MURDER.
Murder! an awful word under the most ordinary circumstances of
every-day life--an 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 book-case. 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 bed-clothes,
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,
spell-bound, 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 and found her
lying here, as you see her.’
‘Somebody ought to go for a policeman,’ suggested Desrolles.
‘I will,’ said Chicot.
He was the only person present in a condition to leave the house and
before any one could question his right to leave it he was gone.
They waited outside that awful chamber for a quarter of an hour, but no
policeman came, nor did Jack Chicot return.
‘I begin to think he has made a bolt of it,’ said Desrolles. ‘That
looks rather bad.’
‘Didn’t I tell you he’d done it?’ screamed the landlady. ‘I know he’d
got to hate her. I’ve seen it in his looks--and she has told me as
much, and cried over it, poor thing, when she’d taken a glass or two
more than was good for her. And you let him go, like a coward as you
was.’
‘My good Mrs. Evitt, you are getting abusive. I was not sent into the
world to arrest possible criminals. I am not a detective.’
‘But I’m a ruined woman!’ cried the outraged householder. ‘Who’s to
occupy my lodgings in future, I should like to know? The house’ll get
the name of being haunted. Here’s Mrs. Rawber even, that has been with
me close upon five year, will be wanting to go.’
‘I’ve had a turn,’ assented the tragic lady, ‘and I don’t feel that I
can lie down in my bed again downstairs. I’m afraid I may have to look
for other apartments.’
‘There,’ whimpered Mrs. Evitt, ‘didn’t I tell you I was a ruined woman?’
Desrolles had gone into the front room, and was standing at an open
window watching for a policeman.
One of those guardians of the public peace came strolling along
the pavement presently, with as placid an air as if he had been an
inhabitant of Arcadia, to whom Desrolles shouted, ‘Come up here,
there’s been murder.’
The public guardian wheeled himself stiffly round and approached the
street door. He did not take the word murder in its positive sense,
but in its local significance, which meant a row, culminating in a few
bruises and a black eye or two. That actual murder had been done, and
that a dead woman was lying in the house, never entered his mind. He
opened the door and came upstairs with slow, creaking footsteps, as if
he had been making a ceremonious visit.
‘What’s the row?’ he asked curtly, when he came to the first floor
landing, and saw the two women standing there, Mrs. Evitt wrapped in a
waterproof, Mrs. Rawber in a yellow cotton dressing-gown of antiquated
fashion, both with scared faces and sparse, dishevelled hair.
Mr. Desrolles was the coolest of the trio, but even his countenance had
a ghastly look in the light of the guttering candle which Jack Chicot
had set down on the little table outside the bedroom door.
They told him breathlessly what had happened.
‘Is she dead?’ he asked.
‘Go in and look,’ said Mrs. Evitt. ‘I dared not go a-nigh her.’
The policeman went in, lantern in hand, a monument of stolid calm,
amidst the terror of the scene. Little need to ask if she were dead.
That awful face upon the pillow, those glazed eyes with their wide
stare of horror, that gaping wound in the full white throat, from
which the life-blood had poured in a crimson stream across the white
counterpane, until it made a dark pool beside the bed, all told their
own tale.
‘She must have been dead for an hour or more,’ said the policeman,
touching the marble hand.
La Chicot’s hand and arm were flung above her head, as if she had known
what was coming, and had tried to clutch the bell-pull behind her. The
other hand was tightly clenched as in the last convulsion.
‘There’ll have to be an inquest,’ said the policeman, after he had
examined the window, and looked out to see if the room was easily
accessible from without. ‘Somebody had better go for a doctor. I’ll go
myself. There’s a surgeon at the corner of the next street. Who is she,
and how did it happen?’
Mrs. Evitt, in a torrent of words, told him all she knew, and all she
suspected. It was La Chicot’s husband that had done it, she was sure.
‘Why?’ asked the policeman.
‘Who else should it be? It couldn’t be burglars. You saw yourself that
the window was fastened inside. She’d no valuables to tempt any one.
Light come light go was her motto, poor thing. Her money went as fast
as it came, and if it wasn’t him as did it, why haven’t he come back?’
The policeman asked what she meant by this, whereupon Desrolles told
him of Mr. Chicot’s disappearance.
‘I must say that it looks fishy,’ concluded the second floor lodger. ‘I
don’t want to breathe a word against a man I like, but it looks fishy.
He went out twenty minutes ago to fetch a policeman, and he hasn’t come
back yet.’
‘No, nor never will,’ said Mrs. Rawber, who was sitting on the stairs
shivering, afraid to go back to her bedroom.
That ground floor bedroom of hers was a dismal place at the best of
times, overshadowed by the wall of the yard, and made dark and damp by
a protruding cistern, but how would it seem to her now when the house
was made horrible by murder?
‘Do you know what time it was when the husband gave the alarm?’ asked
the policeman.
‘Not more than twenty minutes ago.’
‘Any of you got a watch?’
Desrolles shrugged his shoulders. Mrs. Evitt murmured something about
her poor husband’s watch which had been a good one in its time, till
one of the hands broke short off and the works went wrong. Mrs. Rawber
had a clock on her bedroom mantelpiece, and had noticed the time when
that awful cry awoke her, scared as she was. It was ten minutes after
three.
‘And now it wants twenty to four,’ said the sergeant, looking at his
watch. ‘If the husband did it, he must have done it a good hour before
he gave the alarm; at least that’s my opinion. We shall hear what the
doctor says. I’ll go and fetch him. Now, look here, my good people: if
you value your own characters, you’ll none of you attempt to leave this
house to-night. Your evidence will be wanted at the inquest to-morrow,
and the quieter and closer you keep yourselves meanwhile the safer for
you.’
‘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
wine-glassful 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 blood-stained 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 gray 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 neighborhood 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 any one 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 a crime apparently so
motiveless. He made his notes of the plain facts of the case, and went
away with the sergeant.
‘What am I to do about laying her out?’ asked Mrs. Evitt of the doctor.
‘I wouldn’t lay a finger upon her for a hundred pounds.’
‘I’ll send round a nurse from the workhouse,’ said the doctor, after a
moment’s thought. ‘They’re not easily scared.’
Half an hour later the workhouse nurse came, a tall, bony woman, who
executed her horrible task in a business-like manner, which testified
to the strength of her nerve and the variety of her experience.
By five o’clock in the morning all was done, and La Chicot lay with
meekly folded hands under clean white linen--the heavy lids closed for
ever on the once lovely eyes, the raven hair parted on the classic brow.
‘She’s the handsomest corpse I’ve laid out for the last ten years,’
said the nurse, ‘and I think she does me credit. If you’ve got a kettle
on the bile, mum, and can give me a cup of tea, I shall be thankful for
it; and I think a teaspoonful of sperrits in it would do me good. I’ve
been up all night with a fractious pauper in the small-pox ward.’
‘Oh, lor!’ cried Mrs. Evitt, with an alarmed countenance.
‘You’ve been vaccinated, of course, mum,’ said the nurse cheerfully.
‘You don’t belong to none of them radical anti-vaccinationists, I’m
sure. And as to catching complaints of that kind, mum, it’s only your
pore-spirited, nervous people as does it. I never have no pity for such
weak mortals. I look down on ’em too much.’