Gimblet was very pale, and he took a quick breath as he braced himself to lift the enveloping chintz. The lighted windows cast three streaks of light out into the darkness and threw grotesque distorted shadows of the men upon the coping of the balcony. A sudden gust of wind made the trees in the street moan and shiver as though they had been swept by the passing broom of some night-riding hag; all around them the darkness gathered close like a wicked thing that would if it dared swallow up the tiny protecting lights men burn in self-defence.
Gimblet felt himself struggling against some such malevolent influences; half conscious fears, some sensation of evil presences in the air, gibing, mocking, clustering round to gloat over the results of earthly villainy, seemed to paralyse him; and he had to call up his reserves of will power before, after a moment’s hesitation, he bent forward and unrolled the chintz covering.
Inside it was the body of a young woman. Long black hair lay in masses on her shoulders and streamed over the single white garment she wore. The face was so terribly disfigured as to be quite unrecognisable.
With a shudder Gimblet drew the wrapping over her again.
“Vitriol,” he muttered, and became aware, as he spoke, of some one behind him in the opening of the window.
Before he could turn, a heartstricken cry sounded in his ear, and he was not in time to catch Sir Gregory, who staggered back in the embrasure, and from there slid fainting to the ground. As Gimblet sprang to his help, he had a fleeting vision of a ghastly face and a crouching figure in the back of the drawing-room: it was the face of Tremmels, the clerk, but so wild and white with terror, so distorted by the shock of what he had seen as to be almost like that of another man.
Suspecting from the noise made by the opening shutters, followed by the sudden and prolonged silence, that something was happening on the floor above them, and unable any longer to bear the suspense and curiosity accentuated by waiting and inactivity, Sir Gregory, followed by the clerk, had crept upstairs into the drawing-room without attracting the attention of Gimblet or his assistants, and the horror of what they had seen was too much for both of them.
As with the help of Higgs Gimblet lifted the inanimate form of the baronet from where it had dropped, a sudden loud noise from the street below made them nearly let fall their burden; and it was a second before any of them realised that the sound was only the first jangling bar of a popular music hall tune. The barrel organ they had heard a quarter of an hour earlier had wandered into Scholefield Avenue, and, attracted without doubt by the lighted windows, had thought fit to draw up before No. 13 and there begin its headlong plunge into melody. Half the rollicking air it was playing had been thumped forth, with all the usual din of banging bass and clanking scales, before any one of those who stood above it in the grim presence of death sufficiently recovered his presence of mind to be able to stop it.
Telling the clerk curtly not to be an ass, but to pull himself together and follow them, Gimblet, with the help of Higgs and Brampton, carried Sir Gregory out of the fatal house and into No. 15, the home of the artist. Here they gave him over to the care of Mrs. Brampton, a capable, bustling woman with common-sense written all over her, to whom her husband explained in guarded terms as much of the situation as was inevitable.
“There has been a terrible tragedy next door, my dear,” he told her. “This poor gentleman has fainted on learning of the death of his friend,” and the kind-hearted, sensible creature took charge of Sir Gregory without wasting precious time in questions.