"He had no hand in it, sir, as I hope for mercy! I'll tell you everything I know, as I said I would; but it must be in my own way, and you mustn't interrupt me."
I decided that it would be useless to put any further questions to her, and that I had best listen patiently to what she was about to impart. I told her that I would give her my best attention, and I solemnly impressed upon her the necessity of concealing nothing from me. She nodded, and pouring out a glass of water, drank it off. A silence of two or three minutes intervened before she had sufficiently composed herself to commence, and during that silence the feeling grew strong within me that Providence had directed my steps to her house.
The tale she related I now set down in her own words as nearly as I can recall them. Of all the stories I had ever heard or read, this which she now imparted to me was the most fantastic and weird, and it led directly to a result which to the last hour of my life I shall think of with wonder and amazement.
[CHAPTER IX.]
FANNY LEMON RELATES UNDER WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES SHE RESOLVED TO LET HER SECOND FLOOR FRONT.
"I must go back sir," she commenced, "a few years, else you won't be able to understand it properly. I'll run over them years as quick as possible, and won't say more about e'm than is necessary, because I know you are as anxious as I am to come to the horrible thing that has just happened. I was a happy woman in your angel father's house, but when Lemon come a-courting me I got that unsettled that I hardly knew what I was about. Well, sir, as you know, we got married, and I thought I was made for life, and that honey was to be my portion evermore. I soon found out my mistake, though I don't suppose I had more to complain of than other women. In the early days things went fairly well between me and Lemon. We had our little fall-outs and our little differences, but they was soon made up. We ain't angels, sir, any of us, and when we're tied together we soon find it out. I daresay it's much of a muchness on the men's side as well as on our'n. Lemon is quick-tempered, but it's all over in a minute, and he forgits and forgives. Leastways, that is how it used to be with him; he would fly out at me like a flash of lightning, and be sorry for it afterwards; and one good thing in him was that he never sulked and never brooded. It ain't so now; he's growed that irritable that it takes more than a woman's patience to bear with him; he won't stand contradiction, and the littlest of things'll frighten him and make him as weak as a child unborn. There was only a couple of nights ago. He'd been going on that strange that it was as much as I could do to keep from screaming out loud and alarming the neighbourhood, and right in the middle of it all he fell asleep quite sudden. It was heavenly not to hear the sound of his voice, but I couldn't help pitying him when I saw him laying there, with the prespiration starting out of his forehead, and I took a cool handkercher and wiped the damp away, and smoothed his hair back from his eyes.
"He woke up as sudden as he went off, and when he felt my hand on his head he burst out crying and begged me to forgive him. Not for the way he'd been storming at me--no, sir, he didn't beg my forgiveness for that, but for something else he wouldn't or couldn't understandingly explain."
"'What do you mean by it all?' I said. 'What do you mean by it all?'
"But though I as good as went on my bended knees to git it out of him, it wasn't a bit of good. I might as well have spoke to a stone stature. Lemon's had a scare, sir, a frightful awful scare, and I don't know what to think.
"When I married him, sir, he kep a saloon, as I daresay you remember hearing of; shaving threepence, hair-cutting fourpence, shampooing ditter. He had a wax lady's head in the winder as went round by machinery, and Lemon kep it regularly wound up with her hair dressed that elegant that it would have been a credit to Burlington Arcade. There used to be a crowd round his winder all day long, and girls and boys 'd come a long way to have a good look at it; and though I say it, she was worth looking at. Her lips was like bits of red coral, and you could see her white teeth through 'em; her skin was that pearly and her cheeks that rosy as I never saw equalled; and as for her eyes, sir, they was that blue that they had to be seen to be believed. She carried her head on one side as she went round and round, looking slantways over her right shoulder, and, taking her altogether, she was as pritty a exhibition as you could see anywheres in London. It brought customers to Lemon, there was no doubt of that; he was doing a splendid trade, and we put by a matter of between four and five pounds a week after all expenses paid. It did go agin me, I own, when I discovered that Lemon had female customers, and, what's more, a private room set apart to do 'em up in; but when I spoke to him about he said, with a stern eye: