The girls who spend a social evening or a Sunday at the Inn occasionally talked of her with honest tears. They are good, kind, hard-working souls, these gay little shop girls, as a rule. And I think they felt it all the more because they could not do anything for her; dare not even say how sorry they were. Between them and her was the unbreakable barrier which stands breast-high between the women who are—well, particular—and the women who are not.
She brought a faint air of repression and tragedy into the Inn, but no one dreamed of resenting it. The careless, rather wild life we all lead seemed suddenly hollow, feeble—wicked almost. Many a host said to a noisy friend:
“Don’t make so much row, old man. You’ll frighten Mrs. Piety.”
She used to creep about at all hours; used to listen on the stairs, peep into sets if a door happened to be open, watch men and girls in and out with the air of a hungry cat. But everybody understood and everybody sympathized. The little light-haired woman in black, with the sad, inquisitive glances, became our Deity.
I went with her to every curio shop and marine store in Bloomsbury. There are many. Some of the people who keep them are regular characters in their way. We were trying to find out the history of the dagger—that queer-handled weapon which had stuck out from dead Murphy’s waistcoat. The police had it. They were making every inquiry of course, but Barbara thought she could do better than they. As I said, a true woman must do something—even if it is something foolish. The little stuffy, foul courts of Holborn grew to know her and to pity her. All the other women pointed after her furtively and said, as the laundresses said, “Pore young thing.”
You don’t want me to go into the detective side of the affair. You can well imagine the array of evidence against Bob; you can see the damning importance of his row with Murphy, of the soaked red corner of his cuffs, and the red-ocher splashes on his face and hands.
Barbara heard him committed for trial. She didn’t cry out or even shudder. But her eyes grew more wide and somber than before.
That night I took her to the theater. Several fellows came to me quite seriously and said:
“Do something to distract her. The poor woman’s going out of her mind.”
Hemming—he had been a friend of Jimmy’s, and was on a dramatic paper—added: