Two, as all the world knows, is company, three is none.
Mrs. Bunting put down three sixpences.
“Wait a minute,” said Hopkins; “you can’t go into the Chamber of Horrors just yet. But you won’t have to wait more than four or five minutes, Mrs. Bunting. It’s this way, you see; our boss is in there, showing a party round.” He lowered his voice. “It’s Sir John Burney—I suppose you know who Sir John Burney is?”
“No,” she answered indifferently, “I don’t know that I ever heard of him.”
She felt slightly—oh, very slightly—uneasy about Daisy. She would have liked her stepdaughter to keep well within sight and sound, but Mr. Sleuth was now taking the girl down to the other end of the room.
“Well, I hope you never will know him—not in any personal sense, Mrs. Bunting.” The man chuckled. “He’s the Commissioner of Police—the new one—that’s what Sir John Burney is. One of the gentlemen he’s showing round our place is the Paris Police boss—whose job is on all fours, so to speak, with Sir John’s. The Frenchy has brought his daughter with him, and there are several other ladies. Ladies always likes horrors, Mrs. Bunting; that’s our experience here. ‘Oh, take me to the Chamber of Horrors’—that’s what they say the minute they gets into this here building!”
Mrs. Bunting looked at him thoughtfully. It occurred to Mr. Hopkins that she was very wan and tired; she used to look better in the old days, when she was still in service, before Bunting married her.
“Yes,” she said; “that’s just what my stepdaughter said just now. ‘Oh, take me to the Chamber of Horrors’—that’s exactly what she did say when we got upstairs.”
—
A group of people, all talking and laughing together, were advancing, from within the wooden barrier, toward the turnstile.
Mrs. Bunting stared at them nervously. She wondered which of them was the gentleman with whom Mr. Hopkins had hoped she would never be brought into personal contact; she thought she could pick him out among the others. He was a tall, powerful, handsome gentleman, with a military appearance.
Just now he was smiling down into the face of a young lady. “Monsieur Barberoux is quite right,” he was saying in a loud, cheerful voice, “our English law is too kind to the criminal, especially to the murderer. If we conducted our trials in the French fashion, the place we have just left would be very much fuller than it is to-day. A man of whose guilt we are absolutely assured is oftener than not acquitted, and then the public taunt us with ‘another undiscovered crime!’ ”
“D’you mean, Sir John, that murderers sometimes escape scot-free? Take the man who has been committing all these awful murders this last month? I suppose there’s no doubt he’ll be hanged—if he’s ever caught, that is!”
Her girlish voice rang out, and Mrs. Bunting could hear every word that was said.
The whole party gathered round, listening eagerly.
“Well, no.” He spoke very deliberately. “I doubt if that particular murderer ever will be hanged——”
“You mean that you’ll never catch him?” the girl spoke with a touch of airy impertinence in her clear voice.
“I think we shall end by catching him—because”—he waited a moment, then added in a lower voice—“now don’t give me away to a newspaper fellow, Miss Rose—because now I think we do know who the murderer in question is——”
Several of those standing near by uttered expressions of surprise and incredulity.
“Then why don’t you catch him?” cried the girl indignantly.
“I didn’t say we knew where he was; I only said we knew who he was, or, rather, perhaps I ought to say that I personally have a very strong suspicion of his identity.”
Sir John’s French colleague looked up quickly. “De Leipsic and Liverpool man?” he said interrogatively.
The other nodded. “Yes, I suppose you’ve had the case turned up?”
