It is fortunate I did not see Miss Clara as I left the house. Had I met that dear creature on my way out, I should, to a dead certainty, not only have kissed her on the spot, but with never a thought for horrified servants or scandalised neighbours, should have put my arm around her capacious waist, and then and there have compelled her to dance a Highland fling with me. That Metcalfe thought I had been drinking (as I had—deep draughts of the most intoxicating of all elixirs, the elixir of love), I am positive. Detecting me in the act of tweaking the nose of the stone bust of a celebrated Nonconformist divine, which stood in a recess at the bottom of the stairs, and of painstakingly (mere absence of mind that!) wiping my boots on the doormat, as if I were about to enter a drawing-room instead of passing out into a muddy street, he inquired solicitously whether I wouldn't like a cab, remarking with a surreptitious glance at the boots with which I had been performing such unnecessary antics on the doormat:
"Yes, sir; the streets is very muddy, but you'll get home nice and dry and comfortable in a keb."
Telling him that I was tired out and half asleep from my long watch overnight, and that to walk home would be the surest way to awaken and freshen me, I slipped a sovereign into his palm, and made my way into the streets, all the blood in my body dancing in my veins, all the joy of first love singing in my brain.
At my rooms I found the expected notice requiring me to attend and to give evidence at the inquest to be held that day at noon upon the bodies of the three men who had been found drowned in the Thames.
That the inquiry was not wanting in painful interest the reader will readily surmise, but except to say that I was subjected to a severe and suspicious examination, I do not propose further to enter upon the details of the inquest here.
I come now to a point in my narrative when the trend of events takes a new turn, and when I shall have to relate happenings of infinitely greater importance than the circumstances under which Parker and Smudgy, the negro Black Sam, and the two Grants, met their death. These were but the "curtain-raisers" preceding the drama in which the man known to the readers of this history as "the Dumpling" took so remarkable a part. Up to this point my tale—I had to tell it as it happened—has been little more than a detective story. Now we shall soon come to a story of quite another sort.
CHAPTER XXIV.
I DISCOVER THE IDENTITY OF THE DUMPLING.
The inquest over—for two mortal days I was kept hanging about Southend, to the mortuary of which the bodies had been taken—I returned to town, eager to see Kate, and to compel from her dear lips a second sweet admission that I was not without a place in her heart. Something there was in the look of the house—the drawn blinds of the reception rooms, the fact that, except for the hall and the basement, the place was in darkness—which turned me cold and sick with apprehension and with a sense of coming evil.