The lodging-house keeper gripped him firmly by the wrists, and forced him back to his seat. Her hands were strong with years of housework.
“I’m used to this sort of thing,” she said aside to me; “my first-floor lodger has had D. T. twice. My lady in the parlors takes her drop. Her husband pays me well to look after her—but they get it at the grocer’s as soap or candles, at the confectioner’s and call it tea, at the draper’s when they go shopping, and have it put on the bill as extras.”
Orion rambled on.
“She is sitting next you. She followed us out of the house. I saw her come down the stairs. She rode with us all the way. She stood by her own grave—followed her own funeral. She looked across and grinned at me, the old witch, when they threw earth on the coffin. She has followed us back. She jostled me just now on the cemetery path, d——n her! She’d have had me down if I hadn’t caught hold of Groome. She wanted to seal me up in that dirty yellow grave, as we tried to seal her. But I could bear it. I wasn’t going to let her frighten me. I bore everything until she came away from her own grave—then I knew it was all up with me. She is filling the coach. Can’t you see her red dress puffing out? I never saw a woman swell so. The red dress, Groome; the dress she wore at dinner on Sunday week! The one she always wore in the evening, the one she died in. Oh! can’t you two see her? Can’t you turn her out? The coach is all growing red.”
“Do you mean Mrs. Grigg?” Clara Citron asked crisply. “I can’t see anything.” She bounced to the other side as if to convince him. “But then,” she added significantly, “I didn’t murder her.”
“You see, I did,” Orion returned with a foolish smile and the tremendous simple relief of a child who gets something off his mind.
He did not seem to realize what the admission involved. He was evidently indifferent to everything but the one in red; the dead old woman in the blood-colored gown, who was slowly, slowly, but very surely, filling up the coach.
“I got so tired of waiting,” he continued in a confidential way, and we both bent close to catch every word, closing him in, as it seemed.
“She wouldn’t part with a penny and she wouldn’t die,” he went on piteously. “What are you to do with a woman like that? I was on my beam ends. It is all the accursed City. I was afraid of getting out of a berth. When you get out of a berth you’re done. I’ve been with the same firm fifteen years, and yet they were going to turn me off like a dog—the bookkeeper told me so.”
He was laying himself quite bare. He dropped the flimsy lie of his daily life. He did not hold to the junior-partner fiction any longer.