Then, speaking very quickly, as if he wished to dismiss the subject from his own mind, and from that of his auditors, he went on:
“Four murders of the kind were committed eight years ago—two in Leipsic, the others, just afterwards, in Liverpool,—and there were certain peculiarities connected with the crimes which made it clear they were committed by the same hand. The perpetrator was caught, fortunately for us, red-handed, just as he was leaving the house of his last victim, for in Liverpool the murder was committed in a house. I myself saw the unhappy man—I say unhappy, for there is no doubt at all that he was mad”—he hesitated, and added in a lower tone—“suffering from an acute form of religious mania. I myself saw him, as I say, at some length. But now comes the really interesting point. I have just been informed that a month ago this criminal lunatic, as we must of course regard him, made his escape from the asylum where he was confined. He arranged the whole thing with extraordinary cunning and intelligence, and we should probably have caught him long ago, were it not that he managed, when on his way out of the place, to annex a considerable sum of money in gold, with which the wages of the asylum staff were about to be paid. It is owing to that fact that his escape was, very wrongly, concealed——”
He stopped abruptly, as if sorry he had said so much, and a moment later the party were walking in Indian file through the turnstile, Sir John Burney leading the way.
Mrs. Bunting looked straight before her. She felt—so she expressed it to her husband later—as if she had been turned to stone.
Even had she wished to do so, she had neither the time nor the power to warn her lodger of his danger, for Daisy and her companion were now coming down the room, bearing straight for the Commissioner of Police.
In another moment Mrs. Bunting’s lodger and Sir John Burney were face to face.
Mr. Sleuth swerved to one side; there came a terrible change over his pale, narrow face; it became discomposed, livid with rage and terror.
But, to Mrs. Bunting’s relief—yes, to her inexpressible relief—Sir John Burney and his friends swept on. They passed Mr. Sleuth and the girl by his side, unaware, or so it seemed to her, that there was anyone else in the room but themselves.
“Hurry up, Mrs. Bunting,” said the turnstile-keeper; “you and your friends will have the place all to yourselves for a bit.” From an official he had become a man, and it was the man in Mr. Hopkins that gallantly addressed pretty Daisy Bunting: “It seems strange that a young lady like you should want to go in and see all those ’orrible frights,” he said jestingly….
“Mrs. Bunting, may I trouble you to come over here for a moment?”
The words were hissed rather than spoken by Mr. Sleuth’s lips.
His landlady took a doubtful step towards him.
“A last word with you, Mrs. Bunting.” The lodger’s face was still distorted with fear and passion. “Do not think to escape the consequences of your hideous treachery. I trusted you, Mrs. Bunting, and you betrayed me! But I am protected by a higher power, for I still have much to do.” Then, his voice sinking to a whisper, he hissed out, “Your end will be bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword. Your feet shall go down to death, and your steps take hold on hell.”
Even while Mr. Sleuth was muttering these strange, dreadful words, he was looking round, glancing this way and that, seeking a way of escape.
At last his eyes became fixed on a small placard placed above a curtain. “Emergency Exit” was written there. Mrs. Bunting thought he was going to make a dash for the place; but Mr. Sleuth did something very different. Leaving his landlady’s side, he walked over to the turnstile. He fumbled in his pocket for a moment, and then touched the man on the arm. “I feel ill,” he said, speaking very rapidly; “very ill indeed! It is the atmosphere of this place. I want you to let me out by the quickest way. It would be a pity for me to faint here—especially with ladies about.”
His left hand shot out and placed what he had been fumbling for in his pocket on the other’s bare palm. “I see there’s an emergency exit over there. Would it be possible for me to get
out that way?”
“Well, yes, sir; I think so.”
The man hesitated; he felt a slight, a very slight, feeling of misgiving. He looked at Daisy, flushed and smiling, happy and unconcerned, and then at Mrs. Bunting. She was very pale; but surely her lodger’s sudden seizure was enough to make her feel worried. Hopkins felt the half-sovereign pleasantly tickling his palm. The Paris Prefect of Police had given him only half-a-crown—mean, shabby foreigner!
“Yes, sir; I can let you out that way,” he said at last, “and p’raps when you’re standing out in the air, on the iron balcony, you’ll feel better. But then, you know, sir, you’ll have to come round to the front if you wants to come in again, for those emergency doors only open outward.”
“Yes, yes,” said Mr. Sleuth hurriedly. “I quite understand! If I feel better I’ll come in by the front way, and pay another shilling—that’s only fair.”
“You needn’t do that if you’ll just explain what happened here.”
