The String of Pearls 109Mrs. Oakley Sees a Strange Sight, and Thinks There Is No Place Like Home
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Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
The String of Pearls 109
Mrs. Oakley Sees a Strange Sight, and Thinks There Is No Place Like Home
PrestEnglish
"What's that, eh?" added Lupin.
Mrs. Oakley sank flat upon the floor in a moment; she thought that now surely her last hour was come.
"I thought I heard a noise. Did you, Jane?" added Lupin.
"I didn't hear anything," said the woman. "It's your conscience, old boy, that makes you hear all sorts of things. You know you are a hard one, and no mistake. You know, there ain't exactly your equal in London for a vagabond. But come, hand out the cash, for I ain't particularly fond of your company, nor you of mine, I take it."
"It must have been imagination," muttered Lupin, still alluding to the noise he had heard or fancied he had heard. "It must have been imagination, and the wind at night does certainly make odd noises in the chapel at times, know."
"Bother the noises. Give me the money, and let me go, I say. Come, be quick about it, or else I shall think of some way of helping myself, and you know when I begin, that I am apt to be rather troublesome."
"A little," said Lupin. "Just a little. But as I was saying, Jane--you and I together might make a fortune quite easily. You are a clever woman."
"Am I really? When did you find that out, you old rogue?"
"Really, Jane, it is difficult to talk with you while you are in such a humour. Come, will you take something to drink? Say you will, and you shall have the very best I can get you. Only you must promise to take it in moderation, and not get much the worse for it, Jane."
"Do you think now that I am such an idiot as to take a drain of anything in your place? No! I am not quite so green as that. Give me some money and I'll fetch something, and as long as I have got my hand on the bottle, where I will take good care to keep it, I shall know that I am safe from you, but not otherwise. You would like to give me a drop of the same stuff you have set the woman in the next room to sleep with, wouldn't you now, my beauty?"
"No, Jane. Not you. You are not such a fool as to be taken in as she is. Such poor tricks won't do for you, I know well. There is money, and there is an empty bottle. Go and get what you like for yourself, as you wish not what I may happen to have in the place. I will let you in again, so you need not be afraid of that, Jane."
"Afraid? Afraid? That's a likely thing, indeed. I afraid of being kept out by you? No, old boy, if you did keep me out one minute longer than my patience lasted, and that would not be very long I think, I would raise such a racket about your ears, that you would wish yourself anywhere but where you are. How did I get in before, when you would have given one of your ears to keep me out? Why, by frightening you, of course, and I'll do it again. Give me hold of the bottle. I afraid of you, indeed? A likely thing."
The lady left the room with the bottle and half a guinea in her hand, while Lupin, with affected solicitude, lighted her to the door of the chapel, and lingered until he heard her footsteps die away right up the dismal dingy-looking court.
While Lupin was lighting his wife down the stairs, Mrs. Oakley found a small slit in the canvas that the division between the two rooms, and she industriously widened it, so that she was enabled to see into the adjoining apartment. She then waited in fear and in trembling the return of Lupin.
The arch hypocrite was not many minutes in making his appearance. He set the candlestick down upon the table with a force that nearly started the candle out of it, and then in a fierce voice he cried--
"Done--she is done at last! Ha! ha! Jane, you are done at last! I kept that bottle for an emergency. It seemed empty, but smeared all around its inner side is a sufficient quantity of a powerful narcotic to affect the very devil himself if he were to drink anything that had been poured into it. You think yourself mighty clever, Jane; but you are done at last. Now what a capital thing it is that I have sent that old fool, Mrs. Oakley, to sleep, for otherwise I should certainly be under the necessity of cutting her throat."
Mrs. Oakley could hardly suppress a groan at this intelligence; but the exigences of her situation pressed strongly upon her, and she did succeed in smothering her feelings and keeping herself quiet.
