As with the jug on one side of the door, so, on the other, down went Mother Carey. She tumbled in a heap, rending away from the clutch on her wrist, and appeared to lie in the hall moaning. Very swiftly and neatly then, using a tool he had taken from his pocket, the detective, nearly closing the door first, ran the chain along its socket within, and made himself master of the filthy stronghold. Once entered, he beckoned to us, and stooping to the collapsed figure a moment, rose to his height again.
“All right, gentlemen,” he said. “She’s all right. Shut that door please—now my good people” (this to the inevitable congregation gathering outside), “this ain’t an inquest, you know. Come clear away, clear away.”
He stepped across the whispering bundle on the boards, drew us in, and closed the door on the little breathless group of faces.
“Now,” he said, “if you’ll please to go and make a light somewheres, will you, sir, so as we can see ourselves speak? Better take the back for privacy.”
We went as directed, and found a reasty little kitchen, black with grease and soot, its walls flaking, its floor vermin-riddled, its long cold grate one refuse-bin of garbage. There was a tattered curtain pinned across the window, and this we unfastened to let in the daylight. It seemed to awaken immemorial odours in its entrance. The squalor of the place took on a festering sickness.
Hardly had we pulled the rag from its string, when the detective came bearing in his capture professionalwise. He did not actually carry the old woman, but he lifted her before him at a sort of helpless run. I was glad to see at least that she had recovered her nerves of motion, as I had feared that her downfall might have signified a stroke of some sort.
He flopped her unceremoniously into a chair, where she sat rocking and weeping and mumbling, and swaying her head and hands up and down like a Japanese tortoise. But, for all her apparent collapse, I had a shrewd idea that her eyes were not failing to take stock of me, and that her mind was busy over that association of ideas which my return in company with the law could not have failed to suggest. She kept up her mechanical moaning, I thought, simply to gain time.
“Now, ma’am,” said the detective suavely. “When you’re quite recovered.”
Her moans rose the windier at that, but presently with scraps of articulation threading them.
“O good sir the deuce! ... O my heart and lungs! ... the shock of it good sir ... wouldn’t hurt a fly the devil take it ... O what a libel and slander on poor old Mother Carey the deuce!”