The man went and pulled the curtain aside, and put his shoulder against the door. It burst open, and the light, for a moment, blinded Mr. Sleuth.
He passed his hand over his eyes. “Thank you,” he muttered, “thank you. I shall get all right out there.”
An iron stairway led down into a small stable yard, of which the door opened into a side street.
Mr. Sleuth looked round once more; he really did feel very ill—ill and dazed. How pleasant it would be to take a flying leap over the balcony railing and find rest, eternal rest, below.
But no—he thrust the thought, the temptation, from him. Again a convulsive look of rage came over his face. He had remembered his landlady. How could the woman whom he had treated so generously have betrayed him to his arch-enemy?—to the official, that is, who had entered into a conspiracy years ago to have him confined—him, an absolutely sane man with a great avenging work to do in the world—in a lunatic asylum.
He stepped out into the open air, and the curtain, falling-to behind him, blotted out the tall, thin figure from the little group of people who had watched him disappear.
Even Daisy felt a little scared. “He did look bad, didn’t he, now?” She turned appealingly to Mr. Hopkins.
“Yes, that he did, poor gentleman—your lodger, too?” He looked sympathetically at Mrs. Bunting.
She moistened her lips with her tongue. “Yes,” she repeated dully, “my lodger.”
CHAPTER XXVII
In vain Mr. Hopkins invited Mrs. Bunting and her pretty stepdaughter to step through into the Chamber of Horrors. “I think we ought to go straight home,” said Mr. Sleuth’s landlady decidedly. And Daisy meekly assented. Somehow the girl felt confused, a little scared by the lodger’s sudden disappearance. Perhaps this unwonted feeling of hers was induced by the look of stunned surprise and, yes, pain, on her stepmother’s face.
Slowly they made their way out of the building, and when they got home it was Daisy who described the strange way Mr. Sleuth had been taken.
“I don’t suppose he’ll be long before he comes home,” said Bunting heavily, and he cast an anxious, furtive look at his wife. She looked as if stricken in a vital part; he saw from her face that there was something wrong—very wrong indeed.
The hours dragged on. All three felt moody and ill at ease. Daisy knew there was no chance that young Chandler would come in to-day.
About six o’clock Mrs. Bunting went upstairs. She lit the gas in Mr. Sleuth’s sitting-room and looked about her with a fearful glance. Somehow everything seemed to speak to her of the lodger. There lay her Bible and his Concordance, side by side on the table, exactly as he had left them when he had come downstairs and suggested that ill-starred expedition to his landlord’s daughter.
She took a few steps forward, listening the while anxiously for the familiar sound of the click in the door which would tell her that the lodger had come back, and then she went over to the window and looked out.
What a cold night for a man to be wandering about, homeless, friendless, and, as she suspected with a pang, with but very little money on him!
Turning abruptly, she went into the lodger’s bedroom and opened the drawer of the looking-glass.
Yes, there lay the much-diminished heap of sovereigns. If only he had taken his money out with him! She wondered painfully whether he had enough on his person to secure a good night’s lodging, and then suddenly she remembered that which brought relief to her mind. The lodger had given something to that Hopkins fellow—either a sovereign or half a sovereign, she wasn’t sure which.
The memory of Mr. Sleuth’s cruel words to her, of his threat, did not disturb her overmuch. It had been a mistake—all a mistake. Far from betraying Mr. Sleuth, she had sheltered him—kept his awful secret as she could not have kept it had she known, or even dimly suspected, the horrible fact with which Sir John Burney’s words had made her acquainted; namely, that Mr. Sleuth was victim of no temporary aberration, but that he was, and had been for years, a madman, a homicidal maniac.
In her ears there still rang the Frenchman’s half careless yet confident question, “De Leipsic and Liverpool man?”
Following a sudden impulse, she went back into the sitting-room, and taking a black-headed pin out of her bodice stuck it amid the leaves of the Bible. Then she opened the Book, and looked at the page the pin had marked:—
“My tabernacle is spoiled and all my cords are broken….There is none to stretch forth my tent any more and to set up my curtains.”
