IN WHICH BECKY, CONTINUING HER LETTER, RELATES HER IMPRESSIONS OF MRS. PREEDY’S YOUNG MAN LODGER.
My own dear Fred,—Once more I am in my little cupboard of a bedroom, writing to you. Again it is past twelve o’clock, and Mrs. Preedy is asleep.
I will now tell you why I have altered my mind with regard to Richard Manx, and why I have determined to watch his movements. The seal to this resolution was fixed the night before last.
Mrs. Preedy was sitting up, as usual, drinking her regular allowance of gin and water. I was in my bedroom, supposed to be asleep, but really very wide awake. Peeping through a chink in my bedroom door, I saw Mrs. Preedy thus engaged, and engaged also in reading an account of the police-court proceedings in which you were so cruelly implicated. There was nothing interesting in this picture of Mrs. Preedy, and I crept into bed again. I was dozing off, when I was roused by the sound of Mrs. Preedy leaving the kitchen, and going up-stairs to the street-door, which she opened. I ventured out into the passage, and listened. She was talking to a policeman. Presently she came down-stairs and mixed a glass of gin and water, which she took up to him. Then after a little further chat, she came down again, and resumed her melancholy occupation. After that, I fell asleep.
Changes have taken place in me, my dear. Once I was nervous; now I am bold. Once I could not sleep without a light in my room; now I can sleep in the dark. Once I was a sound sleeper, and was not easily awakened; now the slightest sound arouses me. The dropping of a pin would be almost sufficient to cause me to start up in bed.
On the occasion I refer to, it was something more than the dropping of a pin that aroused me. It was the sound of voices in the kitchen—Mrs. Preedy’s voice and the voice of a man. What man? I peeped through the chink. It was Richard Manx, our new lodger.
He was standing on the threshold of the kitchen door; from where I knelt I could not obtain a good view of his face, but I saw Mrs. Preedy’s, and it seemed to me as if she had received a fright.
Richard Manx, in reply to an observation made by Mrs. Preedy, said her clock on the mantelpiece was wrong, and that he had heard twelve o’clock strike a quarter of an hour ago. Mrs. Preedy asked him if he had come to pay his rent. No, he said, he had not come to pay his rent. Then Mrs. Preedy very naturally inquired what he had come for, and Richard Manx, in a voice resembling that of a raven with a bad cold, said,
“I have—a—heard it once more again!”
My dear, the moment he uttered these strange words, Mrs. Preedy rushed at him, pulled him into the kitchen, and then flew to my bedroom door. I was in bed before she got there, and when she opened it and called my name, I was, of course, fast asleep. She made sure of this by coming into my little cupboard, and passing her hand over my face. My heart beat quickly, but she herself was too agitated to notice it. When she left my room, I thought it prudent to remain in bed for awhile, so as to avoid the risk of discovery. My mind was in a whirl. Richard Manx had heard it once more again! What had he heard?