“Whatever’s those?” asked Bunting in a low voice.
Daisy clung a thought closer to her father’s arm. Even she guessed that these strange, pathetic, staring faces were the death-masks of those men and women who had fulfilled the awful law which ordains that the murderer shall be, in his turn, done to death.
“All hanged!” said the guardian of the Black Museum briefly. “Casts taken after death.”
Bunting smiled nervously. “They don’t look dead somehow. They looks more as if they were listening,” he said.
“That’s the fault of Jack Ketch,” said the man facetiously. “It’s his idea—that of knotting his patient’s necktie under the left ear! That’s what he does to each of the gentlemen to whom he has to act valet on just one occasion only. It makes them lean just a bit to one side. You look here—?”
Daisy and her father came a little closer, and the speaker pointed with his finger to a little dent imprinted on the left side of each neck; running from this indentation was a curious little furrow, well ridged above, showing how tightly Jack Ketch’s necktie had been drawn when its wearer was hurried through the gates of eternity.
“They looks foolish-like, rather than terrified, or—or hurt,” said Bunting wonderingly.
He was extraordinarily moved and fascinated by those dumb, staring faces.
But young Chandler exclaimed in a cheerful, matter-of-fact voice, “Well, a man would look foolish at such a time as that, with all his plans brought to naught—and knowing he’s only got a second to live—now wouldn’t he?”
“Yes, I suppose he would,” said Bunting slowly.
Daisy had gone a little pale. The sinister, breathless atmosphere of the place was beginning to tell on her. She now began to understand that the shabby little objects lying there in the glass case close to her were each and all links in the chain of evidence which, in almost every case, had brought some guilty man or woman to the gallows.
“We had a yellow gentleman here the other day,” observed the guardian suddenly; “one of those Brahmins—so they calls themselves. Well, you’d a been quite surprised to see how that heathen took on! He declared—what was the word he used?”—he turned to Chandler.
“He said that each of these things, with the exception of the casts, mind you—queer to say, he left them out—exuded evil, that was the word he used! Exuded—squeezed out it means. He said that being here made him feel very bad. And twasn’t all nonsense either. He turned quite green under his yellow skin, and we had to shove him out quick. He didn’t feel better till he’d got right to the other end of the passage!”
“There now! Who’d ever think of that?” said Bunting. “I should say that man ’ud got something on his conscience, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, I needn’t stay now,” said Joe’s good-natured friend. “You show your friends round, Chandler. You knows the place nearly as well as I do, don’t you?”
He smiled at Joe’s visitors, as if to say goodbye, but it seemed that he could not tear himself away after all.
“Look here,” he said to Bunting. “In this here little case are the tools of Charles Peace. I expect you’ve heard of him.”
“I should think I have!” cried Bunting eagerly.
“Many gents as comes here thinks this case the most interesting of all. Peace was such a wonderful man! A great inventor they say he would have been, had he been put in the way of it. Here’s his ladder; you see it folds up quite compactly, and makes a nice little bundle—just like a bundle of old sticks any man might have been seen carrying about London in those days without attracting any attention. Why, it probably helped him to look like an honest working man time and time again, for on being arrested he declared most solemnly he’d always carried that ladder openly under his arm.”
“The daring of that!” cried Bunting.
“Yes, and when the ladder was opened out it could reach from the ground to the second storey of any old house. And, oh! how clever he was! Just open one section, and you see the other sections open automatically; so Peace could stand on the ground and force the thing quietly up to any window he wished to reach. Then he’d go away again, having done his job, with a mere bundle of old wood under his arm! My word, he was artful! I wonder if you’ve heard the tale of how Peace once lost a finger. Well, he guessed the constables were instructed to look out for a man missing a finger; so what did he do?”
“Put on a false finger,” suggested Bunting.
“No, indeed! Peace made up his mind just to do without a hand altogether. Here’s his false stump: you see, it’s made of wood—wood and black felt? Well, that just held his hand nicely. Why, we considers that one of the most ingenious contrivances in the whole museum.”
Meanwhile, Daisy had let go her hold of her father. With Chandler in delighted attendance, she had moved away to the farther end of the great room, and now she was bending over yet another glass case. “Whatever are those little bottles for?” she asked wonderingly.
There were five small phials, filled with varying quantities of cloudy liquids.
“They’re full of poison, Miss Daisy, that’s what they are. There’s enough arsenic in that little whack o’ brandy to do for you and me—aye, and for your father as well, I should say.”
“Then chemists shouldn’t sell such stuff,” said Daisy, smiling. Poison was so remote from herself, that the sight of these little bottles only brought a pleasant thrill.
“No more they don’t. That was sneaked out of a flypaper, that was. Lady said she wanted a cosmetic for her complexion, but what she was really going for was flypapers for to do away with her husband. She’d got a bit tired of him, I suspect.”
“Perhaps he was a horrid man, and deserved to be
