THE ONE IN RED.ORIONwas mean. He gave a party once. The whisky was watered. He came to me confidentially in the course of the evening and whispered angrily:“You see that fellow Pearson? My word! how he’s helping himself to whisky. He’s drinking it neat. I’ve watched him. Don’t you call that confounded impudence?”He was also one of those men whose brains never seem to develop; a weak-minded chap who, when he had his hair cut, allowed the barber to wheedle him into buying a bottle of hair wash—half a crown the small size, but only four-and-sixpence for one containing more than double. Brains! Men like that have only just enough to grub along with—just enough to see that they get their proper change across the counter, and are given the right brand of tobacco.I knew a barmaid—a nice girl, without the least harm in her. I gave her flowers—a bangle once.For some years she has been the mistress of a flourishing public-house off New Oxford Street; married a barman who had dropped in for a legacy. Doubtless by now she is the mother of an appallingly large family. Yet, whenever I met Orion, he used to snigger, bob his silly face forward, and chuckle:“Well, old man, seen anything of Rosey lately? Fine girl, Rosey!”I should have forgotten the girl’s very name, but Orion would not let me. He always said the same thing.One Christmas Eve I took her to his rooms—it was the only time he ever met her. He was sitting by a tremendous fire cooking a fine turkey. The table was set out most elaborately, with flowers, crackers, serviettes folded into shape.We sat and chatted; he basting the bird, Rosey dimpling about with appetite. He told us how much he had paid for that turkey in Smithfield market, he showed us the sausages that were to be eaten with it. He went to the cupboard and brought out a very dainty tin of fancy biscuits. Rosey half put out her plump hand and then drewit back awkwardly. He lifted the rice paper so that we might admire the sugar on the top row. He pointed out bottles of ginger wine, boxes of preserved fruit—all sorts of things. They made poor Rosey’s blue eyes glisten. But he never offered her so much as a fig. What is more, I ascertained afterward, as a positive fact, that he never had a soul to dine with him that Christmas. That’s the sort of fellow Orion was.He had the third floor set at No. 7. We all wondered why he lived in the Inn at all. It held no advantages for him. His oak was never sported, except when he was out.Perhaps you see nothing so very important, nothing, certainly, that is romantic, about that heavy black door on which my name stands white. But a man’s oak guards faithfully the secrets of his life. Generations of secrets, of sins, of sorrows are held by those stout doors—black and inscrutable, two by two on every landing. The oak shuts out duns; shuts in a pretty woman. The stories those black doors could tell! I wonder they never crack—with laughter or great, splitting sobs.The oak knows everything. It is like a fashionable woman’s toilet. I love to hear them clang to somberly at night; when a man goes out, when he creeps in late. The oak is the bachelor’s discreet parlor-maid. It says “not at home.” When we sport it—which is simply shutting it—we defy the world.Yet Orion only used this potential thing, this sacred and confidential black door, to protect his electro plate. He had no debts, no compromising visitors, no delicate difficulties. What a man! What a mean, drab life!We all chaffed him about his electro plate; the box in which he kept macaroons, the fish slice, the sugar tongs—all the useless things. He really ought to have lived in a neat villa. No doubt he would have done if his aunt had not happened to live in Great Ormond Street, close by.He took me to dine with her once. It was a wet Sunday. The aunt, Mrs. Grigg, was a terrible woman of seventy or so. She was dressed in the height of fashion—as it had been in the fifties. No doubt you have seen mold-spotted fashion plates ofthe period. She had a muslin chemisette, muslin under-sleeves, a wide skirt of some blinding, bright red stuff. Great rings stretched the lobes of her ears. On her neck she wore string after string of jet and on her bony wrist a hair bracelet. Her brooch was set with braids of sandy hair. I suppose it was Grigg’s.How that ancient woman leered and bridled at me all through dinner! We had cold mutton and mint sauce, gooseberry tart and tapioca—cold water to drink. That leering, mincing meal! Those vapid gulps of plain water! There is nothing in this world more ghastly than the labored archness of an old coquette. For days afterward I never looked at a woman, except at my laundress—and they are hardly women.Orion apologized for the water as we walked home.“The old girl’s stingy,” he said with satisfaction. “But it suits me, my boy. When she kicks the bucket, I’m in for a good thing. And it can’t be long, can it? What did you make of her? I don’t like the way she wags her head about—paralysis.She’ll go off like a champagne cork some day.”“I suppose she will,” I said wearily.“Of course she will. She can’t last long. She’s over seventy, and she was a beauty once; you wouldn’t think it.”I groaned, remembering those old eyes with red, lashless lids; that mouth with the infantile, pearly false teeth.We crossed Lamb’s Conduit Street. In Chapel Street, Wood, who was a decentish fellow and always in low water, had two back rooms on the second floor at No. 8.“I’m going in here to get a whisky,” I said, none too graciously, to Orion.He put out his hand. His face, with the weak mouth and watery eyes, looked quite haggard in the moonlight which speared down into the narrow street. He bore a horrible family likeness to Mrs. Grigg.Did I mention that he was a thin fellow? He had a straggling, straw-colored mustache and his skin matched it. Everything about him was ill-hungand undecided. With his yellow face, yellow hair, fawn-colored overcoat and soft hat, he looked as if he had been just flipped into a weak solution of saffron and drawn out again. Why will fair men persist in wearing fawn?“When she dies,” he went on, “that house in Great Ormond Street will be mine; that and a snug bit—the old girl banks at Barclay’s. She hasn’t got a relation in the world but me. Some sort of second cousin of Grigg’s used to live with her, but they rowed; she’d row with an archangel. I don’t know where Clara Citron—that was the cousin’s name—is now.”“Well, good-night, old fellow,” I said.“Wait a bit. You see property’s going up at such a devil of a rate in Bloomsbury. The house alone will bring in a tidy income, let out in flats. I shall do it up and charge good rents and keep it select. Everything on the square, you know.”He gave his suggestive grin and dropped my hand. I wiped it mechanically as I pulled Wood’s bell, and drummed on his knocker. The landlady kept me waiting; it was a trick she had. When atlast she opened the door she asked me acrimoniously:“Aint the bell enough, but you must go playin’ on the knocker and bringing a person’s ’art into their mouths?”A week later Orion came to my rooms. It was about nine in the evening—Saturday evening. I was just off to the “Oxford,” and told him so. But he caught me by the sleeve and said feverishly:“Haven’t you heard?”“What?”