“Safe in prison now, and hanged very soon. I shan’t be easy otherwise. And then I shall sleep peacefully in my bed.”
She was better than she had been for the last year. She ate and slept, and seemed to have taken a new lease of life. She was absolutely callous about Mrs. Curtis’s death, and suggested that half-a-guinea was quite enough to give for a wreath.
“If you’re thinking of the number of times she gave us tea,” she said, “it could not possibly, with tea as cheap as it is now—Harrod’s own only one and seven—come to more than eight and six.” And she opened her “Daily Mail” and pored over it. She had of late ceased to take in any paper, but now she took in the “Daily Mail” and the “Evening Standard,” and read the police news with avidity, looking for the trial of “her murderer.”
Mark and I went to the funeral, and he was very low all the way home. He was really distressed about Mrs. Curtis and Gregory, but of course he would not allow it, and accounted for his depression by saying that he had been attending the wrong funeral. He said he did not actually blame Clarke (the lift man), for he had shown good intentions, but the man was evidently a procrastinator and a bungler, who had deceived the confidence he (Mark) had reposed in him, and on whom no one could place reliance. Such men, he averred, were better hanged and out of the way.
When I got back to our rooms I found Aunt Pussy leaning back in her armchair near the window, with the “Evening Standard” spread out on her knee. A large heading caught my eye:
“SENSATIONAL ARREST OF THE
MURDERER OF MRS. CURTIS.”
“Release of Clarke.”
It had caught Aunt Pussy’s eye too. And her sheer terror had been too much for her. She would never be frightened any more. She had had her last shock. She was dead.
A month later Mark came to see me in the evening. We did not seem to have much to say to each other, perhaps because we were to be married next day. But I presently discovered that he was suffering from a suppressed communication.