CHAPTER XXVII

Mrs. Muggeridge paused, and had a fit of coughing. Vera waited with the patience which seemed part of her dogged resolve to avenge Victor's death.

"Yes?" she said mildly, as Mrs. Muggeridge wiped her eyes.

"Where was I? Oh! About Sar' Ann making tracks like that. Well, if I tell you what she told me, and ease my conscience like, will you give me your word, Miss Anerley, as no harm shall come to the girl? Poor, unfortunate girl! I'm glad as it wasn't me! You promise? Well, it was like this: My first-floor front, what corresponds with yours where your gentleman lodges what's been away for his Ma's funeral, is occupied by a gent in the City, what leaves a lot of vallables about as I don't harf like having the charge of. So, when I'm goin' out, I locks up his room, if so be as 'e ain't at 'ome, and puts the key where he knows how to find it. Now, we was all out except Sar' Ann the night of the murd--oh, well, the night Mr. Musser died: I was at the horspital entertainment along with the rest. So what must my lady needs do, but get that key--sly puss! she must have watched and found out where I put it--and go up into Mr. Marston's room to fiddle about with his things. I believe she spent the evenin' there. At all events, when she was a-sitting at the window, peepin' out, she sees a tall lady come along, and disappear into your house. She did think it queer, knowin' or suspectin' as you was all out! So she listened, and small blame to 'er, as I told the girl! She listens--and she swore to me she could 'ear two voices in the next room, a man's and a woman's. She sat there listenin' for a hour or more after dark, and they was talkin'--sometimes loud--but she couldn't distinguish the words. And then there was quiet-like, and she wondered what had become of 'em--so she was peerin' out of window when out comes the tall lady, shuts the door, and makes off. Your 'ansom drove up at the same time, and she declared to me she see the lady stop short and stare at you! There now!"

Vera's thoughts, spurred by the excitement of such important, unexpected evidence, worked with lightning rapidity. Even as she listened with concentrated attention, she was warning herself to be cautious. If her suspicions that Victor was foully murdered were shared by others, the criminal might be forewarned, and escape her doom.

So she gave a sad, incredulous smile, and shrugged her shoulders. "My dear Mrs. Muggeridge, your girl ran away because she was a wretched story-teller, and was afraid of being called to account!" she dryly returned. "The voices, the tall lady--everything--is pure invention! Surely I ought to know? The only fact is that I came home in a hansom. You said she was hysterical. It is a pity her perverted ideas were on the subject of my dear, dead brother!"

"Brother? I read as you said at the crowner's quest that he was your sweetheart!" exclaimed Mrs. Muggeridge, vulgarly. She had confidently expected to become one of the chief _dramatis personae_ in the gruesome tragedy at number Twelve, and her disappointment exasperated her. "And as for my poor Sar' Ann bein' a story-teller, allow me to tell you as she's never told a lie to my knowledge! Stealin' the key? Gals will be gals! Let me giv' you a word of warnin', Miss Vera Anerley, or whatever you call yourself. Your best plan'll be to find Sar' Ann--I can't, my respectable house is ruined by bein' next door to a disreputable hole where people comes to sudden deaths and their friends want it hushed up--I've to see about movin' as soon as I've got over the shock it's been to me to be next door to such a orful thing--but if you don't find Sar' Ann and let 'er help to discover the lady what murdered your sweetheart, p'raps you'll find yourself havin' the cap fitted to you, maybe! So there! Ere's Sar' Ann's larst address, to show as I don't bear no malice, and wish your poor old Mar well--I never had no call to complain of _'er_--but though I knows as Sar' Ann come original from Oxfordshire, that's all I do know."

Mrs. Muggeridge huffily made her exit, giving a contemptuous little shake of her skirts and a backward glance of defiance as she issued forth, and down the steps of the offending house.

Vera closed the door upon her and for some moments seemed riveted to the spot, her thoughts awhirl. If she could have known that where she stood, contemplating vengeance, fiercely if voicelessly praying for justice, the girl who had been her lover's legal wife, the girl who had drugged him and brought about his death, had stood unconsciously listening for his last breaths, that she might return and steal the documents which incriminated her!

But no voices came from out the walls, the ticking of the clock had no sinister meaning. She heard the charwoman singing some common music-hall tune to herself as she swept. Swish, swish, went the irritating broom--then an organ began to play aggressively at the end of the street--a chorus from a comic opera she had heard one night, nestling against Victor in the dress circle of a suburban theatre.