At last, leaving the Bible open, Mrs. Bunting went downstairs, and as she opened the door of her sitting-room Daisy came towards her stepmother.
“I’ll go down and start getting the lodger’s supper ready for you,” said the girl good-naturedly. “He’s certain to come in when he gets hungry. But he did look upset, didn’t he, Ellen? Right down bad—that he did!”
Mrs. Bunting made no answer; she simply stepped aside to allow Daisy to go down.
“Mr. Sleuth won’t never come back no more,” she said sombrely, and then she felt both glad and angry at the extraordinary change which came over her husband’s face. Yet, perversely, that look of relief, of right-down joy, chiefly angered her, and tempted her to add, “That’s to say, I don’t suppose he will.”
And Bunting’s face altered again; the old, anxious, depressed look, the look it had worn the last few days, returned.
“What makes you think he mayn’t come back?” he muttered.
“Too long to tell you now,” she said. “Wait till the child’s gone to bed.”
And Bunting had to restrain his curiosity.
And then, when at last Daisy had gone off to the back room where she now slept with her stepmother, Mrs. Bunting beckoned to her husband to follow her upstairs.
Before doing so he went down the passage and put the chain on the door. And about this they had a few sharp whispered words.
“You’re never going to shut him out?” she expostulated angrily, beneath her breath.
“I’m not going to leave Daisy down here with that man perhaps walking in any minute.”
“Mr. Sleuth won’t hurt Daisy, bless you! Much more likely to hurt me,” and she gave a half sob.
Bunting stared at her. “What do you mean?” he said roughly. “Come upstairs and tell me what you mean.”
And then, in what had been the lodger’s sitting-room, Mrs. Bunting told her husband exactly what it was that had happened.
He listened in heavy silence.
“So you see,” she said at last, “you see, Bunting, that ’twas me that was right after all. The lodger was never responsible for his actions. I never thought he was, for my part.”
And Bunting stared at her ruminatingly. “Depends on what you call responsible——” he began argumentatively.
But she would have none of that. “I heard the gentleman say myself that he was a lunatic,” she said fiercely. And then, dropping her voice, “A religious maniac—that’s what he called him.”
“Well, he never s
eemed so to me,” said Bunting stoutly. “He simply seemed to me ’centric—that’s all he did. Not a bit madder than many I could tell you of.” He was walking round the room restlessly, but he stopped short at last. “And what d’you think we ought to do now?”
Mrs. Bunting shook her head impatiently. “I don’t think we ought to do nothing,” she said. “Why should we?”
And then again he began walking round the room in an aimless fashion that irritated her.
“If only I could put out a bit of supper for him somewhere where he would get it! And his money, too? I hate to feel it’s in there.”
“Don’t you make any mistake—he’ll come back for that,” said Bunting, with decision.
But Mrs. Bunting shook her head. She knew better.
“Now,” she said, “you go off up to bed. It’s no use us sitting up any longer.”
And Bunting acquiesced.
She ran down and got him a bedroom candle—there was no gas in the little back bedroom upstairs. And then she watched him go slowly up.
Suddenly he turned and came down again. “Ellen,” he said, in an urgent whisper, “if I was you I’d take the chain off the door, and I’d lock myself in—that’s what I’m going to do. Then he can sneak in and take his dirty money away.”
Mrs. Bunting neither nodded nor shook her head. Slowly she went downstairs, and there she carried out half of Bunting’s advice. She took, that is, the chain off the front door. But she did not go to bed, neither did she lock herself in. She sat up all night, waiting.
At half-past seven she made herself a cup of tea, and then she went into her bedroom.
Daisy opened her eyes.
“Why, Ellen,” she said, “I suppose I was that tired, and slept so sound, that I never heard you come to bed or get up—funny, wasn’t it?”
“Young people don’t sleep as light as do old folk,” Mrs. Bunting said sententiously.
“Did the lodger come in after all? I suppose he’s upstairs now?”
Mrs. Bunting shook her head. “It looks as if ’twould be a fine day for you down at Richmond,” she observed in a kindly tone.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 88