He was always saying it. He never said more than three things at the same period. He had attacks of sentences and worked them off. He said it every time you went to his set. He said it to all new acquaintances. He took them in to look at the sideboard, and while they looked he enlarged on the rank villainy of Pearson. I actually waited for him to say it on that Saturday night. But he didn’t. He only lifted the old woman’s leg of mutton from the center table where she had set it. It was foreign meat and the blood had run out freely, pulping the newspaper and making a patch on the tablecloth. He carried it, with an air of reproof, to the cupboard and set it carefully on a dish.
The woman looked at him and then she looked at me. There was defiance and self-vindication and a lurking terror on her face. It was a long, horselike face, I remember. People of her class always look like that when anything suspicious occurs. She seemed to be saying in a terrified, insolent way:
“Don’t you think I did it, because I didn’t.”
It is pathetic; this perpetual assertion of innocence—before they are accused—of such people.
“It give me such a orful turn!” she burst out at last, addressing herself to me, as Orion remained half in the cupboard, carefully putting a wire cover over the joint. “I’ve never been mixed up in no sich thing before. I’ve never been to prison. Not me! Nor any of my relations. It’s made my ’eart that bad—I suffers with the palpitations.”
Orion remained in the cupboard, deaf to the hint.
“I come straight off to Mr. Rine,” she went on. “I didn’t even think to take the joint from under my arm. I’d only bin gone ’arf an hour down Tibbalds Row marketin’ with another lady—’er as is ’ousekeeper in Chapel Street, where Mr. Wood lives. She could tell you the same. I’ll take my Bible oath I wasn’t more’n ’arf an hour. The larst place I was in was the fish shop at the corner of Devonshire Street.”
“We’d better go to Great Ormond Street,” I said to Orion.
The servant stood up, pulling her gray and black shawl closer round her throat. She gave a critical glance round the room before she left, and paid it her feminine tribute.
“You’ll excuse me,” she said, “but what a pretty room this is. Quite a doll’s ’ouse, to be sure. I never see but one like it, and that was Mrs. Abraham’s in North Street—’er whose ’usband was in the ready-made line.”