“The old woman—her servant—has just come round to tell me,” he continued. “Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard! How could I?”
“I forgot. Of course you couldn’t. It’s enough to confuse a fellow, isn’t it? Murdered!”
“Yes. But how?”
“I’m going to tell you. Is there any more whisky? Thanks. It is Saturday night and the servant had gone out to shop. She always shops late on Saturday—when she doesn’t do it on Sunday morning. On Sunday morning in the Lane you can get a very decent fowl cheap. My aunt was left alone in Great Ormond Street. Am I making myself quite clear? She must have been cooking some mess over the dining-room fire; a pot had boiled over on the hob. She was stabbed—just above the heart. Isn’t it awful? Thanks, old man. It—it pulls me together. Come up to my place. The old woman’s waiting. I don’t know what to do first. She came straight to me. She—the other one, my aunt—is lying on the dining-room hearthrug. Well—thanks.”
I followed him upstairs. Late as it was, one of the Inn laundresses—those travesties of women, all flesh, sacking apron, and dusty hair—was scrubbing the third floor flight. Saturday is the great day for stair scrubbing. She moved her pail for us to pass and looked at Orion’s face curiously. As we went up we were followed by the rasping swish of her brush.
Mrs. Grigg’s servant was waiting in the sitting room. She had seated herself. Orion did not seem to like this.
It was such a swell room—all varnish, gewgaws, and rose-colored lights. He had stuck squares of leather paper on the panels of the walls and put white porcelain finger plates painted with roses on the doors. He burned gas in the grate instead of coal—it was cleaner. It looked like an old maid’s room. I believe that he helped his laundress to clean it. She was a rather clean woman herself, who always wore a stiff bow of white muslin tied under her chin.
There was a shiny sideboard, on top of which was set out the electro plate. The looking-glass above the sideboard was cracked. Pearson, his nerves strung by the respectability and smugness of that room, had flung his glass at it on the night of the party—as a graceful return for watered whisky. Emily Higgins, a girl that Orion knew—she served in a fancy shop in Hampstead Road—had skillfully painted a cobweb and a trail of flowers across the crack. Orion never spoke to Pearson afterward.
“A fellow who will come into one’s rooms and do a thing like that is a dirty cad,” he would say in his thin, piping voice.