Such a shout—repeated with passionate clamour—scared the inhabitants of the Cibber Street lodging-house at three o’clock in the winter morning, still dark as deepest night. Mrs. Rawber heard it in her back bedroom on the ground floor. It penetrated confusedly—not as a word, but as a sound of fear and dread—to the front kitchen, where Mrs. Evitt, the landlady, slept on an ancient press bedstead, which by day made believe to be a book-case. Lastly, Desrolles, who seemed to have slept more heavily than the other two on that particular night, came rushing out of his room to ask the meaning of that hideous summons.
They all met on the first-floor landing, where Jack Chicot stood on the threshold of his wife’s bedroom, with a candle in his hand, the flickering flame making a patch of sickly yellow light amidst surrounding gloom—a faint light in which Jack Chicot’s pallid countenance looked like the face of a ghost.
‘What is the matter?’ Desrolles asked the two women, simultaneously.
‘My wife has been murdered. My God, it is too awful! See—see——’
Chicot pointed with a trembling hand to a thin thread of crimson that had crept along the dull grey carpet to the very threshold. Shudderingly the others looked inside, as he held the candle towards the bed, with white, averted face. There were hideous stains on the counterpane, an awful figure lying in a heap among the bed-clothes, a long loose coil of raven hair, curved like a snake round the rigid form—a spectacle which not one of those who gazed upon it, spell-bound, fascinated by the horror of the sight, could ever hope to forget.
‘Murdered, and in my house!’ shrieked Mrs. Evitt, unconsciously echoing the words of Lady Macbeth, on a similar occasion. ‘I shall never let my first floor again. I’m a ruined woman. Seize him, ’old ’im tight,’ she cried, with sudden intensity. ‘It must ’ave been her ’usband done it. You was often a-quarrelling, you know you was.’
This fierce attack startled Jack Chicot. He turned upon the woman with his ghastly face, a new horror in his eyes.
‘I kill her!’ he cried. ‘I never raised my hand against her in my life, though she has tempted me many a time. I came into the house three minutes ago. I should not have known anything, for when I come in late I sleep in the little room, but I saw that——’ (he pointed to the thin red streak which had crept across the threshold, and under the door, to the carpetless landing outside), ‘and then I came in and found her lying here, as you see her.’
‘Somebody ought to go for a policeman,’ suggested Desrolles.
‘I will,’ said Chicot.