“My aunt—Mrs. Grigg, you know. She—she’s murdered.”He sat down in the saddlebag chair by the fire. Yes, the same saddlebag. That shabby old thing you are sitting in, with the fallen springs and the shiny mark of many fingers on the arms. Don’t get up. I brought out the bottle and gave him a nip of whisky. He was shaking all over like a little clay-tinted marionette.“Murdered!” I said, the vivid image of the old woman coming back. “Murdered!”“Yes; just now.” He made a gesture for more whisky.The glass he held was dancing a jig in his hand. I noticed—it seemed an odd thing to notice at such a time—how clean his hands were. One does notice unimportant things.“The old woman—her servant—has just come round to tell me,” he continued. “Haven’t you heard?”“Heard! How could I?”“I forgot. Of course you couldn’t. It’s enough to confuse a fellow, isn’t it? Murdered!”“Yes. But how?”“I’m going to tell you. Is there any more whisky? Thanks. It is Saturday night and the servant had gone out to shop. She always shops late on Saturday—when she doesn’t do it on Sunday morning. On Sunday morning in the Lane you can get a very decent fowl cheap. My aunt was left alone in Great Ormond Street. Am I making myself quite clear? She must have been cooking some mess over the dining-room fire; a pot had boiled over on the hob. She was stabbed—justabove the heart. Isn’t it awful? Thanks, old man. It—it pulls me together. Come up to my place. The old woman’s waiting. I don’t know what to do first. She came straight to me. She—the other one, my aunt—is lying on the dining-room hearthrug. Well—thanks.”I followed him upstairs. Late as it was, one of the Inn laundresses—those travesties of women, all flesh, sacking apron, and dusty hair—was scrubbing the third floor flight. Saturday is the great day for stair scrubbing. She moved her pail for us to pass and looked at Orion’s face curiously. As we went up we were followed by the rasping swish of her brush.Mrs. Grigg’s servant was waiting in the sitting room. She had seated herself. Orion did not seem to like this.It was such a swell room—all varnish, gewgaws, and rose-colored lights. He had stuck squares of leather paper on the panels of the walls and put white porcelain finger plates painted with roses on the doors. He burned gas in the grate instead of coal—it was cleaner. It looked like an old maid’sroom. I believe that he helped his laundress to clean it. She was a rather clean woman herself, who always wore a stiff bow of white muslin tied under her chin.There was a shiny sideboard, on top of which was set out the electro plate. The looking-glass above the sideboard was cracked. Pearson, his nerves strung by the respectability and smugness of that room, had flung his glass at it on the night of the party—as a graceful return for watered whisky. Emily Higgins, a girl that Orion knew—she served in a fancy shop in Hampstead Road—had skillfully painted a cobweb and a trail of flowers across the crack. Orion never spoke to Pearson afterward.“A fellow who will come into one’s rooms and do a thing like that is a dirty cad,” he would say in his thin, piping voice.He was always saying it. He never said more than three things at the same period. He had attacks of sentences and worked them off. He said it every time you went to his set. He said it to all new acquaintances. He took them in to look at thesideboard, and while they looked he enlarged on the rank villainy of Pearson. I actually waited for him to say it on that Saturday night. But he didn’t. He only lifted the old woman’s leg of mutton from the center table where she had set it. It was foreign meat and the blood had run out freely, pulping the newspaper and making a patch on the tablecloth. He carried it, with an air of reproof, to the cupboard and set it carefully on a dish.The woman looked at him and then she looked at me. There was defiance and self-vindication and a lurking terror on her face. It was a long, horselike face, I remember. People of her class always look like that when anything suspicious occurs. She seemed to be saying in a terrified, insolent way:“Don’t you think I did it, because I didn’t.”It is pathetic; this perpetual assertion of innocence—before they are accused—of such people.“It give me such a orful turn!” she burst out at last, addressing herself to me, as Orion remained half in the cupboard, carefully putting a wire cover over the joint. “I’ve never been mixed up in no sich thing before. I’ve never been to prison. Notme! Nor any of my relations. It’s made my ’eart that bad—I suffers with the palpitations.”Orion remained in the cupboard, deaf to the hint.“I come straight off to Mr. Rine,” she went on. “I didn’t even think to take the joint from under my arm. I’d only bin gone ’arf an hour down Tibbalds Row marketin’ with another lady—’er as is ’ousekeeper in Chapel Street, where Mr. Wood lives. She could tell you the same. I’ll take my Bible oath I wasn’t more’n ’arf an hour. The larst place I was in was the fish shop at the corner of Devonshire Street.”“We’d better go to Great Ormond Street,” I said to Orion.The servant stood up, pulling her gray and black shawl closer round her throat. She gave a critical glance round the room before she left, and paid it her feminine tribute.“You’ll excuse me,” she said, “but what a pretty room this is. Quite a doll’s ’ouse, to be sure. I never see but one like it, and that was Mrs. Abraham’s in North Street—’er whose ’usband was in the ready-made line.”It wouldn’t interest you to hear the rest, but I have all the newspapers put aside if you would like to read the reports some day. The murder of Mrs. Grigg was one of London’s many mysteries. There was no clew. The servant was able to clear herself conclusively of all suspicion. Scotland Yard was baffled. Ambitious journalists, with a taste for intrigue and interviewing, started wild theories, and there ended. Great Ormond Street was blocked with the crowd that gaped stolidly all day at the shabby house with the drawn blinds opposite the hospital.Orion didn’t go to the City. He was junior partner—so he said—in a shipping-house near London Bridge. He stayed at home in the jaunty room with the pink-tinted gas globes and drank all day. Orion was in a bad way. You might guess that when he drank whisky at three and something a bottle as if it had been water.We’ll skip the inquest and so on, and pass to the funeral.Orion begged me to go, and I went. One couldn’t refuse a poor, invertebrate, pleading foollike that. His aunt’s death had absolutely doubled him up.There was the uncomfortable atmosphere of death about the place when we got there. I’ll show you the particular house next time we are in Great Ormond Street. There is a narrow passage paneled to the ceiling with wood that is painted stone color. There is a sitting room to your left as you go in, and a flight of stairs ready to your feet at the end of the passage.We went into the sitting room. There was a smeary decanter half full of thick port on the table. There were wine glasses and an uncut cake. Orion sat down. By and by we heard deprecating, creaking shoes coming downstairs, heard unctuous words of sympathy in the passage. Then we heard a woman’s shrill voice—a sharp, short voice, like the keen snap of ice. Orion started.“That’s Clara Citron,” he said in a frightened way.She came in, a little middle-aged, shrewish-looking woman. She gave Orion her hand—it was thin and red and knuckly.“I saw it in the papers,” she said, without any circumlocution. “I came up from Southsea at once.”