Lupin paced the room anxiously waiting for his wife's return; and in the course of about five minutes, a heavy dab of a single knock upon the chapel door announced that fact. He immediately snatched up the candle and ran down stairs to let her in, lest according to her threat she should get to the end of her very limited stock of patience. They came up the stairs together--Jane was speaking--
"Brandy!" she said; "I have got brandy, and I mean to keep my hand on the bottle, I tell you. Ah, I know you--no one knows you better than I do. You may impose upon everybody but me. You won't find it so very easy a thing to get the better of me; I'll keep my hand on the bottle."
"How very suspicious you are," said Lupin, "It's quite distressing."
"Is it? Ho! ho! Well, I'll have my drop and then I will go. If you are civil to me whenever I choose to come it will be better for you; but I am not the sort of person to stand any nonsense, I can assure you."
"No, Jane, I never said you were," replied Lupin; "and I hope that to-night will see the beginning as it were of a kind of reconciliation and better feeling between us. I am sure I always thought of you with kindness."
By this time they were in the room, and the lady half drew the knife she had before exhibited from the bosom of her dress, as she said--
"Look at this--look at this! I distrust you all the more when you talk as you do now, and I tell you that if I have any of your nonsense, I will pretty soon settle you. You mean something, I know, by the twinkle of your eye. I have watched you before, and I know you."
"Now, really, this is too bad," said Lupin, as he wiped his face with a remarkably old handkerchief; "this is too bad, Jane. If I am kind and civil to you, that don't suit; and if I am rough and rather stern, you fly out at that too. What am I to do? Will nothing please you?"
"Bah!" said Jane. "Hold your nonsence. How much money am I to have when I have finished the brandy? That is the question now."
"Will three guineas be enough, Jane, just for the present occasion?"
"No, I must have five, or if you don't produce them, I'll make you."
"You shall have them, Jane. You see how complying I am to you. But won't you give me a drop of the brandy? You don't mean to take it all?"
"Yes I do. It's only half a pint, and what's that? You can drink some of what you said you had in the place. I didn't go out to buy for you. Besides, I won't trust it a moment out of my hands. You would put something in it before I could wink."
"Really, really! What a strange woman. But won't you have a glass, Jane, to drink it out of? Let me get you a glass now?"
"No, you would put something in that too. Oh, I am up to your tricks, I am, old boy. You won't get the better of me. Very good brandy it is, too. Ah! strong rather."
Jane took a hearty pull at the bottle, so hearty a one that two thirds of the mixture vanished, and then with her hand on the neck of it, she sat glaring at Lupin, who was on the opposite side of the table, with an awfully satanic grin upon his ugly features.
"It has an odd taste."
"An odd taste?" cried Lupin. "It's a capital thing that you bought it yourself, and kept your hand over the bottle. I'm very glad of that, old woman."
"But I feel odd--I--I--ain't the thing. I don't feel very well, Lupin."
"Ha, ha, ha!"
"I--I feel as if I were dying. I--I don't see things very clearly. I am ill--ill. Oh, what is this? Something is amiss. Mercy, mercy!"
"Ha, ha, ha!"
"I--I--shall fall. Help! The room swims round with me. I am poisoned. I know I am. Mercy! help! murder! Oh, spare me."
"Ha, ha, ha!"
Lupin rose and went round the table. He caught hold of the wretched woman by the head, and applying his mouth close to her ear, he said--
"Jane! There was something in the bottle, and I intend to cut your throat. I hope the knife you have got with you has a good edge to it?"
She tried to scream, but an indistinct, strange, stifled cry only came from her lips. She tried to get up, but her limbs refused their office. The powerful narcotic had taken effect, and she fell forward, her head striking the table heavily, and upsetting the bottle with the remainder of the drugged brandy in it as she did so.