She shuddered and wrung her hands. Why was life so ghastly, so full of horror, of terror? But she must not stand there, letting the precious moments go idly, fruitlessly by.

"I must have help," she told herself. "Alone, I can do nothing. I will write to Mr. Naz, and ask him to come and see me."

Writing an ordinary little note, merely asking Paul conventionally if he could make it convenient to name some time to visit them, it would comfort her and Victor's poor mother to see one who had been a good friend of their loved one's--then going out to post it at the nearest pillar-box--restored her outward, if not her inward equanimity. She spent the day literally setting the house in order--assembling all Victor's belongings in the attic lumber-room, to be thoroughly searched by her on the morrow.

Early the following morning an empty hansom drove up, bearing a little note from Paul. Would twelve o'clock suit her to see him? And would she send an answer by the cab?

She wrote a few lines in affirmative reply; then, after seeing her step-mother comfortably established on the sitting-room sofa where she and Victor had revelled in each other's society that night of happiness after the performance--the night he first showed her his somewhat sudden passion for her in all its fulness--she stole away upstairs to the attic to put away the relics of the dead man.

She had cleared her two best trunks; and in these she meant to store everything he had left--clothes, books, pipes. The money had been placed in a bank in her step-mother's name. A lawyer friend of Doctor Thompson had acted for them, and had simplified everything.

The little room was hot. She opened the window wide, drew down the tattered old green blind, and set to work shaking, folding, and arranging Victor's clothes.

How like him it was to have shirts that a French marquis would hardly have disdained! As she laid them away with as tender and reverent a touch as that of a bereaved mother storing away the little garments of a loved, lost infant, she almost broke down. But she took herself sternly to task, repressed her melting mood, and reminded herself that a strong man's work--the bringing a criminal to book--was hers. Any and every womanish weakness must be sternly disallowed.

One trunk was soon full of linen and odds and ends. This she locked, and proceeded to fill the next. The books came first--mere remnants of volumes, mostly French, with morsels of yellow paper cover adhering to them. But--strongly redolent of tobacco, she put them carefully in a layer beside the cases of pipes, and the odd-looking curios he had collected. They seemed almost part of him, somehow, those pipes. That they should be there, smelling of the weed he had smoked, and he should be mouldering in his grave in that densely populated cemetery! She shuddered. Her hand trembled: she picked up a yellow volume, _Quatre Femmes et un Perroquet_, with eyes brimming over with tears, picked it up carelessly; something fell out.

Something? Two things--one, a soiled little photograph. As she seized it her tears dried--her eyes burned. It was the photograph of three girls.

Evidently an amateur attempt--badly mounted. Three girls in summer frocks and aprons, two standing, one seated on a bench--in front there was grass--at the back, part of a brick house and some shrubs.

Fiercely, with intense anxiety, she stared at the three faces. Two were round and plain: these belonged to the girls--fifteen or sixteen years of age at the utmost--who were standing. The face of the seated girl was a beautiful one: full of sweet pathos, and yet with a tender happy smile about the mouth.

"Too young to be that awful woman," she mused, crouching on the floor, and gazing. Still, one of them might have been her daughter. The woman, by his account, had been older than Victor, possibly a widow with a child, or children.

She was so absorbed in contemplation that she forgot the other "thing" which had fallen from the book, until, as she laid aside the triple portrait and began to resume her task, she saw it and pounced upon it--darted upon it like a serpent upon its prey--for it was a letter, and in a feminine handwriting.

A letter--soiled, its edges worn--it almost fell to pieces as she touched it. Yet it was, by its date, written but a few years previously.

The hand-writing was unformed. But it was unmistakably a love-letter.

"Dearest Victor," it ran. "I am longing to see you quite as much as you are wishing to see me. You say, if I cannot answer your question to me the other night you would rather not see me any more! It has made me very unhappy. You see, I am so young to be married. Then, if I did what you say, it would kill my poor mother, who is so very ill. But I do love you, Victor! I dream of you nearly every night. Sometimes you are Manfred, sometimes Childe Harold, and last night you were Laon and I was your 'child Cythna!' It was so sweet--we were lying side by side on a green hill, your eyes gazing into mine, and I seemed to hear some one singing 'Oh, that we two were maying'! Dear Victor, I must do all you ask: I could not bear not to see you again! It would break my heart!

Your promised wife, JOAN."