“I didn’t know your address,” he stammered feebly.Mrs. Citron looked at him in a meaning way. She solemnly poured out three glasses of muddy port and cut three slices of cake.“We must leave enough for the undertaker and his men,” she said, measuring the bottle with her little alert eye. “Yes, I came at once. It was my duty. She was my relation, too, by marriage. And all the money was my cousin Grigg’s.”The hearse and the one coach drew in at the curb. They threw an added shadow across the room where those two sat solemnly munching and sipping—the small, prim room with the putty-colored walls and the bits of fancywork, a sampler, mats, a beaded footstool—worked, no doubt, by Mrs. Grigg herself half a century before.Clara Citron bustled up.“The undertaker is such a very sympathetic man,” she said, wiping the loose crumbs of cakefrom her pale lips. “His wife’s great-uncle, or his sister-in-law’s great-uncle—I really forget which—was murdered in a similar way. He said he quite understood my feelings.”“The undertaker has always got somebody who died in a similar way,” I said, with involuntary flippancy. “It is one of the business trappings; he brings it with the pall.”Clara Citron gave me a stony glance, and Orion stared at me entreatingly. He seemed afraid of offending her; he was afraid of everything and everyone.“I don’t know how we are going to get her downstairs,” the business-like little woman said. “It is such an awkward turn on the landing. We could lower her out of the window, but there is such a crowd.”She peeped through the brown wire blind before she hurried away. Orion poured himself out a second glass of that deplorable port directly the door was shut on her and he dared. Every time there was a scrooping sound overhead he shook from head to foot. It seemed a long time before we heard thecautious, thumping tread of men bearing a heavy load. At the ominous resting of those feet we both knew, although we said nothing, although we did not even look at each other, that they were maneuvering the turn at the landing. We both drew a breath of relief when the steady stumping went on again, came nearer, passed the door, went down the steps. A faint murmur floated up from the crowd. Orion had his third glass of port.Clara Citron came in, a little flushed and triumphant. She poured out more wine in clean glasses, cut more cake, and beckoned the men in. When they were ready she coaxed on new black kid gloves.“Come on,” she said to us. “We are late as it is. Such a squeeze with that coffin at the head of the stairs! She was a fine woman. I want, if I can, to catch a late train back to Southsea. There are my lodgers to look after. I’ve only left the girl in charge.”“Do you keep a lodging house?” Orion asked mechanically, snatching up his hat with the deep black band.“Yes,” she said shortly; “I must do something.”We all three wedged into the passage. Orion was last. Clara Citron marched out, a compact, trim figure in cheap black, between the thin line of sickly London faces. She wore a solemn, festival sort of air. I followed, feeling very awkward and uncomfortable in the frock-coat I had borrowed from Wood: he got it out of pawn for the occasion. I never owned a frock coat in my life, and hope I never shall. It is one of those respectable, stultifying possessions that I refrain from on principle.I looked back for Orion. He was wavering on the step, as if he felt afraid to walk between those lines of white faces which stretched from the door to the coach. Then I saw him give a hasty look into the house, at the passage, the stairs, muddy with so many feet. Then he seemed to come headlong to the coach. I thought he had slipped on something. He jumped in and banged the door furiously. The crowd gave a soft, sympathetic “boo” at the sight of his ghastly face. Clara Citron, who held a new handkerchief with a very wide border to her dry eyes, looked over the hem.That terrible long drive to Finchley! That shimmeringline of faces all the way! I went to Jimmy’s funeral, I went to Chaytor’s, and I went to Mrs. Grigg’s—under protest. I will never go to another, unless it is my own—that will be unavoidable.The Great Ormond Street murder made a tremendous sensation. I think Clara Citron thoroughly enjoyed herself. She seemed to regard the crowd in the light of a personal ovation.Did I tell you that it was May?—a wet, warm May morning. At Finchley, away from the houses, the rain seemed to fall more softly. In the cemetery all sorts of pink and white and purple bushes were in bloom. They reminded me of my childhood; I was born in the country. The great, intensely green stretches of grass were hideously humped with graves. The soft, rushing rain seemed to make them greener every moment.I forgot to mention that Clara Citron coolly took the whole of the seat facing the horses. It was the best position for seeing the people, and it allowed the people to have a good view of her. She spread her skirt out carefully and kept the handkerchief to her eyes, peering furtively all the time. Orion and Isat as far back as we could on the cushions—those dusty, pluffy cushions which reeked of a thousand stale griefs. We tried to get beyond the range of those gimlet-like eyes which pointed in their hundreds, from the pavements. Once Orion said, in a queer, strained voice:“For God’s sake let me get out and walk.”A moment later, before Clara Citron could make any scandalized protest, he bent forward, pounced forward, in a quick, cunning way, as you would on an animal you wished to catch, and brought his hand down heavily on the cushions of the opposite seat. A cloud of dust rose up and choked our companion. When she had done spluttering, she asked him angrily why on earth he did it. He didn’t answer. He only sat and stared, with dazed eyes, at the seat where she sat. Once he moaned and shivered. He was not looking at Clara Citron. He was looking past her, through her. He was like an imbecile. But what could one expect of a man who had drunk whisky as if it had been water for a week, and had wound up with funeral port from the grocer’s?The service was a trial to everyone but Clara Citron. She reveled in the crowd. I was never in such a rage in my life. Every slatternly woman was pointing and whispering. Orion’s face was clammy and yellow, like the clay into which they lowered Mrs. Grigg. I watched them drop earth onto her coffin; watched them put away for ever that leer of hers, those old coquetries.When everything was over we went quickly across the sodden, exquisitely green turf to the gravel. The crowd seemed to melt away; softly, with a gentle rustle, like the gurgling May rain. We were almost alone.A warm, wet day in spring is perfect. The rain came finer and thicker every moment. It made a mysterious veil of gauze which dropped over the graveyard.Halfway down the path Orion clutched my arm. It was the despairing mad clutch of a doomed man. He clutched my arm and looked hurriedly behind him.We had reached the coach. The undertaker’s men climbed to their box with an air of business.Some sat on the roof of the hearse, their legs dangling jovially.