“Come, doctor, come!” she screamed again, and fled out into the night, crossing another girl who was apparently speeding on the same errand. Barton could just see the flying skirts of the first messenger, and hear her footfall ring on the pavement. Up a long street, down another, and then into a back slum she flew, and, lastly, under a swinging sign of the old-fashioned sort, and through a doorway. Barton, following, found himself for the first time within the portals of The Old English Bun-house.
The wide passage (the house was old) was crowded with girls, wildly excited, weeping, screaming, and some of them swearing. They were pressed so thick round a door at the end of the hall, that Barton could scarcely thrust his way through them, dragging one aside, shouldering another: it was a matter of life and death.
“Oh, she’s been at the drink, and she’s killed her! she’s killed her! I heard her fall!” one of the frightened girls was exclaiming with hysterical iteration.
“Let me pass!” shouted Barton; and reaching the door at last, he turned the handle and pushed. The door was locked.
“Give me room,” he cried, and the patrons of The Bun-house yielding place a little, Barton took a little short run, and drove with all the weight of his shoulders against the door. It opened reluctantly with a crash, and he was hurled into the room by his own impetus, and by the stress of the girls behind him.
What he beheld was more like some dreadful scene of ancient tragedy than the spectacle of an accident or a crime of modern life.
By the windy glare of a dozen gas-jets (red and shaken like the flame of blown torches by the rainy gusts that swept through a broken pane), Barton saw a girl stretched bleeding on the sanded floor.
One of her arms made a pillow for her head; her soft dark hair, unfastened, half hid her, like a veil; the other arm lay loose by her side; her lips were white, her face was bloodless; but there was blood on the deep-blue folds about the bosom, and on the floor. At the further side of this girl—who was dead, or seemingly dead—sat, on a low stool, a woman, in a crouching, cat-like attitude, quite silent and still. The knife with which she had done the deed was dripping in her hand; the noise of the broken door, and of the entering throng, had not disturbed her.
For a moment even Barton’s rapidity of action and resolution were paralyzed by the terrible and strange vision that he beheld. He stared with all his eyes, in a mist of doubt and amazement, at a vision, dreadful even to one who saw death every day. Then the modern spirit awoke in him.
“Fetch a policeman,” he whispered, to one of the crowding frightened troop of girls.