"Done!" said Lupin. "Done at last. Oh, how I have watched for such an opportunity as this. How often I have pleased myself with the idea of meeting her in some lonely place when she was off her guard, and killing her, but I never thought that anything could happen half so lucky as this. Let me think. I am quite alone in this building, or as good as alone, for Mrs. Oakley sleeps soundly. I can easily drag the dead body down stairs, and place it in one of the vaults underneath the chapel, to which I have the key. I will wrench open some coffin if that be all, and cram her in on the top of the dead there previously. Ah, that will do, and then I defy any circumstances to find me out. How safe a--mur--I mean a death this will be to be sure. How very--very safe."
Mrs. Oakley shook in every limb, but she kept her eyes steadfastly fixed at the small hole in the canvas, through which she could see into the room, and by a horrible species of fascination, she felt that if she had ever so much wished to do so, she could not then have withdrawn it. No! she was as it were condemned as a fiat of destiny, as a punishment for her weak and criminal credulity regarding that man, to be a witness to the dreadful deed he proposed committing, within the sphere of her observation.
It was dreadful. It was truly horrible. But it was not now by any means to be avoided.
Lupin disappeared for a few seconds into a room where he usually himself slept. From thence he returned with a wash-hand basin in his hand, which he placed upon the floor. He then fumbled about the clothing of his wife until he found the knife that she had twice so threateningly exhibited to him. He held it up to the light and narrowly scrutinised it.
"It will do I think," he said.
He tried its keenness upon the edge of the sole of his shoe, and he was satisfied that it had been well prepared for mischief.
"It will do well," he said. "Well, nothing can be better. From this night I shall be free from the fears that have haunted me night and day for so long. This woman is the only person in all London who really knows me, and who has it in her power to destroy all my prospects. When she is gone, I shall be perfectly easy and safe, and surely never was such a deed as this done with so much positive safety."
Mrs. Oakley felt sickened at what she saw, but still she looked upon it with that same species of horrible fascination which it is said--and said truly, too--prevents the victim of a serpent's glittering eye from escaping the jaws of the destroyer. She saw it all. She did not move--she did not scream--she did not weep--but as if frozen to the spot, she, with a statuesque calmness, looked upon that most horrible scene of blood. She was the witness appointed by Heaven to see it done, and she could not escape her mission.
Lupin twined his left hand in the hair at the back of the head of the wretched woman, and then he held her head over the wash-hand basin. There was a bright flash of the knife, and then a gushing, gurgling sound, and blood poured into the basin, hot, hissing and frothing. The light fell upon the face of Lupin, and at that time so changed was it, that Mrs. Oakley could not have recognised it, and, but that she knew from the antecedents that it was no other than he, she might have doubted if some devil had not risen up through the floor to do the deed of blood.
He dropped the knife to the floor.
The murdered woman made a faint movement with her arms, and then all was over. The blood still rolled forth and filled the wash-hand basin. Lupin caught the cover from the table, throwing everything that was upon it to the floor, and wrapped it many times round the head, face, and neck of his victim.
"It is done!" he said. "It is done!"
He still held the body by the hair of the head, and dragging it along the floor, he dropped it near the door opening on to the staircase. He then went to a cupboard in the room, and finding a bottle, he plunged the neck of it into his mouth, and drank deeply. The draught was ardent spirit, but it had no more effect upon him at that moment than as though it had been so much water from a spring. That is to say, it had no intoxicating effect. It may have stilled some of the emotions of dread and horror which his own crime must have called up from the bottom even of such a heart as his. He was human, and he could not be utterly callous.
Leaning against the cupboard-door for a few seconds he gasped out--
"Yes, it is done. It is quite done, and now for the worst. Now for the body, and the vaults, and the dead. Can I do it? can I do it? I must. Yes, I must. There is no safety for me if I do not. I shall come else to the scaffold. I think already that I see the hooting crowd--the rope and the cross-beam. Now they hold my arms. Now they tell me to call upon God for mercy to my wretched blood-stained soul. Now the mob shouts. The hangman touches me--I feel the rope about my neck. They draw the cap over my face, and so shut out the world from me for ever. I die--I struggle--I writhe--I faint--God--God--God help me!"