“We shall get back faster than we came,” Clara Citron said, getting in and looking round, half in disappointment, because there was no longer such a crowd. “I’m dying for a cup of tea.”Orion leaped in and rattled to the door. I was beginning to be really anxious about him. We started off at a brisk trot, but the iron gates of the cemetery were hardly out of sight before he stumbled up with a fearful cry. The cemetery, I say, was hardly out of sight; we might still have seen the grave which held Mrs. Grigg and the mystery of her death. He gave that cry and put out his trembling hands to the door.He saw what we could not see. He saw the door of the coach open easily, and saw the fourth mourner come in. She brushed by him silently—the one in red—to the vacant seat.“I can’t stay. I tell you I won’t stay,” he shrieked, and the sharp rattle of wheels and hoofs dulled the agony in his voice. “Don’t you see her on the seat?”—he was speaking to Clara Citron.“She has hardly left you room to sit. Those confounded crinolines take up so much room.”The lodging-house keeper gripped him firmly by the wrists, and forced him back to his seat. Her hands were strong with years of housework.“I’m used to this sort of thing,” she said aside to me; “my first-floor lodger has had D. T. twice. My lady in the parlors takes her drop. Her husband pays me well to look after her—but they get it at the grocer’s as soap or candles, at the confectioner’s and call it tea, at the draper’s when they go shopping, and have it put on the bill as extras.”Orion rambled on.“She is sitting next you. She followed us out of the house. I saw her come down the stairs. She rode with us all the way. She stood by her own grave—followed her own funeral. She looked across and grinned at me, the old witch, when they threw earth on the coffin. She has followed us back. She jostled me just now on the cemetery path, d——n her! She’d have had me down if I hadn’t caught hold of Groome. She wanted to seal me up in that dirty yellow grave, as we tried toseal her. But I could bear it. I wasn’t going to let her frighten me. I bore everything until she came away from her own grave—then I knew it was all up with me. She is filling the coach. Can’t you see her red dress puffing out? I never saw a woman swell so. The red dress, Groome; the dress she wore at dinner on Sunday week! The one she always wore in the evening, the one she died in. Oh! can’t you two see her? Can’t you turn her out? The coach is all growing red.”“Do you mean Mrs. Grigg?” Clara Citron asked crisply. “I can’t see anything.” She bounced to the other side as if to convince him. “But then,” she added significantly, “I didn’t murder her.”“You see, I did,” Orion returned with a foolish smile and the tremendous simple relief of a child who gets something off his mind.He did not seem to realize what the admission involved. He was evidently indifferent to everything but the one in red; the dead old woman in the blood-colored gown, who was slowly, slowly, but very surely, filling up the coach.“I got so tired of waiting,” he continued in aconfidential way, and we both bent close to catch every word, closing him in, as it seemed.“She wouldn’t part with a penny and she wouldn’t die,” he went on piteously. “What are you to do with a woman like that? I was on my beam ends. It is all the accursed City. I was afraid of getting out of a berth. When you get out of a berth you’re done. I’ve been with the same firm fifteen years, and yet they were going to turn me off like a dog—the bookkeeper told me so.”He was laying himself quite bare. He dropped the flimsy lie of his daily life. He did not hold to the junior-partner fiction any longer.“It was very easy,” he added, with a certain workman-like pride in the affair. “I knew when the servant went out marketing; knew how long she’d be, and where she hid the street-door key—on a ledge near the coal cellar by the area steps. It was the easiest matter in the world. The old woman—keep her back, can’t you? She doesn’t want to hear—she knows. She was stooping over the fire—weren’t you? She had been cutting up meat; the stew was on the hob and the carving knifewas on the table. I gave her one certain blow. She gave me one look—I might have known what that look meant.“But I did it beautifully. I went back to my rooms and washed my hands and changed my cuffs, so as to be sure,” he sniggered. “I had only just finished when the servant came round. It was a close shave. And then I went and told Groome. No one need ever have known. But you can’t fight with a woman who comes out of her grave!“She takes up so much room that I can’t breathe. Let her out, shove her into the road. She’ll never be able to catch us up. Let the wheels go over her.”Clara Citron, who had held his wrists firmly all the time, dropped them and cautiously opened the door of the coach a very little way. I twitched her skirt.“What are you doing?”“I’m going to tell them to drive to the Old Bailey—that’s Newgate, isn’t it?” she returned viciously. Evidently she owed Orion some deep grudge.“Pooh! We don’t do it that way. Sit down.Take up all the seat—try to convince him, to keep him quiet. I’ll look after him to-night.”She sat down looking slightly sulky.“I trust you to look after my interests,” she said plaintively, after a pause. “I’m a hard-working woman and all the money was on my side of the family. Here’s my card.” She pulled out a thickly-lettered squab of cardboard. “‘Citron, The Parade, Southsea.’ If you ever want a blow of sea air, I can always let you have bed and breakfast on reasonable terms.”The coach swung merrily on. I rather fancy that the men on the box were singing. Orion kept on saying piteously that Mrs. Grigg, in the red dress, was taking up all the room—more and more room—that she was slowly strangling him. In this fashion we rattled back to Bloomsbury, where it was getting dusk and where rain fell more heavily than it had done in the morning.I watched him all that night. In the morning the sun came fiercely in. The hot, golden air seemed all Sunday frocks, church bells, and the weighty caw of rooks.There was a pane of glass above Orion’s bedroom door. He said, quite quietly,—it was the first time he had spoken:“She keeps on looking through that glass. There’s a confounded red bonnet on her head now—never knew such a woman for red. Can’t you do something? Can’t you rig up a curtain, old chap?”There was a crafty look on his silly face. I remembered that afterward. I turned aside to find something, and the next thing I knew was a “ploomp” on the stones underneath and a loud, ringing shriek.Orion had flung himself out. It was really the best finish he could have made. Adeline saw him do it and shrieked. She was standing at Murphy’s window; Orion, in his fluttering shirt, dropped past her startled eyes. I must tell you Adeline’s story some day.The money? That was the one funny touch in the whole affair. Mrs. Grigg actually left the house and every penny she had in the world to the man who brought her round two hundredweight of coal once a week, from the greengrocer’s shop in RedLion Street. He was a handsome sort of chap—that seemed the only reason. He sold the house. I heard the other day that he was drinking himself to death.Clara Citron? She went back to the lodging-house at Southsea; is there now, I suppose. But she was one of those women without attributes; not the sort of person you would have the least interest in investigating.Hard on Orion, wasn’t it? Quite superfluous, you see. I never liked him. Yet, looking back, I’m sorry for the mean little humbug. That cursed City grinds men down to any pettiness. I’d rather starve in Piccadilly than eat turtle in an Alderman’s robe at Guildhall.
