The voice was low, confidential, horribly "just between you and me." But it was a pleased voice also, full of an eager and voluble satisfaction,—the last chance of toxic insanity to explain itself!
The lurid swan-song of a conceited and poisoned man.
. . . "Business was going well. There seemed no prospect of a child just then, so Mary got in with Church work at St. Philip's. That brought a lot more customers to the shop too. Fancy soaps, scents and toilette articles and all that. Dr. Mitchell of Hackney, was a church-warden at St. Philip's and in time all his prescriptions came to me. No one had a better chance than I did. And Mary was that good to me." . . .
Two facile, miserable tears rolled from the man's glazing eyes. He wiped them away with the back of his hand.
"You can't think, sir, being a bachelor. Anything I'd a mind to fancy! Sweet-breads she could cook a treat, and Burgundy we used to 'ave—California wine, 'Big Bush' brand in flagons at two and eight. And never before half-past seven. Late dinner you might have called it, while my assistant was in the shop. And after that I'd play to her on the violin. Nothing common, good music—'Orer pro Nobis' and 'Rousoh's Dream.' You never heard me play did you? I was in the orchestra of the Hackney Choral Society. I remember one day . . ."
"And then?" the Doctor said, gently.
He had already gathered something, but not all that he had come to gather. The minutes were hurrying by.
The man looked up at the doctor with a sudden glance, almost of hatred. For a single instant the abnormal egoism of the criminal, swelled out upon the face and turned it into the mask of a devil.
Dr. Morton Sims spoke in a sharp, urgent voice.
"Why did you ask me to come here, Hancock?" he said. "You know that I am glad to be here, if I can be of any use to you. But you don't seem to want the sort of sympathetic help that the chaplain here could give you far better than I can. What do you want to say to me? Have you really anything to say? If you have, be a man and say it!"