a tent bedstead draped with flabby faded chintz, a rickety washstand, a small chest of drawers with a looking glass on the top, and three odd chairs, picked up at humble auctions.
After inspecting Mr. Desrolles’ rooms, and overhauling his limited wardrobe, they looked in upon Mrs. Rawber, and roused that talented woman’s ire by opening all her drawers and cupboards, and peering curiously into the same, whereby they beheld more mysteries of theatrical attire than ought to be seen by the public eye.
“You don’t suppose I did it, I hope,” protested Mrs. Rawber, in her grandest tragedy voice.
“No, ma’am, but we’re obliged to do our duty,” answered the police-officer. “It’s only a form.”
“It’s a very disagreeable form,” said Mrs. Rawber, “and if you tallow-grease my Lady Macbeth dresses, I shall expect you to make them good.”
The man in plain clothes committed himself to no opinion, nor did he enter upon any discussion as to the motive of