ORIONwas mean. He gave a party once. The whisky was watered. He came to me confidentially in the course of the evening and whispered angrily:
“You see that fellow Pearson? My word! how he’s helping himself to whisky. He’s drinking it neat. I’ve watched him. Don’t you call that confounded impudence?”
He was also one of those men whose brains never seem to develop; a weak-minded chap who, when he had his hair cut, allowed the barber to wheedle him into buying a bottle of hair wash—half a crown the small size, but only four-and-sixpence for one containing more than double. Brains! Men like that have only just enough to grub along with—just enough to see that they get their proper change across the counter, and are given the right brand of tobacco.
I knew a barmaid—a nice girl, without the least harm in her. I gave her flowers—a bangle once.For some years she has been the mistress of a flourishing public-house off New Oxford Street; married a barman who had dropped in for a legacy. Doubtless by now she is the mother of an appallingly large family. Yet, whenever I met Orion, he used to snigger, bob his silly face forward, and chuckle:
“Well, old man, seen anything of Rosey lately? Fine girl, Rosey!”
I should have forgotten the girl’s very name, but Orion would not let me. He always said the same thing.
One Christmas Eve I took her to his rooms—it was the only time he ever met her. He was sitting by a tremendous fire cooking a fine turkey. The table was set out most elaborately, with flowers, crackers, serviettes folded into shape.
We sat and chatted; he basting the bird, Rosey dimpling about with appetite. He told us how much he had paid for that turkey in Smithfield market, he showed us the sausages that were to be eaten with it. He went to the cupboard and brought out a very dainty tin of fancy biscuits. Rosey half put out her plump hand and then drewit back awkwardly. He lifted the rice paper so that we might admire the sugar on the top row. He pointed out bottles of ginger wine, boxes of preserved fruit—all sorts of things. They made poor Rosey’s blue eyes glisten. But he never offered her so much as a fig. What is more, I ascertained afterward, as a positive fact, that he never had a soul to dine with him that Christmas. That’s the sort of fellow Orion was.
He had the third floor set at No. 7. We all wondered why he lived in the Inn at all. It held no advantages for him. His oak was never sported, except when he was out.
Perhaps you see nothing so very important, nothing, certainly, that is romantic, about that heavy black door on which my name stands white. But a man’s oak guards faithfully the secrets of his life. Generations of secrets, of sins, of sorrows are held by those stout doors—black and inscrutable, two by two on every landing. The oak shuts out duns; shuts in a pretty woman. The stories those black doors could tell! I wonder they never crack—with laughter or great, splitting sobs.
The oak knows everything. It is like a fashionable woman’s toilet. I love to hear them clang to somberly at night; when a man goes out, when he creeps in late. The oak is the bachelor’s discreet parlor-maid. It says “not at home.” When we sport it—which is simply shutting it—we defy the world.
Yet Orion only used this potential thing, this sacred and confidential black door, to protect his electro plate. He had no debts, no compromising visitors, no delicate difficulties. What a man! What a mean, drab life!
We all chaffed him about his electro plate; the box in which he kept macaroons, the fish slice, the sugar tongs—all the useless things. He really ought to have lived in a neat villa. No doubt he would have done if his aunt had not happened to live in Great Ormond Street, close by.
He took me to dine with her once. It was a wet Sunday. The aunt, Mrs. Grigg, was a terrible woman of seventy or so. She was dressed in the height of fashion—as it had been in the fifties. No doubt you have seen mold-spotted fashion plates ofthe period. She had a muslin chemisette, muslin under-sleeves, a wide skirt of some blinding, bright red stuff. Great rings stretched the lobes of her ears. On her neck she wore string after string of jet and on her bony wrist a hair bracelet. Her brooch was set with braids of sandy hair. I suppose it was Grigg’s.
How that ancient woman leered and bridled at me all through dinner! We had cold mutton and mint sauce, gooseberry tart and tapioca—cold water to drink. That leering, mincing meal! Those vapid gulps of plain water! There is nothing in this world more ghastly than the labored archness of an old coquette. For days afterward I never looked at a woman, except at my laundress—and they are hardly women.
Orion apologized for the water as we walked home.
“The old girl’s stingy,” he said with satisfaction. “But it suits me, my boy. When she kicks the bucket, I’m in for a good thing. And it can’t be long, can it? What did you make of her? I don’t like the way she wags her head about—paralysis.She’ll go off like a champagne cork some day.”
“I suppose she will,” I said wearily.
“Of course she will. She can’t last long. She’s over seventy, and she was a beauty once; you wouldn’t think it.”
I groaned, remembering those old eyes with red, lashless lids; that mouth with the infantile, pearly false teeth.
We crossed Lamb’s Conduit Street. In Chapel Street, Wood, who was a decentish fellow and always in low water, had two back rooms on the second floor at No. 8.
“I’m going in here to get a whisky,” I said, none too graciously, to Orion.
He put out his hand. His face, with the weak mouth and watery eyes, looked quite haggard in the moonlight which speared down into the narrow street. He bore a horrible family likeness to Mrs. Grigg.
Did I mention that he was a thin fellow? He had a straggling, straw-colored mustache and his skin matched it. Everything about him was ill-hungand undecided. With his yellow face, yellow hair, fawn-colored overcoat and soft hat, he looked as if he had been just flipped into a weak solution of saffron and drawn out again. Why will fair men persist in wearing fawn?
“When she dies,” he went on, “that house in Great Ormond Street will be mine; that and a snug bit—the old girl banks at Barclay’s. She hasn’t got a relation in the world but me. Some sort of second cousin of Grigg’s used to live with her, but they rowed; she’d row with an archangel. I don’t know where Clara Citron—that was the cousin’s name—is now.”
“Well, good-night, old fellow,” I said.
“Wait a bit. You see property’s going up at such a devil of a rate in Bloomsbury. The house alone will bring in a tidy income, let out in flats. I shall do it up and charge good rents and keep it select. Everything on the square, you know.”
He gave his suggestive grin and dropped my hand. I wiped it mechanically as I pulled Wood’s bell, and drummed on his knocker. The landlady kept me waiting; it was a trick she had. When atlast she opened the door she asked me acrimoniously:
“Aint the bell enough, but you must go playin’ on the knocker and bringing a person’s ’art into their mouths?”
A week later Orion came to my rooms. It was about nine in the evening—Saturday evening. I was just off to the “Oxford,” and told him so. But he caught me by the sleeve and said feverishly:
“Haven’t you heard?”
“What?”
“My aunt—Mrs. Grigg, you know. She—she’s murdered.”
