Men of Marlowe's — Edition Insights

k. 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.

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.”

It wouldn’t interest you to hear the rest, but I have all the newspapers put aside if you would like to read the reports some day. The murder of Mrs. Grigg was one of London’s many mysteries. There was no clew. The servant was able to clear herself conclusively of all suspicion. Scotland Yard was baffled. Ambitious journalists, with a taste for intrigue and interviewing, started wild theories, and there ended. Great Ormond Street was blocked with the crowd that gaped stolidly all day at the shabby house with the drawn blinds opposite the hospital.

Orion didn’t go to the City. He was junior partner--so he said--in a shipping-house near London Bridge. He stayed at home in the jaunty room with the pink-tinted gas globes and drank all day. Orion was in a bad way. You might guess that when he drank whisky at three and something a bottle as if it had been water.

We’ll skip the inquest and so on, and pass to the funeral.

Orion begged me to go, and I went. One couldn’t refuse a poor, invertebrate, pleading fool like that. His aunt’s death had absolutely doubled him up.

There was the uncomfortable atmosphere of death about the place when we got there. I’ll show you the particular house next time we are in Great Ormond Street. There is a narrow passage paneled to the ceiling with wood that is painted stone color. There is a sitting room to your left as you go in, and a flight of stairs ready to your feet at the end of the passage.