Then having set straight such of the furniture as had been moved or disarranged, he quietly opened the dining-room shutters and those of the back drawing-room, for he did not wish the place to look uninhabited. The shutters of the front drawing-room, however, he could not bring himself to touch, though he seemed to hear the words of scorn which Madame Querterot would have used if she had still been present. He listened at the door of the library for some time, but not a sound came from within; at last, seeing no more to do, he stole quietly out of the house and back to his lodgings, where, in spite of the fears that pursued him and the dreadful memory of the night’s work, he soon slept the sleep of exhaustion.
Not for long, however. In a couple of hours his alarm clock awakened him, and he started up to face the new terrors which the day would bring. He had to feed the dun horse, he remembered; it would not do to annoy Ned.
After that came breakfast, for which he was surprised to find he had a certain appetite, and soon it was time to begin his daily routine at Ennidge and Pring’s office.
Every time the door opened that day, and on the days that succeeded it, Bert expected to see a policeman enter. But the evening came without any such nightmare materialising, and he even managed to snatch some more uneasy slumber during the evening, before he once more assumed his disguising beard and stealthily returned to the house in Scholefield Avenue, knowing that before him lay far the worst part of the whole business. He was too frightened for his own safety, however, to hesitate.
Madame Querterot had counted on that when she mentally balanced his regard for his own neck against what she would have designated his milksoppy squeamishness. It was hard to stay in that house of death alone and in the dark, waiting till the small hours, when his project might be best entered upon.
Bert was very, very sorry for himself as he sat, trembling violently, in an arm-chair in the dining-room. His pity did not extend to the other side of the partition wall, where the girl whose life he was about to take had sat in the same darkness and solitude for the last twenty-four hours. For her, Bert, thoroughly selfish by nature and education—as, cowering among the shadows in the grim company of his fears, he shuddered away the hours—was shaken from start to finish by no disabling pang of sympathy. Though at times his heart was like to burst with compassion, it held barely enough to meet the urgent need of Albert Tremmels; and when like her he heard the far-off murmurs which heralded the approaching storm and the angry boom of the thunder began to rumble closer and closer, though he started at each clap as if it were indeed the wrathful voice of the Avenger drawing near to him, his whole being cried out in resentful protest against this judgment that was being passed on him in the heavens, and against the certainty that it would be endorsed by mankind.
His intention was to wait till two o’clock, but it was not yet half-past one when he got to his feet, unable to face his solitary vigil any longer. Better get it over, he said to himself, like a patient in a dentist’s room who has got to have a tooth out. Only this tooth was not his. He had long since decided that the spade would be the best thing to ensure the sinking of his victim, and he had placed it, with a piece of cord tied to it, ready by the door.
Weighted with that heavy piece of iron, so he comforted himself, there would be a single splash and all would be over. He would be spared the sight of a struggling figure rising to the surface, perhaps crying to him for help or mercy, which above all things was what he most dreaded.
Fortifying himself with a mental vision, in which Julie, the hangman, and the body in the flower stand upstairs were all mingled, he unlocked the library door and pushed it open.
It is not necessary to tell again of his walk with Barbara through the drenching rain and clamour of the storm, which was more severe and prolonged than any of those that burst over London during a year remarkable for the number and fierceness of its atmospheric disturbances. The horror with which, at the last moment, as he was trying to tie the spade to Barbara before pushing her into the water, he beheld the running figure of the advancing policeman need not be described. In a frenzy of disappointment, rage and fear, he lifted the spade and struck at the girl again and again, missing her the first time, and, as the handle twisted in his weak grasp, bringing it down flat on the top of her head at the second blow, instead of edgeways as he was trying to do. He did not stay to see the result, but throwing down the spade fled for dear life.