He sat down in the saddlebag chair by the fire. Yes, the same saddlebag. That shabby old thing you are sitting in, with the fallen springs and the shiny mark of many fingers on the arms. Don’t get up. I brought out the bottle and gave him a nip of whisky. He was shaking all over like a little clay-tinted marionette.
“Murdered!” I said, the vivid image of the old woman coming back. “Murdered!”
“Yes; just now.” He made a gesture for more whisky.
The glass he held was dancing a jig in his hand. I noticed—it seemed an odd thing to notice at such a time—how clean his hands were. One does notice unimportant things.
“The old woman—her servant—has just come round to tell me,” he continued. “Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard! How could I?”
“I forgot. Of course you couldn’t. It’s enough to confuse a fellow, isn’t it? Murdered!”
“Yes. But how?”
“I’m going to tell you. Is there any more whisky? Thanks. It is Saturday night and the servant had gone out to shop. She always shops late on Saturday—when she doesn’t do it on Sunday morning. On Sunday morning in the Lane you can get a very decent fowl cheap. My aunt was left alone in Great Ormond Street. Am I making myself quite clear? She must have been cooking some mess over the dining-room fire; a pot had boiled over on the hob. She was stabbed—justabove the heart. Isn’t it awful? Thanks, old man. It—it pulls me together. Come up to my place. The old woman’s waiting. I don’t know what to do first. She came straight to me. She—the other one, my aunt—is lying on the dining-room hearthrug. Well—thanks.”
I followed him upstairs. Late as it was, one of the Inn laundresses—those travesties of women, all flesh, sacking apron, and dusty hair—was scrubbing the third floor flight. Saturday is the great day for stair scrubbing. She moved her pail for us to pass and looked at Orion’s face curiously. As we went up we were followed by the rasping swish of her brush.
Mrs. Grigg’s servant was waiting in the sitting room. She had seated herself. Orion did not seem to like this.
It was such a swell room—all varnish, gewgaws, and rose-colored lights. He had stuck squares of leather paper on the panels of the walls and put white porcelain finger plates painted with roses on the doors. He burned gas in the grate instead of coal—it was cleaner. It looked like an old maid’sroom. I believe that he helped his laundress to clean it. She was a rather clean woman herself, who always wore a stiff bow of white muslin tied under her chin.
There was a shiny sideboard, on top of which was set out the electro plate. The looking-glass above the sideboard was cracked. Pearson, his nerves strung by the respectability and smugness of that room, had flung his glass at it on the night of the party—as a graceful return for watered whisky. Emily Higgins, a girl that Orion knew—she served in a fancy shop in Hampstead Road—had skillfully painted a cobweb and a trail of flowers across the crack. Orion never spoke to Pearson afterward.
“A fellow who will come into one’s rooms and do a thing like that is a dirty cad,” he would say in his thin, piping voice.
He was always saying it. He never said more than three things at the same period. He had attacks of sentences and worked them off. He said it every time you went to his set. He said it to all new acquaintances. He took them in to look at thesideboard, and while they looked he enlarged on the rank villainy of Pearson. I actually waited for him to say it on that Saturday night. But he didn’t. He only lifted the old woman’s leg of mutton from the center table where she had set it. It was foreign meat and the blood had run out freely, pulping the newspaper and making a patch on the tablecloth. He carried it, with an air of reproof, to the cupboard and set it carefully on a dish.
The woman looked at him and then she looked at me. There was defiance and self-vindication and a lurking terror on her face. It was a long, horselike face, I remember. People of her class always look like that when anything suspicious occurs. She seemed to be saying in a terrified, insolent way:
“Don’t you think I did it, because I didn’t.”
It is pathetic; this perpetual assertion of innocence—before they are accused—of such people.
“It give me such a orful turn!” she burst out at last, addressing herself to me, as Orion remained half in the cupboard, carefully putting a wire cover over the joint. “I’ve never been mixed up in no sich thing before. I’ve never been to prison. Notme! Nor any of my relations. It’s made my ’eart that bad—I suffers with the palpitations.”
Orion remained in the cupboard, deaf to the hint.
“I come straight off to Mr. Rine,” she went on. “I didn’t even think to take the joint from under my arm. I’d only bin gone ’arf an hour down Tibbalds Row marketin’ with another lady—’er as is ’ousekeeper in Chapel Street, where Mr. Wood lives. She could tell you the same. I’ll take my Bible oath I wasn’t more’n ’arf an hour. The larst place I was in was the fish shop at the corner of Devonshire Street.”
“We’d better go to Great Ormond Street,” I said to Orion.
The servant stood up, pulling her gray and black shawl closer round her throat. She gave a critical glance round the room before she left, and paid it her feminine tribute.
“You’ll excuse me,” she said, “but what a pretty room this is. Quite a doll’s ’ouse, to be sure. I never see but one like it, and that was Mrs. Abraham’s in North Street—’er whose ’usband was in the ready-made line.”
It wouldn’t interest you to hear the rest, but I have all the newspapers put aside if you would like to read the reports some day. The murder of Mrs. Grigg was one of London’s many mysteries. There was no clew. The servant was able to clear herself conclusively of all suspicion. Scotland Yard was baffled. Ambitious journalists, with a taste for intrigue and interviewing, started wild theories, and there ended. Great Ormond Street was blocked with the crowd that gaped stolidly all day at the shabby house with the drawn blinds opposite the hospital.
Orion didn’t go to the City. He was junior partner—so he said—in a shipping-house near London Bridge. He stayed at home in the jaunty room with the pink-tinted gas globes and drank all day. Orion was in a bad way. You might guess that when he drank whisky at three and something a bottle as if it had been water.
We’ll skip the inquest and so on, and pass to the funeral.
Orion begged me to go, and I went. One couldn’t refuse a poor, invertebrate, pleading foollike that. His aunt’s death had absolutely doubled him up.
There was the uncomfortable atmosphere of death about the place when we got there. I’ll show you the particular house next time we are in Great Ormond Street. There is a narrow passage paneled to the ceiling with wood that is painted stone color. There is a sitting room to your left as you go in, and a flight of stairs ready to your feet at the end of the passage.
We went into the sitting room. There was a smeary decanter half full of thick port on the table. There were wine glasses and an uncut cake. Orion sat down. By and by we heard deprecating, creaking shoes coming downstairs, heard unctuous words of sympathy in the passage. Then we heard a woman’s shrill voice—a sharp, short voice, like the keen snap of ice. Orion started.
“That’s Clara Citron,” he said in a frightened way.
She came in, a little middle-aged, shrewish-looking woman. She gave Orion her hand—it was thin and red and knuckly.
“I saw it in the papers,” she said, without any circumlocution. “I came up from Southsea at once.”
“I didn’t know your address,” he stammered feebly.
Mrs. Citron looked at him in a meaning way. She solemnly poured out three glasses of muddy port and cut three slices of cake.
“We must leave enough for the undertaker and his men,” she said, measuring the bottle with her little alert eye. “Yes, I came at once. It was my duty. She was my relation, too, by marriage. And all the money was my cousin Grigg’s.”
The hearse and the one coach drew in at the curb. They threw an added shadow across the room where those two sat solemnly munching and sipping—the small, prim room with the putty-colored walls and the bits of fancywork, a sampler, mats, a beaded footstool—worked, no doubt, by Mrs. Grigg herself half a century before.
Clara Citron bustled up.
“The undertaker is such a very sympathetic man,” she said, wiping the loose crumbs of cakefrom her pale lips. “His wife’s great-uncle, or his sister-in-law’s great-uncle—I really forget which—was murdered in a similar way. He said he quite understood my feelings.”
“The undertaker has always got somebody who died in a similar way,” I said, with involuntary flippancy. “It is one of the business trappings; he brings it with the pall.”
Clara Citron gave me a stony glance, and Orion stared at me entreatingly. He seemed afraid of offending her; he was afraid of everything and everyone.
“I don’t know how we are going to get her downstairs,” the business-like little woman said. “It is such an awkward turn on the landing. We could lower her out of the window, but there is such a crowd.”
She peeped through the brown wire blind before she hurried away. Orion poured himself out a second glass of that deplorable port directly the door was shut on her and he dared. Every time there was a scrooping sound overhead he shook from head to foot. It seemed a long time before we heard thecautious, thumping tread of men bearing a heavy load. At the ominous resting of those feet we both knew, although we said nothing, although we did not even look at each other, that they were maneuvering the turn at the landing. We both drew a breath of relief when the steady stumping went on again, came nearer, passed the door, went down the steps. A faint murmur floated up from the crowd. Orion had his third glass of port.
Clara Citron came in, a little flushed and triumphant. She poured out more wine in clean glasses, cut more cake, and beckoned the men in. When they were ready she coaxed on new black kid gloves.
“Come on,” she said to us. “We are late as it is. Such a squeeze with that coffin at the head of the stairs! She was a fine woman. I want, if I can, to catch a late train back to Southsea. There are my lodgers to look after. I’ve only left the girl in charge.”
“Do you keep a lodging house?” Orion asked mechanically, snatching up his hat with the deep black band.
“Yes,” she said shortly; “I must do something.”
We all three wedged into the passage. Orion was last. Clara Citron marched out, a compact, trim figure in cheap black, between the thin line of sickly London faces. She wore a solemn, festival sort of air. I followed, feeling very awkward and uncomfortable in the frock-coat I had borrowed from Wood: he got it out of pawn for the occasion. I never owned a frock coat in my life, and hope I never shall. It is one of those respectable, stultifying possessions that I refrain from on principle.
I looked back for Orion. He was wavering on the step, as if he felt afraid to walk between those lines of white faces which stretched from the door to the coach. Then I saw him give a hasty look into the house, at the passage, the stairs, muddy with so many feet. Then he seemed to come headlong to the coach. I thought he had slipped on something. He jumped in and banged the door furiously. The crowd gave a soft, sympathetic “boo” at the sight of his ghastly face. Clara Citron, who held a new handkerchief with a very wide border to her dry eyes, looked over the hem.
That terrible long drive to Finchley! That shimmeringline of faces all the way! I went to Jimmy’s funeral, I went to Chaytor’s, and I went to Mrs. Grigg’s—under protest. I will never go to another, unless it is my own—that will be unavoidable.
The Great Ormond Street murder made a tremendous sensation. I think Clara Citron thoroughly enjoyed herself. She seemed to regard the crowd in the light of a personal ovation.
Did I tell you that it was May?—a wet, warm May morning. At Finchley, away from the houses, the rain seemed to fall more softly. In the cemetery all sorts of pink and white and purple bushes were in bloom. They reminded me of my childhood; I was born in the country. The great, intensely green stretches of grass were hideously humped with graves. The soft, rushing rain seemed to make them greener every moment.
I forgot to mention that Clara Citron coolly took the whole of the seat facing the horses. It was the best position for seeing the people, and it allowed the people to have a good view of her. She spread her skirt out carefully and kept the handkerchief to her eyes, peering furtively all the time. Orion and Isat as far back as we could on the cushions—those dusty, pluffy cushions which reeked of a thousand stale griefs. We tried to get beyond the range of those gimlet-like eyes which pointed in their hundreds, from the pavements. Once Orion said, in a queer, strained voice:
“For God’s sake let me get out and walk.”
A moment later, before Clara Citron could make any scandalized protest, he bent forward, pounced forward, in a quick, cunning way, as you would on an animal you wished to catch, and brought his hand down heavily on the cushions of the opposite seat. A cloud of dust rose up and choked our companion. When she had done spluttering, she asked him angrily why on earth he did it. He didn’t answer. He only sat and stared, with dazed eyes, at the seat where she sat. Once he moaned and shivered. He was not looking at Clara Citron. He was looking past her, through her. He was like an imbecile. But what could one expect of a man who had drunk whisky as if it had been water for a week, and had wound up with funeral port from the grocer’s?
The service was a trial to everyone but Clara Citron. She reveled in the crowd. I was never in such a rage in my life. Every slatternly woman was pointing and whispering. Orion’s face was clammy and yellow, like the clay into which they lowered Mrs. Grigg. I watched them drop earth onto her coffin; watched them put away for ever that leer of hers, those old coquetries.
When everything was over we went quickly across the sodden, exquisitely green turf to the gravel. The crowd seemed to melt away; softly, with a gentle rustle, like the gurgling May rain. We were almost alone.
A warm, wet day in spring is perfect. The rain came finer and thicker every moment. It made a mysterious veil of gauze which dropped over the graveyard.
Halfway down the path Orion clutched my arm. It was the despairing mad clutch of a doomed man. He clutched my arm and looked hurriedly behind him.
We had reached the coach. The undertaker’s men climbed to their box with an air of business.Some sat on the roof of the hearse, their legs dangling jovially.
“We shall get back faster than we came,” Clara Citron said, getting in and looking round, half in disappointment, because there was no longer such a crowd. “I’m dying for a cup of tea.”
Orion leaped in and rattled to the door. I was beginning to be really anxious about him. We started off at a brisk trot, but the iron gates of the cemetery were hardly out of sight before he stumbled up with a fearful cry. The cemetery, I say, was hardly out of sight; we might still have seen the grave which held Mrs. Grigg and the mystery of her death. He gave that cry and put out his trembling hands to the door.
He saw what we could not see. He saw the door of the coach open easily, and saw the fourth mourner come in. She brushed by him silently—the one in red—to the vacant seat.
“I can’t stay. I tell you I won’t stay,” he shrieked, and the sharp rattle of wheels and hoofs dulled the agony in his voice. “Don’t you see her on the seat?”—he was speaking to Clara Citron.“She has hardly left you room to sit. Those confounded crinolines take up so much room.”
The lodging-house keeper gripped him firmly by the wrists, and forced him back to his seat. Her hands were strong with years of housework.
“I’m used to this sort of thing,” she said aside to me; “my first-floor lodger has had D. T. twice. My lady in the parlors takes her drop. Her husband pays me well to look after her—but they get it at the grocer’s as soap or candles, at the confectioner’s and call it tea, at the draper’s when they go shopping, and have it put on the bill as extras.”
Orion rambled on.
“She is sitting next you. She followed us out of the house. I saw her come down the stairs. She rode with us all the way. She stood by her own grave—followed her own funeral. She looked across and grinned at me, the old witch, when they threw earth on the coffin. She has followed us back. She jostled me just now on the cemetery path, d——n her! She’d have had me down if I hadn’t caught hold of Groome. She wanted to seal me up in that dirty yellow grave, as we tried toseal her. But I could bear it. I wasn’t going to let her frighten me. I bore everything until she came away from her own grave—then I knew it was all up with me. She is filling the coach. Can’t you see her red dress puffing out? I never saw a woman swell so. The red dress, Groome; the dress she wore at dinner on Sunday week! The one she always wore in the evening, the one she died in. Oh! can’t you two see her? Can’t you turn her out? The coach is all growing red.”
“Do you mean Mrs. Grigg?” Clara Citron asked crisply. “I can’t see anything.” She bounced to the other side as if to convince him. “But then,” she added significantly, “I didn’t murder her.”
“You see, I did,” Orion returned with a foolish smile and the tremendous simple relief of a child who gets something off his mind.
He did not seem to realize what the admission involved. He was evidently indifferent to everything but the one in red; the dead old woman in the blood-colored gown, who was slowly, slowly, but very surely, filling up the coach.
“I got so tired of waiting,” he continued in aconfidential way, and we both bent close to catch every word, closing him in, as it seemed.
“She wouldn’t part with a penny and she wouldn’t die,” he went on piteously. “What are you to do with a woman like that? I was on my beam ends. It is all the accursed City. I was afraid of getting out of a berth. When you get out of a berth you’re done. I’ve been with the same firm fifteen years, and yet they were going to turn me off like a dog—the bookkeeper told me so.”
He was laying himself quite bare. He dropped the flimsy lie of his daily life. He did not hold to the junior-partner fiction any longer.
“It was very easy,” he added, with a certain workman-like pride in the affair. “I knew when the servant went out marketing; knew how long she’d be, and where she hid the street-door key—on a ledge near the coal cellar by the area steps. It was the easiest matter in the world. The old woman—keep her back, can’t you? She doesn’t want to hear—she knows. She was stooping over the fire—weren’t you? She had been cutting up meat; the stew was on the hob and the carving knifewas on the table. I gave her one certain blow. She gave me one look—I might have known what that look meant.
“But I did it beautifully. I went back to my rooms and washed my hands and changed my cuffs, so as to be sure,” he sniggered. “I had only just finished when the servant came round. It was a close shave. And then I went and told Groome. No one need ever have known. But you can’t fight with a woman who comes out of her grave!
“She takes up so much room that I can’t breathe. Let her out, shove her into the road. She’ll never be able to catch us up. Let the wheels go over her.”
Clara Citron, who had held his wrists firmly all the time, dropped them and cautiously opened the door of the coach a very little way. I twitched her skirt.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to tell them to drive to the Old Bailey—that’s Newgate, isn’t it?” she returned viciously. Evidently she owed Orion some deep grudge.
“Pooh! We don’t do it that way. Sit down.Take up all the seat—try to convince him, to keep him quiet. I’ll look after him to-night.”
She sat down looking slightly sulky.
“I trust you to look after my interests,” she said plaintively, after a pause. “I’m a hard-working woman and all the money was on my side of the family. Here’s my card.” She pulled out a thickly-lettered squab of cardboard. “‘Citron, The Parade, Southsea.’ If you ever want a blow of sea air, I can always let you have bed and breakfast on reasonable terms.”
The coach swung merrily on. I rather fancy that the men on the box were singing. Orion kept on saying piteously that Mrs. Grigg, in the red dress, was taking up all the room—more and more room—that she was slowly strangling him. In this fashion we rattled back to Bloomsbury, where it was getting dusk and where rain fell more heavily than it had done in the morning.
I watched him all that night. In the morning the sun came fiercely in. The hot, golden air seemed all Sunday frocks, church bells, and the weighty caw of rooks.
There was a pane of glass above Orion’s bedroom door. He said, quite quietly,—it was the first time he had spoken:
“She keeps on looking through that glass. There’s a confounded red bonnet on her head now—never knew such a woman for red. Can’t you do something? Can’t you rig up a curtain, old chap?”
There was a crafty look on his silly face. I remembered that afterward. I turned aside to find something, and the next thing I knew was a “ploomp” on the stones underneath and a loud, ringing shriek.
Orion had flung himself out. It was really the best finish he could have made. Adeline saw him do it and shrieked. She was standing at Murphy’s window; Orion, in his fluttering shirt, dropped past her startled eyes. I must tell you Adeline’s story some day.
The money? That was the one funny touch in the whole affair. Mrs. Grigg actually left the house and every penny she had in the world to the man who brought her round two hundredweight of coal once a week, from the greengrocer’s shop in RedLion Street. He was a handsome sort of chap—that seemed the only reason. He sold the house. I heard the other day that he was drinking himself to death.
Clara Citron? She went back to the lodging-house at Southsea; is there now, I suppose. But she was one of those women without attributes; not the sort of person you would have the least interest in investigating.
Hard on Orion, wasn’t it? Quite superfluous, you see. I never liked him. Yet, looking back, I’m sorry for the mean little humbug. That cursed City grinds men down to any pettiness. I’d rather starve in Piccadilly than eat turtle in an Alderman’s robe at Guildhall.